I’m very gratified – and flattered – to see my work on skeuomorphs feature at the Journal of the History of Ideas, and provide the theoretical basis for original anthropological research. That research – by Christopher B. Lowman, of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley – is on the artefacts of the Ainu, an indigenous people of northern Japan.

Christopher’s research is utterly fascinating and, from my own narrow point of view, closes a loop of strange attraction I had felt towards Japanese traditions of lacquering, but had not fully understood hitherto.