Things in Culture, Culture in Things Approaches to Culture Theory Series Volume 3 Aims & scope The Approaches to Culture Theory book series focuses on various aspects of analy- sis, modelling, and theoretical understanding of culture. Culture theory as a set of complementary theories is seen to include and combine the approaches of different sciences, among them semiotics of culture, archaeology, environmental history, ethnology, cultural ecology, cultural and social anthropology, human geography, sociology and the psychology of culture, folklore, media and com- munication studies. Series editors Kalevi Kull Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia Valter Lang Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu, Estonia Tiina Peil Institute of History, Tallinn University, Estonia Things in Culture, Culture in Things Edited by Anu Kannike & Patrick Laviolette This volume and the initial conference have been financed by the Centre of Ex- cellence in Cultural Theory (CECT, European Regional Development Fund). Managing editors: Anu Kannike, Monika Tasa Language editor: Daniel Edward Allen Design and layout: Roosmarii Kurvits Cover layout: Kalle Paalits Copyright: University of Tartu, authors, 2013 Photographs used in cover design and in the beginnings of sections: the photo collection of Estonian National Museum, ERM Fk 184:71, ERM Fk 127:3, ERM Fk 114:134, ERM Fk 139:43, ERM Fk 2644:3724. ISSN 2228-060X (print) ISBN 978-9949-32-394-4 (print) ISSN 2228-4117 (online) ISBN 978-9949-32-395-1 (online) University of Tartu Press www.tyk.ee/act Contents List of figures 7 Notes on editors and contributors 9 Acknowledgements 12 Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects 13 Patrick Laviolette Soft objects The natural order is decay: the home as an ephemeral art project 36 Stephen Harold Riggins Placing objects first: filming transnationalism 58 Carlo A. Cubero Beware of dreams come true: valuing the intangible in the American Dream 74 Rowan R. Mackay Stoic stories The travelling furniture: materialised experiences of living in the Jewish diaspora 102 Susanne Nylund Skog A hard matter: stones in Finnish-Karelian folk belief 114 Timo Muhonen An embroidered royal gift as a political symbol and embodiment of design ideas in 1885 139 Kirsti Salo-Mattila Consuming and the collectable The ‘vintage community’ in Bucharest: consumers and collectors 158 Maria Cristache The visual form of newspapers as a guide for information consumption 172 Roosmarii Kurvits Design for individuality: the Jordan Individual toothbrushes and interpassivity in material culture 204 Visa Immonen Collecting the Nagas: John Henry Hutton, the administrator-collector in the Naga Hills 222 Meripeni Ngully Waste and technologies Waste and alterity in ‘speculative fiction’: an assessment of the de- and re-evaluation of material objects in selected dystopian novels 244 Brigitte Glaser Toilet cultures: boundaries, dirt and disgust 256 Remo Gramigna The social childhood of new ambivalent objects: emerging social representations of new biotechnologies 280 Maaris Raudsepp, Andu Rämmer Index of names 303 7 Introduction List of figures Collectors of vanavara (antiquities) in Rame village, Karuse parish. Photo: Friedrich Kohitsky, 1912 front cover A solitary inhabitant of Kärla parish. Photographer unknown, before 1915 34–35 Closing a summer cottage, Quogue, New York, 1957 78 Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want , 1943 80 Branding and appropriation of a symbol: John Stetson, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan-as-actor, Ronald Reagan-as-President, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama 85 Landscape in Haapsalu. Photo: Jaan Kristin, 1899–1912 100–101 Sage Tuomas Lomajärvi with his wife in 1920 117 Emma Leinonen (1868–1955), an old woman from Lohilahti village in southern Savonia heals a girl’s leg by pressing it with a sauna stove stone 120 Interior of traditional Finnish sauna in Korpiselkä 122 Potential biography of a stone in the context of Finnish-Karelian folk belief 128 Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna in the mid-1880s 140 Embroidered ornaments for the Empress boat, 1885 141 The Empress Screen, 1885, embroidery on silk 142–143 The arrival of the Emperor and Empress in Helsinki, 1885 146 The grand-ducal coat of arms in the centre panel of the Empress Screen 148 Detail of the lower frieze in the centre left panel of the Empress Screen 149 Working drawing for the centre right panel of the Empress Screen 151 Vanavara (antiquities) from Nissi parish. Photo: B. Kangro, 1913 156–157 Newspaper Marahwa Näddala-Leht , 12 January 1821, 14–15 177 Newspaper Postimees , 19 August 1895, 2 and 4 180–181 Newspaper Päewaleht , 27 October 1929, 3 183 Newspaper Rahva Hääl , 5 May 1985, 1 and 4 188–189 Newspaper Eesti Päevaleht , 8 March 2010, 4 192 A Jordan Individual toothbrush in its original packaging from 2007 205 Some of the Jordan Individual toothbrushes from 2007 were marked with symbols indicating gender, ♀ or ♂ 206 Advertisement “Life is tough, Jordan gentle” ( Aku Ankka , 26 October 2005) 211 Connections between John Henry Hutton and Henry Balfour 228 Hutton’s top seven collected items 233 8 List of 7gures Laboratory in the Institute of Oil Shale. Woman looking through magnifying glass. Photo: Viktor Salmre, 1969 242–243 World map of toilet cultures 262 Public perception of scientific and technological development in Estonia and