Ed Potton has written a great article on the materiality of production and political economy of the Oscar statuettes in the London TImes...

The award for a polished bit of casting goes to...

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Ellie Reynolds, University College London

The following is an exploration of the materiality and meaning of HIV positive semen for a group of gay men who engage in two behaviours: bugchasing and giftgiving. Bugchasing is the desire for, and active pursuit of, HIV infection; giftgiving is the attempt to infect others with HIV. Central to these behaviours is the ‘conversion’ ritual where HIV positive giftgivers attempt to infect HIV negative bugchasers. The bugchasers, during the ritual, are considered to be both feminine (in their behaviour and in the ‘bottom’ (insertee) role they take during sexual intercourse) and female (where maleness is defined as the ability to act upon and transform another).

Bugchasers are said to be ‘impregnated’ by the masculine and male giftgivers when they are infected. HIV positive giftgivers, following receptive anal intercourse with another HIV positive giftgiver, are said to have been ‘repozzed’ or ‘recharged’. These dominant metaphors of pregnancy and electrical power reveal notions of HIV as a transforming and empowering substance. Research material and quotes used here are from my own research using a bugchasing and giftgiving website carried out as part of my undergraduate dissertation.

Previously, this behaviour has been seen to empower men on two levels; first, by giving them the (male) ability to act upon and transform others. In this case, the feminine, female HIV negative bugchaser seems to represent feminine, female HIV negative society (i.e. that which is outside the ‘bugbrotherhood’ of giftgivers) and the giftgiver is not only acting upon and transforming an individual but is appropriating the hegemonic masculine (heterosexual) ability to act upon and transform society (c.f. Ortner, 1974). Second, the HIV positive giftgiver who embraces the stereotype attached to him as polluted, evil, sinful and demonic (particularly in the American bible belt where the behaviours predominantly take place) inverts the power differential within the stereotype. So, instead of the stereotype being used to control gay men and their sexuality, the giftgiver becomes an object of fear as the nightmare becomes reality. This behaviour has been interpreted as an attempt to escape the feminised position of gay men in western society who are controlled and acted upon by religious fundamentalist groups, government policies and the media, to achieve masculine social agency and the embodiment of a terrifying stereotype.

Initially it was thought that this agency took place physically only at the individual level (transformation of the HIV negative bugchaser) whereas agency at the collective level (acting upon society) took place only symbolically (with the bugchaser representing ‘outside’ society). However, a revision of the materiality of the ‘toxic’ semen suggests that men see themselves as having agency in sexual networks across space and time. To explore this concept I want to return to the pregnancy metaphor which is used for several reasons. First, the giftgiver is seen to introduce something alien into the bugchaser’s body which then grows. Semen is referred to as ‘seed’, the newly inseminated bugchaser talks about his giftgivers ‘babies’ swimming around in him, and the HIV (in the giftgivers ‘seed’) grows inside the bugchaser and eventually takes over his body. Second, the giftgivers toxic semen is said to contain his DNA. When a man becomes infected with HIV it takes over all the cells in his body and becomes inextricably intertwined with his DNA. When he infects another man, his DNA is passed on with the virus, so when the HIV becomes established in the newly infected bugchasers body, the giftgivers DNA is present and will be present for as long as the second man (the bugchaser) remains alive. For this reason, the giftgiver is not only HIV positive, but he is HIV. The HIV virus, where it exists in every man he infects, and every man they subsequently infect, contains his DNA. Here we can begin to understand how being HIV positive gives a man indefinite agency. Even if he dies from AIDS very quickly, his DNA, and thus he himself, will live on indefinitely in the bodies of other men. Quotes from the website illustrate this:

Member R. T. ‘I’m mostly top and love to fuck and breed other pigs but I’m always looking for other poz/AIDS brothers who will recharge and strengthen my seed’

Member P. O. ‘The hot thing about toxic cock is every man who leaves his seed in you LIVES in you forever! I carry the ‘ghosts’ of so MANY hot men in me!’

