museum anthropology
Caribbean for their labor. Enslaved Africans were
we have always been modern:
Museums, Collections, and Modernity
in the Caribbean
Wayne Modest
tropenmuseum
abstract
In this article, I explore the ways in which notions of the
ancient and the modern have helped to shape early museo-
logical interest and practices in the Caribbean. I argue that
the Caribbean, and for my purposes Jamaica, occupies an
ambiguous place between the ancient and the modern
worlds—not ancient enough yet not modern enough—
which has resulted in the material culture of the modern
Caribbean being largely absent from anthropological (and
in fact history) collections both in the Caribbean as well as
in museums across Europe. The result is that the region
has come to be defined materially primarily through its nat-
ural and not its cultural history, and thus is represented as
a place of nature and not culture. [nature, modernity,
Jamaica, Caribbean, slavery, Tainos, colonial collecting]
Framed within the theme of this special issue of
Museum Anthropology, this article explores the ways
in which notions of the ancient and the modern have
helped to shape early museological interest and prac-
tices in the Caribbean. Drawing on the work of schol-
ars such as Sydney Mintz, Michael Dash, and David
Scott, I will argue that the Caribbean, and for my pur-
poses Jamaica in particular, occupies an ambiguous
place between the ancient and the modern worlds—
not ancient enough yet not modern enough—which
has resulted in the material culture of the modern
Caribbean being largely absent from anthropological
(and in fact history) collections both in the Caribbean
as well as in museums across Europe.1 The result is
that the region has come to be defined materially pri-
marily through its natural and not its cultural history,
and thus is represented as a place of nature and not
culture.
Briefly put, the history of the modern Caribbean
may be described as one of aggressive European con-
quest and near extermination of the region’s indige-
nous peoples (the Tainos in Jamaica, for example).
This was followed by colonization and then repopula-
tion through abusive and oppressive force over Afri-
cans who were enslaved and brought to the
Museum Anthropology, Vol. 35, Iss. 1, pp. 85–96 © 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2011.01124.x
torn not only from their home, family, and cultural
groups, but they were also alienated from a past
to which they could no longer connect (Patterson
1985). Later, when African labor could no longer be
secured through force and hence was not easily
available because of Emancipation, other fungible
bodies—indentured Indians, Chinese, and more
Africans—were brought in as replacements. The sys-
tem of indentureship that developed, while not based
on forced labor, failed to result in significant changes
in the relationships of power or hierarchies of oppres-
sion structured around race that characterized the
earlier system under slavery. The new labor force was
to inherit a system in which they were deemed to be
merely laboring bodies for an imperialist enterprise
that mainly served the white ruling class’s needs.
The Caribbean that resulted was one produced in
large part by Western modernity—a region popu-
lated by new groups of immigrants involved in a
sociocultural and economic environment that could
be described as “modern in some way even before
Europe itself” (Mintz 1996:21). This “new” region
was to unsettle established notions about many of the
categories that we have come to understand within
social theory. Categories such as history, modernity,
past, and ethnicity became especially nuanced in the
Caribbean and the region has helped to introduce
new categories for exploration such as creolization.
Accordingly, Sidney Mintz in his 1993 Walter Rodney
Memorial Lecture, “Goodbye Columbus: Second
Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millen-
nium,” (quoted in Scott 2004a:191) has described the
region and its peoples as:
the first modernised peoples in world history.
They were modernised by enslavement and
forced transportation; by “seasoning” and coer-
cion on time-conscious export-oriented enter-
prises; by the reshuffling, redefinition and
reduction of gender-based roles; by racial and
status-based oppression; and by the need to
reconstitute and maintain cultural forms of
their own under implacable pressure. These
were people wrenched from societies of a differ-
ent sort, then thrust into remarkably industrial
settings for their time and for their appearance,
and kept under circumstances of extreme
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n

repression. Caribbean cultures had to develop this volume, for a discussion of collecting practices in
under these unusual and, indeed, terrible condi- the Pacific). On encountering a welcoming indige-
tions. The argument here is that they have, as a nous population on his first voyage, Columbus
result, a remarkably modern cast for their time. returned to Spain with tangible evidence of his dis-
covery, in objects (including samples of the flora and
Scott (1999, 2004b), who concurs with Mintz,
fauna) and actual Amerindians, as curiosities and as
describes the region and its peoples as being con-
proof of his discovery of the “West Indies” (Milanich
scripted to modernity.
and Milbrath 1989).
