MUSEUM FATIGUE

Michael Taussig on Field Notebooks—I Swear I Saw This

March 17, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“I think of the hard work I have done and even more of all the waiting and boredom as not exactly irrelevant but as nothing more than a necessary prelude for chance to show its hand” (Taussig 2011:59). Last night I finished reading Michael Taussig’s reflections on drawings in anthropological field notebooks (namely his) in his 2011 book, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (University of Chicago Press.) Similar to my experience with most of his […]

Categories: Anthropology, Drawing, Fieldwork, Quotes • Tags: drawings, fieldnotes, Georges Bataille, I Swear I Saw This, Joan Didion, John Berger, Michael Taussig, notebooks, roland barthes, Walter Benjamin

HU Visual Anthropology Class in the Local Newspaper

March 14, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I was really excited an proud to see that this semester’s Visual Anthropology class got a writeup in this past Monday’s local newspaper. Mila Koumpilova, an education reporter at the Pioneer Press, visited our class the week before, sat through some student projects, interviewed students and then went to observe a filming session with a student and neighbor. Her article, “Film anthropology class bridges gap between Hamline U and neighborhood,” does a great job summarizing the history, goals and pedagogy of the class in a […]

Categories: Anthropology, Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Hamline University, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, neighborhood, news, Robert Flaherty, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, student projects, Visual Anthropology Class

(Simple) Mobile Visual Ethnography Equipment

March 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I’m often telling folks that the goal of my visual anthropology class is not to make filmmakers, but to use basic equipment to have my students make films together with others… For the past few years, students in my class have been working with local volunteers from our university neighborhood—The Hamline Midway—to make simple films together. During the first half of the semester they get to know one another, and the students get to learn the equipment, by making a […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: FlipCam, FurryHead Windscreens, iPhone, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

Native Wear (for White Kids)

March 11, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

While shopping last week I snapped an image of some clothing that feature Native American imagery. Nearby were other items of clothing with some kind of faux native cloth or rug design. I’m surprised that such imagery still sells—retains some kind of exotic value—with the white middle class customers that I am sure are its target market. I guess the upscale “tribal fashion” trend of the past few years has finally arrived a the local mall. *UPDATE: Heidi Klum’s Redface […]

Categories: Consumption, Value • Tags: clothing, Native American, red face, tribal fashion

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Simulating Victor Turner’s Liminal of Pilgrimage on Campus

February 22, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Every other year I offer one of my favorite and longest-running classes, Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists—a class which surveys different genres of travel and voyaging historically and cross-culturally. Since travel and movement—questions of who travels, where, why and how—are central to the experience of being a person these days, I find the interesting theories and cases we examine in class to be easy for students to connect to their everyday experiences. Studying something as interesting and exciting as travel—something that is so […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Education, Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Space • Tags: assignments, campus space, liminal, pedagogy, Peter Haakon Thompson, pilgrimage, spatial practice, teaching, university, Victor Turner, www.tentservices.org

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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Memories: 128 Megabytes, $125 Dollars, Circa 2002

February 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

There is something melancholy about old technology. A few days ago, while cleaning my office, I came across a small, black, USB-powered, flash drive. It wasn’t just any drive, but the first drive—the first flash drive that I ever purchased. It brought back memories of my first teaching experiences, and its memory size amazed me. Back in the fall of 2002, I used a bit of one of my first real paychecks to buy the drive at CompUSA. It was […]

Categories: Everyday Things, Technology • Tags: Flash Drive, melancholy, Smart Drive, USB Drive, www.universalsmartdrive.com

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Shen Yun Buys The Front Page—Promises Authentic, Beautiful, Old “Culture”

February 2, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

As if junk mail spam-bombing college faculty and advertisements stuck up on community bulletin boards everywhere weren’t enough—this morning I awoke to find that the front page of our local community newspaper, The Saint Paul Pioneer Press had an advertisement for Falun Gong’s Shen Yun dance troupe. These guys have some seriously deep pockets and lots of energy to get out their message. OK, technically the advertisement wasn’t *on* the front page, it was the front page—enveloping the whole Sunday […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", Bodies, China, Mythologies • Tags: advertisement, culture, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Shen Yun

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Facebook’s Tiers of Selling Your Information

January 28, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“If you aren’t paying for the product, you’re the product” never really made much concrete sense until this morning. The folks over at Boing Boing posted an image from @TheBakeryLDN illustrating what companies know when customers login to their services via Facebook. I suppose much of this could be expected, I posted about the increasingly insistent and irritating way that Facebook tells me it wants my data a few months ago (“The Facebook Database Must Be Fed”) complete with Little […]

Categories: Bodies, Privacy, Surveillance • Tags: digital double, Facebook, Privacy, Social Media

Class Lectures: The Content of the Form

January 26, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I just reviewed course evaluations from last semester. Overall they were quite positive and some had some useful feedback. My favorite comment: “The teaching style was my favorite. I’ve never seen anybody draw and write such illegible things that end up making me understand exactly what is being said. It’s quite funny to me.” It just so happens that I have an image from the class to which I think this student was referring. I am a firm believer that […]

Categories: Higher Education, Teaching • Tags: course evaluations, Hamine University, student evaluations

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