The Liminal Collection: Vietnamese Handicraft at the Smithsonian

Abstract

115 Jennifer Way The Liminal Collection: Vietnamese Handicraft at the Smithsonian The position of Asian artifacts in the Smithsonian remains, in some cases, peripheral. While Asian handicraft has been collected and housed for the better part of the last century, these artifacts have often languished as loose groups of material waiting to be made meaningful by curatorial processes. In 1995, Paul Michael Taylor, director of the Smithsonian Asian Cultural History Program, wrote that “artifacts of diplomacy ,” “the Japanese materials brought back from Commodore Matthew Perry’s historic voyage to Japan,” remained in need of attention, despite the fact that they constituted the first major collections of Asian art and handicraft in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and had acquired nearly half a century earlier. He explained that the artifacts’ “origins and collection meanings have been poorly understood” (Taylor 1995, iv). In redress, museum staff embarked on a study of what the artifacts revealed about their “collecting culture” (iv), resulting in a catalog tracing the collections’ origins back to who presented them to whom, where and when, historically (Houchins 1995). In this essay, I consider another collection owned by the Smithsonian, this one consisting of Vietnamese handicraft. I examine it redressively and recursively for what it, too, can reveal about its collecting culture. First, a very brief account of the collection under consideration is in order. On August 7, 1962, the NMNH registered as accession 244852 a collection of “67 ethnological specimens” “gathered from living peoples in Viet Nam” that it had acquired as a gift from the government of Vietnam through its embassy in Washington, D.C. (U.S. National Museum Accession Memorandum, National Collection of Fine Arts US). However, since that time, the Smithsonian has not named the collection anything 116 Jennifer Way besides accession 244852, nor has it exhibited or published the artifacts, which include a carved chest with bone shutters; a wooden printing block; ceramic fighting cocks; lacquered, brass, and silver trays; carved, wooden, inlaid, and silver boxes; a brass perfume brassier; a brass tea kettle; a silver desk set; silver betel boxes and a spittoon; a chalk pot; tortoise shell fans; glasses; silver spoons; a brass powder case; a woman’s scarf; an embroidered curtain; a coat with silver buttons; a pink dress with white flowers; material for a blouse and embroidered material for a coat; a silk patterned belt; a bamboo hat; and a conical hat (Figure 1). For that matter, online museum registration records do not even signal that the artifacts constitute a collection, despite that they were named as such in the accession papers. Furthermore, these papers do not explain how the Smithsonian came to acquire the collection or why it affiliates it with Asian ethnography in the anthropology section of the NMNH rather than with the Freer Gallery of Art or the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery , both of which specialize in Asian art. For these reasons, I consider accession 244852 liminal—it remains at the threshold of being treated as a collection. In redress, I take the historical aggregation of its artifacts and some of the circumstances that contributed to its liminality as the focus of what follows. In tracing the history of the collection’s “collecting culture,” I suggest that its failure to exemplify fine art, along with the artifacts’ similarity to the hybrid and commercial status of Vietnamese handicraft central to a State Department aid program, prevented the artifacts from meeting museum staff’s expectations for an ethnographic collection. This left the artifacts without a context or narrative to explain their importance as a collection and resulted in their being disregarded. Today, a major approach to understanding the history and importance of ethnographic collections involves museums engaging with their source and local communities (Byrne 2011, 308). Some support dispersing their acquisitioned objects to original makers or communities of users to redress Western, imperialist-laden epistemologies and museological practices that overwrite non-Western, indigenous makers’ understanding and intended uses of the things they made or that belong to their ethnic and cultural groups (Sleeper-Smith 2009). Likewise, Margaret Bodemer (2010, 10) reports that in Vietnam, ethnology museums face questions from “local communities and indigenous groups” concerning “authority, ownership...