Emily Levick’s talk “All Being Well” brings her own personal experiences with health conditions and definitions in conversation with museum praxis. Levick, herself a doctoral student of Museum Studies, turns to museums as stimulating, inspiring, and rewarding environments, spaces where people gather socially, and places of learning and discovery. Yet, she notes, for chronically ill, disabled, and housebound individuals, they are also largely inaccessible.
Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias offer a comparative ethnographic study of the evil eye in contemporary Iran and Greece. With rich ethnographic detail, the authors explore the ongoing significance of evil eye affliction as well as the diagnostic approaches and remedies used for removal of this curse. Their analysis shifts focus from previous paradigms of social cohesion to local cultural logics, ways of knowing, and realities that foreground bodily integrity and experiences of energy. They present evil eye as a case study in relationality and embodied affliction/healing.
The author explores the affective and physical ‘territorialisation’ of the body during measles, and how vernacular Tamil beliefs consider this a visit from the Goddess called Mariammen. She traces the interruption (and disruption) into the devotee’s life through the material presence of measles as the immaterial, yet tangible existential presence of her anger splayed ferociously out across the body. The healing instance of measles, invokes and provokes a bodyscape of heat and cooling to match the temperament of the goddess. The essay deconstructs the poly-semiotics of healing as a kind of purging and takes an under-the-skin look at the materiality of both body and goddess in this context.
In this article, the author discusses the myriad of ways agricultural practices are interconnected with healing modalities. Using environmental justice and healing justice frameworks, the author examines how Our Mother Corn (“Native Corn”), as a Wixárika relative, prescribes and assures the health of Wixárika families. Drawing from ethnographic research, the author examines Wixárika communities’ views on health. To be healthy, Wixárika families maintain a harmonious relationship with their ancestors—including Our Mother Corn—to receive wellness from them. In the article, the author questions current healing frameworks and problematizes the current traditional practices.
What processes, movements, and epistemological or physical structures make productive spaces for healing? How can we think about healing in a sense that moves via and past the physical, interrogating temporal ways of being throughout time, place, and space? How can relationality, place-based thinking, and embodied ways of knowing come together to form a collective consciousness around healing when framed as well-being, care, mindfulness and gratitude? Fundamentally, if anthropology and cultural studies are about paying attention to certain contexts what does the praxis of healing mean and do in varied contexts?
This paper investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, the author looks at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics as a locus of “residual vulnerability”.
Jack Smith was a visionary American filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist. Smith was able to get his co-travelers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events, adopting lowly, discarded film materials, in other words trash, marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, to provide the grounds for transmogrification, with almost incredible results. Smith’s life and work demonstrate that a condition of absolute lack is not necessarily to be equated with inadequacy. An ostensibly deprived state can in fact be inspiring occasion to reconsider the meaning of art, the role of the artist and artistic valuation.
ReBuilding 2 continues themes of the Spring Issue, relating processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.
Winnie van der Rijn is a multi-disciplinary artist of opportunity–collecting materials, experimenting with techniques and pursuing her curiosities. Her art practice includes textiles, sculpture, collage and collaboration (which she considers its own art form). A life long learner, Winnie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 with a BA in Sociology. She has studied printmaking, sculpture, metalsmithing and Marxist theory. In addition, Winnie has explored weaving, machine knitting, bookmaking, altars, exploding picture boxes, automata, shoe making, millinery, sewing, fusing, stamping, metal weaving, resin, riveting, precious metal clay and mixed media. She is wildly curious about how things are made.
Interview with Sophie Bjork-James, Author of “The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family”. Dr. Bjork-James is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has engaged in long-term research on both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movement.
This essay examines the ways in which (Classical) archaeology’s inherently destructive nature is deeply intertwined with and informed by its destructive foundations. Despite the traditional prevalence of white scholars in our syllabi, in our conference panels, and in our institutions, archaeologists of color have made it exceedingly clear in the last several months that this is our discipline, too. By juxtaposing the destructive natures of both archaeological method and the discipline at large, the author suggests how professors can apply principles of archaeological fieldwork to their mentorship of students of color.
Textiles are imbued with the multifaceted and complex values, beliefs, and ideals of the cultures in which they were produced and consumed. They have been used as clothing, shelter, and ornament, and are often remade and repurposed throughout their ‘lives’, constantly acquiring new layers of meaning along the way. As such, they are ideal media for museums attempting to widen their audience reach and more effectively represent world history and culture. How can museums rebuild the stories and lives of textiles in exhibits? This essay explores the possibility of building connections between visitors and textiles through multisensory engagement and, in doing so, suggests the remaking of the museum experience.
This article investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’
In October 2020, Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” Through conversations between memory works, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars, “Shaping the Past” asked questions surrounding the future of monuments and monumentality, setting the stage for the future(s) of public space, artistic and curatorial activism, and community-building in the wake of 2020.
The 110-year-old Lost Mural, damaged by almost 30 years behind a false wall, is a patchwork of tones – some areas carefully cleaned by art conservators, other still dirty and showing chipped and missing paint. In this state, it exists simultaneously as an example of damage and restoration, and as both a significant cultural artifact and a work of religious art. This article shows how the conservation process and the practice of close looking allow us to better understand each of these aspects of the Lost Mural.
