The Tree, the Tower and the Shaman

The Material Culture of Resistance of the No M11 Link Roads Protest of Wanstead and Leytonstone, London

Bibliographic Data

ID2391329
AuthorsBeverley Butler (0000-0002-6512-2362, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume1
Issue3
Pages337-363
Publication date1996-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/135918359600100304
OpenAlexW2099735494
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited5

This paper, 'The tree, the Tower and the Shaman', is a bricolage of comment, analysis, critique, oral testimony and myth, the 'subject' of which is the material culture of one specific urban landscape - Claremont Road. My text explores the ways in which a study of material culture offers us an insight into the cultures of resistance that inhabited this particular space in protest against the British National Roads Programme, and similarly, the impli cations of these findings for subsequent critiques of museology, space and 'everyday life'. Claremont Road, whilst functioning as a critique of the 'auto'-(mobile) culture, also functioned as an auto-critique of both the domi nant museum culture and of 'traditional' definitions of material culture. I posit that the culture of resistance created at Claremont, the people who inhabited the space and the rituals performed here functioned as an 'auto' critic of everyday life, and that the art, the artefacts and the landscape itself were purposefully (re)-created to 'display' and to confront this potential. Thus the Claremont Road experience offers an insight, a clarity: a parody, an inversion and a subversion of 'ordinary' perspectives; with this co existed/co-exists alternative visions. What emerges from this study are the various, often competing, ways of seeing and experiencing the urban environment, materiality, democracy, partisan politics, social identities, ritual performance, time, place and everyday life. The 'common ground' or praxis is located in the transforming potential of 'contact

Aesthetics · Art · Everyday life · Materiality (auditing · Political science · Praxis · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Public Spaces through Art

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