MUSEUM FATIGUE

Mystery Object #18: Foreigner Costume

May 30, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“Hi, I’m a foreigner.” Over twenty years ago, while shopping at a store in Japan I came across a party novelty “foreigner” (gaijin) costume set–for dressing as a foreigner at parties. In this case it meant a specific kind of foreigner. The set came complete with a large white nose and two tape-on blue eyes. I immediately bought the kit figuring that I would use it in a future anthropology class. Unfortunately the costume got lost in some move or […]

Categories: Bodies, Mystery Objects, Race, Representation, Toys • Tags: blue eyes, costume, gaijin, nose

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Midway Conversations 2014: Neighborhood Documentary Projects Premiere

May 21, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

On May 20th from 5:30-7:30pm at a local neighborhood venue, the Turf Club, this spring’s Visual Anthropology class premiered their final mini-documentary projects to a packed house of 100-120 people. This was the second such public event (the first was written about here) and the first to actually be pulled off during finals week at the end of the semester. Together the students, their collaborators and other interested neighbors, friends and family came together to enjoy the documentaries along with bags […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Documentary, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Hamline Midway, Hamline University, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Midway Conversations, neighborhood, neighborhood research

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Museum Fatigue Reads, May 17, 2014

May 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Diagrams in Anthropology: Lines and Interactions Utopian Origins of Restroom Symbols The Special Obligations of Tenured Faculty After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen Young Chinese Maoists Set Up “Hippy” Commune Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Book) 为什么会没有中国队长？(Why Don’t We Have a Captain America?) The Search for General Tso – Trailer from Wicked Delicate Films on Vimeo. Marxism and the Critique of Value (Book) Wages for Facebook The Sad, Slow Death of America’s Retail Workforce The Postcapital Economy […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: cinema, diagrams, Facebook, food, General Tso, Historical Films, Karl Marx, labor, Logistics, Mao, Mars, nostalgia, symbols, Tenured Faculty, value, video games

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Patrick Wilken’s Biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss

May 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I just finished a very enjoyable read—Patrick Wilcken’s biography Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology. I picked it up used at a local Minneapolis Bookseller, Magers and Quinn late last week. Billed as “the first biography in English” of its subject, it was not something I could turn down. For years I have enjoyed teaching Tristes Tropiques in my Anthropology of Travel class—Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists and I read some of his work in graduate school—but never really had an impression […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Nostalgia, Objects of Power • Tags: biography, Bororo, Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mato Grosso, Musée du quai Branly, Patrick Wilcken, structural anthropology, Tristes Tropiques

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Mystery Object #17: The Walking Taco

May 4, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This weekend while at the Comic Con in Minneapolis I happened upon the most fascinating food abomination—The Walking Taco. It is basically a bag of Doritos sliced along one side with a scoop of meat, topped with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, salsa, cheese and a dollop of sour cream. While I was happy to see that the food didn’t generate tons of trash by using disposable styrofoam and plastic, that joy was tempered by the fact that the “food” was basically […]

Categories: Food, Mystery Objects • Tags: Doritos, fast food, Walking Taco

Haunting the Campus, Making Spaces

April 30, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

In spite of the overcast skies, students in Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists fanned out across campus to renarrate its spaces in an application of concepts we have been discussing in class. This is the second year I have done this with the class and it seems to be an enjoyable exercise. This year I also went to great pains to alert any possible member of the campus control, command and management authority that we were doing this activity—so that students would […]

Categories: Assignments, Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Space

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Mystery Object #16: Chocolate Cross for Easter

April 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

While at the checkout counter at a local grocery store last week I noticed a chocolate cross for sale as Easter candy. Made by a well-known local chocolatier, Abdallah, it immediately it struck me as curious. I suppose the sweet object could be interpreted as a creative extension of the chocolate Easter bunny into the realm of religious observance. As religious icon the cross is a powerful religious symbol—indeed evoking the death and ascendence of a God—the cornerstone of […]

Categories: Mystery Objects • Tags: Abdallah Chocolates, chocolate, cross, Easter, holiday, Sidney Mintz, sugar

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Museum Fatigue Reads, April 12, 2014

April 12, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

香港將於33年後毀滅 Hong Kong will be destroyed after 33 years Tiananmen Conference 2014: Keeping the Memory Alive at Harvard Say Goodbye to ‘Peaceful Unification’ Medicinal Soft Drinks and Coca-Cola Fiends: The Toxic History of Soda Pop Jail House Recipes: Prison Cuizine Jennifer 8 Lee: The Hunt For General Tso Ephemera: Ethics of the Brand Why We’re in a New Gilded Age Aral: Fishing […]

Categories: Food, Surveillance • Tags: Aral Sea, brands, Coca-Cola, Hong Kong, Peaceful Unification, recipies, Science Fiction, storytelling, surveillance, Taiwan, Tiananamen, Tiananmen Conference, Windows XP

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Museum Fatigue Reads, April 5, 2014

April 5, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Mustang Wanted Compilation Google Glass Diaries The Camera That Changed the World People’s Park Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life The Dawn of Modern Tourism [Infographic] Open Access Maps at The New York Public Library The Global Flow of People: Global Migration from 1990-2010 The Incredible GDP Map that Shows Half of U.S. Output is Generated by a Few Cities Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon and its Workers Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption Climate Change 2014: Impacts, […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: Amazon, Climate Change, games, Google Glass, maps, migration, New York Public Library, Taiwan, tourism, visual anthropology

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Museum Fatigue Reads, March 22, 2014

March 22, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Social media offers an easy and satisfying way to quickly share interesting information with friends, students and colleagues. When I first joined Facebook, for example, I loved the fact that it was a passive way to post things without the temptation to impose myself on the inboxes of others. Read something interesting. Post. Someone likes it. They read it. Share. Frictionless joy all around. As the accretion of shares grown over years, however, finding an old post can be frustrating. […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: Facebook, high pants, Laura Croft, Michel Foucault, North Korea, selfie, Target, Umberto Eco, unions, value, video games, 打鬼子

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