Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer Handbook of Material Culture PDF
Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer Handbook of Material Culture PDF
Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer Handbook of Material Culture PDF
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HANDBOOK
of
MATERIAL CULTURE
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HANDBOOK
of
MATERIAL CULTURE
Edited by
CHRISTOPHER TILLEY,
WEBB KEANE,
SUSANNE KCHLER,
MICHAEL ROWLANDS
AND
PATRICIA SPYER
SAGE Publications
London
Thousand Oaks
New Delhi
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Editorial Introduction Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kchler, Patricia Spyer and
Michael Rowlands 2006,
Part I introduction Christopher Tilley 2006, Chapter 1 Bill Maurer 2006, Chapter 2 Robert
Layton 2006, Chapter 3 Julian Thomas 2006, Chapter 4 Christopher Tilley 2006, Chapter 5
Janet Hoskins 2006, Chapter 6 Bjrnar Olsen 2006, Chapter 7 Peter van Dommelen 2006
Part II introduction Patricia Spyer 2006, Chapter 8 Christopher Pinney 2006, Chapter 9 Judith
Farquhar 2006, Chapter 10 David Howes 2006, Chapter 11 Diana Young 2006, Chapter 12
Jean-Pierre Warnier 2006
Part III introduction Webb Keane 2006, Chapter 13 Jane Schneider 2006, Chapter 14 Robert
St George 2006, Chapter 15 Suzanne Preston Blier 2006, Chapter 16 Victor Buchli 2006,
Chapter 17 Fred Myers 2006, Chapter 18 Robert J. Foster 2006, Chapter 19 Barbara Bender
2006, Chapter 20 Paul Connerton 2006
Part IV introduction Susanne Kchler 2006, Chapter 21 Ron Eglash 2006, Chapter 22
Daniel Miller 2006, Chapter 23 Margaret W. Conkey 2006, Chapter 24 James G. Carrier 2006,
Chapter 25 Jon P. Mitchell 2006, Chapter 26 Paul Lane 2006, Chapter 27 Chris Gosden 2006
Part V introduction Michael Rowlands 2006, Chapter 28 Marilyn Strathern 2006, Chapter 29
Beverley Butler 2006, Chapter 30 Anthony Alan Shelton 2006, Chapter 31 Michael Rowlands
and Christopher Tilley 2006, Chapter 32 Diana Eastop 2006, Chapter 33 Russell Belk 2006
First published 2006
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CONTENTS
viii
xi
Introduction
13
29
43
Objectification
Christopher Tilley
60
74
85
104
125
131
145
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CONTENTS
161
11
173
12
186
197
13
203
14
221
15
Vernacular Architecture
Suzanne Preston Blier
230
16
254
17
267
18
285
19
303
20
Cultural Memory
Paul Connerton
315
325
21
329
22
Consumption
Daniel Miller
341
23
355
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CONTENTS
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24
Exchange
James G. Carrier
373
25
Performance
Jon P. Mitchell
384
26
402
27
425
443
447
29
463
30
480
31
500
32
516
33
534
Index
546
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ILLUSTRATIONS
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
7.1
120
12.1
190
16.1
16.2
16.3
16.4
256
256
257
257
21.1
21.2
21.3
The hands
Phylogenetic tree of the vertebrates
Low-rider: an appropriation of standard automobile
technology in the US Latino community
329
330
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
7.8
50
51
51
52
56
111
113
114
116
117
118
118
336
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21.4
21.5
21.6
25.1
ix
337
338
339
399
26.1
26.2
26.3
26.4
26.5
405
408
409
413
415
27.1
435
520
520
521
521
522
522
523
527
25.2
25.3
27.2
32.1
32.2
32.3
32.4
32.5
32.6
32.7
32.8
397
398
432
TABLES
26.1
404
27.1
434
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
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James Carrier has taught and done research in Papua New Guinea, the United States
and Britain. He is Senior Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University and
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana. His main publications in economic anthropology include Wage, Trade and Exchange in Melanesia (with
A. Carrier, 1989), Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700
(1995), Meanings of the Market (ed., 1997), Virtualism: a New Political Economy (ed.,
with D. Miller, 1998) and Handbook of Economic Anthropology (ed., 2005).
Margaret Conkey is the Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology and Director of the
Archaeological Research Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. She has
worked with the materiality and material culture of the Upper Paleolithic, written
on the uses of style in archaeology, and contributed a number of publications to
the field of gender and feminist archaeology.
Paul Connerton is Honorary Fellow in the German and Romance Studies Institute
at the University of London and Research Associate in the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has been Visiting Fellow at the
Australian National University and Simon Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Manchester. He is the author of The Tragedy of Enlightenment: an Essay
on the Frankfurt School (1980) and How Societies Remember (1989).
Dinah Eastop is Senior Lecturer in Textile Conservation at the Textile Conservation
Centre, University of Southampton. She is also an Associate Director of the AHRC
Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies. She is a member of
the editorial board of the International Institute of Conservations Reviews in
Conservation and is conducting research on garments concealed in buildings
(http://www.concealedgarments.org).
Ron Eglash holds a B.Sc. in Cybernetics, an M.Sc. in Systems Engineering and
a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. A
Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship enabled his field research on African ethnomathematics, which was published in 1999 as African Fractals: Modern Computing
and Indigenous Design. He is an associate professor of Science and Technology
Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His current project, funded by
the NSF, HUD and Department of Education, translates the mathematical
concepts embedded in cultural designs of African, African-American, Native
American and Latino communities into software design tools for secondary
school education. The software is available online at http://www.rpi.edu/
~eglash/csdt.html.
Judith Farquhar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is
the author of Knowing Practice: the Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994) and
Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China (2002). Her current research, undertaken in collaboration with Qicheng Zhang of the Beijing University of Chinese
Medicine, is an investigation of popular self-care practices in Beijing.
Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. He is
the author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift
Exchange and Custom in the Tanga Islands (1995) and Materializing the Nation:
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Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea (2002), and editor of
Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia (1995). His research
interests include globalization, material culture and comparative modernities. He
is working on a book tentatively entitled Worldly Things: Soft Drink Perspectives on
Globalization.
Chris Gosden is a lecturer/curator in the School of Archaeology and the Pitt Rivers
Museum, University of Oxford, where he teaches archaeology and anthropology.
He has carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan and Britain.
His main interests are in material culture and colonialism; his two most recent
works in the area are Collecting Colonialism (with Chantal Knowles, 2002) and
Archaeology and Colonialism (2004). He leads the Relational Museum Project on the
history of collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum, using the museum as a privileged
means of exploring the links between people and things. He is developing a project on material culture and human intelligence.
Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Play of Time (1994, awarded the
Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies) and Biographical Objects: How Things tell
the Stories of Peoples Lives (1998) and editor of Headhunting and the Social
Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996). She did research in Indonesia from 1979 to
2000 and has been working in California and Vietnam since 2002.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. He
is the editor of Empire of the Senses: the Sensual Culture Reader (2004), the lead volume in the Sensory Formations series, as well as the co-author (with Constance
Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell (1994) and
author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003).
His other research interests include the anthropology of consumption, legal
anthropology, and the constitution of the Canadian imaginary.
Webb Keane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Signs of Recognition: Powers
and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997) and of articles on cultural
theory, language, exchange and religion. Among his writings on material culture are
The hazards of new clothes: what signs make possible (in The Art of Clothing, ed.
Kchler and Were, 2005), Semiotics and the social analysis of material things
(in Language and Communication, 2003), Money is no object: materiality, desire, and
modernity in an Indonesian society (in The Empire of Things, ed. Myers, 2001),
Materialism, missionaries, and modern subjects in colonial Indonesia (in Conversion
to Modernities, ed. van der Veer, 1996) and The spoken house: text, act, and object in
eastern Indonesia (American Ethnologist, 1995). His forthcoming volume Between
Freedom and Fetish is about subjects and objects in Christian modernities.
Susanne Kchler is Reader in Material Culture Studies in the Department of
Anthropology at University College London. She has conducted long-term field
research in Papua New Guinea on objectification and remembering and has written on issues of art, memory and sacrifice from an ethnographic and theoretical
perspective. More recently she has directed comparative research into clothing
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and innovation in Polynesia, which has now developed into a project on artefactual
intelligence. Her publications include Malanggan Art, Memory and Sacrifice (2002)
and Pacific Pattern (in press).
Paul Lane is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, and
specializes in African archaeology and material culture. His Ph.D. was an ethnoarchaeological study of space and time among the Dogon of Mali, and he has published widely on this topic and more generally on ethnoarchaeological research in
Africa. His recent work has encompassed archaeological studies of Tswana
responses to European colonialism and conversion to Christianity, and the historical archaeology of Luo settlement. His most recent book is African Historical
Archaeologies (ed., with Andrew Reid, 2004).
Robert Layton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Durham. His main
research interests are in art, indigenous rights, social change and social evolution.
He has carried out fieldwork in France (1969, 1985, 1995) and Australia (1974-81,
1993, 1994). His publications include The Anthropology of Art (1991), Conflict in the
Archaeology of Living Traditions (1994), An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology
(1997) and Anthropology and History in Franche-Comt (2000).
Bill Maurer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Irvine. He is the author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative
Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005) and Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and
Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997). He conducts research on the anthropology of money, finance and law, and also writes on anthropological theory and
globalization.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology,
University College London. Recent publications include Materiality (ed., 2005),
Clothing as Material Culture (ed. with S. Kchler, 2005), with Mukulika Banerjee,
The Sari (2003), and with Heather Horst, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of
Communication (in press).
Jon P. Mitchell is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He has written on the anthropology of performance, ritual, religion, memory and politics, primarily in the Mediterranean context of Malta. His books include Ambivalent
Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (2002), Powers of Good and
Evil: Social Transformation and Popular Belief (ed., with Paul Clough, 2002) and a
special issue of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Modernity in the Mediterranean
(2002).
Fred Myers is Silver Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University.
He has carried out research with Western Desert Aboriginal people in Australia.
He is interested in exchange theory and material culture, the intercultural production and circulation of culture, in contemporary art worlds, in identity and
personhood, and in how these are related to theories of value and practices
of signification. He is the co-editor of The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art
and Anthropology (with George Marcus, 1995). His interests in material culture, circulation and value are developed in an edited volume, The Empire of Things:
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Regimes of Value and Material Culture (2001), and a study of the development and
circulation of Aboriginal acrylic painting, Painting Culture: the Making of an
Aboriginal High Art (2002).
Bjrnar Olsen is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Troms. His research
interests include archaeological theory, material culture, Saami history and
ethnography, and north Scandinavian archaeology. He has written several books
and numerous papers on these topics, including Camera archaeologica: rapport fra et
feltarbeid (with J.E. Larsen, A. Hesjedal and I. Storli, 1993), Bosetning og samfunn i
Finnmarks forhistorie (1994), Fra ting til tekst: teoretiske perspektiv i arkeologisk forskning (1997) and Samenes historie fram til 1750 (with L.I. Hansen, 2004). He is directing a research project on dwellings and cultural interfaces in medieval arctic
Norway as well as conducting research on the ontology of things.
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University
College London. He has held visiting positions at the Australian National
University, the University of Chicago and the University of Cape Town. His most
recent book is Photos of the Gods: the Printed Image and Political Struggle in India
(2004).
Michael Rowlands is Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture at University
College London. His earlier research was in long-term social change and the
archaeology of colonialism in prehistoric Europe and West Africa. More recently
he has focused on cultural heritage issues and ethnographic studies of heritage
projects in Mali and Cameroon. Recent publications include Social Transformations
in Archaeology (with Kristian Kristiansen, 1998).
Jane Schneider is Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York
Graduate Center. She is the co-editor with Annette B. Weiner of Cloth and Human
Experience (1987) and the author of several essays on cloth and clothing. In
1998 she edited Italys Southern Question; Orientalism in one Country and in 2003
co-edited (with Ida Susser) Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a
Globalized World. Her anthropological field research in Sicily has led to three
books, co-authored with Peter Schneider: Culture and Political Economy in Western
Sicily (1976), Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily
(1996) and Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo (2003).
Anthony Shelton is Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Professor of
Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra and Keeper of
Ethnography at the Horniman Museum, London. His most recent exhibition is
African Worlds at the Horniman Museum and he has published extensively on
museum theory and museum history and material culture styles in Mexico and
the South-Western United States.
Marilyn Strathern, currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Cambridge and Mistress of Girton College, has had a longstanding ethnographic
interest in gender relations (Women in Between, 1972) and kinship (Kinship at the
Core, 1981). This led to a critical appraisal of ownership and control in models
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of Melanesian societies (The Gender of the Gift, 1988), and, to some extent, of
consumer society in Britain (After Nature, 1992). Interest in reproductive technologies (Reproducing the Future, 1992 and the co-authored Technologies of Procreation,
1993) sharpened a concern with new property forms, a collection of essays,
Property, Substance and Effect, appearing in 1999. Most recently she has been
involved with colleagues, in PNG and the UK, in another collaborative study, this
time of debates over intellectual and cultural property under the general title
Property, Transactions and Creations (Transactions and Creations, edited with
E. Hirsch, 2004).
Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University. She is the author
of The Memory of Trade: Modernitys Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island
(2000) and editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (1998). She
has published, among other topics, on violence, the media and photography, historical consciousness, materiality and religion.
Robert St. George teaches in the history department at the University of
Pennsylvania. His research focuses on American cultural history, material culture,
vernacular landscapes and heritage productions in North America, England,
Ireland and Iceland. Among his publications are The Wrought Covenant: Source
Materials for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in South-eastern New England,
16201700 (1979), Material Life in America, 16001860 (1988), Conversing by Signs:
Poetics of Implivation in Colonial New England Culture (1998) and Possible Pasts:
Becoming Colonial in early America (2000). He is completing a book on popular
violence, law and lived religion in eighteenth-century Maine.
Julian Thomas is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Arts, Histories and
Cultures at the University of Manchester. His research is principally concerned
with the Neolithic archaeology of Britain and north-west Europe, the philosophy
of archaeology and material culture studies. He has a particular interest in the role
of modern thought in the formation of archaeology as a discipline, and he is a
member of the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute and an Associate
Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation Textile Studies.
His publications include Understanding the Neolithic (1999) and Archaeology and
Modernity (2004).
Christopher Tilley is Professor of Material Culture in the Department of
Anthropology and Institute of Archaeology, University College London. His
research interests are in anthropological theory and material culture studies,
phenomenological approaches to landscape, the anthropology and archaeology of
art, and the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Britain and Europe. He has carried out
fieldwork in Scandinavia, Britain, France and Vanuatu. Recent books include An
Ethnography of the Neolithic (1996), Metaphor and Material Culture (1999) and The
Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (2004). He is a series
editor of the Journal of Material Culture.
Peter van Dommelen is Senior Lecturer in Mediterranean archaeology at the
University of Glasgow. His research interests are in postcolonial approaches to
ancient and (early) modern colonialism as well as survey archaeology and rural
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INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION
kinds of positivist and functionalist approaches
which had largely been abandoned in mainstream ethnographic studies. Material culture
came primarily to be seen in terms of its contribution to environmental adaption or the
smooth functioning of social systems. This
functionalism contributed to a growing disciplinary divergence between ethnographic and
archaeological approaches to material culture.
However, it also led to two very important
developments which to a certain extent directly
reintegrated ethnographic and archaeological
approaches in ethnoarchaeological studies and
archaeological studies of contemporary or
modern material culture. From the 1980s
onwards the development of symbolic, structural, structural-Marxist archaeologies had
the effect of reintegrating ethnographic and
archaeological conceptualizations of material
culture, effectively giving birth to the broader
field of material culture studies represented in
this Handbook.
In the past, archaeology, with a few exceptions, has been concerned with the past and
considered itself, alternatively, as being an
extension of history, a science of the past seeking laws and generalizations about human
social behaviour, a social interpretation of the
past, and so on. Before the advent of a distinctive field of material culture studies most
archaeologists generally read anthropology
not because they were interested in material
culture per se as a project of study important in
and for itself, but in order to provide better
ideas for the interpretation of the past. Similarly,
most social and cultural anthropologists, until
recently, have rarely been interested in archaeological studies in terms of how they might
inform considerations of materiality and material culture in general, but more as a means of
providing a historical background to their contemporary cultural concerns. A distinct field
of material culture studies transcending both
disciplines has, we believe, enormous potential
in transforming their relationship in terms of a
common focus on materiality and material
culture, and with shared epistemological and
methodological problems raised by material
things. One of the primary objectives of this
Handbook is to contribute to a new relationship between sociocultural and archaeological
anthropology.
The intellectual background of both the editors and the contributors to the Handbook is primarily in the disciplines of archaeology and
anthropology and, inevitably, some chapters
are more archaeological or anthropological
than others. However, the various contributors
also frequently cite, review and discuss material
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INTRODUCTION
attempting to analyse a plethora of material
domains (e.g. architecture, food, technology
and landscape) within the ambit of particular
archaeological or ethnographic case studies.
The Handbook reflects all these concerns and
interests. In doing so, it principally attempts to
promote a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates and traditions of
study characterizing material culture studies.
The book thus goes far beyond providing a
simple literature review of various empirical
or conceptual domains. Rather than simply
describing and discussing the field as it currently exists, the Handbook also attempts to
chart the future: the manner in which material
culture studies may be extended and further
developed.
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PART I
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
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THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
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THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
of a supposedly invariant human mind (in
Lvi-Strausss version of structuralism) and
lack of consideration of power, exploitation
and domination in much phenomenological
thought.
Bourdieus work on Kabyle society has
heavily influenced a host of archaeological and
anthropological material culture studies of relatively undifferentiated small-scale societies,
while his studies of French society in his book
Distinction (1984) and elsewhere have provided
a springboard for numerous anthropological
studies of contemporary consumption. The
thrust of analysis shifts here from a traditional
Marxist emphasis on processes of production
and exchange to the manner in which practices
of consumption are actively used to fashion personal and social identities through the differential uses, appropriation and meanings of things.
But, for Bourdieu, consumption is far more than
an appropriation of things. Things also shape
people through their effects in relation to the
reproduction of habitus in relation to class.
At a disciplinary level, in archaeology ideas
drawn from Bourdieus approach to objectification provided part of the impetus to the
critique of, and the development of an alternative to, new, scientific or post-processual
archaeology with its emphasis on laws, functional systems, social evolutionism and so on
advocated during the 1960s and 1970s.
Together with insights drawn from structuralMarxist, structuralist and semiotic approaches
it heavily influenced a paradigm shift, within
Anglo-American archaeology at least, during
the 1980s to what became known as postprocessual or, somewhat later, during the
1990s, interpretative archaeology. In the
process prehistory, as a study of material
forms, was rewritten. In anthropology, by
contrast, a widespread rejection of functionalist,
positivist and empiricist approaches had taken
place long before as a result of the post1960s influence of structuralist and symbolic
approaches. Here Bourdieus work was so
influential because it provided a clear break
with and critique of the dominance of atemporal structuralist and symbolic approaches
based primarily on Lvi-Strausss appropriation of structural linguistics to study
society and material forms. Bourdieu argued
that agency is mediated through practical
embodied routinized activity in the world. He
stresses in particular the contingent, improvised and provisional character of action in
relation to structural rules and principles
resulting in habitual dispositions to behave in
particular ways.
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one position, or any present or future possible
combination of them, could ever provide
a comprehensive understanding of either
materiality in general or particular sub-sets of
material forms such as clothing, domestic
architecture or art. Our various theories of
materiality and material culture may inevitably
be rather rusty and blunt tools but without
them any but the most innocent and unreflective empirical research would be well nigh
impossible.
Theory, from a post-structuralist perspective, is useful only in so far as it is continually
being contextualized, worked through, altered
and changed, in relation to particular empirical
studies and problems. Rather than being
applied from the top down in order to organize,
discuss, describe and then interpret a particular
set of data, the post-structuralist imperative is
instead to set theory to work from the bottom
up and alter it and, in the process, our selfunderstanding of the world through the
process of empirical research. It is also to
understand that facts and values cannot be
clearly separated, that the values and interests
we hold will, in part, determine what we
believe to be facts. Rather than believing that
our studies enable us to arrive at certain truths
with regard to the nature of material forms,
we have a more limited aspiration: to make
sense of them in a particular way, something
which always has to be argued for, and can
be argued against: a dialogic relationship.
Post-structuralism requires us to be far more
self-reflexive with regard to the personal and
institutional conditions of academic research
and the effects of representing things in particular ways: what does it mean to re-present
objects in words? Is this not a domestication of
their difference? How can we cope with the
sensory and experiential domain of human
experience in a text? Can images substitute for
words? In what manner should we write:
linear narratives, double texts? How do we cope
with different perspectives, different voices,
with multiple perspectives on materiality,
11
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IN THE MATTER OF MARXISM
Bill Maurer
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This passage nicely demonstrates the dialectic between human consciousness and practical activity that Marx borrowed from Hegel. It
is not simply that people imagine things separately from the things themselves, but that
their practical activity in turn shapes their consciousness. The worst architect projects his will
into material constructions that then not only
reflect that will but operate back upon it to shift
it in another direction. Elsewhere in Capital,
however, one reads that [t]he ideal is nothing
else than the material world reflected by the
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SPECTERS OF MARX
It is just such discussions about globalization
and transnationalism that have brought the
commodity form and its materialization in
objects and in persons to the forefront of
contemporary anthropologies of capitalism.
Rejecting earlier developmentalist frameworks, figures like James Ferguson (1999), Lisa
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REFERENCES
Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy, and other
Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Althusser, Louis (1977) For Marx. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Asad, Talal (1972) Market model, class structure,
and consent. Man, 7: 7494.
Barth, Frederik (1959) Political Leadership among Swat
Pathans. London: Athlone Press.
Beaudry, Mary, Cook, Lauren J. and Mrozowski,
Stephen (1991) Artifacts and active voices: material
culture as a social discourse, in Randall McGuire
and Robert Paynter (eds), The Archaeology of
Inequality. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15091.
Bloch, Maurice (1983) Marxism and Anthropology: the
History of a Relationship. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS
Robert Layton
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31
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33
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35
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REFERENCES
Barthes, R. (1967) Elements of Semiology, trans.
A. Lavers and C. Smith. London: Cape.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.
R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1980/1990) The Logic of Practice, trans.
R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Breuil, H. (1952) Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art,
trans. M. Boyle. Montignac: Centre dtudes et de
Documentation Prhistoriques.
Campbell, S. (2001) The captivating agency of art:
many ways of seeing, in C. Pinney and N. Thomas
(eds), Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technology of
Enchantment. Oxford: Berg, pp. 11735.
Charbonnier, G. (1961) Entretiens avec Claude LviStrauss. Paris: Plon.
Clifford, J. (1986) On ethnographic allegory, in
J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
pp. 98107.
David, Bruno (2002) Landscapes, Rock-art and the
Dreaming: an Archaeology of Preunderstanding.
Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dobres, M.-A. (2000) Technology and Social Agency.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. London:
Routledge.
Douglas, M., ed. (1973) Rules and Meanings.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Douglas, M. (1975): Deciphering a meal, in
M. Douglas, Implicit Meanings. London: Routledge,
pp. 24975.
Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, trans. J.W. Swain. London: Unwin.
Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1903/1963) Primitive
Classification, trans. Rodney Needham. London:
Cohen & West.
Faris, J. (1971) Nuba Personal Art. London: Duckworth.
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Sturrock, J., ed. (1979) Structuralism and since: from LviStrauss to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tilley, C. (1990) Claude Lvi-Strauss: structuralism
and beyond, in C. Tilley (ed.), Reading Material
Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 381.
Tilley, C. (1991) Material Culture and Text: the Art of
Ambiguity. London: Routledge.
Turner, V.W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-Structure. London: Routledge.
Turner, V.W. (1990) Are there any universals of
performance in myth, ritual and drama? in
R. Schechner and W. Appel (eds), By Means of
Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and
Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 813.
Ucko, P. and Rosenfeld, A. (1967) Palaeolithic Cave Art.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Wang, Shucun, ed. (1985) Corpora of Chinese Fine Arts,
Fascicule of Painting XXI, Folk New Years Painting.
Beijing: Wenwu Press.
Wiessner, P. (1983) Style and information in Kalahari
San projectile points, American Antiquity, 48 (2):
25376.
Wittig, S., ed. (1975) Structuralism: an Interdisciplinary
Study. Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick.
Wobst, M. (1977) Stylistic behaviour and information
exchange, in C.E. Cleland (ed.), Papers for the
Director: Anthropology Papers of the Museum of
Anthropology, University of Michigan, 61: 31742.
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PHENOMENOLOGY AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Julian Thomas
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THE EMERGENCE OF
PHENOMENOLOGICAL THOUGHT
Phenomenology in the accepted sense began
with the work of Franz Brentano in the later
nineteenth century. Brentano proposed what he
called a descriptive psychology, which was to
be differentiated from the neurological study of
mental processes, and concerned with the significance and content of cognitive acts (Moran
2000: 9). Brentano pointed out that mental phenomena differ from physical ones in that they
are always directed at something (Schuhmann
2004: 281). Anything that does not refer to
something else is rightfully the subject matter
of the natural sciences, but a different approach
was required to address the directionality of
conscious activity, which Brentano referred to
as intentionality. Intentionality always takes
a form in which individual mental events are
connected to one another relationally, so that a
single episode of sense-perception is never just
the acquisition of an atomized unit of information. In thought and perception, objects appear
as presentations, which form the basic elements
of consciousness (Rollinger 2004: 259). The intentionality of mental activity forms a whole or
horizon, which renders these presentations
comprehensible.
Brentanos account of intentionality greatly
influenced Husserl, who originally intended
his phenomenology to be a form of descriptive psychology. Husserl wanted to establish
a science which could identify the fundamental structures of consciousness, thereby
unravelling the problem of perception (Moran
2000: 60). Intentionality was central to this
project, for Husserl held that consciousness is
always directed towards some object, whether
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GEOGRAPHY, ARCHITECTURE
AND PLANNING
The concerns of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas
ostensibly draw us away from this chapters
focus on material culture studies. But both
demonstrate that it is impossible to insulate the
phenomenological approach, and present it as
a neatly packaged methodology, which can
be straightforwardly applied to a given body
of evidence. Because phenomenology systematically undermines the modern Wests prioritization of epistemology and the demand that
ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric and politics be
purged from analysis and explanation, these
concerns are forever on the brink of erupting
into any phenomenological investigation.
Phenomenology deals in world disclosure, in
which an engagement with a particular entity
leads us into an expanding web of relationships. No matter how restricted the frame of
inquiry, phenomenology will tend to lead
towards more extensive reflections.
It was precisely this reflexive dimension of
phenomenological thought that attracted geographers and architects during the 1960s
and 1970s. In both disciplines, the earlier twentieth century had seen a growing emphasis on
a Cartesian conception of space, in which the
relationships between objects could be discussed in purely geometrical terms (Gregory
1978: 131). This perspective appeared to evict
human beings from their lived world, repositioning them as viewers and interpreters of a
domain of objects. The so-called humanistic
geography presented an alternative which
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Figure 3.1
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Figure 3.3
51
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separates the partitioned sleeping, cooking
and eating space of the apartments from the
outer gallery. This means that the primary
distinction is not between the individual
apartments, but between the apartments collectively and this outer space. While, from
a Western point of view, it is easy to misread the
apartments as the private space of a family
unit, the longhouse community is a collectivity
which distinguishes itself from the Malay
people who are granted access to the outer
gallery.
While the Malay, who neither eat pork nor
drink rice wine, are excluded from the apartments, these are less separate from one another
Partition
CROSS SECTION
Floor
Ironwood
beams
LAWANG
SAWAH
Neighbouring
apartment
Wall
Partition
C
Hearth
SADAU
Sleeping
space
LOMANG
Eating
space
Apartment
PALEPER
PENGIRI SAWAH
PADI
Malay
PALEPER
Cooking
space
Door
GENGGANG
Partition
space
where rice
is pounded
Wall
Neighbouring
apartment
FLOOR PLAN
(Scale approximate)
Space
cooking
where rice space
is trampled
SADAU
SAWAH
Malay
sleeping
space
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PHENOMENOLOGIES OF LANDSCAPE
AND MONUMENTALITY
The clearest example of a debate over the usefulness of phenomenology to the investigation
of material culture can be found in relation to
recent experiential studies of landscape and
monumentality, which are primarily archaeological in their subject matter (see Corcos 2001;
Chapman and Geary 2000; Cummings and
Whittle 2000; Fleming 1999; Hamilton 1999;
Witcher 1998 and among many others, Bender
this volume). The principal inspiration for this
burst of activity has been Christopher Tilleys
A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994). In this
work Tilleys arguments are informed by
ethnography at least as much as by phenomenological philosophy, but the two strands harmonize to the extent that they both cast doubt
on the universality of contemporary Western
conceptions of space and place. A survey of
the anthropological literature reveals that for
many non-Western societies supernatural
powers and ancestral presences are immanent
in the landscape, and are implicated in the
way that people understand their own place in
the life-world (Tilley 1994: 59). Particular landmarks are often identified as places of ancestral or metaphysical influence, and these may
serve as reminders of the past which serve to
stabilize contemporary identities and social
relationships. On this basis, Tilley argues that
there is every reason to suppose that the prehistoric communities of Britain also understood the landscapes that they frequented
to be inherently meaningful and filled with
spiritual power. Present-day archaeologists,
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Figure 3.5
Thomas
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The entrance to the megalithic tomb at West Kennett, north Wiltshire. Photo Julian
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REFERENCES
Barrett, J.C. (1994) Fragments from Antiquity. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Brck, J. (1998) In the footsteps of the ancestors: a
review of Christopher Tilleys A Phenomenology of
Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 15: 2336.
Chapman, H.P. and Gearey, B.R. (2000) Paleoecology
and the perception of prehistoric landscapes: some
comments on visual approaches to phenomenology, Antiquity, 74: 31619.
Corcos, N. (2001) Churches as prehistoric ritual
monuments: a review and phenomenological perspective from Somerset, Assemblage, 6, www.shef.
ac.uk/assem/issue6.
Critchley, S. (2000) Heidegger for beginners, in
J.E. Faulconer and M.A. Wrathall (eds), Appropriating
Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 10118.
Cummings, V. and Whittle, A. (2000) Tombs with a
view: landscape, monuments and trees, Antiquity,
77: 25566.
Dovey, K. (1985) The quest for authenticity and
the replication of environmental meaning, in
D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer (eds), Dwelling, Place
and Environment. New York: Columbia University
Press, pp. 3349.
Dovey, K. (1993) Putting geometry in its place:
towards a phenomenology of the design process,
in D. Seamon (ed.), Dwelling, Seeing and Designing.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
pp. 24769.
Fleming, A. (1999) Phenomenology and the megaliths of Wales: a dreaming too far? Oxford Journal
of Archaeology, 18: 11925.
Frede, D. (1993) The question of Being: Heideggers
project, in C. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 4269.
Gregory, D. (1978) Ideology, Science and Human
Geography. London: Hutchinson.
Guignon, C. (2001) Being as appearing: retrieving
the Greek experience of Phusis, in R. Polt and
G. Fried (eds), A Companion to Heideggers
Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, pp. 3456.
Hall, H. (1993) Intentionality and world: Division I
of Being and Time, in C. Guignon (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 12240.
Hamilton, S. (1999) Using the surface: inter- and
intra-site visibility, Sussex Archaeological Collections,
137: 1115.
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans.
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
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OBJECTIFICATION
Christopher Tilley
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exchange, appropriation and consumption.
Objects circulate through peoples activities
and can contextually produce new types of
activities, objects and events.
Theoretical discussions of the concept specifically in relation to the study of material culture
have been relatively few. For Bourdieu (1977,
1984, 1990) objectification processes form a
central part of his theory of practice which has
had a major influence on the recent development of material culture studies in archaeology
and anthropology since the 1980s, which, for
this reason, is discussed in some detail below
together with some other influential studies.
Miller, for whom Bourdieu is a central influence, has written by far the most substantive
discussion of the birth and development of this
concept in the literature in relation to the study
of material culture, attempting to develop a
general theory of material forms in relation to
objectification processes (Miller 1987). The
central ideas can be simply put as follows.
Objectification, considered in the most general way, is a concept that provides a particular
way of understanding the relationship between
subjects and objects, the central concern of
material culture studies. It attempts to overcome the dualism in modern empiricist
thought in which subjects and objects are
regarded as utterly different and opposed entities, respectively human and non-human, living and inert, active and passive, and so on.
Through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things people
make themselves in the process. The object
world is thus absolutely central to an understanding of the identities of individual persons
and societies. Or, to put it another way, without
the things material culture we could neither
be ourselves nor know ourselves. Material
culture is thus inseparable from culture and
human society. It is not a sub-set of either, a part
or a domain of something that is bigger,
broader or more significant, but constitutive.
Culture and material culture are the two sides
of the same coin. They are related dialectically,
in a constant process of being and becoming:
processual in nature rather than static or fixed
entities. Persons and things, in dynamic relation, are constitutive of human culture in general, societies and communities in particular,
and in the agency of groups and individuals.
Ideas, values and social relations do not exist
prior to culture forms which then become
merely passive reflections of them, but are themselves actively created through the processes in
which these forms themselves come into being.
61
OBJECTIFICATION: THINGS
AND WORDS
Given the domination of linguistic analyses in
anthropology, and the social sciences more
generally, it has always been tempting for
those interested in the study of material culture
to oppose a world of things to language as very
different kinds of objectified representation.
Keane (1995, 1997) usefully discusses both in
relation to objectification and embodiment in
public performances stressing their mutual
intertwining in social practices which go
beyond simply an expression of meaning as
normally understood. He stresses the manner
in which public performances bind the objectifying powers of words and the objectifying
powers of things together. To choose to investigate either one or the other therefore inevitably
results in a partial account. The hazards of
representation are bound up with the vicissitudes of social interaction, with the unintended, as well as the intended, consequences
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OBJECTIFICATION AND
SOCIALIZATION
Consider the following diary entry:
Sunday 21 March 1998, 9.15 a.m. They run outside
into the conservatory from the kitchen. Alice carries her red jacket. She falls over and bangs her
head on the kitchen door. Terrible howl. Benjamin
opens the garage door, closes it, opens it, closes it,
opens it and starts fiddling with the key. K. opens
a drawer in the kitchen. B. immediately runs up
and removes a yellow plastic chicken leg and a
coat hook and throws them on the floor. A. swings
OBJECTIFICATION AND
PRODUCTION
The qualities of artefacts may objectify the
persons who have made and used them. So for
the Telefol of Papua New Guinea a good bilum
[net bag] is like a good woman (MacKenzie
1991: 127). It embodies her personal weaving
skills and energy. A good bilum enhances
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63
The personification or anthropomorphic representation of people through things is one powerful and typical form objectification processes
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The important point made here is that objectification processes have the effect of breaking
down simplistic dyadic distinctions between
object and subject worlds. Things and food can
become persons in the ceremonies and the consumption of these things is a necessary precondition for the reproduction of persons.
Keane notes that formal exchange in Sumba,
Indonesia:
extracts certain kinds of objects, principally metal
artefacts and cloth, from the general economy of
production, utility and consumption and imposes
constraints on how they can properly be handled.
The act of exchange is a moment into their transformation into things that circulate . . . the transactors of valuables can hope that, eventually, the
social agency that they construct . . . can be incorporated into ancestral identities that stand out
above the risks to which ongoing activity is prone:
concretized in tombs and villages, recalled in
names and histories.
(Keane 1997: 68)
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according to a set of homologous oppositions:
fire : water :: cooked : raw :: high : low :: light :
shade :: male : female :: nif : hurma : fertilizing : able to be fertilized (1977: 90).
The most important of these oppositions is
that between male and female. According to
Bourdieu these same oppositions are established between the house as a whole and the
rest of the Kabyle universe. One or other of
the two sets of oppositions either with regard to
the internal organization of the house or with
regard to the opposition between the house and
the outside world is foregrounded depending
on whether the house is considered from a
female or male point of view so that whereas
for the man, the house is not so much a place he
enters as a place he comes out of, movement
inwards properly befits the woman (1977: 91).
He argues that the same generative schemes
organize magical rites and representations and
rituals. They give meaning and significance to
basic operations such as moving to the left or
the right, going east or west, filling or emptying containers, and so forth. The opposition
between movement outwards to the fields or
the circulation of exchange items and movement inwards, towards the accumulation and
consumption of things, corresponds with a
male body, self-enclosed and directed outwards, and a female body resembling the dark,
dank house with its food, children, animals
and utensils (1977: 92). It is:
through the magic of a world of objects which is the
product of the application of the same schemes to
the most diverse domains, a world in which everything speaks metaphorically of all the others, each
practice comes to be invested with an objective
meaning ... the mental structures which construct
the world of objects are constructed in the practice
of a world of objects constructed according to the
same structures. The mind born of the world of
objects does not arise as a subjectivity confronting
an objectivity: the objective universe is made up of
objects which are the product of objectifying operations structured according to the very operations
that the mind applies to it. The mind is a metaphor
of the world of objects which is itself but an endless
circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.
(1977: 91)
65
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OBJECTIFICATION, DOMINATION,
SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
Bourdieu stresses that the social world, objectified and manifested through material forms, is
always an essentially arbitrary construction in
so far as there is never just one way to order
human social relations, build houses, use tools,
decorate pots, etc. However, the reproduction
of every social order requires beliefs to be legitimized through ideological means. One of the
primary means of achieving this is through naturalization, i.e. making the social order appear
inevitable and timeless or part of an order
of nature rather than culture. According to
Bourdieu this is part of the hidden (because it is
never discussed) significance of the homologies
between the passage of the seasons and the
agrarian calendar and their linkage with a
whole host of seasonal rites and specific practices such as food preparation and pot making
for the Kabyle. It has always been like this; how
could things be otherwise? This is what
Bourdieu refers to as doxa (1977: 164. ff.).
The world of tradition is experienced as a
natural world. It is self-evident and cannot be
disputed. In Kabyle society doxa legitimates
social divisions and inequalities in relation to
sex and age materially objectified by clothing
and cosmetics, decoration and ornamentation,
tokens and emblems. Such a world goes without saying because it comes without saying
(1977: 167). There are no competing discourses
or opinions. In this world material culture, far
from passively symbolizing social divisions
and inequalities, plays an active and fundamental role in legitimizing and reproducing
them. The male pursuit of symbolic capital, or
prestige and social honour, can be readily converted back into the material medium of economic capital: goods and resources. Relations
of domination have themselves the opacity
and permanence of things. Bourdieu argues
that in societies without any self-regulating
market, educational or juridical system, relations of domination can be set up and maintained only by strategies that must be endlessly
renewed and repeated because there are no
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in a clan-based gerontocracy, with powerful
individuals, because they are used to discriminate between different areas of owned land
and because they are used to mark status differences between men and women, the initiated and the non-initiated. Although they are
regarded as having intrinsic value and worth
in themselves their use to mediate claims
among the living to power and authority contributes dialectically to their own significance
and power. By encoding meaning and being
integrated with a system of restricted knowledge that is only gradually revealed through
the course of a persons life, and through their
articulation with the political system, the
paintings, Morphy argues, serve to connect
(1) the particular with the general; (2) the individual with the collective and (3) the outside to
the inside. People move from having the world
defined for them by others, through the agency
of the objectified images, to eventually playing
a creative role in fashioning for others this
world themselves.
Different forms of paintings play different
roles. They may have iconic, indexical or purely
symbolic elements. The power of geometric art
lies in its multivalency and its ability to express
polysemous relationships between things not
possible in iconic representations which have
more restricted meaning ranges. It establishes
relationships between objects and events that
otherwise may remain unconnected. Morphy
comments that the paradox of Yolngu art is that
the geometric representations are multivalent,
but their interpretation is initially obscured by
the non-iconic nature of the elements, whereas
the figurative representations obscure the multiplex relations between things by orienting interpretations in a particular direction (1991: 296).
Different artistic forms in which the world is
objectified have different consequences and
powers. Some are more appropriate in one
social context, others in another. In the final
analysis Yolngu art is very far from being a passive reflection of ideas or social relations and
has played a key role in the reproduction of
Yolngu identity, part and parcel of a creative
response and resistance to colonization.
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OBJECTIFICATION AND
CONSUMPTION
There are fundamental differences between
things and their relationships to persons in
industrial consumer societies and the smallscale communities that archaeologists and
anthropologists have typically studied until
recently. Hoskins (1998: 192) has summarized
these differences in terms of:
1
2
3
4
Investment in form.
Investment in work.
Novelty versus age.
Exchange histories and paths.
A persons relationship to an object is obviously very different when they have made it
themselves, or provided the raw materials, or
in other ways participated in its production in
ways discussed above in relation to Telefol net
bags and Yekuana basketry. It is easy to see the
manner in which the self becomes part of the
thing and vice versa. By contrast almost all
the things surrounding us in consumer societies
are bought ready-made and their conditions of
production are concealed from the consumer.
The things thus appear to have a price and a
value in themselves rather than their value
being socially created. This is, of course, the basis
for Marxs analysis of commodity fetishism
and the distinction he draws between the use
value of a thing and its exchange value. As a
consequence almost all discussions of commodities have centred on our intrinsic alienation from them and this has consistently been
linked with moralistic discussions of materialistic and acquisitive values in late capitalist
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forms and bodily states. Gawan society is
understood in terms of its grounding in an
inter-island world involving kula exchange of
armbands and necklaces circulating in opposite
directions (Leach and Leach 1983; Malinowski
1922). Engagement in the kula results in the
fame of Gawa, in the positive evaluation of
Gawans, by others with whom they have few
or no face-to-face relationships. The circulation
of the shells effectively converts material forms
into an immaterial essence, the renown of
Gawa, which is ultimately about the selfesteem and self-worth of Gawans. This fame
can be achieved only by an externalizing
process involving the production of material
forms, such as garden crops and canoes, and
their transaction into an inter-island world. The
self-identity of Gawans is thus produced on
Gawa and in relation to a wider world. Both on
Gawa and beyond, the production and
exchange of material culture make this possible. The agency of Gawans is thus achieved
through the medium of the active possibilities
afforded by things as they circulate between
individuals and groups.
The production of value involves, on the one
hand, consideration of the phenomenal form of
practices and, on the other, underlying structures or generative schema that characterize
this process, as in Bourdieus work on Kabylia
(Munn 1986: 7). The lived world is both an
arena for action and constructed through the
actions of persons, a dialectic of objectification
and embodiment. Agents engaging in social
actions are themselves acted upon by these
very acts, which are thus both constituting and
constituted. Actions such as the exchange of
food produce desirable outcomes or effects as
well as sometimes having more latent undesirable properties. Key types of acts have positive
outcomes; others, involving witchcraft, are negative in their effect. Social acts, and the material
forms implicated in these acts, can thus have
relative degrees of potency in the creation of
value. As in Bourdieus work sociocultural
practices do not take place in space and in time
but create the space-time in which they go on.
Space-time is thus action objectified in relation
to a system of value (1986: 11 ff.). Different
degrees of extension of intersubjective spacetime are intimately related to different material
media. For example, the kind of space-time created by the annual internal transmission of yam
tubers from a womans kinsmen to affines is
very limited compared with canoe transactions.
The latter have much greater depth in spacetime, i.e. their spatio-temporal reach, and therefore their value is far greater.
69
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OBJECTIFICATION: HISTORY,
PLACE, LANDSCAPE
Objectification theories of material culture
have almost always privileged the manner
in which artefacts relate to the identities of
individuals and groups and cultural systems
of value in the manner discussed above.
However, this does not end their entanglements. In transcultural and colonial contexts
these forms of identification can readily be
made by outsiders. As N. Thomas has pointed
out, things to which local people attach no particular importance can be regarded as resonant
of local distinctiveness or badges of identity by
outsiders (Thomas 1991: 163). This is, of
course, precisely what archaeologists and
anthropologists have always tended to do. In
these mixed contexts of interactions artefacts
can also objectify particular events and transactions in a much more specific way. For example, Marquesans and some other Polynesians
treated guns, whether received through purchase, barter or as gifts, as though they manifested elements of the person who gave them
and the power of foreign warriors (1991: 98 ff.).
The adoption of a new clothing style, the poncho, by western Polynesian Christians did not
merely express their new found modesty. The
clothing style made this modesty possible
(N. Thomas 1999).
In particular contexts of interaction and
exchange people by presenting themselves to
others may simultaneously present or objectify
themselves to themselves and be suprised by the
result (Strathern 1991). Their self-objectifications
can thus be revelatory. Artefacts may thus
objectify a particular event of transaction or
aspects of the identity of the transactor. They
can also objectify particular places where they
were made or transacted or places from which
the raw materials were obtained. The artefact
can thus be a place, a landscape, a story or
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and gardening in industrialized societies have
focused on the grand public gardens, the
gardens of the privileged, the rich and the powerful. A rather different perspective on the personal and cultural significance of the garden
is emerging from research I am conducting
on ordinary peoples gardens and allotments
(Tilley n.d.).
Another persistent theme in the literature
has been to link different forms of objectication
with different types of societies, principally
capitalist and non-capitalist. However, recent
consumption studies have shown that blanket
distinctions between types of things such as
gifts and commodities are fairly meaningless.
Things change their meanings through their
life cycles and according to the way they are
used and appropriated and in the manner in
which individuals and groups identify themselves with them. Further studies need to be
undertaken of these kinds of value transformations, and their possible linkage with generative structures or cultural schemes that result
in generative homologies between different
material domains, both in the past and in the
present.
In colonial and postcolonial contact situations an inappropriate relationship between
persons and things has frequently posed problems for missionaries in particular and others.
The aim was often to create a new human
native subject independent of a world of
things, of dead matter, to free people from a
false relationship with things, as in fetishism
and animism, to abstract persons from their
entanglements with things in the name of
enlightenment, freedom and autonomy (Keane
2001, 2004a). But as Keane points out the irony
of all this is that the overall premise is false:
people can never be free from objectification,
since people must always work, use, transact,
possess and consume objects. Studies of the
role of different Christian religous cults, missionary work and the values of traders and settlers in colonial and postcolonial contexts
provide a fertile domain for further exploration of objectification processes and how
they transform peoples relationship with
things in historical perspective.
Objectifications can take on myriad forms,
from tombs to houses to pots to paintings to
ritual speech and cultural performances to sacrifice and hunting rites, and so on. Some will
be more important in one social context, others
in another, some foregrounded, others backgrounded. We need to take these differences
seriously and analyse their similarities and differences cross-culturally and in the past and
71
REFERENCES
Appadurai, A. (1995) The production of locality, in
A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Barrett, J. (1994) Fragments from Antiquity: an Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 29001200 BC. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Basso, K. and Feld, S., eds. (1996) Senses of Place.
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Press.
Battaglia, D. (1990) On the Bones of the Serpent.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Belk, R. (1992) Moving possessions: an analysis
based on personal documents from the 18471869
Mormon migration, Journal of Consumer Research,
19: 33961.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Bradley, R. (2000) An Archaeology of Natural Places.
London: Routledge.
Brck, J. (2001) Body metaphors and technologies of
transformation in the English middle and late
Bronze Age, in J. Brck (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes:
Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow.
Carrier, J. (1995) Gifts and Commodities. London:
Routledge.
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Prine, E. (2000) Searching for third genders: towards
a prehistory of domestic space in middle Missouri
villages, in R. Schmidt and B. Voss (eds), The
Archaeology of Sexuality. London: Routledge.
Richards, C. (1996) Henges and water: towards an
elemental understanding of monumentality and
landscape, Journal of Material Culture, 1: 31336.
Riggins, H., ed. (1994) The Socialness of Things. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Shanks. M. and Tilley, C. (1987) Social Theory and
Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Simmel, G. (1990) The Philosophy of Money. London:
Routledge.
Srensen, M-L. (2000) Gender Archaeology. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Strathern, M. (1991) Artefacts of history: events and
the interpretation of images, in J. Siikala (ed.),
Culture and History in the Pacific. Finnish Anthropological Society Transactions 27. Helsinki: Finish
Anthropological Society.
Thomas, J. (1996) Time, Culture and Identity. London:
Routledge.
Thomas, J. (1999) An economy of substances in late
Neolithic Britain, in J. Robb (ed.), Material Symbols:
Culture and Economy in Prehistory. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Thomas, J. (2000) Death, identity and the body in
Neolithic Britain, Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 6: 60317.
Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Webb Keane, Howard Morphy
and Mike Rowlands for advice and comments
on this chapter.
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5
AGENCY, BIOGRAPHY AND OBJECTS
Janet Hoskins
Her definition, in which agency is the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (2001: 110),
is deliberately not restricted to persons, and
may include spirits, machines, signs and
collective entities (ancestors, corporations,
social groups). It is also deliberately relative,
since just as different societies have varying
notions of social action, they may have diverse
ideas about who and what is capable of acting
in a particular context.
An open definition raises the question of
exactly what is meant by an agent. Does the
capacity to act imply individuality and distinctiveness? Can it also apply to relatively generic
classes of objects? Can the agency of objects be
dissolved and decentred (as certain structuralists and post-structuralists have argued) or
does the notion of agency by itself imply an
idiosyncratic power to change the world? Such
questions need to be explored in relation to an
ethnographic study of objects as agents in the
world.
The proposition that things can be said to
have social lives was developed in an influential edited collection (Appadurai 1986),
which drew attention to the ways in which
passive objects were successively moved about
and recontextualized. Appadurais essay in
that volume framed this explicitly as a process
of commodification and decommodification,
although of course commodity is only one
of a wider range of different identities (gift,
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CONCLUSION
Anthropologists have long argued that things
can, in certain conditions, be or act like persons:
they can be said to have a personality, to show
volition, to accept certain locations and reject
others, and thus to have agency. Often, these
attributes of agency are linked to the anthropomorphizing process by which things are said to
have social lives like persons and thus to be
appropriate subjects for biographies. Gells
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REFERENCES
Ahern, Laura (2001) Language and agency, Annual
Review of Anthropology, 30: 10937.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (1986) The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Arnold, Dana, ed. (2002) The Metropolis and its Image:
Constructing Identities for London, c. 17501950.
London: Blackwell.
Benjamin, Walter (1978) One Way Street and other
Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC.
Bradley, R. (1990) The Passage of Arms. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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6
SCENES FROM A TROUBLED ENGAGEMENT
Post-Structuralism and Material Culture Studies
Bjrnar Olsen
As signified by their common prefix, poststructuralism belongs to the number of oppositional intellectual projects that emerged in the
(late) twentieth century. Despite the fact that
most of these enterprises were united in opposing dominant regimes of power/knowledge
and associated essentialist conceptions of truth,
their differences should not be underrated. This
even counts for post-structuralisms relations to
its closest relative, postmodernism, with which
it is often confused. Although postmodernism
as a concept has proved extremely elusive
(which may actually be seen as representative
of the very condition it is meant to signify),
some identifying distinctions can nonetheless
be noted. Writ large, postmodernism can be
conceived of as an epistemic rupture that has
shaken the foundational pillars on which modern life was built, announcing a new condition
tellingly signified by the numerous ends it
became associated with (of grand narratives,
the nation state, universal reason, authenticity,
history, etc.). Probably more conspicuously,
however, postmodernism has surfaced as a
new aesthetic or style characterized by a playful allusiveness that stresses irony, genre mixing, eclecticism and ambiguity (Connor 1997;
Jameson 1984; Lyotard 1984).
Although clearly related to the wider orbit of
postmodernism (like fish to water, to paraphrase
Foucault), post-structuralism is distinctive in
being confined mainly to academic discourses
and more firmly located within a defined body
of knowledge. As an intellectual project, it
became heavily marked by its close (although
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87
Post-structuralism did away with the traditional notions of authors as producers and
readers as consumers of text. Interpretation or
reading was claimed to be much more than
recovering a preconceived message. It was a
creative and productive task that involved a
redistribution of power and responsibility
from the author to the reader. This process of
democratization, however, conditioned that
the orthodox idea of the author as the father
and owner of the work was dismantled. Thus,
a new epistemology of reading and the birth
of the reader could happen only at the cost of
the death of the author (Barthes 1977: 1429).
Put in less absolute terms, this approach suggests that even the most self-conscious author
can circumscribe only some aspects of meaning. Those who read the text often in different
historical and cultural settings bring to it
other voices, other texts, and create meanings
far beyond the authors intention. It is inconceivable that a play by Shakespeare, for example, should have a present meaning identical to
the one it had at the moment of production, or
should conform to the authors intentions. We
translate into the text the effective history of
sociocultural development, we expose it to new
conditions, new regimes of meaning and truth,
and transform it into a present product. Thus,
the reader becomes an actor, a producer of
meaning (cf. Olsen 1990: 181).
The decentring of the author, however, was
not in itself an attack on the structuralist
approach; on the contrary, such a decentring
may be argued to be well in concordance with
the structuralist anti-subjective agenda. The
A ROUGH GUIDE TO
POST-STRUCTURALISM
Even if mostly a summarizing term-ofconvenience, textualism can be regarded as a
key nominative for the early post-structuralist
movement. Despite the fact that it also carried
serious ontological implications it is most commonly associated with a new epistemology of
reading that radically challenged existing interpretive premises. The transition to this new
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Thus, the new epistemology of reading conditioned more than the assassination of the author.
The main act of the structuralist constitution,
proclaiming that the text is just a manifestation
of an underlying structure or grammar, also had
to be sacrificed. The script of this act was sameness, not difference.
The latter concept or diffrance2 became a
major mantra in post-structuralism, and especially in Derridas embrace of it. To put it in
very simple terms, in his version difference
denies the possibility that a single element, a
sign, can be present in and of itself, referring
only to itself. It always refers to some other
outside itself, which is not present, and which
is itself constituted through this difference.
Thus, every element is constituted on the basis
of the trace it carries of other members of the
signifying system, a differential network, a
fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential
traces (Derrida 1979: 84, cf. Derrida 1973:
13840, 1987: 26; see also Yates 1990: 114 ff. for
a more detailed discussion). When Barthes
(above) refers to the difference of the text, he
did not refer to its identity (its difference from
other texts), but rather to its fragmentation as a
product woven of quotation and traces from
other texts (Barthes 1986: 60). All boundaries
and divisions of the text are blurred, provoking
those who want to set up strict limits for the
text: speech, life, the world, the real, history,
and what not, every field of reference to body
or mind, conscious or unconscious, politics,
economics, and so forth (Derrida 1979: 84).
This new epistemology of reading, or deconstructive reading, did not aim at destroying the
text, but at shaking up its unity and individuality; to reveal its polyvalence as a tissue of
quotation from innumerable other texts
(including the non-written texts of the world).
This transgression was more than an interpretative turn: it clearly involved an ontological
rupture, since any strict division between the
world and the text was denied. Or rather, it
was a denial of the possibility of living outside
the infinite (inter)text. This inevitably brings us
to probably the most debated and ridiculed
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Thus, to write is not a parasitic act, or a dangerous and incidental supplement to a primordial unitary world. In fact, there have never
been anything but supplements (Derrida 1978:
159). Writing, interpretation, or science, may be
conceived of as replacing one signifying chain
with another. In this sense, the world has alwaysalready been written; difference as the meaningconstitutive quality has always existed. Hence,
the futility of craving for an origin and presence
outside this play of difference, in other words, an
authentic invariable world where things have
meaning without referring to other things and
other systems of signification (Derrida 1977:
1589, 1987: 289; Norris 1982: 3241).
89
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MATERIALIZED TEXTS
Post-structuralism brought an important
dimension to the epistemology of interpretation, emphasizing the processes by which
meaning is produced rather than passively
recovered. Interpretation is a never-ending
task, a creative act of production, not the disclosure of some fossil strata of meaning. Within
material cultural studies the criticism it brought
forward of narrow contextual hermeneutics
was clearly an important and liberating turn.
However, the somewhat biased enthusiasm for
selected aspects of post-structuralist theory,
especially those stressing multivocality and the
plurality of meanings, seems to have encouraged a somewhat game-like even numerical
attitude towards interpretation: how many ways
can a thing come to mean? How many layers of
meaning can be accumulated? Furthermore, and
despite stressing the relational foundation of
meaning (as activated by the free play of the
signifier), the important sources of meaning
seem always located outside the signifier (the
object, the text) in question: in the reader, in
other readings, other texts, who/which donate
to it these new dimensions of meaning. And
finally, even if the textual analogy was powerful and productive, few asked about the difference in the way things and texts mean. Do we
experience a city, a house or a landscape in the
91
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WRITING THINGS
Post-structuralist textualism worked both
ways; thus it also triggered a debate and a
series of reflections on the ways in which material culture was written and the formation
processes that are activated as we move from
things to text (cf. Tilley 1989; Baker and
Thomas 1990; Olsen 1990; Hodder et al. 1995,
Joyce 1994; Joyce et al. 2002). Studying material
culture is of necessity to engage in textual
activity. A thing becomes an anthropological or
archaeological object basically by being realized as texts (field reports, catalogues, journal
articles, books). Every description and classification analysis, ranging from the labelling of
artefacts (Bouquet 1991) to social and historical
synthesis (White 1973, 1978), involves textualization and the use of (oral/written) language.
Even the photographed and exhibited item
gets most of its identity from the meta-text (the
caption) that accompanies it (Olsen 1990: 192).
Most researchers, however, regard language
and writing mainly as means of communication, and the dominant style or genre guiding
scholarly authorship has been clarity. (Write
so that people can understand you!) Writing
academic texts is to write about a subject matter,
a transformation that always is supposed to
involve the hierarchical and irreversible move
from signified to signifier, from content to form,
and from idea to text. The aspired-to ideal
seems to be that of an erased or transparent signifier that allows the content to present itself as
what it is, referring to nothing other than its
presence (Derrida 1978: 22). Thus, the common
conception of academic language has been that
it is:
merely an instrument, which is chooses to make as
transparent, as neutral as possible, subjugated to
scientific matters (operations, hypothesis, results),
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MIMESIS REGAINED?
The new emphasis on dialogue and plurality
was clearly intended as a liberating turn. In
ethnography is was partly a project of empowering the other as more than an informant,
or in James Cliffords more modest words to
loosen at least somewhat the monological control of the executive writer/anthropologist and
to open for discussion ethnographys hierarchy
and negotiation of discourses in powercharged, unequal situations (Clifford 1997:
23). Things are maybe less likely to be cared for
as complex, historical agents or in need of
emancipation. However, their treatment in
scientific discourses is somehow analogous
to Western blindness towards the other (cf.
Olsen 2003, 2004). This even includes a certain
ambiguity (cf. Young 1995), being at the same
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8
NOTES
99
REFERENCES
Andersson, Dag T. (2001) Tingenes taushet, tingenes
tale. Oslo: Solum Forlag.
Baker, Fredrick and Thomas, Julian eds (1990)
Writing the Past in the Present. Lampeter: St Davids
University College.
Barthes, Roland (1975) S/Z, trans. R. Miller. London:
Cape.
Barthes, Roland (1976) The Pleasure of the Text, trans.
R. Miller. London: Cape.
Barthes, Roland (1977) Image-Music-Text, essays
selected and translated by S. Heath. London:
Fontana.
Barthes, Roland (1986) The Rustle of Language ed.
F. Wahl, trans. R. Howard. Oxford: Blackwell.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Chris Tilley and Chris Witmore
for comments on earlier versions of this
chapter. I also pay homage to Orvar Lfgren
and Ingmar Bergman for providing inspiration for its title.
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COLONIAL MATTERS
Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in
Colonial Situations
Peter van Dommelen
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structures and I will use the term in that sense
throughout the chapter. Where this leaves the
term postcolonialism is another matter which
I will consider in more detail below.
While this simple observation alone would
warrant exploration of these ideas and insights
and consideration of their relevance to and
connections with material culture studies, it is
worth noting that the rise of postcolonial studies has been accompanied by a renewed interest in colonialism and colonial situations more
generally, that has not had much follow-up in
material culture studies. This is all the more
remarkable, as material culture has gained
substantial prominence in discussions of globalization, which is a theme that is inherently
intertwined with post-colonial developments
(in the chronological sense), and which has not
escaped the attention of postcolonial studies.
Because globalization studies constitute a substantial field in themselves at the interface
between geography and anthropology that
has not failed to note the significance of material culture, I will limit my discussion in this
chapter to colonial situations (Eriksen 2003; cf.
below).
It is therefore my aim in this chapter first to
discuss postcolonialism and the wide-ranging
views of postcolonial studies as well as to consider their background and characteristics. I
will then go on to explore how and to what
extent they can inform material culture studies
and how an emphasis on the role of material
culture may contribute to postcolonial theory
and studies of colonialism. Throughout the
chapter I will draw on archaeological and
anthropological examples from colonial situations across the world, albeit with a bias
towards the Mediterranean.
POSTCOLONIAL ORIGINS:
DECOLONIZATION, COLONIAL
REPRESENTATION AND
SUBALTERN RESISTANCE
While the suggestion that the Algerian war of
independence (195462) represented a critical
moment in the emergence of postcolonial studies may be difficult to substantiate (Young
1990: 1), there can be little doubt that their origins hark back to the early post-World War II
decades, when the European nations were dismantling their overseas colonial networks.
As formal decolonization, for a variety of reasons, was slow or failed to be matched by
economic and cultural independence, Western
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Representing Colonialism
If ever there was one term that expressed what
postcolonial studies are about, it would have to
be representation. In the first place of course
because of their heavy literary bias but in the
second place also, and probably more importantly so, because of their concern with the
place of the colonized in colonial societies,
CONTEXTUALIZING
POSTCOLONIALISM
Outside literary studies, postcolonial theory
has not become a distinct field anywhere else.
There is nevertheless no shortage in other disciplines of research inspired by or drawing on
postcolonial theory, especially not in history, as
one might expect, given the historical background of the subaltern studies group (Cohn
1990; Washbrook 1999).2 In anthropology and
archaeology, where most attention to material
culture may be expected, postcolonial ideas
have certainly not passed unnoticed, especially
as colonialism has again come to the fore as
an increasingly prominent research topic
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(Thomas 1994; Gosden 1999: 197203, 2004;
cf. Pels 1997; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002).
In both anthropology and archaeology, colonialism has long remained and to some extent
continues to be a theme of limited interest in
general. It is only in specific fields, such as
Pacific ethnography and classical and historical archaeology, where colonial situations play
a central part, that colonialism has been the
subject of substantial debates. This is somewhat surprising, because colonialism has been
such a widespread phenomenon across the
globe and through the ages that it has arguably
been a manifest feature of many situations
(Gosden 2004). As pointed out earlier, this contrasts markedly with the attention given in
anthropology to globalization (Eriksen 2003).
While the renewed anthropological archaeological interest in colonialism has certainly
resulted in a number of fine studies of the significance of specific categories of material
culture in colonial situations (see below), it is
nevertheless the representation of colonial situations that has figured most prominently in
anthropological and archaeological studies of
colonialism, alongside occasional more specific
approaches such as a long-term perspective in
archaeological studies. In this section I will
first discuss how these two disciplines have
responded to postcolonial theory. I will then
focus more specifically on material culture and
examine, first of all, how it has been studied in
relation to colonialism and postcolonial theory.
Because of the very different ways in which
material culture and consumption have been
taken up in globalization studies I will limit
this discussion to colonial situations only.
Second, I will explore some theoretical issues
of relevance to material culture studies and
postcolonial theory alike.
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Figure 7.1 Overview of the site of the Roman military camp of Lambaesis, as shown on a nineteenthcentury postcard
Source: Afrique Franaise du Nord, http://afn.collections.free.fr/)
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POSTCOLONIAL MATTERS
Whilst colonial situations may differ substantially from other social contexts in a variety of
ways, social interaction in such contexts is not
intrinsically different from that in general (Pels
1997: 1669; Prochaska 1990: 626). There is
consequently no reason why material culture
would play a less significant role in colonial
situations than anywhere else. The basic
insight that things matter consequently
applies just as much to colonial contexts as to
any other situation (Miller 1998: 3).
While there is a remarkable lack of archaeological and anthropological studies that have
taken up the role of material culture in relation
to postcolonial theory, as discussed above, the
significance of material culture in colonial contexts has nevertheless been highlighted or commented on in one way or another by a number
of archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians
and geographers. Most of these studies are unrelated to one another, as they consider colonial
situations that differ widely in time and place,
and only few refer explicitly to postcolonial
theories. At the same time, they do share several
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Victorian ideal as usually expressed in public
(2000, 2002). General historical wisdom has it
that the colonial world of British India was
dominated by the strict separation of public
and private spheres, in which men and women
led strictly separate lives. Keeping up the distinction and literally keeping a distance from
the indigenous inhabitants was deemed to be
equally important, and it was the womens task
to realize this in the domestic context. Novels
and housekeeping guides are the key sources
from which evidence is sought to support this
representation (Chattopadhyay 2002: 2436).
x1
x1
1
2
3
x2
House on 1/1 Little Russel St.
3
House on 23/24 Waterloo St.
Main entry
113
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Figure 7.3 Rabat around 1920, showing the colonial expansion of the city
Source: Abu-Lughod (1980: figure 6)
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Moroccans as backward and by implication in
need of Western and modern(ist) stewardship.
As underscored by the stark contrast between
the modernist boulevards and the mud-brick
city walls in Rabat as well as by the use of terms
such as cordon sanitaire, referring to the open
spaces between the indigenous and European
quarters, colonialist representation was supported as much by material culture as by
discourse.
This contrast, however, stood in obvious contradiction to developments in the urban centres
of neighbouring Algeria, which had been under
French rule since 1831. Those places witnessed
the creation of a distinct French North African
settler culture and in these hybridization
processes well established distinctions between
colonizers and colonized were gradually being
lost (Abu-Lughod 1980: 1525; Prochaska 1990:
20629). These developments were actively
countered by the French colonial elites, who
coined for instance the disparaging term pied
noir to refer to North African-born French settlers. The large-scale urban planning efforts can
be seen in the same light as an attempt by the
French colonial elites actively to use the material culture of the urban fabric to put the inhabitants of French Morocco literally in their place.
Lyautey in fact admitted as much when he
declared that he was keen to avoid the mistakes
made in Algeria (Rabinow 1989: 28890).
Alternative Histories
As the previous section has already demonstrated, material culture studies can unlock
information about social groups who normally
remain out of sight when considering colonial
contexts through written documents, regardless of whether these are novels or other types
of documents. As might be expected, archaeological research looms particularly large in this
respect (Given 2004).
The point has most forcefully been made by
the work in and around Fort Ross, which was
a Russian trading and hunting settlement
established in 1812 on the coast of northern
California (Figure 7.4). The history and occupation of the fort itself are relatively well
known from archival Russian sources and
these show that close to the fort an indigenous
settlement had been located, where native
Alaskan workers were housed, who had been
brought in by the Russian company as a labour
force. Excavations in this settlement and careful analysis of the archaeological remains have,
however, shown that the Alaskans were not the
115
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Figure 7.4 California, showing the location of Fort Ross and the Spanish missions. The detail map
shows the area around Fort Ross and the Alaskan village
Source: After Lightfoot et al. (1998: figure 1)
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and relationships with the landscape differed
greatly between the coastal lowlands and the
interior (Figures 7.56). In the former areas,
very high numbers of individual farmsteads
were established ex novo in close proximity to
colonial towns, whereas in the interior houses
mostly clustered together into hamlets and
villages (Figure 7.5). They were moreover usually built on the sites of long-established indigenous settlements that were clearly marked by
monumental settlement towers called nuraghi
(Figure 7.7). In many cases, the Punic houses
simply continued earlier settlement patterns in
117
Figure 7.5 The west central region of Sardinia, showing Punic settlements dating from the fourth to
the second centuries BC. Drawing Peter van Dommelen
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Figure 7.6 Two typically Punic locally produced domestic items from Punic sites in the Terralba district:
an amphora and a tabuna, or cooking stand. Drawings Riu Mannu survey
Figure 7.7 View of the nuraghe San Luxori (Pabillonis) immediately to the left of the medieval
church dedicated to St Luxorius, with the site of the PunicRoman settlement in the foreground. Photo
Peter van Dommelen
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improved understanding of colonial contexts.
If, however, the concept is connected to cultural practice and hybridization is redefined as
the process underlying the cultural mixture
[which] is the effect of the practice of mixed
origins (Friedman 1997: 88), it does provide
a conceptual tool that allows Bhabhas ideas
about ambivalence and the third space to be
meaningfully related to social practice and
material culture (Nederveen Pieterse 1995;
Friedman 1997; van Dommelen forthcoming).
