Larissa Hjorth, Games and Digital Art at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

1. Snapshots: Portrait of the mobile explores the ways in which we imbue mobile technology as an extension of ourselves; both in terms of self-expression and self-identification but also as an object inflected by the particularities of the socio-cultural. In this project we are greeted by portraits of mobile phone users. But rather than face portraits, we are met by their mobile phones. On the one hand this work explores the rhetoric around the personification of technologies, most notably the mobile phone. On the other hand, the work investigates how much one’s mobile phone can tell a story about their user/ owner. Can the mobile phone be symbolic of one’s lifestyle? How many clues does it leave about the user’s identity and social capital? In this work I spoke to 150 people (from Seoul and Melbourne) and took pictures of their phones and asked them about how they personalized their phone.

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Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

A Congress of different cultures: the General Assembly of the United Nations (in lieu of a conference photograph from the AAA)

Last week I attended the annual meetings of the AAA held at San Jose. I went along with a group of students, staff and ex-students from University College London to present a panel concerned with studies inside and outside the home. As usual we are fairly up-front in presenting ourselves under the auspices of 'material culture studies'. But while this term seems to have established itself as fully as one could wish outside of the US, in the anthropology of places as diverse as Australia through to Brazil, US anthropology continues to exhibit some reticence with respect both to the terminology and its associated conceptualisations. An example was a panel for which I was discussant, held on the topic of Caribbean Movements: linking people, objects and places. Every paper within this panel was of interest. Topics ranged from Flemming Daugaard-Hansen on the difference in fate between the house and its internal possessions for migrants returned to Belize from the US, to the contrast between Dominican and Haitiain paintings sold in Santo Domingo by Erin Taylor, though to the importance of shopping and sending back goods for Jamaican’s on temporary labour schemes in the US by Deborah Thomas. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that the papers would be less constrained if they were given license to explore the ways relationships are constituted by these contrasts in materiality, rather than remains common in the US the need to ground such papers back into arguments over identity politics and representation.

I felt the same about the next panel I visited on the topic of Virtual Worlds. Again Tom Boellstorff started promisingly with the motif of the virtual as the not fully realised, rather than merely the simulation of the off-line. There were some excellent papers such as Mizuko Ito and Heather Horst on how a site such as Neopets can become almost a precursor to share trading in that which is created as value within the site. Still, in some of these papers, including Boellstorff, I felt there is a retreat back to the fascination with simulation of the off-line, in his case arguments over real-estate, rather than keeping hold of the way other possibilities are constituted precisely by the different materiality of virtual worlds. I felt this is in part a constraint that comes with a the reluctance to see off-line worlds as equally consisted by specific materialities, in which case virtual worlds would start to emerge as perhaps less special, but perhaps more different. I would never wish to advocate any special status for material culture, or that it either is or should be a discipline or sub-discipline. It is more that the AAA affirmed a sense of what motivated many of us, quite some time ago, to take a particular interest in this area. More a feeling of something lost by the suppression of potential insight.

But I am curious to know if these are views shared by anthropologists in the US. Is there still the same pressure to justify ethnographic papers in terms of identity politics and is there still a reticence to advance one’s work under the explicit title of material culture within mainstream cultural anthropology?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Conferences and other events | From the editors | Topics for Discussion

Mikkel Bille, University College London

Light: From old English leoht, meaning luminous, from Indo-European leuk-, to shine, to see.

Light has been studied as metaphor for truth in Philosophy, and within Science in terms of lumen (as external and objective matter) and lux (as subjective and interior; as sight and mental sensation). Additionally, light, as a ‘building material’ has been an important element in the development of architectural as well as artistic forms. More recently some aspects of light, such as colour and luminosity, have gained significant influence in material culture studies. Many studies indicate that people conceive, use and experience colours and the luminous qualities of things in culturally specific ways. Colours and surfaces of objects may be emitting or omitting brilliance, tint, or saturation and such variations may signify sacred, spiritual or other particular social dimensions.

Opposition Effect: Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan's photograph of his own shadow cast on the coal black lunar surface December 1972. His shadow, or more accurately his camera's, appears to be surrounded by a bright glow.
Photo from the book Full Moon by Michael Light. ©Michael Light, taken from Sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/oppos1.htm.

