The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies

The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies
Author: Lu Ann De Cunzo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 932
Release: 2022-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 110865987X

Material culture studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the relationships between people and their things: the production, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects. It draws on theory and practice from disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as anthropology, archaeology, history, and museum studies. Written by leading international scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive view of developments, methodologies and theories. It is divided into five broad themes, embracing both classic and emerging areas of research in the field. Chapters outline transformative moments in material culture scholarship, and present research from around the world, focusing on multiple material and digital media that show the scope and breadth of this exciting field. Written in an easy-to-read style, it is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals with an interest in material culture.

Handbook of Material Culture

Handbook of Material Culture
Author: Chris Tilley
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2006-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1446206432

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed. The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections. • Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field. • Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses. • Section III focuses on subject-object relations. • Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term. • Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity. The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe
Author: Catherine Richardson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 908
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317042840

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

Material Powers

Material Powers
Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 113401516X

This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns – from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonized in French colonial practices to the part played by the relations between museums and expeditions in the organization of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ‘cultural turn’. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.

History through material culture

History through material culture
Author: Leonie Hannan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526112922

History through material culture is a unique, step-by-step guide for students and researchers who wish to use objects as historical sources.Responding to the significant, scholarly interest in historical material culture studies, this book makes clear how students and researchers ready to use these rich material sources can make important, valuable and original contributions to history.Written by two experienced museum practitioners and historians, the book recognises the theoretical and practical challenges of this approach and offers clear advice on methods to get the best out of material culture research. With a focus on the early modern and modern periods, this volume draws on examples from across the world and demonstrates how to use material culture to answer a range of enquiries, including social, economic, gender, cultural and global history.

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies
Author: Dan Hicks
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 794
Release: 2010-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199218714

Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.

Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective

Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective
Author: Moira Donald
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2000-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780312223991

Material culture is not a subject which has to date attracted much attention from historians, whose usual source material is the written word. This volume shows just how illuminating the study of artifacts, and documentation concerning the acquisition and meaning of artifacts can be for the study of history in any period. Ranging from the use of clothing as votive offerings in ancient Greece to the function of reproductive technology in the 20th century, the scope of this volume is excitingly dismissive of traditional chronologies and disciplinary boundaries. Gender historians will not be surprised to find the historical meaning of many artifacts to be permeated by gender difference.

Learning Things

Learning Things
Author: Doug Blandy
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2018-06-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0807759198

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