Material Lives

Material Lives
Author: Serena Dyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350126985

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

The Lives of Objects

The Lives of Objects
Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: Class 200: New Studies in Religion
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020
Genre: Church history
ISBN: 022670758X

"Judaism and Christianity as condensed illustrations of how people across time struggle with the materiality of life and death. Speaking across many fields, including classics, history, anthropology, literary, gender, and queer studies, the book journeys through the ancient Mediterranean world by way of the myriad physical artifacts that punctuate the transnational history of early Christianity. By bringing a psychoanalytically inflected approach to bear upon her materialist studies of religious history, Kotrosits makes a contribution not only to our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity, but also our sense of how different disciplines construe historical knowledge, and how we as people and thinkers understand our own relation to our material and affective past"--

A Material Life

A Material Life
Author: Malcolm Holzman
Publisher: Images Publishing
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2008
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781864702118

"This book is by New York architect Malcolm Holzman. It explores his relationships with and thoughts about the various building materials he has used throughout his career. Chapters cover glazed tile, glass, metal, wood, clay, materials appropriated from other sources, sustainable materials, and the use of art in architecture. It is heavily illustrated with examples of the various materials."--Provided by publisher.

The Global Lives of Things

The Global Lives of Things
Author: Anne Gerritsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 131737455X

The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which ‘things’, ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects? This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of ‘proto-globalization’, ‘the first global age’ and ‘commodities/consumption’. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship. Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.

Material Culture in America

Material Culture in America
Author: Helen Sheumaker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2007-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1576076482

The first encyclopedia to look at the study of material culture (objects, images, spaces technology, production, and consumption), and what it reveals about historical and contemporary life in the United States. Reaching back 400 years, Material Life in America: An Encyclopedia is the first reference showing what the study of material culture reveals about American society—revelations not accessible through traditional sources and methods. In nearly 200 entries, the encyclopedia traces the history of artifacts, concepts and ideas, industries, peoples and cultures, cultural productions, historical forces, periods and styles, religious and secular rituals and traditions, and much more. Everyone from researchers and curators to students and general readers will find example after example of how the objects and environments created or altered by humans reveal as much about American life as diaries, documents, and texts.

Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life

Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life
Author: Bridie McGreavy
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2017-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319657119

This volume brings together three areas of scholarship and practice: rhetoric, material life, and ecology. The chapters build a multi-layered understanding of material life by gathering scholars from varied theoretical and critical traditions around the common theme of ecology. Emphasizing relationality, connectedness and context, the ecological orientation we build informs both rhetorical theory and environmentalist interventions. Contributors offer practical-theoretical inquiries into several areas - rhetoric’s cosmologies, the trophe, bioregional rhetoric’s, nuclear colonialism, and more - collectively forging new avenues of communication among scholars in environmental communication, communication studies, and rhetoric and composition. This book aims at inspiring and advancing ecological thinking, demonstrating its value for rhetoric and communication as well as for environmental thought and action.

The Secret Life of Stuff

The Secret Life of Stuff
Author: Julie Hill
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011-01-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1409040232

Wouldn't you like: - Products that don't damage the environment? - A better way of life without agonising about your 'footprint'? - To really know your stuff? Climate change? Biofuels? Nuclear power? Landfills? Recycling? Renewable energy? Environmental issues can feel overwhelming. But, in fact, it is simple; it all comes down to one thing - stuff. Our use of the Earth's resources - whether a crisp packet or a cargo ship, a T-shirt or a wind turbine - has an inescapable impact on our future. In The Secret Life of Stuff, Julie Hill uncovers the origins and the true cost of what we use. Her inventory of over-consumption may shock but it is the first step towards overcoming waste. The misuse of stuff is not your fault, it's a product of history. But it is only by understanding what has gone wrong, that everyone - politicians, business people and us as consumers - can create a new and better material world.

Wild Things

Wild Things
Author: Judy Attfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 135007229X

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for 'the real thing' become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's “lives”. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as “things with attitude” differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to 'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

The Material Life of Roman Slaves

The Material Life of Roman Slaves
Author: Sandra R. Joshel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 649
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113999140X

The Material Life of Roman Slaves is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the archaeology of Roman slavery. Rather than regarding slaves as irretrievable in archaeological remains, the book takes the archaeological record as a key form of evidence for reconstructing slaves' lives and experiences. Interweaving literature, law, and material evidence, the book searches for ways to see slaves in the various contexts - to make them visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. Part of this project involves understanding how slaves seem irretrievable in the archaeological record and how they are often actively, if unwittingly, left out of guidebooks and scholarly literature. Individual chapters explore the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and between appearance and disappearance in four physical and social locations - urban houses, city streets and neighborhoods, workshops, and villas.