UNDOING
HARVARD PEABODY MUSEUM
The translation of biological racism into intellectual progress represents Louis Agassiz’s trip to plantations across the South, to utilize photography to prove the species inferiority of Black people to whites. Merging one’s credibility in objective science with their hunch for eugenics allowed Agassiz to leave a legacy of some of the first images of enslaved Africans. Centuries later the scourge of this attempted scientific proof has been dislodged and accepted as unjust, inaccurate, and cruel. However, the property of these photos remains in the custody of their perpetrators. When confronted by Tamera Lanier, a descendant of the photographed, she was denied the right to these images as personal property. The same legal system that heard from former slave Belinda Sutton, heard from a free black woman in 2022 and remained its fidelity to the institution. The familiarity and recognition of these images has been reappropriated through art and photography, by Carrie Mae Weems, and discussed at length by scholars through the recent decades. Yet, these images are not considered as the representation of the voyeuristic, and once contextualized in a science of eugenicism, objectivity of human people as instruments of experimentation. The fullness that we subject now to these images is a posthumous writing of the human into a vision that has rendered the object below, and beneath the human. What can be recovered from that scale of dehumanization, and the form of hypervisibility that has left a legacy of interest, sadness, and ghostliness.
The accumulation of human-bodies, and cultures into an objectivity of study and fixedness of history has amassed Harvard its intellectual reputation, while negating the interpersonal and ultra-human repercussions that live in the afterlives. The descriptions of these materials are evident of an attempt to transform the mundane into the scientific in order to substantiate some arcane idea of who and what a culture is or can be. “Two Chinese Men in western clothing,” is a photograph of two men, who likely had no consideration of their dress as worthy of accumulation within the archive of the Harvard Peabody Museum. What becomes implied in the usurping of normative acts and representation of people is the supposed condition that these individuals are somehow not of the norm, and therefore, their practice of normality is somehow intriguing, exotifying, or wholly so astonishing it must be cataloged into knowledge. Knowledge becomes a tool of confirming an existing narrative. People are acquired, extracted, sold, and accumulated to become collections of proof of some form of being that is supposedly no longer existent. In fact, those that do exist are present and engaged today. Why are images of mothers, families, and people living daily the possession and legal right of an institution? Why are they not present in the context that they emanate? Counter laws for repatriation, such as Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and Costa Rica’s Nacional Patrimonio Arcipaleago, exist and are only enforced when non-complied, and when that non-compliance is from an entity who will be enforced. The matter of bones, and bodies, and ancient stones are withheld in a legitimate system of bureaucracy that is designed to protect the institution’s accumulated wealth. Processes must be followed and when not there is an entity, an institution, that must exist to ensure that it is. The institution has set its own standard and processes that it follows in alignment with its own goals. As such, the accumulation continues, and we walk on buried lives, we matriculate on accumulated subjectivities, and we continue on…