Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Social Economy at Cardiff School of Management

We are seeking to appoint a social economist or heterodox economist to contribute to both the teaching and research aspects of our School.

The Cardiff School of Management has a strong profile, both nationally and internationally, in the fields of Management, Business, Computing, Tourism and Hospitality, together with proven standing with a range of relevant professional bodies. The School is now looking to recruit additional academic staff to maintain the pace of its development.

Applications are invited from candidates with a strong appetite and ability to embark immediately on a doctorate as a minimum for Lecturer level. An enthusiastic engagement with the discipline is essential, as is the ability and flexibility to teach across a range of modular options at all levels.

The appointee will also be expected to be research active and an interest in the social economy or co-operative research is particularly welcome. The Wales Institute for Research into Co-operatives is located within the Cardiff School of Management and being qualified and enthusiastic about contributing to the research of this team would be an advantage.

Lecturer: £33,780 - £38,019
Senior Lecturer: £39,160 - £45,397

Closing date for receipt of applications: 2nd May 2008

More details of the post are available on the UWIC website.

There is also a forthcoming Research Assistant post within Wales Institute for Research into Co-operatives. For an informal chat about this post call Molly Scott Cato on 01453 764730.

Posted by at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder, University of Exeter

Hawaii-inspired music marketed via popular record albums, radio shows, and Hollywood film soundtracks aided Hawaii’s transformation in the popular imagination from a mysterious ‘primitive’ paradise into the 50th U.S. state. Indeed, by constructing and capturing the temptingly tropical so-called ‘sounds’ of Hawaii on the latest hi-fi recording equipment, the music industry offered up Hawaiian music as an achievement of modern technology, promoting these U.S. islands as an acoustic, as well as a tourist, paradise. Popular Hawaiian music’s marriage of stereo technology and so-called authentic sounds produced a repertoire of songs, a musical identity, and an auditory brand asset, creating a potent force and a performative example in the sonic branding of Hawaiian paradise. Indeed, what became known worldwide as Hawaiian music still provides a soothing soundtrack for South Pacific holidays, backyard luau parties, or ironic late night lounging.

The Hawaiian record album formed an important stage of Hawaii’s construction as a conceptual resource, just as pineapple, sugar and battleships played important roles at earlier stages. For decades the iconic Hula girl and her musical accompaniment have formed the foundation of a strongly appealing Hawaiian identity, making Hawaii instantly recognizable the world over. Contemporary efforts to re-establish ‘authentic’ Hawaiian motifs in Hawaii, too, draw upon a concocted image (Halualani 2002). Informing even native islanders’ conceptions of Hawaiian identity, these images fall under an ontological shadow. Hawaii remains an important tourist destination, strategic military outpost, and ‘tropical paradise’. Reflected in such record album titles as ‘Island Paradise,’ ‘the Lure of Paradise,’ and ‘Hawaiian Paradise,’ Hawaii has been represented as paradise on earth. Western Judeo-Christian culture gives paradise two central meanings: the Garden of Eden and heaven. Record album covers emphasize the former, featuring the women of paradise clad in ‘native cloth,’ peering out from palm fronds, sensually frolicking in the ocean tide. Indeed, a Hawaiian vacation might be considered the ultimate American consumer product – allowing anyone who can afford a ticket to participate in the neo-colonial project through a re-creation of discovering Hawaii.

In this project, we turn a critical gaze onto a veritable archive of consumer artifacts – including our collection of over 400 Hawaiian LPs that provide a wealth of data – invoking a range of issues around consumption, objectification, and representation. Album covers, liner notes, and songs provide sites for an analysis of the representation of Hawaii in popular culture around the time it gained statehood in 1959. Record albums were given away by airlines, travel agents, and tour companies as part of broader efforts to attract visitors to Hawaii, and moreover supported the nation-building radio show, Hawaii Calls. The record album covers and songs under scrutiny are still available, often smartly repackaged as ‘exotica,’ ‘lounge’ and ‘chill’ in CD stores worldwide.

Hawaiian records – cover art, liner notes and song lyrics – often reflect a dominant cultural view of the exotic other. Interestingly, the typical themes and tropes displayed in Hawaiian record albums -- paradise, escape, sexuality, tropicality, going native – are present in many marketing campaigns for products ranging from suntan oil to corporate relocation. Thus seemingly innocuous material artifacts create and maintain a discourse – produced through the use of models, poses, and conventions from art history and advertising design.

