Visual Anthropology

In this article, I delineate the zone of TV serials in Kinshasa as a space in which young people and women interact and collectively produce narratives that reflect their understandings of what it means to live in Kinshasa today. The serials thus generate a "cultural public sphere".

Este artigo pretende ser um contributo para uma discussão sobre a cidade contemporânea, tida enquanto artefacto cultural passível de exploração ao nível de uma antropologia da comunicação visual urbana. A cidade é desde há longa data vislumbrada por diversos intelectuais, académicos e cientistas como um terreno particularmente fecundo para um estudo dos processos de comunicação visual. O meio urbano parece imerso em circuitos de comunicação de diversa ordem, mantidos por diferentes protagonistas, linguagens e signos. Proponho uma análise à cidade que tenha simultaneamente em consideração o seu espaço físico mas, igualmente, o espaço virtual que cada vez mais se torna elemento fulcral para a fabricação das imagens e representações dos lugares.

Sub-Saharan African public spheres have increasingly transformed following the Pentecostalist wave that is sweeping over the continent since two decades
ago. This is also the case for Kinshasa, where this new type of Christianity dominates both the urban soundscape and the media world. A Christian popular culture
flourishes with its own music, dance forms, TV shows and celebrities. This article focuses on local TV serials, that, disregarding the profile of the channels
on which these are broadcast, are embedded in the spread of an apocalyptic interpretation of life, as professed by these new churches. The TV serials are approached as narratives that, just like traditional epic tales, depict spiritual and social transgression. Two main characters, the fool and the false pastor (pasteur), will be studied through the lens of the trickster, a longstanding figure in the study of traditional storytelling.

This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual, material and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the multiple dialogues that developed between Classics and colonialism in this period and argues that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at various levels. Most at issue in the contexts where Classics and empire converge is the critical question of ownership: to whom does the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre-eminent ownership of the visual, literary and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of Northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non-European communities and powers – Africa, India, America – commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, this volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of Classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, this volume contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimised and evaluated using classical models.

This article describes how to conduct visual research by using new technologies. Modern versions of software enable to catalogue and analyse multimedia data . The author describe the tools, techniques and merged use of different hardware and software which helped him in some recent visual sociology's projects. His conclusion is that CAQDAS freeware and open source software, could be effectively used to design the research and map the ideas, assist the coding process, record photo elicitation interviews, index and analyse visual data.

From the Editor's preface:

"Regev Nathansohn considers a different visual dimension of the occupation in the territories: photographs by photojournalists. Actually, he deals with attempts by photographers to tame, organize and distill the chaotic reality of the occupation by
means of photography. Having analyzed hundreds of photographs, he distinguishes between three types and attempts to identify the photographers of what he calls “transgressive photography.” One of the surprising results of the analysis is that
photojournalists rarely create transgressive photographs. Rather, soldiers who are not professional photographers are the ones who, surprisingly — or perhaps not— create most of the photographs that are not banal."

Shenhav, Yehouda. 2007. "Why not “The Occupation”". Theory and Criticism 31, Winter 2007. Pp. 322-332.

Over the past decade, multinational pharmaceutical companies have been encapsulating yaqona (kava, Piper methysticum), the natural intoxicating relaxant, soporific and social lubricant of the Pacific Islands, and retailing it as an over the counter alternative stress and sleep management medication.  This activity is netting multinational pharmaceutical companies huge profits whilst the grassroots cultivator receives a minimal return for their raw product.  In my presentation, I will describe an ethnographic account of a simple social experiment that was conducted at a yaqona drinking session on Kadavu Island, Fiji, in June 2005.  To the surprise of those present, Fiji’s yaqona cultivators were identified as playing both a significant role, and an insignificant role, within the multinational pharmaceutical industry’s commodity chain.  The term significant describes the cultivators’ role as the producer of the vital ingredient needed in order for the multinational pharmaceutical companies to manufacture their yaqona capsules.  However, the term insignificant is ascribed in a postpartive manner, as it could be argued that the cultivator receives inequitable remuneration for that vital ingredient.  I will close with several recommendations which, if introduced, could possibly allow the yaqona cultivators at the grassroots to reap equitably alongside the multinational pharmaceutical companies.

