In Darkest Alaska by Campbell Robert;

Author:Campbell, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Figure 23. “The Thlinket [Tlingit] Indian” (sitka, 1887), E.J. Partridge Collection. (Courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections)

The travelers' society possessed two quite contradictory beliefs: that they might be both driven by primitive desires and completely free, as civilized beings, of such conscious or unconscious drives. Their understanding of history as a progressive movement from the primordial to the civilized present enabled such a balancing of opposite extremes.138 The travelers' society in turn held contradictory impulses to both preserve and transform native culture.

The Tlingit, according to guidebook writer Eliza Scidmore, were “almost too quick to lay aside their old ways…. It is the Thlingit's aim to dress and live as the white man, and he fills his home with beds, tables, chairs, clocks, lamps, stoves and kitchen utensils, and even buys silk gowns for his wife.”139 The Tlingit, she believed “were no longer picturesque, distinctive, or aboriginal.” Even as they became domesticated in the eyes of the newcomers, they could not help but lose those attributes that constituted their very Indian-ness, according to the sightseers.

The travelers' written observations of native familial demise confirmed the superiority of their own particular social class. While the tourists' eyes gazed on fresh scenes, their minds were set on home. These imperial contrasts helped bolster bourgeois identities. “The private individual, who in the office [and on tour] has to deal with realities,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions…from this derive the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.”140 Imperial contexts were instrumental in helping to fix bourgeois identities in the imperial metropolis. They never left home too far from their thoughts.

The words and things that they carried home provided the evidences of their having traveled. Their published travel books, their journals and diaries passed among family and friends, Kodak snapshots and lantern slides, and their curios neatly displayed in their parlors all stood in for their fleeting experiences. Their admitted pleasure in possessing native objects depended upon others. The gratifications associated with ownership relied upon others' acknowledgements.141 All social relation was based upon its representational value. As traveler Ella Higginson wrote, “you will bring home with you not only Atka baskets, ivories, kamelinkers, bidarkas, virgin-charms, and dozens of other curios that will make your friends die of envy.”142

“As the home, in its loveliness and in its sanctity, grows up and obtains permanency and durableness,” a writer for a late nineteenth-century collecting magazine noted, “the collector's genius presides over its beautifying operations and coordinates the treasures scattered about by past and present generations.”143 Psychoanalytically speaking, fetishism was a strong, mostly eroticized attachment to a single object. The fetish was an object supposed to be inhabited by a spirit. It was anything that was exaggeratedly reverenced or loved, an object rousing undue interest by its sexual association. The tourists' carefully arranged curios filled the mantles and tables of their parlors, taking privileged positions.

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