Equatoria

A postmodern romp through the rain forest, Equatoria is both travelogue and cultural critique. On the right-hand pages the Prices chronicle their 1990 artifact-collecting expedition up the rivers of French Guiana, and on the left, stage an accompanying sideshow that enlists the help of Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alex Haley, James Clifford, Eric Hobsbawm, Germaine Greer, and even the noted anthropologist James Goodfellow (who asks for more sex). Also included are quotes from the nurses, doctors, tourists, convicts and countless others who live in this French penal colony turned space center in tropical South America. Charged with acquiring objects for a new museum, the Prices kept a log of their day-to-day adventures and misadventures, constantly confronting their ambivalence about the act of collecting, the very possibility of exhibiting cultures, and the future of anthropology. By the time their expedition arrived in the villages of the Aluku Maroons, these African-American descendants of rebel slaves had become as comfortable in blue jeans and frilly mail-order dresses flown in from Paris as in breechcloths and trade cotton wrapskirts. What would they think of exporting material chunks of their artistic heritage to a glossy modern building in a suburb of Cayenne? Probing the nature of museums, collecting, and power relations between "us" and "them", the authors raise many troubling questions. Anyone concerned about cultural preservation, museums, "primitive" art, anthropology, indigenous rights, and the legacies of colonialism will be challenged by this playful, but eminently serious work.