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

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

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