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"We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions -- which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose -- and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects."--Bloomsbury Publishing

As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868‐1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work, an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged as an eccentric dilettante who damaged the reputation of the discipline, setting back its adoption as a practical science of value to colonial governance by a generation or more. Adopting a micro‐historical approach, closer scrutiny of the archival evidence challenges this orthodoxy, and places Thomas more centrally within the professional networks and practices of British anthropology in the period 1900 to 1915. As well as correcting the record concerning Thomas's professional reputation, a more complex picture emerges regarding the colonial authorities' attitudes towards anthropology and the reason why this early experiment in colonial anthropology failed.

This paper explores the intertwining of personal or autobiographical narratives with broader cultural and historical narratives associated with particular regions, nations and diasporas. More particularly, it is concerned with the intertwining of surnames, place names and 'place-stories', and with notions of clanship, clanlore and clanlands, as resources used in the negotiation of self-identity among members of the transnational Scottish heritage community. Using the spatial histories and mnemonic practices of the Clan Macpherson as examples, it demonstrates how the 'romantic ideology' of Highland clanship serves to re-root members of an 'unsettled' settler society in what is perceived as their ancestral homeland. This (re-)establishment of kinship ties to a particular territory is effected through various enunciative acts: for instance, becoming acquainted with the clan's origin myths, slogans, stories and symbols; visiting the clanlands and those collective 'sites of memory' associated with events in clan history; participating in clan marches and ceremonials; and tracing the family tree. Whilst this 'sedentary poetics' of Highland clanship entails a re-essentialization of identity that has become morally untenable in the contemporary West, it is argued that, in the context of Scottish diasporic roots-tourism, the assertion of a close bond between blood and soil is more benign. For those who, by virtue of a particular surname, or through the labours of their genealogical research, have identified themselves as members of a Scottish Highland diaspora, the ideal of Highland clanship provides a powerful 'answering image' to that represented by the indigenous peoples and cultures of the countries in which their migrant ancestors settled. Sensing their own (vicarious) complicity in the violences of colonization and thus questioning the legitimacy of their right to belong in lands historically appropriated from indigenous populations, the clan provides its diasporic members with the possibility of recovering their own indigenous identity.

"While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these 'past-making' and 'future-making' projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people's aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus"--

Examines the impact of the Scottish legacy on North American cultures and heritage. During the past four decades, growing interest in North Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new Scottish clan and heritage societies. Well over 300 Scottish Highland games and gatherings annually take place across the U.S. and Canada. Transatlantic Scots is a multidisciplinary collection that studies the regional organization and varied expressions of the Scottish Heritage movement in the Canadian Maritimes, the Great Lakes, New England, and the American South. From diverse perspectives, authorities in their fields consider the modeling of a Scottish identity that distances heritage celebrants from prevalent visions of whiteness. Considering both hyphenated Scots who celebrate centuries-old transmission of Scottish traditions and those for whom claiming or re-claiming a Scottish identity is recent and voluntary, this book also examines how diaspora themes and Highland imagery repeatedly surface in regional public celebrations and how traditions are continually reinvented through the accumulation of myths. The underlying theoretical message is that ethnicity and heritage survive because of the flexibility of history and tradition. This work is a lasting contribution to the study of ethnicity and identity, the renegotiation of history and cultural memory into heritage, and the public performance and creation of tradition.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Methodological Premises and Purposes -- SECTION ONE. Memory and Identity -- Chapter 1. Autobiographical Memory -- Chapter 2. Oral History and Remembering -- SECTION TWO. Qualities of Memory -- Chapter 3. Experience and Memory -- Chapter 4. Between Official and Vernacular Memory -- SECTION THREE. Media and Memory -- Chapter 5. Televised Remembering -- Chapter 6. Vernacular Remembering -- SECTION FOUR. Locations of Memory -- Chapter 7. Memoryscapes and Multi-Sited Methods -- Chapter 8. Ethnicity and Memory -- SECTION FIVE. Disturbed Memory -- Chapter 9. Painful Pasts -- Chapter 10. Disrupted Childhoods -- SECTION SIX. Confessing and Witnessing -- Chapter 11. Apologia -- Chapter 12. Testimony -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the "idian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms