gems, jade, pyroxene jade, fei cui, Guatemala, Mesoamerica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, archaeogemology, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Maya, Mayan, Olmec, Aztec, sculpture

Reviewing a work of Alfred Métraux in 1962, Claude Lévi-Strauss approved the author’s efforts to “demystify” the ancient Incas and to reinforce the standards of “austere science,” but he observed that nevertheless the Incas remained a mystery and indeed that all of Pre-Columbian America was like “a sort of planet Mars” (1962: 140). This statement is a bit jarring, coming as it does from the professional anthropologist whose stock-in-trade is usually presumed to be the process of demystifying, reducing strangeness, and narrowing cultural gaps. Certainly it marks a break with the tone of early twentieth-century anthropology, in which the assumption was current that once the prejudices imposed by Eurocentrism, colonialism, and racism were jettisoned, “understanding”—even across the barriers separating the modern and the Pre-Columbian worlds—would be the result. Lévi-Strauss’ scepticism about such a possibility marked yet another turn of the wheel in the long process of interpretation and reinterpretation that constitutes the history of the European encounter with and response to Pre-Columbian civilization. His remarks were one instance of a more general retreat from the claims of Western science (to objectivity, comprehensiveness, and boundless hermeneutic prowess) that was essential if the blinders created by the scientizing process itself were to be recognized. This paper—which examines some moments in the history of French and English collecting and exhibiting of Pre-Columbiana—is offered in the spirit of recent work in the history of anthropology that “observes the observer” in order to chart this growth in self-consciousness and reflexivity in what has come to be called the discourse of the Other (Stocking 1985: 3–14). Like a number of the papers here, it explores the changing cognitive and cultural frameworks that conditioned the search for and representation of the materials of Pre-Columbian civilization. The focus is on Europe, where rationales for Pre-Columbian inquiry developed that were quite distinct from American ideologies of hemispheric cultural identity (Hinsley and Barnet-Sanchez, this volume). The specific focus is on France and England, the two leading colonial powers of the nineteenth century and countries in which extensive Pre-Columbian collections were built despite hesitations, perplexities, and formidable material obstacles. The period treated is 1870–1930, an era of peculiar importance because it encompasses the development of “museum anthropology,” with its privileging of the study of objects rather than cultural or social processes, and because it includes the period of the dramatic aesthetic revaluation of Pre-Columbiana that accompanied the so-called primitivist revolution.