Journal of Material Culture最新文献

{"title":"Contemporary archaeology in conflict zones: The materiality of violence and the transformation of the urban space in Temuco, Chile during the social outburst","authors":"Henrik B. Lindskoug, Wladimir Martínez","doi":"10.1177/13591835221074167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221074167","url":null,"abstract":"We have, during the Latin American spring, studied the material traces of state oppression and social movements in Temuco, Chile, and the transformation of the urban landscape with archaeological surveys. Our results demonstrate alterations in the urban landscape related to both police presence and protesters. Large amounts of teargas-projectiles and rubber bullets indicate strong police presence and repression of different social movements. We have also identified protection and resistance modes in the form of shields, paint bombs, and protective masks, often associated with graffiti's, barricades, and other alterations of the public space. Material vestiges combined with interviews have shown how state institutions have tried to cover up the traces of violence. We argue that archaeology can play a central role in this process and in recording the materiality of these events with the aim to hand over the information to human right associations to prevent state oppression.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"63 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48759787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading clay: The temporal and transformative potential of clay in contemporary scientific practice","authors":"L. Bryant, K. Jamie, G. Sharples","doi":"10.1177/13591835221074159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221074159","url":null,"abstract":"Clay has a long history in the global south and has been extensively studied by ‘Western’ social scientists particularly anthropologists and archeologists in relation to histories of earlier civilisations and cultural practices. Clay in relation to contemporary ‘science’ has received less attention in social science despite the emergence of the sub-discipline of ‘clay science’ and its increasing focus on clay to transform wide ranging aspects of social life. In this paper we work towards an exploration of clay in science. We begin with the question of ‘what is clay?’ from the perspective of a multidisciplinary group of scientists, whilst being alert to culturally located and past knowledges of clay that shape current scientific knowledges and practices. Drawing on interviews with six clay scientists we explore the ontological and epistemological process for scientists in ‘reading’ clay to reveal how clay is ‘classified’, ‘worked upon’ and ‘partnered’. Our findings suggest that clay comes into being for scientists by being read as an informational and temporal medium and agentic matter with transformative promise to remedy specific threats to human and environmental health.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"87 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47281799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Refiguring Art and Anthropology, For Whom? A conversation with George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers","authors":"Karin Zitzewitz, M. Ciotti, G. Marcus, F. Myers","doi":"10.1177/13591835211069611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211069611","url":null,"abstract":"Karin Zitzewitz: We wanted to begin our conversation by asking about what we call here “the will to collaborate,” both among anthropologists in projects like Traffic in Culture, and among anthropologists and art world professionals. Since Traffic in Culture, George has written about this in terms of para-ethnography, in which anthropologists collaborate with “experts with shared, discovered and negotiated critical sensibilities,” including “those who are deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful institutional processes” (2000: 3,5). We recognize that current strands in the anthropology of art tend to rest upon collaborative processes with artists and, to much less of an extent, with other art-world actors. That stands in contrast with the call for independent ethnographies that you all made in the pages of Traffic.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"71 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41595617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When Does Infrastructure “Qualify for [Artistic] Attention”? The “ABCs” of Contemporary Art in Post-Liberalization India","authors":"Karin Zitzewitz","doi":"10.1177/13591835211069613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211069613","url":null,"abstract":"The period between “liberalization,” or the 1991 opening of India's economy to foreign direct investment, and the 2008 onset of the Great Recession was one of unprecedented change in the forms of Indian art and the infrastructures that supported its understanding, presentation, and circulation. This period of efflorescence—of multiplying growth in and transformation of a set of interlocking artistic and social forms—poses methodological challenges similar to those identified by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers in their 1995 volume, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Marcus and Myers’ call to focus on appropriation, boundary-making, and circulation, though meant to submit the Western art world to critique, coincides quite clearly with three particularly salient changes seen in Indian contemporary art in the period: the turn to unconventional material as artistic media (appropriation); the deliberate integration of artistic work with the materialities of everyday life (boundary); and the development of entirely new curatorial infrastructures and frameworks (circulation). The present essay examines these changes through Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf's post-1996, ongoing collaborative work with adivasi (indigenous) artists in the Central Indian region of Bastar. Eventually registered as the NGO Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), the collective's activities have ranged from parallel exhibitions of “art” and “craft” to site-specific, cross-disciplinary engagements with play structures (Pilla Gudi) and water taps (Nalpar) built upon collective practices meant to bridge the considerable social distance between urban upper-class and adivasi artists. DIAA's work with water, like other artistic engagements with infrastructure, highlights the social, aesthetic, material, and political aspects of the built networks that sustain everyday life. Their critique leveraged Marcus and Myers’ ABCs, incorporating critical acts of appropriation, the active violation of social and geographical boundaries, and, above all, demonstration of a concern with circulation.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"30 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44148682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mood as medium: Reconstruction and the material speculations of “new heritage”","authors":"Timothy P. A. Cooper","doi":"10.1177/13591835211052466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211052466","url":null,"abstract":"If the politics of aspirational construction appeal to the enchantment of infrastructure, reconstruction usually takes as given an environment of post-conflict, natural disaster, or the degradation of systems of preservation or resource management. If construction and conservation are taken as markers of continuity and political stability what does the urge to build again say about those who exert these ideas in advancement of a set of common goals? Shaped through multi-sited ethnography in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, this essay explores the mediation of mood and its material speculations. Concepts borrowed from both the preservation of the moving image and digital forms of heritage restoration provide ways of rethinking the place of reconstruction and coming to a new understanding of its sensual and atmospheric terrain.