What Objects Know: Circulation,Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives

Modern self-possessing subjects must learn how to alienate parts of themselves economically – their labour, ideas, recorded voices, photographed faces – without alienating themselves psychologically. Victorian it-narratives provide object lessons for such subjects: they tell the stories of their owners, suggesting that inalienability need only be imagined – in the shape of talking umbrellas, feathers, and needles – to be effective. Object narrators also enact a form of omniscience unavailable to human narrators. Rather than traversing the consciousness of characters, they more ‘realistically’ simply over-hear the innermost thoughts of their owners. They circulate among a much wider range of subjects than do the narrators of mainstream fiction. Royals, gypsies, aristocrats, thieves, actors, and shopkeepers are witnessed intimately and accurately by their possessions. Their circulation is comic: they knit the social world together in collecting the stories of their disparate owners. They suggest that the subjects who are most like objects in Victorian Britain and its empire (women, the colonized, slaves, children, the poor) have a specific power: a certain omniscience, and therefore the power to confer, contain and preserve inalienability. Silas Wegg, of Our Mutual Friend, has suffered radical dispossession – his leg belongs to someone else. He is the modern subject par excellence, resolutely optimistic about the inalienability of his leg, which he refers to as ‘I’. Wegg, like the object narrators this essay discusses, suggests to us the necessary porousness of the subject–object boundary given the self-possession of liberal individuals. That boundary has become more porous since the Victorian period: we now alienate our DNA, organs and infants. It is the disavowal of this permeability that marks the great divide between then and now.     

We Branded Ourselves Long Ago: Intangible Cultural Property and Commodification of Fijian Firewalking

ABSTRACT The Fijian firewalking ceremony (vilavilairevo), traditionally performed only by members of the Sawau people on the island of Beqa, is a prime example of a propitiation ritual that has become commodified to suit the requirements of tourism. The Sawau ‘gift’ of walking on white‐hot stones introduces another dimension of the gift practice. Although gifts and commodities are often treated as ideal‐type opposites, and a tradition of Melanesian scholarship has focused attention on the inalienability of gifts, I argue that the self‐consciously traditional firewalking practice of Beqa Island, Fiji, is an inalienable sui generis commodity that becomes effective by ‘branding’ Fijian concepts of different places' distinct custodianships. Over the last two centuries, the gift of firewalking has transmuted itself into a sociocultural tool that has consistently indigenized the power of the foreign. The gift of firewalking has allowed its custodians to locally sustain their community, to gain a reach and respect across the nation and beyond, and to intensify the group's social sentiment and social capital.     

War Shields of the Torricelli Mountains,West Sepik Province,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT The usefulness of the term ‘ethnolinguistic group’, as a construct suggesting that ‘differences in language automatically translate into differences in culture’, has been questioned by Welsch, Terrel and Nadolski (1992). Not many researchers would insist on the term ‘automatically’, but would nevertheless support an argument for a strong correlation between material culture and language. As a contribution to this debate, we discuss two types of wood shields of the Torricelli Mountains (one of which is being identified for the first time) and pigskin shields to the south of the Torricellis, their use, and the details of the carved designs of the wood shields. The results of our analysis provide limited support for the correlation of material culture and language but highlight the need for analysis of material culture based on reliable data for a large number and wide range of artefacts, from defined regions, presently held in museums and private collections worldwide.     

物质·制度·精神——关于方志文化建设的思考

从方志发展历史来看,方志文化已远远超越狭义的物化文化范畴,广义方志文化包含人们在方志编纂和应用实践中所获得的物质和精神的总和。方志文化结构可分为物质文化、制度文化、精神文化三个层面。全方位建设方志文化要开阔视野,拓展发展空间,着眼于大文化概念,促进物质、制度、精神文化三者协同发展。在物质文化上,以志鉴为中心,开发多元方志产品,为方志文化发展提供坚实的物质支持。在制度文化上,依法修志,创新工作机制,为方志文化建设提供有力保障。在精神文化上,内修志德,外营识志、用志氛围,推动方志精神的传播。     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

论汉画像石文字榜题和题记

在迄今全国发现的约1万多件(处)画像石中,刻有文字者约250多件(处),其时代多为东汉中晚期。画像石文字内容分榜题和题记两类,内容丰富,为研究汉代历史、文化、风俗等提供了第一手资料。     

The Upper Paleolithic of Northern Asia: Achievements,problems, and perspectives. III. Northeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East

Research into the Upper Paleolithic of northeastern Asia began in the 1940s. Recent work has led to the discovery of numbers of sites, some of them more than 30,000 years old, which are assigned to the D'uktai culture. The material recovered from these sites indicates relationships between the D'uktai culture and other cultures in Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and North America. For the most part, however, these similarities do not result from a spread of cultural traits from Europe into Asia. Instead, most of them reflect local development of the Upper Paleolithic, within both Asia and Europe, out of local Middle Paleolithic industries, which were themselves originally similar in technology and typology.     

“A Little Gravy in the Dish and Onions in a Tea Cup”: What Cookbooks Reveal About Material Culture

Six British colonial and Anglo-American cookbooks from the period 1770–1850 provide insights into the ways in which items of material culture often were used in the past. The multiple functions of many items suggest the need for critical reconsiderations of the functional typologies and status markers so heavily relied upon by historical archaeologists, as well as rethinking of gender associations for some items of material culture.     

Matilda,Leonor and Joanna: the Plantagenet sisters and the display of dynastic connections through material culture

The material culture related to Duchess Matilda of Saxony, Queen Leonor of Castile and Countess Joanna of Toulouse (and former Queen of Sicily) offers a rich resource that allows us to understand how, when and why they connected themselves to their father, Henry II of England. The objects studied in this article prompt significant questions regarding the relation between material culture and royal women, which allow us to explore the formative phases in women’s lives as well as their roles in the promotion and construction of a dynastic consciousness. Even though the sisters probably acted separately, they did so with a shared awareness of their positions as royal daughters and the need to communicate this collectively. By centring on the three sisters’ objects, this article proposes that the study of material culture is crucial for a better understanding of the co-operation between siblings and can contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of power.     

Voting Technology,Political Institutions,Legal Institutions and Civil Society: A Study of the Hypothesis of Cultural Lag in Reverse

The 2000 Presidential election was plagued by butterfly ballots and ‘pregnant chads’. Electronic voting systems, lacking verifiable paper trails that are subject to possible fraud, promise to wreak havoc with the 2004 Presidential election. There is a great diversity of systems of voting technology in the 50 states: from paper ballots, lever‐operated machines and punch cards to optical scanners and electronic systems. Associated with each technology is an estimated error rate. The underlying theory of this paper was set forth by William F. Ogburn in his famous book entitled Social Change, published in 1922. Dividing culture into material and non‐material elements, Ogburn argued that non‐material elements lag behind material elements. His explanation for this lag is that technology, which underlies material culture, changes at a faster rate than elements of non‐material culture. Obgurn did not contemplate the possibility of a reverse lag, viz., technology lagging behind non‐material culture. In analyzing the anomalous relationships between voting technology, political institutions and legal institutions, a striking instance of a ‘reverse cultural lag’ is discerned. To eliminate the phenomenon of the reverse cultural lag, there is a need for a federally‐funded program of a uniform, state‐of‐the‐art voting technology, plus an amended Help America Vote Act, to implement the innovations in the 3,114 counties. The complex problems reviewed in this paper point to a vexing question: how do we educate an electorate in a democratic society—such as the United States in the twenty‐first century—to be responsible for ensuring that periodically‐elected representatives implement the will of the people?     

The Wirral Brooch: The Form,Distribution and Role of a Regional Romano-British Brooch Type

The Wirral brooch is a distinctive and easily recognizable type of Romano-British brooch with a distribution primarily focused on rural sites around the Wirral peninsula in the north-west of England. The article provides a brief catalogue of the type, investigates whether it is a truly regional form, and establishes its relationship with other contemporary brooches. The accepted dating of this brooch type to the second century AD is discussed as well as its function, typology and manufacture. The role of Wirral brooches in trade, fashion and identity within the northwest of Roman Britain is considered. In wider terms, this paper demonstrates an aspect of provincial material culture from an area often seen to be lacking in material evidence and highlights the importance of the data provided by the Portable Antiquities Scheme for new insights into the material culture of Roman Britain.     

Indigenous claims and heritage conservation: an opportunity for critical dialogue

Abstract

Indigenous claims of ownership and access to material culture challenge the field of heritage conservation. This article illustrates how indigenous concerns conflict with basic constructs of Western conservation, and how conservators respond to these claims. Despite efforts of inclusion, relatively few conservation projects integrate indigenous knowledge with scientific research. Redistribution of conservation authority is rarely put into practice. The article concludes by pointing to conservation as a meeting ground where collaborative decisions can be made about material culture on display. Conflict negotiation in conservation presents a potential forum for cultural representation and contested meaning of objects on display.     

Foraging–Farming Transitions in Island Southeast Asia

The origins of agriculture have been debated by archaeologists for most of the discipline’s history, no more so than in Island Southeast Asia. The orthodox view is that Neolithic farmers spread south by sea from mainland China to Taiwan and thence to Island Southeast Asia, taking with them a new material culture and domestic rice and pigs and speaking the precursor of the Austronesian languages that are spoken in the region today. Opponents of this ‘farming/language dispersal’ theory have proposed models of acculturation, in which foragers acquired new material culture and food resources by trading with farmers. However, new work in archaeology, palaeoecology, palynology and anthropology, especially in Borneo, and in genetics and linguistics for the region as a whole, is suggesting that foraging/farming transitions in Southeast Asia were far more complex than either of these opposing ‘grand narratives’ of discontinuity (population colonisation) or continuity (acculturation) allows. Through the course of the Early/Mid-Holocene new material culture, technologies and foods were variously taken up, promoted or resisted in order to provision changes in the social and ideological constitution of societies. Whilst new readings of the data for foraging–farming transitions in the region vary, a consensus is emerging that it is more useful to focus on how materials and modes of life were used to underwrite changes in social networks than to seek to explain the archaeological record in terms of migrating farmers or acculturating foragers.     

Experiencing Texture and Transformation in the British Neolithic

The Neolithic period saw the introduction of new material culture into Britain, including monuments, pottery and polished stone axes. Over recent years, the uses and meanings of these objects and places have been considered in depth, with emphasis now firmly placed upon their social role and symbolic value. However, a growing interest in a multi–sensual archaeology has highlighted the paucity of information concerning the role of texture in the experience of Neolithic material culture. This paper will examine the evidence for the use of texture in the archaeological record. I will suggest that texture may have been a fundamental part of the experience of objects and monuments, and may have imparted meanings and messages to those who came into contact with them. In particular, the transformation of differing textures may have been a crucial metaphor in the Neolithic.     

Filming Fairies: Popular Film,Audience Response and Meaning in Contemporary Fairy Lore

This study examines the idea of fairy lore (faery) as a modern concept with personal and humanistic overtones transmitted through mass media phenomena such as films. Analysis of the relationship between folk and popular culture has become increasingly sophisticated and has widened our appreciation of the ways in which mass-culture audiences use tradition to shape popular culture. Fantasy films draw on recognised traditional elements, but the significance of these elements has been mediated through nineteenth-century interpretations of fairy lore. Contemporary audiences are more likely to be exposed to such legends and beliefs in the context of mass media than by any other means, and visualisation of fairies in fantasy films is closely linked to these modern interpretations of traditional material. For cinema audiences, the idea of faery is no longer a traditional and immediate response to experience, it already carries overtones of nostalgia for the past, childhood innocence, utopian societies or sexual discovery. However, personal response and exegesis of this material, reinforced by repeated viewing, access to Internet sites and related activities such as role-play and merchandising, means that the interactions of these virtual communities can transmute and insert themselves into daily life through a shared appreciation of fantasy worlds. The ways in which these consumers of mass culture resemble or differ from a folk audience presents an interesting arena for understanding folklore as a living contemporary phenomenon.     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.     

Face-Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe

Bringing gender history, the history of the body and art history into a conversation with material culture studies, this article argues that the sudden fashionability of beards in Renaissance Europe has been intricately linked with a culture of material and visual experimentation. I propose shifting perspectives from a focus on the symbolism of beards towards examining how early modern ways of material engagement with the matter of hair crafted a visual attention to facial hair that made up the sociocultural significance of beards. Focusing on how people made hair matter, I suggest working with the concept of face-work. In particular, this article maps how the Reformation upheavals and the rise of new visual practices dynamised Renaissance protagonists’ creative engagement with facial hair as a means for staging the self.     

Crossing the rubicon: fact or fiction in Roman re-enactment

Abstract

This paper discusses the role and use of Roman re-enactment as a means of engaging with, visualizing and interpreting Roman material culture, and how this is translated into presentation material for public display. The paper raises several issues on the use of re-enactors to interpret a specific period from the past, and reflects on why people actively participate in re-enactment, with an emphasis on accuracy and authenticity.     

文化遗产保护中的“人”——增冲鼓楼文物保护规划中的一些尝试

增冲鼓楼,具有双重属性的文化遗产地 增冲鼓楼是一处比较特殊的文化遗产地。 首先,它是一座文物建筑。增冲鼓楼位于贵州省黔东南苗族侗族自治州从江县往洞乡增冲村增冲侗寨,始建于清康熙十一年（1672年）,为木结构中心柱型鼓楼,     

“He is Worst Than the [Shawnee] Prophet”: The Archaeology of Nativism Among the Early Nineteenth Century Potawatomi of Illinois

Abstract

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Great Lakes Native American groups splintered into nativist and accomodationist factions that advocated opposing strategies for dealing with Euro-Americans. Nativists urged a return to a so-called traditional Algonquin way of life while accomodationists adopted varying degrees of Euro-American ideology, material culture, and subsistence practices. The mid-1990s excavation of an early 1800s Potawatomi village (the Windrose site) in northern Illinois once led by Main Poc, one of the fiercest Potawatomi nativist leaders and an ally of the Shawnee Prophet, provided detailed information on the material culture, subsistence, and ideology of the early nineteenth century nativist movement among the Illinois Potawatomi.