Haidy Geismar, NYU

Two key figures for, and indeed, founders of, Material World Blog have recently been awarded prestigious prizes for their contributions, through their work on material culture, to the field of anthropology. Both Fred Myers and Danny Miller would be too modest to draw attention to this themselves, and I'm posting this without letting them know in advance! Congratulations!

Fred R. Myers was named winner of the 2008 J. I. Staley Prize for his book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art b (Duke University Press, 2002). Fred Myers was recommended for the prize by a distinguished panel of anthropologists, who reviewed a total of 43 nominated books. The J. I. Staley is awarded annually by the School for Advanced Research to a living author in honor of a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship in anthropology.

In their award citation, the J. I. Staley Review Panel stated, “Through a sustained thirty-year engagement with a single ethnographic community, Fred Myers reveals a critical historical depth to cultural processes. As he follows the trajectory of Pintubi painting from a remote village in the Australian Outback to Sydney, New York, and Paris, we see how these paintings exist as sacred ritual stories and as high-priced commodities on the art market. While sharing his intellectual journey, Myers reveals his command of the subject and his sweeping vision. This lucidly written book speaks to anyone with an interest in Indigenous arts, material culture, and rich ethnography.”

Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic “dot” paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings have become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of acrylic paintings relates to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

The book has been widely acclaimed by reviewers such as Francoise Dussart, who describes it as “a landmark contribution to the subject of Aboriginal art” (Anthropological Forum, July 2004). In a review appearing in the June 2004 issue of the American Anthropologist, Sally Price writes: “Theoretically, the book is state-of-the-field, engaging frequently with prominent analysts of cultural dynamics... bringing art historical/art considerations into play, and giving serious attention to both the politics and the economics of the art scene(s) he describes.” In conclusion, she states, “Painting Culture makes a monumental contribution to understandings of the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of an increasingly globalized art world.”

AND

On Thursday 25th September the Royal Anthropological Institute awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal to Professor Daniel Miller. Previously recipients of this medal have included Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Darryl Forde and Mary Douglas. Danny Miller was also elected to be a Fellow of the British Academy this year.

Congratulations to both Fred and Danny

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Haidy Geismar, NYU

Those of you based in NYC will be very familiar with this artefact, but for those further afield, I wanted to draw your attention to a startling materialisation of labour law, unethical corporate practice, and performative street life.

On any given day, one is likely to confront a large inflatable rat on the streets of NYC, flanked by union representatives campaigning for fair and lawful employment. The rat comes out at construction sites, restaurants, and even at NYU where it became part of the protests surrounding the controversy over the graduate student's right to unionise.

A brief google search ("inflatable rat new york") discovers that Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79 says it introduced the rat to New York about 1997, borrowing the idea from Chicago unions. Since then, other unions have bought inflatable rally rats of varying sizes, and at any time there could be more than half a dozen rats humiliating employers around the city. While unions set their own standards, Local 79's system is probably typical.

A "rat contractor" is an old phrase in construction and can refer to an employer who is not providing proper safety equipment, benefits or wages, said Richard A. Weiss, communications director for Local 79. When the union gets a complaint, if the job site isn't one the union is already monitoring, the union research department checks it with the reports all contractors are required to file with the city. The actual decision to send out one of the gray, red-eyed, snarling rats is usually made by Local 79's market development department, Mr. Weiss said.

The Mason Tenders District Council, which oversees Local 79, owns seven rats, mostly from 12 to 15 feet high but including a monster 30-footer, which is often used for high-rise sites. "We've got a whole family of them," Mr. Weiss said. Other unions can request a visiting rat.

(taken from the site about the NYU strike, http://nerdsforgsoc.blogspot.com/2006/02/beware-rat.html)

The rat is a visceral reminder of the normally invisible labour force that props up the city. It is the inversion of a cartoon character, a sinister materialisation of unethical practice and a humerous reminder of ethical and moral responsibilities around labour. I have never seen such a carnavalesque and everyday form of protest on other city streets outside of the US, outside of the extra-ordinary events of large protests such as the huge anti-war rallies in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

Does anyone know of any other strike material cultures?

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

Graeme Were, University College London

Now we are firmly into the academic recess when summer is upon us, I recently decided to build a large patio in my garden with the help of some friends after being put off by the price a local builder was asking. Hiring a cement mixer, kango and compacter, we set to work demolishing tons of broken concrete, earth, and brick, then lug it by hand through my modest London terraced house where we loaded it all into a skip outside. The plan was to replace the old patio with a lorry load of new paving and cobbles which I ordered from a local builders merchant – a task that could only be completed by hauling it all back through the house and into the garden.

Originally estimated as a three-day job, though ending up as five twelve-hour days of total work, what I had anticipated as an arduous task ended with some pleasant surprises. On day two, after digging down through layers of concrete, sand and dirt, we were amazed to find some Victorian ironmongery, York stone and other architectural salvage. Amongst the rubble, my garden had been hiding an old Victorian fireplace – broken into several pieces though with paint intact – a fireplace poker, the tip rusted away but with a neat decorative design at the handle, and some sizeable chunks of York stone which previous owners had poured concrete onto.

As a form of archaeology of the recent past, this discovery in the garden made me wonder not only of what lay under our urban gardens, paths, and roads, but also made me think of the thriving trade in architectural salvage in the UK. On many street corners in London, traders are selling anything from brass doorknobs, four-panel doors, brass light fittings or red quarry tiles. I have even heard that because of the price fetched by old London stock, people now scavenge the banks of the River Thames at low tide searching for building materials for re-sale or use.

Given my emerging fascination with the material culture underneath my garden, I wonder if any readers knew of any studies in this area or indeed, on architectural salvage? Has anyone read, Moving Rooms: the Trade in Architectural Salvages by John Harris (Yale University Press) – it was recently reviewed in Museum Practice (Summer 2008: 42, 68-9).

Those of you more interested in building patios, a word of warning… now I see why builders charge so much….

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Having passed the 50,000 mark for unique hits - we thought it was time we reached out to you, our readers, and find out who you are...and to expand our own network...

We know from statcounter that we have readers from all over the world, but we're curious to know how many of you are teachers, how many are students, what other fields you hail from and so forth

Please post to the comments below - let us know who you are, where you are, what you do, give us links to your sites, your spaces and your material...maybe some interesting connections will be made!

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Daniel Miller, University College London

Marianne Gullestad, a distinguished Norwegian anthropologist has just passed away on Tuesday 10/03/08. In recent years she was working in Oslo and previous to that mainly in Trondheim. She was also twice a visiting scholar in Chicago. Her books in English, in addition to many in Norwegian were:-

2007 Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication. Word and Image in a North Cameroon Mission. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.
2006 Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Practices and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2006.
1997 With Martine Segalen, (eds.) Family and Kinship in Europe. London: Pinter, 1997. (English edition of a book published in French in 1995.)
1996 Everyday Life Philosophers: Modernity, Morality and Autobiography in Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
1996 Imagined Childhoods: Constructions of Childhood in Autobiographical Accounts (Edited volume). Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
1992 The Art of Social Relations. Essays on Culture, Thought and Social Action in Modern Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scandinavian Library).
1984 Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press / Oxford University Press. (Two reprints.)

She was a vivacious and impressive individual as well as an outstanding scholar. I was privileged to be asked to write the introduction to a re-issue of her book Kitchen Table Society. I was pleased and honoured to be asked since it was one of the publications that most influenced by own work, and is a classic in material culture studies. I have re-printed here some of my earlier comments:-

Kitchen Table Society could be taken as the starting point for the material culture study of the home interior, and yet what I want to emphasise is, paradoxically, the degree to which this was not a study of the home interior per.se. Indeed, what made this such an important work when it first came out was, rather, that it was in many respects a conventional ethnography - though of the type of population that, on the whole, had not been the subject of conventional ethnographies. The topic was working class women in the town of Bergen on the West coast of Norway. What made this special was that there was nothing special about these people. They were not being studied because they were a problem that academics were supposed to shed light on, such as drug-takers or the unemployed. They represented the neglected topic of the merely ordinary. What makes this conventional, I would say classic, as ethnography is the unremarked focus on what might be called the totality of their lives. The book takes its scope from the obvious experiential sense that these women had of their own lives that everything they did came together because it related to them. Their activity as workers in employment, as housewives, as parents or lovers are all integrated in their experience. Ethnography with its commitment to a holistic approach is intended to reflect that sense of totality.

