`Those who are above', the wangeregi, were one of the moieties into which the Winnegabo of the Great Lakes were divided, according to their famous ethnographer Paul Radin. The other moiety was `those who are on earth', the manegi. It may be that in Britain a similar relationship of dual organization or complementary opposition obtains between the phratry of the museum profession and that of art dealing, particularly the world of the auction houses which have grown in recent years into bureaucratic multi-departmental hierarchies. (I shall leave out of my analysis the phratry of private art-dealers, who are for the most part specialist entrepreneurs and whose counterpart is the individual collectors - though obviously the whole system is interconnected.)

Clearly the analogy is metaphorical rather than literal, for the phratries are not recruited by descent. But they do draw on a pool of recruits who are for the most part educated at the major universities in the arts and humanities and have decided to stay within the field; there is some exchange between the phratries in the course of individual careers; and each has its own key rituals, respectively the exhibition opening and the auction preview and sale. One leading London auction-house recently described their role as being that of `temporary curators'.

The most salient difference is that money values attached to objects are publicly mentioned as little as possible by the Curators, and then most guardedly, though money is of great importance behind the scenes: for instance, they have to keep up-to-date with saleroom prices in order to advise on tax-deductible donations or on export licences. By contrast, the Auctioneers are uninhibited in talking of money. The curators earn more frugal financial rewards than do the Auctioneers, except that junior staff in the auction houses are paid low wages in return for the privilege of gaining hands-on experience. The Auctioneers are on friendly terms with the rich and powerful people who are often their clients, but their academic prestige is less than that of the Curators - though (like the private dealers) they may gain enviable practical knowledge through a fortunate apprenticeship, experience in handling objects and visual flair: a few very successful experts in the trade have had no formal tertiary education. Hence the Auctioneers seek to acquire academic credibility through publishing detailed catalogues with quotations from scholarly writings, and also through carrying on ancillary museum-type activities such as book-publishing and adult education (though all of these activities of course have a commercial justification too). The Curators seek to keep the Auctioneers `at arm's length', and if they could not do so successfully they would not be able to maintain the high ethical standing of their profession.

Scene at a 'good' - i.e. highly valued - auction in the West End recently. A piece of Chinese ceramics is being sold. The auctioneer is supported by (right to left) the departmental director, two sales clerks who note successful bids and also on postal and telephone bids, and a press office lady ready to announce any outstanding price that is reached. In the background, experts from the department. On the walls are oil-paintings about to be sold shortly in a separate sale. Seen from the back in the front rows are some leading specialist dealers. (Photo courtesy of Sotheby's.)

All except a few exceptionally expensive and heavily publicized auction sales are open to the public, and it is possible to enter a binding contract by means of a barely perceptible gestural sign to the auctioneer. The auction houses have various procedures to protect themselves - not always successfully - against mischievous abuse of the bidding rules, but the grave demeanour of the officiants would seem to be one deterrent.

My field of informants is almost exclusively British-based but not confined to those working in the ethnographic field. The ethnographic speciality, however distinctive, should not be considered in isolation from the whole system. It does not need to be underlined that the ethical and professional standards of British museums are extremely high. Moreover, if there have been one or two publicized lapses from these standards in recent years, such lapses have not involved any of the ethnographic museums or museum departments - which are obviously the principal focus of attention in this article. No criticism is intended in this article of any museum curators, least of all ethnographic museum curators.

As to how far the proposed model may be transferable to other countries, I do not have enough evidence. Auction-houses are increasingly becoming multi-nationals, whereas museums are hardly ever organized across national boundaries. Britain is a special case for various reasons: London is still by and large the centre of the auction world, its only rival being New York. But in the ethnographic field there are very few major collectors in Britain; moreover, one museum, the Museum of Mankind, dominates the other ethnographic museums on account of its size, reputation, and purchasing power. Possibly the complementary opposition that I have outlined is less marked in the United States. The attitude to money of cultural elites in the USA is probably franker and less convoluted than is that of their counterparts in Britain, and their museums receive more subsidies and donations from private sources. The well-known American-based journal African Arts contains a cheerful mixture of scholarly articles and opulent advertisements for dealers and auction-houses - a mixture that it would be hard to imagine in Britain. (Apparently there has been opposition to this policy, but the editors insist, no doubt with justification, that without these advertisements the journal could not survive.)

But what relevance does the model I have suggested have for anthropologists?

My soundings suggest that in the traditional collecting fields, relations between Curators and Auctioneers in Britain, though characterized by vigilant boundary maintenance, are increasingly amicable and cooperative. For instance, it is not considered a matter for comment that one director of an auction-house is also a Fellow of the British Academy and an honorary keeper in a great university museum. In the ethnographic field, relations are more strained.

How do the ethnographic departments relate to the auction world as a whole? The ethnographic market is relatively small, and notoriously tricky and unstable. Some categories of object fetch high prices, but only when some of a number of favourable factors combine: such as aesthetic appeal, suitability for display, rarity, fashionableness, nationalistic appeal, an illustrious provenance, and finally the degree of scholarship and documentation available to substantiate catalogue entries. On the whole prices are considered to be rather low, `value for value', by comparison with other collecting specialities.

So `ethnographica' is small within the whole system, but the auction houses as a whole are increasingly powerful financially and so exert an increasing pull over the ethnographic market as well.
What would be a fair prediction for the future? Currently price-levels for the most desired collectable objects - royal jewellery or Impressionist paintings - are soaring ever higher. Run-of-the-mill auction sales scrape the barrel as bric à brac from attics is dusted off and consigned. At a sale I observed recently, the auctioneer started to yawn during one lot, and had to be revived with coffee. Yet there are still works of art of high quality from non-Western sources which seem inexpensive. While the ethnographic market is sure to remain tricky, there is some scope for appreciation in prices, especially if the collecting public becomes more knowledgeable and perhaps if the standard of cataloguing is improved. In the most prestigious auction houses (Sothebys and Christies) strict demarcation is observed between the `authentic', especially the putatively `not made for sale', and the rest; items that do not make the grade are shunted into inferior sales of `decorative arts' or suchlike. Phillips,the third rival, is rather less particular. The field of ethnic and tourist arts, reproductions and acknowledged fakes is likely sooner or later to expand in the salerooms - if they follow the pattern of other categories of collectable. So there is a process of selective appreciation of a few highly valued `styles', coupled with a broadening of the run-of-the-mill market into new collecting areas.

Possibly anthropologists could do something to retard or impede this market trend if they were firmly decided to oppose it. Ought they to try? How clear-cut is the moral issue?

Peter Gathercole in the last issue of A.T. has put the case against auction-houses in uncompromising terms and with admirable clarity. To summarize him, auction-houses as capitalist concerns are inimical to the humane values which alone should be associated with works of art and which are, or should be, the guiding light of museum curators and academics. Private collectors, though not as reprehensible as auctioneers, are to be viewed with reserve, for they are not publicly accountable. Gathercole's museum colleague George Bankes mentions that rising prices add to the risks of theft from museum collections. Neither happens to mention, though they might have, the fact that market values encourage smuggling of works of art out of Developing Countries; or the further point, specific to the ethnographic market, that it is only collecting speciality which is concerned both with living art traditions and with art traditions external to Western culture - some of these traditions being also associated with oppressed minorities.

All of the above points are important, but there are points to be made on the other side of the broad moral argument and they are worth enumerating.

1. Care for works of art of all descriptions, linked as it may be to money values, has resulted in a vast number of objects being preserved for the future which would otherwise have disintegrated or been lost or destroyed. (Many of these objects were not made with a view to preservation; however, this fact does not necessarily cancel their interest for posterity.)

2. High exchange values for authenticated works of art are not necessarily against the interest of present members of the societies of origin. They can gain political prestige and recognition, as have the Sepik people or the Navajo Indians. Or they can develop imitative craft industries for tourism and export. The Chinese, Greeks and Egyptians have practised these secondary craft traditions for centuries, to the benefit of local economies. Why should not other societies whose art traditions have been recognized more recently not benefit in the same way?

3. Though some museum curators may deprecate private collectors, the majority of present museum collections probably derive from personal collections rather than from direct acquisition. (This raises the question of `what is a collection?' which would call for another article.)

4. Private collecting on a grand scale is often a kind of private obsession or a manifestation of competitiveness that irresistibly recalls the Big Men of Melanesia. But when private collecting is kept in proportion, it is no more than part of the normal culture of the Western professional classes. Before anthropologists cast stones, they should look at their own living-rooms. Not that a penchant for picking up ethnographica is a monopoly of anthropologists, for the following is a description by the novelist John Updike of a typical bacteriologist's house in an academic suburb of Boston:

...how happy the Kriegmans appeared in their dining alcove, their multicoloured lamp just barely illuminating the shadowy walls, which they, like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects - African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds' horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas - displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire (Roger's Version, 1986).

Updike's satire strikes home, but foreign travel and exotic trophies also have their broadening and liberating aspect which museum curators should surely be willing to approve.

5. Assuming that a market of some kind in ethnographica is inevitable, auction-houses at least ensure that it is more of an open market. Admittedly there is occasional malpractice in the auction world, but that fact that auction sales are open to individual members of the public gives some protection in the long run against `rings' and other rigging of markets by private dealers.

6. Auction-houses and dealers are likely - again in the long run, and some egregious exceptions could be cited - to act in a helpful way towards museums, who are both potential purchasers and also a constantly needed source of information.

7. High market prices do make it more expensive for museums to add to their collections, and to provide required security. But they can in some cases also help museum curators to convince their governing bodies to allocate funds for storage, conservation, staffing, new acquisitions etc. This is unfortunately not the case for many smaller museums, especially those that are part of universities in their present financial crisis. But Mr Gathercole himself has previously mentioned high prices for ethnographic art as being one factor among others which has given museum ethnographers `much more self-confidence' (RAIN, Oct. 1981, `The repatriation of Ethnographic Objects'.)

8. The problem of societies of origin losing their cultural heritage through smuggling out, etc., is serious but is not peculiar to the ethnographic field. It should be the responsibility of all governments to take steps to protect major items of their nations' heritage, and most of them do (though the cost of policing their borders adequately is often prohibitive). One of the most valuable tasks performed by Unesco, from which Britain and the USA have now withdrawn, is the drawing up of international `conventions' proscribing trade in contraband art, and these conventions are of course supported by museum curators and anthropologists. But it is difficult to see how an effective system of control could be introduced without the cooperation of trade associations. (According to the American Anthropology Newsletter, April 1987, dealers have pressured the U.S. authorities into blocking and delaying legislation regulating the import of prehistoric art.) A problem that should specially concern anthropologists arises when a minority group's art traditions are not esteemed by the national government - i.e., in many cases, when they are not associated with commercially valuable artefacts.

In short, the moral arguments for and against the ethnographic art market and auction sales are not conclusive one way or the other.

There are some emotional reasons as well for our view of auction sales in general, which have a long history. We may think ill of auction sales because they are associated with the disposal of worldly goods after death (when they are often a kind of secondary mortuary rite) or bankruptcy; and because we habitually despise as sordid the common denominator, money, into which sophisticated connoisseurship is converted in the auction rooms. Sellem, the auctioneer in Auden's opera The Rake's Progress, is such a satisfying characterization because it implicitly ridicules the occasional cultural pretensions of auction-houses. As Roland Barthes has written, all our leading moral philosophies - Christian, Marxist and Freudian - are hostile to money. But on the other hand, auction rooms, like racecourses or stock exchanges, are ascribed in our society the positive values associated with exciting unpredictability.

A more sophisticated argument by the Curators than moral disapproval takes its stand on the issue of expediency rather than morality. `We are in no position', a spokesman might say, `to make moral judgments. The great public collections of ethnographic art were largely formed during the colonial period, and we have mixed feelings about all that. But we have to take account of what other people think about the art market, especially a party to the debate which is increasingly important, the authorities in Developing Countries'.

Recent trends in collecting policies support this position. Museums are now collecting from overseas in an ethnographic mode, with more methodical documentation than before. Many of the objects collected may be of trivial financial value, and are not regarded by anyone as being part of the inalienable heritage of the society of origin. Yet in sum and with their supporting ethnography, such collections are likely to make valuable exhibition material and to be of great interest to future researchers. The government of nation X is happy to endorse such collecting and to have its own national museum fully involved, perhaps cooperating on an exhibition of a programme of exchanges. But the government of X is not going to be happy if it should find out that the same museum has purchased at auction an important work of art from X dating back a hundred years, which is believed by the government to have been stolen or smuggled out of X. Hence the museum abstains from bidding for this work of art - even if it is tempted to do so because it would fill a notable gap in its collections.

Auction houses claim to have house rules about not accepting property which they know to have been stolen or smuggled, but these rules are far less stringent than those of museums and some would say that they are not rules at all. The law concerning title to stolen goods is extremely complicated and varies from one country to another.

From holding off from the art market in specific cases, it is a natural step for ethnographic museum curators to develop a more thoroughgoing detachment from the market and to maintain their boundaries more rigorously, perhaps, than do some of their colleagues in other specialities. But there are drawback to this state of affairs. A closer working relationship between ethnographic museums and and the trade might help, not hinder, the drawing up of a generally accepted code of practice, especially with regard to stolen and smuggled artefacts. The growing financial muscle-power of the auction-houses would give them considerable influence over trade practice if they could be persuaded to exert it more actively and responsibly. Also, if the curators followed the auction sales more overtly (it is said from the auctioneers' side) they might perhaps be able to bid more astutely when they do want to enter the market. And the standard of auction-house cataloguing, at present uneven, would probably rise.

