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Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter
Abstract
The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in Material Cultures. A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad. The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, Material Cultures emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.
... It was shown in the 1980s that materiality produced social worlds just as much as the other way around, marking the advancement of the first stage. According to Miller (1997), the second stage makes the argument "that things matter can now be argued to have been made." The first approach, embodied by Appadurai, holds that objects have significance because their "social life" or "cultural biography" provide insight into the society and culture they experience along their "life course." ...
... In pointing out the relationship between material culture and social identity, Miller recognises the value of what he terms the initial phase of material culture studies. However, Miller (1997) criticises those works for "privileging something called society" by transferring already significant social identities, like gender and class, onto material items and thereby ignoring the materiality of things. As a result, he suggests that material culture studies take a new turn and that it is now possible to argue that things matter (Miller, 1997). ...
... However, Miller (1997) criticises those works for "privileging something called society" by transferring already significant social identities, like gender and class, onto material items and thereby ignoring the materiality of things. As a result, he suggests that material culture studies take a new turn and that it is now possible to argue that things matter (Miller, 1997). He has two meanings when he says it. ...
World post-industrialisation has become a global village, and the cultural life of western countries has become a global norm, resulting in a side-lining of Easter lifestyle, including dressing sense. This westernisation of dressing sense has increased the apprehensions of traditional weaving crafts in India. This paper presents how the ever-increasing westernisation of dresses in hinterland India has marginalized the traditional handloom weaving crafts, and youths are increasingly disinterested in pursuing the rich cultural profession. Government Programmes for the Promotion and promotion are of very limited help to ensure the future of handloom continues.
... Univ. Lomé (Togo), 2024, 26 (1) : [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] ...
... Univ. Lomé (Togo), 2024, 26 (1) : [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] couvrent tout le cycle de la vie du kabyè et se font en fonction du sexe et de l'âge. Chez l'homme par exemple, il existe une panoplie de rites de socialisation qui se font en plusieurs étapes. ...
... En dehors du courant de pensée symbolique [16] [17] [18], les outils théoriques convoqués touchent également la théorie de la performance [19] [20]), celle du corps et de la personne [21] [22]) ainsi que celle de l'esthétique et de la sensibilité [23] [24] [25] [26] et de la théâtralisation [27]) qui renvoie à une mise en scène même du corps paré ainsi que sa dimension esthétique. Nous pouvons alors convenir que « l'apparence corporelle répond à une mise en scène par l'acteur, touchant la manière de se présenter et de se représenter » [28] Cette recherche vise donc à décrire la sémiotique des parures utilisées dans ce rite quinquennal et le lien entre ces objets rituels et la formation de l'identité des initiés. ...
Les Lama-Dessi sont un sous-groupe kabyè qui pratique plusieurs rites dont le Waah, le dernier qui permet aux adultes de passer de la catégorie des adultes relatifs à celle des adultes complets en vue de participer pleinement aux activités socioéconomiques, politiques et religieuses du lignage et d’assurer la pérennité des pratiques, discours et représentations y afférents. La manifestation de ce rite est toujours marquée par l’usage des accessoires vestimentaires qui sont des parures rituelles. Au-delà de leur fonction pratique, celle de couvrir le corps de l’initié et de le protéger contre les intempéries, et leur fonctions esthétiques, celles de rendre l’initié plus beau dans ses atours, ces parures sont des symboles de véritables marqueurs d’identité de l’initié. Dans ce sens, cet article se propose de présenter la sémiotique de ces accessoires vestimentaires et de démontrer à partir d’une ethnographie, qu’elles participent de la construction de l’identité des LamaDessi. La démarche méthodologique est essentiellement qualitative en mettant à contribution l’observation, les entretiens, l’analyse matérielle et l’ethnohistoire. Il en résulte une typologisation des parures rituelles en usage dans le Waah, leurs significations symboliques profonde au sein de la culture kabyè ainsi que leur rôle social dans la construction identitaire chez les Lama- Dessi. The Lama-Dessi are a Kabyè subgroup who practice several rites of passage including the Waah, the last which allows adults to move from the category of relative adults to that of complete adults in order to fully participate in socio-economic activities, political and religious aspects of the lineage and to ensure the sustainability of related practices, discourses and representations. The manifestation of this rite is always marked by the use of clothing accessories which are ritual adornments. Beyond fulfilling their biological function, that of covering the body of the initiate and protecting it against bad weather, and their aesthetic functions, those of making the initiate more beautiful in his finery, these adornments are symbols of true identity markers the insider. In this sense, this article aims to present the semiotics of these clothing and demonstration accessories from an ethnographic perspective, that they participate in the construction of the identity of the Lama-Dessi. The methodological approach is essentially qualitative of the anthropological type. As results, we can retain the typology of ritual adornments involved in the Waah, their semantics as well as their role in the construction of identity among the Lama-Dessi.
... Infatti, a partire dal finire degli anni '70 del Novecento, l'antropologia culturale ha iniziato a puntare il cannocchiale etnografico su singole merci, nell'ottica di dipanare la rete di relazioni, significati e pratiche che si legano ad esse e ai processi di produzione, distribuzione e consumo che ne scandiscono la biografia culturale (Kopytoff, 1986). Laddove il contributo di Douglas e Isherwood (1979) aprì la strada, i contributi di Appadurai (1986), Latour (1996), Miller (1997Miller ( , 1998, Buchli (2004) ed altri (per una esaustiva revisione della letteratura: Buchli, 2020) hanno costruito uno sfaccettato quadro di riferimento teorico e metodologico di questo percorso di ricerca. Esso è stato utilizzato per esplorare il ruolo degli oggetti nel quotidiano (Tokoro, Kawai, 2018), fossero essi una sigaretta (Reed, 2007) od un sari (Banerjee, Miller, 2003). ...
... Esso è stato utilizzato per esplorare il ruolo degli oggetti nel quotidiano (Tokoro, Kawai, 2018), fossero essi una sigaretta (Reed, 2007) od un sari (Banerjee, Miller, 2003). In questo contesto di ricerca, bibite (Miller, 1997), pizze (Ceccarini, 2011) e tortillas (Counihan, 2009), vino (Black, Ulin, 2013), zucchero (Mintz 1985) e spirits (Wilson, 2005), così come altri alimenti, sono stati usati come strumenti per esplorare le trasformazioni culturali e le caratteristiche proprie delle comunità. In particolare, in Italia, gli antropologi hanno, così, esplorato la biografia culturale di piatti e prodotti locali, in particolare, approfondendo il significato del legame che questi hanno con i territori e la loro storia (e.g Grimaldi, 2012, Nicolai, 2015, Niola, 2009. ...
Questo articolo può essere utilizzato solo per la ricerca, l'insegnamento e lo studio privato. Qualsiasi riproduzione sostanziale o sistematica, o la distribu-zione a pagamento, in qualsiasi forma, è espressamente vietata. L'editore non è responsabile per qualsiasi perdita, pretese, procedure, richiesta di costi o danni derivante da qualsiasi causa, direttamente o indirettamente in relazione all'uso di questo materiale.
... The reason this relationship (between the notion of home and objects) is important is because the structure of a dwelling or other physical space where practices of home-making take place cannot be conceived of without the objects that occupy and constitute the space and, if we are interested in the spatial meanings of a home, then objects play a vital role in this interplay. Miller (1998) argues that our social worlds are constituted through materiality. As we live with an array of objects, and at some stages, we decide what to do with things that surround us, we are making decisions to re/construct our homes that impact our sense of who we are. ...