Member P.F. ‘He [Alex] said he had full blown AIDS, and he was looking for pigs who would continue to carry and spread his strain after he croaked. I assured him I’d spread his strain to hundreds of other raw pigs at home and anywhere I travel. After being poz for more than twenty years, I believe the virus only makes me stronger and enables me to continue my twisted mission. I heard from another pig bud that Alex died two weeks later. Fortunately he still lives deep in my sick brain and in the toxic DNA that I continue to spread to other brothers, who share my dark, twisted passion.’

There is a political aspect to this which is present in the connotations of HIV. HIV is still, undeniably, associated with gay men and the gay community. For the men in the bugchasing/giftgiving group HIV is a metaphor for homosexuality. Conversely, condoms and antiretroviral drugs (which control HIV replication) have become metaphors for those groups in society (the religious right and public health) which are seen to feminise gay men and attempt to control their sexuality. Condoms have become ‘something designed by the Religious Right to stop us touching each other again’ (O’Hara, 1997 in Yep, Lovaas & Pagonis, 2002). This is clear from the increase of barebacking (unprotected anal intercourse) in the gay community and the refusal of some HIV positive giftgivers to conform to doctor’s instructions regarding health, sexual behaviour and the use of antiretrovirals, despite increasing the risk of dying from AIDS.

The body, since the time of antiquity, has been used as a metaphor for the socio-political unit and the socio-political unit as a metaphor for the body. This materialises in various forms, from the description of stigmatised groups (such as the gay community) as ‘bacteria’ or ‘tumours’ (Napier, 2003), to the modern correspondence of a physically fit, tough body to a physically fit, tough nation (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987). In biomedical and popular discourse, disease (such as HIV or cancer) is seen as invasion of the body, an attack on the self (body) by the non-self (disease). The body becomes a battleground and this idea is extrapolated to society as metaphor. The idea that HIV/AIDS originated in either Africa or the gay community giving the sense that mainstream (American) society had been invaded and polluted by an outside agent both politically (in the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’) and physically (‘self’ and ‘non-self’) is an example of this (Gilman, 1988).

The idea of the body as a political or religious battleground is present in the bugchasing/giftgiving discourse where the agency/power present in an infected individual is considered to be ‘demonic’. The ‘father’ of the newly infected bugchasers ‘babies’ is the Devil, or some unspecified evil force. Many men wish to be blindfolded and raped during their ‘conversion’ ritual and fantasise that they are being raped by the Devil, HIV being the ‘Devil’s seed’.

Bugchasers and giftgivers essentially play on the language of immunology, now part of popular discourse, which represents the cancer cell or HIV virus as a volitional agent (Napier, 2003). Sontag (1990) presents a description of the ‘agency’ of the HIV virus in immunology;
‘Single-mindedly, the AIDS virus ignores many of the blood cells in its path, evades the rapidly advancing defenders and homes in on the master coordinator of the immune system, a helper T cell’ (Sontag, 1990:105). The immunologist could easily be describing the invasion of a society at war.

So, to return to the materiality of HIV positive semen in bugchasing and giftgiving, giftgivers achieve agency on several levels. First, by viewing the individual body as a metaphor for society, giftgivers, who are considered and consider themselves marginal and peripheral to mainstream society, can act upon it (society) symbolically by infecting an HIV negative bugchaser. In this sense the use of the pregnancy and power metaphors to describe and physically experience (Johnson, 1987) infection doesn’t repudiate the military metaphor used in immunological and popular narratives of infection but inverts it so giftgivers (as HIV) become the invaders. On another level, giftgiving is not just a metaphor for acting upon society but giftgivers actually physically penetrate social matter (other’s bodies) as volitional agents (the HIV/DNA hybrid). Giftgivers exist at the level of the cell as HIV/DNA and penetrate and destroy society as disease. This agency, however, requires a sacrifice; a sacrifice of the individual for the collective. In a sense, the giftgiver is displacing his agency and there is a location of the self in his HIV positive semen (the HIV/DNA hybrid) rather than in his body or mind. His body becomes a tool to disperse his self/agency and he becomes immortal.

This can be understood using a materialist approach, particularly focussing on the agency of the nonhuman subject as in Latour (1999). A theory of materiality suggests that ‘we cannot know who we are, or what we are, except by looking in a material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived before us. This world confronts us as material culture and continues to evolve through us’ (Miller, 2005:8). This concept has been developed particularly by Latour (1999) who focuses on agency. Latour’s approach is nondialectical in that he doesn’t recognise a distinction between the agency of subjects (humans) and objects (nonhumans) but rather considers it impossible to separate the two spheres. According to Latour, the human agent (the person) and the nonhuman agent (a gun, for example) combine to form a third agent (a gunman), a hybrid of the two. The third agent has an agency that neither of the first two agents possesses independently of one another, that is, each agent is transformed by the other. This third agent is the collective of the human and nonhuman agents. An equality of competences between the first two agents suggests a symmetrical association.

So, to return again to the materiality of the giftgivers HIV positive semen: through the creation of a hybrid between human (HIV negative gay man) and nonhuman (HIV), a third agent is created, the giftgiver. However, this formulation only explains the giftgivers agency on the individual level (transformation of the bugchaser) and not the collective (transformation of society). By reassessing Latour’s notion of symmetry, this could maybe be rectified. I would suggest that giftgivers see their relationship with HIV as asymmetrical but with the nonhuman agent (HIV) having greater agency in the sense that the human is transformed and enabled to a greater extent than the virus through their association. So, by association with a nonhuman agent with a greater degree of agency, the giftgiver, through a sacrifice of the individual, achieves the agency of the collective. The object gives the subject a degree of agency he would never have achieved as an HIV negative, feminised gay man. This is achieved through a dislocation of the self. The giftgiver locates the self, and the agency of the self, in the HIV/DNA hybrid. HIV is characterised as the Devil’s presence on earth so by attaching himself to the Devil, and sacrificing his body/soul, the feminised man achieves the Devil’s power through association. HIV is not part of the giftgiver; the giftgiver is part of HIV.

These behaviours, and the narratives surrounding them, give fascinating insight into one contemporary American formulation of sexuality, gender, disease and personhood. The idea of a disease like HIV as an enabling material which gives men agency across space and time and immortality is an interesting one and one that deserves analysis using a conception such as the theory of materiality. From a material culture point of view, two aspects of this it would be interesting to explore further are other examples of a material form giving an individual a sense of immortality, and the possibility that a nonhuman subject can have greater agency than a human subject.

References

Gilman, S. L. (1988) Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Johnson, M (1987) The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Miller, D. (2005) ‘Materiality: An Introduction’ pp. 1-49 in D. Miller (ed.) Materiality . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Napier, A. D. (2003) The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Ortner, S. B. (1974) ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ pp. 67-88 in M. Z. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (eds.) Women, Culture and Society . Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. & M. Lock (1987) ‘The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly . 1: 6-41.

Sontag, S. (1990) Illness as Metaphor: and AIDS and its Metaphors (2nd ed.) New York: Double Day.

Yep, G., K. Lovaas & A. Pagonis (2002) ‘The Case of Riding Bareback: Sexual Practices and Paradoxes of Identity in the Era of AIDS’ Journal of Homosexuality . 42 (4):1-14.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

The painter mayor who orchestrated the highly coloured coating of grey post communist buildings in Tirana says in Anri Sala’s film ‘Dammi I Colore’; ‘here colours replace the organs (of the city) whereas in a city that developed naturally colours would be like a dress or a lipstick’.

This film was shown as part of a symposium called ‘Re-materialising colour’ in September 2006 held at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the Australian National University. The intention was to move away from Cartesian models of colour as light and questions about what people perceive and instead address what it is material colour does to things – how for example colour can extend or shrink anything (thing-person) and the implications that has for thinking about things and concepts. Barbara Saunders interrogated the ocular engineering of ‘colour’ as a post enlightenment phenomenon, a form of colonisation that anthropology should be challenging not accepting as a ‘natural’ aspect of perception - all perception is socially constructed. Linguist Anna Wierzbicka agreed that there is no universal of ‘colour’ but proposed another universal in ‘seeing’ as a commonality to all languages.
Artist Jane Gavan talked about her work with fluoro pink and the way it grabs at you. David MacDougall and Cathy Greenhalgh each discussed greyness in their respective film making. Diana Young talked about colour ‘series’ in bush foods in central Australia where Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people conceive colour as a mobile animating quality that is employed to structure space and time.

Diana Young, Research Fellow, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University

MaterialWorldBlog editors would be keen to hear of anyone else exploring colour in their research. With increasing attention focused on the multi-sensorial dimensions of material culture, this weblog could provide the forum for discussing some of these approches.

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Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of ebay (and check out the more up-to-date subsite of disturbing auctions daily...

http://www.disturbingauctions.com/

Jabba the hut's face on a Heineken Can: Everyone has action figures, ONLY YOU WILL HAVE THIS!

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Marilena Alivizatou, UCL Institute of Archaeology

While material culture studies are based on the idea that ‘materiality is an integral dimension of culture’ (Tilley 2006: 1), the recent adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in October 2003 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has brought the concept of intangible heritage and subsequently, the notion of ‘immateriality’ into the spotlight. In this sense, an examination of the implications of employing the concept of intangible heritage in material culture studies could raise new challenges around the interaction between the material and the conceptual.

Rooted in Japanese and Korean understandings of cultural heritage, the concept of intangible heritage emerged on an international level in the 1990s within the operational grounds of UNESCO, as an alternative and complementary concept to the Eurocentric understanding of cultural heritage that was dominated by the ideas of monumentality and authenticity. According to the concept of intangible heritage, the primarily Western focus on the technical or aesthetic characteristics of artefacts as an expression of cultural heritage, often ignores the living and performed dimensions of cultural creation and transmission. Extending beyond the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body and material and immaterial, the concept of intangible heritage focuses on the examination of artefacts and spaces as an expression of the practices, processes and representations that communities and individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage. As a consequence, objects and places obtain meaning and significance through the values that are ascribed to them by the people that create and come in contact with them.

This shift in the international understanding of cultural heritage could signify a new way for understanding objects and spaces by focusing on the human element inherent in them. In this sense, the concept of intangible heritage invites anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural heritage and museum theorists to adopt holistic and humanistic perspectives when interpreting material culture.

Reference
Tilley, C. 2006. Introduction in Handbook of Material Culture Studies. London: Sage Publications

Related Websites
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich_convention/index.php

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Marta Rosales ESCS and CEMME FCSH/UNL, Professor Filomena Silvano CEMME FCSH/UNL (scientific coordinator)

Domestic consumption practices, colonialism and transcontinental migration experiences of a group of Portuguese and Goan families.

This project aims the study of the domestic consumption practices of a restrict group of families of Portuguese and Goan origins that share a common biographical past: an inter-generational lived experience in Mozambique (during the colonial period) and a forced migration out of Africa to Portugal and Brazil after de Mozambican independence. Theoretically, the research intends the development of an approach that allows the integration of material culture and consumption studies to the discussion of a significant phenomenon that had a critical impact on the Portuguese recent social history – the forced migration of diverse social groups out of the Portuguese former African colonies.

The consumption practices within the home are being studied bearing in mind a triple mediation: the present context of integration (Portugal, Brazil), the shared past context of integration (Colonial Mozambique) and the past context of origin (Portugal, Goa). This triple mediation is key to the establishment of a comparative approach that allows to highlight both the uniqueness and the similarities of the families’ “African Memories”, the strategies developed towards the assertion of their shared past and the role played by the Mozambican colonial context, being a cultural resource, on their present identities.

The projects structure is based on two main interrogation guiding lines: to determine the relevance and implications of the inter-generational passage the of Portuguese and Goan families thru Mozambique in their present consumption practices; to assess the ways objects are used as a resource in the display of their specific identities. The consumption areas being studied are: furnishing and decoration, food habits, music, literature, arts and recreational practices. We are making use of ethnographic observation to explore the patterns and options of family consumption within the home, the negotiation processes involved in the establishment of consumption practices, as well as the particular cultural biography of the objects pointed as closely related to the family history and migration background. With the objective of contextualizing the families’ specific trajectories we also discussing: their family history (since they first left Portugal and Goa); their social, economic and geographical trajectories in Mozambique; their particular experience of forced migration out of Mozambique; the reasons presiding the decision making of establishing Portugal and Brazil as their present contexts of integration; the connections maintained, or not, with Mozambique after departure; the connections maintained with their context of origin (Portugal (to the Portuguese families currently living in Brazil) and Goa).

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Sensory worlds - Sensory methods

University of Manchester: June 30- July 2 2007

In combination with 10th Royal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Film

Convenors: Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright

Repeated calls for experimentation in anthropological representation alongside the ‘anthropology of the senses’ and the ‘ethnographic turn’ in the contemporary art world, seem to suggest many rich and sensory possibilities for collaborations and border crossings between art and anthropology. However the implications for new research methods and representations based on the senses have been little explored. If anthropologists are intent on representing the sensual richness and variety of fieldwork (and ‘cultural’ data, more generally), there is a need for new forms of research and representation beyond text, and text-informed visual media. Dialogues with contemporary art can provide a starting point for such investigations.

This workshop invites presentations from anthropologists and artists that are practice based and specifically related to the senses, either - and preferably- in the actual form they take at the conference, or in their direct implications for research practices.

Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright are the editors of Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2006).

Please send an outline to beyond.text@gmail.com by Feb 28th 2007

For further information regarding the Conference please visit: http://www.raifilmfest.org.uk/conference.htm

notice posted by Aaron Glass and the Society for Visual Anthropology

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Robin Boast, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

http://museum.archanth.cam.ac.uk/blobgects

The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge has a new weblog. I grant you that this is not particularly earthshaking, but this Blog is a little different. It is only a little different, and that is the point. Though it is a weblog, the entries are not curatorial statements, nor academic discourses, nor even the contributions from the public -- they are objects. Or, rather, they are the catalogue entries and, eventually, the images of objects.

The goal of Blobgects is simple, What might happen if rather than just being able to search a museum's on-line catalogue, and being forced into the idiom of the catalogue, users could engage with the catalogue as they would a Blog? Engagement that would include all the features of a Blog: commenting, tagging, RSS feeds of individual records or searches, etc. In other words, what might happen if we extended the principles of Social Computing, in one small way, into the privileged world of the museum catalogue? Hence, Blobgects.

I imagine that I do not have to state on this forum that knowledge is embodied, it is situated and requires sets of social relations between people. However, I feel that I do have to state, or restate, that knowledge also requires things. Just like people, things are not outside of knowledge but are part of its embodiment. It is true that you cannot have knowledge with just things, things are not knowledge, but knowledge is not simply conceptual -- I would argue that it is not conceptual at all, but that is another matter. Objects, even digital objects, embody surrogate practices, surrogate social practices. They do this so they can be knowledge objects, or, more accurately, can participate in situated knowledge production and reproduction.

So why Blobgects? We could say that there is little point to Blobgects. It is, after all, just a catalogue as a Blog. But this would miss the point, I would argue. The point is that Blobgects, at least at this stage, is a manifesto. Perhaps a very weak and obscure manifesto, but a manifesto none the less. The point of Blobgects is not to resolve any historical or philosophical, one could even say sociological, problem of the desire of most on-line resource providers to make us all think in the same categories, but to make the point that solutions lie in the understanding that knowledge, and hence access to knowledge, is diverse, discursive and necessarily about social relations. This is, of course, in complete distinction to certain major trends, as well as much of the history of, cataloguing as well as the dominant programmes for managing web content.

By situating a catalogue, the definitive universal description, into a discursive idiom, the Weblog, we are drawing attention to the fact that this is but one way of narrating these objects. Through the ability of users to tag, comment, and order these accounts in their way, we hope that the provisional and local nature of the catalogue itself will become clear. However, we also recognise that Blobgects is, in and of itself, insufficient. Through an international research group, centred in the Museum, we are exploring ways of travelling our digital objects to other knowledge communities, other knowledge settings, to other social settings. Through this work, we hope to vastly extend the knowledges in which these objects participate.

Further reading:

• David Bloor (1983) Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. London: Macmillan.
  
• Robin Boast, Michael Bravo and Ramesh Srinivasan (in press) Return to Babel: Emergent diversity, digital resources, and local knowledge. The Information Society.
  
• James Clifford (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  
• Harry Collins (1990) Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  
• K.D. Knorr-Cetina (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
  
• Bruno Latour (1991) Technology is Society Made Durable. In John Law (Ed.) A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination - Sociological Review Monograph. London: Routledge, pp. 103-131.
  
• Michael Polanyi (1958) Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  
• David Turnbull (2003) Assemblage and Diversity: Working with Incommensurability: Emergent Knowledge, Narrativity, Performativity, Mobility and Synergy. AAHPSSS, Melbourne.
  
• Susan Leigh Star and James Griesmer (1989) Institutional Ecology, "Translations" and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19: 387-420.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Toby Wilkinson. Research Scholar, British Institute at Ankara. January 2007.

Most readers of this blog will have doubtless come across Google Earth (figure 1), the interactive three-dimensional simulated globe, published by Google. If not, it is almost inevitable that you soon will, as its increasing usage amongst academics for showing spatial locations of fieldsites, and concurrent application by news agencies such as CNN and advertising agencies such as for British Airways (see figure 4), means its visual style is in danger of becoming the ubiquitous global image. From the point of view of material culture studies, virtual globes such as Google Earth raises a range of important issues. This includes the significance of the interface’s visual realism and simultaneous appeal to corporeal delight and entertainment; the dominant modality of space employed by users; common patterns of place-image ‘consumption’; the social narratives and biographies constructed using the program; and ultimately the relationship between material culture and social change. Here, I will summarise a few aspects arising from an analysis of the visuality and historical precedents of the program and the small ethnographic study I undertook, to examine Google Earth in use amongst teachers and students at two schools in southern England.

A close analysis of the visual ‘regime’ of Google Earth reveals an interesting mix of ‘perspectivalism’ and ‘projectionism’ (cf. Jay ; Pickles 2004), as the camera angle shifts from global to local (figure 2) and from vertical to oblique perspective (figure 3) The program is deeply indebted to these Renaissance and Enlightenment models of objective visuality. It represents space in the visually authoritative manner of a photograph and/or modern map. However the program also appeals to a humanised, subjective, or rather, enchanted space in several aspects. Visual referents recall familiar earlier cinematic forms, from the revolutionary visual effects of films such as Citizen Kane, to entertainment of the zooming camera which scales from atom to universe in Powers of 10. Virtual globe development, has been strongly driven by imagination of the future, for example, from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash: a sci-fi thriller which features a live computer-generated model of world called simply ‘Earth’. Indeed, many in the user group I studied were particularly concerned with the entertainment potential of the program (delighting in spinning the globe manically, or enjoying the visual effects of zooming or panning). All users preferred to search for discrete, familiar places, and avoided anonymous or abstract concepts of environment.

No doubt Foucault would have had a thing or two to say about Google Earth. But curiously, the potential fear of panoptic surveillance, of being watched from above, widely discussed amongst adult informants, was usually outweighed by excitement at being able to see one’s own house in high-resolution. The stereotype, confirmed by the ethnography, of most users spending inordinate amount of time searching for places closely associated with the self, was confirmed repeatedly. This trope, a kind of ‘egovisualism’, I found intriguing and difficult to explain satisfactorily. Most informants from who I asked for speculative explanations, suggested simply that people are self-obsessed: ‘like checking they look good in a photograph’. But if this is the case, the house has come to stand as icon for the self. I suspect that there is a cultural logic at work, in the context of screen and celebrity culture, which involves a desire to link the self into a wider public visibility. Is this desire for visibility the positive form of panoptic fears? The effect of seeing a place one knows on television is not dissimilar: somehow through the depiction of a place, or person that one knows on a screen, the place gains a magical aspect and a taste of divinity, or ‘celebrity’. What does this mean for the way people think about themselves and their identity?

Here the ‘global’ nature of Google Earth comes into play: both symbol and actuality. Of course, Geographic Information Systems with the ability to display global satellite imagery have been around for some time. What is significant about the current program and its contemporaries (such as WorldWind), is the scale of distribution due to its digital ‘portability’ (no doubt something that will increase as mobile phone versions are developed), and thus the huge potential for data integration with simultaneous centralisation and democratisation, as a few interfaces come to dominate an increasing number of spatial sources. This trend towards a ‘re-spatialisation’ of the internet, a field which in general discourse is discussed as a aterritorial ‘virtual’ space, will no doubt have unforeseeable consequences. In the context of other media developments, such as e-mail, 24-hour news, mobile phones (cf. Eriksen 2001), in which an increasing importance is attached to instantaneous, continuous synchronicity, the lack of live images in Google Earth (once recognised) was unsurprisingly a cause for disappointment for my informants. If, as Benedict Anderson (1987) noted, the nation state only become a cultural and practical ideal in part through the temporal synchronicity resulting from the development of print capitalism, it is fascinating to speculate on the potential new ‘imagined communities’ and concomitant identities which may be enabled by the temporalities of these new technologies such as Google Earth.

Links
Google Earth - http://earth.google.com

Bibliography
Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London.
Eriksen, T. H. 2001. Tyranny Of The Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. Pluto: London. Anderson
Jay, M. 1998. 'Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Foster, H. (ed). Vision and visuality. New York: New Press.
Pickles, J. 2004. A History of Spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world. Routledge: London. Jay
Stephenson, N. 1992. Snow Crash. Penguin: London Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

[From the editors: we have reposted this from the early days of the site last year, as there seems to be a theme developing in the site regarding landscape, moving through space, and the politics of embodying place....more to come]

Footpaths: In England and Wales the statutory definition of a footpath is a right of way over which the public have a right to pass and repass by foot only.

Kate Cameron-Daum, PhD Student, Anthropology, University College London

The essential element of the footpath is the human interaction with it. Henri Lefebvre wrote of how social and mental activity embeds its network on the landscape and this is clearly evidenced in the historical use and pattern of footpaths which has changed from a mainly economic to a recreational usage. Once people used the local paths crossing fields and woods in order to walk to work, to shop, go to church or visit the pub. From the late eighteenth century, with the improvements in roads and transport, walking was increasingly viewed as a romantic pastime; its popularity influenced by poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and writers such as Jane Austen whose novel Emma is interlaced with footpaths both literal and metaphorical.

But their use has also been one of a convoluted history between landholders and the landless. Footpaths are not the property of the underlying landholders yet their sites continue to be contested. For nearly 200 years certain landholders have denied or hidden access and, pressure groups and organisations such as the Ramblers have by campaigning and walking conserved the footpaths. Footpaths have become heritage sites; they are part of a cultural appreciation of landscapes often still aestheticized with Romantic notions of the picturesque where a sought terra incognita becomes a place made intimate by the act of walking the path. An individual may find solitude, to explore the places within as well as without. Other people relax and walk companionably, sharing their thoughts; some come to jog, or walk with their dogs. Such occasions may lead to a sense of well-being and becoming entwined with place. They are a part of Paul Adams’ continuum of light peripatetic to dark peripatetic; the latter being associated with hypersensitivity and self absorption where in walking the footpath one may experience walking on the margins, if not outside, of society.

Footpaths partake in Merleau-Ponty’s “simultaneous patterning of body and world in emotion” (2002). Some footpaths are a way of holding the past; their way markers totem-like, rising in the landscape as Certeuan ghosts (1998). Others are a source of storytelling, where footpaths subjectively read by the body and a heightened synaesthesia of the senses offer possible interpretations of human embodiment in the landscape, both past and present. For what is brought to the footpath, emotions, hopes, helplessness, may be transformed by the path’s agency, its materiality and the rhythms induced when walking.

Additional Reading

• Adams, Paul C. (2001). ‘Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place’ in Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E.Till (eds.) Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Austen, Jane (2006). Emma. London: Headline Review.

• Bachelard, Gaston (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

• de Certeau, Michel and Luce Giard (1998). ‘Ghosts in the city’ in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (eds.) The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

• Edensor, Tim (2000). ‘Walking in the British Countryside: ‘Reflexivity Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape’, Body & Society Vol. 6, Issue 3: 81-106.

• Jarvis, Robin (2000). Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

• Lefebvre, Henri (2005). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2005). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Classics.

• Tilley, Christopher (1994). A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg.

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