scholarly journals MatteRealities: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 308-316
Author(s):  
Ingrid Gessner ◽  
Miriam Nandi ◽  
Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Research Organizations ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Political Character

Abstract “No ideas but in things!” William Carlos Williams’s leitmotif for the modernist epic Paterson seems to anticipate the current renewal of academic attention to the materialities of culture: When the Smithsonian Institution accounts for The History of America in 101 Objects (Kurin) or when Neil MacGregor, designated director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, aims at telling The History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), they use specimens of material culture as register and archive of human activity. Individual exhibitions explore the role of objects in movements for social and political change (Disobedient Objects, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Large-scale national museum projects like the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., draw attention to the long existence of collections in Western institutions of learning and reveal the inherently political character of material culture—be that by underscoring the importance of institutional recognition of particular identities or by debates about provenance and restitution of human remains and status objects. The plethora of objects assembled in systematic as well as idiosyncratic collections within and outside the university is just beginning to be systematically explored for their roles in learning and education, funded by national research organizations such as the German BMBF.1 In theatrical performances, things function as discussion prompts in biographical work (Aufstand der Dinge, Schauspielhaus Chemnitz) or unfold their potential to induce a bodily experience (The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, GK Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY). Things are present: as heritage, as commodities, as sensation; they circulate in processes of cognition and mediation, they transcend temporal and spatial distantiations. Things figure in narration and performance, in our everyday life practices, in political activism. They build knowledge of ourselves and others, influence the ways in which we interact with our fellow human beings, and in which we express or control our feelings. They combine the apparently concrete and the fleetingly abstract. Overall, things make us do things.

scholarly journals WOJCIECH ANTONI JANUSZ GLUZIŃSKI (1922–2017)

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (0) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Gajewska-Prorok
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Department Head ◽  
National Museum ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Theorie Und Praxis ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
Long Term Studies

Wojciech A.J. Gluziński, a philosopher and an outstanding Polish theoretician of museology, passed away on 26 March 2017. He was born on 31 March 1922 into an intellectual family in Lviv. He commenced studying philosophy in 1945 at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and continued at the Faculty of Humanities at the University & Polytechnic in Wrocław. He got an MA in philosophy in 1952, but even in 1949 he had already started working in the Old Townhouse (later the Historical Museum of the City of Wrocław), a branch of the Silesian Museum (since 1970 the National Museum) in Wrocław. He was connected with the National Museum until the end of his career. In the following years he held the posts of Head of Historical Department, Head and later Curator of the Department of History of Material Culture, and was the museum’s advisor and counsellor from 1991 to 1995. He organised a dozen permanent and temporary exhibitions during more than 40 years of working. He wrote numerous articles published in such periodicals as: “Annual of the Kłodzko Region”, “Annual of Silesian Ethnography” and “Annual of Silesian Art”. His long-term studies on the theory of museology resulted in a doctoral dissertation entitled Philosophical and methodological problems of museology written under the supervision of Prof. Kazimierz Malinowski in 1976 in the Institute of Conservation and Historic Monuments Studies at the Copernicus University in Toruń. The edited work was published in 1980 as a book entitled Underlying museology. Gluziński shared his opinions at numerous conferences abroad, and published articles in post-conference materials, including in “ICOFOM Study Series”, “Muzeologické Sešity” and in “Neue Museumskunde. Theorie und Praxis der Museumsarbeit”.

History of the Workers' Museum in Denmark

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ludvigsen
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
General Council ◽  
Governing Board ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Prime Location

The Workers' Museum in Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on April 12, 1982, at a meeting held at the historic Workers' Assembly Hall at Rømersgade in Copenhagen, the prime location near the Royal Gardens and Rosenborg Palace where the museum is located. At that time the museum had a governing board with representatives of The National Museum, The Museum of Copenhagen, The Library and Archives of the Danish Labour Movement, The University of Copenhagen, the National College of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the Friends of the Workers' Museum, and the General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions.

scholarly journals An Editor's Wish List

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-305
Author(s):  
Maria Shevtsova
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Robert Wilson ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Senior Research Fellow ◽  
Senior Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

The co-editors of New Theatre Quarterly take time out here to reflect on the milestone of the journal reaching its hundredth consecutive issue, in succession to the forty of the original Theatre Quarterly. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the ‘old’ Theatre Quarterly in 1971. He is the author of numerous books on drama and theatre, including New Theatre Voices of the Seventies (1981), Shakespearean Concepts (1989), the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1993), The Faber Guide to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2006), and Will's Will (2007). Formerly Reader in Drama in the University of London, he is now Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College. Maria Shevtsova, who has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since 2003, is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts and Director of Graduate Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of more than one hundred articles and chapters in collected volumes, her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (co-edited with Shomit Mitter, 2005), Robert Wilson (2007), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (with Christopher Innes, 2009), and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009).

