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NOTIONS OF DOMESTICITY were central to colonial projects around the globe. They were part of the fray when metropole and colony collided and transformed one another. As Jean and John Comaroff put it, "Colonialism was as much about making the center as it was about making the periphery. The colony was not a mere extension of the modern world. It was part of what made the world modern in the first place. And the dialectic of domesticity was a vital element in the process."1 The colonial desire to order domestic space had its correlate in broader attempts to impose discipline in the public sphere.2 On the late-nineteenth-century Northwest Coast, this process took shape for Aboriginal people who increasingly lived not only overseas from, but within, the society of the colonizing metropoles. Aboriginal people experienced extreme pressure to bring their lives into conformity with Victorian expectations about private, middle-class, bourgeois domesticity. This pressure came not only from isolated missionaries posted in lonely colonial outposts but also from a broad swath of colonial society. So intense was the interest in Aboriginal domestic arrangements, however, that colonial society brought Aboriginal domestic space into the public domain as never before, even as it urged Aboriginal communities to adopt the Victorian values of the domestic private sphere. While missionaries and government officials pressured Aboriginal families to replace multifamily longhouses with Victorian-style nuclear family dwellings, anthropologists and tourists invaded Aboriginal homes, alternately in search of a rapidly receding ("savage") past or a slowly dawning ("civilized") future. Missionaries encouraged such voyeuristic investigations in the hope that the object lessons of everyday Aboriginal life would generate a flow of funds from Christian pocketbooks into missionary society coffers. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas fed their own form of economic necessity with these displays, which they hoped would encourage benefactors to provide funding for additional anthropological fieldwork and collecting. In a sense, as they transformed Aboriginal domestic spaces into spectacle, all of the members of these non-Aboriginal groups became sightseers.
Domestic space was transformed into spectacle, and attempts to effect greater separation between private and public spaces simultaneously blurred the two, creating a hybrid public/private domain. Colonialism is riven with such invariably ironic contradictions. But the importance of such contradictions runs deeper than postmodern irony....