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Summary All Literature of Materiality, Identity and Nature (SOWCAOSB2030)
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Summary of and quotations from all literature of the course Materiality, Identity and Nature (SOWCAOSB2030).
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Materialiteit, identiteit en natuur LiteratuurBibliografie
Week 1
- Descola, Philippe en Gísli Pálsson. 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological
Perspectives. Londen: Routledge.
- Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description.
Londen: Routledge.
Week 2
- Haberman, David L. 2013. People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
- Lien, Marianne E. en Aidan Davison. 2010. Roots, rupture, and remembrance: The
Tasmanian lives of the Monterey Pine. Journal of Material Culture 15 (2): 233-253.
- Hastrup, Kirsten en Frida Hastrup. 2016. Waterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid
Environments. New York, Berghahn Books.
- Strang, Veronica. 2005. Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the
Generation of Meaning. Journal of Material Culture 10 (1): 92-120.
Week 3
- Eriksen, Thomas. 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change.
Londen: Pluto Press.
- Liboiron, Max. 2016. Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics. Journal
of Material Culture 21 (1): 87-110.
- Reno, Joshua. 2015. Waste and Waste Management. Annual Review of
Anthropology 44: 557-572.
Week 5
- Gieser, Thorsten 2014. Enskillment inhibited: ‘industrial gardening’ in Britain. Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 20: pp.131-149.
Week 6
- Kopytoff, Igor 2010 (orig. 1986). The cultural biography of things: commoditization as
a process. In: A. Appadurai (ed.) The social life of things. Commodities in cultural
perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Week 7
- Miller, Daniel 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.
INGOLD (2011)
- In anthropological and archeological studies the focus while studying materiality has
never been on the materials themselves.
- “A woodworker is someone who works with wood, yet most anthropologists
would be content to look at the work in terms of the social identity of the
worker, the tools he or she uses, the layout of the workshop, the techniques
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, employed, the objects produced and their meanings - everything but the wood
itself. The materials, it seems, have gone missing.”
- “What academic perversion leads us to speak not of materials and
their properties but of the materiality of objects?”
- Gosden: the material world consists of two components: landscape and artefacts.
However, together with human minds, a lot of things are left out according to Ingold:
sunlight, the sky, air, snow, fire, ink, etc.
- Gibson: the inhabited environment exists of three components: medium, substances
and surfaces.
- Medium for human beings: air. “It affords movement and perception.”
- Substance: rock, gravel, sand, wood, concrete, etc. “It furnishes necessary
physical foundations for life.”
- Surface: “It separates one kind of material (stone) from another (air)” →
between medium and substance.
- Hetherington: role of touch in everyday practices of placemaking.
- “We say houses are built, but can you ‘build’ a cave? (...) Whereas the house-builder
erects an edifice, a monument to his labour, by the time the cafe is finished all that
seems to have been created is an unfurnished volume.”
- If there was a roofed frontage added to the cave, we encounter a problem: we
regard one part of the “house positively as a material object and the other half
negatively as a hole in the ground.”
- “The source of the problem lies in the slippage from materials to
materiality.”
- “Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the ‘other side’ of materiality,
but swim in an ocean of materials.”
- Moreover, human beings, as well as creatures of every other kind, play a part
in the transformations that the materials undergo.
- “It is the objects themselves that capture our attention, no longer the materials of
which they are made. It is as though our material involvement begins only when the
stucco has already hardened on the house-front or the ink already dried on the page.
We see the building and not the plaster of its walls; the words and not the ink in
which they were written.”
- At the same time, even though we are not as aware of it, the materials are still
there and they keep transforming and reacting → dematerialisation: “Plaster
can crumble and ink can fade.”
- “No objects last forever. Materials always and inevitably win out over
materiality in the long term.”
- “We see wood that has been made into a ladder rather than a ladder made out of
wood.”
- But the wood keeps being an important part of the ladder, ever changing and
in action, which is why it’s weird we don’t pay enough attention to the material
the ladder’s been made of, since that’s the only aspect that will keep being
part of the object.
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, - “With the passage of time the wood - as it seasons - splits, warps and cracks,
eventually settling into a shape quite different from that given to it by the
sculptor’s initial intervention.”
- Pye: “It is not really the properties of materials that an artist or craftsperson seeks to
express, but rather their qualities. The properties of materials are objective and
measurable. They are out there. The qualities on the other hand are subjective: they
are in here: in our heads. They are ideas of ours. They are part of that private view of
the world which artists each have within them. We each have our own view of what
stoniness is”
DESCOLA EN PALSSON (1996)
- For over forty years the nature-culture dichotomy has been a central dogma in
anthropology, providing a series of analytical tools for apparently antithetical research
programmes as well as an identity marker for the discipline as a whole.
- Materialists considered nature as a basic determinant of social action and
would import from the natural sciences models of causal explanation which,
they hoped, would give sounder foundations and a wider scope to the social
sciences.
- For cultural ecology, sociobiology, and some brands of Marxist anthropology,
human behaviour, social institutions and specific cultural features were seen
as adaptive responses to, or mere expressions of, basic environmental or
genetic constraints. Internal or external nature - defined in the ethnocentric
terms of modern scientific language - was the great driving force behind
social life.
- As a result, little attention was paid to how non-western cultures
conceptualised their environment and their relation to it, except to
evaluate possible convergences or discrepancies between bizarre
emic ideas and the etic orthodoxy embodied in the laws of nature.
- Most importantly, the authors share a concern with the nature-society interface and
the theoretical problems it necessarily invites. Anthropology is broad in scope,
drawing upon both the natural and the social sciences, but, as we have seen, it is
continually troubled with a fundamental contradiction;
- 'The first part of the story of the human species is couched in evolutionary
and environmental terms, the second denies environment a meaningful role in
human history' (Crumley 1994: 2). Rethinking the nature-society interface
means rethinking ecological anthropology, in particular its notion of the
relation between person and environment. The deeply entrenched biological
and anthropological traditions which insist upon separating the two are
increasingly being challenged on both empirical and theoretical grounds.
- Bateson identified some of the problems using the example of a blind person
with a stick: 'Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of
the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? But
these are nonsense questions (Bateson 1972: 459). Indeed, they are. The
point is not simply to determine the exact location of the boundaries of
person, technology, and environment, but rather to draw attention to fields of
significance, 'mental systems' in Bateson's terminology.
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, LIEN & DAVIDSON (2010)
- We demonstrate how the trees simultaneously invite and resist purification through
binaries such as nature and culture, wild and domestic, then and now.
- In the grounds of the public high school in a suburb called Taroona, a pair of
Monterey pine trees stand together on a rocky point.
- Sanctioned in government legislation and policy, the ecological restoration of
Taroona is being led by a voluntary environmental network of local residents,
for whom it is self-evident that the ‘trees have to go’.
- But uprooting turns out to be difficult because, as the trees have grown larger,
they have also rooted themselves in memories of children-turned adults who
grew up in Taroona.
- In the dispute that developed around and through these trees, it
became apparent that the trees were indivisible from the histories and
possible futures that bind this place to wider cultural and ecological
dynamics.
- Environmental discourses of nativeness and invasion can be read through the lens of
Australian society’s colonial and settler heritage and present postcolonial aspirations.
- … we explore the way in which questions of belonging are played out in postcolonial
Australian society through material engagements with what is constituted as
Australian nature.
- In spite of the vigorous dismantling of conceptual dualisms surrounding nature and
culture in the social sciences, the representation of nature as something separate
from society continues to permeate much physical science, public policy and
vernacular discourse about nature and the environment.
- For example the biological classification of alien species, which rests on an
ontological distinction between human and non-human.
- Spatial distinctions between natural and artificial environments.
- As TEN’s vision of landscape restoration includes the preservation of aboriginal
heritage, possible threats to the midden had long been an issue of concern to
members of the group.
- This midden is one of the few physical remains in Tasmania of the
pre-European era, indicating that this particular point offered food and shelter
for the Big River Tribe prior to European invasion.
- The aim of TEN is to protect biodiversity.
- Pine trees change the chemistry of the soil. This is because the
needles make the soil acidic and prevent other trees and bushes from
growing underneath the pine. He also explains that when the trees get
blown over, the roots are going to take a significant part of the midden
with them and expose the rest to various threats such as storm water
run-off, waves at high tide and erosion caused by people walking over
it.
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