object description

"Describe your object’s materiality (e.g., size, weight, design, style, and decoration) and mode of production in the most precise language possible. What is your object made of? How was it made? List and describe relevant production methods. When was it made? Where was it made? How much did your object cost when it was made? How much did it cost to make your object?"

My object is immense in size. It is over four thousand eight hundred and thirty kilometers long, crosses two countries, and the tallest point of it being four thousand four hundred and one meters above sea level. Large dramatic collisions of tectonic plates and the slow melting and refreezing of glaciers have helped produce my object. From a distance, parts of my object have been described as looking like a woman's back, two lions, two sisters, teeth, a wall, the heavens. Parts of my object are covered in a green carpeting of coniferous trees, other parts are black and grey stone, while others still are the brown remnants of land slides where part of its face has slipped away. Most famously, my object is known for the glaciers resting in its uppermost regions. No one really agrees on when my object was made, but the range 80 to 55 million years ago crops up in discussion. It was made all between the Laird River in BC and the Rio Grande in New Mexico. When it was made, no people were around to evaluate it. When people discovered it, it's cost still couldn't be defined outside of the cost of life for endless generations, as it became sustenance and people, their children, their grandchildren, their children's grandchildren and so on. I also can't comment on what it cost to make the object, I imagine it cost millions of organisms their lives in the earthquakes that shifted the plates and the ice ages that spurred the glacial movement. I suppose my object, the Rocky Mountain Range, raises some interesting questions about production and initial cost. 

facilitation environments and re-memory in Turan and Tolia-Kelly's articles

    Turan’s article surveys the homes of four Palestinian Americans to document their ‘facilitation environments’ (real places created by displaced peoples through objects that evoke their collective identity, and usually also collective action) using the “transitional objects” theory of Donald W. Winnicott for relating material objects to dislocated people’s efforts of easing their transition to a new place of residence.  Turan structures the paper around interviews, picking up on themes within each interview that reinforce objects as gathering elements through their relation to humanity, or the evolving “material confirmation of the existence of Palestinians people [sic]” (Turan): one interviewee, Warda, comments on the Ramallah regional dress (not her family's regional dress) as being a thing whose invention becomes necessary away from home as a marker of identity: and she does not like the dress but lends it as a more ‘authentic’ home setting for her guests. Here the tension being address by Warda’s interview is who one performs their identity for and why. As well, Winnicott’s ‘transnational objects’ theory is being addressed, in that later generations experience these objects not specifically as provisions of comfort to east transition for themselves, but rather as providing a sense of continuity.
    Concerning in this article, is that though the Palestinians the author used are quoted as being eager participants in hopes to bring "greater attention to their cause", the history backgrounder of displacement that the author gives is unexplained and does not do ‘their cause’ justice: "1.4 million Palestinians were dispossessed and more than 10,000 homes were confiscated" by some invisible force for some mysterious reasons unknown to humankind? As well, here in mentioning the ""intifada" ...against Israeli occupation that began in 1987" the reader is left without the reason for uprising, and the essential injustice of the settlements being illegal in international law. It is disconcerting that the Palestinian participants have been swindled out of their anticipated trade-off, the author’s ethics being questionable.
    Later, however, the author writes a particularly provocative section about interviewing Mariam Haddad. Haddad talks about the disconnect between her image of her ethnicity passed down through objects and the popular image she learned she was i.e. kids throwing rocks...and the disparity in awareness between her and the other kids who'd say "I am Scotch," "I am Irish," "We are Polish" or "My grandparents survived the Holocaust." The popular images of these identities match more directly with the objects of identity the people have had passed down to them.   The urgency of the objects being a "material confirmation of the existence of Palestinians people [sic]" is made very apparent through these statements.


In Tolia-Kelly’s article, rather than focusing on dispossessed people, uses ‘post-colonial’ groups of South Asian women living in North London to illustrate the home as a site of memory activation, interpreted through Toni Morrison’s theory of re-memory (which can be memories of others told to you, absorbed by daily life, not just a linear narrative of events that make the self, i.e. re-memories of slavery experienced socially and manifest materially and collectively among the African-American community). The article is structured around objects (the mandir/home shrine, and crafts/curios) that function as stages for emitting the vernacular history of this marginalized group who’s been excluded from official recorded history.
    A few pieces are missing in this paper structurally in linking the object analysis to the section on ‘race politics of culture’. Here the author has a confused understanding of double-consciousness exampling "Black artists, writers and musicians have engaged with the 'doubleness' of being the heart of the West, but figered as 'other' within that nation's history and society" (322) – where double consciousness speaks more to the consciousness one has of one’s self on top of the consciousness one has of how the white world sees/positions the one.  This is not addressed in the essay. Concurrently, the author glosses over the different ways that British South Asians have been constituted as black citing political alliances between black and South Asian Brits, essentialist counter-arguements, and 'new ethnicities': However, what is lacking is the linkage of this term’s complexity with the author’s sample heavily influenced by East African South Asians and the intensely divisive colonial heirarchy between blacks and South Asians in East Africa, making it unclear how this section is linked to the rest of the paper.
    Yet the author does do a good job of illustrating the evolving of meaning in objects with the first focus on the mandirs (home shrines) of Hindu households. They contain not only metonymical symbols from India i.e. water from the Ganga or incense dust from India's shrines (re-memory), but family objects which symbolize moments of the family's life, allowing the shrine to be used as a site for tracing family history. Here the significance of the shrine grows in time and with collection of objects within it while the daily viewing of a mandir triggers memories and produce new meanings and memories of the families. It becomes a site of cultural education and reference points.


Questions:

According to Turan and Winnicott, facilitation environments are constructed can claim collective identity, often associated with a sense of political consciousness and collective action. While making the creator feel less displaced, is it possible for facilitated environments to displace other people? Examples?


This one is particularly personal to me, and I find it a bit amusing. In reading this scenario please think about the idea in Tolia-Kelly’s paper - ‘re-memory’ and the creation of the collective and individual self: Random person is introduced to me and starts telling me about how her boyfriend is really into learning ‘all about’ Japanese culture. She says, ‘he’s so into it, he’s more Japanese than Japanese people!’ (Implied here is that the boyfriend is not Japanese himself). In defense of my ethnicity, I cry, ‘I highly doubt that,’ to which she unwaveringly responds, ‘no! it’s true! He is more Japanese than Japanese people themselves!’. I continue to cry, ‘But no! It is layers and layers of history that create a people – not going to language classes and attending Anime conventions!’ Is there any saliency to either of our arguments?

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