... As we live with an array of objects, and at some stages, we decide what to do with things that surround us, we are making decisions to re/construct our homes that impact our sense of who we are. Miller (1998) argues that practices of decoration, using ornaments or specific items to transform an inhospitable dwelling into a meaningful place, can have deep impacts on our core beings and sense of belonging that are central to identities and the sense of who we are. ...
This chapter focuses on materiality of migrant homes and the relationships between objects in migration and social processes that make certain material components of a home more meaningful and useful than others. The chapter acknowledges that the space of home is not separate from the larger socio-political structures that make it possible or impossible. However, it turns the lens of analysis towards a more mundane and everyday aspect of home making practices, that is, material composition of a home. This chapter highlights three important areas in studies of objects in home and migration processes: the first are objects of memory, that capture symbolic meanings in relation to past lives, homes and contexts. The second is about objects of everyday use, that refers to instrumentality of objects and their usefulness as tools in present times. The third one is about objects that convey a form of identity (such as in relation to class, gender, nation) that is useful for one in relation to their desired homes or even homes for future.
... The reason this relationship (between the notion of home and objects) is important is because the structure of a dwelling or other physical space where practices of home-making take place cannot be conceived of without the objects that occupy and constitute the space and, if we are interested in the spatial meanings of a home, then objects play a vital role in this interplay. Miller (1998) argues that our social worlds are constituted through materiality. As we live with an array of objects, and at some stages, we decide what to do with things that surround us, we are making decisions to re/construct our homes that impact our sense of who we are. ...
... As we live with an array of objects, and at some stages, we decide what to do with things that surround us, we are making decisions to re/construct our homes that impact our sense of who we are. Miller (1998) argues that practices of decoration, using ornaments or specific items to transform an inhospitable dwelling into a meaningful place, can have deep impacts on our core beings and sense of belonging that are central to identities and the sense of who we are. ...
... Daniel Miller, himself a trained ethnoarchaeologist, conveyed the significance of objects and materials in everyday social life as he examined the social symbolism of material culture in the contemporary world through several extensive studies (e.g. Miller 1997Miller , 1998Miller , 2005. While cultural materialists had focused on different modes of production, Miller focused his theories on consumption (1987), arguing that consumption is one of the processes of objectification whereby things gain meaning in modern everyday life. ...
... Daniel Miller, himself a trained ethnoarchaeologist, conveyed the significance of objects and materials in everyday social life as he examined the social symbolism of material culture in the contemporary world through several extensive studies (e.g. Miller 1997Miller , 1998Miller , 2005. While cultural materialists had focused on different modes of production, Miller focused his theories on consumption (1987), arguing that consumption is one of the processes of objectification whereby things gain meaning in modern everyday life. ...
... В ландшафте, который включает в себя церемониальный центр памяти, монумент должен прочитываться в контексте этих взаимодействий. И другие подобные статуи Данте приобретали значение от своего окружения, в частности монумент Данте в Тренто, чье расположение в пограничном контексте повлияло на модифицированные формы взаимодействия с объектом [77] 12 . Статуя во Флоренции изначально располагалась в центре площади, но затем была подвинута в виду проблем с передвижением и сейчас находится слева от главного фасада здания. ...
p>The translation presents excerpts from an article published in Italian Studies, the largest scientific journal devoted exclusively to the study of Italian culture in English and Italian. The article explores contemporary approaches to the study of the material environment and materiality, in particular — as applied to the study of Italian culture. Interest in the problem of materiality in the English-speaking research environment is largely associated with the spread of actor-network theory and the revision of the ontological status of things in culture. At the same time, other approaches are not excluded, leaving the field of material culture studies as an interdisciplinary space. Several trends can be identified in studies of the materiality of Italian culture. The first branch is connected with the concept of “consumption” and the analysis of various goods in their economic and symbolic dimensions. To a large extent, studies of consumer culture focus on studies of the culture of the Renaissance, on the assumption that it was at that time that the patterns and symbolic practices of this cultural phenomenon were conceived. The article includes a practical study of this topic based on the analysis of the artifacts of pharmacies of the Renaissance. Another significant area is the study of books and literature. In the English-speaking environment, in contrast to the Italian and Russian academic tradition, philology as a scientific discipline is not widely spread, and specialists from other areas are also engaged in text research. In addition to textual analysis, contemporary research focuses heavily on the materiality of the book itself — the study of materials, their origins, migration, the techniques required to process them. Various combinations of distinctive features of the books, among other things, formed readers' ideas about the significance of certain cultural characters and events. At the same time, Dante, Petrarch and Bocaccio still remain the central figures of research, which is largely due to the active funding of these studies, including those from the Italian state. Another large and less specialized branch of research is connected with the symbolic dimension of material objects. The article gives an example of such work on the study of the dynamics of the appearance, transformation and migration of the monuments of Dante Alighieri, which since the middle of the 19th century occupied a central place in the squares, acting as a symbol of the new united state, and over time began to lose their place as the center of the material environment of Italian cities, and in the symbolic space of Italian culture. The proposed methodologies should be considered as possible ways of working in the interdisciplinary space of materiality studies, which open up great opportunities in the study and understanding of Italian culture.
The translation was made according to the publication: Daniels R., O’Connor A., Tycz K. “Italian material cultures”, Italian Studies , 2020 , no. 2 : 155–175. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2020.1750272</a
... Les objets, en ce qu'ils sollicitent un engagement sensoriel, suscitent et s'imprègnent d'émotions, d'affects et de mémoire, provoquent l'attachement, portent des narrations, permettent de raconter l'expérience habitante quotidienne. Conçus, fabriqués, utilisés, consommés, déplacés, posés ils définissent aussi les relations sociales, sous-tendent l'expressivité culturelle et l'émergence d'identités (Miller, 1998). Dans l'expérience migratoire tout particulièrement, comment permettent-ils d'exprimer la part culturelle du sentiment de chez-soi ? ...
... Como argumenta Miller (2001), el estudio del consumo y las mercancías ha significado desde la antropología un hecho transformador de la disciplina. Para este autor, desde la visión antropológica, el consumo de cosas materiales juega en el mantenimiento de las relaciones y la cultura. ...
Resumen En las últimas décadas, el papel del plástico en la economía global ha aumentado considerablemente, y ello se debe en gran medida a sus propias cualidades. El principal inconveniente de este material es la dificultad que presenta para su eliminación o reciclado. Desde la disciplina antropológica como ciencia comprometida en develar todas las manifestaciones culturales y sociales de la sociedad, el reciclaje de residuos plásticos es tema de tratamiento de esta era antropocénica. Por ese motivo, este trabajo sobre el reciclaje de plásticos en Uruguay no escapa a la realidad vivida en sus descartes, procesos y futuros utópicos posibles.
... However, it is not just the built environment but also remitted objects that matter. Qualitative research on material culture has shown how objects can be read as a concentration of social circumstances when their material, function, and meaning are analyzed within the specific contexts and situations in which they are used, exchanged, ignored, or appropriated (Hahn 2015;Miller 1998). International migration scholars have described the crucial role of biographical objects in the cross-border processes of homemaking and self-positioning (Frykman 2019, p. 31). ...
