Does the recutting of a famous gemstone—improving its luster and increasing its market value—fundamentally alter its identity as a historical artifact by erasing signs of use? Which temporary owners of an object get to decide whether and how to alter it, not to mention add their own names to its official title? Conservators erase layers of dirt and grime all the time, improving the appearance and condition of artworks prior to exhibition, reproduction, or sale; is such physical intervention different for other kinds of material objects? Like valued artworks, this stone has an impeccable provenance. Unlike an artwork, however, gems are rarely valued for their conditions of authorship; rather, diamonds are rare natural resources, transvalued as commodity and currency by means of human ownership as well as labor and markets. Yet while precious metals such as gold (which share these features) are particularly susceptible to physical transformation, diamonds are highly resilient—are famously “forever.” What added value—economic and cultural—will contemporary museum exhibits confer onto an already famous but long hidden treasure? Should the product of centuries of international circulation and exchange ever come to a rest, whether in private or public hands? Whose claims trump all others: Individuals? Lineages? Old money or new? Nations? The masses of museum-goers?

These questions and more are explored, if not quite answered, in this recent New York Times piece about the social biography of the world’s second most famous diamond, currently—but only briefly—on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

And here’s the related press release from the Smithsonian.

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Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge for museums

Copenhagen, 16-19 September, 2010

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–19 September, 2010.

This year’s cross-disciplinary conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level – limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years – towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body – is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.

The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The conference will address questions like (but not limited to):

+ How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?

+ How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?

+ How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?

+ What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?

+ What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?

+ How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?

+ How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?

+ How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?

+ What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?

+ What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.

+ How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?

+ How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists – including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists, medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk.

For further information, see http://tinyurl.com/ylx5atx or contact Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk. For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., please contact Anni Harris, konference2010@sund.ku.dk, after 4 January 2010.

The 15th biannual conference of EAMHMS is hosted by Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Conferences and other events

This article on the BBC Technology website presents some of the latest gadgets designed for use in schools. It shows some of the new devices used for administering student attendence, interactive teaching and immersive teaching environments. As the school classroom becomes increasingly technologically sophisticated, how much do we really learn at school anyway? And what is wrong with the trusted ruler, compass and blackboard? Surely, these are questions to be asked by anthropologists.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_8459000/8459207.stm

Graeme Were, UCL

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KINĒMATHEQUE
A new strand curated by Curzon Cinemas and Second Run DVD to present special world cinema screenings and events presents: GAEA GIRLS a film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams.

SPECIAL SCREENING + Director Q&A.

Renoir Cinema, Sunday 31st January, 12:30 pm

"Gaea Girls is about more than wrestling. Like 'Divorce Iranian Style' it smashes preconceptions about the women it depicts, transcending its subject in the process" Toronto Film Festival.

“The filmmakers build their story in a way that's more compelling and suspenseful than many narrative films” Chicago Film Festival.

Winner - Edinburgh International Film Festival, Best of Festival Section
Winner - Chicago International Film Festival, Silver Hugo

Second Run and Curzon Cinemas are committed to presenting the work of important contemporary filmmakers. Kim Longinotto is renowned for creating extraordinarily intimate portraits of women on the fringes of society, tackling controversial topics with sensitivity and compassion. In Gaea Girls she explores perceptions and complexities of female sexuality in modern Japan.

This award-winning documentary follows the gruelling training regime of a group of Japanese professional women wrestlers. Featuring the legendary Chigusa Nagayo, it is a fascinating account of a closely-guarded universe in a country where women are perceived as docile and subservient.

The Renoir cinema is delighted to welcome Kim Longinotto to this very special London screening.

UK, 2000, 100 mins, Cert 15
SCREENING + Director Q&A
(Kim Longinotto in conversation with Sophie Mayer)

Book tickets at www.curzoncinemas.com or call 0871 7033 991
GAEA GIRLS / SHINJUKU BOYS Special Edition DVD is released by Second Run DVD on 25th January 2010.

