IN DIALOGUE:

THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE:

A GuATINAUI ODYSSEY
RUTH BEHAR AND BRUCE MANNHEIM

The Society for Visual Anthropology sponsored a credulity of the visitors with regard to the "authenticity"
screening of the video The Couple in the Cage: A of the two Guatinaui.
Guatinaui Odyssey, by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Anthropologists on the staff of the Smithsonian
at the 1994 American Anthropological Association Institution and Field Museum concerned with raising
(AAA) meetings in Atlanta. The video is based upon the viewer consciousness about issues of representation
perfonnance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians and the colonial legacy of displays in museums of
Visit [Washington, Chicago, Syndey, etc.] created by natural history were instrumental in convincing mu-
the MacArthur award-winning performance artist, seum administrators that it was appropriate to sponsor
Guillenno Gomez-Pena and cultural critic and artist the perfonnance-itself a parody of the former mu-
Coco Fusco. The two artists portray a man and a woman seum practice of putting non-Western peoples on dis-
from the remote (imaginary) Caribbean island of play as museum exhibits. But some viewers were
Guatinaui. Conceived of as part of a larger counter- outraged that museums allowed such an event to be
cultural event entitled "The Year of the White Bear" performed inside the walls of institutions supposedly
perfonned during the Quincentenary yearof Columbus's dedicated to "science" and "truth."
"discovery" of the New World, the performance piece Anthropologists and others who came to viewThe
was meant to be a critical commentary on the long- Couple in the Cage at the AAA meetings had an
standing Western practice of objectifying and distanc- opportunity to discuss the question of what relationship
ing the Other through spectatorship, in particular, cultural critiques such as the performance ofTwo Un-
through .museums exhibitions of "primitive" peoples. discovered Amerindians... have to the contemporary
As Gomez-Pena and Fusco explain in a program that pratice of anthropology and the representation of the
describes "The Yearof the White Bear'': "Performance Other. Ruth Behar, the organjzer of the event, had
art in the West did not begin with Dadaist events. Since arranged for the filmmaker/perfonnance artist, Coco
the early days of the Spanish conquest, aboriginal Fusco, to be present at the screening. We publish here
samples' of people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas Behar's introductory remarks along with comments
were brought 10 Europe for aesthetic contemplation, made after the screening by one of the discussants,
scientific analysis, and entertainment." anthropologist Bruce Mannheim. NL.
Two Undiscovered Amerindians... was seen by
visitors to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington 1
RUTH BEHAR S INTRODUCTION
D.C., Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and
the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as by I am pleased to be here tonight to introduce Coco
audiences in London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Fusco and the work she did with Chicano perfonnance
Sydney.The Couple in the Cage records elements of the artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena on The Couple in the
performance, such as visitors paying to have their Cage. It is especially significant that we are presenting
photographs taken with the couple, feeding the Fusco or their work at the AAA. precisely this year when the
Gomez-Pena bananas, asking the fem ale ''Guatinaui" to general theme of our conference is the issue of human
dance or the male to recite a story in the Guatinaui rights. The Couple in the Cage is for me one of the most
language, but its true subject is the audience and peoples' significant cultural works produced recently dealing
reactions to the performance, in particular, the seeming with the most fundamental of human rights-the right

118 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review

 never to be treated as an object, the right to full human- a real perfomlance. a dramatic rendition of Marjorie
i1y. the right to subjecthood. With irony. humor, wit. Shostaks Nisa, in which thi~ canonical texr of an
and pathos. The Couple in rlie Cage seeks to engage the intercultural, inter-women encounter was brought lO
history of how the Wes! has constructed otherness by the stage. For me it wa:-. exciting and heartening to see
putting a cage around "'difference." B\ engaging that how weJI Shostak s work could he translated into
history so passionately. The Couple in the Cage offers cathartic theater as ano1her way of doing anthropolng~
an important vision of the history of what Michel Rolf- And it made me realize: Hasnt anthropolog~ alway-.
Trouillot has called "the sa\age slot" that anthropology been about performance? Not just the classically clumsy.
inherited when it became an intellectual system, a Woody Allensque performance an of the anthropolo-
practice. and an angst-rid- gi..,1 in rhe field. or the per-
den moral philosophy It formance" we ask the na-
also offers u~ a \ ision of ti \e-. to put on for our hen-
the wan ne\\ efit, but the performances
anrhropologies will need that we. in tum. render of
robe made and performed nati \ c Ii \e:-. on our inevi-
as we move into the nexl table return home?
century The Couple in rile Sahlins has noted thar
Cage is a film that ought to one of the great paradoxes
be shown to students in ofconfemporary anthropol-
Anthro I 0 I and to grad og~ is how we have escaped
students beginning their from dealing with culture..
initiation in their core just at the moment when
Anthrocourses: it isa work even one else is furiou-.J ~
that we ought to discuss. embroiled in discussions
debare, and reflect upon as around its meaning. No-
broadly as possible within where has this discussion
all the subfields of anrhro- been more intense. excit-
EXPERTS SA
pology. HE'SA
ing, heart-rending. and pain-
This is a moment not POLITICAL ful than among minority cre-
so much of "crisis" for an- LEADERI ative writers and artist-.. for
thropology, it seems tome, whom discussion is too
but of expanding THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE: tame a word for the experi-
anrhropology s boundaries A GUATINAUI ODYSSEY ence:-. of their own
so that we can take P'drt in. o video hy Coco Fusco ontl PoulaH~io "othering which the~ bring
EotrrD er DAIS r -.c;,n. 'ftfOlfMANCf 1r GIJIUERMO GOMEZ 'fHA ANO coco FUSCO
rather than hide from, the to the concept of culture. 1
dynamics of cultural inter- think it is time for anthro-
actions as they unfold in a pology lo engage in discus-
global context. One area in which these dynamics are sion with rhose "others.. here in our midst who ha' e
unfolding is in performance art and various kinds of reclaimed rhe concept of culture not a~ a dead collection
creative media projects involving \ ideo and film. of artifacts and customs. bur as a nccc:-.si1y of survi \'al.
Lourdes Arizpe noted in Thursday s panel about "Re- Tonight, I hope we can begin that dialogue with
thinking the Cultural'. that just as the nineteenth-cen- Coco Fusco. who graciously agreed to come to discus-.
tury realist novel has been superseded by new forms of The Couple i11 the Cage with us anthropologists.
documentary media and crearhe nonfiction writing, so
too has anthropology. and we must do more than just ABt>l T C1>Cfl Fl'SCO
look on. unle:-s we want to go the way of the dinosaurs.
That panel, curiously enough, was fuJI of performers. Coco Fusco i-. a L11' Angdes-ha!>ed an critic, film
imposters, and spiril medium:- reading papers for the critk. curator. performance a11i-.1. and media ar1is1. She
absent presences of Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall has been a visiling artist at the Uni\'L'rsil\' of California.
Sahlins. But 1hen on Thursday night we were treated to at the Uni versify of lllinoi:-.. and al Colgate Universil)

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 119

 Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, a performance, where they enact the role of recently
The Village Voice, Art in America, The Nation, and discovered "natives" or "noble savages" or "Guatinauis"
many other national and international publications. She from a hitherto unknown island in the Gulf of Mexico,
has written catalogue essays for the 1994 Fotofest, the appearing before audiences in a cage, as exhibits, as
J 993 Biennial, and many other art exhibitions. Her museum-pieces on display, who speak an unknown
book of essays, interviews, and scripts, titled English is language, and can only be apprehended through the
Broken Here, will be published next spring by The New gaze and touristic Polaroids at a dollar a shot. Coco has
Press in New York. She has curated numerous film and noted that as artists of color in the United States, she and
art series, from Black American Short Films and Videos Gomez-Pena "carry [their] bodies as markers of differ-
to The Hybrid State Film Series ,and she also writes ence and reminders of the endlessly recycled colonial
frequently on Cuban cultural and art movements. Her fantasies on which Western culture thrived." Indeed,
wonderful essay, "El Diario de Miranda/Miranda's the performance carries a particular intellectual and
Diary," about her return trips to Cuba is published in the emotional power because it's done by two artists of
special double issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review color who've known what it is to be othered (Guillermo,
on "Bridges to Cuba" (Behar 1994) that just came out for example, was not too long ago apprehended by
this year. police because two concerned women in an LA restau-
In recent years, the rethinking of identity has led to rant thought he had kidnapped the blond boy who was
both a fruitful engagement with diversity, plurality, and with him-his own son). But the performance of The
multicultural dialogue, and an often frustrating need to Couple in the Cage also carries a particular Latino/
put people who are still "other" into neat ethnic boxes Latina history, for it brings together a Mexicano-
or cages, where their difference can be made palatable Chilango-Chicano for whom the cage is about the lived
and statistically chartable. Coco, from the beginning, experience of the barbed wire that divides the U.S. and
has resisted these boxes and has used her own self- Mexico (and now with Proposition 187. California and
positioning to stir up trouble. In the first, absolutely its "aliens"), and a daughter of a Cubana and the African
brillliant, article I ever read by her, titled "Managing the diaspora who's known firsthand the meaning of coming
Other" published in the Brazilian bilingual journal from an island isolated and caged by oceans of ideol-
Luistania. in 1992, Coco introduces herself in the ogy, nationalism, and Cold War.
following way: "In the past five years, I have been asked The Latino/Latina history embedded in The Couple
to speak as a Cuban, as a Latina, as a Black person, and in the Cage embeds a longer history that begins with
as a person of color. I have been confused for being Christopher Columbus bringing an Arawak from the
Arab, Puerto Rican, East Indian and West Indian. I have Caribbean back to Spain, where he was put on display
been told that I speak English like a British person, or for two years until he died of sadness. The Couple in the
'like an educated person. I've also disappointed many Cage began as a counter-Quincentennary event, an
because I don't speak English with a Spanish accent. anti-1992 discovery of the New World mania and
What category do Americans have for someone com- industry.and it is rooted in the sad knowledge that, "The
posed of Taino, Yoruba, Catalan, Sephardic, and only progress we have made in 500 years is that today
Neopolitan blood?" the Others have the option either of an 'authenticity
In that same article she adds, "I don't speak constructed by the dominant, or living on as a parody of
Spanglish, except with bilingual friends, because be- their former selves" (a quote from Ashis Nandy and the
fore it was a fashionable object of cultural studies, using co-authors of a recent manifesto on Western racism
it was a good way of getting classified as mentally titled Barbaric Others). Guillermo and Coco play with
retarded." this continuum between the authentic and the parody; in
ABOUT THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE the cage, they enact the role of postmodern primitives,
Guillermo in cowboy boots, Indian feathers, watching
In "Managing the Other," Coco had posed a key Gilligan s Island on TV drinking Pepto Bismol as if it
question: "Where does otherness begin when the very were a milkshake, and strengthening his biceps on an
language of authenticity and cultural purity has already exerciser, and Coco in a grass skirt, baseball sneakers,
been subverted?" green face paint, dancing to Rap music and reading a
In The Couple in the Cage she and GuiIIenno children's book about Columbus's voyages; they enact
Gomez-Pena pose this question again but in the form of a brilliant, twisted Adam and Eve in the Garden of the

120 Volurne 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review

 Reciprocal Gaze. The amazing thing, the tragic thing, is postcoloniality and multiculturalism.
that the audience that greets them in Natural History As anthropologists working at the end of the cen-
museums in this country and in public pJazas in Spain, tury with new global agendas that we presume have far
England, and Australia, tends to believe that they are in surpassed the popular uses of the primitive Other, our
fact for real. The "savage slot," it turns out, is alive and first impulse may be to feel superior, to pat ourselves on
well. I had the eerie pleasure of being there at the Field the back and say, this doesn't represent us; this is a
Museum in Chicago when the sailor noted that the fiction of what true anthropology does. But who among
female in the cage seemed to shave her Jegs, but of us can forget that Ishi was a man of our century, and that
course, he quickly added, she probably rips out the hair anthropologists knew no better than to put him in the
by the roots. cage of the Anthropology Musuem at Berkeley so he
We talk about doing applied anthropology, about could play native, while putting him on the payroll as a
bringing anthropological concerns to wider audiences, janitor? The destruction of the savage slot-that is a
about bringing ourethnographies back to the people we project easier said than done, isn't it? We need to find
work with, etc, etc. But we can be more creative about ways to acknowledge our complicity with the cages of
all this, it seems to me. The Couple in the Cage is an otherness we've helped to create in our ethnographies
example of a form of applied anthropology: it is a form and our museums, without, on the other hand, becom-
of interactive ethnography seen live by at least 200,000 ing so paralyzed that we give away the work of cultural
people; it is a form of studying the Wesr s construction interpretation to advertising, tourism, the circus, and
ofitself through its construction of the Other; it is a form literary criticism, realms with which we do share a
of applied cultural critique; a reverse ethnography. It is common world of meaning. From Coco Fusco I've
also a form of being accountable to the history embed- learned that we can return dignity to those who've been
ded in anthropology's origins and continued existence. humiliated into otherness and in that process of recu-
"The task," write Ashis Nandy and his co-authors, "is peration move forward into new forms of subjecthood
to render the West's occulis mundi, this eye of the with spunk, laughter, grace, intelligence, and hope.
world, visible in all its deformation so that people Thank you, Coco, for being here.
everywhere can see themselves clearly once again." Or
as Rolf-Trouillot has put it, "Anthropology needs to Ruth Behar is the author ofTransloJed Woman: Cross-
turn the apparatus elaborated in the observation of non- ing the Border with Esperanza's Story and co-editor of
Western societies on itself and on the history from Women Writing Culture, which is forthcoming with
which it sprang ... We owe it to ourselves to ask what University of California Press, fall 1995. She teaches
remains of anthropology ... when we remove [the sav- anthropology at the University of Michigan.
age] slot. The time is ripe for substantive propositions
that aim explicitly at the destruction of the savage slot." ON THE MARGINS OF TH CouPI..E IN THE CAGE1
It seems to me that one way to destroy the savage BRUCE MANNHEIM
slot is to embrace it, satirically and yet also-and this is
essential-respectfully, as Coco Fusco and Guillermo
Gomez Pena have done. The range of responses they In Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... 2 Coco
elicited, from the most despicable forms of paternalism, Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena toured museums in
to the chest-beating of the woman who says she's America and Europe as two Native Americans from an
ashamed to live in America, to the response of the island off the coast of Mexico who had somehow
Native American man who says he could see his own avoided contact with outsiders. Led on leashes to a cage
grandchildren in that cage, point to the different ways in by confederates posing as museum docents, Fusco and
which their performance touched a vital nerve. It is no Gomez-Pena paced around, stared at a television, worked
longer possible to construe the West monolithically, at a laptop computer, read, and posed for the audience,
because the smug white man who notes that the male in all the while maintaining silence with each other. The
the cage seems to be interested in things he doesn't "docents" and descriptions on the cage explained to
understand coexists with the Native American who can gathered crowds that these "specimens" were represen-
see his own grandchildren in that cage; both are located tatives of the "Guatinaui," from the undiscovered is-
in the debris of the history of the West, in that inherited land of Guetinau. Their audiences responded in unex-
web of Columbian political consciousness known as pected ways. Although the perfonnance was conceived

