Two Drinking Cups, Egypt 1550 BC
Politics of Viewing Stephen Quirke; Reader, Curator of the Petrie Museum, University College London What gives a viewer the right to look at a picture? Or an object? Or these two drinking cups, of fired Nile mud, made three and a half millennia ago in the lower Nile Valley, andContinue Reading
Freud's Therapeutic Boxsprings
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
Materialising Democracy
Mukulika Banerjee, Anthropology, UCL This week, reportage of the mid term US elections seems to devote almost equal coverage to the Democrat re-capture of the Congress and the close race to finish in the Senate as it did to malfunctioning electronic voting machines. Indiana and Ohio were singled out forContinue Reading
Traumwerk Website
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
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)
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
Where Stuff Comes From
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
Review: Prelude to Totems to Turquoise – Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest
Nicky Levell, PhD student, UCL Anthropology On Saturday 30 2004, the Totems to Turquoise exhibition debuted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The opening ceremony, from 12.00 – 5.00 pm in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, began with a special welcome by representatives of NewContinue Reading
Primitivism, eroticism, exoticism, fetishism…
How to value tribal art (particularly clubs): http://www.spearchuckasart.com/default.asp Then follow the link to tribal and fine art and scroll down….
On the Circulation of Ethnographic Knowledge:
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
Three objects exemplify for me the capacity of things to trigger or make thinkable otherwise elusive ideas.
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
Material World – a new webspace
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