Emily Brennan, UCL Anthropology Approaches to culture theory 3: Things in Culture, Culture in Things Edited by Anu Kannike and Patrick Laviolette, 2013, Estonia: University of Tartu Press. This volume addresses the dynamics of materiality over time and space. In cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary studies the authors examine how things gainContinue Reading
Book Review: Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell. Edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliot Berghahn Books (London & New York), 2013 By Fiona P. McDonald (University College London) According to Georgina Born in Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell, “we all have ourContinue Reading
Adam Drazin, UCL Anthropology, and convener of the MA program Culture, Materials and Design In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Aloud (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bfk9h), the book the Noodle Narratives was compared to Sidney Mintz’s classic study Sweetness and Power (http://sidneymintz.net/sugar.php). In Sweetness and Power, Mintz famously shows how sugar underwroteContinue Reading
By Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center) After knowing about the book for a couple of years, I finally found the time to read The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), Edmund de Waal’s evocative exploration of his material patrimoine. The book traces its author’s geographical, archival, and emotional wanderings though theContinue Reading
Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth Phillips (2011, Montreal: McGill-Queens’s University Press) Reviewed by Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center) “Canada’s collaborative models of museum practice have arisen as organically from its history as the canoe or the snowmobile.” The first sentence of Ruth Phillips’ long-awaited volume ofContinue Reading
Charles Stewart, UCL Anthropology This being athletics season, I was watching a major European track event on the television when the pacemaker caught my attention in a middle distance race. The announcer was excoriating him for running too far ahead of the pack, thus becoming an irrelevance. Pacemakers, also referredContinue Reading
Book Review Benediktsson, Karl & Katrín A. Lund (eds). 2010. Conversations with Landscape. Farnham: Ashgate. by P. LAVIOLETTE, Anthropology Dept, EHI, Tallinn University Finally a book that could speak to me. And yet, with the unpredictability of conversational direction that the editors remind us of in their introduction, what wouldContinue Reading
Control Order House is the latest project of the artist, photographer and archivist Edmund Clark. Clark’s first project, Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out, explored the domestic architecture and environment of the Guantanamo Bay Military Base and tracked this “domesticity” back into the homes of British detainees, particularly following the case of OmarContinue Reading
Reflections on Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press 2012), Arlene Davila, NYU Anthropology Each book has an ethos, and a lot of my work has been led by a critical angst on the mainstreaming of Latino culture, which is also reflected in Culture Works: Space,Continue Reading
Empson, Rebecca, 2011. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia. Oxford University Press. Daniel Miller, UCL One of the issues in teaching material culture studies under the auspices of an anthropology department is explaining what is, at least in my case, a very conservative attitude to ethnography. I haveContinue Reading
Glenn Wharton, NYU Museum Studies and Museum of Modern Art, I just published a book which describes my cultural research during the conservation of the Kamehameha I sculpture in North Kohala, Hawai’i. My aim is to show how ethnographic and participatory research during a conservation project can reveal complex networksContinue Reading