There are, however, also other variations such as shadows, or types (electrical, fire, sun, etc.) and modes (bright, dim, subdued etc.) of lighting, which have not yet been significantly studied. These variations may change or be significant parts of the lightscapes in which the coloured or potentially luminous things are equally involved, and thereby affecting their very materiality. Tanizaki (1933) describes many such examples in relation to Japanese aesthetics, and claims that ‘We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of the shadows, the light and darkness, that one thing against another creates’.

A dualism between lux and lumen, from a material culture point of view fails to encompass the way light – or absence of certain kinds of light – is used actively in social life. Light is often shed for – and not just on - the material environment. Lightscapes can be used (not necessarily deliberately) to orchestrate inclusion or exclusion of aspects of the material and social world, or the permeability of these worlds. Thus, despite the long history of studies on light and luminosity, what is still missing, with very few exceptions, are studies on how lightscapes and shadows are used socially to manipulate, orchestrate, and affect the experiences and materiality of places, people and things relating for example to notions of identity, cultural heritage, security, honour, personhood, hospitality, etc. In short: an anthropology of luminosity.

FURTHER READINGS

• Blumenberg, H. (1993) Light as a metaphor for truth: At the preliminary stage of philosophical concept formation. In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D. M. Levin. London: University of California Press. Originally published in German (1957) Translated by Joel Anderson.
• Bolt, B. (2000) ‘Shedding light for the matter’ Hypatia vol. 15 (2)
• Classen, C. (1993) Worlds of Sense. Exploring the senses in history and across cultures. Routledge, London
• Ingold, T. (2000) Vision, hearing and human movement. In The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Ed. T. Ingold. Routledge, London
• Jones, A. & MacGregor, G. (eds.) 2002 Colouring the Past. The Significance of Colour in Archaeological Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford
• McQuire, S. (2005) ‘Immaterial Architectures. Urban Space and Electric Light’ Space and Culture vol 8 (2)
• Tanizaki, J. (1933) In Praise of Shadows (2001 edition) Translated by T.J. Harper & E.G. Seidensticker. Vintage Books
• Waldman, G. (2002) Introduction to light. The physics of light, vision and color. Dover publications inc. First edition 1983.
• Young, D. (2006) ‘The Colours of Things’ In Handbook of Material Culture. Eds Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S. Rowlands, M., & Spyer, P. Sage Publications, London

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Review: "Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity," by Donald Preziosi (2003); University of Minnesota Press

Sharon Macdonald teaches at the University of Manchester

Donald Preziosi’s "Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity" (2003, University of Minnesota Press) is the published version of his 2001 Slade Lectures (an annual series of Art History Lectures at Oxford University). Somebody I know who went to these lectures told me that he found them fascinating but almost impossible to understand. I can see why. But at least in the book form you can read sentences several times (and untangle all the multiple partial parentheses of words). It’s an effort worth making.

Preziosi makes an argument against a representational account of art that is similar to Gell’s in Art and Agency. But where this goes is rather different, for Preziosi is principally concerned with art as a practice of the modern self – and with what follows from this, especially for how we understand the discipline of art history and the institution of the museum, especially the relationship between subjects and objects (which, he argues, is as often about denial as any kind of realisation). The journey is a wonderfully heady one that takes us, among other places, through the John Soane Museum (which we learn is, like many museums, an ostensification of principles of Freemasonry), via a photograph that Preziosi happened upon of his father (or possibly his twin brother) on the walls of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, via the Crystal Palace, the streets of Cairo, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, circumcision, Lacan, ‘the irony of all exit signs’…. to, where? The final chapter rethinks the ubiquitous Index, Icon, Symbol distinction to add a fourth: ‘artifice’, based on a relation of ‘adequation’ which, Preziosi suggests, can offer an alternative to the ‘ultimately unsatisfying attempts to apply a verbocentrist or linguistically based semiotic model or theory to art’ (p.146). (Intriguingly, this is based on recollections of conversations about this with Roman Jakobson.)

But what, you may ask, is the ‘brain of the earth’s body’? The answer is ‘Europe’, though as this is a blog and I’ve run out of space, you’ll have to read the book to decipher Preziosi’s ruminations on why he can get away with what might otherwise seem an outrageously non-pc metaphor.

