Urban Development and Fishing Livelihoods in the Museum: Nostalgia and Discontent in Central Vietnam

This article explores how the topics of fishing and urban development are addressed in a Vietnamese social history museum. Drawing on a project taking place in the Museum of Danang, it describes the way the museum represented the voices of a displaced fishing community who were moved from traditional fishing huts on the riverside to a social housing complex as part of Danang’s urban development plan in the 2000s. Capturing the impact of the community’s relocation on their fishing livelihoods through an exhibition of objects, photographs and texts, the article reveals ways in which nostalgia is recruited to make social, political and moral commentary on urban equality and livelihood change in a rapidly developing city. Methodologically, the project explored the limits of critical representation in an authoritarian state and how nostalgia can be understood as a subtle call for ethical action

Empathie avec la matière

Empathie avec la matière  : comment repenser la nature de l’action technique.L’importance des matériaux est souvent minimisée dans l’analyse des systèmes sociaux et techniques alors qu’ils façonnent les bases mêmes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l’attention sur la nature des matériaux et des actions calculées qu’ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des matériaux joue un rôle essentiel quant à leur choix et leur utilisation, lequel potentiel va de pair avec une certaine empathie, une «  intersubjectivité  », dont la nature est déterminante pour comprendre comment les individus interprètent leur monde social de manière abstraite, généralisable et souvent immuable. Nous examinons la nature de l’empathie avec les matériaux à travers une série d’études de cas ramenés du Pacifique, où le rôle du concret dans l’imagination sociale occupe une place importante dans les études ethnographiques, contrairement aux collections d’artefacts qui, curieusement, demeurent en marge, un simple témoignage de la description du monde social.Empathy with the matter  : how to reconsider the nature of the technical action. Materials are often downplayed in the analysis of social and technical systems and yet materials shape the very basis of the world we live in. This paper sets out to challenge this oversight by drawing attention to the nature of materials and the acts of calculation they engender. The transformative potential of materials, we argue, plays a fundamental role in their selection and uptake and is met with an empathy that is shared intersubjectively, the nature of empathy with materials being crucial for explaining how individuals interpret their social world in abstract, generalizable and often unchanging ways. We examine the nature of empathy with materials through a series of case studies taken from the Pacific, where the role of the concrete in social imagination has figured prominently in ethnographic studies, yet where artefact collections have curiously remained bystanders to the depiction of social worlds

E-CURATOR: 3D COLOUR SCANS FOR OBJECT ASSESSMENT E-curator project team

This paper presents an overview about the E-curator project focussing specifically on the integration of user needs through the participatory user interface design process

Digital heritage in a Melanesian context: authenticity, integrity and ancestrality from the other side of the digital divide

This article examines how digital heritage, in the form of 3D digital objects, fits into particular discourses around identity, ancestrality and cultural transmission in Melanesia. Through an ethnographic analysis of digital heritage use amongst the Nalik community in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), it demonstrates how digital heritage is understood not in terms of deceit and a loss of authenticity, but instead, towards an understanding of authenticity in terms of completeness and integrity. A notion of completeness and integrity, I argue, has the effect of creating an authentic experience of the past for Nalik communities by bringing back museum objects ('old' objects) that have been dispersed amongst museums and heritage institutions worldwide. In tracing out the operations and effects of how a Melanesian community engages with 3D digital objects, this article offers unique ethnographic insights into digital heritage in ways that challenge widely-held assumptions about the heightened value placed on the original object over its digital counterpart. © 201