Europe, 2002–2010 289 Public perception of scientific and technological development in Estonia and the European Union, 2005 and 2010 290 Awareness of and support for new biotechnologies in Estonia and the European Union, 2005 and 2010 292 Awareness of and support for animal cloning for food in Estonia and the European Union, 2010 296 9 Introduction Notes on editors and contributors Maria Cristache (Maria.Cristache@gcsc.uni-giessen.de) completed a Master’s degree in sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University, Hungary. She is currently a doctoral student at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Her research inter- ests include material culture, post-socialism, sociology and the anthropology of consumption, including patterns of taste and consumption of domestic objects in communist and post-communist Romania. Carlo A. Cubero (carlo.cubero@gmail.com) is associate professor at the Depart- ment of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Estonian Institute of Humani- ties, Tallinn University, Estonia. His research focuses on ethnographic filmmak- ing methodology, migration, transnationalism and post-colonial identities. Brigitte Glaser (Brigitte.Glaser@phil.uni-goettingen.de) is professor of English literature and cultural studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. She has published two monographs, one on 18th-century fiction and the other on 17th- century autobiographical writing. During the last few years her research focus and publications have been on colonial and postcolonial literature as well as transnational writing. A co-edited volume of essays The Canadian Mosaic in the Age of Transnationalism appeared in 2010. Remo Gramigna (gramigna@ut.ee) is a doctoral student in semiotics at the Uni- versity of Tartu, Estonia. He gained a Master’s degree in science of communica- tion at Rome’s Sapienza University with a dissertation entitled Culture Jamming: Phenomenology of Creative Destruction (2006). He completed a second Master’s degree in semiotics at the University of Tartu with a thesis entitled Augustine on Lying: A Semiotic Analysis (2011). His main research area is the semiotics of lying and deception. Visa Immonen (visa.immonen@helsinki.fi) is a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, and adjunct professor of archaeo- logy at the University of Turku, Finland. He is an archaeologist specialising in the Middle Ages and the Modern period. 10 Notes on editors and contributors Anu Kannike (anukannike@yahoo.com) is researcher at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia, and managing editor of CECT book series. She defended her doctoral dissertation in ethnology at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the material culture of the home from historical and contemporary perspectives, particularly home decoration and food culture. Roosmarii Kurvits (roosmarii.kurvits@ut.ee) is researcher at the Institute of Jour- nalism, Communication and Information Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research focuses on the changes of the visual form of newspapers and the history of Estonian journalism. In her doctoral dissertation Eesti ajalehtede väli- mus 1806–2005 (2010) she analysed the visual form of Estonian newspapers across two centuries. Patrick Laviolette (patrick@ehi.ee) is professor of anthropology at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. He is one of the chief editors of www.materialworldblog.com as well as the author of the monographs Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport (2011) and The Landscaping of Metaphor and Cultural Identity (2011) Rowan R. Mackay (R.R.Mackay@sms.ed.ac.uk) is a doctoral candidate at the De- partment of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focuses on legitimation, multimodality and semiotics. Timo Muhonen ( tiilmu@utu.fi) is salaried member of The Finnish Graduate School in Archaeology, Finland. His research focuses on the archaeology of reli- gion, Finnish-Karelian folk belief, cairns and the Finnish Iron Age. Meripeni Ngully (meripeni55@gmail.com) is associate professor at the Depart- ment of History, Dimapur Government College, India. She is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is working on colonial collecting in the Naga Hills. She is interested in museums, exhibitions and the representation of foreign cultures. Susanne Nylund Skog (susanne.nylund.skog@sofi.se) is researcher at the Institute for Language and Folklore in Uppsala, Sweden. Her theoretical interests concern gender, sexuality, identity and narrativity. Her doctoral dissertation is a folklor- istic gender study of childbirth stories. At present she is working with a project about Jewishness in Sweden. 