Record albums are useful sights for material culture studies for several reasons. First, they are durable. Records from the 1950s remain widely available today, collected and coveted by consumers, and recirculate as retro icons. Used records are sold by the thousands in vinyl stores, at record fairs, and on the Internet; and, surprisingly, vinyl has rebounded as a viable niche within the music industry. Furthermore, old records are often re-released on compact disc, thus enjoying a new life. Although images from 1950s and 1960s advertisements usually appear hopelessly dated, record cover designs enjoy new life on compact discs that cash in on ironic trends or retro fashions. Second, as consumer artifacts, records and CDs exemplify crucial material practices, such as identity building, collecting, and invoking nostalgic reverie. Third, record cover design was a driving force for graphic art during the decades after World War II. Many leading artists and graphic designers produced record covers, some of which are considered collectible classics.

On a more conceptual level, the word album is derived from the Latin albus, white, and also albho, white ghostly apparitions. By definition, an album is a book with blank pages for the insertion and preservation of collections, such as photographs or other keepsakes. Alternatively, an album has been defined as a blank tablet on which records or notices were inscribed, registered, or listed. In the case of ethnographic recordings, or ‘ethnic’ music, ‘album’ might evoke the white colonialist potential of a medium that begins as a blank slate and treats the observed exotic native, often dark-skinned, as an object to be reported upon and recorded by the outside observer.

Recorded music albums are albums within albums. The black vinyl disks are inscribed with a collection of musical pieces held within another album form: two covers containing ‘liner’ notes, photographic or graphic images, and an index of songs. Record album images include the visual and aural: the photographs or designs on the covers collaborate with the music and lyrics inside. Record jackets, liner notes, and song lyrics instruct and inform through their representations of place, history, and culture.

Musical versions of Hawaii show up in the iconic Kodak Hula Show and the Webley Edwards' Hawaii Calls Show. Both of these popular tourist attractions released multiple tie-in record albums. The Kodak Hula Show was created to provide ‘authentic’ Hawaiian scenes every day for tourists and promoted the sale of Kodak film. Such a well-established attraction provided a comfortable familiarity for anxious visitors who, having purchased the album, had essentially already seen the experiences they themselves would have and the pictures they would take (Buck, 1993; Costa, 1998; Wood, 1999). Hawaii Calls live show, radio program and record albums attracted avid fans, and claimed Hawaiian authenticity for their Tin Pan Alley-originated music. Most songs were ‘adapted’, written, and recorded by white men who asserted authorship, copyright, and hence, royalties for this so-called ‘authentic’ Hawaiian music.

Another genre of Hawaiian album focuses on the hula. The hula is a royal and spiritual prerogative, historically practiced by both men and women (Kanahele 1979). However, a profane promoted version of the hula became a necessary site on the tourists ‘to do’ list, and the tourist industry provided hula ‘shows’ in a spectacle of representation: ‘These free Kodak Hula shows are staged especially for picture takers, in colorful Hawaiian surroundings, framed by the blue Pacific ocean’ (from Kodak Hula Show). The hula, a term that describes a dance, a communicative practice, a system of authority and hierarchy and a discipline taught in special schools, is now most popularly associated with females dancing for male titillation. The hula dancer evokes the exotic female – primitive, different, undiscovered ‘who may have the ice-blue eyes of the Scandinavian, the warm coloring of the Tahitian, the femininity of the Japanese and Chinese all apparent in the ancestry.’ (Island Paradise, Webley Edwards Presents, Capitol). Body movement in dancing as a form of storytelling and epic is opposed to the literature of a written culture.

The motions of the hula dancer were used to tell stories, just as in other lands the scratching of a pen on paper was used. Just how close a relationship the hula bears to great literature has never been determined. 'Just let me tell you this,' remarked one delighted U.S. sailor, watching a group of beautiful hula dancers, 'it beats reading books!'
(Liner note from More Hawaii in HI-FI, RCA).

Thus, Hawaiian narrative present in Hula is perceived by the Anglo male as sexy, erotic dancing for sexual stimulation. In other words, all Hawaiian 'literature' reduces to the realm of titillation, visual consumption of staged simulated pseudo-ritual. The Hawaiian cultural and sacred tradition of the Hula serves merely as erotic pleasure.

The song ‘Texas Has a Hula Sister Now’ from the LP Come to Hawaii is one of our favorites. The confluence of statehood, womanhood, and kinship is spectacularly suggestive, and deserves unpacking. Texas, of course, was a state – the lone star state, a big, brawny, braggart of a state. Sister, of course, is a close familial relation. Hawaii is called a Hula sister – feminizing this distant, rather small exotic new state. By linking Hula with sister, the songwriter captures much of the fascination of Hawaii. As the lyrics begin:

The yellow rose of Texas wears an orchid in her hair
and her garland of white blossoms so sweet in the Western air
She was born of a pagan marriage of the sand and the coral sea
and she learned from the restless tradewinds that men and the wind are free
(lyrics by Coloma and Millican)

A Hula sister identifies a being, simultaneously similar and different, that represents poles of mimesis and alterity. At once exotic and familiar, distant yet belonging, Hawaii stirs up issues of attraction and taboo. In the representation of Hawaii we often find a powerful conflation of paradise, female, and exotic with ownership, statehood, and familiarity (sisterhood).

The process of branding Hawaii produced a Hawaiian signifier that could be associated with other signs – including music, sound, and an imaginary cultural heritage. This sonic conceptual resource provides authenticity to the brand by drawing upon cultural, historical, mythical, and stereotypical notions of Hawaii, the exotic, and earthly paradise (Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006). Hawaii, and what sonic branding has deemed her lilting and undulating call, lure us to an ultimate retro-escape. Hawaiian music calls forth an earlier era, invoking a complex legacy of culture and history, tourist management and nostalgic hype – perhaps vibrating through strings of a steel guitar, a ukulele, or coconut shell bongos on famous favorites ‘Little Brown Gal’ or ‘Lovely Hula Hands’ that appear on literally thousands of ‘Hawaiian’ albums.

All images from the authors’ collection.

Janet Borgerson is Reader in Philosophy and Management and Jonathan Schroeder is Professor of Marketing at the University of Exeter. They are founding members of the Information Society Network. http://shl.stanford.edu:3455/collaboratory/Home

Selected References
Borgerson, Janet L. and Schroeder, Jonathan E. (2002), Ethical Issues of Global Marketing: Avoiding Bad Faith in Visual Representation, European Journal of Marketing, 36 (5/6), 570-594.

Borgerson, Janet L., & Schroeder, Jonathan E. (2003). The Lure of Paradise: Marketing the Retro-escape of Hawaii. In Stephen Brown and John .F. Sherry, Jr. (Eds.), Time, Space and Place: Retroscapes Rising (pp. 219-237). New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Buck, Elizabeth (1993), Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Costa, Janeen A. (1998), ‘Paradisal Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Marketing and Consuming Hawaii’, Consumption, Markets and Culture, 1, 303-346

Desmond, Jane C. (1999), Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Farrell, Bryan H. (1982), Hawaii, the Legend that Sells, Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.

Giesler, Markus and Schroeder, Jonathan E. (2006), ‘The Sounds of Consumption: Listening to the Musical Landscape,’ European Advances in Consumer Research, 7, 498-501.

Halualani, Rona Tamiko (2002), In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kanahele, George (ed.) (1979), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History, Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.

Kirsten, Sven A. (2000), The Book of Tiki, Köln and London: Taschen.
McGregor, Davianna Pomaika'i (2006), Na Kua'aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Schroeder, Jonathan and Salzer-Mörling, Miriam (2006), Brand Culture, London: Routledge.

Sturma, Mark (1999), ‘Packaging Polynesia’s Image’, Annals of Tourism Research, 26, 712-715.

Tatar, Elizabeth (1987), Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music, Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

Wood, Houston (1999), Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai’i, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Posted by at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Conference on "Onwership and Appropriation" (Auckland, New Zealand, 8-12 December 2008)

Panel on "Cosmopolitanism and the Appropriation of Culture"

Co-organisers: Mark Busse (University of Auckland) and Jade Baker (University of Canterbury)

In a chapter of his 2006 book Cosmopolitanism, provocatively titled “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?”, Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that objects of cultural value “belong in the deepest sense to all of us” and “are of potential value to all human beings”. While reminding us of our common humanity, cosmopolitan claims to a universal connection to art (what Appiah called “the connection despite difference”) are also an appropriation—a claim to pan-human ownership that sidesteps political and economic inequalities in the contemporary world. These inequalities privilege people living in metropolitan centres who have access to public museums and art galleries, and allow only the wealthiest individuals to enjoy valuable cultural objects on a daily basis. This panel will further debates arising from cosmopolitan claims of universal ownership of cultural objects, and the on-going appropriations underwritten by such claims. It will do this by comparing and contrasting connections “despite difference” with what Appiah called “the connection to art through identity” (the connections people feel to objects that were created by their ancestors), as well as the concrete manifestations of such connections in art markets, histories of cultural objects in museums and private collections, the significance of repatriation in a globalizing world, and arguments against the cosmopolitan position which emphasize the entanglement of objects, persons, communities and places.

This panel continues discussions started at a special session of the College Arts Association in New York in February 2007, the proceedings of which are being published as a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property

The conference on "Ownership and Appropriation" is a joint conference of the Association of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, the Australian Anthropological Society, and the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand. For further information, see the conference website: http://www.theasa.org/asa08/index.htm or contact the conference organisers Professor Veronica Strang (v.strang [at] auckland.ac.nz) or Dr Mark Busse (m.busse [at] auckland.ac.nz).