This open access book explores the transformative effects of remittances. Remittances are conceptualized as flows of money, objects, ideas, traditions, and symbolic capital, mapping out a cross-border space in which people live, work, and communicate with multiple belongings. By doing so, they effect social change both in places of origin and destination. However, their power to improve individual living conditions and community infrastructure mainly results from global inequality. Hence, we challenge the remittance mantra and go beyond the migration-development-nexus by revealing dependencies and frictions in remittance relations. Remittances are thus scrutinized in their effects on both social cohesion and social rupture. By highlighting the transformative effects of remittance in the context of conflict, climate change, and the postcolonial, we shed light on the future of transnational society.
Presenting empirical case studies from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Turkey, Lebanon, USA, Japan, and various European countries, as well as historical North America and the Habsburg Empire, we explore remittance relations from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, history, design, architecture, governance, and peace studies.
... However, it is not just the built environment but also remitted objects that matter. Qualitative research on material culture has shown how objects can be read as a concentration of social circumstances when their material, function, and meaning are analyzed within the specific contexts and situations in which they are used, exchanged, ignored, or appropriated (Hahn 2015;Miller 1998). International migration scholars have described the crucial role of biographical objects in the cross-border processes of homemaking and self-positioning (Frykman 2019, p. 31). ...
Transnational practices, including the sending and receiving of remittances, have increasingly attracted the attention of policy makers. Such practices are very appealing to them as they have the potential to reduce poverty in regions of origin and to constitute a significant share of national economies. This chapter aims to discuss how the governance of transnational practices, and of remittances in particular, might contribute to the mitigation of and adaptation to environmental change. A ‘migration as adaptation’ discourse here provides the general conceptual framework that connects transnational practices and environmental change together. This in turn assists reflection on the ways in which migrants might act as transformative agents in transnational societies when facing degrading natural environments, whether due to climate change or disasters.
... However, it is not just the built environment but also remitted objects that matter. Qualitative research on material culture has shown how objects can be read as a concentration of social circumstances when their material, function, and meaning are analyzed within the specific contexts and situations in which they are used, exchanged, ignored, or appropriated (Hahn 2015;Miller 1998). International migration scholars have described the crucial role of biographical objects in the cross-border processes of homemaking and self-positioning (Frykman 2019, p. 31). ...
Based on an ethnographic study of Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles, this chapter explores the role of the destination state in shaping remittances. It finds that the temporary character of the migration and family separation of migrants in Japan causes them to remit a greater portion of their income, whereas permanent settlement with the family and integration in the USA reduces remittances to just one-third of their income. This chapter explains these differences in terms of the destination state’s policies and practices toward the immigrants: whereas Japan allows migrant workers without offering permanent settlement, the USA invites Bangladeshi migrants to enter and permanently settle with their families and close relatives. By recognizing the destination state’s role in shaping remittances, this chapter expands our understanding of the remittances decay hypothesis and its implications for the migration-development nexus.
... However, it is not just the built environment but also remitted objects that matter. Qualitative research on material culture has shown how objects can be read as a concentration of social circumstances when their material, function, and meaning are analyzed within the specific contexts and situations in which they are used, exchanged, ignored, or appropriated (Hahn 2015;Miller 1998). International migration scholars have described the crucial role of biographical objects in the cross-border processes of homemaking and self-positioning (Frykman 2019, p. 31). ...
Research on remittances mainly focuses on the nexus of migration and development, economic effects on the places of origin, and motives for remitting. However, little is known about the materiality of remittances. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography in Stubai Valley (Austria) and Usṃak (Turkey), this chapter introduces the concept of remittance affordances by following the spatial and temporal trajectories of a crucial type of material remittances in the encountered research field, namely knives and tools manufactured by the Stubai cooperative. It examines the transformative effects of migration on the involved actors and the built landscape. I argue that in order to be appropriated in the intended way, the remitted objects depend on certain criteria, such as impact of the transactors’ relations, which are historically accumulated and hierarchically constituted, on the material and biography of the object and the bodily incorporated practices of usage.
... Daniel Miller ha dicho que los estudios de la cultura material requieren de técnicas etnográficas que brinden un conocimiento más profundo de quienes son las personas. Estos estudios etnográficos son los que darán el criterio de lo que es importante estudiar (Miller 2001). En pasadas investigaciones se ha realizado un trabajo etnográfico enfocado en personas mayores (Maya-Rivero y Rubio-Toledo 2017, Maya-Rivero y Rubio-Toledo 2020) encontrando ciertos objetos relevantes para la gente mayor, tanto sana como con algún padecimiento (véase Maya-Rivero y Castro-Ricalde 2017). ...
... Un fenómeno relacionado con procesos de estetización de la vida cotidiana y la conformación de nuevos estilos de vida que expresan nuevas formas de diferenciación social en el marco de las transformaciones del capitalismo contemporáneo. La aplicación del Diseño resulta relevante en este contexto en el cual la oferta y la demanda están cada vez más impregnadas de contenidos simbólicos, cognitivos y expresivos, ya sea en tanto insumo de la producción o como componente de su circulación y apropiación (véase, por ejemplo, Du Gay, 1997;Miller, 1998;Boltanski y Chiapello, 2001;Power y Scott, 2004;McRobbie, 2016;Phizacklea, 1990;Aspers, 2010, entre otras investigaciones). ...
Problematizamos la convergencia entre Diseño y Artesanía, centrándonos en el análisis de la interacción entre diseñadoras profesionales y artesanas indígenas en emprendimientos de indumentaria y accesorios en Argentina. Se analizan las construcciones de sentidos, usos y prácticas que emergen en ese encuentro, resaltando las tensiones y negociaciones implicadas en la definición de dinámicas productivas consensuadas que, en un entramado desigual y jerárquico, no están exentas de conflictos. Desde una metodología de corte cualitativo, se recupera el trabajo de campo realizado en el área metropolitana de Buenos Aires y en la provincia del Chaco, Argentina. Dicho enfoque permite revisar la construcción de significados y sentidos que el Diseño despliega en su encuentro con la artesanía en Argentina, donde el Diseño se combina con la Artesanía resaltando atributos «trascendentales», mientras que la artesanía incorpora diseño en la definición de una «lógica de pedido», donde los procesos de valoración cobran centralidad introduciendo tensiones tanto en términos económicos como simbólicos y afectivos. A modo de balance, proponemos una lectura sobre estas prácticas que aporta a analizarlas desde una perspectiva crítica, a la vez que dinámica y productiva.
... Moreover, borrowing from Marx's notion of praxis, Miller pointed to the fact that individual and collective identities are crafted as we produce and handle material objects. In this sense, the study of the material world is indispensable to our understanding of culture, society, and religion (Miller 1987(Miller , 2007. ...
Based on fieldwork and the analysis of the historical literature, this article studies the development of material culture in the cult of popular goddess Mazu, exploring in particular the materialization mechanisms and strategies deployed by various actors in her worship nowadays. Through the ages, people in China have expressed their religious feelings and experiences in the objects they display, worship, and exchange, as well as in the spaces that they build and inhabit. In this process, religious beliefs are externalized in forms of material culture, including symbols, texts, relics, music, and temples. As a result, these artifacts and places carry individual and collective memories and affects that allow believers to experience religion not only at special events like festivals and pilgrimages, but in everyday life. In modern China, the connotations and forms of material carriers have diversified. The rise of souvenirs and other forms of cultural consumption have transformed the materialization of religiosity. In the worship of Mazu, the relationship between pilgrimage, tourism, entertainment, and the production and circulation of commodities has become increasingly tight, changing the cult’s beliefs and their physical expression. That connection also brings social and economic sustenance to the local community. Taking the Mazu Temple in Meizhou as a case, this paper adopts a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to examine the pilgrimage–tourism–commerce nexus, as well as other contemporary forms of the materialization of her cult.
