Sámi culture and resources have long been exploited by the Swedish state, church and government. The material culture that was collected during the late 19th and early 20th century, has many times lost their original meaning and context later on in museum collections. This is problematic and needs to change in order to prevent further damage to the Sámi material and immaterial culture. This study aims to analyse the Sámi silver brooches with Marian-symbols, that were found together with other types of silver artefacts at Passekårsa, Gällivare parish. By doing this type of analysis it allows for further and mor difficult discussions to be adressed and it also allows for the silver find in question to be further contextualized. We non-Sámi archaeologists, scientists and staff at museums need to talk about how we are interpreting, examining and portraying Sámi cultural heritage whether it concerns human remains, places of sacrifice or small silver brooches.

Located on a ridgetop in central Kentucky, the Singer-Hieronymus Site Complex consists of at least four Native American villages. The Native Americans who lived there are called the “Fort Ancient” by archaeologists. This study examined relationships between these villages, both spatially and temporally, to build a more complete history of site occupation. To do this, aerial imagery analysis, geophysical survey, and archaeological investigations were conducted. This research determined there were differences among villages in terms of their size, however other characteristics—internal village organization, village shape, radiometric dates, and material culture—overlapped significantly. Additionally, landscape-scale geophysical survey identified at least three potentially new villages. It has been suggested that Fort Ancient groups abandoned villages every 10 to 30 years due to environmental degradation, but these results suggest that native peoples did not abandon villages at Singer-Hieronymus. Current thought surrounding Fort Ancient village abandonment and reoccupation must therefore be reconsidered.

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This thesis is focusing on a visual culture within Instagram where women display traditional western femininity through aesthetically pleasing images of homes and interiors. When observing this culture from a critical perspective, questions on normativity, gender and home representation together with the complexity of personal narratives comes up. In an attempt to begin understanding the mechanisms and pleasures behind the use of Instagram this way, a small number of user interviews were made and analyzed towards representation, identity and feminist theory, and ideas around roles of photography, femininity, digital communities and material culture. As a result of the study it could be claimed that images of interiors and homes are used as frameworks for a feminine culture where participants are creating a safe space in relation to other social network cultures. The space is used for remembering moments, being creative, developing skills and engaging in undisturbed social practice. Photography, interior design and the materiality of the home can also be seen as visual tools used to reflect on and create identities, at the same time as they are used for social positioning. Though faced with contradicting feelings, frustration about superficiality and concerns around privacy, it can be concluded that this refined practice of taking and sharing images, engaging socially and being creative is pleasurable enough for the users not to stop participating.

This dissertation investigates the ways in which Philadelphia artists and architects visualized, comprehended, and reformed the city's rapidly changing urban environment in the early republic, prior to the modern articulation of "ecology" as a scientific concept by late nineteenth-century naturalists such as Ernst Haeckel. I consider a variety of different media--including popular depictions and manifestations of Penn's Treaty Elm, fireplace and stove models by Charles Willson Peale, architectural designs for the Philadelphia Waterworks by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and a self-portrait bust by the sculptor William Rush--in order to demonstrate that the human body served as a powerful creative metaphor in Philadelphia circa 1800, not only for understanding and representing natural processes in political or aesthetic terms, but also for framing critical public discourse about the city's actual environmental conditions. Specifically, I reveal how this metaphorical framework produced a variety of effects in art and architecture of the period, sometimes facilitating and at other times obscuring an understanding about the natural world as an arena of dynamic transformation. By revealing the previously unexplored environmental significance of the objects in question, my dissertation asserts that ecological change played an instrumental role in shaping artistic production and urban development in the decades following United States independence. / Art History

The foundation for a museum is the collection. To collect, preserve and display is what constitutes a museum. But the process of deciding which object´s should be saved, and which objects should not, are based on values. It is also values that make people inclined to donate objects to museums. How and why we value a museum determine if and why we donate. Objects themselves could be said to have a biography just like people. Depending on the objects biography and the context, the value of the object differs. My aim is to try and give an explanation to how we value the material heritage we collect, and to explain why people want to donate to museums; despite the fact they don’t get paid. I will also try and explain how value theory is used in economics and in philosophy, and how those value theories might differ from a museological theory of value.

In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.

This thesis examines the circulation of physical music media (78rpm records, LPs, CDs, tape) in the independent music marketplace. It is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Austin, Texas, amongst the producers of goods for the independent marketplace, independent music stores and consumers of these goods and services. Against prevailing constructivist interpretations, I will argue for the value of authenticity as an analytical anthropological concept because it unites what my research participants value about materiality, technology, and marketplace relationships. In the independent marketplace for physical music media, authenticity is a multi-local, multi-vocal phenomenon. A nexus of economic rationales, design, reproduction-technologies, histories and personal conduct interact in an ongoing process that authenticates music commodities and their marketplace. This means that particular commodities are sought out over others on account of the multi-local authenticities they anchor. The thesis firstly demonstrates how the independent music scene safeguards claims to authentic identities by constructing an opposition to the mainstream, drawing on discourses of ethical production and consumption, sound technologies, spaces of consumption and cultural production. Secondly, I will uncover how physical music media and sound-reproduction technologies are assessed as effective providers of authentic musical reproductions according to their historical contingencies and performative material capacities. Thirdly, I develop the notion of the scene (Shank 1994) from its previously genre-fixed perspective to encompass multiple musical styles operating within a common social network of producers, retailers and collectors. The pluralistic scene I describe utilises multiple musical genres and nuanced notions of materiality and authenticity to establish their complex hierarchy of sonic and technological experiences.