The Materiality Of The Past

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.

What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage? Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual ‘Viking Moot’ festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Lê, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of its toppling. Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with ‘historical fact’, in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of the material aspects of Sikh identity, showing how material objects, as well as holy sites, and texts, embody and represent the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social construction.

The relation between religion and things has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, privileging spirit above matter, belief above ritual and objects, meaning above form and 'inward' contemplation above 'outward' action. This book addresses these issues.

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.