It is this history, this modern formation, that is
This encounter and return signal two divergent yet
my focus in exploring the emergence of museums in
interrelated ideas that were to remain significant not
the region, and specifically in Jamaica. The questions
only to fashioning ideas about the Caribbean—“invent-
that arise from the region are how, within museologi-
ing the region”(see, e.g., Hulme 1992; O’Gorman
cal (or anthropological) theory and practice, to
1961)—but also to collecting practices within the
account for a people who, as Scott (2004a:192) puts it
region for centuries to come. First, Europeans collected,
are: “neither properly ‘primitive’ nor ‘civilized’, nei-
harnessed, and ordered (natural) things as they tried
ther ‘non-Western’ on the conventional criteria nor
to construct and control (knowledge about) the
unambiguously ‘Western’ (in short, neither fish nor
natural world. Secondly, such practices included the
fowl)?” How do we understand a region that “never
collecting of humans, that is (savage) bodies, as
quite fit[s] securely within any anthropological
fungible commodities to be classified and exploited.
agenda. Whereas New Guinea, Africa, Amazonia
These ideas were to frame the New World as a place
offered kinship systems, costumes, coiffures, cuisines,
of the curious and the exotic, where nature abounded
languages, beliefs, and customs of dizzying variety
and wild man roamed. Indeed, from the moment of
and allure,” how might we understand the Caribbean
European contact, the Caribbean has been framed as
within anthropological, and, more cogently for my
a natural space—sometimes as the Garden of Eden
concerns, museological theory and practice (Scott
and at other times a torrid zone—within imperial
2004a)?
imagination (Sheller 2003:13).
Within traditional museological conceptions of
Numerous scholars have commented on the cen-
time (often as chronology), space (as belonging), and
trality of these two tropes to imagining the region in
history/heritage (as past), how do we account for a
recent years. J. Michael Dash (1998), for example,
group of peoples whose originary formation is not so
comes to a similar conclusion in his discussion of the
much located in the land of their current negotiations
literary narratives that he suggests have been impor-
of identity and belonging but rather within a colonial
tant to the “invention” of what he calls the “Other
formation characterized by forced migration, dis-
Americas.” Following Hayden White, Dash (1998)
juncture, and loss? How might we rethink the object-
identifies the tropes of “wilderness” and that of the
based museum or heritage model, where objects act
“noble savage” as discursive frames through which
as sites of memory that connect us to our past, to
the region has been created. By inventing faraway
account for the “new ethnicities” (Hall 1996) that
lands of wild nature and savages, Europeans were not
now characterize the Caribbean? How, in short, do
only inventing themselves as dialectically opposite to
we account for a people who, through a specific colo-
tropical man, that is, civilized and cultured, but also
nial formation have always been modern?
laying claim to the power to domesticate the New
World (see Said 1978; Trouillot 1991). Dash describes
Nature, Curiosity, and Collecting the
the ways these tropes have worked to structure narra-
Caribbean
tives about the Caribbean as a natural as opposed to a
Columbus’s initial encounter with the indige-
cultural space:
nous population—what Europe has described as
discovery—arguably signals the first instance where a Whether the prevalent trope is savage wildness
kind of Western museological collecting can be iden- or pristine innocence, the New World is
tified in the Caribbean region (see also Hooper et al., overwhelmingly the realm of the natural. To

86
 w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n

even the most benign commentators, there is no curious plants and their uses was gained in part from
culture or civilisation worthy of mention. local populations in the region, including the
Europe, on the other hand, is the domain of the enslaved population.3 While we may never really
culture, even if that culture is seen as decadent know what happened to Columbus’s “collections” of
or repressive. [Dash 1998:28] humans—the Tainos that accompanied him back to
Spain—or where his collection of fruits and spices are
It is this image of cultural unworthiness and what
today, we are aware of other collections in and of the
I believe to be its material consequences that is the
region.
focus of this article. Dash’s project is primarily con-
The collection of Sir Hans Sloane in the years 1687
cerned with literary attempts at self-fashioning in the
to 1689 is one of the earliest and arguably the most
Caribbean through the works of several of the
significant examples of a Caribbean collection.
region’s leading literary figures such as Glissant and
Sloane’s collection is illustrative of the ways in which
Césaire. He makes his case in light of European liter-
the West Indies was materially imagined in the 17th
ary discourses—from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to
century as a place for the curious and the natural.
