Joanna Alario, NYU Museum Studies

In the Connecticut River Valley, the thirteen-thousand-strong Pequot tribe lived in villages, practicing agriculture and trading products with neighboring groups. Similar to so many other Native people across the nation, the arrival of the English and their foreign diseases decimated the Pequot, reducing their population by close to eighty percent. Following growing hostilities between the Pequot and Colonial authorities, the Pequot Wars of 1636-1638 further diminished the tribe. Surviving Pequot, numbering between two thousand and twenty-five hundred, were either captured and sold into slavery or absorbed into neighboring tribes with whom they had ancestral ties (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:42; Quin 1999:54; Lawlor 2006:35). In 1638 the Pequots became the first “terminated” tribe with the Treaty of Hartford. The Treaty declared that “the Pequots shall no more be called Pequots, but Narragansetts and Mohegans” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:43). In the years that followed, the Pequots reclaimed their name and petitioned for expanded lands for their reservation. However, their reservation lands continued to be sold off by the state and, by 1972, 204 acres remained, with only two women—Elizabeth George Plouffe and Martha Langevin Ellal—left living on the land (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:43-44).

Skip Hayward, the grandson of Plouffe, was inspired by his grandmother’s commitment and encouraged tribal members to move back to the reservation “to reclaim illegally seized land, gain federal recognition, achieve economic self-sufficiency, and revitalize tribal culture” (Quin 1999:54). The Mashantucket Pequot Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1983 granted the tribe with federal recognition and $900,000 to purchase back their tribal lands. Ten years after the ruling, the tribe expanded into gaming as a means to support the future of their reservation. The Foxwoods Resort and Casino provides funds for the reservation’s infrastructure and has made the Pequot the wealthiest tribe in the nation (Lawlor 2006:31; 35-36).

To gain tribal membership one must provide documentation that lineally links them to a person appearing on the 1900 or 1910 tribal roll calls. After so many decades away from the reservation, the Pequot today represent a highly diverse ethnic background (Lawlor 2006:34). Because of this racial component and the fact that history considers them to be long extinct, the “Indianness” of the Pequot has been called into question over and over. For example, Atlantic City casino developer Donald Trump, who faced direct competition from Foxwoods, stated to a Connecticut legislative subcommittee: “Go up to Connecticut, and you look at the Mashantucket Pequots…They don’t look like Indians to me. They don’t look like Indians to Indians” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:46). The Pequots faced a continued need for legitimizing their presence even after gaining federal recognition and chose to open a tribal museum. Tribal museums throughout North America are “sites for establishing Native American humanity, historical presence, and contemporaneity for post-colonial audiences” (Erikson 1999:46). In 1998, the Manshantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center opened and serves as a vehicle for authenticating the Pequot people both past and present.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889751391/

CONTEXT OF TRIBAL MUSEUMS
Before I delve into the specifics of the MPMRC, it is helpful to know the definitions and history of tribal museums. Lisa J. Watt, a member of the Seneca tribe, is the founder and principal of Tribal Museum Planners and Consultants, an organization in place “to inform tribes about the challenges and opportunities that building a museum entail and present program ideas that help meet [their] cultural goals” (“Lisa”). She defines a tribal museum as a “museum, cultural center, heritage center, history center, or interpretive center that is owned and operated by any one or more of the federally recognized or unrecognized American Indian tribes, either on or off reservations” (2007: 71). They exist to perpetuate tribal culture and traditions, to hold onto the material culture, to construct and instill a tribal identity, to maintain a presence in the world, to define tribal territory, to exert tribal sovereignty, and to reinforce treaty rights. They serve as a public declaration, saying “we are important and worth culturally maintaining” (Watt 2007: 73). Tribal museums help reclaim and preserve their cultural heritage, often by building upon earlier traditions concerned with protection and transmission of knowledge, and expand to include overall community development (Kreps 2003: 114). Anglo-American understandings of ownership and rights of access do not always translate in the realm of tribal museums (Isaac 2007: 5-7; Kreps 2003: 114). In his observation of four Northwest Coast museums, Clifford notes that, in contrast to majority museums, “tribal museums express local culture, oppositional politics, kinship, ethnicity, and tradition” (1991: 225). He lays out the agenda of a tribal museum as follows:

(1) its stance is to some degree oppositional, with exhibits reflecting excluded experiences, colonial pasts, and current struggles; (2) the art/culture distinction is often irrelevant or positively subverted; (3) the notion of a unified or linear History (whether of the nation, of humanity, or of art) is challenged by local, community histories; and (4) the collections do not aspire to be included in the patrimony (of the nation, of great art, etc.) but to be inscribed with different traditions and practices, free of national, cosmopolitan patrimonies (Clifford 1991: 225-226).

Carla Roberts, director of a Phoenix-based Native American Arts organization writes “there have always been mechanisms in native communities for transmitting cultural values from one generation to another” (Kreps 2003: 107). The curator of New World Ethnology at the Burke Museum in Seattle James Nason supports this statement with his description of the Southwestern kivas, which were used “[to house] collections whose use was vital to the members of the pueblo and their sense of place in the world” (1999). The widely practiced method of passing on cultural knowledge through oral traditions and ritual practices has been inhibited in recent years because of an increasing generational gap in Native American communities (Isaac 2007: 9-10).

The Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, established in 1938, is considered to be the oldest tribal museum in the United States (Watt 2007: 70). The first wave of tribal museums coincided with the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, during which time tribes began to question the museum’s authority and Native American representations. Under President Nixon in the 1970s, tribal museums were also seen as a source of job opportunities and a chance to diversify tribal economics. The next wave of tribal museums occurred in the 1990s when tribes with resources, knowledge, and desire established museums (Isaac 2007; Nason 1999; Watt 2007: 70-71). Gwyneira Isaac, an assistant professor and the director of Arizona State University’s Museum of Anthropology, cites Fuller and Fabricius’ argument that links the growth of tribal museums to a loss of tribal knowledge and a rise in self-determination, causing “the need for a new forum to transmit cultural knowledge [to meld] with the needs for autonomy and self-sufficiency” (2007: 10). Nason feels that tribal museums “complete a circle that began with alien institutions imperialistically collecting and interpreting Native American culture and ended with a resurgence of tribal communities” (1999).

THE MASHANTUCKET MUSEUM AND RESOURCE CENTER
The MPMRC is a 308,000-square-foot facility opened on August 11, 1998 and was founded to “serve as a major resource on the history of the Tribe, the histories and cultures of other tribes, and the region’s natural history” (Quin 1999: 54). Funding for the facilities came from the lucrative gaming industry at Foxwoods, which also helped fund education and healthcare on the reservation. Costing close to two hundred million dollars, more money went into the Pequot tribal museum than the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Erikson 1999:49). Exhibits cover Pequot life in southeastern Connecticut from the last Ice Age to the present, featuring displays like “a glacial crevasse, a caribou hunt of 11,000 years ago, a sixteenth century Pequot village, an eighteenth century farmstead, and a twentieth century trailer home” (Erikson 1999:46). It features a high level of transparency by featuring curators’ and researchers’ voices throughout the exhibits, as well as including information about how the exhibits were constructed (Lawlor 2006:46).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889752101/

Anthropologists have long acknowledged the draw of life group dioramas, however, the MPMRC has taken this technique to new heights (Hinsley 1991: 347-348). The largest display in the MPMRC is the 22,000-square-foot immersion style diorama of a 16th century coastal Pequot village. There is also a palisade fort next to the village, set fifty years after the village scene, included to represent the impact of European presence in the area. Patricia Pierce Erikson, currently a visiting professor at the University of Southern Maine, described the Pequot Village as follows:

Bombarding visitors’ senses are the smells of the forest and campfires, the sounds of chipmunks and running water. The human dimension of the diorama depicts daily life and provides a basis for interpreting coastal subsistence activities and Contact-period social structure (1999:50-51).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889752079/

Visitors use audio-guides as they walk through the display. It offers both “unattributed” Pequot perspectives, as well as anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ interpretations of the diorama (Erikson 1999:51).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889751271/

An important element of the Pequot Village display is the use of sound. Douglas Quin was one of the researchers who developed the soundscape. In addition to recreating what the environment sounded like in the 17th century, researchers had to figure out a way to represent the Pequot language as there are no native living speakers. After looking at other Algonquin languages, tribal members from Maine were brought in to record exhibition scripts in the Passamaquoddy language (Quin 1999:64). Other portions of the exhibit that utilized secondary voices—areas such as the sweat lodge ceremony and the hide tanning display—utilized recordings of voices of Native peoples from all over North America, including Navajo and Osage, to create “a collective resonance and identity” (Quin 1999:65).

In addition to the Pequot Village, the MPMRC has exhibits that speak to the continued presence of the people and culture. The Life on the Reservation gallery establishes Pequot presence in the Post-Pequot War time period, effectively dismissing accepted notions that the tribe was extinct. The stories featured in this exhibit include those of Pequot children working as indentured servants in colonial households, as well as those tribal members who learned the English legal system in an attempt to hold onto their traditional territory. This gallery is where the trailer home sits to represent the hardships faced by those who lived on the reservation in the 1970s. Also present in the Life on the Reservation gallery is the story of the casino and how it impacted the Pequot’s land claims and their contemporary lives (Erikson 1999:47-48).

Native Americans have been the subjects of portrait projects since the nineteenth century during the age of salvage anthropology (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:179). The MPMRC appropriates this method not to capture the evidence of a dying people, but to show the cultural survival of the Pequot tribe:

The portraits reinvigorate the historic progression of life on the reservation by introducing the contemporary to the visitor experience. As the oral histories provide a shared remembered history, the portraits give that history an individual face. While they indicate each other as a group and destabilize essential notions of “Indianness,” the portraits provide a progression of possible singular connections for the visitor, mixing elements of person al, historic, and cultural markers, and offering multiple routs for recognition (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:208).

The Tribal Portrait Gallery is an exhibit that “encourages visitors to humanize popular notions of Native peoples generally, and Pequot people in particular” (Erikson 1999:46). It is comprised of black-and-white portraits of tribal members and has accompanying recorded interviews from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project (Bodinger de Uriart 2007:163). John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, who worked for and studied the MPMRC and the Foxwoods Casino, feels that the Tribal Portrait Gallery, like the overall museum space, becomes a charged contact zone (2007:208).

THE POWER OF A TRIBAL MUSEUM
Tribal spokesperson, Lori Potter, made a statement to the Tribal Tribute that effectively sums up the MPMRC’s purpose and power to bring legitimacy to the Pequot: “When I was a little girl and I looked up our tribe in an encyclopedia, it said we were a warlike tribe that was extinct. That was a lie, and I never forgot it. Now, our tribe is strong and united again, and this museum will make it possible for the world to know the truth” (Erikson 1999:46). In addition to the impact of the physical institution, the MPMRC is also making a presence on the internet. Its website has information about the tribe history, the exhibitions, as well as educational resources and information about programming. They have also broken into the realm of social networking sites, like Facebook, which serves as another outlet to make connections with people and maintain their contemporary presence (“Mashantucket”).

A criticism of the MPMRC concerns the “Disney-fication” of the displays that supposedly distracts from the authenticity of the information (Lawlor 2006:49). The style of display toes the same line of “infotainment” that other majority museums face. Curators have had issues with the level of entertainment present in the museum since Franz Boas’ time at the American Museum of Natural History. It persists in this case as well, yet the immersive life group experience at the MPMRC appears to be awe-inspiring and engaging. Coupled with their institution’s transparency, the technology remains grounded by the cultural information.

Another criticism is that the Pequot Village exhibition falls into the museum trap of displaying Native American cultures only in the light of the pre-Contact past and that the sheer size of the exhibit (22,000-square-feet) physically overshadows the displays about current Pequot life, thus diminishing their importance (Erikson 1999:52). Size, however, is not always a fair indication of social importance. People are proud of their heritage and possibly feel an ache of nostalgia for a life they never had the chance to know first hand, so they put that past on full display. Some museums only present Native peoples in the past and include nothing of their contemporary life. The MPMRC, however, makes the effort to include present-day elements of their culture to show the ties to the past (the recognizable “authentic Indian”) and how through all the changes time has brought, they are still a living, breathing, distinctive people with a legitimate claim to their culture.

Continue reading "Legitimizing a People: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Miriam Basilio, Art History and Museum Studies, NYU

I recently visited San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chipas, Mexico to take part in an academic workshop, and, although I had read and heard about the traffic in Zapatista souvenirs, knick-knacks, or tchotchkes there, was overwhelmed by their variety and number. The complex political motives that led to the Zapatista movement are not my subject here rather I am interested in the ways in which popular representations of this movement for self-determination circulate as objects for tourist consumption. What is our role as consumers? What does it mean to buy these objects? Just prior to my visit, the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler column published a piece promoting San Cristobal de las Casas as an ideal travel destination. Of course, this feeds this place into a cycle whereby those of us with relative wealth travel seeking this particular bargain, which then makes the place less inexpensive, more crowded, and less seemingly remote, and the new cheap and undiscovered place is…elsewhere.

One particular feature of this city, which the reporter underscored, is its proximity to a network of autonomous communities governed by the Zapatista movement. (For the account of a visit to one such community see: http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/in-the-village-of-the-zapatistas/) That even a few years ago, the US State Department warned US citizens against going there lends the region a seductive hint of danger for some travelers. Other Americans, sympathetic to the Zapatista cause, travel there to see for themselves the revolutionary changes being made on behalf of the Mexican people. But most of us are not experts on the political situation there, and our role is more ambiguous. Are we seeking the thrill of the supposedly off the beaten track? Romanticizing revolution? Empathetically yet somewhat voyeuristically witnessing others’ struggles, only to safely return to our lives of privilege? How do we negotiate these at times intersecting positions?

As Americans in particular, and at a time when we are being urged to consume as our patriotic duty, we shop. Is it out of a desire to support the revolution in Chiapas, to help locals in one of the poorest areas in Mexico to make a living, regardless of where the proceeds end up, or, buying souvenirs motivated by the basic tourist drive to return home and say “Look, I was there.” Despite the New York Times reporter’s breathless account of his trip to view a Zapatista community (easily accessible and cheap public transport) and his detailed description of the group’s self-presentation and scripted tour of their community, I was shocked by the “Zapatista tourism” infrastructure that existed in San Cristobal. Large bus tours were advertised, and private taxis may be hired as well.

Seemingly hard to access, yet openly advertised, the prospect of visiting such communities was thus paradoxically tantalizingly possible, and mysteriously remote. Goods produced to publicly assert sympathy for the Zapatistas, however, were openly sold everywhere. Ubiquitous at the local market beside Santo Domingo church were T-shirts in myriad designs: black star logos, the EZLN initials, women with bandanas tied across their faces, hair worn in braids, with slogans calling for women’s dignity, others featured male freedom fighters, faces covered in ski masks. Male and female dolls made of yarn wore indigenous garb from the region, with the ski masks, and carried tiny cardboard rifles. Handmade revolutionary Barbies and Kens, they also are sold as Lilliputian key chains. Cotton handkerchiefs had slogans praising Subcomandante Marcos and his portrait all hand embroidered. Small change purses and pouches were similarly embellished. I purchased a tote bag large enough to carry my MacBook, featuring a female freedom fighter and the slogan: Las mujeres con la dignidad rebelde (Women with rebel dignity) for myself.

There were a few stores in town that advertised themselves as cooperatives that sold the goods for the benefit of Zapatista communities, so I tried to buy most of my gifts there. However, I also felt torn and bought a few things from local women at the market. The coop stores had the greatest variety of products, posters, postcards with photos of Zapatista communities, often featuring the beautiful murals painted on many of their walls and buildings, and locally produced textiles or coffee. I regret not asking the people selling these things at both places where they were made, did they also keep them in their homes, who else was buying them, what did they think about them, when did they start to sell these objects, and more. But someone should.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Abby Loebenberg, DPhil Candidate, ISCA, Univ. of Oxford

I am currently in the fieldwork phase of my DPhil thesis examining the popularity and effect of children’s television and associated material culture on children aged 1-11 from multi-ethnic backgrounds in Westernized contexts, by original ethnographic research in Vancouver, Canada. Particularly, I am investigating moments of transition, material hybridity and liminality in children’s animation as symbiotic with public nervousness about issues of moral danger. I argue that this in turn presents the seed of appeal of these products with the informant children, themselves perceived by society as transitory, hybrid and liminal, as often children of migrants, but especially those with experience of the foster system.

This derives from my MPhil thesis work on children’s television and toys from Japan and its relation to transformational pretend play. The fieldwork further connects ideas of moral danger to notions of safety and adult concern for children by examining children’s use and understandings of ‘traditional’ space categories, public, semi-public and private, particularly in the light of theoretical claims by postmodern spatial theorists (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) of the ‘blurring’ of boundaries by shopping malls, gated developments and particularly the internet (Castells 1989, 2000). In this light, the thesis will make a contribution to the development of an ‘anthropology of childhood’ particularly dealing with the idea of a distinct child culture, as separate from, but containing elements and inversions of the adult world. The results will help in creating an understanding of the development of complexity in older children’s culture by considering the diversities in play from toddler to age 11 and charting the clear contributions of global television cultures to contemporary children’s public and private worlds.

By considering both Alison James’ thesis (1979) that children’s play is not mimetic of the adult world but instead contains and inverts elements of it, as well as Cullingford (1992) and Erikson’s (1963) work on play as a parallel to ritual but constructed without consequence, one would expect that a spatial reading of play in the city to be a reflection of these qualities. Certainly, Sutton-Smith’s (1976) argument that modern toys exert a solitarizing influence on children’s play points to a construction of childhood in line with Sennet’s (1977) reading of the public realm, as well as that of architectural and public space theorists (Such as Jane Jacobs, 1961 and Mike Davis, 1992). Considering particularly spatial arguments for ‘safety’ such as Marcuse (1997), perhaps the most interesting question regarding the anthropology of a spatial version of children’s play would be to ask whether children’s play becomes more anthropologically ‘dangerous’ as it becomes more private.

This construction is semantically different from that of the home as ‘private’ and ‘safe’ and the street as ‘public’ and ‘dangerous’. However, particularly through the reading of toys and play, anthropological dangers and taboos (Douglas, 1966) such as themes of pollution, liminality and gender/identity changes are more likely to be more present as the child moves from the public realm of games and sports through the semi-public realm of consumption and group play such as schools, after-care centres, and shopping to the private and super-private realm of the home and child’s bedroom, or other private area within the bedroom, such as in one of my informant’s cases, the area underneath her (raised) bed.

The challenges to this research primary derive from the notion that the anthropology of children, and moreover children’s television and toys are considered somewhat ‘anti-intellectual’. This derives from a typical view encountered around the idea of an anthropology of childhood, namely that children’s culture is mimetic, insignificant and that all children are, are processes, on their way to adults.

Historically, this sort of notion of children as ‘becoming’ attributes to Freud and psychology in general, that with predominantly laboratory-based methodologies, ethnography fundamentally challenges. Furthermore, it is key to separate judgement on this type of research from one’s own ‘adult’ notions of what ‘culture’ is valid and what invalid, in that it is naturally because child culture contains elements of adult culture that we attribute higher significance to our own condition. Thus, it has been important to theoretically separate this research from ideas of homo ludens (Huizinga:1938), adult recreation and game playing and notions of carnival. This is of particular significance when one notes that the great majority of anthropological research on children, both historically and presently is performed as part of a larger ethnographic study, or otherwise with some other aim in mind, using adults as informants. This means that whilst a large quantity of anthropology deals with children, little considers children’s culture as a distinct entity.

A further point to be considered is the history of the idea of ‘childhood’ in general, namely that as a concept it is bound together with modern society. This is in contrast to the medieval period where children had no separate status, but were integrated into daily work and life routines (Aries:1962). The idea of children as reflective of some “originary state of Eden” (Kline 1993:51), connects them to romantic, Rousseaun ideals of the natural – indeed the term ‘kinder-garten’ (lit. children’s garden) derives from this source. Margaret Mead, (1932) was one of the first notable anthropologists whose work led her to direct research on and with children. Mead was concerned with discovering whether animism was present in play universally, or was the product of a specific cultural environment. The ethnographic results of her work with children began to support a distinction between children’s stories, play and peer structures from those of the adult world. Later work such as that of Allison James (1979) begins to support a theory of distinction between adult and children’s culture, but similarly an interdependence. This is primarily manifest through an inversion of elements of the adult order, but also by the connection between play and ritual.

The key distinction between these two concepts here is that, due to a level of inversion and irreverence, play seems to lack an intrinsic efficacy and “carries a negative weight...treated as unimportant, trivial or unworthy of adult attention” (Mead 1975:160). This is partly why, as part of academic tradition, play is seen as anti-intellectual, but similarly it draws attention to the paradox that children, who are considered to be the ‘players’ of society, are awarded less freedom than adults in terms of the content of their play.

A second important theoretical area in terms of children’s play is the notion of ‘pretendership’, which relates to the ability to transform an object or situation into a signifier of some other phenomenon, but also particularly in the case of television toys it draws attention to the difficult and nervous relationship between adult and children’s society. That this is due to a fundamental, sacred seriousness that is embodied in playing itself where in fact children’s behaviour is only likely to be interpreted as mimetic by adults in that adults perceive their own behaviour and culture as valid as children’s as invalid. Thus, it is the attribution of significance to mimetic play over fantasy and narrative play that creates a sense of nervousness about television and television toys that are somehow perceived as non-educational or violent - rather than the reality that any toy is educational, depending on what the child needs to learn.

Ultimately the toys a child likes will be those that expand the emotional life of the child. It is more a question of adult society than child society, why some children are restricted access to toys that make them happiest. It is particularly repetitive narrative play, based on television series, that adults so despise as ‘un-educational’ or violent. Yet, the types of toys that are involved in this type of play, such as action figures, not only allow the child to accommodate the fearfulness of the world around them in a safe environment of their own making, they introduce a new type of playing similar to that previously observed in Huli children in Melanesia. (Goldman:1998) A form of self-narration with multiple voicings or ‘hetroglossia’ is a key feature of television-based play where one child can index various social roles and explore multi-valent approaches to play under the narrative ‘backstory’ of a television show. The great public criticism of television and play surrounding it is that it is repetitive and somehow impoverished in content, yet research on hetroglossic play and play in general argue that play is always repetitive in some elements, philosopher’s such as Latour and Gadamer argue that the ‘to-and-fro’ nature of play is a fundamental part of all games, and it is through this method that a child learns to understand the pressures of modernity and how to control their own environment.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Tomohiro (Tomo) Morisawa, ISCA, Oxford University

Last month I started my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Through an ethnography of the production process of anime movies in Japan, my research will look at how socially negotiated ideas of creativity, facilitated by the institution of copyright law, have come to articulate the terms with which animators evaluate one another's work as well as their professional development. Through this project, I plan to engage with the emerging debate in anthropology about the concept and practices of creativity (Liep 2001, Hisrch and MacDonald 2005, Ingold and Hallam 2008) and intellectual property (Strathern 1999, 2006, Brown 1998, 2003, Myers 2005 etc.).

Whereas the analytical potential of creativity as a topic has been rather well discussed, I believe a more ethnographic engagement still finds ample space to be explored. The starting premise of the project is that ethnographic engagement with creativity does not yield much satisfactory result without turning to the legal and economic regime of intellectual property rights (Leach 2007). Both stem intricately from philosophy of John Locke and the Western liberalist tradition of possessive individualism (cf. Macpherson 1962). This point is brilliantly exposed in ethnographies of copyright, which look at how differing conceptions of authorship may prove to be a critical problem in determining ownership (Myers 2005). The ethnographic focus on creativity - the twin concept of authorship - where the local and the international regimes of copyright do not significantly differ i.e. Japan (but see for other examples Geismar 2005a, 2005b) will not only add on to the emerging literatures of creativity and intellectual property in anthropology, but also facilitate a connection between them.

Anime is a Japanese abbreviation for the English word 'animation', which has increasingly come to specifically mean animation movies produced in Japan and consumed worldwide. Currently, the estimated number of anime programmes broadcast on TV networks amount up to 80 per week domestically; the wide availability corresponding with its high visibility within popular cultures and media in Japan. However, the rise in the presence of anime related subculture also led to its polarized reception in public discourses during the past decade, oscillating between anime as the expression of creativity and that as arresting social malady.

Whereas the ideal of creativity in anime is personified in a few master animators such as Miyazaki Hayao, who has come to embody everything Japan aspires to as the master of personal creativity, malicious images of anonymous (more often than not male) consumers who are latent public offenders and social misfits also began to dominate in daily shows and sensational news media. This shift from creative individual to malfunctioning mass also traces a change in public imagination from the side of production to that of consumption. While 'genius' animators produce 'creative' art-like crafts, 'anonymous' consumers destroys the value by turning them into fetish commodities.

The government has promoted the anime industry as Japan's core 'softpower', and the relative success of such anime films like "Spirited Away" and "Pokemon" abroad are shaking up something of its newly defined sense of cultural uniqueness verging on that of superiority. Yet, the daily work the professional animators actually carve out at the studio, as the result of their labour, is anything but spectacular. Rather, it is the banality of it all that may perplex the researcher on the first encounter - a thousand of stop motion drawings which are hard to make heads or tails for non-professionals. By focussing on how animators make use of the concept of creativity in articulating their work and personal ideals I will be able to examine the juncture between creativity, work, and personhood, onto which the larger ideas of national future have come to be staked.

Starting from October 2009, I will conduct a 12 month fieldwork at a yet-to-be-specified anime production studio in Suginami-ku district of Tokyo, where almost one fifth of the entire industry (approx. 80 studios) is concentrated. Ideally, I will work as an assistant to the production-management section of the given studio, which foresees the schedule management of ongoing projects and entails highly frequent face to face interactions with animators. In the field, I will pay particular attention to how references to the ideas of creativity entail the corresponding references to the material forms it is objectified. That is to say, when animators talk about their work, and actually produce their drawings, how personification, objectification, and idealization of creativity all play out in such a way to elude rather than cement the boundaries between them.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Andrew Bowsher, D.Phil Candidate at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University

My research project explores the production, marketing and consumption of boxed-sets of recorded specialist music in Europe and North America. Boxed-sets collect archival materials pertaining to musical genres, eras and artists in elaborate packaging. They run in limited numbers, and are highly sought-after by music fans and collectors, who view them as valuable cultural artefacts and tributes to artistic legacies of cultural importance. Through an ethnographic investigation of practices surrounding these nostalgic goods, I examine the complex creative processes involved in producing these specific commodities, the dynamics of collecting practices, and the specific forms of sociality created through participating in fan culture to question anthropological theories of value creation in commercial marketplaces and consumer lifestyles (Graeber 2001) from a new perspective.

By questioning why boxed-sets are so prized and important to consumers, my methodological and theoretical consideration of anthropological debates creates a perspective for understanding how the value of boxed-sets is produced, negotiated and sustained. My study on boxed-sets questions previous anthropological research into the industries of cultural goods, which has suggested that producers can engender specific consumer reactions to goods through advertising (Moeran 1996), or that producers’ efforts have little impact on consumer behaviour (Miller 1997). By understanding how musical nostalgia and memory are packaged for, utilised by, and become symbolically powerful for consumers of boxed-sets, my research anthropologically analyses cultural industries by novelly researching the sociality of boxed-sets’ consumers, and their relationship with music producers, to anthropologically explore market dynamics, consumer agency and the creation of inalienable, culturally dense valuables (Weiner 1994). My study employs ethnomusicological literature (Frith 1998, Seeger 1986), but adds a pertinent new dimension to anthropology’s study of music by investigating music as a commodity within the context of cross-cultural transmissions and sociality (Hannerz 1987). My research on boxed-sets also critiques current shifts in the anthropological research agenda on consumption from focussing on shopping, fashion, and taste to consumption in the home and commodity disposal.

Methodologically, my research combines the biographical model for studying objects grounded in anthropology (Kopytoff 1986) and the commodity-chain approach developed by geographers. I am currently conducting a multi-sited ethnography that examines the specific social and economic practices surrounding boxed-sets as they move from their production in the US to their consumption in the UK. I will conduct ethnography where boxed-sets are consumed in the UK and North America, in spaces ranging from concerts and conventions to Internet sites and fan literature.

Moreover, in a six-month internship with Revenant Records in Austin, Texas, I aim to gain insights into the multiple creative processes crucial to designing their unique boxed-sets, and to understand how this influences the value that consumers perceive in their commodities. Thusfar in Austin, I have come to realize the importance of authentic aesthetics in the city, and have further realized the trend-setting capabilities of this local music-market in the wider marketplace. It is clear therefore that Austin’s local characteristics impact upon industry-wide concepts of authenticity from production through to consumption, and these factors appear to bear influence upon the viable production of box sets by companies such as Revenant Records. Austin’s magnetism within the global music industry has made it the heartland for many subcultural styles; how this melting-pot of a city has prized musical authenticity and simultaneously nurtured many musical genres and modes of production is something I wish now to understand as part of my research; to understand how the local aesthetic for the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ has affected the reception of Austin’s products in the global marketplace. My research has therefore benefited from immersion in a local music industry with worldwide influence. I anticipate to finish this research and my D.Phil by the end of 2010.

Any interest, comments or suggestions would be most welcome to this work-in-progress.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Deirdre McKay (Keele Univ) & Padmapani Perez (Leiden Univ)

Francis Ford Coppola’s experiences on the Apocalypse Now shoot in the Philippines were famously a journey ‘up the river’ into the director’s own hour of darkness. His wife, Eleanor Coppola, published her own account of life on the set and made a documentary [1]. She details how, ill and beset by cost overruns on his production budget, Coppola had also run out of creative juice—having no idea what to do for the final scene. On August 24, 1976, Eleanor Coppola wrote:

In the script, Kurtz’s band of renegade soldiers has trained a tribe of local Montagnard Indians to be a fighting team. They live in huts by the temple. Rather than dress up Filipino extras everyday, Francis asked Eva, a production assistant, to go to a northern province where the rice terraces are and recruit a real tribe of primitive people to come live on the set and be in the scenes. I hear she is trying to make a contract with a group of 250 Ifugao Indians….

Two of Edgar’s friends, in costume, with one of the props they built for Kurtz’s temple. (Edgar Dupingay)

The production was successful in recruiting a larger group of Ifugao people to act as extras on the film. They joined the shooting first in Baler, Quezon – the site of the “Charlie don’t surf” scene – and then in Pagsanjan, Laguna – at Kurtz’s “temple.” Living in accommodation around the set, the Ifugao extras constructed props, made handicrafts to sell, and continued their cultural life.

As Coppola puzzled over how to stage the death of Kurtz, Eleanor called him to see some of the Ifugao extras who were conducting a ritual. Coppola watched the ritual slaughter of a carabao (water buffalo) and immediately decided to incorporate what he had seen into the film. If his genius as filmmaker lies in the images he incorporates into his movies, he actually took these images straight out of Ifugao ritual.

The famous final scenes of Apocalypse Now thus show the Ifugao extras hacking apart a carabao. All the Ifugao extras we interviewed in 2002 insisted that this scene wasn't in the script. "That came from us!" Many audiences flinch. Maybe they don't want to think about the origins of meat? Or is it the apparent savagery of the ritual? These are superficial readings and westernized audiences don't see that there is much more to this than meets the eye!

This scene is reminiscent of the old colonial relations reported in the National Geographic of the early 1900s. [2] In the early colonial era, U.S. appointed provincial governors held "cañaos"—large redistributive prestige feasts. In a traditional Ifugao cañao, a carabao or several were slaughtered and the meat was doled out by the feast's sponsor to relatives in order of their importance to the sponsor. The Americans sponsored these feasts to make peace between fractious Ifugao villages and establish colonial hegemony over the redistribution of wealth and justice. Since the Americans had no relatives, in their cañaos the order of precedence was 'up for grabs'—particular Ifugao community leaders vied for the first chance to strike a blow on the carabao, in order to show their affinity with their hosts. Men armed with bolos rushed to the carabao in a running melee until all the meat was taken from the bones, attempting to outdo each other in symbolically claiming kinship with the Americans. Photos of cañaos suggested the carabao slaughter was a 'free-for all,' reinforcing American ideas that Filipinos were primitive and barbaric.

To the Ifugao,
the carabao remained a symbol of colonial power and its slaughter by the Ifugao became the symbolic tax levied on the Spanish as colonial overlord. But the carabao holds a deeper significance in Ifugao ritual. The carabao entered the rice terraces of what is now Ifugao Province when Ifugao people living along the Magat River were displaced by Spanish incursions. The river ran through lowland Ifugao, separated the uplands of Ifugao Province from the neighboring lowland provinces of Isabela and Nueva Viscaya. The Spanish tried to Christianize the population and bring them into reducciones (or mission settlements). The Ifugao abandoned their hunting grounds along the Magat and moved up to the mountains.

The theft of the animals by raiders from the Ifugao uplands was understood as a form of payment exacted from the Spanish for the use of the land the latter had occupied. As one Ifugao elder described it: "First, we just killed the carabao and carried the meat. Then we saw that it could be done to lead the carabao back. That was our pride, to kill many carabaos for meat when there was a death. That's how we were rich, sharing the meat."[3]

To the Ifugao, the carabao remained a symbol of colonial power and its slaughter by the Ifugao became the symbolic tax levied on the Spanish as colonial overlord. Therefore, the prestige and the feast retain an ambivalent quality. Even as the Ifugao accept the gift of meat, they are symbolically assassinating the imperial donor.

In the actual filming of this scene, the natives (as Cambodians) are led in a dance and ritual by Guimbatan, a respected mumbaki (ritual specialist or ‘native priest’). Guimbatan came from Banaue, and the performances retain definitive Banaue Ifugao elements of expression and gestures.

In discussion: Francis Ford Coppolla, Lily Luglug and Guimbatan, the mumbaki (Lily and Gerry Luglug)

Coppola was "in love" with the Ifugao since he was so reluctant to let them leave. Some of the Ifugao even said that they shouldn't show Coppola any more rituals; otherwise they would never be allowed to go home.

The former extras told us that, after Coppola first witnessed the carabao ritual slaughter, he tried to shoot every ritual that the Ifugao performed. Once he asked Roben Bahatan if the Ifugao elders could chant in one of the scenes. Roben said that they would be willing but that the utterance of those chants must always be accompanied by a sacrifice of chickens. So Coppola went overboard and ordered a whole truckload of chickens, which were then distributed to the entire Ifugao group.

Just before the Ifugao left for home, they performed one more ritual. Gerry Luglug saw Coppola throw down his cap and swear, "Shit, why didn't they show us this before? I want that for the film." Lily Luglug, who led the Ifugao extras along with her husband Gerry, Roben, and Benjamin Cappelman remembered forming a similarly impression. It seemed to her that Coppola was "in love" with the Ifugao extras since he was so reluctant to let them leave. Some of the Ifugao people even said that they shouldn't show Coppola any more rituals; otherwise they would never be allowed to go home.

Edgar on set in his warrior costume. (Edgar Dupingay)

In December 1976, the Ifugao extras completed their contract with the production company and returned home. In contrast to their trip down to the set, Lily Luglug made sure they traveled comfortably. They rode in air-conditioned coasters and were escorted by the local police in every province that they drove to. When they reached Dalton Pass – the beginning of the mountains - Gerry Luglug told the police to go home, "Baka kami pa ang mag-escort sa inyo dito" (maybe we had better escort you from here on).

In our interviews, the former Ifugao extras recalled their participation in the film with a mixture of fondness and smugness. Their having been part of the filming is more important to the Ifugao than the film itself. Benjamin Cappelman said, "You feel proud that you're part of the film but first it was just about the money." He recalled that he was paid about $500 a week for managing the Ifugao extras, and the exchange rate then was P7 per $. Prior to the filming, he was earning P350 a month as a teacher.

For Edgar Dupingay, one of the on-screen extra actors, "seeing the movie filmed, it lessened my belief…. In the movie, you are attracted with them, you are believing what is being performed there. But, when I saw it for myself, it lessened my interest. Now, I only take in the history of the movie. Now, I don't believe already—once I have seen it, I know it is not true… In my experience there, at least by myself, I have done what they call filming. I stand in front of a camera and it's even an American film. It's a good experience for myself, when it comes to film. I'm a common person here, but I have experience. I was trained, for a short time, in martial arts for the film and even firing guns. Only we didn't operate the cannon… We learned how to load, to really attack and capture the object. It's like being a soldier without entering the military."

Edgar remembered that he even went to Bayombong, Nueva Viscaya (the nearest cinema) to see the film and was dismayed by how many scenes were missing. "I didn't even see my face there. I was very eager to see Brando with us. That was the scene where Brando investigated Sheen. We were dragging Martin Sheen to him."

Lily Luglug, who led the recruiting of the Ifugao group explained, "It was fun because it helped a lot of people here. They experienced traveling to a far place, there was good food. It was like a vacation for most of them. No hard work! We were pampered. There were truckloads of ducks and chickens. Drinks all over the place, lanzones (a delicious lowland fruit), toilet paper. For me, when I saw the making of the film I lost interest in watching other films. I don't get so excited so much because I know they fake it. It must have been a nice experience for the other women too. They traveled, they were a community together, they liked doing what they were asked to do, and some met future husbands."

All in all, our interviewees suggested that being in a Hollywood film and contributing to its ending was no big deal to the worldly Ifugao, really. It was fun while it lasted, and then life went on as usual and films thereafter lost their luster. No one could have said this better than Benjamin Cappelman. When we first asked him to tell us about his experiences on the set, he replied: "Apocalypse Now? That's Apocalypse Yesterday already!"

-----------------


[1] Coppola, E. 1979 Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now (London: Faber & Faber) and her documentary on the shoot, Hearts of Darkness.

[2] See Worcester, D. "Field sports among the wild men of Northern Luzon" National Geographic 22(3), 1911: 215-267; Worcester, D. "Head-hunters of Northern Luzon" National Geographic 23(9), 1912: 833-930; Worcester, D. "The non-Christian peoples of the Philippines-with an account of what has been done for them under American Rule" National Geographic 24(11), 1913: 1157-1256.

[3] The sacrifice of a carabao is part of rituals to cure sickness and misfortune as well as to honor the dead.

The images are courtesy of Lily and Gerry Luglug and Edgar Dupingay. The text is excerpted from a larger collaborative research study by Deirdre McKay (Keele University) and Padmapani Perez (University of the Philippines Baguio City and PhD candidate, Leiden University).

Versions of it appear in Flip Magazine (2003, v.2, n.3, pp. 29-33, 90-91) and the Filipino e-zine Our Own Voice
http://www.ourownvoice.com/essays/essay2004a-3.shtml.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Daniel Miller, UCL

Over the last two months I have been conducting fieldwork in the Philippines, based in Manila and the surrounding countryside, along with Dr. Mirca Madianou from the University of Cambridge. One of my long term interests in material culture is new media, and its impact on relationships, and the project that we are engaged in, which later on will also include fieldwork in Trinidad, is to take this to the extreme. If you want to know how far the media itself can constitute or transform a relationship then this can be most fully explored when a relationship is entirely dependent upon that media.

Over the last year Mirca and myself have been getting to know members of the Filipino Diaspora population in London and Cambridge. Mostly the individuals we work with are domestic labourers but many are also nurses. Although there are big populations of Diaspora male Filipinos, for example, working on ships, we are working almost entirely with women. Perhaps unusually for such migrant female populations, almost all our informants first married and had children, and only then migrated for work. For many reasons, they were restricted in leaving the countries where they worked, which in most cases were places such as Saudi and Hong Kong, before coming to the UK. As a result, apart from occasional Christmas visits, they have mainly been absent for the entirety of the time during which their children have grown up.

A Child whose mother lives in the UK

We went to the Philippines in order to talk to the children of these same mothers. Most of whom are now young adults, and in some cases have children themselves. We have worked now with twenty direct `pairings,’ where we are involved with mothers and children in the same family, but also with many more separate parents and children. In our discussions we usually start with a history of the time when the relationships were mainly sustained through the sending of letters and in most cases also cassette tapes. While today we have mothers who are using yahoo messenger, skype, and in some cases a social networking site, which is very popular in the Philippines, called Friendster. Most people are also aware that the Philippines has for many years been the world’s most prolific texting nation, and in the Philippines texting is central to the creation and maintenance of almost all relationships – in fact the greatest number of texts sent, tends to be on Valentine’s day. Without twenty or thirty texts a day people feel there may be something lacking in any given relationship. I think we startled a few people by using the phone for calling them, since in the Philippines this usually signifies an emergency or problem.

Image from telecommunications company in Manila.

We havn’t yet started our detailed analysis of the material we have collected over the last eighteen months, but it is already clear this will require us to work on two levels. We will obviously have to involve ourselves in the discourse that dominates this situation, which is simply a concern with the impact of this absence on the left behind children. Almost everyone in the Philippines has seen a locally made film Anak which portrays a young woman getting pregnant, taking drugs but mainly berating her mother who is visiting from her work in Hong Kong, for destroying her life by being absent for her childhood. This is a much debated issue in the academic literature, and we obviously have a great deal of information that bears upon this debate. In general there had been a supposition that the improvement in technology would be mainly significant in its ability to ameliorate the negative consequence of absence, as mothers who could now speak to the their children several times a day could to some degree recover their role as active parents to children on the opposite side of the world. Not surprisingly, perhaps, we found this to be far too simple a story; and that in many ways the improvement in technology can exacerbate, rather than improve, what are seen as the negative consequences of separation.

Learning to use the internet prior to migration

We will clearly become involved in these debates. But working as anthropologists it is already evident to us that the debate itself sets up often inappropriate and imposed presuppositions about what it means to be a mother, about the nature of childhood, about how communication operates in relationships, not to mention a failure to consider other aspects of the situation such as the wider impact of poverty and prior internal migration. From a material culture perspective, the way we hope to approach these more nuanced appreciations and engagements is through detailed attention to the media themselves and the precise nature of their position, not just as media, but as mediations in relationships. What is a Filipino social networking site? Why is texting quite so ubiquitous, other than just cost? What kinds of text circulate? Which messages are retained as memories? What is shared and what is private? How does each media manifest different possibilities of relationships and to what extent does it realise something within the relationship as opposed to create some new potential in that relationship? We would then want to relate these materialities of communication to more specific Filipino concepts of debt, kinship and obligation.

As often happens in such fieldwork, one starts with a largely academic reason for developing a project, as I just suggested an `extreme’ dependency upon the media. But of course once one starts fieldwork it is the humanity of the people one works with and the sadness and suffering that that is associated with separation, as well as the new freedoms and the ability to contribute to one’ family that takes centre stage. Although at this point we are focused on the Filipino Diaspora we are also very much aware that this world of remittance economies, separated families and transnational communities, is fast becoming one of global transformation and global experience, which makes even the ten million Filipino Diaspora just a small component of a vast new world. It is an issue that more and more anthropologists are likely to find themselves engaged with, even if it was never the topic they intended to study, simply because its prevalence and consequences will increasingly impose itself upon us. Meanwhile, over the next few months, we hope that we will be able to bring some insights to this particular and poignant example of the social and welfare consequences of new media.

Mother

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Chris Gosden, School of Archaeology, Univ. of Oxford

Just how we should think about, and work in, museums is a considerable question at the beginning of the 21st century. Older ways of thinking about museums, as sets of static, decontextualised objects, are unhelpful and inaccurate. Museum objects are in a very definite set of contexts, even if they have been through a series of networks and relations to get where they are at present. The Relational Museum project, which ran from 2002 to 2006, was based around the idea that museum objects to some degree conceal the mass of relations that lie behind them, ranging from the people who originally made and used the objects, to all parties to their trade and transfer and ending, for now at least, with the curators, conservators and visitors who make up the museum community in the present.

Charting the relations that have helped compose a museum will provide insights into the colonial relations of administrators, missionaries, travellers and anthropologists, the changing situations of local people responding to and participating in these colonial forces, shifting intellectual fashions in the metropolitan centre lying behind collections and a mass of biographies of people of all types whose lives were entangled with objects and collections. Museum collections represent a privileged form of historical source composed of the objects themselves and the various links to other material backgrounds they have enjoyed, written and oral histories, archival materials, photographs and film. The Relational Museum project looked at the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford from 1884, when the museum was set up, to 1945, the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The project was funded by the ESRC and directed by Chris Gosden and Mike O’Hanlon, but the real work was done by the two researchers on the project Frances Larson, who concentrated on archival and historical work and Alison Petch, whose main task was to enhance the computerised databases of the Pitt Rivers and to carry out a mass of statistical analyses on them looking at when objects came in, where they came from and through which hands or conduits. In addition to articles, the project had two main outcomes – a website http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk/ and a book, Knowing Things. Both are linked and meant to be understood together. Although the book is the result of our reflections, the website contains material for anyone interested to carry out their own analyses.

The main aim of our project was to investigate the sets of relationships between people and things that make up the Pitt Rivers Museum. Let us start with one small example of what these relationships might involve. There are two ‘jew’s harps’ in the Pitt Rivers Museum – these are small, inconspicuous bamboo instruments that are held against the lips and plucked with the fingers. The Museum’s curator, Henry Balfour, acquired these two instruments in the Naga Hills of India in 1922. He was staying with his friend, James Mills, a Sub-Divisional Officer with the Indian Civil Service who was stationed at Mokokchung in the Naga Hills. On 1st December, Balfour visited a Chang Naga man called Ngaku, who worked as an interpreter at Mokokchung. They spent a ‘cheery’ time together discussing local traditions and practices, before the mother of a friend of Ngaku’s played the jew’s harp for their British visitor. After ‘quite a pleasing melodious performance’, the old woman gave Balfour two similar instruments for his ‘memsahib’, by which she probably meant Balfour’s wife. Memsahib is the female form of the Hindi word ‘sahib’, then used as respectful address for Europeans in India. From the use of this single word we know that during the course of the transaction Balfour was implicated in the existing social hierarchies in Mokokchung and India as a whole. The two jew’s harps are now in the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they were not accessioned until 1939, the year Balfour died. His wife, Edith, had passed away in 1938, so perhaps he did give them to her as the Naga lady had intended (the details supplied here are drawn from Balfour’s notebooks of his trip to Nagaland, held in the Pitt Rivers Museum and from documentation pertaining to the objects themselves).

These two bamboo instruments have quickly drawn us into a little cluster of relationships, involving Mills, Balfour, Ngaku, Ngaku’s friend’s mother, and Balfour’s wife. We cannot now know what Ngaku and his elderly friend understood of the Pitt Rivers Museum, if anything, but their stories have been part of the institution ever since, because their actions and interactions helped to create it, albeit in a small way. Rather than being distant observers, Ngaku and his friend are participants in the formation of the Pitt Rivers Museum. They are implicated and involved, and integral to the institution as a whole. Museums emerge through thousands of relationships like these; through the experiences of anthropological subjects, collectors, curators, lecturers and administrators, amongst others, and these experiences have always been mediated and transformed by the material world, by artefacts, letters, trains, ships, furniture, computers, display labels, and so on. No one person or group of people can completely control the identity of a museum. They have multiple authors, who need not be aware of their role nor even necessarily willing contributors. But however else each person’s involvement differs, all of their relationships cohere around things. It is objects that have drawn people together, helped to define their interactions, and made them relevant to the Museum.

This project had a series of intersecting research themes concerning variously the disciplinary histories of archaeology and anthropology, the history of museums within Oxford (itself embedded in broader discussions concerning the sciences and humanities), the nature of colonial histories as illuminated through the movement of objects, links with originating communities and an overarching concern for the relations between people and things. These themes include many of the big current issues within archaeology, anthropology and science and technology studies, so that a lot has been written about these topics, but we know of no one work which has combined in the way we have, focussing crucially on the collections of one large institution which provides coherence and focus.

The general ambit of thought within which we are working is that which explores the interactions and relationships between people and things. The notion is that people and things are equal (although different) players in the creation of social relations, institutions, knowledge and politics. Such ideas allow material things to be active players in the human world in manners which are still controversial and debated – in what sense objects are active or are agents is not at all clear or agreed and many are unhappy with this line of thought altogether (Gell 1998, Ingold 2000, Latour 1993, 2005, Strathern 1996). A museum which has lasted several human generations is given continuity through the objects in it, which are conventionally seen to be the museum, rather than the people. For museums it may be an issue as to how far people are active players.

The key idea of the Relational Museum is to look at the relationships between people and things in an historical context, charting how both continuity and change arise. Rather to our surprise a key issue has become through the course of the project a question about the nature of knowledge and the manner in which knowledge is embodied as well as, or instead of, being a mental construction. In the early twenty first century a number of divisions are breaking down, first of all between disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, but also between key conceptual divisions such as culture and nature, or mind and matter. The Pitt Rivers Museum was established in 1884 at a period in which disciplinary boundaries had not been drawn up and the conceptual landscape different to that of today. There is no way in which we can return to the intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, but this was a world sufficiently different from our own to shake up now established forms of thought and provide some inspiration for the future. In particular, a general lack of distinction was made, by people like E. B. Tylor, between the material and the mental, so that objects were seen as materialisations of ideas, interacting with the skills of the body, as much as the operations of the mind.

Our particular focus has been on one museum, that of the Pitt Rivers, in the first 60 years of its history. There is a considerable literature on the history of museums and collecting (e.g. Barringer and Flynn 1998, Pearce 1995) but there has been surprisingly little in the way of detailed empirical studies of individual institutions and their collections. This, we suspect, is because working out when collections came into a museum, from whom and from where has been very difficult, a difficult now partly overcome through searchable electronic databases. We feel that our work has made a unique contribution in a number of important areas.

The Anthropology Diploma class of 1910-11. Back row from left - Wilson D. Wallis, Diamond Jenness and Marius Barbeau. Front row from left - Henry Balfour, Arthur Thomson and Robert Ranulph Marett.

We have charted the first sixty years of the Museum’s existence looking at the intellectual, institutional and political forces influential in its creation. This has been made possible through the creation of electronic versions of the Museum’s catalogues which can be searched relatively rapidly and systematically. Because the Museum’s holdings are so large and various, now comprising some 275,000 objects from all continents of the world, we chose a number of routes into the collections, particularly those provided by the collectors. Some 4000 people are known to have collected objects in the ‘field’ (whether this is West Africa, Tasmania or north Oxfordshire) which they gave to the Museum, either directly or indirectly. Such a large number of collectors threw light on issues of class, gender and social networks which lay behind the Museum’s collections. We also concentrated on a number of topics (stone tools, toys and games, head hunting to take a few) important to the history of the Museum in various ways. Lastly, we selected out a small number of people either within the Museum or outside, who threw light on different aspects of the Museum’s history. This group was made up first of Pitt Rivers himself whose gift of 20,000 objects provided the starting point for the Museum. Analysis of this collection, which built up from the 1850s onwards, allowed us to extend our period of analysis back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Henry Balfour was employed for a year to unpack Pitt Rivers’ collection but stayed in the Museum until his death in 1939 and became the major force behind the build up of the collections through travel, letter writing and conversation which meant that he either gathered objects himself or encouraged others to collect. E. B. Tylor, the first professional anthropologist in Britain, was employed as Keeper of the University Museum from 1883 and oversaw the acquisition and initial ordering of the Museum. He had much less hands-on connection with the objects than Balfour but was the major intellectual force behind the Museum in the 1880s and 1890s, producing important work on objects and their role in religious life, magic and technology.

Henry Balfour, Upper Gallery PRM some time in 1890s

John Hutton never worked for the Museum, but became a member of the Indian Civil Service in 1909, working in particular in Assam and especially in the Naga Hills. Through his friendship with Balfour, Hutton collected large amounts of material, especially from Naga, which he gave to the Museum. He also formed a focus for others to collect and donate. Hutton was a small, but exemplary, element of the British colonial world and its entanglement with anthropology and collection. In 1937 Hutton became William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Charles Seligman’s major institutional affiliation was with the LSE, but he, with his wife Brenda, was a major collector for a number of different institutions including the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Seligman archive at the LSE provides considerable detail on the Seligmans’ style of fieldwork in the Sudan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and New Guinea and the impact that their survey mode of work had on patterns of collection of objects given to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Our final collector was Beatrice Blackwood who worked for a long time in the Department of Anatomy at Oxford, but latterly at the Pitt Rivers Museum where she stayed as an active presence until her death in 1975. Blackwood carried out fieldwork in north America and New Guinea which resulted in important collections. She was attracted to a Malinowskian style of fieldwork, more sedentary than the Seligmans, but was never quite able to achieve her aims, partly because of demands by Balfour to collect for the Museum. Blackwood was an important teacher of ethnography using the Museum’s collections, as well as being instrumental in setting up the catalogues that were later to be digitised to form the base for the Relational Museum project. We chose this range of collectors to provide some chronological span, which provided an insight into changing intellectual interests, styles of fieldwork and thoughts about the centrality of material culture to anthropology. The resulting work was not a history of the Pitt Rivers Museum but a series of key insights into aspects of its history, which can be used to throw light on key questions in the present.

The 'Relational Museum' project team was interested not only in knowing more about the individuals who contributed to the PRM but also to understanding more about the networks of people who created the museums collections. We were quickly confronted by a daunting mass of information concerning thousands of collectors and donors who have contributed to the Museum’s development, and the thousands and thousands of objects with which they were associated. All these people and things were interconnected to varying degrees in complex ways. We considered that when faced with a complicated, shifting circulation of people and things that is literally endless – as is the case when considering the history of a museum, a person’s life, a business or a laboratory – network analysis was a stimulating and revealing methodological tool. We hoped it would throw up patterns in sets of social relationships hard to perceive otherwise, and that it would be a spur to more in-depth, nuanced research. This complexity might be clearer if seen through an example. Take a collection of around 80 objects, primarily pottery eating bowls, water vases, cooking pots and ladles, from the Zuni and Hopi people of Arizona and New Mexico. These particular objects were collected by James Stevenson, who, in 1879, led to the first research expedition for the Smithsonian’s newly formed Bureau of Ethnology to study Zuni and Hopi cultures. The collection – made sometime between 1879 and 1884 – passed from Stevenson to John Wesley Powell, who was Director of the Bureau, and then from Powell to Henry Nottidge Moseley, who was Oxford’s Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy. Moseley was great friends with E.B. Tylor. It may well be that he acquired the collection from Powell during his visit to Canada and the United States in 1884, since he and Tylor traveled together and spent some time studying the cultures of New Mexico during this trip. Tylor and Moseley managed the administration of Pitt Rivers Collection when it first arrived in Oxford in the mid-1880s, so it is no surprise that his wife, Amabel Nevill Moseley, donated his ethnological collections to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1896, five years after his death. This small group of objects passed through four pairs of hands – Stevenson’s, Powell’s, Henry Moseley’s, and Amabel Moseley’s – before entering the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Museum contains well over 275,000 objects, so it is easy to see how complicated such sets of social relationships can become. Many, although by no means all, of the people who collected and donated objects were known to each other and moved in the same social and intellectual circles. They might have worked together, or traveled together, or been members of the same clubs and societies, or met the same people during the course of their research. The same field collectors sometimes supplied objects to a number of different secondary collectors, who later gave their material to the Museum. The scale and complexity of the relationships that have constituted the Pitt Rivers Museum led us to seek alternative ways of visualizing and analyzing our data. We used network analysis to complement our in-depth historical research with some broader exploration of these sets of associations and relationships en masse.

The late nineteenth century is often seen (and caricatured) as a period of intellectual certainty when people pursued an ‘onwards and upwards’ notion of history within an evolutionary framework. By contrast we found this to be a period of intellectual openness in which people were exploring the nature of human culture, its links to the material world and its intellectual manifestations. The Pitt Rivers Collection was initially taken into the University Museum, which had itself opened in 1860 as a physical location which could bring together the various sciences in Oxford, but within an holistic conception where the links between physics, chemistry and anatomy could be sought. The Pitt Rivers collection became part of the Anatomy Department, so that human products were conceived on in comparative terms in much the same manner as biological organisms. The divisions between natural things and human products were not made, partly because people like Balfour were trained in the Natural Sciences before working on artifacts. Both archaeology and anthropology emerged through a series of links between the sciences and classics, which seem unlikely today, brought together in the person of someone like E. B. Tylor who ranged widely between interests in fire drills or flint tools on the one hand to the differences between magic, myth and religion on the other. As the twentieth century progressed this open intellectual atmosphere was divided up due to the growth of disciplinary specialisms, so that at the end of his life Balfour was defending his broad conception of anthropology, and the importance of the Museum within that, against the newly-appointed Radcliffe-Brown, Professor of Social Anthropology, who wanted more specialist teaching and a division made between the older generalist degrees (Gosden et al. 2007). It was against these changing backgrounds that collecting took place and the role of material culture was debated. Although an over-simplification, it is possible to say that the debates within anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s were between an older more materialist view of the subject, in which material culture was central, to a newer post-Durkheimian stress on social relations. These debates are still being pursued today.

The main results from the project were analyses of the collections themselves, either pursued statistically or through the archives. As described in the Methods section we carried out a series of searches through the electronic catalogues of the Museum to discover when, from where and via which hands the collections came. We now know in great detail about the structure of collections from the various continents or countries or individual major collectors. Such statistics allow us to gain an overview of the collections as a whole, from which various surprises emerge, which include the number of stone tools we have in the collections (about a third of the collections are stone tools) or the number of objects from England (we have some 30,000 objects from England alone, which form the basis for a follow-on project). We can see that there was a lag between areas entering the Empire and collections flowing into Oxford – in the case of East Africa, annexed in the 1890s, material does not real flow into the Museum until the 1920s. A key result is to uncover the huge number of people (almost 4000) who contributed objects to the Museum that they had collected in the field which allows us to look at the broad community of collectors in terms of their class, gender and social connections, a vital result for the Relational Museum project. The raw data for this element of the project is provided on the Pitt Rivers Museum website (http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk/). One important element of this presentation is that people can search the website for themselves, if they are interested in an individual or a network of people who engaged in collecting, so that the results of the project lie not just in what we have been able to deduce about the collections but also what others can explore for themselves using the new and expanded information on the Museum.

We have attempted to make the objects and the museum itself active players in its history and constitution, starting with the question of what is a museum? Museums seem to be defined and circumscribed institutions, but in fact they spread out into space, existing also trans-temporally, raising questions about where the museum is and how it is constituted. Museums also seem to be objects collected by people, but it is easy to reverse this formulation and see objects drawing people into the Museum, through various forms of attraction of form and function. Tylor developed the concept of animism, a belief in the capacity that objects had to act and move which he felt was held by many people in the world and in some ways museums can be seen as being composed of objects animating people. The typological form of thought employed by Pitt Rivers, Balfour and Tylor divided up the world into a series of categories of objects, which could then be displayed in and through the Museum. This represents a very different intellectual approach to the forms of relational thought with which we work today, in which categories are temporary entities arising out of a network of connections between entities. The comparisons and contrasts between categorical and relational thought could be productively explored further.

As the Pitt Rivers Museum came into existence in Oxford in the 1880s this caused a considerable realignment of the University’s collections, with large transfers of ethnographic material from the Ashmolean Museum and smaller ones from the University Museum of Natural History. The University’s collections represent a form of categorisation of the world and collections change in shape as such categories change. The Pitt Rivers internally also can be seen as a means of representing the world through its collections, a representation transformed through changing intellectual and other interests. It is perhaps no surprise that there are so many stone tools from Australia, but it slightly more thought provoking that there is a considerable amount of material to do with witchcraft and magic from England or many Ashanti gold weights from West Africa, the former part of an attempt to work through so-called ‘primitive’ traits at home, the latter concerning an unsuspected sophistication of measurement and commerce amongst people outside Europe and Asia. Anomalies and puzzles were worked through in the Museum as much as the expected being reflected and this is a large part of its charm today.

We coined the term ‘participatory anthropology’ to look the range of collectors and source communities which helped created the Museum’s collections in the first sixty years of its existence. The Museum today is also trying to re-embrace forms of participation which allow real engagement with the collections and their possible significance. Ostensibly, the aim of this project has been to uncover the history of the Museum, but through working on this history we have uncovered many features that are still of relevance today and by making the history of the Museum accessible on the Web we hope to encourage more interactions with the collections both in a virtual and real form.

We feel that the project was a considerable success, but that an infinite number of similar projects might be possible at other institutions, which could eventually be joined into some sort of larger mapping of communities, colonial connections and institutional connections of various kinds. The ultimate aim of such mapping would be not just to understand the past, but to gain insights into the conditions which gave rise to collections and connections, so that these can be used as sets of raw materials in the present for making new sets of relationships between all parties in a post-colonial world.

One outcome of the Relational Museum project is follow up work on Englishness, also funded by the ESRC. Englishness is a recurrent issue within the identity politics of the British Isles, being generally framed as a problem, not a solution; a question rather than an answer. Debates about the definition of Englishness have come to the fore again recently, making it an ideal time for us to reconsider the history of the concept over the last century. Many writers make the point that modern concepts of Englishness developed at the end of the nineteenth century in a context marked by the rise of Germany and France as national powers, as well as worries about the decline of Empire (Colls 2002, Colls and Dodd 1986, Kumar 2003). It is no coincidence that just over a century later debates about what it means to be English are again achieving prominence in a context of perceived external threats through terrorism, immigration and globalization (Blunkett 2005). The nineteenth century construction of English identity was enacted and transformed through a range of publications, and the creation of university positions and other institutions designed to explore and propagate what it meant to be English. At first sight it might seem strange that Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum - founded in 1884 and overtly an ethnographic museum dealing with exotic peoples - should be involved in such developments. However, a considerable proportion of the collections of the PRM prove to be from England, ranging between then contemporary items and archaeological material.

We shall argue that the collections of the PRM were involved in attempts to define what it meant to be English in a manner which took a material form. Much of the change through the nineteenth century which put identity at risk concerned the material world, through the production of mass-produced goods, the rise of consumer society and an empirical science. It should come as no surprise that thoughts about local identity should take the form of collecting craft products, items concerned with witchcraft and magic or the making of folk music. The links between material culture and Englishness have been little studied. The English collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum offer a rich set of possibilities, allowing us to look both at the objects, but also the people who collected them, who were in many cases involved more broadly in setting up the Folklore Society or the Folk-Song Society. The English collections will provide a unique insight into the construction of the concept, but also an excellent starting point for looking at the mix of intellectual, biographical and social motives for collection, allowing us to set these within a wider context through the analysis of relevant archives and published sources. The result will be an ethnography not of the English, but of the construction of Englishness in the past and its continuing resonances today. Initial results from the project are to be found on a website still under construction -
http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/

References
Barringer, T. and T. Flynn (eds) 1998. Colonialism and the Object. Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge.

Blunkett, D. 2005. A New England. An English Identity within Britain. Speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, London, 14 March 2005.

Colls, R. 2002. The Identity of England. Oxford: Univ. Press.

Colls, R. and P. Dodd (eds) 1986. Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. Croom Helm.

Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Kumar, K. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Univ. Press.

Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. (trans. Catherine Porter). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. (trans. Catherine Porter). Oxford: Univ. Press.

Pearce, S. 1995. On Collecting. An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge.

Strathern, M. 1996.‘Cutting the Network’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, NS, 2: 517-35.

Outputs from the Relational Museum Project

Alison Petch 2004 'Collecting Immortality: the field collectors who contributed to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford' Journal of Museum Ethnography 16: 127-139.

Alison Petch 2005 'The happiest years': J.H. Hutton and the Nagas' Friends of the PRM, Oxford Newsletter Issue 54 November.

Frances Larson. 2006 Anthropology as Comparative Anatomy? Reflecting on material culture studies during the late 1800s and the late 1900s' in Journal of Material Culture 12 (1): 89-112.

Frances Larson & Alison Petch. 2006 "Hoping for the best, expecting the worse": Thomas Kenneth Penniman - Forgotten Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum Journal of Museum Ethnography 18: 125-139.

Alison Petch. 2006 "Counting and Calculating: Some reflections on using statistics to examine the history and shape of the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum" Journal of Museum Ethnography 18: 149-156.

Gosden, C, F. Larson and A. Petch. 2007. Origins and Survivals. Tylor, Balfour and the Pitt Rivers Museum and their role within Anthropology in Oxford 1883-1905, in P. Rivière (ed.) A History of Oxford Anthropology Oxford: Berghahn Books. pp. 21-42.

Alison Petch 2006 'A Typology of Benefactors: the relationships of Pitt Rivers and Tylor to the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford' Forum for Anthropology and Culture [Russia]

Alison Petch 2007 'Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum' Museum Anthropology 30 (1): 21-39.

Alison Petch 2006 'Chance and Certitude: Pitt Rivers and his first collection' Journal of the History of Collections 18 (2): 257-266.

Frances Larson, David Zeitlyn and Alison Petch. 2007 'Social Networks and the Creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum' Journal of Material Culture 12 (3).

Frances Larson 2007 'Anthropological Landscaping: General Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean, the University Museum, and the shaping of an Oxford discipline' - Journal of History of Collections.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Szilvia Simai-Mesquita,
Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

The research "Made in Brazil: Jeans and Identity Export to the Global Fantasy Market", explores how the representation of Brazilian-ness today can be understood through the visibilities of a new identity construction which is driven by a desire for emancipation but which is subject to a neo-colonial concern for a favourable image abroad as a prerequisite for further foreign investment in the country. This ambiguous position is analysed in a recent working paper focusing on the process of fantasy construction for export.

In this recent paper I argued that (i) the construction of images of Brazilian-ness is a very complex and ambiguous process containing a large amount of fetishism and determined by post-colonial mimicry; (ii) cultural fetishism contributes to the materialization of the Brazilian national imaginary. Through the Brazilian samba-jeans fetish various national imaginaries can be studied; (iii) finally, the importance of the exploitation of Brazilian exoticism in these existing fantasies were discussed and considered whether the samba-jeans myth was part of a bigger political–economic process and whether it contributes to the glamorization of misery for global marketing purposes.

Three image-contributing fantasies – (i) the tropical, (ii) the post-colonial female and her body, and (iii) the samba and the carnivalesque – were explored in the research paper and it was argued that the fetishistic power of these fantasies drive people to perceive Brazilian samba jeans not in their 'thing-ness' but in their fantasized state of fabricated representation of Brazilian-ness abroad, which feeds the myth and popularity of these jeans and creates a longing for them.

The opening question from which the analysis sets out was an etymology inspired interdisciplinary exploration of the name Brazil. Through this initial analysis it is uncovered that Brazil has a history of intrinsic mimesis, born out of mimicry and carrying this weight in its own name. The word 'Brazil' is a corruption of the European name for the Malaysian sapang tree, from whose reddish wood was drawn an extract not unlike saffron, but which tints less and has no flavour. When this was discovered and trafficked from the tropical South this corresponding part of the New World metonymically assumed an alien name, the nominally transferred referential for the whole territory.

According to this view, Pau Brasil, 'Brazil-wood', was the first notable item to be exported from this land but was also a designator of the land itself and ultimately of its identity by carrying the name of the first exported object in the name of its own identity. Thus Brazilian-ness also has a complex symbolic sphere in analysis. This nominal condemnation of the colonial rulers, the eye of the outside world, understandably became the dominant perspective and intrinsic for the invention of Brazil's self-image throughout its history. Pau Brasil was also a powerful cultural movement in twentieth-century Brazil. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) initiated the Poesia Pau Brasil (Brazil-wood Poetry) in 1925 when he published his famous 'Brazil-wood Manifesto'. Brazil-wood was his intended symbol for Brazilian culture as an international commodity in its own right; his Brazil-wood Poetry was conceived of as an export product, as something to combat the historical imitation of European models.

The end of colonialism, resistance, modernization contributed to the development of the modern Brazilian national exotic or Creole identity: the one who felt sympathy for his or her own cultural exoticism and heritage, the one who put an emphasis on the new ideology of multiracial Brazil, but who at the same time desired to attain socio-economic prestige and the imagined cultural sophistication of the former European colonizers. This struggle of ambiguity and auto-contradiction drove Brazilians to initiate the creation of an exoticized image of their own Brazilian-ness. This psycho-social process has become a political and economic strategy during the last few decades and has formed itself into a national strategy. Visual materials of Brazilian Samba Jeans used in my research provided ideological insight into this Brazilian strategy and national imaginary.

The first strategic Brazilian Samba Jeans myth contributing fantasy explored in my working paper was the tropical fantasy. I found that fantasized images of the tropical in Brazilian jeans catalogues are overwhelming. These images include bright sunshine, beautiful beaches, tropical paradise and fruits. Such powerful tropical fantasies are used by many prestigious Brazilian jeans companies. As Picture 1 clearly shows, the Sawary Jeans catalogue used eight pictures and attached the parts to one another on its opening page. These pictures are lacking in variety and repeat common images of the tropical. These include green, tropical forests; tropical beaches, palm trees and Mediterranean-style architecture. These pictures are then repeated on the following pages, where young women appear wearing various Sawary jeans placed on the pictures introduced on the opening page. In fact, the idea comes through clearly; the tropical images appear far more in the catalogue than any of the jeans models, which clearly reinforces the idea that Sawary is selling a tropical fantasy rather than jeans as things in themselves. Similar images can be found in the brochure of the Samba-Jeans Company, showing the beach at Rio de Janeiro (Picture 2).

This Rio image has, in fact, historically been seen in Brazilian culture as a symbol of optimism. Although Rio de Janeiro is among the most dangerous cities in the world, its charm and its reputation abroad are still powerful. According to Nicholas Brown the apolitical image of Rio de Janeiro has been culturally constructed since the 1950s, through associated images of 'pretty girls, beaches and the scenic backdrop of a postcard Rio de Janeiro' (Brown, 2003 :124). The tropical fantasy provides a path to an illusionary state of satisfaction (Freud, 1961) and through this attraction and appeal this psychological power can be used in favourable image creation for marketing (in this case, specifically export) purposes. Thus, as Freud (1927) argued, a fetishist is able simultaneously to believe in his or her displaced desire or fantasy and to recognize that it is not real but fantasy. However, this does not reduce the power of the fantasy of the displaced desire over the individual. The tropical fantasy works exactly for this reason: through its psycho-power people have constructed the image of Brazilian samba jeans and worked it into a fetish.

The second fantasy explored was the postcolonial female body fantasy. The imaginaries of this fantasy include the sadomasochist fantasy, which comes directly from the historical imaginary on female passivity and developed into a common obsession among Brazilian males, namely that females like being beaten on their bottom as well as from the practice of bottom-oriented samba dancing and also from recent derogative stereotypes formed on the basis of perceptions of Brazilian immigrants abroad. All these developed an exaggerated interest in, and the mass fantasy that sex appeal is focused on, the bottom. In fact, the most common way of centring attention on the bottom involves concentrating all or any decorations present on the jeans on that body part. This can be observed in the picture below (Picture 3).

The last Brazilian samba jeans myth contributing fantasy explored was the Samba and Carnivalesque imaginary. In my research I found that the image and history of samba culture and the carnivalesque gives a sensation of rebelliousness, a dissenter or non-conformist illusionary feeling to youth which can be seen on the following model. (Picture 4).

The conclusion of my paper was that it would be naïve to think that these fantasies are constructed just for the sake of enjoyment and that there are no political and economic consequences. This complex and ambiguous fantasy market and jeans trade in and outside Brazil is a serious and complex identity industry linking politics, fantasy and economics. Thus the phenomenon of Brazilian samba jeans is a political, psychoanalytical and economic notion. I also noted in my research paper that there is one element in this representation that is problematic, and that is the use of the socially peripheral or semi-peripheral condition of the people who are fantasized through Brazilian samba jeans.

The fantasies presented in my research, namely the tropical, post-colonial women and carnivalesque samba, are all related to socially peripheral groups of people. The protagonists of these fantasies are from the global south (tropical), Creole or immigrant women (post-colonial women), and slave descendants (carnivalesque samba). The exploitation of their disadvantage as an aesthetical representation becomes problematic for two main reasons. If aesthetic representation does not have ideological limits it will mean that any peripheral or semi-peripheral condition can be represented aesthetically and therefore enjoyed. If the Creole woman or the misery of the Amazon is to be aesthetically represented, then it is at some level enjoyed. At this point samba jeans become problematic and subject to critique because the protagonists of fantasies constructing their sex appeal, who make them into a myth, would not necessarily agree on such a representation. Furthermore, these images are used for marketing purposes, which means that somebody can make a profit from them. On the grounds of these points, I suggest, the export of Brazilian samba-jeans remains problematic.

References:
Brown, N. (2003). Bossaposbossa: Or, Postmodernism as Semi-Peripheral Symptom. The New Centennial Review 3.2 (Summer) 117-159.

Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 22. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Răzvan Nicolescu.
PhD student, Department of Anthropology, University College London.

This post is based on my MA dissertation on boredom and its relation with communication technology, among Romanian teenagers. It is founded mainly on a two months fieldwork I conducted this summer. I worked with 14 – 17 years old teenagers who lived in upper middle class families, residing primarily in central and affluent neighborhoods in Bucharest. I focused on a particular ‘instantiation’ of boredom, which I named the ‘after-school boredom,’ considered as it was individually or collectively experienced by teenagers. Boredom was not necessarily grasped in relation with any particular technology, but I used technology mainly to frame this particular incidence of boredom.

Indeed, there is a tight link between boredom and technology, but not because one follows the other, but because one creates the conditions for the other to emerge. Exploring teenagers’ perpetual balance between these experiences, I examined the two main factors that articulate this subtle relation: the first one is represented by teenagers' individual and group self-introspection, under specific forms such as self-awareness. This attitude further shaped a certain emerging normativity within teenagers’ peer groups. At the level of experience, teenagers consider everyday boredom especially in relation with the potentiality for excitement offered by the various communities they form. In the second perspective, I explored the social norms and institutions that largely regulated the social self. In this context, the rather unexpected encounter between boredom, as an individual or group subjectivity, and the appropriation of technology contests the ethical norms drawn upon teenagers by different institutions such as the family or school. Fostered by this twofold permanent interrogation of the self, teenagers actively engage with a permanent process of intensification of their existing social ties. I am suggesting that by appropriating communication technology within the collective accumulated expertise, teenagers dialectically negotiate the terms of their social relations against an ever changing set of ethical self-made norms. Teenagers are able to reproduce their social arrangements especially because while being bored or excited they insist on those normative schemes driven by group expectations. Furthermore, I am arguing that the permanent adjustment of teenagers’ social engagement corresponds to their enduring effort to overcome the underlying conflict between boredom and excitement.

Summarizing, periods of boredom are commonly thought (by teenagers, and particularly by their parents and professors) to be filled up by technology, namely by the various forms of exciting opportunities offered by the mobile phone, access to the internet, messaging systems, offline and online gaming, music, or television. Looking at how teenagers use such opportunities, I suggest that the intimate relation between boredom and technology is to be understood dialectically: on the one hand such personal technologies are constantly appreciated by the individuals as objects of desire per se, while on the other hand they represent unproblematic means for the individuals to access specific peer groups they are already engaged with. In other words, the object of desire distinctively shifts between the technological object itself and teenagers’ social sphere. This dualism is generating consistent tension in teenagers. In my thesis I argue that they manage to solve this anguish by constantly evaluating it against one particular set of ethical norms negotiated within the group. Teenagers’ notion of ‘value’ is what remains constant throughout their perpetual swing between boredom and excitement.

But what is boredom?
[to be bored is] ‘to have nothing to do, to finish all the things you have [to finish] that day and to want to do something and to come with no idea!... You haven’t the faintest idea what to do! And there is nobody there to tell you [what to do]…’ (Miruna, 16 yo)
or, more existentially:
[Boredom] ‘is like some small little worms that come to your feet, like that, and simply don’t let you stay in bed… you don't have peace! So you don’t have peace and you must do something in that moment: to consume your energy somehow, or at least to enter Mes for example, or to talk to phone, to let your thoughts go in some other direction, not to stay and think: ‘God, I’m staying in my room, like between four walls [laughs] and I cannot stand anymore, I cannot stand it!’ And I am looking for flies!’ (Beata, 16 yo)

I will give a sense of what is actually happening during this kind of boredom, by taking here only one aspect of it: that is the different strategies teenagers use in order to overcome boredom.

Most frequently, the afterschool boredom is experienced individually, while teenagers are in their own apartments. Usually it ‘settles in’ after some rather intense activity, such as practicing sports, finishing homework, or even playing for six hours on the computer. While bored, teenagers complain that ‘there is not much to do,’ time is ‘still,’ and especially that ‘you simply don’t know what to do!’ Under those circumstances, recuperation of the activities which are considered ‘interesting’ turn out to be something strongest desired. The main strategy teenagers use to ‘fight boredom’ is to promptly engage through various forms of communication with the most trusted friends. Following one of my informants’ words, this strategy could be called ’phone a friend!’ Indeed, mobile phone is renowned as the most reliable media one can use when bored. This strategy is generally considered the most active engagement with dissipation of boredom.

The second, more problematic, strategy consists in a rather ‘passive’ engagement (in the first place) with a larger audience: the bored (endangered) self publicly announce the fact that he or she is… bored. This announcement is explicitly done by broadcasting this annoying disposition to an extended list of contacts by means of Internet messaging systems, such as Yahoo Messenger or Skype. Such messages could be as simple as: ‘I am boooored…,’ as well as they could stand for a straight invitation to some specific activity: 'I am bored. Who wants to play Counter Strike?' In any case, teenagers could send such messages to several hundreds contacts. By publicly acknowledging they are bored, teenagers participate to a collective game with simple rules: in the first phase, they offer their peers the option to adopt or not the required attitude towards such a rescue mission. In a second phase, both senders and receivers would have one opportunity to engage into conversation: they could subtly choose if they want to respond or not, as well as the intensity of such response. Following that decision, the initiator of the message chooses at his or her leisure the persons and the modality he or she wants to continue the conversation. This method of dissimulated enquiry leads ultimately to a broader selection base for the future conversation. From this perspective, the apparently passive activity to ‘stay on’ the Messenger hoping that something interesting would happen constitutes in fact a dynamic method of exploration.

All these strategies include issues such as, for instance, differentiated response times (that correspond to the various levels of intimacy between peers), or a common preoccupation for maintaining a certain balance between a too enthusiastic attitude and an aloof one, between constancy and instability, and ultimately between boredom and excitement. Usually determination is to be found outside the self. As one consequence, if the expectation to overcome boredom is not met, the peer group is also in danger. During this entire process, the existing relationship is not questioned. What is questioned is how the peer group still responds to the individual need to overcome boredom.

From this perspective, boredom is perceived by teenagers as a temporary and precarious suspension of their notion of value, considered within their dual relation with the technological object and the various social groups they are part of.

As a consequence, technology constitutes just a means to expand the self through its active exploration of opportunities. Technology is important not because of what it enables people to do (relate, play, entertain), but because of how people do articulate their individual or collective selves through it. Both strategies outlined here, or more generally the way teenagers act (in the world) articulates a certain collective ethical realm, permanently adjusted by the bored or excited individuals against a set of shared values.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Francesca Simon Millar, PhD candidate Material Culture, UCL

Image 1: 3D scan of a Sepik Yam Mask, Papua New Guinea from the Ethnographic collection at UCL (Source: E –curator project)

Digital heritage technologies are radically changing the way we engage with material culture and are negotiating new ways of knowing and understanding the object. Realising the importance of digital technologies and new interdisciplinary possibilities, the E-curator project at UCL has been undertaken with the goal of applying two state of the art digital technologies: 3D colour laser scanning and e-science technologies. The research group behind the E-curator project are scanning six objects from across UCL Museums and Collections using an Arius 3D colour laser scanner installed in the Chorley Institute. It is the highest resolution and most geometrically accurate 3D colour scanner currently in the UK. The 3D object scans and relevant catalogue information are stored on an e-science storage system, Storage Resource Broker (SRB). Curators and conservators can then access the 3D object scans and catalogue information via the E-curator website, which displays the records stored at different sites.

Image 2: Aruis 3D scanner which is stored in the Chorley Institute at UCL. (Source: E- Curator project)

The project seeks to: (i) develop a traceable methodology for recording surface detail and colour quality of a range of object types and materials; (ii) explore potential for producing validated datasets to allow closer and more scientific examination of groups of objects, their manufacture and issues of wear and deterioration; (iii) examine how resulting datasets can be transmitted, shared and compared between disparate locations and institutions, for effectiveness in conservation reports and data transmissibility vis-à-vis conservation and object loans; (iv) begin to build expertise in use and transmission of 3D scan data as a curatorial tool.

Continue reading "E-curator project at University College London" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Joshua Bell, Curator of Globalization, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute

Long known for its pioneering role and place in the ethnographic/documentary film circuit, the 33rd annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival (http://www.amnh.org/programs/mead/) held this past weekend (14 – 16th November) was no exception. Twenty-six films/shorts were shown that collectively pointed to the continued vitality of film making and which highlighted an array of issues. In total I watched two shorts, and seven films, which I thought I would highlight for readers. A fervent believer in the capacity of film in teaching and reaching a wide array of publics, this was the first festival that I attended in full. My hope in reviewing these films, is that others will make the effort to see them and to generate a discussion about other films not discussed here that were shown at the festival.

Opening night of the festival (14th) celebrated the restoration of Edward Curtis's 1914 silent film In the Land of the Head Hunters. Presented in conjunction with the U'mista Cultural Center and Rutgers University, the film was shown accompanied by original music score played by The Coast Orchesta, an all-Native American Orchestra (see previous Material World blog post May 9, 2008, and see http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu for further information). Having watched and used the 1974 version of the film edited by Bill Holm and George Quimby, I was eager to see this version. The U'mista Cultural Center and executive producers Aaron Glass, Brad Evans and Andrea Sanborn are to be commended for their work on this project. The footage has been cleaned, missing portions replaced by Curtis' still photographs and in the case of the burning of a longhouse the deteriorated stock used to wonderful effect. The Coast Orchestra brought the film alive to a packed LeFrak Theater in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Descendants of key Kwakwaka'wakw collaborators and other participants in this project answered questions following the film. The screening and the film restoration epitomize the type of community collaboration that should be done with historical materials in museums, and provides a wonderful role model for other such projects. The evening was also a welcome antidote to an afternoon spent observing another form of revaluation of indigenous creativity at the Sotheby's auction of the African and Oceanic collection of Frieda and Milton Rosenthal, which despite the recent economic downturn fetched a total of $10,859,941 USD (http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotResultsDetailList.jsp?event_id=29056&sale_number=N08510 ).

Continue reading "Roving reporter - the Mead Film Festival at the AMNH" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Conferences and other events | Notes from the Field | Topics for Discussion

Christopher Tilley, Anthropology, UCL

The East Devon Pebblebeds project is an interdisciplinary investigation of the prehistoric, historic and contemporary landscapes of the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands of south-west England, UK. This area is one of the largest surviving areas of lowland heathlands in the UK and is a site of special scientific interest. To the south it borders the Jurassic coast World Heritage site. The heathlands survive on a geologically unique low ridge comprised entirely of water worn pebbles, the remains of a huge river which flowed through the area 240 million years ago and bounded today by the river Exe to the west and the river Otter to the east. Here there are a series of archaeologically unique Bronze Age cairns built out of bright multicoloured pebbles. A project investigating the landscape settings and the structure and form of the cairns began in 2008 and will continue for the next four years.

The heathlands also have a series of unusual landscaping mounds constructed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are fake prehistoric barrows. Their design seems to have been inspired not by the local pebble cairns but by monuments found elsewhere in southern England, probably those documented by antiquarians around Stonehenge and Avebury. These lined carriage drives to the grand house and 18th and 19th century landscape gardens of Bicton to which a dismantled prehistoric stone circle was taken to form part of a rockery. The contrast between the fake prehistoric barrows constructed on the pagan heathlands and the vision of nature produced in the landscaping of Bicton Park is quite striking.

Today the heathlands are very much a contested landscape being used for military training while also being a wildlife conservation area and a recreational resource for local populations. Topsoil scraping practices are, on the one hand improving bird habitats, but on the other threatening the archaeological resource. Pebble structures (walls, pavements, barn floors, house walls etc.) form a significant component of the vernacular architecture and heritage of the area.

The Pebblebeds project is researching all these different aspects of the landscape of these heathlands and is based in the UCL Anthropology department as well as involving scholars from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL and the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.

For more details see www.pebblebedsproject.org.uk

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Audrey Low, University of Technology, Sydney
Contact details: audrey.lpl@gmail.com,
Blog: http://papayatreelimited.blogspot.com/

(photo by Audrey Low. Detail, burial poles on the grounds of the Sarawak Museum, Borneo)

I came across Hedda Morrison's books on Borneo, and saw a photo of these exact burial poles in their original location in a Kayan area in Sarawak. It was incredibly evocative seeing the poles, called kelirieng, surrounded by mature trees in the forest. Morrison noted that because the poles were situated in such a densely forested area, it was really difficult to photograph. Today, the poles are situated in the grounds of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching.

(photo by Audrey Low. Burial Poles (kelirieng) and hut (salong))

These burial poles have had a very interesting biography.

Lucas Chin, the previous director of the museum, told me that he was involved in the negotiations with the original owners, the Kayans, to bring this object downriver to Kuching.

Continue reading "Burial Poles" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Notes from the Field

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

Adam Drazin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

“Freewill has to be experienced, not debated, like colour or the taste of potatoes” (William Golding 1959 p5)

How can we think about domestic materialities which effect a sense of deprivation or an absence of home-making?

I have been working since 2004 with people who have moved from Romania to Ireland, on the material culture of their homes. In many ways, this is a journey which typefies contemporary European experience: from post-socialism to a country which represents an economic and political renaissance within Europe; from a relatively cash-poor everyday life to one where salaries are higher. Most people make the move not as individuals but as families – a part of the project of family life and setting up home. Many people have married, many have had children, but cannot easily realise the aspiration to own a material home in Romania. Within Romanian culture, the drive to have a family and home are irresistable; ironically, many people feel they have to leave Romania in order to fulfil this project.

Consequently, the Irish-Romanian home might be expected to be a conscious celebration of materialism and a sense of liberation through mass consumption. Both Romania and Ireland are countries with a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in their recent experience, and in each case it is the home and consumption which provides the key measure of where society and culture stand now. McWilliams (2006) draws attention to the importance of consumption and home-making after the celtic tiger, negotiating what class and identity comprise in the ‘new’ Ireland. One third of the houses in Ireland have been built since 1995, an immense change, and a large proportion of Romanian men in Ireland work on these building sites. Romania meanwhile is still in some accounts a country after socialism, where private property and the home is the site of negotiation of identity. In the moment of moving from Romania to Ireland, a person is under immense social pressure to know their own mind, and to make the form of the home a mirror to their conscious plans for their own relationships and identity.

What can the specific material homes of Irish-Romanians tell us about this situation? The dangerous temptation for the anthropologist is to read the domestic material culture of Irish-Romanians as having an inevitable social trajectory, like a destiny. A person is seen as a ‘migrant’ who is on a road to ‘becoming Irish’, or on a road to becoming a ‘happy family’.

Irish-Romanian homes however defy expectations. Firstly, they are immensely varied. One person has little in common with another. Secondly, in many cases, practically no effort has been made for any kind of home-making at all. Walls are bare or – worse – retain posters and objects hung there by previous tenants. Objects lie around from multiple previous tenants, developing a veritable archaeology of habitation but not inhabitation.

Many people in Ireland have not actually made the decision to live in Ireland, and their physical homes and consumption manifest this state of being.

It is not unusual to meet people who have a large house, or several houses, in Romania, but have no plans to ever move back to Romania, disillusioned with that country. Nor do these wealthy people seem to have plans to attempt to integrate into Ireland, but work long hours and in the evenings stay in bare, rented homes, eating cheap food and watching Romanian TV. The physical sensations associated with these flats are often the subject of jokes: poor ventilation; plumbing which is either hot or cold, never warm; globular bathroom lights which gather water inside; windows which form ice on the inside. Such things, the joke goes, must have been installed by a Romanian builder, but they are unfavourably compared with Romanian apartments.

Petru and Betty are one couple in this situation. So why did they build the house in Romania? “Ca sa aiba copii” Petru told me, “for the children to have it”. Their two teenage children were still in Romania, living with relatives.

“The Romanian is different from the Irishman…” Petru said, “that’s the stupidity. The Romanian works like an idiot. He builds his house and then he dies.”

Home-making is often interpreted as a rooted activity, in terms of its relationship with place. But interpreting Irish-Romanian homes in only these terms evokes confusing contradictions and ironies. During two years of fieldwork, most material consumption evoked a sense of building relationships not only across spaces and places, but across time. When Petru says that the point of the house is for the children to have, he is not only saying that the house builds a relationship with the place, Romania, but that it builds a relationship with the future. The future is of course unknown, but nothing can build a relationship with children existing in the future, even after one is dead, like a house.

The counterparts to the monstrous empty villas being built in Romania are bare flats in Dublin. Just like those houses, the physical surfaces of flats often seem to bear witness to the development of intentions with regard to the project of building a moral family and household, and the variety of means by which this is to be achieved.

Carmen for example has a map of Romania on her wall which recalls a process of disillusionment in moving to Ireland, and her new resolutions of how to live and save for her future. She originally moved to Ireland on a full work visa from Romania, to work for a cleaning company (although they did not tell her that when she interviewed in Bucharest). She lived with her husband in a house for some years, and the idea was to settle and fully participate in Irish life, eventually becoming citizens. They tried to make friends and integrate, socialising with work colleagues in pubs. Over their time in Dublin, however, they came to “live different lives”. The decision to “live” in Ireland proved fatal for their 13-year marriage, and they decided to divorce. Taking stock of their situation, they had not managed to save much, nor to buy a house, and their pub-based social lives had not blossomed into any deep friendships. They decided to move back to Romania to divorce and, having closed all their accounts in Ireland, said goodbye to everyone.

Through a process of painful realisation accompanying divorce, Carmen decided that actually, she wanted a new start. She returned to Ireland, and resolved to do things differently this time around.

When I talked to Carmen, she was intending to implement the second strategy of living in Ireland. She did not intend to socialise, spend money, and make a home. She intended to work hard, save money and build up capital in order to be able to have a house and family, probably back in Romania. In her second life in Dublin, Carmen was living in a rented bedsit in a converted Georgian house, inherited from another Romanian tenant. The main part of the room was occupied by a bed, table and single chair. In a corner was a sink and small kitchen area, where she cooked on a set of rings. In the other corner, partition walls enclosed a cramped shower and toilet. Above the fireplace was a map of Romania and the Romanian national anthem, which begins ‘Wake up Romanian’ (Desteapta te Romanule). These belonged to the previous tenant, and she purposely left them there to remind her to ‘wake up’ to her situation. The walls of her bedist are like a calculated time capsule, in which she will live for a time, barely socialising, barely emerging except to work, which will transport her to an unspecified future life and home.

Continue reading "Irish-Romanian Homes and the Anthropology of Uncertainty" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Theocharidis Andronikos, PhD student, Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece

The typical conical shaped fireplace decorated with plates and bowls standing on the selves and jugs hanging on top. Top right: the built iconostasis and other mobile icons. Below left: Skyrian wood-carved skamnia (little chairs) positioned in front of the fireplace. Early 1920s. Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum, Athens.

Skyros is a small island located in the northwest Aegean Archipelago and in the south of a group of islands known as Sporades of which it is a part. It has around three thousand permanent inhabitants most of them living at the capital village which is situated at the east side of the island and is built on a hillside above the coast, with Saint George’s monastery and the old Fortress standing on the rock on top of it. In Skyros, there is a long tradition of collecting various types of ceramic, glass and copper wares. From the accounts of travelers who visited the island from the middle of the 18th century onwards we know that by that time these items were plenty and were used for the house decoration in a way that they covered almost completely the walls of the house. In published and unpublished documents, mostly marriage contracts (concerning the dowry of the bride or sometimes of the groom) and to a lesser extend wills (late 16th – early 19th century), one notes an extensive account / record of a variety of objects such as household utensils, tools, bridal costumes and other locally made or imported craftworks (embroidered cotton or silk quilts, bed sheets, towels, garments, dresses, carpets, wooden carved or painted chests and varieties of tin ware). The careful description and distinct place of these objects in the contract which also includes houses, land, animals and sometimes money denotes their importance. The various ceramic and glass wares because of their number are mentioned as an entity, as the ‘aloni’ (αλώνη) of the house, at the end of the document. In certain lists where all the portable property of an individual is written these objects are mentioned one by one and it is specified along with their number, also their material, color, shape, provenance (or the previous port where they came from) and sometimes whether it is an ‘old’ item.

The examination of the remaining such objects in contemporary houses, local and national museums and antique shops, in relation to the relevant literature, shows that some of these imported objects were even at the time when they were first acquired, luxury or semi-luxury items not only for the Skyrian upper class of the time but more widely in Europe and the Ottoman empire of which Skyros was a part from 1538 until 1830. Some of these are Italian Maiolica from the 17th to the early 19th century, Iznik ware from the 17th century and Kutahya ware of the 18th century, two of the main ceramic industries of the Ottoman empire, as well as European industrialized porcelain of the late 18th century and the 19th century, other varieties of ceramics from Italian, French and Dutch workshops of the 19th century and Tsanak kale ware, made by Greek potters in Asia Minor during the 19th century.

The upper class of the island, mainly literate landowners and merchants involved in the local administration, and the clergy connected to the monastery of St. George in Skyros, started to loose gradually their previous power and influence after 1830 when Skyros was incorporated to the newly formed Kingdom of Greece. The extended intervention of the Greek state and the overall social and economic changes led them to new means for acquiring economic and symbolic capital and many of them became doctors, high-rank officers, lawyers and professors or extended their mercantile activities. Their collections though of the various table wares retained their value and some of the merchants opened shops in the main city of the island and in so doing continued the import of these objects. The wealthiest of the shepherds and farmers had now greater access to such items which in the past constituted mostly the privilege of the upper class. Furthermore, as some of the families of the upper class moved to Athens they sold some of these valuable heirlooms to antique dealers and peddlers who were active in Skyros and in Athens. The interior of the Skyrian houses were these objects were displayed became more sophisticated with the adjustment of curved shelves and other constructions which the local carpenters and woodcarvers made. By the end of the 19th century and even more at the interwar period the local market of such ‘antiques’ (παλαιά, literally means of old) or ‘antiquities’ (αρχαία), as they are called in Skyros, was at its peak and during this period and later on in the second world war and in the 1950s and 1960s when more of the upper class families migrated to Athens, many such heirlooms changed hands between the Skyrian families or were purchased by outside dealers and found their way to antique shops or museums. At the same time new decorative wares of similar qualities kept coming into the island and these together with the local products of the ceramists (which started as copies of the ‘antiques’ in the 1920s and later created its own interpretations and variations) replaced the loss.

The interwar period was also the time when Skyros became more widely known to the Greek public and to an international circle of poets and intellectuals. The book of the folklorist Aggeliki Hatzimichali, published in 1925, in which she described the ‘Skyrian house’ and the local ‘folk art’ was one of the first studies in Greece which dealt with the ‘vernacular’ architecture and the so called ‘material life’(υλικός βίος) of ‘folk culture’ and her overall activity had a great influence on the aesthetic choices of a certain part of the Athenian upper class. The ‘Association of Greek Folk Art’ in Athens of which she was a leading member and the ‘Union of Skyrians’, founded at 1922 by a Skyrian elite who was living in Athens, helped to promote the Skyrian customs and handicrafts. The work of Skyrian woodcarvers won a distinction at the International Exhibition of Thessalonica in 1932 and at other national festivals. Also, many Greek poets and painters visited the island at the time and were inspired by its natural environment and its culture. The event that brought all those activities together and attracted the attention of the media of the time was the festival that took place at the island on the 5th of April 1931 for the occasion of the unveiling of the monument of the English poet Rupert Brook (1887-1915) who was buried in Skyros. The president of Greece Eleutherios Venizelos was present at the event along with Greek, English, Belgian and Egyptian scholars and politicians. The local municipality in collaboration with the ‘Union of Skyrians’ took great care in preparing the city for the reception of the honored guests, the journalists and the other visitors and founded a local archeological museum and a folklore museum which was actually a replica of the ‘Skyrian house’ and included an exhibition of local handicrafts.

With such a launching it is no wonder that from the middle of the 1950s and on, when the tourist industry start to grow in Greece and with the renewed interest in crafts internationally, Skyros and its local arts (mainly woodcarvings, ceramics and embroidery) came once again at the epicenter of the national crafts market. Especially the woodcarvings were very popular during the 1970s and 1980s when the use of ‘Skyrian’ furniture in the living rooms of many middle class apartments in various urban centers in Greece was a fashion. The embroideries were mostly popularized as images through the reproduction of their motifs in museum catalogues, magazines, postcards, pillowcases and advertisements of mass produced goods such as cigarettes. The potters’ products had also a wide circulation in Greece and to a certain extend outside of Greece. The period from 1955 to approximately the end of the 1980s was the time when the local arts ‘flourished’ and the local crafts market was at its peak, although some part of the potters’ production was made in workshops in Athens or was sold there. In addition, some non-Skyrian woodcarvers established workshops in Athens where they made ‘Skyrian style’ furniture. The connoisseurs and the aesthetic institutions played an important role in the promotion of ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ crafts and in the formation of the criteria of its authenticity but they were finally disappointed by the direction that the crafts market took because in their view it produced goods that lacked innovation and quality. From the beginning of the 1990s the demand for ‘traditional’ crafts is increasingly falling but ever since their price has been rising as many of the workshops have started to promote their artistic and their craft value.

The flourishing of the local arts at this period was a result of and depended on both the external and the internal demand. The Skyrian consumers influenced production with their preferences on color, technique, motives and their local knowledge in general, especially in the formation of the new ‘artistic ceramics’ and the numerous tourists (foreign and Greek) who bought souvenirs and made orders for their apartments contributed to the growth of the local market. This meant also that the Skyrians (both living in Athens or at the island) were able to purchase many decorative objects for their homes and enrich the interior constructions. In this way the local custom of decorating the walls with painted ceramic wares and the ‘traditional’ arrangement of the house with its wooden mezzanine, selves and other constructions were maintained and were gradually extended also to the rooms made for rent as well as the hotels and the houses that the foreigners bought. At the same time a series of replicas of the ‘Skyrian house’ became available to the wider public and contributed to the further institutionalization of this local morpheme of house decoration and interior arrangement. Furthermore, one of the commonly used statements for the advertisement of the island is that each house comprises a ‘little museum’.

Following the social biography of the Skyrian handicrafts as an imaginary totality and of the ‘Skyrian house’ as a complicated artifact in itself, I examine each one as a ‘distributed object’ (Gell 1998:221-23): an object having many spatially separated parts with different micro-histories. In this sense both the Skyrian handicrafts and the ‘Skyrian house’ are not viewed as ‘symbols’ but as indexes of agency. A pattern of protentions and retentions can be identified in the history of these interconnected orders of material culture which can be understood as distributed objects that are ‘structurally isomorphous to consciousness as a temporal process’, in this case to the collective consciousness and/or memory of the Skyrians. In the part of the Skyrians, both producers and consumers, various strategies have been adopted towards the reproduction of their crafts and the ways of decoration and interior arrangement of their houses which are relevant to constructions of their individual, family and collective identities.

Continue reading "An island of Collectors: Circulation of Heirlooms and Handicrafts on the Aegean island of Skyros, Greece" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Posted to Notes from the Field

Jennifer Stampe, Museum Studies, New York University

In April, Erica Lord performed Artifact Piece, Revisited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, in New York City. In reprising James Luna’s work The Artifact Piece, first presented in 1987 at San Diego’s Museum of Man, Lord asks us to reassess relationships among Native American peoples, museums, and anthropology now, after twenty year’s work at repatriation, collaboration, and Native self-representation. In addition to returning to issues of stereotype and expropriation raised by Luna, Lord broached several concerns not apparent in Luna’s work, including the position of Native women in the popular mind and the role of consumption and commodification in identity-production.

In his performance-as-installation, Luna, a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, lay stretched out on a bed of sand in a horizontal glass case, dressed in a loincloth and surrounded by personal effects and official documents, including his divorce decree and high school diploma. The work performed Native presence: against the prevalent idea that American Indian people vanished under European domination or were reduced to those traces found in static exhibit halls, Luna lodged himself in the museum as a living, animate, disruption of established power relations. As Jean Fisher put it in a 1992 Art Journal article, Luna’s work did not simply threaten to return a controlling gaze: rather, she wrote, the presence “of the undead Indian of colonialism . . . and the possibility that he may indeed be watching and listening disarms the voyeuristic gaze and denies it its structuring power” (Fisher 1992:48-9). The Artifact Piece thus came to exemplify a postcolonial critique of museums and anthropology that troubled long-standing assumptions about the relationship between “us” and “them.”

Lord’s Artifact Piece, Revisited was mounted at NMAI with Luna’s cooperation, in conjunction with an exhibit of his Emendatio, a piece commissioned by the Smithsonian for the 2005 Venice Biennale. In Lord’s hands, the physical disposition of the work did not differ much: it consisted most fundamentally of the artist’s body on display, surrounded by artifacts from her life made museum objects through anthropological commentary. This included a text panel giving the ethnographic particulars about her species (Homo sapiens), culture (Athabaskan/Dena), and region (Alaska). But where Luna’s work relied upon the threat that the museum-goer’s gaze might be returned, Lord’s depended more substantially on inviting that gaze and the viewer’s desire. Labels mounted in the case with her called attention to her pedicure (identifying her painted toenails as a component of a ritual for attracting a mate), her endomorphic body type and wide hips (suitable for childbearing), and her pierced ears and nose, specifying that while these were not traditional, they did allow her to wear ornaments acquired through traditional practices of gifting and trading. In this way, Lord called attention to ways that constructions wrought by the gaze are not only raced but gendered, such that Native American women find themselves in different relation to museums and anthropology, as well as popular culture, than that experienced by Native men. The larger issue here, the phallocentrism of the museum gaze, is a subject that goes much remarked in discussions of contemporary art and in the literature on exoticism but is comparatively absent in Native American studies. Lord provides us with a way to begin to attend more completely to the multiple desires and pleasures active in museum display.

In his work, Luna drew attention to his scars, explained in label text as the remainders of injuries suffered while drinking. Alluding to Luna, Lord noted her scars and bruises, but attributed them to biking and skateboarding accidents sustained in the course of what she termed an active lifestyle. This small difference between passive, depressive drinking and active, healthful—if dangerous—biking, suggests a world of change: where Luna takes up, and even embraces, stereotype in order to confront it, Lord refuses stereotypical associations, aligning herself with an ethnically unmarked, and perhaps unexpected, community of X-sporting youth. In a similar move, Lord wore a buckskin dress, described in label text as made of “traditional materials, moose and deer hides” and “previously used in the ritual of costuming for the popular American holiday of Halloween.” With this, Lord drew attention to multiple vectors of appropriation, suggesting that “playing Indian” is a Native pursuit as much as a non-Native one.

Continue reading "Artifact Piece, Revisited: Erica Lord at the National Museum of the American Indian, April 3-5, 2008" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

There is a good review of the Creation Museum at the literary journal, n+1:

Creation Nation

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Design Management Team, Heartlands

[Editorial note: The following photo essay expands upon recent postings on this blog about urban exploration, extreme landscapes and the relationships between objects, exhibitions and creative community representation].

The Heartlands Project is a community-led vision to transform Cornwall’s most derelict urban area into an inspirational cultural landscape. By celebrating and reigniting Pool’s local traditions of innovation, invention, creativity and enterprise the project will contribute to re-creating a truly great place to live, work and play.

Photo credit: Angelina Boscarelli and Ollie Oakenshield of Rogue Theatre

Fusing past, present and a progressive 21st Century future, the Heartlands landscape will see the creation of an inspirational public green space, outdoor classrooms, and event and performance spaces; all supported by the highest standards of streetscaping and landscaping. The site will incorporate public art in metal, stone, sound, light, and water features. The key feature within this reclaimed landscape will be the restoration of the derelict Robinson’s Shaft minehead complex into the 'World Heritage Gateway for Mining' in Devon and Cornwall. Heartlands highlights the aims of both the Big Lottery Fund’s Living Landmarks Programme and the local aspirations for community regeneration.

Continue reading "Heartlands, Pool - Play Jumping, Cornwall" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Nicolette Makovicky, Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Is a hand-made, lace g-string an appropriate symbol of local cultural heritage? This has been one of the questions villagers in Koniakow, southwestern Poland, have been asking themselves since some local lace makers began to turn out crocheted lingerie in the face of falling demand for their traditional products. The production of tablecloths and ecclesiastical items in crochet lace has been a cottage industry in Koniakow since 1864, when the wife of a local schoolteacher taught the younger girls in the village the technique. The craft was passed on from one generation of women to the next, eventually developing into a distinct local style with its own vocabulary of floral motifs. Acknowledged as a craft unique to the village, it became recognized as a form of ‘folk art’ in the 20th century. Koniakow lace found its way to national and international exhibitions, as well as into the households of several European royal families and the Vatican with the appointment of John Paul II. Since 2003, bra and panty sets are churned out by members of the collective KONI-Art, along with the by now infamous ‘stringi’ – Polish for thongs. Their products are sold locally, through the village website (www.koniakow.com) and through websites located in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

The commercial success of this crocheted lingerie demonstrates the ability of the small-scale manufacture of specialized goods to flourish alongside the global flow of mass-produced commodities. Yet, the innovative application of traditional motifs and techniques for the creation of this new line of products has not been without its challenges. The ‘stringi’ and their producers have been met with some resistance from within the community itself, as well as from the Catholic Church. Religious authorities have labeled the new line of products ‘indecent’ and the media reported that some craftswomen were reluctant to admit they make lingerie for fear they would be named and shamed in church. The Association of Folk Artists (Stowarzyszenie Tworcow Ludowych) has refused to grant the lingerie the official status of ‘folk art’, seeking to assert its right to determine and control ‘Koniakow lace’ as a brand (Grygar et al. 2004). Indeed, media interest in the story has done nothing to allay the social tensions that have appeared in Koniakow since the activities of the KONI-Art group in 2003. Rather, feasting on the story, the media has been eager to present the conflicts as a result of a liberal, young minority challenging an elderly, conservatively Catholic population within the village community. The Polish press has been keen to represent the ‘stringi’ as a symbol of burgeoning modernity, a thread that has been eagerly taken up by the international media.

Yet, while the image of grannies crocheting racy lingerie undoubtedly makes for eye-catching journalism, for the anthropologist it provides a case study for a much wider range of issues, particularly the relation between the transmission of craft knowledge and commercial innovation. Quite clearly, the emergence of the ‘stringi’ has challenged established norms and brought out latent conflicts surrounding issues of (sexual) morality, gender and entrepreneurship. The craft, however, is cultural knowledge shared by the majority of the women in this village and thus also a shared resource of income. The discussions and conflicts surrounding the application of a traditional technique for making ‘stringi’ can then be seen as an articulation of an ongoing negotiation of boundaries between the legitimate use and the misuse of craft knowledge. The relationship between tradition and innovation is a question of the political economy of knowledge, rather than simply the emergence of new material forms. The boundary between ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ is drawn through the constant renegotiation of who should know and how they should use their knowledge.

In July, I shall be going to Koniakow in order to conduct my first extended period of fieldwork in the village and these are some of the issues that will be informing my approach. Initially, I seek to understand why such issues as sexual morality, religious piety and adherence to craft tradition become the chosen vehicles for the articulation of this negotiation. Secondly, I seek to understand how the political economy of knowledge influences, and is influenced by, commercial practice. With the perhaps somewhat naïve enthusiasm of an amateur lace maker myself, I regard the emergence of Koniakow lace lingerie as a sign that the common prediction of the hand-made as a dying form of production is misconceived. I wonder what this case tell us about the emergence of new markets for craft objects in the globalised world.

Grygar J., Hodrová L. and Kočarková E. (2004) Koniakowská Krajka™. Vyjednávání tradice a lidovosti uměni ve Slezských Beskydách. In L. Hodrová and E. Kočarková III. Antropologické symposium. Plzeň: Aleš Čeněk.

Selected press:
Hańba z trzydziestu kwiatków Wysokie Obcasy (20/10/2003)
Koronkowie stringi budzą kontowersje Gazeta Wyborcza (24/8/2003)
Polish lace makers at odds over recent switch to G-strings The Wall Street Journal (4/6/2004)
Pope’s altar cloth makers turn to a more profitable line – thongs The Independent (8/8/2004)
Verushka’s Secret The New York Times (15/5/2005)
Heilige Höschen Stern (13/4/2006)

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Aaron Glass, UBC

Figure 1: T-shirt design by Beau Dick, distributed at his 1993 potlatch in Alert Bay, BC (photo by author).

A couple of years ago, at a conference on Native American art, I stood speaking with two colleagues, a Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) scholar from Alert Bay, British Columbia—the primary site of my research since 1993—and a non-Native man who had once attended a potlatch there. This gentleman reminded the woman that they had previously met at this potlatch, which was hosted by Beau Dick, a prominent artist, as a memorial for his father. The man couldn’t remember the exact year of the event, however, so he asked his indigenous interlocutor if she recalled. “Let’s see,” she said, tilting her head back and gazing at the hotel ceiling, “what does it say on my T-shirt?” After a brief silence, I chimed in: “1993.” They both glanced at me. “I have the same shirt,” I said with a shrug. (Figure 1)

This paper examines the circulation of Kwakwaka’wakw T-shirts within larger visual economies of display. Specifically, I explore the role of printed T-shirts in facilitating social reproduction through the public articulation of memories and identities in diverse contexts of daily life and in the face of plural audiences. This entails a historical and classificatory exercise, as I relate different types of shirt to their contexts of production and exchange. I draw particular attention to T-shirts as “souvenirs,” that is, as material forms that encourage individual memories for specific events, collective family and village commemorations, and public affiliations at varying levels of identification. To speak of T-shirts produced in First Nations communities is to track the indigenization of this technology of mass production and consumption, to trace its legacy and legitimacy within communities that have long been objectified by outsiders and that have witnessed their own art forms appropriated to sell everything from smoked salmon and mouse pads to the idea of province and nation itself.

Like other forms of visual display on the Northwest Coast, T-shirts play a mnemonic role, prompting the recollection and discursive recounting of the events marked by the shirt’s graphics or text. Unlike totem poles and crest tattoos, however, T-shirts allow for flexible affiliation as they can be put on and taken off as occasion merits or as personal membership in social groups fluctuates. As Georg Simmel (1904) would have appreciated, they permit the (post)modern individual wide latitude in his or her vestimentary constitution vis-à-vis social norms and fashions. Here, I focus ethnographic attention on non-ceremonial, everyday items of Kwakwaka’wakw clothing that are nonetheless highly significant as objective links to ceremonial names and titles, extended kin units, various organizations, and historical events. This paper addresses an essential—if mundane—form of modernity as it is indigenized and circulated through a local economy of gift exchanges, fund-raisers, and thrift stores, where it materializes both the remembrance of local events and the re-membering of socialities.

- The full article is published in Museum Anthropology 31(1): 1-18, 2008.

- For full color versions of the illustrations, please visit: http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com/2008/05/color-images-for-crests-on-cotton-paper.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Daniel Miller, Anthropology, UCL

I have just returned from spending December and January in the town of Kannur, in the north of the Indian state of Kerala. My main work there was concerned with a project being conducted by Dr Lucy Norris on the topic of waste and the decline of the handloom industry as part of the Waste of the World project. But while there I also carried out some work for the Global Denim Project. On return I decided to publish a short photo essay which can now be found at the Global Denim Project at www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project/ww While it is clear that there are few prospects at present for publishing a set of colour photographs, let alone video and sound within the normal academic genres of articles and books, it seems worthwhile to complement such publications with material posted on the internet. I am sure many people are coming to the same conclusion. Along with the sociologist Don Slater I attempted this originally with the book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach where all the illustrations were placed on an associated web site. I thought this would become a common convention, but clearly I was wrong. I have seen remarkably little use of the internet for posting the visual component of academic texts. While this blog is very helpful for giving some sense of new research, it doesn’t lend itself to extensive publication of photographs and other visual materials, for which a separate website seemed more appropriate. This is what I have done using the auspices of the global denim project.

A website allows one to give some background, for example, a sense of the range of housing, an image of the ruling Communist party and the rituals for which the area is best known; as well as more specific material about denim and other clothing. I intend to also write a paper on jeans in Kannur, but I see no reason why the visual material shouldn’t remain available, since it is unlikely that any academic publication will allow for such materials to be printed.

