Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Upasana Goswami and Abhishruti Sarma
Articles, Peer Reviewed

In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region.

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Maggie Hansen
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Urban landscapes are created, in part, from living materials and are shaped by human use and care. Human actions of maintenance and stewardship produce and sustain designed environments over time. Like other care labor, this work is physical, ongoing, and requires specific local knowledge, yet it is often considered ‘unskilled’ labor. Recent discourse in landscape architecture and planning has highlighted the role of land care work in addressing the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, while creating ‘green jobs.’ This article aims to identify opportunities and particular approaches for creating meaningful social change through stewardship activities.

Writing, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Spectre of ChatGPT

Writing, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Spectre of ChatGPT

Alexios Tsigkas
Essays

The speed at which ChatGPT has penetrated higher education has been nothing short of astounding. ChatGPT is able to respond to prompts or commands and generate original content: in other words, it can write. For writers and readers ChatGPT may trigger anxieties about the very essence of authorship and originality, which in turn reflect certain deeply held notions of subjectivity. It is hard not to feel unsettled by the current moment. In this essay I reflect on the very practice of writing itself, and the values we ascribe to it, at this very moment at which its upending seems likely.

Artisans by Trade: Working as Weavers and Embroiderers in the Chiapas Highlands

Artisans by Trade: Working as Weavers and Embroiderers in the Chiapas Highlands

Rachel Barber
Videos, Essays

Textile work has traditionally been part of Tsotsil and Tseltal women’s domestic duties in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. However, recent national and foreign interest in artisanal handiwork has led women from the region to start selling their work. In this commercial foray, artisanal work emerges as a trade, one that entails accommodations between women’s economic activities and their home life. While most women carry out their artisanal work at home alongside family members, the way in which they define the nature of their work and its relation to their other domestic activities varies considerably. The following video and text profile three textile artisans from the Highlands region, highlighting the distinct ways in which they organize their work and fit it together with their family life and social relations in their communities.

Disrupting Individualism through the Intimate: A Review of 'The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices' (Routledge, 2024)

Disrupting Individualism through the Intimate: A Review of 'The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices' (Routledge, 2024)

Emma Cieslik
Reviews

From 2020-23, The Jugaad Project ran 3 virtual workshops with global participants. These workshops produced papers that were later edited into a book The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices (Routledge, 2024). Now released to very positive endorsements, this edited volume showcases new, exciting work at the intersection of belief, intimacy, and material culture, and connects life-worlds across religion and politics. Emma Cieslik reviews this book to explore how it might be useful to scholars.

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Tanuj Luthra
Articles

While conducting fieldwork with informal doctors in low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, I noticed that several patients consulted them for what appeared to be work-related ailments. Reflecting on these encounters at the intersection of medicine and labour, I thought about how work consumes both our time and our vitality, and how responses to the effects of work mobilize particular ideas of care and wellbeing. I wondered: if health is socially constructed, in what ways does labour construct it? In this essay, I explore how, across various urban work contexts — from informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.” — people experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions (such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various infectious diseases) in relation to their labour.

Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Elizabeth A. Cecil
Articles, Photo Essays

How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects–intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation? In what ways are religious values expressed through the continued use and reuse of historical sites? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the preservation of ancient temples and religious sites in Southeast Asia? To explore these questions, this essay brings images collected during field research in 2023 at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects.

Amateur or Professional?: Reclaiming the Role of the Amateur at the Intersection of Work and Religious Faith

Peter Bush
Articles

I am a Presbyterian minister serving St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Fergus a small town in Ontario, Canada, and that fact impacts how I view the intersection between religious faith and work. The Presbyterian Church in Canada defines my status as being a professional church worker. Woven through the essay will be engagement with the Judeo-Christian assertion that human beings are called to love the Lord their God with their entire being. The proposed essay will explore how the professionalization of clergy impacts the work-life of clergy including shaping their religious lives outside of work. Professionalization invites a splitting of work from the personal creating two spheres of life, this contrasts with the all-encompassing claims that the religious makes on life.

2023 Winter Editorial: What Matters in Work?

2023 Winter Editorial: What Matters in Work?

Emily Levick and Urmila Mohan

Work is “good to think with”, situated at the intersection of various socio-cultural and ontological contexts and complexities—and for our purposes—practices, materials, and interactions. What does ‘work’ mean, make, and do in different contexts? As a noun, work is associated with effort, labor, occupation, and achievement while, as a verb, it suggests the process of operating, forming and cultivating something. Through the notion of cultivation, a context in which the word culture itself arose, we see the overlap between work and culture. In this issue we cover a range of contexts from the work of clergy to weavers and embroiderers, and span geographic areas from the Americas to Asia.

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Sara Ann Knutson
Peer Reviewed, Articles

Coins have long been important materials for examining values and exchange networks in the past. Housed today in museum collections around the world, Islamic coins are no exception. But Islamic coins are more than simply material traces of the past, they also hold important contemporary meanings that have been overlooked and undervalued by academics. In this peer-reviewed article, Sara Ann Knutson shares how she has begun to explore the possibilities for, and ethical commitment to, community involvement in the meanings and values that are constructed around museum-based materials. She discuss some results from her cultural heritage survey of people culturally connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and how stakeholder voices revealed the understated importance of museum-housed assemblages for cultural heritage and community values, including those that span across national borders, languages, and religious beliefs. This work envisions transformative approaches to collections and museum practice in which communities are recognized for their values regarding materials from the Islamic World’s vibrant past, rather than remaining the “recipients” of museum narratives and academic research.

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Susan Rodgers
Articles

In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat)  among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

Poornima Sardana and Shivangi Pareek
Articles

How is the new museology of museums rooted within communities different from museums displaying communities? What can this new museology learn from previous engagements by museum actors with source communities and multiple stakeholders? Using ‘Otherness’, ‘difference’ and ‘communities’ as analytical frames, this conversation between a museologist (Poornima Sardana) and an anthropologist (Shivangi Pareek) aims to bring together perspectives at the intersection of museum studies and ethnographic work, and reflect on plural entanglements within museums.

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Howard Skrill
Articles

Through plein-air drawings and studio works on paper, this essay grapples with processes of national belonging and exclusion brought to bear on the surfaces of extant public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. ‘Whitewash’ is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. Similarly, an exploration of the fate of two representations of the U.S. Confederate general Robert E. Lee reveals the nationalist, political forces that led to these monuments’ raising and subsequent removal.

(Mostly) Indigenous Readings that Challenge Imposed Euro-Enlightenment [aka Colonial] Perspectives in Museums

Laura Phillips
Bibliographies

The Enlightenment era names an 18th-century European philosophical movement whereby reason or human intellect informed what was considered knowledge and understanding of the world. As collecting institutions, museums founded with these logics use processes of acquisition to collect items, objects, and specimens to understand the world, supposedly to move humanity forward in the name of progress. Mechanisms that (re)named and classified the world enabled Euro-Enlightenment minds to feel they (we) knew and understood the world, through this mastery of placing complex beings within predefined structures. This annotated bibliography presents resources for museum professionals to understand the errors of the past in our inherited present so we can move towards more equitable, decolonizing, and Indigenizing futures. 

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