Material Culture & Materiality

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

La investigación en el campo de las técnicas y materiales en el arte contemporáneo requiere la aplicación de nuevas metodologías transdisciplinares que permitan obtener una perspectiva renovada sobre los contenidos que entraña la amplia experimentación artística desarrollada en esta dirección durante el siglo  XX. El cambio de paradigma de la física y el progreso tecnológico han dado lugar a un caudal de nuevas narrativas posibles en las que se ha visto alterado profundamente el sentido tradicional de nociones como las de
materia
o
memoria
en el arte. La presencia material del agua en el arte de la segunda mitad del siglo  XX como objeto de estudio, nos permite proponer una metodología que revisa dichos conceptos a través del análisis de los planos imaginativo y técnico-operativo, así como afrontar los problemas que plantea a nivel teórico una estética de lo fluido.

Referencia completa:
MOÑIVAS, Esther. “Narrativas fluidas. El agua como presencia material en las artes plásticas contemporáneas” en: Dept. Història de l'Art i CEHA-Comité Español de Historiadores del Arte (coords.). CEHA, XVII Congrés Nacional d´História de l´art. Art i Memóri. [Actas]. Granada: Editorial Atrio, 2012, pp. 249-263.

This volume argues that museum exhibitions can eff ectively work as a particular way of doing research, a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it. More than that, while this may not at fi rst glance seem to be a particularly revolutionary statement, we contend that, if taken seriously, it does shake a number of the basic pillars of museum practice. If the exhibition is research and not merely a way of communicating research, a number of questions arise: Can we exhibit something, which we do not know the end result of, which is still in the making? Which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format? How do we conceive of the roles between the partakers in an exhibition process if this is not a matter of giving shape to a given content? How do we conceive of the role of audiences in exhibitions if research is extended into the exhibition itself? Why, indeed, should we even think of exhibitions as research rather than as a platform to communicate the results of research to a wider audience? These are all questions that we will touch upon in the volume. The idea of exhibitions as research Museums and exhibitions have increasingly been referred to as "laboratories" (MOMA, 2014 ; Heller, Scholz and Wegner, 2015 ; Treimo, this volume; J ø rgensen, this volume) or "experiments", respectively (Healy and Witcomb, 2006 ; Macdonald and Basu, 2007). These terms point to a move away from understanding the museum as a site for representing the world to perceiving the museum, instead, as an agent that produces its own particular eff ects. The museum does not simply mirror the world, but constructs new perspectives and ideas that are generated through the particular mechanisms and qualities of the very institution (Bjerregaard and Willerslev, 2016 , pp. 226-235; Thomas, 2016 , p. 9). One eff ect of this approach to museums has been a focus on the capacity of exhibitions to generate research in and through themselves (Macdonald and Basu, 2007 ; Lehman-Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010 ; Herle, 2013 ; O'Neill and Wilson, 2015). Working intensely with collections, testing ideas out in a physical environment, and relating more or less directly to a lay audience does not only tell us something new about how to make exhibitions, but may also provide us with more insight into the subject matter of the exhibition. That is, the exhibition has the potential to create a research surplus ; through the making of exhibitions we are liable to learn more about the topic of the exhibition. But, as we will explore further 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1

Between 1968 and 1972 the Argentinian artist Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) realised a series of works that years later the art critic Jorge Glusberg would define as ‘biological physical-chemical experiences’. In these works Benedit included plants, animals and even humans, presenting them as living inhabitants of his constructed environments. The installations were not created by the artist merely as empirical experiments in order to observe the behaviour of his ‘participants’. They were also devised to operate a sort of ‘antropofuguismo’ – a term that was coined by the writer Julio Cortázar over two decades later. This roughly translates as ‘anthropoescapism’, a perspective that, in opposition to anthropocentrism, displaces the centrality of humans in favour of non-human beings.Benedit’s artistic research into the biological world can be broadly categorised into two groups: hydroponic environments and labyrinths. This article will analyse these elements of Benedit’s œuvre in the context of Argentine avant-garde culture in the 1960s. It will focus in particular on the artist’s Biotrón (Biotron; 1971) and Fitotrón (Phytotron; 1972), which he conceived with a team of scientists, and his Labyrinths series. In these works, in the absence of a human narrator, Benedit’s protagonists – insects, plants and animals – themselves become narrators, ‘escaping’ anthropocentrism and denying linear interpretation.

