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Tel: +44 20 7679 8644 E-mail: s.kuechler@ucl.ac.uk |
MA Anthropology, Religious Science, Sociology
Free University of Berlin, Germany 1981
PhD, Social Anthropology
London School of Economics and Political Sciences, 1985
Professor of Anthropology
Co-editor of Journal of Material Culture 1996-present
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Publications |
RESEARCH INTERESTS
The Material in Art and Design; The Nature of Innovation; the Cognitive Work of Beauty
Küchler is currently working on a new manuscript, which develops the theoretical implications of her past ethnographic research into the making of sculpture and the cognitive work of images. The Material Mind takes insights into the nature of innovation, won during long-term and collaborative research on the take up and transformation of cloth in the Pacific, to the context of the development of ‘mindware’ in laboratories. The manuscript offers a critical review of the existing theorisation of the aesthetics of the material [Materialästhetik] and sets out a new vision for the study of sculptural art and design, which takes into account the interface between the material and the cognitive as symptomatic of knowledge economies.
Geographical: South Pacific; Papua New Guinea, New Ireland; Polynesia, the Cook Islands. And laboratories.
INTERESTS RELATING TO PAST FIELDWORK
Research into the relation between remembering and image making, and into the place of material manufacture in gift exchange have shaped Küchler’s work on the sculptural arts of the Pacific. Ethnography provided the basis for a theoretical preoccupation with art and memory, and with the study of pattern, which more recently has led to a concern with the relation between counting and ‘material translation’, involving the at once gestured and cognitive mapping of lines to fit either limited or un-limited materials.
Theoretically, this work has led to a growing preoccupation with the difference made by the material to the aesthetics of cognitive mapping and its impact on the modelling of the biographical in social relations. Küchler’s forthcoming book on quilting in the Cook Islands [Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the Cook Islands, with Andrea Eimke, British Museum Press 2009] tests the hypothesis that the historical take-up of cloth as new material effected the framing of a new indigenous model of knowledge transfer networks in support of a burgeoning transnational community.
Methodologically, this research has provided the foundation for work on skeuomorphism, which traces a prototype across diverse materials; and with the cognitive translation of images against the background of ‘material knowledge, involving the transposition of perceptual qualities of materials onto their scientific properties and behaviours, as required for the recognition of ‘likeness’ in the absence of visual resemblance.
FUNDED RESEARCH
Jan 2008-Dec 2008: New Materials and New Technologies: Innovation, Future and Society, an ESRC funded competitive seminars grant, won jointly with Engineering at King’s College London.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/conferences/newmaterialsnewtechnologies/
Emerging from this seminar is a new project into the mobility of new materials.
September 2005-July2006: Invited Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin: The library research conducted during the year of residency concerned the evolving technology and fabrics supporting wearable computing and investigated its implications for the theory and methodology of material culture and anthropology. ‘Smart’ clothes and ambient intelligence provoke questions of how notions of mind and of life inform and are informed by prototyping, where it is the functionality of collections of artefacts which supports systemic relations between artefacts, and where a sociality with objects is mediated by such inter-artefactual relations. The initial work on the manuscript also concerned itself with a critique of current work on innovation, directing attention to the need for anthropological research to be conducted on the social history of the prototype in order to develop new methodologies and theories capable of handling emerging futures.
November 2004 – 2009: Sustainable Development in a Diverse World funded by the Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 7 (Contract no 513438). Responsible for Research theme 4.2: Cultural dialogue through art: diversity in the cultural arena. The research seeks to 1) understand the role of arts in fostering identity formation and intercultural dialogue, and how arts themselves transform and evolve in the process, thereby creating new forms of expression; 2) understand what kinds of contexts facilitate such processes and how we can contribute to creating those contexts.
A forthcoming publication related to this research is an annotated bibliography of diversity, written with Sandra Wallmann (Sussex Academic Press).
January 2001-2004: January 2001-2004: ESRC funded Project on “Clothing the Pacific: The Study of the Nature of Innovation.” (ROOO 23 91 98) (Research funding for 3 staff and 2 post-doctoral researchers). Director of collaborative research programme, UCL, Goldsmiths College, and The British Museum. The first project submitted under the auspices of The London Centre for Visual and Material Culture. The part historical, part contemporary project investigated the co-occurrence of the introduction of clothing into the Pacific and the conversion to Christianity. The research team investigated archives and collections and conducted primary fieldwork in a number of strategically placed areas. To my role as coordinator of research and output was also added primary ethnographic research which I conducted in the Cook Islands where highly innovative fabric quilts have taken over the role of Pandanus mats as exchange items. The research led to the theoretical exploration of material translation and the systemic relation between media and material technologies in the Pacific. Theoretically, this question of innovation and of a sociality with objects in societies where objects are tokens of knowledge, is currently being developed in relation to the development of ‘smart fabrics’ and ubiquitous computing. In relation to the Cook Island material, the implication for material culture was explored primarily in relation to the existing analysis of pattern as the starting point for an object based theory of knowledge, incorporating a mathematical and cognitive perspective on design.
The publication of Pacific Pattern (2005) with Thames&Hudson made it possible to shed light on the materiality of pattern in the everyday and to direct attention away from male-dominated ritual arts to works in fibre and fabric whose examples have lingered in collections and have largely been eclipsed from analytical perspective.
