Material Culture
SANb 2033 FSS MUNI (lecture 2 photos museums)
Last week ‘history’ of MC studies session. So started with an historical photo/song.
Now, museums and photos session, so more obscure song about an aspect of museums:

Enid Blyton 1937, 1950, 2000



10,000 Maniacs
The Colonial Wing (The Wishing Chair) 1985
Written by Merchant / Buck
Natalie Merchant (singer).
The guitar player, Rob Buck, amongst Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 100 guitarists of all time.
Buck and Merchant attended Jamestown Community College, JCC (SUNY), the former studied
anthropology.
Motto of which is:
“Come as you are, leave as you want to be”.
Sound familiar? Reminds you of?




The Colonial Wing  (4:02 mins)
Here is the store house of Her Majesty          Over mountain, over dune and over sea
Well guarded by sentry                                   Crude map and compass lead the caravan
But looks are free                                            And lead the fleet
              Here's the loot and plunder
Call this the rayless and benighted age          They bore home
Witches by tallow candles shifted                   Ivory tusk inlaid with precious stone
Shifted their shapes                Raw silk and spices by the barrel load
Here is the pestle and mortar                          A soft skin drum with mallets
That ground the poison seed               Of human bone
A lute, a suit for jousting
And the poems of a balladeer A world wide rampage
When all the Latin books were copied off Rampage of greed
In golden script
Well hoarded away in So here the tour concludes
A monastery crypt The Colonial Wing
The rooms of the most refined
Superstition Museum property
Superstition beyond belief A claw footed divan
Ornate clocks with birds that strut
On the half hours and quarter hours
Hear them chime..







Te Poho-o-Rawiri, Gisborne, Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts carvers (including John Taiapa,
Pine Taiapa and Wihau), opened 1925


Raharuhi Rukupo (of Rongowhakaata) Te Hau-Ki-Turanga, 1840-42



Raharuhi Rukupo Poupou (side post) of Te Hau-Ki-Turanga, 1842-43



Pare or korupe (door lintel), Ngati Kahungunu, circa 1860



United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Entrance, Washington, D.C. James Ingo Freed   (1930-2005)



Hall of Witness U. S. Holocaust Memorial
























Las meninas: Diego Vélasquez  (1656-1657) Collection: Musée du Prado, Madrid
Philip IV & Mariana of Austria. Infanta Margaret Theresa. Their five-year-old child later married
the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.  At this time, she’s the King & Queen’s only surviving child.






















•Foucault, Michel (1966). Les mots et les  choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris:
Gallimard.
•
•(1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock.

NOTES, T. Whincup
“Underpinning this article is the belief that being able to remember lies at
the heart of our survival, our humanity, and our individual identity” (2011:
59).
In a meeting house of Kiribati, in the rafters of the ceiling, are held the
bones of an ancestor warrior (Kourabi). These relics are washed roughly every 7 years, once a
village elder has a specific type of dream. The washing is a ritualistic community event, involving
the washing in the sea, drying the next day and then oiling the bones, which are the put back until
the next dream.

Meeting house is also preserved through refurbishing techniques, the skills
for which are kept alive through this practice. These are not just physical but
also connected to associated songs and dances which need to be rehearsed for the event.

TW presents some examples of electrically light up shrines near the homes of current residents.
“ To lose the memories of this chief, Kourabi, would be to lose an essential
and vital aspect of community” (62).
Compare this to Maurice Bloch, washing of bones in Madagascar.
“Unlike the examples from the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia, the South
Tarawa memorials are not at the sites of death but are built on family land and in close proximity
to the house” (71).
“Beyond the flashing lights and plastic glitter of recently imported materials
reside ancient beliefs of ancestral spirits. Bones and plastic are drawn into
function as mnemonic objects, bridging the gap to ensure ancestors are not lost and the spirit
world maintains its hold on the living”.

Cemeteries as outdoor ‘museums, exhibition spaces for a particular set of ‘objects’ (human remains
and the things we connect to people flowers, photos drawing etc).


The Great Dissenter, (born March 8, 1841, Boston—died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C.), associate
justice of the United States Supreme Court, U.S. legal historian and philosopher who advocated
judicial restraint. He coined the concept of “clear and present danger” as the only basis for
limiting the right of freedom of speech.
From a family with significant contribution to the abolitionist movement in the US.
a second successful career as an acclaimed poet and essayist.
The 1858 compilation of essays
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table became a best seller.
Re-inventor of Stereoscope

"We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming
novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in
the history of human progress dates from the time when He who
'- never but in uncreated light Dwelt from eternity -’  took a pencil of fire from the hand of the
"angel standing in the sun," and placed it in the hands of a mortal."  OW Holmes