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This chapter investigates the concept of innovation and its research history across a number of disciplines, from economics to archaeology. It explores how particular conceptualizations of innovation and progress have been tied up in colonial and racist discourse through the case study of colonial and archaeological assessments of Aboriginal Tasmanian culture and technology. The chapter argues that archaeologists, by dint of their training in exploring worlds and social structures not shaped by post-Industrial-Revolution capitalist relations, are particularly well suited to explore the wider question of how and why people innovate (or don’t).
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
. Innovation in its most general sense can be understood as any new thing, idea, or practice taken up by a person or people – this is the definition put forward nearly seventy years ago by the anthropologist Homer Barnett ( 1953 , 7). More materially minded writers, whose interests tend to lie in economics or technology studies, treat innovation as a synonym for the development of novel techniques, technologies, or organizational principles; while others separate the actual creation of the new thing or idea (its invention ) from its dissemination and uptake (as an
. In setting the chronological parameters of this project, however, I consciously avoided the last decade of the twentieth century, possibly the most significant and certainly the most turbulent decade in the history of the Manchester Museum and UK museums more generally. From 1994 the Heritage Lottery Fund provided a massive financial injection into the museum sector at the millennium, and the New Labour government elected in 1997 shifted the emphasis in museums from free market economics to social inclusion. Capital projects such as Norman Foster’s Great Court at
sociology, economics, and anthropology, we run the risk of uncritically reproducing the social and economic modalities of the last 200 years in Olde Worlde drag. The social world of innovation In order to push back against what I see as a tendency towards overly presentist arguments in archaeological studies of innovation, I have chosen to focus throughout this book on social relationships and social phenomena. The innovation-studies literature – and indeed the wider popular discourse around innovation – is profoundly bound up in common wisdom about social and
. The usefulness of the humanities can be asserted in relation to economics, social science, medicine, natural science, and engineering. Motives can be discussed from a philosophy-of-history perspective, with analyses of how different periods viewed usefulness. Accounts of different motives can be presented in textbooks. Justifications that come across as rhetorical slogans for the already initiated may appear in an appeal or at the inauguration of a memorial, a new museum, or a new initiative: The past for the future! History, heritage, and memory as a resource
kin and community. Formal apprenticeships may emphasize the social difference between master and apprentice, but even here more complex relations may emerge. John Singleton ( 1989 , 22) notes, for example, that even within the strictly hierarchical context of a Japanese master potter’s workshop, the apprentice is like a new bride and their apprenticeship like an adoption into a craft-kinship with their fellow practitioners. The implication here is that the establishment of apprenticeships is not purely a matter of economics or knowledge transmission, but one in
arts. This new institute of anatomy was to re-establish the importance of anatomy and instigate further research into human evolution. Elliot Smith sought funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for his project; however, he ultimately lost out to Bronislaw Malinowski, a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Malinowski’s proposal favoured a social science methodology in the study of human life and culture, which the Rockefeller Foundation felt was ‘more scientific’ than Elliot Smith’s anatomically focused proposal (Fisher 1986: 6). In fact, the
essentialism that privileged Native exegesis above others. For the German curatorial team, equating culture with ethnic identity obscured the global interdependence of politics and economics and, among other negative consequences, obfuscated alliances between local and foreign classes that cut across culture. In opposition, El Colectivo argued for the incorporation of video presentations and first voices to express the Indigenous historical perspectives of how Andean communities had appropriated Spanish colonial imagery which they had ritually rearticulated and transmuted
, and it has to be admitted that the division is not always clear-cut. So, while Gustavsson, Hansson, Arwill-Nordbladh and Sheppard discuss individual scholars they do so partially within the context of institutions. Snead, Milosavljević and de Tomasi focus on institutions but refer to specific people working within those organisations. Additionally, given the nuanced and critical nature of modern histories of archaeology, these chapters vary in their focus, discussing state formation, politics, law or economics, applying gender theory, ROBERTS 9781526134554 PRINT