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

Panel on "Cosmopolitanism and the Appropriation of Culture"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler

Click on the link for schedule and further details

Continue reading "Objects of Affection: The Wedding in Jewish Life: A Colloquium" »

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A conference in honour of
Professor Susan Pearce

University of Leicester
15-17 December 2008

Professor Susan Pearce is an internationally renowned professor of museum studies and historical archaeologist, who has had a long and important association with material culture studies both within and beyond the museum.

The University of Leicester’s Department of Museum Studies plans to honour Professor Pearce’s contribution to the field with a significant material culture studies conference and the subsequent publication of a volume of essays based on the conference papers. Both the conference and the volume will explore agenda in theoretically-oriented material culture studies. We are now inviting the submission of abstracts. Presentations will address or inform approaches to theorising relationships between people and the material world. The range of potential themes is broad, and might include embodied experience and sensory engagements, the agency of – and distinctions between – objects and persons, the construction of value, etc.

In keeping with Professor Pearce’s own interdisciplinarity, proposals in this area are warmly welcomed from those working on the cutting-edge of object studies not only in archaeology, anthropology and museum studies, but also in a wide range of other disciplines including history, management and organisational studies, geography, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, art history, science technology studies, natural sciences and beyond.

Abstracts

Abstracts of 300-450 words should be sent to the conference convenor, Sandra Dudley, (shd3@le.ac.uk) by 20 March 2008. Any enquiries about the scope of conference may also be sent to the convenor. A draft conference programme will be available here after the end of March 2008.

Registration

Conference registration forms will be available from March 2008. Interest in – and enquiries about – attending may be sent to Barbara Lloyd (bl5@le.ac.uk).

Full conference fee including lunches and refreshments: £150 (concessions £90; daily rates also available)

Bed and breakfast: £50/night
Dinner, including main conference dinner: £20/night

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Conference Review by Kaori O’Connor, Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UCL

The Pasold Research Fund in association with the Department of Anthropology, UCL
Foundling Museum, London WC1, January 17-18, 2008

Childhood is developing into a mainstream field of contemporary enquiry across the social sciences and humanities, legitimised by new degree courses and research centres, dedicated e-lists and special interest groups in organisations like the AAA, American Studies Association and the American Popular Culture Association. Yet, strikingly, the study of the material culture of childhood – especially clothing – has not kept pace. A number of factors have contributed to the privileging of the inner child over the outer – the avowed determination of ‘child-focussed’ studies to reflect the ‘real’ child, not adult projections; the anti-consumerism and moral panics that studies of childhood consumption in Euro-America tend to evoke; and the tendency within the academy to see ‘kid’s stuff’ as frivolous and superficial. Equally unhelpful has been the penchant of many dress, costume and textile historians for cloth and clothing of the periods during which natural fibres and craft- and hand-work were the norm – the Victorian era is a particular favourite – perpetuating the notion that the enchantments and distinctions of making and meaning do not apply to synthetic fibres or operate in the arena of mass production, a misconception that has remained largely unchallenged since the 1989 publication of Weiner and Schneider’s edited volume Cloth and Human Experience. Finally, there is a lacuna in the field of clothing itself: contemporary fashion theory doesn’t deal with children, only with adults. From this perspective, before the little black dress, there is nothing but a big black hole. Yet the children’s wear industry is one of the most buoyant in the fashion trade, and has been throughout the twentieth century. So why is it invisible in academic analysis? There is a clear need to make childhood material through its clothing, and face up to the questions - whose childhood is it anyway, what is it wearing, and why?

This was the background to the two-day conference that I organised with Professor Pat Hudson, Director of the Pasold Research Fund. The Pasold (see http://www.pasold.co.uk) is the leading private funder of textile studies and related social, cultural and economic history, supporting individual research, conferences, workshops and publications including the journal Textile History. It is keen to encourage work by students and recent graduates as well as established scholars. The Pasold owes its existence to the success of the Ladybird brand of children’s clothing which, under the direction of the fund’s founder Eric Pasold OBE and his brothers, became the largest and most successful company of its kind in Europe in the post-World War II era, and this added a unique dimension to the conference. It has always been my view that material culture studies and anthropology ‘at home’ have suffered from lack of contact between the academy and industry. Ladybird was at its height during a key transitional period of great change in society, childhood and children’s clothing. Putting the history and ongoing development of the Ladybird brand on the conference agenda, provided the rare opportunity to see childhood from the producers’ perspective.

The conference, the first of its kind, dealt only with the twentieth century and with children’s clothing in Britain, to give depth and focus to the event and also to generate a cohesive body of comparative material. The keynote speaker was Professor Daniel Thomas Cook of Rutgers University-Camden, USA, whose acclaimed 2004 book The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and The Rise of the Child Consumer on children’s clothing in America was a landmark study in the field, both for its subject and its innovative use of trade journals rather than fashion magazines as primary research sources. Opening with a paper entitled Fashion for Whom? Display, Ambiguity and the Performing Child, Dan highlighted the increasing social personhood of children over the twentieth century, and the degree to which retailing is now pitched at the imagined perspective of the child, finishing with three points for future scholarly work in the field – don’t shy away from ambiguity; remember that there is more than one childhood; and maintain a keen eye on multiple observers.

