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 TheApproaches 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 7 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 8 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. 9 Notes on editors and contributors Anu Kannike ([email protected]) is researcher at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia, and managing editor of CECT book series. She defended her doctoral dissertation in ethnology at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the material culture of the home from historical and contemporary perspectives, particularly home decoration and food culture. Roosmarii Kurvits ([email protected]) is researcher at the Institute of Jour- nalism, Communication and Information Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research focuses on