Journal of Material Culture

We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography. There is a preconception of things being relatively stable, fixed and inert entities. In this paper, I suggest exploring the ordinary life of things, accounting for the interweaving of the human life with nonhuman materials. The mutual becomings of various entities, both humans and nonhumans, create assemblages that emerge from the interaction between their parts. Assembling things works to conceptualize how mutual entanglements create new possible worldings among a contemporary indigenous group in low land Latin-America. Ethnographically I trace the production process of hammocks and other types of items among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, and how it entangles different ‘others’ like traders, tourists, missionaries and anthropologists and how these encounters affect the process of assembling things. Assembling things draws attention to how heterogenic component parts construe temporary but stable configurations that partake in people's worldmaking efforts. I use ethnography from the Warao and how their crafts, especially hammocks, become differently as they entangle various assemblages. I investigate three fields of assemblages in order to discern how the human/nonhuman entanglements unfold, namely household, market and museum.

Heritage has been established as a core factor in shaping identity and community. Alongside the human suffering and mass displacement arising from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, there has been increased attention on heritage as a victim of war. While scholarship has predominantly focussed on the impacts of conflict on built heritage, through semi-structured interviews and oral histories produced in collaboration with three Syrian artisans displaced to Amman, I unravel the relationship between artisanal crafts, the intangible practices that manifest in them, and the spatial environments through which they are conceived. As such, I highlight processes of change occurring through migration in relation to this heritage, to illustrate how reconfigurations of space have led to reconfigurations of craft. By suggesting an approach that emphasises the reconfiguration of heritage rather than its destruction, I accentuate the resilience of people and processes of un- and re-making.

This paper describes the cooking installations found inside a specific building, Building C, in the Late Neolithic site of Kleitos 1, their morphological and functional diversification, how they changed and evolved throughout time, and their spatial arrangements. Building C provided the stratigraphic information required by the authors to discern two distinct chronological phases, during which a significant change took place in the characteristics and organisation of the cooking facilities in the building. Building C underwent a transformation from a household unit during phase A to a medium-scale gathering place, capable of hosting a certain number of people, in Phase B. The identification of Building C as a medium-scale gathering place is based on the quantity and quality of its cooking facilities in comparison both to findings in other buildings on the site and to two well-explored Neolithic contexts of large-scale gatherings in Northern Greece, Makriyialos and Promachon-Topolniča. This is the first time a medium-scale gathering place has been recorded in Neolithic Greece. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of multi-scalar gatherings and the broader variability witnessed in social dynamics and site organisation in the Late Neolithic period of Northern Greece (late 6th to early 5th millennium cal BC).

In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization of relics enabled a subversive, quasi-mystical counter tradition that located loving experiences within the unmediated physicality, or thingness, of Christian artifacts themselves. Moving next to Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), the article explores a curious case of self-negating devotion to fire. While contextualizing the saint's love against a background of scholastic materialism and ecstatic mysticism, it explores how fire gained a unique onto-theological status as the material essence of both love and the heavens in the 1200s. Finally, turning to love for animals, the analysis explores the astonishing care shown to falcons by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d.1250). While surveying a series of trends in medieval ways of loving creatures, the article stresses how the emperor's radical empathy for beasts allowed him temporarily to surrender his sovereignty, melding the interest of king and bird. Just like the mystical theology that underpinned much of medieval devotion, it argues, these three loving encounters were all essentially structured as self-annihilating journeys into a “oneness” with the material landscape. Considering the ongoing threads of this forgotten type of self-erasing love, these medieval encounters can have intriguing implications for debates in the environmental humanities today.

What are the social dimensions involved in the technology of traditional tattooing among the Igorots of north Luzon, the Philippines? Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork among the Igorots, an examination of the varying traditional tattooing practices of these ethnic groups demonstrates that the significance of batok (traditional tattoos) does not only lie in their symbolic and aesthetic qualities, but also in the rituals performed, the taboos observed, and the technology employed in the production of tattoos. The tattoo's appearance on skin is also dependent on the method or technique employed in the production of designs; the varying pigments used to produce a blackish, greenish, or bluish color in tattoos that mark the identity of a group; and the symmetry and arrangement of tattoos. More importantly, this paper explores the social and cultural practices involved in the production of batok for these to achieve the efficacy of purpose and function. This paper examines how the technology of tattoos, along with rituals and their associated taboos, contributes to the production of what is classified among the Butbut of Kalinga as: whayyu or maphod (“beautiful”), rather than lagwing (“unpleasant”); unfinished versus finished; and “thin or thick” tattoos. Traditional tattooing was formerly practiced in the confines of collective and place-based rituals among the people of the Philippine Cordillera. However, the rarity, rawness, and the particularity of the technology used in the production of these tattoos render them more “authentic,” as such, traditional tattooing has entered contemporary tattoo practices in the Philippines as a form of revival.

The pax was an object intended both to symbolise and to enforce peace among Christian congregations in pre-modern Europe and so when a man named John Browne smashed one over the head of the parish clerk during one of the holiest services of the year in a church in southeast England something had evidently gone wrong. This article is dedicated to explaining not only why Browne reacted with such fury at precisely the moment when he was expected to do the opposite but also why the pax and the clerk were chosen as his victims. The pax's material and visual qualities are integral, and overlooked, parts of this story but it is only by relating them to its representational and institutional contexts that Browne's actions begin to make sense. By integrating the material and the semiotic in this way, this article posits a conceptual structure for explicating not only an important dimension of the relationship between materiality, representation and affectivity but also how such relationships can, indeed must, be historicised to particular objects, ideologies and institutions.