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Conferences and other events

Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, PhD student, Department of Educational Sociology, Danish School of Education – University of Aarhus

The rough asphalt against the knees in the schoolyard, the teacher’s golden watch chain replaced with trousers in brown velour, the wooden pen between the fingers, ink dripping everywhere, embarrassingly skipping mummy’s sandwiches in the bin. Standing in the sunny schoolyard (maybe on the bench), sitting in the classroom (tables in lines, tables in groups), running along the corridor (painted grey, painted orange), and hiding behind the bicycle shed or in the dark basement.

The changes in the Danish folkeskole [primary and secondary school] after 1945 have been profound. Judging from political visions and pedagogical strategies, there seems to be all the differences in the world between the strictly academic school of the 1950s, the progressive school of the 1970s and the strongly individualised and consumer-oriented school taking its form in the 1990s. But when looking at everyday life and the world (and creation) of the school pupil, what then are the implications of these changes. My Phd-project sets out to explore: What matters when it comes to being (or becoming) a pupil, taking part in the daily life and festive occasions of school? How have political incentives, pedagogical norms and practices, relations of authority, categories of class, gender etc. been taken up, lived and reframed in individual processes of subjectification?

The empirical material of my project is made up of individual life story interviews with 3 generations from a school on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The former pupils went to school in the 50s, the 70s and the 90s, respectively. In addition a number of group interviews have been carried out in the context of the old school. At first the interview material invites to applying a narrative approach, but storying the often non-verbalised memories of childhood schooling tends to be a challenging task. Though, the lingering and the laughter, the tears and regrets tell that school must have mattered – and still matters. Furthermore, when talking about the memory of past school experiences, the informants keep returning to elements of materiality in their struggle for creating coherent narratives. Through objects, places, and through the body wordless memories of schooling are given presence. Materiality seems to be important to the memory of school in a subtle (and unnoticed) way. Looking closer, materiality in its different forms is part of, enables and shapes the memories. In the memories of school, materiality is relevant in relation to collected grade books, school photos, exercise books and worn down school buildings as well as in careful and vivid descriptions of pens, benches, classrooms etc. Taking the embodiment so closely linked to these school memories into account, it might even be possible to say that the experiences of school – of discipline and of experimentations – are also somehow materialised. In this a twofold role of materiality is linked together in the relations between the very processes of schooling and the memory of such. This is not a statement about the past as simply stored either mentally or materially. Rather, recollection is perceived as a reinvention of the past and of the meaning-making processes connected to it. Still, it keeps a link to the past, though, continuously being reworked and not simply repeated or reconstructed.

Through references to materiality pictures of the rooms of everyday life at school in the three periods come into shape. In the stories about the 1950s, the school is ironically named ‘the yellow prison’ with its high windows, tables in lines and the friendly guards walking the yard. The informants’ stories about the 1970s focus on ‘the small Christiania’ painted in bright colours and experimental workshops provisionally installed in the basement shelter. Finally, the school of the 1990s has no name, is characterised by chaos in a continuously changing organisation of chairs and tables, ceilings kicked down during breaks and care and disputes over pet turtles kept in the class room. Also the materiality of teaching – whether it is ink and pen, tie-and-dye, computers or the various reading books – is part of the pictures. In the memories put forward in the interviews things rarely stand alone. On the contrary, they are constantly linked to personal emotions and the very sensuality of school which might in fact be rather difficult to express in words. It also indicates how memories of school are often non-verbalised and bodily embedded. This shows how memory is not necessarily to be understood as an exclusively mental phenomenon since it also extends out into the world (Middleton & Brown 2005). Moreover, in the school memories processes of subjectification related to school are sketched out and contextualised through the matter of things and surroundings. Also the bodily aspects of subjectification, to which Judith Butler (1993) directs attention, are emphasised in the informants’ memories.

The spontaneous concern with things and surroundings when it comes to the process of recollecting school experiences tend to grow over time. On their own initiative the generation from the 1950s is much more occupied with photographs and stored things from their time at school than the younger generations. Also descriptions of the school buildings and teachers’ clothes play a central role in their accounts. It is as over time the memory work slides from matters of narrativity to materiality. But it is also like aspects of materiality tend to create an order, which works differently than the self-narrated memories in the individual interviews. Noting the role of materiality when it comes to recollecting school, during the projects unfolding, has led to a more conscious use of the potential of paying attention to materiality. In the development of concrete methodological techniques with a concern for materiality also the younger generations seem evocated. These techniques include group interviews which involve a confrontation with the physicality of the school and some of the former class mates. It also comes to the fore by making room for the objects placed on the table in the interviews, asking into the described objects and places, and posing questions specifically about the things that are linked to the memory of school.