For more information or press requests please contact Chris Barwick
chris.barwick@secondrundvd.com / 07805 818 154

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Announcements and Listings | Objects and visual analyses

BBC Radio 4 recently kicked off a new series on the collections of British Museum called A History of the World in One Hundred Objects. The programme, written and presented by BM director Neil MacGregor, aims to tell the entire history of the world in a 100 15-minute episodes focusing on key objects in the BM's permanent collections. Each episode will concentrate on one 'thing' in the museum, explore its context and significance in the culture that produced it, together with its collection history and interpretation.

More about the series can be found by clicking: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/

Editorial Comment: If the story of the world can be told in 100 objects, maybe the BM can start thinking about giving back some of its 7 million or so objects it has in its collections.

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Applications are invited for a Lectureship in Anthropology. The postholder will be responsible for contributing to teaching foundation and specialist courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Material and/or Visual and/or Digital Culture and will be expected to take on administrative duties in the Department.

The start date for the postholder is 1st September 2010.

The successful applicant must hold a PhD and be able to demonstrate a strong record of research and publication. Applications from qualified candidates specialising in any area of the world are welcome.

For more information and how to apply:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/vacancies/adverts/job-list.html

Posted by Graeme Were at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

RUTGERS, The State University of New Jersey
Center for Cultural Analysis

Friday, January 29, 2010
10:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Free and open to the university community and the public

Alexander Library
Teleconference Lecture Hall (4th Floor)
169 College Avenue
College Avenue Campus
New Brunswick, New Jersey

Etymologies of ‘collect’ point to practices of assembling and gathering, with historical reference to money, religious congregation and political organization. Scholars have recently insisted on the need to understand ‘the social’ as constituted by processes of assembling, while ‘things’ have been re-interpreted through the human collectives that make them meaningful. How do human groups produce collections of things, and how do their collections produce social organization? Scholars from history, history of science, literature and philosophy will explore the reciprocity between collecting things and collecting people and the novel mixtures that emerge from encounters between cultural worlds.

Speakers:
James Delbourgo (History, Rutgers University)
Ann Fabian (American Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Alessandra Russo (Spanish and Portuguese, Columbia University)
Miguel Tamen (Literature, University of Lisbon; Romances Language, University of Chicago)
John Tresch (History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania)

For more information:
http://cca.rutgers.edu/events/public/spring10/collecting.html

Posted by Aaron J Glass at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings | Conferences and other events

Francisca Pérez
PHD. Program Architecture and Urban Studies
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
fperez1@uc.cl

“A place dwelt in by the same person over a period of time becomes a portrait unto itself, through the objects (present or absent) and the uses that they suppose…” (De Certeau y Giard, 1999).

Domesticity defined as an interdisciplinary field of study of social space traditionally linked with the house, home and everyday life implies the analysis of daily practices, discourses and images that produce and reproduce it in time (Cieraad; 2000; Blunt y Dowling 2006) .

Within this focus my research tries to outline some interpretative elements in the construction of domesticity in Santiago –Chile between 1930-1960. On the one hand, the research approaches the everyday practices of domesticity in the context of Santiago elite, taking the historical perspective of inhabitants of the first garden suburb called Barrio El Golf. This suburb was inaugurated in the 30’s and represented the definitive abandonment of the city centre by the elite in favor of a new suburban family and domestic way of life (Fishman, 1987, Sennett 1975). The suburban process as a historically situated phenomenon, produced a specific domesticity that spread as one of the central elements of western culture. In this way, we can link suburbanization, with a particular moment of domesticity, in which emerges new imaginaries of living at home (Mumford; 1979; 641).

On the other hand, the research includes the analysis of discourses and images within the social imaginaries of the period, present in the weekly women’s magazines that proliferate from the beginning of the 20th century, and in institutional publications that reproduced an official discourse about home. In this way, the research connects an analysis ofthe specificity of the elite within the frame of a suburban ideal with a more general reflection about the social meanings of domesticity that circulated in that period.

