Reviewed by Ian Wedde

Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches. 2009, edited by Phillip Vannini, New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 256pp. ISBN 978-1-4331-0301-8.

One way to write a review of this book is to treat it as a material object suitable for ethnographic study within the social field of Material Culture and Technology Studies in Everyday Life – where, for our convenience, ‘everyday life’ here encompasses the daily practices, social constructions, actor networks, epistemologies, semiotics and narratives of those whose profession is the academic study of material culture and technology.

The tautological and even solipsistic implications of such an approach are not resisted by the volume itself. If anything it invites this approach, and its compliance provides the ethnographic reviewer with a place to start. This might be the following question: What is it about this object that so comprehensively situates (a signature term in the book) it in the ethnographic field of academic material culture and technology studies?

This comprehensive question can be broken down into four parts: What is the contribution’s escutcheon – how does it proclaim its identity and allegiance? Behind the escutcheon, what is its discourse model – how does its obvious organisation reveal its hegemonic aspect? And within that discourse model, what are the emergent qualities or entelechy implied by the book’s semiotic consistency, its concordance of terminologies – its dialect, if you like? And finally, what signs of power, ideology and management are visible within that concordance?

Such an approach is interesting not because it has satirical potential (though some of the book’s jargon lapses do invite that) but because it provides a way in to the issue of reflexivity in academic publication, and not just in the disciplines associated with sociology. The likelihood that a compilation like this might be effecting positive feedback to its own causes (or intentions) deserves the kind of critical attention empirical ethnography – surely an inherently sceptical practice – is well suited to provide.

The escutcheon
The collection is published by Peter Lang Publishing Group, specialists in the production and distribution of academic texts, from published PhD theses to substantial scholarly works, some of which are by individual writers, others (as here) edited as compilations of chapters by various hands. The publisher is not a commercial one in the conventional trade sense, in that by and large its economy is one where books circulate within their professional user communities of interest – communities the books represent (in several senses) as social constructs of those communities whose relationships the books also perform as agents.

The publisher’s brand values are represented on-line by images of antique art paper with deckle edges and an early twentieth century typewriter keyboard. Immediately behind these symbols of historical scholarly depth the user will find a suite of practical on-line forms with which to submit book proposals. The implication of the forms, which runs somewhat counter to the publisher’s antiqued brand identity, is that the Peter Lang Group does not commission and develop books; rather, it assesses proposals and subsequently processes manuscripts. Book production takes place in or close to the manuscript’s country of origin, which will often (as here) be where its editor is located. Sales and distribution take place on-line and appear to involve a significant print-on-demand option, which implies first print runs tailored to known markets, for example a book’s measurable community of interest, its use as a class text, and its library and archive subscriptions.

Often, the task of academic publishers such as Peter Lang or Brill Academic Publishers is to put into circulation texts whose contributions to scholarly discussion (in the case of book-length compilations of chapters) may have begun as conference papers. In this, the volume’s nearest relative is the peer-reviewed scholarly journal, including or even especially the user-pays e-journal; or even more modest compilations of un-refereed poster papers; rather than university press book titles competing for prestige (and prestigious authors) in wider markets. The publisher’s imprint, then, provides an early general marker of the ethnographic meaning and entelechy (another signature term) of compilations such as this.

The concordance
Theorists who might be cited in an ethnography of the object (or, indeed, technic) Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life will be found in the book itself on a stretch between neo-Hegelians identifying effects of objectification, Durkheimian sociologists focused on social facts and the totemising of objects, and Bourdieusian analysts of social distinction and taste; and a second loosely-coupled group whose performance implies varying kinds and degrees of critique of the broad confederation of materialists. Chief among these are the proponents of what has become the intellectual entrepôt Actor Network Theory (ANT) whose main albeit sometimes unwilling administrator is the sociologist Bruno Latour. Also in the second group are social scientists who look at the politics of choice within the frameworks of SCOT (The Social Construction of Technology), in particular Latour again (but also Pinch included in this volume) and others; and a third component whose focus is narrative and the ways in which objects ‘make meaning’ or contribute to interactions through which meanings are made, including what is commonly known as ‘self-knowledge’. Though his shadow falls lightly on many parts of this book, it is in the context of narrative and meaning-making that Roland Barthes appears most cogently, and Woodward’s chapter in this compilation is grounded lucidly in the consequences of Barthesian semiotics. Other éminences grises include pragmatists and instrumentalists loosely associated with the Chicago Group, especially (in this volume) the symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead in the early part of the twentieth century.

Signs of power, ideology and management
The volume’s citation span is wide but coherent and, in some respects, culturally managed; and includes all the above and many more contemporary extrapolators, whom the book therefore constitutes as its networked society (and, in publisher’s terms, its target market). One of the key cultural narratives enacted by the collection is, therefore, the networked nature of this society. Another way in which the collection is both narrated and enacts a cultural narrative, has to do with its clear theoretical agenda. This agenda – or thesis – involves urging the study of material culture in the direction of empirical ethnography, ethnography in the direction of objectification, and materialist approaches in the direction of the kinds of symbolic interactivity that have come to coalesce around ANT. Implied within this urging is an issue of agency: who is doing the polemic (and faintly ideological) urging, and why?

Staying with the issue of power and management, but moving in closer under the canopy of our overarching question (‘How does this book matter?’, or, ‘What is it about this object that so comprehensively situates it in the ethnographic field of academic material culture and technology studies?’) we find a further cascade of sub-questions. These include the standard SCOT question about the book’s politics: What choices does it enact and offer? Or, in ANT terms: how does it translate the agenda (or thesis, or urging) that has been generated within the network it performs?

Some hints are available in the collections’s overall plan and organisation. Its title already announces ethnographic approaches to the established disciplinary field of Material Culture studies. The implied question in this sub-title (‘What ethnographic approaches?’) is moved into view by Halton’s excellent, succinct Preface in which he unpacks an ethnographic encounter with a Chicago high-rise apartment dweller with a collection of over 300 flowering houseplants. Next, the volume’s editor, Vannini, lays out in his Introduction what is in effect a literature review which, we will find, describes the book’s tool-kit at the same time as it declares its polemic:

If bringing together the tradition of material culture studies and technology studies is a key concern of this book, so is achieving that goal through methodological and epistemological means that expose the meaningfulness and polysemy of materiality, and the potential of technological relations for shaping culture (and being shaped by it). For us [my emphasis] what that means is ethnography ... (p. 3)

The collection then proceeds to advance our cause in three sections: the first (‘Ways of Knowing the Material World’) consists of five chapters summarising theoretical approaches to the topic, most of which have been foreshadowed in Vannini’s Introduction; the second (‘Ethnographic Strategies of Representing the Material World’) has six chapters which describe ethnographic methodologies derived or devolved from field work informed by the kinds of theory adumbrated in the first section and, again, summarised in Vannini’s introductory literature review; and the third and final section (‘Ethnographic Studies’) consists of four examples of ethnographic field work in which the thesis, agenda, or polemic of Vannini’s Introduction and literature review, theoretical approaches of Part 1, and ethnographic methodologies of Part 2, are deployed in – converge and conclude at – actual ethnographic fieldwork case studies in material culture and technology in everyday life. This, then, in its overall structure, is a very carefully designed and managed – orchestrated – object. For the ethnographic reviewer, its design therefore raises interesting questions about agency and power regarding the ways the entity has been coached in its performance.

Within each section the chapters are discrete but also discursively linked in several ways. Vannini, for example, reiterates the polemic drive of his Introduction in his Chapter 5 by concluding that interactionist approaches to material technoculture have ‘the obvious potential of changing ethnography as a strategy of data collection, analysis, and representation’ (p. 83). Another kind of internal linkage is provided by internal citations or finger-post citations (‘See Vannini Chapter 5’). Chapters are, for the most part, organised in standard formats with propositions or theses, summaries of methodological and theoretical frameworks, thematic sub-headings, conclusions or summaries, notes, and (most importantly) substantial lists of references. In this, the volume resembles a practical handbook for students; indeed, it often reads like a compilation of the dutiful results of such a handbook.

Within the framework of the book’s overall structure and its managed advance from theory to praxis, an underlying discursive momentum is sustained through the repetitions of key or signature terminologies (the concordance), as well as citations and references that frequently refer back to the Introduction’s literature review. There are thematic links – for example considerations of what we mean by ‘creativity’ in both Merrill’s ethnography of home music recordists and Tilley’s of home gardeners. However, the most persistent iterative device returns the ethnographic reviewer to considerations of how this object has been coached (or carved, perhaps) in its performance – and, of course, to what end. There are frequent signs of editorial interpolation throughout, of which the most conspicuous are the internal, finger-post citations mentioned above; of these the majority are to the editor’s own chapters or publications.

In summary, on the strength of obvious as well as internal evidence, an ethnographic review of this volume must note its highly reflexive nature; and the marked extent to which its reflexivity provides positive feedback to its managing principal or editor, and his principles or editorial authority.

Chapters
Now to some matters of judgement that have no place in a review as ethnography. One of the opportunities afforded by the study of material culture in everyday life is its recovery from a focus on institutions, for example the institution of professional music recording, as noted by Merrill; and a consequent opportunity to look at the effects of interaction between professional and everyday practices. This is, indeed, a rich ethnographic field, from which this collection draws much of its interest. However there is also a downside, which is the risk of remaining trapped in the banality of the everyday; or of failing to accomplish what Barthes did, to (so to speak) make something of banality. Some of the contributors don’t cross this bar; these are often the most dutiful in their adherence to the approved forms of the chapters, to the most ubiquitous terminologies, references, and citations; and – conspicuously – these writers are also those who have engaged with the least ethnographically comprehensive research situations or scenarios.

Kien’s chapter on ANT is a thorough if compacted account of this somewhat heterogeneous tool-kit. It provides a number of steering devices, and at times resembles what film production managers would call a ‘bible’ – but it does so without losing its capacity for internal critical scrutiny. It also gets the term and concept of entelechy into circulation (it subsequently encounters Vannini’s distinction between determinism and consequentiality). Pinch’s chapter on SCOT is also significant to the book’s overall momentum, and provides some degree of critical tension with ANT, especially in respect of the possibility of ‘symmetry between humans and nonhumans’. (p.51) Kien also warns against the potential for triviality in ANT-style analysis, not unjustified as it turns out.