Posted by at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

I read about this on the BBC this week and felt so uncomfortable I thought it was worth a post here:

The Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth has drawn criticism from the Ugandan government from intervening in the state project to get everyone to have identity cards. He has offered pigs and goats to the inhabitants of one particular village in exchange for them taking his name in this process.

Storm over pig-for-name artist

At first I thought this was a provocative and interesting intervention into the issue of forcing citizens to conform to state regulated identity practices and materialities. Carrying federally recognized id cards is taken for granted in the USA but remains a contentious issues in the UK.

Then I went to the artist's website (http://www.hornsleth.com/). The open invitation of an exhibition of photographs of the Ugandan villagers is below:

I'm not sure if this really is a critique of materializing identity for state purposes or some bizarre megalomaniacal attempt to self-replicate throughout the African continent.

There are two really interesting articles in American Ethnologist of May 2006, both of which deal with the material tensions of state identity documents. Gaston Gordillo, in his paper The Crucible of Citizenship, starts from the observation of how many people he worked with in Argentina voluntarily showed him their identity documents over and over again. Holding and showing documents is an important part of claiming state legitimacy for indigenous peoples. Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin, in their paper, Backed by Papers, have a more ambivalent relationship to the materialisation of identity in paper cards and its effects. Taken together both articles give depth to the shock-factor of Hornsleth's art project. Their abstracts and link to the journal may be found below:

The crucible of citizenship: ID paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
Gastón Gordillo
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state’s military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but simultaneously expected them to show written proofs of their reliability. In the following decades, this contradictory experience made many indigenous people view ID documents and other written records as objects with a force of their own, with the capacity to deflect state violence and shape major aspects of a group’s collective history. Drawing on the concept of “state fetishism,” I analyze the peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by focusing on the historical and current experiences of the western Toba and the Wichí. In particular, I explore how Toba and Wichí views of ID papers include ideological forms of reification of social practice but also critical interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation. [citizenship, fetishism, the state, identity papers, indigenous people, Toba, Wichí, Gran Chaco, Argentina]

Backed by papers: Undoing persons, histories, and return
Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin
Deportations of long-term U.S. residents to El Salvador and roots trips that Swedish transnational adoptees make to their countries of birth attempt to reconnect individuals to their origins. As they (re)connect, however, such journeys dismantle, reconfiguring the original departure—emigration or adoption—in ways that can destabilize current, future, and past selves and the national and familial belongings in which these selves are embedded. By examining the paths and disjunctures that journeys “back” entail, we consider the significance of “return” for the production of legal knowledge. [adoption, deportation, law, return, El Salvador, Sweden, United States]

http://www.music.columbia.edu/%7Ececenter/AES/ae332.html

Haidy Geismar, NYU (with thanks to Josh Bell for discussion about the AE articles)

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the news

Museums on the web are, in general, rather disappointing. At worst a selection of digital images with directions for how to get to the institution, at their best, they use the potentials of the internet to create new online visitor constituent (see the Brooklyn Museum's Myspace page for instance, http://www.myspace.com/brooklynmuseum.

Possibly one of the best 'virtual' museums, The Lost Museum is a digital recreation of P.T Barnum's American Museum in New York, which burned to the ground in 1865. Visitors are encouraged by the man himself to solve the mystery of the fire. You can explore the museum in three-dimensions with innovative use of image, film and sound, search archival material, maintain personal files on the case, and engage with specific objects. There is also a classroom section for linking into classes on American history, Museum Studies and material culture. The project was created by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in collaboration with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/intro.html

Any other recommendations for really good 'virtual' museums? Or comments about museums on/in the internet?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Good Links

Haidy Geismar, NYU

Map showing the location of the last 100 viewers of Materialworldblog, source www.statcounter.com

Alongside this site, there are several recent additions to the Museum/Anthropology blogosphere which are definitely worth checking out (any other good links, please add to the comments below!).

http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com

The bi-annual journal, Museum Anthropology, now has it's own blog, which will be used increasingly to supplement materials published in the journal. The blog offers a forum in which articles published in the journal can be discussed formally as a form of post-publication peer-review. It will also dynamically post notifications of current exhibitions, symposium, book releases and other relevant material. Scholars interested in the fields of museum studies and material culture studies are urged to submit announcements and other materials of interest to the community. These can be forwarded to the journal editorial office at: museanth@indiana.edu.

http://goldwaterlibrary.org

This is the blog of the Robert Goldwater Library in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's an excellent resource, linking exhibition reviews, media coverage of key issues, to current scholarship with sound bites and good images and a lively commentary on key issues such as intellectual and cultural property, issues of representation and so on.