... A noção de agência humana, contudo, constitui um debate de longa data na Sociologia e na Antropologia Sociocultural. Em grande medida, suas raízes, evidentemente, encontram-se no momento histórico do "material turn" nas relações entre homens e objetos, em que a produção capitalista e industrial em série reifica e aliena o processo de confecção dos artefatos e das relações de trabalho (MILLER, 1987(MILLER, , 1998(MILLER, , 2005. Segundo Karl Marx (MARX, 1867-1883), práxis constitui toda ação humana no mundo que possui consequências físicas externas e molda não somente o mundo material, mas os agentes envolvidos na ação. ...
A noção de agência tem sido usada com frequência na Arqueologia há mais de trinta anos. Durante este período, os significados e os usos do conceito de agência foram apropriados e transformados a partir dos paradigmas das diferentes linhas interpretativas arqueológicas. Contudo, muitas vezes, tais usos carecem de discussões teóricas e explicitações didáticas claras sobre as origens, princípios e modelos da noção de agência. Recentemente, o conceito de agência tem sido subsumido a uma revisão e debate teórico e metodológico cada vez mais intenso na área dos estudos da cultura material e tornou-se ponto central no processo de entendimento das sociedades do passado por meio do estudo relacional entre pessoas, materialidade e campos de ação. Este artigo visa apresentar e discutir o desenvolvimento da noção de agência, seus fundamentos e parâmetros aplicados aos estudos da cultura material. Iremos explorar teoricamente o conceito no campo da Antropologia visando entender como seus pressupostos alcançaram a Teoria Arqueológica e fornecer alguns instrumentos e recursos didáticos para a adoção e a aplicabilidade dos usos e significados da agência material.
... Terceiro, o engajamento arqueológico deliberado com os ofícios contemporâneos em contextos familiares a nós me parece uma oportunidade interessante de trazer a técnica, e problematizar a sua ausência, para os debates no campo da Arqueologia do Passado Contemporâneo, uma vez que abordagens focadas em dimensões estéticas, simbólicas, políticas e teóricas parecem dominar as análises recentes e as temáticas populares no campo (BUCHLI e LUCAS, 2001;MILLER, 1995MILLER, , 1998MILLER, , 2005MILLER, , 2009OLSEN e PÉTURSDÓTTIR, 2014). Sendo assim, o objetivo geral deste artigo é a apresentação de algumas reflexões acerca da presença e do papel das tecnologias perecíveis em contextos modernos/contemporâneos com intuito de estabelecer um diálogo em torno da temática com outros pesquisadores no campo da Arqueologia do Passado Contemporâneo e das Tecnologias Perecíveis para que, assim, seja possível expandir o repertório analítico através do contato com experiências e bibliografias que ultrapassem os campos específicos de trabalho. ...
Neste artigo serão apresentadas reflexões acerca do papel das tecnologias perecíveis na contemporaneidade. Para isso, farei discussões breves sobre a formação do campo da Arqueologia do Passado Contemporâneo, seus objetivos, temáticas e as razões pelas quais os debates sobre técnica e tecnologia, e mais especificamente aqueles sobre tecnologias perecíveis, se mantêm ausentes na bibliografia. Também serão apresentadas discussões acerca das temáticas tradicionais dos trabalhos sobre perecíveis nas arqueologias de contextos pré-históricos e das possibilidades analíticas trazidas pela inclusão dos perecíveis contemporâneos no debate. No decorrer do artigo proponho um esboço de uma Arqueologia dos Ofícios Contemporâneos voltada para os processos técnico-produtivos modernos. Essas discussões serão apresentadas e exemplificadas a partir do meu trabalho com a produção artesanal de guitarras elétricas.
... As a result of the material turn (Hicks 2010), social scientists are embracing material culture as an interdisciplinary approach. Material culture reveals the interactions between material world/things and social worlds/individuals (Appadurai 1986;Miller 1998;Tilley 2012). Cross-cultural artifacts are displayed, and objects are invested with meanings through associations and usage, which give an understanding of how the relationship between material and social realities changes over time, connecting the lives of things and individuals (Woodward 2019). ...
This article is based on the concept of material culture, which reveals the role of material objects in the social world. It shows how the urban environment changes the relationship between neighbors who share a common yard but live in housing of different types—in khrushchevki (the Soviet-era housing) or in new high-rise buildings. The article depicts a hierarchical material environment in the common space formed because of a municipal renovation program involving the gradual demolition of old housing and the redevelopment of the area with new dwellings. Material used in this article was collected in Moscow in 2019, through a case study of a yard shared by several building; the study involved interviews with 17 residents and concierges of the area and multiple observation sessions. The article shows that the long-pending demolition of a khrushchevka and the destruction of the common yard space caused conflict and resulted in hierarchical courtyard materiality and housing inequalities. This created a perception of the khrushchevka residents as a “stigmatized” group and strained their relationships with neighbors in the new buildings. The hierarchical housing environment as a structural materiality forms and maintains multidimensional aspects of housing inequalities—spatial, social class–based, and symbolic dimensions.As interpretative and analytical framework, the article uses Wendy Bottero’s notion of the sense of inequality, which is understood as an emotion that develops from hierarchical relationships. On the basis of the empirical date, this article elaborates on Bottero’s idea and explains why, in this situation, it is more appropriate to call this social emotion “a sense of injustice,” referencing society’s ideas about what is proper. Therefore, structural housing inequality is a condition for the emergence of an intersubjective sense of injustice as a social consequence of this situation.
... Perhaps one way of accomplishing this is by inviting people to bring in objects or materials, whether tangible or intangible [9], to use in dialogue and exchange. Objects are touchstones of memory and meaning, interwoven into the fabric of human experience [8] and are essential in the construction and negotiation of identities and social worlds [7]. Having people share something of relevance to themselves and the collective may be a way of building shared understanding, common ground, and group cohesiveness. ...
... transmission, humans attribute meanings to objects (Mauss, 2016;Miller, 1998). Such meanings are conditioned by the cultural contexts in which human-objects relations are inscribed (Baudrillard, 1968(Baudrillard, /1996Bourdieu, 1979Bourdieu, /1984Douglas & Isherwood, 1979), but may also emerge from singularized interactions between individuals and particular objects (Belk, 1988;Kopytoff, 1988). ...
Can visual data provide insights that words do not reveal? Meanings of objects in visual studies are usually captured through elicitation meetings. In this article, we propose to explore them from a purely visual standpoint and assess the methodological and substantive benefits of such denotative approach. We used a database of 660 photographs produced by 225 participants in a study of everyday religious practices in three Latin American cities. Following a ‘lived religion’ approach, respondents were asked to present an object (or photograph of it) that was ‘meaningful’ for them, in relation to their spiritual practices. Analyzing these pictures without resorting to the verbal content that accompanied them proved useful to operationalize such a large corpus of visual data, facilitate the transmission of the study’s results, and build a representative classification of the types of objects most commonly brought by participants. From a substantive perspective, our analysis contributes to enlarge the spectrum of what is considered religious or spiritual in Latin American cultures, and to question certain assumptions established by conventional theories of religion, such as class stereotypes and the overstated influence of religious institutions. We conclude that a denotative analysis of participant-produced visuals ‘beyond words’ represents an untapped opportunity to challenge existing representations and elicit new research directions, which, in turn, require returning to verbal data to be elucidated.
