Peter Oakley, Doctoral Research Student, UCL Material Culture

Whilst assisting at a SWLLN workshop this summer I was intrigued by a problematic feature of the heritage site hosting the event. Tyntesfield House, a National Trust property, is currently undergoing extensive conservation, necessitating the erection of a second roof over the entire structure. Until recently standard Trust policy was to close such a property to the public until conservation had been completed. At Tyntesfield it was decided to not only keep the house open as far as practicable, but also to build a observation tower out of scaffolding up to the top of the Victorian roof, allowing visitors to view the work being undertaken. The observation tower had been completed and opened to the public before the second roof covered adjacent parts of the old building. Therefore whilst visitors in June 2009 could not see any roof-related conservation activities, they could stand on a platform that had never previously existed and look over the Victorian roof to the Tyntesfield estate and the valley beyond.

The staff consistently described the tower as existing primarily in order to view the conservation efforts (a task it was evidently not performing during the summer of 2009). This distinction between the old and new structures was shared by the visitors, who consistently took photographs of the view that included the chimneys and tiles of the Victorian roof but pointedly excluded the scaffolding of the tower. But this supposedly transient, inconsequential and apparently un-photogenic object is anticipated to have a lifespan of at least a year, during which time it will continue to modify both the building’s physical appearance and the visitor experience in a myriad of unacknowledged ways.

Staff and visitor reactions to the tower epitomise the Trust’s perspective regarding the properties in its care. Each site is presented as a physical relic of a point or period in time, which has always occurred prior to the Trust acquiring the property. Some of the Trust’s interventions are presented as conservation or restoration of the material fabric with the aim of ‘returning’ structures or landscapes to this privileged previous period. More prosaic alterations, such as turning fields or gardens into visitor car parks and the interiors of less cherished structures into tearooms, offices and holiday accommodation to provide sufficient funding to maintain the more visually spectacular elements, the Trust prefers to exclude from open recognition or debate.

An alternative conception would be to consider sites such as Tyntesfield House as evolving in direct consequence of their acquisition by organisations such as the National Trust. What the Trust regards as ‘turning back the clock’ is in reality the creation of an entirely new artefact. Though some elements come close to visually resembling the site’s previous appearance, others are entirely new and the site as a whole is fundamentally different both in its social rationale and agency. Such an approach would admit a proposal that during 2009 Tyntesfield House physically grew through the addition of a modernist openwork observation tower. The tower turned Tyntesfield into something other than it had ever been before, was as much a part of the architecture as the earlier elements of the assemblage, and had a specific social function that related directly to the desires of the human actors that visited the site during 2009.

Posted by Graeme Were at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Daniel Miller, UCL

I wonder if this can be considered a coming of age year for Digital Anthropology. Of course there is a blowing of our own trumpet here with the launch of our new MA degree programme in the topic at the Dept. of Anthropology UCL, but the current publications coming out certainly seem to justify the initiative. There is the radical energy of Two Bits by Chris Kelty, with a very engaging narrative and clear agenda for the wider importance of open source thinking and practice, as a vanguard with potential for much wider application. There is Tom Boellstorf’s Coming of Age in Second Life which convincingly demonstrates that it is possible to undertake a classic ethnography within a virtual world. Then there was also a wonderful conveying of participant observation in Julian Dibbell’s highly readable Play Money from 2006. The trends are also seen in postings here, such as the recent one by Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett showing the degree to which digital practices are becoming central to Museum practice.

One book that perhaps may not garner as much attention as these but is perhaps particularly important in thinking about the issues involved for material culture studies is Thomas Malaby’s book Making Virtual Worlds: Linen Lab and Second Life, published in 2009 by Cornell University Press. Although the topic clearly overlaps with Boellstorff in that both are about second life, the strength of Malaby’s book is less from its ethnography, which in any case is more about the production than the usage of second life. Rather the book is much more an important complement to Kelty, because it is concerned not just with the libertarian ideals of technology and material, or if you prefer immaterial, culture more generally. As Dibbell had noticed in his earlier work there was something special about the way in which Linden Labs took on the ideological mantle of virtual worlds and tried to put their ideology into practice.

The starting point for the argument, from an anthropological perspective, comes from Malaby’s last page and its discussion of the work of Sahlins on the relationship between history/structure and event/contingency. This takes on a more specifically material culture direction with the trajectory from Mauss to Bourdieu on habitus, which increasingly also focused upon structure, this time in the order or things or the order of practice, and disposition in its own tension with contingency. Malaby is fascinated by this tension, but his perspective, which in this case he shares more with Dibbell, rather than either Kelty or Boellstorff is coming from a very particular perspective, which is the theory of gaming. He sees gaming as the kind of antithesis of bureaucracy and modernist attempts at rational control. Since while they create structure in order to eliminate contingency, gaming creates structure in order to proliferate contingency. Which is why earlier theorists of gaming saw this as a kind of alternative history of modern life based on play as an imperative in its own right.

Material culture theorists will find in Boellstorff and Dibbell a continuation of important debates about the nature of the material/immaterial and online/offline worlds. But what Malaby beings to the table is his specific study of Linden Labs and the way they conceptualized and realized the relationship between production and consumption in gaming. Linden Labs sought to cede more of the construction of the virtual world to users. Following from the ideals of liberation through technology they envisaged a kind of co-construction between the game and the gamer. Respecting contingency as central to gaming they tried to eschew hierarchy or control by constantly learning from the unexpected appropriations of consumers. At least that was the theory. How it works out in practice is excellently analyzed in the course of this book.

This volume was written during the period when Second Life went from being relatively small to relatively large, but ended with expectations that were becoming huge. Second Life has certainly stimulated some incredibly useful anthropology. Yet it looks like it may have stalled with regard to public usage more generally. I admit to some curiosity as to what Boellstorff and Malaby would say about what didn’t happen and why. But the larger point is how the combination of these new books and writings make this digital world of increasing interest to material culture studies, which ought to in turn provide precedents and ideas that can contribute to this field.

References
Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton: Univ. Press.

Dibbel, J. 2006. Play Money. NY: Basic Books.

Kelty, C. 2008. Two Bits. Chapel Hill: Duke Univ. Press.

Malaby, T. 2009. Making Virtual Worlds. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to From the editors | Topics for Discussion

Erik Champion, School of Design, Massey Univ.

The notion
"Visualisation has been defined as 'to form a mental image of something incapable of being viewed or not at that moment visible'… (Collins Dictionary)... a tool or method for interpreting image data fed into a computer and for generating images from complex multi-dimensional data sets” (McCormick et al. 1987).

So the point of virtual heritage might be to visualize a culture through its artefacts. Virtual heritage is thus a ‘visualisation’ or ‘recreation’ of culture. In virtual heritage projects, the aim is typically to “recreate” or “reconstruct” the past through three-dimensional modelling, animation, and panorama photographs. In some advanced cases, objects are laser-scanned, and accurate textures of what used to be there are applied to the resulting digital models.

Why would we do that? For many reasons, for when a culture is no longer with us, when a culture is so ingrained that we do not normally notice or appreciate it, or when the remains of a society or civilisation are currently inaccessible or scattered.

It may now seem to us that virtual heritage is simply the recreation of what used to be there. Yet what used to be ‘there’ was more than a collection of objects. Those objects had specific meaning to the cultural perceptions of the land’s traditional inhabitants.

The problem of culture
If the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1998) is to be believed, culture is that which is not seen: “Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture”. He has further defined culture as a shared form of escapism. Such a definition raises an interesting paradox for the visualisation of past cultures. How do we see what is not there?

There are many issues in the presentation of culture. One is the definition of culture itself, the second issue is understanding how culture is transmitted, and the third is how to transmit this cultural knowledge to people from another culture. In the case of virtual heritage, a fourth also arises, exactly how can this specific cultural knowledge be transmitted digitally?

The problem of meaningful engagement
Research has indicated that the general public does not want realism but entertaining immersion. Various researchers have suggested that virtual environments (specifically heritage environments) often lack several features that would make them more engaging to the general public.

"... [T]he archaeological use of VR is at present all about the creation of pictures... Only after they have been generated does attention turn to the uses to which such models can be put" (Gillings, 2002: 17).

