Living as a human being in the 21st century is a more or less constant three-dimensional textile experience. Textiles have a continuous proximity to our bodies as clothing but also as an essential material in our dwellings, both with practical and emotional functions. The Everyday Performing Textiles derives from my deep interest in the qualities and embedded connotations of textiles, the stuff that affectively shapes our material reality. These soft things play different roles in our lives, as parts of a web of function and meaning.  In this thesis I focus on the unobtrusive position of everyday textiles, searching to reflect upon the significance and substance they have within our homes. I predicate that our wellbeing is deeply dependent and connected to the comfort of textiles – it being an emotional material as much as a physical. I use the expectations of materiality as a method, balancing between the familiar and the strange, to challenge and expand our perception of cloth, both as a statement and a query of its value in modern society. I depict everyday textiles in a skewed way, mixing the realistic and the unrealistic, to create an expanded perception of them – playing with their immanent, possibly unspoken, expectations. The Everyday Performing Textiles is an acknowledgement of our textile reality – the existence of this interactive, interdependent relationship in our everyday practice of living.

Understanding fashion and dress is frequently dictated by the sense of sight and the social fact of visibility. This thesis aims to explore the phenomenon of non-visual fashion and dress with a particular focus on visually impaired people and their bodies as a site of knowledge production. While previous studies of the relationship between body and dress have examined how the sighted body is fashioned, the present small-scale and socio-sensorial study attempts to fathom how fashion and dress become perceivable in haptic, audial, and olfactory terms. This thesis engages thoughtfully with the visually impaired and their feelings related to the present-day field of fashion and dress, building on a Bourdieusan framework of habitus and embodiment applied to fashion studies. Employing qualitative interviews conducted among visually impaired women in Finland, this thesis gives voice to the people meagrely represented in the literature on fashion and dress. Furthermore, while acknowledging the empirically grounded non-visual dimension, this thesis adheres to previous contributions of revaluing the plurality of epistemologies and discourses vis-à-vis fashion, dress, and the body.

of diploma thesis Title: Strangers at home - In Search of Indigenous Identity at the Suburbs of a Glocal Mexican City Student: Marie Heřmanová Tutor: Mgr. Radovan Haluzík The presented thesis is based on a fieldwork realized during five months in the city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas in south of Mexico and deals with different strategies through which are young Tzotziles and Tzeltales living in the new suburbs of the old colonial city constructing their identity. Main axes of the thesis are first the relationship of these young people to the native communities of their parents and second to the rich and turistic city centre. As a main ethnographic method I use participant observation and also the material culture studies ( the tesis focus mostly on identification through visage and consequently on the consitution of identity through styles and modes of dressing).

Folk religiosity during High Middle Ages and Early Modern times as reflected in material culture (the example of small ceramic sculpture) This work focuses on study of religious practice and urban everyday life of urban folk groups in Prague Towns from High Middle Ages till Early Modern times. The most common archaeological artifacts reflecting religious practice are small clay figurines found both in urban and in rural environment. These figurines made of fired clay depict in most cases Madonna with Christ-child and various saints, nevertheless profane figurines and various zoomorphic artifacts can be found too. This work is focused mainly on findings of clay figurines obtained during the large archeological excavation on Republic Square in Prague, which offered a unique collection of artifacts dated from 1250 to 1600. Analogies from the Central Europe will be considered in the process of evaluation of the assemblage mentioned above. It is not known exactly what the purpose of these artifacts was and it is still a subject of discussion, into which we will try to bring some new light. Right iconographic interpretation requires a comparation with some other objects of folk religiosity and urban everyday life (such as medallions and other small holy objects, pilgrim signs, pilgrimage pictures,...

Uppsala University Library owns eight volumes of manuscripts attributed to the academy equerry Johan Leven Ekelund (c.1701−1775). In this thesis, I apply methods from the field of material culture studies in order to establish which of the volumes that formed the donation from Leven to the library mentioned in his will. By mapping certain markers such as places, names and dates I am able to identify to some extent where Leven gained his practical skills and which writers influenced him. By analysing the texts, I draw the conclusion that the manuscripts can be divided into groups aimed for different audiences. Some of them fit in an utilitarian context, some of them aim to give riding and horsemanship scientific legitimacy. Some are aimed for a narrow circle of peers, connaisseurs of the art of riding. By examining Leven’s networks, I seek to shed light on whether he wrote in order to further his career. My conclusion is that in that case, Leven’s main focus was probably to help his son, who had a remarkably successful career as a physician after the death of his father. / <p>Orcid nr: 0000-0002-8791-4109</p>

The aim of the presented thesis is to cover the topic of one of the first archaeological research explorations of the originally middle-age fortified manor in Martinice u Votic, Czechoslovakia, done in years 1951 and 1954 and led by an archaeologist Květa Reichertová, an employee of the former State Institute of Archaeology in Prague. The knowledge obtained during this research became a regular part of our archaeological literature. The author of the thesis provides a detailed reconstruction of the research, essential for the interpretation of the findings and the construction development of the stronghold. She also tries to explain the strongholdin Martinice u Votic in the broader context of all the retrievable writtensources that mentionthe strongholdor its owner and presents a broad and by far not yet exhausted collection - mainly ceramic tableware, embossed tiles,and metallic objects - which are indicative of the state of the stronghold as well as of the lifestyle, social class and views of the owners. The author concentrates mainly on the iconographically rich set of embossed tiles from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The tiles are presented in a detailed catalogue accompanied by texts and pictures. Iconographic motives are compared mainly with the findings from neighbouring...

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The return of objects that belong to ethnographic collections to their places of origin is one of the topics of discussion that, despite not being new, has been gaining more and more relevance today. Taking the Iku indigenous craft collection in the archives of the National Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg as a case study, I pursue to develop an object-based methodology that increases and deepens the understanding of the notion of ethical stewardship, while joining current debates on indigenous heritage and decoloniality. This work aims to reveal material and immaterial aspects embedded in textile objects. The methodology included field visits to the museum archive, material culture analysis, and semi-structured interviews. The work evokes a decolonial discussion regarding the need to engage with epistemologies from the “South” and with methodologies not fully recognized by the dominant western-modern educational frameworks in order to achieve a more inclusive and assertive production of knowledge. / La restitución de colecciones etnográficas a sus lugares de origen es uno de los temas de discusión que, a pesar de no ser nueva, ha ido cobrando cada vez más relevancia en la actualidad. Tomando la colección de artesanía indígena Iku/arhuaca en los archivos del Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo en Gotemburgo como estudio de caso, busco desarrollar una metodología basada en objetos que aumente y profundice la comprensión de la noción de administración ética, mientras me sumo a los debates actuales sobre patrimonio indígena y decolonialidad. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo revelar los aspectos materiales e inmateriales incrustados en los objetos textiles. La metodología incluyó visitas de campo al archivo del museo, análisis de cultura material y entrevistas semiestructuradas. El trabajo evoca una discusión decolonial sobre la necesidad de involucrar epistemologías del “Sur” y metodologías no plenamente reconocidas por los marcos educativos occidentales-modernos dominantes para lograr una producción de conocimiento más inclusiva y asertiva.

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