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 121

 as parody, many spectators responded with an earnest- At another level, I was disturbed by the scope of the
ness that ranged from reverence to horror. In Buenos broadside. Collapsed were anthropology, museums,
Aires, G6mez-Peiia was attacked with acid. Surrounded world's fairs, circuses, and other cross-cultural "en-
as it was by a carefully sanitized commemoration of the counters" that were both more obviously coercive and
500th anniversary of the "encounter of two worlds," more clearly bound up with the interests of commerce
Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... reached the and empire. The only plausible response to an anthro-
poJiticaJly and emotiona11y charged interior of the pology so encompassed is the familiar, self-righteous
Quincentenary. argument that anthropologists should stay home and
The Couple in the Cage documents the Two undis- concentrate on the ethnography of the every-day in the
covered Amerindians visit ... , splicing performance and United States, or in another similar slogan, on the
audience reaction with a depressing history of museum, history of the present. This argument threatens the
sideshow, and world's fair exhibits of people from closure of one of the few venues in the North American
Africa and America. The film moves seamlessly be- academy in which it is respectable to talk about and
tween the performance and newsreel, embedding Two listen to, study, and study with, people other than
undiscovered Amerindians visit ... in a pre-configured European and Euroamerican elites. Even at a time in
rhetorical field of human "specimens" exhibited in the which multiculturalism is a booming industry, it is a
name of "science." The audiences are filmed in a range multiculturalism of hyphenated North Americans, not
ofreactions, from concern forthe two exhibits to canny a demand that we listen to and learn about the rest of the
awareness that they might in fact be marks in a put-on. world. In this context, the very power of parody fore-
Parodic moments in the film give way to deadly serious closes any possibility of arguing with the image of the
ones; the distance from the subject that is a11owed by circus impresario trafficking in exotica.
parody collapses in the segues from documenting Two In addition, to be lured into that particular rhetori-
undiscovered Amerindians to scenes of living World's cal configuration, is to deny the complexity of
Fair exhibits. For anthropologists, The Couple in the anthropology's political engagement, particularly at
Cage presents special challenges, especial1y after more earlier moments in its existence in the United States,
than a decade s critiques of objectifying moves that are when-in contrast to its counterparts in the colonial
closely related to those documented in the film, both metropoles, such as the U.K. or the Netherlands-the
through parody and historical footage. Because the discipline emerged partly in response to eugenics and
anthropological critiques of these objectifying moves other racist political tendencies, and in which anthro-
have so often been constructed around issues of "repre- pologists took an active role in organizing coherent
sentation," it would be easy for an anthropologist to intel1ectual and political alternatives. Franz Boas both
reduce the film to an allegory of the politics ofrepresen- co11aborated and echoed W.E.B. DuBois at the pivotal
tation, simplifying a complex and equivocal relation- moment of founding of the NAACP (Baker 1994; cf.
ship to its subject to a univocal, moralistic one. Stocking 1968; Hyatt I 990). To accept the tenns of the
Here I propose to use The Couple in the Cage as the parody as boundaries of discussion of the location of
starting point for some reflections that really belong on anthropology in the world today, it seems to me, is to
the margins of both the performance and the film. respond to the film at the same level as the museum-
Speaking personally, The Couple in the Cage elicited goers who did not understand that the "temporary
several mutually contradictory reactions: As someone exhibit" was parody.
who has often found ethnographic museums painful- Final1y, I was disturbed by the closeness of the
the more so after several years of field research-I was museum-goers' experience and my own about ten years
pleased to see Gomez-Pena and Fusco make a point that ago at seeing a peopled ethnographic exhibit on India at
deeply needs making, and what is more doing so with the Smithsonian. The last part of the exhibit, Aditi: A
brilliance. audacity, and humor-none of which are Celebration of Life~ included "forty folk artists-
found in oversupply in cultural criticism today. And craftspeople and perfonners-who worked in specially
indeed, one response that I've seen from anthropologist designed spaces, illustrating their creative role in the
colleagues is a delight at the deflation of the rhetoric life cycle" (Kurin 1991 :318). Although that part of the
through which ethnographic work is translated for exhibit was conceived as a work space for the folk
popular consumption in newspapers and on public artists, it was quite easy to reverse the figure and
television. ground, and to understand the folk artists as part of a

