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“Sing Red to Fight Darkness”: Chinese Urban Development as Apocalypse

July 23, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“Yes, people are constructed by their material world, but often they are not themselves the agents behind that material world through which they must live” (Miller 2009: 84). “The apocalyptic describes not just the spilling forth of the unseen, but also of the undifferentiated matter of the possible, of what could have been and was not, of what neither came to be nor what went away” (Williams 2011: 6). While in Dalian last month I found myself with a free […]

Categories: China, End of Times, Material Culture, Mythologies, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: apocalypse, Chinese Communist Party, corruption, 红色年代, Dalian, Daniel Miller, Evan Calder Williams, 钉子户, homes, Mao Zedong, nail houses, neighborhood, Omega Man, security, slogans, surveillance, tea, urban planning, 口号, 拆, 人情味

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The Mini Museum: An Alchemy of Value

February 20, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

How small can an object be and still have value? How can a valuable object be fragmented to the point of destruction—where each individual piece is so small as to be nearly valueless—and yet when collected together with other basically valueless fragments become something completely different—something more valuable? The formula is a strange alchemy of division which might look something like this: Valuable object —> valueless fragments —> combined with other fragments —> more valuable collection An interesting Kickstarter, The Mini […]

Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Museums, Value • Tags: Celeste Olalquiaga, collection, Hans Fex, Kickstarter, Mini Museum, reliquary

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“Moroccan” (Tourist) Things

January 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Representation, Souvenirs, Tourism • Tags: Morocco, Orientalism, souvenir, tourism, tourist experience, travel

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Sleeping Under a Bridge in Shanghai

October 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday, while walking along the Suzhou River in Shanghai, I came across an area under a bridge where a bunch of migrant workers were living. They weren’t around–presumably they were working at their day jobs. Walking by, I was struck by the belongings of one person. They were carefully laid out under the bridge as if in a room at home. The bedroll was neatly folded over, and bags and boxes and a cup and a bowl were all meticulously […]

Categories: China, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Urban, Work • Tags: homeless, migrant worker, Shanghai

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Among Warm Objects

September 29, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“These wild objects, stemming from indecipherable pasts, are for us the equivalent of what the gods of antiquity were, the ‘spirits’ of the place. Like their divine ancestors, these objects play roles of actors in the city, not because of what they do or say but because their strangeness is silent, as well as their existence, concealed from actuality. Their withdrawal makes people speak—it generates narratives—and allows action; through its ambiguity, it ‘authorizes’ spaces of operations.” —Michel de Certeau, “Ghosts […]

Categories: Antiques, Collecting, Consumption, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Value • Tags: carnivalesque, commodity chain, flâneur, global commodity, Junk Bonanza, maker culture, memory, Michel de Certeau, nostalgia, patina, practice, Shakopee, shopping, souvenir, vintage, warm objects

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The Chinese Businessman and His Magic

June 20, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] Earlier this summer, just outside of Shenyang, China, the group with which I was traveling stopped for a visit to a small […]

Categories: China, Collecting, Corporate Culture, Material Culture, Objects of Power • Tags: buddha, 貔貅, guangong, guanyu, manufacturing, pixiu, Shenyang, 关羽, 沈阳

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Good Luck With Your New Car in Shenyang

June 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

During a few days in Shenyang I noticed a number of cars that had little pieces of red cloth tied on their tires. Actually, once I noticed the pieces of cloth I started seeing them everywhere. A local acquaintance explained to me that it was a local custom to tie a piece of red cloth in this way on the tires of new cars—to bring the driver of the car good luck. Often the cloth was then left on the […]

Categories: China, Everyday Things, Material Culture • Tags: automobile, local custom, red cloth, Shenyang, tires, 沈阳

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TARDIS Value: Blue Box as Totem and Fetish

June 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

There is a lot of Doctor Who going around these days. My teenage self—the closeted geek who stayed up late on Fridays and Saturdays to catch episodes on my local public TV channel—would be very happy to see the show’s resurgent global popularity. I even found an advertisement that used his image on the streets of Beijing a few months back. Of course there is a big difference between Doctor Who of the 1970s and 1980s and the post-2005 reanimated […]

Categories: Anthropology, China, Consumption, Games, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Science Fiction, TV, Value • Tags: Barnes and Noble, Branding, Doctor Who, Evans-Pritchard, Karl Marx, Monopoly, TARDIS, totems, Yahtzee

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