Woodward’s chapter on narrative begins with what may be the volume’s most succinct and coherent paragraphs, and one of its most lucid opening statements: ‘... material things are one part of culture and they do cultural work. Being good to think with, objects are cultural categories materialised’ (p.59). So much for any overcooked distinction between actions and ideas. Further along, in the collection’s second section on sampling methodologies, Woodward’s pragmatism is rewarded in Richardson & Third’s chapter on cultural phenomenology (despite what looks like some editorial carelessness in mis-locating an opening statement some three pages into the text). Introducing Merleau-Ponty’s useful concept of ‘corporeal schema’, the authors suggest that, ‘movement, mobility, motility and gesture are fundamental to our somatic involvement with the world, and integral to visual perception’ (p.146). It is fruitful to think about narrative in the context of such statements, as indeed in relation to ‘a regime of visibility that entails not just seeing with the eyes but with the whole body’ (p. 153).

I enjoyed Tilley’s contribution ‘What Gardens Mean’ in the ethnographic studies section not so much for its sensible conclusions about private gardens, but because he broke step with the volume’s prevailing style guide and wrote engagingly, without jargon, and with warmth and appreciation for his interviewees. ‘A gardener dwells ... inside the garden that he or she has created ... Thus in a metaphoric sense the gardener is inside himself or herself, in a garden body, underneath a garden skin’ (p.178). In addition, Tilley worked from a substantial interview sample of sixty-five, and paid that collective the respect of reproducing verbatim some of their own thoughts and statements about their gardens. One important effect of his approach – and, one might add, its slightly unfashionable humanism – was to open the window of his research to a wider world than the reflexively academic one by which this book is largely confined. Without wanting to ignite a pointless argument about alleged distinctions between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research, I have the sense that Tilley’s research matters and might make a difference in the world through that window: that it might inform town-planning policy, guide social development and therapeutic practices, enhance empathetic understandings of identity formation, and even the political economics of domestic ecologies.

The same can be said of Laviolette’s chapter ’the Death of the Clinic’, which could also be paraphrased as ‘taking the clinic home’. This has involved very substantial, professional and carefully designed research, in marked contrast to the slapdash and amateurish models used by some others in this volume. Looking back at Foucault for a place to launch a discussion of the clinic, and to Heidegger for some epistemological stretch, Laviolette’s piece builds a much broader and better informed philosophical platform than most of the others in this book. Informed also by a thorough knowledge of the volume’s concordance, he writes without jargon, and, to the relief of this reader, with humour. Like Tilley’s, Laviolette’s chapter clearly matters – it breaks the reflexive academic cycle of internalised positive feedback. ‘From this empirical study [of Telecare], I would appeal for the provision of a comprehensive overview of the use of interactive assistive technologies to support the intimate act of domestic medical care’ (p. 223). Such a statement has gone to work in the world first, and been reproduced in this book second. That makes it a refreshing and even salutary encounter here.

Conclusion
Almost conspicuous by its absence is a perfunctory Index. I, for one, have to wonder why more editorial attention wasn’t paid to such useful work. The Index is, almost blatantly and certainly reflexively, a concordance of the book’s iconic and therefore ideological terms. More attention, too, could have gone to the sourcing and incorporation of texts that did justice to de Certeau’s challenge to make something of the everyday; and a bit less attention to coaching the book in the performance of the editor’s emergent career.

That said, Vannini’s own Introduction and two chapters contribute substantially to the book, and while we may tire of his fingerprints we can’t deny the firmness of their grip. I am puzzled – but also intrigued and encouraged – by two issues in Vannini’s Chapter 5, his exploration of culture and technoculture as interaction. In downplaying ‘the importance of cognitive cultural dimensions such as values, beliefs, codes and ideas’ while emphasising ‘the materiality of the world of interaction’ (p.73), Vannini gets to the heart of the book’s thesis. But he also opens up the possibility of a dichotomous distinction between actions and ideas and, by implication, the kind of modernist distinction between mind and body the book is elsewhere at pains to refute. This would seem to be a fertile discussion opportunity which the book may open up subsequently. A second opportunity, also located in a paradox, arises from Vannini’s discussion of diffused agency, not only a dynamic and useful concept in its own right but also central to the book’s overall drive and focus. Warning against the danger of reintroducing elements of determinism or even animism to the discussion of materiality and agency, he suggests that ‘the true characteristic of materiality is not its essence, but instead its consequentiality, thus its agency.’ (p. 78) One would have to wonder, here, about the possibility of slippage between ‘determinism’ and ‘consequentiality’ – a critical discussion that took Vannini’s emphatic distinction as its starting point might prove fruitful.

Posted by Graeme Were at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

David Sutton, Dept.of Anthropology, Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale

Cristina Grasseni 2009. Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps. (European Anthropology in Translation ). Oxford: Berghahn.
ISBN 978-1-84545-537-8 Hb $70.00/£45.00

Cristina Grasseni’s new book, part of Berghahn’s “European Anthropology in Translation” series, illustrates how far anthropology and the tradition of European community studies has moved from studies of villages to studies in villages (to paraphrase Geertz). The keywords of Grasseni’s study are not the old social norms , values and mechanisms, nor even “identity” per se, but rather skill, enskillment, and practices of vision. Inspired most directly by the Phenomenology of Ingold and the Actor-Network Theory of Latour, Grasseni explores the ways that cattle breeders, in and around the mountain village of Vedeseta in the Valtaleggio region of the Italian Alps, go about the process of learning, transmitting and adapting their practices against a background of shifting social norms, EU regulations and global shifts in breeding knowledge, practice and evaluation. She is most directly interested in practices of looking and seeing, and how they are inflected by local and global systems of meaning and moral evaluation.

Developing Skill, Developing Vision, then, doesn’t read like a traditional ethnography, but rather an ethnographically-grounded series of reflections on issues of method and theory in anthropological understandings of the role of skilled, sensorily embodied practice in human collective life and relations with the environment. While focused on the practices of a group of cattle-breeders living in Vedeseta, Grasseni does not take “place” as a stable point for her analysis, but rather sees it as “an unfolding practice of belonging…an event rather than…a location” (38), which is, in fact, reproduced and reinvented in the process of adapting “local” skills and practices to “surviv[al] in the global market” (184).

Methodologically, Grasseni’s book explores interesting questions about the use of visual anthropology techniques in studying skilled vision. She analyses her own evolving use of video, critiquing some of the embedded assumptions of disappearing worlds that seemed to be inseparable from ethnographic film, moving to a more reflexive use of video which argues that anthropological participant-observation must be understood as an “apprenticeship of the eye.” As she writes (91):

"The filmic anthropology could not just be about stressing the image-storing capacity of recording technologies, but rather about using them as facilitators for the ethnographer’s access into a structured perceptual environment. I am claiming that an apprencticeship of the eye can further our ethnographic understanding of how practice and skills construct identities. This training of perception is intrinsic to the social structuring of practice, and is achieved by attuning oneself to the rhythms and sensitivities of a complex environment".

Thus, in attempting to capture the breeders’ “skilled vision” through her camera, Grasseni was gaining an apprenticeship, or an “education of attention” (as Ingold calls it), in how to properly look at cattle. By attending to the ways that cattle breeders showed her how to look, how they themselves used video and other recording media as part of their training in how to see their cattle, and reproducing the important distinctions in cattle breed, Grasseni doesn’t reject vision as Western and imperialist, but moves toward understanding it as part of a multisensory practice. She illustrates these notions, and leads into the analysis that follows, by showing how breeders in looking at fellow breeders’ stables, derive information about their skill, their network of information about the availability of bull semen, their adaptation of industrial architecture to the demands of mountain farming, their political connections that allowed them to work bureaucracies for proper permissions. In other words, in a description that recalled to me Alfred Gell’s notion of abducted agency, she argues that skilled vision reveals the display of “a large network of people and competencies supporting their enterprise, weaving the ‘traditional’ skills of cattle rearing, milking and cheese-making together with the ‘new’ skills of trading in genetically evaluated cattle, milking in high-tech parlours and securing state aid” (96).

The second half of the book gives a detailed description and analysis of these interrelated processes. Grasseni is particularly concerned to think through notions of changing skill in relation to so-called ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ practices of breeding, taking up tensions in the discussions of Ingold and Latour as to whether global, abstract, capitalist processes lead to a decline of sensorily embodied skills or a transfer of skills from tool-using humans to black-boxed technologies. She examines these questions through key points in the process of cattle farming: the process of breeding, the milking parlour, and the production and marketing of “traditional” cheese.

In considering selective breeding, Grasseni describes the role of expert knowledge and standardizing artefacts in creating the international standards which discipline the vision of the community of practice of breeders and farmers. These artefacts include the forms and tables which breeders must fill out to evaluate cattle, which make possible the “partitioning gaze” and the quantification of the animal into a set of traits that allow the cattle to be compared “according to a single standard of reference, through numbers and listings that are published and circulated on the internet” (141). They also include the trophy cow replicas and toy cows which circulate in the community, the ubiquity and everydayness of which allow for the inculcation of values in relation to the proper appearance of cattle. And they include social occasions such as the cattle fairs, which allow for the display of expertise and the further solidification of the criteria for judging animals.

She also explores the tensions between aesthetics and functionality, and the universalizing, abstracting criteria of genetics and quantifiable morphology with the “concrete contexts” by which farmers make judgments about the appropriateness of cattle to particular conditions and “assumptions about what is virtuous knowledge and what makes virtuous conduct for a breeder” (159-160). Genetics, for example, is seen as providing a blueprint for the production of high quality cattle, but Grasseni shows that there is much taken on faith in investing ones resources in the discourse and knowledge of genetics—outcomes are based on all sorts of “local” and non-specifiable factors that used to be considered part of a breeder’s “instinct” (149). This insight provides a model for the relationship between “expert” and “local” knowledge more generally, as it is negotiated by the farmers of the Valtaleggio. But this doesn’t mean that these approaches are on a level playing field. Here, as below, farmers are forced to balance the high value given to discourses and practices of so-called “modernity” with the advantages of local knowledge and so-called “tradition,” and the moral and aesthetic commitments that go with an emplaced sense of cattle rearing practice.

In the case of the milking parlour, Grasseni shows that the mechanization of aspects of the milking process does not lead to a diminution of human skills. Even if certain senses, such as the vision to monitor the processes of milking rather than the more tactile aspects of hand milking, suggest a distancing or perhaps even alienation of humans and cows, Grasseni suggests that farmers still value the skills required in “a competent response to the animals’ reactions, needs and idiosyncrasies…Guiglielmo insists that each cow is different and that one needs to know how to bend the machine to her idiosyncrasies” (121), thus arguing for the ongoing “intimate relationship between milkers and cows” in the mechanized milking parlour.

Similarly, and recalling Latour’s work on laboratory life, Grasseni shows in the cheese making process the need for apprenticeship and interpretation even in the process of reading a “standardizing” device such as a thermometer (125). She concludes that “there is no zero-sum game of skill and technology by which an increase of technology means a decrease in skill in absolute terms. Here, however, Grasseni’s ethnography of such aspects of the cheese-making process seems a bit thin, and might be usefully read in conjunction with Heather Paxson’s (2008) work on this topic.

Indeed, Grasseni’s interest in cheese making focuses more on how changes in the presentation of the process are being made in response to EU hygiene regulations and tourist interest in “local” food products. Grasseni argues that much of the “skill” involved resides in the farmer’s capacity “to adapt or calibrate standard procedures to local recipes and ‘traditional tastes’” (128). It becomes a balancing act for farmers to package the cheese, in fancy, evocative wrapping, and “package” themselves, in videos and documentaries designed for urban and tourist consumption, as practicioners of a “local” tradition in close contact with an outsider’s nostalgic imagining of nature and peasant life, while still adapting to and adopting many aspects of current technology, standardization and bureaucratic demands. “Idyllic landscapes and pasteurized milk!” as Grasseni summarizes. While this part of Grasseni’s argument will be familiar to those in tourism studies or in food studies, she usefully traces how the ability to preserve “local” identity resides in the ability to smoothly negotiate and adapt to “global” bureaucratic protocols and capitalist markets. Thus, she stresses the irony that “local” products often imply much more than “local” skills (187).

I recommend this book to readers of this weblog interested in a rich ethnographic engagement with some of the key issues of materiality, skill, the senses and emplacement arising from the work of Ingold and Latour, and from the concerns of apprenticeship studies and visual anthropology. At the same time, it is an important contribution to revitalizing European community studies by combining concerns about place and identity with these other contemporary theoretical trends.

It would have been interesting for Grasseni to compare her work with that of Sarah Franklin (e.g. 2007) and others working on genetics and animal breeding in anthropology and science and technology studies, but this is a minor omission in an otherwise impressive ethnography. There are a few frustrating bibliographical errors in the text (for example, the oft-cited “Ingold 1993c” does not appear in the bibliography); whether such omissions are the fault of the author, or of publishers’ increasing laxity in copy editing is another matter. Overall, Berghahn is to be commended for its series on “European Anthropology in Translation.” If Skilled Vision is a representative example, I will be eagerly awaiting its forthcoming volumes.

References
Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

Paxson, Heather. 2008. Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw Milk Cheese in the U.S. Cultural Anthropology. 23(1):15-47.

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Haidy Geismar, NYU

Browsing in the British Library I came across this book, right next to Danny Miller's The Comfort of Things (2008).

D. Mackenzie's Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed explores the nature of hedge funds, derivative markets, asking how abstract economic principles are brought into being and taking the assumption, drawn from STS studies, of the materiality of markets, "their physicality, corporeality, technicality" as a basic starting point (p.2). Taking this emphasis on materiality allows Mackenzie and his collaborators to inject an ethnographically inflected understanding of human agency into the economics of the finance industries: rather than disembodied agents or abstract information processors economic agents are "embodied human beings, and bodies are material entities." (p.3). The study positions people, the technology that they work with, and the abstract ideas that guide them as equal partners in forming the analysis.

Mackenzie outlines ten precepts for the social study of finance, which guide his method and which are useful to abstract for any ethnographic study of modern bureaucracy:
1. Facts Matter; 2. Actors are embodied; 3. Equipment matters; 4. Cognition and Calculatio are distributed and Material; 5. Actors are Agencements (a clunky notion drawn from Deleuze, and Callon which delineates the complex material-social nexus that makes up an social actor, here in the field of economics); 6. Classification and Rule Following are Finitist Processes; 7. Economics Does Things; 7. Innovation isn't Linear; 8. Market Design is a Political Matter; 10. Scales aren't stable.

I confess to not reading the entire volume, but enjoying what I did read (the intro and the chapter on derivatives). the chapters are short, they aren't what you might call ethnographic or anthropological, in that they provide summaries and overviews, but are clear and cogent in making this world accessible in a broad sociological framework. The material perspective could be followed up a little more, the focus is much more on the people and discourses than on a real scrutiny on equipment and technology.

Subsequent chapters examine the assemblage of economic actors in hedge funds, the production of virtuality in derivatives markets, the material sociology of arbitrage, the process of measuring profit, and the process of constructing emissions markets..

It's a good introduction to the working of financial markets and good methodological model for translating STS and Anthropological critiques of economics and finance into a workable perspective...In a similar frame to Olag Velthuis's work on the symbolic construction of price in art markets

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Daniel Miller, UCL

Review of: Seeing Things: Deepening relations with visual artefacts. S. Pattison 2007, Canterbury: SCM Press. (292 pages). ISBN-10: 033404149X

I received this book by Stephen Pattison pretty much out of the blue. I was intrigued to see that the author was a theologian, a Professor of religion at the University of Birmingham. It is published by SCM press and since I have not seen any reviews of it, and otherwise would probably not have come across it, it seemed likely to remain fairly obscure outside of the teaching of theology. I think this would be a pity, and what I intend to do here is provide a brief summary of its contents, rather than a conventional review, just to make sure that this blog can do its own work to help bring research and ideas to people with common interests and concerns.

Actually the more one reads this book the more one sees that the author has deliberately been fairly reticent in taking any kind of theological perspective, which is largely left to the final chapter. Instead what we have is a rather clear introduction to the study of visual and material culture that certainly deserves to be considered as a good and useful introductory textbook on these subjects. It starts by reflecting on the devaluation of the material and visual in theology, and our more general tendency to treat the visual and material as merely the dead in opposition to the human. The agenda set out in the first chapter is an appeal to a much more respectful acknowledgment that our relationship to things and images are indeed relationships and the visual in particular should be rescued from cold isolation to be seen as linked to the sensual appreciation of the world more generally. He is also concerned to move from conventional theological reductions of the visual mainly to an interest in art and iconography to the much wider field of visual and material culture.

The main text starts by addressing various approaches to sight and vision and then promoting the ideal of a more haptic notion of vision embracing this wider sensory experience and particularly reconnecting seeing and touching. In chapter three he turns to various approaches to the image including writers such as Pinney and Taussig as well as more conventional religious imagery. While chapter four acknowledges the suspicion and sometimes denigration of the image in both Western philosophy and Western religion. By contrast chapter five looks at the factors which allow us to grant power to images, firstly contextual factors for example sacralisation, and then in chapter six factors thought to be inherent in the object including texture and colour but also semiotic features such as indexical qualities that create a relational bond.

Up to now the text has been dominated by visual culture and relatively conventional images, but chapter seven moves towards more general issues of material culture and the constraints on seeing relations to objects as somehow personal relations. This he sees as to some degree overcome by modern material culture theory which he reviews. Chapter eight then takes up recent approaches, such as from Latour, that question the conventional dualism between subjects and object. He considers the various ways objects could be considered to speak to us, focusing upon the case study of the photograph. Chapter nine then critiques the more obvious ways we might see objects as reanimated, including religious, magical and romantic ideals of animation. Instead he follows pretty much through to the centre of contemporary material culture theory by arguing for the need to respect the role of objects in simply making us human, and thereby recognising further the way artefacts in some measure participate in the moral community of society.

Although he doesn’t quote Simmel there is a similar sense in this work that the author hopes that the cultivation of a depth of relationship with specific objects will help lead us away from what might otherwise be the more superficial relationships we cultivate with a plethora of things. Chapter ten return us to his haptic vision of how people might enact these close and deeper relationships with visual and material culture creating what he calls joyous attachment. Finally in chapter eleven he considers the specific stance of Protestant Christianity to these issues, starting form its fear of idolatry, asceticism and disembodied spirituality. To overcome these he envisages a new positive theology of artefacts including a kind of Biblical holism that recognises our materiality and that of the world. He sees this as in the tradition of figures such as William Blake or the Shakers in their respect for the mundane things around them. He includes an intriguing metaphor of the world as God’s body and ends with an appeal to re-sight Christianity.

What struck me in reading this volume is not anything especially novel in its contribution, but rather how well it works as an introductory text book, because I can’t think of another book that covers the same ground in the same way. The stance seems entirely in accordance with contemporary approaches to visual and material culture as represented by many entries to this blog. The writing is generally clear and scholarly. I hope this brief summary is sufficient to show why I think it would be a pity to ignore a book which has very likely done us all some favours in introducing our perspective to peoples and debates few of us are likely to reach. Although in that sense it is also a complement to the journal Material Religion which is rapidly developing a very high reputation for the quality of its papers. In fact I confess that in the end my slight disappointment was actually with the author’s reticence with respect to theology itself. That for those of us already perhaps rather too comfortably settled within material and visual culture a more full throttled engagement from theology might actually have been of still greater interest - but perhaps that may come in time.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Amiria Salmond, Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Pasifika Styles. 2008. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, in association with Otago University Press. ISBN 978-1-877372-60-5

Francis Upritchard, Sports Heads (2005). Photo: Kerry Brown

This book explores the making of the Pasifika Styles exhibition (Cambridge, UK, 2006-2008) from the perspectives of artists, art historians and academics.

Pasifika Styles was the first major exhibition of contemporary Maori and Pacific Island art in Great Britain. The show featured the work of contemporary artists from New Zealand whose work responded to Maori and Pacific Island cultural issues and influences. Located in a museum, in and amongst historical ethnographic artefacts, it aimed to challenge assumptions about art and about culture in the Pacific, emphasizing continuities and connections as well as contemporary innovations.


George Nuku, Outer Space Marae (2006). Photo: Kerry Brown

The show (like the book) was a labour of love on the part of everyone involved, and generated lots of publicity in New Zealand (the opening featured on prime time news and it was the subject of two separate documentaries commissioned by Maori Television). Strangely, however, critical attention has been hard to come by - the Museums Journal tried unsuccessfully to get it reviewed, and the fine arts press in the UK and New Zealand were virtually silent on the topic.


Rosanna Raymond, Eye land Part II: Welcome 2 da K’lub (2006)

Why? As one of its curators, and co-editor of this volume (with Rosanna Raymond) I think the show wasn't able (despite our intentions) to break out of the 'ethnic art' box to which it was assigned (perhaps inevitably, because of its location in an ethnography museum). For us it was a platform on which a group of artists (not all of whom were of Polynesian descent) could present their work and commentate on contemporary issues (including conventions of ethnographic representation), but for others it was clearly another case of a museum trying to update itself by inviting 'indigenous' artists to add their 'cultural' art to the collections. ('Real' contemporary art being, of course, culturally unmarked, or rather marked by ethnic signifiers that are sufficiently abstracted, used ironically, or have been critically sanctioned - think 'the New Chinese Art' etc.)

Can Pacific Art ever avoid this problem?

These issues and others are discussed in the various contributions to our book. All feedback gratefully received!

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews | Exhibition reviews

Ross Hemera, SVMC, Massey University

Review of The Carver and the Artist: Maori Art in the Twentieth Century
By Damian Skinner. Auckland: Univ. Press. 2008
ISBN: 9781869403737. 224pp. 142 Plates, glossary, index. $NZ 99.99

E nga mana
E nga waka
Nga Hau e wha
Kia ora koutou katoa
Nga mihinui ki a koutou
No reira
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa

In January 1973, as a shy young man from the small North Otago high country village of Omarama, I arrived at Epsom Secondary Teachers College, Auckland. With not much more than artistic passion I was completely anonymous in the big city. Although of Ngai Tahu decent I was culturally naïve, with little understanding of Maori language. I thought that Maori art was photographs of carvings in history books.

Not long after arriving I came to the notice of two leaders in the field. As a young secondary school art teacher trainee Dame Georgina Kirby took me under her wing and Arnold Wilson became my mentor. They introduced me to a Maori arts impetus bursting with creative energy and enthusiastic people. I later learned that this creative community had gained its momentum as a result of the inaugural gathering of the New Zealand Maori Artists and Writers Society at Te Kaha in 1973. Becoming part if this extended Maori art family had a major impact on me and although my art continued to follow references to cubism and expressionism, I soon became familiar with Maori cultural values. I began to realise the importance of identifying as Maori and the significance of networking concepts like whanui (community) and whanaungatanga (kinship).

By 1975 I was a regular member at gatherings of the Auckland Branch of the Maori Artist and Writers Society and in 1976 attended the annual hui at Taurua Marae in Rotoiti. From this point on I found myself totally immersed in a Maori art renaissance, a phenomenon that helped define the shape of Maori art as we know it today. I am referring to the organisation of Maori artists that extended right throughout New Zealand during the 1970s, 80s and 90s known as Nga Puna Waihanga. As a consequence of the kotahitanga (unity) inherent in this community, I began my engagement with Maori culture, started my awareness in te reo and embarked on developing a practice in Maori focused creative arts.

I consider myself uniquely privileged to have developed a personal kaupapa (methodology) alongside so many inspirational and talented people. The Nga Puna Waihanga community advocated “unity in the arts”, “understanding in and through the arts” and “fellowship of artists” (Nga Puna Waihanga 1993, p. 3). The Nga Puna Waihanga legacy is that it did not discriminate between traditional or contemporary art. This theme is referred to throughout the Society’s publication, ‘Maori Artists of the South Pacific’. The book includes traditional whakairo carvers Tuti Tukaokao and Pakariki Harrison, traditional weavers such as Rangimarie Hetet and Digger Te Kanawa side by side with contemporary artists such as Paratene Matchitt, Ralph Hotere and Buck Nin. It was also this legacy that assisted in paving the way for the creation of Ihenga, the whare whakairo at Waiariki Institute of Technology (previously Waiariki Polytechnic) carved by Lyonel Grant in 1996.

As Head of Visual Arts at Waiariki Polytechnic between 1983 and 1994 I was responsible for developing a Maori focused programme. Much of the philosophical basis for this programme came straight from the Nga Puna Waihanga ‘handbook’, as it were. As a graduate of the New Zealand Maori Arts and Crafts Institute, Lyonel Grant was appointed to lead teaching in the wood studio. His appointment reinforced a community based kaupapa (plan) and creative fellowship in the arts.

More recently I have continued to develop a deeper appreciation of the context and complexity of Maori visual and material culture and where my own creative practice fits within it. Although no longer operative, the Nga Puna Waihanga kaupapa about collective aspirations still rings true. Consequently, when thinking about Maori art, mine is a view from within and, in the main, is felt rather than studied - experienced rather than theorised.

Against this background I am intrigued with an entirely different perspective regarding Maori art. While his credentials are impeccable and his investigation entirely credible, it is from the ‘outside’ that Damian Skinner examines Maori art. He is, after all, an art historian not a practitioner, using a pakeha view to describe Maori art.

In ‘The Carver and the Artist: Maori Art in the Twentieth Century’ Skinner introduces novel perspectives on how Maori art may be appreciated. The book concentrates on the period from Aprirana Ngata’s leadership direction, for meeting house construction in the 1920s through to Lyonel Grant’s creative work in Ihenga meeting house at Wairiki Polytechnic in 1996. Skinner uses an art historian orientated construction as a means of describing and categorising different aspects in this history.

The book sets out to examine and clarify the differences indicated in the title. The inference is that two divergent practices operate within the ambit of 20th century Maori Art. Skinner lays out his framework over the top of this period, introducing us to the Maoritanga carver and the Maori modernist artist. While Skinner publishes against a somewhat scant literary background, we must remember that a “grassroots” vocabulary, used by the Maori artists’ community, has long been considered an appropriate way to describe these differences. Over the last 35 years or so Maori practitioners have commonly referred to these differences by the use of the term ‘traditional’ and its inferred opposite ‘contemporary’. The term traditional is employed frequently in the book ‘Maori Artists of the South Pacific’. For instance, “Pakariki Harrison claims to be a traditional carver…” (Mataira 1984, p. 31) and Tuti Tukaokao “…is required to work within the confines of the traditional mode…”(Mataira 1984, p. 39). In the booklet ‘Te Moana’, produced by Nga Puna Waihanga, a succinct use of these terms provides a further example. The second kaupapa (principle) objective reads, “To evaluate the contemporary artists’ movements against the solid background of cultural traditions and heritage” (Nga Puna Waihanga 1993, p. 2).

Continue reading "The Carver and the Artist" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Book Reviews

Patrick Laviolette, SVMC, Massey University

Book review of: Grinker, Roy Richard, In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [2000]. xii + 368 pp.

The famous anthropologist Colin Turnbull began to establish himself in the US through his first post as the African curator for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Even though he trained in Britain and his work has of course had significant impact in Europe and Africa, Roy Richard Grinker's biography of Turnbull convincingly shows us how he has been much more influential to cultural anthropology and material culture studies in America rather than anywhere else.

This cross-Atlantic connection in Turnbull's work is interesting in itself however. It reflects of course the internationalization as well as professionalization of the discipline from its ‘imperial/colonial’ heartland. A further reconciliation comes through from his Oxford training and doctoral field site in Africa both of which were archetypical of post Second World War UK anthropology (Goody 1995). Like Mary Douglas though, it is important to note that Turnbull’s research was in a Belgian territory and thus outside the direct influence of the British Colonial Office. Additionally Turnbull’s Scots/Irish identity does come in to play at times in Grinker’s text, even though we are shown how his real personal development after his initial immersive fieldwork is completely tangled up with his New York cosmopolitan lifestyle, his Virginian retirement home life and a renewed field persona involving his partner.

Grinker reminds us many times that Turnbull’s life and ideas were more often than not ahead of their time. What is significant for those of us interested in contemporary material culture studies is the way in which Grinker makes it obvious that Turnbull should be seen as a highly significant predecessor of this area. His museum curating in New York; his involvement in the production of the theatrical production of Les Iks; and the relationship that he helped establish between art/drama and anthropology are all good examples. Grinker incisively points out the possible connection to Turnbull’s Oxford training under Evans-Pritchard here, whereby anthropology began to be formulated as a humanities subject which had much more affinity with the arts than the sciences (p.235).

Grinker adopts a popular non-academic style with a number of literary devices to keep the attention of the average undergraduate. The text is easy to read, with a bounty of gossip, suspense and generalisations about the discipline. At times the story is remarkably captivating in relation to the many debates that Turnbull was shrouded in. But overall the book comes up short in terms of the presentation of wider conceptual and theoretical substance. Grinker nevertheless makes many observations which are considerably astute, if overtly dilute and lacking in elaborative discursive context. Early on he suggests that part of Turnbull’s fame resulted from writing about experiences and feelings that were more universal than was the case for most of his more traditional ‘scientifically’ minded colleagues. Yet it is not until the end of the book that he is even vaguely critical of the fact that Turnbull left little by way of significant contribution to the theoretical development of social anthropology or museology.

Continue reading "Colin Turnbull's MC legacies" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Special Issue of Mobilities, Volume 3, Issue 3
Edited by Paul Basu & Simon Coleman (Univ. of Sussex)

Migrating materialities. Lochaber No More by John Watson Nicol (1883), discussed by Paul Basu & Simon Coleman in their introduction to the special issue.

While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this special issue of the journal Mobilities we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between ‘migrant worlds’ and ‘material cultures’ and bring together a series of articles that takes this exploration in a number of intentionally disparate directions.

In the collection, we refer to ‘migrant worlds’ rather than ‘migration’ per se, in that we are not only concerned with the materiality of migration itself, but also with the material effects of having moved, perhaps many years earlier, to a new place, and with the inter-relatedness of the movements of people and things. In addition, we want to convey the sense that a ‘world’ – an often fragmented and fragile set of material and non-material assumptions and resources – can itself be made mobile, seemingly translated from one geographical location to another, even as it is transformed in the process. Thus the migrant worlds explored in this collection range from a ‘temporary’ refugee camp in Uganda to living rooms in England and the Caribbean, from the emotive, as well as locomotive, materialities of rail travel in Scandinavia to the social as well as physical migrations of cloth in South Asia.

