Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the roles of 'mapping' as a product of engaging ethnography with institutional 'project-oriented' research as well as what it can tell us about considering material culture as a temporal mapping.

Paper long abstract:

Mapping is seen for the purposes of this presentation as an exercise of making explicit what Gell refers to as "enacted texts", existing at the confluence between implicit physicalised understandings and representation. This process may involve the collapsing of spatial orders and experience into temporal orders.

This paper, based on the Ageing in Place project, involved an ethnographic study of the material culture of elderly homes in Ireland, conducted by anthropologists in the Digital Health Group based at Intel Ireland in 2006. The study concerns the notion of the material production of the elderly home in relation to the experience of ageing, and involved creative 'design exercises' to map possible envisaged futures through objects. In a home for a presumed, but often unspecified, life experience of 'old age', tourist experiences and artefacts can play a key part. At key moments of ageing experience, such objects as souvenirs and tourist mementoes can be appropriated in a fashion which implies that the spatial experience of life is re-represented in a home whose prime quality is its temporality, negotiating frames of permanence or transience. Creative design exercises, aimed at the production of temporal maps using domestic objects, were found in some peoples' lives to incorporate tourist artefacts as permanent features of homes envisaged as locales for permenent retirement.

The production of temporal maps provoked negotiations in different homes, proving incomplete and impossible for some objects and in some homes, but more assured in others. The notion of the artefact as tourist expresses both the role of the object as agent in such 'engaged' ethngoraphy, and the role of material culture in spatio- temporal mapping.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed