Review of: " Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday things " by, Donald A. Norman (paperback 2005); New York, Basic Books.

Ian J. Ewart, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford

I had to like this book, it was a matter of principle. Being an engineer turned archaeo/anthropologist, I am constantly frustrated by the lack of consideration in material culture studies of the processes which go into creating objects. Consumption has been in recent years dragged from the anthropological skip, cleaned up, and put on show at the front of the house. Where Exchange used to be the be-all and end-all of analytical tools, now Consumption has been very successfully added to the mix. We can now debate issues of consumption as anthropologically charged, relevant and intellectually stimulating.

But what’s happened to Production recently? Traditionally filed under ‘M for Marxism’, there is more to making things than meets the eye, at least that eye which is cast over the literature on material culture. We have to some extent broken away from the ‘Art paradigm’ (hurrah!) and seen a fruitful move into, for example, the mundane, the sacred and the downright tacky. Initially debated along the lines of whether these things should be collected and displayed, or what rights they have to be elevated to the academic centrefield, alongside the more deserving and implicitly more scholarly ‘Works of Art’, a more enlightened outlook now prevails. However, I think now is the time to throw some of this enlightenment into new and shaded areas. Let’s begin to re-think issues of Production: for starters, how about the process of conceptualisation-design-manufacture? Or re-aligning ‘Technology’ as an anthropological concept, representing something other than hi-tech, or development assistance? What about Materiality as material choices of socially charged appropriateness? Never mind Picasso ‘borrowing’ African art, what about borrowed Technology? (cold weather clothing and indigenous plant pharmaceutics immediately spring to mind). This is surely a fertile field yet to be harvested.

Coming back to ‘Emotional Design’ (if I was ever there), this book is written by Don Norman, a prolific author whose background is in cognitive science and design. Some of the points he makes are familiar to anyone who has studied material culture, although he is explicitly Western and modern in his outlook. This does jar slightly on occasion, such as his list of genetically programmed affects (29-30), which are within us all as a result of evolutionary forces. One negative affect (sic) for example, is a fear of jungles and forests. I need to bear that in mind next year when visiting the Kelabit in the rainforests of Borneo. Similarly in discussing why attractive things work better, he sidesteps debates about universal aesthetics and assures us that the Jaguar E type is undeniably attractive. That may be true, but the basis of his argument I feel is somewhat weakened by not engaging with some of these debates. Having said that, Norman is a cognitive scientist interested in the design and use of modern products, so it is perhaps understandable that he should concentrate on those societies which are the prime movers in his field. As a branch of anthropology, material culture studies would need to be a little more circumspect in its assertions, and there are some here (such as those mentioned above) which need to be treated with caution.

What I want to do though, is to use this book as an example of a way in which we can draw on the work of a different discipline to illuminate our own subject of study. Norman uses this book to outline his theory explaining why we love or hate everyday things, a general topic of central interest to us all. In the process of design (which I suggested above was one facet of Neo-Productionism), Norman considers three ‘Levels of Design’: visceral, behavioural and reflective. By considering each of these in turn, he provides a cognitive model for the nature of objects. The ‘visceral’ level is the basis for his discussion on attractiveness, dealing with appearance and the emotional response thereof. For Norman, this is a natural state, something intrinsic in all human beings, coming from our evolutionary relationship with the environment: bright colours, sweet tastes, organic shapes that sort of thing. Although the cross-cultural universalities are perhaps overstated, the general point is a good one; positive emotional response comes from aesthetically pleasing design. Secondly, the ‘behavioural’ level deals with the functioning of an object. Performance and usability matter. This raises interesting issues of the design process, for example the use to which a product is put, versus the use for which the product is designed. We are familiar with the idea of an object being appropriated in culturally specific ways, but how was the original concept used or abused in generating that variety, and what is the response from, and influence on, future designs? For example, products can be made to have built-in difficulty, whether a piano or a blowpipe, to create a cult of secrecy and awe, but how is this justified socially and in terms of engineering? Consider also jeans designed to fade in a particular way, such that they retain a trace of use (a wallet mark on the front pocket for example), hence enhancing their emotional attachment.

Norman’s third category is ‘reflective’ design. He discusses how we respond to objects (or in many of his case studies, brands) in a culturally controlled way. Reflective design is aimed at producing a self image which is projected to those around us in a way that distinguishes our personality, values and aspirations. These signals are of course not only projected, but also received, and it is the reception that determines the message. So reflective design is a complex interaction of personal meanings and communal messages; a typical enough area for current material culture studies, but one which Norman discusses from a slightly different perspective, as part of the design (and I would argue production) process.