The issue can be accessed at:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g903561919~db=all

Titles of articles and abstracts follow.

Continue reading "Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Stephen Brigdale, Southampton University

This photography book published by Booth-Clibborn Editions and H N Abrams features over 150 photographs by the artist Andy Hughes made on different beach locations from California to Western Cornwall. The book explores and examines the relationship of beach waste as both an object of visual enquiry and as a reference to the global environmental crisis. "Dominant wave theory", we are told, " is loosely based on a scientific term used in the prediction and observation of wave models". The book sets out to parallel this idea visually through the observation of the beach as a local site for the interplay of nature and consumer culture.

Through extraordinarily focused colour photographs of found waste objects, the reader is offered tangible stilled moments of reflection on the nature of these objects and left to ponder their place in the world now that their original purpose has been washed (eroded) away. This extensive archive of images forms the core of the project with the design and development of the book by David Carson working to heighten the visual scope and pace of the work. This is apparent in the scale, ordering and pairing of the images, creating thoughtful and revealing relationships throughout the book.

The photographs are complemented by a collection of essays by five eminent writers, who are here linked through the common thread of the project but coming from a wide range of perspectives. They discuss ideas connected with the beach from eco-activism through to cultural theory and marine biology; their contribution extends and puts into context ideas initiated within the photographs.

The essays open with a discussion by Christopher Short, of the visual context of Hughes's work as a contemporary art practice. The wider implications of these photographs, in terms of art history through formalism and the development of modernism in St Ives (Hughes is based in West Cornwall), are speculated upon together with tourism in this locale to draw anthropological perspectives.

Continue reading "Dominant Wave Theory, 2006" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Book Reviews

Daniel Miller, University College London

I happened to be talking to a potential publisher, Profile Books, and at the end of the discussion they were kind enough to leave me a copy of the book Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. When I opened this up I found that the book actually consists of an alphabetically ordered review of some 1,500 fragrances. I have never actually worn a perfume, and I don’t believe I have ever purchased a perfume for anyone else, except maybe cheap Christmas presents for informants during fieldwork. Yet one week later I find that I am reading this book cover to cover. There are two reasons for this. Firstly I am intrigued with this work as an exposition of the relationship between the material, the immaterial and language. Secondly because its utterly brilliant.

My fascination with the issue of immateriality and language arose a very long time ago when I read a volume called Wine and Conversation by the linguist Adrienne Lehrer in 1983. I am writing from distant memory but as I recall it documented a series of blind testing of people talking about wines. This included lay wine quaffers and professional wine experts from California. The point was that wine has developed an extraordinarily rich vocabulary of description, but was that actually effective in conveying something about the wines themselves? To cut to the chase, the book seemed to suggest that most people, including experts, could not actually identify wines based merely on such verbal descriptions. It implied that this language existed for social and symbolic purposes that falsely presumed the communication of substance and managed to survive happily even when this was largely illusory.

Now that could be seen as essentially a negative take on things like wine buffs, pretentiousness etc. But you could turn this around and see it instead as an interesting argument for the creativity of descriptive language itself even in the absence of actual denoted objects. Wine description developing its own artistic agility precisely because of the difficulty of its project. The present volume on perfume makes this much more plausible. Because I think it would generally be agreed that if taste is difficult to convey through language alone then smell is a great deal harder. It seems about the most intractable of the senses. Now I have no idea whether this book succeeds or not in creating the kind of objectivity that is ascribed to wine. Certainly it starts with an introduction that explains the chemistry and dynamics of perfume construction much as one might for wines, and I certainly imagine that the authors believe that language can actually convey substance, just as those wine experts were convinced that that is what they were engaged in doing when talking about wine.

But for me this ceases to matter when one comes up against the other quality of this book and the one that drives me to read it in full. What I mean by claiming that it is brilliant, is that the quality of the writing itself transcends any such link to either the material or immaterial. It’s not just the richness of metaphorical extension required in trying to convey smell. The point of the book is unflinching adjudication and this is where it excels. The put downs are often incredibly funny and so devastating and terse as to be an absolute delight. But then one is equally carried away by the soaring praise of what they consider the emperors of scent, and the sense of the ecstatic that they ascribe to the experience of perfumes such as Chanel No5 or Beyond Paradise.

It is the scale, the distance they create between their peaks and troughs that make reading about 1,500 scents such a joy. We are driven right down to `as near nonexistent it as it is possible to be while still remaining technically a fragrance’ or `the worlds most expensive lemon sorbet flavour’ or `hideously screechy’ or `probably first rejected for use in industrial drain cleaner.’ We are carried all the way up to `it is an ideally proportioned wonder, all of a piece, smooth to the touch and solid as marble, with no sharp edges or extraneous fur trimming, a monument of perfect structure and texture’ or `Laurent married grapefruit instead with an intensely pink floral accord and somehow gave it durability and that elusive quality of radiance; the ability to project an accurate image of itself at a distance’ or `a husky voiced come on’ or `one of the great emancipated fragrances.’

I suspect for some people the writing is too extreme, even vulgar. But then I like coral reef and Nirvana. I am not sure I could ever become completely entranced by smell, but I now find that I can certainly be captured by these florid tendrils of descriptive phrasing wafting by my nose.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews | From the editors | Objects and visual analyses

Daniel Miller, University College London

I am not sure about the ethics of using this blog to announce ones own books, but I hope it’s excusable to at least use the opportunity to explain what I hope is different about this particular book from others written under the auspices of material culture studies The most obvious difference when you open this book is that for something that is clearly intended as an academic book there are no references, no citations and no index. Instead there are thirty `portraits’ of individuals and households almost all from a single street in South London. There is a prologue which gives some indication of the academic intention and by far the most evident academic element is the final chapter or appendix which is an explicit discussion of the implications of this work for academic issues. In brief, it suggests that there is a so far unexplored potential legacy of anthropological perspectives on the world. This emerges if we dissolve away our usual dualism between the individual and some larger category of society or culture. Instead the book argues that it is possible to take the kinds of approach that anthropologists have traditionally employed in the study of society and culture and apply it directly to the household or individual. To recognise that these tiny elements of society may have created a cosmology, order and rhythm of life, a pattern of cultural form, sense of morality and many of the other creations normally seen as adhering to larger social wholes.

This might be argued of individuals and households of any time or age, but tthre is a further argument that it is particularly appropriate for the study of the people of contemporary London. So many of these households fail to fit the kinds of categories that are used to subsume individuals in social science. They may be in some respects working class, or women, or Brazilian, or migrant, or gay or lawyers, but none of these categories really capture what is richest about our encounters with them. The advantage of using a random street as one’s unit of enquiry is that you are forced to deal with whoever opens the door, and not choose them as tokens of social science notions of identity. So there is a fit between the particular methodology employed in this work and the theoretical arguments it makes about how people construct their worlds.

But this doesn’t itself explain the lack of the usual accoutrements of academia nor its link to material culture. Working on this book was a very different experience from any previous volume I have worked on. On this occasion my aim was to concentrate on the nature of writing itself. To try and create a style that emulated more literary models rather than academic genres of writing. Something which after years of writing in academic modes, I find quite hard to do. The reasoning was that in the same way that historians have managed to make their work far more popular in the last couple of decades with a more general audience, it ought to be possible to do the same for anthropology. True we don’t have the advantage of narrative, but on the other hand we can demonstrate an empathetic encounter with people in many different ways that are particular to our discipline. So this is an attempt to create a popular work in material culture, as. In a rather different way, I had previously tried to do this along with Mukulika Banerjee in the earlier book The Sari. Though on that occasion through the use of pictures and design, without hopefully losing the academic insight that, rather than academic style, ought to be what we bring to the world as academics. What is it that I am hoping to popularize? It is basically what I have always seen as one of the larger transcendent points of material culture studies. The way that persons and things are mutually constituted, and how the study of relationships cuts across the animate and inanimate. Instead of making this point theoretically, the aim is to convey it in such a manner that it becomes an obvious implication of this reflection upon our private lives. In a subsequent edited collection together with my post-graduate students we are hoping to take the theoretical implication of this work and subject it to critique. But The Comfort of Things itself is an attempt to bring material culture studies to a different, wider audience. to Whether I have succeeded, and whether in fact this reaches that wider audience, I shall see. But then failures are often more instructive than successes, at least to authors.

Posted by Graeme Were at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Book Reviews

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

I'ld like to draw your attention to a project which has just come to fruition by Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett: the publication of the book, They called me Mayer July, and opening of the exhibition of the same name.

"The only Jew in the volunteer fire brigade."

Barbara's father, Mayer Kirschenblatt taught himself to paint, aged 73, and has created an evocative visual record of his life in Poland before World War Two and his emigration to Canada. Drawing on interviews conducted over decades and in Mayer's own words, the book and exhibition are a visual ethnography of Polish Jewish life, and highlights the redemptive power of art as a medium to not only evoke memory and narrate life histories, but to reconnect to the past and to broader cultural histories.

The project has a website:
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/

The exhibition will travel from California, to Poland, to Amsterdam and New York City.

BKG discusses the project:
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/daughters_afterword.html

Mayer Kirschenblatt has also recorded an audio narrative which can be accessed through the website, and for US visitors, by calling a cellphone number
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/2007/09/listen-to-mayer.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews | Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Jeffrey Sissons, Anthropology Programme, Victoria Univ. of Wellington

Book review of: 'Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display', by Conal McCarthy (paperback 2007) Oxford/Wellington: Berg & Te Papa Press.

Conal McCarthy introduces this book by inviting the reader to consider four photographs, taken at different times, of a waharoa or carved gateway. The first, a postcard, shows the waharoa, flanked by large carved figures with protruding tongues, at the entrance to a model Maori village built for the 1906-7 New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch. A second image depicts the gateway as an ethnographic specimen in the Dominion Museum of the 1930s. A third shows the same object as a ‘treasure’ or taonga – an imposing, solitary sculpture at the entrance to The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. One narrative in this book tells the story of the shifting meaning of this and other aspects of Maori material culture as they are reconceptualised through display as curio, specimen, artifact, art and taonga. This is a genealogy of taonga and contemporary understandings of Maori art and material culture expressive of changing relations between Maori and the colonial state. But there is also a second, more surprising and more original narrative here: It is introduced by yet another photograph of the waharoa. In this image the carvers, Neke Kapua and his sons, are shown standing beside and in front of their almost completed work. This narrative plots changing forms of Maori involvement in the exhibition and production for exhibition of Maori material culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

McCarthy reveals complex and ambiguous forms of Maori engagement with 19th century international exhibitions and local museums. When leaders from Whanganui sent items to a Philadelphia exhibition in the 1880s, for example, they expected the Americans to reciprocate in kind. When Ngati Awa in the Bay of Plenty agreed to send their new meeting house, Mataatua, to the Sydney International exhibition held in 1879 they expected to accompany it. Maori ‘curio-dealers’ sold objects to exhibitors and to the Government in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. Henry Uru, for example, ran an emporium selling, among a wide range of items, feather cloaks, woven tea-cozies and carved pipes. By the turn of the century, other Maori were donating to museums and leaders were deeply concerned over the potential loss of their material heritage to tourists and overseas buyers. McCarthy argues that the passing of the Maori Antiquity Act (intended to prevent Maori art leaving the country) in 1901 coincided with an increased Maori interest in cultural preservation. James Carroll and other Maori leaders of the time strongly supported the concept of a National Maori Museum.

By the 1930s, Apirana Ngata’s carving school had opened in Rotorua and Thomas Heberly had been appointed as the first full-time Maori staff-member at the Dominion Museum. For Ngata and Heberly Maori material culture was a living art form that had meaning in relation to the present and future of Maori society. Museum objects were to become sources of cultural inspiration rather than ethnological specimens. Thus Hau-ki-Turanga – the meeting house being restored by the Dominion Museum – would become a model for many others built throughout New Zealand during the Maori renaissance of the 1930s. McCarthy’s account of this period is important because it deepens and complicates earlier analyses of the ‘traditionalisation’ of Maori meeting houses. More information on the wider context of Ngata’s engagement with the Dominion museum would have strengthened the argument, however. McCarthy notes that Ngata was ‘too embarrassed’ to attend the opening of the new Dominion Museum in 1936 because the restoration of the meeting house was not completed. But this was just one in a string of ‘embarrassments’ since a 1934 Commission of enquiry into his development programmes had forced him to resign in 1935 as Minister of Maori affairs.

McCarthy’s discussion of Maori critiques of the 1940 Centennial Exhibition held in Wellington and of Ngata’s involvement in its successful staging furthers our understanding of Ngata’s post-assimilationist views and reveals more widespread Maori resistance to assimilation during this period. The large crowds that visited the exhibition included many Maori who enjoyed the entertainment provided by the recently formed Ngati Poneke kapa haka group. Carvers displayed their skills, deliberately emphasising the contemporary nature of their work. When a Pakeha visitor complained to one of the carvers, ‘your ancestors didn’t do that with a steel adze’, the carver is said to have replied, ‘no, and you didn’t come here in a stage coach’ (p.92).

Ngata’s most vigorous and inspiring successor was probably Kara Puketapu, Head of Maori Affairs in the 1970s and early 80s. He initiated and led major reforms in the way his department related to Maori centered on the Tu Tangata programmes aimed at increasing Maori self-determination. McCarthy reveals that in 1981 his inter-departmental committee played a significant role in ensuring wide Maori involvement in the planning and staging of Te Maori. This international exhibition redefined Maori artifacts as taonga, a move that was to have far-reaching consequences for the display and public understanding of Maori material culture.

McCarthy’s final chapter, ‘Mana Taonga’, is a careful and insightful examination of changes introduced by Maori at Te Papa aimed at attracting more Maori visitors and creating links with iwi. He describes well the confusion over the definition of taonga and the enormous difficulties associated with iwi-liaison that at times threatened to overwhelm staff.

This story of Maori agency is closely interwoven with a second narrative that traces the shifts in meaning of Maori display objects as they move from curio to taonga. The role of museum directors, especially those at the dominion museum, is highlighted here. McCarthy is sensitive to the difficulties of determining the meanings of objects and displays for visitors – Maori and Pakeha – in the absence of good visitor surveys. It is clear from his account, however, that Maori material culture became ‘art’ in very different ways at different times. The Maori ‘art’ of Augustus Hamilton at the turn of the century was not that of the ethnologist Terence Barrow in the 1950s or that of the curators of Te Maori. This shifting notion of Maori ‘art’ disrupts the linear progression of curio to taonga.

This book began life as a Ph.D. thesis but, with the exception of some theoretical formalities near the beginning, it is written in a direct and engaging style. The 76 well-chosen photographs enhance the text considerably. McCarthy notes in his conclusion that his book is intended to reopen debate about postcoloniality and settler societies. It probably won’t achieve such a grand aim by itself. But what it will do, or should do, is encourage a reassessment of colonial relations in New Zealand – a more modest, but none-the-less very considerable achievement.

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Daniel Miller, Anthropology, UCL

In teaching courses about consumption, the nearest thing I have employed to textbooks are materials that were written over a decade ago. I used Acknowledging Consumption, my own edited survey of disciplinary perspectives and Don Slater's Consumer Culture and Modernity a summary of more sociological debates. None of the many books that have emerged since then seemed to me very satisfactory as replacement textbook materials. Indeed I think many of these give the very term textbook a bad name. You feel they are written under pressure from publishers, an excuse for a relatively superficial and simplifying encounter with the material. Something done on the side in between the authors real research. Or alternatively they are used to make some particular point, promoting the authors own research under the guise of a textbook. A thesis with a general chapter stuck at the beginning and the end.

This I think has been radically changed by the publication in 2007 of Roberta Sassatelli’s Consumer Culture with Sage. This is a model of what a textbook ought to be. Over the past decade the original debates about consumption have been overlaid by a vast amount of detailed research, and it seems unimaginable that a single text could do justice to all of these. To do so would involve as much a commitment to depth as to breadth. I was quite astonished at how well Sassatelli succeeds in balancing the two. It covers a huge amount of ground in its three main sections which are roughly historical, theories of consumer agency and finally the politics of consumption. Each chapter is divided into various themes and in each of these themes she manages to be fair to several different perspectives in turn. Furthermore the bibliography is astonishingly up to date, making full use of studies that were carried out in the last couple of years as well as all the classic works. So the bibliography is excellent. There are at least some references for a vast array of different consumption issues. How we came to be thought of as consumers, each genre of consumption from shopping to gyms, all the various institutional forms that bear on the consumer society. Yet for all this breadth, this sense of something truly comprehensive, there is far more depth than one could possibly expect given the brief compass in which each approach is considered. Instead of simplifying she manages to bring out the key theoretical and often key problematic elements of each approach and author and some of the debates particularly on classic sociological figures would be entirely suited to original research papers in journals.

Continue reading "“Consumer Culture” by Roberta Sassatelli" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest single emphasis of the volume, however, is on the ten years that allowed Douglas to synthesise the ideas that would become her consistent theoretical stances and would turn her into an international figure. In deconstructing her two most well known books, Fardon here uses the clever reflexive technique of offering a ‘structuralist’ analysis of Douglas’s own structuralist work and prose style (p.84). That is, he gives us a pattern for the way she formulates her arguments in writing which is recurring and forms rhetorical foundation. He demonstrates that this is present from the linking of paragraph passages, all the way through to the way the overall chapter outlines of her books work as a sequence of thesis, antithesis and dismissal reinforcing initial thesis.

Fardon then goes on to explore Douglas’s attempts to establish theoretical pillars for supporting the understanding of universal forms of human behaviour as gleaned from comparative methods in social anthropology. “The juxtaposition of contemporary and exotic materials, often but not always African, has become a hallmark of her work on Western society [...] Douglas’s juxtapositions derive from her desire to create a genuinely catholic, in the sense of universal, comparative social anthropology” (p.110). This ethos would fuel an incredibly diverse and prolific career based on her oft reworked but generally consistent conceptual grid-group model. Fardon unpacks its evolution as Douglas applied it to economics and consumption, risk analysis, religion and ritual as well as institutional thought. By looking at these periods of research in her life, he effectively demonstrates the multi-dimensionality of grid-group theory whilst nonetheless providing an overview of the ways in which is has been contested and opposed.

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

Continue reading "Biographical Subjects" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Mukulika Banerjee, Reader in Anthropology, University College London

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

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

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

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

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Paul Williams, NYU

United States Holocaust Museum: Online Exhibit, Do You Remember When?

Among the various modes of museum display, “online exhibits,” are often disappointing. They are overwhelmingly purely visual, comprising two-dimensional representations of select artworks or artifacts. These are chosen without explanation by the museum and organized in a this-then-that sequence that has little to do with the personal idiosyncrasies of museum visitation – or the cross-institutional, hyper-textual possibilities afforded by the web. While some science and a few art museums offer important exceptions, history museums are particularly guilty of this tendency.

It is heartening, therefore, to find a truly enlightening online history exhibit. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ‘Do You Remember, When’ exhibition went online in 2001. It is based entirely on a book given by one young man, Manfred Lewin, killed at Auschwitz, to his gay friend, Gad Beck, a half Jew who survived in the small Jewish underground of World War II Berlin. While the book is ostensibly comprised of notes about Friedrich Von Schiller’s 18th century play Don Carlos, it is impossible to read without also detecting the subtext of a doomed friendship in 1940s Berlin.

This dual meaning makes the text especially well-suited to the USHMM’s conceptual criss-crossing between two historical layers. The 17 easily-navigated (and translated) pages of the illustrated handmade book are filled with rollover links to further explanatory material, including audio songs, archival photographs, and recorded sections of interviews with Gad Beck (who entrusted the book to the museum). The well-chosen design and content makes the reading experience near seamless, and allows one to choose their level of immersion in historical detail. (A technical review of the site can be found at http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/10686.html).

The exhibit verges on that most quality most elusive in online exhibits – being tactile. A diary, or any book, can work better online than in a museum (where pages usually can’t be turned, and interpretive commentary in text-label or audio form is added only clumsily). In ‘Do You Remember, When,’ the viewer gains a real sense of both the intimacy of the primary material (the amateurish drawings, the occasionally disjointed narrative) and the research that went into producing the secondary interpretation. This research stimulated memories (particularly from Gad Beck) but also revealed some gaps that couldn’t be filled in. The result is a rare online document that is not only moving and content-rich, but also provides readers with a vivid insight into both the alignments and disparities cleaving personal memory and archival artifact.