Continue reading "Marienne Gullestad (1946-2008)" »

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Haidy Geismar, NYU

I thought I would write a brief note about the class that I have just finished teaching this semester, which drew on the methods and practices of museum work and material culture studies to extend the intellectual practice of NYU graduate students not just within the university, but outwards within New York City.

Entitled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”,the class drew together Museum Studies students alongside students from the Draper Program (an interdisciplinary MA program at NYU) and was Co-taught between myself and Robin Nagle, Director of the Draper Program and Anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation.

The class worked closely with the DSNY and with NYU Faculty Technology Services and had a number of guest speakers from DSNY artist in residence Mierel Laderman Ukeles talking about work with the department as a contemporary artist and social activist to Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett describing the formation of the new Museum of Polish Jews in Poland. The aim of the class was to develop a series of materials drawn from archival and contemporary research into the history and importance of the DSNY that would provide a blueprint for the formation of a DSNY museum.

In class we looked at the history of the DSNY, the cultural landscape of waste that has underpinned the development of NYC, the ways in which material culture passes through different registers of meaning and value within this context explicitly through the lens of working to establish a prototype for a future DSNY museum. Unlike the other public services of Police, Fire and Transit Authorities in NYC, the DSNY does not have its own museum. Its archive lies in a series of mouldy cardboard boxes, its artifactual history is scattered in the form of personal possessions and a few odd bits and pieces saved around DSNY facilities. Part of this lack of reification is due to the negative values associated with the job – DSNY workers, San Men, are valued by the public in relation to the material that they work with – being called “Garbage men” is also internalised by many of the people on the job who refer to their own work as a rubbish job. The class project therefore drew on the dual nature of collections based research to a). preserve and represent complicated histories and labour practices in material form and b) to use object based research as a strategy to influence the ways in which ideas around these concepts were formed and c) to use the idea of a new museum for the DSNY as a starting point for social activism – to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way. This work should not need to be done, as we depend more on a daily basis upon Sanitation workers than on almost any other public service. However it became glaringly apparent that there was a real need for the DSNY to have some kind of institutional and representational space, and to have a series of valued collections of historical and contemporary material that could contribute to this shift in valuation.

Image from our archive (http://archive.nyu.edu). The archive is currently password protected but will be made open shortly. Here however you can see the digital repository that NYU has been developing.

As a class, over the course of this semester we have created a digital archive, working with the digital repository structure being developed for faculty use at NYU. Students mined archival material culled from the DSNY, scanned it and catalogued it. We developed collaboratively a series of key words and discussed how we should frame this material. Students also interviewed members from across different divisions of the DSNY and uploaded their oral histories to the same archive. They conducted their own ethnographic research into the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city, attending Freegan tours of the city, documenting litter in their neighbourhoods and keeping diaries of mongo – the things left on the street for hungry scavengers to recycle.

The 'Garbage Mark' left on the street even once the garbage has been collected - permanently marking the city. Photograph taken by Casey Lynn as part of an assignment to do a contemporary ethnography of trash in NYC.

The archive was based on DSpace, an open source database programmed in Dublin core, but not specifically designed for museums. Alongside this formal archive, we ran a class weblog which we used as a commentary on our work in class. Collectively we used the blog to devise key word lists that we then incorporated into the archive, we shared media clips, articles, and have created a rich subsidiary repository of popular culture, our own research and writing and discussion. The blog is a less formal digital space that reflects the sociality of the class. For instance, the blog we also developed a looser framework of tagging which the archive did not permit, to open up our more formal list of key words. We used the blog to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects. Between these two digital forums we have created a rich resource of commentary surrounding a newly formed collection that we hope that the DSNY will carry forward and use as a prototype catalogue for its new museum in the future.

In this way, both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be.

