Abstract
Material culture provides powerful teaching opportunities for core anthropological themes and issues. Based on experience in teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students, teh authors provide examples and a framework for a class exercise which supports students to learn from objects and to think anthropologically about them.
Highlights
Encounters with the sensory provocations and embodied stories of material culture have the potential to ground and open up key issues of anthropological enquiry for students at all levels
This exercise uses encounters with ethnographic objects in museum collections in research spaces, it can be adapted to work with objects on display. It draws on techniques from a range of cognate disciplines: elements of ‘close looking’ adapted from literary ‘close reading’; formal stylistic analysis of visual and material properties from art history; technical observation from museum conservation research; curatorial assembly of comparative items and their cultural and historical contexts; object biography and ethnographic analysis. We illustrate this process below for two objects we have used in exercises with anthropology students, together with some of the thematic considerations that were supported by information generated through close observation of the material details of the objects
Physical and visual examination by postgraduate anthropology students, augmented by information in the museum catalogue record for the coat, showed that it is made of Indigenous-tanned moose or caribou hide with stamped painted decorations and dyed porcupine quill wrapping on the fringes
Summary
Encounters with the sensory provocations and embodied stories of material culture have the potential to ground and open up key issues of anthropological enquiry for students at all levels. Close observation of the materiality and biography of ethnographic objects provides powerful examples for considering topics central to the study of anthropology: belief systems, social and political structures, gender and age roles, economics, the embodied and sensory cultures and knowledges of everyday lives.
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