The immediacy of the Phillips Collection exhibition The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement

In an opinion piece in the New York Times (Blessed are the Refugees, 9/13/19), Brett Stephens identified Harry Truman's signing of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act as the first time that US immigration policy "became actively sympathetic to the utterly dispossessed." As a result of this law, and subsequent legislative activity, the US accepted (Stephens):

• 40,000 Hungarians who fled the Soviet tanks after 1956 (including the young Andy Grove who became the CEO of Intel Corporation
• Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Castro's repression after 1959 (including a young Gloria Estefan)
• 750,000 Soviet Jews fleeing persecution by Soviet despots (including a young Sergei Brin)
• Over 1 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians after the fall of Saigon
• Hundreds of thousands of Iranians after the Khomeini revolution
• In excess of 100,000 Iraquis since the fall of Saddam Hussein
• Over 100,000 Burmese.

According to Stephens, a total of 3 million refugees have been accepted into the US since the Refugee Act of 1980 and "by almost any metric, America's refugees tend to succeed, or at least their children do. Whatever they do to enrich themselves, they enrich the country a great deal more."

In light of the foregoing, and the "ennoblement" that accrues to the US as a result of opening its doors to the displaced, the actions of the current administration renders this a "moment of unique shame for the United States" according to Stephens. The number of refugees has plunged from 97,000 in 2016 to 23,000 in 2018 with plans to potentially bring the number down to zero.

But the US is not the only major country to be moving in this direction. According to an article in today's New York Times (Patrick Kingsley, Is Trump's America Tougher on Asylum Than Other Western Countries?), "Mr. Trump's plan is also in keeping with a wider international trend  of curtailing the right to asylum, as western nations try to curb migration from the global south, where the overwhelming majority of displaced people live." Mr. Kingsley then goes on to detail actions that have been taken by the EU, Australia, and Israel to limit refugee flows.

It is within this context that The Phillips Collection has organized an exhibition titled The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement. This exhibition, spread over three floors of the Goh Annex and Sant Building of the Phillips Collection premises at 1600 21st Street NW, Washington, DC.,

... brings together works of art from five continents to consider the current mass movement of people globally alongside historical migrations to and within the United States. Through sculpture, video, painting, photographs, and more, the exhibition poses urgent questions about representation and experience of migration and dislocation. The artists bear witness to both personal and historical events, many also questioning the capacity of images to portray reality and truth.

Material on the first floor of the exhibition focused primarily on providing context for the exhibition  plus two pieces focused o North America and the Mediterranean Sea.

There are two striking exhibits on platforms located alongside the stairway leading between the first and second floors. The items, which, at first sight, appear to be a jumble of blown glass and disparate ephemera, are representations of typical street hawkers of African cities. "These 'rescuers' are known for recycling salvaged goods to sell and are thought to 'save' their customers with their resale services. This particular savior is a passport seller, a welcomed figure of luck for desperate migrants."

Sauveteur (Passport Vendor 1), 2011
Pascale Marthine Tayou

The multimedia installations on the second floor focus on migrations and displaced persons in countries outside the US ranging from a group of Syrian refugees in the port of Lesbos, to a map of a refugee camp in Lebanon, to a Chinese artist's plaintive cry for his mother who had remained behind in China.

Queen Mary II, La mère (The Mother), 2007
Adel Abdessemed

Refugees 4, 2015
Liu Xiaodong

Mémorial aux Réfugiés Noyés (Memorial for
Drowned Refugees), 2016
Meschac Gaba

Ville de Calais, 2015 - 16
Henk Wildschut

Shabriha 1, 2001
Marwan Rechmaoui

Where is my Mother, 1926
Yun Gee

Maine Family, c. 1922 - 23
Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Liberty, N.Y., 2001
Zoe Leonard

The pieces on the third floor switch to a focus on migration in North America: from the wall on the Southern border and how it has split families apart; to the Trail of Tears, the forcible displacement of Native Americans from their southeastern homelands in the 1830s; to the migration of blacks from the South to the North beginning at the turn of the 20th century. The latter movement is captured in Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series (1940 - 41), a 60-panel set, 30 of which are owned by The Phillips Collection and are displayed in this exhibition.

