From mammoth to miniature
Model of a summer encampment of the Yakuts' as a narrative object
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2254672 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alison K Brown (0000-0001-6629-1363, University of Aberdeen), Alison Brown (0000-0003-3998-7212, University of Aberdeen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 111-131 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9655.14289 |
| OpenAlex | W4413089304 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
Classic anthropological accounts of miniature objects have focused on their spatial and aesthetic dimensions, with more recent work addressing their communicative potential, connections with play, and role in protecting threatened cultural knowledge. This article analyses responses to a miniature landscape model of yhyakh, a festival celebrated in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russian Federation, carved from mammoth ivory in the mid-nineteenth century and now in the British Museum. Based on fieldwork with artists following the model's loan to the National Art Museum, Yakutsk, and in the British Museum, I argue that while the model's reduced scale is part of its fascination, its material and temporal dimensions and its cultural associations - its 'mammothness' - are inseparable. Mammothness both enhances the model's narrative capacity and prompts consideration of the temporal dimensions of materials as well as of objects
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Mammoth · Narrative · Object (grammar · Sociology · Threatened species · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Philosophy · Ecology
Trading Identities
Art And Agency
On Longing
Museum Materialities
So Much More Than Art
Ohuokhai
Miniatures of the nation
A. W. Franks, Nineteenth-century collecting and the British Museum
The Post-Colonial Ecology of Siberian Shamanic Revivalism
Ivory Carving in Yakutia
Sensing the Life of Material
The revival of rituals among the Sakha‐Yakut and the Hokkaido Ainu
Environmental encounters
Miniature town models and memory
Model Subjects
The Yakut [Sakha] National Festival Ysyakh in Transition
Religion-Making at the SakhaYhyakh
Ohuokhai
Agitating Images
Making
Teddy Bear Patriarchy
Small devices, memory and model architectures
The British Museum Citi Exhibition Arctic
Trace Ethnography, Affect, and Institutional Ecologies in the Distributed Records of a Plaster Model
Repatriation as Pedagogy
Perclusive Alliances
Whose Idea Was This
The World Unwraps from Tiny Bags
Materials against materiality
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |