Journal of Material Culture最新文献

Containment practices have been largely overlooked as a set of techniques. When they have received attention, it has largely been a matter of seeing containers as spaces. I argue here that a focus on the temporal dimension of containment can generate a more dynamic understanding of containers as artefacts. One key aspect of this reorientation is a recognition that containment invariably is followed by release, whether anticipated or accidental. In other words, there is a duration to containment. In exploring this question of duration, I turn to an ancient case study, looking at the varying durations incorporated into the design and use of Bronze Age ceramic vessels from the island of Crete in the Aegean. The method entails an integrated approach that inserts the body and its gestures between containers and their contents. With a fuller emphasis on duration as a factor in container design and use, archaeology can reanimate the interdependent containment practices of ancient societies.

Carnival in New Orleans is a complex, vibrant field of cultural production that generates a wealth of material culture. In the small-scale, countercultural 'new wave' of carnival 'krewes' or clubs that have proliferated since Hurricane Katrina, that material culture is often handmade. Framed by Daniel Miller's dialectical theory of material culture and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork spanning several carnival seasons, this paper unpacks what is at stake in new-wave carnival's costumes, throws, and floats. We argue that making these objects makes carnival itself: the handmade things shape people's experiences of carnival, generating vivid, memorable interactions and encounters, which they later encapsulate as mementos. In their handmade-ness, carnival-makers not only recognize the effort that people put into the events, but also carnival's sociality and relationality. While Miller emphasizes 'the humility of things,' these things are loud and flamboyant. They nonetheless help illustrate how culture unfolds with and through stuff.

This article positions Haida, Irish, and Kwakwaka'wakw artist Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O'Brien)'s transmediation of her woven artwork in conversation with Indigenous curatorial practices in physical and virtual spaces. Transmediation is presented as a method for engaging with decolonial practices in museums and archives using research-creation and collaborative media production, and an intervention to provoke consideration of new possibilities for the digital in museum practice that moves beyond the replica (see Hennessy et al., 2024) as a generative force shifting theory and practice.

The social life of things, in the aftermath of war and forced displacement, is associated with change in significance and value. Against a background of massive destruction and dispossession, object survival is exceptional. However, not every object that survives gains value equally. Private possessions that survive might not be attended to or be discarded. This complicates a straightforward coupling of person and surviving object. In this paper, the becoming of biographic objects is addressed. My interview partners fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children. The objects they presented in biographic interviews have accompanied them throughout their lives. Rather than being mere prompts to tell life stories, these biographic objects, I suggest with Barad's study, emerged in tandem with the biographic subject. By example of a wartime letter and a childhood object, I demonstrate how these things become biographic objects as they afford social action at various points in people's lives. My main argument is that things come to be biographic objects because they afford agency in specific socio-historic constellations.