If you are working on related issues – material culture and education, now or in the past – I would appreciate to hear from you. Please, contact me on: lisa@dpu.dk

References
Butler, Judith. (1993). Bodies that Matter. New York and London: Routledge.

Middleton, David, & Brown, Steven D. (2005). The Social Psychology of Experience. Studies in Remembering and Forgetting. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

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

Review by Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

There have been a number of attempts to write general textbooks on material culture. Clearly I form one part of a particular grouping within UCL anthropology that has itself produced a good deal of material of this kind. So for me it is interesting and refreshing to also find works that come from different positions and perspectives. Having said that, there have been others I have not been very impressed by. But I would recommend this new textbook by Ian Woodward. It is a book which keeps a balance between what might be expected of a textbook, trying to conscientious and fair to all positions and act simply to synthesise, and also acts as a book with its own agenda that is seeking to promote a particular approach of the authors choosing.

It is clearly composed, with guidelines setting out what it intends and what it has achieved for each chapter. It starts with a fairly gentle introduction to the cultural nature of objects, and a reasonable history of the development of this inter-disciplinary concern. Chapter three provides a concise and conventional coverage of Marxist arguments, and means that material culture is initially largely identified with commodities. As such other branches of material culture studies, such as museums and anthropology, may feel relatively neglected. Although, at least methodologically, they might find chapter four’s coverage of structuralism quite useful for teaching. While chapter five has a strong culturalist agenda focusing on the anthropological contribution, with perhaps more on Durkheim that I might have expected. This is not balanced by any anti-Durkheimian perspective such as Latour, who is completely absent.

The next section is called objects in action. Chapter six is mainly concerned with issues of distinction and social status, while chapter seven is directed at the role of objects in respect to identity. Since this is intended as a textbook, it is actually no bad thing that the coverage to this point remains conservative and balanced. There is perhaps a bit more social psychology in chapter seven than might have bound found in some social science. To some degree a more social orientation in chapter six is balanced with this more individual orientation in chapter seven.

Chapter eight is probably the most original contribution, setting out a route from more conventional debates to what seems to be the author’s own perspective. This centres on issues of narrative and performance and follows fairly smoothly from the social psychology of the previous chapter. These are seen as the frames within which objects are recognised and make sense for people. This is also used as an excuse to bring in the home as a case study. It takes us back to methodological and epistemological issues of how we constitute our findings, with as much an emphasis upon language as upon objects. As it happens I don’t much agree with the arguments, or find them that persuasive, but that’s just one person’s opinion. I would still welcome them as an original and different approach. It seems quite fair that the author, having done a patient treatment of everyone else, should be allowed some advocacy for the kinds of approaches in the final two chapters which I assume are those he most favours. Overall then I think this book deserves its niche, both as a textbook covering long standing debates and discussions, but also as an entry point to a particular perspective. It comes about as close as anything I have seen to a genuine standard textbook, that tries to transcend particular disciplines.

Posted by at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Radical History Review (RHR)
Issue #106: Taking Sides:
The Role of Visual Culture in War, Occupation and Resistance

The RHR solicits contributions for a special issue on visual culture in war, occupation and resistance. Artists have often taken sides in ideological conflicts and in actual conflagrations. In terms of visual culture and resistance, the literature and music of the South African struggle, the murals of Belfast and Derry in Ireland and the poetry of the many Latin American movements for change are relatively well documented. Less analysis is available on the role of artists on one side or another of recent conflicts. Wars of Liberation and popular revolts such as those in Angola, Algeria, Iran and the Basque Country spring to mind. Despite the scale and impact of the Vietnam War, little knowledge is available in terms of the role of visual culture in the mass mobilizations against both the French and US occupations.

Approaching five years into the occupation of Iraq and with numerous groups engaged in resistance, what form does visual culture play in demarcating opposing political positions? How have artists in colonized or oppressed nations viewed themselves and their work in terms of the largely western models that shape what is commonly defined as ‘art’ (the gallery, theater etc)? What has been the role of visual culture in support of imperialism or colonial expansion, as well as officially ‘state sanctioned’ cultural production?

The role of visual culture in conflict situations also prompts an examination of the implications of artistic ‘neutrality’. Despite current global instability many artists and cultural producers, especially in the western artistic tradition, consider their work to be apolitical or neutral. Can artistic neutrality be said to exist in conflict situations, or is culture ultimately, in the words of Edward Said, “…a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another?” (Culture and Imperialism).

This issue of RHR is particularly interested in exploring these questions. Issues of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

-The role and impact of visual culture (visual art and photography, theater, film or graphic works) in anti-colonial and popular struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

-Culture and de-colonization: The role of visual culture in reinventing/reclaiming a sense of self/nation in newly independent states.

-Shifts in visual culture in Eastern Europe (Poland/Soviet Union/former Yugoslavia, etc). How do politics and aesthetics relate in these emerging capitalist economies?

-Occupation and Collaboration: What strategies and roles have artists played either in opposition to, or in collaboration with, occupying, repressive forces?

-The role of visual culture in resistance and social movements in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the class struggle and the movements for asserting identities in the African American, Latino(a), Asian, Native American movements, as well as in support of broad forces such as anti war, disability rights, struggles for gender equality and acceptance.

-The role of visual culture in the service of imperialism and in the imposition of authoritarian and repressive regimes.

-Cultural policy in newly independent states and cultural policy in liberation movements aiming to establish power (ANC, PLO etc).

-Art and class in struggles for social transformation.

-New technologies and media in the service of liberation movements.

-Visual culture and war: How do artists responding to war compete with photography and documentary filmmaking? Are images of war so ubiquitous as to be redundant?

-Art versus Propaganda: How does visual culture retain power and how are partisan viewpoints articulated in an image/media-saturated world?

RHR solicits article proposals from scholars working in all historical periods and across all disciplines, including anthropology, art history/history, religious studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, political science, gender, and cultural studies. Submissions are not restricted to traditional scholarly articles. We welcome short essays, documents, photo essays, art and illustrations, teaching resources, including syllabi, and reviews of books and exhibitions.

Submissions are due by November 15, 2008 and should be submitted electronically, as an attachment, to rhr@igc.org with "Issue 106 submission" in the subject line. For artwork, please send images as high-resolution digital files (each image as a separate file). For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include "Issue 106" in the subject line. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 106 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2009.

Submission Deadline: November 15, 2008
Email

Posted by at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

The Center for Jewish History and The Working Group on Jews, Media & Religion @ The Center for Religion & Media, New York University present

Objects of Affection: The Wedding in Jewish Life: A Colloquium

Sunday, April 13, 2008
10:00am-9:00pm
The Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
New York, NY 10011

This event is free and open to the public; reservations required.
Please call SMARTTIX at 212-868-4444 or visit their website.

Weddings are the most elaborately celebrated of Jewish life-cycle events. This is reflected in a wide array of customs (rituals, songs, dances), objects (canopies, rings, clothing) professions (entertainers, caterers, photographers), and works of cultural creativity (representations of weddings in plays, films, visual art). Some of these phenomena are centuries old and widely familiar; others are rare, highly localized, or very recent innovations.

Consequently, weddings provide abundant opportunities for considering the intersection of media and religiosity in Jewish life. We have invited today’s gathering of scholars, artists, and performers to select key examples of mediating the Jewish wedding—from its graphic representation in a medieval manuscript to avant-garde performance—and to discuss what their place in a rite that is central to Jewish communality and continuity reveal about Jewish life itself. How do all these media practices enhance this ritual—or serve as opportunities for critique? What other aspects of Jewish life—gender, family, religious authority, economic concerns, aesthetic desires—do these wedding practices engage? How do the various media involved help articulate notions of spirituality, sexuality, memory, and religious tradition or provide a means for transformation?

-Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler

Click on the link for schedule and further details

Schedule:

10:00am-10:30am
Welcome
Faye Ginsburg, The Center for Religion and Media, New York University
Judith Siegel, The Center for Jewish History

Introduction
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, colloquium co-conveners

10:30am-12:00
Session 1: Images
Chair: Sally Charnow
Marc Michael Epstein: Marriage Procession, Italy, 1465: “The way we were”—Realia or fantasia?
Nahma Sandrow: Weddings in S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk
Edward Portnoy: Four Weddings and a Funeral: Cartoons of weddings from the Yiddish press
Edna Nahshon: Nechama Golan: Between sacredness and feminism
Rachel Kranson: The "No Chuppa, No Shtuppa" T-Shirt: Mocking the Jewish wedding

12:00-1:00pm
Lunch Break

1:00pm-2:30pm
Session 2: Performances
Chair: Brigitte Sion
Olga Gershenson: Benya Krik (1927): How it was done in the USSR
Alisa Solomon: Fiddler on the Roof: Sunflowers, bottle dancers and the invention of tradition
Ilana Abramovitch: Wedding videos: Performing ritual for the camera
Irit Koren: My Wedding Video: An atypical modern Orthodox feminist wedding
Susan Chevlowe: Nikki S. Lee’s The Wedding: Performing a “Jewish bride” / casting a Jewish bridegroom

