Editorial: Outside things?

This issue, entitled ‘Outside things’ simultaneously proposes and questions notions of inclusion and exclusion, about belonging and not belonging, and having and not having. It implies, and sometimes challenges, that there are boundaries and oppositions and consequently an inside for other things. The contributions offer a number of approaches as to how the sense of ‘outside things’ may exist usefully in world art studies as a means of constructing self in relation to other, as a means of sharpening senses and spaces of difference, reflecting on conflict, and as a means of negotiating social change and interaction.

To be sure, the contributions explore a topic that has long been of interest to people around the world. Since time immemorial, human cultures have been fascinated with the outside – an ambiguous world at once brimming with power and resources, but equally unknown and dangerous. People have gone greatly out of their way to find and get things from long-distance, such as flint for a stone tool or ochre for a painting. It is patently common to find outside things valuable, precious, and instrumental. And more than that, people strongly desire them. It is from there that any shared commonplace begins to diverge, for there is no formula for how or why people should want those things. It may be distant spatially (such as, lunar rocks) or temporally (lost techniques); it may be inaccessible culturally (mana), legally (nuclear fuel), and ethically (exotic birds). Often it is rare and has distinctive material properties (colour, weight, brilliance, hardness). These are objectifications of outsidedness.

All the contributions in this issue emphasise objects, knowledges and materials concerning the ‘outside.’ In this seemingly straightforward term ‘outside,’ however, some necessary connotations and ambiguity reside. It captures but also colours important semantic elements: spatial distance, desirability, and alterity. ‘Outside,’ at first glance, connotes a world beyond one's ‘inside’ and the familiar. But how do we go about knowing or describing the ‘outside,’ especially for those perspectives that have been muted by time, history or politics? Is it outside the local or the community? Is it stuff beyond one's ken? Is it the colonial vs. colonised spaces? Is it about interiorities (inner selves, self-knowledge and souls) and exteriorities (surfaces, masks, apparel) (Descola 2005)? Perhaps it is simply beyond one's usual routine and catchment. All of these remain viable open possibilities.

The volume explores some of these perspectives from cultural encounters centred on transmission and the exchange of skill, negotiations around cultural translation, mimesis, alterity (Mack pp. 79–103, this issue; Lau pp. 119–134, this issue) to nationalist versus indigenous sensibilities (Townsend-Gault pp. 13–24, this issue). There are questions of status and elite politics (Rawson pp. 25–45, this issue; Sheales pp. 47–66, this issue), of conflicts, assimilation and appropriations and the creation of the ‘other’ in terms of spiritual and cosmological significance (Helms pp. 105–118, this issue; Olesen pp. 9–12, this issue). Two contemporary interventions, a visual essay (Dallaporta and Stourdzé pp. 135–145, this issue) and an interview (Mntambo, by Ecclestone pp. 67–77, this issue) tackle quite different themes to do with conflict and local/global identity while both treating the ‘outside thing’ directly as a force for change.

There are many commentators, especially following the burst of interest in globalisation over the few decades, who have argued that binary definitions, boundary arguments and characterisations of ‘the other’ have been superceded by ideas of shifting dynamic interactionism (Featherstone et al. 1995) or by the immutability of radical universalism, or by more relativist values of cultural difference (Beck 2008; Guibernau 2008). In the mid-1990s, Arjun Appadurai (1996) had already delivered a multiple vision of global culture which seemed to be characterised by complex social, political, financial, technocratic and media-oriented dynamics, operating and interacting at both local and transcultural levels. The dominant experience of the world, as seen by him (Appadurai 1996, 27–47), seemed to be an ever-shifting ‘de-territorialisation’ of global flows, such that people on the move and communicating between cultures in ever more complex ways, were inevitably drawn into a widespread process of re-imagination of identity as part of an increasingly heterogeneous culture. As well as a re-imagination of personal identities, he proposed new metaphors of cultural interactions: a ‘mass mediated imaginary which frequently transcends national space beyond the notion of boundaries, of inside and outside, but more inflected by overlapping, fractal and polythetic formulations which would vary according to their specific contexts and locations.’

Attempts to theorise the global effect on more local or specific aspects of culture, have, if anything, been increasingly cognisant of a tendency for people to be more vigilant about boundaries, to adopt changes and influences piecemeal in response to the complexities of different external influences and pressures, and to maintain a strong sense of locality and innovation in the process of consumption (for example, Clifford 1997; Miller 2006). In terms of cultural institutions, especially museums, ‘Outside things’ perhaps reflects a move that seeks to delimit and define oppositions again. An edited volume on museums, Museum frictions (Karp et al. 2006), was mindful of the frontier nature of the museum as contact zone between an inside and outside each equally bounded but by quite different values, politics, expectations. Frequently wary of the totalising agenda of globalisation, authors in the volume highlighted different boundaries between public and private, inside and outside things and ideas associated with them, as a means to sharpen senses of difference, balance the institutional agendas against, or in parallel to those of personal, local, national and indigenous politics (Bennett 2006).

While globalisation (and before ‘it’, the rise of capitalist world systems) takes interactions, economic and cultural, to further reaches, and proliferated at great pace interactions between one part of the world and another, ‘Outside things’ pops up again and again as a regular pattern in human history. The prevalence of things from elsewhere, so nonchalantly acquired and incorporated now, are taken for granted, but was it always the case? Kwame Anthony Appiah highlighted the extent to which influences from one culture to another are common and are and always have been characteristic of the ways in which humans adapt and change. Among his examples, he pointed out that coca cola is drunk at funerals in Kumasi whereas in England the customary drink is sweet Indian tea, both habits signalling an infiltration, but both entirely adapted to local circumstances (Appiah 2008, 241). Nicholas Thomas (1999) argued that, in spite of the effects of flows and cosmopolitanism of globalisation, such relations are over-ridingly shaped by local factors. What is revealed in the interplays between colonial power and the indigenous artistic expression highlights the importance of listening to who tells the story, where the power lies and how different levels of ownership are negotiated and established.

Many of the contributions in this volume share the opinion that there is value in studying local forms of recognition and incorporation of otherness (or signs therefrom). For example, Charlotte Townsend-Gault's study (pp. 13–24, this issue) reflects on heated perspectives on inside/outside, local/exogenous, and representation and ownership among First Nations groups of British Columbia. She investigates their status and histories in relation to the state which formed to encompass and mediate them. She discusses how things from the past and present can form a means of critique for the clichés of colonialism, and a means of both separation and self-definition. Agents, of things and of persons, from elsewhere can both heighten the tensions of belonging, and not belonging – surely reflective of the inexorable drive of making and administrating groups (tribes, ethnicities, races, and so forth). Things created by First Nations peoples have created an internal exotic and increased the status of their crafts and skills within their own nation. This has paradoxically both strengthened their identity and re-inscribed their distinctive outsider status within a framework of community.

The studies in this issue demonstrate that the processes of ‘Outside things’ have time depth and relevance in the theorising of world art and into current art production. John Mack's article discusses the dissemination by certain anthropologists and educators of precise pencil drawing to different parts of the world – a kind of ‘so called globalisation’ (pp. 79–103, this issue). He highlights subtle detections of inside and outside and argues for an examination and understanding of the terms of encounter, before any conclusions are reached which assume that an art practice is either conceived or received as universal. For him, drawing was a conceptual and intellectual innovation, which remained an outside thing in many different cultures, and in many ways enabled artistic expression that produced alien objects. It was not so much a technical leap which the introduction of pen and paper might imply, as much as it offered a new cognitive space to do both new and old things. Thus what had been assumed to be a universally accessible means of communication also served to ‘[herald] an (albeit unintended) strategy of what in reality was a kind of colonialism.’

There are ‘things’ discussed here which were created of and for the outside. Raphaël Dallaporta's striking images of anti-personnel mines sum up the heightened tensions of outside things – partly because of their clarity of form and partly because of their latent and terrible potency. Sam Stourdzé's essay, and the accompanying information labels, transform them into art, emphasise the tensions as things which are entirely purposeful, yet random, waiting for the moment of havoc (Dallaporta and Stourdzé pp. 135–145, this issue). The images are precise and crystal clear and yet the forms are impossibly varied, echoing the terms of engagement between insider and outsider across the world. They reify an inside by objectifying a boundary (a minefield) and subjectivising the outsider (as unwanted enemy). Mines, of course, are primarily objects of conflict, but as the late Alfred Gell (1998, 20) observed, are also artworks of a sort – extensions of the persons responsible for arming them. Dallaporta's images transport them out of this context and perhaps more comfortably in Gell's ‘art-nexus’, serving as still-life and outside objects brought within the refined languages of the world-artworld; either way, they are still frightening interlopers of the outside within.

‘Things’ are not necessarily always objects. ‘Outside things’ as objectifications of sorts of knowledges and meanings, which are often, but not necessarily, bundled up in co-presences (Keane 2003, 188), which must include persons. George Lau, interrogating ancient Peruvian images of warfare mainly revealed from archaeological contexts, asks another series of questions about alterity – how people are stylized as outside and how to interpret the multiple ways in which another culture, perceived as the enemy, is characterised. His essay reads signs of conquest and conflict which enable further observations about the stylisation of the other, the desirability of subordination, the assimilation of what are perceived to be sources of vitality. The study, guided and enriched by a range of visual sources enables insights into the assumption of power and its transfer through predatorial relations with others.

If ‘outside’ connotes worlds beyond the inside and the familiar, outside things are the stuff associated beyond/without the local: the stuff exterior to the community. These then potentially contrast with interiorities. The ancient metals in the European Bronze Age discussed by Mary Helms (pp. 105–118, this issue) are materials that are outside things, both literally and metaphorically; their patina, developing through their cycle of use, transforms their cosmological meaning. They are thus valued to act as a conduit for religious beliefs and ritual practices. In other works, most notably Craft and the kingly ideal (1993), Helms argues that physical distance is one of the principal variables in the desirability of things. This is because, to adulterate the common adage, ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’. According to the theory, distance makes things more sacred, rarer, more significant in cosmological terms. Distance in other words makes the material or the object more special. The acquisition of rarities and their control were important elements in leadership ideologies especially by and for elites – a topic discussed by scholars as ‘enclaved’ or ‘singularized’ commodities (Appadurai 1986, 22; Kopytoff 1986, 74). Such operations of making boundaries and classifications also resonate with the processes of difference-making of ‘cultures,’ ‘tribes,’ and ‘races,’ mentioned earlier, by those in power.

In terms of world art, ‘things’ are subject to possession, are matters of dispute and contention, to local heritage, to personal history, customs and laws of ownership and descent. Things may be a focus for isolating aspects of experience, memory, ownership, history. Fiona Sheales (pp. 47–66, this issue) discusses the outside thing as a key to a reinforcement of status and an acknowledgement of Asante-British diplomatic exchange at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Consisting of the British flag and other ceremonial textiles, with which the Asante ruler wrapped his body, these acted to create an aura of power enabling him to express diplomatic relationships with foreign colonial powers. It conferred status in a way which also enabled him to signal to his own people that honour was being upheld. As such they operated as both markers and distinguishers of national identity. In a similar way, Jessica Rawson (pp. 25–45, this issue) discusses things as potential markers of changing political views or aspiration. Ancient Chinese ceramics are the focus of Rawson's study and her paper responds to an initial question as to why they look suddenly different from preceding works and how and why they apparently assume certain characteristics associated with high status metal objects from Iran. This, she contends, relates to a desire by their elite owners to adopt exotic and cosmopolitan associations from central Asia. Thus the things from outside bestow a power which is notionally assimilated as part of a transfer of style. These and other works in this volume reinforce the notion that things and collective styles mediate the internal and external, however constituted.

Outside things can disguise, or transform and create new relationships. They can also take a thing, an artist (and public) out of their familiar territory to evoke another state of being or set of values or style. This is exemplified through the work of Nandipha Mntambo, discussed in her interview by Susan Ecclestone (pp. 67–77, this issue), which invokes the randomised cultural interactions of contemporary globalisation. Their dialogue was entirely generated and nurtured by the internet, and as such, the work of an artist potentially outside one culture was connected with another, from South Africa to Suffolk, England, and from there to a specific international audience of this journal. The interviewer poses questions about Mntambo's identity, as African, woman, feminist, political being, her sense of specific locality and subject matter, all of which she refutes, claiming the right only to an identity as an artist. Her references are entirely cosmopolitan: classical mythology, bull-fighting, Picasso; and she characterises her experiences as global. Nestor García Canclini (1998) has discussed the phenomenon of an international, ‘homogenised discourse’ somewhat pejoratively in terms of the appropriation of an art market which ‘declassifies national artists, or at least subordinates the local connotations of the work’ (García Canclini 1998, 183). But Nandipha Mntambo's homogenised discourse here is a chosen one, not imposed. She denies her specific local connections, preferring to retain an identity as a kind of professional and independent outsider, potentially relevant therefore on her own terms to a wider world.

The range of discussions aired here reveals complexities between analytical oppositions and reflections on values, status, beliefs and conflicts, exoticism, and information. If things are different from people, commentators need to acknowledge materialities and physical properties as well as relationships and interactions between the things themselves, as well as with their makers, owners and siting. And if ‘things’ can stand for ideas in multiple and multivalent ways and their cultural and historical contexts, the means by which they are acquired, the relationships in which they participated, and their modes of belonging and internalisation can shift them perpetually from inside to outside, or vice-versa.

In many ways, it seems to us that the process of scholarly work, predicated on gathering and recasting categories and knowledge, must embody and instrumentalize some notion of the outside (the ‘artwork,’ ‘archive’, ‘field,’ ‘culture’, etc.). It is to make the known and unknown more comprehensible, in various acts of translation. This journal is itself part of a growing movement to recognise the specificity of difference, the distinctiveness of local positions, the rich contributions which individuals may make to increase the subtlety of interpretations of cultures around the world and how they relate in terms of both shared visions and sharper distinctions.