Reclaiming the Sacred: Implementing a Community Based Museum in Santa Maria el Tule, Oaxaca.

Monica Salas Landa, Museum Studies, NYU

Monstrance, Community Museum in Santa María el Tule

Unlike the rest of the community museums established in Mexico, usually focused on pre-Columbian traditions, agrarian histories and contemporary craft production, the museum in Santa Maria el Tule, Oaxaca is devoted to religious objects, paintings, books and antiques. These pieces were found in the local church by residents who, holding a position in the Chapel Committee, came up with the idea of creating a museum to display these pieces. They sought support from the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca and presented the project to the rest of the community during an assembly. Although the idea of making a museum was accepted by the majority, the local priest openly condemned the project. Despite the priest’s protests, the community decided to use a fraction of the annual Church donations to implement their plan. With this moral and economic support, the Church committee carried on with the venture and started working along with the Union. Is the museum a setting where clerical authority and power are put into question? Or on the contrary, is it a setting where religious objects become a vehicle to challenge the picturesque way the Mexican State has imagined and represented both- indigenous and peasant communities- as carriers of a glorious pre-Hispanic past and a traditional culture?

Santa Maria el Tule is a small municipio (municipality) located in Oaxaca’s Central Valley, 6 miles west of the state capital, Oaxaca City. The community takes its name from the village patron saint, Santa Maria, and the famous ancient cypress tree, El Tule, which is a natural monument visited by tourists everyday. The church, dating from the 17th century, commands the central plaza, where the tree is also located. Together they compose the dominant landmark and form tourist industry of the town.

Santa Maria el Tule

As in many other villages in Mexico, life in Santa Maria el Tule is governed by popular religiosity. Especially in Southern Mexico, popular religion has been understood as a syncretic fusion of Mesoamerican and Catholic beliefs. Since the conquest, the clergy has attempted to impose Catholic orthodoxy by prohibiting folk practices and rituals. Today, an important aspect of “Folk Catholicism” especially in indigenous but also mestizo communities, like Santa Maria el Tule, is the cargo or mayordomia system. This civil-religious hierarchy is based on ranked offices that together comprised a community’s public, civil and religious administration. The men in the community aspire to attain lifelong positions in the hierarchy, which brings prestige and influence, but also requires a generous financial outlay, (Chance and Taylor 1985).
Besides its colonial origins, and the social inequalities it reinforces within the communities, the cargo system is also understood as a manifestation of spiritual authority and political resistance (Russ and Wassertorm 1980:466-477). According to Chance (1985:2-22), during the period of post-revolutionary consolidation in Mexico, the cargo system in many states such as Oaxaca began to decline. The State sponsored an “anti-mayordomia” campaign which portrayed the institution as wasteful and primitive. The system was abolished in many villages, but in many others such as Santa Maria el Tule it endured.

In July 2007, the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca invited me to work with the Church Committee of Santa Maria el Tule. The Committee, one of the most influential, prestigious and esteemed in the local cargo, was responsible not only for maintaining the chapel and organizing saints’ festivities, but also for the implementation of the community museum. Since my fist visit I was aware of the political significance of the project. The museum location in the main plaza, next to the patron saint and sanctuary, was revealing: the museum is located in a sacred space which historically, has symbolized community identity and autonomy (Bantjes 2006:147).

For one month I worked with the members of the Church Committee. They explained to me that, as guardians of the temple, they needed to be with me every time I wished to work in the museum space. Their company and public support not only legitimized my work but also justified my presence in the village. Each day, at least one member of the Committee would open the doors of the museum space for me, and together we would measure, clean, and photograph most of the pieces that became part of the collection. Surprisingly for me, most of the items “selected” were orthodox ceremonial objects regularly used by parish priests: crucifixes, corporals, old bibles, and chasubles among many others. There was no popular imagery that could represent the “Folk Catholicism” (specific rituals, beliefs, organizations) that not only gave birth to the museum project but also characterized the community.


Ciborium. Community Museum in Santa Maria el Tule

Although the museum was intending to show conventional religious content, the parish priest discarded the project from the beginning and suggested it would be better to “turn everything into ashes”. Defiantly, the members of the Church Committee decided that the antiques found in “their” church should be “invested” in a way that benefited the community. The members of the Church committee believed that if displayed in a museum context, the objects could be incorporated to the local tourist industry, which is mostly controlled by local people.

There were several occasions in which the whole Committee met in the museum space while I was doing my work. The parish priest’s discomfort was a recurrent theme in the conversations held between them. I realized the museum was not simply a neutral ground for presenting religious art but rather a site where clerical authority was being contested. Don Enrique, the president of the committee, once told me that the parish priest felt he had been excluded from the project, “What happened, is that nobody asked for his permission…the priest thinks we still live in the times before the Revolution, when people used to listen to whatever they had to say”.

Chasuble. Community Museum in Santa Maria el Tule

Don Enrique’s response depicts the long history of popular anticlericalism that has existed in Mexico. As Bantjes (2006:144) pointed out, the role of the village priests has always been controversial mainly because of the authority they exercise, their close ties with elites, and their engagement in business. Don Enrique, once commented “You know, the priest charges a fee to the foreigners who want to celebrate mass in this Church. But he does not tell them that we (The Church Committee) also required a donation because, at the end, this is the community’s Church not the priest’s”. Anticlericalism was also a key element in the popular liberalism that framed the revolutionary struggle during the 20´s, a struggle that led to the inhabitants of El Tule to reclaim land a decade later. Today, conflicts over control of these communal terrains are not rare and often involve clerical authority. According to Don Enrique, the priest demanded control over a fraction of the communal lands a few years ago. The community, during an assembly, decided not to accept the priest’s petition: “that was something he did not like at all”, he said. Don Enrique’s remarks and stories illustrate how this liberal anticlericalism is still part of local discourses of autonomy that frame the creation of this community museum. The first day Don Enrique, took me for a walk to visit the main plaza, he said to me, pointing to the recently renovated Church façade: “We are the ones who take care of all this: the Tree, the Chapel and now the museum, we don’t received any help neither from the Church nor for the State””.

In Mexico, the battle for cultural hegemony essentially involves the church, the state and the people. The relationship between these three elements has always been extremely complex and ambiguous. The creation of the community museum in Santa Maria el Tule reflects these historical conflicts, which are an integral part of the nation-building process.

After the antiques were found in the Church of Santa Maria el Tule, conflicts over their meaning, ownership, and future arose. Were they sacred material? Or were they mere objects once used by clergy? Did the objects belong to the priest, or did they belong to the community? Which vision of the sacred are they representing? Why should a museum be created? The community’s final appropriation of the orthodox religious objects was an attempt of the village to gain control over local religion and tourism. The community sought to raise money through the display of these objects for the benefit of their local economy and their own religious organizations. The integration of the museum into the local tourist industry is a way of inverting the traditional order in which, the clergy gains economic benefits from the community.
The religious objects displayed in the museum also become a medium to criticize the “State’s Utopian Projects” (Vaughan and Lewis 2006:9). For example, the discourse of indigenismo is rejected when the Indian component of the population, traditionally exalted in state museums, is absent. In the same way, the liberal discourse that considers popular religiosity and fanaticism an obstacle for modernization is put into question. Through the appropriation and display of religious antiques, the authority of both, the Church and the State is being challenged.

References
Bantjes A. 2006. 'Saints, Sinners, and State Formation: Local Religion and Cultural Revolution'. In The Eagle and the Virgin, edited by M. Vaughan and S. Lewis, pp. 137-156.Duke University Press, Durham.

Chance, J. y W. Taylor 1985. 'Cofradías and Cargos: An Historical Perspective on the Mesoamerican Civil-Religious Hierarchy'. American Ethnologist 12(1):1-26.

Russ, J. and R. Wasserstrom 1980. 'Civil- Religious Hierarchies in Central Chiapas: a Critical Perspective'. American Ethnologist 7(3): 466-477.

Vaughan, M. and S. Lewis 2006. 'Introduction'. In The Eagle and the Virgin. M. Vaughan and S. Lewis (eds) pp. 2-20. Duke University Press, Durham.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Daniel Miller, UCL

Please do visit www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project This is the web address of a scheme designed to bring together what we hope will be an increasing number of projects on the topic of denim. The project is being announced in a paper called A Manifesto for the Study of Denim by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward which is being published in the next issue of the Journal of Social Anthropology. The abstract of the paper follows:-

This paper considers the challenge to anthropology represented by a topic such as global denim. Using the phrase ‘blindingly obvious’ it considers the problems posed by objects that have become ubiquitous. While there are historical narratives about the origins, history and spread of denim, these leave open the issue of how we make compatible the ethnographic study of specific regional appropriations of denim and its global presence in a manner that is distinctly anthropological. Ethnographies of blue jeans in Brazil and England are provided as examples. These suggest the need to understand the relationship between three observations: its global presence, the phenomenon of distressing and its relationship to anxiety in the selection of clothes. As a manifesto, this paper argues for a global academic response that engages with denim from the global commodity chain through to the specificity of local accounts of denim wearing. Ultimately this can provide the basis for an anthropological engagement with global modernity.

One of the main arguments in this paper is that at least occasionally it would be helpful if social anthropology tried to be social. Instead of everyone picking topics on the basis that no one was studying the same topic, perhaps we could occasionally pick topics because many people were agreeing to study the same thing in different ways over the same period. The Global Denim Project is an attempt to persuade as many academics as possible to consider studying denim over the next five years. Hopefully these will include historians, people concerned with the economics of the industry, and the cosmological significance it represents as a tension between global ubiquity and the personalisation of distressing. Miller and Woodward have now begun an ethnography of denim wearing in three streets in North London. Other projects range from a study of denim, sexuality and the body in Italy, to a study of trashed denim shoddy and its uses in recycling (until recently a third of US dollar bills were denim shoddy). Other proposals include denim in China, Japan and Korea, a study of how blue jeans record the movements of the body in their wear, and a proposal to work on the pressures towards ethical trade in denim in Turkey and Brazil. Brief outlines may be found on the global denim site. The point is that this is a global phenomenon and would be much better understood through collaboration between many projects. Think open-source academia. So if anyone out there would like to consider working on any aspect of denim over the next five years, a) go for it b) please contact me at d.miller@ucl.ac.uk and send something for the global denim project. Similarly if you know of anyone working on this topic please ask them to get in touch with d.miller@ucl.ac.uk

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Jana Carrey, MA Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

“The thing about camp is that no matter who you may be back in the valley you can start over here; you can take off your mask and try out different ways of dealing with other people. Because people here won't judge you, you can decide what kind of person you want to be.”*

“Envisioning Normality” looks at how youth with serious illnesses, chronic disorders and disabilities maintain a sense of normality in their life and how they seek to define their identity in the face of continual life disruption and physical limitation. Marrying a documentary realist style with participant observation-based ethnography, this project looks at the embodied illness experience from an adolescent and childhood perspective. This work explores how positive self-image and identity reconstruction are encouraged by participating in the embodied and collective social experience of summer camp in rural, upstate New York.

Taken from a larger ethnographic project, the selected images focus specifically on how campers “perform normality” to fit culturally prescribed roles in relation to their own bodily perception and self-image. Childhood is a series of performances for a variety of audiences and through exploring different roles, children learn who they are and want to be. This view of childhood performance goes beyond the idea of actors masking another reality and instead looks at performance as a way to define personal narrative. Through the embodied performance of normality, campers can transform the meanings attached to their illness whilst reconstructing a more positive body and self-image.

This project also involves the use of photography as a collaborative and therapeutic tool through which children can reflect upon themselves and how their experiences at camp impact their developing sense of self. Campers were taught to use digital cameras and through a series of reflexive exercises explored topics ranging from nature photography to selfportraiture.

For more information on the ethnographer/photographer or this project please see the website http://janacarrey.scarrey.com/jana.htm and reference the accompanying book under Visual Anthropology Work, Envisioning Normality: The Ethnographic Photographic Essay.

* Anonymous quote taken from “Tillery, Randal K. 1992. Touring Arcadia: Elements of discursive
simulation and cultural struggle at a children’s summer camp. In Cultural Anthropology 7 (3): 374-
388.”

Posted by Graeme Were at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

P. Allen Roda, Ph.D. candidate Music Dept., NYU

Organologists (those who study musical instruments) have generally focused on instrument design, classification, and the use of instruments in ‘traditional’ settings. In so doing, they have tended to take the relationship between humans and instruments for granted, rather than investigate the myriad ways in which this relationship is manifest in human – instrument encounters. This point of view lead Margaret Kartomi to assert that “musical instruments are fixed, static objects that cannot grow or adapt in themselves” (2001:305). In this overview, I adopt a point of view best expressed by Nicholas Thomas, that “objects are not what they were made to be, but what they have become” (1991:4).

Fig. 1: golf club sheath or didjeridu?

