Material Culture Perspective Research Articles

Visualising the universe: The role of pictures in mediating people's relationship with outer space

The last decade has witnessed an increased interest in outer space among non-expert citizens of London; many astronomical societies have expanded, and telescopes and astronomical magazines have experienced pronounced growth in sales. Anthropology, as a discipline focused on the study of human culture, has recently provided new insights into the cultural dimensions involved in contemporary experiences of the universe. After spending two months among amateur astronomers at two London astronomical societies, I argue that pictures – understood from a material culture perspective – play a key role in shaping people's relationship with the universe. This relationship is currently influenced by new technologies that offer more accessible ways to capture and share pictures of the skies. Simultaneously, new social media apps have opened new digital platforms for sharing outer space pictures, introducing innovative visual ways to engage with it.

조선시대 설행된 여제(厲祭)의 제장 연구

The purpose of this study is to re-examine Yŏ-je(厲祭) by targeting Yŏdan( 厲壇) of the Hansungbu(漢城府, Hanyang area) during the Joseon Dynasty. Yo ̆-je is a ritual to appease Yo ̆-gui(厲鬼), who was considered to be the source of plague and disaster. Since space(空間) and symbols(象徵 物) were not carefully discussed in the existing studies, this study focuses on ritual space and ritual symbols. Therefore, this study attempts to clarify the cultural value of death inherent in Yŏ-gui, focusing on material culture. Joseon Dynasty attempted to build a new Yŏ-dan from the beginning of the dynasty. Yŏ-dan had begun to be built in the 15th century, but it was shaped according to the formality by etiquette in the 16th century. In Hanyang, ritual spaces were located outside the four gates. It can be divided into permanent and temporary space. The permanent Yŏ-dan was located in the Bukgyo(北郊) outside the ChanguiMoon(彰義門) and the temporary Yŏdan was located in Samgyo. Yŏ-dans of Hansungbu were built in the same form of Youngsungdan(靈星 壇). Yŏ-je was held in Yŏ-dan in Bukgyo after ceremony of Seonghwang(城 隍) to Yŏ-dan in Namgyo(南郊). Seonghwang is god of the other world, he places a role in bringing MusaGui(無祀鬼) together. As for the arrangement structure of the altar, memorial tablet of Songhwang was placed facing south, tablets of MusaGui were placed left and right of Seonghwang on the lower altar facing each other. The number of tablets of MusaGui was 12 in the beginning of the Joseon Dynasty under the influence of Ming, but it changed to 15 in king Sejong period. I guess that types of sorrow abnormal death reflected sense of value of the contemporary people were added. This study seeks to value Hansungbu's Yo ̆-je in that it has developed its thesis from the perspective of material culture. The purpose of this study is to re-examine Yŏ-jeby targeting Yŏ-danof

Crystal Shops and Shopping for Crystals in Estonia: Materiality and Experience as Sources of Value

Abstract This article concentrates on crystal shops and shopping for crystals in Estonia. Consumption and commerce are inherent parts of New Spirituality. Crystals became the most salient commodities in esoteric shops during the 2010s, most of the shops having become “crystal shops” in Estonia. The aim of this article is to analyze the meaning-making potential of the materiality of crystals in shopping, and the material and sensuous aspects of crystal shops. From the perspective of material culture and consumption studies, this case study proposes that crystals are valuable in shopping primarily because of their materiality as a source of meaning and experience. In choosing crystals, people follow their material form and material qualities instead of a textual description of their supportive effects. Crystal shops are generally described as therapeutic places, however as an “experiencescape” they are strictly sensuous and material places.

The Continuity of the Traditional Livelihood of the Altai-Kizhi People in the Post-Soviet Period from the Perspective of Material Culture and Social Change

The livelihood of the Altai-Kizhi people saw two paradigm shifts during the 1900s: forcible collectivization at the turn of the 1930s, and its impromptu deconstruction in the 1990s. This paper observes the changes to the livelihood of the Altai-Kizhi following the collapse of the USSR with a particular focus on the area of material culture and social change. It investigates the issue of continuity of traditional culture patterns in modern society and their importance. Particular attention is paid to the form and function of farming buildings in the context of climatic conditions in the South Siberian Mountains, the veneration of the horse hitching post, the aspect of agriculture, and the relationship of the Altaians to their livestock.

