The Lives in Objects

Author: Jessica Yirush Stern
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
In The Lives in Objects, Jessica Yirush Stern presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and consumption. Stern upends the long-standing assertion that Native Americans were solely gift givers and the British were modern commercial capitalists. This traditional interpretation casts Native Americans as victims drawn into and made dependent on a transatlantic marketplace. Stern complicates that picture by showing how both the Southeastern Indian and British American actors mixed gift giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, such that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard narrative allows. By tracking the debates about Indian trade regulation, Stern also reveals that the British were often not willing to embrace modern free market values. While she sheds new light on broader issues in native and colonial history, Stern also demonstrates that concepts of labor, commerce, and material culture were inextricably intertwined to present a fresh perspective on trade in the colonial Southeast.

The Lives of Colonial Objects

Author: Annabel Cooper
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927322024
Category : Material culture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Lives of Colonial Objects is a sumptuously illustrated and highly readable book about things, and the stories that unfold when we start to investigate them. In this collection of 50 essays the authors, including historians, archivists, curators and Maori scholars, have each chosen an object from New Zealand's colonial past. Some are treasured family possessions such as a kahu kiwi, a music album or a grandmother's travel diary, and their stories have come down through families. Some, like the tauihu of a Maori waka, a Samoan kilikiti bat or a flying boat, are housed in museums. Others--a cannon, a cottage and a country road--inhabit public spaces but they too turn out to have unexpected histories. Things invite us into the past through their tangible, tactile and immediate presence: in this collection they serve as 50 paths into New Zealand's colonial history.

The Lives of Objects

Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670758X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.

The Lives of Chinese Objects

Author: Louise Tythacott
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452398
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo – China’s most important pilgrimage island – to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers’ and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the ‘Mongolian race’ and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

The Whole Picture

Author: Alice Procter
Publisher: Cassell
ISBN: 1788402219
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Treasures in Trusted Hands

Author: Jos van Beurden
Publisher: CLUES no. 3
ISBN: 9789088904394
Category : Colonies
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.

The Brutish Museums

Author: Dan Hicks
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781786806833
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.

Current Industrial Reports

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pharmaceutical industry
Languages : en
Pages : 12

Book Description

Lost Histories

Author: Kirsten L. Ziomek
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Book Description
"A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives. Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life."

Monuments, Objects, Histories

Author: Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231129985
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
This book offers both an insider and outsider perspective, moving from a period that saw the consolidation of western expertise and custodianship of India's "antiquities," to the projection over the twentieth century of varying regional, nativist and national claims around the country's archaeological, architectural and artistic inheritance, into a present time that has pitted these objects and fields within a highly contentious politics of nationhood.