Material Cultures

Download or read book Material Cultures written by Daniel Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Material Cultures of Music Notation written by Floris Schuiling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.

Download or read book Material Cultures written by Daniel Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century written by Wendy Bellion and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

Download or read book "Material Cultures, 1740?920 " written by Alla Myzelev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interweaving notions of identity and subjectivity, spatial contexts, materiality and meaning, this collection makes a significant contribution to debates around the status and interpretation of visual and material culture. Material Cultures, 1740-1920 has four primary theoretical and historiographic lines of inquiry. The first is how concepts of otherness and difference inform, imbricate, and impose themselves on identity and the modes of acquisition as well as the objects themselves. The second concern explores the intricacies of how objects and their subjects negotiate and represent spatial narratives. The third thread attempts to unravel the ideological underpinnings of collections of individuals which inevitably and invariably rub up against the social, the institutional, and the political. Finally, at the heart of Material Cultures, 1740-1920 is an intervention moving beyond the disciplinary ethos of material culture to argue more firmly for the aesthetic, visual, and semiotic potency inseparable from any understanding of material objects integral to the lives of their collecting subjects. The collection argues that objects are semiotic conduits or signs of meanings, pleasures, and desires that are deeply subjective; more often than not, they reveal racial, gendered, and sexual identities. As the volume demonstrates through its various case studies, material and visual cultures are not as separate as our current disciplinary ethos would lead us to believe.

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Material Cultures written by Irina D. Mihalache and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.

Download or read book Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.