« January 2010 | Main | March 2010 »
The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive", a group of leading libraries has said.
That's a really interesting iteration of intellectual property rights on the world wide web....
A recent article in The Nation magazine (Feb. 11/18) by Barry Schwabsky called "How Soon Was Now?" called my attention to current interest in the fate of the Polaroid (the last batch of the famous instant film expired on October 9, 2009). Schwabsky reviews two recent London gallery exhibits--at the Pump House Gallery and at Atlas Gallery--that showcased the art world's uptake of the vernacular medium. He has insightful things to say about the unique materiality of Polaroids, which returned photography to its pre-negative roots through the creation of singular, one-off objects. No doubt the current, somewhat nostalgic interest in the format stems in part from the ease of multiplying digital images, which also provide the satisfaction of instant photographic gratification but not the tactile qualities of the Polaroid (with its just-below-the-surface squish of chemical emulsion).
Although there are indications that an independent group may be trying to revive the technology in a former Polaroid factory in Holland, a separate channel of interest survives among casual collectors of found images/objects (who have their own web presence at sites like Found Magazine, where users can upload, share, and tag their street-side instamatic finds, and which published a book of found Polaroids a few years back--the cover of which is above).
And now, in the wake of bankruptcy brought on by a Ponzi scheme, the defunct Polaroid Corporation is being forced to auction off a major portion of its historic collection of prints through Sotheby's in New York this June (see the recent New York Times article).
Like the resurgent interest in vinyl, these developments remind us of the limits of the digital and to never count out passé media.
The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum seeks a doctoral candidate who is a Papua New Guinean citizen to work on the Museum’s PNG Collection. The successful applicant will build a project around an aspect of local and national identity in PNG embodied in material and/ or visual culture. The applicant will have access to the Museum Collection and will gain experience in museum curation and collection management as part of their studies. Among its 24000 accessioned items, the Museum holds more than 4000 artefacts and art works created by people living in PNG and 1700 photographs taken in PNG by missionaries, colonial officials and
other visitors. Much of this material dates from the early and mid twentieth century.
Interested in applying or require additional information?
Please contact:
T: 07 3365 2674
F: 07 3365 1544
W: http://socialscience.uq.edu.au/anthmuseum
W: http://www.uq.edu.au/international
"Recycling Textile Technologies"
A workshop to be held at the Department of Anthropology,
University College London,
on June 14th 2010
This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers who work
on textile recycling, including anthropologists, geographers,
historians, political economists, designers, and materials scientists.
This is with a view to develop a research agenda that explores
innovation in textile recycling technologies in the widest sense, and
how these succeed or fail in becoming socially embedded. Textile
recycling activities, as socio-technical systems, arise in specific
cultural contexts within global trading patterns, and their study may
incorporate the underlying relationships between people and things, raw
materials and technologies and the emergence of entrepreneurs and
innovators in social networks amongst other (f)actors.
We see at least three possible clusters of themes emerging, but welcome
further ideas:
1. Reinventing Old Solutions to New Problems?
Industrial recycling practises are specific, historically situated
socio-technical systems. While pre-industrial papermaking industries
used rags as a source of raw materials, 19th century textile mills
looked to recycled clothing as a cheaper source of raw material for the
wool shoddy industries. In the 21st century, the problem has changed to
what to do with mountains of cast-off clothing, and this drives the
search for technologically solutions appropriate to diverse cultural
contexts. Anthropological understandings of technology embrace
materials, makers, designers, and users in a relational networks
including socio-economic, political, and legal factors. In this broader
context, how are some old technologies being reinvented for the future,
and in what fields are new technologies being successfully developed?
2. The value of knowledge and skills in cultural contexts
As different cultures have developed different somatic skills and
practices, we wish to investigate the importance of tacit knowledges to
recycling. Consideration of these embedded knowledges within the global
perspective raises a number of questions specific to the processing of
waste textiles. How are knowledge and skills valued differently within a
textile waste industry compared to primary production? How intimately do
you need to know used textiles in order to process them effectively, and
how do differing levels of entanglement affect your social status within
a recycling system? For those who are bodily engaged with waste, how
valuable are these tacit knowledges and are they acknowledged by others?
And what are the cultural specificities of the valuing of people and
skills within different textile waste sectors? For example, there are
differences in skills and status between an immigrant rag sorter in a UK
factory, an illiterate migrant woman cutting up rags in an Indian shoddy
factory and the designer creating eco-textiles from recycled materials.
Do these differences come down to a narrowing of knowledge domains? Are
these limitations the only factors affecting personal value ranking
within global systems?
3. Networks of global trade
Since at least the early 19thC rags have been globally traded for reuse
and recycling industries. Many rag businesses are family businesses that
have been trading for generations, and have nurtured valuable networks
of business contacts that span the developed and developing world in
both directions. The movement of second-hand textiles across the globe
both creates social relations and at the same time is enabled by
pre-existing social contacts. Why is it difficult to start up a new rag
trade business? A related question is what can waste do as an actor in
international trade? For example, how does the trade in second-hand
clothing and textile waste facilitate the movement of other goods along
similar networks? To what extent is textile waste trade a conduit for
other licit and illicit goods? How might the degrees of regulatory
frameworks surrounding waste enable or inhibit other flows of goods, and
is this conducive to it becoming the visible front for invisible
commodity exchange? Is this particular to textiles, to waste or raw
materials in general?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by Feb 28th to:
Lucy Norris lucy.norris@ucl.ac.uk AND Julie Botticello
j.botticello@ucl.ac.uk
Department of Anthropology, UCL.
This workshop is being initiated as part of the ESRC project, the Waste
of the World
www.thewasteoftheworld.org
Timothy Webmoor, Saïd Business School, Univ. of Oxford
Review of: Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, 2008. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.
 |
This is an innovative and creative book. These are its best qualities. It is also ambitious - the authors setting themselves the task of both complying with the “archaeological morality” (269) of publishing the results of field investigations, and conveying the experience of working at Leskernick on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. To do this, the authors have experimented with form and content. And while their citational circle does not extend to media studies (where, I would suggest, they would find inspiration and edification), the book exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage: the medium is the message.
Reviewing experimental work, criticism rather than accolade comes easier, partly because the novelty excludes easy comparative evaluation. So I think it important to underscore that being innovative and taking risks, even though you may be safely tenured scholars, should be commended. It creates discussion, fosters debate, stirs emotion, and motivates colleagues to work harder. It disrupts our insulated routines of scholarly production. It is, unfortunately, all too rare.
The collaborative effort of the Leskernick project, steered by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, bends the parameters of analogue publication to transcend traditional site reports. The reader will not find neat topical divisions, no ‘introduction’, ‘background’ (limited to environmental characteristics and a few weather stats), ‘results’, ‘discussion’ or ‘significance’, followed by add on (and on and on) appendices. And with few exceptions, it does not resemble any other field project’s publication in archaeology.
There is a structure, however, with the book divided into four parts. Part One somewhat approximates a conventional ‘introducing the site’. Goals for the project are laid out, the setting and unique “awe and mystery” of the rocky hill where Leskernick is situated are conveyed, and the authors quickly dispel any notion that this will be a conventional report focused upon an archaeological site. By the time they conclude Chapter 1 stating that “we stand with the Leskernick people at the centre of their world” (35), the reader can expect to share an intimacy that will bring her to the edge of being an ‘insider’ of the project (cf. 266). We then receive an orienting tour of the site, followed by Chapter 3’s methodology.
Part Two encompasses the ‘real’ archaeological information. If one were after conventional details, Chapters 4-7 are were we glean the details about Bronze Age Leskernick gathered through the excavation of 400 square meters of area, and the survey of every house and field enclosure on Leskernick Hill. A rough chronology, pegged to the radiocarbon dates in Table 4.1 (88-89), develops. Initially there were the earliest stone rows and circles, with the most spectacular ‘Propped Stone” and its summer solstice alignment dating to as early as the Neolithic. Then, in the hill’s clitter of stones, a growing population of 100-200 people, or eight to sixteen families, built their houses and field enclosures during the Middle Bronze Age and supported a pastoral economy (138).