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"124 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45439675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Getting attached to a classic Mustang. Use, maintenance and the burden of authenticity","authors":"J-E Denis, C. Hummel, David Pontille","doi":"10.1177/13591835211068940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211068940","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the relationships consumers cultivate with mass-market commodities while caring for their authenticity. Drawing on a six-year ethnography of classic Mustang owners communities in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the authors show that, far from being a symbolic value only, or a resource into which people can “invest” in a mechanism of social distinction, authenticity can also appear as a burden that weighs constantly on the relationship between people and things. Indeed, throughout their uses and maintenance, the material integrity of classic Mustangs is of great concern for their owners, who apprehend every breakdown or maintenance intervention as threats that could jeopardize their car's authenticity. For the sake of security, comfort or health, because new regulations come up, or because some original parts are not available anymore, classic Mustangs owners compose with heterogeneous elements, constantly reshaping both their cars and their concerns for authenticity. The authors draw on Hennion's notion of “attachement” to describe the intimate relationship that grows through these arrangements. The notion particularly helps to grasp the ambivalence of the bonds between people and things: while they get more and more attached to their classic Mustang, owners are getting more and more worried. Moreover, throughout this growing relationship and the recurrent material interventions it draws on, the car does not remain passive. It progressively reveals itself, sometimes surprising its owner. Therefore, not only is authenticity “in the making” in this process, the contours of the thing itself evolve, as well as the knowledge of its owner.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"259 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42735424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The issue is moot: Decolonizing art/artifact","authors":"R. Phillips","doi":"10.1177/13591835211069603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211069603","url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics and science-- understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing convergences exhibited by the concerns and methods of practitioners of the two disciplines, both in the academy and the museum. By training our attention on contemporary artworlds—understood as systems—they illuminated the exchanges of aesthetic and conceptual ideas and forms that have brought Western and non-Western arts into shared discursive and real spaces. Yet in the quarter century since the book’s publication there has been a noticeable retreat from attempts by the proponents of visual studies and an expanded visual anthropology to actualize disciplinary convergences. The boundaries that separate art and anthropology have not been dissolved. Art historians and anthropologists continue to ask different questions and to support different regimes of value. From the author’s vantage point in a settler society currently directing considerable energies to institutional projects of decolonization the old debates have rapidly been receding as a new ‘third term’ – Indigenous Studies-- intrudes itself on the well trodden terrain. Not (yet) definable as a discipline but, rather, maintaining itself as an orientation, Indigenous Studies nevertheless renders the earlier disciplinary debates moot. Place, rather than time-based, collective rather than individual, holistic rather than either disciplinary or interdisciplinary, Indigenous Studies formulations exert decolonizing pressures on institutions that are rapidly mounting. Using Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, a show in 2017 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as a case study, this article shows how an exhibition moved representation away from the art/artifact dichotomy as well as from contested strategies of ‘inclusion’ and pro forma recognitions of ‘Indigenous ontology’ toward a genuine paradigm shift.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"48 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42128945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward an anthropology of plastics","authors":"Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko","doi":"10.1177/13591835211066808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211066808","url":null,"abstract":"Materially plastics are ambivalent. In spite of their often lauded quality of creating seemingly untethered imitations, representations and replacements, they have a materiality that leaks, off-gasses and disintegrates. They are accomplished at mimicry yet frequently unable to be remoulded. They are ostensibly resistant to microbial contamination yet absorb environmental pollutants and leach endocrine disrupting plasticisers. This article argues that, due to the material influence of plastics, their ubiquity, and the societal transformations that they have enabled, that anthropologists need to pay sustained attention to this material. Moreover, it argues that anthropological methods and theories are crucial to understanding plastics at a vital moment in their (and our) history. It articulates three ways in which anthropology can engage plastics at all stages in their lifecycles. Firstly, to study plastics challenges what it means to exist: whether or not human beings are bounded or permeable entities, experienced as individuated, collective or somewhere in between. Secondly, plastics disrupt what people know, are willing to know, or are persuaded is worth knowing about the production and disposal of the products that they consume. Thirdly, the materiality of plastics expose contemporary inequalities. Plastics can create unseen violence, both in their geographically unequal toxic distributions and in the vastness of their temporal effects.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"49 6","pages":"3 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41277249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction","authors":"Mark McConaghy","doi":"10.1177/13591835211064426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211064426","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"166 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43907659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gazing on invisible men: Introducing the gallery gaze to establish that (in)visibility is in the eye of the beholder at Westminster Menswear Archive","authors":"Joshua M. Bluteau","doi":"10.1177/13591835211066821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211066821","url":null,"abstract":"The Westminster Menswear Archive, housed at the University of Westminster held an exhibition in 2019 entitled ‘Invisible Men’. The purpose of this show was to “shine a light” on men, or more accurately menswear which had been hitherto neglected by scholarship and exhibitions featuring dress (Groves and Sprecher, 2019). This article draws on research conducted at this exhibition to ask anthropological questions as to the nature of menswear both in the gallery space and beyond. Fundamentally this will question the invisible nature of menswear and whether such invisibility really exists. In order to accomplish this, this article will suggest a new theory of the gaze that exists in the gallery or exhibition space – the gallery gaze – and use it to provoke analysis of the ethnographic material presented. This article acknowledges a distinction between intellectual, semiotic and symbolic invisibility but suggests a different approach, arguing for an (in)visibility of progressive degrees.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"192 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47730520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}