Finally we drew back from both blog and archive to create an exhibition which opened on Wednesday 12 December to resounding success. Held at the DSNY's Derelict Vehicles Office (they are the people responsible for all the abandoned cars and wrecks in the city) we scavenged objects to recreate an old-school style locker rooms, we took objects from the basement of the DSNY headquarters and from people's offices, displayed our archive and the archival collections, created a cd from the oral histories we had been discussing and had a soundscape evoking the gathering of trash in the city. We will continue in another exhibition venue at NYU next year.

Installing the 'locker room' using lockers already in the DSNY space

DSNY pipers at the opening

Commissioner Doherty speaking at the opening

The class after everyone left!
the class has used the tools of conventional museum collection, preservation and research to interrogate the framework in which the DSNY has been conventionally understood and to develop a voice for the department which we hope will resonate both internally and throughout the city. It was rewarding for all of us to see the Commissioner of Sanitation respond so emotionally to the opening of the exhibition (he first worked out of the office in which the exhibition was held) and to hear representatives from the pipe and drum band play. It was obvious that this project has achieved a level of recognition for the issues that the Department faces and extended our practice outside of the conventional boundaries of museum and university walls (see press coverage below):

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/A_museum_for_city_sanitation/11066.html

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/garbage-in-museum-out/?ex=1198213200&en=1a34c86fab799fe1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

WE would love to hear from anyone who has used this kind of investigation into materiality as a key tool in teaching...

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Students who came to several of the regular material culture seminars last year at the Department of Anthropology UCL were probably somewhat amazed that there, in the audience, was a slight woman, evidently in her eighties, who listened and questioned, and was still clearly an active participant, despite having become one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists long before they were born. After one of these seminars she came out with the rest of us to have a drink with the speaker. During which she beckoned me over. The conversation started in typical Mary Douglas style:-. `Aren’t you the person who is responsible for all this nonsense about materiality?’ We then had an entirely amicable conversation based on finding an academic whose influence we could both agree to heartily dislike, in this case, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby.

Her presence at these seminars was entirely appropriate because it is hard to imagine that they would have existed but for her influence on the department at which she was Professor for many years (1951-1977) and at which she wrote several of her best known works. In recent years there has almost always been one of the material culture PhD students working as her personal assistant in her continued writing – I believe she completed two further books this year. Its not that she ever associated herself with the term material culture, but rather that several of the many productive strands in her work were essential ingredients to what become the characteristic cuisine of UCL material culture. Even when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge it seemed almost impossible not to devote at least one essay to the application of Purity and Danger to almost any genre of objects that one chose. When you told people you were hoping to become an anthropologist it was the most common point of recognition. `Oh an anthropologist, you mean like Purity and Danger.’ For good reason; this was a book that simply changed the way people saw their world and made sense of every day distinctions that we observed but failed to understand. In my case the most important impact came with The World of Goods. Along with Bourdieu’s Distinction these were the two books that ensured that it was in some ways astonishingly anthropology, the discipline least associated with modern industrial society, that actually invented the modern study of consumption which was the path I took into material culture studies. Furthermore she established the essential grounds for those studies of consumption - the critique of economic assumptions as to why we desire goods and the critique of the consequences of those economic assumptions, for such fundamental issues as to what we mean by poverty.

More generally Mary Douglas became the conduit for the application of structuralist and semiotic studies to material culture. More immediately accessible, both in writing style, and in her choice of illustration than Levi-Strauss, it was her work, that at least in Britain, was the model for countless student essays. Applied to familiar terrain such as working class meals in Britain, comparative studies of drinking, or well known biblical texts, she showed how to see pattern and order in what previously had just appeared to be arbitrary behaviour, and then ground these in a Durkheimian perception of social order and social difference. I won’t pretend that I was equally enthralled by all her work. Some of her closest acolytes favoured her model of grid and group which always left me cold. On the other hand some of her most recent biblical studies such as Leviticus as Literature (1999) are to my mind quite brilliant and yet have been comparative neglected outside of biblical studies. But there is simply so much to her legacy. In my recent work with Heather Horst on the impact of the cell phone on poverty in Jamaica, the central point that we were trying to make had only ever to my knowledge been made clear by one academic - Mary Douglas. It was she who showed that previous studies only saw communication as a means to other ends and therefore failed to acknowledge its importance as a facility in its own right within modern development. In typically combative style she had written `a social being has one prime need – to communicate’. Something of an inspiration given the intentions behind our project.

When you then reflect on the extent of all her other work, on risk, on organisations, on culture more generally, it is a breathtaking landscape of intellectual argument and insightful interventions. Mary Douglas will leave a considerable and lasting legacy throughout the social sciences and humanities, and in her case this goes well beyond any narrow academic impact to have become part of the popular understanding of the world, something very few anthropologists have ever achieved. But I think that for material culture studies at UCL there was a more particular and more personal debt. It was her association with the department that prepared the local ground, the soil from within which what became our collective approach to material culture could take root and flourish.

Daniel Miller, UCL

Major Works

The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(1966)
Pollution (1968)
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
Implicit Meanings (1975) essays
Evans-Pritchard (1980)
The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood
Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky
In the Active Voice (1982)
How Institutions Think (1987)
Missing persons: a critique of the social sciences (1988) with
Steven Ney
Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996)
Leviticus as Literature (1999)
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of
Numbers (2001)
Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004)
Thinking in Circles (2007)

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July 29th 1929 to March 6th 2007

Academic creates genuine breakthrough in thinking about key issues with carefully composed original thesis. Comes to be better known. Responds to the hype by writing pretentious, largely ungrounded but clever sounding prose about more or less everything. After a while best known through journalism about this latter work, while original contribution is largely forgotten.

Jean Baudrillard would hardly be the only academic to pass through such a trajectory, but he was, to my mind, one of the clearest exemplars of it. Most of the obituaries currently being written, concentrate on his writings about the simulacrum. Frankly I have always considered this to be pretty worthless. But it was certainly his most influential contribution. The effects were dire. Amongst the worst were a certain phase of excruciatingly awful cultural studies writing based in Australia amongst other places. I also suspect that some of the worst hype about virtual reality was written in the hope that the internet would finally live up to some of the hype that Baudrillard had generated about the world in general. Interestingly, from the perspective of an obituary, some of the most informed discussion were in books with titles such as `Forget Baudrillard’.

What all this misses is the reason Jean Baudrillard come to academic attention in the first place. Initially he wrote a couple of books such as The Mirror of Production which were quite early attempts to theorise consumption, largely within a structuralist and semiotic vein. I saw his highpoint as represented by the book with a mouthful of a title `For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.’ Written in 1972 (translated in 1981) this was an extremely impressive re-working of some basic ideas of Marx in order to demonstrate that radical thinking had to take seriously issues of consumption that were neglected in the Marxist emphasis upon production. It gave the theoretical underpinning to attempts to analyse that which had been dismissed as superstructure or superficial under the auspices of what he called sign value. He also argued the importance of this for developing a serious study of areas such as the art world and media. All of this makes him quite properly seen as one of the key ancestors of what later developed as cultural studies. Mind you it certainly helps if, as I do, you retain a soft spot for Marx’s own writing and theorising.

The problem was that having argued cogently for why these areas should be taken seriously and not seen as merely superficial, his own writing became itself increasingly superficial and slight. The result was merely to return the objects of his enquiry back into the appearance of superficiality and the superficiality of appearance. This was why I think ultimately he became much more of a negative than a positive influence upon academic genres such as cultural studies. But it would be a pity if all this later more problematic work means that his original important contributions were to now become entirely forgotten. So my epitaph would be `Forget the later Baudrillard, but resurrect the early work’.

Daniel Miller Anthropology UCL

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Intel Corporation's Domestic Designs and Technologies Research Group is calling for interns! As part of Domestic Designs and Technologies Research, the ethnographic and design research team within the Digital Home Group, you will work within a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, design researchers and documentary film makers to explore and research 'love and spirituality' and its intersection with computers and technology, in and around the home.

DDTR is a driving force within the Digital Home Group: our charter is to develop a clear & actionable understanding of daily life all over the world, identify opportunities for our platforms to enable experiences that consumers value, merge original insights with technology, market, platform and planning intelligence to define usage models & platform requirements, and seed future research & platform opportunities. DHG's vision is to make Intel the trusted foundation of your digital home. To
that end, the Digital Home Group develops computing and communications oriented platforms that anticipate and satisfy the needs of consumers world-wide.

We will be offering 3 month paid internships starting in April '07 and July '07 for graduate students in anthropology, design research or related social sciences. Interns must re-locate to the Portland, Oregon area to work closely with the research team during the entire length of the internship, and be eligible to work in the US.

We are looking for individuals with experience in designing and conducting both qualitative and/or quantitative user or design research studies, including analysis of the resulting data. Candidates should prepare a concise yet thorough 3-5 page proposal to explore some aspect of love and spirituality and its intersection with computers and technology in and around the home; inclusion of how the proposed research fits with the candidate's own research interests (broadly defined) is a plus. Exact responsibilities of the position will be defined with the successful applicant based on the submitted proposal.

Please submit your proposal (3-5 pages, including bibliographic references) describing the research you'd like to do in this area over the course of your internship to francoise.bourdonnec@intel.com. Applications (CV + proposal) must be received by January 31st and April 30th, respectively for the April and July start dates.

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It is with great sadness that we have to announce the death of Judy Attfield, one of the pioneers of contemporary material culture studies who did so much to demonstrate the value of this approach. Judy started her academic career within a discipline called design history that was largely devoted to hagiographic accounts of great designers and the history of great designs, both of which almost entirely ignored the wider context of understanding the form and style of the world of goods most people lived with. Thanks to her textbook Wild Things and a series of exemplary studies she transformed Design History into a study of the intimate relationship between populations and the common form and design of mundane material culture. She thereby switched the discipline from a complete disrespect for people other than named designers, into one that starts from an empathetic respect for ordinary lives. More than anyone else she can therefore be credited with the invention of a new contemporary design history that can command a respected position within social science and the humanities, instead of being relegated to the poor sibling of art history.

I first came to know Judy as the external supervisor of her PhD on a history of British furniture, including the Utility furniture that had dominated the period of the last war. There were many revelations in her work, of which the one I best recall is how through patient scholarship she revealed the autonomy of different parts of the furniture commodity chain. Shops selling hand made furniture might market them as exemplary modern industrial forms, while shops selling industrially made furniture might sell them as olde-worlde hand crafts, depending entirely upon what they thought would appeal to the market. Judy’s courage lay in the very topics she then chose. Other design historians would hope for vicarious respect by tackling famous design images, but Judy devoted her time to key papers on topics such as the tufted carpet, or the empty cocktail cabinet. What her work demonstrated was the possibility of a subtle and different history of well enshrined topics such as gender (she wrote several papers on feminist approaches to design history), class and family, through this grounded sensibility to everyday objects and the ironies and paradox of popular taste and desire. These studies culminated in the book Wild Things, surely the single best introduction and exemplification of this new genre of design history studies, and a major advance in material culture studies more generally. This is a classic `must-read’ book.

It is entirely appropriate that her death followed the publication a week earlier of her edited volume of Home Cultures on the topic of kitsch. The fact that unlike any other work on this topic this starts from a respect for otherwise denigrated materials, not from some postmodern or ironic or clever conceit but from a modest humanism, a desire not to judge or patronise but simply pay attention to and create an understanding of all our material culture however it is otherwise labelled and dismissed. This politics of respect is something that was a leitmotif of all her work and is her legacy for the future.

-- Daniel Miller

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Attfield, J 1994 The tufted carpet in Britain: its rise from the bottom of the pile 1952-1970 Journal of Design History 7: 3


• Attfield, J and Kirkham, P Eds 1995 A View from the Interior, The Womens Press (including her Inside Pram Town: a case study of Harlow House Interiors 1951-1961)


• Attifeld, J 1997 Design as a practice of modernity. Journal of Material Culture 3: 2


• Attfield, J Ed. 1999 Utility Reassessed. Manchester University Press


• Attfield J, 1999, "Bringing modernity home: open-plan in the British domestic interior'', in At Home: An Anthology of Domestic Space Ed. I Cieraad


• Attfield J 2000 Wild Things. Berg


• Attfield, J Ed. 2006 Kitsch. Home Cultures 3: 3

»More work by Judy Attfield

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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

Victor Buchli, Dept of Anthropology, UCL

It is with great sadness to have to report that Bruce Trigger died at the beginning of this month.

Bruce Graham Trigger (born June 18, 1937 died December 1, 2006) was a Canadian archaeologist. Born in Preston, Ontario, he received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. His research interests include the history of archaeological research and the comparative study of early cultures. He taught at Northwestern University for a year in 1964 and since then has been in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montréal. For his in-depth study of the ethnohistory of the Hurons, he has been adopted as an honorary member of the Huron-Wendat Nation. His book A History of Archaeological Thought is a must for anyone who wishes to understand the development of archaeology as a discipline. In 2003 a session at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference was dedicated to the research of Bruce Trigger.

In 2001, he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2005, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he won their Innis-Gérin Medal in 1985. In 1991, he won the Quebec government's Prix Léon-Gérin.

Bibliography

* A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
* Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context. New York:
Columbia, 1993.
* The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas
[vol. I]. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
* Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
* Artifacts and Ideas: Essays in Archaeology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003.
* Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

References
* Ronald F. Williamson and Michael S. Bisson (eds) 2006. The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism.
McGill-Queens's University Press, Montréal.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the editors

Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

A Congress of different cultures: the General Assembly of the United Nations (in lieu of a conference photograph from the AAA)

Last week I attended the annual meetings of the AAA held at San Jose. I went along with a group of students, staff and ex-students from University College London to present a panel concerned with studies inside and outside the home. As usual we are fairly up-front in presenting ourselves under the auspices of 'material culture studies'. But while this term seems to have established itself as fully as one could wish outside of the US, in the anthropology of places as diverse as Australia through to Brazil, US anthropology continues to exhibit some reticence with respect both to the terminology and its associated conceptualisations. An example was a panel for which I was discussant, held on the topic of Caribbean Movements: linking people, objects and places. Every paper within this panel was of interest. Topics ranged from Flemming Daugaard-Hansen on the difference in fate between the house and its internal possessions for migrants returned to Belize from the US, to the contrast between Dominican and Haitiain paintings sold in Santo Domingo by Erin Taylor, though to the importance of shopping and sending back goods for Jamaican’s on temporary labour schemes in the US by Deborah Thomas. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that the papers would be less constrained if they were given license to explore the ways relationships are constituted by these contrasts in materiality, rather than remains common in the US the need to ground such papers back into arguments over identity politics and representation.

I felt the same about the next panel I visited on the topic of Virtual Worlds. Again Tom Boellstorff started promisingly with the motif of the virtual as the not fully realised, rather than merely the simulation of the off-line. There were some excellent papers such as Mizuko Ito and Heather Horst on how a site such as Neopets can become almost a precursor to share trading in that which is created as value within the site. Still, in some of these papers, including Boellstorff, I felt there is a retreat back to the fascination with simulation of the off-line, in his case arguments over real-estate, rather than keeping hold of the way other possibilities are constituted precisely by the different materiality of virtual worlds. I felt this is in part a constraint that comes with a the reluctance to see off-line worlds as equally consisted by specific materialities, in which case virtual worlds would start to emerge as perhaps less special, but perhaps more different. I would never wish to advocate any special status for material culture, or that it either is or should be a discipline or sub-discipline. It is more that the AAA affirmed a sense of what motivated many of us, quite some time ago, to take a particular interest in this area. More a feeling of something lost by the suppression of potential insight.

