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Cultural Heritage

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Mass Incarceration and Mental Health

MICHAELSHANKS.ORG. Michael Shanks. RUIN MEMORIES. Archaeolog: Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. The aesthetics of waste and heritage One outcome of the modern attitude towards things and materiality is an oppositional hierarchy between, on the one hand, functional and/or aesthetically pleasing things and, on the other, waste – all rubbish supposed to be eradicated by increasingly more effective systems of disposal and recycling (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004, Scanlan 2005).

Heritage practices may at first be seen to be mediating this opposition, reflecting a care for and attentiveness to the useless and stranded. Heritage, however, contains its own regimes of cultural valuing and othering. In the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an “age-value” which is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, modern ruins become ambiguous, even anachronistic. The materiality of memory Places of abjection also relate materially (although ambiguously so) to another type of memory, a habit memory. The significance of things Dag Andersson 1. Archaeology and Material Culture | The material world, broadly defined.

Winterthur Digital Collections. Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. NYPL Digital Collections.