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.

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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.

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Haidy Geismar, NYU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DSNY pipers at the opening

Commissioner Doherty speaking at the opening

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

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

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

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

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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).

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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

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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/

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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?

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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 (0) | 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" »

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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 (0) | 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" »

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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 at 3:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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" »

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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 (3) | 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 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