The architecture of collection has two key implications as understood in this chapter: it has a direct relationship with colonialism, even where it is attempting to redress that balance in some way, it is with reference to the body of theory emerging from this challenge to Western dominance in academia and geopolitics more broadly. The second is that collecting is a way of organizing and bringing order to the world: a form of organization that might have unreal or jarring results, as it abstracts things from their context. Anthropology as a discipline has context at its heart: this is a kind of extreme contextualization, directly opposed to modernist tabula rasa approaches where the desire for starting from a fresh piece of territory erases something essential from the social fabric and cultural memory attached to a place. Collection and cultural display, for all the benefits of allowing for communication and understanding, are fraught with dangers meaning that care must be taken in order to allow the qualities of resonance and wonder to emerge without harm to the people we are being asked to identify with, ensuring that their voices are heard and that misunderstandings and assumptions are not made.
Not all collection is cross-cultural, of course, as we see in the example of the open-air museums and courtyard house typology. Such attempts to re-present our own histories are just as difficult to manage, of course. The underlying intention of such activities can be problematic, either freezing a living tradition at a certain point or constructing a false narrative, one which supports an agenda which might appear essential or positive at the time. The intentions become more and more apparent over time, as does the artifice driving the collection: meaning that the narrative, however useful it is, becomes suspect as a constructed fiction serving a purpose rather than historical facts which serve to contextualize peoples’ lives.
FIGURE 4.13 Author’s photograph of modern hanok.
Notes
1 See Baudrillard (1994) and Lucas (2014) for more on this, particularly as it relates to the keeping of a sketchbook.
2 See Greenblatt (1991) for a full exploration of the themes of resonance and wonder.
3 One question architects often ask when presented with anthropologically based works is the status of the anthropologist within that context: are they more than mere tourists or postcolonialist adventurers? What is the value in an outsider trying to understand these events or objects which might be much more swiftly explained by someone who actually uses them in their everyday life? There are various forms of anthropology of course, but one aspect of the study is to position oneself as a curious outsider, asking naive questions in order to unpack the deeper details of what is happening.
4 Papua New Guinea, and the study of malanggan is not restricted to Küchler, of course: a wide range of anthropological approaches have been taken to both this region and these artefacts. Others have discussed malanggan in order to pursue alternative theoretical agendas. Marilyn Strathern (2001) uses the sculptures as a lens through which to view Western intellectual property debates, and Miyazaki (2010) develops this into a discussion of the familiar themes of gifts and exchanges. Janet Hoskins further uses the malanggan to develop the themes of agency and biography, drawing on earlier work by Alfred Gell.
5 See Hwangbo (2010) and Hwangbo & Jarzombek (2011) for more on these processes.
6 I have discussed museum studies, ideas of collection and the architect’s sketchbook as a kind of museum in Lucas, R. 2014. ‘The Sketchbook as Collection: A Phenomenology of Sketching’ in Bartram, A., El-Bizri, N.
& Gittens, D. (Eds.). Recto-Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook. Farnham:
Ashgate. This chapter includes a detailed discussion of the Soane Museum, the Francis Bacon studio in Dublin, and contextualizes my sketching practice in the British Museum through the work of Baudrillard, Greenblatt and Elsner.
7 Both ‘East’ and ‘West’ are too wide ranging to be truly useful as categories given the enormous variety present in each region. Contemporary
theory discusses the ‘global North’ and ‘global South’: indicators of the concentration of wealth in the Northern Hemisphere which are argued to be more useful, if similarly broad categories.
8 Indeed, Japan is a notable exception due to its long period of near isolation called Sakoku, lasting from the 1630s to 1853 when American Black Ships forced the opening of Japan’s markets.
9 There is obviously a wider critique of contemporary architectural practice to be made within the framework of Said’s theory: the export of architectural expertise from the West to the East such as detailed by Stanek (2012), the exoticization of non-Western works as a misunderstanding of their
context and the extreme decontextualization encouraged by contemporary competition-based commissioning for grand projects.
10 See Scott Lukas (2012) for a sociologically informed history of the theme park centred on American examples.
11 The most extreme example here is the ethnographic collection. It can be argued that outdated practices of display in such museums offer as much understanding as potential misunderstanding aside from the moral and ethical considerations of placing a group of people on display without their explicit permission or input.
12 See Rossi (1982) for more on his distinction between ‘pathological’ and
‘propelling’ monuments.
13 See Lebbeus Woods (1996, 1997) for more on his strategies towards scar tissue and other forms of ‘radical reconstruction’ in war-damaged architecture, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.
14 Japanese periods run according to the Emperor’s reign; Shoˉwa Emperor Hirohito’s dates are 1926–1989, and the era name often used as a short hand to refer to pre–Second World War Japanese architecture when European construction techniques were combined with Japanese detailing in an early example of critical regionalism.
15 See Hwangbo (2010) for more on the conservation strategies used for hanok houses in South Korea.
16 As documented in: Kim, Dan Bi & Lee, Jae Soek (Eds.). 2016. Hanok, Korean Traditional Architecture: 2011–2016 National Hanok Competition. Seoul:
Architecture & Urban Research Institute & Kim Dae Ik.
17 Cho, Byoungso. 2018. ‘Imperfection and Emptiness’ in Architectural Review 1448, February 2018, pp. 44–50.
18 See Hwangbo & Jarzombek (2011) for more on this.
Introduction
This chapter discusses marketplaces through a number of theoretical lenses.
As one would expect, theories of exchange feature strongly here, as these unpack the details of how people trade materials, goods and services.
Anthropological accounts of exchange explore ideas of economies other than the dominant mode of capitalism, seeing that there are means of trade other than through monetary equivalence. Foundational to this is Marcel Mauss’s influential study of gifts. Whilst conventionally thought of as acts of generosity, Mauss observed that gifts are often accompanied by obligation and reciprocity. By accepting a gift, you enter into a social relationship where, at some point, you will make an equivalent offering; should one refuse the gift, then the perception could be that social relations are being refused or rejected: a serious insult.
Such exchanges are the focus of the sub-discipline of economic anthropology instigated by the likes of Hart and Hann. A more general theory of practice is also explored here, but could easily be applied to any of the typologies under discussion. In economic exchange, the practices around trading are apparent and based on rules, making them an excellent example for the discussion of practice. Theories of practice turn their eye to the things that we do and the ways in which we do them. This set of theories explores how we know the world through the skills we use and how constellations of those skills constitute an embodied lifeworld known as a habitus. To a skilled negotiator, the world is constituted of opportunities, margins and negotiations: their skilled practices influence how they understand the world. Other collections of skills offer alternative understandings, such as that of the marketplace
5
Marketplaces and
Sites of Exchange
porters and couriers who know one market intimately, or the most efficient routes between markets and retail, respectively. For these individuals, the market is a spatial construct, understood at different extents of scale.
The spaces designed most completely around practices of exchange are marketplaces. These sites could be described as perfect images of the rules of engagement of that market, describing the tacit understandings and explicit rules governing position, extent, neighbours, competition and trust.
Two examples are discussed: Tsukiji seafood market in Tokyo, which was decommissioned in 2018, and Namdaemun general market in Seoul, which borders a commercial retail zone on one side, and a business district on another, and a third border provided by one of the ancient gates to the city.