Posted by at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Fiona Parrott, Department of Anthropology, UCL

The Tea Caddy, Paris

Ever wondered how Englishness is portrayed in Paris? Visit The Tea Caddy on 14 rue Saint Julien-Le-Pauvre for Un buffet anglais where tiny scones and dainty cucumber sandwiches are served in a dark wood panelled room, surrounded by china and old maps. The occasion was in honour of the publication of a special issue on Grande-Bretagne: Anthropology at Home. This is the most recent special issue of Ethnologie Française (April 2007) to be part of a series of issues devoted to different countries written by scholars in those places, in short anthropologists doing anthropology at home. In this case the editors were Sophie Chevalier (Universite de Franche-Comte/Laios-MSH), Sharon MacDonald and Jeanette Edwards (University of Manchester). Curiously there was no tea, but there was plenty of French wine which was a fitting celebration for a beautifully presented journal.

Coming out of the tradition of European Ethnology, a journal such as Ethnologie Française will always have a closer relationship to material culture studies than a purely social anthropology journal such as L’Homme. Indeed, for this reason it has been easier for French scholars to view their research on France as a natural part of their work, while harder to get British anthropologists to frame their work as on Britain, as opposed to an aspect of Britain such as class or ethnicity.

The publication of the issue was marked by a workshop at Le Centre de recherches sur les îles britanniques et l’Europe de l’Université de Paris titled “Qu-est-ce-que la Britishness?” Sophie Chevalier opened with a brief historical comparison of the sociology and anthropology of Britain and France. Sharon MacDonald focused on the creation of the issue followed by papers and discussion from some of the contributors. The papers of most interest to material culture included Elizabeth Hart’s study of how former pottery workers explain the decline of the UK pottery industry. Globalisation and abstract market forces have little place in the narratives of workers for whom the decline rests with the decreasing quality of the hand painted images, the consistency of the slip and the ‘abuse’ of the clay by modern managers. And Catherine Degnen’s study of ‘Placing memory’ in a small Northern town focused on the way people and their relationships are embedded in places of which the material traces are long gone. Both papers presented a contemporary take upon the loss of community, a theme that has long concerned the study of Britain and work by scholars such as Frankenberg, Young and Wilmott. Not to mention the residents and politicians of Britain. By contrast my own paper drew upon a study of one hundred households on a London street that has little in common with village-orientated studies as few residents will ever get to know each other and there is a larger and more transient population.

My paper on the material condition of memory in modern urban households examined how interior décor, collections of clothing, books, music and photographs, differentially structure remembering and forgetting, from the intentional creation of memory to the incidence of utilitarian archives. Although genres of material culture may be studied as if they have certain capacities for memory, individuals and households develop their own habits of memory, selecting between the genres in which they invest memory in the long term and utilising them differently. Each household forms it’s own topography of memory. Also included in the issue is a paper on Cremation and the disposal of ashes by Jenny Hockey and David Prendergast, and a historical examination of the making of anatomical knowledge in Scotland through the materiality of dead bodies by Elizabeth Hallam. In one of the few papers which considered the explicit performance of Britishness, Emma Crewe examined the rites and symbols of the House of Lords.

Finally, Marilyn Strathern reminded the workshop of the importance of critical distance when doing anthropology at home. It is sometimes surprising to see Britain through others eyes. She recalled how visitors from PNG simply did not share our obsession with class and identity, for instance they saw the houses of Britain as all the same, rejecting the way British read differences of size and ornamentation as indexes of class and focusing on the blue print structure. Some of the counterpoints for comparison are closer to home however. Taken as a whole the workshop and the journal issue suggest just how much there is to gain from a rapprochement between British material culture studies in general, and the traditions of European Ethnology both in France and elsewhere in Europe, and I am very grateful to the editors for initiating this relationship.

For details of the journal issue see:

"Grande-Bretagne : anthropology at home", Ethnologie Française, n°2, tome XXXVII (2007)

Contents page:
http://www.puf.com/Book.aspx?book_id=025604&feature_id=map

Posted by Graeme Were at 3:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

MIT Press has just released Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse, edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine. Here is the publishing blurb:

"In Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, experts offer a critical and theoretical appraisal of the uses of digital media by cultural heritage institutions. Previous discussions of cultural heritage and digital technology have left the subject largely unmapped in terms of critical theory; the essays in this volume offer this long-missing perspective on the challenges of using digital media in the research, preservation, management, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritage. The contributors--scholars and practitioners from a range of relevant disciplines--ground theory in practice, considering how digital technology might be used to transform institutional cultures, methods, and relationships with audiences.

The contributors examine the relationship between material and digital objects in collections of art and indigenous artifacts; the implications of digital technology for knowledge creation, documentation, and the concept of authority; and the possibilities for “virtual cultural heritage”--the preservation and interpretation of cultural and natural heritage through real-time, immersive, and interactive techniques.

The essays in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage will serve as a resource for professionals, academics, and students in all fields of cultural heritage, including museums, libraries, galleries, archives, and archaeology, as well as those in education and information technology. The range of issues considered and the diverse disciplines and viewpoints represented point to new directions for an emerging field. "

The papers are on the whole shorter and accessible and this looks like a good resource to start thinking through the impact of digitisation on our apprehension of the object world, especially within Museums.

If anyone has read this book, and would like to comment/review it here, please comment below. Equally, what other text or digital resources are available as resources for thinking through the impact of the digital on our understanding of the material world?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Danny Miller, UCL

A new book has just been published by Nicky Gregson, Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University, well known through her previous publications such as Second Hand Worlds. The latest book is called Living with Things (Seankingston.co.uk). I admit to a bias, since I am the editor of the series this appears in, and indeed I would use the opportunity to encourage people to send manuscripts. We are certainly interested in material culture books with an anthropological inflection. Living with Things reports a fascinating ethnography of a former coal-mining village in North-East England, seen largely through the internal relationships between the long term lives of objects in the home and the long term occupancy of the homes.

Two main aspects of these relationships emerge through the writing. The first is the idea of accommodating, the way things have to be shifted around and reordered in relations to events such as moving in, doing up the place or having children. With the further implication that, without such events, things often remain stable occupants of home for very considerable periods. But then there is just as much on the internal circulation of objects within the home that may eventually lead to their being thrown out or otherwise disposed of. So here exchange appears mainly as a study of the internal dynamics of households. I confess this is very much my kind of ethnography with considerable attention to the long term trajectories of objects such as toys and appliances. It is the kind of ethnography which shows why material culture is often an ideal conduit for conveying how essential, ordinary, mundane and therefore often quite overlooked practices are central to the normative form of everyday life. Which, after all, these days is increasingly a matter of what happens within the private home.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | Posted to Book Reviews

Patrick Laviolette (UCL / Massey University)

Review of “Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” by Carl Knappett (2005); Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

[Editorial note: and see Martin Holbraad's response to Danny Miller's review on this site of the book Thinking Through Things as a cross-reference to this review and for an interesting discussion of some of the limits of the category of material culture...]

“Quantum Cloud” (30 m. x 16 m. x 10 m.) is an elliptical sculpture by the artist Antony Gormley. A version of this piece, standing on four watertight cast iron pylons in the Thames adjacent to London’s Millennium Dome in Greenwich, illustrates the jacket cover of the book reviewed here.

One of the main problems with this text is that it has no real thesis. Knappett is a ‘rebel without a cause’ in his attempt to carve out a niche for this book. Indeed, the idea that dualistic thought has hindered the social sciences is far from new. Moreover, there are not that many people, scholars or otherwise, who have any real qualms with accepting or even exploring existential, phenomenological, poetic, post-modern, symbolic or the many other types of non-Descartian modes of being-in and understanding the world. From his preface, we should acknowledge and sympathise with the difficult interdisciplinary task that he has set out for himself. One is nearly ready to suspend disbelief in order to tolerate the omission of certain details in lieu of this idealised project. This is difficult to do for two reasons however. The first, ironically enough, is that Knappett is his own worse enemy in straying from the interdisciplinary path and providing what is largely a conventional cognitive archaeology point of view (unless he feels that examining his own coffee cup is some sophisticated new form of illusory satire in auto-ethnography).

Continue reading "Tinkering Through Material Culture" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Book Reviews

Alex Starace, MA student, Program in Museum Studies, NYU

Museum Highlights: a Gallery Talk. Performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989
Source: http://www1.uol.com.br/bienal/24bienal/rot/erotcanfras03a.htm

Andrea Fraser’s new book Museum Highlights is quite depressing – and I mean that as a compliment. Fraser, an artist and writer, bases her work on the idea that contemporary artistic practice should expose and change the institutional hierarchies and self-interests of the art world. Many of her critiques are scathing. In her essay, “It’s Art When I Say It’s Art, or...” Fraser even admits that “my stomach turns every time I reread this essay,” (43) because she can come to no other conclusion than that the deep-down aspirations of artists are always oriented towards gaining as much authority, recognition, and legitimacy as possible. It’s a decidedly unromantic view of the art world, yet the more one reads of Fraser’s book, the more convincing she becomes. She’s clearly done her homework and, as an artist, she has access to museums, curators, collectors, and dealers in a way that many of us can only dream of. A series of her essays, published in one volume, comprise Museum Highlights (edited by Alexander Alberro) – some are transcripts from performance works she has done, others are pieces of literature written as part of an art work, while still others are critical texts she has published in various magazines.

Continue reading "Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Daniel Miller, UCL

On Thursday 7th December a book launch was held for a new volume Thinking Through Things. Edited by A Henare, M Holbraad and S Wastell and published by Routledge.

The book is clearly of interest to anyone in material culture studies. The primary theme is concerned with transcending any dualism between things and concepts, for which purpose there is considerable engagement with epistemological and ontological issues. The intention is not to develop a new theory, but rather to affirm an analytical methodology, that anthropologists could utilise to gain insights in their various studies. The inspiration is quite clearly the work of Marilyn Strathern, and the degree to which this clearly represents a cadre of younger scholars working enthusiastically to related themes is testimony to her inspiration at Cambridge. After Strathern the other key influences would be the Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro who has been debating related issues with Strathern at Cambridge. The introduction works through the general concepts surrounding perspectivism that was central to these debates and the degree to which these raise such ontological questions.

