Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and med- ical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now- classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact. Timothy Carroll is principal research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, UK. Antonia Walford is lecturer in Digital Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, UK. Shireen Walton is lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies Perspectives from UCL Anthropology Edited by Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, and Shireen Walton First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, and Shireen Walton; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, and Shireen Walton to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Carroll, Timothy (Timothy Andrew), editor. | Walford, Antonia, editor. | Walton, Shireen Marion, 1986– editor. Title: Lineages and advancements in material culture studies : perspectives from UCL anthropology / edited by Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford and Shireen Walton. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031267 (print) | LCCN 2020031268 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350127487 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003085867 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Material culture–Research–Methodology. | Material culture–Case studies. | University College, London. Anthropology Department. Classification: LCC GN406 .L564 2020 (print) | LCC GN406 (ebook) | DDC 306.072/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031267 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031268 ISBN: 978- 1- 350- 12748- 7 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 08586- 7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK Contents List of figures vii List of tables ix List of contributors x Preface xvii Acknowledgements xix 1 Introduction 1 TIMOTHY CARROLL, ANTONIA WALFORD, AND SHIREEN WALTON 2 Extraterrestrial methods: towards an ethnography of the ISS 17 VICTOR BUCHLI 3 Being, being human, becoming beyond human 33 TIMOTHY CARROLL AND AARON PARKHURST 4 ‘Things ain’t the same anymore’: towards an anthropology of technical objects (or ‘When Leroi- Gourhan and Simondon meet MCS’) 46 LUDOVIC COUPAYE 5 The object biography 61 ADAM DRAZIN 6 A new instrumentalism? 75 HAIDY GEISMAR 7 Objects of desire: sexwork and its objects 89 DAVID JEEVENDRAMPILLAI, JULIA BURTON, AND EVA SANGLANTE vi Contents 8 Digital devices: knowing material culture 102 HANNAH KNOX 9 Rethinking objectification and its consequences: from substitution to sequence 115 SUSANNE KÜCHLER 10 Looking at things 129 DELPHINE MERCIER 11 Making things matter 146 DANIEL MILLER AND LAURA HAAPIO- KIRK 12 Prophetic pictures: or, What time is the visual? 158 CHRISTOPHER PINNEY 13 Held in Amma’s light: the enchantment and political efficacy ofgopurams in Tamilnadu 171 JILL REESE 14 A curatorial methodology for anthropology 190 RAFAEL SCHACTER 15 Data aesthetics 205 ANTONIA WALFORD 16 Place- objects: anthropology of digital photography/ s 218 SHIREEN WALTON Bibliography 235 Index 272 Figures 2.1 Primitive Warfare II, Pitt- Rivers 1868 27 2.2 Cosmographia, Peter Apian 1539 28 2.3 Artist’s rendering of ISS above earth, passing over the Straits of Gibraltar. NASA ID 9802668 29 6.1 ‘Camden Rules’ posted at CCA 83 7.1 Eve’s Mound 93 10.1 K.0050, top view 133 10.2 K.0050, inside view 133 10.3 K.0050, view from one of the small sides 134 10.4 Attempt to introduce a hand inside of K.0050 134 10.5 The whole Inuit collection kept in UCL Ethnography Collection 138 10.6 Detailed view of the adze, showing the different layers of paint used to cover the wood every time it was reused 138 10.7 The major part of the Fijian collection kept in the UCL Ethnography Collection 142 12.1 Hieroglyphic for the Eventful Year 1830, Handcoloured copperplate engraving 162 12.2 Hieroglyphic for the Eventful Year 1831, Handcoloured copperplate engraving 165 12.3 Hieroglyphic for the Eventful Year 1841, Handcoloured copperplate engraving 166 13.1 Jayalalithaa as gopuram to celebrate her birthday (pirandanaal). Madurai 2014 172 13.2 MGR and Jayalalithaa as gopurams at entrance to sports arena. Madurai 2014 174 13.3 Jayalalithaa as gopuram along street outside Thamukkam Grounds. Madurai 2014 176 13.4 Comparison of LED and incandescent bulbs. Madurai 2013 178 13.5 Large- scale gopuram installed for Thevar Jayanthi. Madurai 2014 181 14.1 Cian Dayrit. Northern Conquests in Oriental Soil and Sea, 2019. Tapestry, 215 cm x 238 cm 199 viii Figures 14.2 Mark Salvatus. Blue Moon, 2019. Video installation in single channel with masks, vinyl, and LEDs. 8’, dimensions variable 200 15.1 Raw data before being copied into the spreadsheet 209 15.2 Revealing the relations using graphs: here, photosynthetically active radiation and short- wave radiation are meant to follow a certain pattern when plotted against each other 211 16.1 Mundane ‘Iranian’ objects of everyday life 224 16.2 Majun 226 16.3 Geotagging on Tehran Live photoblog 228 Tables 10.1 Materials used to make the objects of the Inuit collection 139 10.2 Raw materials present in the Inuit collection 139 Contributors Victor Buchli is professor of material culture at UCL and works on the material culture of ‘Low Earth Orbit’, architecture, domesticity, the archaeology of the recent past, and critical understandings of materiality and new tech- nologies. Currently, he is principle investigator of the five- year European Research Council (ERC) funded research project, ‘ETHNO- ISS: An Ethnography of an Extra-terr estrial Society: the International Space Station’ (ERC Advanced Grant, no. 833135). His previous books include An Archaeology of the Immaterial (2015); An Anthropology of Architecture (2013); An Archaeology of Socialism (1999); and, with Gavin Lucas, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (2001). He has also edited The Material Culture Reader (2002), Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences for the Major Works Series (2004); and, with C. Alexander and C. Humphrey, Urban life in Post Soviet Asia (2007). Timothy Carroll is a principal research fellow and a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow in Anthropology at UCL. His research focuses on the role of material within the religious practice of Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the relationship between the body as a cultural artefact and the wider material ecology. His research works across reli- gion, art, medicine, and ecological contexts. He is the author of Orthodox Christian Material Culture: Of People and Things in the Making of Heaven (2018), co- author of A Return to the Object: Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (2021), and co- editor of Medical Materialities: Toward a Material Culture of Medical Anthropology (2019) and Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Wrong (2017). Ludovic Coupaye is associate professor of anthropology at UCL and professor of history and anthropology of Pacific Arts at the École du Louvre, Paris. His research focuses and combines different strands of research, distributed over four interrelated topics: material and visual culture in Oceania; art and aesthetics among the Abulës-speaking communities (‘Abelam’) of East Sepik Province; anthropology of techniques, skills and materiality; and anthropology of technology and Modernity. His most recent strand of research deals with the wider question of the relationships between Contributors xi ‘technology’ and ‘society’, from the angle of technical activities, technical objects, and technical systems. He is the author of a monograph, Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea (2013), and co- edited a spe- cial issue in the journal Oceania on ‘Interweaving of Vital and Technical