There is disagreement about whether these people inhabited Leskernick year round or only seasonally, though the directors favor the former scenario. Then there is a decrease in the number of families, leaving the hill with perhaps only 60 inhabitants. Then a gradual abandonment of the dwellings and the hill until much later medieval visitation and re-use. It is the narrative of part of the life-cycle of a landscape.
The volume could have ended here with the conclusion of Chapter 7. But this book is not really about archaeological information. The remaining Parts Three and Four use the archaeological endeavor as more of a backdrop for what seems to particularly interest the project directors (or at least two of the three). This is the experience of Leskernick in the present. It is this emphasis, which makes the work stand out. It also draws the reader in – initially.
What rapidly occurs, though, is an overabundance of information; sometimes repackaged for different chapters, or indeed blatantly repeated (compare diary entries of 53 with 255). There is simply too much detail. They are concerned not to “close off alternative interpretations” (86), to let “the voices proliferate” (438, note 1.3), to avoid “a rhetoric of authority in which closure is created and debate shut-down” (27-28). But what happens is a numbing effect. So that rather than precise details concerning Leskernick, the reader comes away with a series of theses.
This is too bad as the following chapters, though somewhat disjointed, present a range of interesting ‘case studies’ that span anthropology and cognate fields and which dissolve disciplinarian distinctions. The phenomenological treatment of the ‘processional way’ of the site (184-190) and ‘photo essay’ of the neighboring ridge of Brown Willy (231-236), the artistic interventions of Chapter 13, the frank discussions of political economy in Chapter 11, and of running a public outreach exhibition in Chapter 14, as well as the visual and material culture analyses packed into Chapter 12 are examples of what’s on offer. While these extra-disciplinarian studies could have been better merged with the more traditional archaeological reporting, casting the net wider like this worked well in conveying the experiential side of Leskernick.
Indeed, I wish I had been present at the ‘pissing on Bourdieu’s book’/burying of the excavator’s trowel incident (273-274). Now that doesn’t happen often! Or does it? This is another major point of the book. The “background noise” (281) or the “back regions” (298) edited out of traditional reports for being superfluous and irrelevant to the project’s findings are, in fact, integral to its operation from the ground up. A reflexive acknowledgement in anthropological and archaeological fieldwork that being human, caught up in fields of relations while ‘in the field’, cannot and should not be bracketed off from being a ‘scientist’.
This is the book’s ‘sociology of the discipline’ thesis: archaeology is a social practice in the present that makes it impossible to sieve out subjectivity from archaeological interpretations. Steeped in postprocessual and interpretive archaeology, the book holds true to the ‘principle of honesty’. It is well taken, and the authors do a good job of opening up the process of how consensus in interpretation is reached by presenting discussions and diary entries where alternate views are expressed. The discussion with the geomorphologists (Chapter 9) was the best example of this.
As a corollary to this social activity thesis, in Chapter 11 the book expands upon the experience of fieldwork as initiation into craft, of apprenticeship. Archaeology is a field of relations that bind participants together as a seasonal community undergoing Van Gennepian rites of passage. Whilst most archaeologists are highly aware of these initiatory rites, and are often drawn to doing fieldwork because of the comradeship, no other book has treated it with such serious attention.
But the volume attempts to do too much with too much ‘data’. Presenting these ‘back stories’ as well as the ‘front stories’ of survey and excavation, contributes to the continued inundation of the reader with repetition and innocuous details – exactly what is intervisible and from which stone? who’s trowel had more rust? why were Danner boots better than steel Doc Martins? just what did that post-it comment from the Altarnun exhibition say?
A postmodern paralysis. Rather than sieving all potential information through experts’ experience and judgment, we have the opposite. Document it all as anything may be relevant. This forensic ‘thesis’ relates to the ‘crisis of representation’ and the claim that all statements about the past are subjective interpretations. Since statements cannot be definitively adjudicated based upon accepted criteria, and so cannot be objectively ‘true’, the emphasis shifts to a ‘shotgun effect’ approach. Put enough (multiple) interpretations out there so that amongst them all we are sure to hit upon something important. As seasoned scholars, this manic desire to document, as well as the “concern with the manner in which the past is written and presented” (27, emphasis original) is not simply experimentation for the sake of satisfying rebellious impulses and postmodern anxiety. It is backed-up by a body of theory that spans the social sciences. Yet only this exact combination – established scholars, theoretical depth and experimentation – legitimizes the book’s excesses. Indeed, I suspect if any of these three ingredients were absent, the book would not have worked – literally, as I doubt very much that an established press would have published it.