Both Gillings and I suggest it is not a lack of realism but a lack of meaningful content which impedes the enjoyment of virtual heritage (Champion 2006). I call it the ‘Indiana Jones’ dilemma. On the one hand, adventure films have popularised archaeology as an interactive and engaging pursuit. On the other hand, they and computer games typically destroy the very object of admiration. Digital media can recreate both objects and activities, but what sort of activity is both engaging and educational? How can we both significantly preserve and meaningfully communicate the past?

References

Champion, E. (2006). Enhancing Learning via 3D Virtual Environments. In E. Korsgaard-Sorensen & D.O. Murchu (eds). Enhancing Learning Through Technology. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

Gillings, M. (2002). Virtual archaeologies and the hyper-real. In P. Fisher & D. Unwin (eds.), Virtual Reality in Geography. London: Taylor & Francis: 17-32.

McCormick, B., DeFanti, T. & Brown, M. (1987). Visualization in Scientific Computing. Computer Graphics. 21 (6): November.

Tuan, Y. (1998). Escapism. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press.

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett, NYU Performance Studies and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being created in Warsaw on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and facing the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. At the heart of this educational and cultural center is a multimedia narrative museum presenting a millenium of Jewish presence on Polish soil. While we will show original historical objects, we do not depend primarily on them to tell this rich story.

There is a general perception that if we are not basing the exhibition on objects we must be a "virtual" museum--and that is generally taken to mean a museum that lacks materiality. I offer one example here of our work as a challenge to the generally accepted dichotomy between
virtual and--take your pick--actual, digital, material.

Source: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews

I call the problem the materiality fallacy: what constitutes an "original" or "actual" or "authentic" object. The 18th-century wooden synagogue of Gwoździec that we will feature in the 18th-century gallery offers a fine case for exploring this issue. We intend to reconstruct the timber-framed roof and polychrome ceiling of this spectacular synagogue. Now we could go to a theater prop maker, give him the dimensions and some pictures, and say to him "Make it!" The result would look pretty much like the original, but it would be a theatrical prop. That is not what we want to do. What we want to do goes to the heart of the issue of actual and virtual. We want to work with a studio in Massachusetts, whose motto is "learn by building."

These beautiful 18th-century wooden synagogues no longer exist; the Germans burned to the ground those still standing in 1939. We can however recover the knowledge of how to build them by actually building one. What is actual about that artifact resides therefore not in the original 18th-century wood, not in the original painted interior, but in the knowledge that we recovered for how to build it.

It's a completely different concept of the object. This approach is related to a completely different tradition of thinking about what constitutes an object.

The best example I can think of is the Jingu Shrine in Ise, Japan. This is a shrine that is 800 years old and never older than 20 years because for 800 years they have been tearing it down every 20 years in order to rebuild it. The only way to maintain the embodied knowledge of how to build it is to build it, and to make it necessary to build it, they tear it down and then must build it again. The value is in maintaining the knowledge of how to build it, not in preserving the original materials. The result is not a replica or simulation of the Jingu shrine; it is the Jingu shrine. This is a completely different way of defining what is "actual" about such an object.

This posting is adapted from my interview with Obieg, Poland's leading online contemporary art magazine. An English translation of the complete interview appears here:
ttp://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/news_archive.php?miId=120&lang=en&nId=1744

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Announcements and Listings | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Webb Keane, University of Michigan

An interesting book called Thinking Through Things (2007), edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastel (see earlier discussion on this site, starting on Dec. 14, 2006), proposes that we think of ethnographic otherness in terms of multiple ontologies. Thus Holbraad reports that Cuban Ifa diviners tell him a certain red powder is power. He argues that in order to take this assertion seriously, we--those of us who are not Ifa diviners--must understand that their red powder exists within a radically different ontology from ours. It’s not that there is one thing, powder, which diviners interpret in a certain way that differs from ours. Rather, in this alternative world, that’s what the powder is.

Now in certain respects this is an appealing version of a familiar, if highly unstable, ethnographic move. If Azande say witches exist, the traditional ethnographer’s first responsibility is to take them at their word (though the very act of writing tends to sabotage that epistemic stance). And certainly, against the Eurocentric self-certainties of nearly all other academic disciplines, this responsibility to alterity grounds one of anthropology’s distinctive contributions to knowledge and its ethics.

But Henare et alia would, I think, argue that the Azande example doesn’t go far enough, since at the end of the day, the usual treatment turns on reducing their statements about witches into nothing more than different interpretations of a reality the Azande share with those of us who are not Azande. In contrast, the editors assert that the claim about multiple ontologies is not just a matter of different interpretations or epistemologies. Ifa powder really is power.

Now there are various questions one might raise about this assertion. We might, for instance, ask for a more precise analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the word the authors translate as “is,” a notoriously difficult linguistic and philosophical problem. We might also wonder how the Cuban diviners in my old neighborhood in New York managed to converse with me and otherwise handle relations among the distinct ontologies they seem to inhabit. But what I want to point to here is a consequence that seems to follow for any attempt to make sense of the temporality.

The notion of radically different ontologies, if I read the authors correctly, seems inadvertently to render the very temporality of things incomprehensible, and to confine them within static realities. In material terms, history often reflects people’s capacity to respond to the things around them in new ways. They see new possibilities in what had always been there. The world may surprise them. When people see new possibilities, it is often because they have discovered something new about their material surround. As things enter new contexts, they enter into new human purposes, afford new kinds of actions, and suggest new projects (see Keane 2003, 2008). If this is so, it seems to follow from two characteristics of material things. First, material things cannot be reduced to whatever happens to be found in concepts. Henare et al’s invitation to rethink the relationship between “concepts” and “things” is certainly full of promise. But if we simply collapse the distinction, we are likely to overlook this: at any given moment there remains something about them that is unknown or unnoticed. Second, it is because things in their very materiality exceed any particular concepts, times, and projects, that they persist across different concepts, times, and projects. They enter into quite distinct concepts, times, and projects.

From this perspective, then, the red powder of which Ifa diviners speak cannot be confined to that singular ontology in which red powder really “is” power, and “is not” whatever someone who is not an Ifa diviner thinks it is. In order to get at the historicity of people and their things, we need to understand things in ways that do not reduce them to some stable essence, to the particularity of a certain context.

If there were an essence—which I think is implicit in the idea of multiple ontologies--then things would never suggest anything new, beyond what is already known about them given the terms of any particular ontology. They would be like the US Constitution, according to Antonin Scalia: no one would ever get past the original intent of their creators. Things would have no futures, since there would, in principle, be no link between one ontology (the present) and another (the future or the past). Indeed, we might go so far as to say, people would have no futures either, to the extent they would always already be full masters of any conceptual universe they might find themselves within. There could never be any surprises, material or conceptual. But the importance of things for people lies, in part, in the ways they may contribute to new futures. They suggest new possibilities and, given certain novel conjunctions and shifts in experience, can steer people’s attention to new aspects of the world. The postulate of multiple ontologies, in its most radical form, seems to erect insuperable barriers between different parts of people’s present worlds, as well as between their pasts and possible futures.

References

Keane, Webb 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication, 23: 409-425.
__________. 2008. The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14: 110-127.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Diana Espirito Santo, Institute of Social Sciences, Univ. of Lisbon

On responding to a review of his edited book, written by Danny Miller on this Material Culture blog site a few months subsequent to the publication of Thinking Through Things (2007), Martin Holbraad glosses what he perceives to be the crucial difference between his ‘ontographic’ camp and material culture studies, one, as he argues, curiously motivated by ‘decency’ on both sides. “Crudely put”, he says to Miller, “I think your decency leads you to
’embrace’ your informants, and that puts you on the spot when it comes to
articulating the assumptions that might allow you to do so.

Conversely,
my concern for decency leads me to remain silent about my informants, because,
as with God, I feel I cannot presume to say anything 'about' them." While Holbraad argues that we should return to ‘analytical innocence’, where distinctions between materiality and culture, ideas and things, artefacts and imaginings, obscure more than elucidate, Miller accuses Holbraad of skirting the importance of a prior materiality upon which all anthropology should ultimately base itself. As he says, “material culture is not a subset of social anthropology but more the other way around. Material culture is a condition for anthropology itself”; we should by now be past these divisions. More importantly, he also says of Holbraad’s chapter on powder and power, the author’s emphasis on dissolving the concept/thing divide has the paradoxical result of ignoring what seems to be most important to the ethnography – the ‘being’ of the diviner. Thus, for Miller ‘silence’ here seems counter-productive to the task of anthropology.

In my view we need to be prepared to accept the premises of both approaches – an ontographic one, where we allow persons, objects, and things to be fully ‘subjects’ of their relations, and a more material culture oriented one, where we try to understand how this ‘work’ of culture, that is, the achievement of such relations through the physical and material world, creates a particular kind of thinking and feeling person. In a recent panel that Nico Tassi and myself convened at this year’s ASA conference in Bristol, we aimed to provoke and expand on some of these debates. Our contention is that in an analysis of religious objects and artefacts, we must be both radically relativist and grounded in our common understanding of humanity, allowing for a plurality of ‘worlds’, but also attempting to unwind how these ‘worlds’ can come about and be experienced through ‘things’, experiences which far from merely conceptual, have an undeniably phenomenological referent. In particular, we want to stress the importance of movement and transformation, as a means of grasping how such worlds ‘become’ and are continuously ‘reborn’ (Ingold, 2006).

In an article that re-examines the notion of ‘animism’, so typically problematic in anthropological history, Tim Ingold sets out to “recover that original openness to the world in which the people whom we (that is, western-trained ethnologists) call animist find the meaning of life” (2006:11). In such ontologies, he tells us, life is not an emanation but a generation of being, “a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual” (ibid: 11-12). Things, such as art forms, or indeed ritual or religious objects, do not represent the world, they make it visible. But in order to understand this we must also reconceive of the person, and especially, give primacy to his or her movement in the world.

We agree with Ingold that the person is not a self-contained entity that interacts with a pre-made world, but a being that actively brings this world forth via their movement in it: in short, the world becomes known to the knower through their ‘entanglement’, social and material, where being is knowing, and vice-versa. And thus, in this sense persons and things simply are their movement, their paths, their becoming. When we speak of notions of ‘agency’ and ‘materiality’, we must acknowledge that very different ontologies have the capacity not to attribute agency to inanimate matter, but to recognize that human beings are as material as they are spiritual, social and biological. As Toren has argued: “Our ideas are constituted in material relations with one another and we communicate with one another in and through the materiality of the world, its manifold objects, and awareness of our common humanity” (1999: 5). Thus, she continues, “our understanding of what is material is always mediated by our relations to others and likewise, the material stuff of the peopled world confirms our ideas of what those relations are or should be” (ibid). Our subjective and objective perspectives always guarantee eachother, she says. Mind, body, and the world of ‘things’ are not in dialectical relation to eachother. Rather, by tracing out our paths in the world, they come into being as aspects of one process.

In a project that Nico Tassi and I are currently developing together, we wish to emphasize the processual character of human religious experience, one which cannot do without materiality. Objects are not imbued with meanings or intentions as much as they enable these meanings and intentions, which, latent or emergent, are fundamental to a human relationship with the ‘divine’ or the ‘transcendent’. We thus propose a thoroughly relational approach to religious materiality which gives primacy to the achievement of these human-spirit/god/divine relations and the ‘work’ that this achivement implies. Movement, we contend, is key, indissociable to communication; not communication as a manifestation of intent predicated on reference, but as a process of creating selves, deities and things. “The problem with objectivism”, argues Alf Hornborg (2006:27), “is the notion of a ‘knowledge’ that is not situated as part of a relation”. The problem with constructivism is that in recognizing the ‘constructing subject’ (ibid: 28), it fails to acknowledge the subject’s embeddedness and relationality, assuming instead a real world ‘out there’ which the subject re-orders according to their schema.

We thus aim to merge the concerns of the ‘quiet revolution’ put in motion by anthropologists such as Viveiros de Castro and Martin Holbraad, with a focus on being-in-the-world, which enables us to understand the importance of movement and ‘becoming’ to the relationship between materiality and the divine.

References

Hornborg, A., 2006, ‘Animism, fetichism and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing)’, Ethnos, 71:1, 21-32.

Ingold, T., 2006, ‘Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought’, Ethnos, 71:1, 9-20.

Miller, D. ‘Thinking Through Things’, materialworldblog.com, posted 14 December 2006, and comments by Martin Holbraad, posted 3 March, 2007

Toren, C., 1999, Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge.

Editor's note: this topic was also recently discussed on the blog Savage Minds, by guest blogger Olumide Abimbola (http://savageminds.org/2009/05/08/towards-an-ontological-anthropology/ )

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

This account is taken from a site hosted by Joy Garnett: http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/joywar.html.

NY artist Joy Garnett makes paintings based on found photographs gathered from the mass media [more info]. In January 2004 she had a solo exhibition of a series of paintings called "Riot," which featured the figure in extreme emotional states. One of the paintings, Molotov, was based on an uncredited image found on the web that turned out to be a fragment of a 1979 photograph by Susan Meiselas.

When Meiselas and her lawyer learned of the painting, they sent a cease-and-desist letter to Garnett accusing her of "pirating" the photo. They demanded she remove the image of Molotov from her website, and that she sign a retroactive licensing agreement that would sign over all rights to the painting to Meiselas, and to credit Meiselas on all subsequent reproductions of Molotov. Garnett offered a compromise: she agreed to give Meiselas a credit line on her website, but refused to sign a “derivative work” agreement, claiming that her painting was a transformative fair use of the Meiselas photo. Meiselas’ attorney, Barbara Hoffman, turned down the offer and instead threatened Garnett with an injunction, demanding that Garnett comply with all of the demands as well as pay $2,000 in retroactive licensing fees.

Garnett pulled the image of Molotov from her website, lest it result in the entire site being pulled down (cf: a “Take-Down order”). She never signed over the rights to her work, but she was not pursued once the image of Molotov was removed from her site.

Before Garnett removed the image from her site, fellow artists who were following her story on Rhizome.org, (a not-for-profit organization with a website and list serve dedicated to new media art), grabbed the jpeg in solidarity. First they copied the html and created mirror pages on their own websites; then they started making anti-copyright, or “copyfight” agitprop based on the painting, resulting in many derivative works including collages, animations, etc. Several media and copyright reform blogs ran the story, and soon it spread globally, along with the images. The story was translated into Italian, Czech, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Catalan.

Two years later, (April 2006), Garnett and Meiselas were invited to speak together at the COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities, organized by Lawrence Weschler and hosted by New York University (click here for the podcasts). They had the opportunity to meet the day before over a cup of tea and clear up some misunderstandings. They went on the next day to present their stories in tandem at the conference. Their panel presentations were then re-edited and published in Harper’s, February ‘07 (see here).

See also this video Painting Mass Media and the Art of Fair Use - about the entire controversy.

The series of websites, artistic interventions and debates is a fascinating commentary on the politics of fair use, the appropriate use of images, the power of reproduction, the weight of context, the ethics of display, and the importance of history.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Objects and visual analyses | Podcasts | Topics for Discussion

Greetings!

I am a New York University Graduate student in the Program of Museum Studies requesting your participation in a unique survey conducted as research for my Master’s thesis. The survey should take less than 15 minutes and is completely anonymous. Your participation could affect the understanding of public perceptions of museum collecting practices and the display of antiquities. Are you aware of the issues or hold museums accountable for their acquisition policies?

Please take your time to answer each question honestly and thoughtfully. The following link will take you to the survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8SsSFcghwaTf4c76EI_2bipA_3d_3d

The results will be posted on my NYU web blog (http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/clh365/antiquities/) or possibly published as an article at a later date.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please feel free to e-mail Cherkea_Howery@yahoo.com

Thank you for your participation!

Sincerely,
Cherkea Howery, NYU Museum Studies

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Lisa L. Wynn, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University

Online ethics training programs (a photo essay)

When I was a graduate student, we all had to take an online ethics training course from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. I think it was a condition for our department to receive federal funding of some sort. I wonder how many other anthropologists have taken the NIH ethics training? (I’d be curious to know, so post a comment if you have, or tell me if you’ve done CITI or some other online ethics training).

The NIH training course has many strengths, but it is ill-suited for training anthropologists for the kinds of ethical dilemmas they will encounter in the field. The basic model of “human subjects research” that it assumes is one of clinical research, but the intricate and intimate relationships that develop during ethnographic research raise dilemmas that are nearly unthinkable in a clinical encounter – dilemmas like: What if you’re doing research on sexuality and you start sleeping with your informants? (See Ralph Bolton’s chapter in Taboo [1995] for some thoughts).