The most impressive achievement of the book as a whole is the way these ambitious analytical debates are tied to a constantly high level of scholarship and ethnographic depth that characterise the individual contributions. The papers are much too rich to be constrained within any single theme. For example Amiria Henare’s chapter concerns the interpretive flexibility with which they key treaty that bound the Maori and the colonialists has been dealt with in the subsequent period. She demonstrates how this interpretive flexibility is not something that came from the generic West but is grounded in Maori transformative and dynamic genres. A similar point is made by Wastell through showing that while the envisaging of Western law by the Swazi of Southern Africa as encompassing, was presaged by their notions of divine kingship, this was not an aspect of cultural continuity as conservative. Rather they should be seen as consummate modernists.

Another interesting pair of papers includes a revision of Alfie Gell’s book Art and Agency by James Leach based on research he has conducted on collaborations between artists and scientists in Cambridge. Gell is also employed by Pedersen on shamanist ontologies in Mongolia and in a chapter by the PNG anthropologist Andrew Moutou on switching our conceptualisation of museums from issues of classification to issues of how people conceive of loss (something close to my own current work). Also based in PNG is a sparkling essay by Reed on smoking amongst prisoners in Port Moresby.

The most curious aspect of this book, however, is its first sentence. This states `what would an artefact-oriented anthropology look like, if it were not material culture?’ I found this slightly weird since my own conception of material culture is of a field in which people do not by and large define themselves in a semi-disciplined form, making it quite hard to see it as something one excludes oneself from from. Rather, as one hopes is the case with this weblog, it is more a welcoming and inclusive space for people with shared interests and an eclectic base. The sentence is elaborated upon in the introduction largely by separating out the transcendence of the dualism of thing/concept from that of subjects/objects. Actually I think this is not at all an accurate description of the papers that follow. Several, such as Empson’s paper on Mongolia, seem to me quite clearly exemplifications of the concept of objectification and the way a Strathernian approach to relationships can best be understood through exploring the process of objectification itself which as is clear in Strathern’s own work certainly implicates issues of subjects and objects. But the volume’s introduction does lead to an intriguing result. I felt the fullest exemplification of this desire for separation comes in Holbraad’s paper on the concept of mana which is also applied to a case study of his own fieldwork in which he asserts that one cannot distinguish between the concept of power and the actual powder as used by Cuban diviners. This is expertly done and I wholeheartedly recommend the chapter in question. But what intrigues me is that here it probably is the case that the degree of focus on this powder/power concept/thing ends up with the author paying relatively little regard to something that has been core in material culture studies which is the being of the Cuban diviner. In other words that appreciating that we have here a rather different kind of `object’ should in turn lead an appreciation that we have a rather different kind of subject.

This then has a paradoxical, but I think highly significant result. The separation from material culture might have been an attempt to preserve a more central social anthropology. But it is clear that by narrowing the brief of the introduction the result (if the authors had actually followed such advice), would have not been to make the book more anthropological but actually less so. As I have argued in my introduction to the book Materiality (2005, Duke University Press), I think we should by now be beyond such issues and one of the most powerful contributions of material culture studies is to try and represent the vanguard of anthropology as a whole. An anthropology that no longer feels any such need to ground itself only in concepts such as society and social relations on the one hand, nor take refuge in cognitive studies on the other, but one that is comfortable with the idea of a prior materiality within which a more specific social anthropology can flourish. In short material culture is not a subset of social anthropology but more the other way around. Material culture is a condition for anthropology itself.

Such a material culture adds to anthropology but subtracts nothing. The problem is that this is a relatively new understanding of anthropology, and while adventurous in some ways these Cambridge anthropologists were quite conservative in others. To be frank, I suspect they chickened out of any direct identification with material culture since they were scared that the term might still have a somewhat lower status than mainstream social anthropology. Something which may reflect their parochialism, since in general I don’t think this is a fear that holds much ground these days. To use the term would not then be a commitment to any particular approach, since again as this weblog shows it is both relaxed and eclectic. It is merely an acceptance that materiality is one of the necessary engagements of a larger anthropology.

Ultimately, however, whether people call themselves material culture or not is of limited interest, what matters is the quality of the work and the quality of the insights. And, whether the authors like it or not, this is a volume of considerable interest and consequence to anyone working in the field of material culture studies, with many exemplary chapters.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Book Reviews | Conferences and other events | From the editors

Review of: "A Brief History of Globalization" by, Alex MacGillivray (2006); New York, Carroll & Graff

Richard Wilk teaches at the University of Indiana

This is not an academic book, written instead by an activist with a decidedly anti-globalization position. Nevertheless, because it takes a historical perspective, and sees globalization as a complex phenomenon with contradictory tendencies, the book is an excellent introduction to the topic, suitable for classroom use. MacGillivray is an especially good guide to the long term trends in the velocity of travel, exchange, migration and transportation, avoiding that heated tone of sudden crisis which characterizes so much recent writing on globalization.

Anthropologists will especially appreciate the balanced tones with which he approaches the topic of cultural globalization. He correctly identifies the central paradox that even as the culture industries become ever-more concentrated in the hands of a few major transnational companies, local culture constantly re-asserts itself. Rather than falling into the right-left moral discourses of globalization as a panacea or the ultimate evil, MacGillivray carefully identifies the groups who are winners, those who are losers, and those in the middle who get some of each effect, or get nothing at all. Most important for the readers of this blog, the book gives due place to important consumer goods in global history, from the spice trade through tobacco and sugar, to DVDs and cocaine. This book is an easy and quick read, and it includes enough references to get anyone started on a thorough study of this important topic.

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Book Reviews

Review: "Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity," by Donald Preziosi (2003); University of Minnesota Press

Sharon Macdonald teaches at the University of Manchester

Donald Preziosi’s "Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity" (2003, University of Minnesota Press) is the published version of his 2001 Slade Lectures (an annual series of Art History Lectures at Oxford University). Somebody I know who went to these lectures told me that he found them fascinating but almost impossible to understand. I can see why. But at least in the book form you can read sentences several times (and untangle all the multiple partial parentheses of words). It’s an effort worth making.

Preziosi makes an argument against a representational account of art that is similar to Gell’s in Art and Agency. But where this goes is rather different, for Preziosi is principally concerned with art as a practice of the modern self – and with what follows from this, especially for how we understand the discipline of art history and the institution of the museum, especially the relationship between subjects and objects (which, he argues, is as often about denial as any kind of realisation). The journey is a wonderfully heady one that takes us, among other places, through the John Soane Museum (which we learn is, like many museums, an ostensification of principles of Freemasonry), via a photograph that Preziosi happened upon of his father (or possibly his twin brother) on the walls of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, via the Crystal Palace, the streets of Cairo, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, circumcision, Lacan, ‘the irony of all exit signs’…. to, where? The final chapter rethinks the ubiquitous Index, Icon, Symbol distinction to add a fourth: ‘artifice’, based on a relation of ‘adequation’ which, Preziosi suggests, can offer an alternative to the ‘ultimately unsatisfying attempts to apply a verbocentrist or linguistically based semiotic model or theory to art’ (p.146). (Intriguingly, this is based on recollections of conversations about this with Roman Jakobson.)

But what, you may ask, is the ‘brain of the earth’s body’? The answer is ‘Europe’, though as this is a blog and I’ve run out of space, you’ll have to read the book to decipher Preziosi’s ruminations on why he can get away with what might otherwise seem an outrageously non-pc metaphor.

Posted by Graeme Were at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

García Canclini, Néstor (2001) Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. University of Minnesota Press

In Consumers and Citizens, García Canclini suggests the necessity to consider how the changes in modes of consumption have altered the possibilities of citizenship in the Latin American context. Through several essays the author proposes a romanticized idea of citizenship and social movements in Latin America that struggle to survive by being redefined; people in mega-cities (particularly Mexico City) answer the questions on belonging, rights and interests traditionally located in the public sphere in the realm of private consumption.

This book belongs to the 1990s trend within anthropology, sociology and cultural studies on globalization, Americanization, multicultural identities and mass consumption, with a particular focus on the cultural industries. Some essays are quite pessimistic; the author exacerbates the ideas of disconnection, atomization and insignificance. Others propose the several policy measures that are needed in order to achieve new versions of citizenship.

As a whole, it is hard to find either answers or a creative reflection on the relationship between consumption and citizenship. This book is better at showing the methodological implications of doing research in contemporary Latin American urban sites and the need of interdisciplinary work. The author’s ability to gather and integrate data from the most varied sources –including literature, ethnography and continental surveys- is maybe its selling point.

This book is of interest for those anthropologists working on material culture of Latin America, as it works as a frame for contextualized research. It is well strong on studies and literature of that time and written from the insider perspective of one of the well reputed scholars in the region.

Marjorie Murray
PhD candidate Department of Anthropology, University College London

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews

Review: Harvey Molotch (2003), Where stuff comes from - how toasters, toilets, cars, computers and many other things come to be as they are. London: Taylor and Francis

Elizabeth Shove and Matt Waton teach at the Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster

'Where Stuff Comes From' does an excellent job of opening up debate about product design and of asking new questions about the hardware with which we live our lives. What is it that gives shape and form to the 'stuff' that surrounds us? In dipping into the world of design, Harvey Molotch deals with questions of fun, functionality and fashion, also taking note of the structuring of supply chains and the organisation of production. In focusing on design in this way, his book sits squarely between typically generic arguments about consumers' pursuit of novelty and more technologically oriented theories of innovation.

This is interesting and surprisingly unpopulated territory. On the other hand, and despite the promise of the first chapter, Molotch does not go on to analyse objects in use or to develop the theoretical resources required to take such a project forward. Instead, he follows products to the market, commenting on the relation between material and cultural dynamics at a relatively abstract level, but stopping short of looking at how 'stuff' is appropriated in practice. As the title suggests, the focus is on where stuff comes from, not on where it goes to, or what happens next.

Questions about how stuff is appropriated, transformed and embedded are all central topics for those who write about 'material culture'. But the funny thing is that such authors only rarely ask themselves where does this stuff come from? How is it that there is such a divide between social studies of stuff up to the point where it is sold, and social analyses of what goes on beyond that point? Artefacts cross this boundary with ease, but it remains an important stumbling block in academic scholarship.

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Book Reviews