Kari,
Beautiful post and proposal.
An aside: Elizabeth Shove and Mikka Pantzar nicely call things
separated from their practices 'fossils.'
Shove, Elizabeth and Pantzar, Mika (2005) Fossilisation.
Ethnologia Europaea - Journal of European Ethnology, 35 (1-2). pp. 59-63
Elizabeth speculates in her contribution to _Time Consumption
and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture_ (Berg, 2009)
about
"This possibility brings me to the fossilisation-innovation-transformation index (FITI), the third and final instrument in my imaginary tool-kit. Properly applied, the FITI gives a sense both of the rate at which practices are changing, and of the relative plasticity or rigidity (lock-in) of the interlocking systems of practice of which society is composed."
Cameron
On Aug 29, 2012, at 10:36 AM, Kari Kuutti wrote:
> Artifacts are, however, half-muted witnesses; the further (geographically and historically) they are taken from practices they are used, the more feeble is their voice, and eventually it dies down. The museums around the world are full of artifacts nobody has a clue what for and how they were once used (the weasel word for them is "cult objects":-)). Artifacts reveal themselves fully only in human practices, and correspondingly they should not be studied separately.
|