Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

ISSN: 1550-5170 (Print) 2156-8154 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujcp20

More than just skin and bones: The cultural

materiality of bodies and embodiment

Jennifer A. Sandlin & Will Letts

To cite this article: Jennifer A. Sandlin & Will Letts (2016) More than just skin and bones: The
cultural materiality of bodies and embodiment, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13:3, 185-190,
DOI: 10.1080/15505170.2016.1250446

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2016.1250446

Published online: 21 Nov 2016.

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JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY
2016, VOL. 13, NO. 3, 185–190
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2016.1250446

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

More than just skin and bones: The cultural materiality of

bodies and embodiment
Jennifer A. Sandlin and Will Letts

In September 2016, for the 32nd Kaldor Public Art Project, the Royal Botanic
Garden in Sydney, Australia hosted Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones’ site-
specific installation titled “Barrangal Dyara” (Skin and Bones). This installation con-
sists of 15,000 white gypsum replicas of Aboriginal hand-held shields that were used
by Gadigal men in the 1870s who inhabited the land where the Royal Botanic
Garden now stands (Westwood, 2016). In the installation, the shields are arranged
across 20,000 square meters to create a haunting outline of the 19th century Garden
Palace building that was built on that land in 1879. The Garden Palace, which was
the largest building in the Southern Hemisphere when it was constructed
(McDonald, 2016), originally had been built to host the Sydney International Exhibi-
tion of 1879—which was the first World’s Fair in the Southern Hemisphere—and
thus acted as the kind of “cultural showcase” that Willinsky (1998, p. 55) called a site
of an “imperial show-and-tell,” much like London’s Crystal Palace that housed the
Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydney Exhibition was designed to showcase Austral-
ia’s newly emerging national identity and to highlight the colony’s wealth, success,
and “civilized” sophistication (Piggott, 2016). While this new national identity was
built upon the backs of Australia’s indigenous peoples, they were excluded from the
new official narrative of Australia’s wealth and success. Instead, indigenous peoples
and perspectives were relegated to the “Ethnological Court” of the Garden Palace,
where indigenous material culture was represented in ways that reinforced Social
Darwinism and showcased the colonial mission to “civilize” indigenous peoples (Pig-
gott, 2016). Displays of indigenous shields, spears, and other aspects of material cul-
ture were used to create a narrative that positioned European Australia’s “material
wealth and progress” as more highly evolved and civilized than the “relics of ‘prehis-
toric’ Aboriginal Australia” (Westwood, 2016, para. 20). As one cultural commenta-
tor stated, in exhibits such as the Garden Palace, Aboriginal material culture was
“contained in an anachronistic space to tell at a glance a story of progress on the one
hand and of extinction and dispossession on the other” (Accarigi, cited in West-
wood, 2016, para. 21). Moreover, the kinds of material culture collected and dis-
played were those that helped position “indigenous people as primitive and savage,
depicting a masculine, violent race with no suggestion of a cultural life” (Westwood,
2016, para. 22), with little to nothing representing Aboriginal women or children.
Just 3 years after it was built, the Garden Palace building burned to the ground.

