Mar 18
[A Hui Restaurant,] Guolang Community, Nuodeng Town, Yunlong County, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.
Visited June 8, 2023.
This is the fifth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.
Approximately: 25° 54′ 30.948″ N, 99° 20′ 49.392″ E
Heli [Dong Administrative] Village, Liangkou Township, Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, Liuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China.
Visited July 18, 2018.
This is the fourth post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.
Approximately: 25° 44′ 27.432″ N, 109° 28′ 48.12″ E
[Basket Market,] Micheng Town, Midu County, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.
Visited June 1, 2023.
This is the third post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.
Approximately: 25° 20′ 37.788″ N, 100° 28′ 39.612″ E
Basha [Miao] Village, Bingmei Town, Congjiang County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, China.
Visited December 9, 2014.
This is the second post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.
Approximately: 25° 43′ 12.216″ E, 108° 51′ 58.8594″N.
Wengji [Bulang Ancient] Village, Jingmai Administrative Village, Huimin Hani Ethnic Town, Lancang Lahu Autonomous County, Pu’er City, Yunnan, China.
Visited December 27, 2023.
This is the first post in the series: Villages and Towns of the Southeast Asian Massif.
Approximately: 22° 10′ 25.65″ N, 99° 59′ 55.908″ E
Check out this call for papers for an promising meeting to be held at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu.
Conference call for papers
Sustainability in Practice: DIY Repair, Reuse and Innovation
30 October – 2 November 2024
Estonian National Museum, Tartu, Estonia
This conference addresses ecological sustainability through do it yourself (DIY) practices, and through consumer behaviour. The focus on DIY repair, reuse and vernacular innovation seeks to examine sustainability in the context of everyday life and domestic and community settings. By bringing together ethnological, anthropological, sociological and craft studies perspectives, the conference aims to show and discuss contemporary, traditional and vernacular sustainable practices.
Repair, reuse and repurpose of diverse commodities and materials, and vernacular innovation, are today increasingly perceived as part of sustainable consumption culture. However, the role and meaning of these practices have changed over time, depending on social, economic and political environments. Facing the global climate crisis, we are looking for lessons from the past and present for more sustainable and resilient ways of life.
We invite presentations, workshops and documentaries that explore various forms of DIY practice, solution, innovation and material culture related to sustainability in a variety of settings and regions. Apart from academics, experts from memory institutions and craft scholars, this conference also invites activists, craftsmen and designers to share their experience and knowledge.
See the conference call for papers.
The conference is being organised by the Estonian National Museum in collaboration with the Washing Machine Made of Beetroot joint exhibition project, curated by the Estonian Road Museum, the Estonian Agricultural Museum, and the Tartu City Museum. The conference and the exhibition are part of and supported by the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 programme.
Conference webpage and info: http://enmconferences.ee/sustainability-2024
Pictured here (Figure 1) is a seed pot-style (i.e. globe shaped with a small opening) basket by Joan Shoemaker (b. 1937) (Cherokee Nation) (then) of Locust Grove, Oklahoma. It is of honeysuckle and has dyed elements in three colors produced with walnut hulls, polk berries, and blood root (natural) dyes. The basket comes with a signed artist card attached. It shows the date 1999, which is soon before I received it as a gift (in 2000). (The card also notes the material and dyes.)
As seen from the shot of the bottom (Figure 2), the upper section has suffered light damage over the past two decades.
As noted by Karen Cody Cooper in Oklahoma Cherokee Baskets (2016, 99), two Joan Shoemaker baskets are in the collections of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. These are: E/2003/1/001 (a round, flat tray of honeysuckle) and E/2000/1/002 (a round open-mouth basket of honeysuckle).
While the Gilcrease Museum holds paintings by Mrs. Shoemaker’s husband Ben Adair Shoemaker, it does (to my knowledge) not yet curate any of her baskets (Jackson 2000). There are not baskets by Mrs. Shoemaker in the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. There were no baskets by her in the collections of the former Mathers Museum of World Cultures, at Indiana University*
At the time of this writing, two Joan Shoemaker basketry trays could be seen online at this commercial site: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/set-cherokee-indian-baskets-joan-1848909520
Note
*I served as a curator at the Gilcrease Museum between 1995 and 2000. This basket was a gift on the occasion of my departure to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where I worked between 2000 and 2004. I have been a research associate of the Sam Noble Museum since 2004. From 2014 to the present, I have also served as a research associate of the National Museum of Natural History. Between 2013 and 2019, I served as the Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.
References Cited
Cooper, Karen Cody. 2016. Oklahoma Cherokee Baskets. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2016.
Jackson, Jason Baird. 2000. “Southeastern Indian Basketry in the Gilcrease Museum Collection.” American Indian Art Magazine. 25 (4):46-55.
This is a first in a series of posts writing up baskets in my family’s modest (mostly-gifts) collection.
I am happy to be hosting a group of colleagues in Bloomington this week for a long-delayed (COVID…) writing workshop on “Textile Arts and Heritage Practices in Southwest China.” This grows out of the work of the “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a joint project of the China Folklore Society and the American Folklore Society. Specifically, the effort arises from that project’s “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project (2017-2021), an effort now extended through the “Craft and Heritage in Upland Southwest China” project (2022-present) of the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Research Laboratory. The generous funders and partners for these various projects are discussed in Jackson 2023. This week’s workshop has been supported by the College Arts and Humanities Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, both at Indiana University. Thank you to all of those who have supported these projects.
There will be a campus event associated with the workshop on Friday, May 19, 2023 at 2:30 pm. Read about it here at this calendar link and in the flyer posted below.
“But at the laste, as every thing hath ende…”
Today I published my final editorial as founding editor of Museum Anthropology Review. It may be that Museum Anthropology Review thus concludes with volume 17(1-2), now just published. Perhaps instead it will be revived someday by a new editorial team in partnership with the wonderful folks at the Indiana University Press and the IUScholarWorks Program at the IU Libraries. As of now, the search for a new editor or editorial team can be considered concluded unsuccessfully and the journal is either ceasing or pausing publication. I do not need to write a new version of the editorial here. I invite everyone interested in the journal and the fields that it serves to read it (always open access!) for a contextualized back story.
Here I just want to reiterate my thanks to all who contributed to, supported, and encouraged the journal as a project and who supported me as its editor. I also want to reiterate my thanks to the Indiana University Press for supporting my fields—folklore studies and cultural anthropology, including material culture studies—so well. Even though the journal—by design—was not a money making endeavor, the press stood by it and invested in its improvement and its success. Equal thanks go to the extraordinary IUScholarWorks program (now broadened as Open Scholarship) that helped launch the journal and supported it vigorously for its full run.
I am very pleased to share news of a new publication. It is an article appearing now in the Journal of American Folklore:
Jackson, Jason Baird. “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies: An Initiative of the American Folklore Society and Its Partners in China and the United States.” Journal of American Folklore 136, no. 539 (2023): 48-74. muse.jhu.edu/article/877843.
The paper’s abstract is:
Since 2007, the American Folklore Society has pursued a partnership project with the China Folklore Society. Diverse in activities and extensively participated in, the endeavor is known as the China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. In this peer-reviewed report, one sub-project within this umbrella effort is reviewed. The Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies sub-project continued the project’s established exchange practices and added a program of material culture and heritage studies research.
Thanks to the generous terms of the American Folklore Society’s author agreement, a version of the article is now available in the Indiana University open access repository. Find that version online here: https://iu.tind.io/record/3333
Shreds and Patches 