Christopher Pinney, UCL Anthropology   The recent events in Paris have focused attention on the complex relationship between different varieties of Islam and the image. Historians will rightly point to a French tradition of anti-clerical satire that reaches back to Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage of 1771, and which providesContinue Reading

Since the Material World Blog began, the digital media landscape changed dramatically. In social media terms, we have moved from Friendster, MySpace and Orkut to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, with a range of other digital, mobile and social media becoming embedded within many people’s everyday lives around the world. TheseContinue 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

In this post, I link to the very best posts in our archive focused on making, doing and craft. In Fixing, Things, Fixing Ourselves, Lydia Nicholas writes about Suguru, an open source material for extending the life of mass produced (or any other) artifacts. In Plan B for a NuclearContinue Reading