Review by Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

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

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

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

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

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

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 (0) | 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.

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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 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 outline of the book works 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.

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Posted by 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

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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 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" »

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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.

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