Some other blogs of note that may be of specific interest to readers here

From the professionals:

http://www.savageminds.org

A blog dedicated to serious discussion of anthropological topics and developments within the discipline.

http://www.philbu.net/media-anthropology/
Not strictly a blog, but an online scholarly community committed to media anthropology, as is the online journal flow:

http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/about.php

A critical forum on television and media culture published biweekly by the department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

http://www.boas.wordpress.com
This is an engaging blog from a Columbia University student which discusses diverse topics framed around the process of studying anthropology at undergraduate level.

And
http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/
Eyebeam: a site dedicated to the more techical side of art and materiality within the digital domain.

And there are increasingly a good number of museum-oriented blogs:

Many of these are linked through
http://www.museumblogging.com/

And
http://museum-madness.blogspot.com/

And the Attic is a good resource from the Department of Museum Studies at Leicester University
http://attic-museumstudies.blogspot.com/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to From the editors | Good Links

García Canclini, Néstor (2001) Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. University of Minnesota Press

In Consumers and Citizens, García Canclini suggests the necessity to consider how the changes in modes of consumption have altered the possibilities of citizenship in the Latin American context. Through several essays the author proposes a romanticized idea of citizenship and social movements in Latin America that struggle to survive by being redefined; people in mega-cities (particularly Mexico City) answer the questions on belonging, rights and interests traditionally located in the public sphere in the realm of private consumption.

This book belongs to the 1990s trend within anthropology, sociology and cultural studies on globalization, Americanization, multicultural identities and mass consumption, with a particular focus on the cultural industries. Some essays are quite pessimistic; the author exacerbates the ideas of disconnection, atomization and insignificance. Others propose the several policy measures that are needed in order to achieve new versions of citizenship.

As a whole, it is hard to find either answers or a creative reflection on the relationship between consumption and citizenship. This book is better at showing the methodological implications of doing research in contemporary Latin American urban sites and the need of interdisciplinary work. The author’s ability to gather and integrate data from the most varied sources –including literature, ethnography and continental surveys- is maybe its selling point.

This book is of interest for those anthropologists working on material culture of Latin America, as it works as a frame for contextualized research. It is well strong on studies and literature of that time and written from the insider perspective of one of the well reputed scholars in the region.

Marjorie Murray
PhD candidate Department of Anthropology, University College London

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An Exploration of Its Presence in a European Periphery

Magda Craciun, PhD Student in Material Culture, University College London  e.craciun@ucl.ac.uk

A widespread phenomenon, re-production is morally and legally contested and combated, culturally derided, and socially dismissed as belonging to the lower social strata. I am interested in approaching it in its everyday complexity, by focusing on the lives of objects, and meanings and consequences of their presence; on practices, and preoccupations of people living in the vicinity of these objects; on institutions these objects bring together; and on the trans-national routes along which these clothing items move.

In order to grasp as much as possible of this complexity, I have designed a multi-sided ethnography, choosing as field sites Istanbul (the main regional producer of fakes); “Europa” market on the outskirts of Bucharest (considered the source of 80% of the counterfeited goods on the Romanian market); and Turnu Magurele (a provincial town in south Romania, chosen for its typical clothing-scape, in which “Europa” clothing predominates).

