The audience at Sotheby’s sits hushed in silence while the auctioneer opens the bidding on the object on view. It is a Hawaiian shark’s tooth weapon said to be from the eighteenth century. The auctioneer starts the bidding at $30,000. It goes up several notches, and one of the bidders shouts out $100,000. Then the counter bid of $110,000, followed by a bid of $120,000, by which point the audience is stunned and the auctioneer asks “Are there any more bids?” Hearing none, he knocks down his gavel and the object is sold. Such is the atmosphere in which Tribal Art today changes hands. This auction was held on November 16, 2001; and the price now would surely be two or three times that amount. Collectors, dealers, and museum curators, all participants in the world of Tribal Art collecting, were present at this auction. They all often purchase objects at such venues. Here value is created and determined. Ethnographic objects, now “Tribal Art” or “African, Oceanic and American Indian Art”, have become big business in an international market, and part of the process of globalization. Bidders in the room, on the phone, and those who have Emailed their bids came not only from America but also from Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
How did a Hawaiian weapon come to have such great value? The way in which warriors used such weapons centuries ago does not account for its great value today, but its rarity and age are contributory factors in decisions about what its monetary value should be. Many value it highly on a purely aesthetic


basis. The seller of the object, its most recent owner, was the Masco Corporation. In the early part of the twentieth century, it had been in the collection of W.O. Oldman, a collector/dealer, and then later owned by James Hooper, the famous collector. Such provenance greatly enhanced this object’s value. The suggestion in the Sotheby’s catalogue that this weapon might have been collected by Captain Cook is what really increased its importance and worth. The catalogue notes, “…there is some speculation that it may have been collected by Captain Cook…. Although its connection with him remains unproven, it was certainly taken from Hawaii in the eighteenth century as it bears the inscription ‘Owhyhee’ and (sic) archaic spelling…” (Sotheby’s 2001: 184). This Hawaiian weapon is pictured in the Hooper collection catalogue # 369 next to a similar one of the same type #368 ( (Phelps 1976:82, 418). Interestingly, #368 pictured next to it came from the Leverian Museum. and was collected on Cook’s Third Voyage. There is no information to the effect that the Hawaiian weapon sold at Sotheby’s was collected by Cook.
There are significant differences between the object pictured in Sotheby’s catalogue and the one in the Hooper catalogue. The piece pictured in the Hooper collection catalogue is missing some sharks’ teeth, while in the Sotheby’s picture, no sharks teeth are missing. This means that the object being sold at Sotheby’s had, at some time, been restored, and seven broken shark’s teeth had been replaced . No mention of this restoration, or “conservation” as this process is sometimes called, is made in the Sotheby’s catalogue. Information which connects an object to Captain Cook will always greatly enhance its value because objects associated with the “martyred” Cook have come to have a godlike aura or “mana”, increasing their value even more. The connection of the Hawiian weapon to Hooper and Oldman also illustrates the important of provenance and its historical dimension.
This auction scene gives one a sense of what the market in Tribal Art is presently like. What does the rest of the world of collecting Tribal Art look like? Do contemporary collectors of Tribal Art have the same motivations to collect and the same interests as those of the past? How is today's collecting world organized? What is its institutional structure? Are there variations depending on the class position of the collector? Does the world of the well-heeled collector differ from that of the less moneyed? What are the connections between collectors and academics who are thought to be the "real" experts on Tribal Art? Though collectors and dealers would seem to be different personae, as we noted earlier, collectors often turn into part or full time dealers. How and why does this transformation take place today? How do dealers, museum personnel, and auction house personnel fit into the picture? We will be answering all these questions in the following chapters.
Over the past twenty-five years there have been many changes in the collecting of Tribal Art. The class structure of collectors has been transformed, mirroring the great rise in value and price of Tribal Art, particularly those objects deemed to be the finest examples of artistic expression. After World War II, there were collectors of Tribal Art who lived on Park Avenue, and also those of more modest means. It was still possible to find fine pieces from Africa, Oceania, and Native America at flea markets, estate sales and other more unlikely venues, as it had been for the Parisian collectors of the early twentieth century. These ethnographic objects, often found in attics, frequently had been handed down within families for one or more generations. Perhaps they were collected by an ancestor who had traveled to the Pacific as captain of a whaling vessel like Captain Macy of Nantucket, or by another who had gone to Africa as a missionary as well as a doctor like George Harley, who went to Sierra Leone, or by still another ancestor who had gone to Alaska, during the gold rush. One could purchase clubs from Fiji and Florida Island, in the Solomons, which had descended from nineteenth century whaling captains, whose heirs were still living in New Bedford. Sometimes these objects were not in the best condition like the eight foot long spear from Micronesia, missing most of its shark’s teeth, which turned up several years ago together with whaling paraphernalia, at a small auction in Greene County, New York..