Introduction

Manhunts ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grégoire Chamayou ◽  
Steven Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on manhunts—the concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked down, captured, or killed in accord with the forms of the hunt. These were regular and sometimes large-scale practices whose forms were first theorized in ancient Greece, long before their enormous expansion in the modern period in conjunction with the development of transatlantic capitalism. The main problem has to do with the fact that the hunter and the hunted do not belong to different species. Since the distinction between the predator and his prey is not inscribed in nature, the hunting relationship is always susceptible to a reversal of positions. Prey sometimes band together to become hunters in their turn. The history of a power is also the history of the struggles to overthrow it.

Music Transcendent and Sublime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Form Of Expression

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.

Iron Age landscape, society, and regionality : The material culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

In his review of South East Britain in the later Iron Age, Hill (2007, 16) observed that ‘Since the 1980s, little attention has been given to large-scale social explanations and narratives in British Iron Age archaeology. Debates over core–periphery models, the interpretation of hillforts, and the nature of social organization, were—for good reason—eclipsed by a focus on the symbolic meanings of space, structured deposition, and ritual.’ He goes on to argue that British archaeology is in need of more ‘straightforward storyboards’ around which data can be arranged (Hill 2007, 16), and Brudenell (2012, 52) has similarly noted how ‘close-grained understandings have often been won at the expense of broader pictures . . . [and that] with a few exceptions, recent approaches have atomized the study of later prehistoric society, focussing on the specifics of the local social milieu at the expense of broader scales of social analysis’. There have been some ‘big picture’ studies—most notably Cunliffe’s (1974; 1978; 1991; 2005) Iron Age Communities in Britain—but all too often studies of this period have focused on specific counties, types of site, or artefact, and it is noticeable how little systematic mapping of data there was in three recent collections of papers (Gwilt and Haselgrove 1997; Haselgrove and Moore 2007; Haselgrove and Pope 2007). This study, in contrast, aims to shed light on one important ‘storyboard’: the territorial structures within which communities built their landscapes. The written history of Britain begins in the first century BC when we first get insights into its political and territorial arrangements, although as this was a period when the island was becoming embroiled in the political instability caused by the expansion of the Roman world, the trends seen then may not reflect the longer-term patterns of territorial stability or instability that preceded it. In 54 BC, for example, Caesar describes how his major opponents were a civitas (usually translated as ‘tribe’) who had recently surpassed the neighbouring Trinovantes as the paramount group in South East Britain (Gallic War, 20–1; Dunnett 1975, 8; Moore 2011).

scholarly journals Museum cultural collections: pathways to the preservation of traditional and scientific knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The University

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.

On the 10-year anniversary of the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade South Africa: A conversation between parade creative directors Aja Marneweck and Sudonia Kouter

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aja Marneweck
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Western Cape ◽  
Original Performance ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Rural Town ◽  
Puppet Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

2020 marks the tenth anniversary of the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, a large-scale, experimental annual public puppetry event and performance in a small rural town in the Klein Karoo of South Africa. This multifaceted, collaborative puppet theatre-making process, which results annually in the creation of a parade and large-scale original performance, is co-organized by Net Vir Pret (a children’s school aftercare non-profit organisation based in the town of Barrydale) and the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (CHR@UWC). The following conversation between the author (a Theatre Research Fellow at the CHR@UWC and creative director of the parade since 2014) and Sudonia Kouter (the Net vir Pret Aftercare manager and a key artistic contributor in the parade creative and directing teams) explores some of the experiences of meaning-making that arise in such a multi-layered and ambitious project.

Towards a Chronology of the Eritrean Red Sea Port of Adulis (1st – Early 7th Century AD)

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Zazzaro ◽  
Enzo Cocca ◽  
Andrea Manzo
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Coastal Site ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Architectural Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Sequence ◽  
The University

The Eritrean coastal site of Adulis has been known to archaeologists since the second half of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Italian archaeologist Roberto Paribeni conducted extensive excavations in different areas of the site which uncovered the remains of monumental buildings, churches and houses, as well as rich deposits of related material culture. Since then, archaeological investigations have been limited to the activities of Francis Anfray in 1961–62 and to a survey conducted by the University of Southampton in 2003–04. Our team’s first excavations in stratified deposits began in 2011, and soon revealed a complex chronological sequence of great importance for the understanding of the cultural history of the southern Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa. The project’s main efforts were directed towards the identification of the main phases of occupation at Adulis, the establishment of a typological sequence of pottery, and the analysis of architectural change.

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