Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Insiders’ Manual to Breakdown
Francisco Martínez
Head, Hand, Heart: On Contradiction, Contingency and Repair
Caitlin DeSilvey
Chapter 1. Underwater, Still Life: Multi-species Engagements with the Art Abject of a Wasted American Warship
Joshua O. Reno
Beyond the Sparkle Zones
Kathleen Stewart
Chapter 2. “Till Death Do Us Part”: The Making of Home Through Holding onto Objects
Tomás Errázuriz
“The Lady is Not There”: Repairing Tita Meme as a Telecare User
Tomás Sánchez Criado
Chapter 3. In the House of Un-Things: Decay and Deferral in a Vacated Bulgarian Home
Martin Demant Frederiksen
Undisciplined Surfaces
Mateusz Laszczkowski
Chapter 4. A Ride on the Elevator. Infrastructures of Brokenness and Repair in Georgia
Tamta Khalvashi
Don’t Fix the Puddle: A Puddle Archive as Ethnographic Account of Sidewalk Assemblages
Mirja Busch and Ignacio Farías
Chapter 5. What is in a Hole? Voids out of Place and Politics below the State in Georgia
Francisco Martínez
Maintaining Whose Road?
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi
Chapter 6. Dirtscapes: Contest over Value, Garbage and Belonging in Istanbul
Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe
Repairing Russia
Michał Murawski
Chapter 7. Village Vintage in Southern Norway: Revitalisation and Vernacular Entrepreneurship in Culture Heritage Tourism
Sarah Holst Kjær
A Story of Time Keepers
Jérôme Denis and David Pontille
Chapter 8. Keeping Them “Swiss”. The Transfer and Appropriation of Techniques for Luxury Watch Repair in Hong-Kong
Hervé Munz
Lost Battles of De-bobbling
Magdalena Crăciun
Chapter 9. Small Mutinies in the Comfortable Slot: The New Environmentalism as Repair
Eeva Berglund
Why Stories About the Broken Down Snowmobiles Can Teach You A Lot About the Life in the Arctic Tundra
Aimar Ventsel
Chapter 10. The Imperative of Repair: Fixing Bikes – For Free
Simon Batterbury and Tim Dant
Repair and Responsibility: The Art of Doris Salcedo
Siobhan Kattago
Chapter 11. Repair and (Re)creation: Broken Relationships and a Path Forward for Austrian Holocaust Survivors
Katja Seidel
Living Switches
Wladimir Sgibnev
Chapter 12. Brokenness and Normality in Design Culture
Adam Drazin
And Then You See Yourself Disappear (in Iceland)
Jason Pine
Epilogue: This Mess We’re In, Or Part Of
Patrick Laviolette
Index
About the Author :
Francisco Martínez is a Lecturer in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and member of the editorial team of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. He has edited several books and is the author of Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia. An Anthropology of Repair, Forgetting and Urban Traces (UCL Press, 2018), which was awarded the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Review :
“There are many compelling, evocative, and insightful contributions here that will appeal to a very broad readership from undergraduates to specialist researchers.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)
“Anthropologists, sociologists, human geographers and STS scholars who research the affective expressions of brokenness and repair will find this book particularly helpful. In discussing social identities and relationships, ethical stances, as well as novel aesthetic and affective formations, this book offers a holistic take on the dialectics of breaking and fixing that is not only intellectually stimulating but also politically timely.” • Social Anthropology
“What I like about this book is its richness in ideas; it opens up a wide range of issues and associations, it invites the reader to see surprising linkages and new aspects of the seemingly trivial everyday. There is a lot of inspiration here for a number of research fields.” • Orvar Löfgren, University of Lund
“This is a very original, interesting and critical piece of work. It manages to bring the political in touch with the existential in an enlightening and, at moments, moving way.” • Paolo SH Favero, University of Antwerp