Archaeological culture, document texts, and the construction of early Wu Yue history

Abstract The current study first systematically traces the archaeological cultures of southeast China (the Wu Yue region) during the Western Zhou, from the perspective of material culture remains, sources, regional variants, and social conditions revealed from the archaeological evidence. It then analyzes the plurality of interpretations of bronze inscriptions and the nature of documentary records concerning the emergence of the Wu and Yue states and their early history. The author points out that a regional archaeological culture with unique characteristics, showing great cultural affinity with the Wu Yue culture during the late Eastern Zhou period (771–475 BCE) had existed in southeast China during Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE). However, the emergence of Wu and Yue states and their early history recorded in historical texts have not been confirmed by any archaeological discoveries in the form of material cultures, bronze inscriptions, or documentary texts. Assertions of direct connections between related archaeological cultures and early Wu and Yue states lack persuasiveness. Considering this, the author proposes new insights into the textuality of documentary records, the relation between archaeology and historical texts, as well as the essence of historiography.

Tracing the absence of children’s voices – artefacts of children’s persecution under the National Socialist regime

ABSTRACT Research on the history of childhood faces fundamental challenges in tracing children’s voices. Not yet skilled in forms of written self-documentation, children leave few documents behind. Other forms of expression (i.e. drawings) must thus be recognised as valuable historical sources and appropriate methods must be applied. These research challenges are aggravated in regard to persecuted children under the National Socialist regime. Few artefacts produced by children have been preserved, and in many cases nobody is left to tell the stories attached to them. The rare preserved artefacts thus paradoxically refer to the absence of children’s voices in history. Referring to the epistemological concept of the trace and a material culture perspective, I address some of these remarkable exceptions to discuss their potential and limitations as historical sources to research children’s lives. Two drawings by an 11-year-old girl from her lessons at the Private Jewish Elementary School in Düsseldorf serve as the starting point of a case study. Beginning with the materiality this study raises further questions about conditions of origin and preservation. Furthermore I discuss the researcher’s role in identifying artefacts as sources and creating meaning. In this way, I contribute to the methodological discussion of how research on children’s history can draw on artefacts like drawings produced by children.

BAMBOO BASKET OF KABUI: TECHNO-FUNCTIONAL, SOCIAL AND AESTHETIC SIGNIFICANCES

In the light of the Binfordian theoretical perspective of material culture, the present paper aims to understand the three dimensions of carrying bamboo basket of Kabui (the Kabui are also called Rongmei) tribe of Manipur, viz. a) utilitarian, that is, instrumental linked to its function (technomic), b) social (sociotechnic) and c) ideational relating to symbolism and social meaning (ideotechnic) of the appliance. Carrying baskets form one of the most diverse bamboo and cane-based crafts. The Kabuis of Manipur (especially the hill dwellers) produce some of the finest carrying baskets (Ka) with variation in design, size, shape and types of weave, which can be consociated with people’s perceptions of the environment, modes of economic interaction, and division of labour, particularly by gender. The technological significance of Kabui carrying baskets entails their weave patterns like wickerwork, cross weft, and diagonal or twilled, where significant relations of the pattern and design with age and sex of the carrier or user are observed.

What do ancient names reveal about identities in the past?

What do ancient names reveal about identities in the past? ArcNames investigated naming in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia from a material culture perspective. It aimed to understand the role of names in identity constructions and as markers of status and landholding in place names and runic monuments. The vocabulary in personal names corresponded with iconographic and poetic motifs, and names conveyed messages about status, kinship, affiliations and personal qualities.

Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China by Yan Liu

Reviewed by: Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China by Yan Liu Huaiyu Chen (bio) Yan Liu. Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. xvi, 261 pp. Paperback $30.00, isbn 978-0295748993. Based on his revised dissertation, Liu Yan's new book Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China is a welcoming addition to the English-language scholarship on the history of medicines in China, focusing on the medieval transformation of poisons as medicines. In the past two decades, the history of pharmacology, pharmacy, and medicines in China has experienced a booming development across the globe. Many books focus on early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. For example, just in the past couple of years, we have seen the publications of Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton, 2020) and Mao's Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China (Duke, 2021). However, many books on premodern periods have been published in Chinese, Japanese, and French, as Liu Yan also noted in the introduction of his new book. On the one hand, these books resulted from the flourishing of cultural history that focused on the body, health, medicine, and life. On the other hand, there was also inspiration from newly available materials, such as manuscripts found in Dunhuang and other sites in Central Asia and entombed stone inscriptions. Indeed, Chinese and Japanese scholars have continued the tradition of studying materia medica (bencao) to compile, edit, and study these manuscripts. In recent years, some East Asian scholars also attempted to incorporate new concepts to interpret these new materials in light of the history of medicine and material culture. One of the strengths of Liu's book is to digest numerous secondary sources in East Asian languages. Besides incorporating secondary sources, Healing with Poisons focused on two genres of texts as primary sources, meteria medica (bencao) and formula books (fangshu). I would further point out that from the perspective of material culture, since there were three major material sources for Chinese medicines in medieval China: animals, plants, and minerals, many texts on the roles of plants, animals, and minerals in Chinese medical history might not be categorized into the two genres noted in Healing with Poisons, so their values for this theme might have been underestimated. For example, the text on zoomancy or animal divination collected in Treatise on the Auspicious Signs of Heaven and Earth (Tiandi ruixiang zhi 天地瑞祥志) often mentioned the animals serving as medicine for healing illness. Healing with Poisons has three parts and seven chapters. The first two parts trace the origins and evolving transformation of the "du" as "potent" or "potency" from poison to medicine in the textual sources from the Han to the [End Page 124] Tang dynasties. And the second part focuses on the relationship of state power to pharmaceutical knowledge and its medical and political implications. The third part turned to the role of poison in life enhancement. The Conclusion summarizes the discussions and makes several arguments. First, Liu argues that the traditional Chinese pharmacy encompassed various substances possessing great transformative capacity. Second, he argues that the materiality of Chinese drugs was fluid, and the medical knowledge was transformative across political and social spaces. Third, he also argues that medicines could alter the body for both positive and negative functions. Fourth, Liu suggests that the center of medical activities was shifted to the northwestern region in the seventh century due to the establishment of state power. The state and the elite class played active roles in producing, regulating, and institutionalizing medical knowledge. In particular, part 1 has two chapters. Chapter 1 traces the changing meanings of "du" in early Chinese sources, from the earliest materia medica, The Divine Farmer's Classics, to Tao Hongjin's Collected Annotations. He argued that "du" was more sophisticated than simply the negative connotation of "poison" in early Chinese texts, which denoted the strong sense of potency for a medicine's therapeutic power, and the role of "du" in healing was established in the sixth century. He also suggested that political visions and cosmological views contributed to the blurry boundary between poison and medicine due to the Yin...

The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald

Reviewed by: The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald Barbara M. Hoffmann The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, 296 p., paperback, $39.95) Turning point, calamity, revolution, horror: these are but a few of the terms used to describe An Gorta Mór by the contributors to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. These terms—complex and almost contradictory in connotation—speak to the difficulty of representing the Famine, both at the contemporaneous moment and for generations after living with its legacy. With this important contribution to famine studies, Corporaal, Frawley and Mark-FitzGerald offer the first edited collection devoted to an entirely visual and material culture perspective on the Great Famine. The editors have divided the collection into three sections that follow, as Mark-FitzGerald notes in her introduction to the text, a "roughly chronological sequence": Section I, "Witness and Representation: Contemporaneous Depictions of Famine"; Section II, "Negotiating Form: Famine/Post-Famine Modalities and Media"; and Section III, "Legacy: Postmemory and Contemporary [End Page 147] Visual Cultures." The collection's range comes not only from this broad temporal view but also from the diversity of perspectives of the contributors, who hail from universities across Europe and North America as well as from institutions such as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the Irish Heritage Trust and National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Likewise, the contributed essays cover an impressive array of visual and material products: paintings and sketches, political cartoons, religious artifacts, textiles, memorials, television shows, graphic novels, and even a film that never was. This variety and diversity, looking to capture a fuller picture of the Famine in history and memory, is enhanced by another focus of the collection, as explained by Mark-FitzGerald: "prioritiz[ing] methodologically close readings of specific engagements with the famine." Rather than presenting broad or universalizing claims about the Famine and its representation, each chapter engages specific examples of visual and material culture, offering nuanced analysis of the product or production itself within its specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. Enhancing this goal, and an invaluable part of this collection, are the thirty-nine brilliant reproductions of the paintings, drawings, and artifacts discussed by the contributors. The four chapters in section one exploring contemporaneous material and visual items all deal with a predominant presumption that the Famine was a moment of aporia in terms of cultural production, not only because, as Niamh O'Sullivan points out in her chapter, "Irish artists tended to avoid the appalling conditions in which the majority lived" but also because that majority's struggle to survive supplanted all leisurely or artistic activities. The contributions in section one suggest that, while representations of the Famine by or depicting the actual suffering of the famine victims may be rare to nonexistent, exploring representations beyond that focus, both within Ireland and abroad, can offer a fuller understanding of the Famine. This suggestion to look beyond seemingly obvious images of the Famine is manifested in the first chapter, O'Sullivan's "The Bond that Knit the Peasant to the Soil: Rural Lore and Superstition in the Work of Daniel Macdonald." Rather than exploring Macdonald's famous 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store—"renowned as the only known painting representing the blight itself"—O'Sullivan examines representations of superstition in his works from just before and during the Famine. She reveals a continuity in such representations, highlighting not only superstition's role in uniting the Irish peasantry and providing a link between life pre- and post-Famine but also its connection to sedition and proto-nationalism that heightened during the Famine. In the second chapter, "HB's Famine Cartoons: Satirical Art in a Time of [End Page 148] Catastrophe," Peter Gray explores depictions of the Famine in the political cartoons by the London-based middle-class Catholic Irishman John Doyle, known as "H. B.," aimed at a...

Framing movement experiences: Migration, materiality and everyday life

Abstract This article aims to discuss contemporary migrations from the perspective of material culture. The discussion presented here assumes that material culture plays a significant part in all migration processes by establishing lines of continuity between present and past, confirming and reproducing identity and belonging, framing everyday life and displaying new positioning strategies. Beginning with two snapshots of recent ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazil and Canada, I hope to contribute to the discussion of contemporary migration through studying the lens of materiality and the role it plays in these processes. It will be argued that material culture is a productive tool, not only to address the grounds, motivations and resources people activate in order to utilize migration as an effective option, but also to discuss the relationships between movement, settling, cultural reproduction and innovation.

The Lens, the Mirror and the Frame: Glasses, Good Taste and the Material Culture of Looking

ABSTRACTThis article explores the material culture of taste, examining the ways that artifacts we look with (the technologies of looking) can mediate and produce our understanding of taste. Taking a phenomenological approach to shopping and luxury it examines how processes of looking closely, of connoisseurship and distinction are bound up with the performance of good taste. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984a) formulation of “distinction,” it unpacks the multiple modes of vision and roles of looking necessary to perform and maintain the capital of good taste. Much has been written on the gaze in consumer societies, building upon theories of looking and desire (Mulvey 1989; Berger 1972). Whilst recent writing has often focused on screens and the subjectivity of desire (c.f. Rocamora, 2011, 2017, Pham, 2015) this article addresses ideas of taste and looking from a phenomenological and material culture perspective, utilizing the work of sociologist Bourdieu (1984a ), and phenomenologists Schilder (1935) and Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968) to examine the embodied and bodily experience of looking with and through things.

Becoming at home in residential care for older people: a material culture perspective.

Residential homes encourage new residents to bring belongings with them, so that they can personalise their room and 'feel at home'. Existing literature on material culture in residential homes views objects as symbols and repositories of home and identity, which can facilitate a sense of belonging in residents through their display in residents' rooms. I suggest that this both misunderstands the processual and fluid nature of home and identity, and conceptualises objects as essentially passive. This article uses ethnographic data and theories of practice and relationality to argue that rather than the meaning of home being inherent in objects, or felt subjectively by residents, meaning is generated through ongoing, everyday interactions between the two. I show that residents became at home by acquiring new things -as well as displaying existing possessions - and also through interacting with mundane objects in everyday social and relational practices such as cleaning and hosting. I conclude that being at home in older people's residential homes need not be so different from being at home at other stages of the life course and in other settings. This challenges conceptualisations of older people's homes - and older age itself - as somehow unknowable and unfamiliar.

Constructing a High-Society Mosque: The Controversy and Significance of the Sakirin Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey

3 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XL, No.2, WINTER 2017 Constructing a High-Society Mosque: The Controversy and Significance of the Sakirin Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey Yücel Demirer* This article addresses the unique construction process of the Şakirin Mosque, located near Karacaahmet Cemetery in theAnatolian section of Istanbul, Turkey, and the controversies associated with its construction. Looking beyond form and function, which are known as the principal characteristics of architectural design, this article analyzes the representation of contemporary religious standpoints in Turkey through the Şakirin Mosque’s design and construction process. The mosque was funded by the children of a prominent philanthropist couple and designed by the team of a prominent mosque architects and a female interior designer who has won awards for her work including bars and restaurants. This striking and spacious structure has sparked controversy in Turkey and became known to journalists as “the high society mosque.” Closely reviewing the architectural characteristics of the mosque and discussing the interior designer’s extensive exercise of freedom in her choice of forms and motifs, this essay intends to elaborate the ways in which the design negotiates issues of national and religious identity. In the process of this analysis, the major controversies that influence religious discourses in Turkey come to light. * Yücel Demirer received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and is a member of Kocaeli Academy for Solidarity in Turkey. His research centers on the intersection of culture and politics. He has published articles and books on political culture, symbolic politics and political aspects of religion. An earlier version of this paper was presented in theAnnual Meeting of theAmericanAcademy of Religion, San Francisco, CA, on November 19th 2011. The author would like to thank Nicole Wilkinson Duran for her helpful and constructive comments that significantly contributed to improving final version of the paper. Email: yuceldemirer@gmail.com 4 . . . Lindsay Jones, prominent architectural historian of worship places, reminds us that a building’s meaning can be categorized as “situational, provisional and non-definitive,” and that, like other artistic works, buildings convey a plurality of meanings.1 However, Jones also assures us that “[a]rchitecture is definitely the most visible and arguably the most powerful means both for expressing and for stimulating religious sensibilities.”2 The varieties of architecture and decoration in places of worship and the side-by-side analysis of objects and styles has occupied a significant position in scholarly research. Scholars interested in the interplay between religion and social change have examined the material and cultural aspect of worship places for a long time. In keeping with this research, the present essay focuses on the case of the Şakirin Mosque from the perspective of material culture and architecture. The mosque forms a noteworthy site for this kind of study for two reasons. First, we will see that the mosque’s design functions to display the social transformation and negotiation between the main social and political divisions in Turkey. Second, by bringing artists, architects, and various other practitioners together, the Şakirin project has functioned as a material bridge in a highly divided context. The Şakirin Mosque symbolizes the negotiations between religious traditions and the laicist sphere in a highly compartmentalized social setting. It further serves as a venue for the invention of a new tradition that would combine conflicting stances together.While bridging different lifestyles throughout the construction process, this project represents tolerance and mutual understanding. The theme of bridging and negotiation is the focal point of analysis. Manifold interactions among various bitterly divided actors and social groups occur within Şakirin’s architecture and decoration. In contrast to some divisive mosque projects in Turkey,3 Şakirin will be discussed as a harmonizing project that may stand as an answer to the growing controversy over mosques in Turkey and as a pragmatic solution in negotiations among opposing social positions. With its religious, aesthetic, and historic importance, this project also paved the way for the purpose-built mosques which correlate the issue of meaning at the personal level. While this study is very much interested in the display of multi-layered meanings of Şakirin for different parties, informal 1 Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of...

Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain ed. by Mary E. Barnard, Frederick A. de Armas (review)

barnard, mary e., and frederick a. de armas, eds. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. xxi ^ 326 pp.The consumption and display of luxurious objects to establish personal and sociopolitical cultural hierarchies in the early modern period surpassed all historical precedents. In flagrant disregard for the topos of vanitas, well-chosen material possessions-then as now-served as markers of vaguely ''spiritual'' riches, such as intellectual curiosity, erudition, and taste. The elegantly written introduction to this collection of essays, which the editors propose as a kind of Wunderkammer, establishes further relevance of material objects to the written word in a reflection on the book as itself a handled, symbolically charged, and cherished object. Each essay presents either a well-documented history of an element of material culture, or an example of suggestive reasoning that invites the reader to consider selected nonmaterial phenomena as objects on account of their particular function in a literary text.Leading the first section of the book, ''Objects of Luxury and Power,'' Mary E. Barnard explores how Garcilaso de la Vega inscribes himself in his third eclogue, dedicated to the vicereine of Naples, Maria Osorio Pimentel. The etymology of the word textus associates the practice of weaving tapestry with the writing of poetry. This association allows Garcilaso to accumulate numerous layers of cultural and literary allusions and plays in an act of poetic offering that, according to Barnard, mimics the economy of gift giving. Barnard is followed by Marsha S. Collins analyzing tensions centered around the spatially and visually dominant structures whose artifices compete for primacy with the natural setting of the sixteenth century Iberian pastoral romances: the palace of the wise Felicia in Jorge de Montemayor's Diana, and Dardanio's cave in Lope de Vega's Arcadia.While ekphrasis overtly appears to stop time and the narrative flow, Collins argues that the scenes unfolding around these spatial structures are pivotal for characterization and plot development in the analyzed pastoral texts. For his part, Frederick A. de Armas looks at the interpolated story of El curioso impertinente in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote from the perspective of material culture and theatricality. De Armas picks up an unnoticed reference to Danaein Lotario's discourse as a key to interpreting an intricate web of references to visual imagery and gambling that identify the figure of Fortune dealing cards to the unfortunate players in this theatrically staged three-part tale. Maria Cristina Quintero's take on material culture analyzes several moments in Pedro Calderon de la Barca's play La gran Cenobia in which carefully manipulated stage props are used to comment upon the arbitrariness and mutability of power, a poignant message to be delivered to its original audience in the midst of social and political turmoil during the early reign of Phillip IV. Finally, falling portraits on the Golden Age stage that prevent a crime could strike one as a contrived dramatic device. However, Christopher B. Weimer suspends the reader's disbelief as he contextualizes this dramatic technique within an early modern tradition of miracles that described saints' images coming to life and even interceding on a devotee's behalf. Weimer studies the theatrical motif of the falling portraits-turned-agents in plays by Damian Salucio del Poyo, Luis Velez de Guevara, and Tirso de Molina.The second section, ''The Matter of Words,'' considers material objects in relation to elusive concepts such as time, vision, memory, and sound. Heather Allen studies time, examining the role of the book of hours in the chronicles documenting the rescue of the Franciscan priest Jeronimo de Aguilar who, following the shipwreck of his expedition, lived among the Mayas for eight years. In a reading of three histories describing Aguilar's rescue, Allen observes how the book of hours functions as ''an ambivalent signifier,'' a symbol of the Castilian's intellectual, religious and physical difference from Amerindians, as well as of Aguilar's liminality between the two cultures after the extended period of immersion in Mayan society. …

The second-hand market: the practice of reusing goods in cultures dominated by the new

This article offers a literary review with the intention of analysing the studies conducted on the topic of used goods. The need for reviewing the existing considerations and research on the subject lies in the necessity to examine this topic in an organic manner, since so far it has only been examined by social sciences and particularly by the sociology of consumption in a marginal fashion. The research presented thus far ranges from studies concerning the field of cultural geography to those about economics and marketing focusing on reasons for purchase and the geography of purchases. Used goods have also been the topic of cultural anthropology studies, which focus on the subject of consumption by contemporary societies in a variety of cultural contexts, and which have examined the different contexts, systems and rituals associated with this specific exchange practice. One specific element that emerged from anthropology studies on fashion is the vintage phenomenon, which has elevated used goods in this realm. The analysis of this research suggests that the study on used goods should be carried out from a material culture perspective, so that the human relationships mediated by (used) goods can be taken into account.

Test or toy? Materiality and the measurement of infant intelligence.

Adopting a material culture perspective, this article interrogates the composition of the copy of the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale housed at the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection. As a deliberately assembled collection of toys, the Cattell Scale makes clear the indefinite boundary between test and toy in 20th-century American psychology. Consideration of the current condition of some of the material constituents of this particular Cattell Scale provides valuable insight into some of the elusive practices of intelligence testers in situ and highlights the dynamic nature of the testing process. At the same time, attending to the materiality of this intelligence test reveals some of the more general assumptions about the nature of intelligence inherent in tests for young children. The scale and others like it, I argue, exposes psychologists' often-uncritical equation of childhood intelligence with appropriate play undertaken with an appropriate toy, an approach complicit in, and fostered by, midcentury efforts to cultivate particular forms of selfhood. This analysis serves as an example of the kind of work that may be done on the history of intelligence testing when the material objects that were (and are) inherently a part of the testing process are included in historical scholarship.

Spousal bereavement in later life: a material culture perspective

Using a material culture perspective, this article provides new insight into the experience of later life spousal bereavement. Drawing on qualitative data gathered during interviews with 20 older widows and widowers, it pays particular attention to the domestic setting within which they were living and the ways in which this had come to constitute an environment of memory. Its focus is therefore the sustaining of ‘continuing bonds’ between older surviving and deceased partners. Key to the article is a distinction between dedicated and emergent memorialisation, the former exemplified in the funeral, the grave and the display of photographs, the latter in the more subtle forms of residual traces within the home and embodied domestic practices which together evoke the presence of the dead spouse. Highlighting the sensory and embodied dimensions of bereavement, the article complements a prevailing emphasis on visuality by paying careful attention to the senses of touch and smell. In that it explores the experiences of people aged between 63 and 91, it critiques universalising models of bereavement, providing a nuanced generationally specific account that reveals the importance of shared inter-war domestic cultures for people now living alone, routinised practices that have increasingly less salience among succeeding generations.

Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective Edited by Daniel Miller Oxford: Berg, 2009

Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective Edited by Daniel Miller Oxford: Berg, 2009

Costume and the Self-Extension: The Functions of Costume in Elmer Gantry from the Perspective of Material Culture

As the other creation of material culture, clothes have concrete forms, and reflect the wearer’s taste and appreciation of beauty while provide certain social significance. This paper attempts to analyze the connection between the costume of the hero Elmer Gantry in the novel Elmer Gantry and his self-identity, then to discover how the novelist, Sinclair Lewis ,the first Nobel Prize winner in the USA, by describing the costume of the character, explores the different inner self-identities of one man.