{"title":"Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media","authors":"Kunming Li","doi":"10.1177/1359183521994876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183521994876","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of cute material culture, this article focuses on the production of valorized cute aesthetic in fashion clothes being sold on Chinese social media. Through corpus-enlightened empirical case studies, the article demonstrates how the baby-talk register converges with the material design and embodiment of clothes to synergically affect the cute materiality of the clothes at issue. With special attention paid to discursive practices of enregisterment, the study tries to recalibrate the existing biased hermeneutics of cute material culture that largely reduce cute clothes to material immediacy and consumerist passivity. The study sheds light on the collegiality and complementarity that enregisterment shows for embodiment and material design in the production of material aesthetics, and by doing so enriches the understanding of materiality within clothing material culture in general.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"201 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183521994876","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42099317","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":"Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures","authors":"Pooyan Tamimi Arab","doi":"10.1177/1359183521997503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183521997503","url":null,"abstract":"Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges anthropologists, Islamic Studies scholars, art historians and museum practitioners to question the theological assumptions underlying conceptions of Islamic art and material culture. This article analyses three object types key to Ahmed’s analysis – Islamic figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls – from the vantage point of the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. Based on the author’s experience as Assistant Curator for West Asia and North Africa in 2015–2016 and on exhibition developments up until 2019, Ahmed’s framework is demonstrated as a guide for critical interpretations of exhibitions of Islamic art and material culture. This perspective lays bare a tension that contemporary museums struggle with in response to nationalist pressures to integrate Muslim citizens in Western Europe: between a diverse Islamic heritage, on the one hand, and orthodox desires to materially purify the very idea of Islam, on the other.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"178 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183521997503","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46267153","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":"Hazy clouds: Making black carbon visible in climate science","authors":"Vasundhara Bhojvaid","doi":"10.1177/1359183521994864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183521994864","url":null,"abstract":"In 1995, a multimillion-dollar experiment – the Indian Ocean Experiment – discovered a dark mass of polluting air hovering above the Indian subcontinent. This mass of air was termed a cloud and found to be composed of a high amount of black carbon that was judged to be the second biggest threat to climate change after carbon-dioxide. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the life of black carbon by documenting its changing forms since the experiment. It emerges that the changing forms allow for the movement of air – smoke from traditional cookstoves and vehicular diesel emissions in India lead to the formation of the cloud – and reveal how an ethnography of air can be undertaken.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"162 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183521994864","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49543992","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":"Keeping the family silver: The changing meanings and uses of Manchester’s civic plate","authors":"T. Edensor, B. Sobell","doi":"10.1177/13591835211025547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835211025547","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the shifting uses and meanings of Manchester civic plate, a huge silver dining service purchased in 1877 to coincide with the opening of the city’s neo-Gothic Town Hall. The authors explore how the silver collection has successively forged relations with a host of different people, places and objects, exemplifying the changing processes through which objects are understood, utilized, valued, maintained, stored and curated. Three key processes are deployed to illuminate these shifting entanglements: the use of the silver to express municipal prestige and advance particular cultural values, the maintenance procedures that have responded to the silver’s vital material constituency and practices of display, storage and curation. In accounting for these diverse and volatile processes, the article argues for the virtues of theoretical breadth in exploring the multiplicities of material culture.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"280 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/13591835211025547","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45057914","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":"Malagasy art on the move: Materiality, home displays, and problems in decolonizing Christianity","authors":"Britt Halvorson","doi":"10.1177/1359183520971336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520971336","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how white US Christians’ home displays, including their decorative presentation of paintings, small sculptures, and other memorabilia of foreign travel, play a critical role in representing imperial geographies. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research on the current aid partnership between Lutherans in the US and Madagascar, which stems from American Lutheran mission work in southern Madagascar (1888–2004), the article studies the relationship of contemporary white Minnesotans’ home displays about Madagascar with more historically-established projects of colonial knowledge production. The visual dimensions of materiality have been significant for building traces and imaginaries of far-flung places for home or metropole audiences in Christian colonization. Thus, by placing theories of Christian souvenirs and devotional objects in dialogue with work on Christian colonialism, the author examines home displays as a lesser-considered aspect of the colonial project in the metropole and considers the problems they raise for contemporary efforts to decolonize Christianity.