October 1998-October 2001 Trench Art: The Interdisciplinary Potential of an Undocumented Resource. British Academy Institutional Fellowship: Candidate Dr. N. Saunders’ UCL. This research is part of a wider concern with ‘recyclia,’ sacrificial economy and collecting which commenced during residency as Scholar at the Jean Paul Getty Centre for History of Art and the Humanities in 1995/96. The research project collected data around the fabrication and dissemination of remains of trench warfare in the form of images. Trench art, the evocative but misleading name given to a variety of three-dimensional objects made by soldiers and civilians in the context of war has had no fixed or agreed place, neither in the world of military collectables and memorabilia nor, more importantly, in academic discourse. The research into trench art was carried out by Dr. Nicholas Saunders, but was accompanied by my comparative study of things that are made out of discard.
October 1995-July 1996 The Nature of Sacrificial Economy: On Forgetting and Collecting. Scholar in Residence at J.P. Getty Centre for History of Art and Humanities. The study took as its subject the investigation of the ritual death and riddance of artefacts as point of departure for the rethinking of collecting: not as an enterprise guided solely by the intention of the collector, but facilitated above all by the mobility of artefacts which were conceived as Gifts to God. I argued that what we have in collections tells a story which has hardly been tapped; this is a story about the inciting of absence as privileged site of intellectual property and of resistance through acts of ritual consumption. The research culminated in an analysis of forgetting.
October 1991-July 1994 Images of Memory: Library Research Project funded by the British Academy. This research project gathered comparative data on the relation between remembering and representation from an interdisciplinary perspective.
October 1989-July 1990 Survey of Malanggan-Collections: Berlin, Hamburg, Basle, London, NewYork, Boston, Chicago. This research was supported by a J. Paul Getty Post-doctoral fellowship.
January 1982-April 1984, 1986 & 1987 Field-research: On malanggan-art, memory and sacrifice in New Ireland, PNG, and periodic return visits to Northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.
BOOK PUBLICATIONS
A1: Authored (co-authored) Books:
2002 Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice. Oxford: Berg (short-listed for the Folklore Prize of the Warburg Institute 2003)
2005 Pacific Pattern. London: Thames&Hudson; with Graeme Were and Photographer Glenn Jowitt
2009 (Jan) Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the Cook Islands London: British Museum Press
In preparation: The Material Mind: An Anthropology of Innovation and Material Aesthetic.
A2: Edited works:
2006 eds. The Handbook of Material Culture. With C. Tilley, M. Rowlands, W. Keane, P. Spyer. London: Sage
2005 eds. The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience. London: University College Press. With G. Were
2005 eds. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg With D. Miller
1999 eds. The Art of Forgetting Oxford: Berg with A. Forty
1991 eds. Images of Memory: On Representation and Remembering. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. With W. Melion
TEACHING
Since 2006 Professor in Anthropology
Teaching on Anthropology of Art and Design, Melanesian ethnography and the Masters Programme in Material and Visual Culture.
Earlier positions:
1985-1986 New Blood lectureship in History of Art at The University of East Anglia
1986-1990 Director of Interdisciplinary Programme, The Johns Hopkins University
CURRENT PHD STUDENTS
2003-present Amar Mall – Mathematics and Personhood in India. ESRC funded
2004-present Fabio Gygi – Hoarding and Collecting in Japan – Overseas, Japan Foundation
2005 – Damon Dennis – Scribes and the Second-hand Book Trade in Morocco. ESRC funded
2005- Oliver Deepwell – An Anthropology of the Kabala. AHRC funded
2007 – Zoe Roberston – Indigo-production in South-West China.
2007 – Carlos Miranda – Autobiographical Memory and an Anthropology of Contemporary Art
2008 – Peter Oakley - The meanings and agency of gold amongst goldworkers. AHRC funded
2008 – Joanna Wilson – Cloth and Loss in Japan
RECENT PHD STUDENTS
2002-2007 Nicolette Makovicky - Lace in Slovakia. Funded by the Danish Government
2002-2007 Adeline Trude - Pattern, Knowledge, and ‘Wearable Technology’: The Case of Wax Print Cloth ESRC funded
1999-2002 Graeme Were - Mathematics, Anthropology, and the Analysis of Pattern: the Kapkap of New Ireland. ESRC funded
1998-2003 Lucy Norris - The Recycling of Clothing in urban India. ESRC funded
1998-2002 Haidy Geismar - Art and the Market in Vanuatu, South Pacific. ESRC funded
1997-2001 Diana Young - The Colour of Things: the Pitinjiarra in South-western Australia. ESRC funded
1995-2000 Susannah Kelly - Mats and Memory in Vanuatu, South Pacific. ESRC funded
1995-2000 Chloe Colchester - Barkcloth in Fiji, South Pacific. ESRC funded
1994-1999 Sean Kingston - Memory and Imagery in Siar, Southern New Ireland, PNG. ESRC funded
Languages
German (mother tongue) and French reading
Prizes
1986 - John McKenzie Prize for best dissertation, LSE
2001 - Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, UCL, Prize for Teaching Excellence