2:30pm-3:00pm
Coffee Break

3:00pm-4:30pm
Session 3: Practices
Chair: Chava Weissler
Hankus Netsky: Uncovering Jack Levinsky's Complete New York Russian Sher Medley
Jill Gellerman and Mark Kligman: “Yidden” on YouTube: The mediation of Mordechai Ben David’s music and wedding dance moves
Juliana Ochs: Wedding Menus: Nagamaki on the smorgasbord
Vanessa L. Ochs: Jewish Wedding Booklets: Tweaking tradition for personal meaning

4:30pm-5:15pm
Artist presentation
Melissa Shiff and Louis Kaplan: Postmodern Jewish Wedding: Rejuvenating Jewish Ritual

5:15pm-5:45pm
Reception

5:45pm-7:15pm
Dinner Break

7:30pm-9:00pm
Screening of Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
Remarks by J. Hobermanl

http://modiya.nyu.edu/
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/center/religionandmedia/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Conferences and other events

Emily Clark, Ph.D. candidate, College of Creative Arts, Massey Univ.

As the contemporary rallying cry to be screened as a means of ‘prevention’ against life threatening diseases and ailments gets ever louder, my research addresses the intricate processes of imaging the body in today’s climate. Artists have risen to the challenge of portraying the somatic using these complex technologies and offered up alternative visions to those mostly demanded and processed through scientific methodologies. More often than not, an artist is compelled to work with the medical profession to achieve the required portrayals. But as much of the medical science community are dubious about the contribution that artists make in the field, it seems to be time to investigate exactly what participation they do have, however subtly. Hence, the core problematic that this project addresses is how much creativity is incorporated into the so-called ‘objective’ view of an imaging technology, which is placed at the very epicentre of our social understanding of the healthy body?

Background
To say that the image as produced by X-Rray, CT, MRI or any other contemporary medical imaging technology, is an image of objectivity, can no longer be claimed – if indeed it ever could. These images, mostly seen in the auspices of a medical environment, and delivered by the authoritative character in the starched white coat, are highly complicated and politically charged. This projection of the state of our bodies does not just stop at the machine.

In the form of documentation and/or representation, the body portrayed and projected, is revealed not so much as the body in itself but as the framed body, both literally and culturally. In most areas of what we call the ‘civilized’ world, from ancient India to China, through the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, the body and medicine have involved complex drawings that reveal what the medical profession of the day and culture were looking for – the elements, the chi, the muscles and sinews, the flow of blood and so forth.

In the realm of contemporary western art, especially since the arrival of photography, the Cartesian dialectic dividing the body and the mind, appears to have become increasingly pronounced. Notable thinkers in the field of cultural and visual studies, for example Betty Holtzmann Kevles (1997) have written on how imaging of the body through various technologies has, through the ages endangered and compromised social relationships by privileging the health of some and not others. There has also been considerable work done, especially by Lisa Cartwright (1995), on how the enthusiasm to use these more elaborate technologies coincides with increased dissemination of these images in the creative and popular culture worlds of visual art and cinema, as well as perhaps more controversially, in advertising and marketing.

The shift from ‘reading’ the state of the body to screening the ‘image’ of our bodies is subtle, but suggests that the visceral entity might once again be rendered unsavoury and distasteful as Foucault (1973) points out in his seminal publication, The Birth of the Clinic:

"Instrumental mediation outside the body authorizes a withdrawal that measures the moral distance involved; the prohibition of physical contact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen. What one cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see".

We can see, from early and diversely originating illustrations (Fig. 1) that as well as being sources of information for the practice of medicine and anatomy, they were also laden with metaphors and cultural meanings that were particular to the peoples for which it was serving. In other words, the images themselves spoke volumes about the cultural practice of looking at the body being ‘enworlded’. They therefore appear as representations of the model or ideal body imbued with cultural meanings, with the authority of the image being given by the necessary surrounding written texts.

Daniel Ricco: Mechanical anatomical plate
from Ristretto anomico. Venice 1790

The sophistication of contemporary technologies, on the one hand deals directly with the body as a singular entity allowing the peculiarity of the individual be viewed, whilst at the same time abstracting the body to fit within the parameters of the viewing machine.

