Ghosts of Objects Past: Material Culture and the Debris of History
Material culture is a troublesome label, especially when humanistic disciplines are concerned. Unlike ‘goods’, ‘things’ or ‘artefacts’, material culture posits a relationship between a material object and the meaning that this objects has or is imbued with. Such meaning varies in time but so do material objects and people. My paper is concerned with how a ‘material turn’ in the discipline of history – and in the humanities more generally – has challenged the ways in which research is carried out. I consider three objects (a fan, a car, and a pair of shoes) and discuss the relationship between materiality and time. I wish in particular to highlight the role of conservation as an exercise (often wrongly thought of as technical) in safeguarding the material integrity of historic objects through research. My examples will deal with concepts such as those of provenance, biography, collecting, function, curation and asphyxiation.
Giorgio Riello
Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture and Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Foot in the Past (OUP 2006) and Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP 2013; winner of the World History Association Bentley Prize 2014) and has published extensively on the history of material culture, fashion, design and consumption in early modern Europe and Asia. He is the co-editor, among the many, of Global Design History (Routledge 2011), Writing Material Culture History (Bloomsbury 2015) and The Global Lives of Things (Routledge 2016). Between 2013 and 2015 he was the coordinator of the Leverhulme-funded ‘The Luxury Network’. He recently completed a book entitled Luxury: A Rich History (co-authored with Peter McNeil) that will be published by Oxford University Press in Spring 2016. He has been recently awarded the 2016 Iris Foundation Award for contribution to the Decorative Arts and Material Culture.
Kolloquium Materiality
Prof. Dr. Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick
Prof. Dr. Christine Göttler, Universität Bern
Prof. Dr. Joachim Eibach, Universität Bern
Prof. Dr. Kim Siebenhüner, Universität Bern
Datum: 11. März 2016
Zeit: 10:15 - 12:30 / 14:00 - 17:00 Uhr
Ort: Universität Bern, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, Raum F012
Für Doktorierende und fortgeschrittene Masterstudierende der Universität Bern
Das Kolloquium besteht aus zwei Teilen: Zunächst werden auf Grundlage des Vortrages und der Lektüre verschiedene Aspekte, Ansätze und Perspektiven von ‚Materiality’ diskutiert und einander gegenübergestellt. Daraufhin haben ReferentInnen im zweiten Teil die Möglichkeit, in Kurzreferaten (max. 20 Min.) Fallbeispiele aus ihren Forschungsprojekten in Verbindung mit dem Kernkonzept zu setzen und zur Diskussion zu stellen. In einem interdisziplinären Austausch soll auf diese Weise die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Konzept ‚Materiality’ für die jeweiligen Forschungsarbeiten fruchtbar gemacht werden.
Organisation und Kontakt:
Eric Häusler M.A. eric.haeusler@unibe.ch
Dr. des. Michael Toggweiler mike.toggweiler@unibe.ch
Anmeldung:
Teilnahme mit oder ohne Kurzreferat bis zum 15.02.2016 an mike.toggweiler@unibe.ch
