This research approaches archaeological human remains in museum collections from a rhetorical perspective. Instead of joining the body of scholarship in museum studies that focuses on the process of curatorial interpretation, this project applies public memory studies to explore what happens to curatorial interpretation when it goes out into the world and is taken up in public circulated discourse. With a focus on publics, the moment of knowledge construction when visitors approach a display of human remains in a museum is captured and analyzed through the lenses of new materialism, rhetoric in situ, and public memory studies. Each lens represents the chosen approach to each of the three elements that converge at the moment of knowledge construction ? publics, objects, and place ? which are grouped together as a triangle of interrelated dynamics all working in a situationally-contingent rhetorical ecology of other factors and influences. Thus, the dynamic inseparable trio of publics, objects, and place are coined the ?ecotriangle.? For museum studies, rhetoric?s foundational work can provide critical perspective into the nature of communication and meaning-making that happens when publics meet human remains in a museum space. In order to explore the ecotriangular relationship of publics, objects, and place with an interdisciplinary approach, this project begins by interrogating the implicit assumptions within the defitions of terms like ?public? and ?object? then develops collaborative definitions from the scholarship in rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies. The particular case of human remains challenges most scholarships? definitions of object. Yet as this research reveals, human remains as case study help develop and refine the approach to objects, materiality, interpretation, and museum display when challenged to inclusively frame such a case instead of treat human remains as an exception or outlier to scholarship on objects. Exploring the ecotriangle as a heuristic model for conceptualization of interrelational dynamics in knowledge construction extends current scholarship in rhetoric, especially rhetoric in situ and rhetorical ecology, and also reinforces existing interdisciplinary bridges between the fields of rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies.

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Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's novel demonstrates that religious syncretism centered in an ethics of things is a viable, fruitful reaction to the colonizers' religion, and that religious practice can be healthily enacted through the medium of things and bodies.

This study turns to what is for many an everyday item – yogurt – as a critical zone observatory, a synergistic, place-based laboratory which aims to integrate heterogenous representations of planetary phenomena as they are registered at a common surface. Yogurt has an impressive cultural endurance largely derived from its prominence in various paradigms of health. The product has culturally endured in another sense: as a common cultural medium where humans and microbes have met for generations. This study begins with a profile of yogurt as most encounter it today to consider how normative notions of health interface with the temporal and spatial imaginaries entailed in commodity geographies. Commoditized yogurt is characterized by a low and limited microbial biodiversity compared to yogurts produced outside of the commodity context. Yogurt is therefore presented as a micro case study to consider modes by which we sense and valuate ecological phenomena beyond the perceptible surface, how such sens-abilities intersect models of health, and to what effect. To trace a history of yogurt along these contours, I introduce it as a particular kind of artefact: a global object. As an object of environmental history, I define a global object as a global commodity with a high potential to be re-localized, and therefore with a high potential to re-shape commodity geographies. However, this trajectory is contingent upon framing yogurt as a critical zone observatory – a site where global phenomena like human-microbial interaction may become familiar and intimate. Guided by new materialist theory, I weave together historical and ethnographic case studies from the following consortium: resident yogurt bacteria, artisanal yogurt producers and home fermenters, a mystical immunologist, and an 11th century linguistic scholar. Through these perspectives, I both sketch and apply a framework for de-centered, interspecies histories of cultural (re)production through an extended metaphor of biofilm: the coagulative bacterial structure giving yogurt its characteristic texture. In so doing I provide a re-articulation of “the probiotic” as an integrative case of human and more-than-human health. The study concludes by directing these implications towards a consideration of aesthetic engagement by displaying how fermentation practice may enliven matters of re-diversification and re-localization.

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Clothes are the second skin on human bodies. By coming in contact with humans, clothes become a part of the body. Through the contact, clothes affect and enable human actions. This thesis investigates the relationship between human bodies and clothes by conducting interviews and wardrobe studies. Together with the informants and clothes, the exhibition “Fashioned from Nature” from The Victoria and Albert Museum is partly analyzed. The material is being interpreted in a critical analysis through theories on material agency and skin. The analysis turns to the culture and nature dualism, in order to highlight the neglected physical agency in clothing. Clothing’s agency is both physical and aesthetical. Neither of the aspects can be subordinate, nor superior, since clothes consist equally of both. Following the theories, clothing’s agency is being acknowledged through the encounters with humans. However, the results in this thesis show that clothing’s agency is ever present.