From this juxtaposition the research tries to identify the particular meanings that domesticity takes within a process of modernization of urban life that begins in the early twentieth century and represents both certain continuities and breaks with a more traditional meaning of domesticity linked to the values of family and home along with patterns in the use of domestic space that were deeply rooted in earlier Chilean society.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

An appeal to help victims of the Haiti earthquake is breaking all records, fuelled by the power of social media. The story here, and links to help, from the comfort of your own computer...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

LONDON GROUP OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHERS

Seminar Programme, Spring Term 2010

Guest convenor: James Kneale, UCL

19th January 2010
David Beckingham (University of Cambridge)
Liberalism, liberty and the geography of the Inebriates Acts, 1879-1914

2nd February 2010
Stella Moss (University of Oxford)
Spitting and Sitting: Gender, Space and the English Public House, 1918-39

16th February 2010
James Brown (University of Oxford)
Drinking Geographies in Early Modern England

2nd March 2010
Deborah Toner (University of Warwick)
Everything in its Right Place? Drinking Spaces and Popular Culture in 19th Century Mexican Literature

16th March 2010
James Nicholls (Bath Spa University)
The pub and the people: drinking spaces and UK alcohol policy, past and present

These seminars are held on Tuesdays at 5pm in the Wolfson Room, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, University of London. For further details, or to have your name added to LGHG's e-mail list, please contact David Lambert, Royal Holloway or Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary.

LGHG is grateful to the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway, Kings, UCL, the Open University and the IHR for supporting this series.

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By Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington
2010: University of California Press.

Reviewed by Emily Yates-Doerr, NYU Anthropology

A half-dozen strips of white, greasy fat, with a few thin lines of blood-red flesh running through them— this is the image on the cover of Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands. One can’t, perhaps, judge a book by its cover. But in the case of Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington’s latest book – which could easily become a food studies classic – the cover is instructive. The authors suggest that the appearance of this cheap meat typically elicits a response of disgust. Moreover it is this common response that makes flaps an unusual material commodity as they resist Marx’s notion of fetishization (the straightforward equation of value with price). Instead of appearing as disconnected from the processes of production through which they emerge, the image of the “cheap, fatty, and undesirable cut of meat… evokes the labor processes of killing and dismembering that went into them” (p. 27). Flaps additionally, Gewertz and Errington argue, resist fetishization of consumption; because they are a widely stigmatized meat, they do not hide, but draw attention to the persisting inequalities between those who eat and those who eschew the fatty meat. Flaps, already embroiled in local controversies, “encourage people to think about the broader historical relationships that make them” (p. 28).

In this easily readable, but nonetheless ambitious book, Gewertz and Errington apply their longstanding interest in change in Papua New Guinea to the controversies surrounding the sale and purchase of lamb and mutton fat among, what they call, “Flap Food Nations.” They suggest that flaps embody numerous ambiguities about post-colonial relations between the Pacific Islands (specifically Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga) and Australia and New Zealand. Although they are a tasty and important source of nutrition for many Pacific Islanders, they are also widely seen as “by-products”, “dumped” upon the poor by wealthier nations. Furthermore, given an escalating incidence of obesity in the Pacific Islands, flaps – themselves more than 50% fat – have come to represent the high prevalence of dietary related illnesses: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, etc. Gewertz and Errington suggest that because of their complicated symbolism, flaps function akin to totems, marking group membership— in this case third world eaters and first world refusers. This totemic quality of flaps additionally references inextricable relations of dependency, indexing those who live in a second-rate modernity in which they reply upon a second-rate source of food.