These interests have led to me following up many promising trails. In Turnu Magurele, I have started by scrutinizing the clothing-scape and its sources, establishing the basic conditions of my ethnography; investigating different aspects of people’s relationship to clothing, i.e. the formation of a systematic discourse about clothing and social re-differentiation, budgeting, dreaming, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, wardrobe as financial capital, and respectability. Within the next site, a huge still expanding commercial area, fakes are a tiny part of the merchandise. Since its opening in the mid 1990s, “Europa” market has become part and parcel of everyday life in Romania, substantially contributing to the local material world.  I also paid attention to the ethnic interactions that shape the market experience. This almost illegal site being a battleground on which economic interests of Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Roma and Romanian groups collide. I took into account the way visitors and non-visitors represent it, as “Europa”/Europe to be left behind. I am now exploring the third field site, Istanbul, where the main goal is the ethnography of production, of the workshops where the making of original brands, fakes and local brands is closely intertwined. In brief, I have entered the underbelly that supports the visible and the acknowledged. Fake goods are revealing themselves as a means to transport people from one experience to another.

Right now I am still in the middle of my fieldwork, but i would be very interested indeed to hear from anyone else who is working on related topics or would want to be involved in expanding this field of the anthropology of fake brands.

Clothing Shops, Turnu Magurele	Merter Textile District, Instanbul
Fire in Europa, Bucharest
	Grand Bazaar, Instanbul

Posted by at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Notes from the Field

The Death of Taste, ICA, London November 23-24 2006, examines the work of making, styling and fashioning taste within the context of increasingly speeded-up fashion trends and the constant plundering of the recent past. It combines academics from the fields of material culture, sociology and fashion history with leading figures of the fashion industry.'

The event is organised by the Alistair O' Neill and Dr. Joanne Entwistle, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK and Prof. Alison Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria.

For more information see http://www.ica.org.uk

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Politics of Viewing

Stephen Quirke; Reader, Curator of the Petrie Museum, University College London

What gives a viewer the right to look at a picture? Or an object? Or these two drinking cups, of fired Nile mud, made three and a half millennia ago in the lower Nile Valley, and buried at a site an archaeologist chose to dig in 1914 and chose to call Harageh, the pair now sits on a low glass shelf in a university museum in London. What gives us the right to learn, might be the recognition of political realities, that London had troops occupying Egypt in 1914, that London museum-goers and university students have higher living standards, better health service, higher literacy rate, that politics, society and the economy, after all, exist. And a live connection with the home-town of the man who dug out the pots for the archaeologist, to let people living in that part of Egypt see London as it is.

These two cups were the only surviving finds along with some glazed beads and the remains of a body identified as a male child: The record card from the excavation (in the Petrie Museum Archive)

Ceramic typologists place the cup form in the local production sequence at c.1600-1500 BC, when the kings based at Thebes, in the South, fought to reunite Egypt. It is not possible to identify the precise date, so to know whether the cups were made before or after the reunification – and from that to imagine the lives of the makers and users, and the people who buried this child.

A Museum Object?

A dilemma in the control records of the institution: is a pair two objects or one? A pair is as easily breached as any set, by taking one physically separable item to a different place, by the choice of not keeping a link that is reinforced here by the words on them, that continue from one to the next cup. The same breach or keep is continually created-undone either by the memory of or by the sight of the rest of the world around the display-case, or around the computer-screen. The ‘it’ only becomes an object – museum object, object of study – by heavy forgetting.

Of fired Nile-flood silt, at one level these two objects embody Water-drinking, a pair of regular drinking cups – the shape is found abundantly enough on archaeological sites of this region and period. These two have, though, been chosen for a moment out of the ordinary, a choice that has left its traces in faded writing. Special words, special use, that makes these cups more precious than other cups, not for reflecting literate (elite) life, but for reminding us of the sacredness of the everyday: not to assume what any other cup might have been at a moment of its use; and instead to remember how we depend on the incessantly repeated act of drinking water. A literate user had a life, a producer had a life, an illiterate user had a life, but history and archaeology and their philologies use some users more comfortably than others. The museum display naturalises the social hierarchy that we bring to the object, but this pair disrupts the hierarchy of the bog-standard drinking-cup by making it more obvious that any Thing can be sacred in its ordinariness, because this pair is covered in ritual recorded in writing, and this ritual makes explicit precisely the sacredness of all Material and every Thing.

The Writing

Deities named in this ritual include the creator, the sun-god Ra; the god of order and kingship, Horus; the god of metal arts, Ptah; and the goddess of sensual life, Hathor.

