reblogging from Jason Baird Jackson's Museum Anthropology, here's an excerpt of an interesting post on Harper's and material culture:
Anthropology and Material Culture Studies in Harper's Magazine
[...] As always, the ads and photographs in Harper's are telling. There is a beautiful full-page ad, facing the "Harper's Index," promoting heritage tourism in Romania. The key line is "25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites" suggesting they ways that the paradoxical and problematic UNESCO list is being operationalized in tourism promotion aimed at educated audiences. (On UNESCO heritage policy, see MUA editorial board member Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's great essay in the new book Museum Frictions (Durham, Duke University Press, 2006). Photographs on pages 24, 27, 65, and 66 are especially evocative vis-a-vis material culture studies. There is also an beautiful essay (I cannot tell if it is ethnographic reportage or ethnographic fiction) on hopping freight trains ("Catching Out" by William T. Vollmann) that brought to mind, for me, a wonderful classic ethnography of Chicago School sociology, Nels Anderson's The Hobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923).
Comments