The conference was arranged in six themed sessions: Design, Marketing and Gender; The Business of Children’s Wear; Knitting and Childhood; Home Made Clothing; Promoting Children’s Clothing and Designer Children. Clare Rose’s (University of Brighton) Democratic Design and Edwardian Children’s Clothing used contemporary photographs, documents and catalogues from 1900-1914 to reveal tensions between conformity and distinctiveness, democracy and elitism, mass-produced and `designer’ styles, that are still with us today. Katrina Honeyman (University of Leeds) showed that, although they did not publicise it, the Leeds multiple tailors produced boyswear as part of their core business from 1900 to 1940, revealing a previously unsuspected ‘youth’ market long before it was thought to have emerged with the sharp young suits for which Leeds later became famous. Alison Carter’s (Museum of Hampshire) paper From the Liberty Bodice to the 28AA Bra: Revealing Stories in the Girls Underwear Department 1900-1940 established the intensity of the childhood memories embedded in the rites of passage of wearing these most intimate of clothes, and the suitability of oral history techniques for recording them.

Continue reading "Clothing Childhood, Fashioning Society: Children’s Clothes in Britain in the Twentieth Century" »

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London conference & Wellington Museum exhibition

This year see's a new exhibition in Wellington to celebrate the life and work of Katherine Mansfield at her NZ Birthplace Te Puakitanga.

The new exhibition entitled MATERIAL MANSFIELD runs from 19 February to 4 May 2008 and is put on by the Katherine Mansfield Society (admission charge applies). It displays her clothes and possessions, brought together in New Zealand for the first time as well as new creations by contemporary designers who have fallen for her unique sense of style.

As well as being the 120th anniversary of her birth, this year also celebrates the centenary of her arrival in London in 1908 at the age of nineteen, in order to pursue a career as a writer. Within three years she would see her first collection of short stories published – In a German Pension – meet John Middleton Murry, her future husband, and go on to establish herself as one of the writers of some of the twentieth-century’s most remarkable short stories.

Consequently, The Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London,in association with The University of Northampton, are hosting a conference to commemorate Mansfield's exceedingly significant yet short career as a writer.

THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD CENTENARY CONFERENCE

Birkbeck, University of London
4-6 September 2008

This major three-day international conference aims to re-evaluate Katherine Mansfield’s contribution to 20th century literature, as well as assessing the state of Mansfield scholarship and criticism today.

Enquiries to: Professor Janet Wilson or Dr Gerri Kimbers

Mansfield's Grave, Fontainbleau

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From at least Bass Ale’s red triangle—advertised as “the first registered trademark”—commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in this month’s issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society. The article is currently available free at: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current

In “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” author David Wengrow (University College London, Institute of Archaeology) challenges the widespread assumption that branding did not become an important force in social and economic life until the Industrial Revolution. Wengrow presents compelling evidence that labels on ancient containers, which have long been assumed to be simple identifiers, as well as practices surrounding the production and distribution of commodities, actually functioned as branding strategies. Furthermore, these strategies have deep cultural origins and cognitive foundations, beginning in the civilizations of Egypt and Iraq thousands of years ago.

Branding became necessary when large-scale economies started mass-producing commodities such as alcoholic drinks, cosmetics and textiles. Ancient societies not only imposed strict forms of quality control over these commodities, but as today they needed to convey value to the consumer. Wengrow finds that commodities in any complex, large society need to pass through a "nexus of authenticity.” Through history, these have taken the form of “the bodies of the ancestral dead, the gods, heads of state, secular business gurus, media celebrities, or that core fetish of post-modernity, the body of the sovereign consumer citizen in the act of self-fashioning.” Although capitalism and branding find in each other a perfect complement, they therefore have distinct origins.

Together with colleague Andrew Bevan, David is organizing an inter-disciplinary conference at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, called: Cultures of Commodity Branding: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives (May 10th-11th, 2008), with speakers including Rick Wilk, Jean-Pierre Warnier, Alison Clarke and many others. Further details at:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/conferences/other/commodities-2007/poster_commoditybranding.pdf

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Changing Meanings in Early Colonial America

Two day conference, February 17-18th 2008
Venue - Sackler Room, Clore Centre, British Museum

Registration from 10am Entry £10, Concessions £5
www.plymouth.ac.uk/adoptionandslaveryinamerica

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The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester announces its 2008 meeting. The motion to be debated is

Ontology is just another word for culture

Speaking for the motion : Michael Carrithers (Durham), Matei Candea (Cambridge)

Speaking against the motion: Karen Sykes (Manchester) Martin Holbraad (UCL)

Saturday, 9th February. 2-5pm. G.7 Humanities Building, Bridgeford Street (off Oxford Road, sort of behind Blackwells), Manchester.

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/research/gdat/

GDAT is free to attend and everyone is warmly welcomed.

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The GREEN LINES Institute for Sustainable Development is proud to announce the official support of the Portuguese Ministry of the Culture to Heritage 2008: an International Conference on World Heritage & Sustainable Development.

Invited Key-Note Speakers:

Professor Frank Matero, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA;
Professor Tomislav Sola, Univ. of Zagreb, Croatia;
Professor Gregory Ashworth, Univ. of Groningen, The Netherlands.

To make this event a great success, the Organizing Committee would like to invite all researchers and academics interested in this field of knowledge, to present a paper at this International Conference in Portugal from 7 to 9 May.

Relevant information on this event is available at the conference's website:
or, if you need any additional information contact the conference secretariat by e.mail:

DEADLINE FOR PAPERS' SUBMISSION 15 FEBRUARY 2008

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Call for Papers

The Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference,
July 9-11, 2008, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, invites conference papers of up to 4000 words broadly related to the topic of Power and Place.

Image: Megan Baker, Massey graduate (Institute of Communication Design) 2007

Those who are active in the performing and creative arts, design, and visual and material culture know that the theoretical models and studio practices attached to the disciplines are rich with embedded meanings. They can direct discourses, construct or demolish power frameworks, articulate place and situate culture itself, yet they are often neglected as pathways to scholarly knowledge and an understanding of historical or contemporary life.

Continue reading "ANZCA 2008 Power and Place" »

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Call for Papers

The 25th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand [SAHANZ]

Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, 3rd – 6th July 2008

/ between critique and intervention / between analysis and creation /
/ the history of architectural practice / the practice of architectural history / the architecture of historical practice / critiquing the practice of architectural history / gaps:connections:contentions /

Continue reading "History in Practice" »

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University College London / Kings College London seminar series supported by ESRC

The Social History of the Prototype: seminar one in a series of four

Date: 11th February 2008; 1:30-6pm
Venue: Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street (North-Eastern Corner of Gordon Square), London WC1E 6BT

The seminar will examine the social history of the prototype in order to draw out the differences represented by present innovations in materials, technology and manufacture and explore the earlier 18th and 19th century origins and contexts of development underlying current innovations.

Continue reading "New Materials, New Technologies: Innovation, Future and Society" »

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The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington is pleased to open the Call for Submissions:

Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice
An Interdisciplinary Academic Conference at the University of Washington
May 15-16, 2008

Museums are institutions steeped in tradition but surrounded by constant change. "Transforming Museums" seeks to find ways that professionals can meet these changes deliberately and thoughtfully instead of being swept along their currents. Building on the overwhelming success of last year's "Rethinking Museums" conference, we now turn to the task of "Transforming Museums." Come join us in the green and beautiful city of Seattle as we reach, share, and dreamstorm toward the future of these most beloved institutions. With its unique host of changing museums, both new and old, we can't think of a better place!

Continue reading "Transforming Museums Conference: Call for Submissions" »

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The Pasold Research Fund, which owes its existence to the success of the Ladybird brand of children’s wear under the direction of Eric Pasold OBE, opens a new field of textile research in the

2008 PASOLD CONFERENCE

CLOTHING CHILDHOOD, FASHIONING SOCIETY: CHILDREN’S CLOTHING IN BRITAIN IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Thursday 17th-Friday 18th January 2008
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
10am-5:30pm Thursday, 10am-4pm Friday

Until now, studies of contemporary clothing and textiles have focussed on adults and ‘youth’, while studies of children’s wear have concentrated on the Victorian and earlier eras. This is the first conference to examine the twentieth century – a period of unprecedented social, economic and technological change – through the material culture of childhood. What do children’s clothes and textiles, the fortunes of the industriy and companies that produced them, and the childhoods they fashioned say about society in our time?

Contacts:
Conference contact Dr Kaori O’Connor k.o’connor@ucl.ac.uk
Pasold contact: Professor Pat Hudson, Director, Pasold Fund hudsonp@Cardiff.ac.uk

Continue reading "Clothing Childhood, Fashioning Society" »

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To introduce the AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme, a two-day symposium entitled Managing Material Change will be held on the 10th and 11th December 2007, at Jeffrey Hall, Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London.

The symposium will deal with material culture as a physical phenomenon, rooted in the physical environment while acknowledging that change is driven by society as well as the environment. These ideas sit well with the current definition of conservation as the process of 'managing change'.

Programme available by:
Download file

Please contact Debbie Williams for further information about the symposium, registration and participant forms.

Science and Heritage Programme Coordinator
Email: debbie.williams@heritagescience.ac.uk
020 7679 1674

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9 November 2007 1:30 - 6:30 Museum Building Theatrettre 10A02
Entrace D, Buckle Street, Te Aro, Wellington

The School of Visual & Material Culture at Massey University is flagging its recent postgraduate developments and future research initiative - MATTER: the New Zealand Centre for Material Culture Studies - by hosting an interdisciplinary discussion forum that is national in scope. SVMC is inviting guest speakers in the various fields of visual and material culture to help contextualise the current nature of research and teaching in this area within a context that is relevant to New Zealand/Aotearoa and the South Pacific.