I propose that by studying the intimacy of their sonic relationships, the physical experience of bodies interacting, and the cultural and intellectual knowledge that musical instruments embody and transfer; the musical instrument – human relationship could be a unique realm of analysis for a new organology that both draws from and contributes to an interdisciplinary approach to the human/non-human relationship. In order to understand the relationship between humans and musical instruments it will be necessary for organologists to use tools and methodologies from other disciplines such as the anthropology of material culture, actor network theory, and phenomenology.

The study of material culture has a long history in the social sciences dating back to what Germain Bazin (1967) has termed 'the Museum Age', a period starting in the 19th Century, in which the material artifacts of a given society were organized and displayed for the purpose of showing the social evolution of primitives en route to European Civilization. Distance in space was conflated with distance in time as 'foreign' or 'primitive' items were presented as emblematic of Europe’s past (Miller 1987). Later anthropological studies focused on the role of material objects in exchange and exchange itself as the foundation of social relationships. Building upon these works, anthropologists and sociologists began to think of about the role of material objects in post-industrial society – a role that many see as constituted by consumption.

Daniel Miller defines consumption as work which “translates the object from an alienable to an inalienable condition; that is from being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artefact invested with particular inseparable connotations” (Miller 1987:190). For Miller, consumption is a productive process of cultural, social and self creation. He refuses to let the consumer be reduced to the status of the commodity. Drawing upon Hegel’s notion of 'objectification' as the process through which subjects and objects are mutually constituted, Miller concludes that our very self awareness is dependent upon our ability as subjects to interact with the external world. Neither subject nor object exists independently; subsequently neither should be analyzed independently.

This strategy for analysis has been adopted by a branch of sociology called Actor Network Theory which has pointed out that all encounters between humans, between non-humans, or between humans and non-humans are mediated by social relationships (Latour 2005). The internet, our computers, and the social history of their production all mediate my relationship with you as readers as well as our more abstract joint interest in material culture. Rather than focus on the actor, whether it be human or non-human, Actor Network Theory argues for a focus on the network of relations that are forged between various actors in social interaction. According to this logic, organologists would cease to study musical instruments at all as it would be impossible to isolate 'the instrument itself' from any social encounter. Though I support this line of reasoning, I do not wish to discredit the valuable organological research undertaken through more traditional methods.

Fig. 2: author playing his DIY didjeridu

Now I would like to draw your attention to Figures 1 and 2. Once I learned from Dennis Havlena’s web site (Havlena 2007) that 'ready made didgeridoos' were for sale at Kmart for 97 cents in the sporting goods department where they are called 'golf club sheaths', I set out immediately to find one – and indeed found one in my late grandfather’s set of golf clubs in my parents’ basement. Now it is a didjeridu. Listen to a sound sample by:
Download file
I want you to think about the significance of this event. What does it mean for me, a white male representative of the Academy to proclaim ‘this is a didjeridu’. What power relationships are being enacted? Who agrees or not with my proclamation? Who might contest my authority to define didjeridus in this fashion? How did this object and I come to relate to each other in this particular way? Why do I not call it a mini-alphorn, a lur, or von Hornbostel-Sachs? If I leave this on a train accidentally and someone else finds it, what will it be for them? How might it affect them? How might it change if I ceremoniously present it to a future grandchild or encase it in glass at a prestigious institution? As I briefly review the various complex and overlapping relationships between musical instruments and humans which can be: sonic, commercial, physical, and/or museological – that is to say mediated by practices of classification and display.

The Sonic Relationship - Listening
In general, musical instruments are primarily dedicated to producing or modifying sound – a characteristic which separates them from other entities that also make sound (such as alarm clocks, refrigerators and medical equipment). This distinction is created primarily by the intimacy of the sonic relationship between musical instruments and humans. One example is didjeridu healing as practiced in various ‘new age’ communities around the world in which the sound of the instrument is thought to ‘envelop’ or ‘open’ the patient. Some patients believe that the sound waves emitted by the instrument penetrate their body and align their energy centers to facilitate healing. In describing his practice, Hans Schuldheiss says, “The didgeridoo creates a sound bubble around the client, creating a sense of well-being and relaxation” (Ellis 2005). Perhaps for Schuldheiss and his patients, the golf club sheath is a piece of medical equipment. For me, it's a musical instrument; for my grandfather it was a golf club sheath; for the Federal Transit Authority it is a potential weapon. What something ‘is’ depends on our relationship with it.

Drawing on extensive studies of the relation of music to language, Steven Feld and Aaron Fox demonstrate that music, even instrumental music, can convey emotion and has communicative capabilities (Feld & Fox 1994). Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetics’ articulates numerous ways in which we can communicate information without the use of referential speech, many of which are found in music (Jakosbson 1995). The sound of musical instruments can make people laugh, cry, scream – or even surrender (Cusick 2007).

Don Ihde writes of the ‘voices of objects’, claiming that the sounds different objects make reveal something about their material nature, their interiority, and the space in which they make sound. He rightfully points out that most objects do not make sound on their own, but in duets or complex polyphonies – that is to say that it is not just the sound of the drum skin that we hear but also that of the stick or the hand and the room in which we are present (Ihde 1986).

The sound of musical instruments reveals more than just their physical characteristics and their relationship with acoustic space, however. In describing the inseparability of hearing from listening, David Sudnow (1979) points out that the human mind makes associations and judgments at the moment of perception. We do not hear in the same way that tape recorders do, though sometimes we imagine that we do. Subsequently, the sounds of musical instruments also invoke a variety of connections in the ears/minds of the listeners. These connections are related to each listener’s familiarity or lack thereof with the sound of any given musical instrument.

These sounds are frequently connected to particular places or cultures in the ears of listeners. Max Peter Bauman lists 59 instruments which are commonly thought to be ‘national icons’ (Baumann 2000). I would argue that all instruments invoke some sense of cultural significance whether it is related to a specific region, a national identity, or simply a sense of Otherness. I like to think of them as sonic ambassadors. For example, musical instruments are frequently brought home by tourists in an attempt to sonically invoke their tourist destination. Some work on the global trade in tourist art exists, though it focuses primarily on visual art and the tourist ‘gaze’ (Urry 2002). Perhaps future work in organology could present a study of the tourist 'ear'.

The flow of musical instruments as commodities of international trade has significant theoretical ramifications for organologists, because it helps to articulate the various types of human relationships these instruments have as they encounter different individuals over the course of what has been termed their ‘social life’. For instance, Igor Kopytoff (1986) writes of the process through which objects (specifically slaves) transform to become commodities. These changes do not occur instantly, or overnight, but are part of a process that is to be understood as dynamic, in flux, and intangible. This work could serve as a model for organological investigations into the way in which musical instruments enter the marketplace, especially when combined with Miller’s theory of consumption. An example of this type of research is Sean Murray’s paper on pianos and the 19th Century Ivory trade (Murray 2007).

The Physical Relationship – Performance, Practice and Discipline
Perhaps the most complex way in which musical instruments interact with humans is through the intimacy of musical performance and practice. Some might argue that the relation is so intimate that the distinction human and instrument is dissolved. In describing the way in which he communicates via the piano, David Sudnow (1979) describes it as an extension of himself – another medium he uses for sonic expression beyond that of his vocal cords. When I think of playing the didjeridu and the way in which the instrument alters and amplifies the buzzing of lips and the continuous column of breath flowing out of its orifice, it seems appropriate to think of the instrument as an extension of the player, rather than a separate entity. Scholars in many fields have found examples of intimate human/non-human interactions that blur the distinction between person and thing such as: Robert Plant Armstrong’s “works of affecting presence” which are objects that “own certain characteristics that cause them to be treated more like persons than like things” (Armstrong 1981:5); the Marx’s analysis of workers as human extensions of the machines they operate; ethnographies of the South Pacific in which ritual artifacts called Malangan are treated as part of the human life cycle (Küchler 1987. 1988); the increased usage of machines to replace internal organs in modern medicine; and various theorizations of online behavior as ‘post human’ (Haraway 1991). These types of cyborg analyses might prove useful in organologies of performance.

The relationship between player and instrument is so intimate that both are physically altered in the process – a topic that has sparked debate in organology with reference to methods of collections conservation (Fisher 2007), but needs to be addressed with regard to the effects instruments have on players. Learning to play a musical instrument shapes the player’s body through the development of certain types of dexterity and the strengthening of particular muscles in a way that resembles the active relationship humans have with sports equipment as opposed to the passive bodily shaping of desk chairs. Often, however, there is more to learning than just going through the motions: for example, in learning to play golf, one’s arms strengthen while learning how to swing a club, yet at the same time one also learns to embody ‘appropriate’ behaviors on the golf course. Similarly, when learning to play the piano, one learns to identify oneself with the culture of that repertoire whether it be Scott Joplin, Mozart, or church hymns. However, one also learns the fundamentals of music theory, chord progressions and cadences, major scales and the spatial orientation of intervals. The same could be said for any theory of music with regard to any instrument. Learning to play a musical instrument involves learning about the relationship between sounds in time. It impacts the student physically, culturally, and intellectually and creates a truly unique human/non-human relationship.

When learning to play musical instruments of different cultures, frequently players begin to identify themselves with romanticized notions of that instrument’s culture of origin as the those origins get filtered through the player’s individual experience. Yet as players associate themselves with the instrument and its culture, the instrument gets associated with the players and their culture. Through a slow, gradual process, the didjeridu can be transformed from an ‘Aboriginal instrument’ to a ‘hippy new age instrument’. Its connection to Aboriginal Australia gets blurred by numerous connections to both specific and generic tropes of Otherness such as: yoga, Eastern meditation and mysticism, chakras, crystals, African drumming, and Native American shamanism. The didjeridu will always index Australia, but that index gets subsumed by an index of ‘hippy new-age culture’ which consists of various appropriations of Otherness and recontextualizations of material culture (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Tribal Soundz Store on 6th Street in NYC

The process of recontextualization does not occur silently, however, but through discourse, and control over discourse is power (Baumann & Briggs 1992, Chakrabarty 2000). Those who have the power to (re)contextualize musical instruments control this transformative process. Indigenous people do not control the main channels of discourse – academia, media, and commerce. Subsequently, they are unable to pigeonhole the European Diaspora into their own imagined stereotypes. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples are able to transform the musical instruments they appropriate from western society.

According to David Samuels (2004) in his ethnography of the Western Apache, electric guitars were not only signs of resistance (in this case resistance against being frozen in time by ‘traditional’ ideas of what it means to be Apache), but they were also symbols of status and coveted commodities associated with successful Anglo-American bands. The concept of the Apache themselves as a fixed identity, already recognized as problematic by Samuels and others, is no less problematic than the concept of the electric guitar as a fixed identity. According to Samuels, the Apache with whom he worked appropriated the electric guitar as a sign of resistance, as well as an icon of the material wealth of the West or a romanticized notion of that material wealth. Romanticized notions of a musical instrument’s culture of origin accompany it to new contexts regardless of whether the flow of instruments is moving from the Rest to the West or in the opposite direction.

The Museological Relationship – Classification and Display
Classifying musical instruments is an exercise of power through control over discourse. Despite Kartomi’s call for increased awareness of indigenous instrument classification systems, organologists still refer to the kora as a ‘harped lute’ or a ‘lute harp’ defining it in European terms and forging a relationship between instruments that have no historical connection. The power of classificatory discourse is most obvious when non-western scholars use European instruments to define musical instruments from their own country (Cavour-Aramayo 2003). As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, there could be no ‘ethnographic objects’ without ethnographers (1998). Writing ethnography is also a performance of power.

James Clifford (Clifford 1988) points out that displaying objects as emblematic of a group of people has a tendency to ‘concretize’ them, to freeze them in the time and place in which those objects were made. In my opinion, and that of Actor Network Theorists, not only do the people get frozen in time through their association with this particular instrument, but the instrument is frozen in time through its association with a particular group of people. By constantly reminding the public that the accordion is a European instrument, museums are actively erasing the way in which the instrument has been transformed by other groups of people throughout the world and subsequently placing value judgments on those transformations as being somehow ‘less authentic’ than the instrument’s cultural origins.

A similar argument could be made for the didjeridu, through its transformation in the hands of the European Diaspora. Questions that should be more seriously addressed by musical instrument museums are: how does the act of display change the human – instrument relationship? How do display practices reinforce ideologies that further distinctions between us and them with the inherent value judgments that accompany those distinctions? To listen to a bamboo didjeridu:
Download file
Returning now to my natural end-blown lip vibrated straight plastic aerophone with an integral mouthpiece – or golf club sheath, whatever you want to call it; I want to ask you, what types of questions will lead us towards an understanding of this object in relation to the people who encounter it? By reframing, if only temporarily, organology’s minimal unit of analysis to the relationship between the musical instrument and one or more humans, what types of research methodologies will help us advance a social understanding of musical instruments that does not merely freeze them in time and space as part of some cultural practice unique to the objects’ place of origin but allows them to be dynamic agents forging multiple distinct social relationships over the course of their existence?

References

Bauman, R.B., & C.L. Briggs. 1992. Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2): 131-172.

Baumann, M.P. 2000. The Local and the Global: Traditional Musical Instruments and Modernization. World of Music 42 (3): 121-144.

Bazin, G. 1967. The Museum Age. Universe Books.

Cavour-Aramayo, E. 2003. Diccionario Enciclopedico de los instrumentos musicales de Boliva. CIMA Producciones.

Chakrabarty. 2000. Provincializing Europe: An Intersection of Political Philosophy and History. Princeton: Univ. Press

Clifford, J. 1988. On Collecting Art & Culture. In Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Cusick, S. 2007. Soundscapes of Captivity in the “Global War on Terror”. Society for Ethnomusicology conf. seminar, Columbus, Ohio.

Ellis 2005. Didgeridoo Healing in Glastonbury. Somerset: Blast.

Feld, S. & A. Fox. 1994. Music and Language. Annual Review of Anthropology. 23: 25-54.

Fisher, I. 2007. Fingers That Keep the Most Treasured Violins Fit. The New York Times, June 3.

Haraway, D. 1991. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 149-181.

Havlena, D. WEBPAGE of DENNIS HAVLENA - W8MI Mackinac Straits, MI. (accessed September 25, 2007) http://www.ehhs.cmich.edu/~dhavlena/

Ihde, D. 1986. Consequences of Phenomenology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Jakobson, R. 1995. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. Found in Semiotics An Introductory Anthology. Indiana Univ.

Kartomi, M.J. 1990. On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments. Chicago: Univ. Press.

———. 2001. The Classification of Musical Instruments: Changing Trends in Research from the Late Nineteenth Century, with Special Reference to the 1990s. Ethnomusicology 45 (2) (Spring - Summer): 283-314.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. LA: Univ. of California Press.

Kopytoff, I. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things. In Appadurai, A (ed). The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Univ. Press.

Küchler, S. 1987. Malangan: Art and Memory in Melanesian Society. Man 22, no. 2: 238-255.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Univ. Press.

Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.

Murray, S. 2007. Music and Materiality: Ivory, the Piano, and the Construction of Race. Society for Ethnomusicology conf. seminar, Columbus, Ohio.

Samuels, D. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It. Tuscon: Univ. of Arizona Press.

Sudnow, D. 1979. Talk's Body: A Meditation Between Two Keyboards. New York: Knopf.

Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Urry, J. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications.

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

It came as a shock within the museum world to learn of the proposed closure of the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester. The TCC is one of the world’s leading centres in textiles research, conservation and development. Having merged with the University of Southampton in 1999, it offers a range of postgraduate courses in textiles studies and applied textiles arts, and is considered by museum and conservation professionals to be a centre of excellence in this field. Even with a track record for high level publications by leading scholars of conservation and textiles research, and innovative research projects such as the AHRC-funded Concealed Garments project, the University of Southampton proposes to close the TCC on financial grounds in 2009.

For further details:
http://www.icon.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=632&Itemid=15

To sign petition:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/TCCClosure/

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

Efe Levant, MA Material and Visual Culture student, UCL

The Question of ‘online identity’ and/or ‘cyberspace’ is increasingly gaining importance with the ever-increasing popularity of online games like Second life and World of Warcraft (WoW). An increasing amount of concern and interest is focusing on the supposed addictive qualities of the software and the emergence of economic interactions involving the exchange of online goods with real money. A specialized industry is steadily developing to cater for the demands of MMO players (Massively Multiplayer Online). These industries are known amongst players as ‘gold farms’; a great deal of which consists of workshops in China, where Chinese gold farmers perform repetitive tasks to gather/farm in-game currency (known as gold or simply g).

The increasing amount of time spent by players in ‘virtual spaces’ like World of Warcraft has not failed to reach the attention of a diverse range of interest groups. A fruitful analytical categorisation, in terms of illustrating the historical continuity of the controversy surrounding artificial spaces can be extracted from the debate between Boyle and Hobbes regarding the air-pump. The problem is whether manufactured, synthetic spaces have experimental legitimacy to potentially alter human existence. In a paper called “Just like IRL: Play, Spatiality and sociality in Online Fantasy Games.” I have identified the two positions in the controversy as Boylean and Hobbesian. The Boylean position is the suggestion that online spaces provide unique situations that allow possibilities for experimenting with various aspects of human existence such as: identity, literature and economy. Economist Edward Castronova argues that economies in synthetic worlds can be considered as a ‘corporate Petri-dish’ as they provide the opportunity to experiment not only with new forms of organisational technologies but also with the conventional ethical paradigms that condition the study of economics. However fieldwork results can ascertain that virtual economies function too much like the unpredictable ‘real’ economies (of which they essentially a part of) to be able to enjoy the degree of control a natural scientist might enjoy in a laboratory or a Petri dish. For instance the ultimate problem of inequality is often brought up in discussions between players. The most common source of agitation amongst the players is what is known as the nerf debate. When a specific class (mage, hunter, warrior etc…) gets nerfed (reduced in power) the players who play the class take action to lobby for the reversal of the nerf, which mostly consists of whining on the World Wide Web forums. Far from being a hygienic space suitable for controlling experimental variables, the economies of MMOs are just as susceptible to arbitrary factors unpredictable both to the players and the developers of games like World of Warcraft. This view draws a picture of online environments as a cyberian apartness that gives numerous experimental possibilities both to the users and a diverse spectrum of scholars ranging from economists to medical scientists. Although it is evident that online games may provide food for thought for a wide range of intellectual pursuits, approaching these spaces as mere illustrations to pre-existing models and paradigms will not do justice to the activities carried out inside them. Ethnographic study is in a unique position to reveal the significance of these quotidian activities and correct misconceptions that detach these spaces from the ordinary condition of human existence with labels like ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual community’.

The Hobbesian view stands in opposition to the Boylean willingness to seek experimental opportunities in ‘virtual’ spaces. This position claims that online games are dangerous and addictive. Some view such recreational uses of the Internet as time consuming and unproductive others suggest that video games are killing simulators and encourage violent behaviour. This approach generally uses hypodermic metaphors to illustrate how video games induce a ‘permanent state of arousal’ and seduce the players into an illusion of control. The argument echoes Hobbes’ objection to the laboratory space set up by Boyle, to be specific the Hobbesian attitude towards artificial spaces involves the denouncement of such environments as illegitimate. In Hobbes’ case the laboratory is a challenge to the Leviathan/state, embodied in the person of the sovereign. The contemporary case against MMOs replaces Hobbes’ monarchic symbolisms with liberal values like autonomy and entrepreneurship, hence it should be no surprise that an overwhelming majority of this literature comes from the field of clinical psychology, which as noted by Nikolas Rose has a significant tendency for disciplining difference in the name of stability. Hence the Hobbesian interpretation views spaces like World of Warcraft as deeply subversive to legitimate values and the structures of authority attached to them. The policy implications entailed by this approach expectably involves the ‘treatment’ of what is considered to be an‘epidemic’ in order to subdue these spaces to the authority of the Leviathan. Though there is certainly policy to be made in this field these policies need to bear in mind that online communities have not suddenly descended from outer space but are deeply embedded in ‘real’ social relationships.

From October 2006 to June 2007 I conducted fieldwork on the popular MMO World of Warcraft to investigate the extent to which the spaces of online games are intertwined with ‘real life’ (RL). This fieldwork involved both the observation of the community within the game and individual players outside. Often players had one simple answer to respond to my questions concerning a variety of different aspects of the game. Whether I asked them about how players attain their reputation among their peers, how wealth is distributed within player associations known as guilds or what determines an appropriate moment for using the in game facility to take pictures (screenshots) the answer was unwavering: “Just Like IRL” (In Real Life). The testimonies of these players have also largely matched my observations. Aspects of ordinary life like inequality, fellowship and even gender roles reflect almost exactly on the surface of the MMO. Such participant observation is bound to make nonsense of fictitious scenarios like the dawn of the age of the originless ‘cyborg’ who are “not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust”. As a matter of fact despite their obvious proximity to Harraway’s cyborg theory due to the combination of technology and organism in these online communities, these spaces are far better understood by observing how unspoken rules are generated to ensure the replication of specific types of behaviour much like a habitus instead of introducing new historical paradigms.

The fundamental aim of the effort undertaken in this project is to dismiss obscure and unhelpful conceptions surrounding what are essentially fairly ordinary communities that happen to gather around spaces generated in MMOs. It is my belief that despite their values, existing theories concerning MMOs are largely inadequate due to their failure to realize certain essential truths about online games and persist instead to employ unsustainable concepts like ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtuality’. These abstruse notions may make impressive illustrations for re-occurring ideologies whose historical ancestry I have attempted to reveal, however they are useless if not harmful for understanding environments like World of Warcarft. As pressure slowly increases to formulate legislation concerning diverse aspects of MMOs, I that hope this project and others that might follow it will be allowed to inform these policies.

Posted by Graeme Were at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Presenting the Dead

Prof. Stephan Feuchtwang, London School of Economics

Thursday 22 November, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG

£5, concessions £3

In the First Emperor exhibition we see things that were not made for anyone's eyes but those of a dead emperor's eternal spirit, the result of his quest for immortality. For us these mortuary and ancestral rites are both sources for historical research and awesome treasures for display. Displaying them indicates a number of profound changes in the power relations entailed in making things visible. Professor Feuchtwang discusses these issues and also looks more broadly at death rituals in China - rituals of the ordinary dead as well as the imperial dead - and how they have changed throughout history.

Booking tickets:
* In person at the Box Office
* By telephone on +44 (0)20 7323 8181

The Box Office is open from 10.00 to 16.45 every day.

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Carys Banks, MA Material and Visual Culture, UCL

My dissertation has investigated surveillance and security systems and what their implementation indicates about perceived risks and fears in British society. My analysis focuses on a commercial communications company: C3 who are suppliers of a security service ‘LookOut Call’. This service is specifically designed to provide security for lone or mobile workers. I have also conducted fieldwork research within CCTV (close circuit television) control rooms run by Governmental bodies.

My research indicates that societal notions of risk and fear are pivotal to perceptions and usage of surveillance and security within modern society. Consumption of surveillance and security systems is also a consumption of societal conventions of perceived risk and risk management. This has had consequences for notions of personal and social responsibility in society.

The ‘LookOut Call’ security technology as a risk management device is indicative of how surveillance and security are constitutive of people’s responsibility. Investing in and consuming security devices allow people to take their own precautionary measures. With the aid of technology, they are thus taking on the responsibility for their own safety in the face of perceived crime. ‘LookOut Call’ can be viewed as a “therapeutic” or ‘life style’ choice. Consuming the security is a means by which the individual partakes in “introspection” and “management” (Rose, 1996:162) of plans and goals in their life. Much like other forms of “therapeutics” the ‘LookOut Call’ service can be ‘tailor made’ to meet individual needs. It is “imbued with a ‘personal’ meaning” (1996:162) so as to highlight what kind of person is participating in the consumption of this technology device.

As regards security within governmental bodies and CCTV operating, it appears there is a real need for collaborative legislation. The huge amounts of funding that is being driven into CCTV equipment and employment do not automatically mean that the systems are going to be effective. Cameras are now an integral part of all citizens’ daily activities in public spaces. Essentially they are perceived as a good thing by my informants, and they can be used very effectively in court proceedings. Nevertheless, organised strategies and research must be conducted in order for the control room environment to become as worth while as advocators of CCTV proclaim it is. At present this form of visual technology possesses too many flaws and areas whereby incorrect and unethical use can take place. The visual will, it seems, always be prominent in human understanding and objectification. We just have to make sure we do not lose sight of why people feel the need to be watched.

Posted by Graeme Were at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

The Design Research Group are organising a one day conference on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin on 14th February 2008.

The relationship between people and their objects is a complex and multifaceted one, which is continually negotiated between the material and the immaterial. Objects are used as tokens of affection, symbolic gestures and statements of devotion and can be represented, employed and
appropriated in a multitude of ways. They carry out important roles in our relationships with each other, either as bearers of significance, or through embodiment, engagement or control. The seductive quality of objects can also mediate our relationships with them, as they engage our emotions in both subliminal and visceral ways. In doing so they facilitate the projection and subversion of identities, and the creation of the contexts in which they operate.

It is expected that selected papers will be collected in an edited anthology. Papers are invited to contribute towards thematic areas, which include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Mind – memory, nostalgia and symbolic value; collecting, hoarding and losing objects; objects and rites of passage; the representation of love of / in objects; objects and devotion

• Body – sex, desire and romance; wrapping, covering and wearing; kitsch and ironic objects; the queer and the camp; objects as tools in sustaining / subverting gender roles; objectification and commodification

• Environment – the role of objects in the construction and performance of identities and relationships in public / private spaces; green objects and sustainable design

• Networks – mediating, signifying and negotiating relationships, including the interpersonal, the group and the political

Papers should be of 20 minutes duration and abstracts of max. 300 words should be submitted by 16 November 2007 to: designresearchgroup@eircom.net

Convened by the Design Research Group
Anna Moran
Sorcha O’Brien
Dr Ciáran Swan

http://designresearchgroup.wordpress.com/

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Heather A Horst, University of California, Berkeley

In contrast to the industrial workplace wherein the factory gate established a clear boundary between work and domestic life, workers in the ‘knowledge economy’ maintain more fluid boundaries between home and work (Nippert-Eng 1996, Shumante and Fulk 2004). Joining a conference call during dinner, sorting email while watching a movie with the kids and logging in to work for a few hours after putting the kids to bed characterize just a few of the routine ways that work permeates into the domestic sphere in Silicon Valley, California (Darrah, Freeman and English-Lueck 2007, English-Lueck 2002). For children growing up in the land of Apple, Yahoo! and Google, innovation, self-regulation, competition and other values associated with work in the technology industry are as much a part of everyday life as the company logos emblazoned on shirts, hats and bags hanging in the closet.