MOIA's NYC Women's Cabinet, 2016
Aliza Nisenbaum

The Wall (Component), 2015 - 2016
Griselda San Martin

Miguel & Christian, 2017
John Sonsini

Untitled, 1941
Diego Rivera

Traveling (Lead Kindly Light), 1918
William Edouard Scott

The Migration Series, 1940 - 41
Jacob Lawrence

Trail of Tears, 2005
Benny Andrews

This exhibition is thought-provoking and causes self-reflection on the part of the viewer. In today's environment, when being born in the Southern Hemisphere increases the likelihood of one being a refugee, thoughts run to what actions are available to us, the more fortunate. It caused me to look, contemplatively, at the potential for this situation to become even more dire in the future given the potential for climate-driven refugee flows.

This exhibition does not dwell on the whys of migration or offer any solutions going forward; but that is not its stated intent. Rather it seeks to inform and place the viewer within the minds and experiences of the refugee/displaced person. And it causes us to think about our shared humanity,

©EverythingElse238

Franz Boas and his early battles against the "establishment" societal model -- after Charles King

In Chapter 3 of his book Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King provides the backstory of the evolution of the establishment position on societal organization and how Franz Boas came to oppose that position. I summarize the high points in this post.

A version of the word anthropology has been around since Aristotle but its impact and meaning has shifted over time. The first academic to have the name Anthropologist in his title -- Edgar Burnett Tyler of Oxford University -- defined the field as the "study of man" while early institutional use -- Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute and France's Musée d'histoire Naturelle -- placed the field as a branch of anatomy or natural history.

For early Anthropologists (a la Frazer), the secrets of human societies lay primarily in the texts that they produced. Beginning in the 1840s, a new word -- Ethnology -- made its way onto the scene, with the premise of extending the study of humans into their "ethnos." The US Government funded the Bureau of Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institute, to go beyond what was ancient and written, to collect observable data about remote groups.

John Wesley Powell was appointed to head up the Bureau of Ethnology and he organized it -- and charged his staffers --after principles espoused by Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan had studied the Iroquois Federation and had written a definitive tome on the history, language, and culture of this alliance. In a follow-up book -- Ancient Society -- he combined his Iroquois learnings with texts from ancient Greek and Roman sources in order to formulate a global model of how societies organize themselves. According to Morgan, all societies run through the same stages in their evolution, beginning with a simple form which becomes more complex over time.

Powell bought into this concept fully, making the book required reading for all staffers and then formalizing his construct in a March 1886 presentation to the Anthropological Society of Washington. The evolution of this thought process is shown in the chart directly below while the characteristics of each societal component are shown in the table immediately following.

Table 1. Identifying characteristics of the three societal components

Characteristic	Savages	Barbarians	Civilized
Societal Organization	Primary kinship group	Tribe	Nation-State
Language	Individual words and simple concepts	Complex phrases	Languages capable of handling complicated abstract ideas
Music	Beat out a rhythm on a log or a stone	Sing a melodic line	Added counterpoint and harmony
Religion	Many gods, often represented as a beast or fowl	Forces of nature as gods	Single god

The role of the Ethnologist, according to the Bureau of Ethnology, was to study (King):

• The frontiers between the stages of human progress and to describe how different peoples have travelled from one end of human culture to the other
• The development of languages and other specific characteristics that defined each of them
• The various institutions --- from tribes to states -- that allowed them to remain coherent units
• Their changing opinions on life and the universe.

In this model, Ethnology was "simply the act of a civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod."

After his initial work on Baffin Island, Boas had returned to Germany where he finally fulfilled the requirements for his Ph.D. Based on contacts he had made while in Germany, he returned to North America and traveled to British Columbia to collect cultural data on myths and folktales from North Coast inhabitants.

Upon the completion of that work, he returned to New York where he got a position as an Editorial Assistant at the young and struggling Science magazine. Shortly after beginning work, he traveled to Washington, DC to visit the Smithsonian's collection on the peoples of the Northern Coast. He was questioning of what he saw.

Boas felt that the museum's collection was mis-organized and would continue to be so because the data collection premise and framework were flawed. The solution, he felt, would emerge after comprehensive study of collected data rather than by going in with a template and trying to fit data into boxes. Boas used his platform at Science to argue his position but he was going up against much more powerful people and his contract at Science was not renewed upon its expiration.

©EverythingElse238