Shakespeare’s Tempest, for example—that have
Sloane’s association with the Caribbean began in
helped to frame the region as “Other” or “elsewhere.”
1686 when he accepted the offer to become the physi-
For the purposes of this paper, I am more concerned
cian of Christopher Monck, second Duke of Alber-
with the ways that these imaginations of the Carib-
marle, who had recently been appointed governor of
bean helped to structure collecting practices within
Jamaica. On December 19, 1687, Sloane landed in
the region. What I would like to suggest is that it was
Jamaica. On his return to London, he published two
this notion of “tropicalness”—of a space of the natu-
volumes on the natural history of the region, both of
ral and not the cultural—that framed later collecting
which emphasized his Jamaican collections. The first,
practices within the Caribbean. As I have discussed
Catalogus Plantarum, was published in 1696; the sec-
elsewhere (Modest 2010), at the end of the 19th cen-
ond, published in 1707 (and expanded in 1725), was
tury, when museums and other exhibitionary institu-
entitled Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados,
tions emerged in the Caribbean, the collections that
Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica, with the Natural
developed in local museums as well as those objects
History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts,
collected and sent to World’s Fairs were overwhelm-
Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles etc. of the Last of Those
ingly natural objects and presented the island as a
Islands. With the second publication, Sloane hoped
controlled and productive space of nature.
that it served to “teach the Inhabitants of the Parts
The years following Columbus’s arrival in 1492
where these Plants grow, their several Uses, which I
saw the inclusion of the West Indies into a broader
have endeavour’d to do, by the best Informations I
European Renaissance project of collecting natural
can get from Books, and the Inhabitants, either Euro-
wonders for both economic gain and as part of map-
peans, Indians or Blacks” (MacGregor 1994:16). By
ping the entirety of God’s creation.2 Columbus was to
the time of his departure from Jamaica, his “plant col-
be followed by other voyagers, doctors, naturalists,
lection” alone amounted to 800 specimens, “most of
and colonists who traveled to the region in search of
which were new” (MacGregor 1994:13), along with
wealth and wonders, and collections of nature from
other objects of humanity, vertebrates, insects, and
all across the West Indies were taken back to imperial
botany.
centers such as France, the Netherlands, and England.
Describing Sloane’s “Voyage to the West Indies,”
In the Caribbean, the European explorers were to
Gavin de Beer, former director of the British
meet upon “curious” plants and animals, previously
Museum, writes:
unknown to them, as well as what were at the time
“curious” black bodies of early plantation slavery. The story of Sloane’s journey to Jamaica may
The plants that were collected formed part of both well be left for him to tell in his own words, by
private and public collections, as botanical and zoo- means of extracts from his book. They have the
logical specimens and as living specimens in botanical freshness that would be expected in a narrative
gardens across Europe. Knowledge of these new and of one of the earlier Englishmen to undertake a

87
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
naturalist voyage to distant parts by sea, thereby
setting a tradition which, including as it does
the voyages of Sir Joseph Banks, Robert Brown,
Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, Mosely and many
others, has been one of the prides of British
Science. [1953:32, emphasis added]
Here, de Beer locates Sloane’s travels within the
context of a broader European tradition of collecting
and knowing nature as Europeans moved “farther
into the knowledge of her [Nature] ways and
workeings” (quoted in de Beer 1980:128).4 According
to Mimi Sheller, “by his scientific method of careful
observation, collection, and exhaustive recording,
Sloane furthered the incorporation of the New World
into the material network of European knowledge-
production” (2003:17).
By the time Sloane reached the Caribbean, he
was preceded by other travelers concerned with the
region’s flora and fauna such as Gonzalo Fernández
de Oviedo y Valdé, who traveled to Santo Domin-
go in 1514 and wrote La Natural Hystoria de las
Indias, which was first published in 1526. Sloane’s
voyage, however, could be seen as different from
that of earlier travelers. His formal training as a
physician and scientist allowed him a more system-
atic approach to collecting in the region as com-
pared with earlier collectors. This, of course, also
coincided with developments in natural history
away from its “folkloric” past of the early Renais-
sance period to its initial systematization in the
early 17th century (see Jardine et al. 1996). Like
many of the other European travelers, physicians,
and naturalists, Sir Hans Sloane was, however, also
interested to extend his knowledge of the curative
powers that nature offered as a way of tapping into
the significant economic potential that they repre-
sented. We know, for example, that Sloane made
“a considerable amount of money from the pro-
motion of milk chocolate,” recommended as a
drink “For its lightness on the Stomach & its Great
use in all Consumption Cases” (MacGregor
1994:15). Other scholars, such as Londa Schiebin-
ger (2004:119–134), have also pointed out the
growing importance of the West Indies in the 16th
through the 18th centuries to what she has called
“colonial bioprospecting” and the ways in which
colonial powers vied for different lands, not only
88
to annex territories for their imperial booty but
also for the economic potential of the natural
products available in these new territories. To own
the territory where these new species of plants were
being found also meant the ownership of the cura-
tive agents that these plants produced.
