Journal of Material Culture recent issues

Subject and Object in a Vanuatu Social Ontology: A Local Vision of Dialectics

Rio, K. — 2009-07-27

In this article, the author addresses the social effects of material exhibitions in Melanesia. He suggests that people in Vanuatu perceive subjects and objects within a totalizing mode of production, in which the material object takes on the capacity of encompassing social relations. He introduces the Vanuatu case as countering some of the analytical problems with materiality, especially efforts to dismantle the subject/object distinction or to understand the role of agency and will in objects.

Materializing Resistant Identities Among the Medieval Peasantry: An Examination of Dress Accessories from English Rural Settlement Sites

Smith, S. V. — 2009-07-27

This article examines metal dress accessories from a range of late medieval English rural settlement sites. It is argued at the outset that medieval archaeology has been very slow to consider the concept of resistance when interrogating the material culture of the peasantry and that items of dress are particularly amenable to such consideration given the close relationship between personal appearance and social power in this period. The dress accessories from seven excavated sites are investigated and interpreted as revealing the use of `infra-political' power by members of the medieval peasantry as they deployed this aspect of their material lives in re-fashioning and resisting the identities imposed on them by the medieval elite.

Tournaments of Value: Argentina and Brazil in the Age of Exhibitions

Andermann, J. — 2009-07-27

The `Age of Exhibitions' included the newly independent Latin American nation-states almost from the very outset. This article studies the complex strategies of material and visual display, architecture and writing through which representations of Argentina and Brazil were fashioned at the world fairs. It argues that, as peripheral affiliates of the emergent capitalist world-system, Latin Americans had to negotiate the material and symbolic value of their commodities and cultural samples with a host of agents, including not just foreign audiences but also exhibition organizers, artists, architects, and so on. National pavilions, therefore, rather than being seen as material texts authored by state governments, could be understood as `contact zones', performative spaces for the exchange of objects, gazes and words. The article concludes by comparing the world fairs with trade and industry exhibitions held in Brazil and Argentina themselves. In these, it observes the emergence of a dissident figure of national modernity as `development', challenging hegemonic regimes of value.

The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding Childhood Objects in the Museum Context

Brookshaw, S. — 2009-07-27

This article examines the issues and problems surrounding the material culture of children and childhood, with the aim of making children more visible within material culture studies. It presents results from recent research examining such material culture within the accredited museum collections of mainland Britain, and compares the data from this study to expectations and statements made in the small body of existing literature in this field. Evidence is offered to both challenge and confirm ideas, and new perspectives on this area are offered, notably that `the material culture of children' and `the material culture of childhood' should be considered distinguishable and separate entities.

The `Social Death' of Unused Gifts: Surplus and Value in Contemporary Japan

Daniels, I. — 2009-07-27

This article investigates the circulation and consumption of gifts in contemporary, urban Japan. It sets out to challenge key anthropological debates about gifting that, firstly, focus on the inalienable connection between the donor and the gift and, secondly, emphasize the symbolic potential and historical depth of things. The Japanese gifts under discussion, employed in the production and reproduction of the social, cosmic and economic order, are commodities. They can be easily disentangled from the donor and are imbued with the spirit of the recipient through everyday consumption. Moreover, because these gifts are supposed to disappear through use, this article also draws attention to the significance of material loss in the creation of value.

Naturalizing the Environment: Perceptual Frames, Senses and Resistance

Ruiz-Ballesteros, E., Valcuende, J. M., Quintero, V., Cortes, J. A., Rubio, E. — 2009-05-27

Following the closure of the mines and the crisis in agriculture, an alternative process of cultural and natural `heritagization' has been taking place in certain areas of Andalusia with a marked tourist focus. Productive spaces have been transformed into post-mining and post-agrarian landscapes. The aim of this article is to analyse representations and perceptions of surroundings in these contexts through the discourse of those who have experienced these changes most acutely: farmers and miners. This interpretation invites reflection regarding the concept of nature in the western world. Nature is one of our most genuine cultural creations, but we cannot ignore that, in addition to its discursive dimension, it also has a perceptive component. Hence, the analysis carried out here seeks to gain a more in-depth understanding of the perceptive frames through which nature acquires meaning and significance. The dual perceptive and discursive dimension of nature yields a more comprehensive understanding of how landscapes become spaces for resistance and identity.

