Sensible objects : colonialism, museums and material culture

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth Edwards & Professor Of European Archaeology Institute Of Archaeology Chris Gosden & Professor Ruth Phillips

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic;Berg
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 320
• Series: Wenner-Gren Center international symposium series
• Edition: English ed
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, feel and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.

✦ Table of Contents

Content: Enduring and endearing feelings and the transformation of material culture in West Africa / Kathryn Linn Geurts and Elvis Gershon Adikah --
Studio photography and the aesthetics of citizenship in The Gambia, West Africa / Liam Buckley --
Cooking skill, the senses, and memory : the fate of practical knowledge / David Sutton --
Mata ora : chiseling the living face, dimensions of Maori tattoo / Ngahuia Te Akwekotuku --
Smoked fish and fermented oil : taste and smell among the Kwakwaka'wakw / Aldona Jonaitis --
Sonic spectacles of empire : the audio-visual nexus, Delhi-London, 1911-12 / Tim Barringer --
The museum as sensescape : western sensibilities and indigenous artifacts / Constance Classen and David Howes --
The fate of the senses in ethnographic modernity : the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History / Diane Losche --
Contact points : museums and the lost body problem / Jeffrey Feldman --
The beauty of letting go : fragmentary museums and archaeologies of archive / Sven Ouzman.

✦ Subjects

Material culture. Senses and sensation. Human body -- Social aspects. Ethnological museums and collections. Colonies. Postcolonialism. Culture matérielle. Sens et sensations. Corps humain -- Aspect social. Ethnologie -- Musées et collections. Postcolonialisme. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropolo