Journal of Material Culture

This article describes the everyday practices of consumption of heavily indebted people and discusses the links between economic resources and everyday aesthetics. It is based on interviews with people in a Finnish debt adjustment programme. Becoming overindebted has markedly changed the interviewees’ habits of consumption that are now characterized by constant and careful control of the resources and a self-understanding of never buying anything unnecessary. Becoming indebted has also affected the interviewees’ relations to the social world: on the one hand they now feel themselves inferior compared to other consumers with more resources; but on the other, some of them feel critical and superior in relation to the whole consumer culture; indebtedness has given them ‘new values’. Despite this critical stance, small pleasures and aesthetic judgements intermingle in the interviewees’ practices of shopping. Thus it becomes evident that degrees of freedom or aestheticism in consumption are not completely reducible to resources.

This article considers the instrumental role of commodity marketing and mass consumption in producing nationality as a dimension of personal and collective identities. It asks: if nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily refer to political identities, then to what sort of imagined communities, if any, do they refer? It addresses this question in part through a discussion of commercial images from Papua New Guinea, one of the ‘new nations’ of the South Pacific.

Does the collection of archaeological and ethnographic material created by Sir John Lubbock shed light on the nature of late 19th-century English society, and Lubbock's role within it? I am currently undertaking research¹ into this very question, exploring the depths of potential meaning held by a selection of artefacts now housed at Bromley Museum² and the British Museum. This article proposes a methodology for carrying out such a collection analysis, as a form of discourse analysis, and summarizes a few of the conclusions and ideas that are beginning to emerge from its application.

This article argues for a theoretical extension in anthropology from the post-Cartesian depiction of body and mind as one (rather than as separable) to the idea that this composite body-mind can be regarded as enmeshed in social trails created by the movement of objects. Movements of persons therefore occur with or in relation to the objects to which people attach themselves. Such everyday movements need to be contrasted with those dramatically resulting from forcible human displacement, in which refugees, for instance, take what items they can both for immediate practical use but also in order either to re-establish or re-define personal and collective origins. The article concludes by suggesting that, as mementoes of sentiment and cultural knowledge and yet also as bases of future re-settlement, the ‘transitional objects’ carried by peoples in crisis inscribe their personhood in flight but offer the possibility of their own de-objectification and re-personalization afterwards.

This article argues that the notion of a singular art world will have to give way to that of ‘art worlds’, the point being, as Myers has suggested, ‘to imagine conditions of cultural heterogeneity, rather than those of consensus, as the common situation of cultural interpretation’ (1994: 13). The argument is based on a detailed analysis of the contending practice and discourse of two - of the several - groups involved with a traditional craft in coastal Orissa. More specifically the article explores the relation between the pragmatic concerns of patta chitra painters regarding their work on the one hand and the Indian art elite's priorities on the other. A central issue is the way the painters, as agents, seek to influence the reality in which they live. The specific case of a painter, who contextually has reframed Sanskrit extracts in order to secure his position as an acknowledged artist, illustrates the creative aspect of agency.

Contrary to the received wisdom that ‘authenticity’ is a culturally specific phenomenon on the verge of disappearing, this article holds that it is a mode of interrogating the world available to all. It is argued that a cross-cultural and analytic notion of authenticity can be profitably fashioned once it is noted that its attribution applies to performances and representations which are important because they present something regarded as ontologically inaccessible. The social and political dynamics of authenticity's ontological operations are explored in a reading of recent literature on Primitive Art, ethnographic performances and museums.