A Trip to Diagon Alley (High Street)
Walking through the city centre of Oxford, it is difficult to ignore the abundance of small shops with merchandise of the University of Oxford in their windows. As ...
An ongoing exhibition in London on printmaking in modern China
Hi all! I wanted to share some information on this exhibition in SOAS, London: 'Lu Xun’s Legacy: Printmaking in Modern China'. Lu Xun (1881-1936) played a leading role ...
Candles and prayer requests: Anglican transductions
Hi all – wanted to share some excerpts of my essay this week for my blog post: There is an ontological problem posed when we try to communicate with the invisible, ...
Mormom Momfluencers
In the last class, I mentioned Mormon women who are successful lifestyle influencers, thereby combining the values of hard work and money-making while still staying at ...
Additional thoughts
1. I just saw that the speaker in this week's VMMA seminar will be relevant for our discussions about spiritual commodities this week Myriam Lamrani (Harvard & ...
The Power of Dictionaries?
Following the recent post about the use of dictionaries, I wanted to suggest the following 'light' article that cautions us that these devices are of course not ...
The labour theory of bitcoin
When we think about digital technologies, especially new and incipient technologies such as blockchain, it can be easy to take for granted that there are real people ...
baked beans
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cost-of-living-crisis-food-bank-donations-journey-one-can-beans-1428750 By following a can of baked beans donated to a food ...
A look in the Dictionary
When occupied with terms, it is often useful to consult a dictionary. A dictionary I can wholeheartedly recommend looking into frequently, is Emile Benveniste's ...
Gold and Wealth
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013hh7 This episode of In Our Time (on BBC Radio 4) discusses the changing role of the gold standard in the global economy. ...
Museum Stonemasons
Olivia Holder OiM Week 2: Capitalism, Labour and Markets This week I am interested in a postcard from the shop that the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum ...
Who is putting the price on education?
I was just reading Anna Tsing's 'Sorting out commodities: How capitalist value is made through gifts' paper, when the section about the 'barely' commoditized world of ...
Facebook’s ‘Perfect Gift’
I wanted to share today some thoughts I had having read Carrier’s (1990) article. Charities may be used to exemplify or dispute the existence of a ‘perfect gift’, ...
Unanswered Letters
For many years, my mum has donated to the 'Sponsor a Village' programme run by the International Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO) ActionAid. Every month money is ...
Dormant Things
I wanted to share the photo that I took of our family of gifts yesterday; thank you all for your contributions. Also many thanks to all of you who have already ...
Charity, an Ideology.
On Christmas day last year, the Indian Government decided to refuse over 12,000 charities and NGOs, the renewal of a license that allows them to receive foreign funding. ...
The ‘value’ of a gift
In this essay, I study The British Heart Foundation charity alongside Carrier’s (1990) ideology of a perfect gift to argue that the monetary value of an object could ...
The Pause Between
For Christmas this year, I received a small, hand-carved, wooden key ring from my partner's grandfather, who had made something for all the grandchildren. To make this ...