CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Design Studies Forum-Sponsored Special Session College Art Association Los Angeles, February 25-28, 2009

The objects found in Walter Benjamin’s writing constitute a significant part of his material and intellectual world. Benjamin's careful textual descriptions of objects gird his broader critical insight into the status of objects and their significance. In reflecting upon his childhood, objects became a means through which to access a bygone era; taking possession of things was posited as a way to divest them of their commodity character. Activities such as collecting, assembling the archive, or unpacking the library were necessarily material-filled. In a seemingly straightforward manner, Benjamin celebrates the material qualities of objects such as letters, books, or old toys, but he also less directly employs objects to address subjects such as kitsch, modern life, and capitalism. In Benjamin's formulation, antimacassars, cases and containers, in their use, allowed the dweller to leave traces; it is notably through objects that the dweller imprints himself upon the interior.

This session proposes a reappraisal of Benjamin's objects, with considerations of what objecthood meant to Benjamin and how the particular set of objects highlighted in his writing can be understood both within his body of work and the broader period in which he wrote.
Benjamin's theory can also be used to inform the examination of objects in other areas of design history.

This panel invites investigations of objects as a means of soliciting critical insight into Benjamin's larger questions, such as those surrounding the aura, habits, taste, the bourgeoisie, or authenticity. Seeking not just to excavate and explicate previously underexamined Benjaminian objects, this session asks how we might interrogate them as discursive entities or agents.

Continue reading "BENJAMIN'S OBJECTS" »

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Ceres Karam Brum, Professor of the Education Fundamentals, Department of the Federal University of Santa Maria, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. cereskb@terra.com.br

In this research I wish to propose a reflection about the Gaucho clothing and especially about the prenda dress in Rio Grande do Sul. I intend to show a little of its history, relating it to the other Traditionalist outfits, presented by some historians of clothing and folklorists. I want to situate the creation of the prenda dress in the context of elaboration of the Gaucho Traditionalist Movement (MTG), in the 1950's.

The creation of the pilchas is inside of this process. Pilcha is a valuable object such as an adornment, jewel, money. In the language of the Gaucho Traditionalist Movement this means is the typical gaucho clothing. The prenda dress is called pilcha.

The research is inserted in the reflections of the project The Gaucho Traditionalist Movement and the School. Educational and Pedagogical Perspectives. An Anthropological Analysis on the (Re)configurations of the Plural Identities, that I have been developing in the Education Center of the Federal University of Santa Maria since 2006.

Besides the issue of the relation school/Traditionalist, in general lines, the project aims at characterizing the Gaucho Traditionalist Movement or the Traditionalism as a cultural movement that worships the historical and mythical figure of the gaucho in the present. For such endeavor the Traditionalists represent it in various ways, producing a complex cultural universe that includes, among other elements: clothing, language, dance, food, animals, songs, work. These representations are characterized as gaucho traditions and related to the typical gaucho, diacritics that potentialize collective and individual identifications related to the affirmation of the “regional” in the Rio Grande do Sul.

Continue reading "Gaucho Clothing: An Ethnographical Analysis of the Traditionalist Pedagogy of the 'pilchas'" »

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Curtis's Landmark 1914 Silent Film of Pacific Northwest First Nations Culture-Restored, Re-evaluated, and Framed with a Live Orchestral Arrangement of the Original Score and a Performance by the Gwa'wina Dancers, Descendants of the Indigenous Cast.

This collaborative project approaches the film from two distinct but overlapping perspectives: As a scholarly recovery and restoration of the original melodramatic contexts and content of the film and musical score; and as an indigenous re-framing of this material given unique Kwakwaka'wakw perspectives on the original film, its specific cultural content, and its historical context of production.

Please visit: http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu

The website functions as the gateway to partner institutions that are hosting public screening/performance events and related programming in June 2008 (in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver) and in November 2008 (in Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City). In addition, the site provides a thorough scholarly introduction to Curtis's film, to the central role of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) in its production, and to the new archival discoveries that have led to its current restoration. It also includes extensive media relating to the film's production as well as contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw culture.