The event is in the format of an afternoon forum with panel addresses by 5 scholars working in HE institutions within New Zealand plus 1 from Australia. The research of all these speakers is applicable to general concerns within the Pacific. Additionally, all of them can talk to wider theoretical and methodological developments in their respective disciplines as well as the growing interdisciplinary crossovers and collaborations between pedagogy, creative art, museum curation, community participation and social issues.

The 6 guest speakers are:

Mark Busse (Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Auckland);
Wendy Cowling (Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Waikato);
Nancy de Freitas (School of Design, AUT);
Kumi Kato (Univ. of Queensland);
Huhana Smith (Māori Section, Te Papa Museum, WGTN);
Tim Thomas (Dept of Archaeology, Univ. of Otago).

For futher information and booking, please contact Patrick Laviolette (SVMC, Massey Univ.)http://creative.massey.ac.nz/

The Forum will feature as part of a wider inaugural November Festival put on by the College of Creative Arts: BLOW '07, Nga Hau e Wha, Fresh Creative Perspectives (Nov 2-18).
http://blow.massey.ac.nz/

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National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, the Netherlands, 8-11 June 2008
http://www.Museum-Conference.com

At this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum is a place where museum practitioners, researchers, thinkers and teachers can engage in discussion on the historic character and future shape of the museum. The key question of the Conference is 'How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive?'

As well as impressive line-up of international main speakers, the Conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of the Inclusive Museum. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic Journal, as well as access to the electronic version of the Conference proceedings.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 8 November 2007. Proposals are reviewed within four weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the Conference website.

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OUTING THE WATER CLOSET: Sex, Gender, and the Public Toilet

Free and open to the public 3 November 2007

Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place

Presented by: New York University & The Center for Architecture

Please RSVP: Nicole Derise at nicole.derise@nyu.edu

Program schedule after the jump:

Continue reading "Outing the water closet..." »

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Sainsbury Reseach Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Friday 9 November to Saturday 10 November 2007

Statue of Kamehameha, at Kapaʻau, North Kohala. His flesh like paint, originally put on by the local community, transforms the original bronze into an embodiment of the Hawai'ian King.

Conceiving images in their widest sense, this symposium asks how and what do different material forms embody in the world? While diverse types of images (‘artworks’, devotional objects, photographs, monuments, etc.) possess different ontological statuses, they are united by the fact that
they are each embodiments of various sets of social relations, practices, desires and ideologies. We invite scholars working within anthropology, archaeology and art history to explore issues implicated in the notion of images as embodiments. Whether dealing with the miniature or the monumental, the symposium seeks to consider embodiment as a process (cyclical or terminal) situated in time and space. Given the socially and culturally infused nature of our material world, the strategies of
embodiment are significant. They are affective decisions that impact the way images are engaged with, and how images themselves act upon us, channelling behaviour in both the short and long-term. It is anticipated that the following questions and issues, amongst others, will be
considered at this symposium:

* Examining embodiment as process we are interested in considering what intangible qualities are substantiated and transformed when images are wrapped, carved, bound, modified and or collected?

* Once made what is it that images do?

* What is released and made possible through the destruction, dissolution and decay of an image?

* What are the culturally specific aspects of these intentions and qualities of embodiment?

* What is the significance of different materials and forms in the composition of images?

* What are the social effects of the different qualities of surfaces (e.g., burnishing versus incision in pottery)?

* What perspectives on the relationship between persons and things emerge when taking these aspects of images as processes of embodiment?

* How do different disciplines help in our understanding of embodiment?

Confirmed speakers for the symposium include:

Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA)
Stephen Hugh-Jones (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
Christian Kaufmann (Basel, Switzerland)
Pierre Lemonnier (CNRS, Marseille, France)
Howard Morphy (Australia National University, Canberra, Australia)
Ruth Phillips (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
Allen F. Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Mike Rowlands (University College, London, UK)
Ann-Christine Taylor (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France)

Continue reading "Image as Embodiment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives" »

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This three-day conference is the third in a series of six international workshops bringing together current and recent PhD students and senior scholars. Application for participation is open for all disciplines doing research on the historical and contemporary dynamics surrounding National Museums. The program and series is presented on www.namu.se.

The conference European national museums in a global world is part of the programme Making National Museums: Comparing institutional arrangements, narrative scope and cultural integration(NaMu), funded by Marie Curie Conferences & Training Courses – one of the four so-called Host-driven actions aimed at supporting research networks, research organisations and enterprises. The specific objective is to bring together researchers with different levels of experience.

Continue reading "NaMu III: National museums in a global world" »

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Daniel Miller, UCL

On Wednesday 27th June I went to see the closing display from the ESRC funded five year programme, Cultures of Consumption. For anyone interested in consumption studies there is a huge amount of new research represented here, which can be accessed at http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/ As the director Frank Trentmann noted, at one stage they had 85 researchers engaged. If there was a single dominant theme to the programme it was re-thinking the relationship between the consumer and the citizen. With many arguments to suggest that the presumed antagonism between these two aspects of the modern individual, with the citizen being replaced by the consumer, is much too simple. In many instances involvement in consumption has led to greater consciousness of the rights and political involvement associated with citizenship.