(on cup UC 16129)

Pronouncement for offering things to the Transfigured Spirits,
opening the mouth at the beginning of reading.
'Heaven shall be opened to you;
earth shall be opened to you
the ways in the Land bearing the God shall be opened to you,
so that you may go out and in with Ra,
when you have ranged like the Lords of Eternity.

Receive senu-loaves as the gift of Ptah,
and pure bread off the altars of Horus.
Your flight-soul lives, your limbs flourish;
your sight is clear in the ways (of darkness).
The Nile-flood god gives you water;
The Grain-god gives you bread;
Hathor gives you beer;
The Cow-goddess gives you milk.
You wash your feet upon blocks of silver on slabs of turquoise;
you don the 'pure'-garment,
(continued on cup UC 16128)
[and are wi]th Ptah,
You are given bread from your barley,
you drink water at the altar of Ra.
Osiris gives you [new forms].
You glimpse the shining of the water,
when you have moved out from your house of darkness;
The Nile-flood strikes seven cubits deep over your fields in your house of thirst.
You drink a jug of milk, as the gift of the cow-goddess Sekhat-Hor.
You don the 'pure'-garment, and untie any other,
the hands of the Weaving-goddess have clothed you.
You look at the Sun-disk, and worship Ra.
You pacify the one who rises in the Primeval Waters.
You are given bread in Hutkaptah (Memphis), pure in your offerings.

Three references

The Couch: Thinking in Repose, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Austria, Exhibition Review 5 May - 5 November 2006

Martina Grunewald, PhD candidate in Design History and Material Culture, University of Applied Arts, Vienna

On Sunday, 5 November 2006, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna closed the doors to “The Couch: Thinking in Repose,” a special exhibition commemorating Freud’s 150th anniversary this year. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, curator Lydia Marinelli focused on literature, art, science, and design from the mid-nineteenth century until today in an illuminating exploration of the most intimate and complex relationship between neurology and—well—a divan conspicuous by its own absence. The exhibition encompassed paintings, sculpture, photographs, books, furniture, china, and tableware as well as interviews and music. The original psychoanalytic couch, however, was missing. Complete with Oriental rug and cushions, it is to be found at the London Freud Museum, in the house where Freud and his family found refuge after their 1938 emigration.

Maybe it was precisely the original’s absentia that unleashed a flow of free associations in Vienna. Spencer Finch’s “Ceiling (above Sigmund Freud’s couch),” four elliptical pastel colour fields in different shades of beige on paper, recalled the patient’s limited range of sight during therapeutic sessions. To help clients relax and speak without inhibition, Freud always sat at the couch’s top end, vanishing from their perception as they reclined. In addition, most of Freud’s vast archaeological collection of antiquities, his books and papers, retreated from the patient’s view. In setting up the exhibition, Marinelli and her team found themselves in a similarly empty space of references. They produced a broad, if not comprehensive, discussion of the sofa as an eclectic piece of furniture that has been appropriated by its diverse usages over the years as much as it has participated in their gestation.

Apart from Finch, photographs of Andy Warhol’s sofa at the Silver Factory and a Rachel Whiteread sculpture were on display in a portion of the Freud family’s private quarters. They completed a historical survey of the sofa’s social connotations from bourgeois sexual trap to avant-garde muse. A set of 1840s Paul Gavarni lithographs, turn-of-the-century woodcuts by the Swiss painter Félix Valloton, and nightmarish Surrealist figures by Max Ernst together with literary excerpts from Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert and Gottfried Keller documented the sofa’s disputed identity in history as furniture of questionable repute.

Nineteenth-century artists shared a concern for the sofa with bourgeois homemakers and medical doctors treating modern illnesses from alcoholism to tuberculosis. In the rooms of apartment 7, Berggasse 19, one floor up from Freud’s domicile, the exhibit continued to examine the relations between private intimacy and public intrusion, creative freedom and social discipline. Here, Jewish attourney Adolf Mathias had lived with his wife and cookbook author Stefanie until their deportation to concentration camps during the war (Adolf died in Theresienstadt in 1943, Stefanie’s fate is unclear). In the 1950s, the apartment was remodelled with fashionable wallpaper and flooring. Today in the possession of the City of Vienna, it has been made available to the Sigmund Freud Foundation. A tiled stove, a bathtub, a set of built-in mirrors in the wood-panelled salon, the fifties wallpaper and colorful bits of flooring remain as the ruins of bygone domesticity. For the exhibition, the movable furnishings and light fixtures were removed. In their stead, antique daybeds that survived decades of household usage before launching a museum career, a selection of 1920s conduct books with recommendations on couch propriety, and small-scale patent sofa models from the collection of Siegfried Giedion carried on the story of the sofa at home as a battlefield of technology, taste, decorum, and emotion.

The apartment’s bathroom, formerly the place of bodily cleansing, introduced psychiatric practices of the past. A short silent film, part fiction part documentary, showed a mental institution with patients apparently consumed by the drink: utterly confused, they were submitted to physical torture and forced to lie in cage beds, similar to an historic example on view. Later treatments administered by neurologists in private sanatoria like the Westend built by Josef Hoffmann in Purkersdorf around 1904 included electrotherapy, hypnosis, massage, electric light baths, art and music cures, as well as fattening diets and a lighter version of enforced reclining: resting cures, for example, to fight tuberculosis. A 1916 deckchair from the Swiss Davos Sanatorium brought to live the numerous scenes in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain of Hans Castorp lying down for regular “Liegekur” sessions on his sunny balcony set against the backdrop of an alpine panorama.

Sigmund Freud took up the neurological tradition of employing the sofa as a medical instrument. But instead of curtailing his patients’ physical mobility he was interested in the sofa’s potential as a trigger of artistic, social, and psychological associations, an emotional place where all boundaries could break down and suppressed memories would emanate freely. Fashioned with an Oriental carpet and surrounded by the silent witnesses of antiquity en miniature, Freud’s divan was intended as a safe retreat from the daily turbulences of modern urban life. In interviews, contemporary psychoanalysts testified to the couch’s continued usefulness in today’s therapy settings. Photographs by Shellburne Thurber depicted individual descendants of the psychoanalytic couch currently at work in New England and Brazil offices. Comparatively empty by comparison to Freud’s study and consulting rooms, the spaces captured by Thurber’s camera seem to imply that the couch’s capacity in embracing body and soul without the aid of any other material stimuli has expanded through generations of practise. Even though it escapes one’s view when in use, the sofa still inspires our imagination.

An exhibition catalog entitled Die Couch: Vom Denken im Liegen published by Prestel accompanies the exhibition. To date, it is available in German only.

Mukulika Banerjee, Anthropology, UCL

This week, reportage of the mid term US elections seems to devote almost equal coverage to the Democrat re-capture of the Congress and the close race to finish in the Senate as it did to malfunctioning electronic voting machines. Indiana and Ohio were singled out for the most unreliable machines and Florida was reported to have reverted to paper ballots. Thus, who people voted for seems to be hinge crucially on how, literally, they cast their vote. The materiality of the voting process, namely ballot boxes, counting procedures, polling stations do not usually feature in election analysis, but when they do, we can assume that something is either wrong or novel. In the case of the US elections, it was both.

source: www.vote.caltech.edu

In the United States, Electronic Voting Machines were introduced recently and mainly in response to the 2002 federal law called the ‘Help America Vote Act’ which called on states to update their equipment in time for the 2006 elections. This was in response to the debacle with malfunctioning electoral technologies of the earlier Presidential elections of 2000. The stories of ‘hanging chads’ caused by the old fashioned lever and punch machines used then had not only discredited the election of George W. as President, but had damaged the credibility of American democracy all over the world. As a result this time several states in the US used electronic voting machines for the first time and voters were able (in theory) to cast their vote through touch screens or by marking ballot papers which were read by an optical scanner and counted automatically. But rather than inspiring confidence in the voting process their introduction was met with trepidation and anxiety. A number of candidates, officials and campaign groups expressed their reservations about the lack of a paper trail, the dangers of hacking, the inevitability of technical glitches and the lack of proper cards to use these machines. A recent study did not help the general concern by showing that it was easier to rig an electronic voting machine than it was a slot machine in Las Vegas. Theories even abound about the anti-US political agendas of the company that supplies these machines. As a result recent polls indicated that only a quarter of the US population fell fully confident that their vote will be correctly recorded and were urged by their leaders to resort to the old fashioned (paper) postal ballot.

