Journal of Material Culture

A range of works on people’s understandings of their surroundings express a recurring assumption that, as societies become more urban and capitalist, people are decreasingly likely to engage in practical and material ways with their surroundings, and are consequently more likely to stand at a distance from those surroundings culturally. This assumption implies that practical engagement is the only form of engagement that leads people to meaningful and consequential relationships with their surroundings, that the alternative to such engagement is something like the tourist gaze or the flâneur. Using a study of some environmental activists, this article raises questions about this assumption.

Over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of studies in ethnomathematics dedicated towards shedding light on its importance in enhancing education (cf. Bishop, 1988; Gerdes, 1985). Many ethno mathematicians have utilized the object world as a tool in the learning of mathematical concepts, but little research to date has focused on the role of objects as agents that activate mathematical thought. In this article I argue that the material qualities of objects can mobilize mathematical thinking and act as vehicles for learning. I show that geometric patterns incised on traditional arts and crafts are effective tools in the mathematics classroom in cultures that tend towards visual forms of knowledge. Anthropology is ideally suited for this type of study and as I aim to show, an ethnographic approach can give valuable insights into education and knowledge technology.

This article examines the role of imported prints in early colonial Calcutta. It explores the critical entanglements of this art of mechanical reproduction within the cosmopolitics of imperialism. Questioning the 18th-century ‘consumer revolution’ and contemporary ‘actor network theory’, it asks whether either help us to comprehend fully these picture-human relations. In time of economic boom and recession within this early East India Company state, art was valued not so much as an inalienable possession but for its seemingly contradictory status as both quasi-fetish and as an aesthetic of the ephemeral. Patriotic yet disposable, such pictures participated within a visual labyrinth driven by lotteries and gambling, theft and debt. Using Indo-Muslim and British attitudes towards the colonial art market, this article exposes the centrality of chance and luxury for a creole heterotopia that ultimately hinged on a tense ambivalence.

This article concerns hair samples collected in 1925 in the Ojibwe community of Red Lake, Minnesota, USA, now in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. It outlines the process of consultation with community members and of the discovery of the historical context and meanings surrounding the hair. These meanings are emotive because of the conjuncture of Ojibwe beliefs about hair with the history of the cutting and analysis of hair by Whites as part of attempts to control Ojibwe people in various ways. The article also explores the implications of current theory about material culture which sees artefacts as points of contact between peoples, and which focuses on tracing the movements and shifting meanings of artefacts as a way of understanding the relations between the peoples involved.

This article explores the historical meanings of a collection of psychiatric objects on display at the Porirua Hospital Museum, at Porirua, near Wellington, in New Zealand. Founded in 1987 to celebrate the original asylum’s centenary, the museum commemorates the history of the institution. Its curators are former psychiatric nursing staff. Visitors to the museum include educators, researchers and members of the psychiatric community. This article asks why some people have preserved the ‘relics’ of past psychiatry. Such collections and museum exhibitions raise fascinating questions about the 20th-century experience of psychiatric institutions, and the role of the museum collection in people’s lives. In talking about why and how former staff have struggled to preserve their private memories through collections of physical objects, and by interpreting history inside the space of the museum, the article suggests that historians can make a new contribution to the understandings of psychiatric institutions in histories of 20th-century psychiatry.