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Posts from the ‘Ethnography’ Category

May 19

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People Make Collections: Anthropologist Michael Davis (1942-2012)

Museum collections are made by people who gather together the things that other people make. Earlier this week I was looking at a group of objects in the William C. Sturtevant Collection that were gathered together and documented by then-University of Oklahoma doctoral student Michael Davis. This is an exceptional collection of German silver jewelry made in the 1960s by an impressive number of Native American artists working on the Southern Plains.

After his OU studies, Michael Davis went on to become a Professor of Anthropology at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. I wanted to congratulate him on the quality of the collection that he made and the exceptional way in which he documented it. Thinking about getting in touch, I discovered sadly that he passed away a few months ago. An obituary appears in the Kirksville Daily Express and is available online.

One reason that we make museum collections is to preserve something of the past for the sake of the future. I hope that Professor Davis, as well as the artists whom he documented, would be pleased to know that their work is being appreciated by those who have come along after them.

A German silver roach spreader by Pawnee smith Julius Ceasar (1910-1982) collected for the National Museum of Natural History by Michael Davis (1942-2012) and found as part of the William C. Sturtevant Collection, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History.

May 17

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On the Study of Shreds and Patches

Yesterday my work with the William C. Sturtevant collection focused on the material culture side of his efforts to document the history, practice, and significance of the unique Florida Seminole art form known as “patchwork.” Basically, I organized and quickly looked at a couple of hundred patchwork samples such as those arrayed in the image presented here.

I have done little work yet with documents, but a large folder of notes associated with Dr. Sturtevant’s patchwork studies were handy and I took a quick peak. There is a lot there. I hold off on talking about that and describe a single note that is very relevant to this website.

For its early years, this website was just associated with my name. A while back though, it started to seem clear (to me, at least) that it needed a more blog-like name. The name the I chose was Shreds and Patches. I should have explained the source of this name at the time, but didn’t. It was a soft re-launch, I guess. Anyway, the first thing that my eye fell on when peaking into Dr. Sturtevant’s patchwork notes folder was a single slip of paper that explains the source of my name.

It is a medium sized slip of paper in his own hand and it is a quotation–the very quotation from which the title of this blog comes. The source is a famous, oft debated passage from the conclusion of a book by Robert Lowie. I have not gone back to the source to check Sturtevant’s note, but here it is as he has it.

“Nor are the facts of culture history without bearing on the judgement of our own future. To that planless hodgepodge, that thing of shreds and patches called civilization, its historian can no longer yield superstitious reverence. He will realize better than others the obstacles to infusing design into the amorphous product; but in thought at least he will not grovel before it in fatalistic acquiescence but dream of a rational scheme to supplant the chaotic jumble.”–p 441 (concluding paragraph of Lowie’s Primitive Society (1947, N.Y., Liveright; 1st ed. 1920; on pp ix-x of the new preface to the ’47 ed, RHL [Lowie] complains that this famous passage has been misinterpreted)

Lowie was one of Bill Sturtevant’s undergraduate teachers at Berkeley. I can talk some other time about the significance and history of this passage from Lowie. Here it is interesting to think what it is doing in Bill’s patchwork notes. Two possibilities have occurred to me.

If he meant it to be there, it was clever because it suggested that he was going to draw upon anthropology’s most famous theoretical discussion of “patches” in his empirical project on patches (of the Seminole sort). Alternatively, and amusingly, it could have been filed in this place by someone else because a quick scan of the text could suggest that because it is about patches it needed to go with the patchwork notes. I’ll get to the bottom of it someday, perhaps. In any case, it provides the answer to the question of why I named the blog as I did. (Lowie was not the original source of the phrase Shreds and Patches, just the one who gave it anthropological resonance in theorizing the nature of culture and so-called “civilization.”

Note.  The patchwork samples shown above are not yet numbered, but they are part of the William C. Sturtevant Collection at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Oct 26

Appreciation for those Working on Protection of Human Subjects Reform

Here are two sentences of appreciation for those working hard to educate policy makers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the complexities of human subjects protections policies vis-a-vis ethnography and other humanities and social science methods. I very much appreciate the important work of the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society in this area. Find the recent AAA statement here and the new AFS one here.

Oct 20

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Why Michael Wesch’s “Blogging” Should Count

In his essay “Blogging for Promotion: An Immodest Proposal” anthropologist Greg Downey outlines a clear set of actionable proposals for reform at the intersection of scholarly communications practices and academic tenure and promotion practices. I commend his essay, which was published today (10/20/11) on Neuroanthropology, a compelling and influential PLoS (Public Library of Science) weblog that he runs with Daniel Linde. Rather than discussing this important contribution here in depth, I am going to try enacting one of its proposals. (For reference, see especially the discussion that follows Downey’s section heading “An immodest proposal (not an indecent proposition)”.)

First the set up. I am working extensively right now preparing a new course for spring 2011. This course was devised as part of my participation in a two year think-tank funded by the Teagle Foundation (a funder supporting projects designed to foster innovation in undergraduate teaching and learning) and organized by the American Folklore Society. The AFS project was built around the theme “What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?” Colleagues teaching in a range of institutions, from community colleges and private liberal arts colleges to large research institutions gathered to explore the frontiers of research-based teaching, changing curriculum practices, and the wider contexts of our work in a small border discipline bridging the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the academy and the public sphere. As part of our work, we developed plans for new courses and teaching resources. Part of my work focused on working out plans for the course that I will initially teach next spring (it opens for enrollment today).

I have mentioned the course here previously. In a nutshell it uses the toolkit of folkloristics (and by extension my other field–cultural anthropology) to consider human responses–including aesthetic, expressive, customary, and communal responses–to a range of recently emergent and highly contested human social problems. Called “The New Social Problems: Communal and Expressive Responses” the new problem domains to be considered include such things as the digital divide, genetic engineering, intellectual property contests, and nanotechnologies. I am sure that I will be discussing the course further as it moves forward. The important point in this context is noting the influence that one colleague–whom I do not know and whom I have not yet met–has had on the shaping of my plans for this experimental course.

Michael Wesch, on his website/weblog Digital Ethnography (which is a key node in the digital infrastructure of his undergraduate-based research group), has regularly and effectively documented the pedagogical experiments and research work that he has been pursuing (over many years) with many successive groups of Kansas State University students. Wesch has been appropriately recognized and celebrated for the innovative work that he and his students have been doing. What I want to highlight here is that the manner in which he has documented and explained this work has made it richly available for the wider scholarly community. Because he has used http://mediatedcultures.net as a venue for reporting on his work, his strategies and experiences are openly and immediately accessible to me (and to my students) as well as to everyone else able to surmount the digital divide. Essays like “Our Class on How We Run Our Class” in which Wesch and his students describe (and enact) the technical and intellectual strategies through which a standard U.S. undergraduate course is turned into a deeply meaningful research collaboratory for social scientific investigation are just not available in the conventional published literature in our field. It is on the basis of the inspiration provided and the information conveyed by Wesch and his students that I am able to imagine a very different kind of course to pursue with my own students in January.

Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography efforts represent the kinds of “blogging” work that deserves to count as a substantive scholarly contribution (bridging teaching, research, and service) in such areas as annual review and tenure and promotion considerations.

Oct 17

Sukkot=Time to Check Out Gabrielle Berlinger’s Beautiful Photographs of People, Buildings, and Food

It is Sukkot time again and I urge everyone to check out Gabrielle Berlinger’s beautiful photographs. She is at the end of her current fieldwork period in Tel Aviv where she has been studying many interlocking topics, with Sukkot at the center of things. Her reporting and her photographs are beautiful. Don’t miss out.

Oct 7

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New Open Access Tools, Resources, Partnerships, and Content Announced @openfolklore

I am happy to report that real and significant progress in the Open Folklore project continues to be made. A year ago (October 13, to be exact) the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries launched the Open Folklore project and its associated web portal. Open Folklore is about promoting open access in the field of folklore studies (/ethnology) and about fostering partnerships among those working towards the goals of open access in the field. On behalf of the OF project team, I was the author of a news release/project report on the most recent accomplishments of the project and the most recent content additions accessible via the portal site. This was published this morning and is available from the Open Folklore portal.

As readers of the news release will discover, highlights over the past six months include making programs and reports related to the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society (going back to 1889) freely accessible, the launch of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, and the continued growth in the number of AFS section journals being made freely accessible in digital form. The big picture is that the community is continuing to come together to advance the goal of making folklore scholarship and resources more discoverable and accessible to community members, students, tradition bearers, and scholars worldwide. As was recognized this summer when OF was recognized with the Outstanding Collaboration Award by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) during the American Library Association meetings, folklorists have a lot to be proud of. We are pioneering in many parts of the scholarly communications world, from the development of open access journals, books, repositories and archives to developing generalizable collaboration strategies for organizational partnership, especially between libraries, non-commercial publishers, and scholarly societies.

I encourage everyone to get caught up with what OF has been up to over the past six months and to continue to spread the word about the project while putting the tools and resources available at http://openfolklore.org to use in your work.

Sep 28

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Gabrielle Berlinger Reports on the Latest Housing Protests in Israel

While, after inexcusable delay, the U.S. media finally start covering the Wall Street protests here in the United States, my colleague and IU doctoral researcher Gabrielle Berlinger continues to be one of the few people positioned to report in English on the continuing housing protests in Israel. As the protests connect directly with the community in which she is living and working and because they relate closely to her research, her reporting is rich in ways that journalistic accounts never could be. Her latest account, of a protest outside the home of the Minister of Housing in Jerusalem, is here.

Sep 27

“Ritual and Oratory Revisited” in Annual Review of Anthropology

The final, stable 2011 edition of the Annual Review of Anthropology (a vital, not-for-profit undertaking co-edited by Don Brenneis and Peter T. Ellison) is now available (toll access). Because the topic is of great interest to me, I was pleased to see Rupert Stasch‘s review essay on “Ritual and Oratory Revisited: The Semiotics of Effective Action.” Looking more closely, it was a welcome and nice surprise to see that he knew about my work in this realm and found a generous way to weave it into his general narrative. My writings are sometimes high in area studies interest and, conversely, less immediately engaging for scholars working elsewhere in the world, thus it is always nice when it is clear that they have been discovered by, and made sense to, a colleague working in a different context. This essay will be an invaluable resources as I take up new work on the topic. Thanks!

Sep 11

On Museum Anthropology Review

I am very happy to report that the final material for Museum Anthropology Review 5(1-2) was published today, bringing the 2011 volume/issues to a close.

This was the first time that an issue was published with an initial bundle of content and then added to as the year progressed. This represents a kind of transitional strategy bridging older journal publishing norms, in which an issue is prepared and then released into the world as a fully prepared bundle, and the newer pattern in which content is prepared and released into the world as soon as it is ready, item by item. The older pattern has certain hallmarks that many are still fond of, including sequentially paginated pages (in paper-like PDF format) and a table of contents in which articles appear at the top and reviews appear at the bottom. For authors, this format makes for objects that look familiar (to custom-minded observers) on such things as C.V. and annual reports. The cost, of course, is delay in publication, as works pile up in preparation for being bundled up as issues.

The newer approaches leverages the advantages of digital publication platforms and get information in circulation as quickly as possible, something that helps the research community in many ways.

MAR is moving from the older to the newer framework and will probably use the approach adopted for volume 5 again at least for volume 6 next year. This means that volume 6(1) will appear as soon as possible and will initially contain a group of materials from the “top” of the table of contents. Additional reviews will be added to the issue’s table of contents up until the point that additional articles or other content from the top of the table of contents are ready. At that point the effort will switch over to issue 6(2).

Publishing a combined “1-2” issue for 2011 was a valuable step for me personally–beyond these considerations. It allowed me a bit more time this summer to work on other projects, something that I have sorely needed to do. While I had the help of a wonderful graduate student/editorial assistant through the middle of 2010, last academic year (2010-2011) was the first in which I handled the day to day editorial tasks on my own. This was fun and informative, of course, but there is only so much time in the day and it was nice to be able to focus this past summer on other obligations. The combined issue helped make that possible.

From a substantive point of view, 5(1-2) is full of interesting stuff and I am very thankful to the many authors, peer-reviewers, librarians, editorial board members, publishers, and other friends of MAR who have made it possible.

At 154 pages volume 5 is only #4 of 5 in terms of page length, but with 42 discrete contributions it covers a lot of interesting territory, from Captain Cook to the alternative globalization movement; from the history of shoes to the material realities of the current economic crisis. As has been true throughout the MAR experiment, contributions cover a wide diversity of world regions and theoretical, topical, and disciplinary concerns. I am especially proud of the ways that the journal continues to showcase work by the most distinguished senior scholars–generous colleagues such as Richard Bauman, Keith Hart, Marsha MacDowell, Edward T. Linenthal, and Aldona Jonaitis–alongside leading younger scholars, including folks like Karin Zitzewitz, Beth A. Buggenhagen, Elizabeth Hutchinson and so many others. I am also happy that the journal brings together, in what I think is a healthy way, the twinned and entwined concerns that are its focus—museum studies and material culture studies. Rooted in anthropology and folklore studies, MAR has been an effective meeting ground for scholars working in a great many fields. Alongside its folklorists and anthropologists, 5(1-2) features scholars representing the fields of comparative literature, history, art history, fashion studies, architecture, design, communications studies, and religious studies. This diversity is a great strength.

Also speaking to the journal’s diversity aspirations, 5(1-2) was the second issue to feature content in a language other than English. MAR 4(1) had included both French and English versions of Christian Bromberger’s commentrary on the Musée du Quai Branly and now, with 5(1-2) MAR has published a book review concurrently in Portuguese and English. Thanks go to author Lori Hall-Araujo and translator Roberta Crelier for the work on Lori’s review of Mestre Vitalino e artistas pernambucanos.

In conclusion, I wish to especially thank the authors of the issue’s peer-reviewed articles. Richard Bauman’s “Better than any monument”: Envisioning Museums of the Spoken Word is a great contribution to the history of the field, exploring the intersections of linguistic anthropology and museum anthropology. The paper continues his vital research work on the social history of early recording technologies and their intellectual and cultural ramifications. Thanks go to Carrie Hertz’ for her Costuming Potential: Accommodating Unworn Clothes. The article is a rich contribution to contemporary material culture studies, particularly relating to questions of consumption, circulation, reuse, and disposal.

The submission mailbox is always open. Please consider Museum Anthropology Review as a robust not-for-profit, gold open access publishing option for your work in museum and material culture studies.

Aug 7

More on the Protests in Israel, Ethnographically

White City Streets continues to report from the field in Tel Aviv where the multifaceted protests continue to unfold. Anthropologi.info offers a rich post remixing these reports with news accounts and additional reflections.

 

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