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The commercial and regional imagery of big things: Establishing a foundation for the study of oversized roadside landmarks Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Amy Clarke
The highly visible yet poorly studied phenomenon of roadside colossi—oversized commercial buildings and statues in the shape of everyday objects, referred to in this article as Big Things—has often been dismissed as a kitschy by-product of American post-war consumerism and car culture. There are no universal definitions or typologies for this form of material culture, nor is there a sufficiently global
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Beneath the Laarve: Masking during the Basel Carnival of Fasnacht (Faasnacht)1 Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Olga Věra Cieslarová, Martin Pehal, Werner Kern
Describing the historical development of the mask (Laarve)2 within the carnival tradition of the Basel Fasnacht (Faasnacht, Switzerland) during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this articl...
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‘Just a souvenir?’ Entangled identities within an early 20th century American Indian basket collection Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Laura Ahlqvist, Bryn Barabas Potter
In this article, we examine a collection of 47 American Indian baskets collected in the early 20th century, at the height of the ‘basket craze’. Currently stored in a Danish museum without much arc...
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The ophthalmoscope and the physician: Technical innovations and professionalization of medicine Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Corinne Doria
This article examines the impact of the ophthalmoscope on medical practice and the transformation the medical profession undertook during the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that t...
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9/11 steel: Distributed memorialization Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Samuel Holleran, Max Holleran
Steel has become the de facto material to memorialize 9/11. In this article, we show how the vast majority of steel from the World Trade Center (200,000 tons) was recycled abroad but what remained ...
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Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Nathan A Shank
Memorials and monuments often shape the narratives of public memory surrounding key events and figures, even as they help process and represent the trauma and remembered emotions that those subject...
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Invasive materialities: War bunkers as disturbing nodes of collaboration Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Mads Daugbjerg
This article discusses the qualities and affordances of the remaining World War II bunkers still found along Europe's Western coastline. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from a Danis...
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The absence that will not go away Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Julie de Vos
In this article, I will explore the concepts of absence and presence in the context of the Francoist repression during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following dictatorship (1939–1975) r...
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The aesthetics of open-ended mourning: The statue of a holy-madman in Dersim, Turkey Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Çiçek İlengiz
What happens to the notion of commemoration when its object is not fixed in time? Intervening in scholarly discussions on the contested nature of public remembering, this ethnographic research anal...
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Introduction: Afterlives in objects Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Jeremy F. Walton, Çiçek İlengiz
In this introduction to our edited volume, Material Afterlives, we specify the interventions and arguments of our collection as a whole. To begin, we reflect on the recent proliferation of “afterli...
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Between past and future ruins: Post-Ottoman Niš in the album of Knez Milan Obrenović Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Jelena Radovanović
While historians of Southeast Europe have recently increasingly turned to photographs as primary sources, this article reads a late 19th century photographic album not as an (objective) representat...
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Time after death: Material afterlives in the work of estate administration Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Sofia Pinedo-Padoch
When someone dies without a will and with no close family willing to administer their estate in New York City and other large US cities, the Public Administrator (PA), a small state agency, steps i...
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Care in the air? Atmospheres of care in Swedish pharmacies Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Rui Liu
This article builds upon literature on materialities of care and departs from a relational view of care and place. Using the concept of atmosphere, it investigates how care practices are situated s...
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Trauma remains: The material afterlives of the 1989 Alton school bus crash Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Robert Matej Bednar
This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldw...
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The dead wait: Material afterlives in sepulchral spaces Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Jeremy F. Walton
This essay examines the heterotopic and heterochronic material afterlives of cemeteries through a comparative focus on two cities of the dead: Zagreb's Mirogoj Cemetery, which was established durin...
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Local fashion, global imagination: Agency, identity, and aspiration in the diasporic Hmong community Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Tian Shi
Dress has been used as a visual avowal of social status, personality, personal taste, identity, and philosophy throughout history. This article aims to assess the changing dress practices and under...
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Anthropological face casts: Towards an ethical processing of their histories and difficult legacies of intimacy and ambiguity Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Gwyneira Isaac, Sadie Colebank
Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were created and collected in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived ...
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Learning from the secondary: Rethinking architectural conservation through ‘barn architecture’ Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Iida Kalakoski, Sigrun Thorgrimsdottir
This article explores material culture and peoples’ engagement with built environments from the perspective of vernacular architecture, adaptive reuse and more specifically barn-inspired architectu...
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From demon to deity: Forging a new iconography for Mahishasur Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Moumita Sen
This article focuses on the forging of a new iconography for Mahishasur, a ‘demon’ in Hindu mythology who was reclaimed by indigenous communities both as a ‘god’ and as a champion of their politica...
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Making “Senses”: The qualia of Pu’er tea and sensorial encounters between tea producers and traders in southwest China Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Zhen Ma
This article analyses how Han buyers’ perception of and desire for the qualia—sensuous qualities—of Pu’er tea affects how ethnic minority producers perceive and make the tea. As a defining aspect o...
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In defense of materiality: Attending to the sensori-social life of things Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 David Howes
This article presents a defense of the concept of materiality in the face of Tim Ingold’s critique of the concept as part of his “efforts to restore anthropology to life” in Being Alive and elsewhe...
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Pith and power: Colonial style in France and French West Africa Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Victoria L. Rovine
Through close analysis of interwar French representations of the pith helmet, both visual and textual, I trace the array of significations to which this single form of material culture was harnesse...
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The affective economy and fast fashion: Materiality, embodied learning and developing a sensibility for sustainable clothing Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Joanie Willett, Clare Saunders, Fiona Hackney, Katie Hill
Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour tha...
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Making a home in the world: Clothes as mnemonic devices through which refugees experience home in flight and resettlement Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Charlot Schneider
How do refugees experience home not just in the country of settlement but also along their journeys of flight? Departing from theories that see home as something which is left behind in displacement, this paper explores how clothes act as important mnemonic devices, storing and archiving memories from different times and places, whilst connecting people to new places en route. Through the in-depth
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Creels and catenary wires: Creating community through winter lights displays Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Julia Bennett
Lighting up darkness is a material practice shared across many cultures. Lighting up winter darkness is a particular concern in urban areas in order to make urban spaces feel safer and more welcoming. Temporary lights, often characterised as ‘Christmas’ or ‘Winter’ lights, are installed over the darkest period of the year (December in the northern hemisphere) in town and city centres to attract shoppers
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Under one roof: Material changes and familial estrangement in Puno, Peru Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Sandhya Krittika Narayanan
Traditional, Indigenous houses in Puno, Peru, were built using adobe bricks, stone, and wood. Today, young Indigenous couples are building houses that utilize modern materials such as concrete, brick, and steel. In this paper, I analyze the effects that changing materialities of house construction practices have on the durability and breadth of kin-relationships in Puno. I argue that these changes
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Making masks: The women behind Ghana's nose covering mandate during the COVID-19 outbreak Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare
In 2020, Ghanaians adopted face masks, or “nose masks,” in public places to combat the spread of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Seamstresses and tailors quickly pivoted to manufacture nose masks by April, given the longstanding cottage sewing industry. While the country saw an influx of disposable face masks by the end of the year, cloth mask makers made a significant impact on public health at the
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In memory of future earthquakes: Controversial new form and function of a commemorative statue in 1920s Tokyo Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Janet Borland
Earthquake memorials dot the Japanese archipelago, marking its long history of destructive tremors. Today, many of these memorials are designed to serve the dual purpose of commemorating victims, and educating future generations. Almost a hundred years ago, however, this idea that a commemorative statue could also serve as a pedagogical tool proved to be novel and controversial. This article focuses
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Art and anthropology: Twenty-five years of The Traffic in Culture Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Karin Zitzewitz, Manuela Ciotti
Special issue introduction.
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Contemporary archaeology in conflict zones: The materiality of violence and the transformation of the urban space in Temuco, Chile during the social outburst Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-02-04 Henrik B. Lindskoug, Wladimir Martínez
We have, during the Latin American spring, studied the material traces of state oppression and social movements in Temuco, Chile, and the transformation of the urban landscape with archaeological surveys. Our results demonstrate alterations in the urban landscape related to both police presence and protesters. Large amounts of teargas-projectiles and rubber bullets indicate strong police presence and
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Reading clay: The temporal and transformative potential of clay in contemporary scientific practice Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Lia Bryant, Kimberly Jamie, Gary J. Sharples
Clay has a long history in the global south and has been extensively studied by ‘Western’ social scientists particularly anthropologists and archeologists in relation to histories of earlier civilisations and cultural practices. Clay in relation to contemporary ‘science’ has received less attention in social science despite the emergence of the sub-discipline of ‘clay science’ and its increasing focus
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Refiguring Art and Anthropology, For Whom? A conversation with George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Karin Zitzewitz,Manuela Ciotti,George E. Marcus,Fred R. Myers
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When Does Infrastructure “Qualify for [Artistic] Attention”? The “ABCs” of Contemporary Art in Post-Liberalization India Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Karin Zitzewitz
The period between “liberalization,” or the 1991 opening of India's economy to foreign direct investment, and the 2008 onset of the Great Recession was one of unprecedented change in the forms of Indian art and the infrastructures that supported its understanding, presentation, and circulation. This period of efflorescence—of multiplying growth in and transformation of a set of interlocking artistic
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Mood as medium: Reconstruction and the material speculations of “new heritage” Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-01-10 Timothy P.A. Cooper
If the politics of aspirational construction appeal to the enchantment of infrastructure, reconstruction usually takes as given an environment of post-conflict, natural disaster, or the degradation of systems of preservation or resource management. If construction and conservation are taken as markers of continuity and political stability what does the urge to build again say about those who exert
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Getting attached to a classic Mustang. Use, maintenance and the burden of authenticity Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2022-01-03 Jérôme Denis, Cornelia Hummel, David Pontille
This paper investigates the relationships consumers cultivate with mass-market commodities while caring for their authenticity. Drawing on a six-year ethnography of classic Mustang owners communities in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the authors show that, far from being a symbolic value only, or a resource into which people can “invest” in a mechanism of social distinction, authenticity can also
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The issue is moot: Decolonizing art/artifact Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Ruth B. Phillips
This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics and science-- understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing convergences exhibited
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Toward an anthropology of plastics Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-12-17 Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Materially plastics are ambivalent. In spite of their often lauded quality of creating seemingly untethered imitations, representations and replacements, they have a materiality that leaks, off-gasses and disintegrates. They are accomplished at mimicry yet frequently unable to be remoulded. They are ostensibly resistant to microbial contamination yet absorb environmental pollutants and leach endocrine
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Gazing on invisible men: Introducing the gallery gaze to establish that (in)visibility is in the eye of the beholder at Westminster Menswear Archive Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Joshua M Bluteau
The Westminster Menswear Archive, housed at the University of Westminster held an exhibition in 2019 entitled ‘Invisible Men’. The purpose of this show was to “shine a light” on men, or more accurately menswear which had been hitherto neglected by scholarship and exhibitions featuring dress (Groves and Sprecher, 2019). This article draws on research conducted at this exhibition to ask anthropological
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Hunter-gatherer or the other ethnographer? The artist in the age of historical reproduction Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-12-06 Nora A. Taylor
This essay revisits Hal Foster's essay in Marcus and Myers’ The Traffic in Culture (1995), “The Artist as Ethnographer,” through the lens of the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo's practice of collecting historical material. While Foster problematizes Western artists’ “primitivist fantasies” in the 1990s world of “postcolonial and “multinational capitalism,” I will consider Vo’ 21st century method of
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Assembling things: Warao crafts, trade and tourists Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-11-23 Christian Sørhaug
We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography. There is a preconception of things being relatively stable, fixed and inert entities. In this paper, I suggest exploring the ordinary life of things, accounting for the interweaving of the human life with nonhuman materials. The mutual becomings of various entities, both humans and nonhumans
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‘It's Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-11-11 Pavel Mašek
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Material Appropriation for Infant Mortality Reduction: Troubling the discourse Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-11-08 Debbie L. Watson, James Reid
Reducing the risk of Sudden and Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI) is a priority for infant health care services across the globe. Medical knowledge of risk factors for SUDI are well understood and have been part of public health messaging in the UK since the 1990s. These include the ‘back to sleep’ campaign that focused on newborn sleep position, not over wrapping the infant and to avoid passive smoke
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Breaking the peace: Representation, affect and materiality in pre-modern England Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-10-29 Gabriel Byng
The pax was an object intended both to symbolise and to enforce peace among Christian congregations in pre-modern Europe and so when a man named John Browne smashed one over the head of the parish clerk during one of the holiest services of the year in a church in southeast England something had evidently gone wrong. This article is dedicated to explaining not only why Browne reacted with such fury
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Exploring commensality, household and solidarity. Evidence of a medium-scale community gathering place in Neolithic Kleitos 1, north-western Greece Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-10-19 Evita Kalogiropoulou, Christina Ziota
This paper describes the cooking installations found inside a specific building, Building C, in the Late Neolithic site of Kleitos 1, their morphological and functional diversification, how they changed and evolved throughout time, and their spatial arrangements. Building C provided the stratigraphic information required by the authors to discern two distinct chronological phases, during which a significant
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Ritual act, technology, and the efficacy of traditional tattooing among the Igorots of north Luzon, Philippines Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-09-24 Analyn Salvador-Amores
What are the social dimensions involved in the technology of traditional tattooing among the Igorots of north Luzon, the Philippines? Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork among the Igorots, an examination of the varying traditional tattooing practices of these ethnic groups demonstrates that the significance of batok (traditional tattoos) does not only lie in their symbolic and aesthetic
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Crafting displacement: Reconfigurations of heritage among Syrian artisans in Amman Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-09-14 Sofya Shahab
Heritage has been established as a core factor in shaping identity and community. Alongside the human suffering and mass displacement arising from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, there has been increased attention on heritage as a victim of war. While scholarship has predominantly focussed on the impacts of conflict on built heritage, through semi-structured interviews and oral histories produced
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Bones, fire, and falcons: Loving things in medieval Europe Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-09-13 Peter J. A. Jones
In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization
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Will the real materialisms please step forward? Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Christopher Witmore
New Materialisms, as we learn from Govier and Steel, bear but a peripheral resemblance to what readers find in the article, Archaeology and the New Materialisms (henceforth “ArchaNeMs”). If one remains convinced that ontologies in the style of Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism or, as the authors champion, Karen Barad’s agential realism are the only materialisms worthy of this label (Cipolla, 2018:
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Living with landmines: Inhabiting a war-altered landscape Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-08-29 Lisa Arensen
Mined land in Cambodia possesses hazardous potential for those willing to risk its inhabitation, but this potentiality is commingled with threat and uncertainty. Mined terrain creates sites where the affordances of place clash with its dangerous materialities. Village residents in this study were engaged in ongoing efforts to physically alter the place they inhabited, but these tectonic processes were
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Fijian mats: Embodying and mediating female qualities Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-07-06 Jara Hulkenberg, Akanisi Tarabe, Jacqueline Ryle
This article analyses the contemporary significance and sociocultural meanings of Fijian mats. Based on research in different areas of Fiji over two decades and a University of the South Pacific workshop on weaving in 2016, the article argues that mats express relational pathways between kin groups and mediate between the material and the spiritual. It also argues that, embodying ‘female qualities’
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In the service of secrecy: An enveloped history of priority, proof and patents Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the
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Beyond the ‘thingification’ of worlds: Archaeology and the New Materialisms Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-06-19 Eloise Govier, Louise Steel
This article considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion article: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), specifically his emphasis on things. This, the authors demonstrate, is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. They unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological
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Keeping the family silver: The changing meanings and uses of Manchester’s civic plate Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-06-14 Tim Edensor, Becky Sobell
This article explores the shifting uses and meanings of Manchester civic plate, a huge silver dining service purchased in 1877 to coincide with the opening of the city’s neo-Gothic Town Hall. The authors explore how the silver collection has successively forged relations with a host of different people, places and objects, exemplifying the changing processes through which objects are understood, utilized
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Metonyms of destruction: Death, ruination, and the bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-05-15 Antonius CGM Robben
The German and Allied bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War caused thousands of dead and hundreds of missing, and severely damaged the Dutch port city. The joint destruction of people and their built environment made the ruins and rubble stand metonymically for the dead when they could not be mentioned in the censored press. The contiguity of ruins, rubble, corpses and human remains was not
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The circular economy of food waste: Transforming waste to energy through ‘make-up’ work Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-04-15 Tora Holmberg, Malin Ideland
This article unpacks the neat straightforwardness of the ‘waste regime’ of the circular economy of food waste and its main idea: ‘waste as resource’. It explores the making of circularity by paying detailed attention to what is conceptualized as ‘make-up’ work, i.e. how interruptions and leaks along waste flows are handled in practice. Make-up work capitalizes on its double meaning. First, it highlights
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The terrain of thingworlds: Central objects and asymmetry in material culture systems Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-04-08 Gavin Lucas, John Robb
Material culture forms a relational system of distributed reality – a thingworld. But how do we get beyond simply saying that all material culture is meaningful and entangled to understanding the internal structure of such systems? Is it a flat terrain among co-equal things? Or are some objects more important than others, as we might intuitively suppose? And if so, why? This article presents an initial
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Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-03-05 Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges anthropologists, Islamic Studies scholars, art historians and museum practitioners to question the theological assumptions underlying conceptions of Islamic art and material culture. This article analyses three object types key to Ahmed’s analysis – Islamic figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls – from the
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Hazy clouds: Making black carbon visible in climate science Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2021-02-16 Vasundhara Bhojvaid
In 1995, a multimillion-dollar experiment – the Indian Ocean Experiment – discovered a dark mass of polluting air hovering above the Indian subcontinent. This mass of air was termed a cloud and found to be composed of a high amount of black carbon that was judged to be the second biggest threat to climate change after carbon-dioxide. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the life of black carbon
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Malagasy art on the move: Materiality, home displays, and problems in decolonizing Christianity Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2020-11-21 Britt Halvorson
This article explores how white US Christians’ home displays, including their decorative presentation of paintings, small sculptures, and other memorabilia of foreign travel, play a critical role in representing imperial geographies. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research on the current aid partnership between Lutherans in the US and Madagascar, which stems from American Lutheran mission work
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Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design Journal of Material Culture (IF 1.269) Pub Date : 2020-11-16 Albena Yaneva
How is an architectural model consolidated and re-assembled in conservation to be able to continue to communicate a design concept? How does the work of care and preservation of models reveal knowledge about the often taken-for-granted dynamics of creative processes? To provide answers, this article draws on Etienne Souriau’s philosophy of creativity and follows how the ‘modes of existence’ of creative