Wedded to eschewing any general criteria for obtaining objectivity, opting to (over)document the rich and subjective experience of doing archaeology in the present, is another inter-related thesis. A theory of ontology, of Being-in-the-world: making places makes people. With two of the three project directors coming from Material Culture Studies at University College London, we are given the group’s dictum of dialects over and over again. A statistical study could be done to present how often the phrases ‘mutual engagement’, ‘a dialectical relationship’, ‘in making things we make ourselves’, and so forth crop up with mantra-like consistency. The corollary is that since being is embodied, to understand this dialectical process of mutual engagement we need to attend to the sensuous and physical. This again sets themselves the most difficult task of overcoming problems of their own making, as “neither word nor image can be substituted for being bodily in place” (339). How can the book succeed, then?
Despite the explicit attempt to “create a dialogic relationship between images and words” (335), they doom themselves to failure because of the fundamental assumption that textual communication of experience is fundamental to visual forms of expression: “photographs are typically invaded by language from the very moment we start to look at them” (335). Images are inadequate by themselves as “they remain radically underdetermined as to be incapable of constituting a narrative form” (335). This allegiance to constructing narratives, of the importance of rendering the fieldwork of Leskernick in text, runs contrary to their other primary thesis: that conventional archaeological narratives inadequately convey the messiness, subjectivity and sensuous qualities of working at archaeology. The book’s priority of text over the visual ought to be denounced. The visual would seem to be more capable of evoking, with less ‘philosophical-linguistic closure’, the experience of Leskernick. I am surprised that there were not more experiments in video documentation and diaries. And while an analysis of the website is outside this review, the project would have certainly benefited from integrating new media into the project from the outset.
In the end, “we are left with more questions than we started out with” (412). This, both as a reader and as an archaeologist, disappoints me. There may have been rhetorical force behind such a pithy postmodern conclusion. Say in the mid-1990s while the project was conducted. Since this time such statements have become tiresome, part of reflexivity’s redux. We cannot abdicate our anthropological and archaeological authority. We are specialists, trained in a particular practice. We have expertise and so should be able to say something a bit more definitive than this. Indeed, this is borne out of the book’s sociological analyses (Chapters 11-12). While well intentioned and despite efforts at implementing “an egalitarian and nonhierarchical vision of fieldwork organization” (249), flat hierarchies are flawed. Competence, background knowledge and experience, and interests vary amongst practitioners. We tend to sort ourselves out. “We’re trapped in the hierarchy of knowledge: however much we try to democratize . . . there is an inequality” (250). Steeped in Leskernick for five field seasons, I think the authors should proffer expert opinion.
Had it been published (as a book) just after the conclusion of the project in 1999, this volume would have been as groundbreaking as the many academic papers that have also arisen from this collaboration. Both in terms of representational form and as a capstone to the content of the theses concerning social practice, reflexivity, dialectical relationships with material culture, and even archaeological art. While admirably drawing attention to the political economy of doing archaeology at the academy and in the field, an equally uncompromising look at the economy driving publication – where the (textual) wheels meet the road, so to speak - of archaeological work would have aided in explaining the (apparent) delay of the book and pushed the collection’s arguments for reflexive attention to the process of fieldwork even further. In 2008, that would have been radical. But then, how long would that book have needed to be?
[Modified from a review published in SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. 2009, Vol. 6(2)]
In recent years, the evidence of technical and material analysis has become increasingly important to art-historical interpretation. Beyond their traditional role in informing the restoration of artefacts, technical investigations have greatly contributed to our understanding of how works of art were made. Yet, less critical attention has been paid to the “use-life” of artifacts—that is, to the manipulation, exchange and consumption of artefacts throughout their life histories. Drawing together researchers from different areas of expertise including curators and conservators, this research project aims to explore the material lives of artefacts in a variety of media, encouraging object-based, methodological and theoretical discussions relating to the shifting relationship between artefacts, people and environments throughout the life history of particular objects or classes of objects. Emphasis is placed on works of art as material objects considering the ways in which they are manipulated, re-made and unmade by different individuals, at different times, manifesting different social and cultural practices.
Among issues that can be raised are the following: temporality, authenticity and change; fragmentation and reconstruction; aggregation of artefacts and the status of the object; ritual damage/reparation; pre-modern restorations; material history and conservation of new media; durability, ephemerality and material residuals; recontextualisation/decontextualisation (i.e. artefacts in consonant and dissonant environments); confiscation, displacement and repatriation; individual vs. corporate attitudes towards materiality of art; commoditisation and decommoditisation; ownership, market and the value of materiality; historiographic and methodological approaches to the materiality of art; the concept of “object biography” and its implications/limitations.
As part of the Material Life of Things, scholars working across the discipline are invited to join a research group to discuss various topics and address methodological questions within the theme of The Material Life of Things. The group will consist of 15-20 scholars meeting in the academic years 2009-10 and 2010-11, starting in spring 2010. Group members will be asked to develop a research project with a view to publishing the findings at the end of the designated period. Plenary sessions in which all group members will participate will be followed by small group discussions (4/5 members) in which individual projects and papers will be discussed. Group members will also be asked to participate in symposia to take place during the time span of the project, including a final international two-day symposium. A collection of essays presenting the results of the project is also planned.
Applications to join the research group are welcome from scholars at all stages of their career: from current graduate students to established scholars. Scholars applying to join the research group are asked to submit a proposal of 300 words on a topic that they wish to develop over the course of the project. We encourage proposals that address both object-based and theoretical/methodological issues. Topics are welcome from all periods and could address any aspect of The Material Life of Things, with the issues above providing a general starting point.
Deadline for applications: 12 March 2010.
Applicants should send a CV, covering letter and a proposal of not more than 300 words detailing how they would develop their topic over the period of the project.
Applications should be addressed to Professor Caroline Arscott, Head of Research, and sent c/o Cynthia de Souza, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN.
The Research Forum will contribute towards the costs of attending the seminars.
Maynooth, 24 – 27 Aug. 2010
Material culture, migration and the transnational imaginary (W018)
Convenors
Julie Botticello (UCL) email: j.botticello@ucl.ac.uk
Ivana Bajic-Hajdukovic (European Univ. Institute, Florence)
Ivana.Bajic-Hajdukovic@eui.eu
Discussant: Professor David Parkin
Brief Abstract
Material objects are used to objectify memory; as things with their own trajectories, migrating objects are also used to create new links and new relations, positively or negatively affecting imaginations of community and belonging, making migration a crisis of local/global identification.
We welcome papers addressing this crisis and how ordinary people respond to their extraordinary situations through the multiple meanings objects provide.
More information about the conference and the panel can be found here:
Long Abstract
This panel considers the "crisis of passage" that occurs through migration, the roles material objects play to surmount this, and that of the imagination, instrumental in facilitating global connections. Migration is a crisis because those who move are in situations out of the ordinary, with no safety nets to fall back on, with hardly any institutional support, uprooted from their social and physical landscapes. Migrants must develop their own strategies for dealing with complex situations and emotional turmoil. Objects play a tremendous role here to effect self-remembering, self-representation and home (re)making. The forms these take can be religious artefacts, healing materials, clothing, food, photographs, music. These 'mementoes' remind people of who they are and where they come from and to whom they are connected.
Migration is not just about citizens crossing borders from homeland to host-countries; it incorporates global movements of things, ideas and people: transnational movements affecting those who move as well as those who don't. Migration as the crisis of passage moves the traditional paradigm of migration into the realm of the imaginary, in which distant and previously unknown peoples can become connected through materials circulating in this global domain. The same types of objects cited previously can similarly be used to express outward belonging and membership to "imagined communities" not able to be experienced personally, changing persons and altering their concepts of local and global belonging.
Graeme Were, UCL
For those with wistful memories of the Mk 1 and 2 Ford Escort - motoring classics - then the following article on the BBC website will revive fond memories. It did for me: the third and final car I bought in 1990 was a secondhand Mk 2 Ford Escort, sky blue with imitation chrome wheels. It got stolen twice though both times I recovered it undamaged, albeit stereo system missing. I think the car thieves used a duplicate set of keys each time, which was a bit alarming.
In any case, my point is that the article - on the BBC Magazine website - is worth reading for enthusiasts of far-away British colonial outposts, and most interestingly, Ford Escorts. Given the difficultly of shipping goods to St Helena in the South Atlantic, any former owner of a Ford Escort can understand why this special car can endure on this remote island. I remember one of the main reasons that I bought my Escort was because it was then one of the easiest cars to maintain.
For those more interested anthropology and material culture, small islands and cultures of repair seems like an interesting area to explore.
Daniel Miller, UCL
I have always been drawn to anthropological research I never intended to undertake, but just couldn’t help myself. I am writing this towards the end of a period of fieldwork in Trinidad. I am here with Mirca Madianou to study the way new media impact upon transnational relationships in comparison with research undertaken last year in the Philippines which we are working up as a book, probably to be called Distant Parenting. But I just know that I wont be able to stop myself writing at least some papers if not a book about Facebook in Trinidad, because the country seems in the grip of something like a Facebook frenzy which I seem to have been increasingly researching as the fieldwork progresses. To be `Fas’ in Trinidad is to be too quickly into someone else’s business another related word is Maco, that is to view others peoples private business and Facebook is also called Maco book. Since this is seen as a national characteristic leading to the disorder of bacchanal there is a general feeling that Facebook was invented to exacerbate the very nature of being Trinidadian. Indeed as consistent with my previous work I now see Facebook as something invented by Trinidadians. As it happens the word Friending or to Friend is also a common traditional expression in Trinidad unfortunately it meant to have sex with, I am not quite sure about the implications of that particular semantic juxtaposition.
What makes Facebook a natural topic of enquiry is its ubiquity in the country resonating with the anthropological sensibility towards the holistic. It has been important in galvanising the response to the recent catastrophe of fellow Caribbeans in Haiti, as well as in more local politics. It is at the heart of our intended topic of transnational relationships but equally in the reinvigorisation of specifically Trinidadian identity. It provides considerable insights into traditional topics such as the nature of community and family, with a marked effect on both. It may be used for religious expression, and is a common way to conduct business and economic transactions. As such the given literature on the social networks which tended to presume that their early use, mainly for student sociality, was also their given property, is only a very partial insight into the nature of Facebook as it establishes itself as a global phenomenon. Actually the topic had already arisen in our previous work in the Philippines and we had submitted a journal publication called `Should you accept a mother’s friends request?’ which looks at the clash between two networks that, of kinship and peergroup, (not yet heard if this was accepted). But already it is evident that Facebook is becoming so much more than networking.
Let me end with one particular characteristic of Facebook that demonstrates its particular relevance to material and visual culture. In the previous paper we hasd discussed the issue of making relationships visible as an extension of theoretical discussion by Marilyn Strathern. I had also been made aware of the consequences of relationship breakup for deactivation in research work by the anthropologist Ilana Gershon. But here in Trinidad the concern is not only with the consequences of breakup but with the way the very visibility of one’s partners other relationships makes it harder to sustain relationships. For example in an interview yesterday a young woman talked of four of her friends relationships she was convinced had ended almost entirely because of this effect of being on Facebook. This is just one of many instances where at least Trinidadians are convinced that the technology in and of itself is changing what it means to be Trinidadian. Something I am hoping to give time to think about more deeply over the next few months.
WHAT ARE SURFACES?
Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers London, 1st-3rd September 2010
www.rgs.org/AC2010
Session organisers: Isla Forsyth (University of Glasgow), James Robinson (Aberystwyth University), Hayden Lorimer (University of Glasgow), Peter Merriman (Aberystwyth University)
Geographers have long been concerned with describing and understanding the Earth’s surface, and the social and environmental interactions which it enables or constrains. Recently, creative approaches have produced myriad explanations of surface patterns, processes and peopling (Harrison, Pile and Thrift 2004). However, critical reflections on different understandings of ‘the surface’ have been relatively neglected in contemporary geographical study, with greater emphasis placed on geographical concepts such as ‘place’ or ‘landscape’.
Commonly, and metaphysically, we come to know the world, and figure our place in it, as surface-dwellers, moving over ground, across bodies of water or occasionally taking to the air to see patterns of life and habitats from on-high (Cosgrove 2001; Ingold 2008). Meanwhile, much of the commonplace, metaphoric language of the surface is deeply pejorative: beauty is said to be skin-deep or someone is warned they are skating on thin-ice. If surfaces are objects of attraction, they are also subject to our suspicion and distrust.
This session asks what a serious consideration of the superficial might allow, hinging on the question ‘What are surfaces?’ We welcome proposals for papers which have a theoretical and/or empirical focus which critically address different social, cultural, historical and physical engagements with surfaces: human and nonhuman; topographical, topological and technological; imagined, visualized and inhabited; material and metaphoric; reproduced, modelled and designed.
Contributions are welcome from geography, anthropology, cultural history, history of science, science and technology studies, and other cognate areas.
The deadline for submission of abstracts (250 words maximum) is 19th February 2010
When submitting your paper please include the following information: 1) name 2) institutional affiliation 3) contact email, 4) title of proposed paper, 5) abstract (no more than 250 words) and 6) technical requirements (i.e., video, data projector, sound).
Papers may wish to address the questions/issues raised below...
Questions:
- What kind of ontological status are ‘the surface’ or ‘surfaces’ afforded?
- What are the relations (theoretical and lived) between ‘surface’, ‘space’ and ‘place’?
- How do surfaces form versions of exteriority/interiority for ‘the self’ and ‘the world’?
Themes:
- Theories about, and technologies for, the ‘full’ apprehension of surfaces at different scales/distances/heights;
- Treating the Surface as ‘Background’ or ‘Interface’ or ‘Ecology’;
- Re-designing surfaces to augment experience or to enable new forms of worldly engagement/appreciation;
- Sustainability and Surface Design;
- Bio-Mimicry and the Making of Surface Materials;
- The Militarization of Surfaces;
- The Science and the Art of Surfaces;
- Skins, Exteriors and Outsides;
- Visual Cultures of Topographical Surfaces;
- Affective Surfaces, among Bodies and Beings;
- The Place of Colour, Form and Pattern;
- (Re)Modelling Surfaces, Topological and Topographical;
- Aesthetic, Pictorial and Photographic Treatments, new and old;
- The Visualisation, Exposure and Concealment of Surfaces;
- Surfaces and the Retention of Past Presence;
- Accounts of Encounters on/with Surfaces;
- Methodologies for Studies of the Surface;
- The Surface, and what lies beneath;
If you are interested in submitting a paper, please contact Isla Forsyth (isla.forsyth@ges.gla.ac.uk).
http://dlibdev.nyu.edu/tamimentapa/
The Asian/Pacific American Documentary Heritage Archives Survey is the first systematic attempt to map available and potential Asian/Pacific American archival collections in the New York metropolitan area. The project seeks to address the underrepresentation of East Coast Asian America in historic scholarship and archives by working with community-based organizations and individuals to survey their records and raise awareness within the community about the importance of documenting and preserving their histories.
There are some amazing archival resources from private collections, through art galleries, foundations, and theatres..
Dear Colleagues –
I am pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA), a research training initiative launched in 2009 by the Smithsonian Department of Anthropology with support from the National Science Foundation.
SIMA is an intensive four-week training program that teaches graduate students how to use museum collections in research, incorporating Smithsonian collections as an integral part of their anthropological training. Support from the Cultural Anthropology Program at NSF covers full tuition and living expenses for 12 students each summer.
Please help us get the word out on this program.
Where: Dept of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
When: June 28 – July 23, 2010
Application deadline: March 1, 2010
Full information including application instructions and dates is available
here
Candace Greene
Director, Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology
Ethnologist, Collections and Archives Program
Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution