Lineages And Advancements In Material Culture Studies: Perspectives From UCL Anthropology

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
	MCS at UCL, its foundations and threads
	Bringing the object back (again) – from lineages to advancements
		Self, personhood, (post-)humanism
		Time: futures, histories, presentness
		Scales, space(s), topologies
		Representation: aesthetics, signs, semiotics
		Participation, politics, people
	Notes
2 Extraterrestrial methods: Towards an ethnography of the ISS
	The ISS
	Quotidian attunement
	Humans have always already been going to space
	Dialogic worlding
	Space from the armchair
	New material cultures
	Spatiotemporal distantiation
	Conclusion
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
3 Being, being human, becoming beyond human
	The ‘cyborg’ as post-human
	The cyborg and transcendence
	The twenty-first/first-century body
	Discussion
4 ‘Things ain’t the same anymore’: Towards an anthropology of technical objects (or ‘When Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon meet MCS’
	Introduction: the printer, the car and the doll
	The functioning of technical objects vs. their function
	Inside and outside the technical object: at the intersection of milieus
	The politics of technical objects and the object of technical politics: removal and isolation
	Conclusion: towards a ‘technography’ of objects?
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
5 The object biography
	What is this method?
	The life of a toothbrush
	Reflections on the life of a toothbrush
	Conclusion: Why not object biographies?
	Acknowledgements
	Note
6 A new instrumentalism?
	From material culture to digital anthropology
	From writing culture to digital ethnography
	A case in point: learning from social media in the field
		Social media as community?
		Camden Rules
	Conclusion: social media imaginaries, failing methods, and the limits of objects
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
7 Objects of desire: Sexwork and its objects
	Introduction
	The context of the shows
	The shows
	Objects, sexwork and material culture theory
	Conclusions
	Acknowledgements
8 Digital devices: Knowing material culture
	Introduction
	Digital devices
	Detecting digitally
	Knowing with devices
	Materialisations of knowledge
	Productive devices
	Conclusion
	Note
9 Rethinking objectification and its consequences: From substitution to sequence
	The life of working models
	Polymodality: geometry, transformation, and translation
	Conclusion
10 Looking at things
	Object analysis
	Case study one: object K.0050
	Case study two: the Inuit collection
	Case study three: the Fijian collection
	Conclusion
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
11 Making things matter
	From ‘meaning’ to ‘mattering’
	From ‘us’ to ‘them’
	Beyond impact
	Conclusion
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
12 Prophetic pictures: Or, What time is the visual?
	Raphael’s Prophetic Messenger
	‘Ominous’ hieroglyphics
	‘Imagality’: the interpretability of the visual
	Social theory and temporality
	Conclusion: the photograph, a small window on the future
	Notes
13 Held in Amma’s light: The enchantment and political efficacy of gopurams in Tamilnadu
	Political lineage as luminance
	Making, aesthetics, and affect
	The materiality and affordances of light
	Corporeal vision and the technology of enchantment
	Image regimes, morality, and ‘Amma’
	Amma in light: the political efficacy of gopurams
	Notes
14 A curatorial methodology for anthropology1
	Curating to the curatorial
	The curatorial as model
	The curatorial in practice
	Curating tidal/temporal movements
	The curatorial as anthropological method
	Notes
15 Data aesthetics
	A feeling for the data
	Algorithmic vision
	Notes
16 Place-objects: Anthropology of digital photography/s
	Introduction
	The digital photograph in MCS: materiality and practice
		Materiality
		Practices
		Place
	Representing place: photoblogging in/of Iran
	Place-objects beyond representation: digitally (re-)engaging the senses
		Digital geo-locations
		Methodological implications for MCS
		Analysis: place-object and their socialities
	Digital photography/s: towards a new object status
	Acknowledgements
	Notes
Bibliography
Index