scholarly journals A life less ordinary: analysis of the uniquely preserved tattooed dermal remains of an individual from 19th century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin J. Smith ◽  
A. Starkie ◽  
R. Slater ◽  
H. Manley
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Ct Scanning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Infrared Light ◽  
Biological Anthropology ◽  
Light Sources ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Anterior Portion ◽  
19Th Century France ◽  
Infrared Reflectography

Abstract‘Anthropologies of the Body’ often view the human form as a sort of text, onto which meanings and experiences are inscribed during people’s lives, rendering the body effectively as an artefact of material culture. Such ‘inscription’ is generally metaphorical; however, in the case of tattooing, aspects of the way people wish to be perceived are quite literally inscribed upon the body. The current article presents analysis of an unusual ‘artefact’ in the form of the major anterior portion of the preserved, tattooed skin of an adult male. The skin’s provenance was previously unknown, as was the reason why he had been subject to such treatment after death. The current project has progressed towards resolving these issues using multiple approaches, including CT scanning, multispectral light sources, infrared reflectography and spectroscopic dating. The latter technique produced a date range of 1861 ±15 years for the wood on which the skin was mounted. Multispectral and infrared light examination made it possible to discern many of the tattooed motifs much more clearly. The images and text that were made visible suggested this man had been French and had probably spent time overseas, possibly in naval service. Towards the end of his life, he may have been imprisoned and the date ‘1883’ was decipherable. The current analysis allowed the investigators to glean far more information than was initially expected, providing a considerably richer personal narrative of this individual through the content of his tattoos than is usually possible in biological anthropology.

Quantum fountain infrared light sources based on intersubband emissions in quantum wells

1999 ◽  
Vol 09 (PR2) ◽  
pp. Pr2-161
Author(s):  
F. H. Julien ◽  
P. Boucaud ◽  
S. Sauvage ◽  
O. Gauthier-Lafaye ◽  
Z. Moussa
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Wells ◽  
Infrared Light ◽  
Light Sources

Touchy-Feely History: The ‘Stuff’ of American Culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
New Research

This state of the field essay examines recent trends in American Cultural History, focusing on music, race and ethnicity, material culture, and the body. Expanding on key themes in articles featured in the special issue of Cultural History, the essay draws linkages to other important literatures. The essay argues for more a more serious consideration of the products within popular culture, less as a reflection of social or economic trends, rather for their own historical significance. While the essay examines some classic texts, more emphasis is on work published within the last decade. Here, interdisciplinary methods are stressed, as are new research perspectives developing by non-western historians.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

Making Up 3D Bodies

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Kiona Hagen Niehaus ◽  
Rebecca Fiebrink
Keyword(s):  
Software Tool ◽  
The Body ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Modeling Systems ◽  
Exploratory Approach ◽  
Disability Status ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Impact

This paper describes the process of developing a software tool for digital artistic exploration of 3D human figures. Previously available software for modeling mesh-based 3D human figures restricts user output based on normative assumptions about the form that a body might take, particularly in terms of gender, race, and disability status, which are reinforced by ubiquitous use of range-limited sliders mapped to singular high-level design parameters. CreatorCustom, the software prototype created during this research, is designed to foreground an exploratory approach to modeling 3D human bodies, treating the digital body as a sculptural landscape rather than a presupposed form for rote technical representation. Building on prior research into serendipity in Human-Computer Interaction and 3D modeling systems for users at various levels of proficiency, among other areas, this research comprises two qualitative studies and investigation of the impact on the first author's artistic practice. Study 1 uses interviews and practice sessions to explore the practices of six queer artists working with the body and the language, materials, and actions they use in their practice; these then informed the design of the software tool. Study 2 investigates the usability, creativity support, and bodily implications of the software when used by thirteen artists in a workshop. These studies reveal the importance of exploration and unexpectedness in artistic practice, and a desire for experimental digital approaches to the human form.

New Mid-Infrared Light Sources

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 531-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Biegert ◽  
Philip K. Bates ◽  
Olivier Chalus
Keyword(s):  
Infrared Light ◽  
Light Sources ◽  
Mid Infrared

Lifeblood of the Parish

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Neighborhood Change ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Material Religion

Each year the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, celebrates its annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. The crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, a devotional spectacle of strength and struggle in which men lift a four-ton, seventy-foot tower through the streets. This ethnographic study delves into this masculine world of devotion and the religious lives of lay Catholic men. It explores contemporary men’s devotion to the saints and the Catholic parish as an enduring venue for the pursuit of manhood and masculinity amid gentrification and neighborhood change in New York City. It explores the way laymen imagine themselves and their labor as high stakes, the very work of keeping their parish alive. In this Brooklyn church men, money, and devotion are intertwined. In the backstage spaces of the parish men enact their devotion through craft, manual labor, and fundraising. A rich exploration of embodiment and material religion, this book examines how men come to be part of religious community through material culture: costumes, clothing, objects, and tattoos. It argues that devotion is as much about skills, the body, and relationships between men as it is about belief.

Structures of Biomolecular Ions in the Gas Phase Probed by Infrared Light Sources

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey N. Stedwell ◽  
Johan F. Galindo ◽  
Adrian E. Roitberg ◽  
Nicolas C. Polfer
Keyword(s):  
Gas Phase ◽  
Infrared Light ◽  
Light Sources ◽  
Biomolecular Ions

Self and Body

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Sassatelli
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Specific Configuration ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Late Modern

This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, and anthropology, it explores how, from the early modern period, the consolidation of new consumption patterns and values has given way to particular visions of the human being as a consumer, and how, in turn, the consumer has become a cultural battlefield for the management of body and self. The article also discusses tastes, habitus, and individualization.

scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document