122 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review

 material exhibit. The film clips in The Couple in the rina I Malintzin/ La Malinche the translator for Cortes
Cage show us excesses that can easily be dismissed as during his negotiations with Montezuma, now a key
part of a past that we have now overcome. 3 But the part of the Mexican national iconography. According to
responses elicited by the performance undermine such Frances Karttunen s outstanding study ,Between worlds:
smug assumptions, reminding us that making other Interpreters, guides, and survivors ( 1994), Malintzin
human beings into spectacles is an ordinary enough part was bilingual in Nahuatl and Chontal Mayan, a lan-
of our experience that many museum-goers took the guage that she shared with a Spanish priest who had
premises of Two undiscoveredAmerindiansfor granted, been shipwrecked and enslaved in a Mayan commu-
even when they found them horrifying. Indeed, as Fred nity. The priest translated Cortes's Spanish to Mayan,
Myers (1994) has observed, performances set in mu- which Malintzin then translated to Nahuatl. Through-
seum exhibits are increasingly being used to create new out the invasion of Central and South America the
"interculture," with distinct cultural claims being ad- Spaniards relied on lenguas, often working in chains.
vanced by distinct participants. As the Spanish occupation hardened, the role of Native
American translators shifted; in the late sixteenth cen-
FROM THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX TO THE WORLD tury. the Jesuits sent several speakers of Southern
Peruvian Quechua to Spain to use as teachers for
Moving from the museum (or better, from the missionary priests who were about to leave for the New
"exhibitionary complex," as Tony Bennett [ 1988] calls World.~

it) to the world outside of it, sets "the couple in the cage" In 1574, the Peruvian priest Cristobal de Molina et
in an even more horrific context, but one which I think Cuzqueiio" ( 1574: 79) reported that many Native
wiH allow us as anthropologists to engage some of the Andeans believed that the Spanish invaders were "sent
issues raised by the film. For ethnographers and our from Spain for Indian body fat, to cure a certain disease.
critics, the issues raised by The Couple in the Cage for which no medicine could be found except for body
primarily engage representation, and our place in main- fat. Because of that, in those days the Indians went
taining the exhibitionary complex. For our interlocu- around very circumspectly, and they avoided the Span-
tors in the field, in contrast, these issues are frequently iards to such an extent that they didn't want to carry
experienced (and represented) as corporeal. The "un- firewood, herbs, and other things to the house of a
discovered Amerindians" in the cages of Buenos Aires, Spaniard, so that they wouldn't be killed for their fat
Chicago, London, and Seville represent mimetically a once they were inside. " 5
history of bodies taken. My examples-of kidnappings In order to make this idea intelligible, it should be
and other appropriations of the body-will come from pointed out that Native Andeans assume that fat is a
America, mainly from colonial Mexico and colonial basic component of the person's life force, and circu-
and modern Peru. I mention them not to titilJate with lates through the body like blood. Similar accusations
horror, but to introduce a non-representational, embod- to those reported by Cristobal de Molina abound today,
ied understanding that cannot be addressed by "creating directed especially at rural priests and school teachers,
new terminology, a new cultural policy, or a multicultural but also at ethnographers and archeologists, particu-
festival" (Fusco 1990: 77). larly those who live separately from Native Andean
Native Americans were taken by the invaders from households. There are dozens of such stories told anec-
virtually the first moment of the invasion. Although dotally by scholars foreign and Peruvian, often accom-
Columbus brought natives of the New World to the panied by the lament that "they didn't understand why
court of Ferdinand and Isabella, they were taken from I was there." Or perhaps the Native Andeans under-
their native lands aot so much to be made spectacles of, stood all too well!
but to be used for practical purposes, with the same Today "slaughterers" (iiak aq) are said to process
brutal rationality with which slaves were brought from Native Andean fat into church candles, cosmetics, or
Africa to the coast of Peru to replace the Native labor North American machinery (Morote 1952: Sola and
lost to disease. Cusihuaman 1967: ch. 8; Vallee and Palomino 1973;
Throughout the invasion, the Spaniards relied on Liffman 1977 Taussig 1987: 238-241; Ansion 1984:
Native language interpreters called lenguas-tongues, 201-208; Ansion et al., 1989). The victim dies a terrible,
who commonly were kidnapped and pressed into ser- lingering death. Far from a transitory rumor, the
vice. The most famous colonial example is Dona Ma- "slaughterer" (iiak aq) is both widespread and histori-