Image 1: Map of Silicon Valley http://www.siliconvalleymap.com/otherpubs.htm, Accessed March 16, 2007

Work and the material assemblages associated with labor also shape the very infrastructure of home. Sonia Livingstone (2002) has written at length about the increasing importance of ‘bedroom culture’, or the prevalence of televisions and other media in kids’ bedrooms (Bovill and Livingstone 2001). While bedroom culture certainly exists in Silicon Valley, one of the most interesting aspects of Silicon Valley professional households involves the shift from the ‘kitchen table society’ (Gullestad 1985) to what I have been calling the ‘desktop society’. For example, Jeff, a 14 year old in middle school student, lives with his parents and his elder brother in one of the wealthiest areas of Silicon Valley. Both of Jeff’s parents are professionals, but his mother recently decided to become a consultant in order to devote more of her time to the boys’ school and extracurricular activities. Within this remit is the remodeling of their five bedroom house. Although there are two offices (one for each parent) and the two brothers have desk space in their rooms, Jeff’s mom decided to remove the kitchen table in order to construct a large desk space where the kids could do their homework each evening. Out of concern for their media usage, she then decided to make an addition to the home to separate the ‘work’ computer from the ‘play’ computer. Reflecting on her sons’ use of technology and media, she notes,

“We do restrict the use of the computer games and media during homework. And he said that well, sometimes or whatever - that’s just to clarify that - so and I think one of the things that we just had a discussion on is the distractibility of IM and that’s something that my husband and I have really talked to Jeff about…And the concern is the IM and the music and homework. So those three media is [sic] happening. So we’re concerned about his ability to stay focused on task when all that’s happening. And I think he’s been working on that, disciplining himself, right J?”

As becomes evident in Jeff’s mom’s discussion, it is by no accident that kids’ work spaces are constructed in the traditional site of household and familial reproduction, the kitchen and dining room. At a very pragmatic level, this is because many parents fear what their kids could encounter online behind closed bedroom doors. The creation of work place in a shared domestic space creates the sense that what kids are doing on the computer and online is public and thus keeps kids disciplined and on task (see also Lally 2002). A few parents have explicitly stated that the transformed office space is conveniently proximate to where mom and (sometimes) dad are cooking and thus parents can keep a watchful eye on their computer monitors while kids do their school work. In addition, the decision to install a desktop computer rather than a more portable laptop computer assists in solidifying this particular area as a home-work space, akin to their parent’s home offices.

Image 2: The Kids’ Home Office, Photograph by H. Horst, 2006

But parents are not the only ones structuring home-work spaces in and through technology. Evalyn, a 13 year old middle school student, lives in a four-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood with her parents and two siblings. Evalyn and her older brother attend private school and her older sister recently started high school at a respected public school in the area. Evalyn’s parents are both professionals who have worked for a few of the region’s large technology firms, although in the wake of the dot.com bust have become independent contractors and thus work primarily at home. Now that Evalyn has started middle school and is ‘not really a kid anymore’, she has been spending more time with her older sister. One weekend they were talking and listening to music together and they came up with an idea — it might be fun to share a bedroom and convert the extra bedroom into their own home office. As Evalyn describes,

“My sister and I moved in together recently - I was always living downstairs and she was living upstairs. Now she moved downstairs with me and we both put our computers and all our homework stuff and desk stuff up into her room. So now like clothing, jewelry, beds, they’re all in my room, and my room has an adjoining bathroom. And her room holds all the work stuff.”
The ‘work stuff’ Evalyn refers to consists of desktop computers, a printer, paper and a range of school books, work and media devices, including a shared iPod and digital camera. As a place designated for doing their homework, the kids’ office is also a space which is set apart from the shared family computers and printers which their brother and parents use. For teenagers, Evalyn and her sister are unusual in opting out of their own, private bedrooms, an act that seems to run contrary to almost all of the values of individualism and privacy associated with American middle class life. But as a semi-private space for ‘the daughters’, there is a curious symmetry between the integration of ‘work’ spaces in the home through the office and the re-segmentation of the spaces through the designation of one space as an ‘office’ and another as a ‘bedroom’. While this practice is not as prevalent as the transformation of the kitchen table space into an office space for homework, there are a variety of forms of this consolidation and sharing of office resources among siblings in other families as they gradually learn to integrate work in their own lives.

As Mary Douglas (1992) has argued, the creation of ‘home’ is ultimately tied to controlling time and space in order to create an infrastructure to frame the household as a community. In Jeff’s family and others where the home office is constructed in the kitchen and dining room, parents clearly play a key role in structuring the ‘public’ space and attempting to ‘discipline’ kids’ time. Kids’ strategies in using these media and technologies for ‘hanging out’ and countering ‘boredom’ may belie their structure — kids have lots of strategies for ‘looking like they’re doing their homework’ or hiding their use of certain programs. However hidden or revealed, they nonetheless continue to discern the relationship between home and work where it is already quite clear to them that within the home there should be spaces for work. The kid-driven creation of a home office suggests an even deeper incorporation of work into home spaces, one that reveals the micro-dynamics of social reproduction and poses provocative questions about the changing experience of childhood in late capitalism.

This ongoing research, which focuses upon the relationship between technology, media and domestic space in Silicon Valley, is part of a large-scale study entitled 'Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures'. A three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, research is currently being conducted at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley. To learn more about this research and the Digital Youth Project, see http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/

References Cited

Bovill, Moira and Livingstone, Sonia M. (2001) Bedroom culture and the privatization of media use. In Children and their changing media environment : a European comparative study. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 179-200.

Darrah, Charles, James Freeman and Jan English-Lueck. 2007. Busier than Ever!: Why American Families Can’t Slow Down. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Douglas, M. 1992. The Idea of a Home. In Objects and Objections. Toronto: Victoria College in the University of Toronto.

English-Lueck, Jan. 2002. Cultures@SiliconValley. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gullestad, Marianne. 1985. Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.

Lally, Elaine. 2002. At Home with Computers. Oxford: Berg.

Livingstone, Sonia. 2002. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage.

Nippert-Eng, Christine. 1996. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shumate, Michelle and Janet Fulk. 2004. Boundaries and Role Conflict When Work and Family are Colocated: A Communication Network and Symbolic Interaction Approach. Human Relations 57(1):55-74

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Marjorie Murray, Anthropology, UCL

In his critical analysis of the Castilian character at the end of the nineteenth century Miguel de Unamuno described them as people who see things as clear-cut as their climate and landscape; ‘an extreme climate without sweet warmth, with a landscape that is uniform in its contrasts’ (1895: 182). He suggested that people there observe the world in discreet terms. He suggested this could be easily appreciated in the pictures of the old school of Castilian painters, which realism lacks gradations or the soft transition of nimbus. He makes a similar point when describing the Golden Century Theatre in Spain, particularly that of Calderón, whose characters don’t lack internal contradiction when compared with Shakespearean ones and whose stories he describes as slow, sensual and full of didactic clues for the audience.

During the nineteenth century -that in which the position of Spain in the world was definitely questioned- Castilian literature and theatre drifted from romanticism to realism in the search for a detailed description and representation of their ‘traditional’, stereotyped local characters; their work, psychological attitudes, social class and customs. These characters performed regularly in new shorter and cheaper plays (the género chico or small plays of one act) and the zarzuelas to which a wider range of the population had both access and interest. These genres of antiheroes ranged from the young maid coming to town, the ironing lady and the sereno (night guard in the streets) to the young MP or the beggar. This was the time when the now mythical ‘chulapos’ and ‘chulapas’ came to existence both in stage and the street, hanging carnations and Manila shawls. As part of my ethnography of material culture genres in Madrid I spent long hours studying people’s clothing through the analysis of wardrobes, with detailed discussions and comments on others’ outfits such as those of people in the media and shopping. One of the obvious conclusions is that clothing is the best tool for a detailed and sophisticated identification of stereotypes -as well as individuality in the small touches or the capacity for combinination They tend to characterise not serenos or ‘cursis’ (a nineteenth century character of the new rich and bad taste to which several books were devoted at that time) but give detailed descriptions of the ‘pijos’ (upper middle class and upper class that show off with certain labels, etc.), the ‘modernos’ (moderns as against to classic) or the ‘horteras’ (cheap and with bad taste) just to name a few. Most of my informants identified a range of such characters and are quick in incorporating new ones as they appear in the city. More surprisingly, they frequently describe themselves as belonging to one or other category and they have a profound knowledge of the aesthetic option that they have thereby chosen. .

Stereotyping and clothing reveal some of the most profound characteristics in Madrileno society. I will use here Inditex –the giant retailer best known for its brand Zara- as an example of how affluent and cosmopolitan Madrid has redefined but not eliminated strict clear-cut divisions, in this case in the stages in women’s life course. Inditex is the master of the Spanish high street, with several brands and shops. If we concentrate only on those for women, we find that there are five different brands that follow the retailers’ successful strategy of making fashion and style affordable and democratic. The names of the brands are Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Zara and Massimo Dutti. Very briefly, my observation of them in the context of Madrid’s high street suggests that they embody something that is more complex than brilliant market categorizing and identification of taste; they also show how inevitable it is for women to end up buying in what they call ‘mothers shops’ (tiendas de madre). In a nutshell the story goes as follows. After a childhood of laces and pink, early teenagers can express their new stage in life through clothes such as that of Bershka, the most colourful and up to date fashion that resemble the looks of young national and international celebrities. Teenagers can also start buying at Stradivarius and Pull and Bear. The first one is urban and sophisticated, and much wilder than ‘mainstream’ Zara. Pull and Bear is a more sporty version of youth, with less black and more light coloured cotton in what many informants associate with ‘affordable surfer clothing’. Zara welcomes the students and workers in its formal, work and casual clothes sections as well as a section that is more expensive and quality that is certainly targeting middle aged and perhaps mothers, as the range of sizes evidently show. Massimo Dutti is a higher end version of Zara in which the extra euros paid, the more ‘classical’ cuts and colours -as informants put it-, give a sense of elegance that is absent in the other brands.

What I find interesting is how informants themselves associate each of these shops with groups of women in society, that are not only defined by taste (or even class) but very much by life stages. The irreverent young girl in shiny shoes and mini skirt will inevitably end up in something like the middle- age section of Zara or Massimo Dutti depending on their work and income. This takes place before they are ‘sent out’ to the proper ‘mothers’ shops’ (tiendas de madre) as they call them, that range from department store El Corte Inglés to local ‘mothers’ shops’ and the recently arrived cheaper Chinese clothes shops. Put another way, people in Madrid suggest that ‘styles’ through clothing tend to ‘disappear’ after a certain age; there is a time to play the corresponding character, which is reinforced through the right characterisation of the role. As a youngster you can select among different characters (from Goths to pijas); as a mother the options are reduced and you should focus on learning your part very well. This must be considered when thinking of the ‘Peter Pan’ phenomena or the avoidance of making the big step to adulthood and maternity in today’s Spain. If the peasant girl made the biggest step in life passing from virginal long hair to short hair and pearl necklace the day after the wedding, contemporary women in Madrid go through a more sophisticated and longer route but to a similar goal. Many will all end up in the tiendas de madres and will play this very hard role; eventually ‘the performance of their lives’.

I wanted to use this example to share some of the current questions regarding my own ethnographic material in Madrid. After months of analysing my work on different genres of material culture –including clothing, home interior and mobile phones- I am currently going through essayists’ historical, and travellers’ writings. I believe this is an unavoidable step in order to understand some of my findings on their normative sense of propriety and aesthetics, just to mention one of many issues.

Most of this historical and literary material is far from being ethnographic or anthropological but I hope it will help me build little by little what again Unamuno -a sharp observer of his people and times- described as the intra-historical in Spain, which is moulded but always crucial for the observation of events and historical circumstances. He believed in the longue durée before Braudel and I am currently asking (you!) whether this is a right path to understand and explain my ethnography. At the moment it feels like I am trying to grasp something that is too ethereal and elusive, and it might not lead me anywhere, but it has certainly been one of the most exciting times in the process of writing up the thesis. It would be great to hear your opinions or experience as I guess many of you have gone through similar questions and decision- making when working on your ethnographic material and trying to link it with very different styles of historical and literary material that make up the background past to the ethnographic present Or maybe not? Am I going Quixotesque?

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field