Material Culture Studies

The circulation of techniques for violence and the role of materiality in Randal Collins’s violence theory

by Paolo Magaudda

"Sociologica" N. 2/2011

Zentralisierte Produktionsstrukturen? Überlegungen zur räumlichen Beziehung von bronzezeitlichen Gussformen und Fertigprodukten in Südosteuropa am Beispiel der rumänischen Tüllenbeile.

by Oliver Dietrich

Marisia 31, 2011, 77-91.

Bei der Bewertung des räumlichen Verhältnisses von Gussformen zu Fertigprodukten im Karpatenbecken müssen... more Bei der Bewertung des räumlichen Verhältnisses von Gussformen zu Fertigprodukten im Karpatenbecken müssen Überlieferungsfilter stärker als bisher in Betracht gezogen werden. Zunächst stammen Tüllenbeilgussformen, anders als die Fertigprodukte, ganz überwiegend aus Siedlungen und wurden bei Ausgrabungen entdeckt. Der Stand der Siedlungsarchäologie bestimmt damit die Verbreitung von Gussformen in hohem Maße mit.
Der zweite Überlieferungsfilter betrifft die bronzezeitliche Gusstechnik. Es ist kaum anzunehmen, dass allein steinerne Gussformen verwendet worden sind. Neben einigen Funden fragiler und daher selten überlieferter zweischaliger Tongussformen liegen Belege verschiedener Arten von Modeln zur Herstellung von Ton- oder Formsandgussformen vor. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass vermutlich auch archäologisch schwer sichtbare Gussverfahren einen Anteil am Gesamteindruck der Verbreitung von Tüllenbeilgussformen in Rumänien haben. Die Steingussformen können gut zur Herstellung dieser Model gedient haben, ohne dass hier ihre einzige Funktion gelegen haben muss.

Armorikanische Fremdlinge in Ost- und Südosteuropa? Quellenkritische Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung von Tüllenbeilen des armorikanischen Typs -- Armorican imports in Eastern and Southeastern Europe? Critical remarks on the spreading of Armorican type axes.

by Oliver Dietrich

in: Despina Măgureanu, Dragoş Măndescu, Sebastian Matei (Hrsg.), Archaeology: making of and practice. Studies in honor of Mircea Babeş at his 70th anniversary (Piteşti 2011), 123-138.

Starting from two socketed axes of the Armorican type, which were so far mistakenly attributed as chisels of local... more Starting from two socketed axes of the Armorican type, which were so far mistakenly attributed as chisels of local production to the hoard from Şpălnaca, Romania, the author discusses finds of Armorican axes from eastern and southeastern Europe. A number of pieces published as authentic finds can be suspected to be modern imports. Armorican axes circulated widely as gifts between researchers or through the art market especially in the late 19th and early 20th century following the big discoveries in France. Until now, this fact has not been taken into consideration in several important publications of finds. Only for Poland and Bohemia there are finds which could be the result of Early Iron Age contacts. But even their authenticity remains doubtful to some degree, as there are no finds which were discovered after 1950.

Daggers, knowledge & power

by Jan Apel

Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents

by Steve Brown

Draft pre-publication version of Brown, S.D., Reavey, P. & Brookfield, H. (2012) Spectral objects: Material links to difficult pasts for adoptive parents. In Harvey. P., Casella, E., Evans, G., Knox, H., McLean, C., Silva, E., Thoburn, N., & Woodward, K. (Eds) Objects and materials: A Routledge companion. London: Routledge.

A co-authored piece with Paula Reavey and Helen Brookfield that analyses how particular kinds of objects (toys,... more A co-authored piece with Paula Reavey and Helen Brookfield that analyses how particular kinds of objects (toys, clothes) act as problematic links to the past for adoptive parents.

A. Filippoupoliti (2009), “Aspects of a public science: the uses of the collections of the Royal Institution of Great Britain”. In Early Popular Visual Culture Journal, Routledge, 7 (1), 45-61

by Anastasia Filippoupoliti

A. Filippoupoliti (2009), “Spatialising the private collection: John Fiott Lee and the Hartwell House”. In Material Cultures, 1740-1920. The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, John Potvin-A. Myzelev (ed.), Ashgate, 53-70

by Anastasia Filippoupoliti

Material Culture and Literature in Sub-Saharan Africa – Women’s Voices

by Ana Maria Mão de Ferro Martinho Gale

WISPS XII Conference Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, 10-11 November 2011

The collective perception of material heritage has changed dramatically in Sub-Saharan countries in recent years. Some... more The collective perception of material heritage has changed dramatically in Sub-Saharan countries in recent years. Some see this as a direct result of political and social empowerment, others as a consequence of the continuous growth of African cities and of their peripheries.

We may choose to read such change under a political, a cultural, or an ethnographic perspective; in either case the localization of cultural practices and of their objects calls for the acknowledgment of movable signs in current African archives.

The de-centered experiences of archeological venues are no longer out of reach for most subjects, since they operate from multiple, informed reading contexts.

"Being and having" are transforming the material and immaterial settings of cultural identification and establishing unprecedented writing and reading practices. The growth of different forms of "built-in obsolescence", as a means to convey short-lived experiences, has changed the nature of cultural objects and their collective reception.

The engineering of new products and their writing, notably by women, have created revised forms of producing and of designing such objects. Literary archives pertain to this group of radical, hi-tech, "protean matter".

As colonial legacies have been replaced or assimilated by post-colonial discourse, modern African narratives keep emerging as often contested revisions of the so-called traditional oral stories and histories. They are cultural testimonies of national travelers, and epitomize transitions experienced through "nomadism".

Authorship and strategies of appropriation of such macro-narratives carry potential conflicts and power struggle as far as semiotic distribution is concerned.

A combined perspective of Anthropology and Literature can illuminate some aspects of the discontinuities in cultural identification between women intellectuals and their “tribes”.

Many African women writers are in the center of a debate that brought to the public eye a new way of looking at power and culture. One of my main interlocutors in this paper will be the Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane. She belongs to a generation of intellectuals responsible for creating a “violent” reading of cultures in contact, mediation, and “new regionalisms”.

These perspectives can apply to the realities of Angola, Moçambique, South Africa or Botswana, due to the many tensions generated in the peripheral urban communities in these countries. The cyclical growth of the slums not only circumscribes the urban centers, but it also forces them to deal with the disorder of fragmentary cultures in transit and with potential political disruption. The Nation State as idealized in the emergent discourses on sovereignty is currently being re-written from the outskirts of a new metropolis.

The new texts that empower these changing communities support their sovereign status. Urban deregulation originates semiotic deregulation and a new material culture. Alternatively, more radically put, a new social order, which challenges the notions of "postcoloniality", of "subaltern condition" and, naturally, of imperialism as we know it.

Ways of seeing: the poetics and politics of exhibiting Italian Australian cultures in Sydney

by Ilaria Vanni

Studi di Italianistica nell'Africa  Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, pp. 99-121

In 2001 I was commissioned to curate an exhibition on Italian cultures in Sydney by the Museum of Sydney. I worked... more In 2001 I was commissioned to curate an exhibition on Italian cultures in Sydney by the Museum of Sydney. I worked with the museum, the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and with many community groups, families and individuals who were influential in establishing Italian cultures in Sydney. This article traces my negotiation through institutional and community politics and aesthetics.

Il divenire arte aborigena. Due mostre di oggetti aborigeni dalla collezione Berndt

by Ilaria Vanni

Unhomely Europe

by Ilaria Vanni

Introductory essay to the special issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Vol 4, No 2 Contesting Euro Visions, co-authored with Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Murray Pratt

This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward... more
This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. It seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. Rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that give different shape to trans-European identities and model union, commonality, and belonging, according to transregional or translocal values. The special issue, then, is an exploration of possible forms of frictions occurring across the European cultural and historical landscape. It questions the pre-eminence of formal EU discourses on values, and the branding of Europe in the global marketplace, by listening to marginalised, unheard or discordant Euro-voices. The issue demonstrates the need for more rigorous theorisations of notions such as ‘value,’ whether ‘shared’ or ‘cultural,’ in the European region, and posits alternative mappings and visions of European belonging and identity. The essays included in this special issue consider Europe as a locus of frictions, consensus, tension, contestation and reconciliation. This locus is capable of co-locating Scotland with the Costa Brava, crossing Swedish views of Russia with their converse, recognising a Europe of borders that continuously unfold, acknowledging the interference of historical memories, and inflecting the Houellebecquian Euro-futurescape with Greco-Australian undertones; to cite a few examples of vibrant transvaluation occurring in the issue.