Cheap Meat follows “the flow of flaps” (p. 8) in order to explore how a “cheap, fatty meat ends up only in certain places and only in certain bodies” (p. 40). The authors begin their exploration of the “global omnivore’s dilemma” (p. 118) – that is, how to chose what to eat – in New Zealand and Australia, countries where flaps are either rejected or used for pet food. Gewertz and Errington are refreshingly transparent about their methodologies and always forthright about the complexities of their anthropological commitments. They carefully detail their visits to (dis)assembly slaughterhouses, where low-value flaps are separated from high value loins and racks (flaps are the only part of the sheep that needs no further processing, and, because they are a “cheap meat,” they are simply sawed apart and stuffed into bags or cartons without regard for aesthetic presentation). Although flaps constitute just 3-5% of a carcass’s value, because margins of profit for meat production are low, flaps must be sold for the producers to make money. Rather than demonize the “middle men” of the meat trade who are responsible for arranging the export of “cheap meat” to poorer Pacific Island countries, Gewertz and Errington describe the traders they interview as “the commercial corollary of anthropologists” (p. 54). To achieve desired sales, these traders – many of whom operate “at the bottom of the market” (p. 70) – are required to cultivate considerable knowledge about and ties within the communities where they work.

By the second half of the book, when this multi-sited study of globalism moves to the Pacific Islands, the authors have succinctly presented their readers with an important history of the recent origins of the production and inter-island trade of flaps. This history illuminates another ambiguity entailed in the sale of flaps: unlike many “traditional,” so-called “ethnic” fatty foods (lardo in Italy, chitlins in the US south, or even the brined brisket consumed in the Papua New Guinea), flaps are a recently introduced commodity without much cultural cache. Gewertz and Errington carefully point out that poorer Pacific Islanders depend upon flaps as a source of affordable calories, that street venders rely upon their sale, and that many of their informants (surveyed in their study by local anthropology students) described flaps as enjoyable, convenient, and filling. Yet their informants overwhelmingly viewed flaps as sub-par to the local delicacy of pig, and even those Pacific Islanders who depend on flaps for sustenance saw them as a troubling representation of the structural inequalities between first world producers and third world consumers. As the authors write: “Papua New Guineans do know – and do remain concerned by the fact – that lamb and mutton flaps are rejected by white people” (p. 108). Although Australian and New Zealand producers defended their trade with statements such as, “One person’s trash was bound to be another’s treasure” (p. 73), Pacific Islanders were unsettled by their consumption of goods they knew others had rejected. In exploring this controversy, Cheap Meat convincingly demonstrates that in the case of flaps, “Conversion of trash to treasure may become, over time, an increasingly compromised alchemy” (p. 95).

In the last two chapters of the book (“Pacific Island Flaps” and “One Supersize Does Not Fit All”) the authors engage most directly with the public health crisis that shadows their study. They use two Pacific Islands as case studies: Fiji, which banned the sale of flaps in 2000, and Tonga, where public health officials estimate that 60% of those aged 15 and older are obese. In Fiji, the government began to regulate against flaps as a means to protect the health of its citizens (despite the challenge this ban posed to the neoliberal free-trade stipulations of the World Trade Organization, it was locally defended as a public-health corollary to other countries’ regulations of food safety). While the authors raise important questions about potential limits of public health, and point out that the ban has done little to curtail rates of obesity and may have even harmed those who are undernourished and protein-deprived, they also laud the Fijian government for showing itself to be “committed to and capable of” taking steps to address the public health concerns of its citizens (p. 119).

Gewertz and Errington explore numerous public health measures aimed at obesity prevention in Fiji and Tonga. For example, they describe a televised public health commercial that follows flaps as they move from congealed fat to a blocked artery to a man’s stroke. They also detail a church scene where a Pentecostal preacher publically weighs his parishioners while encouraging them to treat their bodies as temples of God. Their analysis entails a trenchant critique of the “just do it” (p. 152) narratives of consumer choice and individual responsibility that drive many discussions of obesity prevention. They point out that given widespread (and increasing) market inequalities, not all citizens have the same range of opportunities and so not all consumers are equally capable of making “healthy” choices. In the beginning of Cheap Meat, the authors said that due to the ethical concerns underlying their research they felt obligated to weigh in with policy recommendations. It is at the end of the book that they do so, and they conclude their study by suggesting that while it would be unreasonable to expect first world countries (New Zealand and Australia) to restrict their export of flaps, poorer countries like Tonga or Fiji should not be prevented from taking actions – perhaps in the form of food bans – to protect the public health of their citizens. “Good food choices,” they suggest, “must be made as easy as possible” (p. 164).

Overall, Cheap Meat is a compelling and informative read, which could be assigned to undergraduate courses on culture and food in any discipline. It would also complement introductory anthropology course syllabi, as it cogently engages with the dilemmas confronting modern-day multi-sited ethnographic research. In studying the global flows of a commodity food across numerous nations, and by linking this food to the weight and health of people’s bodies, the authors are, admittedly, tackling a huge project. Any one of their chapters might have been an entire study, and the book as a whole is a formidable analysis of a complex and increasingly significant public health concern. Because of this, I will not provide concluding criticism typical of book reviews, but will instead suggest areas that might be elaborated upon in further research.

My research on the “nutrition transition” in Guatemala focuses on perceptions of dietary health and changing corporeal ideals, and – likely because of this – the sections of Cheap Meat that I found especially compelling were those that explored the local dilemmas that Pacific Islanders have experienced in their reliance on the consumption of “cheap meat.” While the authors argue that fatty meat is stigmatized (even among people who enjoy it), further research might usefully explore whether, and in what circumstances, this stigmatization extends to fat bodies. We learn that the former King of Tonga was the “world’s most enormous monarch” (p. 50) weighing in at up to 462 pounds. We are also told that the corporeal bulk of PNG politicians indexes their power and privilege (even if illegitimate and disproportionate). The authors suggest that fatness among the Mari was amusing and a source of “good natured banter” (p. 113). In all of these descriptions fatness has positive and even desirable connotations. Yet they also tell us that an estimated 15% of girls in Fiji – caught between familial pressures to eat, and societal and governmental pressures for thinness – are reported to have “patterns of disordered eating” (p. 140). It would be interesting to examine the circumstances through which body fat becomes undesirable, and the strategies of weight management employed in response. If Pacific Island elite, who can afford “luxury” low-calorie foods, have begun to diet, how is this affecting post-colonial understandings of what constitutes proper eating, proper body form, and – by extension – inclusion in national bodies?

In this vein, further studies might explore existing and emerging national stratifications that form around fat meat and fat bodies. The authors describe flaps as embodying a “diffuse social anxiety” about the international inequalities between first and third world countries. To what degree might they also embody, or come to embody, anxieties about local inequalities? I also wonder: Although thinness and health are increasingly conflated in public discourse, is weight regulation in fact becoming the individualized moral problem in the Pacific Islands that is it in many western countries? While the authors devote critical attention to public health and commercial discourses that frame consumption of fatty meat as a “lifestyle” matter and encourage individual responsibility, further studies might explore how these understandings of fat are actually taken up in people’s lives and everyday practices. Given the longstanding anthropological emphasis on Melanesian relationality, it would be instructive to know how Pacific Islanders are adopting, resisting, or transforming public health narratives of personal responsibility.

Finally, I would like to learn more about the understandings of dietary and bodily health that exist in the rural communities where many of the now-urban field informants of Cheap Meat originate. Gewertz and Errington briefly discuss notions of care in Fiji, where a local word, Vikawaitaki, implies food exchange and feeding and is understood to emerge in bodily form. Vikawaitaki (care) both figuratively and materially “marks the body with the record of its success” (p. 139). Given that global public health programs often standardize terms like “health,” “care,” “nourishment,” “nutrition,” and “diet,” an exploration of the local nuances of these ideas – as well as the practices through which they gain their meanings – in places where public health campaigns are still marginal, strikes me as a potentially valuable extension to what is already a valuable and impressive study.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Jane Dickson Mphil/PhD student UCL

Images do more than represent. They are also material artifacts which have social, economic and political effects. They help people to make sense of the world, develop their ongoing biographies and enable and encourage the formation of subjectivities. These processes are evident in the Transition network, a fast-growing organisation which encourages community based responses to the environmental challenges of climate change and peak oil. Transition Initiatives run community building projects aimed at powering-down, localism, resilience and re-skilling; not just for a carbon-neutral future, but for a transformative, Utopian future. The Utopian vision is of a post-oil, zero-carbon, agrarian, socially just, pre-industrial type of lifestyle (Hopkins:2008).