Through the work of some visual artists working with these technologies, Mona Hatoum’s Corps Etranger (1994) and Phillip Warnell’s multli-media performance Host (2005), one can draw connections and disconnections regarding how these parameters work, and how each artist has dealt with what visually is a very similar in style-image produced by two different models of endosope. The first point of interest here is the difference in models. In the eleven years that elapsed between these two works, the technology providing endoscopic views of the body had of course got more palatable, literally and certainly more user friendly as it has become increasingly self-contained. These different tools already speak volumes about how these works are to be engaged with. In an email I received as part of a discussion with Warnell, he explains:

"Capsule endoscopy provides a very different view of the interior body than does television endoscopy, as used by Hatoum. The capsule endoscope gathers two frames per second at low resolution, which essentially become an assemblaged, animated view (the speed of which can be controlled by the clinician during post procedure consultation.) [...] the GI (or gastro intestinal) tract consumes and devours anything that comes its way, seeming as much a shaped and contorting aperture as a canal or passage. Its extraordinary display of muscularity, contraction and peristaltic propulsion (witnessed by the pill and the spectator by proxy) is in opposition to the tele-visual view provided by an endoscopic arm. In endoscopy, real time, high definition images are prioritised, dominating the interior space, providing a very active image, one of techno-visual flexibility and controlled regulated perspectives. It is the image that is active in endoscopy. In capsule endoscopy, it is the organism that is active".

This deliberation regarding the activity of being viewed, offers some central problems and questions about agency and the distancing that makes possible the practice of objectification. My research delves into this quandary further, driven largely by popular imagining of the power of screening and personal experience (Figs 2 & 3). It will examine the job that the image and representation of the body, has to do in the contemporary medical field. My questions revolve around the potentiality of the aestheticized body, as it is perceived through fundamentally reductionist technologies, and examine the changing methodologies in medical practices, which inspire and have been necessitated through these processes.

Echocardiogram of the author's heart

References

Cartwright, L. 1995. Screening the Body – Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Bloomington: Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic. (trans A. M Sheridan Smith). London: Tavistock.

Holtzmann Kevles, B. 1997. Naked to the Bone. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press.

Warnell, P. 2007. pers. comm. (e-mail conversation with the author).

Posted by at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Daniel Miller, Anthropology, UCL

I have just returned from spending December and January in the town of Kannur, in the north of the Indian state of Kerala. My main work there was concerned with a project being conducted by Dr Lucy Norris on the topic of waste and the decline of the handloom industry as part of the Waste of the World project. But while there I also carried out some work for the Global Denim Project. On return I decided to publish a short photo essay which can now be found at the Global Denim Project at www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project/ww While it is clear that there are few prospects at present for publishing a set of colour photographs, let alone video and sound within the normal academic genres of articles and books, it seems worthwhile to complement such publications with material posted on the internet. I am sure many people are coming to the same conclusion. Along with the sociologist Don Slater I attempted this originally with the book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach where all the illustrations were placed on an associated web site. I thought this would become a common convention, but clearly I was wrong. I have seen remarkably little use of the internet for posting the visual component of academic texts. While this blog is very helpful for giving some sense of new research, it doesn’t lend itself to extensive publication of photographs and other visual materials, for which a separate website seemed more appropriate. This is what I have done using the auspices of the global denim project.

A website allows one to give some background, for example, a sense of the range of housing, an image of the ruling Communist party and the rituals for which the area is best known; as well as more specific material about denim and other clothing. I intend to also write a paper on jeans in Kannur, but I see no reason why the visual material shouldn’t remain available, since it is unlikely that any academic publication will allow for such materials to be printed.

The particular interest of Kannur, in relation to global denim, is the relatively low take up of blue jeans in South Asia. In most regions I visit jeans have reached close to 50% of everyday adult dress. But in Kannur the figure is only 5% comprising 10% male and 0% female dress. The photo essay starts to give some indication of why this remains the case, and the academic paper will explore this in much more detail. Factors include the way men, once they gain employment or fatherhood, seek to differentiate themselves, and their relative economic security, from younger males. Also the current relationship between the Muslim population, who are closely associated with fashion compared to the Hindu population, which to some extent therefore avoid certain kinds of fashion. Also the way Kannur itself is constituted as a reserve of conservatism held against the changes taking place in metropolitan India, especially with regard to females. So in at least three different but related instances jeans have become involved in a kind of sartorial politics of repudiation.

There are many other interesting features of the local context. Kerala remains governed by what was the world’s first ever elected communist government. Kannur itself was previously government by Muslim rules, often a female Bibi. The area is undergoing rapid changes mainly as a result of money coming in from the Gulf. There are excellent academic publications on the region by Caroline and Filippo Osella, who give an unusual amount of attention to fashion. Incidentally we are happy to welcome new projects to the Global Denim Project. I am also starting up a news list to keep members in touch with developments. If you are interested in working on this topic with links to the overall project, please contact me at d.miller@ucl.ac.uk.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field