Research output per year
Research output per year
Drawing on a background that combines the Humanities and Social Sciences (M.A. Classical Languages and Cultures, Leiden University, the Netherlands; Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, 2006), I spent a year teaching as Faculty Lecturer in McGill's interdisciplinary Arts Legacy Freshman Program (2006 - 2007) before taking up a two-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, in September 2007. Following my postdoc, I moved to Manchester as a Lecturer in September 2009.
I am especially interested in the social and cognitive dynamics of knowledge production, and how these are mediated by, on the one hand, practical skills involving manipulation of things, and, on the other, rhetoric and other forms of 'play'. My doctoral research concerned the social and performative dynamics of a contemporary amateur practice called 'Indianism', which involves crafting replicas of clothing and artefacts as well as re-enactment of slices of Native American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life by Europeans dressed in home-made Plains or Woodland Indian outfits. Drawing on fieldwork among Indianist groups in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Czech Republic (2003 - 2004), I argued that Indianist mimesis may be understood as a heuristic process in which Indianists employ imagination, creativity, and skill to reach out to an elusive past. In Aberdeen, I elaborated on my Ph.D. research by investigating how replicas used in historical re-enactment, as artefacts situated between 'real things' and forgeries, can become powerful tools in creating social landscapes that are both virtual and real, but always imagined.
My monograph Crafting 'the Indian': Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment (Berghahn Books 2012) uses insights from museum studies, performance studies, art history, phenomenology, and from modern art practices to show how Indianism, as a hobby turned towards the past, constitutes a creative practice in the present. Grounded in fieldwork among networks of Indian hobbyists, the book offers both an ethnography and a theoretical analysis of this particular contemporary practice of serious leisure, in light of a more general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. More information on:
http://berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=KalshovenCrafting
For a review, see: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12015_13/pdf
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
1/05/22 → 30/04/26
Project: Research
Taylor, R., Kalshoven, P. T., Livens, F., Morris, K. & Thomas, E.
18/10/18 → 31/10/19
Project: Research
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Keynote speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Visiting professor)
Activity: External visiting positions or secondments › Visiting an external academic institution
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Advisor)
Activity: Consultancy, spin-outs, CPD & licensing › Consultancy & Services
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Academic founder)
Activity: Consultancy, spin-outs, CPD & licensing › Consultancy & Services
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven (Invited speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk
21/09/13
1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Other