Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, Ruth Phillips

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 321
• Series: Wenner-Gren International Symposium
• 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

Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
Preface......Page 14
Introduction......Page 16
Part 1: The Senses......Page 48
1. Enduring and Endearing Feelings and the Transformation of Material Culture in West Africa......Page 50
2. Studio Photography and the Aesthetics of Citizenship in The Gambia, West Africa......Page 76
3. Cooking Skill, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge......Page 102
Part 2: Colonialism......Page 134
4. Mata Ora: Chiseling the Living Face, Dimensions of Maori Tattoo......Page 136
5. Smoked Fish and Fermented Oil: Taste and Smell among the Kwakwaka'wakw......Page 156
6. Sonic Spectacles of Empire: The Audio-Visual Nexus, Delhi–London, 1911–12......Page 184
Part 3: Museums......Page 212
7. The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts......Page 214
8. The Fate of the Senses in Ethnographic Modernity: The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History......Page 238
9. Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem......Page 260
10. The Beauty of Letting Go: Fragmentary Museums and Archaeologies of Archive......Page 284
C......Page 317
G......Page 318
M......Page 319
S......Page 320
Z......Page 321