Norman concludes by saying ‘we are all designers’ in that we use objects in innovative ways particular to ourselves, which may not (or perhaps may) have been intended by the design process. He approaches what is quite mainstream material culture studies without intending to do so. As a cognitive scientist and a designer, his interest, and indeed my own, is in the way that objects come into being in a physical way, prior to but at the same time part of, their use, re-use and disposal. Although this book is in many ways flawed anthropologically, it does suggest an avenue for investigation, a new direction for material culture studies, and one which I wholeheartedly recommend. Now, where did I put my Lemonnier…

Posted by at 4:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

The journal Siberian Studies has an excellent online edition dedicated to a dissection of culture as/and property, focused regionally on the former USSR and close territories. Of particular note is a great article by Barbara Bodenhorn called, Is Being Inupiaq a form of cultural property?, as well as a discussion of shamanism and museum collections by Thomas Miller, and writing on Russian Museums (Julia Kupina) and Repatriation in Alaska (Sonia Lührmann). Follow the link:

www.siberian-studies.org/publications/cultprop.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links

Christa Salamandra, Lehman College, City University of New York

Over the past decade, Syria has developed a television drama industry rivaling that of Egypt, long the center of Arab media production. With the spread of satellite technologies and the proliferation of Arabic language satellite stations, Syrian dramatic miniseries, musalsalat, reach ever-widening audiences throughout the Arab world and in numerous diasporic communities beyond. The industry has become powerful and prominent, and its products increasingly technically refined. An average of thirty, thirty- episode Syrian series now air each Ramadan—the prime Arab broadcast season—in what industry figures have dubbed al-fawrah al-dramiyyah, “outpouring of drama” (Dick, in press). With this expansion, television drama has become the contemporary Syrian cultural form par excellence. But for many television makers, this success reflects the steep cost of economic liberalization, a process rife with bittersweet consequences. My fieldwork among Damascus-based TV makers examines the processes of liberalization, regionalization and Islamization from the point of view of Syria’s largely secular artistic and intellectual community.

Syrian television has become a key symbol of national culture, transforming both the way Syrians see themselves in relation to other Arabs, and their image in the Middle East and beyond. Syrian historical series are taken so seriously as to produce diplomatic tensions. For instance, the Turkish government took issue with references to the Armenian genocide in Najdat Ismael Anzour’s Brothers of the Earth of 1996. More recently, American officials lobbied complaints about the perceived anti-Semitism of 2003’s The Diaspora. Most dramatically, the US managed to persuade Qatar State Television to suspend broadcast of the Road to Kabul, a Syrian-Jordanian co-production, after eight episodes. The Americans feared the series’ sympathetic depiction of mujahadeen fighting the Soviets would attract new recruits to the Iraqi insurgency (Dick, 2006).

The Syrian television industry parallels and reflects the transformations Syria’s deBa’thification process is producing. Throughout most of its history, Syrian television was state-owned as well as state controlled; its employees uniformly low in status and relatively impoverished. A move toward economic liberalization in 1991 opened the door to a mushrooming of private production companies. Syrian television now attracts, and to varying degrees employs, writers, directors, photographers, visual artists, designers, composers, musicians and actors, from various sectarian, regional and class backgrounds. The emergence of a star system has produced increasing social fragmentation, as some have become wealthy and famous, and many more struggle.

The television industry encompasses entire local intellectual and artistic communities, and situates them in a growing pan-Arab regional market where numerous, well-financed, private and state-owned satellite stations buy Syrian productions. Industry discourses reflect the dilemmas facing Syria’s artists and intellectuals, whose world has widened. Syrian television is increasingly transnational, but must operate within the confines of a state whose attitude towards the medium remains ambivalent. Sometimes the state embraces TV as an emblem of Syrian national culture, or a safety valve for oppositional voices. At others it tightens the reigns on television’s potential subversion. Usually, television drama appears a low priority on the state’s agenda. While government censorship persists, public sector involvement in other aspects of production shrinks. Syrian state television produces an occasional low-budget musalsal, and also buys some privately produced series. But it is the Gulf Cooperation Council satellite television stations, both private and public, that finance and purchase the bulk of Syrian programming. Producers argue that a lack of state regulation exposes them to the capriciousness of Gulf business practice. While Egypt’s foreign ministry has taken upon itself the role of distributor, marketing packages of series to Gulf channels, the Syrian state has left its TV makers to fend for themselves in a competitive market. As one scenarist argues: “We have become like vegetable peddlers, selling series out of sacks on our backs as if they were potatoes.”