... In line with growing concerns in social science research on the importance of methods that might be able to represent the multiple layers of reality beyond language (Blackman and Venn 2010;Miller 2003), the "embodied ethnography" (Dal Gobbo 2022a) that I carried out was a means to sensitize me to the singularity of everyday ecologies, to their materiality and meanings, and to their affective texturing. It was far more than a tool for research: its affordances and the experiences they foregrounded were a way for me to elaborate concepts, transform my own lenses, and question my subjectposition and conceptual categories becoming-other. ...
Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, and Resistance is about the complex, sticky, but also open socio-material relationalities that make up daily existence. It looks at how their established flows are disrupted by multiple capitalist crises (environmental, social, economic), opening opportunities for transformation, or foreclosing horizons of change. Rather than advocating “responsible behaviours” or lifestyle change, this book politicises everyday assemblages, showing their embeddedness in capitalist relations and highlighting acts of resistance that embody alternatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey engages in a wider dialogue with political ecology, new materialisms, and emerging mobilisations that centre on socio-ecological reproduction.
La materialidad de la vivienda evidencia el vínculo entre la arquitectura y el orden social. En la ciudad de León, el orden social tiene una profunda huella empresarial y religiosa que se traduce en estratificaciones e injusticias sistemáticas. El presente artículo recupera, desde el prisma de la memoria oral, la narrativa de tres viviendas del siglo XX en la zona histórica de León, para mostrar las relaciones que existen entre la configuración de la vida social y los materiales de construcción utilizados en las viviendas. La metodología consiste en la integración de datos de archivo fotográfico y entrevistas in situ. El análisis muestra una reinterpretación de cada vivienda en términos arquitectónicos, a partir de las narrativas de los habitantes con respecto a los materiales utilizados en sus viviendas y los valores asociados a cada sistema constructivo y el estrato social al que hace referencia. Los resultados se organizan en tres tipos de vivienda: la vivienda popular, la vivienda obrera y la vivienda burguesa. El estudio sugiere que la memoria colectiva es el principal soporte para preservar la vivienda histórica; pero además indican que la materialidad de la vivienda exhibe el orden de clases, la polarización social y las raíces profundas de injusticia urbana que se fueron recrudeciendo en la ciudad de León.
Settled societies inhabit environments shaped by building activity. Geographic data in social scientific and geographical research are generally composed of architectural and social categories derived from commonplace lived experience and societal knowledge, thus carrying socio-culturally specific meaning. The mundane pragmatism of such categories conflate spaces and buildings with their use and may obstruct effective comparison. Here I introduce a set of formally redescriptive ontological concepts for built environments that operates on the basis of how differentiation and subdivision constitute distinct occupiable spaces through boundaries. An ontology of the inhabited built environment arises from the application of these socio-spatial and material concepts called ‘Boundary Line Types’ (BLT). I present and photographically illustrate the definitions of the BLTs, which are conceived on a critical realist basis and rooted in a multidisciplinary body of theory concerning the development and inhabitation of built space. Considering inhabited built environments through BLTs foregrounds the emergent logic by which spaces are divided and connected, creating configurations of boundaries as material frames that afford everyday social life. Since BLTs offer transferrable empirical principles from which these material frames emerge, they also enable diachronic and cross-cultural comparative social research. My proposition to approach social scientific built environment research through constitutive material boundaries offers a comparative complement to commonplace and socio-culturally specific spatial categories that compose most geographic data, enabling formal thick redescriptions and the potential for quantitative spatial analysis.
The primary function of zines is often considered to be creative and expressive, and the function of other types of DIY (“do-it-yourself”) micro-media as utilitarian (e.g., flyers as promotion), but all of these media also perform important social roles. DIY micro-media (e.g., zines, flyers, Internet pages, graffiti, wall signs, and “thank you” notes) are in this way embroiled in social lives of their makers and help them constitute themselves culturally and socially. DIY micro-media in this way also acquire their own social lives. Inspired by my ethnographic observations of the social lives of DIY micro-media within particular American DIY houses and music scenes, I examine in this article not only the content of DIY zines and micro-media (i.e., to study them as texts), but primarily the social role of zines and other DIY micro-media in the material, social, and affective constitution of DIY and music communities and scenes (i.e., to study them as social agents). Therefore, I show how these micro-media operate as material and media objects that are simultaneously shaped by and shaping human and social relations. By combining zine and micro-media studies with anthropology and material culture studies, I offer in this article a nuanced micro perspective, both ethnographic and emic, of the social processes implicated in the social and economic mutual constitution between media objects and music/art communities and scenes.
La memoria material se expresa en la vivienda como una secuencia entre arquitectura y sociedad, donde el espacio se sustenta en símbolos. El objetivo de este artículo es recuperar la relación que existe entre el orden de los edificios y los materiales que los mantienen en la memoria oral de sus habitantes. La metodología se basa en el análisis de materialidad de un barrio histórico, las microhistorias registradas in situ y la verificación en el archivo fotográfico. Los hallazgos expresan la construcción amalgamada de la vivienda con las ideologías sociales, a partir de los eventos que se fijaron en la memoria colectiva de los habitantes. Además de despejar la noción del patrimonio institucionalizado, que se enfoca en catálogos y listas de edificios por sus valores canónicos, la memoria material de la vivienda pone el acento en los valores sociales heredados que se plasman en lo ordinario de la vida doméstica.
This fourth chapter of critical aesthetics discusses the political and economic dimensions of artisanal production in Santa Clara del Cobre. Market exchanges, production chains, and other relationships are often purposefully made opaque, invisible. To trace this consumption and abduction of maker’s agency and copper things, several scenarios are presented here occurring between artisans, and between artisans and institutions, designers, collectors, artists, museums, galleries, and other players. These stories elucidate aesthetic aura and agency through empirical analysis of authenticity, generational stylistic legacies, simulacra, prototypes, authorship, artisan anonymity, the art of metamorphosis, fetichism, and artifacts as subjunctive events of “as - is” and “as if.” How did Santa Clara become the “ready-made” or “objet trouvé” of one prominent North American artist in the early 1970s? How did this experience of neocolonialism spur a human rights struggle and revolt in Santa Clara? How was this related to the Arts and Crafts movement and its revival? How is this relevant to Santa Clara today? What happens when artisan’s social and representative performance becomes separated from their aesthetic and reproductive performance? How does this complicate Strathern’s (1988) concept of the distributed person and Gell’s (Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) concept of abduction, agency, and the social relations of things?
This paper reflects on the use of objects in qualitative interview methods. We consider the use of objects in “single” research events and in longitudinal designs. This leads us to consider how using objects in interviews situates in relation to time. Emphasizing the materiality of objects as well as how objects help to materialize events, experiences, and accounts, we explore what objects do and how we can practically work with objects, especially in qualitative longitudinal research. Objects in interviews do not simply afford representations or elicitations of participant stories, but become dynamic actors that enable interviews to speak materially. Using vignettes from a longitudinal study investigating experiences of COVID-19 in time, we hone our attention towards the temporal affordances of object methods. We conclude with a list of practical suggestions for using objects in qualitative longitudinal research.