© Curriculum and Pedagogy Group

186 J. A. SANDLIN AND W. LETTS

Jonathan Jones began to conceive this project several years ago—after searching
for material culture from his ancestors. After finding very little material evidence
from southwest Australia represented in Australian museum collections, he discov-
ered that large collections of indigenous artifacts from that area had been destroyed
in the 1882 fire that razed the Garden Palace. Jones stated that since finding out
about the fire, he has been “struck with the loss of our cultural material, what that
loss means for our communities and how you can move forward as a culture when
you can’t point to your cultural heritage” (Jones, quoted in Piggott, 2016, para. 5).
“Barrangal Dyara” highlights the importance of the materiality and embodied
nature of culture—how it was stolen and displayed in colonial institutions, how it
was destroyed, and how indigenous culture resiliently and defiantly resists and
speaks back to past and continuing efforts of colonization. Furthermore, these les-
sons are conveyed via visitors’ material and embodied encounters with/in
the installation. As visitors walk the perimeter of the destroyed building, they view
the 15,000 white shields, which create a concrete remembrance of the material cul-
ture that was destroyed in the fire. Piggott (2016) explained that while the original
shields—which were collected by cultural institutions as well as by colonizers who
treated them as souvenirs—would have been marked with signs that revealed con-
nections to particular families and areas, the replica shields are bleached white,
representing the further stripping of their situated cultural contexts. One commen-
tator expressed that these shields are “reminiscent of scattered bones in the land-
scape, or masses of rubble left by fire” (Piggott, 2016, para. 8), thus they become a
visceral reminder of the scale of the destruction of indigenous culture.
Embodied, material learning also occurs via sound at the installation. Jones has
constructed soundscapes in which visitors walking through the installation hear
eight different indigenous languages that are currently spoken by the descendants
of those groups who made the original artifacts destroyed in the fire. To create
these soundscapes, the artist traveled through southeast Australia and collaborated
with people who spoke various indigenous languages, including the Sydney Lan-
guage, Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, Gunditjmara, Ngarrindjeri, Paakantji, Wirad-
juri, and Woiwurrung (Piggott, 2016). These soundscapes are an aural memorial
not just to the material culture lost in the fire, but also a reminder of material that
is often left out of such museum exhibits, including artifacts used by women and
children, and in everyday practices, such as childcare and agriculture (Piggott,
2016). Some of these sounds, along with sounds of fire crackling, emerge from a
large patch of kangaroo grass—which was and is important to Aboriginal agricul-
tural practices—which Jones planted and cultivated at the center of where the
building once stood. This patch of kangaroo grass also was the site where perform-
ances, dances, activities, and lectures were held as part of the project, which
attempted to connect the material culture of the past with ongoing, current mate-
rial culture and practices, to juxtapose and unify. The material placement of the
grass in the center of the garden serves to center Aboriginal culture while also
interrupting the European formality of the gardens (Piggott, 2016).
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY 187

For Jones, the project is important because it aims to make material and visible
an event from the past that has disappeared from memory and sight (McDonald,
2016). Jones explained that more than making the loss of Aboriginal culture visible
and material, it also “represents an effort to commence a healing process and a
celebration of the survival of the world’s oldest living culture despite this traumatic
event” (Jones, cited in Piggott, 2016, para. 7).
Through its insistence on confronting the visitor with the materiality of Aborigi-
nal culture and the embodied remembrance of its appropriation, destruction, and
resilience, this project helps to establish a strong relationality between the visitor
and issues of culture and colonization. At the same time, it pushes participants to
(re)consider their understandings of themselves and the world around them, and
of their relationships with others.
This installation thus illustrates the importance of embodied, material learning,
following scholars in fields as varied as anthropology, feminist studies, and posthu-
man studies who are disrupting binaries such as those between nature and culture,
body and mind, and textual and material (Francombe-Webb, Silk, & Bush, 2017;
Newman, Giardina, & McLeod, 2017). Francombe-Webb and colleagues (2017),
for example, argue the “body is as much a social, cultural, philosophical, and his-
torical entity as it is a genetic, physiological, and psychological vessel” (p. 563), and
point out that the body cannot be separated from language, history, politics, and
how we come to live and learn in the world.
Karen Barad (1996) catalyzed thinking in this space when she reminded us that
knowledge is “literally embodied” and “situated” (p. 180). She usefully traced the
contours of how knowledge and reality are “material-cultural” (Barad, 1996, pp.
180–181) in order delineate how they are co-constitutive. Just as Jones’ exhibition
rematerializes the past, Barad (1996) insisted that “our constructed knowledges
have real material consequences” (p. 183) that we rely on, build upon, and extend
in our learning. Such learning results from and leads to “knowledges that reject
transcendental, universal, unifying master theories in favor of understandings that
are embodied and contextual” (Barad, 1996, p. 187). Beyond merely acknowledg-
ing the rich interface between the material and the cultural, such calls insist upon
“shifting and destabilizing boundaries. Here knowledge comes from the ‘between’
of nature-culture, object-subject, matter-meaning” (Barad, 1996, p. 188). Such a
“between” space creates its own robust understandings of the inter-implications of
material/cultural, whereby “materiality matters: there are social and material rea-
sons for knowledge claims—the intra-actions of the material and discursive are the
technologies of embodied objectivity—and socially constructed knowledges have
real material consequences” (Barad, 1996, p. 188).
The five pieces in this issue of Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (JCP) all take
up this insistence of the importance of embodiment and/or materiality to/within
learning and teaching experiences as they engage in various ways with the space in
between the material and cultural. In this issue’s first Arts-Based Educational
Research piece, “Conference Space,” Wade Tillett explores the spatial configurations
188 J. A. SANDLIN AND W. LETTS