A sense of disenfranchisement permeates the industry. Syrian TV makers are aware of-–indeed perhaps exaggerate—the power of their medium to transform Syrian society, and often see themselves at the vanguard of a modernizing process. They feel that GCC domination of the market has usurped this important role. Elitist assumptions about mass culture persist in the absence of ratings or formal channels for viewer feedback. TV producers see Arab audiences as unsophisticated and impressionable. Viewers, they believe, will absorb and conform to television’s messages. Industry figures argue that the potential for promoting progressive political or social agendas has actually decreased with regionalization. As a pioneer director put it, “in the old days, we were poor, but our art was our own. We produced work that we felt was good for Syria. Now we have become like merchandise, slaves to a bunch of Bedouin who have no appreciation for our urban civilization.”

Even if TV makers were able to “say” what they liked, the current media cacophony would likely drown out their voices. As viewer choice widens, social and political impact narrows. Increased drama production and expanded satellite access have obliterated the annual media sensations that once both united the national audience in the act of viewing and responding. In place of the singular Ramadan television event of the early 1990’s are some thirty Syrian musalsalat, aired on numerous terrestrial and Arab satellite stations, both private and public. One informant recently calculated that a viewer would have to spend ten hours a day watching TV during Ramadan to get an accurate sense of the drama series on offer.

Drama, once the centerpiece of Arab television production, no longer dominates the primetime, in Ramadan or the rest of the broadcast year. The musalsal, perhaps the oldest local genre, and the one Syria arguably dominates, now cohabits a televisual torrent of game shows and reality TV from Lebanon, and the news-as-entertainment debate shows offered by Al-Jazeera and its many competitors. A resurgent Egyptian television drama industry, recovered from a slump during late 1990s, adds its own numerous muslasalat to the Ramadan mix.

Funding exigencies and foreign competition have not curtailed experimentation, as Syrian series encompass a broad range of styles, genres, settings, and topics. Production has become increasingly sophisticated. As budgets swell technical standards soar. In the mid 1990s Syrian directors moved their cameras outdoors; land and cityscapes distinguish Syrian dramas from their studio-filmed Egyptian counterparts. Yet amid the “outpouring”, two dominant themes emerge: an exploration of local resistance against foreign occupation and evocations of Imperial Islam. Najdat Ismail Anzour’s stylistically groundbreaking 1993 adaptation of Hanna Mina’s novel End of a Brave Man, featured the struggle of costal villagers against French Mandate forces, and his Brothers of the Earth depicted the uprising against the Turks in southern Syria. Folkloric touches such as the distinctive white embroidery-trimmed shawls featured in End of a Brave Man touched many viewers who left the countryside in the massive urbanization process of the late 20th century. But cities dominate center stage in Syrian TV dramas. Damascus of the early nationalist period—late Ottoman and French Mandate—provides the setting for numerous recent dramas, notably the works of Damascene director Bassam al-Malla. In Damascene Days (Ayyam Shamiyyah) of 1993, Bygone Days (al-Khawali) of 2001 Salhiyyah Nights (Layali Salhiyyah) of 2004, and The Quarter Gate (Bab al-Harah) of 2006, al-Malla married themes of local authenticity and resistance to Ottoman Turkish occupation. Affectionately-draw caricatures of everyday life—barber, baker, quilt maker and hummus-seller—with humorously exaggerated Damascene accents, become slices of the everyday life of old. The works of screenwriter Fouad Sharbaji, such as Abu Kamel, Part 2 of 1994 and The Midwife (al-Daya) of 2003 depict the Damascenes’ struggle against the French, emphasizing politics rather than folklore. Such series may have been intended as nation building celebrations of community united against oppression; yet they often provoked fierce discursive battles among both producers and viewers. Perceived inaccuracies, and depictions of collaboration with the Ottomans and the French, angered many. Others took issue with allegedly sanitized depictions of the city, its past and its people.

Series set in the golden ages of Islamic empire are replacing treatments of the more recent, more sensitive, and more local, Syrian past. Biopics of heroic figures such as Saladin and Omar al-Khayyam, and historical epics depicting the Ummayad and Abbassid eras seem designed for pan-Arab audiences. Islamic Spain—Andalusia—forms a significant subset of these, notably in the works of director Hatem ‘Ali. Big-budget dramas, such as Cordoba Spring (Rubi’ Qurtuba) 2003, Hawk of the Quraysh (Saqr Quraysh) 2002, Zaman al-Wasl (Time of Joining) 2002, Petty Kingdoms (Muluk al-Tawa’if) 2005, and Murabitun al-Andalus (about the Murabitun Dynasty) 2005, combine elaborate period sets, luxurious costumes, and extra-filled battle scenes with themes of good and evil, Muslim community against foreign enemy. Ambiguous references to contemporary politics and society encoded in these distant historical narratives can be ignored by censors and denied by producers. They avoid the social complexities of the contemporary world, gliding past conservative GCC censors, and appealing to GCC buyers.

Many industry “have nots”, those who either refuse to join or were left out of the most lucrative projects, argue that Golden Age themes pander to two dreaded enemies: the Syrian regime, and the Islamist movements. Themselves largely secular Muslims, Syrian cultural producers argue that heroic biopics work to bolster these two seemingly opposed forces, both united by non-urban orientations. They accuse big-budget epic producers of selling out to what critics Mazen Bilal and Najib Nusair call “prevailing values in the societies of the oil states” (1999:8). Claims of compromise become part of the competitive fray among cultural producers, reflecting a “poetics of accusation,” a mode of sociability common among elite groups in Syria (Salamandra 2004: 147). A director argues:

These works reviving the glories of the past amount to indirect support for the Islamists. The project is to make money, but the results play into the hands of the Islamists: look to the past, look to our own values, which should be revived. Their major crime is that they glorify the past, falsify the present, and ignore the future. This trend goes along with the Arab regimes. Tribal relations and values are promoted. Islam provides a framework for this: “obey those who are leading you”. It promotes regressive social values. This is all very much blessed by the people in charge, who want everything to remain as it is. This is why we see that there is no effort to deal with the actual lives of people. This is society as expressed by the ruling system, not society as it really is.

An earlier version of this posting appears as “La télévision á l’heure de feuilleton” in
La Syrie au présent: Reflects d’une société, Baudoiun Dupret, Zuhair Ghazzal, Youssef Courbage and Muhammed al-Dbiyat, eds. Paris: Actes Sud, 2007, pp. 469-475.

References

• Bilal, Mazen and Najeeb Nusair. 1999. al-Drama al-Tarikhiyyah al-Suriyyah: Hilm Nihiyat al-‘Asr (Syrian Historical Drama: The Dream of the End of an Era). Damascus: Dar al-Sham.

• Dick, Marlin. 2006. “The State of the Musalsal: Arab Televsion Drama and the Politics of the Satellite Era”, Transnational Broadcasting Journal, 15.

• Salamandra, Christa. 2004. A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Posted by at 4:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology PhD

The Wellcome Collection opened its doors to the public in June of 2007. The museum is housed within the Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road in central London. This was the original site of the first Wellcome Museum that opened in 1913 as an educational tool for professionals interested in science and the history of medicine. Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), after establishing a pharmaceutical empire, began an ambitious project of collecting artifacts across time and space that were related to understanding the human body and curing its ailments. The collection grew to immense proportions, attaining one million objects in the 1930s, most of which are ethnographic artifacts. After many decades in storage and a brief appearance in a major exhibition at the British Museum in 2003 focusing on Wellcome and his collecting ventures “Medicine Man,” and serving as part of a literary experiment in a collection of short stories based on a handful of objects in “The Phantom Museum,” the forgotten collection has finally found a permanent exhibition space.

The Wellcome Collection houses permanent galleries and temporary exhibitions, as well as a library. The core of the museum is a space designed to echo an early twentieth century exhibition space where 500 objects of Wellcome’s original collection are on view, displayed by object type as they would have been given the taxonomical trends during his lifetime. The gallery is divided in sections such as “beginning of life” with objects related to fertility, birth and conception; “end of life” with artifacts used for mortuary practices, funerals, and death rituals; “understanding the body” with a display on acupuncture, nails and x-rays, among many. Other sections are entirely devoted to a type of object like “masks,” “votive offerings,” “metal instruments” and “artificial limbs.” Certain objects are presented more like curiosities such as a lock of King George III’s hair, or Napoleon’s toothbrush. The objects are displayed in glass cases without any labels. To find out information about the object such as provenance and what it was used for, the viewer must open cabinet-like doors behind which explanatory labels are hidden.