This paper evaluates the food memories reflected through the cooking tools and recipes among the communities residing in the modern-day Dholavira village, Rann of Katchchh, Gujarat, India. Dholavira village, located near the Harappan site of Dholavira , is the home of several Indigenous communities. Ethnoarchaeology has been used as an essential tool for understanding ancient subsistence strategies and culinary practices worldwide. Over the last few decades, there has been an intense proliferation in the usage of terms like ‘foodscape,’ ‘foodways,’ ‘food archaeology,’ and ‘archaeology of food choices’ in the subcontinent’s culinary research. In the Indian subcontinent, most of the studies conducted so far highlighted the regionality of the culinary-scapes and are grounded on scientific techniques. This study moves away from traditional food studies and uses ethnoarchaeology as a method to explore food memories, disseminating through simple cooking tools like grinding stones, pots and pans, and recipes created with simple ingredients. Furthermore, the study documents the ceramic production techniques and associated memories of the one local potter from the village of Janan, near Dholavira. This old local potter is the last surviving person from his family, and the only potter in the village, whose work resonates with continuity in the ceramic-making process as the ancient Harappans.
In addition, this study has been conducted from the angle of ‘materiality studies’ where an object shares the journey of the person possessing it and finally becomes part of the family history, reflecting on the sociocultural transformations through generations. From the broader perspective, this study postulates ethnoarchaeology as an effective method to retrieve food memories, disseminating through simple cooking tools like ‘grinding stones,’ ‘pots and pans,’ and recipes created with simple ingredients.
Learning Disability and Everyday Life brings into conversation ideas from social theory with “thick” descriptions of the everyday life of a middle-aged man with learning disabilities and autism.
This book is markedly ethnographic in its orientation to the gritty graininess of everyday life—eating, drinking, walking, cooking, talking, and so on—in, with, and alongside learning disability. However, preoccupation with, the “small” coexists with a gaze intent upon capturing a bigger picture, to the extent that the things constituting everyday life are deployed as prisms through and with which to critically reflect upon the wider worlds of dis/ability and everyday life. Such attention to the small and the big—the micro and the macro—allows this book to explore the ordinary and everyday ways meanings about normalcy and abnormalcy, ability and disability, are put together, enacted, practised, made (up)—in the sense of constituting and fabricating—and, crucially, accomplished through and between people in specific, and invariably contingent, sociocultural, discursive, and material conditions of possibility.
This book will be of specific interest not only to students and scholars of disability but also to persons with lived experiences of disability. This book will also be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and sociology.
I would like to thank to editors of this volume for inviting me to make a contribution. Harun Taşkıran has been through his life so many roles-friend, husband, father, hoca, museum specialist, elder brother, advisor, academic, guide, digger, good company and many many more. In general, he is more than anything else an elder brother and guide and role model to follow for me. If I were to describe him in simple words perhaps I would say "gentle giant of Turkish prehistory", especially on the Palaeolithic, will sum him up. His deep and encyclopedic knowledge of Turkish prehistory is so special, always actively and progressively developing. His always helpful and problem-solving approach for anything, anyone and everyone has made him even more special amongst his colleagues and students. Thank you Harun Abi, for everything. Abstract: This paper, with a completely different perspective, will question the meaning of the term of 'fi nd' in archaeology and go beyond questioning the generally accepted perception of the term that is situated in archaeology. It aims to interrogate the meaning of this term from an ontological perspective. As is known, attempts have been made to reduce archaeology to 'excavation science'. In other words, a perception is created that the work of archaeology is to 'dig'. Archaeology desires to fi nd new things by digging, to bring them into the light, to identify them as the only purpose and work of archaeology. Of course, in archaeology, one can get somewhere by digging. This study takes the 'dig' action to a different dimension, at least that it should not be limited to dirt. The study will question objects that are defi ned as fi nds in the archaeological sense, that can reach from past years to the present day without deteriorating or disappearing, and that have a place in everyday life, and are generally man-made. This paper focuses on the enquiry into the processes of change that have happened to these objects and aims to understand ontological aspects of the fi nds. KARAİN: NESNE OLARAK BİR MAĞARA Özet: Bu çalışma tamamen farklı bir bakış açısı ile alışılagelmiş olan konsept algısı dışına çıkarak arkeolojide 'buluntu' (fi nd) teriminin anlamını sorgulayacaktır. Bunu yaparken standart perspektifi n dışına çıkmayı ve konuyu ontolojik açıdan değerlendirmeyi hedef almaktadır. Bilindiği üzere arkeoloji 'kazı bilimi' olarak tanımlanır veya oraya indirgenmeye çalışılır. Bu yaklaşım ile arkeolojinin işi 'kazmak' gibi bir algı yaratılır. Kazarak yeni şeyler bulmak, gün ışığına çıkartmak, arkeolojinin tek amacı ve işi gibi gösterilmek istenir. Elbette arkeolojide kazarak bir yerlere ulaşılır. Çalışma 'kazmak' eylemini farklı bir boyuta taşımaktadır. Çalışmamız arkeolojik anlamda buluntu olarak tanımlanan ve geçmiş yıllardan günümüze kadar bozulmadan, kaybolmadan ulaşabilen, genelde insan elinden çıkmış, gündelik yaşamda yeri olan nesneleri sorgulayacaktır. Sorgulama
O texto é composto por variadas leituras sobre a aplicação de referências teóricas dos estudos sobre cultura material nos temas de pesquisa dos membros do Grupo de Estudos de Cultura Material e Design. Discutindo e problematizando especificamente o artefato de produção popular, autenticidade e falsificação em objetos, o fenômeno da moda e o design de interiores, pretende-se demonstrar como essas referências teórico-metodológicas podem auxiliar a entender aspectos que caracterizam cada um desses objetos de estudos das pesquisas em design como cultura material.
This paper unravels the idea of the ‘ghost town’ - and more specifically the deserted district of Varosha, Famagusta - as it relates to heritage, questioning the discursive dynamics and affective potential of what can seem a trite and therefore hollow phrase. Drawing on apposite theories of hauntology (Derrida 1993) and the ghosts of place (Bell 1997) I argue that there is a dense back-and-forth between two distinct positions in this term, both of which play into wider heritage processes. The first understands the ghost town as an empty if uniquely atmospheric space, ripe for development or ‘dark tourism’ (Lennon and Foley 2000). Heritage is implicated here in the protection and promotion of sites which may be perceived as ‘ruin porn’ - by turns melancholy and exhilarating but fundamentally removed from contemporary life. The second position unsettles this reading by focusing on the complexities of the very word ‘ghost’, here understood as ‘the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there’ (Bell 1997: 813). From this perspective, common heritage practices (including collecting, exhibiting and narrating) might be seen as an attempt to psychologically re-inhabit vacant places, a process which takes on extra significance around the highly politicised context of Varosha. Through fieldwork, archival research and intertextual and visual analysis I track the description of Varosha as a ghost town across journalism, contemporary art and diasporic discourse, in the process anatomising this spectral designation to reconceptualise its wider relevance to heritage.
O texto é composto por variadas leituras sobre a aplicação de referências teóricas dos estudos sobre cultura material nos temas de pesquisa dos membros do Grupo de Estudos de Cultura Material e Design. Discutindo e problematizando especificamente o artefato de produção popular, autenticidade e falsificação em objetos, o fenômeno da moda e o design de interiores, pretende-se demonstrar como essas referências teórico-metodológicas podem auxiliar a entender aspectos que caracterizam cada um desses objetos de estudos das pesquisas em design como cultura material.