The Repatriation of a Southern Cheyenne Burial and the Contingencies of Authenticity

Clouse, A. — 2009-05-27

Focusing upon an assemblage of Southern Cheyenne burial objects, the author narrates their trajectory through cultural, temporal, and geographic spaces, tracing contingencies of meaning and use. Collected by a US Army medical officer during the 1860s campaigns against the Cheyenne, this assemblage went from the Army Medical Museum to the Smithsonian Institution, and finally, in the 1990s, was successfully repatriated from the National Museum of Natural History to the Southern Cheyenne. Through the combined use of archival records, historical analysis, and consultation with the Southern Cheyenne repatriation delegate, the author analyzes the continuance and re-negotiation of colonial configurations of culture, race, and scientific authority as manifested in shifting formulations of authenticity. She contends that Southern Cheyenne re-interpretations of these objects provide productive reformulations of authenticity, which take into account cultural hybridity, change, and the politics of survival.

Complexity, Transdisciplinarity and Museum Collections Documentation: Emergent Metaphors for a Complex World

Cameron, F., Mengler, S. — 2009-05-27

Our world is becoming increasingly complex, characterized by mobile, global networks, flows and fluids of culture producing new levels of inter-connectivity and interaction. Museum collections are inducted into this hyper-complex world and wider debates in public culture through Googleenabled initiatives and links to YouTube, Flickr and MySpace. As museum culture and public culture reconnect through these various modalities, this poses new sets of challenges for museums, demonstrated by the different and increasingly complex exchanges and interactions observed around objects. Collection documentation systems, however, still tend to produce a certain and stable material world with clearly defined cultural categorizations. This article explores theories of hyper-complexity and transdisciplinarity developed as part of the Australian Research Council Project's Reconceptualising Heritage Collections. It reframes ways of understanding the relations and organization surrounding museum objects in today's hyper-complex, nonlinear world. Moreover, it offers a conceptual framework for re-imagining collections' interpretative and management practices as they might operate as complex systems in these new political spaces.

`At Christmas We Don't Like Pork, Just Like The MacCabees': Festive Food and Religious Identity at the Protestant Christmas Picnic in Hoi An

Avieli, N. — 2009-05-27

Every Christmas, the tiny Protestant community of Hoi An (central Vietnam) congregates and marks the day with a service, a short ceremony and a communal picnic in the church yard. In this article, based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the town since 1998, the author explores the meanings of the culinary features of the event. By analysing the dishes and eating arrangements at the picnic, he shows how differing facets of the participants' identity — the religious, the ethnic and the regional — are exposed, defined and negotiated. He argues that, while the eating arrangements represent ethnic Vietnamese identity, the dishes themselves hint at foreignness and `double marginality': not only of a Christian minority among Buddhists but also of Protestants among Catholics. The author's findings suggest that the complicated relationship between nation-states and marginal religious groups, as well as among members of differing religious communities within the same ethnic group, are often expressed in subtle practices that are easily overlooked by outsiders but are meaningful and evocative for the participants. The discussion focuses on the meaning of the culinary arena as a sphere of socio-religious negotiation, especially within politically authoritative contexts.

A Modular Approach to Understanding the Transmission of Technical Knowledge: Nuaulu Basket-Making from Seram, Eastern Indonesia

Ellen, R. — 2009-05-27

This article identifies a problem relevant to studies of knowledge transmission, namely the simultaneous membership of some element to several cognitive domains. Knowledge loss in one domain may accelerate erosion in another or, alternatively, maintenance of knowledge in one domain may enable retention of knowledge in another. The more complex the domain, the more this overlap is likely to be significant. The basketry knowledge of the Nuaulu of eastern Indonesia is not a single domain and basket-making not a self-contained autonomous set of practices, but rather contingent upon several overlapping domains. Recognizing this provides a more realistic picture of how knowledge transmission works, both in terms of cognition and enskillment. The concept of `basket' is ambiguous in Nuaulu thought and practice, generating overlapping categories of material culture: functional and morphological, scientific and local. Similarly, transmission must be understood in terms of overlapping knowledges of non-mutually exclusive domains.

Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Gell's Art and Agency

Morphy, H. — 2009-02-12

This article is a dialogue with the theoretical arguments of Alfred Gell's book Art and Agency. While strongly supporting an action-oriented perspective on art it is argued that Gell's argument deflects attention away from human agency by attributing agency to the objects themselves. It is argued that the very properties of art that Gell excludes from his definition of art objects and largely from his analyses — aesthetics and semantics — are integral to understanding art as a way of acting in the world and to understanding the impact that art works have on people.

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill

Reno, J. — 2009-02-12

This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or for personal enjoyment, different comportments toward materiality are revealed to have underlying social and moral implications. In particular, it is argued that different approaches to the evaluation of rubbish involve competing understandings of human and material potential.

Gender and Materiality in-the-Making: The Manufacture of Sirwan Femininities Through Weaving in Southern Morocco

Naji, M. — 2009-02-12

In this article, I propose a praxeological and phenomenological approach to weaving in the Sirwa, Southern Morocco. My perspective highlights the significance of `body techniques' in the material process of socialization and subject construction. From the Francophone anthropology of technology I derive the argument that materiality is not given or finished, but is in-the-making and emerging through body techniques. My argument that embodied engagement with materiality constructs gendered subjects through performance can be situated in a theoretical tradition that analyses gender as achieved through `doing' (Butler, 1990, Gender Trouble). I show how the making of carpets contributes to the transforming of the body and mind, desires and emotions of the Sirwan women to fit the patriarchal norm prevailing in their society. Using the concept of subjectivation, however, I argue that the disciplinary techniques of weaving allow practitioners to gain not only technical skills but agency.

Excavating Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities

Harrison, R. — 2009-02-12

While the anthropology of online communities has emerged as a significant area of research, there has been little discussion of the possibilities of the archaeology of virtual settlements, defined here as interactive synthetic environments in which users are sensually immersed and which respond to user input. Bartle (in Designing Virtual Worlds, 2003: 1) has described such virtual settlements as `places where the imaginary meets the real'. In this sense, an examination of the role of heritage in virtual settlements has the potential to shed light on the role of heritage in both `real' and `imagined' communities more generally. This article develops the concept of `cyberarchaeology' (originally devised by Jones in his 1997 article, `Virtual Communities') to study the virtual material culture of the settlement Second Life, and in particular, its explicit programme of heritage conservation. A survey of heritage places in Second Life suggests that the functions of heritage in virtual settlements may be far more limited than in the actual world, functioning primarily as a structure of governance and control through the establishment of the rationale for (virtual) land ownership and the production of a sense of community through memorials which produce a sense of `rootedness' and materialize social memory. Such functions of heritage are consistent with recent discussion of the role of heritage in western societies. Nonetheless, this study of heritage and cyber-archaeology provides insights into the ways in which the notions of heritage are transforming in the early 21st century in connection with the proliferation of virtual environments, and the challenge this provides to contemporary society.

The Art of Auto-Mobility: Vehicular Art and the Space of Resistance in Calcutta

Chattopadhyay, S. — 2009-02-12

The article examines the images and texts on privately operated public buses in contemporary Calcutta as a form of popular culture. By situating the vehicular art within the larger socio-political milieu of the city, this paper analyzes the manner in which the artwork acts as a unique mode of communication and everyday resistance. A close reading of the relation between the images and texts enables us to grasp the spatial logic by which subaltern groups make room for themselves within the bourgeois frame of the city.

Air Conditioning and the Material Culture of Routine Human Encasement: The Case of Young People in Contemporary Singapore

Hitchings, R., Shu Jun Lee, — 2008-10-21

There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has quietly become entrenched. Specifically we focus on the young people we find in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.

Contemporary Engagements Within Corridors of the Past: Temporal Elasticity, Graffiti and the Materiality of St Rock Street, Barcelona

Orengo, H. A., Robinson, D. W. — 2008-10-21

In a medieval Barcelonan side street, urine, rubbish and a bewildering array of graphic imagery splatters the narrowing walls between two major thoroughfares. A contemporary conflict between residents, unknown artists and others is played out using banners, bottles, stickers, posters, stencils, spray paint and bodily substances. In this shadowy liminality, local and global debates are superimposed upon substructures constructed from disease, prostitution and the Saint of the Plague. The continuing urban struggle constitutes temporal statements of dirt and purity, violence and humour, dominance and resistance, death and salvation. Like the renovated facades masking the crumbling remains of structures long neglected, the local council's literal whitewashing of the art is a temporal cover-up of a discursive symptom stretching from deeply embedded preconditions. However, from his niche in the angular bend of the short side street bearing three names, the statue of St Rock remains unblinkingly staring, raised above the contestations expressed below him.

Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian

Isaac, G. — 2008-10-21

The inaugural exhibits created for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC were met with emotive public debates as to their success or failure to change the ways in which Native American cultures are portrayed in the USA. These debates, however, overlooked the significance of the use of electronic media in the NMAI galleries, their effect on the role of material culture and the subsequent shifts in how the collections were not only displayed, but also experienced by visitors. This inquiry draws on these exhibits for a re-examination of the categories of art/artefact and original/duplicate, exploring how electronic media has transformed the interpretation of the museum `object'. It employs interviews with NMAI staff to discuss the history and philosophy underlying the introduction of electronic media, and with visitors to contextualize these changes in the interpretation of collections from a broader perspective. In conclusion, it considers the confluence of Native, postcolonial and mediated knowledges presented by NMAI, and the possibility that media technology itself has become the museum object.

Qualities of Humanness: Material Aspects of Greek Neolithic Anthropomorphic Imagery

Nanoglou, S. — 2008-10-21

This article considers the materialization of human representations in Neolithic northern Greece and particularly the materials used in their production. Contending that materialization is contingent upon but not reducible to the materials used, an attempt is made to understand the implications of using different materials to represent humans, especially clay and stone. Thus, it is suggested that in the earlier Neolithic, clay and stone were reserved for different classes of artefacts. Human figures in this period show an interest in action, whereas in the later Neolithic, changes occur that suggest a preoccupation with the substance of the figures. It is suggested that these changes point to the emergence of different subjectivities during the later Neolithic.

The `Cardinauts' of the Western Coast of Wales: Exchanging and Exhibiting Horses in the Pursuit of Fame

Hurn, S. — 2008-10-21

This article is concerned with considering non-human animals as examples of inalienable material culture. The non-human animals in question are the horses indigenous to a particular area of West Wales in the UK, where they have been selectively bred for centuries. The purpose of this breeding programme initially was to ensure that they were able to negotiate the obstacles presented by the local landscape, thereby providing a lifeline to the people living on isolated farms and smallholdings in the area. However, now that horses are no longer integral to agricultural production, their selective breeding is continued to achieve different ends — the fame of their human owners who engage in a form of ceremonial exchange reminiscent of the Trobriand kula. Traditionally, kula participants travelled to neighbouring islands to exchange shell items which were, according to Malinowski `possessed for the sake of possession itself, and the ownership of them with the ensuing renown . . . the main source of their value' (1922: 89). As Leip (2001) notes when comparing bird watching in contemporary Sweden to the kula, the two practices are not directly comparable. Nonetheless, comparison is rewarding with regard to the motivations of the players involved. Such a position will form the basis of the discussion.