Showing posts with label material culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label material culture. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Chernobyl Museum

I just finished reading a remarkable oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Voices from Chernobyl. The collected stories of those who lived through the accident and are living through its aftermath are powerful and heartbreaking.

One in particular struck me, as it was told by a man who began as a rocket scientist and felt compelled to collect the material culture of the accident. He tells about his father, who fought in the Second World War, and how he has very little left of his father's personal belongings, and treasures those he has. He continues:
Now you understand how I see our museum? In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful. And there's a miner's helmet. Also from there. Some farmer's equipment from the Zone. We can't let the dosimeters in here - we're glowing! But everything here needs to be real. No plaster casts. People need to believe us. And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl. There were and there are still.
I am simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the idea of a museum filled with radioactive objects, and by the commitment of a curator to the absolute unvarnished truth and reality of the physical, actual objects - a commitment so deep it is killing him daily as he works with those objects.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Why Do We Wear Pants?

Every so often I come across something I want to tag for my future research project. This blog post by Peter Turchin is one of them. Turchin talks briefly about the evolution of pants as a practical object of clothing. Essentially, a split garment came about in horse cultures, as it made it safer and more efficient to ride. I can attest to that personally!

One thing that struck me in particular about Turchin's research was this:
Before the introduction of horses by Europeans (actually, re-introduction – horses were native to North America, but were hunted to extinction when humans first arrived there), civilized Amerindians wore kilts.
But when the Plains Indians started riding horses they also adopted pants. Another correlation is that typically only men wear pants (or men are first to switch to wearing pants). 
Two things popped into my head when reading this:

1) The degree to which the Native American cultures were changed by horses is something that has certainly been explored from a scholarly POV, and something I will have to look at in more depth. It's not a strength of mine, currently. This is an interesting piece of material culture history that only adds to that argument.

2) There is some excellent work about the wives of cavalry officers in the late nineteenth century, and how their lives on the edges of civilization, among men, began to shift and their societal norms with them. Wearing pants - and in general shucking fashionable clothing for more practical and protective choices - is just one of those ways. The memoirs of Libby Custer bear this out, and will be one of my sources for the mustang project.