Material Culture & Materiality

Callas’s voice gives rise to unusually polarized reactions, from devotion to disgust. As an artist, Callas was judged as “temperamental,” “out of control,” unreliable due to her walkouts; while Callas-the-voice was considered “mesmerizing,” “terrible,” having “‘lost’ her voice” from “ferocious dieting,” and also out of control. Filled with judgmental language about her body weight and questions of control, voice, and character, the case was seemingly ripe for a feminist critique that addressed Callas’s voice and body head on. However, within the concepts and vocabulary that are currently available, women find themselves the object of the gaze of assessment and criticism. For female singers, this takes place in the visual as well as the sonorous realm.

A recent revival of organology, critical organology, offers a new inroad into considering the body and its materiality outside self-perpetuating dogmatic language. In this article, I first draw out the main points of the public discourse around Callas’s voice and body; second, engaging Susan Bordo’s work, I consider how these narratives about the voice and body rely on ancient and contemporary sentiments about the female body, rather than on current knowledge about the voice; and third, I examine common assertions about Callas’s voice through what I conceive as a critical organological approach to voice research. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a discourse that will separate voice and body from gendered disparities; find a way to deal head-on with voice as a material, vibrational practice; and illuminate where and how vocal vocabulary and concepts are weighed down by millennia of gendered misconceptions.

This review article addresses current controversies and opportunities in research on the roles, uses, and meanings of “Egypt” in ancient Roman visual and material culture. Accordingly, the article investigates problems of definition and interpretation; provides a critical review of current scholarly approaches; and analyzes the field’s intersections with current intellectual developments in the broader fields of archaeology and art history. It is argued that research on Roman Aegyptiaca can gain much from, and is poised to contribute substantially to, (1) 21st-century archaeology’s “material turn”; (2) the construction of new interpretive frameworks for cross-cultural interactions and “hybridization”; and (3) increased attention to the relationships among artifacts, contexts, and assemblages. Roman visual representations of Egypt provide a rich testing ground for research on intercultural exchange, the lived experience of empire, and the complex entanglement of people, things, and images.

Textiles were the second-most-traded commodity in all of world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire in particular, the sale and exchange of silks, cottons, and woolens generated an immense amount of revenue and touched every level of society, from rural women tending silkworms to pashas flaunting layers of watered camlet to merchants traveling to Mecca and beyond. Sea Change offers the first comprehensive history of the Ottoman textile sector, arguing that the trade's enduring success resulted from its openness to expertise and objects from far-flung locations. Amanda Phillips skillfully marries art history with social and economic history, integrating formal analysis of various textiles into wider discussions of how trade, technology, and migration impacted the production and consumption of textiles in the Mediterranean from around 1400 to 1800. Surveying a vast network of textile topographies that stretched from India to Italy and from Egypt to Iran, Sea Change illuminates often neglected aspects of material culture, showcasing the objects' ability to tell new kinds of stories.

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment, especially infrastructures and urban spaces. Within this context during socialism thousands of miles of new roads were constructed in the country. The remarkably limited use of roads, combined with their systematic building and maintenance, kept this infrastructure’s materiality in a relatively good condition for many decades. Since the early 1990s, though, the end of the regime has signified a period of booming mobility and automobility. Postsocialism and the wider context of neoliberalism have been marked by state withdrawal from many of its previous roles, and the maintenance of basic infrastructures has become increasingly dependent on international aid. Nevertheless, the roads are currently being socially reappropriated and reconfigured, as people embrace automobility, which was a very limited practice during socialism. This article explores the kind of socio-material relationships that road construction and the roads themselves generated in socialist Albania and how these
are linked to postsocialist spatial practices.

Religion in Museums: Euthanized Sacredness, in the Beholder’s Eye, or a Multi-Tool for Shifting Needs? Three suggested models to discuss how museums affect sacredness (2018) MUSEOLOGY AND THE SACRED - MATERIALS FOR A DISCUSSION Papers from the ICOFOM 41th symposium held in Tehran (Iran), 15-19 October 2018, 145-148. Ed. François Mairesse

Religion in museums: Euthanized sacredness, in the beholder’s eye, or a
multi-tool for shifting needs? Three suggested models to discuss how
museums affect sacredness.

Abstract for paper for the ICOFOM 41st symposium Museology and the sacred
Tehran, 15-19 October 2018. Aimed for the analysis plan Museality-heritage-sacred.
by Helena Wangefelt Ström, PhD candidate in Museology, Umeå University (Sweden).
helena.wangefelt.strom@umu.se

What happens when religion in the shape of objects imbued with religious meaning is
transformed into cultural heritage? What values are added, what are lost, and who is the
performing agent? These questions concern what museums do to objects connected to
religion, calling for a meditated use of terms such as holy, sacred, religious, and spiritual (all
employed in recent research and policy documents by, for example, UNESCO, while in many
cases as interchangeable). This paper suggests three models to understand the processes of
heritagisation of religion and the factors and agents involved, starting from a historical
background in European, in particular Italian, Early Modernity.

A frequently used scholarly model depicts the museum as a killing of previous identities, and
the objects as provided with entirely new identities, and lives, as museum objects. This view
brings on dramatic effects for sacred objects, how they are handled and narrated in the
museum, and possibly on how they are viewed by the visitors. The use or not of information
signs before sacred objects in museums is an aspect on this matter.
The second model is the hybrid identity, where a museum object can be said to possess two
authentic identities simultaneously, depending on the views and beliefs of the beholder:
authentic sacredness, or authentic art object and evidence of history. This view may fit well
with the focus on the individual in our time.
The third model presented is based on the two previous ones, and suggests a hybridity not
only in identities or living/dead, but defined by the uses of the objects. Even musealized
objects can, as in the cases of religious treasuries or of certain religious images in museums,
shift identity between museum object, object of devotion (to be carried in processions or
used in rituals), legitimization symbol (bishops’ ordinations etc), and, historically, as a

monetary reserve to be sold if needed. The identity of the object shifts, also in practice of
being looked at behind glass or being used and touched, depending on the use currently
applied to it. A distinction between cultual use and cultural use is relevant for this model.

I argue that these different approaches to sacred objects in museum pose different
museological challenges and possibilities, and also ascribes different agencies to museum
staff as well as to the visitors.

Please note: due to journal copyright conditions I have uploaded my earlier working version (pre-publication).

Abstract: The Black Rood of Scotland was a Christian royal reliquary intimately connected to the secular realm of medieval warfare and the bitter skirmishes between the Scots and English. While no longer extant, the palm-sized gold cross with its relic of the True Cross has left a documentary presence that details a rich and active biography. Imbued with the identities of its owners, the Black Rood began its documented life in the pseudo-hagiographies of Queen Margaret and King David of Scotland. It was appropriated by Edward I of England, returned to the Scots, and finally taken from David II on a Durham battlefield. It participated in some of the most fraught periods of medieval Scottish and English relations during which it was transformed from miracle-worker to a symbol of oppression. Over the course of its “life,” it became an actor in the performance of royal virtue, communal identity, and the negotiation of sovereignty. In its afterlife it remains identified with concepts of nationhood which continue to resonate and define the way royal artefacts like the Black Rood are memorialized. The documentary records of the Rood provide a rare opportunity to observe a medieval relic in action within its social and cultural space. This paper examines how and in what ways the Black Rood acquired and exhibited agency and displayed its capacity to affect, provoke and evoke social and political meaning.

Feasting equipment, copper‐alloy cauldrons and flesh‐hooks, are a distinctive feature of the later Atlantic Bronze Age suggesting elements of a shared ideology whose ultimate origin may lie in the eastern Mediterranean. The easterly distribution of the earliest British cauldrons previously identified is further confirmed by the recent discovery of a Type Colchester example at Salle, Norfolk, which brings to three the number of cauldrons of this type found in the region. Similarities between them suggest their origin lies in a single workshop, if not individual craftsman. The appearance of the cauldrons found at Feltwell, Norfolk, and Salle is so close as to suggest a new ‘Feltwell’ Variant. Analysis of the contents of the Feltwell cauldron hint at the function of these intriguing objects as high status cooking vessels, most likely reserved for the chiefly class and deployed in the hosting of feasts which, along with flesh‐hooks, served to build and cement political alliances.

KEYWORDS
CAULDRON, FLESH‐HOOK, FEASTING, LATER BRONZE AGE, IDEOLOGY, BRONZE AGE CHRONOLOGY, METAL DETECTING

The focus of this volume is on the aesthetics, semantics and function of materials in Roman antiquity between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. It includes contributions on both architectural spaces (and their material design) and objects – types of 'artefacts' that differ greatly in the way they were used, perceived and loaded with cultural significance. With respect to architecture, the analysis of material aesthetics leads to a new understanding of the performance, imitation and transformation of surfaces, including the social meaning of such strategies. In the case of objects, surface treatments are equally important. However, object form (a specific design category), which can enter into tension with materiality, comes into particular focus. Only when materials are shaped do their various qualities emerge, and these qualities are, to a greater or lesser extent, transferred to objects. With a focus primarily on Roman Italy, the papers in this volume underscore the importance of material design and highlight the awareness of this matter in the ancient world.

This paper proposes a new material reconstruction of 4Q415, one of the copies of Instruction from Qumran. The reconstruction encompasses approximately one quarter of the 32 fragments of the scroll. This reconstruction supports and further develops the suggestion that several fragments of the scroll were wadded in the rolled scroll. It demonstrates the possibility of placing the fragments in seven consecutive layers, and arranges them in a digital canvas. The material evidence supports new joins, and consequently new readings. The reconstruction sheds new light on the arrangement of the text of the scroll. It thus establishes a better understanding of this fragmentary copy of Instruction, and it hopefully will serve as a further milestone in the study of this enigmatic composition. * This study is funded by a grant from the DIP foundation (Deutsche-Israelische Projektkooperation), Grant Number BE 5916/1-1, as part of the project Scripta Qumranica Electronica. I am indebted to Prof. Jonathan Ben-Dov for his close and critical reading of this paper, which significantly improved it. In addition, thanks are due to Prof. Eibert Tigchelaar and Dr. Eshbal Ratzon for their helpful comments. The methodologies implemented in this study were developed by the team of SQE project, especially Jonathan Ben-Dov, Asaf Gayer and Eshbal Ratzon. I am indebted to all SQE team for the general learning process and for the discussions of the issue addressed here. Finally, images in this article are courtesy of the Leon Levi Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library of Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA); Photographer: Shay Halevi (fig. 5: Photographer: Najib Anton Albina). (1) The exact number of copies of Instruction is still being discussed among scholars. Torleif Elgvin, An Analysis of 4QInstruction

To better understand and more effectively address the complexity of the art of Gandhara, its development out of cross cultural encounters and exchanges, and the multivalent meanings that emerged out of the varied processes of its production and use, two analytical frameworks can be usefully employed: materiality and globalization. The conjunction of these approaches holds tremendous potential for the field of Gandharan art and archaeology. They can move scholarship away from reductive Hellenizing discourses towards ideas, that focus on the effects of the complex connectivity and mobility in lands associated with this art. Beginning with a brief historiographical review and critique of the formative narratives on Gandharan art, this paper goes on to discuss the concepts of materiality and globalization, their respective scope and implications, and how they can be applied (individually and collectively) to Gandharan art.

This article offers a basic model and background methodological approaches to the establishment and development of Ottoman Archaeology in rural Greece, by presenting two surveyed ciftlik-estates in the region of Tanagra and their associated material culture (housing and surface ceramics). The site of Guinosati (6,5 kilometres southeast of Tanagra) and a group of four linked long-houses (here referred to as Bardzi) on the acropolis hill of the ancient Tariagra city-site comprise our present case-study of Ottoman villages dated between the 15th and 18th centuries.

The dissemination of Owen Jones’ studies of the Alhambra and his color theory has been
increasingly well understood as a cornerstone of the later Alhambresque style. And yet, curiously,
Jones offers at once an accurate appreciation of the Alhambra and a basis for a striking divergence
from Nasrid design in Alhambresque interiors. This article examines that discrepancy. It begins with
a review of the aesthetics of the Alhambra in view of the eleventh-century optics of Ibn al-
Haytham, supported by conservation work that has confirmed Jones’ vibrant colors. The aesthetic
key to the Alhambra is not color alone, however, but a principle of visual harmony integrating color
and geometry. The Nasrid builders applied color in conjunction with principles of proportionate
geometric relationships and measurable visual properties—height, distance, size, depth—in the
architectural and decorative design. They also manipulated color through their consideration of
the materiality of the polychromed surfaces, whose reflective and refractive potentials allowed for
differing optical effects. By balancing attention between color, as transmitted through the innovative
technique of chromolithography, and the drawings of plans and elevations, this article strengthens
the understanding of Jones’ grasp of the visual harmony of the Alhambra. Second, it demonstrates
the ways in which Jones’ plates of various ornament were often privileged over, or simply divorced
from, his architectural drawings in Alhambresque interiors: e.g., the Salón árabe (1847-1851) in the
Royal Palace of Aranjuez (Spain), the Salotto Turco in the Villa Mimbelli (1865-1870) in Livorno (Italy),
and the Moorish Bath (1850-1854) at Schloss Albrechtsberg in Dresden (Germany). In conclusion,
this article proposes that, in contrast to the Alhambra, a loss of visual harmony is a significant
characteristic of the Alhambresque, or, otherwise stated, that the Alhambresque interiors feature a
disproportionate emphasis on color, consistent with the ideological burden of Orientalism.

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

This book brings together a range of perspectives on material transitions, observing and explicating the myriad transformations that works of different kinds may undergo: changing contexts, changing matter, changing interpretations, and display. By making a point of the vibrant materiality of objects— their liveliness, power, and ability to change—the book aims to contribute to the conversation that confounds the continuing assumptions that artworks and artefacts are made of static, inert matter—inactive, stagnant, and passive ‘objects’ of investigation, subordinated to hygienic orders of museum vitrines or of preserved historical sites. Instead, it becomes clear that being material, they exist as complex constructs of material relations. In the words of the cultural historian and geographer David Lowenthal, the notions of ‘material permanence, wholeness, … and original authenticity have been increasingly supplanted by appreciative acceptance of temporal transience, processual transformation, varying contextual circumstances, life-cycle mutability, [and] erosive and corrosive agency’ (see Lowenthal, ‘A sea-change rich and strange’ in this volume). Most importantly, a close study of these internal material relationships, often through the trained eye of the conservator, curator, or other specialist offers a more nuanced reading of cultural artefact, which may lead to fundamental rethinking of the aesthetic and formal interpretations it is given, not to mention issues of authorship, authenticity, and permanence.

Author(s): Creel, Andrea | Advisor(s): Feldman, Marian H.; Porter, Benjamin W. | Abstract: In the ancient Near East, the Sinai, the Negev, southern Jordan and northwestern Arabiaconstituted a marginal and peripheral landscape, a liminal land considered both lifelessand teeming with fantastic creatures and divine powers. However, the position of thisregion between the more populated areas of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and theArabian Peninsula marked this landscape as a crossroads for materials and people, amovement of phenomena perpetuated mainly by local mobile pastoral communities. Assuch, roadside ritual comprised a major expression and practice of multiple ideologiesabout the land from earliest times. Sites of ritual along roadsides harnessed multiple,overlapping, and intersecting senses of liminality, the potency and danger of beinginbetween, to lay claim to the land and offer protection against human and suprahumandangers. In this context, roadside ritual sites operated as...

Today’s technology emerges from yesterday’s fantasies. And the technological materializations of the future are already present in the imaginations of the present. This blog post traces the history of the smartphone and points to the ecological problems and social potentials of globally networked communication systems that are kept going by the use of these miniaturized devices. The digital universe still contains a surplus of possibilities that can be activated in very different trajectories.

[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.
    The next two days of stimulating papers, discussions, and meals were organized into three panels:
• Wedding Gifts and Marital Alliances
• Gifts in Economic Perspective
• Power and Propitiation: Political and Religious Aspects of Gift Giving.
    As the Indonesian exhibition provided a point of comparison for the entire topic, so the panels began with one or more Indonesian case studies, each presented by an Indonesianist (anthropologists Hamilton, Aragon, and Pospisil and art historian Jessup). Consequently, each group of essays in this seminar report begins with an Indonesian case study, and then broadens the discussion to include examples from other parts of the world, as examined by scholars from American studies, history, art history, anthropology, literature, and other fields.

Wedding Gifts and Marital Alliances
    The discussion of Wedding Gifts and Marital Alliances opens with Roy Hamilton's vivid account of a Lio marriage ceremony from Flores Island in the Lesser Sundas. Hamilton's account illustrates that, even where the rules of gift exchange at traditional weddings seem precise and ritualized, lively negotiations and individual manipulation of those same detailed rules do prevail "on the ground." Maria Montoya describes the multiple stages of, and exchanges that take place in, a folk Catholic ceremony (called Las Entriegas de Novios) that served to sanction marriage in Hispanic New Mexico. She presents this ceremony, which persists today in modern urban contexts, as a form of "cultural resistance" to outsiders.
    Candace Waid examines wedding-related gifts in Southern U.S. novels, such as those by Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. Mary Jo Arnoldi describes a woman's exchange ceremony called woloma among the Bamana of Mali. Wedding goods are exchanged in the woloma, on the day of the wedding. Arnoldi's description of the woloma ceremony is a refreshing alternative to male-dominated discussions about "brideprice" exchange, since the woloma is organized by women, and women use the ceremony to exchange goods among themselves.

Gifts in Economic Perspective
    Leopold Pospisil opens the second panel on Gifts in Economic Perspective with his essay on the role of gifts and gift-like transactions among the Kapauku of western New Guinea (now Indonesia's easternmost province, Irian Jaya). Pospisil shows that this exchange behavior is associated with both legal and moral expectations, but that the two must carefully be distinguished.
    George Miles's essay on "Real Gifts: Treaties, Grants, and Land Transfers in America" also considers various forms of property transfer in terms of the bundles of rights, duties, and even moral expectations being transferred, as, for example, in homestead grants and grants to railroads. He also examines exchanges taking place between peoples with entire but different systems of defining property rights, as, for example, when rights in land were transferred from American Indians to Euro-Americans who had very different concepts of what that transfer entailed.
    Although he focuses on gifts of much tinier scale, historian John Fleckner's discussion, "Greetings Cards and American Consumer Culture," provoked the most heated discussion. Fleckner traces the history of this relatively new and seemingly inconsequential form of material culture that is now ubiquitous. While some seminar participants compared this phenomenon to Indonesian textiles (some of which are also created only to be given away, or to say things that the wearer cannot say), others depicted the greeting card as a cheap token
that subtly implies that the recipient deserves no better.
    The panel's concluding paper, "The Gift of Giving: Philanthropy in America" by Jean-Christophe Agnew, questions the pure philanthropy of even the most stupendous gifts. Agnew closely examines the antagonism within our culture between commodities and gifts, finding the two "incommensurable although not incompatible," since the intricate calculations accompanying private philanthropic gifts are of a different order from those accompanying commodity exchange.

Power and Propitiation: Political and Religious Aspects of Gift Giving
    The final panel, Power and Propitiation: Political and Religious Aspects of Gift Giving, begins with two very different Indonesian case studies. Anthropologist Lorraine V. Aragon's paper on tributes and offerings in Central Sulawesi Island examines the manner in which that region's political and religious gifts to deities, highland aristocrats, and lowland kingdom rulers were used to construct political and social relationships. She emphasizes that nonmaterial valuables such as access to trade markets, religious blessing, or the status acquired in gift giving must be recognized as important in gift exchange. Art historian Helen Jessup's parallel essay on "Indonesian Court Arts" gives an  overview of courtly traditions of gift exchange as they were used in defining hierarchy or equality among rulers or between rulers and subjects in Indonesian history.
    Turning to American history, Alan Fern's discussion of"Presidential Gifts in America" favorably compares the simple and deeply meaningful gifts of the earliest presidents to the "extraordinary escalation" of recent presidential gift giving. This trend recalls the escalating Cult of Magnificence in Indonesian courts, as described by Jessup. Unlike some Indonesian court societies, however, Americans have not yet come to believe that the expensive heirlooms acquired as our rulers take office are actually the source of our president's authority.
    Gretchen Townsend's essay, "Colonial Boston Church Silver: Gifts of Community, Commitment, and Continuity," provides the conference's parting thought, examining the colonial New England pattern of collecting money or leaving money upon one's death for the purchase of church silver. She leaves us with a well-developed example of a meaningful type of gift, prominent in colonial popular culture, which cannot easily be interpreted in terms of the implied reciprocity and exchange that dominate most thinking about gifts. The donor who bequeathed money for an inscribed silver vessel was, after all, already dead when the transfer took place. And each Puritan donor knew that his  future status, as someone who would or would not eternally be saved, was already predetermined before he made the bequest. Drawing her evidence from contemporary writings and from her examination of the  silver vessels, Townsend presents a moving account of the many meanings these objects of a lifetime conveyed.

In the aesthetic evaluation of objects, a regular conflict (one that dates back to antiquity) has been constructed between material as the passive object of human craftsmanship and the primacy of the material itself. In this conflict, primacy must be held by either the craftsmanship or the material's own qualities. Precious stones, however, represent a vivid example of the vagueness in this supposedly sharply defined opposition. Following the idea that is transmitted in the textual sources-namely, that both material and design have a share in the perception of jewels and contribute to their value-the following discussion will attempt to trace the optical effect of precious stones in the context of Roman society. The first step is to the relationship between materiality and optical appearance on a physical-phenomenological level (1), in the second step, the handling of the material will be focused upon (2). On the premise that natural materials do not have a solely ontological meaning (that is, a meaning limited to the statements they make), and that their perception does not always necessitate someone 'understanding them as' something, both of these perspectives will finally be brought together (3). In doing so, the relationship between naturalmaterial disposition, artificial modification, perception and cultural significance will be taken into account.

The present paper wants to bring to the attention of researchers, who have as subject of study the material remains of the Iron Age communities from Transylvania, some objects kept in the collections of the Gherla History Museum (Cluj County). Therefore, in the centre of this paper are three objects-a bent sword, a slashing knife and a horse bit-that were part of the museum's permanent exhibition, but they did not attract so far the attention of any researcher. In the present state of research, no details are known regarding the date, the exact location and the context of discovery. The Register of Inventory only records the fact that the pieces were discovered in the area of the city of Gherla. The biggest concern about these objects is whether they were discovered together or are coming from two or three different contexts.

This article attempts to analyze the relation between individual, the machinic systems and capitalist ideology that gets more consolidated with the digital by looking closely at the ways in which the human–machine relation gets standardized through the 'stabilization' of technology in what is referred to as Web 2.0. Considering certain aspects of print culture that led to what Foucault refers to as the 'principles of exclusion'—the way in which discourses delimit itself—the larger cultural economies that involved the production and manipulation of symbols in web is critically reexamined. The print-informed relation of individual and text finds its contemporary ramifications in our understanding and usage of hypertext as HTML. The article traces the crucial stages during the establishment of World Wide Web at the turn of the century and affects the question 'What is a blogger' in the same vein that the question 'What is an Author' was asked to trace the role that weblog format played in the constitution of 'access' to cyberspace. The larger implication of such an enquiry would be to situate 'cyborg' subjectivity as one that consolidates human identities as more textual, archived and accessible. The amalgamation of human–machine capacities through the stabilization of material technologies in the digital world concern the governmentality of bodies through HTML, its ideological significations and the praxis that led to its stabilization in the turn of the millennium.

The paper examines New Order Jakarta and Afrizal Malna's engagement with it through his poetry and short stories. In late New Order Indonesia, industrialization generated among Jakarta’s intellectuals a sense of entrapment in an ‘onrushing century’ where the storm of progress had thrown their life into turmoil. What did it mean for them to find their urban experiences structured by this turmoil, which poet Afrizal Malna called an ‘architecture of rain’? Sensing that corporeal and material history may hold the key to this question, I look into why a section of New Order Jakarta’s intellectual class felt they were leading a hyper-fast, overheated life, and how they tried to come to terms with it. Focusing on thing-centred and embodied experiences, I use the tension between Jakarta’s social history and Afrizal Malna’s biography and literary work to spark a different understanding of contemporary Indonesian urbanism.

This article argues that the late 20th-century tradition of material culture studies, as well as its more recent object-oriented offspring, emerged as a response to the 1980s crisis of representation and the deeper postcolonial critiques that accompanied this crisis. As it became more and more difficult to study and make claims about non-Western people, anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines began to explore the advantages of treating non-human objects as quasi-human subjects. Things proved safer to study than people and the popularity of 'thing theory' grew, at least in part, for this very reason. More importantly, the analytical shift of focus from people to things had the effect of salvaging—and, indeed, greatly amplifying—the representational authority of Western scholars at the precise moment when that authority seemed to be evaporating.

readable and available for download from the website of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections (https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jaei/article/view/22036/21401)

Abstract: This paper explores how recent anthropological methodologies (materialities approach) as well as concepts at the interface between archaeology and anthropology (experiential and sensual archaeology) inevitably widen the boundaries of Egyptology. The presented case study contributes to a discussion of the physical relationship of material objects and the human body, focusing on states when materiality seeps deliberately and dangerously into immateriality. This is explored at the example of unpublished headrests from the Cyfarthfa Castle Museum, Merthyr Tydfil (Wales, UK) by looking on the intersection of bodies with the material that also could be interpreted as inter-material communication. Impressions of fabric on their wooden surface are presumably the imprint of bedding intended to ensure comfortable sleep telling us about the sensual experience using these artefacts. The contact between skin and rough wood needed to be alleviated. This theoretical discussion is then set against an experimental and experiential archaeological approach focusing on sensual experiences with these headrests.

In this thesis I explore how mythological narratives and the medium of collage are used by artists Romare Bearden, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith and Della Wells. The cultural identity of a nation cannot be represented by a single story. Together these artists embody a wide range of the United States’ history over the span of approximately thirty years. The pieces I focus on contain distinct and often allegorical iconography representative of their creator’s visual vocabulary. A chapter centered on each artist explores the medium through their narratives and materiality.

8/15-19/2022.  Faculty: Craig Kallendorf and Lisa Pon.
This course will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the history of the book in early modern Europe, from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. Our goal will be to use the holdings of the UCLA Research Library, with a focus on its Aldine collection, the Getty Research Institute Research Library, and the Huntington Library to learn to 'read' a Renaissance book, both as a physical object and as a carrier of cultural values. We will examine in turn how these books were produced, how they were distributed, and how they were used by those who bought and read them. Topics include the transition from manuscript to printed book, the mechanics of early printing, famous scholar-printers, editing and correcting, woodcuts and engravings, typeface and its meaning, the popular print, bindings, the Renaissance book trade, censorship, the formation of libraries, both individual and institutional, marginalia as clues to reading practices and information management, and researching a Renaissance book, using both print and online sources. The course is intended for special collections librarians, collectors, booksellers, and scholars and graduate students in any field of Renaissance studies and library science. Scholarship aid is available.
For more information and how to apply please visit: http://www.calrbs.org/admissions/

Informed by Reinhart Koselleck’s considerations about the intrinsic gap
between historical events and their verbal recognition, this study analyzes
memory construction in the politico-philosophical debate of the Warring
States period by taking primary reference to “Gu ming” 顧命 (“Testamentary
Charge”) from the modern-script recension of the Shangshu . “Gu ming” as understood here is not primarily a document that records historical change through events but a multilayered intellectual enterprise where ancient communities come to terms with the changing realities of their social and intellectual experience.
“Gu ming” presents the act of succession from King Cheng 成王 (r. 1042/1035–1006 BCE) to his son Zhao 釗, the future King Kang 康王 (r. 1005/1003–978 BCE).
Despite its outlook, “Gu ming” should not be seen as an actual witness to the act of succession from King Cheng to the future King Kang, nor should it be considered primarily as an instance of the—retrospectively invented—category “ming.” Instead, in its present constitution it is an Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE) artifact that takes a vital moment of the Zhou’s past as its central theme and translates sociopolitical angst into a founding myth of the Zhou. By so doing, the text connects to the wider debate on appropriate forms of rulership in the politico-philosophical setting of the late Eastern Zhou period, for which it (re)deploys a common textual framing device.