Sian Hindle

My research interests centre on jewellery as an element of dress, and I hold a PhD exploring how jewellery’s wear and use contributes to embodied identity.  Early research involved exploration of jewellery’s gifted nature, and the ensuing reciprocation – through wear and use – that engages both giver and receiver in bonds of appreciation and attachment.  Using a phenomenological lens, gifted jewellery is analysed in terms of how the wearer’s perspective oscillates between self-as-subject and self-as-object, capturing and crystallising both the felt experience of wearing the jewellery and the external perspective of the giver of the gift.  Hence, jewellery’s role as a material artefact that embeds social relations is articulated, and its potential as a vehicle for exploring the embodied narrative of the wearer within the push-pull dynamic of identity is set out.  Subsequent projects seek to explore dower or dowry jewellery as ‘total social facts’ and to analyse dowry’s ability to pull on the full range of legal, economic, religious, aesthetic and political meanings and associations that are at play within the dowry’s social context, highlighted in Mauss’ seminal essay, The Gift (1980 [1954]).