The second permanent display is called “Medicine Now,” focusing on what has happened to medicine since Wellcome’s death in 1936. This section’s collection includes both objects related to medical practice and artworks commissioned especially for the gallery from artists asked to respond to medical issues. Three contemporary medical topics are central in this display: obesity, malaria, and genetics. Much of the exhibition focuses on exposing the disparity in medicine’s availability and development in the global North where obesity is the main illness, and the global South where people die of malaria and starvation. The last section of the exhibition invites the viewer to become part of two current research projects: the first, to find the average face, and the second to create a map of biometric identities. Although the exhibition hints at some debates in recent medicine, certain key issues are either not addressed or simply glossed over such as HIV, stem-cell research, abortion and contraception, controversies over pharmaceutical companies, the increasing reliance on antidepressants, to cite only a few.

The unfortunate silences in “Medicine Now” might be due to a lack of space to cover all of these topics, a handicap that might be remedied by using temporary exhibitions to address some of these pending issues. The current temporary exhibition, “The Heart” certainly delves into a particular body part in all its complexity. The show, curated by Emily Jo Sargent and James Peto, and on view from June 21 until September 16 2007, is comprised of scientific artifacts and artistic works. It dissects the heart as an organ that has been explored by scientists interested in finding out its role within the body, but also looks to its role as a symbol, at times thought to contain the human soul, at others understood as the container of our emotional selves. The introductory label states: “This exhibition looks at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means (…) It follows the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considers its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance.”

Acknowledging a Western bias, the exhibition includes an exploration of the material culture generated around this human bodily organ. The collection is comprised of Egyptian papyrus, 17th and 18th century anatomical illustrations, Leonardo Da Vinci drawings, film footage about the first human heart transplant in 1967, a modern perfusion machine used to substitute the heart during surgery, Aztec sacrificial knives, Sacred Heart imagery, Victorian valentine cards, a silver heart-shaped casket for Thomas Hardy’s heart, who like Livingstone’s, was subject to a separate burial, as well as specimens, both animal and human, of hearts and venal system (all the exhibitions warn the public that they contain human remains at the entrance of the galleries). Other objects include poems about hearts, as well as audio tracks of songs such as “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley and “Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams. Many contemporary artworks also pepper the gallery such as Andy Warhol’s “Heart,” Ana Mendieta’s performance pieces, and two video installations by Jordon Basemen, one showing an open heart surgery, and the other, entitled “1+1=1,” shows Patrick Williams, a recipient of transplanted lungs and heart, discussing his experience. The entire gallery is invaded by the reverberating sound of a beating heart, at first a disquieting soundtrack that soon becomes almost a part of the viewer’s own body as she navigates in the exhibition space.

This multidisciplinary show focusing on a very specific topic, a body part that is literally the core of our being, is a promising beginning for the Wellcome Collection’s temporary displays, one that allowed curators to use many objects from the original collection and library, as well as explore more recent developments and include contemporary artifacts as both specimens and artworks. Hopefully, “The Heart” will be the first of many such intricate exhibitions at this new venue.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

This is an announcement about the beginning of a research programme rather than any results. It is one of two new research projects that I will be working on over the next several years. The project is a collaboration with Mirca Madianou who teaches on media studies and sociology at Cambridge University, and it is funded by the ESRC. Our concern is with the impact of new media on the ability of people, migrants, in particular, to maintain long distance relationships. The two main groups being studied are Filipino and Caribbean migrants. We will be working largely with migrants in London and in Cambridge. Migrants from the Philippines to the UK tend to work in the National Health Service and are often here for a decade and more. Much of the concern has been with mothers separated from their children who remain in the Philippines. At one level one might think that new media such as internet and the mobile phone simply help parents to reconnect and re-establish these relationships with their children. But initial research by anthropologists such as Pertierra, Pingol and Parennas reveal a much more complex picture, and it is possible that if anything new media have negative rather than positive effects. We are also investigating other relationships such as between friends and couples.

