Representations of an Imagined Past: fairground heritage villages

This paper is concerned with groups of historic vernacular buildings, assembled and displayed as 'villages' at agricultural fairgrounds. These are grassroots versions of open-air museums and heritage sites developed by public institutions and private foundations. The fairground heritage village structures are usually collected by volunteers and moved to existing county or state fairgrounds, then used in similar ways as professionally managed sites. The location and situation offer certain advantages, but also present problems that stem from being authentic structures presented as a fictional village. Because narrative, scale and editing are factors in the conflict, adding an outward-directed layer of interpretation would visually reconnect the dislocated buildings with their original sites. This is intended to destabilise the past as a fixed, isolated place, and link the village display to landscape change in the region.     

Observing,Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.     

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.     

Childhood collecting in nature: quality experience in important places*

ABSTRACT

A need for a more specific understanding of childhood geographies has motivated an investigation of one activity, childhood collecting in nature. This study examined collecting behavior, places of collecting, and the relationship of these places to environmental connectedness in adulthood. Topophilia is presented as a guide to help consider why children collect in nature and to expand upon a limited understanding of collecting behavior. These ideas are explored with a mixed-method design strategy involving surveys and semi-structured interviews with a sample of Swedish university students. Results show collecting in nature to be a widespread, meaningful, and memorable experience in the formative years of participants. Results also demonstrate potential support for topophilia as a way to understand the childhood collecting nature phenomenon. Implications include recognition of the importance of family to support children’s engagement in the natural world and proximate access to nature as a critical aspect of childhood experience.