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Via Jane Anderson, ICAS, NYU
The E-book on Australian Indigenous Knowledge and Libraries, edited by Prof Martin Nakata and Professor Marcia Langton, was launched in March.
This is an E-book that has been negotiated with authors as 'open source material' so that it is free to download it. The negotiations with the authors for free access were made on the basis that an open source text could reach more indigenous people across the globe:
Ghent (Belgium)
10-11 May 2007
Supported by Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy, Radboud University, Nijmegen
In this workshop we shall look at the circulation of the material embodiments of knowledge. In recent years the study of the material culture of science – instruments, graphic representations, materia medica, books, letters, and manuscripts, alchemical recipes or specimens, collections of natural and artificial objects, etc. -- has received close attention as a way to understand historical scientific practice. In this workshop we invite the contributors to study this abundant material culture from the point of view of the circulation of knowledge. The guiding question will be the extent to which material objects can be said to be carriers and producers of natural knowledge. We are interested in cases in which materials do not only allow for knowledge to travel, but in which the material objects themselves ‘in circulation’ create knowledge when being applied, looked at, consumed, read, or otherwise appropriated at their place of destination. What happens to the graphic representation, collection of objects, glass prism, pump or cocoa leaf in its new surroundings? To what extent does the ‘knowledge’ of which they are potentially the carriers remain stable, allowing to serve shared knowledge as a material anchor? The focus of the program of our research network and this workshop is on the Low Countries. While thecentral concept of ‘circulation’ makes it impossible to limit discussion to one place, the various contributions to this workshop address the Low Countries as a place of departure, transit or destination.
'The Material Vehicles of the Circulation of Natural Knowledge in the Low Countries' is a workshop that will be held at the Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, 10-11 May 2007. In this workshop, the first of a series of workshops on 'circulating knowledge in early modern science'organized under the auspices of a five-year international scientific research network of the Flemish Research Foundation, we shall look at the material culture of science from the point of view of the circulation of
knowledge.
Program
Thursday, 10 May 2007
18.00 - 18.15 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Fernand Hallyn (Director, Centre for History of Science, Ghent University)
18.15 - 19.00 Making and Knowing: Craft and Natural Philosophy in the
Scientific Revolution
Pamela Smith (Columbia University, New York City)
Friday, 11 May 2007
9.00 - 9.45 The Importance of Exotic Specimens: Gardens, Cabinets, and
Medical Expertise
Harold Cook (The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL,
London)
9.45 - 10.30 Reproducing the Natural World: Considerations on the
Circulation of Knowledge by Pictorial Means in Early Modern Holland
Claudia Swan (Northwestern University, Evanston)
10.30 - 11.00 Coffee
11.00 - 11.45 The Material Circulation of Botanical and Cosmographical
Knowledge between Spain and the Low Countries
María Luz López & Victor Navarro-Brotons (Universidad de Valencia)
11.45 - 12.30 Ignorance and the Circulation of Knowledge: Collecting Optics
in Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp
Sven Dupré (Universiteit Gent)
14.30 - 15.15 Instruments and the Changing Shape of Astrological Practice
Steven Vanden Broecke (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel)
15.15 - 16.00 Chemical Books Printed in the Southern Low Countries
Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Université Catholique de Louvain)
16.00 - 16.30
Coffee
16.30 - 17.15 Reading Diagrams: Order and Motion in Conic Sections
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis (Universiteit Twente, Enschede)
17.15 - 17.45 Concluding Remarks & General Discussion
Christoph Lüthy (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)
Attendance is open to all without charge. However, there is a limit on places available and anyone wishing to attend must register with Arlette Wille (Arlette.Wille@UGent.be) by 1 May 2007. For all other enquires in connection to this workshop, please contact Sven Dupré
(Sven.Dupre@UGent.be). Circulation of this announcement is encouraged.
Upcoming workshops
Geographical circulation, autumn 2007, Leuven
organizers: Harold Cook (Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL)
and Geert Vanpaemel (University of Leuven)
Controlling circulation, spring 2008, Brussels
organizers: Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology) and
Geert Vanpaemel (Catholic University of Leuven)
Circulation of knowledge criteria, autumn 2008, Ghent
organizers: Lissa Roberts (Twente University) and Steven Vanden Broecke
(Catholic University of Brussels)
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Via: H-MUSEUM, H-Net Network for Museums and Museum Studies
E-Mail: h-museum@h-net.msu.edu
http://www.h-museum.net
Olga Neva, Research Assistant, Department of Anthropology, UCL
This project was intended to illustrate how Visual Culture can be analysed through a combination of anthropological and graphic design approaches; understanding the social dynamics where images have been created; and the logics of production and consumption of images, as well as various approaches to formal design and its cultural context. The analysis is based upon contemporary postcards of Bilbao, London and Oslo. The research covers processes where graphic design is involved, such as the design logics of representation in each city, and the production and consumption of postcards. The method incorporated formal analysis and other techniques that derive from graphic design itself.
Analysis revealed that the internal design elements differ from place to place. The contemporary market in postcards is totally controlled by private local producers and distributors and in the case of London by foreign companies. Some attempts by the state to control the images can be discerned in Oslo, and some regulations apply to the postcard design system in Bilbao, but in general city authorities do not concern themselves with this industry. Overall, the bigger the city the less the attempt to control either production or the visual politics of place. Oslo being a small city tries to control their images by having “official Oslo Products”; Bilbao has made various efforts to create a consistent visual identity for the city, but the postcards produced do not correspond with the visual identity manuals they have created; and London the biggest of the three has no attempt at control at all, as evident of the visuals. This is manifested in the role of the shield used as a motif by the production company, the depiction of Londoners, the Monarchy, architectural, governmental and other subjects. Evident also is a lack of design found in the saturation of space with the use of as many images as possible to represent the encounter and the idea of experiencing everything, especially in London. When selecting postcards, people seem to prefer those which were photography based and with a traditional aesthetic based on harmony and rhythm. That is they preferred the designed postcards of Oslo to the relatively haphazard cramming together of images found in London. The point of this study, however, was not to judge any aesthetic value of postcards. Rather it was to demonstrate how graphic design can be a valuable tool when analyzing material culture, including some understanding of the thinking of the graphic designer and their influence on visual culture.
I am hoping to continue my research on how to link anthropology with the graphic design industry, seeing the industry both as a potential subject of study and trying to find approaches which link the perspectives of both. I was wondering if there is anyone else out there with similar interests or who knows of other attempts to create this bridge between graphic design and anthropology.
The Melanesia Art Project(a joint initiative of Goldsmiths College, University of London and the British Museum) is advertising for a postdoctoral position, for details see: RESEARCH OFFICER - Melanesian Art (PDF Format)
Based in the Anthropology department, the researcher will work on a major new analysis of the art of Melanesia, based on the highly significant collections in the British Museum and through archives, fieldwork visits, and organizing visits of indigenous individuals to the collections. The researcher is responsible for research liaison with indigenous communities, the practical organization of the project, video and/or audio documentation, and particularly for editing project publications.
Requires: PhD in anthropology or a related discipline, and research experience in the Pacific, preferably in island Melanesia.
Closing date: 3 April 2007 by 5.00pm
Interview date: 25 April 2007
Committed to equal opportunities
Fanny Wonu Veys, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
After a research visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I decided to visit another Smithsonian museum: the National Museum of the American Indian. Ever since I saw the building works in progress in 2003, I tried to keep updated on what was happening in the museum. It was a unique opportunity for me to see the museum now that it had been open for a little over two years.
Architecturally, the museum building built in hand-cut Minnesota goldstone, with its curvilinear forms and its surrounding garden which includes one hundred and fifty native species contrasts with the other stark white, rectangular buildings on the National Mall and other parts of the city. The visitor enters from the east – the other Smithsonian Museums have their entrances situated on the Mall side or one of its parallel running avenues – , goes through the now ubiquitous bag search routine, and is welcomed into the circular Potomac area, the meeting point for guided tours, arts and craft markets and demonstrations. This area spans the four levels of the museum and is closed off by a step-dome on which daylight, caught by prisms in one of the windows, is reflected.
The ground (first) floor is dedicated to the Museum’s Mitsitam café, the small Chesapeake museum store and the Rasmuson theatre, while the second floor holds the large Roanoke museum shop and an exhibition entitled ‘Return to a native place’ which focuses on the native peoples of Washington D.C.’s local Chesapeake region. The third and fourth floors have the exhibition spaces which are organised thematically into our lives, temporary exhibition space (third floor), our universes, our peoples and the Lelawi theatre (fourth floor). In each section, respectively looking at contemporary native life, native beliefs and native history the voices of indigenous curators representing groups from North, Central and South America are heard. The third and fourth floors are also home to object-rich cases where part of the museum’s vast collection is presented and where visitors can have a self-guided experience through the use of interactive screens. The museum argues that its aim is to give visitors the opportunity to listen to the stories of people that are geographically and culturally related, not taking into account political boundaries. However, it seems to me that existing political boundaries were the major drive force to include the Hawaiian Islands and to exclude Greenland from representation in the museum.
Hawaii which became the fiftieth state of the United States of America in 1959 is represented – only to a limited extent I must admit – by a photo in the ‘our lives’ section and an outrigger canoe outside the main theatre on the third floor. The Hawaiian indigenous people would traditionally be categorised as Polynesians, sharing cultural and linguistic traits with their other Polynesian neighbours. It has been argued that the concept of Polynesia first used in its current meaning in 1831 by Jules Sebastien Dumont d’Urville is still valid. It would thus seem that the main reason to include Hawaii, is its political affiliation with the United States in whose capital this museum of the American Indian is based.
Greenlandic Inuit have many linguistic and cultural affinities with the arctic peoples of North America. Even geographically Greenland belongs to the continent of North America. However, Greenland’s political affiliation with Denmark - as a former colony and since 1979 as an autonomous part of Denmark – seems to have been reason enough not to be one of the museum’s indigenous voices. I would be interested to know how indigenous Hawaiians feel about being included into the National Museum of the Native American Indian and what Greenlandic Inuit feel about being excluded. The answer to this question depends in part on the type of political and cultural relations Inuit from Greenland uphold with those from Canada and Alaska and consequently to what extent Greenlandic Inuit feel they have affinities with the other indigenous peoples of the American continent.
Another thing that struck me when visiting the museum was the issue of identity which is addressed both in the exhibits as in the guided tours: Who is an ‘American Indian?’ One of the guides who introduced herself as a Navaho woman from a water clan showed us, almost proudly, a copy of her husband’s certificate proving he was a full blood Navaho which is expressed in blood quarters. Native American Indians living in reservations need these certificates if they want to benefit from the 18th and 19th century based peace agreements which promise them free healthcare and education in return for staying on their reservation land. Our guide however was only half-blood (2/4) Navaho and half-blood south Ute, which made her and her husband’s children ¾ Navaho. I was utterly surprised to see that the American Federal government upholds principles practised by nineteenth-century physical anthropologists that measured craniums and looked at other physical characteristics to determine the race and thus the step on the evolutionary scale people had taken. We all know the ravages this theory made during the Nazi regime in Europe and we also know from the documents visitors to the USA have to fill out, how clearly the American Federal Government refuses entry to the territory to people with a Nazi past. Hence my surprise at the official use of those physical anthropologists' theories! My experience with Maori people in New Zealand and England, has showed that more flexible approaches exist which are based on self-determination: upholding and living according to the cultural values of your communities and having the support of your community elders is a major determining factor of belonging to that particular community. The concept of self-determination is actually practiced internationally. Indeed, the draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples written by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) upholds the principle of self-determination as one of the fundamental rights of indigenous peoples.
The fact that the guide did not seem to see any problem with this, struck me as perhaps a consequence of these agreements where people who fit the model, gain health and educational benefits. Could it be that even though these laws may not reflect the determining facts for belonging to a nation, the fixing on paper of what belonging to a nation consists of, becomes a point of reference and ultimately something everyone aspires to?
Danny Miller, UCL
A new book has just been published by Nicky Gregson, Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University, well known through her previous publications such as Second Hand Worlds. The latest book is called Living with Things (Seankingston.co.uk). I admit to a bias, since I am the editor of the series this appears in, and indeed I would use the opportunity to encourage people to send manuscripts. We are certainly interested in material culture books with an anthropological inflection. Living with Things reports a fascinating ethnography of a former coal-mining village in North-East England, seen largely through the internal relationships between the long term lives of objects in the home and the long term occupancy of the homes.
Two main aspects of these relationships emerge through the writing. The first is the idea of accommodating, the way things have to be shifted around and reordered in relations to events such as moving in, doing up the place or having children. With the further implication that, without such events, things often remain stable occupants of home for very considerable periods. But then there is just as much on the internal circulation of objects within the home that may eventually lead to their being thrown out or otherwise disposed of. So here exchange appears mainly as a study of the internal dynamics of households. I confess this is very much my kind of ethnography with considerable attention to the long term trajectories of objects such as toys and appliances. It is the kind of ethnography which shows why material culture is often an ideal conduit for conveying how essential, ordinary, mundane and therefore often quite overlooked practices are central to the normative form of everyday life. Which, after all, these days is increasingly a matter of what happens within the private home.
Summer Intern to Catalog Art Collection and Artifacts, Distinguished Private Club in Downtown Financial District, New York City, New York, USA
We are updating our catalogue of Museum quality Art, Maritime Artifacts and Library material.
The Intern will be responsible for the updating and cataloguing of all items that were previously entered into a database in 2002, and additional related tasks. This position entails a thorough knowledge of collections procedures, particularly the cataloging of a significant number of Maritime Art Portraits, objects and material that need to be recorded and documented. Computer skills essential for imputing the database. Digital camera knowledge a plus.
The successful candidate will have experience in museum collections management and should have completed at least one year of undergraduate work by June 2007 in art history, art education, museum studies or related fields.
Contemporary Art and Anthropology: Challenges of Theory and PracticeLecturer: Associate Professor Arnd Schneider, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
Dates: 30. July - 3. August 2007 Course Credits: 10 pts (ECTS) Limitation: 30 participants
Application details: www.sv.uio.no/oss
Objectives
This course will look at recent border crossings between art and anthropology, and explore the epistemological challenges arising from it. Following the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’, contemporary artists have adopted an ‘anthropological’ gaze, including methodologies, such as fieldwork, in their appropriation of other cultures. Anthropologists, on the other hand, in the wake of the ‘writing culture’ critique of the 1980s, are starting to explore new forms of visual research and representation beyond written texts.
»Main disciplines: Anthropology, Fine Arts, Media Studies
Secondary disciplines: Art History/Criticism, Cultural Studies
This course will explore the potential for future collaborations between art and anthropology. The curriculum will be based on an examination of key texts, and review of a number of paradigmatic artists and issues (such as, fieldwork/ site-specific ethnography, appropriation, research in and representation of different sensual domains/’synaesthesia’).
In its workshops and assessment options the course encourages presentation and submission of practice-based visual work.
The course format is lectures and workshops, in which students are encouraged to present their work in progress.
The course is interdisciplinary and directed at doctoral students and researchers in the social sciences, humanities, and in the visual arts (including anthropology/visual anthropology, sociology, art criticism, art history, fine arts, film practice and studies, design, media practice and cultural studies).
Essential readings (we strongly encourage students to obtain and read the following books in advance)
Assessment is either in the form of a written essay (6000 – 8000 words), or; by a visual piece of work accompanied by a 3500 words interpretive statement.
Visual work can be submitted in the following formats (DVD, CD-Rom, PAL VHS, photographic portfolio/essay as bound copy A4 format). Work will not be returned. Students who want to select this option should discuss and agree this with the course director before the end of the course week.
Full course details at:
www.sv.uio.no/oss/schneider.html
The Lecturer
Arnd Schneider writes on contemporary art and anthropology, migrationand ethnographic film. His main publications include Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (Palgrave, 2006) Futures Lost: Nostalgia and Identity among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (Peter Lang, 2000), and as co-editor with Christopher Wright, Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Berg, 2006). His essays “The Art Diviners” Anthropology Today (1993, 4) “Uneasy Relationships: Contemporary Artists and Anthropology” Journal for Material Culture (1996, 2), “On appropriation” Social Anthropology (2003, 2), explore a new emerging field of art practices and anthropology.
is an excellent resource for those interested in the anthropology of consumption, the history of anthropological theory, the potentials of the web to showcase student research, and don't forget to check out the museum of weird consumer culture...
Clothing childhood, fashioning society: Children's clothing in Britain in the 20th Century
The young Baby Boomer as child consumer, from John and Janet Go Walking, James Nisbit, London, 1951.
The Pasold Research Fund owes its existence to the success of Ladybird, which, under the direction of Eric Pasold, became the largest children’s wear company in Britain and then Europe in the years after World War II. It is therefore particularly fitting that this should be the first conference devoted to British children’s clothing and textiles in the twentieth century.
Textiles and clothing are, of course, not just goods – they are also social values in material form, commodities produced and consumed at the intersection of commerce and culture. As such, they have unique potential as tools of combined social, economic and cultural analysis that has yet to be fully explored. This is especially true of children’s clothing. To date, studies of contemporary clothing and textiles have focussed on adults, ‘youth’ and the now-familiar distinctions and discourses of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, locality and class. By contrast, children and their clothes have remained largely invisible to scholarly study, despite the fact that the emergence of children’s consumer culture is a defining phenomenon of our times. What happens when the twentieth century – a period of unprecedented social, economic and technological change – is seen through the lens of children’s clothes and textiles, their changing styles, the industries and businesses that produced them, the childhoods they fashioned and the markets they created?
The conference is informed by recent work that uses material culture in the historical study of society and economy. A pioneering work in the field is The Commodification of Childhood by Professor Dan Cook, the conference’s keynote speaker, which focuses on the American children’s wear market in the twentieth century. Cook shows how social values, culture change and commercial practice combined to facilitate the emergence of the child consumer in America, as seen through the production and consumption of children’s wear. The conference provides an opportunity to consider the British clothing industry, society and childhood in a similar way, and to establish parallels and points of difference between British and American processes, products and practices. It is also intended that the conference will lay the foundations for future work of this kind. Among possible topics of interest:
• The effect of World Wars I and II on the production and consumption of children’s clothes.
• Case studies of the British clothing and textile industries, and of particular British children’s wear companies and labels.
• Fashions in children’s clothing.
• The impact of synthetic/man-made fibres and fabrics on children’s wear.
• Twentieth century dyes and the significance of colour in children’s wear.
• Social class as reflected in design, style, production and consumption.
• Trade archives and the social and economic history of textiles and clothing.
• The emergence of women and mothers as forces in consumer culture.
• The rise of department stores and shops as cultural and commercial institutions with infants’ and children’s wear departments.
• The acceptance of ready-made garments for infants and young children as symbols of modernity and embodiments of rational scientific childcare.
• The fabrics of childhood.
• Exporting ‘the English look’.
• The culture of home sewing, needlework and knitting for babies and children.
• The development of child-focussed advertising and promotion of clothing using storybook characters, cartoons, comics and radio programmes.
• Children’s clothing as agents of age segmentation and gender differentiation.
• The emergence of the child as a commercial persona, marking a turning point in consumer culture and in culture generally.
• The growing marketing emphasis on girls rather than boys, and the reconfiguration of girlhood through increasingly complex age grading, size ranges and aspirational merchandise.
• The effects on production, consumption and society of the Baby Boom (1946-1964) that followed World War II and the emergence of teen and subteen girls as major figures in the post-war marketplace.
• From at least 1960 onwards, concern about ‘sexual precocity’ among subteen girls and about the blurring between chronological maturity, social maturity and the stylistic expression of maturity.
• The phenomenon of competitive parenthood as seen in the conspicuous consumption of children’s clothes epitomised by celebrity children.
As always with Pasold Conferences, the aim is to facilitate critical dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and between academic and other practitioners, particularly those from archive, museum and conservation fields.
• The period of time covered by the conference is 1900-2000.
• ‘British’ refers to clothing and textiles made or worn in Britain during this period and can include imports and exports.
• ‘Children’ includes babies, infants and young people up to the end of the teenage years but the focus of the conference will be primarily on pre-pubescent children.
Within these parameters, papers are welcomed from the fields of textile history, social and economic history, dress and fashion history, design history, sociology, anthropology, material culture, business history, conservation; and from archive and museum professionals as well as academics. This should include postgraduate students and new researchers who may be interested in giving a short presentation (10 mins), as well as established researchers with more developed work.
Please submit your 300-word abstract including a title, along with full contact details and brief cv or affiliation by email to Dr Kaori O’Connor, University College London (k.o’connor@ucl.ac.uk) by 12 April 2007.
A book is one of the planned outcomes of the conference, and submitters should signify their willingness for their work to be included in the publication, if selected.
Cook, Daniel Thomas 2004. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Anna Portisch, Department of Anthropology, SOAS, London
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| A number of large and small syrmaq (felt carpets), taken in Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) in a Kazakh family`s home in June 2005. |
As you bend your head slightly to go through the low doorway you find yourself, on the other side of the threshold, in a surprisingly large, round space. It is lit at the centre by a shaft of light that falls on a stove at the centre of the room. The stove is connected via a tall metal chimney to the round crown and smoke hole in the ceiling where the light comes in. There is a smell of fresh grass and earth from the ground which is covered only in part by linoleum pieces and felt carpets. As your eyes adjust to the dim light you find that the circumference of this living space is closely furnished and elaborately decorated. Embroidered wall hangings cover the lattice walls, carpets are spread out on the ground and folded in neat piles on top of silver-plated chests that reflect the pale light, and other carpets with pictures of running horses or wild mountain goats on hillocks are hung on the walls. The bed frames are hung with decorative embroidered panels and valances, pillows and pillow covers are embroidered and arranged in matching piles. Animal furs hang on the walls as decorative hunting trophies alongside family portraits. The ticking of a Chinese clock sounds from the wall above the chest where the television and DVD player sit. Toothbrushes, saddles, shampoo, cooking pots and plastic slippers have been placed all around the room. This modern summer dwelling, a Kazakh yurt, is surprisingly spacious and you could enter it and sit for a while being occupied by something, and only after a while pick up the sound of someone’s regular breathing and realise that in one of the beds along the edge of this circular living space someone is sleeping.
Some 100,000 Kazakhs live in the western-most province of Mongolia, its ‘Rich Cradle’, or Bayan-Oelgii as the province is called in Mongolian. Most people are either directly or through family networks engaged in pastoral nomadism and during the summer months live in yurts (kiiz yi, literally ‘felt house’). Many of the domestic crafts used to furnish the yurt are made from raw materials derived from the animals herded. Sheep’s and lamb’s wool is used to make felt for the cover of the yurt itself and for the felt carpets (syrmaq) that furnish its interior; camel’s wool is used to make thread; and yak and horse’s hair is used to make rope and woven ribbons. Soft furnishings are made for use in one’s own home and are given as part of wedding-related gift-exchanges between clans. Felt carpets, for instance, are made for sitting and sleeping on and to seat respected guests on; they may be used to pray on; and large felt carpets are used to carry the body of the dead to the grave. Felt carpets are also the most important handmade artefacts in the bundle of gifts given by the bride’s mother to the newly-wedded couple and the groom’s relatives.
Soft furnishings are made by women and young girls in the home in the course of everyday life. Young children are gradually integrated into their mother’s and other female relatives’ activities from an early age. Learning to make these furnishings begins with relatively simple embroidery tasks and proceeds to more complex tasks, such as making felt carpets, usually at the age of 14 or 15 before a young girl marries and moves away to live with her husband and his family. At this stage, learning is a way of contributing to the production of crafts for one’s own childhood home. The transmission of this skill is rarely directly didactic, but rather takes place through observation, mimicking and copying the activities and interactions of one’s co-learners and elders, improvising on these and elaborating one’s own practices and responses. Learning to make these domestic crafts is thus a way of beginning to engage creatively with one’s social, material and natural environment, observing how other households are furnished, and beginning to develop a critical and evaluative approach to one’s own and others’ crafts - both in process and finished.
Domestic crafts production is embedded in a more broadly relevant spatial and social organisation of household members and their activities. The arrangement of things and people within the home reflects dynamic hierarchies of seniority and gender, something which has implications for the ways in which soft furnishings are used and where and by whom they are made. Learning is part of this dynamic spatial organisation of persons and activities. It is a way of contributing to the activities of elders and co-learners and a way of contributing more widely to a routine of tasks that is largely collaborative. My research concerns the transmission and nature of the skilful knowledge of Kazakh syrmaq-makers in the Mongolian province of Bayan-Oelgii.