The second research group will be people from the Caribbean and especially Trinidad and Guyana. The first wave of migrants from Trinidad were mainly working class, though more recent migrants tend to be professionals such as lawyers, accountants and doctors. In many cases they see themselves as permanent settlers though with families who are as likely to be in the US and Canada as in Trinidad. One original aspect of our research is we will be spending some time during 2008 in both the Philippines and the Caribbean looking at the other end of these same relationships. One of the aspects of this work that should be of interest to material culture studies, comes from the range of media currently available. It is already clear that different people prefer particular media such as skype, facebook, mobile phone, landlines, chat, friendster or email, either in general or for particular groups of correspondents. If time allows we would also like to work with a third group of informants, who would be uncategorised in terms of origin, but where we would hope to look in, if anything, even more detail at the specifics of how these relationships operate today. This is a different topic from most studies of migrants, but our argument is that it is the sustaining and form of relationships that is often of rather more significance to the migrants themselves than many of the more common topics of research. Obviously we would love to hear from anyone else interested in similar research.

Posted by at 4:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Patrick Laviolette, School of Visual & Material Culture, Massey University

Given the recent passing of Professor Dame Mary Douglas, I thought that some people might like read a review of Fardon’s intellectual biography of her. Even though the book is now somewhat dated, and I hear that he is planning more work on the impacts of her research, this volume is still a sophisticated tour de force on an important span of her career until about 10 years ago. As a West Africanist and one of her former students, Fardon is well qualified to produce what is a rich piece of scholarly work which, as a straightforward biography, would definitely be lacking in personal detail. Nonetheless, like Stanley Tambiah’s (2002) and Michael Young’s (2004) biographies of Edmund Leach and Bronisław Malinowski, Fardon’s profound contextual engagement with Douglas’s research is indicative of the erudite level that the reflexive history of anthropology can reach.

In this sense, like these other two biographers have done, Fardon situates himself biographically in the preface of the book, offering important insight into the ways in which ‘kinship’ networks can also exist as coherent disciplinary systems. Indeed, he even goes a step further by inferring that on occasion social anthropology can be rather incestuous intellectually - Douglas (1980) writes a biography of Evans-Pritchard; so does Burton (1992); Fardon reviews Burton’s book (1993) and writes his own about Douglas.

As a justification for providing an intellectual biography, Fardon acknowledges the idea of undermining the age-old maxim about describing the person as a means of understanding their work. Instead he follows the Viennese musician Hans Keller who reversed this truism to suggest that an in-depth knowledge of the work explains the person. This holds much truth. We come out from reading this powerful analysis of Douglas’s research as if we know her personally. And since we learn about the extent to which she has the habitus of a perpetual critic and perfectionist, it is easy to assume that she herself could never be one hundred percent happy with this text, although her abilities to find grounds to fault it were far superior to mine.

Fardon’s book is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines Douglas’s Catholic boarding school upbringing, her education at Oxford and her initial African fieldwork. Part 2 analyses and deconstructs her two most internationally renowned publications. Part 3 looks at her post 70s years in America, away from mainstream British anthropology, when she ventured into new terrain that dealt with theories of consumption, risk and religion. Part 4 analyzes her conceptual ponderings on social institutions, modernism and Durkheimian classificatory systems. In examining her early years the author demonstrates that Douglas’s Catholic exposure at The Sacred Heart Convent added a dimension of non-spatial universality to her thinking. It would equally leave lasting impressions on her interests in symbolism, ritual, institutional hierarchy and security as well as what he suggests was one of her biggest achievements – helping anthropologists take seriously the study of Western societies. Analogously perhaps, his analysis of her regimented educational upbringing has textual resonances with the anthropological documentary filmmaker David MacDougall’s ethnographic series about the Indian public school system through the five films of The Doon School Chronicles (1997/2000). Both are accounts about class and normativisation, hence reinforcing the social facets so prominent in the imperial dimensions of British anthropology.

Professor Dame Mary Douglas at a party held at UCL in honour of her DBE, from UCL Events webpage

In examining the training of anthropologists at Oxford, Fardon makes a similar point to Roy Richard Grinker (2000) in his biography of Colin Turnbull by putting forth the argument that Evans-Pritchard and Franz Steiner’s influence on Douglas was such that she acquired most of the characteristics that were archetypical of post World War II British social anthropology. That is, an African field site and a curiosity about social structures particularly in terms of the formation of groups associated with kinship lineages (pp.40-41). Given this institutional structuring mechanism of social anthropology at Oxford, the question thus arises as to why both Grinker and Fardon each omit citing or mentioning the protagonist of the other’s biography in their own.

