Nomad Codes

Francisco’s Austen Books where I scored cheap editions of Conversations with Ogotemmeli , The Gift , and a rare copy of Herskovitz’s Life in a Haitian Valley , I stumbled across a mighty bizarre volume known as The Secret Museum of Mankind . Lacking page numbers, pub date, or any editorial information beyond the name of an obscure press (Manhattan House), this apparently mid-1930s volume consists of a couple thousand captioned “photographs” of traditional folks from the four corners of the globe. I say “photographs” because many of these portraits and scenes have been retouched as blatantly as the average Weekly World News cover shot, and a few are basically cartoons.
    Such absurd distortions are appropriate, because The Secret Museum is no-bones exotica, reflecting early pop anthropological obsessions with racial typology, hygiene, and nipples of color. Nevertheless, these simultaneously gaudy and fading images are powerful, arresting, and impressively strange: a Congo woman’s globular scarifications, a Burmese tyke smoking a cheroot, a group of Arunta tribesmen doffing Seussian wizard-caps. Herein you can find South Sea cannibals, Kirghiz nomads, and the “Fuzzi Wuzzi Woman of the West,” whose gravity-defying hairstyle belongs on a Pedro Bell Funkadelic album cover. You can’t even accuse The Secret Museum of being Eurocentric—one section includes Dutch milkmaids, crossdressing Irish straw boys, and Canary Island “troglodytes.”
    The Secret Museum ’s captions are a hilarious blend of clueless condescension, cheery racialism, and loopy fashion critique, and they require no post-colonial fake books to deconstruct. (“Her disk-sewn neckband and rope of beads are the chief pride of this Ainu maiden whose grotesque tattooed mustache cannot quite destroy her ingenious youthful charm,” reads a typical entry.) Since these captions are basically datafree, the only frame provided for the photos comes from our own raw fascination. Stripped of anthropological machinery, these faces simply amaze; some recall friends and lovers, while others stare out like bizarre carven idols from some pulp otherworld. At the same time, the hack artists who helped flesh out The Secret Museum don’t let us forget that these “photographs” are halfway projections of the rootless American eye. But our pleasure persists nonetheless, or mine anyway, at once a guilty Orientalism and a dreamlike embrace of the universal human carnival.
    Fans of traditional non-Western music know this paradoxical pleasure well. I say fans and not scholars, for there’s always fantasy in fandom, while ethnomusicology is too often a dry sport of pinning butterflies. The information crammed into today’s non-pop world music CDs is our fetish, a promise that all ghosts of exotica will be exorcised, all nomadic imaginings fixed in a briny, anthropological pickle. Preservation is a valuable and necessary goal, but too often suffocates the more errant power of other people’s music to send us tripping out of ourselves.
    When the record collector Pat Conte named his recently debuted compilation series of rare and remastered “ethnic” 78s after The Secret Museum of Mankind (it’s also the name of Conte’s enormous personal collection; his WBAI radio show is called The Secret Museum of the Air ), he wanted to highlight the spectral and romantic spell induced by these crackly tunes rather than their considerable documentary significance. After all, the original 78s were created not by intrepid field scholars like Alan Lomax but by early record companies eager to stimulate enough pleasure to induce people the world over to buy record players. As with the blues and hillbilly sides cut in the States, most of the recordings collected on The Secret Museum were made in the field, with the subsequent discs sold back to local communities or to immigrant pockets in the West. And while it’s impossible to know how the performers felt about being captured on wax, they certainly weren’t building a career for a mass market or preserving their authentic folkways. Being recruited by the record companies was probably more like getting your best cow photographed—the resulting souvenir became a source of pride, pleasure, and community honor.
    Recorded in places as far-flung as Kazakhstan, Rapu Nui, and Cape Breton, the performances collected on the first two volumes of The Secret Museum are almost entirely excellent, making this one of the more