As usual in such programme the highlights came from research that contradicts journalistic and academic presumptions. For example we heard evidence that international retailing firms find that they have to raise their standards to meet Chinese consumers who are more demanding than those in other areas. Another paper demonstrated that people have extended family meals in the UK just as much now as in the 1970s (though migrating from dinner table to kitchen table) and that in terms of food behaviour generally there is no evidence for global convergence e.g. becoming more like the US. A point supported by one of the `celebrity’ discussants Sir Terry Leahy the CEO of Tesco who discussed the diversification of Tesco in different markets. One presentation dealt with the increasing use by people of the equity represented by their properties, but that this tended to be used for house extensions or the costs of caring for others rather than hedonistic holidays. Another showed we are more conservative and less reliant on new media for news than is sometimes suggested.

The range of projects varied from understanding the forces that led to the fashion developments of 1960’s London, the spread of Italian coffee, the consumption of the mild drug Khat, the meanings associated with chicken and sugar along the food commodity chain, re-thinking the place of design in material culture, the evidence that the elderly are just as consumer focused as any other age cohort, the housewife in early modern rural England, the use of the internet in accessing medical services and information, the historic formation of the water consumer, a philosophical engagement with the idea of alternative hedonism, transnational histories of the consumption and production of chewing gum, the history of seed culture, and children’s relationship to fashion consumption. I have probably left some out !

In terms of the event itself there were good and bad lessons. The academics summarised their research in less than five minutes with a limit of a single powerpoint, which given a mainly lay audience was very effective and impressive. What one might call targeted bullet points. On the other hand in order to impress the grant givers it was probably necessary to invite celebrity discussants such as a government minister, the head of the consumer association, the head of a branding company and the aforementioned head of Tesco. But this ended up as a very old fashion discussion about how much we should trust the market which blithely ignored, and in effect thereby devalued, the much more nuanced academic research. However, I guess this was a pretty accurate reflection of the actual fate of most of our research, which in my experience does have an impact, but mainly in the longer term through our role in education, rather than, as we would sometimes wish, more immediately within the corridors of power.

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Patricia G. Lange, University of Southern California
plange@usc.edu

Transitions, From: Missbhavens

Recently, I had the privilege of being an invited curator for the first ever video blogging festival called Pixelodeon, which was held at the American Film Institute on June 9-10, 2007. Pixelodeon is an independent video festival organized to showcase the innovative work of video bloggers and to bring together creators, technologists, and business people to expand their creative outlets and explore potential collaborations. The title of my session was called “Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: The Importance of Physical Place in the Vlogosphere.” The vlogosphere is defined as a series of loosely interconnected video web logs, or vlogs, in which people post video in addition to text or photographs to communicate, enlighten, and entertain viewers. Vlogging contains a number of genres that range from scripted shows to more personal, diary forms in which vloggers document intimate moments in their lives, such as conflict with loved ones, routine events, and surprising encounters.

As I sat down to screen the vast amounts of video to determine a theme for my session, the first thing I noticed was that many vlog titles included a place name. I was struck by titles such as: Minnesota Stories; Beach Walks with Rox; The Delicate Museum; Sustainable Route; Wandering West Michigan; Alicia in Ojai; and Echoplex Park, to name just a few. The intensity of engagement with place in these video blogs belied the prediction that by this century we would all simply exist as meat puppets whose minds would only connect in an abstract cyberspace. The video bloggers who feature place so prominently in their work demonstrate that people continue to experience an embodied sense of place in myriad, important ways. Philosophers have suggested that we are not coherent as human beings except in terms of how we exist in a place. Certainly, the strong emphasis on place in the vlogosphere underscores this profound observation.

I initially planned to screen a group of videos in which bloggers show cased interesting or extraordinary places in their work. Although “travel” vlogs, in which a video blogger documents an exotic place are popular and interesting, what struck me was how so many video bloggers often re-experienced for themselves and their audience familiar or unspectacular places in ways that rendered them strange, beautiful, or destabilizing. In so doing, they showed how people experience places which are tangibly influenced by other people, objects, animals, temperature, light, sound, movement, and other material dimensions. For instance, we’ve all been in an elevator, but what happens when people become trapped inside? In the video Happy Birthday to Me!, two people become frightened when an elevator stops. This unexpected circumstance forced them to consciously experience the elevator as a physical place with dimensions and characteristics that they may not ordinarily observe on a conscious level. Nevertheless the characteristics of the elevator influenced their experience of it as a place.

Instead of seeing an elevator as only a liminal zone that takes people from one place to another, this video blogger helped us to understand that we experience elevators as places in embodied ways with specific expectations about their use and parameters. A number of other videos such as LA Video Cruise, Transitions, and What is Can Shift, also showed how vehicles such as boats and buses, and transport centers such as airports and bus terminals are also distinct places with specific characteristics and unpredictable influences from people and objects that inhabit or travel through them. Although we may think of such transportation centers and vehicles simply as facilitators that move us from one place to another, they are actually places with emotional connotations and regulation of bodies that differ in distinct ways from other places.