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"142 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520971336","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44885477","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":"Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design","authors":"Albena Yaneva","doi":"10.1177/1359183520972736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520972736","url":null,"abstract":"How is an architectural model consolidated and re-assembled in conservation to be able to continue to communicate a design concept? How does the work of care and preservation of models reveal knowledge about the often taken-for-granted dynamics of creative processes? To provide answers, this article draws on Etienne Souriau’s philosophy of creativity and follows how the ‘modes of existence’ of creative works are re-enacted in the anaphoric progression of conservation. Basing her findings on ethnography at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the author examines the epistemic complexity of specific situations of assessing, preserving and assembling large complex scale models. Unpacking the specificity of model conservation, it is argued, allows us to challenge two established beliefs on creativity: the myth of the stable ontology of historically valuable cultural objects and the myth of teleology of creative processes. Conservation-in-action demonstrates the subtle mechanics of crafting historiographic knowledge in the arts.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"85 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520972736","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43185268","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":"Noise in the landscape: Disputing the visibility of mundane technological objects","authors":"M. Fukushima","doi":"10.1177/1359183520970603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520970603","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, a controversy has arisen in Japan regarding an ongoing landscape policy proposing to eliminate the forest of utility poles and electric wires that covers almost all urban and rural landscapes. The controversy is somewhat peculiar vis-à-vis the existing study of landscape, partly because of the utterly ubiquitous and non-monumental characteristics of the poles and partly because of the general apathy in public reaction to them. Drawing upon diverse academic sources, this interdisciplinary exploration unfolds a complex entanglement of tacit landscape ideas behind the controversy. The author discusses the effectiveness and limits of addressing both the substantial and visual aspects of the poles vis-à-vis the public and policy makers by using three conceptual frameworks: (1) ‘erasure’ in the landscape as palimpsest, (2) the dual aspects of ‘noise’, and (3) artialisation, in order to understand this mundane element of technological objects in the context of creating contemporary landscapes.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"64 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520970603","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44557807","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":"Atopic objects: The afterlives of gold teeth stolen from Holocaust dead","authors":"Z. Dziuban","doi":"10.1177/1359183520954462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520954462","url":null,"abstract":"Transfers of property are an integral part of armed conflicts and instances of mass political violence. Not just the state and the military, but also civilians confiscate, dispossess, loot and redistribute wealth across ethnic, national, class or religious lines, in the process re-enacting and sustaining the boundaries of othering and belonging that stand behind the conflict. In this way, economic violence takes on an essentially political dimension. Although, to date, rarely conceptualized as such, even grave robbery perpetrated at the burial sites of a defeated enemy or a member of othered minority constitutes a practice of alterity and dehumanization. And while, in the aftermath of violence, this very fact has the ability to invest things taken from mass graves with a particularly disturbing potential, this article reflects on the practices and affective dynamics surrounding objects of a distinctively unsettling status: golden teeth and dental bridges in their ambivalent condition between material objects (valuables) and bodily remains of the dead. They are considered in this article through the conceptual lens of ‘atopic objects’, a notion designed to bring to the fore both the out-of-place quality and the at once as-well-as/neither-nor character of those things, suspended on the threshold between human remains and material objects, private possessions and body parts of othered and violently dispossessed people. In this article, the author asks how this uneasy ontological status is experienced, acted upon and negotiated by the new (and rarely rightful) ‘owners’ and offers an insight into the practical, affective, political and also legal framings through which ‘atopic objects’ are being constructed and reconstructed either as things or as body parts and, at the cost of their unsettling quality, become embedded in the postwar orders, both in the intimate order of the body and in the political–economic order of the state.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"25 1","pages":"408 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520954462","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47286572","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 materiality of conflict memory: Reflections from contemporary Italy:","authors":"S. D. Nardi","doi":"10.1177/1359183520954506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520954506","url":null,"abstract":"The process and project of rememory (after Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 1987) may be linked with a politics of hope – to exorcise, to move on, to empower; rememories are emergent ‘sites of feeling’ cap...","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"25 1","pages":"447-461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520954506","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65560086","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":"Unrecovered objects: Narratives of dispossession, slow violence and survival in the investigation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War","authors":"L. Renshaw","doi":"10.1177/1359183520954499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183520954499","url":null,"abstract":"The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"25 1","pages":"428 - 446"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1359183520954499","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41323674","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}