Miniature Messages in Material Culture (original) (raw)
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Object Matters: Considering Materiality, Meaning, and Memory
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How do indigenous objects in museum collections "speak" to those who create, collect, curate, display, and observe them? The material traces in these objects obviously evoke connections to particular aesthetic values, beliefs, and practices, but do they also retain memories of the artisans who created them? Can these objects communicate across cultural and temporal boundaries? Do they have agency, outside of the people who handle them? How might the Native American objects in the Penn Museum, in particular, represent a "bundle of relations" that entangle collectors, collections, and communities?1 Students in my Fall 2017 "Anthropology of Museums" course at the University of Pennsylvania have been considering these questions while examining a selection of evocative Native American objects in the American Section of the Penn Museum. Disciplines Anthropology | Archaeological Anthropology | Museum Studies | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultur...
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The most common explanations for the appearance of miniatures in the archaeological record are drawn from practice theory. Two alternatives stem from learning theories, while a third is based in ritual practice and performance. First, miniatures may represent early attempts at craft production by children or novice adults. Second, they could serve as children's toys used for enculturation purposes. Third, miniatures may be produced for use in rituals or as offerings. These explanations are not mutually exclusive; all may be part of the life history of a single artifact. Previous archaeological and ethnographic work on miniature ceramic vessels in the Southwest has variously supported all three prominent explanations. In this article, we examine the miniature vessel assemblage from Homol'ovi I, a prehispanic pueblo in northern Arizona, through a synthetic analysis of craft mastery, use, and deposition. While various life history trajectories are indicated, the miniature vessels at this ancestral Hopi village appear in similar depositional contexts. Specifically, these objects serve as important components in the preparation or closure practices of ritual spaces throughout the pueblo.
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International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
Miniature objects from non-European contexts have ideological elements which are often overlooked in the museum space because their small size and iconic relations make them difficult to accurately interpret and disrupt curatorial efforts to impose meaning upon them; a situation I term miniature dissonance. This article will examine this phenomenon using three related case studies featuring miniatures from the Northwest Coast of North America. It will consider what might have been misunderstood in these objects and what they might originally have been intended to achieve, followed by an example from a recent Ancient Egyptian exhibition which demonstrates that this problem is both more widespread and problematic than is often recognised. These miniatures disrupt curatorial intentionality in the museum space, and it is only by carefully considering their origins and affordances that they can be adequately and accurately interpreted and displayed.
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Fleeing from Categories: Monstrous Artefacts and Style in Archaeology
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Recent anthropological literature is frequently bringing into discussion the need to investigate the social and cultural impact of the children as a distinct social group within the human communities. Thus children of all ages are actively involved in the creation and manipulation of material culture through playful activities. However, many archaeological studies that discuss the inventories resulting from settlements or burials of various chronological periods often fail to reveal the presence of toys. Miniature objects that imitate fully functional objects or real-life beings were commonly found in settlements, sanctuaries or burials, being sometimes classified as toys. However, their possible identification has to be correlated with their own contexts of discovery. Thus the aim of this paper is to propose a few analytical means that would help identifying the practical and symbolic functions of miniature objects according to their contexts of discovery. The discussion will be based on a case-study focusing on the miniature vessels discovered in the Late Iron Age settlement at Sighişoara-Wietenberg, in Transylvania, Romania.