Where should anthropologists stand in all this? Clearly they will want to lend what weight they can against the trade in stolen and smuggled objects and against all other forms of skulduggery in the ethnographic art trade. Museum curators and anthropologists have a common interest in trying to be as effective as possible in cultural diplomacy. It is not sufficiently appreciated by the trade and the public that many of the societies of origin ascribe secret or sacred value to certain objects and images, and special codes of practice ought to apply.

Mr Gathercole knows as much about the complexity of these problems as anyone, and his opinion is entitled to respect. However, when he writes in his letter to A.T. that the main justification for analysing auction sales would be `to demonstrate to what extent they are inimical to the well-being of cultural things' I discern something of the kind of thought-process that is normal in the context of complementary moieties, but which perhaps one should try to avoid.

The auction-houses do deserve criticise from time to time. Last August, an article in A.T. criticized the Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University for his role in the sad affair of the George Brown Collection, and it implicitly criticized Sothebys (who in that transaction arranged a sale by private treaty rather than by auction, as auction-houses increasingly do). Perhaps A.T. should have been more forthright, and should have entered the fray before the transaction was completed rather than afterwards.

In other fields, anthropologists are having to approach questions of cultural, and other, politics more directly than before. It needs to be openly recognized that museums have institutional, and curators have professional, interests (as do anthropologists and their institutions); that auction-houses and the art market are unlikely to disappear under a weight of indignation, but demand detailed scrutiny; and that there are especially delicate issues at stake with regard to the heritage of Developing Countries.

For Australian Aboriginals, the hallowed status of a tjurunga (sacred board) may endure regardless of what happens to it. For many other peoples, an icon is as it were deconsecrated by its removal, for whatever reason, from its original context. Governments of Developing Countries that press for the return of their patrimony deserve to be taken seriously, but often what they hold up to their own people is a mirror fashioned by the West, satisfying to their elites and inextricably associated with market values, but in which adherents of the traditional culture may not recognize themselves. Here is an eminently valid topic for anthropology which is now beginning to be addressed.

This scene at an auction where a record price is being bid shows the auctioneer's hammer clearly, and the electronic 'currency conversion board' above the rostrum. The painting between two porters is 'Flatford Lock and Mill' by Constable. (Photo courtesy of Christie's.)

Prices in the 'tribal art' category do not reach these very high levels; the record price is around £300,000.

Finally, the policy of A.T. A combative periodical called Primitive Art Newsletter was published privately from New York between 1978 and 1983, but has now lapsed. It was directed at collectors and dealers, but was capable of adopting a critical line, mainly against the circulation and legitimation of fakes. African Arts provides informed critical comment on the market in its own field, with special emphasis on poor cataloguing, for instance Sotheby's allegedly careless use from time to time of scholarly citation in order to boost prices. It seems to me that one of the jobs of A.T. could be to adopt towards the ethnographic art market a policy of informed critical engagement such as modern anthropology adopts towards other social and cultural phenomena.

The image of Christ casting the money-changers our of the temple is a compelling one. It is more anthropological to look at how the whole system works, including both temple-officials and money-changers.

Post script. Reading the `Editor's Corner' in the current American Antiquity, it is clear that any sharp contrast between British and American attitudes on the questions covered in the above article would be mistaken. The editor, Patty Jo Watson, sharply criticizes two articles in national American magazines - one of them by a well-known archaeologist in the prestigious Smithsonian magazine - which (according to her) recommend relic-collecting, and looting of historic shipwrecks, for pleasure and profit.

Watson adopts a line similar to Fathercole's, except in an archaeological rather than an ethnographic context, i.e. that all plundering of archaeological sites, and buying and selling of artefacts, is wrong. She describes the antiquities market as `vicious'. Watson says that the archaeological record is threatened enough anyway without the archaeological community sabotaging itself through irresponsible publications of this kind. Perhaps, to preclude any misunderstandings I should emphasize that my own article above does not recommend individuals to make private collections of any kind.

I am grateful to a number of people knowledgeable in this field who have generously passed on to me information and ideas, and especially Peter Gathercole for some most helpful comments on an earlier draft.

As stated in the last issue, A.T. will not publish either advance information about auction sales, or advertisements by auction houses.

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