It was a process of finding something that had significance to me and making it a personal experience. I wasn’t feeling passionately about my first idea, so I found something that had much more meaning to me. This is what Aman stressed the most, and it truly was the most important part of the workshop. What I found most powerful about the experience was the process. He had to leave his friend behind to die so he could save himself. They were on their way when the police started chasing them and his friend fell into an ice pocket in the mountain. “I had been told a story about a boy who made the 30-day journey from Tibet over the Himalayas to Dharamsala. I decided to use those as my artifact and build a story about them. I had prayer flags hanging in my room from when I went to work with Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala. At the end of our first day, I thought more about a topic and artifact in which I might feel more passionately about. While collecting the tiles and thinking about what story I could come up with to represent them as an artifact, I found that I wasn’t totally invested in this idea. I started by finding some tiles in the dumpster of VAPA. What I found most beneficial and informative was going through the process. Some people made their artifact out of found objects while others brought in objects they had and built a story around that. Our task was to create or find an artifact and then give it a history or a story. “Aman’s workshop was incredibly interesting and enlightening. Today, we share with you the artifacts students collected/created as well as some of their reflections on the process of representing the ‘culture of others’. In the spirit of continuing our reflection on the role of ‘artifacts’ both within our discipline and in cultures and societies more generally, yesterday we introduced Amanullah Mojadidi and the ARTifact project he ran with Noah Coburn‘s students at Bennington College. The pictures are often incomplete, and new finds from the same society may completely change the way historians or archaeologists view it. They may be defined as being at least 25 years old, though people may be used to thinking of them as much older and from societies in the distant past.(…) Artifacts help create pictures of a society. These can be ancient things, like Ming vases or soapstone carvings, or they can be fairly recent. In anthropology and history, the typical definition is that it is a product of some society, usually intentionally made by someone in that society. They are material entry points into traditions of craft and reflect societal needs or the state of technological advancement of a specific time.Īn artifact can have numerous definitions. #Living artifact meaning windows#They nevertheless offer windows into our own belief systems and the belief systems of ‘others/alter-egos’. Indeed, our artifacts humourously distort the ‘mysterious’ and the ‘exotic’ that tends to dominate in narratives of classic ethnographic museums. But Allegra would not be Allegra without the pinch of self-irony that characterizes our online experiments. This is the reason why Allegra felt compelled to open its own Virtual Museum of Obscure Fieldwork Artifacts: to exhibit the marvelous objects anthropofolks have brought back from their various fieldworks around the world. Anthropologists have traditionally been artifacts (the products of man) collectors.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |