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The Tree, the Tower and the Shaman

The Material Culture of Resistance of the No M11 Link Roads Protest of Wanstead and Leytonstone, London

Institute of Archaeology, University College London

This paper, 'The tree, the Tower and the Shaman', is a bricolage of comment, analysis, critique, oral testimony and myth, the 'subject' of which is the material culture of one specific urban landscape - Claremont Road. My text explores the ways in which a study of material culture offers us an insight into the cultures of resistance that inhabited this particular space in protest against the British National Roads Programme, and similarly, the impli cations of these findings for subsequent critiques of museology, space and 'everyday life'. Claremont Road, whilst functioning as a critique of the 'auto'-(mobile) culture, also functioned as an auto-critique of both the domi nant museum culture and of 'traditional' definitions of material culture. I posit that the culture of resistance created at Claremont, the people who inhabited the space and the rituals performed here functioned as an 'auto' critic of everyday life, and that the art, the artefacts and the landscape itself were purposefully (re)-created to 'display' and to confront this potential. Thus the Claremont Road experience offers an insight, a clarity: a parody, an inversion and a subversion of 'ordinary' perspectives; with this co existed/co-exists alternative visions. What emerges from this study are the various, often competing, ways of seeing and experiencing the urban environment, materiality, democracy, partisan politics, social identities, ritual performance, time, place and everyday life. The 'common ground' or praxis is located in the transforming potential of 'contact'.

Key Words: ;'everyday life' • landscape • material culture • museology • praxis of resistance • roads protests

Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 1, No. 3, 337-363 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/135918359600100304


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