Abstracts - Ethnography of the Ordinary

Brian Durrans: Encapsulating the Everyday

Speaking of the present to the future and of the imagined future to the present, time capsules confront, tackle, and alternatively embrace or evade the everyday. Looking down on the ordinary or cheerfully at one with it, time capsules are simultaneously expressive and instrumental, clichéd yet obscure, warmly domestic or coldly official, the business of committees and of eccentrics, homely or conniving, known to all, understood by none. I review the field from the perspective of what these diverse endeavours make of the everyday in the conventional sense of normally overlooked experience.
Such experience has long been cherished by poets, is more salient in popular than elite culture, and is only recently finding recognition in discourses about the ‘micro-geography’ of everyday life, about the ephemeral and the sensual. Resolutely privileging the tangible for sampling and transmission, time capsules reflect both the altruism and the naiveté of their authors but rarely do justice to hidden dimensions of the ordinary even when critical of gaps in the orthodox samplings like museums, libraries, history books or TV documentaries. They also reflect the power of publicity, long hypnotised by the subject, to represent, even to their advocates and compilers, a populist parody of time capsules mainly designed to attract publicity. Time capsules chart the fault lines of divided societies, but few are more representative of the everyday than their creators and most less so.
As blogging and digital archiving gain ground, future encapsulators may be inspired less by new technologies than by the appeal of shrinking time and the prospect of telling stories they suspect other archivists will continue to miss. I suggest, finally, how more might be learnt about this practice, while there is an opportunity, on the way to interpreting it more resourcefully.

Shaun Hides: Collecting nothing, collecting denial

By considering practices which clearly sit at the margins of what can properly be described as collecting, it may become possible to usefully interrogate both the notions of collection as a well-formulated cultural /institutional practice, and perhaps more interestingly, to re-appraise the contemporary place of materiality within contemporary culture.
This paper will examine two cases of the 'over-investment' of value in objects - the 'obsessive' collection of trivia and junk, and waste made by “hoarders” and the so-called ‘retained organs scandal’ to reveal both something of the nature of these material 'discourses' in themselves, their politics and poetics (if such exists), and the challenge of constituting discourses around that materiality. As such, this paper is part of an attempt to identify a mode of writing about the material specificity of the thing which re-works Marx's characterisation of the over-investment in objects - fetishism - as "the religion of sensual desire', One tactic is to treat these objects as cultural-political symptoms, another is to work towards a discourse on the sensual, a mode of address capable of allowing an analytic of sensual desire (pace Kant - and Foucault) and a poetics of the artefact.

Jack Lohman: Managing the Mundane of the Museum of London

 

Anouska Komlosy - From Rags to Riches: Cultural Knowledge and the Everyday

This paper addresses the issue of why we need to collect the everyday. What can collections of such material teach us and how should such material be collected?

To answer these questions I shall refer to a simple outfit, now a ‘collection’ that once belonged to a Tai female elder in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan. It consists of a tube skirt; white cotton inner vest; white cotton blouse and wooden prayer beads. Like all artefacts the outfit holds within it spheres within spheres of encoded knowledge. Understood within its ethnographic context this small collection can tell us about Tai cosmological understandings, perceptions of gender and ethnicity and about everyday economic transactions and societal change. The paper will explore the history and meanings of this outfit and examine the complex relationship between the elder who made and wore it and the ethnographic knowledge it can both generate and encapsulate. Such collections provide a site of dialogue between source communities and those of us who want to understand those communities and encourage others to learn about them. In the stories they can tell they give us with a widow through which to approach and be inspired by other ways of being.

Robert Opie – The Everyday: trash or treasure?

Robert Opie has been saving examples of contemporary packs and promotion for the past forty years. In addition he has assembled material that tells the story of our consumer society and how it has evolved since Victorian times. Following an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975, he established the Museum of Brands in 1984 which recently moved to London.

Robert Opie will talk about the importance of saving the everyday things of society. “It is often the ordinary items of daily life that typify a culture and lifestyle, more than any extraordinary thing can ever do.”

Richard Wilk: Collecting as Common Difference: the Internet and New Sources of Authority

In this paper I argue that collecting can be seen as a way in which people simultaneously organize the differences among things, and the differences among people. Using the framework of ‘common difference’ I focus attention on the ways collectors focus attention on particular forms of difference, which are organized through classifying practices. In the process other forms of difference are ignored, suppressed and unauthorized. The acts of collecting also organize people into communities with recognizable and domesticated differences. There are therefore two distinct levels of selection in collecting: 1) among the various varieties defined by recognized dimensions of difference, and 2) the authorization of which differences are legitimate and recognizable. I argue that the explosion of collecting through computer-mediated communications has expanded and enriched the former form of selection, but is transforming the latter, by creating competition for legitimizing authority, opening up the possibilities for more ‘extreme’ kinds of competition among collectors. By making it possible for anything and everything to be collected, the internet also undercuts previous forms of curatorial selection.