11 Notes on editors and contributors Maaris Raudsepp (maaris@tlu.ee) is senior researcher at the Centre for Con- temporary Cultural Studies, Tallinn University, Estonia. Her research interests include socio-psychological aspects of environmentalism, interethnic relations and individual coping strategies for socio-cultural change. She has published on the regulative role of values in culture and mind. Stephen Harold Riggins (sriggins@mun.ca) is professor of sociology at the Memo- rial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada. His research interests are in the areas of ethnic minority media, material culture studies, and the history of sociology. He is the author of The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life (2003) and editor of four books on the sociology of Erving Goffman, ethnic minority media, ‘others’ in discourse, and objects in consumer culture. He is currently completing a book about the first fifty years of sociology in Newfoundland. Andu Rämmer (andu.rammer@ut.ee) is researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Tartu, Estonia. His main research interest is the formation of new ideas and widespread beliefs. In different research projects he has compared the educational and work values of school students, the investment climate, science culture and the adoption of new technologies by the public. Kirsti Salo-Mattila (kirsti.salo-mattila@helsinki.fi) is lecturer and adjunct pro- fessor at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research is located in the intersection of art history and craft studies, with a particular focus on textile art and textile history. She teaches textiles and cloth- ing in the Department of Teacher Education, and supervises doctoral studies in textile culture. 12 Halliki Harro-Loit Acknowledgements This volume was set in motion at the forth annual autumn conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT). The conference was held at the University of Tartu, Estonia, from the 20th to the 22nd of October 2011. We would like to thank all the participants of the conference for sharing their cross-disciplinary interest towards the questions of materiality over time. Even though it was not possible to include all the conference contributions in the present collection, we were pleased so many of the presenters submitted their papers to us for consideration. The conference committee put together the original manuscript and helped to find reviewers – our thanks goes to Valter Lang, Mari Tõrv, Helen Sooväli- Sepping, Kirsti Jõesalu, Maarja Kaaristo, Ester Bardone, Ene Kõresaar and Katre Pärn. We are grateful to the reviewers for their cooperation and patience, and for providing valuable remarks for both the authors and editors. Thanks are also due to the language editor Daniel E. Allen, the managing editor Monika Tasa and the series editors Kalevi Kull, Valter Lang and Tiina Peil. 13 Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects Patrick Laviolette [...] you will understand it better by the derivation than by the defini- tion. I once read a silly fairy tale called the three Princes of Serendip : as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand Serendipity? [...] this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) [...] Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 28 January 1754 (Walpole 1960, 407−411; emphasis in original) Objects, artefacts and matter, even sometimes the immaterial, have been compre- hensively theorised and contextualised through a number of intriguing volumes. Since the ground-breaking publication of The Social Life of Things in 1986 to the launch of the Journal of Material Culture ten years later, the material world in its cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary study could never quite be the same again. Indeed, the very concern for the effects and affects of how materiality evolves over time is what this volume seeks to address. A well-known adage in this field of enquiry is that things make people as much as people make things. Serendipitously, things often tell more about people than people themselves can actually tell us about those things. 1 The relation- ships we develop and share with a tangible arena of artworks, buildings, infra- structures, monuments, relics and everyday trinkets varies from the remote to the intimate, from the fleeting to the durable, from immediate to mediated, from the passive to the passionate, from the philosophised to the commonsensical. Such objects gain meaning and status within an array of creative processes. Whether it is through the usage or non-usage of the physical world, things nonetheless harbour a potentiality for becoming endowed with auras, symbolism and power. Hence our journeys through the material world generate a multitude of emotions Kannike, A. & Laviolette, P. (eds) (2013) Things in Culture, Culture in Things. Approaches to Culture Theory 3, 13–33. University of Tartu Press, Tartu. 14 Patrick Laviolette and sensations: pleasure, attachment, belonging, angst, envy, exclusion, loath- ing and fear are amongst some. They also feed into the propagation of on-going discourses, myths, narrations and stories which oscillate between the robust or durable and the ever shifting. A certain Socratic (or perhaps ‘Serendip’) maxim applies here: that the better one understands things or knows material culture, the more difficulty there often seems to be in defining and delimiting what this thing – this field of research – is all about. So you might ask, what does the area of material culture studies actu- ally consist of? Well, where in Hades do we start. As acknowledged by the many scholars who have contributed in recent decades, material culture studies has a multi-faceted history with different regional/national perspectives. Now the more a nascent field develops, the more all-encompassing it can often become. And so what might be interesting about the future of material culture studies is the recent fascination with the importance of the immaterial and the virtual as well as the abandoned, the decommissioned or the no longer inhabited. For example, the study of stars and luminous auras, or the invisible and the otherworldly. Even the scientific and pseudo-scientific processes of in- terpreting simulacrum data call for attention. There is indeed a lot of research currently done under the rubric of material culture studies which focuses on the not so obviously tangible things in existence (e.g. colour and darkness, memory and the senses for instance). Or on phenomena of the world which do not im- mediately appeal to our classification categories as cultural objects since they are either too big, too small, too mundane or too natural – animals, food, landscapes, painkillers, zebra crossings and so forth. Moreover, by bringing the significance of the mnemonic aspects of story telling to the table, material culture theorists, amongst others, have helped indi- cate that one place where we can start is at the beginning. Not, of course, at the beginning of all things (i.e. physics) or with the source of human evolution (i.e. physiology). Nor even at the beginning of society or culture (although archaeol- ogy, history, philosophy and so on obviously feature prominently). Certainly though, at the beginning of our individual and collective human lives, as well as our first socialised or collective memories of encounters with people, environ- ments and all that stuff in between. It then seems interesting to ask whether the material culture project becomes one that is highly focused on the narrativised memories that objects carry. Stories and how they are stored in things is an angle which the chapters herein pivot around. Inquiring into mnemonic experiences with things might be especially pertinent for opening up a new ethnographic moment of first contact – not with ‘Others’ but with objects. Such a significant inertia for the material 15 Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects (re)turn, as we are witnessing it, can therefore allow us to infer that what we are hearing from such stories (reminiscent to some of ‘origins’ and first con- tact theories), is the implication that maybe it is objects themselves which are (again) becoming the ‘new Other’. This might help explain why the new brand of contemporary material culture studies has become so popular and influential in such a relatively short period of time, especially in the subsequent stages to that historical instant when post-colonialism and post-socialism, as well as the reflexive deconstruction of the ‘Other’, had become so paramount. During these zigzag moments of the material roundabout then, now over a quarter of a century ago, material culture studies has increasingly turned to the visual, the digital and other forms of information and communication technolo- gies. And at the risk of repetition, to pretty much everything else. Indeed, mate- rial culture can be about a lot of things and non-things, particularly within the framework of the global economic system of high, late or post-modern capital- ism. But from the influence of Marxist scholars, we have learnt that the objects of most value or relevance are not always those that are most obviously life-shifting. Service purchases, ritual, kinship, exchange as well as the mundane experiences of everyday life, once the bread and butter of anthropologists, are still pivotal categories for any diligent material culture enthusiast. From certain Marxist axi- oms about making history or the repetition of time, we have also learnt that in addition to mattering significantly, the past is somehow inescapable. Hence, before presenting the diverse contributions in this volume, this intro- duction briefly surveys the contemporary field of material culture studies. It does so by paying homage to a particularly narrow legacy of ‘ancestral’ things – the endeavours of a selective cohort of academics who paved the way for the current generation’s research on human-object relationships. Material sagacity The epistemological roots for addressing the comprehensive study of human artefacts are muddled. Many archaeologists are adamant that this is predomi- nantly the realm of their discipline. They are correct in some ways. Nevertheless, the study of material culture has continuously existed across a range of other disciplines, art and design history for instance. The inaugural editorial of the Journal of Material Culture put forward the undisciplined, politically proactive and creative possibilities as defining features of the field, advancing many perks and advantageous features of not being subject to particular academic dogma (Miller & Tilley 1996). 16 Patrick Laviolette Despite this, anthropology is on pretty firm ground when laying a certain claim to the intellectual development of this field. From the offset, the early theories of Edward B. Tylor (1832−1917) and James George Frazer (1854−1941), compiled from ‘missionary’ data, allowed British anthropology to begin estab- lishing itself as a collections discipline in terms of gathering cultural objects, lin- guistic data and life-history information. Dependant upon second-hand colonial narratives and other travel writing accounts, Frazer’s armchair theorising dealt less with artefacts than that of his teacher E. B. Tylor. So, to an extent, one could argue that his was an anthropological vision for collecting stories, not things. One of the first overtly notable ancestors in allowing the study of material culture to become clearly identifiable was Alfred Cort Haddon (1855−1940). With eclectic interests and a background in the natural sciences, he effectively mas- terminded the most comprehensive ethnological team research in the English- speaking world. The famous Cambridge expedition to Torres Straits and New Guinea at the turn of the 20th century established the textbook model for ‘rescue anthropology’. It would professionalise the discipline by setting as precedence the global export of ethnological field researchers. The objective was one of the orders of the day: to salvage cultural information that was changing (disappearing) due to the increasing pace and scale of global cultural contact; amongst other factors, the result of colonialism and imperialism. Given the disciplinary signatures of the era, the tyranny of distance as well as the theoretical pedigree of the armchair theorising necessary for making cross- cultural comparison, these field expeditions were undoubtedly questionable as proper ethnography. Such initiating phases of rapid-fire fieldwork techniques, developing towards longer term and repeated field visits, did indeed verge on ‘collection binges’. In his many treatises on art, Haddon brought to the table the evolutionary importance of creative adaptability in many capacities (Haddon 1895). 2 It is worth mentioning a few later anthropologists whose global popularity, backgrounds and novel approaches made them unwitting accomplices in creat- ing the intellectual space from which material culture studies could develop. Notably: Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas and Colin Turnbull. All became internationally recognised. In most of their cases, connections with the vibrant art and culture milieu of New York City allowed them to have significant involvements with diverse forms of public outreach. This permitted experimentations with film and photography as well as museum curation projects and research collaborations. In terms of the significant impact on the development of material culture studies as we know it today, the distinct European versus New World trajectories 17 Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects for academic anthropology did find its initial institutional synthesis in the UK through the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI). Certainly one of the oldest independent anthropological institutions in the world, the RAI has had a long history of gathering, collating and storing field material, as well as providing researchers with access to collections and archives. Two noteworthy individuals to have significant influence within the RAI particularly stand out: John Henry Hutton and Cyril Daryll Forde. Hutton argued vehemently for more interest in examining material culture as a means of conceptually rallying against many things such as extreme functional- ism, linguistic determinism, diffusionism, and (more ‘controversially’) applied anthropology. He concluded by nearly opposing the utilitarian value of applied anthropology as against the knowledge value for knowledge’s own sake ethos, which for him the study of material culture encapsulated. In the context of British anthropology, the impacts were significant in the future obfuscation of where the material culture field would most naturally belong. Contemporary material culture studies, through the influence of Marxist archaeology and Daryll Forde’s desires to open up anthropology even further, could seem to come as a reaction against Hutton’s position. Unsurprisingly then, if this was seen as the established anthropological position since the 1940s, that in the 1990s the on-going debate about where material culture studies fit episte- mologically would still be fraught with ambiguity and disputed principles. But let us not obliterate the obvious with such a premature conclusion since Hutton was a key proponent for the inherent significance of the past, particularly as expressed through archaeology, museum collections and the anthropology of art. As stated in his RAI address: [...] thinkers whose primary interest lay in the forms and functions of society, tended perhaps to minimize the amount of attention given to arts, crafts and the material environment of the society studied [...] (Hutton 1944, 1). What are also crucial are the absences and subtexts in this address. He referenced the German influence but not the French. And in so doing, used Radcliffe-Brown as a straw man to remind the audience of the day when in certain camps of an- thropology, some people still saw the functionalist school as a disputable myth. In dispelling Radcliffe-Brown, one could bypass the developments in ethnology of a post-Durkheimian school of structural-functionalism. Yet ironically, through his attention to the impacts of French social theory, Radcliffe-Brown was a sig- nificant facilitator in introducing some of the long-term intellectual building blocks for a British social anthropology that could easily house comprehensive 18 Patrick Laviolette studies of material culture. Instead though, Hutton was drawn back to the British past of anthropology, insinuating through citation to Charles Seligman’s work, that psychology was the bridge between a dualistic anthropology with cultural anthropology (including material culture) on one side and human biology/physi- ology on the other. The second individual in question, Daryll Forde, was the founder of the De- partment of Anthropology at University College London. For obvious institu- tional reasons, given this university’s founding role in the history of material culture studies, Forde has received considerable attention already (Buchli 2002; 2004). As such, we can move on to consider a few international facets to this field of scholarship. In terms of emphasising the different impacts of colonial ethno-history, we should perhaps remind ourselves that Hutton’s dismissal of French theory has long since been redressed. In response to reflexive interpretations of the global repercussions of early European Imperialism, many writers have chronicled how the triad of Britain-Germany-France has significantly shaped the field under investigation. For its part, early French sociology developed in accordance with the close influence of ‘revolutionary’ thinking. That is, those intellectual ideas formative of an ideology which has been more intransigently iconoclastic. In helping to lay some of the reactionary and irreverent groundwork necessary for the fundamental shaking-up of Western paradigms (through such conceptual movements as subaltern studies or Orientalism for instance) certain early French sociologists interested in contemporary objects, as well as the technologies of past human civilisations, would go on to form several influential laboratoire centres with a key interest in material culture. 3 The ethnologie of Durkheim, Mauss and eventually a slurry of other continental anthropologists has been powerful in its self-criticisms of Western research practices and epistemologies. Many of the major material culture debates of the early days arise from (and indeed return to) the pioneering perspectives of French sociology from the 1920s onwards. One of prominence is the East-West tension as it relates to gift exchange societies versus capitalistic ones. Such initial divisions have been identified as structurally deterministic and much on-going research has geared itself towards refining or decoding the ancestral binary gift-logic. The foundational collection of essays to flag the onset of contemporary ma- terial culture studies is presumably The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986) It is paramount in terms of exchange theory because it does not shy away from the symbolic. Indeed, many of the contributors reflect upon the practicalities by which the notion of sacrifice and ritual become embedded into reciprocal action, so that exchange can both transform and continue with vigour; maintaining, 19 Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects reinforcing and forming the possibilities for new social relations along the way. With this we get a significant historical unpacking of the German/British ideo- logical liaisons over Marxist theorising, which had historically advocated more evolutionary and materialist views than the revolutionary French one. The result has been the creation of a powerful intellectual space within which the discussion about the alienability and inalienability of objects has become a vital conceptual pillar for the field of material culture studies. Dozens of issues can be subsumed within this frame, encompassing such areas as bride-wealth, contestable land and resource claims, cultural copyright, heritage and human remains repatriation, slavery and so forth. A final point to bring out here is the global influence of ethnographic reflex- ivity in social theory (Fabian 1983). In terms of the period for the field under investigation, the questions of territoriality and the academic politics of authen- ticity are open game. In the early 1980s, in America, especially through some significant cultural-theorists and social historians in Pennsylvania, there began a process of embracing and engaging with anthropology. Arjun Appadurai and his colleagues were at the forefront of this. Certain British scholars were involved (Renfrew, Gell, Bayly) but not in terms of representing any particular school of thought. Moreover, probably inadvertently, a series of academic presuppositions remained largely unchallenged at the time (the all-male gender selection of the contributors for example). Some institutional consequences from this pivotal publication seem to have themselves been materialised in the form of a self-perpetuating intellectual dis- tinction/divide for the field. 4 To an extent then, an internal structural schemata has been recreated whereby, since anthropology in the USA has largely main- tained the four field approach, many American material culture anthropolo- gists have stood together with social historians. In the UK, the pairing has been between anthropology and archaeology/museology. And as we have seen, the historical side of things has usually been subsumed by a range of other disci- plines. Strictly speaking though, historians and art historians of material culture studies in Britain have only been marginally accepted into the inner circle. The exceptions were themselves initially at the margins of UK anthropology since they were effectively historians of the discipline itself. The landscape of material culture studies in Estonia (where the present vol- ume was put together) as well as in much of Eastern Europe ( Korkiakangas et al 2008), has followed an altogether different pattern. The priority of early archaeol- ogy, ethnology and folkloristics was to collect and preserve the objects that were seen to constitute national heritage in museums and archives. In the pre-World War II period, developments in Germany and Scandinavia were followed here,