In a rather short twenty odd pages which are disproportionately represented by a plate of five fieldwork photographs, Fardon then looks at Douglas’s research amongst the Lele. Or rather, he mostly looks at her study of the Lele, the published outcomes of that work, elaborating very little on experiential encounters or methodological strategies for how she went about doing fieldwork. Owing to what is possibly a lack of letters and similar written archive materials for this period of her life, it is nonetheless a shame in terms of a reflexive history towards the process of fieldwork that this episode of initiatory ethnographic practice is so briefly examined. This must be for me the only real shortcoming.

The biggest single emphasis of the volume, however, is on the ten years that allowed Douglas to synthesise the ideas that would become her consistent theoretical stances and would turn her into an international figure. In deconstructing her two most well known books, Fardon here uses the clever reflexive technique of offering a ‘structuralist’ analysis of Douglas’s own structuralist work and prose style (p.84). That is, he gives us a pattern for the way she formulates her arguments in writing which is recurring and forms rhetorical foundation. He demonstrates that this is present from the linking of paragraph passages, all the way through to the way the overall chapter outline of the book works as a sequence of thesis, antithesis and dismissal reinforcing initial thesis.
Fardon then goes on to explore Douglas’s attempts to establish theoretical pillars for supporting the understanding of universal forms of human behaviour as gleaned from comparative methods in social anthropology. “The juxtaposition of contemporary and exotic materials, often but not always African, has become a hallmark of her work on Western society [...] Douglas’s juxtapositions derive from her desire to create a genuinely catholic, in the sense of universal, comparative social anthropology” (p.110). This ethos would fuel an incredibly diverse and prolific career based on her oft reworked but generally consistent conceptual grid-group model. Fardon unpacks its evolution as Douglas applied it to economics and consumption, risk analysis, religion and ritual as well as institutional thought. By looking at these periods of research in her life, he effectively demonstrates the multi-dimensionality of grid-group theory whilst nonetheless providing an overview of the ways in which is has been contested and opposed.

Such an analysis of the power dynamics at the core and near the peripheries of academia allows Fardon to address a most germane issue in terms of a disciplinary reflexive history - situating Douglas within the wider rubric of British social anthropology’s modernist movement. He concludes that as an inspirational systems builder she was destined to travel a liminal path towards recognition. Indeed, the book shows that in many instances the rationale for her writings has been to bring various theories and methods of social anthropology to their logical extremes, revealing ultimate strengths and weaknesses. This was Douglas’s vision beyond the applicability of specific models or frameworks and would undoubtedly be for many the mark of a truly significant social theorist.

References

UCL Museums & Collections / Department of Anthropology

UCL Museums and Collections and the Department of Anthropology have recently been awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to document and research the ethnography collections housed at UCL.

UCL’s Ethnography Collection consists of around 3,000 artefacts of historical, educational and cultural importance from Africa, Oceania, the Americas and Asia. Most of the collection dates back well before the 1930s and includes several key objects that are instrumental to our understanding of anthropological theory, colonial history and cultural heritage – such as the kula shell armlets from the Trobriand Islands, first written about by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s.

We are seeking an enthusiastic research assistant to input ethnographic data onto a database system and research the collection. The post will involve working closely with UCL staff in museums and collections and in anthropology, as well as staff in other ethnographic museums. In addition the research assistant will play a key active role in collating data for developing a thesaurus that will be implemented for the documentation and development of the collection database system.

We particularly welcome applicants from an ethnic minority as they are under represented within UCL at this level.

Salary
Grade 6: Salary: £23,002-£24,403 (plus London Allowance £2572)
Full-time post, funded for 11 month period, starting October 2007 until end of August 2008

Application details
The deadline is 16th August 2007 with interviews in the first week of September 2007.

For further information please contact Dr Graeme Were via email: g.were@ucl.ac.uk or visit UCL Museums & Collections website on: www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/jobs

To apply please send/email a completed UCL application form explaining your suitability for the post to:

Dr Graeme Were
Head of Teaching & Research Collections
UCL Museums & Collections
c/o Department of Anthropology
University College London
14 Taviton Street
London WC1H 0BW

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The Bard Graduate Center and the American Museum of Natural History announce a Research Fellowship in Museum Anthropology. The fellowship provides support to a postdoctoral investigator to carry out a specific project over a two-year period. The program is designed to advance the training of the participant by having her/him pursue a project in association with a curator in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The Fellow will also be expected to teach one graduate-level course per year at the Bard Graduate Center (BGC). The Fellow will thus be in joint residence at BGC and AMNH. The fellowship includes free housing.

