Memory and materiality

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

This thesis studies a specific relationship between matter and form which can no longer be related to stability, solidity and objectuality, as it has been traditionally interpreted. To this aim, it firstly explores the plurivocity in the concepts of 'matter' and 'artistic material'; and secondly it examines a case study about water as a material presence in contemporary art. Over the course of the study, certain issues arise, such as the problematic use of notions like form, information and memory in the specific context of the artwork .

The  methodological lines of this thesis are an alternative approach to the artwork technical and material system, this understood as a synergistic and complex structure of symbolic, technological and imaginative relations. This methodology focuses on the evolution of the technical and technological thinking in the 20th century, establishing the connection between past and current uses of media and materials. Based on the principle of transversality, this study contributes to the expansion of the Third Culture by visualizing the dialogical relationship between art, science, technology and aesthetics. Thus, its starting point is the states of water (solid, liquid, and gas) as well as the technical and conceptual operations associated with this specific material. A selection of 258 artists or working groups and more than 500 works have been gathered along diverse actional and conceptual tendencies of water in its three states.

Archeology, technological thinking, anthropology, and material imagination are the key epistemological elements used to reflect on the encounter between the so-called traditional art mediums and new media in the 20th century —or from a broader perspective, between both the deterministic-mechanistic and the systemic-cybernetic currents of thought. In this context, water provides a paradoxical and exemplary temporal connectivity.

Resumen
La presente investigación tiene por objeto definir una zona muy poco tratada dentro de la historia del arte, en la que la relación entre materia y forma deja de poder aprehenderse como un fenómeno vinculado a los sentidos de estabilidad, solidez y objetualidad tal como se ha interpretado tradicionalmente. Para ello explora la plurivocidad de los sentidos de `materia´ y `material artístico´, confrontando esta perspectiva con el estudio del agua como presencia material en el arte contemporáneo, de lo que se derivan una serie de problemáticas respecto a los conceptos de forma, información, y por extensión memoria de la obra de arte.

Paralelamente se dibujan las líneas metodológicas de la semántica material como alternativa de aproximación al sistema técnico-material de la obra de arte, entendiendo éste como una estructura sinérgica y compleja de relaciones simbólicas, tecnológicas e imaginativas. La metodología propuesta pretende incidir en la evolución del pensamiento técnico y tecnológico del siglo XX, estableciendo puntos de conexión entre el uso actual de los medios y materiales artísticos, y sus antecedentes. Partiendo de la transversalidad, esta investigación se propone en última instancia contribuir a la expansión de la tercera cultura visibilizando las relaciones dialógicas entre creación artística, ciencia, tecnología y estética. Su puesta en práctica toma como punto de partida el agua en todos sus estados y las operaciones técnico-conceptuales asociadas a este material concreto. Una selección constituida por 258 artistas o grupos de trabajo y más de quinientas obras han sido recogidas en torno a las tendencias accionales y conceptuales del agua en sus estados sólido, líquido y gaseoso.

En definitiva, arqueología y antropología del pensamiento tecnológico e imaginación material son los elementos epistemológicos clave utilizados para reflexionar acerca de las cuestiones que definen el encuentro en el siglo XX entre los medios artísticos llamados tradicionales y los new media −o en un plano más amplio entre el pensamiento determinista-mecanicista y el sistémico-cibernético−, vehiculizadas por la paradójica conectividad temporal que ofrece el agua.

La investigación en el campo de las técnicas y materiales en el arte contemporáneo requiere la aplicación de nuevas metodologías transdisciplinares que permitan obtener una perspectiva renovada sobre los contenidos que entraña la amplia experimentación artística desarrollada en esta dirección durante el siglo  XX. El cambio de paradigma de la física y el progreso tecnológico han dado lugar a un caudal de nuevas narrativas posibles en las que se ha visto alterado profundamente el sentido tradicional de nociones como las de
materia
o
memoria
en el arte. La presencia material del agua en el arte de la segunda mitad del siglo  XX como objeto de estudio, nos permite proponer una metodología que revisa dichos conceptos a través del análisis de los planos imaginativo y técnico-operativo, así como afrontar los problemas que plantea a nivel teórico una estética de lo fluido.

Referencia completa:
MOÑIVAS, Esther. “Narrativas fluidas. El agua como presencia material en las artes plásticas contemporáneas” en: Dept. Història de l'Art i CEHA-Comité Español de Historiadores del Arte (coords.). CEHA, XVII Congrés Nacional d´História de l´art. Art i Memóri. [Actas]. Granada: Editorial Atrio, 2012, pp. 249-263.

Dartmouth College, a member of the elite Ivy League, was founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth is famous for its strong sense of community and tradition. Its traditions arose from the intertwining of history and legend and are often evident in material form in the College's cultural landscape. This paper examines Dartmouth's Old Pine, a purportedly mystical tree from the early days of the College that died in 1895. The preserved stump of the Old Pine subsequently transitioned from a natural feature to a cultural artifact. New traditions grew from the remains of the Old Pine in the form of the Class Day ritual and the erection of Bartlett Tower. The interplay between these artifacts in Dartmouth's landscape contributed to the development of a particular sense of place at the College. Through the years, social changes at Dartmouth generated controversies over class, racism, and exclusion in reference to Class Day, which consequently modified the meanings of the artifacts and rituals traditionally associated with the Old Pine. This paper argues that, despite these changes, old traditions and elements of socioeconomic class remain embodied in Dartmouth's cultural landscape and material culture aids in defining a place identity less evident than the one purported from the College's historical record and folk tradition.

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501752889/the-things-of-life/

The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community.

Boathouse Row, in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, is one of the city's longstanding heritage landscapes. Among this historic collection of buildings stands Turtle Rock Lighthouse, Philadelphia's only remaining lighthouse and one of the few standing in Pennsylvania. Notably, Turtle Rock is embedded within one of the boathouses, the Sedgeley Club, which was the first women's athletic club founded in the United States. This paper traces the co-development of both Turtle Rock Lighthouse and the Sedgeley Club into a single institution as they became significant but lesser-known features of both Philadelphia's social history and heritage landscape. Through this case study's deeper examination of the historical and geographical contexts, I argue that lighthouses are too often overlooked or disregarded elements of cultural landscapes in scholarship and should be better appreciated aspects of our heritage and built environment.

Entertaining Possession: Re-enacting Cook's Arrival for the Queen
This paper is concerned with a re-enactment of the landing of Captain Cook in Australia in 1970, the bicentennial of the event. Amid many nationally organised events to remember Cook's passage up the east coast of Australia and a wide variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous protests, this re-enactment of his landing at Botany Bay, Sydney was performed for the visiting Queen Elizabeth and her entourage, a huge live audience and an even bigger television one. As a performance of ‘lawful’ possession, of practicing the forgetting of Indigenous sovereignty and original opposition, this piece of public relations was meant to unite both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Instead, this conciliation to British rule and non-Indigenous control became a complex set of acts and material accessories that connected the spectacle on the beach with local acts of protest, performers own histories of intrusion and accounts of the re-enactment that unwittingly revealed the paucity of its own claim to a single historical truth. These tensions between a managed historical act and the labile possibilities of live performances revealed the powerful ways in which performances of national histories are also plays within power.

This article studies hair artefacts, such as jewellery made from hair, lockets containing locks of hair, or locks contained in envelopes, poetry albums, boxes or a variety of other objects, over three centuries (1700–2000). The ambivalent position of hair in relation to different cultural codings and ritual practices is explored with reference to theoretical concepts such as memory and materiality. By turning cutoff hair into jewellery, or saving the locks of engaged couples or children, it is possible to bind people and generations together, not only symbolically but also in purely material terms. Locks of hair from deceased children create material memories and evidence of parental status, while ritually cut locks from living children nostalgically freeze a moment of their childhood. At the same time, hair removed from the body always brings into play the different cultural codings of nature/culture, rubbish/adornment, dead/alive and permanent/transient.

I recalled [the deported Jews] because of my friend Jankiel Wiadecki, who remained stuck in my head forever. I often tell my wife and children about him, about the conversations we used to have, about how it used to be. We liked each other […] And he would tell me: you know what, Adam, I won't abandon the children, no matter what. And we said our goodbyes and that was it. They took them soon after that. Apparently, he went with the children. They destroyed him. That's it. And I said to myself: I need to have a reminder of him. And I made one.

"Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival". M. M. Bakhtin

This paper explores the relationship between monuments, memorials and modernity as an aspect of popular cuture, mass society and montage in Australia, where manic overcompensation for the lack of "history" and "national identity"occurs as an aspect of settler colonisation.

Bringing together scholarly discussions on heritage and state violence, this article analyzes the multilayered structure of dispossession in contemporary Turkey. Through a combination of archival and ethnographic material, it documents the journey of the Fabiato Mansion situated in Büyükada, Istanbul becoming first a ruin, then a state property, later a culture house run by the Touring Automobile Company, and now the local courthouse. It argues that, although heritage and waste have been conceptualized in opposition to one another, the case of the Fabiato Mansion reveals that ruins and heritage sites are deeply connected through practices of dispossession. Conceptualizing the layered modalities of dispossession that led to the transformation of the Fabiato Mansion into the Büyükada Culture House, it illustrates the experience of the dispossession of sense of belonging through the life story of Aurora Fabiato. Then, it analyzes the abandonment of the mansion as part of the process of elimination of possible inheritors and it illustrates how the Mansion's dilapidation was operationalized in the politics of redistribution. Focusing on Touring Company's practices of preservation and repurposing it puts forward that by obscuring property relationships, the Büyükada Culture House generates a nostalgic political ideology that operates as way to avoid reckoning the violent past. While civilizational discourses on culture facilitated justifications of contested regimes of inheritance, they could not successfully end the mansion's agonizing presence between heritagization and disinvestment.

Global demand for ivory has caused a decimation of two endangered species: the African elephant and the Indian elephant. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, ivory was a popular materiał for the production of everyday objects. Appreciated for its physical properties (durability, flexibility, malleability), this valuable material obtained from elephant tusks was widely used in the production of billiard balls, piano keytops, cutlery handles, buttons, and jewellery, defining the materiał culture also outside the areas of elephants' natural habitats. It was not until plastic entered mass production that ivory was replaced as a bourgeois materiał for daily use. This historical insight into the transition from killing elephants for 'white gołd' to the boom of the plastic age prompts a materially oriented analysis of the Anthropocene through the prism of human-animal relationships, colonial exploitation of natural resources, and the origins of Western consumer culture. Forming multiple links between nature and culture, ivory emerges as the ultimate artefact of the Anthropocene.


PL: Globalny popyt na kość słoniową przyczynia się do dziesiątkowania populacji słoni afrykańskich i indyjskich, gatunków zagrożonych wymarciem. Na przełomie XIX i XX wieku kość słoniowa stanowiła popularny materiał do wyrobu przedmiotów codziennego użytku. Ze względu na swoje właściwości fizyczne, takie jak wytrzymałość, elastyczność i łatwość w obróbce, ten cenny surowiec pozyskiwany z ciosów słoni był powszechnie wykorzystywany do produkcji kul bilardowych, powłoki klawiszy fortepianowych, rękojeści sztućców, guzików czy wyrobów jubilerskich, kształtując kulturę materialną poza obszarami występowania tych zwierząt. Dopiero wprowadzenie do masowej produkcji tworzyw sztucznych wyparło kość słoniową jako materiał burżuazyjnej codzienności. Spojrzenie wstecz na moment, w którym odejście od morderczego procederu pozyskiwania „białego złota” oznaczało rozpoczęcie epoki plastiku, staje się przyczynkiem do zorientowanej na materialność analizy pojęcia antropocenu w kontekście relacji ludzko-zwierzęcych, kolonialnej eksploatacji zasobów naturalnych oraz początków zachodniej kultury konsumpcyjnej. Splatając naturę i kulturę na różne sposoby, kość słoniowa stanowi modelowy artefakt epoki antropocenu.

Crystal glass containers as novel artefacts in the early modern period acted out their function of containment as miraculous material events. Focusing on glass containers used to contain and constitute Buddhist objects in China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this essay provides historical and critical views on issues of aura and containment. Primarily, it examines the modalities and experiences of container and containment as expressed in the Qing court's material, religious and political practices. In doing so, the essay highlights the fusional relationship between matter and form, while also apprehending the metamorphosis between image and object in processes of transmedial translation and transcultural crossing or dislocation. It argues that glass containers used to simulate, animate and amplify the ‘aura’ of devotional objects manifested more general religio‐political and intercultural phenomena at that time. Those phenomena in turn invite reflections on material objects' immaterial expressions, and vice versa, in terms of the interplay between formal schema and amorphous force.

Der als Fundbericht konzipierte Beitrag berichtet über die Wiederentdeckung einer seit mehr als 160 Jahren als verschollen geltenden besonders frühen Eckhart-Handschrift mit Übersetzungen vorwiegend aus dem "Opus expositionum", rekonstruiert die eruierbaren Zwischenstationen ihrer Tradierung in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und skizziert ihre Funktionalisierung auf der Wartburg in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. und der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stichwort: Immersion), die mitverantwortlich dafür ist, dass die Handschrift dem Blick der Forschung entzogen blieb.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: firstly, I will outline the economy of punishment inflicted on the vanquished, and particularly to the bodies of the vanquished, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and post-war period. Many of those who fell into the hands of the rebel army or paramilitary militias were tortured, killed and their bodies buried in unmarked graves. Others suffered all kinds of deprivations in concentration camps and prisons. In the second part, I will describe how the corporeality of the vanquished has been kept alive in different ways until recent exhumations started to expose the bodies again.

"The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non- white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of  the  GDR’s  solidarity  policies.  Using  the  example  of  Vietnam,  I  challenge formulations  of  Ostalgie  as  a  site  of  white  German  memory  production  only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In  examining  the  objects  that  Vietnamese  migrants  amassed  and  transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a  different  take  on  the  temporal  and  spatial  relationship  between  people  and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and  obsolete,  in  Vietnam,  East  German  products  did  not  lose  their  utility  and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and
meaning of GDR things."

Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history, and textual sources.

highlighted 'the wide range of academic disciplines and methodological approaches' that are essential to the ethos of a journal which was founded, and continues to be published in collaboration with, the National Children's Bureau, and which remains 'committed to understanding the multiple relationships between children and young people and the changing societies they inhabit' (James and others, 2010, p. 5). As the current editors, we embody that diversity, through research that spans disciplines and methodologies, as well as varied social and geographical contexts. To reflectrather than homogenisethat mix, the editors work together here to reflect on our hopes for the future of Childhood Studies to embrace and advance in at least four important areasthe relational, the historical, the political and the inclusivewhile considering what that means for Children & Society as a unique interdisciplinary journal.

The emergence of contemporary impermanent ceramics is considered, using Michael Thompson's rubbish theory and Harold Becker's 'art world' concept to explore the issue of valuing impermanent art, specifically ceramics. Illustrations of artists currently locating clay-based work in the contemporary art environment are offered.

prologue, intro and afterword of book
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.

Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.

Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.

http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/

In this paper I suggest that the evolution of the earliest form of Minoan writing coincides with the transformation of the Minoan seal repertoire towards iconicity. Although the initial stages of the development of the "Archanes Script"(a sequence of five signs which may have conveyed phonetic values) are elusive, it is tempting to see its emergence on seals with an emblematic function as meaningful. I have argued that the constituent signs of this 'formula' possibly evolved out of a gradual transformation from a representational to a symbolic function, as exemplified by specific seal-groups of the Late Prepalatial period (late 3rd millennium B.C.). The contention that emblematic devices, such as seals, may have been one of the sources of inspiration for symbolic visual imagery is reinforced by cross-cultural analogies relating to the earliest stages of Near Eastern scripts (Proto-cuneiform, Proto-Elamite). At the same time, the combination of signs with a pictorial character (semasiographic signs?) and pure script signs (the first glottographic signs) on a few seals of the "Archanes Script Group" may reflect a successful emulation of the earliest imported Egyptian scarabs.

Despite its recent ubiquity in scholarly and popular publications, relatively little attempts have been made to interrogate the meanings and implications of the notion of “old media.” This article discusses this notion in the context of theoretical debates within media and communication studies. Defining old media as artefacts, technologies, or in terms of their social use is problematic, since media constantly change, resisting clear-cut definitions related to age. The article therefore proposes to treat old media as a relational concept: not an attribute characterizing media as such, but an element of how people perceive and imagine them. Rhetoric, everyday experience, and emotions are key contexts where new ground can be found to redefine the concept of “old media.”

Any discussion on object value has to start with Marcel Mauss's famous dictum: " To give something is to give part of oneself. To give away is to give part of one's nature and substance , to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence. " A large bibliography deals with the fusion between subjects and objects in gift exchange or with the simultaneous and mutual definition of the value of things and the prestige of persons. I have argued previously that the conspicuous consumption of objects establishes a different relation between persons and things. While gift exchange brings about a dispersal of personal identity beyond bodily boundaries, through time and across space, consumption allows one to absorb and appropriate transitory gifts, with all their associations of distant places, famous previous owners, and exotic value systems. In this paper I would like to elaborate this point further by discussing the (re)definition of personhood in mortuary ritual and by examining the use of (valuable) objects in bodily practices (such as body modification, adornment, anointment, grooming, arraying, and disarticulating). While conspicuous consumption at death is often discussed as a purely social strategy of display and aggrandizement, or at best as symbolic exchange with the ancestors, I argue that it has a much deeper cultural significance: it is a crucial attempt to contain the drift of meaning and value and to counteract the disintegration of personal identities—during the very process that dissolves persons into ancestors. These ideas will be applied to a specific case study: the grave circles of Mycenae.

This is the table of contents of "The Paper Trade In Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks, eds. Daniel Bellingradt, Anna Reynolds, Brill: Leiden and Boston 2021". The volume will be published likely in March/April 2021 in the series "Library of the Written Word"

Dissertation: The study of materiality teaches us that the connections between objects and subjects express themselves in a variety of ways. Focusing on historic and contemporary challenges of knowledge transmission, this study explores the materiality of Southern Cheyenne moccasins through the lens of religious orthodoxy. Based on research conducted with Southern Cheyenne consultants in Oklahoma, I demonstrate how moccasins serve as the material manifestation of religious ideology and actively circulate within an orthodox Cheyenne system of cultural values. I explore the indexicality of moccasin designs to highlight the didactic function of moccasins as religious art and provide a detailed analysis of an orthodox Cheyenne system of indigenous knowledge and issues of design ownership. The research I present here contributes to anthropological understandings of knowledge transmission, regimes of value, symbolic capital, indexicality, and indigenous knowledge systems. This study, when coupled with earlier work by anthropologists who worked with the Southern Cheyenne, also contributes to a longitudinal study of cultural change and knowledge transmission.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This research explores the role of Anishinabe photographs as distinct material things, in Anishinabeg memory production. Through the materialization and transformation of six (6) photographs of her ancestors, the author as an Anishinabekwe (Ojibwe) artist/researcher, draws upon performative and embodied aspects of Anishinabeg ways of knowing, emphasizing the agency of the materials worked with in the process of meaning-making. Research findings stress the importance of conceptualizing Anishinabeg memory as a visceral, relational, intuitive, creative, and sensorial experience to strengthening relationships to the ancestral past, now and into the future. By locating Anishinabeg photographs as distinct Indigenous things—things that can be worked with as opposed to simply " read " — the author transcends ontological and methodological limitations often associated with photographs in order to trace or " stitch " through the different relationships between actuants made visible, sensible and knowable through a material and phenomenological oriented approach that is informed her identity and cultural teachings.

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” –  Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” –  Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” –  Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” –  Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” –  Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

Н ачиная с периода поздней перестройки и по сей день судьба тела Ленина, хранящегося на протяжении почти 90 лет в мавзолее на Красной площади, не перестает вызывать яростные споры. В последние годы в попу лярных и академических публикациях это тело все чаще сравнивают с мощами христианских святых. Сравнения эти обычно проводятся в довольно приблизитель ных терминах, поскольку особого знания о том, что из себя представляет материальность этих тел -особенно тела Лени на, -у пишущих нет. Вместо обсуждения конкретных фактов обычно просто высказывается мысль, что советский режим с самого начала подразумевал провести аналогию между те лом Ленина и телами православных святых, поскольку такая аналогия якобы была режиму выгодна с идеологической точки зрения. А далее следует известный, но не слишком подтверж денный фактами аргумент: в малообразованной стране с силь ной православной традицией нетленное тело Ленина должно было автоматически восприниматься населением как тело коммунистического святого. И это якобы добавляло режиму легитимности 1 . Аргументы эти, казалось бы, сами собой на прашиваются, но именно их кажущаяся очевидность вызывает сомнение. Как уже было сказано, эти аргументы не основаны на глубоком знании того, что же из себя в действительности представляет тело Ленина и как именно «режим» пытался его сохранить.

This paper examines Mycenaean female figurines, focusing on their  gesture, posture, and dress as evidence for somatic messages of Mycenaean female personhood and identity and what this might tell us about women’s lives in Late Bronze Age Greece. The primary focus is on the corporeal messages encoded in the figurines, with reference to Butler’s understanding of gender performativity and Connerton’s notion of incorporated body knowledges, to better understand how the figurines were embedded in Mycenaean habitus. This includes an experiential study of the gestures and posture of the figurines, to explore ancient embodied experiences, and analysis of the painted and applied details of clothing of the three main female types. The aim of the paper is to
explore becoming a Mycenaean woman through the medium of sculpted clay.

The thesis is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the practices through which a sense of identity and belonging is produced and experienced in the crate digging scene, a hip hop related translocal record collecting collectivity.
Affective attachments are rarely theorised within popular music studies, and are largely neglected or taken for granted in empirical work. Whereas the emergence and prevalence of a sense of companionship and collective identity is less surprising in tightly-woven collectivities that frequently gather in public venues in a particular locality, it demands more of an explanation in spatially dispersed musical worlds, like the transnational crate digging scene, in which regular, locally based face-to-face interaction takes place in small friendly circles that consist of a handful of enthusiasts at most.
The thesis reworks earlier, more elusive definitions of the notion of scene – a shared cultural space in which a range of coexisting and interacting musical practices work towards producing a sense of community – in a way that is more specific both with regarding what kinds of practices – aesthetic, distinctive, and spatial – shall be taken into consideration in accounting for the sources of attachments in musical collectivities. Furthermore, through its empirical chapters it outlines and connects particular areas of inquiry – the collective cultivation of a certain form of musical appreciation, the performance of distinctive practices, the acquisition and passing on of scenic sensibilities and customs, the places of scenic practice, as well as a shared understanding of spatiality – in which the productive – work of these practices could be be more closely observed and understood.
Through a micro-sociological study of the collective practices organised around the consumption of second hand records, the thesis also engages with the sociocultural significance of the transforming technological regime of music consumption.