Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Young adults’ hopes for the long-term future: from re-enchantment with technology to faith in humanity

Recent scholarly research has claimed that young people are predominantly concerned with their immediate ‘horizon of planning’, resulting in an outlook upon the future that is dominated by present-day concerns. By distinguishing between choices and plans, on the one hand, and hope and faith, on the other, this article analyses how young people relate to the future through their attitudes about responsibility and technology in order to complicate this narrative. The data are drawn from an interview project in which 28 young adults (aged 18–34) discuss both their own future and a general idea of the future of society. Two key findings are discussed. Firstly, respondents are found to place faith in the potential of technology to mitigate future predicaments, and secondly, respondents are found to ascribe mystical or magical qualities to technology. Drawing on these findings, this article suggests that the oft-cited attitude that technology will develop in time to meet the needs of the future does not simply signify a deferral of responsibility onto future generations. Instead, by drawing on scholarship on re-enchantment it is argued that for young adults technological development can represent a refuge of faith and hope for the future.     

HRD in 2020: a hop-on,hop-off city tour

This article reports on the outcome of a Future Search Conference in the UK to consider human resource development (HRD) in 2020 and beyond. We firstly consider themes from the past into the present. This includes the persistence of solutions in HRD that are systematic, predictable, how apprenticeships in the UK have had to accommodate government policies to ameliorate youth unemployment and the long-standing difficulty for HRD of failing to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) on activities. We then present four scenarios based on key questions for the future relating to value of HRD and whether this will be a future for HRD. Reponses to the questions form scenario logics which we present against the theme of city tour. Each scenario is explained against the presented logic with positive, negative, ambiguous and uncertain implications for HRD. We suggest that each scenario carries a glimpse of what might be.     

In Recognition of Their Desperation: Sonic Relationality and the Work of Deep Listening

This essay places composer Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy and practice of Deep Listening in conversation with analytic theories of listening in a duet that explores one central question: What can listening do? Thinking through the impact of cultivated listening practices on the sensorium, the relational implications of listening across difference, and the centrality of practices of listening to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis as well as the transformational capacity of performance, this essay claims Oliveros as a practitioner and theorist of a central psychoanalytic practice: listening. Deep Listening has the capacity to act as an amplifier for extending the reach of analytic listening beyond the clinic into an expanded cultural field. Likewise, psychoanalytic thinking allows for a rich exploration of the interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics of Oliveros’s sonic meditations as they resonate in the circuits between the psyche and the social. Her 1970 composition To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe In Recognition of Their Desperation acts as a case study for exploring the dynamics of feminist listening.     

‘Ghost in the Shell’: Reflections on Fieldwork in Kazakhstan

After independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan proclaimed Kazakhs the title ethnic group, and the Kazakh language the national language. This deprived the Russian-speaking population of its former dominant social position. Being a Russian-speaking citizen of Kazakhstan, the daughter of a half-Korean half-Russian father and a half-Kazakh half-German mother, I did my field work as a presumed ‘native’ anthropologist at Kazakhstan State University with linguistically divided groups of students. The relations between the field and the researcher disclosed different geopolitical realities of knowledge production and challenged the legacy of relativist methodology. I reflect on this experience and examine different conceptualisations of the native positionality in the post-Soviet context. Reflections in this paper raise new questions about nation-building in post-socialist states and about ‘nativeness’ itself, and contribute to the criticism of postmodern theory.     

Spatial Inequality in Access to Food Assistance in Indiana

This project is an analysis of the spatial inequality that exists between rural and urban areas in access to food assistance agencies. I gathered the population of all food pantries and soup kitchens in 24 sample counties in Indiana and mapped the location of these agencies using geographic information system analysis. Using the population center of the census block group, I measured the distance from the population center to the nearest food assistance agency. If the closest agency was more than a mile away, the census block group was considered a food assistance desert, a concept I created that draws on the food desert measurement. I found that rural high‐poverty counties in my sample are the most likely to contain census block groups that are food assistance deserts, and urban high‐poverty counties are the least likely to contain food assistance deserts. From these findings, I determine that access to assistance agencies needs to be increased in rural areas, especially rural areas with high‐poverty rates.     

Beards and Bloomers: Flight Attendants,Grievances and Embodied Labour in the Canadian Airline Industry, 1960s–1980s

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30‐year period. Taking a historical, materialist‐feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.