Material Culture And Other Things

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226526003

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Material Cultures by Daniel Miller Pdf

The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in Material Cultures. A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad. The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, Material Cultures emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.

Author : Ian Woodward
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2007-05-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781848607262

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Understanding Material Culture by Ian Woodward Pdf

"In his interdisciplinary review of material culture, Ian Woodward goes beyond synthesis to offer a theoretically innovative reconstruction of the field. It is filled with gems of conceptual insight and empirical discovery. A wonderful book." - Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University "A well-grounded and accessible survey of the burgeoning field of material culture studies for students in sociology and consumption studies. While situating the field within the history of intellectual thought in the broader social sciences, it offers detailed and accessible case studies. These are supplemented by very useful directions for further in-depth reading, making it an excellent undergraduate course companion." - Victor Buchli, University College London Why are i-pods and mobile phones fashion accessories? Why do people spend thousands remodelling their perfectly functional kitchen? Why do people crave shoes or handbags? Is our desire for objects unhealthy, or irrational? Objects have an inescapable hold over us, not just in consumer culture but increasingly in the disciplines that study social relations too. This book offers a systematic overview of the diverse ways of studying the material as culture. Surveying the field of material culture studies through an examination and synthesis of classical and contemporary scholarship on objects, commodities, consumption, and symbolization, this book: introduces the key concepts and approaches in the study of objects and their meanings presents the full sweep of core theory - from Marxist and critical approaches to structuralism and semiotics shows how and why people use objects to perform identity, achieve social status, and narrativize life experiences analyzes everyday domains in which objects are important shows why studying material culture is necessary for understanding the social. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, consumer behaviour studies, design and fashion studies.

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2002-09-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781135361648

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Material Cultures by Daniel Miller Pdf

This volume is an ethnographic study of material cultures. Incorporating local and global dimensions, a team of scholars explore the changing experiences of cultures in locations as disparate as the Philippines and Northern Ireland. Material culture and consumption studies have undergone something of a renaissance recently. This study provides an up-to-date analysis of a developing field in sociological and anthropological based courses.; This book is intended for undergraduate/MA courses on material culture and consumption within cultural studies and anthropology degree schemes.

Author : Arthur Asa Berger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-06-16
Category : POLITICAL SCIENCE
ISBN : 9781315415840

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What Objects Mean by Arthur Asa Berger Pdf

Arthur Asa Berger, author of an array of texts in communication, popular culture, and social theory, is back with the second edition of his popular, user-friendly guide for students who want to understand the social meanings of objects. In this broadly interdisciplinary text, Berger takes the reader through half a dozen theoretical models that are commonly used to analyze objects. He then describes and analyzes eleven objects, many of them new to this edition—including smartphones, Facebook, hair dye, and the American flag—showing how they demonstrate concepts like globalization, identity, and nationalism. The book includes a series of exercises that allow students to analyse objects in their own environment. Brief and inexpensive, this introductory guide will be used in courses ranging from anthropology to art history, pop culture to psychology.

Author : Anna Malinowska,Karolina Lebek
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2016-08-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317219132

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Materiality and Popular Culture by Anna Malinowska,Karolina Lebek Pdf

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

Author : James M. Skibo,Michael Brian Schiffer
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2008-03-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780387765273

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People and Things by James M. Skibo,Michael Brian Schiffer Pdf

The study of the human-made world, whether it is called artifacts, material culture, or technology, has burgeoned across the academy. Archaeologists have for cen- ries led the way, and today offer investigators myriad programs and conceptual frameworks for engaging the things, ordinary and extraordinary, of everyday life. This book is an attempt by practitioners of one program – Behavioral Archaeology – to furnish between two covers some of our basic principles, heuristic tools, and illustrative case studies. Our greater purpose, however, is to engage the ideas of two competing programs – agency/practice and evolution – in hopes of initiating a dialog. We are convinced that there is enough overlap in goals, interests, and conceptions among these programs to warrant guarded optimism that a more encompassing, more coherent framework for studying the material world can result from a concerted effort to forge a higher-level synthesis. However, in engaging agency/ practice and evolution in Chap. 2, we are not reticent to point out conflicts between Behavioral Archaeology and these programs. This book will appeal to archaeologists and anthropologists as well as historians, sociologists, and philosophers of technology. Those who study science–technology– society interactions may also encounter useful ideas. Finally, this book is suitable for upper-division and graduate courses on anthropological theory, archaeological theory, and the study of technology.

Author : Stephen Lubar,David W. Kingery
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2013-06-04
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781588343468

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History from Things by Stephen Lubar,David W. Kingery Pdf

History from Things explores the many ways objects—defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery—can reconstruct and help reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to “read” artifacts, how to “listen to” landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists. Spanning vast time periods, geographical locations, and academic disciplines, History from Things leaps the boundaries between fields that use material evidence to understand the past. The book expands and redirects the study of material culture—an emerging field now building a common base of theory and a shared intellectual agenda.

Author : Hans Peter Hahn,Hadas Weis
Publisher : Oxbow Books
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2013-01-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781782970842

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Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things by Hans Peter Hahn,Hadas Weis Pdf

Things travel around the globe: they are shipped as mass consumer goods, or transported as souvenirs or gifts. There are infinite ways for things to be mobile, not only in the era of globalisation but since the beginning of time, as the earliest traces of long distance trading show. This book investigates the mobility of things from archaeological and anthropological perspectives. Material Objects are characterised by temporal continuity, embodying a prior existence with lingering effects. Yet the material continuity disguises the transformations they may undergo, which only become evident upon closer examination. Objects are in perpetual flux, leaving visible traces of their age, usage, and previous life. While travelling through time, objects also circulate through space, and their spatial mobility alters their meaning and use with respect to new cultural horizons. As objects transform through time and space, so does the value attributed to them. Mapping out itineraries of value in the realm of the material, allows us to grasp the nature of a given social formation through the shape and meaning taken on by its valued 'stuff'. It also provides insights into the nature of materiality, through the value ascribed to objects at a given point in time and space. This edited volume brings together studies of material culture, materiality and value, with regard to the mobility of objects, with the aim of tracing the ways in which societies constitute their valued objects and how the realm of the material reflects upon society.

Author : I. Hodder
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2013-11-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317762324

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The Meanings of Things by I. Hodder Pdf

This unique and fascinating book concentrates on the varying roles and functions that material culture may play in almost all aspects of the social fabric of a given culture. The contributors, from Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea, India, South America, the USA, and both Eastern and Western Europe, provide a rich variety of views and experience in a worldwide perspective. Several of the authors focus on essential points of principle and methodology that must be carefully considered before any particular approach to material culture is adopted. One of the many fundamental questions posed in the book is whether or not all material culture is equivalent to documents which can be 'read' and interpreted by the outside observer. If it is, what is the nature of the 'messages' or meanings conveyed in this way? The book also questions the extent to which acceptance, and subsequent diffusion, of a religious belief or symbol may be qualified by the status of the individuals concerned in transmitting the innovation, as well as by the stratification of the society involved. Several authors deal with 'works of art' and the most effective means of reaching an understanding of their past significance. In some chapters semiotics is seen as the most appropriate technique to apply to the decoding of the assumed rules and grammars of material culture expression.

Author : Craig Clunas
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2004-05-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0824828208

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Superfluous Things by Craig Clunas Pdf

Now in paperback This outstanding and original book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes “superfluous things”—the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China—and describes contemporary attitudes to them. He informs his discussions with reference to both socio-cultural theory and current debates on eighteenth-century England concerning luxury, conspicuous consumption, and the growth of the consumer society.

Author : Tim Dant
Publisher : McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1999-08-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780335231317

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Material Culture in the Social World by Tim Dant Pdf

"This should become a core text for second year courses in sociology and cultural studies... it synthesizes a vast body of literature and a complex range of debates into a text which is at once accessible, engaging and stimulating... it will lead to students seeing and thinking about the material world in a totally new light and can be used as a way into key theoretical debates." Keith Tester, Professor of Social Theory, University of Portsmouth In what ways do we interact with material things? How do material objects affect the way we relate to each other? What are the connections between material things and social processes like fashion, discourse, art and design? Through wearing clothes, keeping furniture, responding to the ring of the telephone, noticing the signature on a painting, holding a paperweight and in many other ways, we interact with objects in our everyday lives. These are not merely functional relationships with things but are connected to the way we relate to other people and the culture of the particular society we live in - they are social relations. This engaging book draws on established theoretical work, including that of Simmel, Marx, McLuhan, Barthes and Baudrillard as well as a range of contemporary empirical work from many humanities disciplines. It uses ideas drawn from this work to explore a variety of things - from stone cairns to denim jeans, televisions to penis rings, houses to works of art - to understand something of how we live with them.

Author : Michelle A. Hamilton
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 9780773537545

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Collections and Objections by Michelle A. Hamilton Pdf

A nuanced study of conflicts over possession of Aboriginal artifacts.

Author : Leora Auslander,Tara Zahra
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2018-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501720086

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Objects of War by Leora Auslander,Tara Zahra Pdf

"Discusses the ways in which material culture affected and reflected how people grappled with social, cultural, and material upheavals during times of war"--

Author : Fredrik Fahlander,Terje Oestigaard
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Archaeology
ISBN : NWU:35556038693263

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Material Culture and Other Things by Fredrik Fahlander,Terje Oestigaard Pdf

Author : Thomas Allen,Jennifer Blair
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2015-06-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781771120166

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Material Cultures in Canada by Thomas Allen,Jennifer Blair Pdf

Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. The first of its kind, this collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body. The book’s three sections focus, in turn, on objects that are persistently material, on things whose materiality blends into the immaterial, and on the materials of spaces. Contributors highlight some of the most exciting new developments in the field, such as the emergence of “new materialism,” affect theory, globalization studies, and environmental criticism. Although the book has a Canadian centre, the majority of its contributors consider objects that cross borders or otherwise resist national affiliation. This collection will be valuable to readers within and outside of Canada who are interested in material culture studies and, in addition, will appeal to anyone interested in the central debates taking place in Canadian political and cultural life today, such as climate change, citizenship, shifts in urban and small-town life, and the persistence of imperialism.