In this context I would like to pick up on the suggestion by Fabio Gygi in his posting on this blog entitled “Hoarding and Disposal in Tokyo” (19 December 2006), that semiotic readings may not always provide the most insightful perspectives on material culture. Like Gygi I have often found that initial reactions to my research have concerned the symbolic significance of these soft furnishings and their patterns and how uncovering such meanings might disclose a particular world view. While for certain people there may of course be important and historically pertinent meanings to crafts and their patterns which are valid in their own contexts, I have found such ‘readings’ difficult to marry with the skilful and specialised knowledge that the craftswomen in Bayan-Oelgii have of their own practices and crafts. Poor, rural, Kazakh craftswomen were not so much concerned with what their practices meant or how their artefacts should be interpreted. They were, on the other hand, exceedingly active creatively and interested in working in ‘dialogue’ with a certain style and aesthetic and producing artefacts that would be both functional and would circulate as testaments to their own creative abilities within a community of relatives. What was involved in their specialised skilful knowledge went far beyond how this horn motif or that floral composition might be interpreted.
The creative process of making a wall hanging or a felt carpet was not so much animated by an intention to communicate a certain meaning. Rather, through working with the raw materials and tools in an evaluative manner, intentional aspects evolved in relation to the unfolding piece and in relation to a particular material and social environment. This creative process was at once oriented towards previous steps and previous learning, the immediate execution, and a broader unfolding piece of work in the making which had to be imagined. Learning, making and teaching the next generation to make soft furnishings were practices that continued to hold relevance in everyday life, as ways of making practical use of raw materials like sheep’s wool, creating an aesthetically pleasing and functional home environment for one’s family, entering into a dialogue with other women’s crafts production, and leaving a material and social heritage for future generations in the form of a skill that has been transmitted and the artefacts that have been passed on. The dynamic and complex skilful knowledge of these women is rooted in particular social, material and natural conditions, and is in a sense a social and material condition for later, often quite abstract, interpretations of meaning.
This photo is of an elderly Kazakh lady sitting outside the spring camp of her household in Dayan, an area in western Mongolia very close to the Chinese border. She is repairing a decorative felt panel for the interior of the yurt, in preparation for setting up the summer camp.
This photo is of a wedding which took place in the province`s main urban centre, Olgii, in the summer of 2005. The bride is seated inside the yurt of her husband-to-be`s parents, and at her feet, tea and sweets and fried breads are laid out on a syrmaq.
This last photo is of an old syrmaq that is no longer being used within the home to sit and sleep on, but is now used to cover the pile of dried dung (dung is used as fuel for cooking)
July 29th 1929 to March 6th 2007
Academic creates genuine breakthrough in thinking about key issues with carefully composed original thesis. Comes to be better known. Responds to the hype by writing pretentious, largely ungrounded but clever sounding prose about more or less everything. After a while best known through journalism about this latter work, while original contribution is largely forgotten.
Jean Baudrillard would hardly be the only academic to pass through such a trajectory, but he was, to my mind, one of the clearest exemplars of it. Most of the obituaries currently being written, concentrate on his writings about the simulacrum. Frankly I have always considered this to be pretty worthless. But it was certainly his most influential contribution. The effects were dire. Amongst the worst were a certain phase of excruciatingly awful cultural studies writing based in Australia amongst other places. I also suspect that some of the worst hype about virtual reality was written in the hope that the internet would finally live up to some of the hype that Baudrillard had generated about the world in general. Interestingly, from the perspective of an obituary, some of the most informed discussion were in books with titles such as `Forget Baudrillard’.
What all this misses is the reason Jean Baudrillard come to academic attention in the first place. Initially he wrote a couple of books such as The Mirror of Production which were quite early attempts to theorise consumption, largely within a structuralist and semiotic vein. I saw his highpoint as represented by the book with a mouthful of a title `For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.’ Written in 1972 (translated in 1981) this was an extremely impressive re-working of some basic ideas of Marx in order to demonstrate that radical thinking had to take seriously issues of consumption that were neglected in the Marxist emphasis upon production. It gave the theoretical underpinning to attempts to analyse that which had been dismissed as superstructure or superficial under the auspices of what he called sign value. He also argued the importance of this for developing a serious study of areas such as the art world and media. All of this makes him quite properly seen as one of the key ancestors of what later developed as cultural studies. Mind you it certainly helps if, as I do, you retain a soft spot for Marx’s own writing and theorising.
The problem was that having argued cogently for why these areas should be taken seriously and not seen as merely superficial, his own writing became itself increasingly superficial and slight. The result was merely to return the objects of his enquiry back into the appearance of superficiality and the superficiality of appearance. This was why I think ultimately he became much more of a negative than a positive influence upon academic genres such as cultural studies. But it would be a pity if all this later more problematic work means that his original important contributions were to now become entirely forgotten. So my epitaph would be `Forget the later Baudrillard, but resurrect the early work’.
Daniel Miller Anthropology UCL
forwarded from Inge Daniels, ISCA, University of Oxford:
The editors of the Russian journal: The Forum for Anthropology and Culture have contacted me concerning a special issue about ethnographic museums which will be published in English and in Russian in the autumn of 2007. They are looking for contributions, who would need to send short essays by the start of May to get them translated in time for the Russian edition. Those interested please contact, Catriona Kelly (Professor of Russian, University of Oxford) at catriona.kelly@new.ox.ac.uk
Ethnographical Collections in the Modern Museum
Curators of anthropological and ethnographical collections are (like museum curators generally) currently going through a period of uncertainty about their function. In the past, such collections were understood to have two distinct purposes: to inform ordinary visitors about the cultural history of different ethnic groups and to act as a centre of research material and expertise for professional researchers. Nowadays, researchers are more interested in the present than in the past, and ordinary visitors have many other ways in which they can find out about cultures that interest them.
It is accordingly not surprising that talk of a 'museum crisis' is becoming more and more common. The editorial board of Forum for Anthopology and Culture invites your thoughts, which you may choose to phrase as answers to the following questions, or as an independent
short essay. In whichever case, please limit your text to a maximum of 10 pp. (1.5 spaced), or
about 2000-3000 words.
1. Many ethnographical museums across the world are looking at new ways of displaying their
collections so as to make these more attractive to visitors (e.g. remodelling extant buildings or building new ones, restructuring the way their permanent collections are shown, setting up new temporary exhibitions). Are the reasons for the changes primarily technical (new facilities, new services for visitors, etc.) or do you see them as lying in a sense that it is essential to change the principles according to which items are displayed, the profile of the ethnographical museum, its name,
its cultural, social, and educational mission? Are these changes symptomatic of a 'museum crisis'? If so, where do you see its causes?
2. The main reason behind changes made to museum displays and to the subject matter and contents of exhibitions has been new thinking about the way visitors react to what they see. What do you think visitors want from museums? How do expectations vary from group to group? Does material that relates to the past of different human cultures (their belief systems, occupations, way of life) still have any relevance? Should more attention be paid to the transformations that so-called 'traditional societies' areundergoing in the modern world, to the effects of globalisation and multiculturalism?
3. In the last few years, several new museums have opened that display large-scale ethnographical
collections in a radically new way. To give a few examples: The National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington DC plans to hold a rotating series of exhibitions drawn from its permanent collections. The opening displays included 'Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World',
'Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories','Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities'. Another
approach has been adopted by the Världskulturmuseet in Göteborg, where there are no permanent displays at all. Recent exhibitions include 'Horisonter:Voices From a Global Africa' and 'Trafficking' (on human trafficking). The third example of a new kind of museum is the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, which describes itself only 'in the small print' as the Musée des arts et
civilizations d'Afrique, Asie, Océanie et des Amériques (www.quaibranly.fr). This museum also
places a considerable emphasis on temporary exhibitions, and the permanent display is organised
round a series of masterpieces of traditional art made by non-European peoples. Do you see cases like this as incidental, or are they part of an overall tendency? What are the causes of such new approaches to exhibiting ethnographical collections, in your view?
4. Where do you think the ethnographical museum should go from here?
March 23, 2007, 1-7PM, 612 Schermerhorn, Columbia University
»A Workshop with: Lila Abu-Lughod, Patricia Dailey, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Nancy K. Miller, Valerie Smith, Silvia Spitta, Leo Spitzer and Kate Stanley
»And Featuring Artist Presentations: Lorie Novak "Reverb", Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock "Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice"
How do objects carry memory across space and time? How do they mediate loss and forgetting, exile and diaspora? More than props or exhibits of historical evidence, material objects are inscribed with the physical and affective traces of memorial transmission across cultures and generations. Looking at how objects mediate memory in familial and social life, and in political discourses and in public archives -- at how they are used, collected, exchanged, and exhibited -- this half-day workshop will explore, in particular, the gendering of familial transmission and the engendering of archives.
Brief presentations will center on a particular object or image, trace its histories across the private and public realms, and reflect on the theoretical issues it raises for the engendering of memory, genealogy and transmission.
Sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Cultural Memory Colloquium, English and Comparative Literature, and Art History
No registration necessary.
For more information contact Vina Tran vtt2103@columbia.edu
Conference website:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/events/main/memory/index.html
Patrick Laviolette (UCL / Massey University)
Review of “Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” by Carl Knappett (2005); Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
[Editorial note: and see Martin Holbraad's response to Danny Miller's review on this site of the book Thinking Through Things as a cross-reference to this review and for an interesting discussion of some of the limits of the category of material culture...]
