Journal of Material Culture

This article examines British action in the South Atlantic by applying the concept of praxis - or practical action - to the analysis of the materiality of social relations. This is achieved through the investigation of ships and the biography of their objects, identifying patterns of production and consumption. I concentrate on local scales looking at objects and the social relations they construct in Royal Navy ships and the different ways that identities are expressed and projected. I particularly focus on a case study: the pottery assemblage of sloop of war His Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Swift (1763-1770) located in Puerto Deseado (Santa Cruz Province, Argentina). By utilizing the concept of praxis, this article goes beyond a descriptive analysis of wrecks by exploring them and their cargoes as embodiments of 18th-century social relations. More importantly, it will challenge traditional maritime approaches providing a different perspective that emphasizes the richness, diversity and complexity of British action at the end of the 18th century.

This article explores the way patients in a medium secure psychiatric unit relate to the institution through the decoration of bedrooms and self-decoration through clothing and accessories. The ethnography reveals that a refusal to decorate can be contrasted with an extreme concentration upon clothing and style. These two material genres are compared in terms of the potential ease with which they lend themselves to different forms of objectification, the values, uses or discourses which are constituted and developed through these acts of objectification and the constraints on the ability of agents to express them. The evidence suggests that patients continue to conceive of themselves primarily in terms of another potential life outside the institution, attempting to ‘live within’ material cultures that orientate them towards the future and to external relationships.

In the 1880s and 1890s, British officials worried that traditional Indian design was disappearing in the face of rapid westernization. But their idea of what constituted ‘traditional’ design was itself new, forged first at international exhibitions and then in the context of Indian artisanal and consumer experimentation with novel combinations of foreign styles and objects. Indeed, it was the latter which prompted British art officials in India to call for a return to tradition. But traditionalism in design was not just in reaction to Indian cosmopolitan tendencies; it tried to achieve its own, slightly different cosmopolitanism by Indianizing western forms with the application of pure Indian ornament. I argue that it was in the intersection of these competing visions - Indian and British, metropolitan and colonial - of how to use and fill homes with new goods that a new definition of Indian traditional design emerged in this period.

This article explores the relationship between aspects of copyright law (as understood in France), copying as a practice employed or condemned by fashion designers (sometimes both at the same time), and the meaning that ‘authorship’ has for the political economy of fashion production. The empirical substance is the result of 18 months of research in the fashion industry in two locations: Paris and Tehran. Foucault’s archaeological method applied to ‘the author’ points to the constellation of conditions that make the existence of the author possible. This study follows ‘the author’ in two differently located fields of power, interrelated through similar and communicating practices. The first part of the article presents the historic formation of legal authorship in the (Paris) fashion industry, the practices of authoring fashion, and the current legal debates connected to the European Law. The second part is an ethnography of the dynamic of authoring practices in Tehran.

By exploring the disordering effects of ruination, this article critically explores the ways in which the material world is normatively ordered. The yet to be disposed of objects in ruins have been identified as ‘waste’, an assignation which testifies to the power of some to normatively order the world, but also is part of an excess, impossible to totally erase, which contains rich potential for reinterpretation and reuse because it is under-determined. Through processes of decay and non-human intervention, objects in ruins gradually transform their character and lose their discreteness, they become charged with alternative aesthetic properties, they impose their materiality upon the sensory experience of visitors, and they conjure up the forgotten ghosts of those who were consigned to the past upon the closure of the factory but continue to haunt the premises. In these ways, ruined matter offers ways for interacting otherwise with the material world.