JBCC2 Archives

Cold War Toys

Cold War Toys examines playthings manufactured, promoted and commercialised in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. Establishing connections and conversations with toys produced in earlier periods, including nineteenth-century dollhouses and building blocks created in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García, it goes on to analyse, among other items, scale-model household appliances distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation, construction sets made in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, and more recent figurines such as the Latin American versions of G.I. Joe and Latin Barbie dolls.

The book approaches toys as dispositifs – cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements and philosophical propositions of Latin America’s Cold War. Drawing on a rich compendium of objects, many inspired by European or US brands, it shows how South American toys incorporated local characters, designs, messages and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring new identities. These and other original artefacts are examined variously as commodities from a once-flourishing industry, as works of art, originators of cultural myths and as training tools for Cold War childhoods. ’Toys are also seen as undervalued expressions of children’s material culture, imbued with the collective memory of a turbulent and contested era.

Critical Heritage and Social Justice

Critical Heritage and Social Justice brings together insights and experiences of scholars and practitioners working across heritage, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions to explore how principles of social justice can be embedded within these spaces. Bridging theoretical frameworks with practical applications, it presents a range of case studies and critical reflections that illuminate pathways toward transformative, justice-oriented heritage practices. Using Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional justice framework of redistribution, recognition, and representation, the book situates social justice at the heart of critical heritage studies, highlighting its intersections with urgent global challenges including the climate crisis, conflict, forced migration, and widening social, cultural and economic inequalities. All these issues demand inclusive, equitable and community-engaged approaches within the heritage sector.

Each chapter considers how to support communities, particularly those that are marginalised, by linking heritage to broader social justice struggles, addressing structural inequalities, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and fostering inclusive education and curatorial practices. Contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, conservation, education, science communication, and urban planning – offer rich, cross-sectoral perspectives. Through this collaborative and critically engaged approach, the volume articulates new conceptual and methodological directions for advancing social justice through heritage work, responding to the urgent demands of a fragmented and rapidly evolving world.

Worlds in Miniature

Miniaturisation is the creation of small objects that resemble larger ones, usually but not always for purposes different to those of the larger original object. Worlds in Miniature brings together researchers working across various regions, time periods and disciplines to explore the subject of miniaturisation as a material culture technique. It offers original contribution to the field of miniaturisation through its broad geographical scope, interdisciplinary approach, and deep understanding of miniatures and their diverse contexts.

Beginning with an introduction by the editors, which offers one possible guide to studying and comparing miniatures, the following chapters include studies of miniature Neolithic stone circles on Exmoor, Ancient Egyptian miniature assemblages, miniaturisation under colonialism as practiced by the Makah People of Washington State, miniature watercraft from India, miniaturised contemporary tourist art of the Warao people of Venezuela, and dioramas on display in the Science Museum.

Interspersing the chapters are interviews with miniature-makers, including two miniature boat-builders at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall and a freelance architectural model-maker. Professor Susanne Küchler concludes the volume with a theoretical study summarising the current state of miniaturisation as a research discipline. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume makes it suitable reading for anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and artists, and for researchers in related fields across the social sciences.

Playthings and Playtimes

In 2024 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs exhibited films of children from across the world playing with sticks, hoops, marbles and other toys. The implication was clear: play feels and looks like a universal language but takes on specific local forms. Using this as a starting point, Playthings and Playtimes explores the conflict and contradictions that circulate when play is simultaneously recognized as a species attribute (part of human nature) and as something crucially differentiated across time and space by design, technology, sentiment, pedagogic values and so on. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this interplay between the fixed and the mutable. Topics range from the elaborate miniature worlds made by H. G. Wells and his sons to digitized fidget spinners, from avant-garde Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s wooden blocks to the playground spaces of Kuwait, and from the much-maligned plastic toy to the new museum Young V&A. Together, they bring play and the world of feelings into sustained contact with the history of material culture and design, psychoanalysis, childhood studies and other disciplines concerned with play culture. In the process, Playthings and Playtimes investigates key elements of a humanities approach to the modern world through the prism of play’s affective materiality.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future.

Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Global Goods and the Country House

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire.

Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context – from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan – we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other.

Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of ‘thinking through things’ literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology.

As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

Come il mondo ha cambiato i social media

Come il mondo ha cambiato i social media è il volume complessivo di comparazione dei risultati di un’ampia indagine etnografica, coordinata da Daniel Miller, dall’eloquente titolo “Why We Post”. Nove ricercatori, incluso Miller, hanno trascorso 15 mesi sul campo, in diversi paesi del mondo (Italia del sud, Turchia sudorientale, due siti in Cina, area rurale e area industriale, Trinidad, Inghilterra, India del sud, Cile settentrionale e Brasile) a osservare e studiare, con un approccio etnografico, i modi in cui le persone usano i social media. È un fatto indiscutibile che i social sono entrati nella nostra vita con prepotenza, in modo capillare, per certi aspetti invasivo. Con un linguaggio fluido, talvolta anche colloquiale, il lettore è condotto all’interno di un ambito che gli sembra di conoscere, se non altro perché ne siamo tutti, più o meno, utenti, scoprendo però quanto di valori, di comportamenti culturalmente codificati, di ‘polizia morale’ ci sia dentro i social media. L’approccio qui presentato parte infatti da un’idea un po’ diversa rispetto a quelle più diffuse, e avvalorata nel corso della ricerca: se è indubbio che i social media hanno cambiato il mondo, la questione più interessante riguarda però il modo in cui il mondo li ha cambiati.

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation is an ethnographic investigation of everyday life in a Romanian apartment block, from its construction in 1974 to the present day. It provides a unique window into how inhabitants, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society, caught in between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. The book attends to the micro, day-to-day transformations of individual apartments and the way in which they cumulatively affect ‘larger’ urban changes in Piatra-Neamț, transforming both the urban fabric and the local sense of what defines a good life. This book also provides social scientists with a novel way of thinking about the fundamental relationship between people and buildings, while inviting architects to consider how buildings are transformed in time by their inhabitants. With minute ethnographic detail, Maria Șalaru demonstrates how social order is created and maintained through the materiality of the building.

グローバル・スマートフォン

スマートフォンはいつも文字通り私たちの鼻先にあり、スマートフォンとは何かという疑問を持つことはなかなかありません。しかし、私たちは本当にスマートフォンを理解しているのでしょうか？より深く理解を掘り下げるために、11人の人類学者が16ヶ月間それぞれアフリカ、アジア、ヨーロッパ、南アメリカの各地域で暮らし、高齢者へのスマートフォンの普及について調査しました。この調査によって、スマートフォンは若者だけでなく、すべての世代が利用するテクノロジーであることが明らかになりました。

『グローバル・スマートフォン』は、独自の観点をそのグローバルな比較研究から提示します。スマートフォンは常に身近にあり、「絶え間なき機会主義（Perpetual Opportunism）」を満たすデバイスであるだけでなく、今や私たちの生活の場そのものにさえなっています。本著は、スマートフォンが単なる「アプリデバイス」以上のものであることを示し、人々が口にするスマートフォンへの意見と、実際にはどのようにスマートフォンを使用しているのか、その違いを探ります。

マートフォンは、私たち使用者が変容させることができるその程度において、未だかつてなく自由度の高いデバイスです。この自由さにより、スマートフォンには使用者個人の価値観が急速に反映されます。この価値観を理解するためには、各地域における民族的・文化的差異を考慮する必要があります。例えば、アル＝クドゥス（エルサレム）、ブラジル、そしてイタリアなど、各地域がたどる高齢化の軌跡の多様性に加えて、中国と日本のビジュアル・コミュニケーション、カメルーンとウガンダのモバイルマネー、チリとアイルランドの保健情報へのアクセスの仕方など、これらの差異を考察して初めて、スマートフォンとは何か、そしてスマートフォンがもたらす生活の変容を理解することができるのです。