But I am curious to know if these are views shared by anthropologists in the US. Is there still the same pressure to justify ethnographic papers in terms of identity politics and is there still a reticence to advance one’s work under the explicit title of material culture within mainstream cultural anthropology?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Conferences and other events | From the editors | Topics for Discussion

Haidy Geismar, NYU

Map showing the location of the last 100 viewers of Materialworldblog, source www.statcounter.com

Alongside this site, there are several recent additions to the Museum/Anthropology blogosphere which are definitely worth checking out (any other good links, please add to the comments below!).

http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com

The bi-annual journal, Museum Anthropology, now has it's own blog, which will be used increasingly to supplement materials published in the journal. The blog offers a forum in which articles published in the journal can be discussed formally as a form of post-publication peer-review. It will also dynamically post notifications of current exhibitions, symposium, book releases and other relevant material. Scholars interested in the fields of museum studies and material culture studies are urged to submit announcements and other materials of interest to the community. These can be forwarded to the journal editorial office at: museanth@indiana.edu.

http://goldwaterlibrary.org

This is the blog of the Robert Goldwater Library in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's an excellent resource, linking exhibition reviews, media coverage of key issues, to current scholarship with sound bites and good images and a lively commentary on key issues such as intellectual and cultural property, issues of representation and so on.

Some other blogs of note that may be of specific interest to readers here

From the professionals:

http://www.savageminds.org

A blog dedicated to serious discussion of anthropological topics and developments within the discipline.

http://www.philbu.net/media-anthropology/
Not strictly a blog, but an online scholarly community committed to media anthropology, as is the online journal flow:

http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/about.php

A critical forum on television and media culture published biweekly by the department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

http://www.boas.wordpress.com
This is an engaging blog from a Columbia University student which discusses diverse topics framed around the process of studying anthropology at undergraduate level.

And
http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/
Eyebeam: a site dedicated to the more techical side of art and materiality within the digital domain.

And there are increasingly a good number of museum-oriented blogs:

Many of these are linked through
http://www.museumblogging.com/

And
http://museum-madness.blogspot.com/

And the Attic is a good resource from the Department of Museum Studies at Leicester University
http://attic-museumstudies.blogspot.com/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to From the editors | Good Links

Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

My impression is that students coming into anthropology today, at least in Britain, are not necessarily expecting to read very much of the writings of Clifford Geertz, compared to my time as a student. But his death on Monday should remind us of just how much a loss that is. I have spent my academic life enamoured of fieldwork and ethnography and I suspect the single biggest influence on this was the sheer pleasure of reading Geertz. As far as I know he never would have described himself as particularly associated with material culture per se, (please comment if you know otherwise) but he was the quintessential cultural anthropologist, and his work shows how much that American tradition of cultural anthropology, (to some degree as opposed to European social anthropology) provided in its heyday an almost seamless acceptance of the materiality of peoples lives and the need to give due credit to the form of cultural order and life.

So many of his works could serve as examples of this. Agricultural Involution (1963) provided a wonderful example of how the propensities of rice itself and the agricultural systems associated with it could be the critical determinant of populations and ways of life, and this was long before the idea of an agency of things became popular with the work of Gell and Latour. Both Peddlers and Princes (1963) and his work on the Moroccan market were invaluable studies of trade and exchange. His classic paper Art as a Cultural System in combination with other essays in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) was one of a series of essays that complement Bourdieu as a basic introduction to the significance of cultural order as embedded and expressed through the order of the material world. Perhaps above all though his book Negara (1980) provides one of the most radical attempts to construct an anthropology based around the potential of aesthetic systems to become the foundational cosmologies of states and peoples. These were my influences and I would be interested to hear from others who may have taken inspiration from different aspects of his work, for example the task of interpretation. I would think for such a consummate scholar the most proper way to pay homage at this point is to read some of his classic works that one might have missed over the years and remind ourselves of the possibility of an anthropological style that was as elegant as it was profound.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the editors

Welcome to Material World, an interactive, online hub for contemporary debates, discussion, thinking and research centred on material and visual culture. It is the brainchild of scholars working in the anthropology departments of University College London and New York University, but aims to create a new international community of academics, students, curators, artists and anyone else with particular interests in material and visual culture.

We will use this digital framework to post exhibition, book and other reviews; discuss key topics; develop online reading groups and symposia; post links to images, objects and collections; highlight cutting edge research and fieldwork, conferences, meetings and other events; develop teaching resources and syllabi; and encourage student participation.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Posted to From the editors