This paper takes the idea of "culture" as a "busy intersection" through a visual ethnography that centers on the pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza. By focusing on this intersection, the author analyzes how diverse agents construct their own identity via the overt construction of the identity and culture of "the Maya" -- agents that range from archaeologists, new age spiritualists, the state, local maya artisans, tourists, and travel writers.  The essay explores the thesis of Walter Benjamin that the mimetic copy whithers away the aura of originals via the close textual reading of the meanings of ruins, original, and the contemporary processes of "copying" via construction of identities of self and other.

Prompted by public response to photographs by Duane Michals and Roger Fenton, and by accounts of photographic documentation by Roland Barthes and Henri Cartier-Bresson, this paper argues that a relation to reality remains essential within photography, however that that relation is more complex than simple indexicality. It concludes by examining how a photograph by Thomas Demand uses that tradition to apparently address a metaphysical reality

A cidade contemporânea é um artefacto cultural em constante mutação, o resultado de forças históricas e de dinâmicas sócio-culturais díspares. Diferentes usos e representações do espaço ajudam a compor este habitat, simultaneamente vibrante e complexo. O espaço metropolitano é, por isso, lugar de contendas de natureza simbólica, colisões entre visões e apropriações do território que nem sempre convivem harmoniosamente. Afirmando-se como terreno híbrido que abriga diferentes actores e interesses, o Bairro Alto lisboeta é um bom exemplo destas dinâmicas conflituais. Neste artigo pretende-se reflectir sobre as linguagens visuais ilegais que nos últimos anos foram preenchendo a paisagem deste local, suscitando a atenção dos media e medidas políticas e urbanísticas por parte dos poderes públicos. Este é um lugar histórico da cidade, uma atracção turística que exige preservação e dificilmente suporta intervenções que interfiram nesta imagem fabricada. O graffiti e a street art executados neste bairro são, neste artigo, entendidos como exercícios estéticos e políticos, recursos expressivos tomados por diferentes actores numa cidade em constante negociação.

"Partindo de uma pesquisa de natureza etnográfica junto de jovens que se dedicam ao graffiti urbano, procura-se reflectir sobre a condição social destes actores que vivem, simultaneamente, entre dois universos sociais e culturais, construindo intrincadas estratégias de gestão da identidade e do seu quotidiano. O graffiti representa para muitos jovens um horizonte de ruptura e transgressão, um território de rejeição da lei e dos normativos hegemónicos, onde se experimentam o risco e o desvio, a excitação e as sanções tantas vezes dolorosas. Este universo social, complexo e paradoxal, serve de mote à análise de questões como a relação entre as margens e o centro, a construção identitária no mundo contemporâneo, a visualidade e o anonimato na cidade.

An ethnographic research developed within the graffiti community of Lisbon is the starting point for a reflection regarding the social condition of the young members of this community. The graffiti writers live between two social and cultural universes, building complex strategies of managing identity and everyday life. Graffiti represents, for many young people, a ground for struggle and transgression, a chance to reject the law and the hegemonic normatives, an arena where they experiment risk, excitement and, sometimes, painful sanctions. This complex and paradoxical social universe inspires the author to analyze subjects such as the relation between the margins and the center, identity construction in the contemporary world, visuality and anonymity in the city."

Within this book chapter, I look at the encounters of Kathleen Haddon and her father A.C. Haddon during their 1914 trip to Papua through their photographic record.  A.C. Haddon's last trip to Papua, this trip was critical for a number of later publications but has remained largely unacknowledged within the history of British Anthropology.  Focusing on the materiality of the photographs and the different photographic strategies involved, within this chapter I examine the disciplinary slippages that have elided certain moments, such as this trip, from the intertwined histories of photography and anthropology. Salvaging this trip brings Kathleen Haddon's photographic styles back into view and offers a more nuanced view of our discipline's representational strategies.