I am, however, not so much concerned with
Sloane’s intent. What interests me here are the ways
in which his collections, in their proportional weight-
ing on nature, signal what was regarded as collectable
from the region and therefore presented a material
view of the Caribbean as a space of nature, especially
within the context of his museum in Europe. That is,
these objects, presented through Sloane’s publica-
tions, his museum—established on his return to
England—and later through his bequest to the British
Museum, delimited the ways in which the Caribbean
was to be understood as a realm of nature (and not
culture) in the metropolitan imagination. In fact, of
Sloane’s entire collection of objects from Latin Amer-
ica and the West Indies, those objects that may be
regarded as ethnographic numbered less than one
hundred, many of which he acquired from collections
from other dealers and collectors after his return to
England (King 1994). Of those, only about ten and
definitely fewer than twenty objects could be identi-
fied as being from Jamaica. Sloane’s collections of
Jamaican natural objects, then, comprised over 99
percent of his Jamaican collections.
Among the ten or so items of Jamaican ethnogra-
phy in Sloane’s collections were several items associ-
ated with slavery in Jamaica. These were “‘a barbary
Scourge with which the slaves are beaten made [from]
a palm tree’; a ‘noose made of cane splitt for catching
game or hanging runaway negros’; a ‘bullet used by
the runaway Negroes in Jamaica’; a ‘coat of the run-
away rebellious negroes who lived in the woods of the
island’; and [a] manatee strap ‘for whipping the
Negro Slaves in the Hott W. Indies plantations’”
(Delbourgo 2007:2). Also included in his collections
were human curios, such as “‘the foetus of a negro’”
and several specimens that related to skin color such
as “‘the skin of the arm of a black’ and ‘the skin of a
negro wt. the black corpus mucosum partly taken off
from the true skin and partly sticking to it’” (Del-
bourgo 2007:11). These objects, although significant,
must have been almost invisible in comparison to the
numerous flora and fauna specimens from the island

in the collection and most likely on show in his
museum. We also know that some of these items,
such as the slave whip, were not actually on show in
Sloane’s museum but in another museum in London
(Delbourgo 2007).
Located in Sloane’s museum in London in the
early 18th century, this collection from Jamaica pre-
sented a view that what was collectable from the
island was its nature. And, if Sloane’s museum did
not sufficiently suggest this idea that the Caribbean
was a place of nature, then his publication surely
would have confirmed this for his readers. As Kriz
(2000) writes, of the almost three hundred images
presented in Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica
only 14 slides do not deal specifically with plant
and animals and even within these 14 some still
include aspects of natural history. She also points
out the importance of the visuality of the images
and the multiple audiences that Sloane addressed—
in text, image, and different languages—in reinforc-
ing ideas about the region.5
What I am suggesting here is that both these
modes of representing the region to a British public
—through his museum and his publication—espe-
cially in light of the significant bias toward nature in
his Caribbean collections, served to convince his
viewers that the region was dominated by nature
with little else. In this regard, Sloane continued
within a trope established by Columbus’s earlier
encounter with the New World. At the same time,
his collections of natural specimens, both as artifacts
of knowing and for their economic value, foreshad-
owed later collecting practices within the Caribbean.
Sloane was to be followed by several others, includ-
ing important naturalists and physicians, such as
Patrick Browne who published The Civil and Natu-
ral History of Jamaica in 1756. It is from these tradi-
tions of accumulating curious plants, animals, and
bodies that the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), like other
museums in places such as Barbados and Guyana,
was to inherit its collecting practices in the late 19th
century.
