Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology

The author discusses the confusion concerning the transition from the mesolithic to the neolithic in Southern Scandinavia, and the relationship of this confusion to the chronological, evolutionary classification system employed at present. He suggests the advantages of using a systemic approach instead. As little is known of the actual economies operative at the time, the hypothesis is suggested that agriculture did not only spread from the southeast, but was actually being developed by the indigenous populations at the time of the arrival of previously domesticated plants and animals. Several methods of testing this hypothesis are discussed.     

An Exchange for All Things? An Inquiry into the Scholarship of Fire

Fire was once considered a founding element and an informing principle for analysis of the world. Today it is neither. Its study resides primarily in those countries that have both public lands, which hold fire, and scientific institutions, with which to study it. In particular, forestry has long claimed fire as a speciality and continues to harbour the most practical experience regarding it. In fact, fire may deserve better, and can give more. A case, not entirely whimsical, can be made for a programme of ‘fire studies’ that could span the many forms of scholarship that share an interest in humanity’s species monopoly over fire’s manipulation.     

These Familiar Things? Witchcraft,War Crimes and Prince Rupert “the Devil”

This review article provides an examination, viewed through the prism of Mark Stoyle's “The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog,” of the reputation of Prince Rupert of the Rhine during the English Civil War and Restoration. In particular, it focuses upon the injection of violence into civil society by the Prince and his troops; and the manner in which the experience of war re-activated fears and theories of witchcraft, bringing to prominence the figure of the familiar spirit. Through the comparison of recent biographical studies with the primary sources that illuminate and underpin Rupert's career, the Prince emerges as a more equivocal figure but also, arguably, as a far more capable statesman and military commander.     

Prof. Dever’s Last Tome: Much Ado about Things and Nothing?

In his recently published book, professor Dever breaks no new ground and adds no new insights into the ever-elusive remote past of the Israelites. Rather, he not only persists in his decades-old, and by-now pointless, scholarly tiff with the European minimalist school of biblical interpretation, but argues, unconvincingly, for the superiority of archeological things as primary sources for writing a true history of ancient Israel. Confusingly, he ends his tome with a plea for integrating [minimalist] biblical hermeneutics with archaeological findings as a way forward to hopelessly construct yet another, but the truest of all histories.     

Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880–1930

The reproduction of racism and class-based oppression are taught to children through various cultural media, including toys and games. Between 1880 and 1930, the popularity of racialized toys and banks were fear-based responses to the perceived encroachment by “foreign and exotic” migrations of African American, Chinese, Irish and Native Americans into the cultural landscape of white middle-class America. This article analyzes how artifacts associated with children, such as mechanical banks, clockwork figures, and other toys are part of a larger cultural structure that viewed race and class as inseparable, and that these objects were essential in the development of a learned habitus that exposed white middle class children in the Victorian era to a racially and class oriented world. We argue that these objects reflect both the times in which they were made, and illuminate the relationship between adults and a newfound emphasis on children and childhood, in which toys serves as symbolic mediators of culture.     

Identity Destruction or Survival in Small Things? Rethinking Prisoner Tags from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp

In concentration camps across Europe, replacing prisoners’ names with numbers was key to Nazi strategies for annihilating the identities of their victims. Number tags issued in the Mauthausen concentration camp are remembered by survivors as materializations of their destroyed identities and bureaucratic means in the murderous camp economy. However, several preserved tags carry prisoner-made decorations which point towards personalization strategies, making these items highly desired objects in current memorial practices for constructing narratives of survival. By taking an object-biographical approach, this chapter traces the ontological shifts the tags have gone through and discusses the relationships of camp life, the post-camp reading of material culture, and memorial practices.     

Evil ThingsTurned IntoGood Things─In Memory of 40th Anniversary of the Democratic Rrform in Tibet

TheDemocraticReformconductedinTibetin1959startedwithsuppressionoftherebellionlaunchedbyreactionariesintheuppersocialstratainTibettostoptheDemocraticReformandsplitthemotherland.AsearlyasJuly1957,therewerePeoplewhoheldgrandritualsinthePotalaPalacetoacceptareportdeliveredbythereactionary"fourriversandsixmountainranges"movementwhichdemandedthe14thDalaiLamaexerciseruleoverallTibetanareasinChina.Rightafterthat,ringleadersofthemovementgatheredinZhegutang,Shannan,organizingrebeltroopscalledthe"r…     

Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries

Although the dichotomization of space and place has spawned a lively archaeological discussion, it threatens to devolve into a troublesome binary like sex/gender. Local place-making and universalizing spatial science are not so neatly segregated. Rather than dividing and bounding the notion of an investment of locations with meaning, it can be extended to describe the intricate topologies of bodies and things, as well as landscapes. Places emerge as sites of the hybrid articulation of representations, practices, and things, as spatialized imaginaries. The notion of imaginaries and the rethinking of place are illustrated with Inuit archaeological and ethnographic examples.     

The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

Focus‐Pocus? Thinking Critically about Whether Aid Organizations Should Do Fewer Things in Fewer Countries

The OECD Development Assistance Committee and G7 Finance Ministers have suggested that many bilateral and multilateral aid organizations are too dispersed, pursuing too many objectives in too many countries and too many sectors with too many partners. These organizations are accused of lacking critical mass, failing to follow their comparative advantage, failing to find and exploit a niche, and having high transactions costs and low effectiveness. Such aid organizations are being told to ‘focus’, ‘concentrate’, or be more ‘selective’ in order to become more effective. This article analyses the arguments in favour of greater focus by aid organizations and suggests that, while some of these arguments are valid, some are not and others need to be more nuanced. There are many possible dimensions along which an aid organization could focus and the link — if any — between focus and aid effectiveness is complex along each of those dimensions. The debate so far has also ignored the possibility that less focus may promote more effective aid. There is no clear, simple link between focus and aid effectiveness, but this finding should not be interpreted as carte blanche for spreading aid programmes indiscriminately. Dispersion, like focus, needs careful thought and justification.     

The Meaning of Things: Kipling’s Formative Journey ‘Home’ in 1889 and the Late Victorian Imperial Tour

The ‘seven years’ hard’ Rudyard Kipling spent as a journalist in north India are generally seen as the making of both his poetic and his politics. But, important as origin, community, identity and ‘my father’s house’ are to Kipling, he should also be seen as a wayfarer of no fixed abode. In 1889 he used his first royalties to return to metropolitan fame by the long way round: Burma, the Straits, Japan, the Pacific and a transcontinental journey past landmarks of his Americanophile boyhood reading. Both distressing and exhilarating, it was a journey that stimulated the productive tension in him between the parochial and the universal. If an upcountry Punjab station had impressed him with the necessity of colonial rule, it was this voyage that engendered his all-embracing imperial vision. If he had honed his eye for ‘local colour’, this trip intimated to him that his metier would lie in culturally translating disparate portions of the empire to one another. Anticipating Baden-Powell’s call to ‘look wider’, vagabonding proved to be an agreeable mode of existence, but metropolitan arrival was to hold its own unforeseen challenges and anxieties. At a time when English writers like Arthur Symons aestheticised their sensation of cultural rootlessness in the figure of the vagabond, Kipling sought to foreground his own vagabondism with a persuasive claim to belonging.     

Networked Spirits and Smart Séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the Era of the Internet of Things

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human.     

From “Dead Things” to Immutable,Combinable Mobiles: H.D. Skinner,the Otago Museum and University and the Governance of Māori Populations

This paper draws on Callon's [2005 Callon, Michael. 2005. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller's Critique of The Laws of the Markets.” Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter 6 (2): 3–20. [Google Scholar]. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller's Critique of The Laws of the Markets.” Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter 6 (2): 3–20] concept of agencement, together with Latour's [1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] concept of immutable combinable mobiles to illustrate how Henry Devenish Skinner, ethnologist and anthropology lecturer at the Otago Museum and University sought to form and shape Māori identity, history, culture and populations as subjects of liberal government. It does this through an exploration of Skinner's fieldwork and collecting practices. The paper suggests that forms of analysis mediated through the American History School, and the culture area concept were deployed during the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in New Zealand (between 1919 and 1940) to produce ethnographic authority that then acted as a point of connection between scientific networks and the colonial administrative field.