Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. The human environment has a…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

A family tale inspired the author to explore seemingly minor, but related details of the Saint-Domingue, French, and American Revolutions, including the population movements to and from the United States. “A Haitian Tale of Diasporas and Revolutions” is a documented historical and personal narrative through cultures and continents, as…[Read more]

The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking transcendence amidst desacralization. Drawing on Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins across time, this ethnography of ruins engages with the paradoxes generated by…[Read more]

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

The process of managing information in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design projects remained relatively unchanged between publication of works of Bavarian theorist Albrecht Dürer and French mathematician Gaspard Monge in the 1500s and 1700s respectively, and the widespread adoption of computer aided design (CAD) in the early…[Read more]

How does colonial violence generate anticolonial resistance? Is violence ever justified, whether as an end or as a means? What aesthetic strategies do writers deploy to legitimate the exercise of violence? What is the relationship between militant insurgency and literary form? Posing these and other questions, this course offers an introduction to…[Read more]

Entry on Senagelese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène.

This study tells the story of Architectural Forum magazine during the Time Inc. ownership period, 1932-64. Why and how did this episode in American discursive life come about? What were its failures and successes, lessons, potential legacy? In answering these questions, the author describes the unusual building industry-wide sense of community…[Read more]

This paper studies the creation, circulation, and reception of two groups of photographs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House, both taken by Hedrich Blessing. The first set, produced for a 1951 Architectural Forum magazine cover story, features curtains carefully arranged according to the architect’s preferences; the Museum of…[Read more]

The inter-allied memorial commemorates the First World War and the fallen, as well as the wartime cooperation between the Allies. Its inter-allied character and its scale make this memorial one of a kind.

Ideas and materials for building a web portal for archival information about Romagna, a historical subregion of Italy.

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between dwelling size, household structure and social status in urban Babylonia during the first millennium BC.

This paper focuses on the possibilities and limitations of the contemporary dérive as a form of ethnography in contemporary Delhi. The dérive, which originated as the Surrealist déambulation and subsequently became the Situationist dérive in the late 1950s, has now been re-imagined by walking artists and practitioners. In seeking to locate the Sit…[Read more]

‘There is an economy of narrative, it will be said, an economy of memory. One cannot recount everything,’ wrote Jean-François Augoyard. ‘What can be known about what occurred during a walk?’ (2007: 68) Over the last decade, explorations on foot of New Delhi have erupted as urban practices indicative of global tourism. These range from middle-c…[Read more]

Review of Peter Eisenman, Palladio Virtuel