In the case of the Alaskan village at Fort Ross,
it is clear that the mixing of material culture
was not random but on the contrary highly
structured: all indigenous objects can be associated with basic domestic practices like food
preparation and cleaning the house while practices like the building of the house and hunting
were all carried out in line with Alaskan
customs. This pattern confirms documentary
evidence that the village had been set up by
Alaskan men from Kodiak island who had been
brought in by the Russians as marine hunters
and labourers and that in time these men had
formed households with local indigenous
women, chiefly from the Kashaya Pomo tribe.
Most significant is the observation that the diet
in these interethnic households was truly new,
as it included foodstuffs that previously had
not been consumed by either Alutiiq people
(venison, Californian rockfish) or Kashaya
people (seal, whale: Lightfoot et al. 1998: 212).
This shows that the joint households of people
from different ethnic background led to the creation of new hybrid practices.
Of key importance for understanding such
hybridization processes is the realization that
the meanings of the objects involved could not
and did not remain unchanged. While this
point has been forcefully made by Nicholas
Thomas for colonial situations in general
(Thomas 1991; 1997a), it is a critical feature of
hybridization processes, in which existing practices and objects are recombined into new ones.
This point is nicely made by Thomas in his discussion of the introduction of cloth in the
Pacific, and in particular by the use of bark
cloth in Samoa (1999, 2002). While cloth gradually replaced traditional bark clothes throughout Polynesia in the course of the late eighteenth
century, the latter has continued to be used,
albeit not as regular clothing, in various parts of
western Polynesia. A particularly interesting
case is Samoa, where bark cloth had never been
common, but where the so-called tiputa, a type
of bark cloth typical of Tahiti, was adopted in
the early to mid-nineteenth century. What
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Figure 7.8 An oil lamp, incense burner and female portrait (of Demeter?) from the Punic shrine in
the nuraghe Genna Maria
Source: Lilliu et al. (1993: figure 1)
The two journals are Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Postcolonial studies: Culture, Politics, Economy (both
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2
3
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the editors for inviting
me to contribute this chapter to this volume
and Chris Tilley in particular for his helpful
comments.
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8
FOUR TYPES OF VISUAL CULTURE
Christopher Pinney
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9
FOOD, EATING, AND THE GOOD LIFE
Judith Farquhar
The clipping was long enshrined on my refrigerator door, and visitors who read it found it
hilarious. These sandwiches seem to be filled
with unselfconscious social class. Our laughter
was directed at the small town housewife who
still buys Spam that wartime food banished
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AGENCY
It is common for anthropologists of food to
remind us that we are what we eat; less
common for them to explore just how practices
of eating do the work of constructing a broader
material (and, of course, lived) reality. The first
theme does not seem to lead naturally to the
second. The forms of agency that construct
social position or subjective identity are not
often theorized beyond some attention to
quasi-consumerist questions of choice, even
where the role of consumption in the pursuit
of social distinction is taken into account. In
other words, though the verbal form identification (as opposed to an all too nominal identity) helps us discern processes of situating
and constituting actors, we too seldom move
beyond questions of expression of selves and
their recognition by others to consider whole
fields of activity, the powers that pervade
them, and the solidarities and exclusions that
arise in them. Where agency itself is under
consideration, on the other hand, as it has been
in science studies and actor-network theory,
the particular powers of human beings in a
diverse field of human and non-human agents
become a problem rather than a given.31
Agency came to be a theme in recent
anthropology in reaction against functionalism
and structuralism, both approaches to explaining human action that seemed at times to
assume excessive limits on human freedom.
Anthropologists and sociologists since the
deterministic social theories of the mid-twentieth
century have tended to advance agency not as
an analytical term, in need of rigorous definition, but as a value to be defended: the human
individual became unimaginable to the liberal
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CONCLUSION
It is fitting for a reflection on the anthropology
of the vast subject of food and eating that more
questions have been asked here than can possibly be answered. The descriptions I have
provided of daily life issues for Mrs Hu and
the two friends Sisters Zhang and Zhou can be
read to extend to, but only partially address,
most of the questions I have raised. Thus we
can see the place of histories of privation in the
activities of these women as they buy, cook,
share, and talk about food. The class positioning in which all three engage is also evident,
even though it does not fit very well with any
stratified system of strictly economic classes.
The relationship of eating to health concerns is
visible in the rhetoric they use as well as in
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3
4
NOTES
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9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
157
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29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
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REFERENCES
Ackerman, Sara (2004) Reading Narratives of
Veganism and the Play of Derridas Animots.
Unpublished MS, 3 May.
Audette, Ray V., Gilchrist, Troy and Eades, Michael
(1999) Neanderthin: Eat like a Caveman and achieve a
Lean, Strong, Healthy Body. New York: St Martins
Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1969) The story-teller, in Hannah
Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. New York: Schocken
Books.
Bennett, Judith (1996) Ale, Beer, and Brewsters:
Womens Work in a Changing World, 13001600.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Bestor, Theodore (2004) Tsukiji: the Fish Market at the
Center of the World. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Biagioli, Mario, ed. (1999) The Science Studies Reader.
New York: Routledge.
Boas, Franz (1966) Kwakiutl Ethnography, ed. Helen
Codere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1970/1990a) The Logic of Practice.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1970/1990b) The Kabyle House,
or, The world reversed, in The Logic of Practice.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
pp. 27183.
Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme (1826/1949) The
Physiology of Taste: Meditations on Transcendental
Gastronomy. New York: Counterpoint.
Callon, Michel (1986) Some elements of a sociology
of translation: domestication of the scallops and
the fishermen of Saint-Brieux bay, in John Law
(ed.), Power, Action, and Belief: a new Sociology of
Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 196229.
Certeau, Michel de (1984) The Practice of Everyday
Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Chang, K.C., ed. (1977) Food in Chinese Culture:
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Chase, Holly (1994) The meyhane or McDonalds?
Changes in eating habits and the evolution of fast
food in Istanbul, in Sami Zubaida and Richard
Tapper (eds), Culinary Cultures of the Middle East.
London and New York: Tauris.
Che Fu (2004) Chuancai Za Tan (Essays on Sichuan
Food). Beijing: San Lian Press.
Cordain, Loren (2001) The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and
Get Healthy by Eating the Food You were Designed to
Eat. New York: Wiley.
Counihan, Carole M. (1999a) The Anthropology of Food
and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. New York
and London: Routledge.
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10
SCENT, SOUND AND SYNAESTHESIA
Intersensoriality and Material
Culture Theory
David Howes
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Sullivan goes on to bring the Desana interpretation of ritual and mythic communication
into alignment with information theory:
The significance of the ritual beverage and the
visions induced by ritual acts arises originally
from the crying sounds of the sacred child. That
sound in the environment of the unspoiled mythic
world is an image similar to the perfect noise-free
channel that Corcoran, the communication theorist, described as lying beyond this imperfect
world of noise and redundancy. It is a unique
163
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SENSORY WORLDS
The field of material culture studies stands to
be significantly enriched through attending to
the multiple sensory dimensions of material
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Artefacts
Every artefact embodies a particular sensory
mix. It does so in terms of its production (i.e.
the sensory skills and values that go into its
making), in the sensory qualities it presents,
and in its consumption (i.e. the meanings and
uses people discover in or ascribe to it in accordance with the sensory order of their culture or
subculture).
The shell valuables (armshells and necklaces)
which circulate in countervailing directions
around the vast inter-island system of ceremonial exchange known as the kula ring in the
Massim region of Papua New Guinea provide
a good example of artefacts as extensions of
the senses. The sonic, kinetic and visual as well
as olfactory characteristics of these objects
(together with their attachments) are keyed to
the Massim hierarchy of sensing and scale of
self-constitution. The shell valuables provide a
standard in terms of which the social status and
persuasive powers of their (always temporary)
possessors can be judged and communicated.
In the Massim world, every man of the kula
wants to progress from being a face with no
name (i.e. admired for his visual and olfactory
appearance when he goes on a kula expedition
to visit his partner on a neighbouring island) to
being a name with no face (i.e. have his name
circulate quite apart from his body in concert
with the named shells of note that have passed
through his possession).
According to Annette Weiners revisionist
analysis of kula exchange, the kula is not about
the love of give-and-take for its own sake, as
Malinowski suggested, but creating ones own
individual fame through the circulation of
objects that accumulate the histories of their
travels and the names of those who have possessed them (quoted in Howes 2003: 67). The
cardinal value of Massim civilization is, in fact,
butu, which means both noise and fame.
This value is condensed in the sensual qualities
of the attachments which serve as an index of a
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Emplacement
The sensuous reaction of people to place has
received increased attention of late thanks to
the pioneering work of Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, 1995)
and Steve Feld (1996), among others. Their
example has led geographers and anthropologists alike to foreground the notion of sensescapes in place of the conventional notion of
landscape, with its primarily visual connotations (see Porteous 1990), and to pay heightened attention to processes of emplacement
(Rodman 1992; Fletcher 2004) as distinct from
(but inclusive of) processes of embodiment
(Csordas 1990).
In his contribution to Senses of Place, Feld
probes the seemingly transparent meaning of
the word sense in the expression sense of
place by asking: How is place actually sensed?
He goes on to argue that as place is sensed,
senses are placed; as places make sense, senses
make place (1996: 91). Felds point is nicely
exemplified by numerous subsequent studies
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SENSORIAL INVESTIGATIONS
Victor Buchli has drawn attention to the curious
neglect of materiality in material culture studies. He observes that material culture transforms a mostly inarticulate realm of sensual
experience into the two dimensions of a scholarly text or the nature-morte of the museum
display (2002: 13). He wonders whether there is
any alternative to this seemingly inexorable
decrease in physicality (or movement towards
the dimensionless and ephemeral) when
objects are reduced to writing or subject to classification and exhibition in glass cases.
I am in sympathy with Buchlis critique of
the neglect of materiality in material culture
studies, though I would be more inclined to
speak of the sensuality of material culture. I am
also in agreement with his attack on the ideology of conservation. (Conservation, according to Buchli, conserves nowhere near as much
as it produces a particular order of things.)
However, I also believe that a number of questionable assumptions remain embedded in
Buchlis state-of-the-art critique, and that these
have the effect of limiting what he is able to
conceive of by way of alternative modes of
presentation. Why suppose that artefacts are
not for handling? Why prioritize the visual
appearance of an object?7 This last question is
prompted by Buchlis observation that:
Most of our publications deny us any visual representation of the very physical objects we explore.
This was never the case in the beautifully illustrated
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NOTES
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REFERENCES
Austern, Linda P. (ed.) (2002) Music, Sensation and
Sensuality. New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean (1968/1996) The System of Objects,
trans. J. Benedict. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, Jean (1970/1998) The Consumer Society:
Myths and Structures. London: Sage.
Bender, Barbara (2002) Contested landscapes, in
V. Buchli (ed.), The Material Culture Reader. Oxford:
Berg, pp. 14174.
Bennett, Tony (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Blum, M. (2002) Remaking the East German past:
Ostalgie, identity, and material culture, Journal of
Popular Culture, 34 (3): 22953.
Buchli, Victor, ed. (2002) The Material Culture Reader.
Oxford: Berg.
Bull, Michael and Black, Les (eds) (2003) The Auditory
Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Candlin, Fiona (2004) Dont touch! Hands off! Art,
blindness and the conservation of expertise, Body
and Society, 10 (1): 7190.
Carp, Richard (1997) Perception and material
culture: historical and cross-cultural perspectives,
Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques, 23 (3):
269300.
Carpenter, Edmund (1973) Eskimo Realities. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Classen, Constance (1990) Sweet colors, fragrant
songs: sensory models of the Andes and the
Amazon, American Ethnologist, 17 (4): 72235.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada and the Quebec Fonds pour la
Formation de Chercheurs et lAide la
Recherche, as well as all the stimulation I have
received from my conversations with JeanSbastien Marcoux and other members of the
Concordia Sensoria Research Team (http://
alcor.concordia.ca/~senses).
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11
THE COLOURS OF THINGS
Diana Young
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COLOUR AS A SCIENCE
Colour science has constructed particular versions of what colour is. Colour, it seems, is a
highly problematic concept, one that philosopher J.J. Gibson refers to as one of the worst
muddles in the history of science, the meaning of the
term colour (Gibson, in Malcolm 1999: 723).
The received view is that colours are not a fundamental property of things at all (Thompson
1995). Following this orthodoxy, colour can
only be a secondary quality of objects in contrast to form. Thus, modern popular accounts
of colour and its pragmatic applications, in
landscape and building, for example, seem to
need to begin with an account of the perceptual apparatus that are deemed to conjure it,
the eye and the brain, something which is not
apparently necessary for an account of form.
This enduring orthodoxy, the understanding
of colour as a secondary quality, dates from
Newton and Locke (Thompson 1995). Newtons
experiments refracted sunlight through two
prisms, producing the spectrum which he
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COLOURS AS MEANINGS
In symbolic anthropology the existence of
colour was not a philosophical problem. But
here, too, the impetus has been to find some
universal rules as meanings for individual
hues, notably for the triad of red, white and
black familiar from ritual settings (Barth 1975;
Sahlins 1977; Turner 1967; Tambiah 1968).
In symbolic theory colours are transcendent,
they stand for something else beyond and in
this sense are representational. Symbolism in
anthropological analysis works iconographically, that is, by similitude: if we want to know
what black means we need to know what black
is the colour of (Bousfield 1979: 213). In the
struggle to systematize unruly colour there are
echoes of colour science. Colour cannot have
influence in itself but must always be subordinated to form and substance, and meaning is
learnt through this route.
Victor Turners essay on red, white and black
as epitomising universal human organic experience has been highly influential (Turner 1967).
Extrapolating from his work on the Ndembu,
Turner proposed that semen and milk are symbolized by white, blood is symbolized by red,
faeces and dirt are symbolized by black. All
these are invoked as not merely perceptual differences but condensations of whole realms of
psycho-biological experience, involving reason,
all the senses and concerned with primary group
relationships (1967: 91).
Turner has been criticized in many quarters
for being totalizing in his approach to symbolism in general (e.g. Sperber 1975) and colour
symbolism in particular (Tambiah 1968) but his
bodily fluids theory has been embedded within
anthropological and archaeological discussions
of colour. As with Berlin and Kays work, the
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MATERIAL COLOUR
So far I have discussed the various dematerializations of colour, namely the reduction of
colour to a measurable stimulus in colour
science and the dematerialization of colour as
language and colour as symbolic meaning
in anthropology. I have discussed how the
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CONCLUSION
Whilst anthropology might deplore the framework that has produced the phenomenon of
colour, I have argued that as a discipline it
cannot afford to ignore the industrial colours in
the contemporary social world which are very
often the result of that framework or are at least
modified by it. Colours have escaped the laboratory where they had been de-materialized
and become a part of material social practices.
I have attempted to argue that it is possible
to step outside the guiding principles of colour
science that have also influenced the social
sciences by concentrating not on the discrimination of singular hues but on the effect of
colours together. I have suggested that the
qualities that Western science has called
colour animate things and are therefore crucial in determining the role of things and
persons in a social context. It is through a
detailed and thorough examination of colour
practices, as well as what people say about
these, that particular intended animative qualities can be revealed.
If colour continues to elude definition,
the evidence of its pragmatic application is
nonetheless present without anyone knowing
why colour does what it actually does. A treatment for dyslexia has used coloured gel overlays on the standard black text on white page
to enable dyslexics to decipher words (Wilkins
2003). It may be the spatial shift that the overlays bring about that introduces the necessary
clarity.
Colour, then, is at once knowledge and being.
Colours can dispense with the distinction
between subject and object and define how
things/persons move in the world through
their animation and spatial distinctions.
Indeed, the mutual constitution of persons and
things will soon be literal in new smart buildings where walls react to the occupants clothing and change colour to match as a person
moves across the space. While colour is still
considered by anthropologists as a narrow specialist field, or as one which is too superficial,
too difficult or as tautological, a whole dimension of the social world has escaped them.
NOTES
1
2
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3
4
6
7
8
9
REFERENCES
Albers, Josef (1963) The Interaction of Colour. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Baines, Jeremy R. (1985) Color terminology and
color classification: ancient Egyptian color terminology and polychromy, American Anthropology,
87 (2): 28297.
Barth, F. (1975) Ritual and Knowledge among the
Baktamen of Papua New Guinea. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Barth, F. (1987) Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative
Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bayly, C.A. (1986) The origins of swadeshi (home
industry): cloth and Indian society 17001930, in
A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 285321.
Beck, B. (1969) Colour and heat in South Indian
ritual, Man (4): 55372.
Berlin, Brent and Kay, Paul (1969) Basic Colour Terms:
their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Boric, Dusan (2002) Apotropaism and the temporality of colours, in A. Jones and G. MacGregor (eds),
Colouring the Past. Oxford: Berg, pp. 2343.
183
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185
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research for this chapter was enabled by
ESRC postdoctoral award No. T026271266 and
ESRC-funded doctoral research from 1995
to 1999.
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INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
Surfaces and Containers
Jean-Pierre Warnier
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CONTAINMENT AS A
TECHNOLOGY OF POWER
Michel Foucault (1975, 2001) has aptly emphasized how power is directed at the body
(read: to sensori-motor conducts) precisely
at the point where the subject governs him/
herself. Let me also emphasize here that the
subject Foucault speaks of is not the conscious
subject characteristic of the Cartesian tradition
through phenomenology. It is rather the
divided subject of its desires. Basically, power
rests on agency, by acting upon the subjects
and directing or helping the subjects to act
upon themselves, govern themselves and act
upon other subjects. All those actions billions
of them rest on the use of given technologies
of power. Such technologies include material
components and know-how like those of the
hospital, the school, the army barracks, the
means of transport, etc. In so far as they are
historically and culturally specific, Foucault
calls them governmentalities.
In this respect, the technology of the skin, of
containment, and the associated material
culture provide techniques of the self that may
act as the point of departure for the construction of fully-fledged technologies of power.
I will illustrate this point with an ethnographic
example.
The highlands of western Cameroon have
been densely settled for the last millenium. In
a territory about the size of Belgium are to be
found some 150 kingdoms, the largest of which
have been revitalized in the last two decades of
the twentieth century as part of the spectacular
return of the kings at the forefront of contemporary African political life.
Such kingdoms are typical examples of
African sacred kingship made famous by
Frazer some 100 years ago.2 The technology of
power in such kingdoms involves the mobilization of sensori-affectivo-motor conducts
applied to containers and their contents. The
kings body is a container of ancestral substances such as breath, saliva and semen. These
substances are complemented by palm oil,
raphia wine and camwood powder, a crimson
pigment rubbed on people and things.
Such substances are transformed into ancestral substances through the utterance of performative words by qualified persons in the
proper context of ceremonial offerings to the
dead kings, or a variety of speech of a kind that
has been analysed by the philosopher Austin
(1962) in his stimulating book How to Do Things
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Figure 12.1 The King of Bafut, Cameroon, c. 1910. Photo Diel, courtesy Photo-Archiv, RautenstrauchJoest-Museum, Cologne
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TOWARDS A PRAXEOLOGY
OF CONTAINERS
In my discussion I will proceed from the larger
space of the frontier and the border to the smaller
artefacts of pottery and household containers.
In each case, sensori-motricity provides a key
for the interpretation of the material.
The open space of the frontier and the closure
of the border are our point of departure.
Turners analysis of the American frontier
(1893/1961), picked up by Kopytoff (1987) and
applied by him to Africa, emphasizes the essential role of movement. The frontier is a vast
space within which one is not only free to move
about but even invited to do so (Go west, young
man) in order to fill up the emptyness and colonize it. It operates very much as an inside
without any relevant outside. In other words,
the notion of a clearly drawn border with its
191
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2
3
REFERENCES
Alvarez, R.R. (1995) The MexicanUS border: the
making of an anthropology of borderland, Annual
Review of Anthropology, 24: 44770.
Anzieu, D. (1985) Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunod.
Appadurai, A. (1997) Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Arnold, D.E. (1985) Ceramic Theory and Cultural
Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bayart, J.-F. (2004) Le Gouvernement du monde : une critique politique de la globalisation. Paris: Fayard.
Bayart, J.-F. and Warnier, J-P., eds (2004), Matire
politique : le pouvoir, les corps et les choses. Paris:
CERI/Karthala.
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PART III
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CLOTH AND CLOTHING
Jane Schneider
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COURTLY CONSUMPTION
In contrast, in courtly societies, the consumption
sphere is all about hierarchy; the most beautiful cloth and clothing, and the most spiritually
powerful, as well, circulate upward, toward
the chiefs and royals and aristocrats at the top,
from whence they may be redistributed as
gifts. In a well known analysis of cloth and its
functions in the Inka state, John Murra showed
that surpluses of peasant cloth, woven with
magical precautions and mobilized through
the tribute system, were piled so high in the
royal warehouses as to stagger the Spanish
conquerors (Murra 1962). The state further
relied for cloth on weavers at court and in its
administrative centers, all source points for
fine, intricately patterned tapestries. Constructed
of strong cotton warps acquired through
exchanges with the coast, and softer, brightly
dyed alpaca wefts obtained from the highlands,
these textiles were in great demand for
purposes of diplomacy and foreign exchange.
Kings offered them as gifts to attract the fealty
of lords in newly incorporated peripheries and
forbade their wear or display in the absence of
royal approval. Especially valued for this
overtly political purpose were cloths from the
royal wardrobe, steeped with associations of
past rulers and deeds. An initial pump primer
of dependence, suggests Murra, cloth of this
sort was hoarded by the lords of the provinces
for four or more generations, symbolizing at
once their obligations to Cuzco and Cuzcos
bestowal of citizenship in return.
In courtly societies, hierarchy rests heavily
upon sumptuary paraphernalia to objectify and
communicate rank, and to constitute material
bonds between the past and the present, the
rulers and the ruled. As noted above for the
Mughals, inaugural regalia, passed on from
generation to generation, is itself the substance
of rule. Among the most famous instances of
cloth distributions illustrating these principles
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CAPITALIST EXPANSION
AND ARTISAN PRODUCTION:
EUROPE AND BEYOND
The tension between productionist and consumptionist understandings of capitalism reappears in the vast literature on cloth and clothing
as these manifestations of material culture
have been affected by capitalisms spread (see
Foster in Chapter 18). A rather pessimistic productionist bias is evident in characterizations
of capitalism as a concatenation of forces that,
rather like a juggernaut or steamroller, flattens
everything in sight. Applied to cloth and clothing, this includes the idea that industrial manufactures are damaging to their hand-crafted
equivalents and the artisans who make them.
Not that evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. Mission schools taught embroidery, sewing,
and knitting to colonized women and children
textile arts that made extensive use of industrial
materials while undermining the transmission
of indigenous skills, above all patterned weaving (Schneider 1987: 434). Clever industrialists
produced batiks expressly to compete with the
Javanese craft, roller-printing copies so precise
as to duplicate the hairline capillaries that occur
in hand dyeing when the wax paste develops
cracks (Matsuo 1970). They also made factory
versions of adinkra, the terracotta mourning
cloth of the Asante, simulating the kente-inspired
embroidery that Asante artisans added for
prestige (Polakoff 1982). Artisans who had been
displaced from hand weaving and dyeing
by the competition of machine-made goods
often met an unhappy end, being forced into
unemployment, migration, or the rather ironic
situation of cultivating textile raw materials for
manufactories in the metropole. Surely the
most dramatic collapse of cloth traditions to
occur in a context of fiber exports was that of
plantation slaves in the Americas. Recruited in
regions of Africa with important weaving and
dyeing traditions, these laborers did not spin,
weave or dye any of the cotton they grew, and
were dressed in clothes made from factory
yardgoods imported from Europe.
There are, however, a number of counterindications to such a bleak picture. Far from
always threatening a craft, industrially produced elements may stimulate it. Plain factory
textiles contributed, like their commercial
Indian forerunners, to the batik traditions of
Java and Nigeria; their smooth surfaces meant
that the wax or starch tracings of the designs
could be applied with greater intricacy and
precision, using finer instruments. Inexpensive
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REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1990) The romance of resistance:
tracing transformations of power through Bedouin
women, American Ethnologist, 17: 4156.
AFF (American Fabrics and Fashions), 1969.
Appadurai, Arjun (1986) Introduction: Commodities
and the Politics of Value, in The Social Life of Things.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 363.
Banerjee, Mukulika and Daniel Miller (2003) The Sari.
Oxford: Berg.
Bataille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: an Essay
on General Economy I, Consumption. New York:
Zone Books.
217
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14
HOME FURNISHING AND DOMESTIC INTERIORS
Robert St. George
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FURNISHING HOUSES
Historians and specialists in the decorative arts
have looked at several kinds of furnishings in
detail, and fortunately an impressive bibliography exists that provides overviews to major
types furniture, ceramic and glass, textiles,
silver and other metals, among others (Ames
and Ward 1989). For present purposes, furniture
may serve as a focus for discussion. General
social histories of domestic furniture typically
argue that furniture forms have increased in
number from medieval times to the present,
and that as the numbers of chests, chairs, or
benches proliferated, their ritual and display
functions have decreased in emphasis (Mercer
1969). This argument raises two points of debate.
The first presupposes that changes in domestic
furniture represented a tension between aristocratic and vernacular traditions. (Consider
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FIELDWORK ON FURNISHINGS
Alongside changes in the historical study of
European traditions, fieldwork in furniture
design and production has emphasized materials, construction, and technology in order to
better comprehend creativity and community
aesthetics; we have studies as diverse as
Estonian furniture crafts, the production of
Turkish framed sandiklar or chests by Mustafa
Sargin, and the constant rearrangement of
dressers in Northern Ireland (Viriis 1969;
Glassie 1982: 36270, 1993: 16578). In addition, curators of ethnology and natural history
museums own examples of North American
Indian furniture forms. Many of these, including the wide range of quillwork boxes made by
the Micmac in Nova Scotia, conform to indigenous storage forms round baskets, oval and
rectangular boxes with both flat and gently
rounded lids commonly placed on raised
interior platforms. In other instances, native
forms such as cradles and settees suggest the
incorporation of European forms into local
design vocabularies. For example, a nineteenthcentury New England kitchen chair reaching
the Kwakiutl was disassembled, its seat shaped
into a beavers back and splat carved as its tail,
and then reassembled. Or a factory-produced
side chair (ca. 187080) made in Halifax has
a slip seat made from Micmac quillwork,
effectively turning the object into a kind of
trophy at the dining-room table of its owner
(Whitehead 1982: 148). On occasion, specific
furniture forms are even claimed to have mythological significance. Certain storage boxes made
by the Haida and Tlingit peoples are decorated,
according to one scholar, with a mythical sea
spirit, Kow-e-Ko-Tate, the implication being
that home furnishings played a role in diffusing
mythology into daily life (Inverarity 1950: cat.
No. 22 [unpag.]). Another scholar has suggested
that the carvings are appropriate because the
box is used to store items imbued with supernatural power (Walens 1981: fig. 2 caption,
fac. p. 82). The same thing could be said of
seventeenth-century historical furnishings from
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CONSUMING INTERIORS
Consumption provides our third approach to
the study of interior furnishings and domestic
space. Recall this key component of the enclosure movement: As market agriculture generated profits for new freeholders in the
seventeenth century some yeomen farmers had
sufficient capital to purchase new kinds of
things in greater quantities. Historian Joan
Thirsk argued in Economic Policy and Projects
(1978) that the new zeal among country farmers
as well as among London merchants for small
purchases of ready-made goods moved England
to a consumer economy by the 1640s. Inventories
of estate provide clues to the rapidity of the new
commercial market for furnishings. In midEssex between 1635 and 1690, for instance, the
total number of chairs owned in the community
by yeomen at their death rose from thirty five to
439 even as the population decreased slightly
with a similar rise in the numbers of ordinary
stools, from sixty six to 301. By the 1620s most
yeoman farmers had invested between onequarter and one-third of their wealth in household movables, including furniture, textiles, and
plate. Seventy years later the percentage had
risen in some rural parishes to almost one-half
(Forman 1988: 85; St. George 1982: 229).
From its origins in early modern England,
consumer culture has been steadily elaborated
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REFERENCES
Agnew, Jean-Christophe (1989) A house of fiction:
domestic interiors and the commodity aesthetic,
in Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Consuming Visions:
Accumulation and Display of Goods in America,
18801920. New York: Norton, pp. 13355.
Ames, Kenneth L. and Ward, Gerald W.R. eds (1989)
Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in
America, 16501920: an Annotated Bibliography.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for
Winterthur Museum.
Bermingham, Ann and Brewer, John, eds (1995) The
Consumption of Culture, 16001800: Image, Object,
Text. New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1973) The Berber house, or, The
world reversed, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Rules and
Meanings: the Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge.
New York: Penguin Books, pp. 98110.
Brewer, John and Porter, Roy, ed. (1993) Consumption
and the World of Goods. New York: Routledge.
Bromberger, Christian (1980) Les manires dhabiter,
in Christian Bromberger, Jaques Lacroix and Henri
Raulin Larchitecture rurale Franaise, corpus des genres, des types et des variantes: Provence. Paris: Muse
Nationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires.
Carson, Cary (1994) The consumer revolution in
colonial British America: why demand?, in Cary
Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert (eds),
Of Consuming Interests: the Style of life in the
Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University
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VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
Suzanne Preston Blier
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Norberg-Schulz (1971) and Bonta (1977) among
others arguing that singling out vernacular
structures from other architectural exemplars
represents a form of fallacious thinking. As
Gven points out (1990: 285) By dictionary
definition and popular use, vernacular and
architectural suggest a semantic differential
that may imply some kind of logical contradiction. Architecture is architecture, they maintain, regardless of when, where, by whom, or
for whom it is created. Gven adds (1990: 286):
Before the so-called modernization of the architectural profession, a good portion of the built environment in the world was what today we would
call vernacular. It is fundamentally a human
activity (although there are interesting comparable
forms in nature), and as such addresses vital considerations at both the individual level and society
as both narrowly and broadly concerned.
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evoke genius and a deep understanding of the
power and potential of form. In many respects,
the most influential of the mid-century authors
is Bernard Rudofsky, whose Architecture without Architects of 1964 accompanied a groundbreaking exhibition by the same name at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. This volume with its rich pictorial format promoted the
aesthetic power of vernacular structures across
the globe. In his discussion, Rudofsky further
brought into the realm of elite architectural
scrutiny buildings designed and built by ordinary people which had hitherto been ignored
or dismissed in academic architectural circles.
The title of his work, like that of MoholyNagys above cited book, goes to the heart of
the difficulties posed by prior Western classificatory schemas, and the general insistence that
to be considered as architecture buildings had
to be designed by academically trained architects. By labeling these works as native or
anonymous, Rudofsky and Moholy-Nagy
broadened the canon of what was considered
as architecture. Moreover, as Rudofsky would
insist in his 1977 study, non-pedigreed building exemplars evidence a way of life which
has special aesthetic and moral value because
they reflect greater popular input and appeal.
Roger Scruton in his 1994 The Classical Vernacular:
Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism goes
on to suggest that vernacular exemplars not only
are visually among the most powerful but also
evince a moral integrity which should serve as
a model for elite modern building forms.
Oliver has criticized (1990: 23) one aspect of
this vernacular focus, namely its general insistence on anonymous design, suggesting that in
global vernacular architecture, as in elite architecture in the West, trained individuals with
technical know-how and design skills also are
important, these figures serving roles in many
ways analogous to architects even if they do
not have academic degrees. Among others
Oliver cites as providing functions analogous
to Western-trained designers are Chinese diviners, Maori building tujunga, and Navajo singers
involved in the Blessingway. Oliver adds with
pointed reference to Rudofsky (1964):
even in traditional societies architecture without
architects appears to be the exception rather than
the rule: most durable cultures have developed,
in one guise or another, the specialized interpretation of cultural values and norms through built
form. The people who exercise this function, and
who rarely bear the title architect, are often both
designers and contractors: They are custodians
of the rules of both design and construction.
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THEORECTICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF
VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE STUDY
That different methodologies shape our understanding of vernacular architecture is a given.
With respect specifically to the Dogon of Mali,
several studies suggest how scholarly perspectives impact related findings in fundamental
ways. French anthropologist Marcel Griaule
and his colleague Germaine Dieterlen brought
Dogon architecture to the attention of the West
through their elaboration of its rich cosmological
symbolism (1954, 1965). Dutch anthropologist
Walter Van Beek suggests (1991, 2001) that earlier
ethnography concerning this and other factors
of Dogon life is flawed. Unable to replicate
Griaules findings, Van Beek argued that, rather
than addressing larger cosmological concerns,
Dogon social expression (including architecture)
was in key respects framed by questions of
need. Adding to the fray have been two ethnoarchaeological analyses of the Dogon, one by
Paul Lane (1994) the other by Jean-Christophe
Huet (1994). Both studies, which address the
temporal dimensions of Dogon architecture
and settlements, maintain that the Dogon, rather
than being an isolated population living at the
very edge of Western Sudanese civilization,
instead evidence notable cultural influences and
architectural changes over the course of their
history, the response in part to religious, political, and commercial shifts affecting this region
of Islamic influence and empire expansion
more generally. Indeed, rather than constituting
an intact ancient civilization removed from the
regions ebb and flow as promoted by Griaule
and to some degree Van Beek, the Bandiagara
escarpment inhabited by the Dogon seems to
have been a sociocultural hodgepodge reflecting traditions of variant disenfranchized populations who over the centuries have sought the
protective refuge of these mountains.
As Huet explains (1994: 48), the Dogon
homeland in the Bandiagara represents not so
much a site of origin (as Griaule argues in
largely cosmogonic and mythic terms) but rather
a place of emergence and renewal. In short, these
ethno-archaeological studies have allowed a
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more complex reading of this setting, suggesting
that mythic idioms of origin elaborated by
Griaule with respect to Dogon architecture
may have been promoted in part to cover a
larger lack within the social fabric. The long
history of regional slavery in this area also seems
to have impacted Dogon architecture and local
perceptions of it, with many Dogon having
been enslaved by nearby Islamic states, and
these populations, once freed, returning to the
Bandiagara cliffs in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, seeking to promote in
their built environment even in their mosque
architecture a sense of homeland and shared
ancestry (Blier 2004). Like the nature of society
more generally, these studies suggest that vernacular architecture has been shaped by an array
of concerns, including the variant perspectives
of scholars who study them.
Functionalist approaches to building form,
following on the work of British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) among others,
has tended to highlight a broad range of practical considerations environment, materials,
sociopolitical factors, economy, and security
as determinants of form, siting, and signification. Among the numerous related studies
which have addressed architecture are those of
Prussin (1969), Rapaport (1969) and Van Beek
(1991). While functionalist perspectives have
tended to privilege the relationship between
buildings and socio-economic practice, one of
the problems with this approach is that many
building forms are created which in whole or
part lie outside broader functional considerations with respect to, among other factors, belief
and aesthetics.
Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into
the 1960s, French anthropologists drawing on
the earlier writings of Emile Durkheim and
Marcel Mauss (1967) with respect to the linkage
between systems of thought and social practice
focused on the symbolic aspects of traditional
building form, saw these works as reflecting
insights into mentalits, as evidenced in part
through cosmological beliefs and idioms of the
human body (see, among others, Lebeuf 1961
and the above cited works of Griaule). Such
studies, however, in their overarching symbolic focus have often left an impression that
everyday thought and actions are predominantly symbol-driven and ritualistic.
In the early 1960s, anthropologist Claude
Lvi-Strauss began to reconfigure the above
largely localized French academic studies of
systems of thought into a broad cross-cultural
theory of internal dualisms. Lvi-Strausss influential Structural Anthropology (1963) and Tristes
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form in new sociocultural arenas. See for
example Benders (1998) study of the ways in
which Stonehenge has been reinvested with
meanings by modern visitors.
Henry Glassies contributions to vernacular
and particularly domestic architecture (1975,
1995, 2000), are reflective of this larger phenomenological interest, as contextualized through
the varied details of everyday lived experience.
His 1995 study of culture and history in the
Ulster community of Ballymenone is a striking
exegesis, rich in ethnographic detail and critical insight. His descriptions of life in the Irish
kitchen as seen in ceremonies of tea and the
positioning of kitchen furniture offer vital
insights into the relationship between place,
practice, and both individual and social identity
(see St. George in Chapter 14). From religion to
Gaelic poetry, songs to work, the volume offers
an insightful view into how homes define a
people. To Glassie, a folklore scholar, vernacular
architecture involves an ongoing social engagement with materials, technologies, and cultural
knowledge. As he explains, vernacular architecture evidences not only the complexity of
cultures but also their changing circumstances.
In Glassies words (1990: 280) Vernacular architecture records subtly but insistently the history
of a people. Glassie sees vernacular architecture
in this way as providing vital evidence of a
range of social and cultural values. He stresses
the importance of seeing architecture as an
accumulation of experiences through participation, with personal investment shaped by
cultural need, these structures helping to construct unique visions of the worlds in which
people live.
Post-structuralism, and the broad array of
theoretical perspectives drawn largely from
Frankfurt School critical theory, as framed
around issues of resistance, the subaltern,
colonial/postcolonial impact, and globalization
have helped to define the study of vernacular
architecture in important ways. The cojoining
of psychology and political dominance as
addressed by theorists such as Theodor Adorno
has brought to the foreground vital connections between the aesthetic and political realms
in architectural perspective; see among other
sources Aesthetics and Politics and Fredric
Jamesons forward to this work (1980) as well as
Soja (1989). Neil Leach provides (1997) extracts
from theorists who have focused on the built
environment from this vantage, including not
only Adorno, but also Gaston Bachelard,
Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Jean
Franois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze. Michel
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often address not only design considerations
but also questions of cost and return. What is
important to emphasize with respect to these
works is that the authors see environment not as
a determinant of architectural form but rather as
a given that builders creatively address through
their selection of materials and effective design
choices, related works sometimes serving as
models for contemporary building practice in a
range of comparable settings elsewhere.
Tim Ingolds (2000) study of architecture and
environment argues that, instead of focusing
our attention on the cultural variation of form,
we should be looking at variation in skill in
addressing the environment as framed by considerations of both biology and culture. Some
of the most interesting work being done in this
area is that being produced in the field of humanist geography (see among others, Adams et al.
2001). In this volume, the last few decades of
geographical study are addressed, specifically
with respect to how humans transform the
world. Much of this work also reveals the longstanding impact of Yi-fu Tuan (1974, 1977, 1991),
and his emphasis on human choice, with a
range of insights materialist, normative, and
aesthetic coming into play.
In the same way that environment can be
seen to pose important challenges and potentialities with respect to vernacular architecture,
so too nature more generally also has been
addressed with respect to models in human
building practice. A classic text in the exploration of these issues is C. Alexanders A
Pattern Language (1977). Bees, hornets, termites,
birds, and in some cases lower primates are
among the many species who build structures
remarkable for their technical expertise and
aesthetic interest. Like the use and making of
tools, one of the central concerns in these discussions is how to viably differentiate animal
and human building imperatives, and the
factors dividing the two. Following Marx,
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977: 102) singles out awareness
(consciousness and intent) as the most salient
means of distinguishing human and natural
construction. The question of choice (selection)
here too is important. As Norberg-Schulz has
noted what we select from nature to serve our
purposes, we also call architecture. ... Our ability to dwell is distinguished from that of a bird
living in a nest by our inherent awareness that
we are not mere things. (1971: 37) That said, it
is also important to note that forms from
nature spheres, shells, termite mounds, nests,
caves have long provided vital visual and technical models for human building efforts. From
this vantage one can also point to the primary
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as Shea explains (1990: 30), economic factors
and, in particular, modes of production, are
part of not independent of culture, and contribute importantly to vernacular settlement.
Studies also have made clear that buildings are
part of larger regional and global interactions
and that these factors also are important.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM,
WORLD VIEW, COSMOLOGY,
ASTRONOMY, AXIALITY
Not surprisingly in light of the primacy of the
human as models of sociocultural construction,
anthropomorphic idioms figure prominently
in building symbolism. Anthropomorphism is
one of architectures universals, and in many
cultures specific body-linked terminologies
and actions are identified with core building
parts. Bloomer and Moores Body, Memory, and
Architecture (1977) addresses the centrality of
anthropomorphism in Western architectural
contexts. House facades constitute the face of
the dwelling, garbage containers like the end
point of digestion are placed often at the domicile rear, and the fireplace mantle like the heart
or soul is a repository for family mementoes, a
function also taken up in the kitchen (in particular the refrigerator) with its array of family snapshots and reminders. Among the broad range of
ethnographic studies emphasizing anthropomorphism are Lebeuf (1961), Griaule (1965),
and Malaquais (2002). Another important and
influential text is Y-F. Tuans eloquent Topophilia
(1974) with its exploration of the intersection of
the human body and a range of spatial considerations. Tuan, a geographer by training, offers
a broadly philosophical analysis of the aesthetics of environment and the affinities which have
long existed between humans and landscape.
The fashioning of world view finds widespread expression in building form as well.
Interest in this question has been long-standing,
as seen in, among other sources, William
Lethabys 1891 Architecture, Mysticism and
Myth with its examination of the iconic elements
of housing. Mircea Eliades widely influential
writings (see especially 1959) also have shaped
related discussions in important ways with
their highlighting of the connections between
dwelling forms and features of sacred space.
Paul Oliver (1975) brings together a range of
scholarly contributions which address this from
both theoretical and regional perspectives.
The importance of the house as an imago
mundi is widespread too. In many contexts, a
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BUILDERS, TECHNOLOGIES,
AESTHETICS, AND DECORATION
Some of the most enduring issues of vernacular
architecture have been those of building technology and construction. The range of issues
involved in the construction of a Malay house
are addressed in Gibbs et al. (1987). Needhams
1971 exploration of engineering factors in
Chinese architecture is important as well. See
also Arnolds examination of building practices
in Egypt (1991) and Stanier (1953) on cost considerations in building the Parthenon in early
Athens. On Mayan building technologies see
Pendergast (1988) and Abrams (1994). Protzens
1993 volume on Inka architecture and construction techniques also addresses a range of related
concerns. Paul Oliver (1990) takes up the critical
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the east coast of Africa emphasize decorative
motifs which reference protection and cleansing, attributes also addressed in West African
Islamic facade decorations (Prussin 1986). Van
Wyk (1993) has noted how decorative building
motifs serve as forms of resistance for the SothoTswana women painters who create them.
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expression in questions of urban planning (Blier
in press). In the Dahomey kingdom in West
Africa, city planners in the seventeenth century
seem to have anticipated later-era destruction
and renovation, creating a spatial plan which
allowed and indeed encouraged each new
monarch to raze buildings in a designated area
of the city, with the king then establishing important family members, ministers, and attendants
in the newly cleared areas. Such planned destruction conveys a unique sense of political imperative and temporality. The marked destructive
impact of segregation and its extreme extension, apartheid also has been taken up by
scholars. Among the many contributions to this
subject are Lemons multi-authored 1991 volume
on South African segregated cities and Rakodis
1995 analysis of Harare, Zimbabwes capital, as
a settler colonial city. Janet Abu-Lughod (1980)
addresses issues of urban apartheid in Morocco.
See also Delaney (1998) on issues of race, law,
and segregation in the United States with specific attention to the geographies of slavery and
the geopolitics of Jim Crow.
In many parts of the world, sprawling shanty
towns fueled by massive population movements
have reflected deeply entrenched poverty and
disempowerment, while also conveying the
unique ingenuity and creativity of related
inhabitants. (See among others Berman (1988)
and Hardoy and Satterthwaites Squatter Citizen
(1989).) Watson and Gibson (1995) examine
adaptive space in postmodern cities and
Harvey (1993) discusses an array of modernity
factors. Development considerations are a significant focus as well, as elaborated by Potter
and Salau (1990) with respect particularly to the
Third World. Marshell Bermans All that is Solid
melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity 1988
is a provocative text in theoretical and other
terms, and addresses the tragedy of development and underdevelopment with specific reference to social theorists (Marx), philosophers
(Baudelaire on modernism in the streets), literary sources (Goethes Faust), and core cities
(Petersburg). See also Venturi et al. (1972) on
learning from Las Vegas.
CONCLUSION
In addition to the larger theoretical issues which
shape scholarly perspectives on vernacular
architecture in significant ways, building forms
and meanings also are defined fundamentally
by an array of local, regional, and global factors.
Questions of domesticity and mobility, as well
245
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ARCHITECTURE AND MODERNISM
Victor Buchli
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Aug, M. (1995) Non-Places: an Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA:
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Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies. St Albans: Paladin.
Baudrillard, J. (1996) The System of Objects. London:
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Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge:
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Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Blier, S.P. (1987) The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology
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Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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17
PRIMITIVISM, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE
CATEGORY OF PRIMITIVE ART
Fred Myers
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PRIMITIVISM
The construction known as primitivism has
been considered by a wide range of scholars, in
the past and in the present, and its origins have
been found by some in the classical period
(Lovejoy and Boas 1935; Gombrich 2002)1 and by
others more meaningfully in the concern of the
Enlightenment to reconstruct the origins of
culture shaped by a reaction against classicism
(Connelly 1995). However they differ among
themselves, the argument of these works is that
particular attributes of objects are valorized as
an alternative to that which is more refined,
more developed, more learned or skilled.
Thus, the primitive is a dialogical category,
often explicitly a function of the modern (see
also Diamond 1969); the current consideration of
the category is inextricably linked to controversies about cultural and ideological appropriation
launched from postmodern and postcolonial critiques. These critiques seek to identify the function of the category as part of Western culture.
As Clifford (1988), Errington (1998), and
Price (1989) have shown, there have been significant consequences of this formation.2 For
much of the twentieth century, primitive art
defined a category of art that was, more or less,
the special domain of anthropology a domain
differentiated from the general activity of art
history by virtue of being outside the ordinary,
linear narratives of (Western) artistic progress
in naturalistic representation. Primarily, therefore, non-Western and prehistoric art, primitive art (later to become tribal art, the art of
small-scale societies, and even ethnographic
art) was most obviously within the purview of
anthropological study and was exhibited in
ethnographic or natural history rather than fine
art museums. One consequence of this placement, noted by many, has been the popular
identification of Native American cultures (for
example) not with other human creations, but
with the natural plant and animal species of a
continent suggesting that products are parts
of nature, as if they had no history. Nonetheless,
many particular analyses of non-Western art
systems, the many detailed studies of local aesthetic organization and function, have value.
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MODERN ART
The foregoing implies that the relationality of
the category primitive art finds its location
within the changing meanings and valence of
the category art itself in the Western tradition.
For many people engaged with the arts, art
remains a commonsense category of just this
sort; and there is held to be something essential
about these practices in terms of their value,
their relation to the human psyche or creativity
or spirituality. This has not, however, been
merely a fact of arts universality, and social
historians of art have pursued this strangeness,
the particularity of Western arts own selfconstruction, from within the tradition. The
research of Kristeller, Williams, and others
(Baxandall 1972; Eagleton 1990) has pointed to
the distinctiveness of this modern notion of
art, one in which quite distinct kinds of activity
have come to be constructed (or recognized) as
separated from other cultural activity and having
something in common as art. They have
attempted to understand the transformations
of European social life that led to the condition
for our (Western) particular experience of an
aesthetic dimension.
The work of historians, no less than that of
anthropologists and critics, has offered a challenge to the universality of the concepts of art
and aesthetics familiar to Modernism. Raymond
Williams (1977) famously outlined the changing meaning of the concept art, and its place
in the history of industrialization (see also
Baxandall 1972). From the Middle Ages to the
nineteenth century, Williams pointed out, the
concept changed from a reference to general
skill to one of a distinct sphere of cultural, aesthetic activity (a sphere distinguished by its
combination of arts into art and by its transcendence of the instrumental, the merely
material and mere bodily pleasure). Indeed,
the Renaissance historian Kristeller somewhat
earlier noted that there was no concept of art
that embraced the quite distinct forms of painting, music, sculpture, theater, and dance:
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PRIMITIVISM STILL
To conclude this chapter, I will remark on the
opportunities I have had to see this myself, in
writing about the representation of Aboriginal
culture in the critical responses to an exhibition
of Aboriginal acrylic paintings at the Asia
Society in 1988, and to trace briefly some of the
trajectories set in motion by the critiques.
In the responses to the exhibition of
Aboriginal art at the Asia Society, I found (Myers
1991) that several evaluations suggested that the
acrylics offer a glimpse of the spiritual wholeness lost, variously, to Western art, to Western
man, or to modernity. The well known
Australian art critic Robert Hughes indulged
precisely in the form of nostalgic primitivism,
praising the exhibition lavishly in Time magazine and drawing precisely on this opposition:
Tribal art is never free and does not want to be.
The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spit
for creativity. It is not a world, to put it mildly,
that has much in common with a contemporary
Americans or even a white Australians. But it
raises painful questions about the irreversible
drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe,
and connection to nature.
(Hughes 1988: 80)
In Hughess estimation, their otherness occupies a world without much in common with
ours; the artistic values of individual creativity
and freedom are not relevant. But this otherness,
he maintained, was itself meaningful for us.
Another line of evaluation asked if they could be
viewed as a conceptual return to our lost (primitive) selves, as suggested in the subtitle of
another review: Aboriginal art as a kind of cosmic road map to the primeval (Wallach 1989).
The conventions of their differences were
also seen as morally instructive about some of
our own associations, especially of our materialism. In his travels to Australia during the
planning of the exhibition, Andrew Pekarik
(then Director of the Asia Society Gallery) was
reported as saying that these people with practically zero material culture have one of the
most complex social and intellectual cultures
of any society (in Cazdow 1987: 9). In this
Romantic and Durkheimian construction, a
critique of Modernity, the paintings may represent the worthiness of Aboriginal survival and,
consequently, the dilemma and indictment of
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NOTES
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Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: a Social Critique of
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Buchloh, Benjamin J. (1989) The Whole Earth Show:
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Campbell, Joseph (1969) Primitive Man as
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Cazdow, Jane (1987) The art of desert dreaming,
Australian Weekend Magazine, 89 August, pp. 69.
Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture:
Ethnography, Literature, Art. Cambridge, MA:
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Clifford, James (1991) Four northwest coast museums:
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TRACKING GLOBALIZATION
Commodities and Value in Motion
Robert J. Foster
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TRACKING GLOBALIZATION
What is at stake, then, in the strategy of
tracking specific commodities in motion is
the promise of a revised approach to culture
and capitalism. Cultural analysis becomes less
a matter of formulating a distinctive logic
or code shared by a group of people living
in one location and more a matter of tracing a
network in which the perspectives of differently situated individuals derive both from
their different network experiences and from
their perspectives on other peoples perspectives their approximate mappings of other
peoples meanings (Hannerz 1992: 43). This
sort of analysis enhances appreciation of how
commodities in motion engage desires and
stimulate the imagination in the construction
of both personhood and place (see, e.g.,
Weiss 2002). Economic analysis, in turn,
becomes less a matter of charting the operations
of institutions whether transnational corporations (TNCs) or nation states and more
a matter of tracing a network of dispersed
and disparate value-creating activities and
relationships. This sort of analysis enhances
appreciation of the extent to which culture
figures in the construction of commodities
(through design, branding, and marketing; see
Cook and Crang 1996a) and in the production
of monopoly rents (Harvey 2001). Following
commodities in motion thus also leads to a
politics of consumption emerging around
contests over control of the knowledge intrinsic to value creation (see Maurer, Chapter 1 of
this volume).
COMMODITY NETWORKS
The metaphor of the commodity network
aims, above all, to foreground the connections between commodity producers and consumers, especially unequal connections between
Northern shoppers and Southern growers of,
for example, flowers (Hughes 2000), coffee
(Roseberry 1996; Smith 1996), bananas
(Raynolds 2003a) and tomatoes (Barndt 2002)
(see also Redclift 2002 on chewing gum). Yet
the metaphor lends itself to multiple glosses.2
I here discuss three overlapping interpretations:
commodity chains or value chains; commodity
circuits or commodityscapes; and hybrid actor
networks. The second of these interpretations,
which I discuss in greatest detail, marks a convergence between anthropology and geography
grounded in ethnographic practice and close
attention to the meanings that people attribute
to things.
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Circuits of Culture/Commodityscapes
Gereffi has identified a reorganization of the
input-output structure of value chains resulting
from an increase in the importance of activities
that deal with intangibles such as fashion trends,
brand identities, design and innovation over
activities that deal with tangibles, the transformation, manipulation and movement of physical goods (Gereffi, Humphrey et al. 2001: 6).
Put differently, tracking commodities and value
in motion now requires far greater attention to
culture the transformation, manipulation, and
movement of meanings. This requirement is
obvious in the case of mobile commodities such
as world music (White 2000) and aboriginal
art (Myers 2002) which entail validations of cultural authenticity. But it is equally compelling in
the case of commodities that now circulate in
increasingly differentiated consumer markets,
such as coffee and fresh fruits. The symbolic
construction of these commodities through
intensive marketing activities, including market
research into everyday consumption practices,
directs attention to both outside and inside
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meanings. While outside meanings refer to the
setting of the terms within which a commodity
is made available, inside meaning refers to the
various significances that various users attribute
to a commodity (Mintz 1986: 167, 171). The exercise of power impinges upon the shaping of both
kinds of meaning. Hence the call of Cook and
Crang (1996a: 134) for a focus on the cultural
materialization of the economic, such that the cultural is increasingly [recognized as] what is economically produced, circulated and consumed.
Within geography and cultural studies, a
circuits of culture approach has emerged for
studying how the movement of commodities
often entails shifts in use value, that is, shifts in
what commodities mean to users (including
producers) situated at different nodes in a
commodity network (see Hughes 2000; Leslie
and Reimer 1999 for discussions). This approach
diverges from GCC analysis in three related
ways. First, it refuses to treat production as the
privileged moment or phase in the story of a
commodity and instead traces the articulation
of several distinct processes. For example, in
their study of the Sony Walkman, du Gay et al.
(1997: 3) contend that to study the Walkman
culturally one should at least explore how it is
represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed,
and what mechanisms regulate its distribution
and use. A prime concern of this strategy,
which derives from media studies (Johnson
1986; see Jackson and Thrift 1995), involves
demonstrating that the uses and meanings
intended or preferred by a commoditys producers and designers are not necessarily the
same meanings received or endorsed by a commoditys consumers/users. Consumption, in
other words, is neither a terminal nor a passive
activity, but is itself a source and site of value
creation. In this sense, the circuits of culture
approach adopts a view of consumer agency
characteristic of polemics in material culture
studies that put consumption in the vanguard of
history (Miller 1995a; Chapter 22 this volume).
Second, as the metaphor of a circuit implies,
the movement of a commodity is treated as
reversible and nonlinear, without beginning or
end. The circuit, moreover, is not a simple loop,
but rather a set of linkages between two or
more processes that is not determined or fixed.
For example, advertisers and manufacturers
convene focus groups and employ ethnographic
fieldworkers in order to anticipate and modify
how consumers will respond to product representations and designs; unanticipated consumer responses ensure that the research never
ends and instead applies ever new techniques
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By highlighting the construction of qualitative value, the circuits of culture approach both
unites economy and culture within a single
analytical framework and defines a point of
intersection between current work in cultural/
economic geography and rural sociology, on
the one hand, and anthropology, on the other.
Anthropological attempts to track commodities
and follow objects in motion derive from a
rebirth of material culture studies during the
1980s that gave new attention to contexts and
practices of consumption (see Miller 1995b for
a review). Similarly, Appadurai (1986) and
Kopytoffs (1986) use of the notion of commodity biographies, with its emphasis on the circulation of commodities, recovered consumption
as an important activity through which people
negotiate and renegotiate the meaning or
qualitative value of things. To a large extent,
this emphasis on circulation recalled classic
anthropological discussions of exchange epitomized in Malinowskis famous (1922) account
of kula. Appadurai (1986) not surprisingly
drew explicitly on more recent ethnography of
kula exchange in formulating his ideas about
the paths along which things moved and the
diversions to which they were subject.
Appadurais essay also aimed to undo the
conceptual dichotomy between gifts and commodities that informed many analyses of
exchange in and beyond Melanesia (see, e.g.,
Gregory 1982; Strathern 1988). Instead of asking
what is a commodity, Appadurai (1986: 13)
asked when is any thing a commodity, that is,
in what situation or context is a things
exchangeability a socially relevant feature. A
things commodity candidacy thus varies as it
moves from situation to situation, each situation regulated by a different regime of value
or set of conventions and criteria governing
exchange (see Bohannan 1955; Steiner 1954).
Accordingly, all efforts at defining commodities
are doomed to sterility unless they illuminate
commodities in motion (Appadurai 1986: 16).
Control over this motion its trajectory, speed,
transparency, and very possibility marks the
parameters of a politics of value (see also
Wiener 1992).
The notion of regimes of value allows for
the possibility that exchange situations differ
in the extent to which the actors share social
conventions and cultural criteria for evaluating
commodities. Thomas exploits this possibility
in his study of how Europeans and Pacific
Islanders appropriated each others things
to satisfy divergent agendas; he thereby renders an historical account of these entangled
objects muskets and soap, barkcloth and
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approaches distinguish themselves from the
GCC approach by their thicker descriptions,
often ethnographically based, of the ramifying
social processes and relations that generate and
transform the value of commodities in motion.
But the conventional methods of thick description what Geertz (1998) calls localized, longterm, close-in, vernacular field research and
Clifford (1997: 58) dubs a spatial practice of
intensive dwelling are at odds with the
demands of following mobile things across
multiple sites occupied by very different sorts of
people speaking very different sorts of vernaculars. The risk, as Bestor (2001: 78) puts it, is that
multi-sited research eventuates in drive-by
ethnography, thin and superficial description.
As ethnographers geographers (Cook et al.
2004) as well as anthropologists take up the
challenge of tracking globalization, they will
more and more confront the question of revising
their field methods (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
They may perhaps even conclude that the conceit of the solitary and heroic fieldworker no
longer serves well (Foster 1999) and that following commodities in motion inevitably
invites team-based fieldwork (see Banerjee and
Miller 2003 for an instructive example).
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(1999: 407) ask if circuits of culture accounts, by
not foregrounding exploitation and its causes,
lose sight of the political motivation for tracing
commodity networks. Hartwick goes further,
characterizing as uncritical fetishism ANTs
preoccupation with nonhuman actants and
hybrid networks: another device for hiding
the real relationships between consumers and
producers (2000: 1182). What, then, are the
political dimensions of each approach to commodity networks, especially the implications
for a new politics of consumption? What sort
of alternative commodity networks does each
approach envision? How might researchers
intervene practically in the commodity networks that they track?
The political rhetoric of commodity chaininspired analysis is one of unmasking and
exposure, of revealing a network of connections
hidden by spatial distance or the magic system
of advertising or even, as in the case of hybrid
corn seed (Ziegenhorn 2000), by the statesanctioned force of trade secrecy. This rhetoric
points to how the tension between knowledge
and ignorance determines both the trajectory
and the value of commodities in motion
(Appadurai 1986: 41; see Hughes 2000). Hence
researchers and activists alike attempt to repair
the disjuncture in knowledge that renders consumers of expensive apparel or toys or fresh
fruits ignorant of the abuses suffered by the
poorly paid producers of these commodities.
The awareness and concern of educated consumers in the North can thus be harnessed
to empower exploited workers in the South
through a range of efforts to improve labor
conditions. These efforts include various
promising fair trade and organic labeling
schemes that guarantee minimum producer
prices as well as corporate campaigns to pressure retailers into ensuring that brand-name
commodities are made under non-exploitative
conditions (Gereffi et al. 2001; Hartwick 2000).
Such schemes inevitably involve political contests over the definition of fair labor and environmental standards and remain vulnerable
to cooptation by corporate niche marketing
(Murray and Raynolds 2000). They rely, moreover, on faith in public education on the
belief that educating consumers about their
responsibilities and educating producers about
their rights are necessary if not sufficient
means for creating long-distance cooperation
and achieving social justice. Connecting and
educating consumers and producers in this
way will therefore require new forms of pedagogy and curriculum (for example, see Miller
2003; McRobbie 1997), media activism (Klein
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2
10
297
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19
PLACE AND LANDSCAPE
Barbara Bender
If I wanted you, the reader, to begin to understand about landscape, I would not start with
the work of anthropologists, or geographers,
or academics of any sort. I would begin with
novelists and poets, because, long before reflexivity, or multivocality, or any other aspects of
postmodern conceptualization were invoked by
academics, writers were subsuming them,
incorporating them, taking them more or less
for granted. If you want a gendered understanding of landscape, read V. Woolfs A Room of
Ones Own (1929), or George Eliots Middlemarch
(18712/1965); for a diasporic view of landscape try Jamaica Kincaids Lucy (1989); a dyspeptic, tormented but also passionate view
of deracinated and colonial landscapes, V.S.
Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival (1987; Bender
1993). For landscapes of movement, displacement and a historical time depth theres none
better than Amitav Ghoshs In an Antique Land
(1992). For landscapes of memory, volume I
of Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time
(1954/1981) would be a good place to start, or
W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz (2001) or The Rings of
Saturn (1998) (see also Connertons Chapter 20
in this volume). For landscapes of war-torn
identity and terror theres Seamus Heaneys
Station Island (1984). Readers will have no difficulty in adding their own titles to this list.
As well as recognizing that one is surrounded by writers teasing apart the meaning
of landscape, the reader might also note the
way in which the phraseology that we employ
in both everyday speech and more formal
communications is replete with landscape
metaphors. Take any page of writing and see
how often such metaphors are employed a
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THEORIZING LANDSCAPE
Landscape as Palimpsest, Structures
of Feeling and the Production
of Space
Whilst the theorization of time and history
has a long genealogy, the serious discussion
of place and landscape has been slower to
get under way. We might take as a reasonable
starting point the work of W.G. Hoskins in
the mid-twentieth century (Hoskins 1955).
For Hoskins the landscape was the material
embodiment of peoples activities. It was a
palimpsest, the attentive reading of which
allowed one to decipher the scribbled signatures of earlier activities. Hoskins pipe in
hand, map under arm avers that one could
write a book about every few square inches of
the Ordinance Survey map, about the imprints
left by changing land use and residential patterns, by changing social and cultural attitudes. He shows the way in which a landscape
that might at first sight appear to be primarily
spatial is always, and irrevocably, shot through
with time.
Hoskins was a brilliant popularist and was
quick to recognize that television provided an
excellent medium for his particular and passionate espousal of landscape studies. But his
work was, by and large, unreflexive, and his
underlying threnody his espousal of a rooted
sense of place and his loathing of contemporary change has made him vulnerable to
hi-jacking by conservative Little Englanders
(Bender 1988: 30).
On the other side of the Atlantic, at much the
same time, the seemingly more robust, though
even more weakly theorized, approach of J.B.
Jackson (his picture has him dressed in leathers
astride a motor bike), creates an on-the-road
landscape of movement, of interstitial places
on the margins of cities (Jackson 1994). Jackson
attempts to draw a sharp distinction between
the law-like grids laid out across the land
by governmental agencies and the vernacular
landscape of ordinary people that compromise conformity. He fails to understand that
impositions from above and vernacular untidiness from below work off each other, and whilst
his seems a more radical understanding of
place than Hoskins, in reality he is equally nostalgic, following in the wake of Kerouacs On
the Road and espousing a somewhat romantic
notion of the American way of life and the
open frontier (Cresswell 1992).
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the sheerly physical and geographical into something that is historical and socially experienced.
By the process of naming places and things
become captured in social discourses.
These phenomenological approaches to landscape owe much to Heideggers earlier conceptualizations to his recognition of the
importance of an embodied experience of the
world, his challenge to the Cartesian split of
mind and body, of nature and culture, his
conceptualization of being-in-the-world and
of dwelling (Heidegger 1962; Thomas 1996
Thomas, Chapter 3 of this volume). Nonetheless
there is a danger in some of his writings, and in
that of some of the practioners following in his
wake, of creating a romantic, almost ahistorical
sense of beingin-the-world, one that is rooted
in seemingly timeless activities and movements (Bourdieu 1991; Bender 1998: 37). There
is a danger of focusing too sharply on social
practices or practical activities and of failing to
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And that:
Place is the reproduction of a particular set, a particular articulation of power-filled social relations There is always a history that is brought to
each situation of political practice.
(Massey 1995)
307
Western Maps
The Western Gaze, whether it be at home,
looking out over a fine prospect, or abroad,
encroaching upon other peoples places and
understandings, is a colonizing gaze (Mitchell
1989; Pratt 1992; Blunt and Rose 1994). And the
mapping of landscape was not just an adjunct
to exploration and colonization, it helped create the conditions for such enterprises. Equally,
Western cartography was not just an aid to the
establishment and monitoring of different
sorts of property and of national and regional
boundaries, but a force in the creation of changing social configurations (Bender 1999; Harley
1992a; Ingold 2000).
Maps may attempt to assert control, but, just
as with the gaze, they are always open to subversion (Crouch and Matless 1996; Harley
1992b). The meticulous detail of the Ordinance
Survey map (a detail that nonetheless is never
quite complete as the nuclear power station, the
bunker disappear from view) makes it open
to renegotiation. The field marshals map may
be annotated with forbidden places (sexual
and political) (Benjamin 1985; Sontag 1983); the
official government map may talk past the
unofficial peasants sketch (Orlove 1991, 2002);
the boundary may become a symbol and thus a
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Some of the worst and most unequal confrontations have occurred between colonizing
and small-scale indigenous societies. And here
we may pause to recognize that the mutual
incomprehension engendered by totally different social, political and economic practices
extends to include the inability to recognize
or at least to tolerate a completely different
understanding of place and landscape.
Some of the earliest accounts of quite different ways of being-in-the-world were written in
the first half of the twentieth century by anthropologists working in Australia. Whilst they had
begun by focusing rather narrowly on kinship
and social organization, the Aboriginal people
soon made it clear that these things could not
be understood without an understanding of the
relationship between human beings and the
land (Morphy 1993). The Aboriginal landscapes had been created in the Dreamtime by
the ancestral beings, and human beings were
dependent upon were nurtured by the work
of the ancestors. But, equally, the ancestral beings
were nurtured by humans. In stark contrast
to the Western gaze, there could be no divide
between nature and culture (Morphy 1995;
Layton 1997).
The contrast between the gaze and a quite
other way of being in place is reiterated in the
difference between the Western map and
Australian Aboriginal representations the
Yolngu bark paintings, the daragu boards, the
Walbiri sand paintings. The Western map
appears non-indexical:
In the Western tradition the way to imbue a claim
with authority is to attempt to eradicate all signs
of its local, contingent, social and individual
production.
(Turnbull 1989: 42)
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LANDSCAPES OF MOVEMENT,
EXILE AND TERROR
Resistance and opposition have shifted from the
settled, established and domesticated dynamics
of culture to its unhoused, decentred and exilic
energies, energies whose incarnation today is
the migrant (Said 1993: 403):
Routes and rootedness identifications not identies, acts of relationship rather than pre-given
forms . . . tradition [as] a network of partially connected histories globalisation from below.
(Clifford 1994)
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MOVING ON
Briefly: where should landscape studies be
heading? Im not a great believer in guidelines,
and what follows are simply my personal inclinations. I do believe that our theoretical, as
well as our practical, understanding of landscapes should espouse acceptance of disorder
and untidiness. Our theories of landscape
should embrace ambiguity and contradiction,
eschew closure, recognize that people, things,
places are always in process, and that the
boundaries between them are permeable and
imbricated.
We should be suspicious of the contemporary passion institutional and personal for
theoretical innovation, for discarding and moving on. We might note how snugly this practice
fits within a wider set of present-day political,
economic and social relationships. It might be
more useful to recognize and contextualize the
swing of the theoretical pendulum, and to consider how, when it swings back, it incorporates,
but also transforms, earlier conceptualizations.
Thus, for example, one might want to consider
how and why, in the earlier twentieth century,
the prehistoric social landscape of Europe was
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REFERENCES
Andrijasevic, R. (2003) The difference borders make:
(ill)legality, migration and trafficking in Italy
among Eastern European women in prostitution,
in S. Ahmed, C. Castaneda, A.-M. Fortier and
M. Sheller (eds), Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions
of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg.
Aug, I. (1994) On not speaking Chinese: postmodern
ethnicity and the politics of diaspora, New
Formations, 24: 4.
Aug, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Aziz, H. (2001) Cultural keepers, cultural brokers:
the landscape of women and children a case
study of the town Dahab in south Sinai, in
B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes:
Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 12132.
Ballard, C. (2002) The signature of terror: violence,
memory and landscape at Freeport, in B. David
and M. Wilson (eds), Inscribed Landscapes: Marking
and Making Space. Honolulu, HI: University of
Hawaii Press, pp. 326.
Barghouti, M. (2000) I Saw Ramallah. Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press.
Barrell, J. (1972) The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of
Place, 17301840. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Barrell, J. (2002) Mr and Mrs Equivalent, Times
Literary Supplement, 8 November, pp. 201.
Barrett, J. (1994) Fragments from Antiquity. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Basso, K. (1996) Wisdom sits in High Places.
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Basso, K. and Feld, S., eds (1996) Senses of Place.
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Basu, P. (2001) Hunting down home: reflections on
homeland and the search for identity in the
Scottish diaspora, in B. Bender and M. Winer
(eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and
Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 33348.
Bender, B., ed. (1993) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives.
Oxford: Berg.
Bender, B. (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford:
Berg.
Bender, B. (1999) Subverting the Western gaze: mapping alternative worlds, in P. Ucko and R. Layton
(eds), The Archaeology and Anthropology of
Landscape. London: Routledge, pp. 3145.
Bender, B. (2002) Time and landscape, Current
Anthropology, 43 (supplement): pp. S103S112.
Bender, B. and Winer, M. eds (2001) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg.
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20
CULTURAL MEMORY
Paul Connerton
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CULTURAL MEMORY
now includes the marble counter top from the
Caf du Croissant at which Jaurs drank his last
cup of coffee.
If this is the evidence for the memory boom
academic studies of national memory, historical
controversies concerning tragic episodes in the
recent past, the culture of retributive justice and
the public apology, the strategy of cultural salvage and invented tradition what of its causes?
Two in particular deserve to be singled out.
The first is the repercussions of twentiethcentury totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes
revealed the existence of a danger hitherto
unsuspected in history, that of the intentional
systematic effacement of memory. There had,
of course, been systematic destruction of the
documents and monuments of opponents
previously. The Spanish Conquistadores burnt
and extinguished all the material traces which
might have remained as evidence of the greatness of the peoples they vanquished. But they
attacked only the official sources which transmitted the memory of conquered peoples, and
allowed many other forms of the memory of
vanquished peoples to survive, for example
their oral narrations and poetry.
Both the Third Reich and the former Soviet
Union, by contrast, waged an obsessive and
total war on memory. Himmler said that the
Final Solution was a glorious page in history
which had never been written and never would
be. The Nazi apparatus of genocide was to be
responsible both for the murder and for the
forgetting of the murder. Under the pressure of
defeat, starting in 1943, the Nazis burnt the
corpses and systematically destroyed the
weapons of their crime; hasty efforts were made
to get rid of potential witnesses through death
marches. Victims who did in fact survive have
told how they were terrified that the attempted
cover-up might in the end succeed. Compared
with twelve years in Nazi Germany, a time span
of many decades shaped the attempt to asphyxiate the memory of victims in the former Soviet
Union. Remembering had been dangerous since
the 1920s, and only with the beginning of
Glasnost in 1986 did it become politically possible
to initiate openly the project of collecting oral
histories. In the countries of East Central Europe
annexed by the Soviet Union, too, memory was
censored, whether because it had a religious
character, or because it testified to the crimes of
the Soviet Union, or because it related to political forces which were judged by the state apparatus to be anti-communist, or nationalist, or
Jewish. In East Central Europe, as in the Soviet
Union, the history of the revolution had been
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CULTURAL MEMORY
of the nation-state. But in any event the classic
works of Maurice Halbwachs and Frances Yates
prefigure this contemporary preoccupation.
No reader can fail to observe the dominance
of spatial metaphors framework, place,
space, localizing, situating in Halbwachss
descriptions of social memory, or to appreciate
the persuasiveness with which Yates excavated
a long tradition of Western rhetoric with its
stress upon the explicit spatialization of
sequences of argument in imagined loci as the
support to a trained memory. Their stimulus
has been taken up most comprehensively, of
course, in the vast collection of studies partly
available in three volumes in English under the
title Realms of Memory and completed under the
direction of Pierre Nora. As a celebration of
national identity in an era of national decline
the design of Noras enterprise is easily
discernible, as a study in the mnemonics of place
its lineaments are more difficult to decipher.
Noras enterprise is a confusing cornucopia.
When he speaks of lieux de mmoire the word lieu
fulfils two distinct types of function. Sometimes
it is used literally to refer to features of topography: Lascaux, Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, street
names. At other times it is employed figuratively to refer to tokens of cultural identity: the
Marseillaise, Bastille Day, gastronomy, the
memoirs of Chateaubriand, Stendhal and
Poincar. Noras enterprise loses in logical
coherence what it gains in comprehensiveness of
treatment. No such incoherence mars other studies of place as a site of memory: Rudy Koshars
From Monuments to Traces, or Raphael Samuels
Theatres of Memory, or James Youngs The Texture
of Memory.9
A further theme of discussion has been the
experience of memory in the era of modernity.
Beginning from the general assumption that
memory has a history, a number of scholars
have argued that the history of memory in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is unlike
that of any other period. Focusing on the generation and a half between 1870 and 1914, Matt
Matsuda has documented the ways in which it
was obsessed by the meanings and uses of
memory: how clinics, hospitals and laboratories
were staffed by psychologists and neurologists
who located memory in the tissues, organs,
muscles and structures of the human body; how
print memory proliferated in the new availability
of mass-circulation newspapers; how the cinematic image was able not only to represent but
also to preserve visual reality; how knowledge
of the file, the accumulation of documents
and images, was increasingly an instrument
of state. Others have suggested that there is a
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CULTURAL MEMORY
signalled by two types of semantic evidence,
one the emergence of a new type of vocabulary,
the other the disappearance of a now obsolete
vocabulary. On the one hand, certain substantives, which refer at once to historical movements in the present and to projects for the
future, enter the currency: History, Revolution,
Liberalism, Socialism, Modernity itself.15 On the
other hand, certain words previously employed
by writers in English cease to be used and are no
longer easily recognizable: memorous (memorable), memorious (having a good memory),
memorist (one who prompts the return of memories), mnemonize (to memorize), mnemonicon
(a device to aid the memory).16 Could there be a
more explicit indication than that signalled in
these two semantic changes of what is thought
desirable and what is thought dispensable?
3. Forgetting as repressive erasure appears in its
most brutal forms, of course, in the history of
totalitarian regimes, where, in Milan Kunderas
often quoted words, the struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.17 But repressive erasure need not always
take such transparently malign forms; it can be
encrypted covertly and without apparent violence. Consider, for instance, the way in which
the spatial disposition of the modern art gallery
presents the visitor with nothing less than an
iconographic programme and a master historical narrative; by walking through the museum
the visitor will be prompted to internalize the
values and beliefs written into the architectural script.18 Entering the Great Hall of the
Metropolitan in New York, for example, the visitor stands at the intersection of the museums
principal axes. To the left is the collection of
Greek and Roman art; to the right is the
Egyptian collection; directly ahead, at the summit of the grand staircase that continues the axis
of the entranceway, is the collection of European
paintings beginning with the High Renaissance.
An entire iconographic programme establishes
the overriding importance of the Western tradition and the implicit injunction to remember it.
But the collection of Oriental and other types of
non-Western art, as well as the medieval collection, are invisible from the Great Hall. They are
included, yet they are also edited out. In exhibiting a master narrative, the museums spatial
script is overt in its acts of celebratory remembrance, covert in its acts of editing-out and erasure. Here too the struggle of man against power
is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
4. Politically expedient forgetting is distinct
from this. Like erasure, it is precipitated by an
act of state, but it differs from erasure because
it is believed to be in the interests of all parties
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CULTURAL MEMORY
NOTES
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
REFERENCES
Assmann, A. (1999) Erinnerungsrume. Formen und
Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedchtnisses. Munich:
C.H. Beck.
Aug, M. (1998) Les Formes de loubli. Paris: Payot et
Rivages.
Barnes, J.A. (1947) The collection of genealogies,
RhodesLivingstone Journal, 5: 4855.
Boyer, M.C. (1996) The City of Collective Memory.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
323
Carsten, J. (1996) The politics of forgetting: migration, kinship and memory on the periphery of the
Southeast Asian state, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (n.s.) 1: 31735.
Caruth, C., ed. (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Casey, E. (1987) Remembering: a Phenomenological Study.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Duncan, C. and Wallach, A. (1980) The universal
survey museum, Art History, 3: 44269.
Evans, R.J. (1989) In Hitlers Shadow: West German
Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi
Past. New York: Pantheon.
Felman, S. and Laub, D., eds (1992) Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.
London and New York: Routledge.
Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. (1992) Social Memory.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Forty, A. and Kchler, S. (1999) The Art of Forgetting.
Oxford and New York: Berg.
Friedlnder, S. (1979) When Memory Comes. New York:
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.
Friedlnder, S., ed. (1992) Probing the Limits of Representation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fussell, P. (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goody, J. (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1925) Les Cadres sociaux de la mmoire.
Paris: F. Alcan.
Halbwachs, M. (1941) La Topographie lgendaire des
Evangiles en Terre-Sainte. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time
in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London:
Routledge.
Judt, T. (1992) The past is another country: myth and
memory in postwar Europe, Daedalus, 121: 83118.
Kaes, A. (1989) From Hitler to Heimat: the Return
of History as Film. Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
Klein, K.L. (1998) On the emergence of memory in
historical discourse, Representations, 69: 12750.
Klein, N.M. (1997) The History of Forgetting: Los
Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. London: Verso.
Kleinman, A. (1986) Social Origins of Distress and
Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern
China. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press.
Kleinman, A. and Kleinman, J. (1994) How bodies
remember: social memory and bodily experience
of criticism, resistance, and delegitimation following Chinas Cultural Revolution, New Literary
History, 25: 70723.
Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: on the Semantics of
Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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PART IV
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21
TECHNOLOGY AS MATERIAL CULTURE
Ron Eglash
Figure 21.1
The hands
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Cambrian
570
Placental
mammals
piais
Maru
es
Trituberculat
Multituberculates
Monotremes
Crocodiles
Dinosaurs
Birds
Snakes and
lizards
Anurans
Turtles
Urodeles
Caecilians
Lungfishes
Latimeria
Sturgeon
INO
DIPNOI
RINCROSSOPT
ERYGII
TH
OD
ON
TS
AN
AP
SID
PA
RA S
PS
I
DI DS
AP
SI
DS
Viviparity
BY
II
YG
ER
T
OP
LA
D
TES
NO
DA
HI
OR
C
CH
E
O
OT
PR
Ordovician
500
M
ER
Silurian
425
Devonian
405
OSTRACODERMS
PL
AC
OD
ER
MS
Mississippian
345
ACANTHODIAN
Pennsylvanian
310
PALEONISCIDS
HOLO
PTE
STEI
RYG C
II HONDR
OSTE
I
TELEOSTEI
CHI
BRAN
ELASMO
)
ir
h
ic
s (B
teru
p
ly
Po
MYXINI
Permian
280
HOLOCEPHALI
PETROMYZONTES
Triassic
230
UROCHORDATA
Jurassic
180
HEMICHORDATA
Cretaceous
135
CEPHALOCHORDATA
TIME
MILLION YEARS
Tertiary
63
Gari Bowfin
ACT
330
5:51 PM
RC
NS
SA IDISTIA
RHIP
Lungs
Paired appendages
TH
Homeothermy
RS
S
D
I
AU
S
S
P
NA
CO
SY ELY
P
RS
Mammalian stance
U
SA
LO
TY
CO
ID
PS
A
ER
Amniotic egg
Tetrapod limbs
Jaws
bony
Earliest vertebrate fossils
late Cambrian
Figure 21.2 Phylogenetic tree of the vertebrates. The width of the branches indicates the relative
number of recognized genera for a given time level on the vertical axis. (Time in millions of years
indicates the beginning of geological periods).
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331
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL PARALLELS
TO SCOT
While SCOT has been primarily the province
of historians, political scientists, philosophers,
and sociologists, anthropologists have been in
conversation with the body of work associated
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POSTMODERNIST ANALYSES
While social construction is widely regarded as
a framework of the postmodern era, few of the
authors mentioned in the previous high
modern section would regard themselves as
postmodernists: their citations are to Weber and
Durkheim, not Derrida and Foucault. For the
purposes of this book postmodernism presents
a unique challenge: generally postmodernism
takes the semiotic turn in analyzing material
objects as sign systems. In that sense there is
very little that is actually material to be found
in the material culture analysis of postmodernism. Take, for example, Traweeks famous
(1988) analysis of particle detector technology. She provides a detailed analysis of the
symbolic meanings of such detectors in the
lives of the physicists as symbols of the relations between nature and culture, male and
female, life cycles of both laboratories and
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COMPLEXITY THEORY
Based on the previous sections, one might have
the mistaken impression that although social
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Figure 21.3
Community
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337
Power
Amplitude
Time
White noise
Power
Amplitude
Frequency
Time
Fractal noise
Complexity
Frequency
Periodic
Fractal
Random
noise
noise
noise
Figure 21.4 Postmodern era (post-1970s) view: complexity as between random and ordered
(CrutchfieldSmale measure)
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Figure 21.5
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Dependence
Consumer
marketing
research
Figure 21.6
339
Independence
Consumer
ombudsman
Participatory
design
Science shops,
community
workshops
Spontaneous
reinterpretation,
adaptation,
reinvention
NOTE
REFERENCES
Adas, Michael (1989) Machines as the Measure of
Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Arthur, W. Brian (1994) Increasing Returns and Path
Dependence in the Economy. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P. and Pinch, T.J. (1987)
The Social Construction of Technological Systems.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloor, David (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery.
London and Boston, MA: Routledge.
Boserup, Ester (1970) Womans Role in Economic
Development. London: Allen & Unwin.
Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1992) Dont throw
the baby out with the bath school!, in Andrew
Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 34368.
Diamond, Jared (1996) Guns, Germs, and Steel: the
Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton.
Douthwaite, B., Keatinge, J.D.H. and Park, J.R. (2002)
Learning selection: an evolutionary model for
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CONSUMPTION
Daniel Miller
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CONSUMPTION
what became a highly ascetic version of Western
Marxism. A version of Marxism curiously out of
synch with Eastern Marxism, where the Soviet
Union proclaimed it would outdo capitalism in
bringing wealth to the people. But the critical
edge was also strong in other perspectives, such
as those influenced by Weber, one of which by
Campbell (1986) became an important contribution to more recent attempts to define modern
consumerism, in this case as synonymous with
hedonism.
Those writings within Western Marxism in
turn developed a more general critique of consumption as simply the end point of capitalism.
This is evident in the more recent writings of
influential sociologists such as Baudrillard
(1988), though others such as Bauman (1991)
would also fit this characterization (see Warde
1994). According to this perspective the massive spread of consumer goods as acts of symbolizing has reached such a level that while
goods once stood for persons and relationships,
for example symbolic of class and gender, they
now come to replace them (Baudrillard 1988).
Such is the power of commerce to produce
social maps based on the distinctions between
goods that actual consumers are relegated to
the passive role of merely fitting themselves
into such maps by buying the appropriate signs
of their lifestyle. Humanity has become
merely the mannequins that sport the categories created by capitalism.
The combination of these critiques has led in
turn to a characterization of the modern world
as an endless circuit of superfluous signs
leading to a superficial postmodern existence
that has lost authenticity and roots. Both
Baudrillard and Bauman have been powerful
influences behind this stance. The tenor of such
contributions is in some ways surprising. If
this century has seen whole populations identifying themselves through consumption rather
than production, this might have been viewed
as progress. We might have welcomed a shift
from identity being founded in something
most people do for wages and under pressure
(see Gortz 1982) to finding identity within a
process over which they have far more control.
We might have argued that capitalism has far
more direct control over peoples identities as
workers than as consumers. The problems of
people being defined by their labour also
extended to women being relegated to domestic
labour as their natural domain. But Marx and
other writers that were foundational to critical
studies actually welcomed such identification
with labour as a more authentic form of humanity. One result of this critique of consumption
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of philosophy and other cultural arenas as an
element of the emergent political process.
Not surprisingly, given the topic of consumption, a particular focus in historical research has
been the early modern period. For example,
Mukerji (1983) with respect to Europe, examines
the move from elite to popular arts (for a parallel in Japan see Akai 1994), while Shammas
(1993) examines the more general shifts in
the consumption of groceries and consumer
durables in the Anglo-American world. There is
also growing historical work on non-European
regions such as Clunas (1999) on China, for
example, including an extended examination
as to why mass consumption arose in Europe as
opposed to China (Pomeranz 2000). This has
been an important corrective to what otherwise
has been a largely Euro-centred literature.
For these historical researches the key early
publication was The Birth of a Consumer Society
(McKendrick et al. 1983), which stimulated a
large literature both as to whether there is a
distinctive form to contemporary consumption
and, if so, when it began. Crucial to this debate
is the question as to whether modern consumption is actually a different kind of activity
in intention and nature from merely the use of
goods in prior times. The most powerful advocate of such a periodization is Campbell (1986),
who defines modern consumption around the
issue of unprecedented hedonism, although historians such as Schama (1987) (working under a
parallel inspiration from Weber), suggest something closer to older forms of ambivalence.
The two disciplines that have retained more
or less continuous interest in this topic have
been Economics and Business Studies. Both
represent the traditional view of consumption
as essentially the study of peoples relationships to the market place. In practice economics
has concentrated upon theory and modelling,
based largely upon aggregate data, and
Business Studies has developed a more empirically focused set of studies often concerned with
an isolated micro-environment of consumer
choice. Lancaster (1966) may be seen as a classic example of more typical economic concerns,
featuring highly abstracted and generalized
models of consumer decision making which are
starting to be attacked even within that discipline (e.g. Fine 1995). In effect these are the
models of what consumption needs to be for
other aspects of neoclassical economic theory to
work. There has grown up a kind of economistic imperialism which tries to project these
approaches on to other disciplinary concerns
with consumption, as for example in the work
of Becker and some of his followers (Becker
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their potential articulation with previously
existing forms of consumption, which in some
ways could outwit the meanings which colonial authorities wished to impose upon the way
people dressed and appeared in public. Finally
through careful ethnography Osella and Osella
(1999) demonstrate that such localization of
consumption becomes if anything more important for people such as those they worked with
in Kerala who, as in many regions peripheral to
metropolitan capitalism, are greatly affected by
remittances from those working abroad. They
may use the money to develop their consumption practices along highly specific lines that
can be understood only in terms of the particular structures and concerns of each of the many
groups that make up a particular region.
The evidence from East Asia has been particularly important in challenging assumptions
about globalization inevitably meaning homogenization. Even such icons of globalization as
McDonalds are given a particularly Chinese
inflection by Yan (1997) through his study of
their consumption in Beijing (see also Miller
1997 on Coca-cola). For example, Davis (2000)
indicates through her summary of a whole
series of articles the many nuances and contradictions we would have to take into account in
assessing the rise of affluence in a particular
region, in this case the area around Shanghai,
which has become the vanguard of mass consumption within contemporary China.
Sometimes this influence is highly nuanced.
So, for example, a study by Burke (1996) based
on historical materials from Zimbabwe shows
that there certainly are cases where the rise
of demand, in this case for soap, does seem
to develop in accordance with the pressure
of advertising and marketing, while other
demands, as for margarine, come from cultural
practices that remain outside capitalist authority.
Other studies accord more easily with the
emphasis in sociology upon capitalist hegemony. For example, also in Africa, Gunilla and
Beckman (1985) document an indigenous and
readily available staple food being replaced by
the rise of an expensive imported staple (see
also Weismantel 1988). These are of particular
consequence in such areas, given the huge
inequalities in income and power.
This concern with the impact of capitalism
brings out the other side to the anthropological
coin. As well as examining specific locations,
the discipline has also contributed to the rise of
new studies of globalization. Following from
historical work such as Braudel (1981) and
Wallerstein (2000), one of the clearest examinations of the way production in one region
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still limited and the need for architects to
acknowledge the consequences of their work
for consumers remains.
The same general point that any genre
of commodity needs to acknowledge its implications for the effects it has on consumers
stands for a wide range of other topics. For
example, clothing studies have traditionally
been just as obsessed with the study of designers, especially haute couture designers, to the
almost complete neglect of the effects of clothing upon users. Although there is good historical work that shows the integrity of clothing
and the sense of the self (e.g. Sennet 1977) and
also anthropological work on non-industrial
societies making a similar point (e.g. Kchler in
press; Henare in press), only recently has this
been applied to the study of the mass consumption of clothing. What was required was
more ethnographic work that sought to consider clothing from the point of view of actually
what it means to wear particular clothes (e.g.
Banerjee and Miller 2003; Clarke and Miller
2002; Dalby 2001; Freeman 2000; Woodward
2005). There has also been some rapprochement
with new writing in clothing history, ranging
from Summers (2001) valuable study of the
Victorian corset through Brewards (1995)
historical work on clothing more generally
in Britain. Recent work on the relationship
between style and being gay has also contributed to this new work (e.g. Mort 1996;
Nixon 1996). A final way in which the materiality of clothing has also come to the fore is
through new writing about second-hand clothes
either sold as garments (e.g. Hansen 2000) or in
particular the implications of its materiality
when it is shredded and remanufactured for
resale (e.g. Norris forthcoming).
Perhaps even more surprising than the
neglect of housing as something lived in and
clothing as something worn has been the same
lacuna with respect to the consumption of
media. Given that while the consumption of
clothing has not been seen as worthy of journalistic attention in its own right, the effects
and consequences of the media are front-stage
in so many discussions of contemporary society.
Yet this concern only really arose with the
development of audience research represented
by figures such as Morley (1992) and Ang
(1985). Once again, students of material culture
have sought to broaden these changes by paying greater attention to the role of materiality
in specific forms of media and the subsequent
impact upon the creation of sociality. An example of this is Tacchis (1998) work on the consumption of radio in the home. This is a
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them and understand the responsibilities that
arise when we benefit as consumers through
low prices at the expense of others. One of the
most poignant examples of the logic behind
this material culture approach to understand
how we constitute ourselves as humanity may
be found in a study which balances the acquisition of objects with our relinquishing of
objects. Layne (2000, 2002) focused upon
women who had suffered from late foetal loss
or stillbirth. She found that the main concern of
the parents who had suffered such loss was to
demonstrate that for them what had been lost
was not simply a thing but a real person, a relation, a child. The most effective way they could
achieve this constitution of their loss as that of
a person was through the relationship with the
things they had purchased in expectation of
the birth and were therefore the possessions of
the deceased: though their gradual separation
from these objects and their continued inclusion of the lost individual in gifting, such as
purchases of objects for what would have been
their birthday, or on behalf of the dead for their
own birthdays. They were able to constitute
and then separate from those they had lost.
What this study demonstrates is how a genuine material culture approach to consumption
is one that starts from and ends with the
understanding of humanity as enhanced rather
than reduced by also recognizing its intrinsic
materiality (Miller in press).
NOTES
1
2
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Akai, Tatsuro (1994) The common people and painting, in C. Nakane and S. Oishi (eds), Tokugawa
Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas. London: Methuen.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (1986) The Social Life of Things.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appelby, Joyce (1993) Consumption in early modern
social thought, in John Brewer and Roy Porter
(eds), Consumption and the World of Goods. London:
Routledge, pp. 162173.
Attfield, Judy (2000) Wild Things. Oxford: Berg.
Banerjee, M. and Miller, D. (2003) The Sari. Oxford:
Berg.
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Lally, E. (2002) At Home with Computers. Oxford:
Berg.
Lancaster, K. (1966) A new approach to consumer
theory, Journal of Political Economy, 74: 13257.
Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism. New York:
Norton.
Layne, L. (2000) He was a real baby with baby
things, Journal of Material Culture, 5: 32145.
Layne, L. (2002) Motherhood Lost. New York:
Routledge.
Lebergott, S. (1993) Pursuing Happiness: American
Consumers in the Twentieth Century. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Leslie, D. and Reimer, S. (1999) Spatializing commodity chains, Progress in Human Geography, 23:
40120.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1972) The Savage Mind. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Lunt, P. (1995) Psychological approaches to consumption, in D. Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption.
London: Routledge, pp. 23863.
Macdonald, S. (2002) Behind the Scenes at the Science
Museum. Oxford: Berg.
Manuel, P. (1993) Cassette Culture. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Marcoux, J.-S. (2001) The refurbishment of memory,
in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg,
pp. 6986.
Marcuse, H. (1964) One-dimensional Man: Studies in
the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London:
Routledge.
McCarthy, A. (2001) Ambient Television. Chapel Hill,
NC: Duke University Press.
McCracken, G. (1988a) Culture and Consumption.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
McCracken, Grant (1988b) Diderot unities and the
Diderot effects, in Culture and Consumption.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
pp. 11829.
McHeyman, Josiah (1997) Imports and standards of
justice on the Mexico-United States border, in
B. Orlove (ed.), The Allure of the Foreign: Imported
Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, pp. 15183.
McKendrick, N., Brewer, J. and Plumb, J. (1983) The
Birth of a Consumer Society. London: Hutchinson.
Meskell, L. (2004) Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt.
Oxford: Berg.
Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass
Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
Miller, Daniel, ed. (1995) Acknowledging Consumption:
a Review of New Studies. London: Routledge.
Miller, Daniel (1997) Coca-cola: a black sweet drink
from Trinidad, in D. Miller (ed.), Material Cultures.
London: UCL Press and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 169187.
Miller, D. (1998a) A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
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23
STYLE, DESIGN, AND FUNCTION
Margaret W. Conkey
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SOMETHING OF A HISTORICAL
OVERVIEW
Of course, Franz Boas (1927, see also Jonaitis
1995) is usually the anthropological baseline for
the study of objects and primitive art, although
contemporary material culture studies today
would go back to major theorists of culture (e.g.,
Marx, Veblen, Simmel). Even though Boass
(1927) chapter 5 was on style, anthropologists
usually trace their roots in the study of style to
Kroeber (e.g., 1919, 1957) and the art historical
roots to scholars such as Wlfflin (1932; see also
Gombrich 1960; Saerlander 1983). Lemonnier
(1993b: 7) identified the 1930s as the period
when there is a noticeable decline in an interest
in material culture; it was only in France, he
points out, that an institutionalized study of the
anthropology of techniques took hold. Thus, the
work of Mauss (e.g., 1935) on techniques du corps
as well as his more well known study The Gift
(1967/1925) may provide an important bridge
between this time period and what would
become, by the 1980s, an increasingly robust
field of technology studies (e.g. Lemonnier 1986,
1993a; Pfaffenberger 1988, among many; see
Eglash, Chapter 21 in this volume). Lemonnier
notes (1986: 181 n. 3) that in one valiant attempt
at recuperating the anthropological study of
material culture, Reynolds (1983) astutely marvels justly at the immediate disinterest of ethnologists for the objects they confer on museums as
soon as they are deposited.
This is not to say, though, that within this socalled gap there was little being done; its just
not of major focus in an anthropology of objects
that is waiting backstage for certain trends to
pass on and for the curtain to be opened on to a
more robust engagement with the object world.
First, archaeology does not really experience a
gap, but this is not surprising, given its dependence on material culture. However, despite
the momentum established with the rise of
the so-called New (or processual) Archaeology
with its emphasis on understanding the nature
and significance of variability in the archaeological record (Binford 1962, 1965), and the studies
that linked stylistic attributes to social phenomena (e.g., Hill 1970, Longacre 1970 and chapters
in Binford and Binford 1968), the primary flurry
of archaeological discussion and debate on
style, for example, came in the two decades
between 1970 and 1990. In fact, if we look for
review or overview articles on the concepts,
use, and study of style, for example, these are
primarily (only?) in archaeology (e.g., Plog
1983; Hegmon 1992; Conkey 1990; Boast 1997;
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RECENT APPROACHES TO
TECHNOLOGY AND ART THAT HAVE
INFLUENCED UNDERSTANDINGS
AND USES OF STYLE, DESIGN
AND FUNCTION
As already suggested, trends in the study
of our three characters style, design, and
function have been integrally enmeshed in,
produced by and yet contributed to shifts and
concerns in the broader anthropological and cultural interests in the study of technology, on the
one hand (e.g., Lemonnier 1986, 1993a; Dobres
and Hoffman 1999; see Eglash, Chapter 21 in
this volume) and art, on the other (e.g.,
Morphy 1994). In some ways, the trends in the
study of technology may have had more of an
impact on our three characters; perhaps this is
due to the growth of social studies of science
and technology (e.g., Jasanoff et al. 1995). From
Lechtmans (1977, 1984) important work that
argued for the place and power of technological practice and therefore of veritable technological styles in the making and meanings of
objects, to the engagement with technology
(sensu latu) as cultural productions, material
culture has not been thought of in quite the
same way, and certainly no longer as just the
forms or end products of previously unspecified, often assumed or ignored practices and
social relations of production. For a concept of
style in the manner of Schapiro (1953), with
a focus on forms, on form relationships, there
was no immediate attention to an understanding of the practices and social relations that
brought such forms into existence. One illustrative case study that might attest how far we
have come in the integration of technologies,
productive practices and social contexts in the
making of things and in the definition of style
would be the continuing work by Dietler and
Herbich (e.g., 1989, 1998) on Luo pottery making. Here, they remind us of not just the distinction between things and techniques (cf. Mauss
1935), but of the two (often conflated) senses of
style: style of action and material style. From several decades of new approaches to understanding technology (e.g., Lemonnier 1986, 1993a;
Pfaffenberger 1988, 1992; Ingold 1993; Dobres
and Hoffman 1994; Dobres 1995, 2000), and
from Bourdieus (1977) concept of habitus,
Dietler and Herbich (1998) put together a compelling case study of a more dynamic and
deeply social understanding of what had previously often been a focus on a static concept
of style and a mechanistic set of assumptions
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ON DESIGN
The debate and shifts in our understandings
about style, the influences from technology
studies and the new approaches to the
anthropology of art have all made their
mark on the study of design. The studies of
designs and decorations on objects are obviously integral to most ways in which style
has been approached. There is often an unconscious slippage from one to the other. Pye
(1982) argues that anyone studying material
culture must understand the fundamentals of
design; without design in some form or
another one cannot really make anything.
This is to consider design at the highest level;
that is, how an object is conceived of and put
together. In a difficult and somewhat classic
essay, Pye proposed six requirements for
design. As stated in the helpful editorial notes
by Schlereth that precede Pyes essay, what Pye
wants to do is to distinguish design as philosophical concept from solely sociological
considerations. In particular, Pye challenges
the presumedly uncomplicated and causal
relationship between design and function;
design is not conditioned only by its function.
Furthermore, its not clear there even is such a
thing as the purely functional. How a number
of factors affect design are Pyes focus: use, ease,
economy and appearance. An early archaeological study of this type of design (McGuire and
Schiffer 1983) wanted to focus on design as a
social process, while noting that the treatment
of the design process is usually subsumed
by discussions of either style or function (1983:
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ON FUNCTION
Some of what there is to say about function is
mentioned above, and yet this is a grand topic
in any aspect of the social sciences and in the
study of the material world. This is notably so
due to the importance of functionalism as an
approach for many decades (e.g., Eisenstadt
1990). If one goes looking for function as a
topic, there are instead plenty of references to
functionalism. On one hand, the study of art
and the material world was not very central to
mainstream developments (such as structural
functionalism) in anthropological theory until
the 1990s, and, on the other hand, theres very
little material culture in classic functionalist
social anthropology (but see, e.g., Firth 1936).
As well, most anthropological definitions of
art have to do with the aesthetic, rather than
sacred or functional qualities (Graburn 2001).
Yet much work was concerned with how art
styles, designs and forms function, particularly
how they function to maintain the social (e.g.,
Sieber 1962; Biebuyck 1973).
In the debate over the function(s) of style,
style came to take on communication as one of
its functions. And style became more substantive than just a residual dimension of material
culture that was left over once we had identified
what was functional about an object or class of
objects (e.g., Wobst 1977; Sackett 1982, contra
Dunnell 1978). Although early attempts at using
style in this way often produced quite functionalist interpretations where style was assumed to
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SOMETHING OF A SUMMARY:
THE STUDY OF CLOTH
In this section, I want to point to two primary
features of current studies of the style, design
and function of material culture: the centrality
now of attending to issues of choices, and the
destabilization of the communication functions and language metaphors. Embedded in
the recent trajectory of material culture studies
have been new approaches to and debates
about the anthropology of cloth, where both of
these features can be seen clearly. In the key
volume that took up the social life of things,
edited by Appadurai (1986), three (of eight)
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REFERENCES
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Anderson, R. (1979) Art in Primitive Societies.
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Attfield, J. (1999) Beyond the pale: reviewing the
relationship between material culture and design
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Attfield, J. (2000) Wild Things: the Material Culture of
Everyday Life. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Barrett, S.A. (1908/1996) Pomo Indian Basketry.
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Barry, H., III (1957) Relationships between child
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and Social Psychology, 54: 803.
Bascom, W. (1969) Creativity and style in African art,
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Art. Los Angeles, CA: University of California
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Biebuyck, D. (1973) The Lega: Art, Initiation and Moral
Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Binford, L. (1962) Archaeology as anthropology,
American Antiquity, 28 (2): 21725.
Binford, L. (1965) Archaeological systematics and
the study of culture process, American Antiquity,
31: 20310.
Binford, S. and Binford, L., eds (1968) New Perspectives
in Archaeology. Chicago: Aldine.
Bloch, M. (1974) Symbols, song, dance, and features of
articulation: is religion an extreme form of traditional
authority? European Journal of Sociology, 15: 5598.
Boas, F. (1927) Primitive Art. New York: Dover.
Boast, R. (1997) A small company of actors: a critique of style, Journal of Material Culture, 2: 17398.
Boser-Sarivaxvanis, R. (1969) Aperus sur la teinture
lindigo en Afrique occidentale. Basel: Naturforschenden Gesellschaft.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.
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Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a Social Critique of
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369
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24
EXCHANGE
James G. Carrier
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THE GIFT
Exchange has been an important topic in social
anthropology for about as long as the discipline
has existed; after all, it was the focus of one of
the founding works in the field in its modern
form, Bronislaw Malinowskis Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (1922). Inevitably, different
anthropologists have drawn on different intellectual resources as they have considered
exchange. However, the work that probably
has the greatest influence is Marcel Mausss The
Gift (1925/1990), the starting point of this
chapter.
Mausss slim book is an effort to identify
forms of the exchange of objects in different
societies, ranging from Polynesia and Melanesia
to modern France. His was a comprehensive
vision, and he was interested in placing
exchange in the context of social organization
and belief more generally. The work uses a core
model to explore a core question: how does
exchange serve to help build social groups, both
the groups that exist within society and society
itself?
The core of The Gift is a discussion of societies
in which the gift form of exchange predominates, societies of the gift. However, Mausss
overall approach is broadly developmental,
in which it echoes much early social science.
So Mauss was interested in the distinction
between Western industrial societies and preindustrial societies, which he (1925/1990: 47)
saw as stages in social evolution that mark a
number of general changes. One is the decreasing significance of large-scale, organized giving.
A second is an increasing cultural separation
of objects from people and social relationships:
We live in societies that draw a strict distinction . . . between things and persons
(1925/1990: 47). A third is a change in the
nature of and motivation for giving. For modern Western societies, gifts tend to be seen as
an expression of individual sentiment. On
the other hand, in gift societies, occasions of
gift giving are total social phenomena ... [in
which] all kinds of institutions are given
expression at one and the same time religious,
judicial, and moral . . . likewise economic
(1925/1990: 3). Mausss approach in The Gift,
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EXCHANGE
represents the relationship between giver and
recipient. To fail to give, to receive or to reciprocate would be to deny, or at least redefine,
that relationship.
In The Gift, Mauss took a critical view of modern France and, by extension, modern Western
capitalist societies more generally, though his
broadly developmental approach made this
criticism difficult to sustain and obscured it
somewhat. That critical view has two aspects.
First, he suggests that the distinction been
modern societies and societies of the gift is not
as radical as some might think. While these societies may be dominated by the gift, modern
societies also contain it. This assertion is, however, somewhat wistful, as Mauss describes an
attenuated set of practices among the French
peasantry or laws that are not enforced
(1925/1990: 667, 154 n. 5), or refers to reforms
that are laboriously in gestation but have yet to
bear fruit (for example 1925/1990: 678, 78).
Second, he approaches pre-modern societies as
forms to be understood on their own terms and,
more important, he uses them to illustrate an
aspect of transaction that tended to be ignored
in the economistic ideology that pervades
modern life (e.g. Dumont 1977). In effect, Mauss
was objecting to Adam Smiths (1776/1976: 17)
famous assertion of peoples innate propensity
to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for
another. For Mauss, there is nothing innate
about the sort of exchange that Smith meant. It
emerges from social circumstance, and if we
forget this, we cannot understand peoples lives
and societies. In spite of these elements in his
work, however, Mausss approach stresses the
differences between types of societies that are
part of a developmental or evolutionary
sequence: societies of the gift developing into
modern societies of purely individual contract,
of the market where money circulates, of sale
proper, and above all of the notion of price reckoned in coinage (1925/1990: 46).
Mausss treatment of types of transactions
and types of transactors in gift societies
attracted criticism from one of the anthropologists whose work he drew on, Malinowski and
his description of exchange on Kiriwina, in the
Trobriand Islands of Melanesia, in Argonauts.
This criticism is interesting, because it identifies a tension in the anthropological treatment
of exchange that persisted throughout the
twentieth century, a tension that, moreover,
helped restrict the context in which researchers
placed exchange.
In Argonauts (1922: 177), Malinowski included
a list of the sorts of exchange transactions that
he observed on Kiriwina, which to Mauss
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social reproduction of people, not just as
individual humans, but as members and
embodiments of kin groups. On the other hand,
commodity societies are oriented toward the
social production of things, not just material
objects but their identity and meaning as indifferent commodities. In these societies, people
are organized in terms of that production,
which means class relations and the division of
labour, and hence in terms of quantitative social
relationships (see generally Gregory 1982).
It is possible to criticize what Gregory has to
say by pointing to the importance of personal
transactions in commodity-based societies (e.g.
Carrier 1992) and of impersonal transactions in
gift-based systems (e.g. Gell 1992). However, it
is important to see that he has made a
sustained and persuasive effort to link social
and cultural, and even economic, aspects of
exchange to the broader social context in which
they occur. With Gregory, then, we move
beyond Mausss descriptive assertion that, in
societies of the gift, gifts express religious, judicial, moral and economic values and processes
to a coherent statement of how and why both
gifts and commodities do so in their respective
sorts of societies. We also see a broadening of
the context in which exchange is viewed, as
Gregory points us to much more than the
obligation to give, to receive and to reciprocate.
Gregory was not alone in seeing links
between forms of exchange and forms of social
life. Marilyn Strathern addressed such links as
well, in The Gender of the Gift (1988), though her
focus is narrower, being what she describes as
Melanesian societies. These are classic societies
of the gift, and Strathern elaborates on the ways
that people in such societies see the transactors
and the objects transacted in gift exchange as
intensely unalienated. She says that in these
societies neither people nor objects are independent entities. Rather, both are conceived in
terms of the social relationships that brought
them about, and in terms of the people, things
and relationships that they help to create.
The pig given in exchange, like the person
who gives it, is an embodiment of the people
involved in its past: the women who fed the
pigs and reared the children, the men who
cleared the gardens and built the houses, the
men and women who carried out the exchanges
that shaped the histories of all that is involved
in the exchange that we see today.
While Gregory and Strathern link exchange
to broader analytical issues, they still restrict
their concern to the field of beliefs and
processes within the society in which exchange
occurs. Claude Meillassoux (1981) represents
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UNDERSTANDINGS OF TRANSACTED
OBJECTS
I said that the third issue that Mausss work
raises is the ways that people understand the
objects transacted. Of course, because these
objects are part of the identities of and relationship between the transactors, their understanding of themselves and the object and their
understanding of the relationship will affect
each other.5 I want to begin to consider this
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EXCHANGE
In their ceremonial gift exchanges surrounding
marriage, death and the like, Ponams regularly
give large quantities of uncooked starch, most
commonly bags of rice (an introduced and
purchased foodstuff) and bundles of sago flour
(a traditional foodstuff prepared by people in
villages near by). Where the immediate family
that leads the ceremonial giving includes an
adult male who has migrated to work in one
or another of the countrys cities, that person
will play a prominent part in accumulating the
gift to be given, a part that will reflect the social
relationships that the migrant has built in
the city. The successful and conscientious
migrant will have established a network of
close relationships with other migrants from
the province who are also working in the city,
including those from the villages near Ponam
where sago is produced. The less successful
and conscientious migrant will not. When the
ceremonial exchange takes place, watching
Ponams do not simply assess the quantity of
starch given, they also see in it the social relationships that surrounded its acquisition. A
generous supply of traditional sago bundles
from nearby villages reveals a migrant who
has successfully engaged in the Western world
of city work; a generous supply of bags of
purchased rice reveals a migrant who has been
less successful, and so can contribute nothing
but money.
The heap of gifts at the door of a house on
Ponam is not, of course, the only place where the
objects exchanged carry a significant meaning
that attaches to the person who acquired them.
People often judge stores by the quality of the
commodities on their shelves. Likewise, they
often judge people by the quality of the things
associated with them, whether these be things
they possess, like the clothes they wear or the
car they drive, or the things they give.6 Consider,
for instance, a couple with a small child who is
in day care while the parents work. That care
can come through purchase, through state
provision, through a neighbourhood cooperative arrangement, through a grandparent or
other relative. Each of these ways of acquiring
child care speaks of the parents, in a variety of
possible ways.
The parents who pay for private provision
may thereby attest to their relative wealth, but
equally they may attest to a social isolation that
means that they are unable to arrange child
care through neighbours or relatives. The couple
who participate in a neighbourhood child-care
pool may attest to their poverty, or perhaps to
their integration into the social networks in
their area (see Narotzky 2005). The point is not
381
CONCLUSION
I have used a set of issues arising from Mausss
The Gift to describe important features in the
ways that anthropologists and others have
approached exchange. In doing this, I have
tried to indicate the ways that those issues and
approaches can take us very far from the conventional image of people giving to and receiving from each other, whether in a marriage
exchange in the plains of southern Africa or on
Christmas morning in Birmingham. I want to
use this concluding section to reflect on the
places that these studies of exchange have
taken us.
Conventional anthropological work on
exchange has focused primarily on the people
transacting and the situation in which they
transact: who gives what to whom, why, and
how they think about it. In addressing these
issues, this work has necessarily extended the
area of interest beyond the immediate time and
place of the exchange, but relatively little, and
generally these extensions are still linked
closely to the transacting parties.
However, I have tried to show that the recent
history of work on exchange has involved
addressing these same questions who, what,
why and how they think about it in terms
that extend far beyond the conventional focus on
the time and place of exchange. These extensions effectively trace the social and cultural
causes and consequences of the exchange to
ever broader times and places. While it is true
that conventional anthropological work devoted
relatively little time to these issues, it will not
do to say that it was blind to them. For instance,
I have shown how Malinowski looked to
broader places when he related individual kula
transactions in the Trobriands to a regional
system, and how Sahlins looked to broader
times when he related competitive exchange
in the New Guinea Highlands to the rise and
fall of sociopolitical groups.
When scholars have situated the people and
places they study in larger fields, the net is cast
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REFERENCES
NOTES
As this might indicate, the physical attributes of objects in exchange are relatively
unimportant in considerations of exchange.
Every so often, anthropologists are told that
they really should look at those attributes,
rather than seeing objects simply in terms of
their social and cultural corollaries. Just as
often, the advice is ignored (but see Keane
2001). Attention, then, remains fixed on
how people interpret the things exchanged,
whether in terms of the relationship in
which they are transacted or in terms of
cultural ascriptions of scarcity, gender,
history or the like.
Gregory has rejected the idea that he meant
to use the distinction between gifts and
commodities to classify societies, adding
nor have I ever suggested that we are
to commodities as they are to gifts. Such
an approach is anathema to me (Gregory
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EXCHANGE
H. Moore (ed.), Anthropological Theory Today.
Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 2447.
Codere, H. (1950) Fighting with Property: a Study of
Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare, 17921930.
Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Dalton, G., ed. (1967) Tribal and Peasant Economies:
Readings in Economic Anthropology. Garden City,
NY: Natural History Press.
Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1978) The World of
Goods. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Drucker, P. and Heizer, R.F. (1967) To Make my Name
Good: a Reexamination of the Southern Kwakiutl
Potlatch. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Dumont, L. (1977) From Mandeville to Marx: the
Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Fine, B. (2002) The World of Consumption: the Material
and Cultural Revisited. London: Routledge.
Gell, A. (1992) Inter-tribal commodity barter and
reproductive gift-exchange in old Melanesia, in
C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds), Barter,
Exchange and Value: an Anthropological Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 14268.
Gregory, C.A. (1980) Gifts to men and gifts to God:
gift exchange and capital accumulation in contemporary Papua, Man (n.s.), 15: 62652.
Gregory, C.A. (1982) Gifts and Commodities. New York:
Academic Press.
Gregory, C.A. (1997) Savage Money: the Anthropology
and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam:
Harwood Academic.
Gudeman, S. (2001) The Anthropology of Economy.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Gudeman, S. and Rivera, A. (1991) Conversations in
Colombia: the Domestic Economy in Life and Text.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, M. (2000) Life on the Amazon: the Anthropology
of a Brazilian Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Harriss, J., ed. (1982) Rural Development: Theories of
Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change. London:
Hutchinson.
Hendry, J. (1995) Wrapping Culture: Politeness,
Presentation and Power in Japan and other Societies.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Keane, W. (2001) Money is no object: materiality,
desire, and modernity in an Indonesian society, in
F.R. Meyers (ed.), The Empire of Things: Regimes of
Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe, CA: School of
American Research Press, pp. 6590.
LeClair, E.E., Jr and Schneider, H.K., eds (1968)
Economic Anthropology: Readings in Theory and
Analysis. New York: Holt Rinehart.
Leslie, D. and Reimer, S. (1999) Spatializing commodity chains, Progress in Human Geography, 23: 40120.
383
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Jon P. Mitchell
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(Gell 1998), material culture studies have at their
centre not the fixity of structure and system but
the fluidity of process, practice, performance
which in turn emphasize transformation of
objects and, reciprocally, persons (see especially
Kuechler 2002). It is transformation, then, that
provides the second theme of this chapter.
The chapter focuses on three types of material
transformation: of the body; of things; and of
space. In each case, it explores the ways in which
the relatively extraordinary performances of
ritual create transformations that are carried forward into everyday contexts. Ethnographically,
it examines initiation particularly in Papua
New Guinea; masking and masquerade in
West Africa; and public procession/parading
in Northern Ireland and southern Europe. It
explores the ways in which the bodily transformations of initiation transform everyday personhood such that, although initiation involves
a period of withdrawal from everyday life, the
experiential qualities of ritual performance
endure in the longer term, affecting everyday
performance. It examines the ways in which the
transformation of wood into mask, and then
mask into artefact of power, creates enduring
political legitimacy for those entitled to make,
own and perform the masks. Finally, it examines
the ways in which parading transforms political
and religious geography to establish and reinforce territorial claims which endure after performance is finished. The chapter therefore
emphasizes the long-term effects of ritual performance on the everyday order of material things.
The third theme of the chapter is the extent
to which, in and through performance, objects
of material culture become subjects. The transformations dealt with here, then, are not
merely the transformation of inert material
from one category to another, but a more substantive transformation in which the material
is endowed with the power to act with
agency. In the case of initiation, it is the agency
of the experiencing body that is critical, which
generates salient memories of terror that
endure in the initiand after their initiation. In
the case of masks, it is the agency of the mask
itself that is significant, which is produced
through careful craftsmanship, the correct
combinations of medicine and performance
itself. In the case of space, it is the agency of
spatial precedence created by previous performance. Where decisions are made and spatial
precedents established by a parade, these will
not only generate political geography in the
everyday but also require the reperformance of
correct spatiality in subsequent parades (see
Pina-Cabral 1984).
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PERFORMANCE
is a political process. Throughout his work he
uses the metaphor of the game. Habitus constitutes a feel for the game that enables people to
participate in the various fields or areas of
social life that they occupy. Where this feel for
the game becomes naturalized such that it is
utilized in a spontaneous manner by all participants where players becomes experts, one
might say, and where the techniques are uncontested doxa prevails. This is a condition in
which the terms of social hierarchy of social
power are uncontested, for example in the
modern education system, which exists for
Bourdieu not to expand or enlighten but to
ensure the reproduction of doxa. Fields, then,
create the mechanisms for the reproduction of
habitus that in turn ensure faith in doxa. They
also create mechanisms for monitoring and
managing entry into the field:
Practical faith is the condition of entry that every
field tacitly imposes, not only by sanctioning and
debarring those who would destroy the game, but
by so shaping things, in practice, that the operations
of selecting and shaping new entrants (rites of passage, examinations, etc.) are such as to obtain from
them that indisputed, pre-reflexive, nave, native
compliance with the fundamental presuppositions
of the field which is the very definition of doxa.
(Bourdieu 1990: 68)
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PERFORMANCE
they live in the initiation hut and are there given
the permanent elements of the transcendental
that they will take back with them into the vital,
everyday world after initiation. After the period
of seclusion, the children return, with the transcendental element dominant. They are now
part spirits and can themselves conquer the vitality of the pigs which are killed in the rituals
phase of rebounding violence. The ritual, then,
entails a movement from children being like
pigs, because vital, to being like spirits because
transcendental, and in doing so acknowledges
the presence in the Orokaiva person of pig-like
vitality and spirit-like transcendence at one
and the same time. It therefore mediates the relationship between the very mortal processes of
growth, reproduction and decay on the one
hand, and the transcendental institutions of
human life on the other. It also substantively
reconfigures the social world, not only through
the transformations inherent in ritual experience, but also through reordering the world of
social relations to accommodate the exchange
relations entered into by the newly initiated at
their final distribution of pig meat:
When the ritual is over, the society, in both its
material and relational aspects, has thus been completely renewed. The universe appears then as a
dense network of freshly constituted relations.
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seeing the body in performance as material
object to performative subject, then the same
might be said of material artefacts in performance. As with the body, recent theorists have
suggested that we move away from seeing artefacts as objects and rather see them as active
subjects in a web of relationships between
persons and things. Part of this movement, as
with the rethinking of the body, involves a
movement away from principally semiological
understandings of the relationship between
materiality and meaning in which the former
is seen to stand for or symbolize the latter to
understand material artefacts as things-inthemselves. As Pels et al. put it:
it is not so much what materials . . . symbolise
within social action that matters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks
of sociality/materiality . . . materials are not given
meaning by a volitional will but are taken as
actants; their agency is understood as constituted
as a relational and non-volitional will-as-force.
(Pels et al. 2002: 2)
391
THE TRANSFORMATION OF
OBJECTS: MASKS
As Layton (2003) suggests, the focus on agency
necessarily draws us towards Giddenss theorization of agency, and particulary his linkage
of agency with questions of power. In the context of West African masks, and particularly
those of the Dogon in Mali, Hoffman asks very
similar questions to those of Gell in attempting
to account for the quality of art objects
though rather than focusing on agency she
emphasizes power as a property of artefacts
we consider noteworthy or masterpieces
(1995). Power understood as an underlying but
central driving force of all things is a common
feature of West African conceptions of the universe (Arens and Karp 1999, Horton 1997).
This is often linked to ideas about sorcery and
witchcraft as technologies of harnessing this
power (Geschiere 1997), and to initiation cults,
secret societies and masquerade associations as
legitimate custodians of the means to invoke
power. Such power is evident in masterpieces
or, as the Dogon sculptors say, works that
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and materials can be arranged in such a configuration as to make them effective; to allow
people to accomplish things with them. Komo
masks embody and contain such effectiveness:
(1998: 131)
(1995: 58)
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PERFORMANCE
exact configurations of daliluw he has included.
Any other smith would have difficulty controlling the mask and harnessing the particular
flows of nyama. It is possible that such attempts
might end in death for the wearer (1988: 1334).
Masks are therefore initially inseparable from
their maker and their wearer so much so that
when a komo leader/mask wearer/masquerade
performer dies, his mask is carefully hidden
until a new leader is found who is strong
enough and knowledgeable enough to wear
the mask. There is a symbiotic relationship
between masks and their performers. Through
performance, masks acquire power as they take
on the properties of their successful deployment, which increases their nyama, giving them
increased capacity for action (1988: 135). Older
masks are therefore more powerful. Similarly,
older komo leaders older performers are
more powerful, as knowledge and experience
generate potency and the capacity for success.
Thus, through performance, both mask and
masker are transformed. The mask, already
transformed from its raw materials from an
object into a subject with power acquires
greater power, greater agency, greater capacity
to act. The masker is transformed, both permanently through the acquisition of power from,
in and through the mask, and temporarily
during the performance itself: Many makers
and users of African masks . . . seem to regard
their creations not as a mere disguise, nor
as the semiotic representation of some
spiritual feeling, but as a real transformation
of the mask carriers personality (Tonkin
1979: 240).
Such transformation links back to the transformations of Melanesian and Gisu initiation,
for, as well as being intiators, masking associations such as the Mande komo association also
have their own initiation processes. Such
processes also entail a transformation that
links persons to wider sources of power and
authority, as embodied in the masking association or society. In Nunleys (1987) treatment of
Sierra Leone Ode-lay societies masquerade
societies based on Yoruba ideas and practices
initiation involves the ingestion by initiands of
secret-society medicine juju or ogun after
which they become an organic part of the
group. Like the Mande daliluw, ogun is a power
or capacity to effect change in both natural and
supernatural realms, and is characterized more
by what it does than what it is (1987: 68). It is
what makes the society, its members and its
masks effective. Ogun is contained in both masquerader and mask, ensuring that they are far
more than mere symbols of the group; they are
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PERFORMANCE
trappings marching bands, militarist colours,
etc. Such triumphalism has been controversial
and was arguably intended to be so since the
early days. There is contemporary controversy
over parade routes, and this I would argue has
its origins in earlier disputes about the material
culture of the parades. In the early nineteenth
century, the routes began to be embellished
with archways erected over the roads for
paraders to pass through (Jarman 1998: 48).
These began as floral displays, incorporating
orange lilies, laurels and evergreen, and
topped with a painting of King William King
Billy at the Boyne; they later developed into
more elaborate iron structures with several
arches topped with more explicit contemporary
political references (1998: 49).
The arches were derived from the ancient
Roman idea of the triumphal arch, which
endowed those passing through it with the
qualities and virtues of the decoration in this
case, Orangeism (1998: 48). They therefore
marked a claim over space such that all those
who passed through the arch were considered
complicit in the celebration of the original victory. Inevitably, the Catholic populations
objected to the Orange arches, erecting their
own Green arches to mark off Catholic nationalist territory. As Jarman confirms: these
developments mark the beginnings of the visible sectarianism of space (1998: 49).
In time, these arches became unfashionable,
but were replaced by more permanent manifestations of sectarian hegemony. In the early
twentieth century the first murals appeared in
the streets of Belfast, initially located in the
same places as and replacing the triumphal
arches (1998: 70). Similarly, the temporary
bunting hung from lamp posts and houses
along the parade routes was supplemented by
the more permanent painting of kerbsides and
lamp posts with the colours of political loyalty
(1998: 209). As with the arches, the Catholic
communities responded with their own
colour-coded demarcations, which permanently inscribed sectarianism in space red,
white and blue for Protestant loyalist areas;
green, white and orange for Catholic nationalist areas. This contributed to the ghettoization
and mutual exclusivity of the two communities, establishing effective no go areas for
Catholics and Protestants respectively. Here,
practices originating in the temporary spatiality of the Orange parades come to permanently
transform the everyday space of Belfast and
Northern Ireland.
Although the parades lead to the fixing of
sectarian spatial zones, the Orange parades
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TRANSFORMATIONS OF SPACE,
OBJECTS AND PERSONS:
MALTESE FESTA
The Maltese saints feast or festa is a procession rooted in such conflict. There are sixty five
parishes in the predominantly Catholic Maltese
islands, each of which celebrates at least one
festa each year. Many of these festi directly compete with one another to produce the best festa,
with the most innovative forms of ritualization:
procession, street decorations, brass band
marches, fireworks, etc. Festa partiti competing festa factions are also political factions,
such that contest between festi is political contest (Boissevain 1965, 1993). Moreover, festa partiti themselves are divided between the often
antagonistic authorities of clergy and laity,
which means that the festa is rooted in the
struggle for both secular and spiritual power.
The example of festa the final example of
this chapter brings together the three themes
transformation of space; transformation of
objects; and transformation of persons in
the context of competition over power. This
thematic unification is not unique to festa.
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Figure 25.1
397
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Figure 25.2
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CONCLUSION
This final example demonstrates the multiple
transformations brought about by and through
performance: of space, of objects, of persons.
The analysis of performance might pick up on
this approach, to establish an agenda for future
research on similar multiple transformations
and perhaps others: of time, for example and
their interrelation.
What this chapter has focused on are examples that demonstrate the fluidity of performance and its role in transformation. It has
therefore focused less on performances per se,
and more on the transformative potentialities of
performance. Performance is consequently not
bracketed off as a separate activity, nor yet is
performance expanded out into a metaphor for
action in everyday life. Rather, the intention has
been to explore the ways in which performative
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Figure 25.3
399
1
2
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PERFORMANCE
Kong, L. (2001) Religion and technology: refiguring
place, space, identity and community, Area, 33 (4):
40413.
Kuechler, S. (2002) Malanggan: Art, Memory and
Sacrifice. Oxford: Berg.
Layton, R. (2003) Art and agency: a reassessment,
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9 (3): 44764.
Lewis, G. (1980) Day of Shining Red. Cambridge:
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Lewis, I.M. (1971) Ecstatic Religion: a Study of
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Looper, M.G. (2003) From inscribed bodies to distributed persons: contextualizing Tairona figural
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Mauss, M. (1973) Techniques of the body, Economy
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McIntyre, A. (2002) Politics, war and youth culture in
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McKay, S. (2000) Northern Protestants: an Unsettled
People. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
McNaughton, P.R. (1988) The Mande Blacksmiths:
Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Miller, D. (1995) Acknowledging Consumption: a
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Mitchell, J.P. (1998) Performances of masculinity in a
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(eds), Recasting Ritual: Performance, Media, Identity.
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Mitchell, J.P. (2002) Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual,
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Routledge.
Mitchell, J.P. (2004) Ritual structure and ritual
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Nunley, J. (1987) Moving with the Face of the Devil: Art
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401
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26
PRESENT TO PAST
Ethnoarchaeology
Paul Lane
Ethnoarchaeology emerged as a distinct subfield of archaeology (and some would even say
it qualifies as a sub-discipline) in the 1960s, as
part of broader changes in archaeological
method and theory that were associated with
what came to be known as processual or
new archaeology. Archaeologists, and their
antiquarian predecessors, however, had always
made use of ethnographic data to assist their
interpretation of archaeological remains. What
was distinctive about the development of ethnoarchaeology as a concept was that it sought to
transform the way in which archaeologists utilized ethnographic data in two fundamental
ways. First, rather than relying on the published
accounts of ethnographers and anthropologists,
as had been the norm among previous generations (with some notable exceptions such as
the British field archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford,
e.g. 1953: 21831), archaeologists themselves
became actively involved in the collection of
pertinent ethnographic information through
participant observation among living communities. Second, the unstructured and random
selection of ethnographic parallels that had
tended to characterize earlier uses of ethnographic data in archaeological interpretations
were challenged, and in their place efforts were
made to establish robust analogies that could
stand up to critical testing and had some validity across both time and space. (For discussion
of the history of using ethnographic parallels,
see Charlton 1981; Daniel 1950; Orme 1973,
1981. For discussions on the use of ethnographic
analogy in archaeology see Ascher 1961; Binford
1967; David and Kramer 2001: 3362; Gould
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Plate 26.1 Imagining the Other a journalist interviews a family group of Khomani from the
Kagga Kamma Tourist Reserve, on the steps of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town at the
opening of the Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture exhibition, 1996 (see
Buntman 1996; Lane 1996a); cf: Figure 26.3. Photo. P. Lane
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FORMATION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL
SITES AND ASSEMBLAGES
One of the most common concerns of ethnoarchaeologists during the heyday of processualist
approaches was with the wide range of human
activities and natural events and actions that
can contribute to the formation of archaeological
sites and deposits. Many of the earliest studies
of this kind were simple cautionary tales, or
spoilers as Yellen termed them (1977a: 911).
For instance, in his study of an abandoned
camp in the Rocky Mountains that had been
occupied by Native Canadians related to the
Cree, Bonnischen found that his intuitively
derived interpretations of the observed patterning resulted in a combination of errors that
included misidentification of items and their
functions, false associations between objects
and their users, and incorrect definition of activity areas and their relationship to one another
(1973: 286). Comparable studies encompassed
investigations of an abandoned Apache wicikup
or living site in Arizona (Longacre and Ayers
1968), comparisons of the artefact assemblages
found at occupied and abandoned camps used
by Turkana pastoralists in northern Kenya
(Robbins 1973), and study of the recycling of
dwellings and other structures in a Fulani
village in Cameroon (David 1971).
The object of such studies was essentially to
observe the operation of particular processes
and events in the present, so as to draw out
broader implications of value to the interpretation of remains from the past. Aside from ethnocentric bias, other suggested reasons for
why errors in interpretation might occur
include the relative proportion of organic artefacts to inorganic ones in household inventories (the latter being more likely to survive and
thus to be over-represented in archaeological
assemblages); the conditions under which a
site was abandoned (for instance, a planned
RECONSTRUCTING DISCARD,
ACTIVITY PATTERNS, AND
BUTCHERY PRACTICES
During the initial stages of the new archaeology, there was a widespread assumption that
the spatial patterning of material on archaeological sites reflected the patterning of activities
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(Continued)
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Plate 26.2 Stages in house collapse at Tswana farming (masimo) settlements a) typical masimo
compound and Tswana cone-on-cylinder rondavel, SE Botswana 1992; b) cone-on-cylinder rondavel
in early stage of collapse, showing pattern of roof collapse, N Botswana 1994; c) Example of a
Tswana rondavel after several years of abandonment, showing surviving residual wall stumps, SE
Botswana 1992; d) House daub scatter marking remnants of a 17th century Tswana house, excavated
near Ranaka, SE Botswana 1992. Photos: P. Lane
and the use of space at the site during its period
of occupation or use. By mapping the distribution of this material, it was believed, aspects of
the organization of the society that produced
these remains could be simply read off,
thereby providing insights into such issues as
room function (e.g. Longacre 1970), whether
certain areas were associated with different
social categories (e.g. Hill 1970; Clarke 1972),
and even the prevailing rules of post-marital
residence (e.g. Deetz 1968; Ember 1973).
Largely as a consequence of ethnoarchaeological research in a variety of settings on discard
behaviour, activity patterns and butchery practices, few archaeologists would now accept
such one-to-one correspondences. Regarding
discard practices, for example, at least three
broad categories of refuse need to be distinguished from one another namely, primary
refuse discarded at its location of use or production, secondary refuse discarded away
from its use location, and de facto refuse that
consists of material (often still usable) left
behind when structures and sites are abandoned (see Schiffer 1976, 1987). A range of other
processes may also account for the formation of
particular deposits, including the caching,
curation and recycling of materials and structures, accidental loss and deliberate deposition.
Attempts have also been made, for example, to
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Plate 26.3
Elephant butchery and meat processing by a group of Bugakhwe (Northern Khoe
Bushmen) in the Okavango Delta, Botswana 1996a) Men butchering a juvenile elephant shot as part
of a Government controlled culling programme; b) Bugakhwe woman hanging up strips of elephant
meat on a wooden frame so as to make biltong (sun-dried meat): Photos. P. Lane
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Plate 26.4 Different stages in the manufacture of a large, open bowl, using a combination of the
coil-technique and a tournette (hand-operated potters wheel), Dia, Mali 2001. a) placing of the first
coil on a clay dish sitting on the tournette; b) the pot wall is then built up by the addition of further coils;
c) once all the coils have been added, the vessel wall is drawn up with one hand while the tournette
is operated with the other; d) the vessel walls are then drawn outwards during the final stages of the
forming process. Photos: P. Lane
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Plate 26.5 The problems of inferring function from form alone examples of five out of a possible eight
stone Dogon artefacts with similar forms but different functions a) Upper & lower grinding stones for
producing millet flour; b) top stone anvil and hammer-stone used during potting, bottom tobacco
grinding stone; c) worn and abandoned grinding-stone for making gunpowder; d) rain-making altar.
Photos. P. Lane: Banani Kokoro and Sanga, Mali, 198083
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CONCLUSION: HISTORICIZING
AND INDIGENIZING
ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY
The use of ethnographic analogies is an
inescapable element of archaeology, and the
past half-century of systematic ethnoarchaeological research has done much to strengthen
how such analogies are formulated and applied.
Their use nevertheless introduces a fundamental
paradox. Specifically, by drawing on ethnographic data to aid the interpretation of archaeological remains, archaeologists necessarily
transform the past into something other than
their own world, from which they are removed
not just in a temporal sense, but also spatially. In
this way, to invoke L.P. Hartleys famous
phrase, the past becomes a foreign country
[where] they do things differently (1953). This
notion that the past is somewhere from which
we have escaped is further reinforced by the
widespread tendency to categorize the disparate remains of past societies into some form
of evolutionary framework. It is precisely such
concerns that lie at the heart of the ethical dilemmas voiced by Fewster (2001). However, while
her recommendation that the notion of human
agency should be at the core of any ethnoarchaeological enquiry is certainly an apposite
one, there needs to be a far more fundamental
reassessment of what the ultimate goals of ethnoarchaeology should be.
Several possibilities suggest themselves.
First, instead of searching the present for resemblances to the past, ethnoarchaeology, combined with some form of historical archaeology,
could be used to examine why and how the
present differs even from the most recent past.
As Stahl has observed, far too often ethnoarchaeologists have assumed that the material
practices they study are of considerable antiquity (Stahl 1993). Indeed, it was precisely such
a belief in the time depth of so-called traditional practices that initiated the growth of
ethnoarchaeological research in the first place.
Only rarely, however, have ethnoarchaeologists attempted to verify such a fundamental
assumption, and as Stahls recent work in the
Banda region of Ghana illustrates there are
good reasons as to why they need to do so, not
least because of the considerable transformations effected in many parts of the non-Western
world as a result of the encounter with European
colonialism (Stahl 2001). Second, and in line
with broader trends within anthropology, ethnoarchaeologists might aim to act more as
enablers for their ethnographic subjects, rather
417
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REFERENCES
Allchin, B. (1985) Ethnoarchaeology in South Asia,
in J. Schotsmans and M. Taddei (eds), South Asian
Archaeology 1983. Naples: Instituto Universitario
Orientale, pp. 2133.
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419
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421
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Page 422
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423
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27
MATERIAL CULTURE AND LONG-TERM CHANGE
Chris Gosden
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PAST ARCHAEOLOGICAL
APPROACHES TO LONG-TERM
CHANGE
All three of these approaches felt that they took
material culture seriously, so that a definite
argument needs to be made as to why such was
not the case. Social evolutionary approaches
derive ultimately from the nineteenth century,
taking inspiration from Darwin. However, it is
their twentieth-century incarnation I shall concentrate on mostly. Just as with other organisms
when taken from a biological point of view, it
was felt that the crucial element of human
history was the ability to harness energy from
the environment. Unlike most other organisms
the human ability to produce tools and technology allowed a sophisticated capacity to gather
and store raw materials and food which were
then used to underwrite aspects of the social
process. The complexity of social relations ultimately depended on a human ability to extract
energy, so that the motor of human social and
political history was technology. As technology
advanced, so did social organization. The notion
of advance was a key one for social evolutionists,
who saw historical developments as taking the
form of shifts from an early hunter-gatherer
lifestyle in all parts of the world prior to 10,000
years ago to the development of farming in some
areas, followed later by the move to cities and
states which eventually saw the rise of industrialism in Europe in the eighteenth century. These
changes in production and surplus were paralleled by social changes from hunter-gatherer
bands to farming tribes or chiefdoms to urbanized states (Childe 1930; Sahlins and Service
1960; Service 1962, 1971; White 1959). Not dissimilar views of history were found in the nineteenth century (Tylor 1871). The main problems
with such views were long ago identified and
have been much discussed a progressive view
of history which works only for some parts of the
world and a functionalist notion of technology,
conceived of in terms of its physical impact and
consequences. To a critical eye these suppositions
about the manner in which human history works
look like nineteenth and twentieth-century
economic rationality and Western supremacy
applied to human history as a whole. The
emphases on functions and measurable outcomes leave a lot of human life out, assuming
that structures of meaning, thought and feeling
are epiphenomenal and weeded out by the longterm processes of human prehistory.
Also, taking inspiration from the nineteenth
century, but with a much more compelling theoretical basis, is structural Marxism (Friedman
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INTELLIGENCE: EMBODIED,
DISTRIBUTED, EXTENDED
AND MATERIAL
What is the quintessential marker of intelligence in a human being? An answer to this
question until recently would probably have
427
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Cambridge
Deaths head
Cherub
Portrait
183039
2029
1019
180009
9099
8089
7079
6069
5059
4049
3039
2029
1019
170009
Concord
Deaths
head
Roman
Cherub
Deaths
head
Heart
Mouth
Medusa
Urn and
willow
Portrait
182029
1019
180009
9099
8089
7079
6069
5059
4049
3039
2029
1019
170009
Plymouth
Cherub
Urn and
willow
184049
3039
2029
1019
180009
9099
8089
7079
6069
5059
4049
3039
2029
1019
170009
9099
168089
Figure 27.1 Battleship curves describing the changing popularity of different grave-stone motifs at
various places in New England, 17001830 (after Shennan 2002: Fig. 6)
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Table 27.1
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Source
Industry
Coiled Basketry
Rim
1. Coloured rim
coil
2. Rim stitching
3. Rim-stitch
gaps
4. False-braided
rim
Decorative Zone
Interior margin
5. Coil interstices
Interior
9. Coiled colour
designs
6. Alternating
coloured and
plain coils
7. Coloured coils
and interstices
11. Coiled/non-loom
triangle
Exterior
13. Coiled surface
texture
8. Stitch-marks
Plaited basketry
17. Exterior
selvage band
designs
16. Coloured
twill-plaited
designs
Non-loom
warp-weft
weaves
18. Pre-cotton
non-loom band
designs
19. Post-cotton
non-loom band
designs
20. Plain-tapestry
terrace
Loom-woven
cotton Cloth
21. Twill-rib
background
22. Twill-tapestry
band designs
23. All-over
twill-tapestry
designs
24. Twill-tapestry
terrace
25. Twill-tapestry
triangle
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435
Generic: Containers
Figure 27.2
table 3)
The links between pottery and weaving styles in Mesa Verde (after Ortman 2000:
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437
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CONCLUSION
The following points are key to the argument
I have developed here. Artefacts can exist as a
mass in which they follow stylistic and formal
logics of their own. This is because individual
makers operate within an overall tradition,
working to originality within that tradition.
The past forms that objects take help shape and
channel the choices made in the present.
Because objects exist to a degree independently
of people they shake not just the actions of the
makers, but also give rise to categories of
thought and notions of sensibility. People as
social beings can be shaped in how they think
and how they feel by objects. Ideas and feelings
do not exist in cultural forms in a manner prior
to things, but are created partly by them. The
process of moving forms or decorations from
one medium to another, for instance from
baskets to pots, decontextualizes them, making
them suitable for abstract thought. Once elements of material culture exist in an abstracted
form then they can be manipulated imaginatively, unconstrained by the nature of the materials from which they are made. Abstract
representation and things exist in a complex
dialectic, by which one can influence the movement between the concrete and the abstract. We
can start to see the full complexity of this
process. Material culture is vital to the notion of
embodied or distributed intelligence. Ideas
such as scaffolding are not sufficient in order to
understand material things, with the equal
partnership hypothesis making much better
sense, as long as we have a real idea of what
both people and things can contribute from
their side of the partnership.
Looking at how artefacts act en masse and at a
distance from people calls into question a whole
range of entities that we take for granted, from
individual people to larger abstractions such as
culture. In almost all views of our social and cultural worlds, people and cultures in their various
different ways have been seen as active elements
and material things as passive. But if it can be
shown that objects educate peoples senses, and
thus their basic appreciation of the world, they
help shape and determine sequences of actions in
making, using and exchanging things, and they
also give rise to thought, then a very different
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441
REFERENCES
Bradley, R. (1998) The Significance of Monuments: on the
Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze
Age Britain. London: Routledge.
Brooks, R. (2003) Flesh and Machines: How Robots will
Change us. New York: Vintage Books.
Childe, V.G. (1930) The Bronze Age. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Clark, A. (1997) Being there. Putting Brain, Body and
World together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clarke, D. (1978) Analytical Archaeology. 2nd edn.
London: Methuen.
Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body,
Emotion and the making of consciousness. London:
Vintage.
Deetz, J. (1977) In Small Things Forgotten: The
Archaeology of Early American Life. New York:
Anchor Books.
Deetz, J. and Dethlefsen, E. (1966) Deaths heads,
cherubs, and willow trees: experimental archaeology in colonial cemeteries, American Antiquity,
31: 50210.
Edwards, E., Gosden, C. and Phillips, R. (eds) (in
press) Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and
Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M.J. (1978) Notes
towards an epigenetic model of the evolution of
civilisation, in J. Friedman and M.J. Rowlands
(eds), The Evolution of Social Systems. London:
Duckworth, pp. 20176.
Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: Towards a new
Archaeological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gosden, C. (2004) Archaeology and Colonialism:
Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gosden, C. (in press) Aesthetics, emotions and intelligence: implications for archaeology, in C. Renfrew,
C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais (eds), Rethinking
Masteriality. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.
Hodder, I. (ed.) (1987) Archaeology as Long-term History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hodder, I. (1990) The Domestication of Europe: Structure
and Contingency in Neolithic Societies. Oxford:
Blackwell.
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PART V
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28
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND RIGHTS
An Anthropological Perspective
Marilyn Strathern
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The recent history rehearsed here concerns
the way IPR came into Social Anthropology in
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Relations. IPR is premised on equity in the twoway flow of knowledge and recompense. It
does not just create a legal arena to protect
rights, it gives power to new social actors,
those identified as inventor or author in whom
economic rights are invested. Such persons are
legal individuals, a concept that includes corporate bodies (government agencies, research
institutes). Any social unit individual, clan,
village could theoretically seek registration
as a potential right holder.
Antagonism
451
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NOTES
1
2
3
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457
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27
28
29
30
31
32
33
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REFERENCES
ALPSP (1999) Draft Declaration. London: Association
of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
Arizpe, L., ed. (1996) The Cultural Dimension of Global
Change: an Anthropological Approach. Culture and
Development Series. Paris: UNESCO.
Bainbridge, D. (1999) Intellectual Property, 4th edn.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work on which this is based was done
largely in the course of the project Property,
Transactions and Creations: New Economic
Relations in the Pacific (UK Economic and
Social Research Council award R000237838,
gratefully acknowledged). PTC publications on
Melanesia include Kalinoe and Leach (2001);
Sykes et al. (2001); Hirsch and Strathern (2004).
Texts on which this is based include the introduction to Hirsch and Strathern above;
Stratherns chapter in Whimp and Busse (2000);
and the 2002 paper Divided origins and the
arithmetic of ownership, presented to the
University of California Irvine Critical Theory
Institute series, Futures of Property and
Personhood. Very special thanks for help to
write the manuscript to Benedict Rousseau.
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29
HERITAGE AND THE PRESENT PAST
Beverley Butler
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Heritage Enlightenment
It is with the coming of the Enlightenment that
what is couched as the ongoing relationship or
quarrel between Ancients and Moderns is subsequently re-expressed as dialectic of reverence and rejection (Lowenthal 1996: xxxxi).
Lowenthal, for example, argues that the classical tradition while remaining the font of veneration is increasingly pitched in relationships
with modernitys new loci of power and authority (ibid.). This sees authors characterize the rise
of heritage as inextricably bound up with the
rise of science, the decline of religious authority
and the establishment of the meta-narratives
such as discourses of progress and rationality.
Modernity and the West as synonymous with
465
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Postmodern Heritage
Related theorizations of the above dynamics
have opened up further intellectual-political
analyses by specifically positioning the heritage debate and the policies of the new right
as symptomatic of the wider postmodern condition (Walsh 1992: 61). As Huyssen states this
stages the anti-heritage debate as the latest
instance of the quarrel [specifically recast as a]
battle between moderns and postmoderns
(Huyssen 1995). Heritage commodification
is subsequently pitched in relationships
with what Walsh defines as the world of the
post a world simultaneously postmodern,
post-ethical, post-moral (Walsh 1992: 2) and
with what Huyssen further refers to as the end
of everything discourse (Huyssen 1995: 13).
Here the broad characterization emerges of
postmodernity as synonymous with the New
Right belief (cf. Fukyama 1992) that the capitalist West has achieved a position of unparalleled supremacy in both space and time,
thus signalling the end of history and confidence in the assertion that the American Dream
is now a reality (Walsh 1992: 67). Authors have
responded by mapping out the more nightmarish implications of a postmodern landscape in
which the predominant motif/metaphor to
emerge is that of the hyper-reality and simulated spectacles and of the theme park (Walsh
1992: 11315).
Baudrillard, dubbed the postmodern
prophet of doom, and his genre of nihilistic
hypercriticism are mobilized by authors alongside Ecos Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality
in the United States (1986) in order to draw
out how heritage emerges as empty-signifier
exhibiting the crisis in which reality has been
469
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Anthropologizing Heritage:
Memorial Approaches
As stated in my introduction, in this second part
of the chapter I want to return to the debate
staged between Lowenthal and anthropologists
which critically addresses the question: is the
past a foreign country? in order to use this as a
framework from which to draw out new and
alternative concepts and models for the theorization of heritage discourse. At stake is a radical redefinition of what constitutes heritage
and heritage value and a critical shift of focus
away from Eurocentic models, frames and
sources and from the Western academys intellectual preoccupations with internal identity
crises and pronouncements of its own death
and resurrection (cf. Huyssen 1995: 33) and a
movement towards understanding alternative
models of cultural transmission, ancestry and
memory work. Anthropological understandings of memory work, for example, crucially
bring into view non-Western contexts, concepts and practices and in so doing pose questions regarding relationships to the other and
the capacity for othering which are central to
this critical context. As such, the focus on the
memorial approach to the past also provides
a means to bring into focus what can be best be
described as alternative or parallel heritages
and alternative framings of difference.
Feeley-Harnik, in defining the memorial
approach, begins by making her own critical
return to L.P. Hartleys novel in order to
engage in a radical refocusing of issues. Here,
she argues, the central theme of his [Hartleys]
story is not the past as a foreign country, but
how the past has come to seem that way,
owing to energetic forgetting and desperate
attempts to deaden feeling. And it is about
the going-between from which new life
471
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Heritage as Memory
The above shifts of discourse give recognition to
how dynamics both within and significantly
from outside the academy have established
lines of debate, action and have influenced, if
not at times dictated, the radical re-vision of
heritage value. This alternative perspective, for
example, highlights how the archival compulsion to return to origin and to revive tradition is now not only seen as symptomatic of the
profound sense of cultural loss and erosion in
the Western imaginary but is increasingly present in non-Western contexts due to the feelings of cultural loss caused by contemporary
experiences of globalization. The consequences
of such experiences are capable of framing
alongside the Wests invention of the past and
modernitys rise of heritage and concomitant
Eurocentric urges to build lieux de mmoire
(places of memory) because there are no more
milieux de mmoire (real environments of memory) (Maleuvre 1999: 59) contemporary acts of
repossession in which the dream to both define
and repossess ones lost heritage endures, as
does an increased faith in, and calls for, culture
as cure (Butler 2003).4
In this sense new investments are being
made in the archive as a place of return, diagnosis and cure and thus as a potent locus for
the narrativization of traumatic loss. One can
include here, for example, the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see
Derrida 2004). With a more critical edge the
historical anti-archival discourse has not only
provided a mobilization of the more subversive models of memory (from, for example,
Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno to Derrida)
to destabilize modernitys dominant preoccupations with a stifling historicism (see
Maleuvre 1999) and its archival traumas
(Derrida 1996) as a searing internal critique of
the Westernization of heritage, but has seen
critics raise questions about the haunting of
the archive by those constituencies exiled,
marginalized and misrepresented within this
sphere. Here, for example, case-study contextualizations take in non-Western contexts
such as China (Feuchtwang 2000a, b).
Similarly the memorialization of modernitys violent conflicts has not only witnessed
the centring of Holocaust memory within heritage discourse (Young 1993) but has seen the
definition of historical and contemporary sites
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Heritage as Well-being
Alternative readings of Eurocentric sources
have, however, successfully drawn out debates
on otherness and strategies of othering.
Freuds therapeutic schema and his preoccupation with notions of speaking cures and, more
particularly, his radical inversion of dominant
memory models in order to profile the
dynamic of forgetting have provided a basis
for the radical rethinking of heritage across
North-South. For postcolonial critics, for example, Freuds work not only offers significant
insights into the relationship between heritage
and the unconscious but as Said (2003), Spivak
(1992, 1993) and Bhabha (1994) have demonstrated, into non-Western identity work.5
Moreover, Freuds theorizing of a disturbance
of memory (Freud 1936/1984: 44356)6 as an
exploration of how the literalization of icons
and images of the past in the present has the
potential to access submerged and repressed
memories has been re-worked as a means to
understanding the complex psychodynamics
and interactions of, among other factors, materiality, memory and persons-object relations,
with the more revelatory dimensions of heritage rituals (see Rojek 1997).
Heritage as a site of contestation, conflict
and in terms of competing interpretations of
sites and monuments has also resulted in
clashes in which the cultural heritage has
become a scene of violence and even death (see
Layton et al. 2001 on the destruction of the
mosque at Ayodhya, India). Similarly dominant discourse on iconoclasm has not only met
its radical other in the Talibans destruction of
the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan (dubbed
by UNESCO Director General Matsurra as a
crime against culture) and in other cultural
fundamentalisms (Stolke 1995) synonymous
with ethnic cleansing but has been itself problematized by new characterizations of heritage
as a renewable resource (see Holtorf 2001).
This shift is captured by calls to actively and
responsibly engage in renewing the past in
our time rather than simply preserve and conserve and thereby sustain the monumental
vestiges left by posterity (ibid.). The contemporary focus upon intangible heritage similarly offers alternative conceptualizations of
culture (see http://www.unesco.org).
What has not yet been fully centred within a
critical heritage discourse is a broader crosscultural exploration of concepts of well-being.
Perhaps a concept such as heritage magic
could be called upon here in order to apprehend
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Indigenizing Heritage
This sense of heritage as a resource for defining
a just future is perhaps nowhere more pronounced and more contested than in the utilization and reworking of heritage by new
constituencies notably indigenous groups8
as a powerful metaphor by which to express
historical and ongoing grievance and injustice and as bound up in accompanying
demands not only for the restitution of cultural
objects and human remains but of human dignity, justice and respect (Rowlands 2002).
Contemporary debates on cultural rights and
cultural property have moved hand in hand
with subsequent attempts to indigenize heritage, to reclaim land and to reinterpret sacred
sites (see Niec 1998). This has often wielded a
critical edge, confronting the heritage culture
with its own complicity in the often violent
appropriation of land, artefacts (including
cultural treasures and secret sacred material),
human remains and in the scientific, cultural
and intellectual colonization of other cultures
(see Simpson 1996; Fforde 2004).
Here, for example, the development of
culture and ethnic-specific cultural centres
and indigenous meeting places has offered
new engagements with alternative dynamics of
cultural transmission (Simpson 1996). Not only
have such institutions repossessed tradition
but have witnessed a hybridization of knowledge and cultural forms that has fundamentally
problematized dominant motifs of spectatorship, authorship, control and exhibition (ibid.).
Similarly, critical reconceptualizations of ethnographic representation have drawn out alternative strategies of cultural reciprocity in cultural
spaces in, for example, in South East Asia and
the Pacific (Stanley 1998). Heritage as living tradition and as part of expressions of local control
and empowerment has likewise defined the
Vanuatu Cultural Centre (Geismar and Tilley
2003) and as a particular model of what a true
post-museum (cf. Hooper-Greenhill 2001) may
represent. The strategy of anthropologizing the
West and the profiling of ethnographic methodologies have also resulted in research into
475
Provincializing Heritage
One is thus confronted with both the limits of
traditional heritage discourse and its possible
futures in terms of the ability to embrace the
above and other parallel and alternative heritages. Here one can find a resonance with the
postcolonial critic Chakrabartys (2000) assertion that the key values, concepts and paradigms that emerged from European thought are
inadequate to understand non-European life
worlds. Therefore, the future reconceptualization of a globally responsive and moral and ethically responsible heritage studies discourse
depends on the ability to address Chakrabartys
broader project of provincializing Europe and
strategizing attempts to apprehend nonWestern histories, subaltern memories and
other modernities (ibid.). This is accompanied
by the need to look beyond the existing or
established canon of cultural heritage texts in
order to refocus our attention upon a wider
scholarship committed to further disrupting
and displacing dominant heritage. The concept
and reality, therefore, of a Chinese modernity or
Arab identity and heritage as a product of these
communities own long-term history not just
of contact need to be considered alongside
theorists calls to provincialize the place of
Europe within our understanding of the
dynamics of cultural power and influence and
as a means to challenge the presumed universalism of human and cultural values (ibid.).
Postcolonial theory, although still a shamefully under-theorized area within mainstream
heritage studies, offers a potent insight into key
themes of identity, representation and the mediation of identity. To return to the work of Spivak
(1988) and Bhabha (1994), the project apprehending the subaltern voice and the critical
reconceptualization of mimicry have done
much to challenge dominant Eurocentric
notions of authenticity. As such, these critics
make it clear that the intellectual must resist
nostalgic desires to reconstruct the subaltern as
a lost object and to recover the pure form and
redeem the unified, true and unmediated
voice of the people and instead argue the need
for a more critical, subtle line in strategies of
representation and in the mediation of identity
(Spivak 1988). From this starting point both the
tactical mobilization of forms of mimicry and
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8
9
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Barthes, R. (1957/1992). Mythologies. St Albans:
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Baudrillard, J. (1988) Simulacra and simulations, in
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WEB SITE
UNESCO: http://www.unesco.org.
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30
MUSEUMS AND MUSEUM DISPLAYS
Anthony Alan Shelton
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483
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485
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Lowenthal (1996: 161) rightly insist commemoration is profoundly anti-historic, and along
with Nora (1995: 6356) and Handler and Gable
(1997: 35), views museums, monuments, cemeteries, archives, libraries and dictionaries as les
lieux de mmoire, dislocated fragmentary sites of
memory, which history continues to rework
and transform in its attempts to subject experience of the intimately lived past to contemporary rationalizing narratives harnessed to the
interests of an emergent democratic, mass
future. Societies that assured the transmission
and preservation of collectively held values,
that valued the preservation of specific objects
that enshrined collective memory, and those
ideologies that ensured a smooth transition
from the past to the future, have all declined,
necessitating lieux de mmoire, sites of memory,
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487
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9
NOTES
4
5
6
7
10
11
12
13
14
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
Michael Rowlands and Christopher Tilley
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DISGRACED MONUMENTS
Since the nineteenth century and earlier, monuments and statues have attracted controversy
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COUNTER-MONUMENTS AND
NON-MONUMENTS
The association of public memory with monuments and memorials is biased towards a
particular historical experience. Although
monuments are powerful because they appear
to be permanent markers of history and
memory, they can weigh heavily on the capacity
to change and to allow alternative renditions of
the past. We should not be surprised therefore
to detect strong evidence that we are moving
perhaps towards the end of monumentalizing
the past. Young suggests that counter-monuments in Germany are more subversive than
providing alternative modes of representing
historical events and personalities. Countermonuments serve more radically to destabilize
the basic premise that the past is stable and
enduring (Young 1993). Klein summarizes
some of the evidence suggesting that we suffer
from a surfeit of memory and a politics of victimization at present. Memory and identity are
typically yoked together in postmodernist discourse to replace history and to re-enchant our
505
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF
MONUMENTS
Given the enormous number and variety
of monuments worldwide any attempt to
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MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE
AND ITS EXPERIENCE
The recent use of a phenomenological perspective has stressed the sensuous dimensions of the
human experience of monuments and its relationship to the manipulation of architectural
space. Prior to this these monuments tended to
be both archaeologically represented and interpreted as plans, providing an entirely abstract
and somewhat surreal two-dimensional view of
them in which the only questions that tended to
be asked were of a typological or classificatory
nature (Richards 1993: 147). The majority of passage tombs, such as Maes Howe on Orkney,
have spacious chambers which contrast with
low, narrow passages to move along which one
must stoop, or crawl. This physically restricts
movement into and out of the tomb and emphasizes the liminal character of the passage linking
the outside world of the living with the world of
the ancestral dead buired in the chamber. Loud
noise is dampened in the chamber but projected
out down the passage to the outside like a
megaphone. Such sound effects have been studied in detail (Watson and Keating 1999).
Visibility and degrees of illumination by the sun
at different times of the year have been shown
to be crucial to the interpretation of the spaces
(Bradley 1989b), as has passage orientation and
mound orientation (see e.g. Burl 1987; Ruggles
1997) and the direction in which the passage
entrance faces (Tilley 1994). The passage entrance
to Maes Howe in Orkney faces north-east,
allowing the rays of the setting sun to shine
down it and into the chamber on the midwinter
solstice. A special roof box constructed above
the passage entrance at New Grange in Ireland
allows the suns rays to enter the chamber on
the midwinter sunrise (OKelly 1982). Passages
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In relation to the Mount Pleasant henge monument Brck (2001) similarly argues that its
meaning and social relevance would very
much have depended on who visited and how
and when, on their social role and status, and
this might account for the messy and often
contradictory sets of artefacts and their associations: people would have experienced several
parallel versions of social reality constructed
through different kinds of knowledge and
informed by different concerns and interests
(2001: 663). It seems quite clear that certain
types of monument such as causewayed enclosures and henges had multiple meanings and
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COSMOLOGIES
The cosmological significance of monuments
has been widely discussed, their link with the
seasons of the year, the passage of day and
night, the rising and setting of the sun, and the
movements of the moon, their relationship to
land forms, etc., as mentioned above. Bradley
has argued that the circular form of monuments in the British (Bradley 1998: Chapters
810) Neolithic and Bronze Age suggests that
the circle was a basic template for understanding the world. The burial mounds and cairns
are circular, surrounded by circular kerbs of
stones or ditches, the ceremonial monuments:
henges and stone circles are circular and may
contain circular structures within their interiors,
and so are domestic dwellings. The whole
world was, in effect, circles within circles, and in
some cases the internal organization of domestic houses and burials is very similar in terms of
the locations of pits, entrances, burials, metal
deposits, etc. The houses of the living and those
of the dead appear to be a structural transformation of the other.
Bradley draws an interesting distinction
between permeable monuments such as stone
circles where one can look out beyond and have
a view of the world and the enclosed interior
spaces of henges where the world is blocked
out. Henges are generally located in lowland
landscapes, stone circles in much more dramatic rocky and rugged highland landscapes.
Stone circles, he argues, often acted as
metaphors for the surrounding landscape (see
also Richards 1996):
the building of such permeable enclosures in such a
varied topography made it possible for the features
of these monuments to refer directly to the world
around them. This is what seems to have happened
through the astronomical alignments in the planning of some of these sites. They located the newly
built monuments within a wider sacred geography.
(Bradley 1998: 145)
509
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CONCLUSION
From the Neolithic onwards monuments and
memorials have littered the landscapes of the
past, and the present. Their material endurance
is clearly fundamental to their power and significance. There are two major aspects to this:
that which they signify, or can be interpreted
to signify, and the effects their very material
presence has in relation to persons, groups,
nation states, etc. A key concept is memory,
although mediated by current debates on its
alienated associations with modernity. There
are, of course, many cultures in the past and the
present which have no need to publicly objectify their identities in this manner. These are
exclusively cultures without history in the
modernist sense and documented archaeologically and ethnographically. To characterize
such cultures as somehow possessing authentic
and non-alienated memory, and thus having no
need for monuments, is clearly inadequate. To
further complicate matters, cultures without
history also erect and use monuments. We still
have a poor comparative understanding of
why it becomes necessary to erect monuments
in different social and historical circumstances.
To simply link their construction to crises of
legitimation, whatever form these might take,
is an all too easy generalization. Perhaps part of
the problem may arise from our own rather
restricted cultural definition of what monuments are. Landscapes, or humanly unaltered
features of those landscapes, such as significant
hills, large trees, deep valleys, etc., might themselves be considered to be monuments: so why
improve, alter or, quite literally, build on them?
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REFERENCE
Aries, P. (1974) Western Attitudes towards Death.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Barclay, A. and Harding, J., eds (1999) Pathways and
Ceremonies: the Cursus Monuments of Britain and
Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Barrett, J. (1988) The living, the dead and the ancestors: Neolithic and early Bronze Age mortuary practices, in J. Barrett and I. Kinnes (eds), The
Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age:
Recent Trends. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology
and Prehistory, University of Sheffield.
Barrett, J. (1991) Toward an archaeology of ritual, in
P. Garwood, D. Jennings, R. Skeates and J. Thoms
(eds), Sacred and Profane. Oxford: Oxford Committee
for Archaeology.
Barrett, J. (1994) Fragments from Antiquity. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Bender, B. (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space, Oxford:
Berg.
Bender, B., Hamilton, S. and Tilley, C. (1997)
Leskernick: stone worlds; alternative narratives;
nested landscapes, Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society, 63: 14778.
Bender, B., Hamilton, S. and Tilley, C. (2005) Stone
Worlds: Narrative and Reflexive Approaches to Landscape
Archaeology. London: UCL Press.
Berg, S. (2002) Knocknarea, the ultimate monument:
megaliths and mountains in Neolithic Cil Irra,
north-west Ireland, in C. Scarre (ed.), Monuments
and Landscape in Atlantic Europe. London:
Routledge.
Berman, M. (1982) All that is Solid Melts into Air.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bloch, M. (1971) Placing the Dead. London: Seminar
Press.
Bodnar, J. (1992) Re-making America: Public Memory,
Commemoration and Patriotism in 20th Century.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bodnar, J. (2000) Pierre Nora national memory and
democracy: a review, Journal of American History,
December: 95163.
Boyer, M.C. (1994) The City of Collective Memory.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York:
Basic Books.
Bradley, R. (1989a) Deaths and entrances: a conceptual analysis of megalithic art, Current Anthropology, 30: 6875.
Bradley, R. (1989b) Darkness and light in the design
of megalithic tombs, Oxford Journal of Archaeology,
8: 2519.
Bradley, R. (1991) Bradley, R. (1998) The Significance of
Monuments. London: Routledge.
Bradley, R. (2000) An Archaeology of Natural Places.
London: Routledge.
Bradley, R. (2002) The Past in Prehistoric Societies.
London: Routledge.
Brck, J. (2001) Monuments, power and personhood
in the British Neolithic, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7 (4): 64968.
Burl, A. (1987) The Stonehenge People. London: Dent.
Calado, M. (2002) Standing stones and natural
outcrops: the role of ritual monuments in the
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32
CONSERVATION AS MATERIAL CULTURE
Dinah Eastop
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The Institutions
Much conservation literature takes the form of
specialist journals and conference publications
issued by various national and international
bodies, either state-funded institutes, e.g. the
Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) or
the professions membership organizations,
e.g. the International Institute of Conservation
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Reversibility
CONSERVATION CONCEPTS
The concepts reversibility, minimum intervention
and preservation of true nature act as governing
principles in the ideology of conservation,
while remaining open to wide interpretation
and supporting a very broad spectrum of justified practice (Ward 1986: 1324; Muoz Vias
2002, 2005). They act as legitimating terms
within all conservation specialisms. The concepts are explained and elaborated below in
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Minimum Intervention
Reversibility is complemented, and in some
instances replaced, by the concept of minimum intervention (Corfield 1988), which has
recently been questioned by Villers (2004). This
means that the intervention is limited to the
minimum consistent with effective conservation. In textile conservation this approach has
led to fewer textiles being cleaned or bleached.
It has also supported the expansion of preventive conservation, with fewer single items
being treated in order to release resources for
better storage and display conditions for larger
numbers of objects. It has also led to greater
interest in supporting objects by custom-made
mounts and greater finesse in the design, materials and the construction of display forms
(Lister 1997).
Documentation
Documentation has become a central part of
conservation. It is no longer considered acceptable to undertake a conservation treatment
without recording the object and the intervention. The preparation of a detailed object
record is now the norm, where the materials,
form and construction of the object are
recorded in a systematic way, often in diagrams
and photographs as well as text. For example,
standard ways have been developed for documenting upholstery under-structures (Gill
2001). The object record will be complemented
by a written assessment of the objects condition. Alterations, repairs and areas of loss are
recorded, and their likely causes and effects
noted. A written treatment proposal (often
with an estimate of cost) will be prepared, as a
basis for discussion between the conservator
519
Preventive Conservation
Preventive conservation describes both a
philosophy and a range of monitoring and control measures, based on the belief that prevention is better than cure, i.e. preventing damage
is better then trying to rectify it. The term is
often used to distinguish these approaches from
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Interventive Conservation
Until the development of preventive conservation, most interventions known as conservation were of the remedial or interventive type,
i.e. those acts of conservation which physically
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Discovery, Documentation
and Investigation
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CASE STUDY 2
TOY STORY 2
The film Toy Story 2 (1999) has been selected
as a case study because it provides a vivid
illustration of key issues. Its distribution by
Disney-Pixars international network means
that the film probably provides the most
widely distributed representation of artefact
conservation-restoration. This was recognized
by Simon Cane, who selected the film as a
referent for his analysis of public perceptions of conservation (Cane 2001). Toy Story 2
enters material culture in a number of ways:
the film and its subsequent VHS and DVD
versions have been bought, sold and exchanged
throughout the world. The toys represented in
Toy Story 2 have been mass-produced in a range
of qualities and re-entered popular culture as
toys and other commodities, such as books (e.g.
Disney/Pixar 1999).
Toy Story 2 focuses on Woody, a toy cowboy
fitted with a pull-string. He is the favourite toy
of American schoolboy Andy. Andy normally
takes Woody to cowboy camp, but when he rips
Woodys right arm the toy is left behind on a
dusty shelf. As his mother explains, Toys dont
last for ever. While Andy is away at camp, his
mother arranges a yard sale, where a toy penguin called Wheezy, whose voicebox no longer
works, is offered for sale. While attempting to
rescue Wheezy from the sale, Woody the toy
cowboy is spotted by Al, a dealer in collectible
toys. As Woody is an old family toy, Andys
mother refuses to sell him to Al at any price.
The dealer kidnaps Woody and drives him
back to his high-rise apartment. While considering how to escape, Woody meets other toys:
Bullseye the horse and Jessie the cowgirl, and
Stinky Pete, the prospector, still in his original
box. They explain that they are all characters
from a 1950s television puppet show, Woodys
Roundup, sponsored by Cowboy Crunchies.
Jessie tells Woody Youre valuable property . ..
We are a complete set. He learns that the toys
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Object Biographies
The central characters of Woody and Buzz
Lightyear have multi-layered biographies. Buzz
is from a distant planet, and is threatened by
Zurg. Once treasured by Andy and befriended
by Woody and his fellow toys, Buzz changes
from a superhuman space ranger to the awareness that he is a toy. He acknowledges that his
laser weapon is merely a light bulb. He recognizes his catch phrase, To infinity and beyond,
as ironic. He discovers that he is not unique on
meeting a new Buzz Lightyear toy equipped
with a better belt. This new Buzz Lightyear
finally recognizes himself as a toy, and he plays
catch with Zurg, his characters deadly enemy.
These toys have complicated biographies
because they are alive in the imagination of the
older generation, as many were popular in the
1950s and 1960s.
525
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CONSERVATION-RESTORATION IN
TOY STORY 2
The film Toy Story 2 can be read as a document
of conservation because it provides a dynamic
representation of debates about an objects
true nature and the effect this has on how an
object is conserved. Key issues are summarized in Figure 32.8. Although documentation
is not referred to in Toy Story 2, Al the dealer
demonstrates a keen awareness of the materials
and technology of Woodys clothes, presumably as markers of the toys authenticity and
resulting commercial value, as well as of his
own connoisseurship. Al is delighted by
Woodys Original hand-painted face . . . natural dyed blanket-stitched vest . . . handstitched polyvinyl hat.
Preventive conservation measures are clearly
demonstrated in Toy Story 2. After treating
Woody, the cleaner places the toy in a glass
display cabinet, and the floppy toy is held
securely by a shaped mount, where it will
be protected from dirt and handling. As the
cleaner closes the door on the display case, he
announces, Hes for display only ... You handle
him too much, he aint going to last. Later in
the story, Al prepares the Roundup gang for
shipping to Japan by packing each toy separately into custom-fitted foam insulation. The
appearance of the foam is consistent with
the closed-cell polythene type, approved for
conservation use.
Repair features centrally in the film. Andy,
having damaged Woodys right arm, leaves
him at home while he goes to cowboy camp.
On his return, Andy immediately repairs
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527
WOODYS ORIGINS
(Production)
Woody as a cowboy string puppet in a 1950s television film
Woody as cowboy doll for sale (television merchandise)
Woody as gift (passed from parents to their son Andy)
WOODYS ROLES IN THE FILM
(Consumption)
Reproduction
Disposal
Retention
Figure 32.8 Summary of Woody's life in Toy Story 2, presented to distinguish the phases of his life
as a culturally salient cartoon character/toy/exhibit
EMERGENT THEMES
As in other fields, technological changes structure much development. In conservation this
is increasingly balanced by the influence of
meaning-based social science, of which material
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529
Bureaucratic Changes
As conservation has passed from a craft to a
semi-profession to a profession, bureaucratic
management has emerged. When selecting and
implementing conservation strategies there is
greater awareness of costbenefit analysis, risk
assessment (Ashley-Smith 1999; Waller 2002)
and community involvement, i.e. working with
different user groups (e.g. Eastop 2002; Putt
1998, 2001). For instance, archaeologists are now
more likely to work with, rather than against,
metal detectorists. These approaches have
encouraged a wider discussion of what should
be conserved and at what cost.
There is also greater co-operation between
the various specialist national and international conservation bodies, supported in part
by the rhetoric of sustainability. One outcome
of such co-working in the United Kingdom
has been the move towards institutional
convergence, with several influential professional organizations agreeing to merge to form
a new body, provisionally called the Institute
of Conservation. The main motivation is
strength in unity, so that the conservation
sector becomes more effective in informing
policies affecting conservation practices and
funding, and is able to provide better services
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CONCLUSION
This chapter has shown how conservation is a
part of material culture as well as a being a
commentary on it. What has emerged is how
textile conservation is now responding to the
wider cultural salience of objects, as well as to
their physical integrity. It is now more widely
recognized within all conservation specialisms
that human social life gives meaning to the life
of objects. The conservation of objects will
remain contested as long as the objects of
concern remain culturally salient. Culturally
important objects are marked by the degree of
contestation about their material and social
significance. Sustaining mechanisms for debate
within conservation is as important as are
methods of investigation, preservation and presentation. Indeed, the debate about the social life
of an object adds to the very cultural dynamic of
which the object is a part.
NOTES
1
2
REFERENCES
AMOL, Australian Museums and Galleries Online
(2003) Development of a Standard Methodology for
Assessing the Significance of Cultural Heritage
Objects and Collections. http://amol.org.au/craft/
publications/hec/significance/sign_cultural_
obj.asp (21 March).
Ashley-Smith, J. (1999) Risk Assessment for Object
Conservation. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
Berducou, M. (1996) Introduction to archaeological
conservation, in N. Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley,
Jr, and A.M. Vacaro (eds), Historical and Philosophical
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533
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am pleased to acknowledge the stimulating
discussion with David Goldberg, Janet
Farnsworth, Simon Cane and Mary Brooks
which helped to develop the ideas expressed
here. I thank the owners of the Reigate
doublet and the Nether Wallop stomacher,
and Nell Hoare, Director of the Textile
Conservation Centre, for permission to
publish. The photographs of the Chiswick
House chairs are reproduced by courtesy of
English Heritage. The x-radiograph is reproduced by courtesy of Sonia OConnor,
University of Bradford.
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33
COLLECTORS AND COLLECTING
Russell Belk
COLLECTING DEFINED
If collecting is consuming, it is a special type of
consuming. Consuming, in its most literal
meaning, is using up, devouring, or burning.
Collecting, on the other hand, is about keeping,
preserving, and accumulating. Although it is
possible to collect intangible experiences (e.g.,
a collection of countries visited, birds seen, or
sexual partners experienced), even in these
cases there must be the sense of an ensemble or
coherent set of experiences that are preserved
in memory as being interrelated. Still, this
distinction may depend partly on the frame of
mind of the person doing the collecting. To one
person, meals may be all about devouring food
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539
CRITICISMS OF COLLECTING
Among the criticisms that have been directed at
collecting, one is that collections are frivolous
objects of consumption rather than creative
objects of production. This is a criticism that has
been particularly directed at women as collectors. Saisselin (1984) observes that in nineteenthcentury France, men were taken to be serious
collectors while women were disparaged as
mere buyers of bibelots (1984: 68). According
with this stereotype, a husband-wife pair studied by Belk et al. (1991) were found to have collections that systematically differed such that
the mans (firefighting equipment, African
hunting trophies, fine art) collections could be
seen as gigantic, strong, worldly, mechanical,
extinguishing, scientific, serious, functional,
conspicuous, and inanimate, while his wifes
(mouse figure) collection could be seen as tiny,
weak, homey, natural, nurturing, artistic, playful, decorative, inconspicuous, and animate.
Pearce (1995) expands on this list, suggesting
other gender biases in characterizations of
mens and womens collections. Similar criticisms were directed at the Romantic movement
that Campbell (1987) identifies as the impetus
for consumer culture. Thus, we might characterize this criticism as charging an excess of
romanticism among collectors.
A different sort of criticism that has been leveled at collecting is that it reveals the obsessivecompulsive personality of one who has lost
control to an addiction to acquisition and
possession (e.g., Danet and Katriel 1994; Freund
1993; Gelber 1999; Rogan 1997). Although a
small number of collectors may be clinically
obsessive-compulsive, clearly such is not the
case for most collectors, who are well in control
of their collecting activities (Belk 1995b; Pearce
1995). Here, too, we can see a link to romanticism, with the obsessed artist epitomizing the
romantic ideal. Although it might be argued
that the artist is engaged in more of a productive than consumptive activity, as noted earlier,
it is indeed possible to see collectors as engaged
in a creative productive activity as well.
Part of the difficulty with collecting criticisms
such as these is that there appear to be diverse
types of collectors and diverse reasons to collect.
One distinction is made by Danet and Katriel
(1989). They distinguish the Type A collector,
who strives to complete a series comprising the
collection (stamp collectors filling a pre-printed
album are an example), and the Type B collector,
who follows aesthetic impulses and has no fixed
sense of a complete collection. Work by some
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REASONS, RATIONALIZATIONS,
AND PLEASURES OF COLLECTING
The criticisms directed at collecting largely
ignore the questions of why so many of us
collect something and how we account for our
collecting activity. The object collected is often
not deliberately chosen, although some collectors have a personal tie-in to a nickname, national
or ethnic heritage, occupation, or realm of experience. But sometimes a collection begins with a
seed gift from a friend or family member.
More often, there is a realization that one has
two or three of something and that it is the start
of a collection. In my study of collectors (Belk
1995b), one common benefit cited from collecting was a feeling of mastery and competence.
By collecting, the collector brings order to a
controllable portion of the world. Collected
objects form a small world where the collector
rules. This is often enhanced by the miniature
nature of many collectibles (Stewart 1984).
Closely related were feelings of competitive
success in a narrowly defined realm of rare
objects. In pursuing additions to their collections there was both a reliance on skill, persistence, and connoisseurship, and an added thrill
due to the element of luck in encountering a
sought-after object by chance, ideally at a
bargain price. Most collecting areas abound
with treasure tales of fortuitous finds (e.g., Fine
1987). This adds to the excitement behind the
thrill of the hunt that many collectors describe
(e.g., Benjamin 1968b; Rigby and Rigby 1944).
Beyond the extended self derived from the
collection (Belk 1995b; Dannefer 1980; Formanek
1991; Pearce 1998), the collectors knowledge
and expertise are the source of status within
circles of fellow collectors. For some, it is seen
as making an important, if vaguely conceived,
contribution to history, science, or art (even for
collections of such humble objects as beer cans
or elephant replicas: Belk 1995b). A prized
provenance for pieces in the collection may also
participate in the contagious magic that rubs off
on the pieces from their previous owners. The
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Abraham, Karl (1927) Selected Papers: Traditions of
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Ackerman, Paul, H. (1990) On collecting: a psychoanalytic view, Maine Antique Digest, May, pp. 22A24A.
Alsop, Joseph (1982) The Rare Art: the History of Art
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Mason, Peter (1994) From presentation to representation: Americana in Europe, Journal of the History
of Collections, 6 (1): 120.
McGreevy, Ann (1990) Treasures of children: collections then and now, or, treasures of children revisited, Early Childhood Development and Care, 63: 336.
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online is easy, fun and wide open to potential
fraud, Forbes 166 (25 December): 186.
Pomian, Krystof (1987/1990) Collectors and Curiosities:
Paris and Venice, 15001800, trans. Elizabeth WilesPortier. Cambridge: Polity Press (original Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux, Paris: Gallimard).
Pynchon, Thomas (1966) The Crying of Lot 49.
London: Cape.
Rehmus, James M. (1988) The collectors mind, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 31 (winter): 2614.
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archeology cont.
structuralism and semiotics
in 3840
and study of style 3567, 358,
359, 360
architecture 22, 11215, 168, 198,
199, 4389
domestic 50, 523, 11215,
23940, 2589, 3489, 412
and modernism 25466
monumental 5079
phenomenology of 48, 4953,
57, 2367, 507
vernacular 23053, 467
Aries, P. 5023
Aristotle 182
Armstrong, C. 137
Arnold, D. 80
arrows 416
art 33, 355, 356, 357, 3623, 365,
366, 430
and agency 301, 756, 77,
82, 391
circulation of objects 267,
27880, 292
conservation 517, 529
modern 2756
and objectification 667
primitive 2678, 27081
structural analysis of 356
universality of 2712, 2745
see also rock art
art history 132, 133, 134, 138, 139,
1745, 437
art-idea 134
artefacts 2, 7
categorization and stylistic
variation 41416
formation of assemblages 406
handling of 1689
sensory meaning of 1667
techniques of
manufacture 41214
artificial intelligence 428
artists intent 529
Asad, T. 201, 109, 127
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Asante 210
Ascher, R. 403
Association of Learned and
Professional Societies 455
astronomy 242
Attfield, J. 3645
Aug, M. 259, 310
Augustine, St 320
aura 76, 77, 466
Austin, J.L. 138, 188
Australia 37, 38, 277, 447 see also
Aborigines
Australian Council of Museums
Associations 490
authenticity 263, 269, 4667
author, decentring of the 87
authoritarianism 332
authority 466
Avebury 511
axes 436, 510
axiality 235, 2412
Aymara 216
Ayodhya mosque 505
Bakewell, L. 1389
Baktaman 179, 38990
Balasescu, A. 193
balconies 168
Bamiyan Buddhas 1401, 474, 505
Barnes, J. 319
Barok people 139
Barrell, J. 307
Barrett, J. 510, 511
Barrett, S.A. 364
barrows 506, 509, 510
barter theory of value 24
Barth, F. 20, 21, 179, 389
Barthes, R. 21, 312, 878, 913,
94, 132, 133, 134, 135, 270, 271
base-superstructure 7, 17,
19, 20, 426
Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) 177
baskets 534, 57, 63, 193, 364,
4336
Bataille, G. 207
Battaglia, D. 634
battleship curves 431, 432, 438
Baudrillard, J. 134, 137, 162, 213,
343, 469, 489, 491
Baum, L. Frank 227
Bauman, Z. 213, 263, 343
Baxandall, M. 131
baxus 35
Bayh-Dole Act 455
Beamish open-air museum 488
Beecher, K. Ward 224
Beek, G. van 96
Beek, W. Van 234
547
Bourdieu cont.
concept of habitus 9, 34, 40,
64, 67, 192, 3056, 362,
3867, 414
on Kabyle society 34, 39, 40,
646, 225, 258, 411
theory of practice 22, 61, 646,
111, 2078, 404
Bowie, K. 206
Boyer, M.C. 500
Bradley, R. 509, 511
Brecht, B. 132
Brentano, F. 44
Breuil, H. 38, 40
brilliance 181, 182
Britain 4389, 5034
British East India Company 209
Bromberger, C. 225
Bronze Age 509, 510, 511
Brooks, R. 428
Brumfiel, E. 20, 22
Bry, T. de 136
Bucher, B. 136
Buchli, V. 1689, 348
Buck-Morss, S. 134, 1378, 262
Buddhism 240, 342
building technology 242
bundling 2001
Burgin, V. 132, 136
burial 81, 50910
see also barrows; cairns;
megalithic tombs;
passage tombs
Busch, L. 293, 294
Bushell, H. 80
Bushong Kuba 206
business studies 3456
butchery practices 408, 409
Butler, J. 89, 956
Cabral, A. 105, 108
Cagnat, R. 110
cairns 506, 509, 510
Calcutta 11213
Cameroon 18891, 406
Campbell, C. 343, 345
Campbell, S. 31, 82
Canada 277, 279, 487
Canadian Museums
Association 490
Cane, S. 524
canoes 82, 430
capitalism 22, 197, 343, 344, 348
postmodern 213
and textile
production/consumption
203, 204, 20811, 213
capitalist time 23, 24
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capitivation 76, 77
cars 349, 440
Cartari, V. 132
Carthaginians 11617
Castiglione, B. 208
causality 197, 201, 202
causewayed enclosures 5089,
510, 511
Cezanne, P. 176, 181
chanes opratoires 32, 405, 414
Chakrabarty, D. 24, 25, 139,
475, 476
change
architectural 2334
long-term 42542
Charbonnier, G. 33
Chattopadhyay, S. 11213
Childe, V. Gordon 7, 18
children as collectors 538, 539
Childs, T.S. 412, 414, 417
China 127, 148, 1506, 214, 238,
243, 318, 342, 345, 347, 473
Chombart de Lauwe, P. 225
Chomsky, N. 258
chronology 359, 360
cinema/film 316, 317, 318, 319
circuits of culture 28893,
294, 295
circular form of monuments 509
cities 1912, 2434, 259
Clark, A. 4289
Clarke, D. 438
class 9, 678, 126, 1502, 155, 165,
342, 346
Classen, C. 161, 1634
classical studies 154
Clifford, J. 93, 94, 271, 272, 273,
274, 293, 309, 537
climate and architecture 232, 238
cloth and clothing 119, 193, 198,
200, 20320, 3667, 414
artisanal production 2034,
2056, 21011
as biographical object 81
capitalist production and
consumption 203, 204,
20811, 213
consumption of 203, 2067,
20814, 349
function-sensitive 209
as language 367
secondhand markets
217, 292, 349
semiotics of 312, 37, 38
spirituality of 2045
Western hegemony 21112
coding/decoding 1323
coffee 146, 294, 347
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INDEX
conservation cont.
institutions 51718, 52930
interventive or remedial 5202
preventive 51920, 526
and technology 519, 527, 528
constructivism 3323, 336, 338
consumer studies 345
consumerism 199, 21214,
2267, 258
consumption 9, 22, 208, 290, 326,
34154, 384, 427, 525
cloth and clothing 203, 2067,
20814, 349
collecting as 538
and objectification 67, 68
containers/containment 18695
contextualism 901
Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) 448, 449, 450
Cook, I. 289, 2956
cooking/cookbooks 145,
1478, 320
copyright 443, 447, 448, 449, 451,
452, 453, 455
corpothetics 126
cosmology 234, 235, 240, 241, 509
Costa Rican Electricity Institute
of Central America
(CREI) 3345
courtly societies, cloth and
clothing 203, 2058
Crang, P. 289
creativity 4512
creolization 244
Cresswell, R. 333, 334
critical fetishism 286
critical museology 481, 490
Csordas, T. 386
Cuisenier, J. 192
cultural capital 67
cultural difference 443
cultural hybridity 7
cultural identity 277, 443
cultural property 277, 4434,
4489, 452, 475
cultural relativism 274
cultural resources management
(CRM) 417
cultural rights 443, 4489, 475
cultural studies 1323, 212, 346
culture industry 468
custom 29
CYC project 428
Dahomey kingdom 245
Dalmatian coastal towns 50, 51
Damasio, A. 4278
Dandrel, L. 191
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Dani 177
Darwin, C. 13, 15, 426
David, B. 39
David, N. 403, 404
Davidson, J. 344
Dayak longhouse 50, 523
Debord, G. 491
De Certeau, M. 136
decolonization 105
deconstruction 96, 107, 134, 237,
470, 4745
decontextualization 437, 440, 443
decoration 364
architectural 2423
textiles and pottery 4336, 437
Deetz, J. 431, 4323
Deleuze, G. 240
De Man, P. 134
denotation 132
department stores 209, 227
dependency theory 105, 108
Derrida, J. 23, 24, 29, 35, 36, 86,
88, 89, 140
deconstructionist theory 96,
107, 134, 237, 4745
on difference 88
Desana 1634
Descartes, R. 43, 175
design 3267, 3489, 355, 3578,
3601, 3635, 3667
participatory (PD) 3389
desire(s) 21214
of things 4378
Desjarlais, R. 168
destruction 237, 245, 342, 525
Dethlefsen, E. 431
development 245, 332
dialectical materialism 1415
dialectical method 7, 13, 17
diasporic movement 30910
Dieterlen, G. 234
Dietler, M. 362
difference 88, 89
discard behaviour 408, 41011
discliplinary practices 89
discourse 8, 345, 106, 133, 135
Disneyfication 469
displacement 168, 289
distributed intelligence 427, 440
Dja Dja Wurrung 277
Dobres, M.-A. 31
Dogon 2345, 242, 3912
dolmen mounds 508, 509
domestic interiors 2219
dominance, architectures
of 237, 244
dominant ideology thesis 19, 468
domination, relations of 66
549
evolution 7, 17, 1719
see also social evolutionary
approaches
evolutionary economics 329, 337
Ewen, S. and Ewen, E. 226
exchange 21, 22, 634, 74, 327,
341, 37383, 427, 525
commodity 3768, 380
competitive 379
gift 21, 22, 63, 66, 205, 327, 350,
37482
see also kula exchange; potlatch
exchange value 68, 286, 288
exile 30910
extra-mundane, the visual
as 1345
Fabian, J. 109, 136, 272, 273
Fair Trade 211, 294, 295, 296,
380, 382
Fang architecture 235
Fanon, F. 105
fashion 2078, 209, 21112, 21617
Fassbinder, R.W. 316
fear, promotion of 244
Feeley-Harnik, G. 471, 472
feeling, structures of 305
Feld, S. 167
feminism 26, 258, 306, 3356, 468
Ferguson, J. 22, 21617
Ferme, M. 80
Fernandez, J. 235
festa 3968
fetishism 199, 270
commodity 23, 68, 75, 212, 350
critical 286
Feuerbach, L. 14, 17
Fewster, K. 405, 417
figural forms 135
film/cinema 316, 317, 318, 319
First Nation peoples 277, 489, 490,
528, 529
see also Aborigines; Native
Americans
Fisher, M.F.K. 1489
Fletcher, C. 168
Flood, F.B. 1401, 505
folklore 449
Fontijn, D. 81
food and eating 18, 323, 65, 66,
678, 14560, 289, 290, 296,
346, 350
food taboos 146, 147
Forde, D. 232, 238
Forge, A. 139, 181
forgetting 31922, 444, 474,
4878, 511
form 430
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Hoffman, E. 310
Hoffman, R. 391, 392
Holland 209
see also Netherlands
Holloway, J. 394
Holo, S. 486
Holocaust 472, 504
home 23940, 258, 259, 3489
home furnishing 198, 199,
200, 2219
homelessness 168, 198, 237, 240,
259, 262
hooks, b. 305
Hopkins, T. 287, 288
Horne, D. 467
Hoskins, W.G. 221, 304, 305
hot and cold societies 33
houses 192, 200, 239
see also architecture, domestic
Hughes, R. 276
Humphrey, C. 258
hunter-gatherer societies
408, 41011, 426
Husserl, E. 43, 445, 46, 56
Huyssen, A. 319, 468, 469, 470
hybrid actor networks 2934, 296
hybridity 7, 107, 108, 111,
11820, 120
hyle 45
hypertexts 94
ICCROM 518
iconicity 8
iconology 132
icons 30, 31, 37, 133
ideal, the 15
idealism 13, 14
Identiteitsfabriek zuidoost 489
identity 147, 155, 239, 475
cultural 277, 443
forgetting and formation of
new 3201
gendered 63, 384
mediation of 4756
national/political 277, 279, 347,
356, 501
ideology 1920, 25
igloos 168
image acts 1389
indexes 30, 31, 37, 133
indexicality 8, 200
India 11213, 138, 204, 209, 211,
342, 3467, 416, 473
indigenous rights 447, 448, 450
individuation 262
Indonesia 64, 7980, 127, 205, 240
industrialization 3301, 426
of cloth/clothing manufacture
2089, 21011, 213, 214
inference 31
information technology 94, 332
see also Internet
information theory 163, 359
Ingold, T. 534, 57, 239, 42930,
463, 471
initiation rites 35, 327, 385, 386,
38790, 392, 393, 394
Inkas 206, 242
Institute of Conservation 518, 529
intellectual property 443, 444,
44762
intelligence 4278, 440
intention, authorial 8990
intentionality 44, 45, 46, 48
inter-artefactual domain 437
intercultural exchange 27880
Intermediate Technology 332
International Council on
Monuments and Sites
(ICOMOS) 518
International Council of
Museums (ICOM) 483, 491,
516, 518
Internet 259, 261, 317, 347
interpretation 87, 90, 91, 97
interpretative archeology 9, 427
interpretative (hermeneutic)
phenomenology 8, 43, 457
intersensoriality 1645
intertextuality 88
intuition 44
investiture ceremonies 204, 206
Iran 412
Ireland, Republic of 225, 504
iron 412, 414
Isherwood, B. 212
Islam 243, 244
Islamic dress 215
Italy 208
Iteanu, A. 388, 389
Jackson, J.B. 304
Japan 204, 208, 231, 315,
316, 347
Japanese tea ceremony 164
Jarman, N. 394, 395
Java 206, 210, 215
Jews 315, 316, 318, 504
Johnson, M. 428, 433
joint attention studies 429
Jones, A. 436
juridical order 24
Juska, A. 293, 294
Kabyle people 34, 39, 40, 646,
225, 258, 411
Kalinoe, L. 452
Kant, I. 45, 201
551
Kashaya people 115, 119
Kay, P. 177, 178
Kayapo 128, 165
Keane, W. 37, 60, 61, 64,
69, 71, 7980, 217,
267, 270, 273
Kenya 406, 411, 416
Khmer Rouge 140
kinship 17, 20, 320, 376
Kleindienst, M.R. 403
knowledge
colour as 180
control of 345
cultural 444
and power 106, 269, 441
traditional 449, 450, 452
Kodi people 79
Koerner, J.L. 138
Kondo, D. 164
Kool-Aid 167
Kopytoff, I. 75, 191, 291
Korsmeyer, C. 32
Koshar, R. 319
Kramer, C. 403, 404, 412
Krinsky, C. Herselle 232
Kristeller, P. 275
Kristeva, J. 86, 88, 92
Kroeber, A. 331, 356, 357
Kchler, S. 778, 309, 3258,
471, 472
kula exchange 31, 70, 125, 166,
181, 291, 379
Kundera, M. 321
Kwakiutl 356, 37
labels and logos 213
labour 343, 426
abstract 24
textile industry 214
labour conditions 214, 295
labour power 23
Lacan, J. 19, 134
Lake Dwellers 255
Lakoff, G. 428, 433
Lambaesis 110, 111
Laming, A. 38
landscape(s) 39, 545, 57, 70,
198, 30314
of contestation 308
embodied approach to 306
in literature 303
metaphors 3034
monuments and 5067,
51112
of movement 30910
as palimpsest 304
phenomenological approach to
545, 3057
of terror 310
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mortuary practices 634, 204,
50910
Moses, R. 332
Mounin, G. 32
Mount Hageners 139
mourning 318, 5034
Mughals 204, 206
Mukerji, C. 209, 345
Mulvaney, K. 378
Mumford, L. 332
Munn, N. 8, 6870, 78, 146, 166,
341, 364
Munsell system 175, 182
Murra, J. 206
Museo Capitolino 482
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
269, 2702, 273, 277, 278
Museum Studies 470
museums 2, 78, 169, 316, 444, 445,
465, 470, 48099, 5001
deathly associations 4845
and First Nation peoples
489, 490
new technology in 489
postcolonial critique 490, 491
semiotic approaches to 4867
as sites of memory 4848
temporal orientations 4856
Museums Association 483, 490
Museums, Libraries and Archives
Council (MLA) 530
Myers, F. 25, 75, 292
Namforsen rock art 39, 40
naming 306
narrative, and built forms and
spaces 261
national identity 279, 347, 356, 501
Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation
Act (1990) 277, 528
Native Americans 18, 80, 167, 224,
231, 232, 240, 241, 268, 277,
403, 406, 490
naturalization 66
nature 17, 18, 239, 307, 451
Nazism 31516, 317, 321
Ndembu society 387, 388
Needham, J.A. 238
ngritude movement 105
Nelson, R. 336, 337
Nemerov, A. 138
neocolonialism 105
Neolithic Age 509, 510, 511
Nepal 238, 243
Netherlands 81, 536 see also
Holland
Neue Wache memorial 504
neurology 176
553
pain 127
Palestine 308
Pandya, V. 1678
Panofsky, E. 31, 132
Papua New Guinea 623, 79, 139,
166, 167, 179, 181, 240, 361,
374, 38890, 452
see also Gawan society; kula
exchange
parading 385, 3946, 399
Paris 209
participatory design (PD) 3389
Pascal, B. 19
passage tombs 506, 5078, 510
patents 443, 447, 448, 449, 451,
453, 455
patrimony 444
pattern 176, 364
Peace Museum, Hiroshima 504
Peale, R. 138
Pearce, S. 482
Peirce, C.S. 30, 133, 201, 236, 363
Pekarik, A. 276
perception 44, 478, 428, 429
colour 174, 1768
performance 327, 384401
personification 63
Pfaffenberger, B. 335
phenomenology 7, 8, 4359, 99,
138, 174
of architecture 48, 4953, 57,
2367, 507
photographic theory 132
photographs 767, 133, 136,
317, 318
phylogenetics 330
Piaget, J. 29, 30, 334
Picasso, P. 2701
Pickering, A. 333
Picton, J. 392
Pincevent, France 408
Pitjantjatjara 181
place 49, 50, 54, 70, 30314
sensuous reaction to 1678
as a site of memory 319
plain speech 15
planning 22, 4950
Plant, S. 335
Plumb, J.H. 464
Pocius, G.L. 2256
political identity 277, 356
politics of technology 332
Pomo baskets 364
Pompeii 254
Ponams 374, 3801
Poole, F.J.P. 389
popular culture 212
positivism 43
postcolonial theory 10420, 475
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sexuality 240, 258
sexualization, clothing and 214
Shakers 241
Shamanism 40
Shanks, M. 93
Sherratt, A. 436
Sierra Leone 80, 243, 393
significance assessment 529
signifier/signified 30, 86, 89, 133
Silver, H. 3589
Simet, J. 452
Simmel, G. 64, 91, 97, 207
simulations 489
Skansen 467
skin 1878, 194
Skoggard, I. 214
slaves/slavery 210, 242, 244, 245,
473, 504
Smith, Adam 375
sociability of objects 437
social capital 66, 67
social construction 3323, 336, 338
social evolutionary approaches
426, 427, 440
social formation 20
social life, objects as 525
social ordering 1645, 508
social organization 41112
social progress 3301
socialization 62, 70
Socit des Ambianceurs
et des Personnes lgantes
(SAPE) 212
Sohn-Rethel, A. 24, 25
The Sorrow and the Pity (film) 316
sound 163, 167
South Africa 245, 316, 489, 505
Soviet Union 255, 262, 315, 317,
343, 504
space 489, 50, 523, 54, 1678,
236
and biographical objects 78
and colour 1812
and gender 240, 306
phenomenological approach
to 306
production of 305
and sexuality 240
symbolic use of 41012
time and movements
through 306
transformation of 327, 385,
3948, 399
space-time
and new technologies 259, 261
value in 6870
Spain 321, 486, 488
spatial mobility 240
spears 416
speech 30, 34, 62
speech acts 138
Spinoza, B. de 427
spirituality of cloth and
clothing 2045
Spivak, G. 11, 107, 140, 474, 475
stability of structural
systems 334
Stafford, B. 137, 491
stage theory 25
Stahl, A.B. 363, 417
state 19, 191
status 67, 412
Steiner, C. 75
Steiner, F. 292
Stephen, L. 211
Steward, J. 18, 21, 331
Stewart, S. 501
Stiles, Rev. E. 224
stone circles 506, 507, 509
Stonehenge 507, 508, 511
Strathern, M. 24, 76, 139, 327,
377, 378
string bags (bilum) 623, 79,
361, 365
structural-functionalism 2, 34
structural Marxism 3, 7, 1617,
1920, 4267, 440
structuralism 7, 8, 9, 2942, 857,
88, 235, 258, 346, 357, 362, 364
structuration 9, 34, 36, 154,
306, 361
structure, and agency 9, 154, 405
style 35567, 41416, 437
style horizons 20
subaltern studies group
106, 1078
subject-object relations 467,
197202
see also objectification
subjectivity 1756, 199
subsistence 17, 18
substantivists 376
suburban communities 259, 263
Sudan 234, 238, 242, 392
sugar 21, 347
Sullivan, L. 161, 1624
Sumba 64, 7980, 205
sumptuary laws 208, 209, 342
supernatural 54
surfaces 18695
Sutton, D.E. 147
Suy Indians 125, 128, 165
Sweden 39, 40, 492 n.3, 506
Switzerland 255
symbolic anthropology 2, 1789
symbolic capital 66, 67, 411
555
symbolism 1789, 235, 363, 41012
symbols 30, 133
symmetry 364
synaesthesia 161, 1624, 173
system function 365, 366
Taborsky, E. 4867
Tacchi, J. 349
Tagg, J. 136
tailoring 208
Taliban 1401, 474, 505
Tallensi 19
taste 21, 678, 342, 346, 363
sense of 21
Taussig, M. 21, 77
Taylor, E. 224
tea 21
technocracy 332
technological determinism 325,
330, 331, 333, 336
technological style 357, 362,
405, 414
technology 3256, 32940, 355,
356, 357, 362, 426
appropriate 332
appropriation of 336
authoritarian aspects of 332
and conservation 519, 527, 528
functionalist notion of 426
new 94, 259, 347, 489
politics of 332
as progress 3301
social construction of 333
technology transfer 3345
Telefol people 623, 79, 361
Teleformin 179
television 317, 318, 349
territorial passage 29
textiles 193, 4336, 437, 51617,
519, 5207
see also cloth and clothing
textualism 86, 8799, 107,
162, 261
Thailand 234
Thirsk, J. 226
Thomas, J. 95, 510
Thomas, N. 70, 75, 110, 119, 120,
277, 278, 279, 291
Thompson, D. 403
Thompson, E. 176
Thompson, E.P. 343
Thomson, K. 483
Thorne, L. 294
Three Age system 431
Tianeman Square 504
Till, K. 502, 504
Tilley, C. 22, 25, 39, 40, 545,
62, 306
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time
and biographical objects 78
monumental 5001
and movements through
space 306
primitive art and neutralization
of 2723
see also space-time
time pieces, objects as 5234, 526
Tolai 4523
tombstones 4312
tools 32, 467
topography 31819
Torres Strait 2, 277
totalitarianism 317
totemism 30, 31, 356, 37, 433
touch/tactility 128, 1689, 182
tourism 308, 363, 467
Toy Story 2 5247
Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property
(TRIPS) 448
tradition 234, 359, 361, 417, 449
traditional knowledge 449,
450, 452
transformation 1934, 3258
performance and 327, 385,
38790, 3919
transnationalism 17, 22
trauma 318, 501
Traweek, S. 335
Trigger, B. 18, 109
true nature of an object 518, 528
tsetsequa 356
Tswana people 111, 216
Tuan, Yi-Fu 49, 167, 239, 241
Tukano-speakers 1634, 169
Turkana 406, 416
Turnbull, D. 308
Turner, V. 35, 1789, 387
Tyler, S. 162
typology 4313
Ucko, P. 38, 357
Ulrich, L. Thatcher 80
UN Draft Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous
Peoples 450
unconscious 474
UNESCO 448, 449, 4745, 512
United States 213, 240, 243, 244,
245, 487, 488, 490, 504
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights 450
universality of art 2712, 2745
Upper Palaeolithic art 38, 40
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Page 556
INDEX
Upton, D. 231
urban planning 2434
use value 68, 286, 288, 289
utility 373
value 21
barter theory of 24
evidential 51819
exchange 68, 286, 288
historical 41718
qualitative 286, 2901
regimes of 291
in space-time 6870
use 68, 286, 288, 289
value chains 2878
value creation 286, 288, 289, 296
value transformation 71
van Brakel, Jaap 175, 177
Van Gogh, Vincent 31, 134
Vstergtland 506
Veblen, Thorsten 207, 342
veiling 215
Vernacular Architecture
Forum 231
Vernacular Architecture
Group 231
Vidler, A. 259
village planning 235, 243
violence to architecture 2445
Violich, F. 50
virtual collections 519
virtual dwelling 261
virtual materialities 25
visual culture 13144
Vitruvius 231
Vogt, A.M. 255
Vortrekker monument 505
Wajcman, Judy 332, 335, 336
Wala people 161
Wallerstein, I. 21, 287, 288
Wal-mart 213, 214
Walsh, K. 46970
war 503
memories of 318, 321, 322
war crimes 315, 316
war memorials 37, 322, 5034
Warburg, A. 132
Wardaman people 38
Washburn, D.K. 364
water 238
waterwheel design 333, 334
Watson, P.J. 403, 412
Wauchope, R. 403
Weber, M. 198, 275, 332, 343, 536
Weiner, A. 79, 146, 166, 204, 366
Weiss, B. 146
well-being 444, 474
Wengrow, D. 436
West Kennet 55, 56
The West as America
exhibition 487
Whatmore, S. 294
White, H. 93, 95
White, L. 18, 19, 331
Whitehouse, H. 389, 390
Whorf, B.L. 177
Wiegman, R. 26
Wiessner, P. 416
Wigley, M. 237
Wilk, R. 359, 361, 363
Williams, R. 275, 305
Wilson, D. 4823
Winner, L. 332, 333
Winter, J. 318, 322, 337, 338
Witmore, C. 98
Wittgenstein, L. 98, 162
Wobst, H.M. 355, 359, 3601,
363, 416
Wolf, E. 21, 105, 108, 472
women 20, 206, 214, 215, 240,
332, 539
World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO)
448, 449, 450
World Trade Organization
(WTO) 448
world view and building form 241
world-systems theory 21, 105,
108, 287
Worsley, P. 19
wrapping 191, 193, 380
Wright, P. 468
written discourse, transformation
of things into 86, 925
yangsheng 150, 151
Yankunytjatjara 181
Yates, F. 319
Yekuana people 63
Yolngu people 667, 179, 182,
308, 309
Young, R. 106, 107
youth cultures 212, 386
Yumbulul, T. 444, 4512
Zambia 217
Zapotec 211
Zeki, S. 176
Zimbabwe 240, 244, 245, 347, 504
Zizek, S. 25
Zulus 240