Since the early 1990s Pentecostal-Charismatic Church membership has spectacularly grown in Africa (Anderson 2001, Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001, Gifford 1998, Meyer 2004a). Scholars of these churches (which are sometimes also called Pentecostalist or Born-Again Churches) invariably mention how audiovisual media are used both in church gatherings and in the proselytising activities of their members. Not only street evangelism, but also print and audiovisual media are perceived as important tools for attracting potential converts. This is especially the case in dense urban societies like Lagos, Accra and Kinshasa. Yet, religious mass media are not all confined to local urban settings. Through a range of different media Pentecostalist leaders also reach out to people in other cities than their own, in villages and in the Diaspora, on the African continent and beyond. (...)
Several explanations have been proposed to account for the appropriation of electronic media such as film, video, radio, and the internet by African Pentecostalist leaders. The global and cosmopolitan scope of these new Christian movements (Hackett 1998, Meyer 2004b), the desire for revelation in contrast to the assumed secrecy of so-called traditional African religious systems (Meyer 2006), and the orality of African societies push Pentecostalist leaders to use modern technological equipment in their predications. These explanations are sought in the peculiarity of African Pentecostalism, though they obliterate the use of mass media in the evangelising work of missionaries during the colonial period. Revisiting the colonial past and taking into account the interfaces of religion and visual media before the heydays of Pentecostalism will, as I hope, contribute to our understandings of how Pentecostalist leaders have been drawn to capture mass media. I attempt to illustrate this with material about Kinshasa’s media history.

Media celebrity, or public status achieved through mass media, is a particular kind of social distinction that appears in most contemporary societies. It is difficult to predict what qualities define celebrity, since the associations conjured up by their names, and the meanings attributed to them, differ from one social context to another. Empirical research is needed in order to understand how celebrities’ reputations are construed. This article focuses on the reputation of television actors in post-Mobutu Kinshasa, a city where charismatic Christianity predominates within the public imaginary. The public identity of Kinshasa’s television stars, audience reactions to artists’ performances, and collective evaluations of these mass-mediated public figures are informed by culturally-rooted approaches toward imitation and the mediation of charisma. This article argues that in order to understand the social and cultural dynamics of media celebrity, we need to examine how, in a given society, connections between mimetic representations and moral authority are perceived.

The article provides insight into the current violent practices of urban
youngsters in Kinshasa. At nightfall youth gangs transform the streets of
Kinshasa’s townships into arenas of the fight. Frequent regular clashes between
these gangs create young violent leaders, who not only sow terror but also
provide security for the inhabitants (young and old) of their territories. Although
many of these boys and young men are trained in foreign fighting styles such as
judo, jujitsu and karate, in the public clashes between the fighting groups, these
boys and young men perform mukumbusu. This fighting style, inspired and
based on the gorilla, was invented during the last decade of colonialism, and
is an original mixture of a traditional Mongo wrestling practice, libanda, and
Asian and Western fighting practices. In the article, I scrutinize the practices
of these young fighters through the diverse images of masculinity (kimobali)
upon which they draw, such as the fighter and the soldier; and the models of
masculinity that they contest, the sapeur and the staffeur.

This article discusses discourses on development in the social space of Kinshasa’s
post-Mobutu teleserials. The producers (dramatic artists and born-again Christian
leaders; some are both) contend that their work will transform society, counter the
social and political crisis and improve the nation in various ways. Pentecostalist
Christianity meets the genre of the melodrama in the way the teleserials focus on
the individual’s spiritual development. This article argues that the fictive representation
of witchcraft relates to a Pentecostalist diagnosis of the crisis and that the
narrative unfolding of the teleserials points towards the cultural key scenario
asserted in Pentecostal-charismatic churches.

Castañeda's study goes well beyond the common anthropological focus on the "impact" of tourism on Mayan communities, instead focusing on the complicated, historical relationships between Maya actors, anthropologists, and tourists at the well know archaeological site of Chichén Itzá, and the nearby - but not so well known - Maya community of Pisté. Castañeda's study weaves together the history of anthropology in Yucatan (with a particular focus on the works of Redfield and Steggarda), tourism (including a fascinating analysis of New Age spiritualists and Aztec revivalists during the equinox at Chichén Itzá), and local Maya actors (through an analysis of their engagement with anthropologists, tourists, and the Mexican state).

http://www.osea-cite.org/class/Review_In_Museum_Maya_Culture_01Lynn_Stephen.pdf

http://www.osea-cite.org/class/Review_In_Museum_Maya_Culture_02James_Todd.pdf

In 1922, F.E. Williams began his first assignment as the Australian Territory of Papua's assistant government anthropologist in the Purari Delta. During this eight-month trip, Williams obtained information on daily life, social relations, material culture, as well as religious beliefs and practices. He collected ethnographic specimens, made sketches and took some 96 photographs and used 29 of these photographs in his 1924 monograph The Natives of the Purari Delta , a publication that subsequently came to define the area for Europeans. However, Williams obscured the culturally specific ways in which Purari histories were locally reproduced and understood. This essay highlights a long-term ethnographic trend by which communities of the Purari have been portrayed as without `history' or as having only a rudimentary historical consciousness and suggests that, despite this `particular bundle of silences', the Purari is not without `important stories'.

Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with indigenous communities unsettles European preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so raises issues about what cultural property is, and perhaps can be. Instead of being a discreet entity, cultural property for the I'ai emerges as a network of relationships that envelopes people, environment, and ancestors. This expansive notion of cultural property can help us rethink how we treat and handle objects within museums and archives.

Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter-related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely.

"INTRODUCTION

Our world of the society of the 20th and 21st centuries is becoming the realm of pictorial representation. Modern technologies of recording images and mediating them enable the press, the television, and the Internet to base their messages on images. As images have dominated our communication, their impact on our cognition of the world has grown substantially.

This thesis attempts at discovering
methods in which technology and underlying culture specific features are built into pictorial messages used in the press and posters. It also describes factors unintentionally or deliberately influencing every act of mediating information.
The thesis is divided into seven chapters corresponding to various approaches and analyses employed within them. The first chapter analyses technological implications of mediating messages. Technology is understood here as both the mechanical and physical features of mediating messages with ‘tools’. The chapter also describes the influence senders and mediators of (pictorial) information may exert on final messages that reach readers. The chapter’s concluding part describes the diversity of discourses present in every society. The nature of discourses and their codes, as well as the manipulation of those, are analysed in chapter 3, devoted
to presenting various linguistic and culture studies theories. Various linguistic and cultural theories are employed in analysis of the act of mediating. The chapter begins with the analysis of signs and systems of communication (de Saussure and Lévi-Strauss). Later, theories of culture-specific codes and mythologies are introduced (Eco, Barthes, Hall). Finally, Marxist approach is employed in the analysis of the mediation of pictorial messages (Althusser, Gramsci). The ideas of scholars are interwoven with graphic examples analysed according to the theories presented. Chapter 5 draws a conclusion from the analyses of chapters 1 and 3. The conclusion is graphically presented in a few versions of information chain. The chain evolves with the development of the theories it attempts to encompass. The final chain is
described as a means of reading messages thanks to which readers may sift out information about an event from ideological elements of a message.

The theoretical conclusion of chapter 5 is employed in the analysis of a few examples in chapter 6.  This chapter presents a few examples of images and posters
as it tries to postulate some reading techniques that a reader may use. Finally, in chapter 7, a general conclusion is sketched out of analyses and conclusions of the previous parts. The conclusion attempts to explain if and how ‘we readers’ are constantly manipulated. Chapters 2 and 4 are devoted to demonstrating a few representative examples of press photography, and war and film posters respectively.
Images constitute a collection of press pictures from numerous newspapers (Time, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph) and of film and war posters from picture collections by Hudson, Yapp and Mayes. As in the case of John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, the chapters presenting only images constitute an indispensable reading for the evaluation of the analysis presented in the thesis."

"2 introductory paragraphs:

Winfried Nöth, in his article Alice’s Adventures in Semiosis (Nöth 1994), approaches a variety of signs within Alice in Wonderland from the perspective of Ch. S. Peirce and his
classification of signs into icons, indices, and symbols. Nöth offers an extensive insight into the world of Lewis Carroll’s novel and semiotics at the same time. In the course of the article the readers are presented with a number of examples of various signs along with the explanation on their proper and reasonable reading as proposed by Alice - Lewis Carroll remaining in a surprising unison with Peirce’s tenets.

However, while concentrating on the sign itself and its nature as visible from Alice’s interactions with a multitude of signs she encounters, Nöth resolved to leave pragmatics aside. Therefore, it seems proper to continue Nöth’s analysis from the place where he decided to finish it. While he concentrated on the sign and its structure, this article attempts at pursuing a pragmatic approach to two signs from Alice in Wonderland
analysed by Nöth, namely those which are supposed to enable Alice to go through the tiny door leading “into the loveliest garden you ever saw”. The first of those is the bottle
marked “DRINK ME” and the second the cake marked “EAT ME”. They are also accompanied by a number of other signs (or more precisely, as Nöth proposes, indices) that to some
extant are transparent or incomplete."

Religion can bring about social harmony as well as social conflict. Religious law is a key element in both cases. Scholars can explain how religious law changes according to historical and socio-cultural context. They can also help
reengineering prescriptions that cause social conflict. Changes in religious law can be explained according to a chronological rhetoric (certain agents cause certain changes) or according to a logical rhetoric (a change acquires its meaning in opposition to other possible changes). The two approaches are complementary, but the semiotics of religious law predominantly adopts the second one. In both cases, the explanation of how a religious law changes and the reengineering of a religious prescription are related activities. The semiotics of religious law is particularly
equipped to propose alternatives for conflicting prescriptions. However, there is a difference between showing that some alternatives exist and advocating which alternatives should be taken. Whilst the latter position is similar to that of semiotic
guerrilla warfare, the former rather configures the semiotics of religious law as a therapy. Semiotic guerrilla warfare stresses the need to demystify the discourse of
power that subjugates individuals or groups to a certain religious law. Semiotic therapy does not focus on demystification but on reconciliation. The task of the
semiotic therapy of religious law is to show that situations of social conflict generated by certain prescriptions can be decreased or eliminated by adopting alternative
paths of meaning. The semiotic therapist of religious law can be effective in showing these alternatives only if some pragmatic and semantic preconditions are
met: a correct involvement with the sets of religious core values at stake and an articulated analysis of the paths of meaning to which these values give rise.

This essay describes the development of digital storytelling as a popular multimedia work and how the authors have applied it in the university classroom. As a pedagogical tool, digital storytelling offers a unique learning experience for students. The authors explore student discourse about the learning and situate this experience within a framework of 'implicated scholarship', an ongoing engagement between the academy and sciety. Implicated scholarship is developed in the methodology and practice of the French visual ethnographer Jean Rouch and has a deep historical lineage running through Canadian applied anthropology. Digital storytelling in an implicated vein protects and illuminates social complexity.

The paper analyses the mass media broadcasting of the funeral and death of pope John Paul II in 2005. It was at that time the most "viewed" event of all times - due to the new internet media. The fascination of this event is linked to the burial traditions the Vatican understood to put forward. In that sense, the Vatican highlighted old traditions to increase the interest for the burial and person of John Paul II to promote his beatification and canonization.

