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
Zachary Hecht, UCL Digital Anthropology I must admit, this review has been a long time coming. I was given Digital Materialities and asked to review it many months ago. I proceeded to read it immediately, but writing the review, well not so immediately. At the time, I had beenContinue 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
Samantha Ellis at the Times Literary Supplement reviews a new book by Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in nine objects. This book is partly an attempt to talk to the dead, by looking at (and holding, sniffing, weighing) the Brontës’ things. Fans of the writers who cross the worldContinue Reading
Christopher Tilley, Department of Anthropology, University College London (c.tilley@ucl.ac.uk) Robert Macfarlane Landmarks (2015) London: Hamish Hamilton, 387pp. £20.00 rrp This is the fifth book by Macfarlane about British landscapes. The ‘landmarks’ of the title are not what one might expect: they are words. The book is about the powerContinue 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
Haidy Geismar, UCL The latest issue of Hau has a symposium on Pierre Lemmonier’s latest book, Mundane Objects, with commentary by Bruno Latour, Chris Ballard, Tim Ingold, Paul Graves-Brown, Susanne Küchler and a response by Pierre Lemmonier. The series of comments essentially sum up a “state of the art” commentContinue 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