The Couch: Thinking in Repose, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Austria, Exhibition Review 5 May – 5 November 2006 Martina Grunewald, PhD candidate in Design History and Material Culture, University of Applied Arts, Vienna On Sunday, 5 November 2006, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna closed the doors to “The Couch:Continue Reading

Victor Buchli, Reader in Material Culture, University College London The Traumwerk website is a brilliant project started by Mike Shanks and his students at Stanford University that experiments with the boundaries of archaeological work and interpretation and wider questions in material culture. In particular there a number of projects hostedContinue Reading

Daniel Miller, Anthropology UCL My impression is that students coming into anthropology today, at least in Britain, are not necessarily expecting to read very much of the writings of Clifford Geertz, compared to my time as a student. But his death on Monday should remind us of just how muchContinue Reading

Review: Harvey Molotch (2003), Where stuff comes from – how toasters, toilets, cars, computers and many other things come to be as they are. London: Taylor and Francis Elizabeth Shove and Matt Waton teach at the Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster ‘Where Stuff Comes From’ does an excellent jobContinue Reading

Aaron Glass, University of British Columbia Contemporary intercultural representation is facilitated in large part by a number of objectifying media that were relatively novel just a century ago. Barring direct social contact, we tend to experience other cultural groups via mediating technologies of representation—illustrated texts, photographs and films, museum exhibitions,Continue Reading

They are, first, a small figurative sculpture of a mother and child from late 19th or early 20th century Borneo; second, a rubber-stamp mounted on a small block of laminated wood, bearing a barcode and a label stating it to have been handcrafted in Emeryville, California, ©2003 Hero Arts RubberContinue Reading

Welcome to Material World, an interactive, online hub for contemporary debates, discussion, thinking and research centred on material and visual culture. It is the brainchild of scholars working in the anthropology departments of University College London and New York University, but aims to create a new international community of academics,Continue Reading