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 123

 cally durable as an explanation for the motives of demand in the industrialized countries, where it is
outsiders being around Native Andeans. For example, used to make medicines, cosmetics, and even to
during the late 1970s a high-school-educated woman lubricate the engines of airplanes.
from a rural village noticed that I had a can of Nivea The bodies of the victims? They are never found._
Cream: Chopped into bits, in order not to lose an ounce of
fat, they disappear. No trace, no proof. (Chappaz
"Sir. Do you know what they make that from?" I 994)6
I saw it coming and could barely suppress a giggle.
"No, seriously. This is true!!~" This is a genuine reverse optic, although its trace
(How could I be so stupid as to buy Nivea cream .... ) through the anthropology and historiography of Andean
South America has been uneven and usually anecdotal
It was then that I realized that Nivea Cream, which (but see Taussig 1987: 238-241, and Ansion's 1989
was almost universally used at the time by the Spanish- collection). Moreover, similar accounts are found else-
speaking elites and middle classes was understood by where in the so-called Third World. The historian Luise
peasants to have been made from the bodies of other White (1993) has found that they are widespread in
peasants. (And here we have a distillation of class and Africa, for example in the image of a fire engine that
race in highland Peru; urban elites take the very fat of takes African blood; White argues that these accounts
Native Andean peasants to keep their skin moist.) Well, mirror local level labor relations. 7 What is critical here
I had to come up with an excuse, no matter how lame, is that even as a "reverse optic" neither the South
and said, "Well, I bought it in Bolivia." American nor the African cases concern representa-
"Oh in that case, its not important." tion; the crisis here is wholesale bodily incorporation.
In other words, ifl was applying the fat of Bolivian Three more examples, brief but horrifying, all from
Quechuas to my skin rather than of Peruvians, it was recent news reports: International organizations have
acceptable. condemned the enslavement of children as laborers in
According to the sociologist Henri Favre ( 1987), in surface mining on the Amazonian side of the Andes.
the mining areas of Huancavelica, the harvest of human The frontier areas in which surface mining occurs are
body fat is even described as an organized extractive virtually unpoliced by the central government. Again in
industry, in which the Peruvian government gives out Peru, the sale of children for foreign adoption is re-
concessions to harvest human fat, always within a well- ported, and is significant enough as problem that the
regulated harvesting season (Favre 1987). In the South- government of Peru is negotiating international agree-
ern Peruvian zones that border on coca-producing and ments to prevent theft of babies, such as the one con-
processing areas, the slaughterers are said to take the fat cluded with the government ofltaly in November 1994
to clandestine processing points, sending them off in (International Press Service, 21 November 1994; Scot-
airplanes in the middle of the night. The fear of slaugh- tish Daily Record, I 7 November J994). FinalJy, in mid
ters tends to be strongest today in those places where November, Argentinean police closed two firms that
there is strongly organized production for export: for employed 200 Peruvian and Bolivian undocumented
example, in the Pampa of Anta in Cuzco, where white workers, kept in virtual slavery (El Comercio (Lima),
maize is produced for export: in the mining areas of 18 November 1994). I have regaled you with these
Ayacucho and Huancavelica; and adjacent to coca- horrors not so much to numb you to the issues raised by
producing regions. The Couple in the Cage as to suggest that alongside
And in Fall 1994, a reporter for the French Press issues of representation--even intertwined with them
Agency (Agence France Presse) reported from Pampa are matters of physical survival.
Cangallo, the original epicenter of the Peruvian vio- ***
lence of the 1980s and 1990s, that fear of the Coco Fusco' s parody concentrates on a particular
"slaughterer" was once again taking precedence over optic through which the North has imagined the South
fear of the army and of guerrillas: at the same time as it systematically looted its resources
and people; that the same imagery remains part of the
At night he arrives and fattens himself by taking the tacit framework with which the North apprehends the
fat of his victims. Human fat is much finer than South today can be seen in the failure of the parody. The
animal fat, the peasants assure me, and greatly in audiences/participants/victims (whatever you

124 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review

 want to calJ them-having been influenced by toon, a mass-circulation newspaper-in 1994--reported
ethnomethodology, I prefer "victims") took the matter a South American tribe that hid their modem goods and
very seriously. Indeed, when The Couple in the Cage trotted out their old stories when the anthropologist
played the rotunda ofthe Smithsonian Institution, some- arrived. I don't know how it is that the news reporter
one called the Humane Society! But in a time in which that "broke" the story was able to get the goods on this
issues of "representation and cultural appropriation of deceit, but it was convincing enough for an English
the Other" get a disproportionate share of theoretical professor at a prairie state university to repeat it as a
attention, it is extremely important to keep a clear pearl of wisdom of post-modem epistemology. this
distinction between the aims of cultural appropriation time unwittingly reproducing the response of many of
of other people and their physical appropriation. What the spectators to The Couple in the Cage. It is critical
is at stake for us specifically is a clear-headed under- that we not stumble blindly into the moment's conceit
standing of the engagement of anthropology and an- of mistaking mass produced imagery for life; images
thropologists in both the material and representational are only a part of the simulacraand circulate more freely
issues surrounding other peoples. in some environments than others. Similarly, at a con-
Anthropology and anthropologists have played ference that I attended in I 994 an anthropologist (with
strongly ambivalent roles--<me might even say schizo- no research experience in Latin America) assured us-
phrenic roles-in both projects, the ambivalence being in all seriousness-that for rural Mexican peasants
clearest in the national anthropologies of the period Zapata had been supplemented by Marlon Brando in
between the two World Wars. WhiJe Dutch anthropolo- Viva 7.apata-that was only about two months before
gists trained explicitly for work in the colonial service the rebellion in Chiapas by the Zapatista National
in Indonesia, and British anthropologists lamented the Liberation Army!
limited extent to which their colleagues in the colonial REVERSE OPTICS
office paid attention to them, American anthropol-
ogy-then as now-was divided between several dis- Finally, I want to raise the issue of the effectiveness
tinct projects, with widely distinct-even opposed po- (and limitations) of parody as a means of interrogating
litical implications. Alongside Kroeber's employment a complex, politically charged, and emotion-laden set
of Ishi as a living museum exhibit was Boass public of issues such as the nature of ethnographic research
prominence in the struggle against racism; alongside and representation.
Mead's argument that it wasn't necessary to ground On the margins of The Couple in the Cage is the
ethnography in prior research in the language was idea of a reverse optic, as one of the guides is led away
Sapir's Native accounts of Nootka ethnography, with on a leash while the credits roll by. A reverse optic is a
running text in Nootka, translated into English at the kind of mirror held up to the representational discourses
bottom of the page (Sapir and Swadesh 1955). Along- of Northern peoples, a set of representations of our-
side myriad monographs on Native North American selves by the people who we usually represent. The
peoples, were Zora Neale Hurston s WPA monograph false democracy in the idea of a reverse optic aside, it is
on the U.S. South, Mules and Men ( 1935) and Ruth important to note that as in the South American and
Benedict's (1934) and Edward Sapir's (1924) critiques African stories of extraction of fat and of blood, respec-
of U.S. culture (embedded-as customary-in their tively, the reverse optic is concerned with material
scholarly writings). It is important for us to recognize conditions, not with conditions of representation.
the diversity of both material and representational poli- The Couple in the Cage is manifestly not an ex-
tics in our own history in part because we cannot afford ample of a reverse optic; rather it is a politically com-
its erasure, given the issues that we face today and those mitted parody from within~ but it raises some serious
that are to come, as eugenics and racism have returned questions about the ways in which the North has appro-
to favor in U.S. public culture. priated cultures of the South. How can we continue to
Because we must engage those issues, anthropolo- do anthropology without falling into a serious version
gists must resist the facile finger-pointing with which of what Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... is
politicians and English professors have recycled parodying? That is a sincere question, one that has to be
Kathleen Gough and Talal Asad's critiques of the asked of the particulars of each of our researches, not a
1970s, or even Edward Said' s of the I 980s. In an almost rhetorical question that can be answered with a sweep-
unwitting reproduction of a famous Gary Larson car- ing condemnation or defence of anthropology. How do

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 125

 you represent ethnographically without surrounding de los indios, para sanar cierta enfermedad, que no se
your discussion with an invented context, which like haHaba para eJJa medicina sino el unto; a cu ya causa, en
the museum exhibit magnifies the singularity of the aquellos tiempos, andaban los indios muy recatados, y
contained object? How do you represent without fram- se extraiiaban de los espaiioles en tanto grado, que Ia
ing-or caging? Jena, yerba, y otras cosas no las querian llevar a casa de
As parody, Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... espaiiol; pordecirno las matasen, allf dentro, para sacar
has the linguistic characteristics that ironic discourse el unto."
6
has more generally. In order to make an instance of talk La nuit ii rode et egorge pour recuperer la graisse de
(or here, an entire rhetoric) the object of its discourse, ses victimes. De la graisse humaine, plus "fine" que la
it uses the same talk (Sperber and Wilson I 98 I; I 986: graisse animale, et, assurent Jes paysans, tres demandee
237-43), thereby conflating use and mention. To put dans Jes pays industrialises: elle entrerait dans la com-
this in a different way, parody is "double-voiced," position de medicaments, produits cosmetiques, voire
containing within it an instance of the very discourse servirait a lubrifier Jes moteurs d'avion.
that it is imitating (Bakhtin 1984 [1929]: 193-196). In Les cadavres ? On ne Jes retrouve jamais: decoupes en
order to succeed as parody, it must be cut from the same morceaux, pour ne pas perdre une once de graisse, ils
cloth as that which it parodies, so that the viewer/ disparaissent. Pas de trace, pas de preuve.
7
participant attends to the discourse being parodied in all I am grateful to Corinne Kratz for referring me to this
seriousness. That is also the source of its failure: It can work. Misty Bastien reports similar ideas about theft of
always be interpreted monovocally as an instance of the body parts in Nigeria, but these are apparently world-
very stuff that it parodies. And that is exactly what wide in distribution; there are persistent stories in
happened to Central and South America that North Americans kid-
The Couple in the Cage; many in the audience (or nap children to use their corneas and other body parts
"among the victims") discovered the mention side of for transplants at clandestine human chop shops in
the perfonnance after the fact-if at all. But that creates northern Mexico. In the early I 980s, there were rumors
an immediate danger for those of us who would use it in Lima, Peru of an organ stealing ring that lured
as a tool to reach a broader audience-if they don't get teenagers and young adults to parties where they would
it, are we not simply reproducing and reinforcing the ingest drugged alcohol and wake up several days later
practices that we sought to undennine? Are we simply with a kidney missing. The latter story recently turned
preaching to the already converted? Are we reaching up in New York City, and a popular U.S. television
out to and educating a broader audience, if they don't series, Law and order based an episode on it.
get it? 8 8
For a similar reaction, see Pamela Sommers's review
NOTES of the perfonnance at the Smithsonian Institution (Wash-
ington Post, 20 September 1992, p. E3).
1
Thanks to Ruth Behar, Coco Fusco, Susan A. Gelman,
Corinne Kratz and to the audience at the panel on Coco REFERENCES
Fusco's The Couple In the Cage for valuable discus- Ansi6n, Juan [Jean-Marie Ansion)
sion. Mary Pratt (I 992) raised my consciousness as to 1984 Demons des Andes, Louvain: Universite
what a little accent can do to America. Catholique de Louvain.
2
The title of the performance included the name of the Ansi6n, Juan. ed.
place in which it was being performed, as Two Undis- 1989. Pishtacos de verdugos a sacaojos~ Lima: Tarea.
covered Amerindians Visit Chicago, Two Undiscov- Baker, Lee D.
eredAmerindians Visit Washington, and so forth. I will I 994 The location of Franz Boas within the African-
use ellipses for the name of the city. American struggle. Critique of Anthropology I 4:
3
See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1990: 397-407) for a 199-217
discussion of the exhibition of humans set in the context Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich
of ethnographic and folkloric exhibits more generally. 1984 [1929] Problems of Dostoevskys poetics, tr.
4
Jonathan Spence (1988) has written about a similar Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Min-
individual who was taken from China. nesota Press.
5 ..
de Espana habfan enviado a este Reino por unto

126 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review

 Benedict, Ruth F Myers, Fred R.
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eral Psychology I 0: 59-82. Asia Society gallery. American Ethnologist 21
Bennett, Tony 679-99.
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the poetics and politics of museum display. Ivan 1968 Race, culture, and evolution: essa.vs in the history
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Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, Manuscript 3169, Bruce Mannheim, Associate Professor of Anthropol-
ff. 2-36. Edition by Henrique Urbano, in Fabulas y ogy at the University of Michigan. is author of The
mitos de Los incas Henrique Urbano and Pierre Language of the lnka Since the European Invasion
Duviols, eds., ( 1989) ~Madrid: Historia 16. 47-134 (Texas. 1991) and co-editor (with Dennis Tedlock) of
Morote Best, Efrain The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (l/linois 1995).
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ethnography of the Andes as seen through Native
Andean discourses, A Nation Surrounded.

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