and the resultant positionings of panel and audience members, and their implica-
tions within a typical panel session at an academic conference. Engaging with a
context familiar to all of us, Wade reads the spatial and interactional economies of
a panel presentation in order to explore the material/cultural interface.
Lucinda McKnight’s Arts-Based Educational Research Article, “Swimming
Lessons: Learning, New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Post Qualitative
Research Emerge Through a Pool Poem,” shifts from the formal learning spaces of
school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage
some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article
enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swim-
ming becomes theory, and ideas and movements are themselves diffracted or
changed by the writing of a poem. What does the pool teach us? What is learned at
the pool? How does learning emerge at the pool? Multiple human and nonhuman
bodies intra-act (Barad, 2007), calling each other into being in this exploration of
how distributed agencies and fractal causalities (Bennett, 2010) change how learn-
ing might be thought, represented, and swum. The poem incorporated here serves
as provocation and inspiration for other scholars struggling with these educational
dilemmas and interested in arts-based research.
In “Introducing Dramatic Inquiry,” Mindi Rhoades and Vittoria S. Daiello
define and explore dramatic inquiry in order to excavate its possible contributions
to discourses on subjectivity, embodied pedagogy, and relational knowing in art
education. As a communal, ensemble endeavor emerging from the discipline of
drama education, dramatic inquiry offers strategies for enhancing arts education’s
critical inquiries by facilitating imaginative, transformative dialogues from within
visual culture phenomena. Arising from this deep engagement are suggestions for
teaching and learning practices that inspire “critical questions that envision alter-
native just futures” (Desai, 2009, p. 25) and imagine their fruition. Building on
Heathcote’s (1984) work in drama education and Edmiston’s explicitly critical,
sociocultural orientation (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro & Ngo, 2007), this
article explores Edmiston’s (2011) seven key dimensions of dramatic inquiry
through their use in K–12 classrooms and their resonance with contemporary
artists’ and art educators’ practices, engaging at the interface, the in-between of the
material and the cultural.
Critical making—and experiential learning in general—has the ability to
develop more than just student intelligence—particularly, although certainly not
exclusively, in the academic venue of architecture. In “Critical Making: Exploring
the Use of Making as a Generative Tool,” Chad Schwartz investigates how critical
making has the potential to create a sense of nearness and intimacy between the
student and the tangible elements of the profession. This article examines the
potential benefit of situating making activities within architectural courses.
The article asserts that making may be underutilized with respect to its potential in
the architectural classroom as a generative tool. Although the conclusions made
about critical making can be applied to students in many disciplines, this
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY 189

discussion focuses specifically on the utilization of critical making in the architec-

tural design studio. The use of critical making as a generative tool in the design stu-
dio has the potential to not only develop architecture students’ abilities to engage
with, critically and creatively work through, and ultimately solve design problems,
but also to help instill within these same students a better understanding of the
relationship between people and their environment (the cultural/material
interface).
In today’s society, where the Promethean project of mastering the universe
seems to guide the scientific community to its last moment of triumph—human
immortality—young people seem to lack curricular opportunities to engage with
mortality. This is not surprising as the legacy of psychology, as far back as the
times of Freud and Jung, exposes a complicated history of the pathology of grief.
Sociologically, the phenomenon of death denial leaves a critical void in our under-
graduate classrooms, and there is not much curricular opportunity to have these
conversations with our students. Brad Petitfils’ “Encountering Mortality: A Decade
Later, the Pedagogical Necessity of Six Feet Under” explores a pedagogy of liminal-
ity via the use of popular culture through the lens of the HBO series Six Feet Under
to facilitate discourse about living with dying around us. The series points to the
lessons that the dead teach us—if we are only prepared to listen and learn. Such a
pedagogy helps students to break away from their hyperconnected lives for at least
a few hours each week and focus on the embodied experience of sharing dialogue
about our mortal humanness.
This issue of JCP engages deeply with the provocations offered in contemplat-
ing the material–cultural in-between and in searching out its manifestations and
workings in our daily lives inside and outside of classrooms. In making culture
manifest, in sensing its embodied and material effects and affects, we engage in a
rich curricular and pedagogical project—a project of wondering and wandering as
our histories, cultures, and futures manifest and reassert themselves for our critical
[re]engagement. Happy reading.

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