A major purpose of the BGC-AMNH Research Fellowship in Museum Anthropology is to promote mutual scholarly interest and interaction among fellows, BGC faculty and students, and AMNH staff members. Candidates for Research Fellow are judged primarily on their research abilities and experience, and on the merits and scope of the proposed research.

Candidates with a research interest in the ethnology of the Northwest Coast of North America are especially encouraged to apply for the 2008-10 fellowship. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to develop a research program in conjunction with the planned renovation of the AMNH Northwest Coast Hall. The AMNH Northwest Coast Hall is the largest, most important collection of 19th and early 20th century Native North American Northwest Coast material culture, including art, in the world. The hall remains the primary monument to Franz Boas' revolutionary argument for cultural relativism, wherein the explanation of culture is held to be explicable only within its own contexts - social, geographical, and historical.

Application Procedures: Interested researchers should send a statement of research accomplishments and intentions, curriculum vitae including list of publications, and three letters of recommendation to Research Fellowship Competition, Bard Graduate Center, 18 W.86th Street, New York NY 10024, USA. Research Fellowship applications must be postmarked by November 15, 2007. At this time, applications are not accepted by fax or e-mail.

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Mukulika Banerjee, Reader in Anthropology, University College London

This issue of the always lush and exciting journal Fashion Theory is specially welcome. At a time when there is an unprecedented interest in Islam and Muslims this volume provides a comprehensive and scholarly investigation of the most ubiquitous evidence of Islam: Muslim dress. Taking on board the common stereotypes of Islam the editors Moors and Tarlo have put together contributions which explore Muslim women’s dress in diverse settings across the Muslim world, from Mali to Indonesia and Turkey to San’a. Each essay is thought provoking and full of surprises. The choice of women’s dress as a topic is entirely apposite. Clothing matters. And it matters to and for women in richer ways, both personally and sociologically, than it does for men.

The editors point out at the outset that contrary to popular (non-Islamic) perceptions, ‘Islamic fashion’ among women is far from homogenous and the relationship between religion and clothing is variously contested across different societies. The sheer range of vocabulary to describe the veil, the mind boggling complexity of different styles of veiling (most readers won’t notice the differences in the excellent visuals without the help of the text), the completely different ways in which women who choose to veil are treated in different countries, how the same garment is viewed in totally opposed ways in different contexts, are some of the indications of this diversity. The struggles between the homogenising tendencies of governments, clerics and the influence of global fashion trends on the one hand and the diversifying tendencies among the wearers themselves is a common theme across the volume. The variations across settings are as much to do with the nature of the political regimes, the presence of Muslims as dominant majorities or significant minorities within nations as with economic forces of marketing, advertising, and the cost of materials. Through sartorial biographies of women in London, marketing strategies of designers in Iran, the influence of Arab styles and materials in south India and a host of such rich case studies, the range of tastes, markers of distinction, ideas of modernity in today’s Islamic world are all brought to life. As several contributors point out, fashion in women’s clothing can be both expressive and emancipatory and exploring the variations, syncreticism and mutability of styles across different societies and Islams, makes this point convincingly. The norm to which Islamic women aspire can be as intensely personal and created to suit their own ideas of modesty, piety and aesthetics as set by those who aim to control women’s dress.

These fine-grained studies also reveal the unexpected, phenomenological aspects of fashion with great sensitivity. Thus we learn that the choice of one type of garment over another is determined as much by trends and budget as it is by the physical quality of the cloth itself. Thus, stretchy woollen face coverings are favoured over more fixed ones for women who need to change their appearance quickly for different audiences, shinier but cheaper fabrics are favoured over more expensive but subtle ones to make an impact, judgements are made about layering depending on the sheerness of the fabric and so on. Finally, the hybrid tailored-draped nature of many of the Islamic garments adopted by women shows how far from being in any sense fixed, clothing which covers, is alive, constantly shifting, slipping, being restored and wrapped to convey various messages. This is an excellent volume that does much to further the writing on Islam and fashion in general and will quickly establish itself a staple for reading lists across disciplines.

Special Double Issue of Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body & Culture Berg Publishers Volume 11 Issue 2/3 June/September 2007 Edited by Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo

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