The Unfamiliar (E-Journal)
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The Story of the End of the World: An Alternative Approach to the Future at the Japanese Museum of Science and Innovation
Get PDFThe following discussion is a critical assessment of the “Story of the End of the World: 73 Questions We Must Answer”, an exhibition at the Miraikan. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on the 11th of March 2011 created the necessity for collective catharsis regarding various threats posed by the future. I will argue that the outcome of the exhibition differs significantly in content, presentation and meaning to the more conventional visions of the future presented elsewhere in the museum
an etymology of desire: de sidere, from the stars
Get PDFThis poem attempts to explore the dynamics between time, desire, and our capacity to dream, and how that in turn impacts our perceptions of ourselves
‘DEMOCRATIC’ KNOWLEDGE: AN OASIS OR A MIRAGE?
Get PDFThis paper examines what I have termed \u27democratic\u27 knowledge: the participation of lay people in processes of sharing and producing knowledge on the internet and its associated advantages and disadvantages
Ossuaries and Charnel Houses: Death, Resurrection and the Living
No full textDuring my studies on the connections between Black Death and culture during the Renaissance, I have come across more than once with a less known aspect of Renaissance Europe which has particularly attracted my attention. I am speaking about the concept/place of “ossuary”, a room or set of rooms containing hundreds of human bones (often arranged in the most peculiar forms) gradually becoming places of cult charged with symbolic meaning. In this brief article, I would like to illustrate the ways in which ossuaries reflect conceptions of death and resurrection through two relevant examples.
Remembering the Gulag in post-Soviet Magadan
Get PDFThis essay explores the relationship between place and memory in the former Gulag periphery of Magadan in northeastern Russia. Located on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea, the city of Magadan emerged as a gateway to the sparsely populated region after the discovery of gold in the late 1920s. Today, a huge monument, the Mask of Sorrow, raised upon a hill on the margin of the city, commemorates the hundreds of thousands of prison- ers who were shipped to Magadan during the dictatorship of Stalin to work in the region’s newly established gold mines. Crucial to the region’s development was the construction of the legendary Kolyma Road between the port of Magadan and the industrial areas at the up- per Kolyma River. Built by prisoners under the most adverse conditions, this road is often referred to as ‘Road of Bones’. This essay demonstrates how the Mask of Sorrow and the Kolyma Road, during particular commemorative events, participate in the enactment of a historical landscape that bears the potential for a ritual return of the victims of the Gulag
REPRESENTING RADIATION RISK
Get PDFIn lieu of an abstract the first paragraph:Consisting of moving subatomic particles, radioactivity is invisible, has no smell and makes no sound. Its presence can only be detected with Geiger counters and other measuring instruments. Its transformations and symptoms are more real to us: the iconic mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, barrels of nuclear waste, cancer increases in exposed populations, or contaminated wastelands. Recognition of radioactive risk, or its denial, depends on those who employ the measuring instruments, assess cancer or toxicity rates, or set safety standards. In a society greatly relying on empirical evidence and technical expertise, it is scientists who have first access to knowledge about radioactivity.
INNOVATIVE WAYS TO ACCESS KNOWLEDGE: UNDERSTANDING ANTHROPOLOGY THROUGH OBJECTS
Get PDFThis piece examines the \u27Anthropology in 100 Objects\u27 exhibition during Innovative Learning Week at the University of Edinburgh as innovative teaching/learning tool
NORMATIVE HORIZONS: READING ENSLAVED AFRICANS’ AUTONOMY THROUGH PRIMARY SOURCES IN COLONIAL BRAZIL
Get PDFThis essay is an exploration of historical knowledge: how it is authored and, more importantly, how we can access it. Through in-depth inspection and careful combination of primary source documents from 1690 to 1806, the text is a result of my attempts to reconstruct Brazilian slave autonomy as a kind of historical knowledge. Disassembling the language that framed colonial encounters, I argue that historical knowledge from primary texts must first be framed within the everyday ‘encounters’ of others in 18th century Brazil social life. Utilising a socially situated textual analysis, the essay accesses the often overwritten autonomy of slaves through historical documents: (1) the text of a friar writing on slaves’ fantastic religious accomplishments, (2) two colonial mandates prohibiting slaves’ promiscuous and suggestive fashions, (3) a history of slave rebellion against colonial powers and (4) a list of demands composed by slaves offered as a peace treaty to their owner. Through exploring the ‘normative horizons’ of the authorial point-of-view of each text, what follows is not merely an ethnohistorical experiment in accessing historical knowledge, but an ethnographic exposition in imagining the lives and futures of slaves in the past