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Serban Vaetisi, PhD Cultural Anthropology, University of Cluj

Photo 1. National Museum of the American Indian (Washington DC)

The Museum store sells not only postcards and slides but reproductions of pottery, fabrics, statuary, and jewelry. It handles books, uses greetings cards to popularize knowledge of the museum’s holdings, and generally functions as a commercial publicist. (Quimby, 1978, pp. 171-172)

Through its material constitution and the reiterative effects of its culturally produced durability, it [material culture] becomes constitutive of desired and imagined subjectivities either nostalgic, futuristic or transformative […] (Buchli, 2002, p. 9)

Photo 2. Traditional architecture of the Pueblo American Indian (Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado) source: visitusa.com

Introduction
This is a research sketch on “Constructing and understanding Tourism through Material Culture”, based on some ethnographic experiences on the Eastern United States coast.

Overview
This is a project on how material culture creates tourism and how we can understand structures and processes implied in tourism industry and practices through the study of its materiality.

The research draws on ethnographic fieldworks as participant observant and tourist in such different places as: Washington DC, New York City, St. Augustine (Florida), Hilton Head Island (South Carolina), Bluffton (South Carolina), Orlando (Florida) and Miami (Florida). We refer in this draft to the first three sites.

This multi-sited ethnography is justified by tracing observation on different types of tourism: museum tourism, urban tourism, historical tourism, ecological tourism, heritage tourism, entertainment tourism, and ‘sun, sea and sand’ tourism.

Photo 3. Indian traditional dwellings around the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington DC)

Nevertheless, this research is not organized in the idea of studying diverse forms of tourism and does not aim to differentiate among types of tourism, but it is mainly interested in how material culture shapes and is shaped within the tourism, as a whole. The different touristic sites provided us just distinct ethnographic material and different cultural perspectives.

This study relies on previous interests on alternative tourism (Vaetisi, 2006) and issues related to community, identity and tourism development in Southeastern United States (Vaetisi, 2008, ms.). If within these two cited works we were mainly interested in aspects such as the local-global relations, ideological constructions of nature and culture as well as processes and challenges of urban development in association with tourism, in this study we are mainly focused on the material culture of tourism.

Photo 4. Statue of Liberty visited by tourists (New York)

We approach tourism largely from an anthropological perspective (Nash, 1996), considering its last decades alternative forms (Stronza, 2001) in search of recapturing values as history, nature and education (Eadington&Smith, 1992). We approach material culture considering the processes of economic/social/cultural/political/psychological/expressive needs through consumption (Miller, 1987; 1998) and the symbolic construction of identities and social lives that material objects provide (Dant, 1999; Berger, 1992) from a broad theoretical perspective (Buchli, 2004; Tilley, 2006).

Photo 5. “Statue of Liberty” in a live statue street performance (New York)

A specific theoretical approach of material culture is based on using the concepts of transformation and translation, seen as both ‘processes of materialization’ and ‘artefact effects’ (Buchli 2002): objects and objectives of tourist immediate use and industry seen not only in theoretical processual perspective but in their material transformation/translation as precise, contextual objects. This being in fact one of the first-hand ethnographic attitudes of the researcher: observing how objects appear and are represented as different material things, and subject of variation and change within the cultural contexts they refer to.

Our research is aiming to address the following aspects of material culture: architecture, urban landscape and monuments; homes, furniture, landscape and backyard objects; cloth; gadgets, souvenirs, iconic objects and art objects; ethnic, domestic and industrial objects; technology and design; food. For this discussion on transformation - architecture, monuments, gadgets, iconic objects and clothes were especially taken into consideration.

Continue reading "Tourist Objects and Objectives: Transformations in Material Culture of Tourism" »

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Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Social Economy at Cardiff School of Management

We are seeking to appoint a social economist or heterodox economist to contribute to both the teaching and research aspects of our School.

The Cardiff School of Management has a strong profile, both nationally and internationally, in the fields of Management, Business, Computing, Tourism and Hospitality, together with proven standing with a range of relevant professional bodies. The School is now looking to recruit additional academic staff to maintain the pace of its development.

Continue reading "Job Announcement" »

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Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder, University of Exeter

Hawaii-inspired music marketed via popular record albums, radio shows, and Hollywood film soundtracks aided Hawaii’s transformation in the popular imagination from a mysterious ‘primitive’ paradise into the 50th U.S. state. Indeed, by constructing and capturing the temptingly tropical so-called ‘sounds’ of Hawaii on the latest hi-fi recording equipment, the music industry offered up Hawaiian music as an achievement of modern technology, promoting these U.S. islands as an acoustic, as well as a tourist, paradise. Popular Hawaiian music’s marriage of stereo technology and so-called authentic sounds produced a repertoire of songs, a musical identity, and an auditory brand asset, creating a potent force and a performative example in the sonic branding of Hawaiian paradise. Indeed, what became known worldwide as Hawaiian music still provides a soothing soundtrack for South Pacific holidays, backyard luau parties, or ironic late night lounging.

The Hawaiian record album formed an important stage of Hawaii’s construction as a conceptual resource, just as pineapple, sugar and battleships played important roles at earlier stages. For decades the iconic Hula girl and her musical accompaniment have formed the foundation of a strongly appealing Hawaiian identity, making Hawaii instantly recognizable the world over. Contemporary efforts to re-establish ‘authentic’ Hawaiian motifs in Hawaii, too, draw upon a concocted image (Halualani 2002). Informing even native islanders’ conceptions of Hawaiian identity, these images fall under an ontological shadow. Hawaii remains an important tourist destination, strategic military outpost, and ‘tropical paradise’. Reflected in such record album titles as ‘Island Paradise,’ ‘the Lure of Paradise,’ and ‘Hawaiian Paradise,’ Hawaii has been represented as paradise on earth. Western Judeo-Christian culture gives paradise two central meanings: the Garden of Eden and heaven. Record album covers emphasize the former, featuring the women of paradise clad in ‘native cloth,’ peering out from palm fronds, sensually frolicking in the ocean tide. Indeed, a Hawaiian vacation might be considered the ultimate American consumer product – allowing anyone who can afford a ticket to participate in the neo-colonial project through a re-creation of discovering Hawaii.

In this project, we turn a critical gaze onto a veritable archive of consumer artifacts – including our collection of over 400 Hawaiian LPs that provide a wealth of data – invoking a range of issues around consumption, objectification, and representation. Album covers, liner notes, and songs provide sites for an analysis of the representation of Hawaii in popular culture around the time it gained statehood in 1959. Record albums were given away by airlines, travel agents, and tour companies as part of broader efforts to attract visitors to Hawaii, and moreover supported the nation-building radio show, Hawaii Calls. The record album covers and songs under scrutiny are still available, often smartly repackaged as ‘exotica,’ ‘lounge’ and ‘chill’ in CD stores worldwide.

Hawaiian records – cover art, liner notes and song lyrics – often reflect a dominant cultural view of the exotic other. Interestingly, the typical themes and tropes displayed in Hawaiian record albums -- paradise, escape, sexuality, tropicality, going native – are present in many marketing campaigns for products ranging from suntan oil to corporate relocation. Thus seemingly innocuous material artifacts create and maintain a discourse – produced through the use of models, poses, and conventions from art history and advertising design.

Record albums are useful sights for material culture studies for several reasons. First, they are durable. Records from the 1950s remain widely available today, collected and coveted by consumers, and recirculate as retro icons. Used records are sold by the thousands in vinyl stores, at record fairs, and on the Internet; and, surprisingly, vinyl has rebounded as a viable niche within the music industry. Furthermore, old records are often re-released on compact disc, thus enjoying a new life. Although images from 1950s and 1960s advertisements usually appear hopelessly dated, record cover designs enjoy new life on compact discs that cash in on ironic trends or retro fashions. Second, as consumer artifacts, records and CDs exemplify crucial material practices, such as identity building, collecting, and invoking nostalgic reverie. Third, record cover design was a driving force for graphic art during the decades after World War II. Many leading artists and graphic designers produced record covers, some of which are considered collectible classics.