The range of video blogs facilitated the investigation of several contrasts, some obvious and some more subtle. Among the obvious contrasts included explorations of small places versus larger city scapes, and so-called natural versus built places. The session also explored a range of emotions and reactions to places, from the frightening to the joyous and many uncertain points in between. A more subtle contrast involved how video bloggers chose to make a familiar place seem unfamiliar. Sometimes video bloggers used straightforward or raw footage to make a familiar place seem odd or wondrous. In the case of Rodents Are With Us, the video blogger needed only to show a few images of rat feces smeared in her closet to illustrate how an intimate space in one’s own home becomes quite frightening.

By viewing these videos, we begin to understand how our feeling-tones for a place are very much influenced by other living things that compete with us to inhabit a place. Similarly, the hallway of an ordinary apartment building took on the feeling of a horror film in the video entitled That b$%@# is crazy! In this video, raw footage set at an off-balancing camera angle included the unsettling and piercing screams of a next door neighbor, once again showing that people influence our perception of and emotional response to place. In contrast, other video blogs such as Bug Mountain used artifice and manipulation of the image through techniques such as colorization or special effects that transform an ordinary walk in the park into something unusual and visually stimulating. We do not always realize how places and the elements within them essentially become characters in our cinematic lives.

Continue reading "The Importance of Physical Place in the Vlogosphere" »

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The Design History Society Annual Conference 2007
Kingston University London: Knights Park Campus
Wednesday 5 September to Friday 7 September 2007

As an embodiment of thought, feeling and intention, design demands to be encountered from a bodily perspective. Design/Body/Sense calls for the interdisciplinary engagement of design and its histories. It suggests the bodily encounter of design is central to its meaning and that the physical and psychical experiences of design are contingent upon historical processes of continuity and change.

Design/Body/Sense aims to provide a forum for academic enquiry within the broad community of design historians. Emphasizing the histories of bodily and sensual experiences of design this conference aims to provide an inclusive theme for historians, researchers, practitioners and academics working across the various design disciplines whilst offering the opportunity for fertile interdisciplinary engagement.

Conference website: www.designbodysense.co.uk

Conference email: designbodysense@kingston.ac.uk

Deadline for early registration: 1 July 2007

Convenors: Dr Trevor Keeble and Juliette Kristensen, School of Art and Design History, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London."

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Via Aaron Glass, University of British Columbia

Collecting art and national formation c. 1800–2000

A three-day international conference at the
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Wednesday 18 July to Friday 20 July 2007

Since the development of the public art gallery and museum in the early 19th century, art and the collecting of art in Britain have been closely linked to the articulation of national identity and the construction of nationhood. They have thus interleaved with debates on national morality, class, race and gender, and the social and civic functions of culture. In recent years ‘cultures of collecting’ have been subjects of considerable study in art history, museology and other forms of cultural studies. This international conference will build on this research, drawing together a range of academics and curators from national and international institutions, to consider the issues surrounding art collecting and nationhood across a variety of locations and cultures.

It will also develop these issues away from a purely Eurocentric focus upon the history of nation formation and the role of art and collecting in the evolution of European nationalism, to explore the significance of art collecting within the history of empire, and for emergent nation-states outside the European arena. It will also confront the complex and contentious issues within those larger histories, of the role of war and looting, and of art and its collecting as both victim and accomplice of international conflict and conquest.

The conference will complement Art for the Nation, the recently opened display in the Queen’s House of the various oil paintings collections that make up the National Maritime Museum’s total holding. One of the principal aims of the exhibition is to consider the history of these collections and how they relate to the historical definitions of Britain’s maritime and imperial identity.

A number of student bursaries for this conference will be available: please see registration details below.

Continue reading "State of the Art" »

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Conference announcement and call for papers

David Wengrow and Andy Bevan, Archaeology, UCL

Commodity branding has come to occupy a central but paradoxical place in understandings of modernity and globalization, and is widely equated with an advanced phase in the development of capitalist societies. Mass consumption of branded goods—and of the images of personal transformation they project—has been linked to the disappearance of older forms of identity based on kinship, class and caste. Branded products inspire visions of progress but also networks of resistance, both arising from the view that brands are a recent and unprecedented phenomenon in human history, spreading from a core area in the post-industrial West to influence a wider economic and cultural periphery.

On May 10th and 11th, 2008 the Institute of Archaeology at University College London will be hosting an international conference that seeks to investigate and challenge these assumptions by approaching the production and consumption of branded goods on a comparative scale, across a wide variety of historical and cultural settings. In particular we seek to explore the contribution of archaeological and anthropological perspectives, thereby broadening the scope of current debate on the role of commodity branding in contemporary social life and in the long-term transformation of human societies.

Continue reading "Cultures of commodity branding: archaeological and anthropological perspectives" »

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Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

On 3rd to 5th May a workshop was held as part of the ESRC-AHRC funded programme Cultures of Consumption. The workshop was held in Florence and attended by around twenty academics mainly from sociology, but including anthropologists, historians and others. It was organised jointly by Frank Trentmann. Elizabeth Shove and Rick Wilk. The theme was routines and rhythms of consumption. My impression was that this forms part of a welcome larger movement to establish consumption processes as central to consumption studies and thereby complement the more traditional emphasis upon the study of things or persons. Of course this does not detract one iota from its interest to material culture given the materiality of such consumer processes.

There were a broad range of perspective presented on the theme of temporal orders, with many varied examples of both routines and rhythms of consumption. For example, Elizabeth Shove worked to interpret aggregate statistical data on temporal routines in the day in terms of more general cultural differences, such as meal times in France. Dale Southerton also discussed daily rhythms, but in his case using archival data from UK diaries kept in 1937 as compared to more recent diaries. The results challenged assumptions about increasing pressure on work and leisure.

A more philosophical dimension to the way certain routines of consumption `capture’ individuals was provided by Roberta Sassatelli using the examples of attendance at gyms or involvement in critical and ethical consumption. Orvar Löfgren emphasised the positive importance of routine in helping people deal with what otherwise might become the overwhelming possibilities of modern life, and this was neatly complemented by Tom O’Dell who looked at the more negative issues when such temporal routines are fetishised, for example, during commuting.

Inge Daniels demonstrated the continued importance of a wide range of seasonal markers in the Japanese home while noting the differences between those who held great store by such markers while others took a more token interest. Other papers dealt with shifts in the sense of time, for example Guliz Ger and Olga Kravets looked at `slow’ tea as in traditional tea drinking in Turkey as compared to the `fast’ tea of teabag drinking today. During the discussion there was a growing sense of the relative autonomy of routines and rhythms as the kinds of process that align people with time rather than simply expressing their agency. Another focus was on new technologies and the way these lead to either bifurcations or realignments of time practices, for example, mobile phones. Other papers were more concerned with the involvement of the market or state in co-opting or regulating such temporal rhythms. Overall participants were left with a strong sense of the way material culture acts as the infrastructure to routines and rhythms which organises the way people experience time to both constrain and enable.

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A series of workshops funded by the AHRC and organised by UCL Museums & Collections.

UCL Museums & Collections warmly invite you to a series of workshops exploring touch and object handling in the context of museums. This series is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Workshop 6: End of project conference: Touch and the value of object handling.
Friday 4 May 2007, University College London, Anatomy JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building.

Continue reading "Touch and the Value of Object Handling" »

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Jacek Goldman and his sister Wanda. Krakw, 1924.

"My mother Wanda Meloch (nee Goldman) was killed in Bialystok after the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941. Jacek left the Warsaw Ghetto to join the partisans and nobody ever heard from him again. I received this photograph from my family in New York."- Katarzyna Meloch, Warszawa

A one-day colloquium on Sunday April 29, 2007 at the Bronfman Center, New York University, 7 East 10th Street, New York City.

Organized by the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion, Center for Religion and Media, New York University

The colloquium will explore photographic practices in Jewish life, with special reference to portraiture and its role in memorializing the "vanished world" of East European Jewry before the Holocaust. We will focus on threesubjects: the iconic images of Roman Vishniac, devotional images of disciples of Lubavitch Hasidic leaders, and the contemporary photographer Rafael Goldchain's project of re-enacting family portraits. This day-long program will inaugurate a larger project of the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion devoted to Jewish photographic practices.

Participants include: Maya Benton, Jonathan Boyarin, Susan Chevlowe, Olga Gershenson, Faye Ginsburg, Rafael Goldchain, Samuel Heilman, Marianne Hirsch, Shelley Hornstein, Andrew Ingall, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Laura Levitt, Maya Balakirsky-Katz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Max Kozloff, Vivian Mann, Jeffrey Shandler, Sadia Shepard, Patricia Spyer, Wendy Steiner, Leah Strigler, Aviva Weintraub, Carol Zemel, Angela Zito.

• Full program: http://modiya.nyu.edu/modiya/handle/1964/974

• Please RSVP: Lauren Shweder Biel, mailto:les259@nyu.edu

• This colloquium coincides with the exhibition And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews, a program of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, North American Council, and The Florence & Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University, at the Yeshiva University Museum, 15 West 16th Street.

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Ghent (Belgium)
10-11 May 2007

Supported by Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy, Radboud University, Nijmegen

In this workshop we shall look at the circulation of the material embodiments of knowledge. In recent years the study of the material culture of science – instruments, graphic representations, materia medica, books, letters, and manuscripts, alchemical recipes or specimens, collections of natural and artificial objects, etc. -- has received close attention as a way to understand historical scientific practice. In this workshop we invite the contributors to study this abundant material culture from the point of view of the circulation of knowledge. The guiding question will be the extent to which material objects can be said to be carriers and producers of natural knowledge. We are interested in cases in which materials do not only allow for knowledge to travel, but in which the material objects themselves ‘in circulation’ create knowledge when being applied, looked at, consumed, read, or otherwise appropriated at their place of destination. What happens to the graphic representation, collection of objects, glass prism, pump or cocoa leaf in its new surroundings? To what extent does the ‘knowledge’ of which they are potentially the carriers remain stable, allowing to serve shared knowledge as a material anchor? The focus of the program of our research network and this workshop is on the Low Countries. While thecentral concept of ‘circulation’ makes it impossible to limit discussion to one place, the various contributions to this workshop address the Low Countries as a place of departure, transit or destination.

Continue reading "The Material Vehicles of the Circulation of Natural Knowledge in the Low Countries" »

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Contemporary Art and Anthropology: Challenges of Theory and PracticeLecturer: Associate Professor Arnd Schneider, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Dates: 30. July - 3. August 2007 Course Credits: 10 pts (ECTS) Limitation: 30 participants
Application details: www.sv.uio.no/oss

Objectives
This course will look at recent border crossings between art and anthropology, and explore the epistemological challenges arising from it. Following the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’, contemporary artists have adopted an ‘anthropological’ gaze, including methodologies, such as fieldwork, in their appropriation of other cultures. Anthropologists, on the other hand, in the wake of the ‘writing culture’ critique of the 1980s, are starting to explore new forms of visual research and representation beyond written texts.

»Main disciplines: Anthropology, Fine Arts, Media Studies
Secondary disciplines: Art History/Criticism, Cultural Studies

Continue reading "Announcement: Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies" »

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Clothing childhood, fashioning society: Children's clothing in Britain in the 20th Century

• 17-18 January 2008 at the Foundling Museum, London WC1

• 2008 PASOLD RESEARCH FUND CONFERENCE -- In association with the Department of Anthropology, University College London -- With the London College of Fashion Conference Organiser: Dr Kaori O’Connor, UCL Email: k.o’connor@ucl.ac.uk Pasold Organiser: Professor Pat Hudson, Director, Pasold Research Fund

The young Baby Boomer as child consumer, from John and Janet Go Walking, James Nisbit, London, 1951.

The Pasold Research Fund owes its existence to the success of Ladybird, which, under the direction of Eric Pasold, became the largest children’s wear company in Britain and then Europe in the years after World War II. It is therefore particularly fitting that this should be the first conference devoted to British children’s clothing and textiles in the twentieth century.

Textiles and clothing are, of course, not just goods – they are also social values in material form, commodities produced and consumed at the intersection of commerce and culture. As such, they have unique potential as tools of combined social, economic and cultural analysis that has yet to be fully explored. This is especially true of children’s clothing. To date, studies of contemporary clothing and textiles have focussed on adults, ‘youth’ and the now-familiar distinctions and discourses of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, locality and class. By contrast, children and their clothes have remained largely invisible to scholarly study, despite the fact that the emergence of children’s consumer culture is a defining phenomenon of our times. What happens when the twentieth century – a period of unprecedented social, economic and technological change – is seen through the lens of children’s clothes and textiles, their changing styles, the industries and businesses that produced them, the childhoods they fashioned and the markets they created?

Continue reading "Call for Papers" »

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March 23, 2007, 1-7PM, 612 Schermerhorn, Columbia University

»A Workshop with: Lila Abu-Lughod, Patricia Dailey, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Nancy K. Miller, Valerie Smith, Silvia Spitta, Leo Spitzer and Kate Stanley

»And Featuring Artist Presentations: Lorie Novak "Reverb", Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock "Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice"

How do objects carry memory across space and time? How do they mediate loss and forgetting, exile and diaspora? More than props or exhibits of historical evidence, material objects are inscribed with the physical and affective traces of memorial transmission across cultures and generations. Looking at how objects mediate memory in familial and social life, and in political discourses and in public archives -- at how they are used, collected, exchanged, and exhibited -- this half-day workshop will explore, in particular, the gendering of familial transmission and the engendering of archives.

Brief presentations will center on a particular object or image, trace its histories across the private and public realms, and reflect on the theoretical issues it raises for the engendering of memory, genealogy and transmission.

Sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Cultural Memory Colloquium, English and Comparative Literature, and Art History

No registration necessary.
For more information contact Vina Tran vtt2103@columbia.edu

Conference website:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/events/main/memory/index.html

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Chris Pinney of UCL informs us at MaterialWorld that Tasveer Ghar has announced a short-term fellowship for collecting and documenting popular visual arts in South Asia. The focus is on "Gender, Nation and Spaces for the Everyday." Tasveer Ghar is a transnational virtual home for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia's exciting popular visual sphere. Visual materials include posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.

This fellowship is ideally meant for individuals or groups who already have an important collection of popular arts that needs to be archived, digitized, or restored, but may not have the resources or technical know-how. Tasveer is also open to proposals to start a new collection or document/photograph something that is available in a public space and needs urgent attention. Currently this fellowship is offered only to individuals or groups based in India, but exceptional cases may be considered.

The Tasveer Ghar Fellowship 2007 is for a period of 6 months, starting June 2007. The last date for the submission of proposals is April 30, 2007.

More information on applying is available at www.tasveerghar.net or by writing to tasveerghar@gmail.com

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