A Berkeley Home for Textile Art and Scholarship, 1912–79

The work of Ed Rossbach, his colleagues, and students at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s and 1970s was critical in forming the modern movement of American fiber art. What may not be as well known is the continuity of this work with a tradition of textile art and study at UC Berkeley going back to 1912. Founded as a department of Household Art as part of the home economics movement, it became a department of Decorative Art in 1939, under the leadership of Berkeley anthropologist and textile scholar Lila M. O’Neale (1886–1948). A cultural approach to the teaching of historic textiles was carried forward by her successors, anthropologists Anna Gayton and Ruth Boyer (who taught 1948–65 and 1962–72, respectively). The most important creative weaver in the department was C. Edmund Rossbach (1914–2002), who taught from 1950 to 1979. Although he never knew O’Neale, he was inspired to creatively adopt the ethnic and historic influences which he encountered in the teaching of her colleagues and in the rich museum collections at Berkeley. This approach was also taken up by Professor Lillian Elliott (1930–94) and student Joanne Segal Brandford (1933–94). As an introduction for the other essays from my session, my article reviews the political battles over the status of the department from its entry into the College of Environmental Design, through its official demise in 1974, until the last textile classes with Rossbach’s retirement in 1979

‘America Is Our Field’: Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945

This article outlines the regional interests and emphases in anthropological collection, research, and display at the American Museum of Natural History, during the first half of the twentieth century. While all parts of the world were eventually represented in the museum’s collections, they came from radically different sources at different times, and for different reasons. Despite his identity as an Americanist, Franz Boas demonstrated a much more ambitious interest in world-wide collecting, especially in East Asia. During the post-Boasian years, after 1905, the Anthropology Department largely continued an Americanist emphasis, but increasingly the museum’s administration encouraged extensive collecting and exhibition for the Old World cultures. For the most part, these collections and exhibits diverged from anthropological concerns, expressing imperialist messages, biological documentation, or artistic display. In thus constituting the ‘stuff’ of an anthropology museum, one can trace the transvaluation of objects, the importance of networks, institutional competition, and the role of disciplinary definitions

Introductory educational laboratory experience for computer engineering undergraduates

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 68).by Michael L. Jacknis.M.Eng

Moving beyond Goffman: the performativity of anonymity on SNS

Purpose: This paper explores consumer behaviour on the popular anonymous social networking site (SNS) Yik Yak. It examines the reasons behind the turn to anonymous social networking and also considers the ways in which anonymity impacts consumers' self-performances on SNS. Design/methodology/approach: The study used a netnographic approach to explore Yik Yak across eight universities in Ireland and the UK. Data are based on observation and participation on the app. Screenshots on smart phones were the central method used to collect data. Data also included twelve in-depth interviews. Findings: Young consumers are becoming fatigued by the negative effects of self-presentation on many SNS. By enabling consumers to engage in what they consider to be more authentic modes of being and interaction, Yik Yak provides respite from these pressures. Through the structures of its design, Yik Yak enables consumers to realise self-authentication in anonymised self-performances that engender a sense of virtue and social connection. Originality/value: By invoking a performative lens, this paper extends a novel theoretical approach to understandings of identity formation within consumer research. Highlighting anonymity as a dynamic process of socio- material enactments, the study reveals how consumers' self-performances are brought into effect through the citation of various discursive arrangements, which promulgate distinct understandings of authenticity. Practical implications: This research highlights the potential value of anonymous SNS in fostering supportive dialogue, concerning mental health amongst post-millennials

Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography

The paper describes the early 20th century debates between several leading Russian anthropologists, including Lev Shternberg, on the best way of displaying artifacts in the newly refurbished Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Petersburg. These debates revealed major tensions and contradictions between evolutionism and historical particularism, as well as universalism and nationalism within Russian anthropology of that era

More than a Footnote or Bibliographic Entry: Mary Lois Kissell as an Innovator of Textile Study

Mary Lois Kissell was a pioneer in the comparative cultural study of textiles and basketry, an art educator, a museum anthropologist, and an intrepid fieldworker. When she died in 1944, no obituary was written about her, and no single study has focused on her contributions to textile scholarship. We have not come to know her through a single collection of personal papers; for as far as we can tell, nothing of the kind was ever deposited in a repository. The scattered correspondence that we have amassed by and about Kissell comes from various museum, library, historic society, and university archives in North America and Europe. These letters attest to her extensive research and teaching on textiles, and to her miscellany of distinguished art educator, anthropologist, and collector-scholar correspondents and mentors: Otis T. Mason, Arthur Dow, Clark Wissler, Henry Ling Roth, Charles F. Newcombe and James A. Teit. In this paper we examine how Kissell appears to have inhabited and been influenced by several communities of practice, while being marginal to each of them. We offer a rendering of Kissell’s training, teaching, and research activities that demonstrates how she lived within a series of separate disciplinary boundaries. Although her writing left an imprint on the study of textiles, she and her pioneering publications are rarely anything more than a footnote or a bibliographic entry. To some students of fiber arts, her name is still connected with the founding of the program at the University of California; a program that later included Lila O’Neale, who is associated with the establishment of the cultural study of basketry and textiles. This biographical sketch serves as an introduction to Mary Lois Kissell, and raises the question of the impacts of her training, social network, and innovations on textile study

Preface

People have been taking pictures of Native Americans for well over a century-for almost as long as they have been taking pictures. The earliest known photograph of an American Indian was exposed soon after the invention of the medium in 1839. Ironically enough, it was taken in Great Britain in 1844, and it depicted Kahkewaquonaby (known as the Reverend Peter Jones), the son of a Mississauga Indian and a Welshman. Thus, from its very beginnings, the photography of Native Americans has been inextricably bound up with the crossing of cultural boundaries. As photographers fanned out across the American continent, native peoples struggled to render their strange activities comprehensible. A term that appears to have been devised repeatedly and independently was shadow catcher. This ominous phrase spoke to one of the most profound aspects of photography: its seemingly magical ability to appropriate and remove some sort of essence of a person’s character. As it was phrased by Yurok author Lucy Thompson, “The old Indians do not like to look at a photograph or to have their photographs taken because they say it is a reflection or a shadowy image of the departed spirit, O-quirlth.” Contemporary Creek writer Joy Harjo remembers her “Aunt Lois’s admonishments about photographs. She said that they could steal your soul. I believe it’s true, for an imprint remains behind forever, locked in paper and chemicals.

Alfred Kroeber and the Photographic Representation of California Indians

Although Alfred Kroeber is universally regarded as the founder of California Indian studies, his important use of the camera as an ethnographic tool is virtually unknown. In fact, Kroeber was one of the first anthropologists to photograph California native peoples. California has never attracted as many photographers as other regions of Native America, such as the Southwest, most likely because of the rapid depopulation and massive acculturation of California Indians. By the time of Kroeber’s fieldwork at the turn of the century, there were comparatively few native people left in the state, and from a naive, Anglo perspective, they did not look particularly native. Most of the earliest surviving photographs of California Indians are by a handful of professional photographer. In the fall of 1892, Henry W. Henshaw photographed the Pomo living near Ukiah for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. With these pictures, Henshaw became probably the first photographer of California Indians who made his living as an anthropologist-although his training had been in biology. Several years later, in 1899, Roland Dixon, a Harvard graduate student working for the American Museum of Natural History, began to photograph the Maidu. About the same time, Pliny Goddard, a Quaker missionary among the Hupa, was also taking pictures, which he published later, when he was an anthropologist at the University of California. Finally, in 1901, just before Kroeber joined the University of California, Dr. Philip M. Jones took a series of California Indian pictures for Phoebe Hearst, the founder of the university’s Museum of Anthropology

Getemono: Collecting the Folk Crafts of Old Japan

This museum catalogue accompanies the Hearst Museum's 1994-1995 exhibition, "Back Roads to Far Towns: Folk Art of Rural Japan." The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay reviewing a century of interest in the folk culture of Japan. The book also contains a series of revealing and entertaining letters written by the Museum's collector who gathered traditional Japanese crafts in Kyoto during the mid-1960s