One of the most provocative and thoughtful new works on Northwest Coast culture comes from an artist and art historian. Shadow House is Jonathan Meuli’s wide-ranging essay on the history of the social and political contexts of production, collection, and display of Northwest Coast (especially northern Northwest Coast) objects, from precontact indigenous communities to the modern day.

At first glance, browsers might assume Shadow House follows a postmodernist model (à la James Clifford) of travelogue peppered with ruminations on globalization and the politics and semiotics of representation. Indeed, Meuli’s fieldwork has been limited to museum-strolling and a few interviews with Northwest Coast artists in urban settings like Prince Rupert, British Columbia. His conclusions, however, are far from mere metacommentary and are based on intensive research, including examination of primary documents.

In the first chapter, “Indigenous Northwest Coast Aesthetics,” Meuli offers close readings of Swanton’s Haida texts and other sources for insights into precontact meanings and patterns. At times, his cataloguing of references is numbingly Boasian in its exhaustiveness, but his exegesis is at least restrained. From there, Meuli moves to a richer second chapter excavating the indigenous mnemonic processes apparent in early field notes and hypothesizes about the relationships among oral narrative, social structure, visual experience, and memory. For one not particularly concerned with the theoretical side of ethnography, Meuli shows a startling grasp of social-structural concepts and their cultural and methodological implications. His synthesis should be read as a call for ethnographers and others to explore the relationship between built space and social space on the Northwest Coast--not only in early historical longhouses, insofar as we can reconstruct them, but also in metaphorical lineage-house spaces such as the church basements, gymnasiums, and community halls used for potlatching today. Meuli does make a real contribution to the current literature on house societies, a literature that is only beginning to be applied, deservedly, to the Northwest Coast, the area, after all, to which Lévi-Strauss first applied the term.

“Collecting Objects and Ascribing Meanings” is the theme of the third chapter, a detailed examination of artifact-collecting expeditions. Meuli draws on the Swanton-Boas correspondence and attends particularly to the constructions of meaning inherent in the cataloguing process itself. He comments thoughtfully on the styles of display of different Northwest Coast museum collections around the world.

With chapter 4, Meuli brings us into the 20th century with an unflinching and unbounded exploration of the role of Northwest Coast art in British Columbia and southeast Alaska today. He examines the politics of repatriation and display, the life histories of artists (with interesting comments on northern British Columbian cannery towns in the mid-20th century as places where diverse local traditions comingled), different touristic and ethnographic regimes of representation, and the landscapes in which Northwest Coast public art lives, from First Nations villages to the totem parks in non-Native communities.

For one coming to this topic from other disciplines, Meuli makes surprisingly few missteps and is aware of his own limitations. An exception is his extended discussion of the Tsimshian cliff paintings attributed to Chief Ligeex (pp. 110-116, 349-353), to which he devotes an appendix. He doubts the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s cataloguing of a photograph that depicts a set of petroglyphs reputedly at the mouth of the Skeena River (p. 114), noting oral historical references to the pictures at the mouth of the Nass River. But the catalogue is correct; there are in fact two sets of petroglyphs, one near the mouth of each river. The photo Meuli questions (reproduced on p. 112) does indeed show the Skeena glyphs, and they are clearly visible from the highway Meuli must have traveled, judging by the communities he mentions visiting. Also in this connection, he states incorrectly that it is because oolichan do not spawn on the Skeena that the Tsimshian visit the Nass to harvest these fish (p. 349).

The volume might have benefited from the inclusion of fewer of Meuli’s own photographs, which are scattered almost randomly through the text. Many of these are artfully computer manipulated into montages and the like, at the loss of the usefulness and clarity readers expect from illustrations in an academic book. Most grievously, there is a shocking proliferation of typographical and grammatical errors, such that I found myself wondering at times if any copy editing occurred at any stage of production. Editorial shoddiness aside, this book is a major contribution to the study of Northwest Coast aesthetics and culture, and I recommend it to ethnographers, artists, curators, and anyone interested in an erudite and truly interdisciplinary synthesis of many facets of an artistic tradition.