Journal of Material Culture

The article discusses the role of online food practices and narratives in the formation of transnational identities and communities. Data has been collected in the framework of a doctoral research project undertaken by the author between 2009 and 2012 with a follow-up in 2014. The working hypothesis of this article is that the way Italians talk about food online and offline, the importance they give to ‘authentic’ food, and the way they share their love for Italian food with other members of the same diaspora reveal original insights into migrants’ personal and collective identities, their sense of belonging to the transnational community and processes of adjustment to a new place. Findings suggest that online culinary narratives and practices shape the Italian diaspora in unique ways, through the development of forms of virtual commensality and online mealtime socialization on Skype and by affecting intra and out-group relationships, thus working as elements of cultural identification and differentiation.

This article examines a collection of miniature objects, now held in museum collections, which were originally made by a Sámi political prisoner in Norway during the mid-19th century as part of an educational programme. The author draws on recent developments in the theory of miniaturization to consider these miniatures as examples of prison op-art autoethnography: communicative devices which seek to address broad and complex social issues through the process of the creation and distribution of semiophorically functionless mimetic objects of reduced scale and complexity, and which reflect the restrictions of incarcerated artistic expression and the questions this raises regarding authenticity and hybridity.

Classic community studies have identified several ways in which material exchanges lie at the heart of kinship relationships and informal networks of support in working-class communities. This article re-examines some key emergent issues in light of social shifts that have occurred in East Manchester, a locality drastically reshaped by de-industrialization and numerous phases of urban regeneration. The ethnography explores how a group of older women made community in these neighbourhoods, which they perceive to be fragmenting through their extended families and friendship networks. The women continued to engage in strategies to support and care for each other and sustain social ties through the exchange of material objects. The analysis suggests that theories of gift exchange and material culture offer useful resources to reinvigorate community studies literature by identifying the ways in which gifts and objects remain central to sustaining kinship and friendship relationships.

This article explores the material and digital culture of warfarin, one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the world. The author uses the drug’s 60-year history to describe its materiality and use, showing how and why it has become an informed material. Three ethnographic cases then show where warfarin has produced and is now reproduced by three types of information: NHS Trust guidelines, genetic codes and the INR (International Normalized Ratio). When a drug becomes so entangled with informational and digital technologies, it becomes reliant on them for its proper and safe use; it can no longer be just an informed material but is a digitally informed one.

In this article, the authors explore the potential of state-sponsored memory sites to engender multi-chronological and sensorial accounts of the past, and create new meanings for visitors in doing so. They do this by recounting first-hand experiences of the Camp des Milles, a Second World War internment and deportation camp in the south of France, near Aix-en-Provence. Inaugurated in 2012, in addition to being an official lieu de mémoire, Camp des Milles also has an explicit pedagogical function in seeking to raise awareness of racism and anti-Semitism, and how to combat it. The article hinges on accounts of a visit to the site and accompanying photographs, which together provide an empirical starting point for a series of linked concepts that frame their arguments. Beginning with Manning’s notion of the ‘minor gesture’ (The Minor Gesture, 2016), the authors build on recent work on more-than-representational approaches to memory and place, and draw in explorations of materiality and industrial ruins. Overall, they call for a more subtle and atmospheric understanding of state-sponsored memory sites, an understanding that attends to the emergent experiences people have in them, which allow us to understand their affective impact more clearly, and thus their potential to promulgate and intensify their messages.

This article focuses on the global traffic in images relating to Kadiwéu culture in South America, analysing the extent to which they are entangled in the group’s continuing sense of presence. It begins with Kadiwéu designs as they appeared in the sketchbook of the artist–explorer Guido Boggiani in the late 19th century. It then explores the mapping of Kadiwéu territory and the practices and protocols informing a politics of land rights, cultural property and economic survival, looking in particular at the commissioning of Kadiwéu designs for a housing estate and an associated exhibition in Berlin early in the 21st century. By developing a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art that considers the transnational networks across different times and spaces, including the case of a transcultural history of copyright, the article seeks to contribute to the ongoing re-thinking of the colonial visual archive and its afterlife.

Protestants mobilize objects such as ‘Holy Land’ flowers, Jordan River stones, vials of Dead Sea water, sand from Lake Tiberias, and Golgotha soil as potent metonymic resources, promising a kind of direct access to the scriptural past and its sacred stories. This article uses this case of biblical landscape items to reflect on the historic ambivalence that characterizes Protestant relations with religious materiality. Building on scholarship that has demonstrated the prolific role of religious materiality in Protestant ritual and everyday lifeworlds, the author extends this analysis by asking: under what conditions do Protestants experience materiality as untroubled and under what conditions is a more anxious disposition activated? To differentiate among conditions, the author proposes that it is helpful to conceptualize Protestant engagements with materiality vis-à-vis legitimized frames (e.g. pedagogy, devotion, evangelism, entertainment). Drawing together archival and ethnographic data, primarily among US Protestants, the article argues that when Protestants function within legitimized frames they are prone to embrace biblical landscape items, but when they find themselves out of frame, their engagement with this particular species of materiality becomes troubled.