Twenty-two years since the arrival of the first consumer digital camera, Western culture is now characterized by ubiquitous photography. The disappearance of the camera inside the
mobile phone has ensured that even the most banal moments of the day can become a point of photographic reverie, potentially shared instantly. Supported by the increased affordability of computers, digital storage and access to broadband, consumers are provided with new opportunities for the capture and transmission of images, particularly online where snapshot photography is being transformed from an individual to a communal activity. As the digital image proliferates online and becomes increasingly delivered via networks, numerous practices emerge surrounding the image’s transmission, encoding, ordering and reception.
Informing these practices is a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration, supported by a mosaic of technologies termed Web 2.0. In this article we attempt to delineate the field of snapshot photography as this practice shifts from primarily being a print-oriented to a transmission-oriented, screen-based
experience. We observe how the alignment of the snapshot with the Internet results in the emergence of new photographies in which the photographic image interacts with established and experimental media forms – raising questions about the ways in which digital photography is framed institutionally and theoretically.

French blurb / quatrième de couverture:
Ce livre est le fruit d'un projet ambitieux visant à replacer l'émergence du portrait européen dans le contexte large d'une évolution où parmi d'autres facteurs les rites funéraires et les masques mortuaires jouent un rôle déterminant. L'« archéologie de la ressemblance » est ainsi la formule que l'auteur propose pour renouveler notre connaissance des débuts du portrait au XIIIe siècle, c'est-à-dire bien avant l'apogée du portrait individuel à la Renaissance. Par une transgression audacieuse des frontières du champ disciplinaire, l'enquête jette un éclairage inattendu sur l'environnement culturel qui favorisa l'apparition de ce genre visuel si caractéristique du continent européen. Le recours à la méthode étymologique enrichit tout particulièrement l'investigation en éclairant d'un jour nouveau les causes profondes de cette représentation figurée. Sur un sujet où tout déjà semblait avoir été dit, un arrière-plan aux multiples facettes se trouve ici mis au jour, qui d'une manière exemplaire révèle la complexité des facteurs intervenant dans l'histoire de la représentation figurée.

Hans Belting


German blurb / Klappentext:
Das Buch spannt einen weiten Bogen und ordnet die Herausbildung des europäischen Porträts in einen viel größeren Zusammenhang ein, in welchem auch Grabriten und die Totenmaske eine Rolle spielen. So ist etwa die „Archäologie der Ähnlichkeit“ ein Stichwort, um unsere Aufmerksamkeit für die Anfänge des Porträts im 13. Jahrhundert, lange vor der Blütezeit des Individualporträts in der Renaissance, neu zu wecken. Indem sie die Fachgrenzen kühn überschreitet, bietet die Untersuchung einen unerwarteten Einblick in das kulturelle Umfeld, in welchem es zur Entstehung dieser für Europa so charakteristischen Bildgattung kommen konnte. Das gilt auch für die Etymologie der Begriffe, die bei diesem Vorgang eine Rolle spielen und ein neues Licht auf die Motivation hinter diesem Bildnis werfen. In einem Thema, in dem alles schon gesagt schien, wird hier ein vielfach verzweigter Hintergrund freigelegt, der exemplarisch beweist, wie komplex die Gründe sind, die in der Bildgeschichte eine Rolle spielen.

Hans Belting

In this article I suggest that art can be more than a passive ethnic marker. Focusing on the architecturally based carvings of the Toraja of Indonesia, I argue that artistic forms are sites for the assertion, articulation, and negotiation of various hierarchical identities and relationships. I trace the contested transformation of Toraja architectural symbols of elite authority into generalized icons of Toraja ethnic identity. As I chronicle these shifts I also illustrate how Toraja architectural carvings serve as vehicles for the rearticulation of assorted sets of rank, ethnic, regional, and political relationships. A key objective in this article is to highlight the complicated and often ironic relations between material culture, identity negotiation, and human agency. Drawing on Scott (1985, 1990), I suggest that while art may serve as a weapon of the weak, it can also be a weak weapon. [identity, art, ethnicity, tourism, agency, Indonesia, Toraja]

This paper explores how traditional narrative language used in film and theatre can be adapted to create interactivity and a greater sense of presence in the virtual heritage environment. It focuses on the fundamental principles of narrative required to create emergence and presence and investigates methods of embedding intangible social histories into these environments These issues are explored in a case study of Green's Mill in the 1830's, interweaving the story of the reform bill riots in Nottingham with the life of George Green, mathematician and proprietor of the mill.