In Collections Management, we did our annual washing and waxing of the statue of Eurydice by Bojan Konaver that sits in front of Yager Hall. We also talked about standards and methods of care of metal objects and textiles.
I spent a lot of time working on our reconstituted Indigenous and Archaeology exhibit plan.
On Sunday, we picked up my wife from the airport after her two week-long research trip in Mexico. It’s a joy to have her back home!
I keep meaning to write a booknotes for David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” which I finished some weeks ago, but for a whole host of reasons, I just can’t bring myself to sit down and write something systematic. So what follows here is some scattered notes:
What I liked about it:
It’s a “big” history, with a broad and synthetic reach, and for a wide variety of reasons, people don’t write those much anymore. I like big histories (e.g. this), even as I recognize that such a broad treatment of any subject can be fraught with ethical perils. I’m sympathetic to critics who make such a case about DOE as marginalizing and provincializing already marginalized people by speaking for them and abstracting the particulars of their historical circumstances into a broad global schema. At the same time, it is delightful and unusual to see a big, global, historical book that presents an emancipatory and interconnected vision of humanity and freedom, as opposed to the usual treatments that see us as hopefully mired in either technological or behavioral fatalism.
It really does a wonderful job of provincializing capitalism and our current historical moment of “modernity” as actually somewhat aberrant and unusual forms of social organization. The way we live right now is not only kind of unusual, but actually somewhat weird and stiff compared to the vibrant, dynamic, and mobile forms of sociality that most people of the world would find familiar even a few hundred years ago.
I learned a lot about new research in archaeology, particularly regarding the frankly wild and unruly worlds of paleolithic peoples, usually portrayed as rather simple and sophisticated in their lifeways.
What I didn’t like about it:
The tone of the book is both arrogant and narrow. Repeatedly, the Davids write about how they are turning our ideas upside down or requiring us to completely rethink our priors. That’s a rhetorical position, and certainly they have the expertise on anthropology and archaeology to write from a place of authority. But their audience seems to be middle-class liberals who are already conversant with the ideas they’re challenging, and this is pretty small window of people. It’s not clear to me just how widespread the commonsense framework of human history and possibility at which they take aim actually is. Do the ancient aliens fans really think of themselves as somewhere on a dialectical continuum between Hobbes and Rousseau? Do followers of QANON or other anti-semitic conspiracy theories relate their historical understanding to innate visions of human behavior and social life? It feels a little like they’re tilting at windmills while the hurricane sweeps in on the horizon.
This is a bit pithy and personal for me, but I think their discussion of the problem of “modes of production” in chapter 5 mischaracterizes the concept and mixes an analytical category with a descriptive one. I’ve made good use of the concept of the mode of production in my own scholarship, and have found it to be a useful framework for thinking about the complicated ways that social surplus circulates through different historical and cultural moments. The Davids rightly criticize categorizing societies typologically based solely on how they grow food–it’s silly and kind of meaningless to say that societies as wildly different as the Onondaga of the 14th century CE and the Egyptians of the 2nd millennium BCE are somehow “the same” because they both rely on cereal crops. At the same time, the whole point of a mode-of-production analysis is separates work (the individual and historical process of wresting energy from the environment) from labour (the social organization by which surplus is extracted, circulated, and consumed) and allows you to think through the relations between surplus, power, and social organization. And this gets me to another issue with the book…
The Davids replace the question of equality and inequality with a question of freedom, which they argue is a better framework for evaluating and understanding human history. They identify three basic freedoms that have been truisms for much of human history: the freedom of movement, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to change and transform social organization. But I think that side-lining questions of equality (who has what) in favor of questions of freedom (who can do what) risks marginalizing the ways in which freedom and equality are ultimately intertwined. I don’t have a clear critique (the Davids hedge their rhetoric enough that it’s not a clear-cut disavowal of questions of equality), but it strikes me that the three freedoms they identify could easily be re-grafted onto hierarchical or oppressive projects. “Freedom” in the United States has a particularly White, patriarchal and capitalist valance. Abstracted from their historical analysis, the three freedoms would be easily cognizant as inherent rights to most American White middle class men. Absent an analysis that identifies equality and inequality and explores how such rights were grafted onto power and surplus distribution (something a mode of production analysis ironically does), such freedoms can be grafted just as easily onto emancipatory or oppressive visions of projects.
So I liked the book, and will think more about its implications, even as I found it to have some problematic or oddly-focused rhetoric.
It was Hartwick’s Spring Break, as well as week 2 of my wife’s research trip abroad, so it’s been kind of a weird and quiet time. My folks and I and my kids did go to Hudson, NY for some lunch and a visit with an old friend, as well as some pottering about town. Later in the week, one of my kids came down with some nasty respiratory thing, so he got a little extra Babi and Grandpa time.
At the Museum, I did some work to finalize a draft of our plan for a new Indigenous and Archaeology exhibit.
I worked on a few cosmetic things for the Micronesia exhibit, especially fixing up the timeline which was one of the least completed aspects of the exhibit when we opened it in February.
I moved to a static website! If you’re reading this, I’m now entirely hosted on AWS S3. I’m using hugo to generate the pages and structure. I’m mostly happy to be off of Squarespace’s increasingly janky legacy platform. I do have some plans for future sections of the site, but one small step at a time. I couldn’t have done this without the immeasurable assistance and patience from the Minister of Intrigue who suggested the idea of a static website to me in the first place and then provided invaluable tech-support and hand-holding as I made the shift.
was sort of drifting, and strange. My wife left for a research trip and I’m holding the house down while she’s gone (with the help of my folks–thanks Mom and Dad!) To quote my son, “I’m sad she’s gone, and I’m happy she’s doing something exciting.”
