Ishi + Glass + Audience + Performance = Title?

The Affective Qualities of Ishi’s Knapped Glass Points
Ishi and His Audience: Negotiations in Glass
Green, Brown, Clear: The Affective Qualities of Ishi’s Knapped Glass
The Affordances of Glass: Ishi’s Knapped Glass in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum
Ishi’s Performative Knapping
Length vs. Color: The Affective Qualities of Ishi’s Knapped Glass Points
Ishi’s Negotiations in Glass
The Negotiated Qualities of Ishi’s Knapped Glass: Audience, Affordances, and Awesomeness
Ishi’s Audience and the Affordances of Glass
Performance, Audience, and Affordances: Ishi’s Knapped Glass Collection in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum
Ishi and His Audience: A Collection of Debitage and Knapped Glass in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum

I’m in the process of applying for a bit of funding to put my Ishi paper into publication, just in time for his 100th anniversary at the Phoebe A. Hearst museum. I wrote the paper back in 2005 and the poor thing needs a lot of work, but the funding will be for illustrations of some points and a couple of half-worked “blanks” that Ishi worked on before his death. I’m getting Kathryn Killackey to illustrate them, and as you can see from her webpage, she has no lack of experience in Ishi points:

http://www.killackeyillustration.com/

So the above list (having a lot of lists lately–must be the end of the semester) is what I brainstormed last night for a title. Obviously some of that will depend where I try to get it published, but I think I like the last one. Simple, not too scary (people tend to freak when I start talking about affordances, but I still haven’t found a better word for “the physical and non-physical qualities/traits of an object that make it useable or non-useable in certain ways”) and it brings in the name of the museum housing the collection. Writing about Ishi is always a minefield anyway–I really need to spend some time on this paper to make sure that it properly honors his legacy. Check out the wikipedia article about Ishi if you haven’t heard of this particular piece of a long history of ignoble treatment of Native Americans.

Author: colleenmorgan

Dr. Colleen Morgan (ORCID 0000-0001-6907-5535) is the Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She conducts research on digital media and archaeology, with a special focus on embodiment, avatars, genetics and bioarchaeology. She is interested in building archaeological narratives with emerging technology, including photography, video, mobile and locative devices. Through archaeological making she explores past lifeways and our current understanding of heritage, especially regarding issues of authority, authenticity, and identity. View all posts by colleenmorgan