‘Concepts have teeth’: capacities and transfers in the digital modelling of Blackfoot material culture

Remarking on the way that colonial encounters produced complex entangled networks between indigenous communities and Euro-Americans, the Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2007, 69) writes that ‘concepts have teeth and teeth that bite through time’.She is writing about the differential power of one account over another in establishing the terms of being seen or being present.This paper explores the way in which these kinds of concepts and encounters produce certain kinds of affective capacities.

This paper introduces an archaeology-art project concerned with digitally modelling Blackfoot material culture in UK museum collections, using photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). Blackfoot sacred artefacts, such as medicine bundles, are involved in a series of complex exchanges and transfers (Lokensgard 2010). In this paper we argue that the transfer and exchange of medicine bundles offers a paradigm for thinking about material encounters. What capacities are revealed by the various exchanges involved in the project?

The project is based on a series of exchanges: between academics and members of an indigenous community; between Canadian and UK institutions; between Universities and museums; and between academic disciplines and their associated practices and techniques.How do the series of encounters involved in these exchanges make a difference to the outcomes and trajectories of the project; how do capacities emerge and extend through the networks established and created by the project?

References
Lokensgard, K.H. 2010 Blackfoot religion and the consequences of cultural commoditization. London: Routledge.
Simpson, A. 2007 On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’and Colonial Citizenship, Junctures 9, 67-80.

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