Working as I do on democracy in India, this is bemusing to say the least. Electronic voting machines have been used in India without any hitches at all for the past five years. In 2004 the entire national election was conducted using them. This covered an electorate of 671,487,930 voters, a large proportion of whom are illiterate. The Election Commission of India (an independent and non-partisan body) employed 4 million people just to conduct this mammoth operation. No one complained about the technology.

Source: M. Banerjee

This makes one pause for thought. Is there something about the techne of democracy itself that we bears thinking through. An electronic voting machine in India is a simple device and is not much more than a well designed circuit board. It displays a list of candidates, the symbol of the party they represent (for those who cannot read) and the vote is cast by pressing the button in front of the chosen party or candidate. Counting is efficient as the results of each machine are aggregated according to constituencies and results are available within a few hours of the polls being closed.

Was the problem in the current elections in the US an example of how not to use technology? Could the US not have deployed simpler, easier to use machines? Is the decision to digitally link the machines up mainly to ensure quicker delivery of results a thoroughly misplaced priority given it panders more to the media than its voters? Is this not what makes it susceptible to hackers? Could not something less intimidating than touch screens, which the large elderly volunteer polling officials have confessed to be nervous about, been used? Is it not one of the main duties of a democratic state, in this case the richest and most technologically advanced of all, not lie first and foremost in conducting free and fair elections? Is the US above learning how to conduct elections from other democracies who do so successfully without mishaps? Could the world’s most powerful democracy not learn from the world’s largest democracy?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Victor Buchli, Reader in Material Culture, University College London

The Traumwerk website is a brilliant project started by Mike Shanks and his students at Stanford University that experiments with the boundaries of archaeological work and interpretation and wider questions in material culture. In particular there a number of projects hosted on the site that are of interest to students of material culture in general: These are the archaeology of the contemporary past project, the china garbology initiative with Bill Rathje, and the three rooms project by Mike Shanks. In addition there are numerous experimental projects based on soundscapes and virtual environments which involve archaeoloigsts, artists and other scholars.

The cultures of contact and the Mercedes Benz Daimler initiative are also well worth exploring especially the Mercedes project which brings together, material culture studies, anthropology, archaeology and design together. Particularly interesting is the report on the recent symposium with Rorty, Harraway and others on the significance of Whitehead for the philosophy of science with particular relevance to material culture studies. A number of the areas of the site are password protected but interested parties can certainly arrange for access and are invited to participate.

Link: Traumwerk.stanford.edu

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Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

My impression is that students coming into anthropology today, at least in Britain, are not necessarily expecting to read very much of the writings of Clifford Geertz, compared to my time as a student. But his death on Monday should remind us of just how much a loss that is. I have spent my academic life enamoured of fieldwork and ethnography and I suspect the single biggest influence on this was the sheer pleasure of reading Geertz. As far as I know he never would have described himself as particularly associated with material culture per se, (please comment if you know otherwise) but he was the quintessential cultural anthropologist, and his work shows how much that American tradition of cultural anthropology, (to some degree as opposed to European social anthropology) provided in its heyday an almost seamless acceptance of the materiality of peoples lives and the need to give due credit to the form of cultural order and life.

So many of his works could serve as examples of this. Agricultural Involution (1963) provided a wonderful example of how the propensities of rice itself and the agricultural systems associated with it could be the critical determinant of populations and ways of life, and this was long before the idea of an agency of things became popular with the work of Gell and Latour. Both Peddlers and Princes (1963) and his work on the Moroccan market were invaluable studies of trade and exchange. His classic paper Art as a Cultural System in combination with other essays in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) was one of a series of essays that complement Bourdieu as a basic introduction to the significance of cultural order as embedded and expressed through the order of the material world. Perhaps above all though his book Negara (1980) provides one of the most radical attempts to construct an anthropology based around the potential of aesthetic systems to become the foundational cosmologies of states and peoples. These were my influences and I would be interested to hear from others who may have taken inspiration from different aspects of his work, for example the task of interpretation. I would think for such a consummate scholar the most proper way to pay homage at this point is to read some of his classic works that one might have missed over the years and remind ourselves of the possibility of an anthropological style that was as elegant as it was profound.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the editors