Continue reading "Packaging Paradise: Sonic Branding of the South Pacific" »

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Conference on "Onwership and Appropriation" (Auckland, New Zealand, 8-12 December 2008)

Panel on "Cosmopolitanism and the Appropriation of Culture"

Co-organisers: Mark Busse (University of Auckland) and Jade Baker (University of Canterbury)

In a chapter of his 2006 book Cosmopolitanism, provocatively titled “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?”, Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that objects of cultural value “belong in the deepest sense to all of us” and “are of potential value to all human beings”. While reminding us of our common humanity, cosmopolitan claims to a universal connection to art (what Appiah called “the connection despite difference”) are also an appropriation—a claim to pan-human ownership that sidesteps political and economic inequalities in the contemporary world. These inequalities privilege people living in metropolitan centres who have access to public museums and art galleries, and allow only the wealthiest individuals to enjoy valuable cultural objects on a daily basis. This panel will further debates arising from cosmopolitan claims of universal ownership of cultural objects, and the on-going appropriations underwritten by such claims. It will do this by comparing and contrasting connections “despite difference” with what Appiah called “the connection to art through identity” (the connections people feel to objects that were created by their ancestors), as well as the concrete manifestations of such connections in art markets, histories of cultural objects in museums and private collections, the significance of repatriation in a globalizing world, and arguments against the cosmopolitan position which emphasize the entanglement of objects, persons, communities and places.

This panel continues discussions started at a special session of the College Arts Association in New York in February 2007, the proceedings of which are being published as a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property

The conference on "Ownership and Appropriation" is a joint conference of the Association of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, the Australian Anthropological Society, and the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand. For further information, see the conference website: http://www.theasa.org/asa08/index.htm or contact the conference organisers Professor Veronica Strang (v.strang [at] auckland.ac.nz) or Dr Mark Busse (m.busse [at] auckland.ac.nz).

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Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, PhD student, Department of Educational Sociology, Danish School of Education – University of Aarhus

The rough asphalt against the knees in the schoolyard, the teacher’s golden watch chain replaced with trousers in brown velour, the wooden pen between the fingers, ink dripping everywhere, embarrassingly skipping mummy’s sandwiches in the bin. Standing in the sunny schoolyard (maybe on the bench), sitting in the classroom (tables in lines, tables in groups), running along the corridor (painted grey, painted orange), and hiding behind the bicycle shed or in the dark basement.

The changes in the Danish folkeskole [primary and secondary school] after 1945 have been profound. Judging from political visions and pedagogical strategies, there seems to be all the differences in the world between the strictly academic school of the 1950s, the progressive school of the 1970s and the strongly individualised and consumer-oriented school taking its form in the 1990s. But when looking at everyday life and the world (and creation) of the school pupil, what then are the implications of these changes. My Phd-project sets out to explore: What matters when it comes to being (or becoming) a pupil, taking part in the daily life and festive occasions of school? How have political incentives, pedagogical norms and practices, relations of authority, categories of class, gender etc. been taken up, lived and reframed in individual processes of subjectification?

The empirical material of my project is made up of individual life story interviews with 3 generations from a school on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The former pupils went to school in the 50s, the 70s and the 90s, respectively. In addition a number of group interviews have been carried out in the context of the old school. At first the interview material invites to applying a narrative approach, but storying the often non-verbalised memories of childhood schooling tends to be a challenging task. Though, the lingering and the laughter, the tears and regrets tell that school must have mattered – and still matters. Furthermore, when talking about the memory of past school experiences, the informants keep returning to elements of materiality in their struggle for creating coherent narratives. Through objects, places, and through the body wordless memories of schooling are given presence. Materiality seems to be important to the memory of school in a subtle (and unnoticed) way. Looking closer, materiality in its different forms is part of, enables and shapes the memories. In the memories of school, materiality is relevant in relation to collected grade books, school photos, exercise books and worn down school buildings as well as in careful and vivid descriptions of pens, benches, classrooms etc. Taking the embodiment so closely linked to these school memories into account, it might even be possible to say that the experiences of school – of discipline and of experimentations – are also somehow materialised. In this a twofold role of materiality is linked together in the relations between the very processes of schooling and the memory of such. This is not a statement about the past as simply stored either mentally or materially. Rather, recollection is perceived as a reinvention of the past and of the meaning-making processes connected to it. Still, it keeps a link to the past, though, continuously being reworked and not simply repeated or reconstructed.

Continue reading "Materiality of School and Memory" »

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Review by Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

There have been a number of attempts to write general textbooks on material culture. Clearly I form one part of a particular grouping within UCL anthropology that has itself produced a good deal of material of this kind. So for me it is interesting and refreshing to also find works that come from different positions and perspectives. Having said that, there have been others I have not been very impressed by. But I would recommend this new textbook by Ian Woodward. It is a book which keeps a balance between what might be expected of a textbook, trying to conscientious and fair to all positions and act simply to synthesise, and also acts as a book with its own agenda that is seeking to promote a particular approach of the authors choosing.

It is clearly composed, with guidelines setting out what it intends and what it has achieved for each chapter. It starts with a fairly gentle introduction to the cultural nature of objects, and a reasonable history of the development of this inter-disciplinary concern. Chapter three provides a concise and conventional coverage of Marxist arguments, and means that material culture is initially largely identified with commodities. As such other branches of material culture studies, such as museums and anthropology, may feel relatively neglected. Although, at least methodologically, they might find chapter four’s coverage of structuralism quite useful for teaching. While chapter five has a strong culturalist agenda focusing on the anthropological contribution, with perhaps more on Durkheim that I might have expected. This is not balanced by any anti-Durkheimian perspective such as Latour, who is completely absent.

The next section is called objects in action. Chapter six is mainly concerned with issues of distinction and social status, while chapter seven is directed at the role of objects in respect to identity. Since this is intended as a textbook, it is actually no bad thing that the coverage to this point remains conservative and balanced. There is perhaps a bit more social psychology in chapter seven than might have bound found in some social science. To some degree a more social orientation in chapter six is balanced with this more individual orientation in chapter seven.

Chapter eight is probably the most original contribution, setting out a route from more conventional debates to what seems to be the author’s own perspective. This centres on issues of narrative and performance and follows fairly smoothly from the social psychology of the previous chapter. These are seen as the frames within which objects are recognised and make sense for people. This is also used as an excuse to bring in the home as a case study. It takes us back to methodological and epistemological issues of how we constitute our findings, with as much an emphasis upon language as upon objects. As it happens I don’t much agree with the arguments, or find them that persuasive, but that’s just one person’s opinion. I would still welcome them as an original and different approach. It seems quite fair that the author, having done a patient treatment of everyone else, should be allowed some advocacy for the kinds of approaches in the final two chapters which I assume are those he most favours. Overall then I think this book deserves its niche, both as a textbook covering long standing debates and discussions, but also as an entry point to a particular perspective. It comes about as close as anything I have seen to a genuine standard textbook, that tries to transcend particular disciplines.

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Radical History Review (RHR)
Issue #106: Taking Sides:
The Role of Visual Culture in War, Occupation and Resistance

The RHR solicits contributions for a special issue on visual culture in war, occupation and resistance. Artists have often taken sides in ideological conflicts and in actual conflagrations. In terms of visual culture and resistance, the literature and music of the South African struggle, the murals of Belfast and Derry in Ireland and the poetry of the many Latin American movements for change are relatively well documented. Less analysis is available on the role of artists on one side or another of recent conflicts. Wars of Liberation and popular revolts such as those in Angola, Algeria, Iran and the Basque Country spring to mind. Despite the scale and impact of the Vietnam War, little knowledge is available in terms of the role of visual culture in the mass mobilizations against both the French and US occupations.

Approaching five years into the occupation of Iraq and with numerous groups engaged in resistance, what form does visual culture play in demarcating opposing political positions? How have artists in colonized or oppressed nations viewed themselves and their work in terms of the largely western models that shape what is commonly defined as ‘art’ (the gallery, theater etc)? What has been the role of visual culture in support of imperialism or colonial expansion, as well as officially ‘state sanctioned’ cultural production?

The role of visual culture in conflict situations also prompts an examination of the implications of artistic ‘neutrality’. Despite current global instability many artists and cultural producers, especially in the western artistic tradition, consider their work to be apolitical or neutral. Can artistic neutrality be said to exist in conflict situations, or is culture ultimately, in the words of Edward Said, “…a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another?” (Culture and Imperialism).

Continue reading "Call for Papers: The Role of Visual Culture in War" »

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The Center for Jewish History and The Working Group on Jews, Media & Religion @ The Center for Religion & Media, New York University present

Objects of Affection: The Wedding in Jewish Life: A Colloquium

Sunday, April 13, 2008
10:00am-9:00pm
The Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
New York, NY 10011

This event is free and open to the public; reservations required.
Please call SMARTTIX at 212-868-4444 or visit their website.

Weddings are the most elaborately celebrated of Jewish life-cycle events. This is reflected in a wide array of customs (rituals, songs, dances), objects (canopies, rings, clothing) professions (entertainers, caterers, photographers), and works of cultural creativity (representations of weddings in plays, films, visual art). Some of these phenomena are centuries old and widely familiar; others are rare, highly localized, or very recent innovations.

Consequently, weddings provide abundant opportunities for considering the intersection of media and religiosity in Jewish life. We have invited today’s gathering of scholars, artists, and performers to select key examples of mediating the Jewish wedding—from its graphic representation in a medieval manuscript to avant-garde performance—and to discuss what their place in a rite that is central to Jewish communality and continuity reveal about Jewish life itself. How do all these media practices enhance this ritual—or serve as opportunities for critique? What other aspects of Jewish life—gender, family, religious authority, economic concerns, aesthetic desires—do these wedding practices engage? How do the various media involved help articulate notions of spirituality, sexuality, memory, and religious tradition or provide a means for transformation?

-Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler

Click on the link for schedule and further details

Continue reading "Objects of Affection: The Wedding in Jewish Life: A Colloquium" »

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Emily Clark, Ph.D. candidate, College of Creative Arts, Massey Univ.

As the contemporary rallying cry to be screened as a means of ‘prevention’ against life threatening diseases and ailments gets ever louder, my research addresses the intricate processes of imaging the body in today’s climate. Artists have risen to the challenge of portraying the somatic using these complex technologies and offered up alternative visions to those mostly demanded and processed through scientific methodologies. More often than not, an artist is compelled to work with the medical profession to achieve the required portrayals. But as much of the medical science community are dubious about the contribution that artists make in the field, it seems to be time to investigate exactly what participation they do have, however subtly. Hence, the core problematic that this project addresses is how much creativity is incorporated into the so-called ‘objective’ view of an imaging technology, which is placed at the very epicentre of our social understanding of the healthy body?

Background
To say that the image as produced by X-Rray, CT, MRI or any other contemporary medical imaging technology, is an image of objectivity, can no longer be claimed – if indeed it ever could. These images, mostly seen in the auspices of a medical environment, and delivered by the authoritative character in the starched white coat, are highly complicated and politically charged. This projection of the state of our bodies does not just stop at the machine.

In the form of documentation and/or representation, the body portrayed and projected, is revealed not so much as the body in itself but as the framed body, both literally and culturally. In most areas of what we call the ‘civilized’ world, from ancient India to China, through the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, the body and medicine have involved complex drawings that reveal what the medical profession of the day and culture were looking for – the elements, the chi, the muscles and sinews, the flow of blood and so forth.

In the realm of contemporary western art, especially since the arrival of photography, the Cartesian dialectic dividing the body and the mind, appears to have become increasingly pronounced. Notable thinkers in the field of cultural and visual studies, for example Betty Holtzmann Kevles (1997) have written on how imaging of the body through various technologies has, through the ages endangered and compromised social relationships by privileging the health of some and not others. There has also been considerable work done, especially by Lisa Cartwright (1995), on how the enthusiasm to use these more elaborate technologies coincides with increased dissemination of these images in the creative and popular culture worlds of visual art and cinema, as well as perhaps more controversially, in advertising and marketing.

The shift from ‘reading’ the state of the body to screening the ‘image’ of our bodies is subtle, but suggests that the visceral entity might once again be rendered unsavoury and distasteful as Foucault (1973) points out in his seminal publication, The Birth of the Clinic:

"Instrumental mediation outside the body authorizes a withdrawal that measures the moral distance involved; the prohibition of physical contact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen. What one cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see".

We can see, from early and diversely originating illustrations (Fig. 1) that as well as being sources of information for the practice of medicine and anatomy, they were also laden with metaphors and cultural meanings that were particular to the peoples for which it was serving. In other words, the images themselves spoke volumes about the cultural practice of looking at the body being ‘enworlded’. They therefore appear as representations of the model or ideal body imbued with cultural meanings, with the authority of the image being given by the necessary surrounding written texts.

Daniel Ricco: Mechanical anatomical plate
from Ristretto anomico. Venice 1790

The sophistication of contemporary technologies, on the one hand deals directly with the body as a singular entity allowing the peculiarity of the individual be viewed, whilst at the same time abstracting the body to fit within the parameters of the viewing machine.

Continue reading "The Body Beautiful" »

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Daniel Miller, Anthropology, UCL

I have just returned from spending December and January in the town of Kannur, in the north of the Indian state of Kerala. My main work there was concerned with a project being conducted by Dr Lucy Norris on the topic of waste and the decline of the handloom industry as part of the Waste of the World project. But while there I also carried out some work for the Global Denim Project. On return I decided to publish a short photo essay which can now be found at the Global Denim Project at www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project/ww While it is clear that there are few prospects at present for publishing a set of colour photographs, let alone video and sound within the normal academic genres of articles and books, it seems worthwhile to complement such publications with material posted on the internet. I am sure many people are coming to the same conclusion. Along with the sociologist Don Slater I attempted this originally with the book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach where all the illustrations were placed on an associated web site. I thought this would become a common convention, but clearly I was wrong. I have seen remarkably little use of the internet for posting the visual component of academic texts. While this blog is very helpful for giving some sense of new research, it doesn’t lend itself to extensive publication of photographs and other visual materials, for which a separate website seemed more appropriate. This is what I have done using the auspices of the global denim project.

A website allows one to give some background, for example, a sense of the range of housing, an image of the ruling Communist party and the rituals for which the area is best known; as well as more specific material about denim and other clothing. I intend to also write a paper on jeans in Kannur, but I see no reason why the visual material shouldn’t remain available, since it is unlikely that any academic publication will allow for such materials to be printed.

The particular interest of Kannur, in relation to global denim, is the relatively low take up of blue jeans in South Asia. In most regions I visit jeans have reached close to 50% of everyday adult dress. But in Kannur the figure is only 5% comprising 10% male and 0% female dress. The photo essay starts to give some indication of why this remains the case, and the academic paper will explore this in much more detail. Factors include the way men, once they gain employment or fatherhood, seek to differentiate themselves, and their relative economic security, from younger males. Also the current relationship between the Muslim population, who are closely associated with fashion compared to the Hindu population, which to some extent therefore avoid certain kinds of fashion. Also the way Kannur itself is constituted as a reserve of conservatism held against the changes taking place in metropolitan India, especially with regard to females. So in at least three different but related instances jeans have become involved in a kind of sartorial politics of repudiation.

There are many other interesting features of the local context. Kerala remains governed by what was the world’s first ever elected communist government. Kannur itself was previously government by Muslim rules, often a female Bibi. The area is undergoing rapid changes mainly as a result of money coming in from the Gulf. There are excellent academic publications on the region by Caroline and Filippo Osella, who give an unusual amount of attention to fashion. Incidentally we are happy to welcome new projects to the Global Denim Project. I am also starting up a news list to keep members in touch with developments. If you are interested in working on this topic with links to the overall project, please contact me at d.miller@ucl.ac.uk.

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