Things in Culture, Culture in Things

311 Pages·25.673 MB·English

by  Anu Kannike & Patrick Laviolette

Things in Culture,
Culture in Things
Approaches to Culture Theory Series
Volume 3
Series editors
Kalevi Kull
Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia
Valter Lang
Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu, Estonia
Tiina Peil
Institute of History, Tallinn University, Estonia
Aims & scope
The Approaches to Culture Theory book series focuses on various aspects of analy-
sis, modelling, and theoretical understanding of culture. Culture theory as a set
of complementary theories is seen to include and combine the approaches of
different sciences, among them semiotics of culture, archaeology, environmental
history, ethnology, cultural ecology, cultural and social anthropology, human
geography, sociology and the psychology of culture, folklore, media and com-
munication studies.
Things in Culture,
Culture in Things
Edited by
Anu Kannike & Patrick Laviolette
This volume and the initial conference have been financed by the Centre of Ex-
cellence in Cultural Theory (CECT, European Regional Development Fund).
Managing editors: Anu Kannike, Monika Tasa
Language editor: Daniel Edward Allen
Design and layout: Roosmarii Kurvits
Cover layout: Kalle Paalits
Copyright: University of Tartu, authors, 2013
Photographs used in cover design and in the beginnings of sections: the photo
collection of Estonian National Museum, ERM Fk 184:71, ERM Fk 127:3, ERM
Fk 114:134, ERM Fk 139:43, ERM Fk 2644:3724.
ISSN 2228-060X (print)
ISBN 978-9949-32-394-4 (print)
ISSN 2228-4117 (online)
ISBN 978-9949-32-395-1 (online)
University of Tartu Press
www.tyk.ee/act
Contents
List of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Notes on editors and contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Patrick Laviolette
Soft objects
The natural order is decay: the home as an ephemeral art project . . . . . . . . . 36
Stephen Harold Riggins
Placing objects first: filming transnationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Carlo A. Cubero
Beware of dreams come true:
valuing the intangible in the American Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Rowan R. Mackay
Stoic stories
The travelling furniture:
materialised experiences of living in the Jewish diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Susanne Nylund Skog
A hard matter: stones in Finnish-Karelian folk belief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Timo Muhonen
An embroidered royal gift as
a political symbol and embodiment of design ideas in 1885 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Kirsti Salo-Mattila
Consuming and the collectable
The ‘vintage community’ in Bucharest: consumers and collectors . . . . . . . 158
Maria Cristache
The visual form of newspapers as a guide for information consumption . . . 172
Roosmarii Kurvits
Design for individuality:
the Jordan Individual toothbrushes and interpassivity in material culture . 204
Visa Immonen
Collecting the Nagas:
John Henry Hutton, the administrator-collector in the Naga Hills . . . . . . 222
Meripeni Ngully
Waste and technologies
Waste and alterity in ‘speculative fiction’: an assessment of
the de- and re-evaluation of material objects in selected dystopian novels . 244
Brigitte Glaser
Toilet cultures: boundaries, dirt and disgust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Remo Gramigna
The social childhood of new ambivalent objects:
emerging social representations of new biotechnologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
Maaris Raudsepp, Andu Rämmer
Index of names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Introduction
List of figures
Collectors of vanavara (antiquities) in Rame village, Karuse parish.
Photo: Friedrich Kohitsky, 1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . front cover
A solitary inhabitant of Kärla parish. Photographer unknown, before 1915 . . . . . 34–35
Closing a summer cottage, Quogue, New York, 1957 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Branding and appropriation of a symbol: John Stetson, John Wayne,
Ronald Reagan-as-actor, Ronald Reagan-as-President, George W. Bush, and
Barack Obama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Landscape in Haapsalu. Photo: Jaan Kristin, 1899–1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100–101
Sage Tuomas Lomajärvi with his wife in 1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Emma Leinonen (1868–1955), an old woman from Lohilahti village
in southern Savonia heals a girl’s leg by pressing it with a sauna stove stone . . . 120
Interior of traditional Finnish sauna in Korpiselkä . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Potential biography of a stone in the context of Finnish-Karelian folk belief . . . . . 128
Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna in the mid-1880s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Embroidered ornaments for the Empress boat, 1885 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
The Empress Screen, 1885, embroidery on silk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142–143
The arrival of the Emperor and Empress in Helsinki, 1885 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
The grand-ducal coat of arms in the centre panel of the Empress Screen . . . . . . . . 148
Detail of the lower frieze in the centre left panel of the Empress Screen . . . . . . . . . 149
Working drawing for the centre right panel of the Empress Screen . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Vanavara (antiquities) from Nissi parish. Photo: B. Kangro, 1913 . . . . . . . . . . 156–157
Newspaper Marahwa Näddala-Leht, 12 January 1821, 14–15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Newspaper Postimees, 19 August 1895, 2 and 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180–181
Newspaper Päewaleht, 27 October 1929, 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Newspaper Rahva Hääl, 5 May 1985, 1 and 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188–189
Newspaper Eesti Päevaleht, 8 March 2010, 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
A Jordan Individual toothbrush in its original packaging from 2007 . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Some of the Jordan Individual toothbrushes from 2007 were marked with
symbols indicating gender, ♀ or ♂ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Advertisement “Life is tough, Jordan gentle” (Aku Ankka, 26 October 2005) . . . . . . 211
Connections between John Henry Hutton and Henry Balfour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Hutton’s top seven collected items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
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List of figures
Laboratory in the Institute of Oil Shale. Woman looking through magnifying glass.
Photo: Viktor Salmre, 1969 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242–243
World map of toilet cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Public perception of scientific and technological development
in Estonia and Europe, 2002–2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Public perception of scientific and technological development
in Estonia and the European Union, 2005 and 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
Awareness of and support for new biotechnologies
in Estonia and the European Union, 2005 and 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
Awareness of and support for animal cloning for food
in Estonia and the European Union, 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
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Introduction
Notes on editors and contributors
Maria Cristache ([email protected]) completed a Master’s
degree in sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University,
Hungary. She is currently a doctoral student at the International Graduate Centre
for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Her research inter-
ests include material culture, post-socialism, sociology and the anthropology of
consumption, including patterns of taste and consumption of domestic objects
in communist and post-communist Romania.
Carlo A. Cubero ([email protected]) is associate professor at the Depart-
ment of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Estonian Institute of Humani-
ties, Tallinn University, Estonia. His research focuses on ethnographic filmmak-
ing methodology, migration, transnationalism and post-colonial identities.
Brigitte Glaser ([email protected]) is professor of English
literature and cultural studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. She has
published two monographs, one on 18th-century fiction and the other on 17th-
century autobiographical writing. During the last few years her research focus
and publications have been on colonial and postcolonial literature as well as
transnational writing. A co-edited volume of essays The Canadian Mosaic in the
Age of Transnationalism appeared in 2010.
Remo Gramigna ([email protected]) is a doctoral student in semiotics at the Uni-
versity of Tartu, Estonia. He gained a Master’s degree in science of communica-
tion at Rome’s Sapienza University with a dissertation entitled Culture Jamming:
Phenomenology of Creative Destruction (2006). He completed a second Master’s
degree in semiotics at the University of Tartu with a thesis entitled Augustine
on Lying: A Semiotic Analysis (2011). His main research area is the semiotics of
lying and deception.
Visa Immonen ([email protected]) is a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, and adjunct professor of archaeo-
logy at the University of Turku, Finland. He is an archaeologist specialising in
the Middle Ages and the Modern period.
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