Recently appearing on an episode of The Dirt Podcast “Studying Salvage Anthropology with Samuel Redman,” Redman discusses his latest book, Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology, just out from Harvard University Press.
In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. In Prophets and Ghosts, Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.
His interest in collecting practices began while interning at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he had “the task of looking through the archives and trying to figure out what the history behind these objects were and sometimes the seedy history of how they arrived at museums.” Redman told The Dirt Podcast that he “was just endlessly fascinated by that, it kept me up at night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I wanted to go to work everyday.”
The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.
Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.
Chip Colwell, author of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture explains that through this book, “Redman has not only become anthropology’s leading historian but also its conscience. Through methodical research and insightful analysis, Prophets and Ghosts provides a window into the motives and practices of ‘salvaging’ cultures often assumed to be on the precipice of destruction. It reveals all the disciplinary successes and failures—and moral contradictions and paradoxes—in this moment that laid the groundwork for how the world thinks of cultures and Indigenous peoples. This is a history that is still resonant today.”
Redman’s research explores the history of anthropology, memory and cultural heritage, and museums. At UMass Amherst, Redman teaches courses in oral history, historic site interpretation, public history, and 19th and 20th century American history.
Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology is now available for purchase from Harvard University Press.