The particular interest of Kannur, in relation to global denim, is the relatively low take up of blue jeans in South Asia. In most regions I visit jeans have reached close to 50% of everyday adult dress. But in Kannur the figure is only 5% comprising 10% male and 0% female dress. The photo essay starts to give some indication of why this remains the case, and the academic paper will explore this in much more detail. Factors include the way men, once they gain employment or fatherhood, seek to differentiate themselves, and their relative economic security, from younger males. Also the current relationship between the Muslim population, who are closely associated with fashion compared to the Hindu population, which to some extent therefore avoid certain kinds of fashion. Also the way Kannur itself is constituted as a reserve of conservatism held against the changes taking place in metropolitan India, especially with regard to females. So in at least three different but related instances jeans have become involved in a kind of sartorial politics of repudiation.

There are many other interesting features of the local context. Kerala remains governed by what was the world’s first ever elected communist government. Kannur itself was previously government by Muslim rules, often a female Bibi. The area is undergoing rapid changes mainly as a result of money coming in from the Gulf. There are excellent academic publications on the region by Caroline and Filippo Osella, who give an unusual amount of attention to fashion. Incidentally we are happy to welcome new projects to the Global Denim Project. I am also starting up a news list to keep members in touch with developments. If you are interested in working on this topic with links to the overall project, please contact me at d.miller@ucl.ac.uk.

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Graeme Were, University College London

From Robert Opie's Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising who spoke at the workshop

In December 2007 and January this year, the British Museum hosted two workshops dedicated to exploring ‘extreme collecting’. Extreme collecting looked at those class of objects that could be considered ‘difficult’, those that resist being collected for these reasons. This may be due to their materiality (e.g. food stuffs), or size, and also those objects posing legal or ethical challenges. What emerged from the first two debates was that within museums, there is perceived to be a crisis in collecting, suggested by recent reports published by the Museums Association, Art Fund and the DCMS.

Some recurring questions emerging over the two workshops highlight the complexities of this debate. These are:
• Is safe collecting of use to museums? Safe collecting reinforces the status quo and leads to more of the same.
• Today’s junk could be the collections of the future. But how do we manage this in an era where data collection around an object matters more than the object itself?
• Widespread public participation in collecting has led to the uncovering of a great amount of information about Britain that otherwise would be lost. Does this force museums to collect in different ways and if so, what kind of ethical and legal issues does this raise?
• In what ways do new technologies such as the internet, EBay and digital images challenge conventional collecting practice? How do such collecting activities reconfigure curatorial authority, knowledge and control, as well as destabilize regimes of value attached to objects? How are museums engaging with these technologies and what are the legal and ethical issues at stake?

These debates will be developed further in two more sessions, on the 28th February and 31st March at the British Museum where we will focus on ‘size, scale and the ephemeral’ and ‘collecting and source communities’ respectively.

If any readers out there have written on extreme collecting, then we are currently soliciting papers for a publication later in the year. Please visit http://www.ucl.ac.uk/extreme-collecting for more information and submission guidelines.

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

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...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the editors | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Reclaiming the Sacred: Implementing a Community Based Museum in Santa Maria el Tule, Oaxaca.

Monica Salas Landa, Museum Studies, NYU

Monstrance, Community Museum in Santa María el Tule

Unlike the rest of the community museums established in Mexico, usually focused on pre-Columbian traditions, agrarian histories and contemporary craft production, the museum in Santa Maria el Tule, Oaxaca is devoted to religious objects, paintings, books and antiques. These pieces were found in the local church by residents who, holding a position in the Chapel Committee, came up with the idea of creating a museum to display these pieces. They sought support from the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca and presented the project to the rest of the community during an assembly. Although the idea of making a museum was accepted by the majority, the local priest openly condemned the project. Despite the priest’s protests, the community decided to use a fraction of the annual Church donations to implement their plan. With this moral and economic support, the Church committee carried on with the venture and started working along with the Union. Is the museum a setting where clerical authority and power are put into question? Or on the contrary, is it a setting where religious objects become a vehicle to challenge the picturesque way the Mexican State has imagined and represented both- indigenous and peasant communities- as carriers of a glorious pre-Hispanic past and a traditional culture?

Santa Maria el Tule is a small municipio (municipality) located in Oaxaca’s Central Valley, 6 miles west of the state capital, Oaxaca City. The community takes its name from the village patron saint, Santa Maria, and the famous ancient cypress tree, El Tule, which is a natural monument visited by tourists everyday. The church, dating from the 17th century, commands the central plaza, where the tree is also located. Together they compose the dominant landmark and form tourist industry of the town.

Santa Maria el Tule

As in many other villages in Mexico, life in Santa Maria el Tule is governed by popular religiosity. Especially in Southern Mexico, popular religion has been understood as a syncretic fusion of Mesoamerican and Catholic beliefs. Since the conquest, the clergy has attempted to impose Catholic orthodoxy by prohibiting folk practices and rituals. Today, an important aspect of “Folk Catholicism” especially in indigenous but also mestizo communities, like Santa Maria el Tule, is the cargo or mayordomia system. This civil-religious hierarchy is based on ranked offices that together comprised a community’s public, civil and religious administration. The men in the community aspire to attain lifelong positions in the hierarchy, which brings prestige and influence, but also requires a generous financial outlay, (Chance and Taylor 1985).
Besides its colonial origins, and the social inequalities it reinforces within the communities, the cargo system is also understood as a manifestation of spiritual authority and political resistance (Russ and Wassertorm 1980:466-477). According to Chance (1985:2-22), during the period of post-revolutionary consolidation in Mexico, the cargo system in many states such as Oaxaca began to decline. The State sponsored an “anti-mayordomia” campaign which portrayed the institution as wasteful and primitive. The system was abolished in many villages, but in many others such as Santa Maria el Tule it endured.

In July 2007, the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca invited me to work with the Church Committee of Santa Maria el Tule. The Committee, one of the most influential, prestigious and esteemed in the local cargo, was responsible not only for maintaining the chapel and organizing saints’ festivities, but also for the implementation of the community museum. Since my fist visit I was aware of the political significance of the project. The museum location in the main plaza, next to the patron saint and sanctuary, was revealing: the museum is located in a sacred space which historically, has symbolized community identity and autonomy (Bantjes 2006:147).

Continue reading "Reclaiming the Sacred" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Daniel Miller, UCL

Please do visit www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project This is the web address of a scheme designed to bring together what we hope will be an increasing number of projects on the topic of denim. The project is being announced in a paper called A Manifesto for the Study of Denim by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward which is being published in the next issue of the Journal of Social Anthropology. The abstract of the paper follows:-

This paper considers the challenge to anthropology represented by a topic such as global denim. Using the phrase ‘blindingly obvious’ it considers the problems posed by objects that have become ubiquitous. While there are historical narratives about the origins, history and spread of denim, these leave open the issue of how we make compatible the ethnographic study of specific regional appropriations of denim and its global presence in a manner that is distinctly anthropological. Ethnographies of blue jeans in Brazil and England are provided as examples. These suggest the need to understand the relationship between three observations: its global presence, the phenomenon of distressing and its relationship to anxiety in the selection of clothes. As a manifesto, this paper argues for a global academic response that engages with denim from the global commodity chain through to the specificity of local accounts of denim wearing. Ultimately this can provide the basis for an anthropological engagement with global modernity.

One of the main arguments in this paper is that at least occasionally it would be helpful if social anthropology tried to be social. Instead of everyone picking topics on the basis that no one was studying the same topic, perhaps we could occasionally pick topics because many people were agreeing to study the same thing in different ways over the same period. The Global Denim Project is an attempt to persuade as many academics as possible to consider studying denim over the next five years. Hopefully these will include historians, people concerned with the economics of the industry, and the cosmological significance it represents as a tension between global ubiquity and the personalisation of distressing. Miller and Woodward have now begun an ethnography of denim wearing in three streets in North London. Other projects range from a study of denim, sexuality and the body in Italy, to a study of trashed denim shoddy and its uses in recycling (until recently a third of US dollar bills were denim shoddy). Other proposals include denim in China, Japan and Korea, a study of how blue jeans record the movements of the body in their wear, and a proposal to work on the pressures towards ethical trade in denim in Turkey and Brazil. Brief outlines may be found on the global denim site. The point is that this is a global phenomenon and would be much better understood through collaboration between many projects. Think open-source academia. So if anyone out there would like to consider working on any aspect of denim over the next five years, a) go for it b) please contact me at d.miller@ucl.ac.uk and send something for the global denim project. Similarly if you know of anyone working on this topic please ask them to get in touch with d.miller@ucl.ac.uk

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Heather A Horst, University of California, Berkeley

In contrast to the industrial workplace wherein the factory gate established a clear boundary between work and domestic life, workers in the ‘knowledge economy’ maintain more fluid boundaries between home and work (Nippert-Eng 1996, Shumante and Fulk 2004). Joining a conference call during dinner, sorting email while watching a movie with the kids and logging in to work for a few hours after putting the kids to bed characterize just a few of the routine ways that work permeates into the domestic sphere in Silicon Valley, California (Darrah, Freeman and English-Lueck 2007, English-Lueck 2002). For children growing up in the land of Apple, Yahoo! and Google, innovation, self-regulation, competition and other values associated with work in the technology industry are as much a part of everyday life as the company logos emblazoned on shirts, hats and bags hanging in the closet.

Image 1: Map of Silicon Valley http://www.siliconvalleymap.com/otherpubs.htm, Accessed March 16, 2007

Work and the material assemblages associated with labor also shape the very infrastructure of home. Sonia Livingstone (2002) has written at length about the increasing importance of ‘bedroom culture’, or the prevalence of televisions and other media in kids’ bedrooms (Bovill and Livingstone 2001). While bedroom culture certainly exists in Silicon Valley, one of the most interesting aspects of Silicon Valley professional households involves the shift from the ‘kitchen table society’ (Gullestad 1985) to what I have been calling the ‘desktop society’. For example, Jeff, a 14 year old in middle school student, lives with his parents and his elder brother in one of the wealthiest areas of Silicon Valley. Both of Jeff’s parents are professionals, but his mother recently decided to become a consultant in order to devote more of her time to the boys’ school and extracurricular activities. Within this remit is the remodeling of their five bedroom house. Although there are two offices (one for each parent) and the two brothers have desk space in their rooms, Jeff’s mom decided to remove the kitchen table in order to construct a large desk space where the kids could do their homework each evening. Out of concern for their media usage, she then decided to make an addition to the home to separate the ‘work’ computer from the ‘play’ computer. Reflecting on her sons’ use of technology and media, she notes,

“We do restrict the use of the computer games and media during homework. And he said that well, sometimes or whatever - that’s just to clarify that - so and I think one of the things that we just had a discussion on is the distractibility of IM and that’s something that my husband and I have really talked to Jeff about…And the concern is the IM and the music and homework. So those three media is [sic] happening. So we’re concerned about his ability to stay focused on task when all that’s happening. And I think he’s been working on that, disciplining himself, right J?”

As becomes evident in Jeff’s mom’s discussion, it is by no accident that kids’ work spaces are constructed in the traditional site of household and familial reproduction, the kitchen and dining room. At a very pragmatic level, this is because many parents fear what their kids could encounter online behind closed bedroom doors. The creation of work place in a shared domestic space creates the sense that what kids are doing on the computer and online is public and thus keeps kids disciplined and on task (see also Lally 2002). A few parents have explicitly stated that the transformed office space is conveniently proximate to where mom and (sometimes) dad are cooking and thus parents can keep a watchful eye on their computer monitors while kids do their school work. In addition, the decision to install a desktop computer rather than a more portable laptop computer assists in solidifying this particular area as a home-work space, akin to their parent’s home offices.

Image 2: The Kids’ Home Office, Photograph by H. Horst, 2006

But parents are not the only ones structuring home-work spaces in and through technology. Evalyn, a 13 year old middle school student, lives in a four-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood with her parents and two siblings. Evalyn and her older brother attend private school and her older sister recently started high school at a respected public school in the area. Evalyn’s parents are both professionals who have worked for a few of the region’s large technology firms, although in the wake of the dot.com bust have become independent contractors and thus work primarily at home. Now that Evalyn has started middle school and is ‘not really a kid anymore’, she has been spending more time with her older sister. One weekend they were talking and listening to music together and they came up with an idea — it might be fun to share a bedroom and convert the extra bedroom into their own home office. As Evalyn describes,

“My sister and I moved in together recently - I was always living downstairs and she was living upstairs. Now she moved downstairs with me and we both put our computers and all our homework stuff and desk stuff up into her room. So now like clothing, jewelry, beds, they’re all in my room, and my room has an adjoining bathroom. And her room holds all the work stuff.”
The ‘work stuff’ Evalyn refers to consists of desktop computers, a printer, paper and a range of school books, work and media devices, including a shared iPod and digital camera. As a place designated for doing their homework, the kids’ office is also a space which is set apart from the shared family computers and printers which their brother and parents use. For teenagers, Evalyn and her sister are unusual in opting out of their own, private bedrooms, an act that seems to run contrary to almost all of the values of individualism and privacy associated with American middle class life. But as a semi-private space for ‘the daughters’, there is a curious symmetry between the integration of ‘work’ spaces in the home through the office and the re-segmentation of the spaces through the designation of one space as an ‘office’ and another as a ‘bedroom’. While this practice is not as prevalent as the transformation of the kitchen table space into an office space for homework, there are a variety of forms of this consolidation and sharing of office resources among siblings in other families as they gradually learn to integrate work in their own lives.

As Mary Douglas (1992) has argued, the creation of ‘home’ is ultimately tied to controlling time and space in order to create an infrastructure to frame the household as a community. In Jeff’s family and others where the home office is constructed in the kitchen and dining room, parents clearly play a key role in structuring the ‘public’ space and attempting to ‘discipline’ kids’ time. Kids’ strategies in using these media and technologies for ‘hanging out’ and countering ‘boredom’ may belie their structure — kids have lots of strategies for ‘looking like they’re doing their homework’ or hiding their use of certain programs. However hidden or revealed, they nonetheless continue to discern the relationship between home and work where it is already quite clear to them that within the home there should be spaces for work. The kid-driven creation of a home office suggests an even deeper incorporation of work into home spaces, one that reveals the micro-dynamics of social reproduction and poses provocative questions about the changing experience of childhood in late capitalism.

This ongoing research, which focuses upon the relationship between technology, media and domestic space in Silicon Valley, is part of a large-scale study entitled 'Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures'. A three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, research is currently being conducted at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley. To learn more about this research and the Digital Youth Project, see http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/

Continue reading "Kids and Home-Work in Silicon Valley" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Marjorie Murray, Anthropology, UCL

In his critical analysis of the Castilian character at the end of the nineteenth century Miguel de Unamuno described them as people who see things as clear-cut as their climate and landscape; ‘an extreme climate without sweet warmth, with a landscape that is uniform in its contrasts’ (1895: 182). He suggested that people there observe the world in discreet terms. He suggested this could be easily appreciated in the pictures of the old school of Castilian painters, which realism lacks gradations or the soft transition of nimbus. He makes a similar point when describing the Golden Century Theatre in Spain, particularly that of Calderón, whose characters don’t lack internal contradiction when compared with Shakespearean ones and whose stories he describes as slow, sensual and full of didactic clues for the audience.

During the nineteenth century -that in which the position of Spain in the world was definitely questioned- Castilian literature and theatre drifted from romanticism to realism in the search for a detailed description and representation of their ‘traditional’, stereotyped local characters; their work, psychological attitudes, social class and customs. These characters performed regularly in new shorter and cheaper plays (the género chico or small plays of one act) and the zarzuelas to which a wider range of the population had both access and interest. These genres of antiheroes ranged from the young maid coming to town, the ironing lady and the sereno (night guard in the streets) to the young MP or the beggar. This was the time when the now mythical ‘chulapos’ and ‘chulapas’ came to existence both in stage and the street, hanging carnations and Manila shawls. As part of my ethnography of material culture genres in Madrid I spent long hours studying people’s clothing through the analysis of wardrobes, with detailed discussions and comments on others’ outfits such as those of people in the media and shopping. One of the obvious conclusions is that clothing is the best tool for a detailed and sophisticated identification of stereotypes -as well as individuality in the small touches or the capacity for combinination They tend to characterise not serenos or ‘cursis’ (a nineteenth century character of the new rich and bad taste to which several books were devoted at that time) but give detailed descriptions of the ‘pijos’ (upper middle class and upper class that show off with certain labels, etc.), the ‘modernos’ (moderns as against to classic) or the ‘horteras’ (cheap and with bad taste) just to name a few. Most of my informants identified a range of such characters and are quick in incorporating new ones as they appear in the city. More surprisingly, they frequently describe themselves as belonging to one or other category and they have a profound knowledge of the aesthetic option that they have thereby chosen. .

Stereotyping and clothing reveal some of the most profound characteristics in Madrileno society. I will use here Inditex –the giant retailer best known for its brand Zara- as an example of how affluent and cosmopolitan Madrid has redefined but not eliminated strict clear-cut divisions, in this case in the stages in women’s life course. Inditex is the master of the Spanish high street, with several brands and shops. If we concentrate only on those for women, we find that there are five different brands that follow the retailers’ successful strategy of making fashion and style affordable and democratic. The names of the brands are Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Zara and Massimo Dutti. Very briefly, my observation of them in the context of Madrid’s high street suggests that they embody something that is more complex than brilliant market categorizing and identification of taste; they also show how inevitable it is for women to end up buying in what they call ‘mothers shops’ (tiendas de madre). In a nutshell the story goes as follows. After a childhood of laces and pink, early teenagers can express their new stage in life through clothes such as that of Bershka, the most colourful and up to date fashion that resemble the looks of young national and international celebrities. Teenagers can also start buying at Stradivarius and Pull and Bear. The first one is urban and sophisticated, and much wilder than ‘mainstream’ Zara. Pull and Bear is a more sporty version of youth, with less black and more light coloured cotton in what many informants associate with ‘affordable surfer clothing’. Zara welcomes the students and workers in its formal, work and casual clothes sections as well as a section that is more expensive and quality that is certainly targeting middle aged and perhaps mothers, as the range of sizes evidently show. Massimo Dutti is a higher end version of Zara in which the extra euros paid, the more ‘classical’ cuts and colours -as informants put it-, give a sense of elegance that is absent in the other brands.

What I find interesting is how informants themselves associate each of these shops with groups of women in society, that are not only defined by taste (or even class) but very much by life stages. The irreverent young girl in shiny shoes and mini skirt will inevitably end up in something like the middle- age section of Zara or Massimo Dutti depending on their work and income. This takes place before they are ‘sent out’ to the proper ‘mothers’ shops’ (tiendas de madre) as they call them, that range from department store El Corte Inglés to local ‘mothers’ shops’ and the recently arrived cheaper Chinese clothes shops. Put another way, people in Madrid suggest that ‘styles’ through clothing tend to ‘disappear’ after a certain age; there is a time to play the corresponding character, which is reinforced through the right characterisation of the role. As a youngster you can select among different characters (from Goths to pijas); as a mother the options are reduced and you should focus on learning your part very well. This must be considered when thinking of the ‘Peter Pan’ phenomena or the avoidance of making the big step to adulthood and maternity in today’s Spain. If the peasant girl made the biggest step in life passing from virginal long hair to short hair and pearl necklace the day after the wedding, contemporary women in Madrid go through a more sophisticated and longer route but to a similar goal. Many will all end up in the tiendas de madres and will play this very hard role; eventually ‘the performance of their lives’.

I wanted to use this example to share some of the current questions regarding my own ethnographic material in Madrid. After months of analysing my work on different genres of material culture –including clothing, home interior and mobile phones- I am currently going through essayists’ historical, and travellers’ writings. I believe this is an unavoidable step in order to understand some of my findings on their normative sense of propriety and aesthetics, just to mention one of many issues.

Most of this historical and literary material is far from being ethnographic or anthropological but I hope it will help me build little by little what again Unamuno -a sharp observer of his people and times- described as the intra-historical in Spain, which is moulded but always crucial for the observation of events and historical circumstances. He believed in the longue durée before Braudel and I am currently asking (you!) whether this is a right path to understand and explain my ethnography. At the moment it feels like I am trying to grasp something that is too ethereal and elusive, and it might not lead me anywhere, but it has certainly been one of the most exciting times in the process of writing up the thesis. It would be great to hear your opinions or experience as I guess many of you have gone through similar questions and decision- making when working on your ethnographic material and trying to link it with very different styles of historical and literary material that make up the background past to the ethnographic present Or maybe not? Am I going Quixotesque?

Posted by Graeme Were at 5:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Paul Williams, Museum Studies, New York University

1. Background

Of the large-scale heritage preservation efforts taking place across the world, the B Reactor is not the easiest sell. Built in just 11 months during World War II, it was the world’s first production-scale nuclear reactor. It provided the source of plutonium for the very first “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert, for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and tritium for the first hydrogen bomb. The Hanford complex was instigated in 1943 when a judge confiscated a 1,500 square kilometer area in the state of Washington. Residents received some money, no explanation, and 30 days to move. A construction camp of 50,000 workers then replaced them almost immediately. Of the nine reactors at Hanford, the B Reactor, which ceased operating in 1968, is the last available for consideration for preservation by the National Park Service as a museum. The other eight decommissioned reactors have been fenced off and “cocooned” while radiation in their cores slowly decays. A final decision on the B Reactor, which has received several national awards as a nuclear and engineering landmark, is not expected for several years.

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Approached from a distance, the B Reactor emerges from the sagebrush steppes like a sinister grey hulk. Once inside, it is difficult not to marvel at the building, at least on an engineering level: its reactor core is a five storey high, 1,200 ton graphite cylinder, penetrated horizontally by 2,004 aluminum tubes. Two hundred tons of uranium slugs, each the size of rolls of quarters, were inserted into the tubes. When enough slugs were in place, they would form a “critical mass,” which would initiate the uranium’s transformation into plutonium. Cooling the reactor core required water pumped from the Columbia at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute. Inside the windowless fortress, the sheer industrial weight of the building feels somewhat menacing. At the same time, there is an uncanny relation between the monumental technical achievement that the building represents – which remains contemporary in consequence – and the antiquated analog dials, gauges, switches, and typewriters within it. Visitors see, for instance, the drafting table where physics Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi worked for three straight days to get the reactor up to speed, using nothing but a slide rule and graph paper.

Continue reading "Plan B for a Nuclear Reactor: After Production Comes Preservation" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Ivana Bajic, Anthropology, UCL

The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
-(Emerson 1906: 291)

This paper is based on a twelve months ethnographic research of material culture of post-1990 Serbian migration from Belgrade to Western Europe, North America and Australia. The ethnographic material seems superficially symmetrical in a sense that I was looking at the same material culture genres -- homes, gifts and communication - on both sides of this migration, sometimes matching specific migrants in London and their parents in Belgrade. However, the data reveals a certain asymmetry between the two sides of migration. Contrary to what development studies on Serbian remittances suggest*, this asymmetry consists in parents’ conscious efforts to be the givers, even if that entails vicarious sacrifices on their behalf, and in children’s, again, conscious efforts not to be the recipients of their parents’ sacrifice, even if that involves minimum efforts on their side. Regardless of whether a son or a daughter would keep in touch by visiting, sending gifts, phoning or sending emails or by contrast had become totally estranged, parents would talk about them, commemorate to mark passage rituals in absentia (i.e. celebrate births and birthdays of absent grandchildren and children, engagements and weddings), distribute their photographs among family and friends. In a nutshell, parents invest conscious efforts in preserving absent migrant children and their families from social death in Serbia.

For the immigrants sending money seems as the most practical gift for their parents. They consider remittances to be a kind of insurance that parents would be able to afford a better diet, to pay for private health services if needed, or for any other emergencies which their parents’ pensions cannot cover. What the children fail to appreciate is that if accepted on those terms, such a gift would radically alter the balance in a parent-child relationship. The power would be seen to shift from parents, as providers and givers, on to children.

For Serbian parents in Belgrade, many of whom were born before or during the Second World War and who share traditional patriarchal values typical of the first half of the 20th century Serbia, it is not acceptable to receive material support from children. Remittances are a taboo among Belgrade-based emigrants’ parents. The very question whether they receive money from their emigrant sons and daughters abroad would cause deep embarrassment among parents in Belgrade. Even if they were receiving remittances, parents would insist that they were not using that money for supplementing their pensions and they did not consider them to be classical remittances like those of Yugoslav Gastarbeiters** on a temporary work in Germany in 1970s and 80s. To receive financial support or a gift which value is not purely symbolic, Belgrade-based elderly parents consider as something which only “peasants” (i.e. non-urban people) would accept. The gift which parents deem appropriate for the parent-child relationship is a gift with little or no material value, the gift which is symbolic and inalienable. Money thereby becomes a kind of circulating form of inalienable gift, which parents do not use for consumption but either put aside and save it so that their children would have it back as an inheritance, the exception being only purposes that transcend consumption such as a treatment of a severe illness or for funeral expenses. The gift which comes from a ‘sacred object’ of parental care and love – a child, cannot be consumed in mundane way. A ‘sacred child’ proved to be a dominant theme in mothers’ discourses about their children’s migration. As one of my informants from Belgrade said:

“My son knows that I am struggling to make ends meet with my pension, and he asks me if I need help. But I would never ask him for help; I would rather find my own ways of surviving than receive money from him. I was trying to get pregnant for thirteen years…For thirteen years I was waiting to have a baby. My son came as a gift from God. There is no way I could ever accept anything from him, because he is so special to me.”

Serbian mothers’ narratives about emigrant sons and daughters are evocative of Viviana Zelizer’s study of the making of ‘priceless child’ in early 20th century America (Zelizer, 1994). Zelizer argues that a shift in constructing the ‘sacred child’ emerged as a consequence of massive industrialization which was going on in American society at the turn of the last century. Gradually a child transformed from seen primarily as a work force, and even priced as such (older children had more value than younger ones), to a priceless, becoming an object of parental continuous sacrifice and unconditional love (Zelizer 1994).

Industrialization in Serbia did not really take place until the mid-20th century, when Tito put Yugoslavia on a fast-track for catching up with belated modernisation. Up until the Second World War, ninety percent of Serbian population were peasants, with families organized in collective households called “zadruga” (Perovic, 2006). The child in “zadruga” was considered primarily as a work force; there are documented cases in Serbia of families bribing teachers not to take their children to school because they needed them to work and sustain household (Isic, 2006). Once social reforms and severe industrialization started in post-Second World War Yugoslavia, the role of a child began to transform as well. “Useless child” became a token of modernity. To admit to having a child with prospect of having material benefit from it, became a taboo in the second half of the 20th century Serbia, similarly like half a century before in the United States.

Continue reading "The Serbian Gift" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field

by April Strickland, New York University and Andy Rotman, Smith College

On a trip to South Africa in 2003, we spent a brief layover in Johannesburg in the lounge of the Airport Sun Inter-Continental Hotel, located just outside of the international terminal. Over coffee and snacks, we joined staff and patrons in watching a South Africa-Scotland rugby match on the lounge’s large television. During halftime we wandered into the main seating area where we came across a wall covered with African masks. The masks were of traditional designs from Kenya, Gabon, and the Congo, but instead of being made of traditional materials, they were made of plaster and painted white.

photo 1: courtesy of Wilson and Associates

photo 2: April Stickland, 2003

To learn more about this wall of masks, we spoke with S, the maître d’ of the restaurant. S explained that the designs of the masks were from “traditional cultures” across Africa, so the wall of masks was “like a map of Africa.” Yet these were not “real” masks. They were “fakes” made in a local factory, rendering the map somewhat artificial. Real masks would have been better, S told us, but traditional objects were simply more expensive. They were also more dangerous. Pointing to the curtain of fake porcupine quills hanging from the ceiling, S explained that real porcupine quills were costly and dangerously sharp. Plastic replicas of porcupine quills, he said, offered the same appearance, but they were cheaper and safer. According to S, Africa’s traditional objects and forms were frightening, if not dangerous, to Afrikaners. Real masks would unsettle them, as would traditional African dress. S said that if instead of his headwaiter’s suit and tie he wore his native attire from Malawi, replete with the requisite “big knife,” diners at the restaurant would flee. By contrast, when we asked S what constituted traditional Afrikaner culture, he gestured to the restaurant’s patrons and said, “Drinking in bars. And they have some songs.”

photo 3: courtesy of Wilson and Associates

Our conversation with S was soon interrupted by the end of halftime, and S once again turned his attention to the rugby match. He had bet on Scotland with another restaurant employee, and he followed the match intently. Though everyone else in the lounge, the mostly black staff and the mostly white patrons, was rooting for South Africa to win, S was rooting for Scotland. S explained that he didn’t ally himself with the predominantly white Springboks, the South African team that for decades was an icon of apartheid. Rugby wasn’t his sport. Soccer was his game. Regardless, Scotland prevailed, and A lost his bet.

Continue reading "White African Masks: Representing Africa in a Johannesburg Hotel" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Chaim Noy, Independent Scholar, Jerusalem, Israel

In this project, in which I am concerned with discursive mobilities and materialities in tourism, I intend to investigate visitor books as a unique medium of communication in a number of different sites. In this opportunity I wish to present and discuss one case study, which includes a visitor book that is located in a military memorial museum in Jerusalem, Israel. The project reflects some of my standing interests in everyday communication processes, which are sometimes titled in sub-disciplinary terms as, “culture and/as communication.” In earlier works I was occupied with travel and communication in the sphere of tourism, and specifically with tourists’ storytelling performances (Noy, 2005, 2007). Yet I realized that these performances, although making primary use of the oral mode of communication, were in effect anchored in material, embodied, and aesthetic realms. This realization led me to search for other types of performances in tourism, where the salient mode is that of inscription (writing), rather than oral; that is to investigate the inscriptional—rather than oral—economy of tourism (as de Certeau would have put it).

Visitors’ books are commonly acknowledged as interesting cultural artifacts. Yet they are also fascinating surfaces of and for communication, and, due to their position within various institutions, they also supply an interesting instance of a public communicative medium.

Instead of directly approaching the discourse embodied in the book, in the form of visitors’ entries, and perform various discourse/content analyses on it, I wish to view this institutional medium primarily from material, spatial and technological perspectives. I choose this approach because the western logocentric bias, as Derrida has taught us, has limited our understanding of semiotics to the sphere of representation. Hence, in attending to non-representational aspects, or at least contextualizing representation in other modalities, what is meaning, and how it is accomplished situatedly can become clearer. Here’s what I mean.

From a spatial perspective, there are two interlinked aspects I will take up here: the space for the medium and the space of the medium. The former space concerns the institutional (museological) space allocated for the visitor book, or the space in which the medium is actually located and operating. This is true for various objects, communicative devices included: where the device is located has much to do with how it is consumed and with the meaning it assumes (cf. domestic, public, ceremonial and other spheres). (See Silverstone and Hirsch 1992).

There is something interesting in this regard to tell of the visitor book I studied. While visitor books are usually located by the exit of the institutional premises, thus enabling to capture visitors’ overall impressions of the sites, attractions and exhibits they have seen, the visitor book at the Military Commemoration Site illustrates an exception. Interestingly, it is not located by the exit, but to the contrary, it is strategically positioned in one of the museum’s innermost halls (see Figure 1). It is thus located in the area of the museum which is variously marked as the space of the “holy of holinesses” of commemoration. This is where the Golden Wall of Commemoration and the Eternal Flame are located, and where an audiovisual installation fills the inner halls with the fallen soldiers’ names and ranks voiced through in a severe tone.

Figure 1: The visitor book’s impressive installation in the “holy of holiness” of commemoration

Continue reading "The Materiality of Visitor Books: Observations from an Israeli Military Commemoration Site" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Philomena Keet, PhD candidate, School of Oriental and African Studies

FRUiTS magazine

What makes a piece of clothing ‘fashion’? What’s the difference between following fashions and being fashionable? Fashion as always been noted for it’s paradoxical elements, simultaneously anchoring the wearer into a group whilst representing the desire to be individual. This dynamic was amongst the phenomena that I researched whilst doing the fieldwork in Harajuku, Tokyo for my anthropology PhD which, appropriately for this blog, is entitled ‘Living in a Material World: Spectacular Street Fashion and the Changing Fabric of Japanese Society.’ Japan, whilst often imagined to be a very conformist society, is a world leader in innovative fashion and the Harajuku fashionistas whom I studied provided yet another instance of individuality to counter this image.

Some people may be familiar with the photo books full of colourful and crazy outfits being worn by youngsters in Tokyo called FRUiTS (Phaidon, 2001). The magazine from which the images came is still published monthly in Japan and is now complemented by a magazine devoted to equivalent men’s street fashion, Tune. Of course, fashions change, and the styles involving bright colours, childish prints and a plethora of plastic which once featured in FRUiTS as as the newest trend are now passé and relegated to the subcultural realm of ‘visual’ rock music.

On every page of current FRUiTS and Tune is a full-length snap of an oshare (stylish) person, usually aged between 18 and 25 and dressed in a mixture of avant-garde designer clothes, ‘remakes’ (customized clothes) and second-hand garments. I spent the majority of my fieldwork working together with the main photographer for the magazines, much of which involved sitting on the railings of a busy corner in Harajuku, a trendy area of Tokyo, watching passers by until one deemed suitably oshare walked past. They were then stalked and pounced upon for photos and a simple questionnaire. Over time I learnt how to distinguish someone who they considered to be oshare, but this was not as a result of learning hard and fast rules, but rather was a process of embodying knowledge over time

One of my outfits at work: Skirt made out of a parachute, militaristic old leather leg gear attached by wires to a belt and shoes from an avant-garde Russian designer.

I also had the opportunity to work in a boutique central to the scene. The staff, many having been to fashion school, were often in FRUiTS and Tune themselves, and the clothes sold there featured heavily in the magazines too. The stock reflected the overall FRUiTS/Tune aesthetic: there were new avant-garde designer clothes sourced from Paris showrooms, their famous ‘remakes’ (customized items such as skirts made from parachutes and Swarovski stone-covered trainers) and peculiar and unusual second-hand clothes carefully chosen from flea markets. Every morning I would be dressed and styled by one of the staff, often to quite strange effect! But this process was invaluable for experiencing oshare first-hand and for experiencing the reactions of others to my daily transformation.

A 're-made' lab coat that I did. It sold quite quickly!

In this project I am interested in exactly what makes someone in this scene oshare. Of course their clothes, but this is not enough. They need to achieve a completely balanced and coordinated aesthetic that includes hairstyle, looks and posture. The outfit must look like it has been assembled naturally, almost like an extension of the wearer – it must ‘fit’ not just your body but your character. That is that an oshare identity is not entirely constructed by a fashionable outfit, but something perceived to be more intrinsic to the wearer, often referred to as ‘aura’, must authenticate it if it is to be successfully carried off. I am also interested in the flow of trends and trendsetting within the scene and the implications this fashion scene has for wider Japanese society and hitherto studies of creativity there.

I have also recently published a book about Tokyo fashion in general, including not just the fashions that my fieldwork dealt with but the entire spectrum of Tokyo youth fashion, ranging from businessmen to Gothic Lolita. Called the Tokyo Look Book it is out in Japan in July and elsewhere in November.

Links:

• www.tokyolookbook.com
  
• www.fruits-mg.co.jp

Posted by Graeme Were at 3:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Christa Salamandra, Lehman College, City University of New York

Over the past decade, Syria has developed a television drama industry rivaling that of Egypt, long the center of Arab media production. With the spread of satellite technologies and the proliferation of Arabic language satellite stations, Syrian dramatic miniseries, musalsalat, reach ever-widening audiences throughout the Arab world and in numerous diasporic communities beyond. The industry has become powerful and prominent, and its products increasingly technically refined. An average of thirty, thirty- episode Syrian series now air each Ramadan—the prime Arab broadcast season—in what industry figures have dubbed al-fawrah al-dramiyyah, “outpouring of drama” (Dick, in press). With this expansion, television drama has become the contemporary Syrian cultural form par excellence. But for many television makers, this success reflects the steep cost of economic liberalization, a process rife with bittersweet consequences. My fieldwork among Damascus-based TV makers examines the processes of liberalization, regionalization and Islamization from the point of view of Syria’s largely secular artistic and intellectual community.

Syrian television has become a key symbol of national culture, transforming both the way Syrians see themselves in relation to other Arabs, and their image in the Middle East and beyond. Syrian historical series are taken so seriously as to produce diplomatic tensions. For instance, the Turkish government took issue with references to the Armenian genocide in Najdat Ismael Anzour’s Brothers of the Earth of 1996. More recently, American officials lobbied complaints about the perceived anti-Semitism of 2003’s The Diaspora. Most dramatically, the US managed to persuade Qatar State Television to suspend broadcast of the Road to Kabul, a Syrian-Jordanian co-production, after eight episodes. The Americans feared the series’ sympathetic depiction of mujahadeen fighting the Soviets would attract new recruits to the Iraqi insurgency (Dick, 2006).

The Syrian television industry parallels and reflects the transformations Syria’s deBa’thification process is producing. Throughout most of its history, Syrian television was state-owned as well as state controlled; its employees uniformly low in status and relatively impoverished. A move toward economic liberalization in 1991 opened the door to a mushrooming of private production companies. Syrian television now attracts, and to varying degrees employs, writers, directors, photographers, visual artists, designers, composers, musicians and actors, from various sectarian, regional and class backgrounds. The emergence of a star system has produced increasing social fragmentation, as some have become wealthy and famous, and many more struggle.

The television industry encompasses entire local intellectual and artistic communities, and situates them in a growing pan-Arab regional market where numerous, well-financed, private and state-owned satellite stations buy Syrian productions. Industry discourses reflect the dilemmas facing Syria’s artists and intellectuals, whose world has widened. Syrian television is increasingly transnational, but must operate within the confines of a state whose attitude towards the medium remains ambivalent. Sometimes the state embraces TV as an emblem of Syrian national culture, or a safety valve for oppositional voices. At others it tightens the reigns on television’s potential subversion. Usually, television drama appears a low priority on the state’s agenda. While government censorship persists, public sector involvement in other aspects of production shrinks. Syrian state television produces an occasional low-budget musalsal, and also buys some privately produced series. But it is the Gulf Cooperation Council satellite television stations, both private and public, that finance and purchase the bulk of Syrian programming. Producers argue that a lack of state regulation exposes them to the capriciousness of Gulf business practice. While Egypt’s foreign ministry has taken upon itself the role of distributor, marketing packages of series to Gulf channels, the Syrian state has left its TV makers to fend for themselves in a competitive market. As one scenarist argues: “We have become like vegetable peddlers, selling series out of sacks on our backs as if they were potatoes.”

A sense of disenfranchisement permeates the industry. Syrian TV makers are aware of-–indeed perhaps exaggerate—the power of their medium to transform Syrian society, and often see themselves at the vanguard of a modernizing process. They feel that GCC domination of the market has usurped this important role. Elitist assumptions about mass culture persist in the absence of ratings or formal channels for viewer feedback. TV producers see Arab audiences as unsophisticated and impressionable. Viewers, they believe, will absorb and conform to television’s messages. Industry figures argue that the potential for promoting progressive political or social agendas has actually decreased with regionalization. As a pioneer director put it, “in the old days, we were poor, but our art was our own. We produced work that we felt was good for Syria. Now we have become like merchandise, slaves to a bunch of Bedouin who have no appreciation for our urban civilization.”

Even if TV makers were able to “say” what they liked, the current media cacophony would likely drown out their voices. As viewer choice widens, social and political impact narrows. Increased drama production and expanded satellite access have obliterated the annual media sensations that once both united the national audience in the act of viewing and responding. In place of the singular Ramadan television event of the early 1990’s are some thirty Syrian musalsalat, aired on numerous terrestrial and Arab satellite stations, both private and public. One informant recently calculated that a viewer would have to spend ten hours a day watching TV during Ramadan to get an accurate sense of the drama series on offer.

Drama, once the centerpiece of Arab television production, no longer dominates the primetime, in Ramadan or the rest of the broadcast year. The musalsal, perhaps the oldest local genre, and the one Syria arguably dominates, now cohabits a televisual torrent of game shows and reality TV from Lebanon, and the news-as-entertainment debate shows offered by Al-Jazeera and its many competitors. A resurgent Egyptian television drama industry, recovered from a slump during late 1990s, adds its own numerous muslasalat to the Ramadan mix.

Funding exigencies and foreign competition have not curtailed experimentation, as Syrian series encompass a broad range of styles, genres, settings, and topics. Production has become increasingly sophisticated. As budgets swell technical standards soar. In the mid 1990s Syrian directors moved their cameras outdoors; land and cityscapes distinguish Syrian dramas from their studio-filmed Egyptian counterparts. Yet amid the “outpouring”, two dominant themes emerge: an exploration of local resistance against foreign occupation and evocations of Imperial Islam. Najdat Ismail Anzour’s stylistically groundbreaking 1993 adaptation of Hanna Mina’s novel End of a Brave Man, featured the struggle of costal villagers against French Mandate forces, and his Brothers of the Earth depicted the uprising against the Turks in southern Syria. Folkloric touches such as the distinctive white embroidery-trimmed shawls featured in End of a Brave Man touched many viewers who left the countryside in the massive urbanization process of the late 20th century. But cities dominate center stage in Syrian TV dramas. Damascus of the early nationalist period—late Ottoman and French Mandate—provides the setting for numerous recent dramas, notably the works of Damascene director Bassam al-Malla. In Damascene Days (Ayyam Shamiyyah) of 1993, Bygone Days (al-Khawali) of 2001 Salhiyyah Nights (Layali Salhiyyah) of 2004, and The Quarter Gate (Bab al-Harah) of 2006, al-Malla married themes of local authenticity and resistance to Ottoman Turkish occupation. Affectionately-draw caricatures of everyday life—barber, baker, quilt maker and hummus-seller—with humorously exaggerated Damascene accents, become slices of the everyday life of old. The works of screenwriter Fouad Sharbaji, such as Abu Kamel, Part 2 of 1994 and The Midwife (al-Daya) of 2003 depict the Damascenes’ struggle against the French, emphasizing politics rather than folklore. Such series may have been intended as nation building celebrations of community united against oppression; yet they often provoked fierce discursive battles among both producers and viewers. Perceived inaccuracies, and depictions of collaboration with the Ottomans and the French, angered many. Others took issue with allegedly sanitized depictions of the city, its past and its people.

Continue reading "Television and Its Discontents" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Olga Kravets, Bilkent University

a reconstructed living room

Having a keen interest in both everyday life and GDR (well, actually in the socialist past), I visited the “Dictatorship and Everyday Life in the GDR” exhibition while in Berlin in April 2007 (the exhibition is on until July, 29). Set up by the German Historical Museum, the exhibition aims to show “How the citizens of the GDR succeed in coping with their everyday life.” [link: Scroll down for Panoramic Pictures] The collection spreads across two floors and is arranged in themes – work and retirement policy, education and family policy, for example. The life of GDR citizens is represented largely through the official insignia, such as party membership cards, school/work uniforms, birth/school/pension certificates, work records, newspapers, posters and so on. There are also a few typical ‘resistance’ items such as blue jeans, The Beatles records, and some bohemian art pieces. While the exhibition is impressive in its size and organization, I was disappointed. For me, such artifacts relate to the ideology (dictatorship) aspect i.e. the structuring of everyday lives, but do not necessarily tell much of what that everyday life was like. They certainly do not provide any insight into the question of “How did the citizens of the GDR succeed in coping with their everyday life?”

Leaving the exhibition, I was wondering if it was at all possible to present in a museum format “state and dictatorship, on the one hand, and strategies of daily life, on the other.” After all, “strategies of daily life” are meant to be enacted…

But then, I just happened to be passing by a sign inviting to a “GDR Museum Berlin.” It turned out to be a private museum, located across the Palast der Republik, the now-half-demolished, former house of the East German parliament. Opened sometime in 2006, the museum aspires to offer “a hands-on experience of everyday life in the GDR.” Like the German Historical Museum “Dictatorship…” exhibition, the museum collection is organized thematically. Namely, the museum has displays on family, work, education, culture, fashion, housing, holidays and consumption in the GDR. While the museum’s concerns and themes are overlapping with those of the “Dictatorship…” exhibition, its display could not be more different. Two points of difference are particularly noteworthy. First, there are hardly any glass showcases, rather the display is an arrangement of a smaller scale concrete-slab apartment block buildings, the ubiquitous symbols of the socialist past still standing in parts of the former socialist countries.

starting a “Trabi

The windows and parts of the buildings can be open to reveal school notes, camping gear, fashion magazines, shopping lists, kitchen utensils, bottles of cleaners, clothing, movie tickets, and a variety of other things. Visitors are encouraged to touch, play with, sit on, listen to, smell, etc. (and they sure do – see photos).

Second, the museum collection consists mainly of the mundane objects once used by East Germans. The artifacts on display are so ordinary that the curators are compelled to remind visitors that ‘the toilet paper is a museum exhibit, please do not remove.’ The ordinariness of the artifacts is further emphasized through the arrangement of the items with the reference to an individual’s life stages and private experiences such as birth, school years, marriage, childbirth, etc. rather than a historical timeline. Thus, the nature of artifacts along with the way they are presented makes these objects appear devoid of the immediate ideological loading that was readily apparent in the artifacts dominating the “Dictatorship…” exhibition. The museum addresses this issue in a straight forward fashion. It features a little Stasi corner, a miniature Berlin Wall and numerous slogans on its red walls. Perhaps more interestingly, the museum frames (sometimes literally) the tension between the daily life and ideology, the lived socialism and the proscribed one, in exhibits themselves. For instance, the set of baby clothes is overplayed with the charts of the party-planned and the actual birth rates in the country. Then, the display of camping gear and photos of nude beaches is juxtaposed to the map of places the East Germans were allowed to travel to. The examples of such juxtapositions are many.

While the museum treats its subject matter with respect and seriousness, it does have a Disney-ish feel to it. Firstly, in contrast to official (state) exhibitions, this museum is not shy about presenting GDR as a spectacle, an entertainment, a market(ing) offering for tourists’ consumption i.e. essentially about making GDR a commodity or at least using it as a brand that sells. At the exit the visitors are offered an extensive collection of the GDR merchandise and there is also a café where they can try some East German treats.

Secondly, the GDR museum is about entertainment first, and about education…afterwards. History is (made) fun here. There is no explicit commentary or particular path for visitors to follow. Rather they discover for themselves the museum’s script by locating artifacts partly hidden in the drawers in the maze of socialist apartment blocks. The artifacts are not labeled and/or described individually, but organized in themes to be experienced. For example, with headphones in a Stasi corner, visitors can eavesdrop on people exploring the recreated GDR living room in the other section of the museum. Other experiences include starting a Trabant auto, trying a garment from a wardrobe, learning dance moves while listening to the East German pop hits, watching a GDR fashion show or a party parade, playing a game of soccer for a winning East German team, to name a few.

work in GDR

In this way, to use a cliche, history is made exciting and accessible to many (and one does see kids and young people enjoying the museum)… Of course, at this point the critics of the museum and its approach might exclaim “what (kind of) history!?” And, I do not have an answer to that but I’d note that despite the Disney-ish feel (which, I understood, was supposed to make me uneasy), I liked the museum. I was pleasantly surprised at the playful and lively atmosphere in a museum talking about the socialist past; this is a notable departure from the way the socialist life is usually discussed and presented. Besides, in my view, this tiny private museum gives a better insight into “How the citizens of the GDR succeeded in coping with their everyday life?” than the “Dictatorship…” exhibition or a permanent display on GDR at the German Historical Museum, for that matter. The museum’s extensive collection of mundane objects suggests that the citizens of the GDR ‘coped’ by engaging in very ordinary daily activities so familiar to people anywhere - they studied for exams and danced at discotheques, cleaned their flats and cooked dinners, used contraceptives and watched soccer on TV…and yes, there were party parades. But, it is these routines of daily human living that possibly made the socialist life with all its politics and ideology bearable. Academically speaking there is nothing new in this, but it is a refreshing message to hear from an exhibition devoted to the socialist past.

References:

• 1. Brochure for the “Dictatorship and Everyday Life in the GDR” (March 30 – July 29 2007; From the Collections of the German Historical Museum) http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/ddr/index.html
  
• 2. Brochure for the “GDR Museum Berlin: a hands-on experience of history” (permanent exhibition) www.ddr-museum.de

[Click to read more for additional photos]

Continue reading "Socialism could be fun…?" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field

Dasha A. Chapman, NYU, Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program

Basil Alkazzi, British, b. 1938 Sea of Spirit Dreams, III, 1997

There has been talk of a New Harlem Renaissance. the speak is filled with hope – a new Harlem, a revived Harlem, Harlem’s second-coming – and real-life happenings – businesses, arts, culinary attractions. I recently visited one site of this proclaimed re-birth: the Museum of Art in Origins (MoAAO) on 162nd Street.

Opened in November, 2005, the Museum is housed in Professor George Preston’s brownstone in Jumel Terrace on Sugar Hill. As the most affluent part of Harlem, Sugar Hill has been known for its residents: well-known African-American artists and intellectuals like Duke Ellington and W.E.B. DuBois. This history is what has provides the neighborhood its grounding – and its cachet – for this second Renaissance.

The Museum is part of a network of cultural institutions and Harlem history sites. It opened at the same time as Kurt Thometz’s rare and used-book store, Jumel Terrace Books, which is also housed in his brownstone. The bookstore specializes in African, African-American, and local history books. The two establishments are located just down the street from one another, and are also in close proximity to Marjorie Eliot’s Parlour Entertainment where jazz concerts take place every Sunday afternoon in her home.

Bamilike Thumb Piano. From the museum's impressive "Traditional African Art" Interactive Map: Click to View Online Map.

Cultural collaboration and a vivid arts scene are intended to animate and inspire the neighborhood and its surroundings. The literati that attend these events are part of a movement to foster greater appreciation and production of the arts. Underlying this mission is an interesting formulation of "origins" – both for "Harlem" as a place in peoples' minds, and for the people who actually inhabit this place.

Continue reading "A Consolidated Materiality for the New Harlem Renaissance?" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field

Ozlem Sandikci and Sahver Omeraki (Bilkent University)

Photo 1: Stands shaped as Ottoman-style houses, selling everything from cheese to home-textile.

Across the Muslim world, there are numerous signs that Ramadan, a time of fasting, prayer and reflection, is transforming from a religious month to a cultural and commercial holiday. The spirit of capitalism is felt in practices ranging from the marketing of specialty items (e.g., fasting calendars, lanterns) emblazoned with company logos to the Ramadan feasts promoted by restaurants and hotels, the Ramadan greeting cards, the Ramadan sweepstakes, the Ramadan themed shopping malls and supermarkets, and the Ramadan festivals. It appears that Ramadan has taken on the commercial trappings of Christmas and Hanukah and is transforming from a religious ritual to a holiday marked by consumption. Intrigued by these developments, our project looks at the commercial expressions of Ramadan in Turkey and explores how the dynamics of consumer culture and globalization interact with the Islamic beliefs, rituals and behaviors and reshape them to fit with modern consumption-driven lifestyles.

Photo 2: People strolling the area after they have eaten their post-sunset meals

One of the contexts of our study is Ramadan Festivals. These are month-long festivals organized by the municipality of Istanbul at different historical locations throughout the city. The biggest and oldest of these festivals is the one held at the square next to the Blue Mosque. During the whole month of Ramadan, the area is transformed into a big market place, packed with more than hundred stands selling food and beverages as well as all kinds of paraphernalia. In each day of the Ramadan month, thousands of visitors cram the square before the sunset and wait until the time that daily fasting would be over. After the meals are eaten, shopping and enjoyment of various cultural activities begin. The activities include religious panels addressing different aspects of Ramadan and Islam as well as artistic performances. The performances mostly include traditional art forms, such as karagöz (traditional shadow show) and meddah (an earlier form of stand-up shows), which have been very popular during the time of the Ottoman Empire but are long forgotten in the modern era. On the other hand, for those who are interested in shopping, the stands offer a wide range of selections from religious objects, such as Qurans and spiritual books, to electronic appliances and Chinese-made decorative ornaments. Moreover, several local and global companies promote their products by distributing samples and other promotional materials. As in other festival areas, the stands are built in the style of the traditional Ottoman houses and many of the vendors are dressed in traditional Ottoman attires.

Photo 3: A vendor dressed in Ottoman-style clothing, selling Ottoman-style candy

Through the intersection of sacred (religion and history) and profane (shopping and leisure), public authorities and retailers, attempt to sacralize the ordinary commercial commodities (O’Guinn and Belk, 1989), most of which are commonly available. Similar to theme parks like Disneyland, a “dedifferentiation of consumption” is evident as different institutional spheres become increasingly interconnected with each other (Bryman, 1999, p.33). This tendency is also evident in the Ramadan festivals as we see a tendency for eating, shopping and leisure to become “inextricably interwoven” and very difficult to separate (Bryman, 1999). Through a selective portrayal of history (Goulding, 2000), the Ramadan festivals also resonate with the trend of the “commodification of history” (Barthel 1996), which involves consumption practices related to the past.

Photo 4: All kinds of paraphernalia are offered to the customers

For further reading:

• Sandikci, O. and S. Omeraki (2007) “Globalization and Rituals: Does Ramadan Turn into Christmas?), Advances in Consumer Research, Vol, 34.

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Dimitris Dalakoglou PhD candidate - UCL

A road in Albania, February 2006. The pavement and the roadbed are partly under construction, the yellow bulldozer in the front was going to the road-works. The local informant who was driving the car apologized: 'Excuse me but this road, here, is only for the [horse-drawn] cart of the uncle in front'.

When I first went to conduct fieldwork in Albania my idea was not to study roads but rather the things that travel on them. Especially my PhD was to be about the material culture of Albanian migration. The possessions people take back and forth between the location of their migratory destination, and the place of their birth. A major part of my thesis will still be concerned with the house and home as part of a larger study of transnationalism, migration and material culture. Yet as time went on, and in particular when I started to write up my field material I realized that actually what was just as interesting was the infrastructure behind this, more especially roads and highways. Roads are dynamic, both materially and culturally, and proved so fruitful analytically that it would probably now be possible to produce a doctoral thesis solely in reference to roads, traffic and their infrastructure, which cross the southern Albanian borders to Greece.

Continue reading "An Anthropology of the Road" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Ellie Reynolds, University College London

The following is an exploration of the materiality and meaning of HIV positive semen for a group of gay men who engage in two behaviours: bugchasing and giftgiving. Bugchasing is the desire for, and active pursuit of, HIV infection; giftgiving is the attempt to infect others with HIV. Central to these behaviours is the ‘conversion’ ritual where HIV positive giftgivers attempt to infect HIV negative bugchasers. The bugchasers, during the ritual, are considered to be both feminine (in their behaviour and in the ‘bottom’ (insertee) role they take during sexual intercourse) and female (where maleness is defined as the ability to act upon and transform another).

Bugchasers are said to be ‘impregnated’ by the masculine and male giftgivers when they are infected. HIV positive giftgivers, following receptive anal intercourse with another HIV positive giftgiver, are said to have been ‘repozzed’ or ‘recharged’. These dominant metaphors of pregnancy and electrical power reveal notions of HIV as a transforming and empowering substance. Research material and quotes used here are from my own research using a bugchasing and giftgiving website carried out as part of my undergraduate dissertation.

Previously, this behaviour has been seen to empower men on two levels; first, by giving them the (male) ability to act upon and transform others. In this case, the feminine, female HIV negative bugchaser seems to represent feminine, female HIV negative society (i.e. that which is outside the ‘bugbrotherhood’ of giftgivers) and the giftgiver is not only acting upon and transforming an individual but is appropriating the hegemonic masculine (heterosexual) ability to act upon and transform society (c.f. Ortner, 1974). Second, the HIV positive giftgiver who embraces the stereotype attached to him as polluted, evil, sinful and demonic (particularly in the American bible belt where the behaviours predominantly take place) inverts the power differential within the stereotype. So, instead of the stereotype being used to control gay men and their sexuality, the giftgiver becomes an object of fear as the nightmare becomes reality. This behaviour has been interpreted as an attempt to escape the feminised position of gay men in western society who are controlled and acted upon by religious fundamentalist groups, government policies and the media, to achieve masculine social agency and the embodiment of a terrifying stereotype.

Continue reading "Becoming HIV: disease as agency" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Marta Rosales ESCS and CEMME FCSH/UNL, Professor Filomena Silvano CEMME FCSH/UNL (scientific coordinator)

Domestic consumption practices, colonialism and transcontinental migration experiences of a group of Portuguese and Goan families.

This project aims the study of the domestic consumption practices of a restrict group of families of Portuguese and Goan origins that share a common biographical past: an inter-generational lived experience in Mozambique (during the colonial period) and a forced migration out of Africa to Portugal and Brazil after de Mozambican independence. Theoretically, the research intends the development of an approach that allows the integration of material culture and consumption studies to the discussion of a significant phenomenon that had a critical impact on the Portuguese recent social history – the forced migration of diverse social groups out of the Portuguese former African colonies.

Continue reading "African Memories" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Topics for Discussion

Mylene Mizrahi
mylenemizrahi@terra.co.br

Here in Rio a very popular genre of party are the funk balls, that happens on weekend nights, most of the time in sport courts in clubs that are kind of decadent. Each of these parties gather thousands of youngsters, coming from their homes up on the hill, where the favela slums are localized. The girls and boys who take part care a great deal about their personal appearance, specially when they go out to dance. I have been studying these parties since 2002 with my principle focus being on their clothes.

What has become known as “ brazilian jeans” is a representative garment of the wardrobe of the girls who come to the funk balls, and in fact it was really a style that was created by them, because it was their appropriation of these jeans, and their wearing them to funk balls, that really gave them life. These jeans are largely known as the “trousers of Gang”, in reference to the leading retailer and producer of this style of jeans, although in the funk context the trousers are called by the native category “moletom stretch trousers”, a reference to the materiality of the garment.

Continue reading "Brazilian Jeans" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Christine Chastain, UCL

In the 1970s, in the small town of Falmouth, Mass., USA, an experimental, sustainable community was formed called Alchemy. This project was funded by government grants and allowed its members to explore such exotic concepts like hydroponic vegetable growth, composting, contained, sustainable systems, etc. Members were so busy and engaged that someone forgot to submit a government grant and the community folded without the necessary financial backing.

Hilda and Earle bought one of the remaining dilapidated greenhouses from this project and decided to revive the vision their own way. Both Hilda and Earle are landscape architects and proud owners of the thriving business, Good Works. They have managed to create a delectable visual feast of their sustainable lifestyle aspirations using materials they either create, grow or that are indigenous to the area of Cape Cod.

Continue reading "Material Visualization of Sustainability" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Dr. Fanny Wonu Veys, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In September 2006, I worked closely with the Tonga Traditions Committee, whose employees were recording the best they could all the events pertaining to the funeral of King Tupou IV. King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, the fourth king in the modern dynasty of Tongan rulers died after forty-one years of reign on 10 September in a New Zealand hospital. Through genealogy, Tupou IV embodied the three royal lines of Tu’i Tonga, Tu’i Kanokupolo and Tu’i Takalaua.

Thursday 21 September 2006. Catholic schoolchildren bring dozens of cakes for presentation	Monday 18 September 2006. People from Niuatoputapu prepare to enter the palace grounds with barkcloth, fine mats, and a basket. Everyone is wearing the appropriate attire for funerals which consists of black clothing, a ragged mat with a pandanus strip belt.

From the day the king’s body arrived on Tongan soil (13 September 2006) different funeral rites were performed. The activities included ceremonial presentations; lotu, prayer vigils; takip?, all-night wakes when palm sheath torches are lit around the palace grounds; ha’amo, presentations of kava, pigs, and cooked foods in palm leaf basket which are carried on sticks over the shoulder; fei’umu, cooking of food in an underground oven; taumafa kava, royal kava drinking ceremony; and of course the different aspects of the interment ceremony itself that took place on 19th September.

Tongan funerals, named putu or me’a faka’eiki – the honorific term used for chiefly funerals - have been discussed in literature from different perspectives. Instead of looking at how funerals reinforce kinship ties (Kaeppler 1978) or what the effective cost is of the objects exchanged (James 2002), I will concentrate on materiality of the ceremonial presentation made before and on the first few days after the funeral.

Most of the presentations took place on the palace grounds under the marquis set up to the left of the palace. Members of the royal family would sit cross-legged with their backs to the sea and facing the group of people performing the presentations. The members of the presenting group (a church group, a village, an island, nation or a government department) positioned themselves in a semi-circle facing the sea and the members of the royal family. These presentations followed a set scheme. First the chief’s attendant or mat?pule would briefly present the objects. These included kava, root crops, live pigs and half-cooked pigs, mats, yams, taro, tapioca, barkcloth, mats, baskets, flower garlands and flower baskets, coconut oil, cakes, bead spreads, crisps, fruit, sweets and large screens named tapu, made out of mats, barkcloth or flowers which will ultimately serve as grave decoration. Then all the products of agriculture and animal husbandry are enumerated by a mat?pule and counted one by one, by touching every pig, kava plant, and palm leaf food basket. After this, a woman enumerates the list of all the other objects that are being presented. The quantity, length and name of the mats and barkcloths is stated. The goods the woman enumerated, are spread out in the circle formed by the giving party and receiving party. No one physically counted these goods. The mat?pule of the presenting group, finally gives a speech and a dried piece of kava root is presented. The mat?pule of the receiving party reciprocates with a closing speech after which people pay their respects to the members of the royal family presiding the presentation.

This descriptive piece of writing is preliminary to a more analytical article focusing on the materiality of the 2006 funeral, and linking it with past funerary practices.

Wednesday 20 September 2006. Presentation on the first day after the funeral. There are kava plants in the foreground, and half-cooked pgs in the background. Women are carrying flower baskets on the right.	Friday 21 September 2006. Presentation of a large tapu (grave decoration) made of fine mats (kie) and barkcloth (ngatu).
Wednesday 20 September 2006. Presentation of a tapu tupenu, or grave decoration.	Thursday 21 September 2006. A p'kakala, or ‘flower fence’, made of freshly cut flowers and leaves, mounted on a background of barkcloth, is presented by the Catholic schoolchildren.
Monday 18 September 2006. Delegation from Niuatoputapu with mats and barkcloth.	Thursday 21 September 2006. Presentation of baskets filled with sweets, fruits, crisps, and coconut oil. A tapu lole (grave decoration) made with sweets such as Cadbury chocolate, crisps and other sweets. Cakes, fine mats and bedspreads were also presented on this occasion.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Fabio Gygi, PhD Student, Anthropology, University College London and University of Tokyo

My project is concerned with accumulation of things, attachment to things and with what psychiatrists call ‘hoarding’. My initial interest was whether by reformulating a psychiatric concern with deviance in terms of material culture, a broader understanding of the relationships people entertain with their possessions could be gained. Hoarding seemed to be an appropriate subject, because a) it required understanding of seemingly irrational behavior (feeling attached to things others consider as ‘rubbish’) and b) because recent anthropological concepts of ownership, possession and attachment and their influence on how we think about things, minds and selves could be put to the test (and put to the test they are…).

While hoarders in psychiatric literature are often described as ‘cannot throw things away’, my fieldwork among inhabitants of gomiyashiki in Tokyo (lit. garbage house, a Japanese topos comparable to the word ‘hoarding’ without however implying a certain category of person) shows that my informants perceive themselves ‘not to want to throw things away’. Instead of translating the figurative disorder of the ‘hoarder’s lair’ into a mental disorder and to read the accumulated things as a pathological symptom of an inner defect, the accumulated things can be conceived of as part of the extended self and thus as inalienable possessions in a sense.

Continue reading "Hoarding and Disposal in Tokyo" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Notes from the Field

An Exploration of Its Presence in a European Periphery

Magda Craciun, PhD Student in Material Culture, University College London  e.craciun@ucl.ac.uk

A widespread phenomenon, re-production is morally and legally contested and combated, culturally derided, and socially dismissed as belonging to the lower social strata. I am interested in approaching it in its everyday complexity, by focusing on the lives of objects, and meanings and consequences of their presence; on practices, and preoccupations of people living in the vicinity of these objects; on institutions these objects bring together; and on the trans-national routes along which these clothing items move.

In order to grasp as much as possible of this complexity, I have designed a multi-sided ethnography, choosing as field sites Istanbul (the main regional producer of fakes); “Europa” market on the outskirts of Bucharest (considered the source of 80% of the counterfeited goods on the Romanian market); and Turnu Magurele (a provincial town in south Romania, chosen for its typical clothing-scape, in which “Europa” clothing predominates).

Continue reading "Fake Branded Clothing" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Posted to Notes from the Field

Mukulika Banerjee, Anthropology, UCL

This week, reportage of the mid term US elections seems to devote almost equal coverage to the Democrat re-capture of the Congress and the close race to finish in the Senate as it did to malfunctioning electronic voting machines. Indiana and Ohio were singled out for the most unreliable machines and Florida was reported to have reverted to paper ballots. Thus, who people voted for seems to be hinge crucially on how, literally, they cast their vote. The materiality of the voting process, namely ballot boxes, counting procedures, polling stations do not usually feature in election analysis, but when they do, we can assume that something is either wrong or novel. In the case of the US elections, it was both.

source: www.vote.caltech.edu

In the United States, Electronic Voting Machines were introduced recently and mainly in response to the 2002 federal law called the ‘Help America Vote Act’ which called on states to update their equipment in time for the 2006 elections. This was in response to the debacle with malfunctioning electoral technologies of the earlier Presidential elections of 2000. The stories of ‘hanging chads’ caused by the old fashioned lever and punch machines used then had not only discredited the election of George W. as President, but had damaged the credibility of American democracy all over the world. As a result this time several states in the US used electronic voting machines for the first time and voters were able (in theory) to cast their vote through touch screens or by marking ballot papers which were read by an optical scanner and counted automatically. But rather than inspiring confidence in the voting process their introduction was met with trepidation and anxiety. A number of candidates, officials and campaign groups expressed their reservations about the lack of a paper trail, the dangers of hacking, the inevitability of technical glitches and the lack of proper cards to use these machines. A recent study did not help the general concern by showing that it was easier to rig an electronic voting machine than it was a slot machine in Las Vegas. Theories even abound about the anti-US political agendas of the company that supplies these machines. As a result recent polls indicated that only a quarter of the US population fell fully confident that their vote will be correctly recorded and were urged by their leaders to resort to the old fashioned (paper) postal ballot.

Working as I do on democracy in India, this is bemusing to say the least. Electronic voting machines have been used in India without any hitches at all for the past five years. In 2004 the entire national election was conducted using them. This covered an electorate of 671,487,930 voters, a large proportion of whom are illiterate. The Election Commission of India (an independent and non-partisan body) employed 4 million people just to conduct this mammoth operation. No one complained about the technology.

Source: M. Banerjee

This makes one pause for thought. Is there something about the techne of democracy itself that we bears thinking through. An electronic voting machine in India is a simple device and is not much more than a well designed circuit board. It displays a list of candidates, the symbol of the party they represent (for those who cannot read) and the vote is cast by pressing the button in front of the chosen party or candidate. Counting is efficient as the results of each machine are aggregated according to constituencies and results are available within a few hours of the polls being closed.

Was the problem in the current elections in the US an example of how not to use technology? Could the US not have deployed simpler, easier to use machines? Is the decision to digitally link the machines up mainly to ensure quicker delivery of results a thoroughly misplaced priority given it panders more to the media than its voters? Is this not what makes it susceptible to hackers? Could not something less intimidating than touch screens, which the large elderly volunteer polling officials have confessed to be nervous about, been used? Is it not one of the main duties of a democratic state, in this case the richest and most technologically advanced of all, not lie first and foremost in conducting free and fair elections? Is the US above learning how to conduct elections from other democracies who do so successfully without mishaps? Could the world’s most powerful democracy not learn from the world’s largest democracy?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion