Lecturer: James Clifford
Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz

TITLE: Repatriation and the Second Life of Heritage: Return of the Masks in Kodiak,
Alaska

Saturday, June 26, 14:00-16:15, Auditorium / National Museum of Ethnology
Admission: Free (reservation required / first come, first served up to 450)

Language: English / Japanese (with simultaneous interpretation)

Greetings: Kenichi Sudo, Director-General, National Museum of Ethnology
Moderator: Kenji Yoshida, Professor, National Museum of Ethnology
Panelists:
Nobuhiro Kishigami, Professor, National Museum of Ethnology
Yoshinobu Ota, Professor, University of Kyushu

Reception:
17:00-18:30 Minpaku Restaurant
Admission: 5,000 yen (includes food and drinks)
* Reservation required / first come, first served up to 100

Reservations:
E-Mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Fax :06-6878-8479
International Cooperative Unit, National Museum of Ethnology
10-1 Senri Expo Park, Suita, Osaka 565-8511

James Clifford was born in 1945. He is a world-renowned cultural critic and
“Post-modern” anthropologist whose work has challenged conventional academic
norms and methods, contributing to postcolonial critiques of Euro-centric
epistemologies. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University,
and has taught since 1978 in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness
doctoral program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also
served as a visiting professor of anthropology at University College London
and Yale University. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Clifford has
published books and essays that are widely translated and frequently cited
in many areas of the arts and culture. They include Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Co-edited with George Marcus,
University of California Press, 1986), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth
Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988),
and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard
University Press, 1997).

Abstract
This lecture will draw on research recently conducted in Kodiak Alaska at
the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository. The museum is a Native
administered cultural center engaged in a variety of heritage renewal
programs. In 2008 a collection of ceremonial masks from the Kodiak
region - acquired in 1870 by a young French linguist and stored ever since in
a French provincial museum - returned on loan to the Alutiiq Museum. These
very rare masks, of enormous iconic value for a culture that had been
devastated by Russian and United States colonization, play a new role in the
process of “heritage” revival. The talk describes (with photographic
illustrations) the masks’ return, and it explores the second life of
heritage in which these repatriated artifacts are now major actors. General
questions concerning the politics of heritage and indigenous renewal are
discussed: differing visions of authenticity and historicity; colonial
legacies and indigenous futures; complex relations with capitalism and
post-modern formations of identity. The talk argues that the meanings of the
masks today, the ruptures and continuities they embody, are ambivalent,
productive and unfinished.