Limn Number 7: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics Edited by Stephen J. Collier, James Christopher Mizes, and Antina von Schnitzler Infrastructure has always had a privileged relationship to both expertise and the public in modern government. But in the early 21st century, this relationship is inflected in novel ways. The purposes public infrastructure wasContinue Reading

Haidy Geismar, UCL Anthropology My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries by Elizabeth Chin, 2016. Duke University Press. My Life with Things is an engaging, quirky, auto-ethnography detailing key moments of Elizabeth Chin’s life, focusing especially on her passionate relationship with commodities and processes of consumption (from shopping in thrift stores and onContinue Reading

Haidy Geismar, UCL As I’m sure you are all aware, last week Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, battering the country with winds of over 270 mph. The storm knocked out the country’s telecommunications and transport infrastructure and now, just a few days later, it is estimated that more then 70%Continue Reading

This critical examination of the 2013 double issue of Museum Anthropology Review (MAR), entitled “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge,” (volume 7, numbers 1-2) was written by our spring 2014 class on the Anthropology in and of Museums, as part of the Museum Studies MA Program at New YorkContinue Reading

Patrick Laviolette (EHI, Tallinn University, hosts of EASA2014) In terms of providing reflections on the material dimensions of place and landscape, here are some links to what I feel have been amongst the more provocative postings on the blog over the years. Many of the authors to the links belowContinue Reading

Since its inception, Material World has treated museums and archives not only as repositories of material culture, but as material culture–that is, material products as well as producers of culture and social memory. As institutions, they are sites of collection and exhibition, acts that have their own material and materializingContinue Reading

Daniel Miller, UCL Krisztina Fehérváry 2013 Politics in Color and Concrete: socialist materialities and the middle class in Hungary. Indiana University Press Léna Pellandini-Simányi  2014 Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan Hungary is a good place to take stock of the current state of material culture studies. Because HungaryContinue Reading