Italiani Di Sydney: Exhibition Catalogue, 30 August-7 December 2003, Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House

by Ilaria Vanni

Objects and Histories: Representations of Aboriginality In Exhibitions of Aboriginal Objects, 1855–1957

by Ilaria Vanni

«lhe nam faltou mais que não nasçer Rei»: splendore et magnificentia no «tesouro» e guarda-roupa do infante D. Luís

by Hugo Crespo

This paper discusses previously unknown royal receipts (quittance or carta de quitação) that offer detailed lists of... more This paper discusses previously unknown royal receipts (quittance or carta de quitação) that offer detailed lists of the most precious possessions and household belongings of King Manuel I's son, Infante D. Luís, who died in 1555. Careful analysis of these lists illuminate important aspects of the princeps's personality, as well as the identity of a number of members of his entourage, including his treasurer, Rui Salema, his silversmith and his two foreign armorers.

«lhe nam faltou mais que não nasçer Rei»: splendore et magnificentia no «tesouro» e guarda-roupa do infante D. Luís

by Hugo Crespo

This paper discusses previously unknown royal receipts (quittance or carta de quitação) that offer detailed lists of... more This paper discusses previously unknown royal receipts (quittance or carta de quitação) that offer detailed lists of the most precious possessions and household belongings of King Manuel I's son, Infante D. Luís, who died in 1555. Careful analysis of these lists illuminate important aspects of the princeps's personality, as well as the identity of a number of members of his entourage, including his treasurer, Rui Salema, his silversmith and his two foreign armorers.

"Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism."

by Susanne Gruss

(with Nadine Boehm-Schnitker) Spectacles and Things: Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism. Neo-Victorian Studies 4.2. 1-23.

A Worth of their Own. On Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and its 12th-century Coinage

by Nanouschka (Nanni) Myrberg

Published in Medieval Archaeology 54, 2010, pp 157-81. Abstracts in English, Frensch, German and Italian.

English:
In about AD 1140, the island of Gotland initiated what was to become one of the most influential... more English:
In about AD 1140, the island of Gotland initiated what was to become one of the most influential coinages of the medieval Baltic Sea area. This was part of a strategy to meet the impact and pressure from the world outside in a period characterised by large-scale political and ideological changes. In this situation, old and new networks were important to maintain autonomy from those aiming for dominance over the island. The coins, with an independent weight standard and an iconography inspired by NW German and Frisian coins, were one way of attracting partners to the island’s main harbour, where its inhabitants could maintain control and trading peace.

Coins incorporate in them the dimensions of object, text and picture. A historical archaeology of coins needs not only focus on large-scale perspectives and formal power, but must also give weight to the archaeological context, the life biography of the coins and the social negotiations behind their production and use. Thus intention and reality, symbolism and social practice may be studied to find openings to the stories behind the objects. The different dimensions of the coins together with historical sources give away plenty of information on several levels: about the networks, ideological framework, artisanship and changing loyalties of this time and area.

“Surprises that struck the hour”: The Tragic Muse and the Modernizing of the Jamesian Serial"

by Adam Seth Lowenstein

Sacred sound becomes sacred scripture: the Veda Mandir in Nashik, Maharashtra

by Borayin Maitreya Larios

Hard to Reach Communities: Living in the UK, and Issues Facing British Muslims of Kashmiri Heritage Born & Bred in the UK

by Owais Rajput

In my presentation I will focus on British Muslim Communities living in UK; my main focus will be on the British local... more In my presentation I will focus on British Muslim Communities living in UK; my main focus will be on the British local community with Kashmiri heritage, as most of the time they are labelled in the media as “Home Grown Radicalised” Muslims, even if they are the fourth & fifth generation born & bred in UK.

I will also focus on Processes to Radicalisation in UK, in local communities, again particularly in the Kashmiri community.

I will also focus on design and delivery processes so far used by authorities in de-radicalisation processes and the results so far, and why we need to change those design and delivery processes, especially when we focus on the British Diaspora with Kashmiri heritage, the fourth & fifth generation born & bred in the UK.