‘He States That This is the Most Lovely Building He Has Ever Had the Pleasure of Seeing . . . ’

The three comparative and interdisciplinary essays in this section treat collecting in the historical context of imperialism and range over the geographical spaces of France, North and South America, New Caledonia, and Japan. Shorter papers on which the essays are based were presented in three-day panel organized and chaired by the Guest Editors entitled Collecting Actual and Metaphorical, the idea for which originated with Helen Asquine Fazio, for the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association. We are grateful to the Editor for extending us the opportunity to explore the notion of collecting in the context of this journal. COLLECTING AS THE APPROPRIATION OF IDENTITIES Material collecting, or the systematic accumulation of material by individual and museum collectors, has been widely theorized from the 1980s by historians, art historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and literary and cultural critics. Although the Guest Editors' approach to collecting in the following essays builds on scholarship that views material as having simple material existence, it extends that scholarship to consider collected as of broader symbolic system. Following Susan M. Pearce, we consider collecting as process of communication between subject and object. Pearce argues that objects are our other selves; the better we understand them, the closer we come to self-knowledge (vii). Pearce goes on to argue that objects, like language, are social ideas (22); that they are signs and symbols, creating categories and transmitting messages which can be read (15). In light of her comments, we consider collecting, then, to be process that mediates between subject (the collector) and object (that which has been collected), whether that object be tangible or an abstract idea or image. We further consider the process of collecting as an appropriation that builds on systematic gathering and interpretation of objects--whether person, people, or country--within certain symbolic code. As such, we envision collecting to be metaphor for practice of transformation that has profound material and symbolic consequences in various cultural registers. Finally, we consider collecting as the building of narrative--a of identity. Walter Benjamin, in Unpacking My Library (1931), suggests that, in the process of building up collection of material objects, the collectors become authors, constructing that links the they have collected to their identity as it has unfolded in time. Extending that idea, narratologist Mieke Bal argues that collecting is a process consisting of the confrontation between and subjective agency informed by an attitude. Objects, subjective agency, confrontations as events: such working definition makes for narrative (100). In line with that logic, Pearce, perhaps the foremost theorist of European collecting in all its ramifications, argues that: [C]ollections are essentially of experience; as are kind of material language, so the narratives into which they can be selected and organized are kind of fiction (412). She further argues that collecting, whether of objects, images, or ideas, is part of our effort to construct an intelligible world-view (vii). Consequently, in the practice of collecting, subjects subjectivize the they have acquired by assembling them to construct that resonates with their perception of themselves; this reflects their personal desires as they are informed by the temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts in which they construct and express them. As this is framed by their desire, its edges are indefinite and its meaning ambiguous, as the includes both their representation of their past self and their articulation of future self that does not yet exist and that they do not know. …

Travelling exhibitions of contemporary art navigate a multiplicity of places. As they travel from one institutional site to the next, they are framed and reframed amidst shifting contexts. Implicit in this navigation of contextual frameworks is the relationship between art and place. Informed by Miwon Kwon's study of site-specificity, this article examines how travelling exhibitions might generate meaning at their sites of temporary placement. It investigates this issue by examining the touring exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes, which completed its journey at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in March 2012. This essay argues that this instance of the exhibition, in evading its surrounding historical and cultural context, inadvertently reiterated the processes of historical erasure that William Kentridge interrogates in his work. This case study indicates that the travelling exhibition format may accrue meaning in conflict with its content.

The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830–1860 M. D. Walhout Long considered an obscure province of biblical studies, hermeneutics is now familiar territory to American literary critics, along with phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other European theories that have redrawn the map of American criticism in the past twenty-five years. The gradual transformation of hermeneutics into a theory of criticism, and ultimately into a comprehensive theory of the human sciences, was the work of a series of great German thinkers, including Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. These figures were introduced (or reintroduced) to American critics by E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) “shattered,” in the words of Richard E. Palmer, “the splendid isolation of American literary criticism from hermeneutics.” Hailing Schleiermacher and Dilthey as the forefathers of “objective interpretation,” Hirsch dismissed Heidegger and Gadamer as prophets of subjectivism. For his part, Palmer strove to vindicate Heidegger and Gadamer as the true heirs of the hermeneutical tradition. Noting the difference between Hirsch’s understanding of hermeneutics and theirs, Palmer concluded, So the hermeneutical debate goes on. On the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for norms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologists of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this “event,” and consequently the limitations of all claims to “objective knowledge” and “validity.” 1 Twenty-five years later this hermeneutical debate is still going on. [End Page 683] What Hirsch and Palmer did not realize is that they were reviving a debate over the nature of interpretation that dated from the late nineteenth century, when American literary criticism was undergoing professionalization. 2 As early as 1885, in the programmatic introduction to his book on Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, Richard G. Moulton had declared, “In the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism.” Moulton proceeded to lay down “a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism: Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.” 3 Thirty years later Moulton repeated this axiom, insisting that “such inductive treatment constitutes the very alphabet of science.” 4 But Moulton’s determination to apply the logic of the natural sciences to the interpretation of literature was not without its critics. In 1900 the German-born philologist Julius Goebel began a valiant, if futile, effort to introduce the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to his American colleagues. 5 Years later, in an article published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Goebel drew on Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) to show “the possibility of attaining exact knowledge in the mental sciences without the aid of the scientific or laboratory methods.” 6 Later still, in an article on Dilthey published in the same journal, Goebel recalled how he had argued in an address to the Modern Language Association that criticism “had lost touch with the contemporary movements emphasizing the independence and importance of the mental sciences. What seemed to me needed above all was a reform of the method of interpretation for which Dilthey had set the example both in principle and practice.” 7 It was not until the late 1960s that Goebel’s project was finally revived. While Goebel may have been the first American literary scholar to use the word “hermeneutics,” the concept of interpretation had long been a part of American critical theory. In fact, what might be called the “hermeneutical turn” in American critical theory occurred well before the era of professionalization. [End Page 684] In order to trace this turn, we must recover the work of the amateur critical theorists of the antebellum era, including such forgotten figures as George Allen and Edwin Percy Whipple. Disciples of the Schlegels and Coleridge, these amateur theorists established the basic premises of the hermeneutical turn: that criticism is a science; that the critic must “reproduce” the author’s creative process; that...

ABSTRACTThis study explores the reasons why an exhibitor participates in a travel exhibition and assesses this marketing strategy. A total of 15 representative exhibitors who participated in the Taipei International Travel Fair were interviewed between January and July 2016. The results of the analysis indicated that exhibitors’ selection of a travel exhibition was based on the exhibition’s performance and condition. The primary purposes for participating in a travel exhibition were to enhance the firm’s reputation and sales. The exhibitors’ marketing strategies primarily involved on-site promotional activity and relevant five-sense experiences. An assessment of exhibitors’ participation factors and marketing strategies can both help firms implement their goals and enable organizers to create sustainable exhibitions. This study contributes to the existing literature by providing both theoretical and managerial implications for the travel fair, service, and tourism industries.

The use of apotropaic practices, that is, of magic to protect against evil, is sometimes included in archaeological interpretations on the basis of similarities between archaeological objects and objects used in historically documented or present-day apotropaic practices. The present article attempts to develop the archaeological study of apotropaism by focussing on apotropaic ritual, in addition to apotropaic devices. The case study is a burial in ad 834 of a high-ranking Viking Age woman in the Norwegian Oseberg ship grave. Drawing on cognitive magic ritual theory, the study focuses on identifying both a repeated ritual core and a counter-intuitive, magic element in the series of actions that led to the deposition of five elaborately carved wooden animal heads in the burial, each combined with a rattling device probably related to horse driving. The study demonstrates that apotropaism provides a viable explanation for this rather puzzling aspect of the burial. In a wider perspective it emphasizes the importance of the contextual, in addition to the functional, interpretation of objects in graves. It also suggests that the use of animal figures and animal style in Viking Age artwork may have been more intimately connected with apotropaic beliefs than previously suggested.

The upper Citarum River watershed utilizes remote sensing technology in Geographic Information System to provide information on land coverage by interpretation of objects in the image. Rivers that pass through urban areas will cause flooding problems causing disadvantages, and it disrupts community activities in the urban area. Increased development in a city is related to an increase in the number of population growth that added by increasing quality and quantity of life necessities. Improved urban lifestyle changes have an impact on land cover. The impact in over time will be difficult to control. This study aims to analyze the condition of flooding in urban areas caused by upper Citarum watershed land-use change in 2001 with the land cover change in 2010. This modeling analyzes with the help of HEC-RAS to describe flooded inundation urban areas. Land cover change in upper Citarum watershed is not very significant; it based on the results of data processing of land cover has the difference of area that changed is not enormous. Land cover changes for the floods increased dramatically to a flow coefficient for 2001 is 0.65 and in 2010 at 0.69. In 2001, the inundation area about 105,468 hectares and it were about 92,289 hectares in 2010.

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

Wilful blindness of the forces at play in the value of things has accompanied the rise of the marketplace as a universal equivalent, slowly eroding any distinctions between the economic and non-economic. The ideal of the museum, a repository for the exemplary products of the past, gave visible form to the existence of a symbolic economy, a resistant space appearing outside or alongside the exchanges of people and things. Encyclopaedic museums were the central banks of this symbolic economy -- networked out into galleries (commercial and public), dealers, curators, academics and so on -- allowing visitors to experience the social value of the things on display -- to feel the enormous cultural presence of the Elgin Marbles, Benin bronzes or the Rosetta Stone, to be staggered by their beauty -- while rendering invisible the enormous material, political and financial investment required to hold those objects in their place. Similarly, the cultural history of the `idea' of the department store is only slowly coming to light, buried as it is under generations of prejudice and dull economic `analysis'. By becoming so obviously entangled, the structural circuit of the museum and store is over, or at least their influence retains only a pale shadow of its previous force. The speed and stunning profusion of modern material life has deformed the nature of culture. If the traditional differences between things have evaporated, or distinctions in operation lie exposed as arbitrary (a worst-case scenario), or ideological (a best-case scenario), a question remains. Values are no longer implemented from above -- informed solely by the taste of the few -- but ripple and fluctuate through a networked web of different images, objects, spaces and media. On an individual and public, national and international scale, we are described by an astonishing array of things: piling up around us is a growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, knowledge, electronic technology and rubbish. This vast accumulation of objects -- anything from ancient Egyptian sandals to a laptop computer -- exists in a complex mesh of competing narratives, narratives which dispute ownership, contest interpretation, disagree on value, and argue over where things belong. As objects are inserted into, and spill out of, every shell cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and landfill site, there is an endless struggle to control, classify and interpret. Traditionally, the privileged sector of European cultures tended to value the `Fine Arts' -- paintings, sculptures and the bric-a-brac of a former aristocracy (and that of their advisers, dealers, market-makers, and the galleries, private homes, academies and museums through which they circulated) -- as the sole vehicle of taste, education and power. These values privileged history, singularity, authenticity, and academicism: a stable and restricted symbolic economy grounded in the interpretation of old objects removed from the everyday circulation of things. But as the nineteenth century progressed, the power associated with cultural competence -- a sense of participating in the interpretation of the important objects within a culture -- could no longer be confined to this restricted economy of Fine Art and related institutions. Finding themselves adrift in an endless stream of commodities made available by new methods of mass-production, the rapidly emerging urban middle class had the opportunity to set itself apart from the industrialists (who emulated the old aristocracy), and from the more established working class. Through a greater access to material things, those outside the former social elite could now participate in the creation of values of all kinds, by discriminating amongst the new products of industry and commerce. The emergence of the department store and public museum seem to perfectly represent the awesome technologies for the sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things. …

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia, this pioneering volume provides a global survey of how museums address religion and charts a course for future research and interpretation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines and institutions explore the work of museums from many perspectives, including cultural studies, religious studies, and visual and material culture. Most museums throughout the world — whether art, archaeology, anthropology or history museums — include religious objects, and an increasing number are beginning to address religion as a major category of human identity. With rising museum attendance and the increasingly complex role of religion in social and geopolitical realities, this work of stewardship and interpretation is urgent and important. Religion in Museums is divided into six sections: museum buildings, reception, objects, collecting and research, interpretation of objects and exhibitions, and the representation of religion in different types of museums. Topics covered include repatriation, conservation, architectural design, exhibition, heritage, missionary collections, curation, collections and display, and the visitor’s experience. Case studies provide comprehensive coverage and range from museums devoted specifically to the diversity of religious traditions, such as the State Museum of the History of Religion in St Petersburg, to exhibitions centered on religion at secular museums, such as Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, at the British Museum.

The Introduction illustrates the challenges involved when thinking about style and perception and how we have classified style in the past and classify it in the present. The aim of the book is to deconstruct the cultural label of Egyptian in the Roman world within the context of object use, and to move the analysis of objects to something called complex relational perception. Interpretation of objects should go beyond stylistic containers such as Roman, Greek, or Egyptian, but has to address the context in which objects were used and by whom. By integrating relationality, object ontology, and theories of perception we will look at how ‘foreign’ objects were used and how classification emerged in the past. Aegyptiaca in Pompeii will therefore serve as a case study to explore new ways of studying object perception and style in archaeology.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in the United States, and the Museum of Women (Musée de la Femme) in Longueuil, Canada, were founded with the objective of making women visible in museum collections and promoting gender equality in society. Can they be considered feminist museums? Feminist museology is not limited to describing the past and the present; on the contrary, it raises questions and paves the way for an egalitarian future. A feminist museum aims to raise awareness and change mentalities. Despite their shared ambition of acting on behalf of women with the help of a museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Museum of Women reflect two different approaches. A comparison of these case studies sheds light on two different solutions for integrating gender into museums. How do these two museums fulfil their missions through their permanent collections and temporary exhibitions? How does a museum become a means for encouraging social change? Their collections raise awareness of women's history and offer new interpretations of objects. Both museums try to change the way visitors look at the past and contemporary society by offering different readings of history and art history. Despite their differences, both make visitors aware of gender inequality in museums and the world.

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

HISTORIC PRESERVATION LAWS

Thellier‐type experiments are a method used to estimate the intensity of the ancient geomagnetic field from samples carrying thermoremanent magnetization. The analysis of Thellier‐type experimental data is conventionally done by manually interpreting data from each specimen individually. The main limitations of this approach are: (1) manual interpretation is highly subjective and can be biased by misleading concepts, (2) the procedure is time consuming, and (3) unless the measurement data are published, the final results cannot be reproduced by readers. These issues compound when trying to combine together paleointensity data from a collection of studies. Here, we address these problems by introducing the Thellier GUI: a comprehensive tool for interpreting Thellier‐type experimental data. The tool presents a graphical user interface, which allows manual interpretation of the data, but also includes two new interpretation tools: (1) Thellier Auto Interpreter: an automatic interpretation procedure based on a given set of experimental requirements, and 2) Consistency Test: a self‐test for the consistency of the results assuming groups of samples that should have the same paleointensity values. We apply the new tools to data from two case studies. These demonstrate that interpretation of non‐ideal Arai plots is nonunique and different selection criteria can lead to significantly different conclusions. Hence, we recommend adopting the automatic interpretation approach, as it allows a more objective interpretation, which can be easily repeated or revised by others. When the analysis is combined with a Consistency Test, the credibility of the interpretations is enhanced. We also make the case that published paleointensity studies should include the measurement data (as supplementary files or as a contributions to the MagIC database) so that results based on a particular data set can be reproduced and assessed by others.

This chapter focuses on the care and conservation of the Indian textile collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. There are approximately 10,000 Indian textiles in the collection, encompassing a comprehensive range of textile and costume manufacturing techniques and historical periods. The principles of conservation, which underpin the treatment of all objects, are discussed, and the importance of understanding the causes of deterioration to assess condition. Preventive conservation is stressed, including maintaining stable environmental conditions, good housekeeping and integrated pest management, and rotation of light sensitive objects. Exhibiting textiles at the V&A is a collaborative effort in which the conservator works with curators, designers, technicians, scientists, registrars, and exhibition organizers to realize the display. Drawing from the preparation of Indian textiles and costume for permanent and temporary display the conservator's role in object research, including scientific investigation are discussed and the importance of understanding context and object interpretation particularly regarding display. Common conservation issues and treatment solutions are examined through case studies. Topics include surface cleaning, humidification, wet and solvent cleaning, stabilization and support methods. Finally, strategies for the handling and display of Indian textiles and costume, which can be very large, embellished, and heavy, are discussed.