This paper is located within a larger study of children’s voice and storytelling. The focus is on how children use artifacts, such as special objects and photographs, to tell stories about their lives. We studied the collaborative learning of educators, in two schools in Eastern Canada, as they used sharing circles and multimodal pedagogies, and worked to elevate and listen to children’s voices during a period of pandemic teaching. This study examines children’s things/artifacts as material culture and relates things/artifacts to artifactual literacies. The action research design included a consideration of children’s voice in early years research alongside the collaborative professional development inquiry undertaken by educators in the study. An analysis of key findings as they relate to evolving pedagogies, including how artifacts were used to tell stories, and how voice can be viewed through this artifact sharing is presented. We argue that building voice and collaboration can result from pedagogies of classroom sharing and listening. Educators’ challenges in this research and their classroom teaching during a constantly shifting set of teaching conditions are fore fronted. Insights from children’s particular artifacts and their stories enhanced educator and peer awareness of difference, and of cultural practices in families. Finally, implications for practice, and future research possibilities are presented, along with an argument for viewing children’s voice as emergent alongside classroom multimodal pedagogical practices that augment children’s voices.
Settled societies inhabit environments shaped by building activity. Geographic data in social scientific and geographical research are generally composed of architectural and social categories derived from commonplace lived experience and societal knowledge, thus carrying socio-culturally specific meaning. The mundane pragmatism of such categories conflate spaces and buildings with their use and may obstruct effective comparison. Here I introduce a formal redescriptive ontology for built environments that operates on the basis of how differentiation and subdivision constitute distinct occupiable spaces through boundaries. The ontology consists of formally redescriptive socio-spatial and material concepts called ‘Boundary Line Types’ (BLT). I present and photographically illustrate the definitions of the BLTs, which are formulated on a critical realist basis and rooted in a multidisciplinary body of theory concerning the development and inhabitation of built space. Considering inhabited built environments through this ontology foregrounds the emergent logic by which spaces are divided and connected, creating configurations of boundaries as material frames that afford everyday social life. Since BLTs offer transferrable empirical principles from which these material frames emerge, they also enable diachronic and cross-cultural comparative social research. My proposition to approach social scientific built environment research through constitutive material boundaries offers a comparative complement to commonplace and socio-culturally specific spatial categories that compose most geographic data, enabling formal thick redescriptions and the potential for quantitative spatial analysis.
Článek seznamuje s objektově-ontologickými teoretickými a epistemologickými přístupy, které jsou diskutované především v západoevropských (anglo-amerických) archeologických vědeckých komunitách. Tyto přístupy mají ambici, alespoň to některé z nich prohlašují, stát se novým teoretickým myšlením a radikálně změnit dosavadní pojetí archeologie, zejména studium hmotné (materiální) kultury. Článek rešeršním způsobem popisuje a hodnotí různé přístupy (teorie aktérských sítí, entanglement, symetrická archeologie, nové materialismy, asemblážní myšlení), které studují relační vztahy mezi lidmi a ne-lidmi a zabývají se „věcmi“ jako sociálními a materiálními předměty s vlastní agenturou. Tam, kde je to možné, jsou přístupy vysvětleny na konkrétních příkladech interpretací archeologických pramenů.
This paper elucidates Body Dysmorphia in its function, taking into account the medico-juridical mechanism complementing the clinical gaze. Considering the contemporary
biomedicine and its obligatory phenomenology following the genealogy of medical sagacity,
being healthy is often understood as having a certain size, shape and configuring to certain
body mass indices; with the human body as a subject of explicit medical knowledge and an
object of clinical practice. This study takes into account Roxane Gay's autobiography,
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body to analyze the fallacious medical culture adhering to
medicine power structure, psychopathologies, social constraints and the flawed BMI.
Keeping up with the aforesaid, this paper applies the Foucauldian theoretical framework to
explore the objectification, oppression and othering of the 'fat.'
The terms globalization and consumption combine with reference to the emergence of a global consumer culture: the same products, services, and entertainment sold in the same kinds of retail and leisure spaces (malls, plazas, theme parks, cineplexes) to consumers around the world. From luxury cars and designer clothes to jeans, t‐shirts, toys, snack food, and bottled water, markets are global rather than national. The same electronic equipment, cosmetics, children's toys and grocery lines are consumed in cities as remote from each other as Sydney and Stockholm, Bahrain and Birmingham. Product availability is less tied to specific places, first because the same global brands are on sale at the same time throughout the world and second because traders catering to deterritorialized immigrants recreate the retail environment of their homeland by importing familiar products. Starbucks, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken are everywhere – as are family‐run restaurants selling “ethnic” food to customers in search of either the taste of “home” or the exotic. It is no longer necessary to go to Paris and Milan to buy Dior and Armani, the US to get a baseball cap, India to get a sari, or the Middle East and Southeast Asia for hijabs and burkhas. All are on sale in cities around the world, although the different circumstances of their circulation serve to remind us that globalization is not one process, but many.
Globalization is not one process but many, and its implications for consumption are contradictory. Consumer culture produced by global corporations undermines the viability of “local” products and threatens cultural diversity, while the movement of people around the globe circulates cultural difference and generates hybridity. Inequalities in the relations of production and consumption of global consumer culture raise questions of human rights and social justice, while resource consumption and the generation of waste associated with global consumer culture threaten environmental sustainability.
The main focus of this chapter is placed on the play that has traditionally been called A Doll’s House in English, in Norwegian A Doll Home [Et dukkehjem] (my underlining). This study will incorporate some perspectives from Ghosts, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken, all prose plays dating from 1879 to 1899. It will examine Ibsen’s use of two Norwegian words, hus and hjem, or house and home. The source for this study of the use of these nouns is the new electronic edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (HISe, 2014) which expands and facilitates access of Ibsen’s entire oeuvre, and enables the user to search for frequency of specific words and expressions. Its maneuverability allows one to quickly create cross references and bookmarks throughout his writings.Keywords
A Doll Home
Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
HomeHouseIbsen
The Lady from the Sea
The Master Builder
When We Dead Awaken
Recent policy and scholarly attention to traditional food has highlighted its importance for developing culturally-appropriate sustainable diet interventions. Yet most approaches to traditional food maintain an unhelpful dichotomy between traditional and modern foodways. Ethnographic research into the ways people experience and articulate the substitution of previously homegrown foods with modern industrial foods can uncover aspects of local food heritage that have been previously hidden or undermined. The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of ethnographic approaches for recent policy debates around the importance of tradition for sustainable diets. An ethnographic ontology, which takes cultural meanings and values of ultra-processed foods as well as so-called traditional foods seriously, can provide a more nuanced picture of food system transitions that can inform sustainable dietary interventions. A combination of ethnographic methods was used for this paper, including participant observation, photo elicitation, questionnaires and go-along/shop-along interviews with N = 200 research participants. Subsequent ‘armchair’ research revealed important insights about Afrodescendant and Indigenous food heritage in Trinidad and Tobago, indicating the need for future research in this area. In particular, the findings suggest that cultural values of ‘colour’ and ‘(local) flavour’ connect old and new foodways in Trinidad and Tobago. Values of colour and flavour, along with shared feelings elicited through the ethnographic research such as concerns about agrochemical use and nostalgia for household food production, can inform the development of culturally-appropriate sustainable diet interventions.
Literature on the Muslim veil is divided into two broad categories: one describes it as a traditional-religious object, a political symbol of Islam and the oppression of Muslim women; and the second a clinging to cultural artifacts as Muslim women act in an orientalist world order, giving the veil new meanings in the local arenas in which they live (אלסעדאוי, 1988 [1931]; Ahmad, 2008; Ahmed, 2011; Bhimji, 2009; Göle, 2003; Mahmood, 2005; Özcan, 2015; Zakaria, 2019). Both categories present the veil as an object that symbolizes the dichotomy between modern, Western values and Islamic, traditional values. They highlight the religious and cultural meanings of the hijab in different local arenas and discuss it as an object with inherent religious meanings. These works on the hijab do not properly refer to the hijab, which was not created as a symbol of the religion of Islam but instead becomes this symbol through Muslim women’s agency and dialect expressed in varying locations around the world, and online.
In this study, I aim to renew theoretical terms to describe veiled women in Muslim societies and their agency by revealing the translations (Latour, 2005) that occur within the framework of the manufacturing, distribution, and procurement of the hijab. I will examine how meanings and values are assimilated into the scarf, turning it into a Muslim veil and constructing a "hijabi fashion" which is passed on to Muslim women. In my work I present the wearing of the hijab in Bedouin society of the Negev as a loaded practice sitting at an intersection of meanings assigned to it by veiled women, Bedouin and Palestinian retailers, Turkish wholesalers, businessmen and Muslim bloggers.
This multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995, 1998) shows how the hijab was created in Istanbul as a scarf and sold to various women around the world. The scarf takes on its meaning as "hijab" only when bought by a Muslim woman or a Muslim retailer who imports it into the country where they live. The findings show that the hijab is a mediator (Latour, 2005) that when entering Muslim space, translates its purely fashionable meaning into a religious one. This religious meaning is strengthened with the attitude towards it as an object that protects the woman and strengthen her humbleness. Apart from religious identity, the hijab and fashion attributed to it create a subjectivity among Bedouin women in the Negev, composed of traditional-Bedouin and neoliberal values, to which they are exposed in local and online environments.
From my conversations with these women, it appears that the combination between local values of preserving tradition and global-Western values of freedom of action and individualism integrates and exists in their personal lives. Whereas they perceive themselves as women with free choice whose manner of dressing and behaving depends on their individuality, they also see themselves as connected and belonging to their families and the Bedouin collective, along with its demands. This tension is reflected in their attitude towards their clothing. They describe their fashion, the hijabi fashion, as modern and personal choice and at the same time as modesty. The combination of these characteristics (modest, religious, personal and modern) is not a contradiction in their eyes. The religious and modern values are not of separate worlds but rather assimilate through this clothing.
I argue that hijabi fashion is a tool through which women create a strategy to establish themselves as agents of action within a structure saturated with constraints and barriers. It is a patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti, 1988), that is, a way through which women act according to the rules of the patriarchal society in which they live and at the same time conduct themselves with sophistication to create a safer and better life for themselves. The connection between the main agents in the creation of the hijabi fashion led the Bedouin women in the Negev to adopt a discourse that characterizes a neoliberal subjectivity. At the heart of this discourse is a rhetoric centered on the concept of "choice," within which the woman is perceived and perceives herself as autonomous, empowered, someone with free choice who "works on herself". This neoliberal discourse, adding a central value to the hijabi fashion adopted by Bedouin women in the Negev, ignores the position of women in a stratified patriarchal social structure (Baker, 2008, 2010) and guarantees their participation in it.
This article considers the problem of how ideas and values are embodied in material things by focusing on the use of white cloth by the Bunu Yoruba of central Nigeria. White cloth, in ritual and in everyday ways, projects a sense of unity between individuals, social groups, and spirit beings. However, white cloth may be used in ways that convey other, more subversive meanings which belie its interpretation solely as a symbol of order and social harmony. The ambiguous qualities of white cloth, which protects but also conceals, are drawn upon to express metaphorically the tenuousness and limitations of social relations.
In this article, we examine ideological statements reflected in, and to a small extent created by, people's participation in garage sales.¹ Although the article touches upon the economics of garage sales, its focus is on ideology, about how people understand what they are doing when they buy and sell, and how this relates to their more general perception of the social world and their position in it. The way people discuss their participation in garage sales tells a great deal about how they understand their worlds: patterns of work and consumption, claims (especially by women and the aged) that their daily activities have more dignity than is normally afforded them within society, a felt need for moral and practical networks.
One way in which exchange systems mediate the values of persons and things is through performances that articulate the transaction of valuables with that of words. This article looks at the forms by which exchanges in Anakalang (Sumba) are carried out, especially the ways in which they treat speech and things as interdependent. In Anakalang, their interrelationship reveals not only the meaning but also the risks of social interaction, and the permeability of the boundaries between exchange and other kinds of transaction. In addition, it is suggested that historical transformations in political economy and in genres of speaking may have mutual influences one upon the other.
The 1988 Trinidadian Carnival gave particular prominence to a dance known as wining. It is argued that this dance is expressive of an auto-sexuality which negates cross-gender sexuality. Moreover, given the importance of sexual relations as an act of exchange which constitutes the very possibility of sociality for one of two diametrically opposed cultural projects within Trinidad, wining may also be understood as the negation of sociality itself. As such the dance is a form of Absolute Freedom comparable to philosophical projects found elsewhere in the world and throughout history.
This paper draws upon the concept of the home at the personal creation of its occupant, as developed in recent literature, to examine what happens to a home after the death of that occupant. Our central question is: given contemporary meanings attached to home, what happens to a home when the person who created it dies? Does the home die with its creator? Can it survive to become someone else's home? If not, what are the processes through which the death of the home is effected? We examine these questions using empirical data from a recent study of inheritance.
This article is concerned with the nature of consumption in an industrial society. It investigates the manner in which tenants on a London Council Estate have decorated and altered their kitchens. Striking differences in the ability of tenants to appropriate facilities provided by the council are considered in relation to gender, ethnicity and other factors. Such a perspective illustrates the dialectical nature of gender categories under certain conditions. It also highlights the dynamic potential of long-term consumption as an arena through which social groups attempt to transform alienable goods into inalienable culture, but are often unable to accomplish this goal.
Estonia's ethnic development between 1991 and 1993 was generally peaceful although there were many factors pushing the new state towards ethnic violence. The main features of the period examined by the article were: a reduction in ethnic violence; a change in citizenship policy; international support from the West but criticism from Russia; a Russian movement grappling with an adaption crisis; and a gradual Estonianisation of the political and state apparatus. The article concludes that compared with other post-communist states the minorities and citizenship policy in Estonia during this period was successful, tensions diminished and violence or active separatism was avoided. -C.Mailey
This article aims to briefly examine the historical links between Iranian nationalism and Islam and the implications of this history for contemporary discourses on women and the family. In examining the complex evolution of Iranian political history this century, and the equally complex ways in which this has shaped women's rights and opportunities, any notion of the current discursive locations of women being a unitary effect of Islam is rejected. It will be argued that the histories of nationalism in Iran have had both particular significance and contradictory effects for women. Women, nationalism and Islam in twentieth-century Iran Twentieth-century transformations in the status and position of Iranian women have been closely linked with Iran's changing relation with the West. In the nineteenth century, Russian territorial intrusions in Iran resulted in the annexation of several northern provinces. The commercial and political concessions gained by the Russians fuelled rivalry with the British over trade and territory and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, too, succeeded in signing advantageous political and commercial treaties with the rulers of the Qajar dynasty in Iran (1779-1925). The military and political superiority of Russia and Britain, and the state's capitulation to these foreign powers became a significant cause for concern amongst various sections of Iranian society (Keddie, 1981). Successive Qajar regimes responded to Western aggression with complacency and weakness and their inability to protect Iran's interest resulted in the development of