Moving Statues and Moving Images: Religious Artefacts and the Spiritualisation of Materiality

This paper addresses the spiritualisation of materiality integral to the expression of religious experience by devotees. It focuses on the ‘objective correlatives' of emotion‐imbued faith. Although primarily concerned with the aesthetics of contemporary Catholic mysticism, the aim is to suggestively allude to the implications for comparative analysis. Beginning with devotion to the rosary, it addresses the ‘moving statues' phenomenon, which in the mid‐1980s in Ireland led to numerous visionaries experiencing apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Arguing that sensory analogues are indispensable to the expression of feelings and thoughts, it directs our attention to the tensions implicit in the process, i.e., to the way humans (in this case, religious devotees) need to find and fix upon an adequate and appropriate sensory equivalent. It stresses that such tensions are integral to the formulation and communication of meaning. Further consideration of the imaginative power of material representations leads into a discussion of the influence now exerted by the moving image. The depiction of penitential suffering in The Passion of the Christ is then used to illustrate how film can function as an objective correlative, in this case by articulating notions of penance and redemption shared by Irish visionaries and their disciples.     

Personifying Objects/Objectifying People: Handling Questions of Mortality and Materiality through the Archaeological Body

Death and the bodies of the dead are managed and handled in contemporary Western society by various professions that include archaeology. The bodies of the dead exist in a variety of material forms, and generate conflicting responses from the archaeologists who work with them. Positioning archaeologists as professionals within a wider society, this article explores the relationship between the physicality of the body, the (de)construction of personhood and the problem of mortality in contemporary Western (British) society.     

Materiality and Cosmology: Old Georgian Churches as Sacred,Sublime, and Secular Objects

Discourses about Georgian churches have since the nineteenth century treated the material quality of'ancientness’ associated with existing churches as being among their essential defining properties. This paper first explores how different material qualisigns of churches, including oldness and qualisigns attendant on oldness, allow churches to be interpreted as secular objects, by ordering them with theatres (as expressive of'civilization'), the natural landscape (expressive of an aesthetics of the sublime) or other monuments, including texts (expressive of culture). One result of such discourses is that the contemporary Orthodox Church finds it difficult to have ‘new’ churches accepted as being churches at all. These nineteenth‐century discourses thus provide a context for the complex and contested reception of old and new Orthodox churches, as well as other religious structures, such as mountain shrines, which have a more ambiguous relation with Orthodoxy.     

Reading and Time: Two Approaches to the Materiality of Scripture

In this article I examine Christian approaches to conceptions of time as expressed in approaches to reading the Bible. The first main focus in this effort is upon the work of Saint Augustine, whose arguments about the connections between reading and time have been, as I try to show, very influential. The second main focus is more ethnographic in nature, and comes from my work in Zimbabwe on a small group of apostolic Christians whose views differ significantly from Augustine. These two cases are framed by some more general remarks on Christian temporalities, as well as a call for the newly-emerging interest in the anthropology of Christianity to take note of more general work on literacy and the ethnography of reading.     

The Role of Binocular Disparity in Stereoscopic Images of Objects in the Macaque Anterior Intraparietal Area

Neurons in the macaque Anterior Intraparietal area (AIP) encode depth structure in random-dot stimuli defined by gradients of binocular disparity, but the importance of binocular disparity in real-world objects for AIP neurons is unknown. We investigated the effect of binocular disparity on the responses of AIP neurons to images of real-world objects during passive fixation. We presented stereoscopic images of natural and man-made objects in which the disparity information was congruent or incongruent with disparity gradients present in the real-world objects, and images of the same objects where such gradients were absent. Although more than half of the AIP neurons were significantly affected by binocular disparity, the great majority of AIP neurons remained image selective even in the absence of binocular disparity. AIP neurons tended to prefer stimuli in which the depth information derived from binocular disparity was congruent with the depth information signaled by monocular depth cues, indicating that these monocular depth cues have an influence upon AIP neurons. Finally, in contrast to neurons in the inferior temporal cortex, AIP neurons do not represent images of objects in terms of categories such as animate-inanimate, but utilize representations based upon simple shape features including aspect ratio.     

Missionary Encounters: Histories and Memoirs

Alexander Merensky: Erinnerungen aus dem Missionsleben in Transvaal (Südafrika) 1859 bis 1882. Ulrich van der Heyden. ed. Cognoscere, 5. Berlin: Edition Ost, 1996.560 pp.
Hate the Old and Follow the New: Khoekhoe and Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-Century Namibia. Tilman Dedering. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997. 205 pp.     

Ghosts of Futures Present: Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive

This article explores the role of photographs in shaping the social selves of Filipino temporary labor migrants. Examining the production of photographic self-images by Filipino migrants in Hong Kong and their reception in the Philippines, I show how people deploy photography as a technology to bring into being their desired future selves. By making present ghosts of the future, photographs of the self shape distinctive translocal subjectivities.     

Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian

Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian. Tim Johnson. ed. Washington. DC. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with the National Museum of the American Indian, 1998. 206 pp.     

Unofficial Histories: A Vision of Anthropology from the Margins

Initially given as the Presidential Address at the 100th Meeting of the AAA, this article examines the contributions women and minority anthropologists who have struggled to gain a place at the center of the discipline. Despite 25 years of scholarship on women and minorities, anthropology needs to go further in terms of paying attention to their pioneering efforts and the breadth of their scholarship. The article explores four currently important areas of creativity: (1) the transformation of field research through problem-oriented participant observation and "native anthropology," as exemplified by George Hunt, the young Margaret Mead, Delmos Jones; (2) the evolution of more dialogical forms of ethnographic writing, as pursued by Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys Reichard, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston; (3) sources of critique, as embodied in the work of Ruth Benedict and Michelle Rosaldo; (4) forms of activism, engaged in by Anita McGee, Benedict, Mead, and Alfonzo Ortiz.     

Comparative Physiological Investigation of Peculiarities of Recognition of Complex Visual Images and Ability to Identify Two-Dimensional Images and Three-Dimensional Objects by the Lower and Higher Monkeys

An ability of primates to compare and identify planar images and three-dimensional objects has been studied at solving tasks of the choice on model type. The study is carried out on three species of monkeys of different levels of phylogenetic development: macaques rhesuses Macaca mulata, brown capuchins Cebus apella, and chimpanzee Pan troglodytes. Plaster casts of fruits, household objects, and toys–animals were used for the identification. It is revealed that representatives of the studied monkey species are able to compare and identify three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional images and to extract identical attributes during solution of visual tasks of different degrees of complexity in variants of the methodical approach choice on model. Under conditions of our experiments, the capuchins, macaques, and chimpanzee performed a direct transfer of the elaborated principle of the solution. There have also been established peculiarities of behavior of different species of the lower and higher monkeys. Macaques rhesuses had difficulties when solving complex combinatory tasks. Capuchins displayed pronounced negative emotions and characteristic patterns of defensive behavior at demonstration and during identification of two- and three-dimensional objects of the toys–animals type. Unlike the lower monkeys, the chimpanzee, when presented with toys–animals, did not change the level of their correct answers and demonstrated pronounced play reactions.     

Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods,Rethinking Materiality

How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the law's ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The assumption is that what changes is not the shape of the box called invention, but the objects that are made to fit that box. But in fact while new technologies produce new innovations, the very concept of invention has not just expanded but undergone substantial qualitative change. The wave of inventive activity associated with the industrial revolution led to an unprecedented reliance on patenting, but as the law articulated ways to protect those inventions, it also took their emblematic form—the machine—as the template for the legal concept of invention. Analogously, the recent reinterpretations of patent law to enable the protection of living organism and biological entities have challenged and modified the traditional machine-inspired concept of invention, initiating a trend toward a more developmental one. The information-based inventions discussed here may elicit a reconceptualization of invention in yet another way.     

The Innovative Materiality of Revitalization Movements: Lessons from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

ABSTRACT  Although Wallace's revitalization movement model has been successfully utilized in scores of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of societies throughout the world, revitalization is considerably less well documented in archaeological contexts. An examination of the materiality of revitalization movements affords an opportunity to redress this lack by investigating how material culture creates and constrains revitalization phenomena. In this article, I reconsider the revitalization model through a case study focusing on the archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, emphasizing the central role of materiality in the formation and mediation of these movements. In doing so, I examine the archaeological signatures of revitalization movements, concluding that they are highly negotiated and heterogeneous phenomena and that the materiality of these episodes cultivates cultural innovation. I also seek to demonstrate that the distinctive types of material culture produced through revitalization are not epiphenomenal but, rather, are crucially constitutive of revitalizing processes.     

A Warrior Celebration: The Photographs of Tom Jones

The photographs of Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) portray American Indian warriors, but not as the stereotyped lone warrior, separated from family or community. Jones photographs Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) warriors rooted in a place and a specific set of traditions, but still part of the contemporary world. His images from the Ho-Chunk Memorial Day Powwow, held each year in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, celebrate the connections between Ho-Chunk warriors, past and present, and their homes, families and communities.