In MUST204, I talked about the history of collections management, and how to label objects in Museum collections.
I helped some students with rec letters.
I continued some collaborative collections research.
I kept hammering away on a revamp of our Indigenous exhibit.
Last week, I read Brian Evenson’s wonderful short story collection “A Collapse of Horses”, which is ostensibly horror, but with much of the horror taking place off-stage–my favorite! I also read Susanna Clarke’s wonderful “Piranesi” which is weird and beautiful.
My wife and I watched Violent Night, a cartoonish and heartfelt Christmas movie where a depressed and demoralized Santa saves a wealthy family from a professional home burglary and invasion. It’s incredibly violent, really funny, and features some delightfully scene chewing performances by David Harbour and John Leguizamo. It was also written by my good friends Pat Casey and Josh Miller and I’m impressed at the Ws they continue to rack up.
Trying to dig myself out of the hole that last week’s reception put me in, I’ve been doing work on a lot of long-term planning, exhibit prep, and collections projects.
In MUST204, we had a snow day, and then had an in-class activity where students had to make a case to accession an object into the Museum’s collection, using the guidelines of our collections policy.
I’ve finished a couple of books, but want to make notes about them.
In MUST204: Collections Management, we talked about Museum Nomenclature, and condition reporting.
I continued to work with students to finish our new exhibits on Micronesia, and Margaret Huntington Boehner.
I did guest lectures or tours of the Museum for courses in Museum Studies, English, and Political Science.
My wife and I finished watching the first season of Welcome To Wrexham, a show about the complex relationship between English football teams and the communities in which they reside. When I first heard about it, I understood it to be kind of a fish-out-of-water comedy about two Hollywood actors (Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney) who buy a Welsh Football team without knowing anything about it. But the beating heart of the show is really the community of Wrexham itself, ravaged by deindustrialization and neoliberal dismantling, and for whom Football is one of the few forms of civic agreement and engagement. In that sense, it’s a rich and heartfelt show, and honestly some of the best parts are when Reynolds and Mcelhenney get out of the way and let the townspeople of Wrexham speak for and about themselves.
I am slowly but surely moving my way towards a static website.
Hartwick’s semester started so a lot of what I did was administrative jockeying. Forms filled in, emails sent and received, and sent again.
I started teaching MUST204: Collections Management.
I did some consultation around collections work.
I helped students to finish the installation of our newest exhibit on Micronesia.
My wife and I continued our Criterion odyssey by watching “The Man who Knew Too Much”, another early Hitchcock masterpiece. As I said to my wife, all of these movies are essential templates for what would become major blockbuster genres over the course of the 20th century, with this movie being in the “race against time” rescue film.
I bought albums by Sharon Van Etten and Neurosis
With the help of the Minister of Intrigue, I took a slightly bigger step towards setting up a static website.
I finished reading Charlie Jane Anders' “The City in the Middle of the Night” which lives up to the LeGuin-ian accolades it received. It was a thoughtful and deeply human book that takes an outrageous and exciting premise (humans trying to live on a tidal-locked planet) and invests it with rich history, complex social and cultural politics, and rich and complicated characters. I also finished reading volume 2 of Garth Ennis' short horror series “A Walk Through Hell” which is dark and mysterious but didn’t grab me by the end.
I played around with setting up a static website, which can be written in Markdown. It sounds like a decent amount of work to get set up, and a moderate amount of work to maintain. On the other hand, my current platform is legacy-locked in 2009 and I’m getting a little tired of accumulating bugs.
In preparation for the upcoming Spring semester, I updated my syllabus for MUST204: Collections Management.
I worked on a redesign of an upcoming exhibit, and did some collections research.
My parents were visiting, which was a wonderful second Christmas. It was also a wonderful second birthday for my daughter, who had a cracking good birthday party at local institution Noah’s World. It’s been a good week to be surrounded by family.
I continued to help get our Micronesia exhibit up on the walls.
I did some more collections research work.
I mostly watch movies in small chunks, when I have a few minutes. This week, I finished watching two movies. The first was “Computer Chess”, a strange love-letter to early computer culture, about a computer chess tournament and the colorful and unusual people who attend it. It was filmed with a very poor quality video aesthetic that added to the surreal mood of time-travel that it created.
The second movie I finished was “Cure”, a late 90s ancestor of modern J-Horror, directed by Kurosawa (but not the one you’re thinking of). It’s a dark supernatural police procedural about a series of grisly murders, committed by random individuals who both admit the murder and also have no sense or reason for doing so. They are, in turn, all connected to a strange and anonymous man who may have amnesia, but may also have a hypnotic power to manipulate anyone he meets. It was a brilliant and shocking film, with a strong social criticism about mental illness, lonliness, and fate.
We ran towards the finish line of our two new exhibits, on Micronesia and Margaret Huntington Boehner respectively, and held our reception on Thursday.
I started getting our tax documents together, with the goal of getting everything filed through Hartwick’s VITA tax program.
My kid was off school this week, and so I did a bit of shuffling him around to a few programs, including kids camps at Bright Hill Press, and Oneonta World of Learning.
In Collections Management, we talked about environmental conditions, as well as collections policies.
With my son, I finished reading “Runaway Ralph” by Beverly Cleary.