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| “Quantum Cloud” (30 m. x 16 m. x 10 m.) is an elliptical sculpture by the artist Antony Gormley. A version of this piece, standing on four watertight cast iron pylons in the Thames adjacent to London’s Millennium Dome in Greenwich, illustrates the jacket cover of the book reviewed here. |
One of the main problems with this text is that it has no real thesis. Knappett is a ‘rebel without a cause’ in his attempt to carve out a niche for this book. Indeed, the idea that dualistic thought has hindered the social sciences is far from new. Moreover, there are not that many people, scholars or otherwise, who have any real qualms with accepting or even exploring existential, phenomenological, poetic, post-modern, symbolic or the many other types of non-Descartian modes of being-in and understanding the world. From his preface, we should acknowledge and sympathise with the difficult interdisciplinary task that he has set out for himself. One is nearly ready to suspend disbelief in order to tolerate the omission of certain details in lieu of this idealised project. This is difficult to do for two reasons however. The first, ironically enough, is that Knappett is his own worse enemy in straying from the interdisciplinary path and providing what is largely a conventional cognitive archaeology point of view (unless he feels that examining his own coffee cup is some sophisticated new form of illusory satire in auto-ethnography).
The second is that he himself has no inhibitions in taking to task some significant perspectives and their key advocates. For instance, his understanding of Lakoff & Johnson’s work on metaphor is dated. They have written extensively since the last citation he uses from the late 1980s. Most notably their Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) is one of the many texts that would undermine his claims to innovation regarding the relationship between mind, body and materiality. Furthermore, his criticism that Tilley relies almost solely “for his cognitive slant on the work of just two cognitive psychologists…” (p.103) is completely inaccurate. Ignoring that Lakoff is a cognitive linguist, it is clear that Tilley is far from a cognitive theorist. He relies as much on James Fernandez (1991), Game & Metcalfe (1996) and many others as he does on Lakoff & Johnson.
In terms of significant absences, the most obvious is that Knappett has nearly completely ignored the contributions of some of the most significant thinkers in material culture studies over the past decades (Buchli 2004), with the exception of his exhaustive coverage of the French Matière à Penser School. Even if one does not like the work or the perspective of the people in the material culture group at University College London, it is simply reckless for a British based archaeologist to ignore their achievements and fail to cite over eighty percent of them when writing a book about this topic. He performs this intellectual dishonesty, it would seem, as a smokescreen to an American audience. That is, to make this book seem more original than it is. It is clear that nothing like this could have been published by a British publisher aware of the real state of affairs in the field. In fact, even though he does reference two individual scholars from this group (one of which he unfoundedly challenges as described above) he does not overtly mention in the text the impacts of this ‘school of thought’ or the existence of the JMC as such (for which he is obviously aware since he then cites his own publication in that Journal). As I have suggested, he has most likely done so deliberately in order to give his book novelty value. What’s more, for someone who has written an entire chapter on Social Network Theory (chap. 5), Knappett demonstrates a shocking double standard by disregarding so many of the relevant people in this academic network.
The best chapter in this volume comes from the material in his own empirical research on Minoan cups in Crete (chap 7). Even this chapter is not exhaustively situated into a socio-historical context. It is largely a descriptive example. For instance, he mentions the relevance of burial graves in relation to symbolically charging objects involved in burial assemblages but more detail would have been helpful (p.136). Still he convincingly makes the case for how Middle-Bronze Age ceramic vessels have come to stand for ‘Minoaness’. What is interesting is that it is in this grounded archaeological case study that Knappett’s promised interdisciplinary perspective is materialised somewhat. It is here that he is finally able to chronicle the ways in which the cups exhibit consistencies in variation that reflect a comprehensive cycle of other Minoan transformations in relation to wider issues involving production and consumption. But the most important lesson learnt at this late point in the book is that he should stick to what he knows and dim down his aspirations towards theory building or attempting to understand modern material culture.
It is interesting that this volume tries to coax material culture studies back into the realm of archaeology. Indeed, the text explicitly makes the claim that archaeology is the privileged home for this approach and conceptual focus. Yes it goes on to say that we are in an interdisciplinary era where material culture studies can exist everywhere. But it nonetheless overtly stipulates that “of all the disciplines, it is archaeology that needs material culture most” (Knappett 2005:1). Most art historians, architects or consumer designers would surely question this. Perhaps these disciplines are somehow seen as less worthy or less dependant on tangible things? Yet at this post-interdisciplinary crossroads, we should be lenient about the intellectual possession of what is becoming known as a rejuvenated interest in the cultural understanding of human-material worlds.
Modified extract from Laviolette, P. (2006) Material Culture 10 Years On – Disciplinary Exodus and the Tin Commandments. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 16 (2): 253-256.
References
Chris Pinney of UCL informs us at MaterialWorld that Tasveer Ghar has announced a short-term fellowship for collecting and documenting popular visual arts in South Asia. The focus is on "Gender, Nation and Spaces for the Everyday." Tasveer Ghar is a transnational virtual home for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia's exciting popular visual sphere. Visual materials include posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.
This fellowship is ideally meant for individuals or groups who already have an important collection of popular arts that needs to be archived, digitized, or restored, but may not have the resources or technical know-how. Tasveer is also open to proposals to start a new collection or document/photograph something that is available in a public space and needs urgent attention. Currently this fellowship is offered only to individuals or groups based in India, but exceptional cases may be considered.
The Tasveer Ghar Fellowship 2007 is for a period of 6 months, starting June 2007. The last date for the submission of proposals is April 30, 2007.
More information on applying is available at www.tasveerghar.net or by writing to tasveerghar@gmail.com