The model of Transition has so far been taken up by more than 200 official Initiatives, with many more in the initial stages. These include forests, villages, universities, and islands, hence the name change from Transition Towns to Movement to network over the four years since its inception. The network emerged from the deep ecology movement, which promotes a “consciousness of identification with the non-human world” where humans and ecosystems are accorded equal status (Dobson 2007:40). The structure and principles come from Permaculture which is the combination of permanent agriculture and permanent culture coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-1970s. Permaculture developed as a system of “consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre, and energy for provision of local needs” (Holmgren 2003:xix). Holmgren's design principles which include: valuing renewable resources, designing from patterns to details and creatively using change, have been foundational to Transitioners (Holmgren:2007). The model also relies heavily on the work of Joanna Macy, an eco-psychologist, for its guiding principles on the psychology of change.

By situating the Transition network as a visual community, this research argues that the network is produced by, organized by and productive of the visual. MacDougall's insistence on images as “constituents of knowledge,” opens up the way that visual anthropology can produce new and different kinds of knowledge from written and discursive knowledges (2006:5). The network attracts and educates members through regular film showings followed by discussion groups. These include titles such as The Age of Stupid and The End of Suburbia. Regular members are encouraged to participate in collective creative visualization exercises in order to envision the future post-oil Utopia. These visions are used as the inspiration to produce material artefacts such as the 'Timeline' and the 'Energy Descent Action Plan'. These are documents which outline the targets and actions to be undertaken to transition to the post-oil future. In addition, members use social networking sites extensively, not only to organise but to share their visual products; everything from gardening projects to how to introduce and promote a local currency. In addition, the production and reception of the internally produced film In Transition was an important landmark for the network, and to which I was lucky enough to gain access.

The work of Edwards and Gell have been particularly influential to this study. By examining the materiality of images it can be seen how the visual both “stops agency” and allows it to continue flowing in different and multiple directions (Gell:1998). In addition, by using theories of processual subjectivity formation and the methodology of examining how the visual operates in circuits to co-produce “complexes of subjectification” this agency and its effects have been traced (Guattari 1995:7).

The Transition network is only four years old and has attracted many thousands of members country and world wide. Often people report that what attracts them to Transition is the move away from oppositional activism (although activism is not discouraged) towards a solutions based reconstruction of society. This ideal of geographically located community really becomes the heart of Transition. Transitioners are seeking what Heidegger referred to as 'dwelling', where there exists a harmony and integration between persons and location which does not destroy the 'essence' of either and which leads to nurturing and gives life meaning (1978:327-328).

Dobson, A. 2007. Green political thought. London: Routledge.

Edwards, E. & Hart, J. 2004. Photographs objects histories: On the materiality of images. London: Routledge.

Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guattari, F. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-esthetic paradigm (trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis), Bloomington: Indiana University press.

Heidegger, M. 1978. Building dwelling thinking. In Basic writings: From being and Time (1927) to the task of thinking (1964). (ed.) D. F. Krell, 323-339. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Holmgren, D. 2007. Design principles (available on-line: http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php)

... 2003. Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability. Cambridge: Holmgren Design Press.

Hopkins, R.2008. The Transition handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Totnes, Devon: Green Books LTD.

MacDougall, D. 2006. The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

Films:

In Transition 1.0. Forthcoming: Dec. 2009. Emma Goude, (dir.) 50 min. Colour.

The age of stupid. 2009. Fanny Armstrong, (dir.) 92 min. Colour. Distributed by Dogwood Pictures.

The end of suburbia: Oil depletion and the collapse of the American dream. 2004. Gregory Greene, (dir.) 78 min. Colour. Distributed by The Electric Wallpaper Company.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Check out this ebook from Duke University Press, about copyright and fair-use in documentary filmmaking. The book takes the form of a comic and is an excellent introduction to copyright issues from the perspective of the creative commons....

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links | Topics for Discussion