Collecting the Dead
But nature was not the only thing that was collectible
from the region. If we agree with Hayden White
(1985) that the noble savage trope helped to structure
imaginations of the tropics, by the time Hans Sloane
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
visited the region in the 17th century, the “original”
noble savages of the Caribbean had all but disap-
peared. For Jamaica, the original inhabitants, the Tainos,
had already been decimated through forced labor
under the Spanish and by new diseases brought by
both the Spanish and later Africans transported
across the trans-Atlantic to replace the dwindling
Taino laboring population. The fact of their decima-
tion, however, did not preclude a sustained interest in
the Tainos for centuries; nor did it prevent the
deployment of the idea of noble savage—childlike
and feminine—to describe native populations of the
Caribbean, including the later African populations of
the region (Edmondson 1999:21).
While the deployment of the noble savage trope to
frame the Caribbean may be explored with various
objectives in mind, I am again interested in the mate-
rial consequences of these tropes—in particular, the
ways in which Columbus’s early collections of Amer-
indians can be seen to prefigure later museological
interest in collecting objects related to the presumed
“disappearing” or already extinct Amerindians of the
Caribbean by and for Western museums and the IOJ
itself. That is, an interest in the ancient peoples of the
region and not the modern (see also Scott, Reflec-
tions, this volume).
By the time the English wrenched the island of
Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, the indigenous
Tainos had all but disappeared, having been deci-
mated, and the Spanish had started to enslave Afri-
cans to replace the depleted native labor force. The
Tainos soon developed into an antiquarian interest
and several important examples of Taino artifacts
became part of European collections, both private
and public, between the 15th and the 18th centuries.
In fact, tucked away within Hans Sloane’s folio of
images of Natural History of Jamaica, reflecting
objects from his collections, are the images of two
ceramic shards, described as “earthenware urns or
pots, discovered in a cave containing the bones of
an ‘Indian’ who previously dwelled in Jamaica”
(Kriz 2000:50).6 Three shards were part of Sloane’s
accessioned collections (King 1994:235). Another
notable example of Amerindian objects from
Jamaica that attracted earlier antiquarian interest
are the three Taino woodcarvings found in the Car-
penter’s Mountain in 1792 and removed to England
to be exhibited first at the meeting of the Society of
89
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
Antiquaries in 1799. These sculptures were later
transferred to the British Museum’s collection. In
the society’s publication of that year, these objects
were mentioned:
Isaac Alves Rebello, Esq. F.A.S. exhibited to the
Society Three Figures, supposed to be Indian
Deities, in wood . . . found in June 1792, in a
natural cave near the summit of a mountain,
called Spots, in Carphenter’s Mountain, in the
parish of Vere, in the island of Jamaica, by a sur-
veyor in meaning the land. They were discov-
ered placed with their faces (one of which is that
of a bird) towards the east. [Notice 1803:269]
These are arguably the most well-known Jamaican
artifacts collected during the colonial period and
within a major museum in Europe. Similar artifacts,
however, exist within other collections in Europe and
the United States. More commonly found within
British and other European and American collections
are Amerindian sculpted stone figures and relatively
large numbers of Amerindian stone and shell tools
and pottery shards.
In 2009, I conducted a brief survey of those United
Kingdom museums with major ethnography collec-
tions to see what constituted their Caribbean collec-
tions. This included web searches of museum
collections as well as interviews with curators about
their Caribbean collections. In some instances, cura-
tors sent me listings of the collections. In all cases,
Caribbean collections were very small. This was espe-
cially surprising in light of the large Caribbean popu-
lations in Britain and the heavy emphasis on
community-driven programs in British museums.
One museum curator I spoke with could name all the
objects in the collections without consulting any cata-
logue or database, as their holding was fewer than ten
artifacts.
Unsurprisingly, however, Caribbean collections
within British museums were overwhelmingly drawn
from the region’s indigenous past and little else.
When compared with large collections from other
regions, this suggests that the Caribbean had nothing
of anthropological interest outside of the Amerindi-
ans. One striking example of a comparably large col-
lection of what could be described as ethnographic
objects from the Caribbean in Britain is that of the
Kew Gardens. These objects, though “ethnographic”
90
in nature are also all “natural” objects, which coin-
cides with Kew’s interest in economic botany.
Although the three Taino sculptures mentioned
earlier arrived at the British Museum relatively early,
at that time there was only sporadic interest in the
material culture of the Tainos of Jamaica. Cultural
objects would have been collected as accidental finds
during land survey projects, for example. In Jamaica,
it was not until late in the 19th century that a
sustained interest in these collections, which were
initially primarily associated with the IOJ, developed.
According to Robert Howard,
Archaeological research, in the fullest sense of
the term, was not initiated in Jamaica until the
last decade of the 19th century. The two most
important pioneers in this field were J. E. Duerden
and Frank Cundall, both of the staff of the Insti-
tute of Jamaica in Kingston. Neither was a
professional archaeologist but both were schol-
ars of catholic interests and accomplishments.7
[1956:45]
This focus on the Taino within the institute is of
particular interest for me here on several levels. First,
this interest coincided with more systematic study of
anthropological material within museums and the
emergence of what has been described as “salvage
anthropology” associated with the noble savage.
Second, Taino artifacts comprised the major part of
the anthropological/archaeological collections of
the IOJ and were a major area of interest of the
institution’s curator in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.8 The only collections that were larger than
the Taino collections were the flora and fauna
collections, which, as I have discussed before, were
significantly larger, and later the objects of the
portrait gallery. Third, this interest in the Taino over-
shadowed any interest in the material culture of black
Jamaicans, both within the local collection of the IOJ
and the collections of museums within imperial
centers such as the British Museum. What I am sug-
gesting here is that these three trends produced a way
of viewing the Caribbean—understood as a place of
nature and a noble savage that was already dead.
These trends evidence the ambiguity that Caribbean
blacks presented to early museum practice as they
neither fit within the natural history of mankind—that
is, anthropology—nor the history of Jamaica. Black

Jamaicans were neither primitive enough—like the
Tainos—to be part of anthropology nor civilized
enough to be a part of history.
Exploring the ways in which the IOJ museum con-
tributed to the “Writing West Indian Histories,”
Barry Higman writes,
the objects connected to the Arawaks [Tainos],
the original Indian inhabitants, are mostly con-
fined to stone implements and a limited amount
of pottery, etc., mostly from the numerous
kitchen middens which have been opened in the
Island. . . . On the other hand the artifacts of the
African majority were almost completely
ignored. [1999:71]
Although Higman makes a convincing compari-
son, this extract does not fully explain the extent of
the interest in collecting Taino (Arawak) material in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example,
issue four of the second volume of the Journal of the
Institute of Jamaica, published in 1892, was dedicated
to the “Aboriginal Indian Remains in Jamaica” and
more closely reflects the research interest in the Tai-
nos. This article was written by J. E. Duerden, a pale-
ontologist and curator for the institute at the time.9
Although some of the collections that were dis-
cussed and illustrated in this article were owned by
the museum of the institute, the majority of the
artifacts were part of the collection of Lady Edith
Blake, wife to the colonial governor of Jamaica.10
The IOJ later acquired more of its own Amerindian
collections. Lady Blake’s collection was on show in
an exhibition at the IOJ in 1895 but was later sold
to the Museum of American Indians in New York
(Howard 1956).
Howard (1956) argues that this early interest dem-
onstrated by the IOJ did not spawn ongoing interest
in more archaeology on the island. However, when
viewed together with other objects collected by the
institute, a different picture appears. In fact, this
emphasis on Taino archaeology overshadowed other
collecting interests. Howard (1956) himself shows
that between the 1890s and the first two decades of
the 20th century there were several excavations of
Amerindian sites across Jamaica: MacCormack, 1895
(the objects of this excavation are in the National
Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.);
Brennan, 1900; Miller, 1931; Reichard and Bastian,
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
1904 (this collection is in the Ethnology Museum in
Berlin); de Booy, 1913 (these objects were also given
to the Museum of American Indians in New York);
and Longley, 1914 (these collections are in the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History in New York). The
institute resumed its own interest in the Tainos in the
1940s with the work of its curator, C. B. Lewis (Alls-
worth-Jones 2008; Howard 1956). These were not
extensive excavations or collections, but they demon-
strated an interest in the material culture of Jamaica’s
Amerindians that started with the IOJ at the end of
the 19th century. Several of these excavations were
published in important journals such as American
Anthropologist and Man. The IOJ also had institu-
tional contacts with several of the museums to which
these objects were sent. At this time in the IOJ, there
was no similar interest in collecting objects related
to the black population and material culture of the
black population was excluded from the institute’s
collections.
The Absence of Bounty
By the time the institute was established in 1879,
the natural history museums of Europe and North
America were still the home for anthropology col-
lections. As Conn has written, “Throughout most
of the nineteenth century, the study and presenta-
tion of other cultures occupied one branch of natu-
ral history” (1998:79). As the end of the 19th
century drew closer, however, anthropology took
on even greater significance and there were advo-
cates for the establishment of museums dedicated
to collections of what was described as a “natural
history of mankind”—anthropology—as distinct
from natural history museums. These anthropology
collections were being amassed and exhibited at
World’s Fairs and later retained by museums. In
some instances, World’s Fairs were seen as a vehicle
through which objects of anthropology could be
accumulated and later these collections were used
to establish museums. The Field Museum of Chi-
cago, for example, was developed from the objects
collected at the Columbian World’s Fair of 1893
(Conn 1998; Nash and Feinman 2003). Collections
were, however, also acquired through the field col-
lections done by early anthropologists and by,
among others, colonial agents and officials based in
the far regions across the world where purportedly
91
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
primitive peoples still existed. I have written else-
where that the IOJ collections, like other collections
in museums across the Caribbean, may be seen to
follow very loosely this model (Modest 2010). The
IOJ’s collections were indeed shared among archae-
ology, art, and natural history in the form of plant
and animal specimens and a small collection of mis-
cellaneous historical items. Moreover, collecting for
World’s Fairs was also seen as a way of building on
local collections (Cummins 1994).
As anthropology grew into its own field in the late
19th century, many of its chief proponents saw their
museums as fulfilling an urgent role to collect and
catalogue the cultures of many “races of peoples” that
they believed were fast disappearing. Equally, these
museums were important places to catalogue what
was regarded as primitive technologies or cultural
practices that were believed to be under threat of
rapid and irredeemable change as a result of Euro-
pean contact. These trends have been termed “salvage
anthropology” (Conn 1998; Penny 2002). The objects
and peoples from native North America, the Pacific,
and Asia were collected, placed on display, and stud-
ied in World’s Fairs and “saved” by and in museums
in Europe and the United States.
While black Africans were of some anthropologi-
cal interest, blacks from the Caribbean and the Uni-
ted States did not fit into either of the salvageable
categories of a dying race or having a culture that
was disappearing due to European contact.11 New
World blacks, it was thought, were already
tainted by European contact and its civilizing
forces and therefore seen to lack practices of cul-
tural significance—and related objects—worthy of
anthropological interest.
The history of black Africans on display at World’s
Fairs is well documented, from Saartje Baartman in
the early 19th century to African villages at the Paris
Universielle Exposition in 1878 to the Columbian
World’s Fair of 1893 and beyond (Corbey 1993;
Rydell 1987; Strothers 1999). However, not all
“Negroes” were Africans. Douglas Lorimer (1978)
has written of the many-sided nature of English atti-
tudes toward “Negroes,” which fluctuated through-
out the 17th to 19th centuries between ethnocentric
xenophobia and racism in response to different
events within the empire. According to Lorimer, “In
these Victorian perceptions, the significant attributes
92
of the Negro were not physical, but rather the social
and cultural traits derived from the associations of
Blacks with the status of American slaves, West
Indian plantation labourers, and African ‘savages’”
(1978:15).
For Lorimer (1978), while within Victorian society
a global category of “Negroes” existed, who were
believed to be inferior to whites, internal distinctions
could be identified between the African and the West
Indian Negro. Although I find Lorimer’s case
somewhat hopeful at times in trying to recover white
Britain from some of the racial prejudice that was part
of mid- to late-Victorian England, his claim is well
made. In mid-Victorian Britain, notions of the primi-
tive were much more easily applied to black Africans
than blacks from the West Indian colonies. Of course
this was not always the case. Indeed, distinctions
based on hierarchy also complicated the issue within
Africa. Yet, colonization, seen as a project to civilize
the colonized, had, to all intents and purposes, partly
achieved its purpose and placed blacks in the Carib-
bean colonies on a progressive ladder of improve-
ment. The progressive ladder could be viewed as a
move from savage Africa to slave, from slave to sub-
jects of the crown, and from there—only with further
improvement—to citizens. This improvement, it was
believed, resulted from the benevolence of colonial-
ism. The exhibitionary or material consequence of
this progression was that blacks from the Caribbean
and their objects possessed no salvageable qualities
for early anthropology. This would impact both the
representation of blacks from the Caribbean in
World’s Fairs and the objects collected that repre-
sented black culture.
Tony Bennett (1995) alludes to this hierarchy of
collectability when he speaks of the progressive taxo-
nomies of nations and peoples that the institutions of
the exhibitionary complex were to enshrine. Bennett
writes:
Subject peoples were thus represented as occu-
pying the lowest level of manufacturing civilisa-
tion and represented through the display of
primitive handicraft. . . . In brief a progressivist
taxonomy for the classification of goods and
manufacturing processes was laminated on to a
crudely racist teleological conception of the
relations between peoples and races which

culminated in the achievements of the metro-
politan powers, invariably most impressively
displayed in the pavilions of the host cultures.
[1995:82]
The general premise of Bennett’s claims also holds
true for the participation of Caribbean colonies at
“Great Exhibitions.” The Caribbean was represented
under the broad category of “Colony” or “West
Indian Colony” and hence subsumed under the
imperial frame and denied a category of its own.
Moreover, the collections of the Caribbean were
thought to occupy a lower rung of a progressive lad-
der of peoples and nations when compared with the
host cultures. Yet the Caribbean did not fit so easily
into Bennett’s taxonomy on two important levels.
First, while Caribbean blacks were seen as less civi-
lized when compared to peoples from the host cul-
tures, many of the products of their labor—sugar,
molasses, rum, et cetera—were the products of a
modern industrial enterprise that the plantation col-
ony provided. These goods, while they may have been
seen as less refined than metropolitan goods, could
not be viewed as primitive. Moreover, Caribbean
blacks, because of their colonization, could be seen to
be “more civilized” than some of their African
counterparts, for example. These factors made blacks
from the Caribbean an anomaly for exhibitionary
institutions and an especially ambiguous category for
museums.
It is this anomaly—ambiguity—namely, in the
position that Caribbean blacks held, that I suggest
made them not of anthropological interest. They were
not cultural enough. At the same time, natural objects
from the region were being collected and sent across
the empire. These were collected along with objects
from the already extinct Tainos.
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed the historical and
perhaps ongoing framing of the Caribbean as a
place of nature and not culture and therefore a
space that falls outside of (material) anthropological
interest. New World blacks were neither ancient
enough nor modern enough as a people whose his-
tory and culture could be collected and celebrated
by museums. The only exception to this collecting
and display trend was the interest in the material
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n
culture of the extinct or near extinct Amerindian
populations of the region, who could be easily
framed within a trope of the noble savage, the natu-
ral man, who was pure and ancient when they were
decimated and hence could yield some knowledge
for early anthropology.
Additional research is necessary to determine
whether the dynamics of collecting discussed in this
article might extend beyond Jamaica and the Carib-
bean. Could the historically shaped collecting biases
outlined here also have been at work in other regions
with displaced, “imported,” or immigrant popula-
tions considered neither modern nor ancient
enough? For instance, ethnographic collecting in
Indonesia has tended to neglect the material culture
of the large Chinese-descent population that has
resided there for centuries (see Adams 2001). A more
careful consideration of these gaps, occlusions, and
partialities in historical and contemporary collecting
could nuance museums’ presentations of “indige-
nous” histories.
Imaginative geographies that position the Carib-
bean as a space of nature rather than of culture con-
tinue to circulate globally, for instance in the tourism
imaginaries that continue to draw European and
North American visitors. Despite the limitations of
the collections they have inherited, museums can play
an important role—through exhibitions, research,
and contemporary collecting practices—in interro-
gating and challenging the dominant modes of fram-
ing regions such as the Caribbean.
notes
1. Whereas this article focuses primarily on collections in the
Caribbean and Europe, I suggest that North American col-
lections may be characterized similarly.
2. I refer here to the Renaissance collecting of natural his-
tory, characterized by the folkloric, mythical, and emblem-
atic ideals (see Ashworth 1996; Farago 1995).
3. For a discussion of the importance of local knowledge to
the collecting of nature in the Americas see Parrish
(2006).
4. Joseph Banks, for example, accompanied Captain Cook on
his first voyage between 1768 and 1771, and traveled to,
among other places, Brazil, Tahiti, and New Zealand;
Robert Brown was a botanist who accompanied Matthew
Flinders on his voyage to New Holland (Terra Australia) in
1801, while Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands.
93
w e h a ve a l w a y s b e e n m o d e r n

5. By visuality I mean a system of visual meaning created not which they were and are imagined as Africans also sup-
just through the use of images but through the bringing ports my point here.
together of images with other elements such as text and
other graphic elements.
6. These are among the few ethnographic objects collected
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