Este estudio analiza procesos contemporáneos de cambio cultural en dos áreas rurales del Noroeste de España. Ambas estuvieron habitadas por grupos sociales con una marcada identidad cultural que ha dejado su impronta en la cultura material: los vaqueiros d’alzada y los maragatos. Mediante una metodología arqueológica se analizan las casas de tres pueblos en cada caso de estudio, desvelando cómo la materialidad juega un papel fundamental en los procesos de cambio cultural. En líneas generales, se produce un tránsito entre las lógicas preindustriales de la domesticidad campesina y la concepción de la casa como un instrumento representacional que sirve para exhibir capital simbólico y social a personas de ámbitos urbanos con mentalidades individualizadas. El estudio muestra cómo la combinación de metodologías arqueológicas y etnográficas puede politizar contextos de cambio cultural contemporáneos aparentemente neutros.

Palabras claves: cambio cultural, cultura material, arqueología de los espacios domésticos, gestión del patrimonio.
This paper explores contemporary processes of cultural change in two rural areas of northwest Spain. These areas were inhabited by social groups with strong cultural identities that have made its mark in the material culture: the Vaqueiros d’Alzada and the Maragatos. The houses of three villages in each case study are analyzed through an archaeological methodology, revealing the key role materiality plays in processes of cultural change. Overall, there is a transition between preindustrial forms of peasant domesticity towards a conception of the house as a representational device used to display social and symbolic capital by highly individualized people from urban areas. The study shows how a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methodologies can politicize contemporary contexts of cultural change that are apparently neutral. Key words: Cultural change, material culture, household archaeology, cultural heritage management.

Der Text stellt liturgische Geräte in ihrem historischen Kontext vor. Dabei werden Gebrauchs- Symbol und Materialaspekte berücksichtigt. Der Text dient so als EInführung in die kirchlich materielle Kultur des Mittelalters und ihrer Veränderungen.

The Kyklades or Cycladic Islands have always been popular amongst archaeologists working on the Aegean Bronze Age and the 'glorious' Classical Greek past. In contrast, not much light has been shed upon aspects of post-Roman life on the islands. Research into the post-medieval period has been a subject mainly for historians and folklorists. This paper attempts to explore aspects of the lifestyle of the peoples who inhabited this island group throughout the more recent, yet most neglected centuries of Greek history, using archaeological, textual and other sources and methods. My aim is to reconstruct everyday rural life in Greece, by focusing on the domestic sphere and addressing questions concerning society and the domestic material culture of a littoral area that has remained traditional until very recently.
This paper examines some .first results of the CYRE.P. (Cyclades Research Project) and introduces examples concerning the domestic material culture of the late medieval and post-medieval periods (early 13th-late 19th centuries) in the Aegean Islands of the Cyclades, with particular reference to housing, furniture and internal.fittings, costumes and embroideries.

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501752889/the-things-of-life/

The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community.

For the published version, see Adam Bursi, "Mijn poep, mijn zelf. Identiteit en religie door de lens van ontlasting," in Wie is er bang voor religie? Waarom kennis van religie belangrijk is, ed. Joas Wagemakers and Lucien van Liere (Almere: Parthenon, 2019), 246-252. Please be aware that the published and the preprint version are not 100% the same. This preprint version is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution.

Seals have a powerful and peculiar connection with people. That they serve as signifiers of social
identity, symbols of status and power, has been well established and extensively discussed. The
association of the seal and the human body has also been investigated, but there are dimensions
of this corporeal relationship that demand further consideration and problematization. My aim
is to interrogate the unique dynamism of glyptic objects, both seals and seal impressions, as
they participate in social actions with and without humans. The dynamism of these material
things – their distinctive juxtapositions and movements, potentials for physical engagement
and separation, their interactive surfaces, the intimacy of their involvement with human flesh,
and their decisive abandonments of it – gives rise to truly vibrant material engagements with
persons. These ideas and their implications are examined through the corpus of Bronze Age
Cretan glyptic and ultimately, my discussion closes with a case study drawn from this field,
specifically concerning seals and seal impressions representing lions. Working through this lens
offers contextualized insight into the prismatic ways that seals and seal impressions contribute
to sociocultural experience – practically, poetically, presently, and absently.

Przedmioty protestu to książka prezentująca nowatorskie badania nad materialnością protestów ulicznych w Polsce i na świecie. Autor posługuje się koncepcjami z zakresu socjologii ruchów społecznych oraz społecznych studiów nad materialnością, aby rozpoznać znaczenie i funkcje przedmiotów, takich jak transparenty, maski, kostiumy i bardziej kreatywne konstrukcje materialne, które możemy zobaczyć w trakcie zgromadzeń publicznych. Poszukując wzorców dla kultury materialnej protestu, przeprowadził między innymi fotograficzne obserwacje uczestniczące w trakcie demonstracji ulicznych, jak również rozmawiał z bezpośrednimi i pośrednimi wytwórcami przedmiotów oraz ramy materialnej dla wydarzeń publicznych. Analizie poddane zostały między innymi Czarny Protest, demonstracje Stop ACTA oraz Marsze Niepodległości. Autor przez pryzmat przedmiotów protestu patrzy na relacje między ludźmi, którzy aktywnie i w różnych rolach angażują się w procesy kontestacji. [opis pochodzi od wydawcy]

Introductory essay [+ "Preface" ], by PM Taylor. In: "The Gift as Material Culture" [Edited by Patricia Thatcher and Paul Michael Taylor with Cynthia Adams Hoover. Yale-Smithsonian Report on Material Culture, 1991.]

    The 1991 Yale-Smithsonian Seminar on Material Culture, held in Washington, D.C., April 28-30, examined gifts as objects of material culture.  The meeting was held in conjunction with the Smithsonian exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, "Beyond the Java Sea: Art of Indonesia's Outer Islands," an exhibition whose objects stimulated much discussion and new thinking about material culture.

    The seminar participants represented a broad range of disciplines and included historians, materials scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists, literary scholars, and art historians. As discussed in the introductory paper, many of Indonesia's finest artworks were created originally as gifts, as a kind of currency in systems of gift exchange.      Consequently, the exhibition and its accompanying catalog (Taylor and Aragon 1991) examined indigenous concepts of reciprocity, as materially represented in gifts, for maintaining (or indeed manipulating) the social order in outer-island Indonesia.

chinese wallpaper is an export product manufactured in the context of
a commercial civilian culture, which bears witness to the exchange of material culture between china and the west. however, the artisans and their working methods have been neglected in the historical narrative of the Chinese canon, which has posed a significant obstacle to the research of export arts. using the Chinese figural wallpapers in Oud-Amelisweerd, a mansion on the outskirts of Utrecht, as a point of departure, this article suggests an approach to deciphering the process of wallpaper production through the analysis of the spatial arrangement in the wallpaper images and the newly discovered ink-line and coloured paintings.

A 12th-13th-century A.D. ceramic assemblage from Alexander’s Hill at Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey provides new evidence for the typo-chronological study of Byzantine pottery. A functional analysis of the assemblage, along with textual and iconographic evidence, archaeozoological and palynological analyses, and chemical analysis of cooking-pot residues, contributes to the reconstruction of diet and cooking practices in Anatolia. While baked fish, vegetables, pulses, and bread are usually regarded as the staples of Byzantine peasant cuisine, diners at Sagalassos were enjoying beef stews before the Fourth Crusade, when the technique of stewing meat was allegedly introduced to the eastern Mediterranean from the West.

Ester Mantovani replicates Isabella d'Este maiolica istoriata by Nicola d'Urbino to investigate the art and design of Italian Renaissance ceramics at the Gonzaga court of Mantua. Link to film: http://youtu.be/H0BDdzJ3_nQ

This film is  part of our larger project of the same name described below (please see pdf).

An online component of The Illustrated Credenza project is in development with "IDEA" (The Isabella d'Este Archive) 
http://isabelladeste.ucsc.edu/?page_id=566

Any discussion on object value has to start with Marcel Mauss's famous dictum: " To give something is to give part of oneself. To give away is to give part of one's nature and substance , to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence. " A large bibliography deals with the fusion between subjects and objects in gift exchange or with the simultaneous and mutual definition of the value of things and the prestige of persons. I have argued previously that the conspicuous consumption of objects establishes a different relation between persons and things. While gift exchange brings about a dispersal of personal identity beyond bodily boundaries, through time and across space, consumption allows one to absorb and appropriate transitory gifts, with all their associations of distant places, famous previous owners, and exotic value systems. In this paper I would like to elaborate this point further by discussing the (re)definition of personhood in mortuary ritual and by examining the use of (valuable) objects in bodily practices (such as body modification, adornment, anointment, grooming, arraying, and disarticulating). While conspicuous consumption at death is often discussed as a purely social strategy of display and aggrandizement, or at best as symbolic exchange with the ancestors, I argue that it has a much deeper cultural significance: it is a crucial attempt to contain the drift of meaning and value and to counteract the disintegration of personal identities—during the very process that dissolves persons into ancestors. These ideas will be applied to a specific case study: the grave circles of Mycenae.

In this book chapter, I explore the materiality of time as a thread in Genet’s texts. As strings, threads, wires, ropes and other motifs of ligature are woven throughout his writing, I contend that Genet configures 'le fil' as a time of filiation to which all of his texts are bound. I analyse how 'le fil' takes centre stage in his 1957 essay 'Le Funambule': 46 disjointed fragments in which Genet describes the dance of the tightrope walker as an autotelic apotheosis, a moment of pure existence which defies the norms of time.  What is it about the tangible wire and the ephemeral body that moves along it that troubles spatio-temporal modes? Why does this thread become a privileged signifier for presence, and more specifically for the unsettling presence of what Genet describes as a “cadavre marchant sur le fil”,  a present-death?  Considering how the tight-rope contributes to and disrupts the Bergsonian definition of movement being present while space is past, this chapter traverses Derrida’s poetic 1997 text  'Un Ver à Soie' to understand more about the materiality of time in Genet’s writing and its reverberations in a poststructuralist context.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” –  Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” –  Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” –  Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” –  Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” –  Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

Are all documents written to be read? Do all sponsors and authors of a text have a specific audience in mind? Can texts that are inaccessible and/or out of view be defined as restricted? In 2010, Hilgert brought the subject of the restricted presence of text in focus and a conference was organized on this topic in 2011 within the framework of the CRC 933. In his article, Hilgert used as one example of “restricted presence” the foundation deposits of Mesopotamian rulers. This paper addresses in more detail these written offerings deposited in the foundations of Mesopotamian temples in the 3rd millennium and evaluates aspects of visibility, intended audience and the purpose of “restricting texts”.

"This dissertation about the Native American mounds... is meticulously researched (30 different sites) and beautifully written, integrating ethnography and theory. It is located at an intersection of disciplinary debate: the status of colonial and post-colonial paradigms at a time when an environmental paradigm of the anthropocene is ascendant." -The Richard Guy Wilson Prize for Excellence in The Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places, University of Virginia School of Architecture

This dissertation centers the study of the mound landscapes on an Indigenous people’s knowledges and ongoing relationships with ancestral places. Thousands of these earthen mounds sit across eastern North America, constructed by Native American peoples over the previous five thousand years. My data is based on ethnographic research conducted in partnership with members of a small Native American community in the Southeastern U.S. who identify as having Muskogee (Creek) ancestry, but maintain their own understandings of the meaning of individual mounds and their interconnections in the past and present. The mounds visited and discussed are distributed widely across the Eastern U.S. (from Illinois to Florida). Popular history, interpretive signage, and dominant archaeological discourses frame mounds as abandoned sites and places “of the past,” yet these landscapes remain powerful and animate presences for members of this Native American community. Oral traditions shared with me describe mounds as places along roads traveled by celestial teachers and human traders, who helped resolve conflicts between warring communities and create peace. These routes extend into the present as animate mounds enroll my hosts into relations of exchange and care, particularly through circulations of ancestral objects, soils, and dreams. In these moments, members of the community cultivate vulnerability to ancestral affects and attend to landscapes wounded by ongoing settler violence. As my hosts visit mound landscapes, they are drawn into a nonlinear, Indigenous longue durée: an emergent space-time of winding, interconnected paths along which stories, things, soils, and dreams circulate.

Things are the staple of our lives, but they are also objects of our studies and products of our activities. We depend on things, but things also depend us. In this course, we will explore convoluted networks of relations that bring together humans, non-humans and things.

Looking at things and thinking about things differently, we will try to understand why they are so irresistible to have, to use, to make, to keep, and to exchange.

During the course, we will approach things as signs (semiotics), as material substances (new materialisms), as objects of affection (affect studies), and as key agents of influence and impact (actor-network theory).

The megalithic phenomenon is one of the most exciting subjects of study in prehistory. The practice of monumentalising places of special significance by erecting large stones started during the Neolithic period, approximately 10.000 years ago. On time, it acquired such a social and ideological depth that it became one of the most geographically and temporally widespread cultural phenomena ever known in Europe. In Andalusia,  megalithic sites and landscapes express themselves with great richness and diversity, representing an exceptional source of scientific information for our understanding of our forebears’ ways of life, as well as a unique and beautiful historical legacy. This book combines the contributions of various university professors, who bring us up to date with their research, with excellent photographic illustrations and, for the first time, reflects the spread of this cultural phenomenon throughout Andalusia. It is suitable for both those who wish to deepen their knowledge of this professional specialisation and those who seek the pleasure of a satisfied interest.