So I got this idea that I would make my own ethics training module for social science students. My original idea was to take the NIH training module and just tweak it to make it ethnography-relevant and more attuned to the context of Australian research (because the NIH training module is heavy with U.S. regulatory code). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t just make a few changes here and there; I needed to come up with something wholly new.

Macquarie was very generous in giving me funding, and I recruited 2 co-authors: Paul Mason, a PhD student at Macquarie who was just back from his first trip to the field and still had those fieldwork experiences and dilemmas fresh in his mind, and Kristina Everett, an anthropologist in Macquarie’s Department of Indigenous Studies / Warawara, who contributed material on research in Australian Indigenous communities (which I know nothing about).

Pedagogy and aesthetics
I won’t describe the entire module that we came up with here. It’s freely accessible online so go to http://www.mq.edu.au/ethics_training to have a look for yourself. I’ve written about the website on Culture Matters, and Zachary Schrag, a U.S.-based historian who is working on a book on the history of ethics regulation over non-biomedical human research, has reviewed and critiqued the site at length on his Institutional Review Blog.

Here I want to consider the intertwined aesthetic and pedagogical decisions that went into creating the site. When I first started planning, I said to myself, “If I were going to improve on the NIH training module, what would I do?” First, I decided that the site could not resemble a corporate PowerPoint slide. Check out this sample page from the NIH website:

Awful. I think the NIH training module has many merits, and aesthetically I think it’s overall pretty good too, and I know that using photos of people can be ethically fraught, which probably explains the use of these illustrations… but ugh!

Second, it shouldn’t read like a dry policy statement – after all, if it did then people might as well just go and read the regulatory code instead.

On a related note, I decided that it shouldn’t be jargony; it should be written at a level that would be accessible for first-year undergraduate students. The words ontology, hermeneutics, and epistemology were banned from the lexicon. (So was lexicon!) But at the same time, it had to be written at a level that wouldn’t make a sophisticated reader feel patronized (I don’t know how successful I was).

Pedagogically, the route I chose was to feature lots of case studies. Case studies make abstract issues accessible and real. There’s a whole section called “case studies” that contains 4 famous ethics controversies:

-Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (psychology)
-Laud Humphrey’s famous Tearoom Trade study (sociology)
-Sudhir Venkatesh and his book Gang Leader for a Day (sociology), and
-the Human Terrain System (anthropology)

But the other sections almost all contain case studies as well – some are historical and well known, while others were taken from my research or that of my co-authors and other colleagues (we used pseudonyms to protect people’s privacy).

Aesthetically I decided that it had to be broken up into relatively short chunks of text, and every page had to have a photo.

Finding illustrations
OK, so how do you get 100 fieldwork photos for a website?

First, Paul and I hit up our colleagues in the anthro department at Macquarie. They had a lot of great photos, but some I couldn’t use, because I thought they were just too complex or ironic for an intro to ethics. For example, Chris Lyttleton offered me this photo and grinningly suggested that I caption it, “drinks before dinner.”

Continue reading "Protected: Open access materials for teaching research ethics" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

In media Res, an online mediacommons project is hosting a week of presentation and debate about indigenous media. Check out and comment on Faye Ginsburg's paper here. Essays by Michelle Raheja, Amalia Cordova, Pamela Wilson and Ernesto Ignacio de Carvalho to follow.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Haidy Geismar, NYU

This is our first effort at podcasting and we've had some trouble integrating audio into our blog template so please excuse us if this is somewhat clunky. The audio quality isn't bad at all for the speakers (recorded on an ipod with a belkin mike) but the questions at the end aren't too clear, so apologies for that. Many of the images referred to can be accessed at the links below.

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This is the audio for a panel entitled Visual Culture, Digitalization, and Cultural Heritage in Oceania which took place at the conference Pacific Alternatives: Cultural Heritage and Political Innovation in Oceania, March 23 - 27 2009, at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The panel was an exciting discussion of a number of different digital projects, from 3-D scanning with a view to digital repatriation, to archiving, online exhibitions and using digital technologies as a tool to reconnect communities to discourses of cultural heritage. The regional focus on Oceania provided an interesting frame for the conversation that ensued.

Anyone with further comments or links, please add to the comments below...

Conference partipcants were (with links to the projects discussed):

Chair: Graeme Were, University Museum Collections, UCL (http://www.museums.ucl.ac.uk/research/ecurator/)

Nicholas Thieberger, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (Digitization for Preservation, Repatriation, and Academic Responsibility—Examples from the PARADISEC and Kaipuleohone Digital Archives)

Guido Pigliasco, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (From Immemorial Heritage to Digital Memory: Owning History in Fiji)

Karen Nero, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury (Digitized Images in Support of the Establishment of Virtual Museums in Oceania)

Stuart Dawrs, Special collections, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (Cultural Heritage Meets Cyber Commons: (Re)creating Island Communities through Digital Collections)

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links | Objects and visual analyses | Podcasts | Topics for Discussion

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

I thought it might be a good idea to open a thread discussing and linking to teaching materials for courses in "material culture", "thing theory", "materiality" and so forth...
I've been looking around a bit.

Here are some of the courses I've come across so far that best exemplify the dynamism of this growing field (I've got a bias towards anthropology...literature people please weigh in in the comments, and design people, and history people...)

Severin Fowles "Thing Theory" in the Anthropology Dept at Columbia University is a great course with student assignments posted online to the class blog. It's also interesting to see how this course has changed over the years.

Robert Frosts course in "Material Culture and the Interpretation of Objects" at U Michigan is mainly focused on museological texts.

Bill Brown's literature based "thing theory" at Chicago

Mike Shanks, Thing Theory, from an archaeological perspective at Stanford.

Dr Fillippo Osella's course, The Allure of Things at Sussex University provides a great overview of the British slant on material culture. the course no longer seems to be online, but I saved the version from 2007 as a webarchive (safari is the browser) which hopefully you can download here: Download file

Then Fred Myers and I taught a graduate seminar in the NYU Anthropology department on Materiality, which was frustrating because there was so much we couldn't include. The idea was to really focus on the intersection of thinking about materiality for the discipline of anthropology rather than a broader based survey of the literature. Download file

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to From the editors | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

Paula Cerni MPhil (paula_cerni@msn.com), Independent Scholar

Consumption and the body have become topics of great interest in academia as well as in popular culture. Writing from a historical materialist perspective, I was intrigued by this, but also dissatisfied with the standard Marxissant view that such topics are trivial, self-indulgent, or, worse still, a concession to false ideology. Instead, I wanted to see whether Marxism could help explain the turn towards consumption and the body as a historical phenomenon rooted in particular economic conditions.

Looking at body studies first, I noticed that recent contributions usually posit either a constructed or a physicalist body, neither of which is generally considered to be much involved in the production of material objects. This unproductive body, I suggested in a 2007 essay (http://reconstruction.eserver.org/074/cerni.shtml), corresponds to the real experience of an economy where only a small portion of the workforce is employed in productive industries. At the same time, however, this body requires those very industries to operate in certain ways - increasingly, by outsourcing highly productive work to impoverished 'others' in developing nations. In Western societies, the result is an extreme separation between people and things, between mind and matter, and between constructionist and physicalist interpretations of the body.

Next I considered how, under the same economic conditions, the commodity is transformed into a one-sided object of consumption, a pure use-value. The main features of this object, I argue in a more recent essay (http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Cerni.pdf), are physical singularity, personal meaningfulness and practical multiplicity. These features are neither naturally embodied in the object nor ideologically constructed; rather, they arise out of the consuming relation between subject and object. The ideology of consumer capitalism - built around notions of desire, meaning-making and choice - is therefore not false, but fitting to the real unproductive subject, to the consumer. Its counterpart is a one-sided objectivism that draws our attention to 'the things themselves', so that 'the materiality of a there-to-be-consumed world is perfectly aligned with the malleable performances of post-modern reflexivity'. The essay ends with a few speculative thoughts on the future of consumer capitalism.

I am now wondering how the global downturn might affect the consuming experience. With credit more difficult to obtain, emptier shopping malls, heavy discounting, and a growing reliance on second-hand goods and charitable donations - will attitudes towards buying and using change? A widely-read story here in the US during the recent holiday season concerned the horrific death of a Walmart employee trampled to death by bargain-hunters (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-28-walmart-death_N.htm)

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

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

Haidy Geismar, NYU

I am currently teaching a graduate seminar "cultural property, rights and museums" in the NYU Program for Museum Studies. During this week's class we had a tour of the Greek, Roman, and Ancient Near Eastern Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with curator Oscar Muscarella. Muscarella is somewhat notorious for his outspoken criticism of the complicity of museum curators in the illicit trade and plunder of world cultural heritage and despite the truth of what he says is ostracized by many in the museum world.

From our perspective, as museum studies students, and anthropologists, it seems self-evident to expose the complex ways in which looted objects are authenticated via fine-art display strategies (as context free and therefore not linked to particular pillaged sites) and to understand the social dynamics of the art world in which the social world of collectors and collections overshadows the seamier side of illicit trade.

Cindy Ho from Saving Antiquities for Everyone asked us to think about the new ethical guidelines developed by the American Association of Museums which lay out a series of principles for ethical collections all museums should adhere to (see http://www.aam-us.org/museumresources/ethics/coe.cfm, and see the ICOM guidelines http://icom.museum/ethics.html) and I asked the class to read the guidelines and make suggestions around ways in which museums could activate ethics in a more publicly available manner (I mean, who has ever seen an exhibition which explains how the objects came into the museum or deals with the intricacies of looting, pillaging, dealing and collecting? In the Metropolitan Museum, objects loaned by the Italian government in return for the repatriation of the Euphronios Krater are labelled with large red labels as Major Loans but there is no explanation as to why these pieces would literally be red flagged and a museum visitor would have no knowledge of the controversy that has arisen around many objects on display).

I thought I would use materialworldblog as a forum to extend our class discussion and open the debate to wider readers - what do we think about the remit of ethical guidelines and their efficacy? How can museums make these issues more available to the public and should this be part of the guidelines themselves? How come ethics and law are so separated on these issues? What responsibilities do museums have in these debates and how should they position themselves?

Class, and anyone else, please weigh in, in the comments below....

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

[Ed: This question just in from Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett, NYU, all input greatly appreciated]

I am interested in exploring issues around the mediation and remediation of photographs in historical exhibitions, especially those dealing with the Holocaust.

There is of course a big literature on the subject of photography and the Holocaust: James Young, Barbie Zelizer, Marianne Hirsch, Diana Taylor, Laura Levitt, Shelley Hornstein, Sybil Milton, Janina Struk, Ulrich Baer, Paul Williams, Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, Molly Nolan, Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, Cornelia Brink, Habo Koch, Caroline Wiedmer, Jeffrey Shandler, Oren Stier, Carol Zemel, Brett Kaplan, Harold Kaplan, Andrea Liss, and others. However, discussion of issues specific to exhibition (design and installation) from the perspective of practitioners is somewhat elusive because pracitioners tend to do rather than write about what they do. I would be grateful if readers could point me to where in their own work or the work of others such issues are addressed.

While my primary concern is with Holocaust exhibits, the issues bear on any history exhibit. What are the protocols that practicing curators and designers develop (or do not develop) with respect to cropping, enlarging, use of details, and graphic treatment of historical photographs when designing the installation for a history exhibit? How do these protocols (or lack of them) affect decisions regarding enlargement, cropping, medium on which the photograph is printed, whether paper or glass, graphic or filmic treatment, digital projection, use in interactive display, and even 3-dimensional treatment. In other words, I am interestsed in the thinking behind all decisions that affect the presence of photographs in the exhibition. This question is especially important when the "originals" (prints made close to the time of the negative) are not shown, let alone the strip of negatives, contact sheets, and uncropped photographs (even when they exist).

I am trying to determine if Holocaust exhibition practice has developed its own protocols, raised the threshhold for what can and cannot be done, or provided the model in other ways. How do issues that have been debated at length with respect to the Holocaust play out in the exhibition of other genocides and in reflections on those exhibitions. What are some of the cultural differences and sensitivities that would make a protocol acceptable in Poland but not in the USA or Israel, in Argentina or Vietnam or Rwanda, but not in Ireland, acceptable for other genocides, but not for the Holocaust.

Atrocity photographs and traumatic images are the limit case and have been discussed at length. I am also interested in the protocols (if there are any) for presenting any photographs taken in Poland during the Holocaust, whether they show civilians looking up at falling bombs or a flowerseller on the street on a sunny summer day. Again, my concern is with curatorial and design practice and with the protocols, stated or unstated, that guide what can and cannot be done with these photographs in an exhibition .

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris hosted a series of round table discussions about the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. Full text of the discussions in French and English can be found here.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Mark Bradford, CoCA, Massey Univ & Ph.D. candidate VUW

Regarded as one of the most difficult and effective of the martial arts, Aikido is derived from adapting and blending ancient Japanese martial arts like Jujitsu, Karate and sword fighting with breathing and meditation studies. My research investigates the interdisciplinary synthesis of ideational flow and the practice and philosophy of the art of Aikido. To what extent can design leadership based in Aikido transform co-creative flow?

The project questions what new behaviours, skills and tools can assist designers to meet the demands of contemporary knowledge creation whilst maximising 'ways' of spreading ideas? Overall, this research seeks to understand and reflect on existing disciplinary experiences through researching other creative 'pathways' – such as ‘Aikido’ – to reflect on how designers think instead of purely what designers think. Hence the project will investigate how designers can connect broader understandings of ‘leadership’ with specific design knowledge to enhance creative performance. The emphasis is on how designers can potentially ‘manage’ their thinking within the ideation process – maximise “ways” to spread ‘memes’.

Photo credit: Toshiharu Sawada Shihan. Photograph by Richard Haslon, Senior Instructor, Wellington Aikido Club, Inc.

Over a three-day period, audiences in New Zealand have been offered an unprecedented opportunity to observe Toshiharu Sawada Shihan (7th Dan, Kimori Dojo, Nagoya) and local Wellingtonian Aikido practitioners in training.

One of the ideas here was to observe specific patterns of behaviour, use of language, and symbols. The research also explores the conceptual possibilities of applying Aikido theories beyond the conventional ‘dojo’ setting – referred to as “Takemusu Aiki” or “Courageous and Creative Living” (Saotome, 1993; K. Ueshiba, 1984; M. Ueshiba, 2002) …

Continue reading "Aikido and Ideational Flow" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

The latest newsletter from SAFE (Saving Antiquities for Everyone) challenges the recent admittance of Harrisson Ford (aka Indiana Jones) to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America...

Archaeologist Dr. Oscar Muscarella, outspoken critic of the antiquities trade and the plunder of archaeological sites, objects to the recent election of Harrison Ford-of Indiana Jones fame-to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). AIA is North America's oldest and largest non-profit organization devoted to archaeology, and according to the AIA website, "the legendary archaeologist Indiana Jones ... shows his commitment to real archaeology." However, according to Dr. Muscarella, Indiana Jones is not an archaeologist, but a plunderer.

And lest we think that Dr. Muscarella's is an isolated opinion, consider a recent statement (lohud.com) by Mark Rose, online editorial director for the Archaeological Institute of America, who also holds a PhD in archaeology: "There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don't think [Indiana Jones] would be a member [of the profession]. Not in good standing, anyway." Professor Bob Murowchick, associate professor of archaeology at Boston University, bemoans the fact that "the movies emphasize the tomb-raiding aspect, leaving the impression that artifacts are there for the taking by whoever stumbles on them first.... The one thing we do worry quite a bit about is the looting aspect, because archaeological looting is really a serious issue," Professor Murowchick said.

It's ironic, as the Associated Press's David Germain points out, that "the closest thing to authentic archaeology in the "Indiana Jones" flicks is done by the bad guys, whose elaborate, systematic digs in 'Raiders' resemble actual excavations." Dr. Jane MacLaren Walsh, an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, agrees. "Not a whole lot of what we know as archaeology goes on in these movies, except what the Nazis do. They seem to be doing some real archaeological work," Walsh said.

Is Indiana Jones a plunderer? Do Indiana Jones movies legitimize plunder and/or treasure hunting?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to From the news | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Robert Foster, University of Rochester

In November 2007, the journal Cultural Anthropology published "The Coke Complex," a cluster of articles that examine the political economy and political ecology of globalization through the lens of The Coca-Cola Company and its products. I have written a brief essay on critical fetishism for Anthropology Newsletter that suggests how to use "The Coke Complex" to prompt classroom discussion and to guide research projects that ground an iconic global commodity in the local conditions of its production and consumption. Both "The Coke Complex" and my teaching advice are available online through AnthroSource and, for non-subscribers, at the following sites: http://www.culanth.org/cokecomplex/ and http://hdl.handle.net/1802/5458.

Continue reading "Critical Fetishism and Coke®" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Patrick Laviolette, SVMC Massey University

When the major national and international sporting competitions get underway, entire populations are glued to the television in support of their home sides. Sport enthusiasts travel for miles at great expense across borders and continents, to personally witness their sporting heroes in their favourite games. The competitive edge of bookies’ favourites dominate discussions in the media whilst myths are propagated about the moral and physical prowess of the players and their coaches.

In deep Cornish waters, summer 2007

The spread of competitive (mostly team) sports such as football, rugby, cricket, hockey, rowing and tennis is historically linked to their adoption in institutional contexts – in educational establishments, in business corporations and for civil defence. Learning institutions forged alliances with sports in Britain through the public school system, so that by the late 19th century competitive team sports were included within the ideal of educating for a ‘mascular Christianity’. This represented ideal physical and spiritual attributes of manhood for moral and military leadership – part of the training for the leaders of an expansive Empire. The spread of sport has therefore had a long relationship with the processes of colonialism.

Today, the globalisation of sporting spectacles benefits from a different type of Empire, massive financial sponsorship. The huge economic associations that they entail and the grandiose scales at which they operate are difficult to take in. The World Cups of football or rugby, the Ashes, Masters, Opens and Olympic Games are indeed as internationally known, standardised and systematically broadcast as are some of the world religions.

Anthropologists have long shown an interest in sport. We inherited a rich body of ethnographic knowledge on sportive activities as embedded in particular social settings such as, for instance, Firth’s (1983) work on hallowed types of dart/spear matches in Tikopia, Geertz’s (1973) depiction of Balinese cockfights and Kildea & Leach’s (1976) representation of Trobriand cricket through ethnographic film. A handful of scholars such as Mauss (1935), Bourdieu (1984) and Deleuze (1992) additionally produced influential theoretical analyses of sport, games and gambling.

There’s also an anthropological legacy in studying extreme behaviour. Needham’s work on headhunting (1976) and Chagnon’s (1968) research on Yanomamo feuds for instance. But the idea of bringing the two together, however, of ethnographically studying the extreme as well as the sporting world – is a fairly new phenomenon (Wheaton 2004; Anthropology Today 2007).

Continue reading "Giving the Extreme a Sporting Chance" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Publicity still for the Universal Kitchen (see link below)

Faye Ginsburg, NYU, has been working on issues related to disability and its public presence as a scholar (currently on a project funded by the Spencer Foundation with Rayna Rapp entitled Cultural Innovations and Learning Disabilities) and as a parent activist (Vice President of the Familial Dysautonomia Foundation). Both projects inevitably lead to questions about the built environment and accessibility, which fall under the rubric of Universal Design, an idea that goes back to the rehabilitative needs of WW II vets, although the term first came into use in the 1980s as "the design of products and environments to be usable to the greatest extent possible by people of all ages and abilities." Later, barrier-free movement influenced legislation that removed physical barriers in the environment.

This is a helpful digital exhibit about its origins:
http://www.hagley.org/univdesignexhibit/index.php?page=Harrison

Here is the link to a video about Faye's daughter, Samantha Myers who has become an active media presence advocating awareness about the Jewish genetic disease Familial Dysautonomia. The video was made by Faye's niece and underscores the profound importance of kinship in the embrace or denial of disability (in this case the former).
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XaI84_ANroQ

Samantha also has a blog in which she records her everyday experiences in a variety of different media:
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/samantha_myers/

More on Universal Design, from Wikipedia:

Universal design is a relatively new paradigm that emerged from "barrier-free" or "accessible design" and "assistive technology."[1] Barrier free design and assistive technology provide a level of accessibility for people with disabilities but they also often result in separate and stigmatizing solutions, for example, a ramp that leads to a different entry to a building than a main stairway. Universal design strives to be a broad-spectrum solution that helps everyone, not just people with disabilities. Moreover, it recognizes the importance of how things look. For example, while built up handles are a way to make utensils more usable for people with gripping limitations, some companies introduced larger, easy to grip and attractive handles as feature of mass produced utensils. They appeal to a wide range of consumers
As life expectancy rises and modern medicine has increased the survival rate of those with significant injuries, illnesses and birth defects, there is a growing interest in universal design. There are many industries in which universal design is having strong market penetration but there are many others in which it has not yet been adopted to any great extent.
Universal design is a part of everyday living and is all around us. The "undo" command in most software products is a good example. Color-contrast dish ware with steep sides that assist those with visual problems as well as those with dexterity problems are another. Additional examples include cabinets with pull-out shelves, kitchen counters at several heights to accommodate different tasks and postures and low-floor buses that kneel and are equipped with ramps rather than lifts.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Good Links | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

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

P. Allen Roda, Ph.D. candidate Music Dept., NYU

Organologists (those who study musical instruments) have generally focused on instrument design, classification, and the use of instruments in ‘traditional’ settings. In so doing, they have tended to take the relationship between humans and instruments for granted, rather than investigate the myriad ways in which this relationship is manifest in human – instrument encounters. This point of view lead Margaret Kartomi to assert that “musical instruments are fixed, static objects that cannot grow or adapt in themselves” (2001:305). In this overview, I adopt a point of view best expressed by Nicholas Thomas, that “objects are not what they were made to be, but what they have become” (1991:4).

Fig. 1: golf club sheath or didjeridu?

I propose that by studying the intimacy of their sonic relationships, the physical experience of bodies interacting, and the cultural and intellectual knowledge that musical instruments embody and transfer; the musical instrument – human relationship could be a unique realm of analysis for a new organology that both draws from and contributes to an interdisciplinary approach to the human/non-human relationship. In order to understand the relationship between humans and musical instruments it will be necessary for organologists to use tools and methodologies from other disciplines such as the anthropology of material culture, actor network theory, and phenomenology.

The study of material culture has a long history in the social sciences dating back to what Germain Bazin (1967) has termed 'the Museum Age', a period starting in the 19th Century, in which the material artifacts of a given society were organized and displayed for the purpose of showing the social evolution of primitives en route to European Civilization. Distance in space was conflated with distance in time as 'foreign' or 'primitive' items were presented as emblematic of Europe’s past (Miller 1987). Later anthropological studies focused on the role of material objects in exchange and exchange itself as the foundation of social relationships. Building upon these works, anthropologists and sociologists began to think of about the role of material objects in post-industrial society – a role that many see as constituted by consumption.

Daniel Miller defines consumption as work which “translates the object from an alienable to an inalienable condition; that is from being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artefact invested with particular inseparable connotations” (Miller 1987:190). For Miller, consumption is a productive process of cultural, social and self creation. He refuses to let the consumer be reduced to the status of the commodity. Drawing upon Hegel’s notion of 'objectification' as the process through which subjects and objects are mutually constituted, Miller concludes that our very self awareness is dependent upon our ability as subjects to interact with the external world. Neither subject nor object exists independently; subsequently neither should be analyzed independently.

This strategy for analysis has been adopted by a branch of sociology called Actor Network Theory which has pointed out that all encounters between humans, between non-humans, or between humans and non-humans are mediated by social relationships (Latour 2005). The internet, our computers, and the social history of their production all mediate my relationship with you as readers as well as our more abstract joint interest in material culture. Rather than focus on the actor, whether it be human or non-human, Actor Network Theory argues for a focus on the network of relations that are forged between various actors in social interaction. According to this logic, organologists would cease to study musical instruments at all as it would be impossible to isolate 'the instrument itself' from any social encounter. Though I support this line of reasoning, I do not wish to discredit the valuable organological research undertaken through more traditional methods.

Fig. 2: author playing his DIY didjeridu

Now I would like to draw your attention to Figures 1 and 2. Once I learned from Dennis Havlena’s web site (Havlena 2007) that 'ready made didgeridoos' were for sale at Kmart for 97 cents in the sporting goods department where they are called 'golf club sheaths', I set out immediately to find one – and indeed found one in my late grandfather’s set of golf clubs in my parents’ basement. Now it is a didjeridu. Listen to a sound sample by:
Download file
I want you to think about the significance of this event. What does it mean for me, a white male representative of the Academy to proclaim ‘this is a didjeridu’. What power relationships are being enacted? Who agrees or not with my proclamation? Who might contest my authority to define didjeridus in this fashion? How did this object and I come to relate to each other in this particular way? Why do I not call it a mini-alphorn, a lur, or von Hornbostel-Sachs? If I leave this on a train accidentally and someone else finds it, what will it be for them? How might it affect them? How might it change if I ceremoniously present it to a future grandchild or encase it in glass at a prestigious institution? As I briefly review the various complex and overlapping relationships between musical instruments and humans which can be: sonic, commercial, physical, and/or museological – that is to say mediated by practices of classification and display.

The Sonic Relationship - Listening
In general, musical instruments are primarily dedicated to producing or modifying sound – a characteristic which separates them from other entities that also make sound (such as alarm clocks, refrigerators and medical equipment). This distinction is created primarily by the intimacy of the sonic relationship between musical instruments and humans. One example is didjeridu healing as practiced in various ‘new age’ communities around the world in which the sound of the instrument is thought to ‘envelop’ or ‘open’ the patient. Some patients believe that the sound waves emitted by the instrument penetrate their body and align their energy centers to facilitate healing. In describing his practice, Hans Schuldheiss says, “The didgeridoo creates a sound bubble around the client, creating a sense of well-being and relaxation” (Ellis 2005). Perhaps for Schuldheiss and his patients, the golf club sheath is a piece of medical equipment. For me, it's a musical instrument; for my grandfather it was a golf club sheath; for the Federal Transit Authority it is a potential weapon. What something ‘is’ depends on our relationship with it.

Drawing on extensive studies of the relation of music to language, Steven Feld and Aaron Fox demonstrate that music, even instrumental music, can convey emotion and has communicative capabilities (Feld & Fox 1994). Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetics’ articulates numerous ways in which we can communicate information without the use of referential speech, many of which are found in music (Jakosbson 1995). The sound of musical instruments can make people laugh, cry, scream – or even surrender (Cusick 2007).

Don Ihde writes of the ‘voices of objects’, claiming that the sounds different objects make reveal something about their material nature, their interiority, and the space in which they make sound. He rightfully points out that most objects do not make sound on their own, but in duets or complex polyphonies – that is to say that it is not just the sound of the drum skin that we hear but also that of the stick or the hand and the room in which we are present (Ihde 1986).

The sound of musical instruments reveals more than just their physical characteristics and their relationship with acoustic space, however. In describing the inseparability of hearing from listening, David Sudnow (1979) points out that the human mind makes associations and judgments at the moment of perception. We do not hear in the same way that tape recorders do, though sometimes we imagine that we do. Subsequently, the sounds of musical instruments also invoke a variety of connections in the ears/minds of the listeners. These connections are related to each listener’s familiarity or lack thereof with the sound of any given musical instrument.

These sounds are frequently connected to particular places or cultures in the ears of listeners. Max Peter Bauman lists 59 instruments which are commonly thought to be ‘national icons’ (Baumann 2000). I would argue that all instruments invoke some sense of cultural significance whether it is related to a specific region, a national identity, or simply a sense of Otherness. I like to think of them as sonic ambassadors. For example, musical instruments are frequently brought home by tourists in an attempt to sonically invoke their tourist destination. Some work on the global trade in tourist art exists, though it focuses primarily on visual art and the tourist ‘gaze’ (Urry 2002). Perhaps future work in organology could present a study of the tourist 'ear'.

The flow of musical instruments as commodities of international trade has significant theoretical ramifications for organologists, because it helps to articulate the various types of human relationships these instruments have as they encounter different individuals over the course of what has been termed their ‘social life’. For instance, Igor Kopytoff (1986) writes of the process through which objects (specifically slaves) transform to become commodities. These changes do not occur instantly, or overnight, but are part of a process that is to be understood as dynamic, in flux, and intangible. This work could serve as a model for organological investigations into the way in which musical instruments enter the marketplace, especially when combined with Miller’s theory of consumption. An example of this type of research is Sean Murray’s paper on pianos and the 19th Century Ivory trade (Murray 2007).

Continue reading "Toward a New Organology: Material Culture and the Study of Musical Instruments" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

All readers of this site should be familiar with the pioneering work of ethnomusicologist and musician Steve Feld, now based at the University of New Mexico, who has been making sustained explorations into the environment of sound through both his written work and his own recording practice for many years. Starting with the Bosavi of the Papua New Guinea rainforest, Feld has worked with many other sonic environments including bell ringers in Europe, and more recently has been working in Accra Ghana.

Feld has linked up with musicians and environmental activists to draw attention to the political landscape, cultural politics and commodification of sound

www.acousticecology.org/

We are keen to get more sound work through this website and to explore the interface between sound and visual representation, and to explore the tactility and materiality of sound, particularly in the digital formats of electronic disseminations such as this blog...we look forward to hearing from any of you working on the boundaries of sound, vision and theorizing their material presences...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Good Links | Topics for Discussion

SAFE is a not-for-profit awareness raising and lobbying organization based in the US, which aims to draw attention to the systematic pillaging and looting of archaeological sites worldwide, linking up to the work of British archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew working at the Macdonald Institute at Cambridge University.

http://www.savingantiquities.org/

They encourage student participation through poster sessions and internships, run public programs and have an excellent website. Those in New York should try to attend Oscar Muscarella's subversive tours of the Metropolitan Museum's Greek, Roman and Ancient Near East Galleries. Founded by a group of private individuals in the wake of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, SAFE exemplifies the ways in which concerned individuals can try to make a difference. Of course, targeting concerned scholars is only part of the task - we need to reeducate collectors as to the implications of the trade in antiquities.

The recent re-opening of the newly renovated Greek and Roman galleries at the Met shows just how much Antiquities are still used to boost the reputation of wealthy collectors into immortality. Recent scandals, such as the arrest of Getty Curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht and the negotiation by Italian authorities with the Metropolitan Museum to return the famous Euphronios Krater feel as though they exist in a different world to these galleries (even though the krater is still just in the next room, with a small label acknowledging that it is on long term loan from the Republic of Italy)...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology Graduate Student

Museums have been pooling from film in both literal and figurative ways. Galleries are peppered with screens and video installations, film segments and screening areas, but they are also generating "blockbuster" shows and featuring trailer-like advertisements for their exhibitions on television and in cinemas.

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is no exception, with the added plus of hosting a the largest ethnographic and documentary film festival in the United States once a year, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Despite its long and intricate relationship with film, in the last few months, the museum has been greatly transformed by film. Since A Night at the Museum, a film based on a book by Milan Trenc, directed by Shawn Levy, and with Ben Stiller playing the main character, was screened around the world, visitors come to the museum looking for the film's many characters: Attila the Hun, Jedediah, Sacajawea, the Easter Island talking head, and Dexter the monkey, among others. In their quest to merge fiction and reality at the museum, visitors are unavoidably disappointed: not only was the film not filmed in the museum in New York, but it was actually done in a building based on the AMNH constructed as a sound stage in Vancouver, Canada. External shots of the actual AMNH were used throughout the film to make it appear that the story takes place inside the Central Park museum.

Rather than working to correct the misunderstanding, and sport its identity as an institution with an educational and scientific mission, the AMNH has been more than happy to take on its role in the film as a marketing strategy. The IMDB website states that visitors to the AMNH increased 20% after the film's opening, a statistic that clearly did not go unnoticed by the museum's public relations team. These days, the museum has very literally let the museum display and characters constructed by the movie inside its walls, using large cutouts of the film to lure visitors to its giftshop, selling AMNH certified "Night at the Museum" badges, and offering "night at the museum" sleepovers during which, for a huge sum of money, children can spend an actual night in one of the museum's halls, using flashlights and going on expeditions with wild buffalo and a blue whale, waiting for Teddy Roosevelt to come to life.

Sleepover Link:http://www.amnh.org/kids/sleepovers/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Erin Mell-Taylor, former UCL Material Culture postgraduate

Bob Haozous is famous person, or that’s how I’ve always looked at him. He is someone that I looked up to as an example of a Native American that has truly ‘made it’. While he works in the same discipline as his father Alan Houser, he has transformed the idea of art, and made it controversial and beautiful. “…His artwork is rooted in his strong communal and cultural identity. Haozous believes that the prestige he earns as an artist goes back to his people and, in a sense, he does not own himself.” (Eun-Hui An www.thephotographyinstitute.org) This is one of the reasons I found the statement that Bob Haozous wrote as apart of the accompanying text to his exhibition in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art beautiful in a melancholy way, as well as very suggestive of what one would think Haozous would write as a precursor to his work.

Bob Haozous always struck me as someone who tried his utmost to accurately view people, society, and culture. His judgments seemed to be centuries old, but full of life and passion for change. He never wanted to put people in pretty boxes to define them. There was no justification in classifying people as white, black, red, or yellow, but just dealt with race, diversity, religion, and culture as fact; this is how it is for all different types of people. “He is concerned with the themes of man’s relationship to the environment and man’s relationship to his fellow man.” (www.haozousarts.com/artist.htm )

Upon one’s first read-through this statement; you would get an idea that this is a modern ‘Indian’, one that seems to struggle with his ideas of individuality and sense of community. The statement seems to read of someone who is questioning the “Indian” norms and way of life. Upon a second read-through, one can begin to see the struggle with aesthetics and what “modern concepts of individualism” have come to mean to someone who is representative of the mainstream native art community. We see conflicts of representation and modernism. “I do not believe non-tribal (emphasis is mine) people can honestly speak for indigenous people.” Haozous seeks to create a definition of who can accurately speak for an indigenous group. While I, as well as many museum curators, academics, and non-tribal (but indeed indigenous people), feel that representation can come with cooperation between community and academia, or research led by indigenous peoples, one has to appreciate Haozous’ candor and honesty in his opinions regarding native representation. The main problems or questions I would have with his representation ideal would be to question if he is suggesting that if one doesn’t grow up on, or end up on a reservation, can they truly understand what it is to be Indian? Or does this just suggest that if you are not affiliated with a tribe you do not understand? What if you belong to a tribe that is exceptionally inactive? Does that make you less of an Indian? What does it mean then to be Indian?

Continue reading "‘Indian Speak’ through an ‘Indigenous Dialogue’" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/14/ebay_wing_mirror/

A couple of years ago a student of mine wrote an essay on the concept of objectification, and the importance of modes of externalisation as the means by which we come to know ourselves. To illustrate this she used the phenomenon of reflectoporn. This is where people flouted the ban on pornography on E-Bay by putting up for auction objects such as mirrors, kettles with reflective surfaces and such like, which when given a second glance, turn out to dimly reflect naked persons presumed to be the people who are selling the things. As far as I know this is not a particularly extensive phenomenon, but it has attracted a sort of urban myth status with hundreds of websites telling us that the phenomenon exists. Rather in the manner of all those essays on the way shopping malls use pastiche, it has become a very obvious way to claim something profound about the modern world. Still even if it doesn’t actually say anything of the kind, its kinda weird and kinda intriguing, and I guess we have just become one more of those websites that is spreading the word. So, just in case someone out there needs a quick and dirty example for some essay on material and visual culture, don’t bother with this one. We already know. Incidentally the student then went on to become a first class researcher.

Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

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

Marilena Alivizatou, UCL Institute of Archaeology

While material culture studies are based on the idea that ‘materiality is an integral dimension of culture’ (Tilley 2006: 1), the recent adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in October 2003 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has brought the concept of intangible heritage and subsequently, the notion of ‘immateriality’ into the spotlight. In this sense, an examination of the implications of employing the concept of intangible heritage in material culture studies could raise new challenges around the interaction between the material and the conceptual.

Rooted in Japanese and Korean understandings of cultural heritage, the concept of intangible heritage emerged on an international level in the 1990s within the operational grounds of UNESCO, as an alternative and complementary concept to the Eurocentric understanding of cultural heritage that was dominated by the ideas of monumentality and authenticity. According to the concept of intangible heritage, the primarily Western focus on the technical or aesthetic characteristics of artefacts as an expression of cultural heritage, often ignores the living and performed dimensions of cultural creation and transmission. Extending beyond the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body and material and immaterial, the concept of intangible heritage focuses on the examination of artefacts and spaces as an expression of the practices, processes and representations that communities and individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage. As a consequence, objects and places obtain meaning and significance through the values that are ascribed to them by the people that create and come in contact with them.

This shift in the international understanding of cultural heritage could signify a new way for understanding objects and spaces by focusing on the human element inherent in them. In this sense, the concept of intangible heritage invites anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural heritage and museum theorists to adopt holistic and humanistic perspectives when interpreting material culture.

Reference
Tilley, C. 2006. Introduction in Handbook of Material Culture Studies. London: Sage Publications

Related Websites
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich_convention/index.php

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to 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

[From the editors: we have reposted this from the early days of the site last year, as there seems to be a theme developing in the site regarding landscape, moving through space, and the politics of embodying place....more to come]

Footpaths: In England and Wales the statutory definition of a footpath is a right of way over which the public have a right to pass and repass by foot only.

Kate Cameron-Daum, PhD Student, Anthropology, University College London

The essential element of the footpath is the human interaction with it. Henri Lefebvre wrote of how social and mental activity embeds its network on the landscape and this is clearly evidenced in the historical use and pattern of footpaths which has changed from a mainly economic to a recreational usage. Once people used the local paths crossing fields and woods in order to walk to work, to shop, go to church or visit the pub. From the late eighteenth century, with the improvements in roads and transport, walking was increasingly viewed as a romantic pastime; its popularity influenced by poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and writers such as Jane Austen whose novel Emma is interlaced with footpaths both literal and metaphorical.

Continue reading "Footpaths" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Patrick Laviolette, UCL/Massey University

Source: Patrick Laviolette

Thirty years ago Malcom Crick (I976) provided an explicit conceptualisation for map usages. His definition for what constitutes a map was that it is “something that is itself a representative device [and] can be employed as a means of representation” (I976: I29). He divided mapping metaphors into two categories: i) those that fit into ‘mirror theory’ where they are iconic reflections of spatial reality; and ii) those that are a part of a ‘semantic field theory’ where they generate a figurative spatial language. Though this simple dichotomy is limiting and perhaps even questionable, Crick was nonetheless able to make the astute claim that the social scientist’s task was to devise methods for reading maps that chart out the worldviews and lifeworlds of different social groups.

Source: Google Earth

Maps are quintessential tools and symbols for geographers and others interested in tourism studies. They form an important component in the results of their research. But the broader cultural use, interpretation and understanding of cartographic images has not been of particular interest outside these fields. Despite a rapidly developing interest in images and visual culture, anthropologists per se have largely overlooked the medium of mapping, at least as far as traditional topographic maps go. The closest parallels that ethnographers have come up with have been in relation to deciphering the ritualistic, navigational/wayfinding, mnemonic and artistic mappings of landscapes or ‘national’ political territories. Such themes are comprehensively developed in the work of Barbara Bender (I992); Alfred Gell (I985) Tim Ingold (2ooo); Susanne Küchler (I996); Maryon McDonald (I989); Howard Morphy (I99I); and Angèle Smith (2003). For instance, Alfred Gell (I985) draws on ethnographic material on the navigational skills of Melanesian seafarers. His work on how to read spatial navigation illustrates the ways in which mapping in Melanesia is often indexical and egocentric. The person references him or herself in relation to known markers. The purpose of mapping in this context is to produce images, the navigational utility of which emanates from their relationship with an imaged spatial grid or cartographic co-ordinates. But what about the non-navigational and metaphorical purposes of these images and artefacts?

Continue reading "‘Anthropography’: Identity and the Material Mapping of Movement" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL

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

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

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

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

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

Mikkel Bille, University College London

Light: From old English leoht, meaning luminous, from Indo-European leuk-, to shine, to see.

Light has been studied as metaphor for truth in Philosophy, and within Science in terms of lumen (as external and objective matter) and lux (as subjective and interior; as sight and mental sensation). Additionally, light, as a ‘building material’ has been an important element in the development of architectural as well as artistic forms. More recently some aspects of light, such as colour and luminosity, have gained significant influence in material culture studies. Many studies indicate that people conceive, use and experience colours and the luminous qualities of things in culturally specific ways. Colours and surfaces of objects may be emitting or omitting brilliance, tint, or saturation and such variations may signify sacred, spiritual or other particular social dimensions.

Opposition Effect: Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan's photograph of his own shadow cast on the coal black lunar surface December 1972. His shadow, or more accurately his camera's, appears to be surrounded by a bright glow.
Photo from the book Full Moon by Michael Light. ©Michael Light, taken from Sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/oppos1.htm.

Continue reading "Light and Luminosity" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Topics for Discussion

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