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
Publicity still for the Universal Kitchen (see link below) Faye Ginsburg, NYU, has been working on issues related to disability and its public presence as a scholar (currently on a project funded by the Spencer Foundation with Rayna Rapp entitled Cultural Innovations and Learning Disabilities) and as a parent activistContinue Reading
Daniel Miller, UCL Please do visit www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project This is the web address of a scheme designed to bring together what we hope will be an increasing number of projects on the topic of denim. The project is being announced in a paper called A Manifesto for the Study of DenimContinue 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
Erin Mell-Taylor, former UCL Material Culture postgraduate Bob Haozous is famous person, or that’s how I’ve always looked at him. He is someone that I looked up to as an example of a Native American that has truly ‘made it’. While he works in the same discipline as his fatherContinue 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
Ellie Reynolds, University College London The following is an exploration of the materiality and meaning of HIV positive semen for a group of gay men who engage in two behaviours: bugchasing and giftgiving. Bugchasing is the desire for, and active pursuit of, HIV infection; giftgiving is the attempt to infectContinue 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