Patrick Laviolette, SVMC Massey University When the major national and international sporting competitions get underway, entire populations are glued to the television in support of their home sides. Sport enthusiasts travel for miles at great expense across borders and continents, to personally witness their sporting heroes in their favourite games.Continue Reading

P. Allen Roda, Ph.D. candidate Music Dept., NYU Organologists (those who study musical instruments) have generally focused on instrument design, classification, and the use of instruments in ‘traditional’ settings. In so doing, they have tended to take the relationship between humans and instruments for granted, rather than investigate the myriadContinue Reading

All readers of this site should be familiar with the pioneering work of ethnomusicologist and musician Steve Feld, now based at the University of New Mexico, who has been making sustained explorations into the environment of sound through both his written work and his own recording practice for many years.Continue Reading

SAFE is a not-for-profit awareness raising and lobbying organization based in the US, which aims to draw attention to the systematic pillaging and looting of archaeological sites worldwide, linking up to the work of British archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew working at the Macdonald Institute at Cambridge University. http://www.savingantiquities.org/ TheyContinue Reading

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology Graduate Student Museums have been pooling from film in both literal and figurative ways. Galleries are peppered with screens and video installations, film segments and screening areas, but they are also generating “blockbuster” shows and featuring trailer-like advertisements for their exhibitions on television and in cinemas.Continue Reading

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/14/ebay_wing_mirror/ A couple of years ago a student of mine wrote an essay on the concept of objectification, and the importance of modes of externalisation as the means by which we come to know ourselves. To illustrate this she used the phenomenon of reflectoporn. This is where people floutedContinue Reading

Marilena Alivizatou, UCL Institute of Archaeology While material culture studies are based on the idea that ‘materiality is an integral dimension of culture’ (Tilley 2006: 1), the recent adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in October 2003 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and CulturalContinue Reading