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This article explores how people choreograph spaces to feel particular ways through material objects and intangible phenomena like light and sound. Drawing on theories of atmospheres and ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, we argue that while there has been a proliferation of research on atmospheres in urban studies, we also need to attend empirically to the processes through which they come into being, consolidate and coagulate. Through exploring the interplay between domestic and urban spaces, we highlight the volatility and inherently social character of atmospheres. This entails how people's dynamic positioning within an urban atmosphere comes to matter for people's sense of the city. We exemplify with one such sensation of the city through the concept of 'midding', as the feeling of comfortably being on the perimeter of a situation. Exploring atmospheric positionings and processes enlightens our understanding of the urban atmosphere and shows how shared atmospheric moments connect people in time and space, stressing the importance of urban design to allow for such sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic data and mapping exercises, this article explores North West Park in Copenhagen, Denmark and asks how lighting forms perceptions of urban space. The park was inaugurated in the late 2000s and has been praised for its bold landscape and lighting design. However, it was received in more ambiguous ways by users, explaining their experience of it in words such as "magical" and "kitsch." This ambiguity highlights how current urban design may entail a reconfiguration of how visibility unfolds. Urban spaces have largely been lit to be seen. However, current trends in lighting design increasingly aim for spaces to be felt. Beyond visibility as the ability to see and be seen, we argue that the park design also evinces a more fundamental attuned visibility, conceptualized through the notion of ways of feeling. In a broader sense, we suggest that the increasingly atmosphere-oriented design of urban spaces facilitates a pressure to feel something. That is, this type of design is not solely functional but demands emotional responses – although undeterminable and open-ended. For the users, the atmospheric design raises questions about how lighting shapes urban life during dark hours in the field of tension between usage and architectural imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a detailed analysis of the historical and current development of lighting in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, this article addresses how this site of extraordinarily diverse illumination exemplifies a carefully orchestrated balance between (1) muted and more vivid forms of lighting, (2) curation of historical styles and promotion of contemporary innovations in illumination and (3) artistic luminaires and those more aligned with popular tastes. Through these themes, we argue that the current strategies towards urban lighting that predominantly promote energy conservation, security, commercial imperatives and place-branding may be supplemented by place-specific design strategies that implement multiplicity, connect past and present, and accommodate diverse desires, dreams and realities. These attributes contribute to the ongoing emergence of what we call a 'lumitopia', a space in which an intensified attention to illumination is integral to the particularity of a place or landscape. In the case of Tivoli, this offers a lens to manage nocturnal space so that it becomes more aesthetically complex, inclusive and convivial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the orchestration of domestic lighting as an object of anthropological study. It takes Bedouin domestic architecture in southern Jordan as a starting point in an analysis of how light is used as means of safeguarding spaces as part of hospitality practices central to Bedouin culture. By arguing that things are “ecstatic” in the sense that they transcend their own tangibility, the article shows how objects, such as tinted windows, impose themselves on other objects to shape the particular visual presence of the world that informants opt for. Such a presence of the world is analyzed through the notion of “atmosphere” as a contemporaneity of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Thus, while boundaries between interior and exterior may be upheld by tangible material strategies, such as walls, these boundaries may also simultaneously be permeated by the ecstasy of material things, which aim to safeguard other aspects of life through less tangible strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the use of light in Denmark as part of shaping atmospheres. It discusses how the words informants use to express a particular atmosphere may have multiple connotations and in essence be defined more by their vagueness than by their clarity. The article argues that, rather than focusing on clear ontological statements, taking informants' lack of clarity at face value offers new ways for the ethnographer to gain insights into material aspects of social life through the concept of atmospheres. Atmospheres denote a sensuous ‘something’ that takes place in-between things and people. They may be ontologically difficult to grasp or to contain, yet they play an important role in ordering spaces and social life. With a focus on the ‘ecstasy’ of things – in this case a light source – as a sensuous encounter of presence, the article argues that both the contemporary focus on the ontology of things within anthropology as well as a post-ANT perspective on performativity, though analytically useful, overlook methodologically how the vagueness of atmospheres foregrounds the contemporaneity and entanglement of matters, minds and cultural preferences of sensing places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process of incorporating the Bedouin of Petra and Wadi Rum in Jordan on UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. The author focuses on the Bedouin tribes around Petra, who were resettled in villages when UNESCO proclaimed the area part of the tangible heritage of humanity in 1985. Heritage is approached as a ‘process of assembling’ that emerges from the interactions of social entities operating on a smaller scale. By focusing on these entities’ various discourses about Bedouin heritage that are included in the reports and applications to UNESCO, it is argued that through the process of proclaiming intangible heritage, cultural categories are formulated so as to fit into contemporary imaginations, longings and settlement policies. Investigating the process of heritage inscription reveals the multiple, and at times contradictory, discourses that undergird the production of particular images of Bedouin culture through heritage institutions that interlock, rather than harmonise, them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with the social and symbolic powers of pyrotechnology, we focus on the sensuous staging of fire in disposal practices. The paper employs two case studies focusing on cremation burial from Bronze Age (c.1300-1100 bc) and modern Denmark in order to demonstrate widely different sensuous engagements with fire and its experiential significance in a cremation context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the relationship between light, material culture and social experiences. It argues that understanding light as a powerful social agent, in its relationship with people, things, colours, shininess and places, may facilitate an appreciation of the active social role of luminosity in the practice of day-to-day activities. The article surveys an array of past conceptions of light within philosophy, natural science and more recent approaches to light in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies. A number of implications are discussed, and by way of three case studies it is argued that light may be used as a tool for exercising social intimacy and inclusion, of shaping moral spaces and hospitality, and orchestrating movement, while working as a metaphor as well as a material agent in these social negotiations. The social comprehension of light is a means of understanding social positions in ways that may be real or imagined, but are bound up on the social and cultural associations of certain lightscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]