Material culture Books

Book SynopsisA guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing. The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked and self-absorbed. How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas, while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future. The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

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Book SynopsisCollection, colonialism, translation, and the ephemera that shapes the stories we tell about ourselves.Featuring new original works by: Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, Cristina Rivera Garza, Joseph Zárate, Juan Cárdenas, Velia Vidal, Lina Meruane, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Dolores Reyes, Carlos Fonseca, Djamila RibeiroThe Central and South American collection at the British Museum collections contains approximately 62,000 objects, spanning 10,000 years of human history. The vast majority cannot be displayed, and those objects are the subject of Untold Microcosms , a collection of ten stories from ten Latin American writers, and inspired by the narratives about our past that we create through museums, in spite of their gaps and disarticulations.Trade Review

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Book SynopsisObject Studies: Introductions to Material Culture is a textbook that introduces students to an interdisciplinary approach to material cultural study. This text helps reveal how everyday objects from pens and coffee cups to our most cherished keepsakes help define our collective histories and personal narratives. Object Studies is organized around accessible and engaging chapters on objects with “model essays” that present original projects designed to engage students with a series of concepts and research activities. Each will demonstrate a key methodology tied to specific learning outcomes, but all chapters will be intertwined in their attention to the project of developing the core skills of “object studies”: careful viewing, writing detailed descriptions, setting out and testing research hypotheses, and telling stories through material artifacts. Aimed towards undergraduate students taking courses in material culture as well as postgraduate students embarking on independent research projects these chapter “studies” are practically oriented and demonstrate research projects that can be undertaken either in a course or even through personal study. Chapters in Object Studies conclude with research questions, suggestions on methodology, and a discursive bibliography designed to help students pursue their own projects based on these examples.Table of ContentsChapter 1: Personal Objects.- Chapter 2: Objects and Local History.- Chapter 3: A History of the World in Coffee Cups.- Chapter 4: Collecting Things: The Psychology of Accumulation, from Museums to Hoarders.- Chapter 5: The Things We Read.- Chapter 6: Consuming Objects.- Chapter 7: Thinking with Things.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Ralph Gomory Prize, Business History Conference""Finalist for the PROSE Award in European History, Association of American Publishers""[A] sweeping economic, social and cultural history of central Europe. . . . unorthodox and engaging."---Marc Levinson, Wall Street Journal"A wide-ranging and thorough study. . . . this is a riveting story, well told . . . by Marchand, who illuminates so much in an original and entertaining way."---Tim Blanning, Literary Review"As Suzanne Marchand shows in her meticulous new book, porcelain has been integral to German life since its reinvention in Saxony in 1708." * The Economist *"As an economic-business history, Marchand's work is a landmark achievement. . . . Porcelain is a monumental achievement in scope and breadth in illuminating porcelain's European beginnings and its increasingly fragile position in the markets of the present."---Megan Brandow-Faller, Central European History"Marchand paints a colourful picture of the day-to-day life of porcelain factories."---Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, Apollo"To weave together cultural, economic, and social history so masterfully takes great historiographical experience and skill. All those who are interested in nineteenth-century German intellectual history admire Suzanne Marchand’s books on the reception of classical antiquity and orientalism. Now she has surprised us with something completely new"---Jürgen Osterhammel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"Marchand, a specialist in German history, writes with clarity."---Norma Clarke, Times Literary Supplement"The remarkable achievement of Suzanne Marchand’s new book, Porcelain, which focuses especially on Germany, is that she moves beyond the celebrated age of discovery in the eighteenth century...to explore modern manufacture and diffusion across a broader consumer society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .... While Meissen lies at the center of Marchand’s book, one of its great strengths is the broader survey of German porcelain manufacturing."---Larry Wolff, Journal of Modern History"N/A"---Monika Poettinger, Austrian History Yearbook

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Rarities of these Lands is a rich reflection on the gap between the enchanting facade we call the Dutch Golden Age, on display...in every exhibition of 17th-century Dutch painting, and the riches, rarities and loot in the warehouse behind."---Timothy Brook, Times Literary Supplement"Claudia Swan’s masterful study explores the Dutch taste for consumption, and the means by which distant lands were reached and foreign goods accessed, first by seizing and plundering Portuguese and Spanish cargoes, then by engaging in war and conquest. . . . Rarities of these Lands provides a rich narrative about the circulation of exotic material culture and the history of collecting in the seventeenth century."---Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Journal of the History of Collections"The early modern phenomenon of the kunstcamer or rariteytencamer (cabinets of curiosities) is a recurrent theme for Swan, and indeed each chapter might be likened to its own self-contained kunstcamer, packed with amazing images and a wide array of intriguing anecdotes. . .All of these wonders and more await the reader in lavishly illustrated pages."---Ellsworth Hamann, CAA Reviews"Rarities of these Lands is a magnificent achievement. . . . [It] integrate[s] art historical and historical perspectives on the history of a single country into a compelling tale of global connections and entanglements."---Maarten Prak, Early Modern Low Countries ​​​​​​​"Rarities of these Lands not only makes important claims about the founding of the Dutch Republic but also speaks to the interdependence of commerce, art, and political self-fashioning among populations across the early modern world. . . . Rich in formal analysis, the passages describing individual works of art are beautifully articulated. . . . An essential work."---Dawn Odell, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews"Swan’s prose brings to life encounters in the Dutch Republic and overseas, as she introduces foreign visitors, travelers, and diplomats who were captured in text and images as they exchanged the types of goods discussed and depicted in this richly illustrated volume.—Marsely Kehoe, Renaissance Quarterly"

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Book SynopsisHistory 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.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Approaches to the material world 2 Planning a research project 3 Developing a methodology 4 Locating sources: understanding museum collections and other repositories 5 Analysing sources 6 Writing up findings Afterword Index

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Book SynopsisThis illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meanings from medieval Europe to 20th-century America. It provides a guide to the changes in style and taste, showing that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society.Table of ContentsMedieval period - fashioning the body; Renaissance - the rhetoric of power; 17th century - clothing and crisis; 18th century - clothing and commerce; 19th century - fashion and modernity; early 20th century - clothing the masses; late 20th century - catwalk and street style.

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Book SynopsisNow more than ever, we live in a society where we covet new and shiny things. Not only has consumption risen dramatically over the last 60 years, but we are damaging the environment at the same time. That is why buying quality and why Tara Button's Buy Me Once brand has such popular appeal.Tara Button has become a champion of a lifestyle called mindful curation' a way of living in which we carefully choose each object in our lives, making sure we have the best, most classic, most pleasing and longest lasting kettles, desks, pots & pans, scissors, coats and dresses, instead of surrounding ourselves with throwaway stuff and appliances with built-in obsolescence. Tara advocates a life that celebrates what lasts, what is classic and what really suits a person.There are 10 steps to master mindful curation and each is explained in this book, from understanding and using techniques to freeing yourself from external manipulations. Finding your purpose and priorities and identifying your coreTrade Review‘I love the idea behind Buy Me Once’ – Ashton Kutcher – actor and activist ‘Brilliant Idea’ Caitlin Moran – author and journalist ‘An excellent new book tackles happiness v consumerism, and how to achieve more of the former with less of the latter. Tara Button’s A Life Less Throwaway promises a more contented way of living and rages amusingly against planned obsolescence, fast furniture, weaselly advertising and cunning shop design. It also offers tips on curating and caring for your possessions, as well as ad-blocking.’ Katrina Burroughs – The Sunday Times journalist

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Book SynopsisWritten 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.Trade ReviewThe extent and ambition of material-culture studies is marvellously revealed in this new handbook . . . a wonderfully rich resource . . . this really is an impressive collection. * William Whyte, English Historical Review *. . . presents an impressive variety of ideas, and the conceptual implications of combining landscape archaeology, cultural primatology, horticultural archaeology, and material geographies with what archaeologists have traditionally thought of as material culture is deeply thought provoking and will have tremendous results within the field. * Danika Parikh, Archaeological Review from Cambridge *Table of Contents1: Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry: Introduction I. Disciplinary Perspectives 2: Dan Hicks: The Material-Cultural Turn 3: Ian Cook & Divya Tolia-Kelly: Material Geographies 4: Robert St George: Folklife 5: Ann Stahl: Material Histories 6: John Law: The Materials of STS II. Material Practices 7: Andrew Pickering: Material Culture and the Dance of Agency 8: Michael Dietler: Consumption 9: Gavin Lucas: Fieldwork and Collecting 10: Hirokazu Miyazaki: Gifts and Exchange 11: Howard Morphy: Art as Action, Art as Evidence 12: Rosemary Joyce with Joshua Pollard: Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition III. Objects and Humans 13: Kacy L. Hollenback & Michael B. Schiffer: Technology ande Material Life 14: Andy Jones & Nicole Boivin: The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency 15: Chris Fowler: `Personhood' and Identity 16: Zoe Crossland: Materiality and Embodiment 17: Tatyana Hulme: Material Culture in Primates IV. Landscapes and the Built Environment 18: Lesley Head: Cultural Landscapes 19: Sarah Whatmore & Steve Hinchliffe: Ecological Landscapes 20: Roland Fletcher: Urban Materialities: Meaning, Magnitude, Friction, and Outcomes 21: Carl Lounsbury: Architecture and Cultural History 22: Victor Buchli: Households and `Home Cultures' V. Studying Particular Things 23: Rodney Harrison: Stone Tools 24: Chandra Mukerji: The Landscape Garden as Material Culture: Lessons from France 25: Douglass W. Bailey & Lesley McFadyen: Built Objects 26: Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris & Peter Tomkins: Ceramics (as Containers) 27: Peter J. Pels: Magical Things: On Fetishes, Commodities, and Computers Nigel Thrift: Afterword: Fings Ain't Wot They Used t'Be: Thinking Through Material Thinking as Placing and Arrangement

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this beautifully written and insightful study of the mutual entanglement between Italy's national art police squad and the deeply entrenched tradition of tomb robbing, Greenland's portrayal of the robbers--in whom Italians see heroic tricksters and traitorous villains by turns--is both sharply analytical and descriptively captivating. She deftly articulates historical and legal detail with a rattling good story."--Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome "Ruling Culture provides a detailed and thought-provoking analysis of the construction of Italian national identity. It promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of Italian national identity, the institutional and legal dimensions of heritage, and the disciplinary history of archaeology. Greenland has written a first-rate piece of work and a valuable scholarly contribution."--Joshua Arthurs, author of Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy "Ruling Culture is groundbreaking. Greenland addresses the problem of how culture is used by states and various non-state actors to foster allegiance to nations, investigating culture as a key building block of national identity and making a convincing case for the difference between cultural power and ideological power."--Richard Lachmann, author of First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great PowersTable of ContentsIntroduction: The World’s Greatest Cultural Power 1 Art Squad Agonistes 2 The American Price 3 Distributing Sovereignty: From Fascism to the Art Squad 4 Tomb Robbers and Cultural Power from Below 5 Made in Italy 6 Farewell to the Tomb Robber Acknowledgments Appendix: Methodology Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisThe secrets of Scotland Yard’s famous Crime Museum revealed

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Book Synopsis

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisJohn and Elizabeth Newson were well known for their studies of child rearing, which have combined a rigorous research methodology with sympathetic insights into family life and a lively approach to scientific reporting. Path-breaking', brilliant', seminal', outstanding', fascinating', enthralling' and enchanting' are some of the adjectives used by critics to describe their previous books. They now turn their attention to toys, the pegs on which children hang their play', a study for which they are uniquely qualified. Not only had they long experience in normal child development: they had been actively involved for many years in research and training in remedial play for disabled children, their research unit was a major influence in the phenomenal development of the toy libraries self-help movement, they designed for and advised the toy industry, and they had their own family-run specialist toyshop. With this background, it is not surprising that their book on toys andTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. 1. Why Toys? 2. People as Playthings: Lap and Cradle Play 3. Toys for the First Two Years: A Developmental Progression 4. Some Timeless Toys and Play Equipment 5. Props for Fantasy 6. Miniature Worlds 7. Play and Playthings for the Handicapped Child 8. Using Toys for Developmental Assessment 9. Using Toys and Play Remedially 10. Toys and Play for the Sick Child 11. Toys Through Time and Space. Notes. List of Suppliers. Further Reading. Index.

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Book SynopsisEighteenth-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.Trade ReviewThere is something deeply moving about encountering eighteenth-century women via the things they stitched, wore, cut, drew and painted. Richly detailed, evocative and precise – as well as beautifully illustrated – Material Lives has much in common with the intricate, creative women's work that Dyer studies in this book. * Hannah Greig, University of York, UK *Serena Dyer’s lavishly illustrated and brilliantly researched book calls for us to rethink the immense cultural power of the “needles, brushes, glue and scissors” that four Georgian women used to fashion new versions of history. It is a compelling read. * Alison Matthews David, Ryerson University, Canada *A meticulous, insightful and intimate reconstruction of how four genteel women recorded and memorialized their lives through ‘material life writing’ ... [and] a compelling vision of women’s engagement in the eighteenth-century world of goods as knowledgeable, skilful and creative makers. * Karen Harvey, University of Birmingham, UK *This splendid book portrays the unforgettable world of female imagination, skill and artistic talent that shaped consumer identity in the eighteenth century. * Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick, UK *Material Lives offers a brilliant re-evaluation of eighteenth-century women’s lives through their craft practices. Organised around four rich case studies, Dyer’s book eloquently questions the presumed primacy of the textual archive and models an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that has far-reaching repercussions for the study of women’s history. * Jennie Batchelor, University of Kent, UK *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Charts and Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1. Introduction: Making Material Lives Material Life Writing The Consumer Culture of Making Four Material Lives 2. Material Accounting: A Sartorial Account Book Barbara Johnson (1738–1825) Educating Barbara Johnson Accounting for Herself Material Literacy A Chronicle of Fashion 3. Dress of the Year: Watercolours Ann Frankland Lewis (1757–1842) Sartorial Timekeeping and the Fashion Plate Accomplishment and Creative Practice Society and Fashionable Display Selfhood, Emotion and the Mourning Watercolours 4. Adorned in Silk: Dressed Prints Sabine Winn (1734–1798) Paper Textiles, Dress and the Dressed Print Sabine Winn’s Dressed Prints Print and Making at Nostell 5. Fashions in Miniature: Dolls Laetitia Powell (1741–1801) The Powell Dolls Mimetic Dolls and Miniature Selves Dolls as Sartorial Social Narrators 6. Conclusion: Material Afterlives Glossary Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisJane Suzanne Carroll is Ussher Assistant Professor in Children's Literature at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published a monograph, Landscape in Children's Literature (2012), as well as articles on Susan Cooper, Jules Verne, J.R.R. Tolkien, ghost stories, and children's fantasy.Trade ReviewAn invaluable exploration of an aspect of children’s literature that is often overlooked, even though (or perhaps because) it lies in plain sight. * Modern Language Review *Provides a fresh and insightful perspective on the dynamic and non-trivial relationships nineteenth-century children had with the material culture that often goes unnoticed as the mundane backdrops of their lives. * BAVS Newsletter *This is a brilliantly fresh account of the relationship between children, children’s literature and consumer culture. In tracing the trajectory from Victorian books that enthusiastically teach children to be appreciative and discerning consumers to Edwardian works that show the relationship between children and the bought objects around them as fraught and sometimes frightening, Jane Suzanne Carroll takes in science, manufacturing, séances, magic and mysterious deaths. The writing is lively and often witty, making this as entertaining as it is informative. * Professor Kimberley Reynolds, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction 'Devoured by a Desire to Possess': Children's literature, commodities and consumption Children's books as commodities and vehicles for consumerism Children's books and the creation of new products Reading objects Structure of this book Chapter One Remarkable and perplexing items: Children and the Great Exhibition Learning to look Getting lost Guiding children Head, hand & heart The world of goods Conclusion Chapter Two The wonders of common things: Worldly goods in the nineteenth century The history of the it-narrative Children's it-narratives The History of a Pin The Story of a Needle 'A China Cup' The wonders of common things Conclusion Chapter Three A hailstorm of knitting needles: Otherworldly goods and domestic fantasy Commodity fetishism Spiritualism and fiction The rise of domestic fantasy Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There Speaking likenesses The cuckoo clock Conclusion Chapter Four ‘A Disgraceful State of Things’: Bad consumers and bad commodities Bad things and bad consumers in E. Nesbit's writing for children Bad things in Nesbit's work The Enchanted Castle and the live thing Bad mice and crooked sixpences: Material deviance in Beatrix Potter's work The (mis)adventures of Mr Toad Conclusion Conclusions Failed palaces and magic cities References

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Book SynopsisUlrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to give us a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he gives us insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles.

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Book SynopsisInformed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern invention' of childhoodwhat we might refer to as objects for a childhood by designChildhood by Design explores dynamic tensions betweTrade ReviewThis volume, edited by Megan Brandow-Faller, is a very welcome addition to the growing literature and the ensuing methodological renewal. * ResearchGate *Childhood by Design expands upon a common body of research that includes work by Gary Cross, Miriam Forman-Brunell, and Brian Sutton-Smith and, like their books often did, it should prove fascinating to students as well as to scholars. And, also as their work did, Childhood by Design poses some new directions in material culture studies. * American Journal of Play *A significant new addition to this area ... Childhood by Design has much to offer those interested in childhood and its physical manifestations, particularly to those with an interest in constructions of girlhood. * Cultural and Social History *Childhood by Design takes toys seriously as material embodiments of cultural and political values capable of shaping children’s beliefs through play. Yet in its careful treatment of design, the volume explores not only toys’ intended uses, but also imagines the ways that children might resist, adapt, and reinterpret the cultural aims that toys seek to impart. Contributions draw upon diverse material evidence from collections around the world to produce nuanced accounts of the role of design in children’s toys. Ambitious in its geographical and historical scope, this rich interdisciplinary volume combines the concerns and approaches of history, art and design history, and childhood studies in an original exploration of children’s material culture. -- Meredith A. Bak * Assistant Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden *This sweeping collection that interpretively and imaginatively crosses fields and continents brings to light the agency of toys in “crystallizing the modern invention of childhood,” and especially girlhood. The uniformly outstanding essays trace more than 400 years of significant historical figures and forces—from aesthetics and ideologies to philosophies of childhood and patterns of consumption, play to pedagogy, discourse to design, anxiety to creativity, and colonialism to appropriation—dynamically informing dolls, doll houses, books, etc. Richly illustrated with objects along with advertisements and embroidery, catalogues and scrolls, this far reaching collection, that contributes importantly to contemporary and scholarly debates, is a major contribution to material culture, visual culture, children’s, and dolls studies, not to mention the history of play, toys, and girls. The innovative methodologies and theoretical frameworks of these accessibly written studies by truly interdisciplinary thinkers from across the academy, are instructional, informative, and inspirational to scholars and students alike. I love this book! -- Miriam Forman-Brunell * Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, and author of Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of Girlhood (1998) and Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play (2015) *[T]his book [is] important and [will] open researchers to many avenues... in a field that continues to open up to new issues. * Strenæ *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children Megan Brandow-Faller, City University of New York Kingsborough, USA Part I: Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption and Commodity Culture 1. Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys and Learning to Shop in 18th-Century Britain Serena Dyer, Middlesex University, UK 2. Transitional Pandoras: Dolls in the Long 18th-Century Ariane Fennetaux, University of Paris, Diderot, France 3. The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics in Belle Epoque France Sarah Curtis, San Francisco State University, USA 4. Building Kids: LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity Colin Fanning, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA Part II: Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design 5. Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking: Walter Crane, Flora's Feast, and the Possibilities of Children's Literature Andrea Korda, University of Alberta, Augustana, Canada 6. The Unexpected Victory of Charakter-Puppen: Dolls, Artists, Aesthetics and Identity in Early 20th-Century Germany Bryan Ganaway, The College of Charleston, USA 7. Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play and Unlearning in the Bauhaus Legacy Michelle Millar Fisher, City University of New York, USA 8. Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Idealogy,and the Avant-Garde in Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968 Cathleen Giustino, Auburn University, USA 9. Reconstructing Domestic Play: The Kaleidoscope House Karen Stock, Winthrop University, USA and Katherine Wheeler, University of Miami, USA Part III: Toys, Play and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and Ideological Indoctrination 10. Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as Inspirational Toys in the Long 19th Century James E. Bryan, University of Wisconsin-Stout, USA 11. Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of Colonial Culture Through Child-Made Objects Lynette Townsend, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, New Zealand 12. Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and German Southwest Africa, 1890 to 1918 Jakob Zollman, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Germany 13. Public Nostalgia and the Infantilization of the Russian Peasant: Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys Marie Gasper-Hulvat, Kent State University at Stark, USA 14. The ‘Appropriate’ Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy, 1910-1960s Valentina Boretti, University of London, UK Index

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Book SynopsisCorrespondence, travel writing, diary writing, painting, scrapbooking, curating, collecting and house interiors allowed British women scope to express their responses to imperial sites and experiences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Taking these productions as its archive, British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775-1930 includes a collection of essays from different disciplines that consider the role of British women's cultural practices and productions in conceptualising empire. While such productions have started to receive greater scholarly attention, this volume uses a more self-conscious lens of gender to question whether female cultural work demonstrates that colonial women engaged with the spaces and places of empire in distinctive ways. By working across disciplines, centuries and different colonial geographies, the volume makes an exciting and important contribution to the field by demonstrating the diverse ways in which European women shaped constructions of eTrade ReviewIt is well established that work, culture, and empire were highly gendered concepts and practices in nineteenth century Britain. And yet, women are rarely invoked as cultural producers in the networks of Empire. This superb collection of essays examines the cultural significance of British women travelling, collecting, publishing, crafting, curating, cultivating, sketching, administering, and more. Moving well beyond bureaucratic archives, this volume recovers compelling material traces of the role that British women played in the creation and propagation of empire. * Douglas Fordham, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia, USA *Here comes a long overdue interdisciplinary study of British women and their literary and material engagements with the British empire in the long nineteenth century. The reader travels from North Carolina to Zanzibar, India to Australia, in a geographical sweep that encompasses the length and breadth of Britain’s empire. Along the way, we encounter a staggering array of things from letters to coconut shells and flower paintings to an ivory throne as the authors examine the dense networks of art and material cultures that shaped the public and private domains of imperial life. From everyday objects and select royal gifts emerge complex histories of travel, curiosity, art-patronage, gift-exchange, loot, frontier politics, and slavery. * Romita Ray, Associate Professor of Art History, Syracuse University, USA *Taking a diverse approach to material culture in Empire, this book broadens our understanding of the imperial archive, allowing us ultimately to read the lives and experiences of women in Empire in new ways. Enriched with sumptuous detail and extensive research, the reader embarks on a virtual tour of the female networks of material culture, collecting and creating that enlivened the lives of colonial women, and left a legacy of female agency and action for the historian. These women made sense of their colonial lives by reference to remembered landscape of home, a sense of purpose through collection and curation, and by creating webs of imagined community with their correspondents at home and abroad through the writing of letters and the sending of gifts. Bringing together gendered, literary, visual and material cultures, this volume gives a uniquely enriched insight into the lives of imperial women from the objects they collected, the texts they created, and the networks they curated. * Emily Manktelow, Senior Lecturer in Global and Colonial History, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Rosie Dias (University of Warwick, UK) and Kate Smith (University of Birmingham, UK) Part I: Travel 1: The Travelling Eye: British Women in Early 19th-Century India David Arnold (University of Warwick, UK) 2: Paper trails of Imperial Trav(a)ils: Janet Schaw’s Journal of a journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal, 1774-1776 Viccy Coltman (University of Edinburgh, UK) 3: Sketches from the Gendered Frontier: Colonial Women's Images of Encounters with Aboriginal People in Australia, 1830s-1860s Caroline Jordan (La Trobe University, Australia) Part II: Collecting 4: "Of manly enterprise, and female taste!": Mina Malcolm's Cottage as Imperial Exhibition, c. 1790s-1970s Ellen Filor (University of Michigan, USA) 5: A Lily of the Murray: Cultivating the Colonial Landscape through Album Assemblage Molly Duggins (National Art School, Australia) 6: Collecting the "East": Women Travellers New on the New "Grand Tour" Amy Miller (Royal Museums Greenwich, UK) Part III: Identities 7: Agents of Affect: Queen Victoria’s Indian Gifts Rosie Dias (University of Warwick, UK) 8: ‘Prime Minister in the Home Department’: Female Gendered Identity in 19th-Century Upper Canada Rosie Spooner (University of Glasgow, UK) 9: Reconstructing the Lives of Professional Women in 1930s Zanzibar through Image, Object and Text Sarah Longair (British Museum, UK) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the History Book Award in Scotland''s National Book Awards, 2023During the long 19th century, Scotland was home to an established body of skilled jewellers who were able to access a range of materials from the country's varied natural landscape: precious gold and silver; sparkling crystals and colourful stones; freshwater pearls, shells and parts of rare animals.Following these materials on their journey from hill and shore, across the jeweller's bench and on to the bodies of wearers, this book challenges the persistent notion that the forces of industrialisation led to the decline of craft. It instead reveals a vivid picture of skilled producers who were driving new and revived areas of hand skill, and who were key to fostering a focused cultural engagement with the natural world among both producers and consumers through the things they made. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how examining the materiality of eveTrade ReviewThis extensively researched and beautifully illustrated book makes an important contribution to material culture studies. It puts the jewellery makers and their materials at the centre of the discussion, around which flow the currents of cultural, intellectual, aesthetic and economic aspects of their craft. The result is a brilliantly effective interdisciplinary account of making and meaning in Scottish jewellery practice in the long 19th century. * Dr. Simon Bliss, author of Jewellery in the Age of Modernism 1918-1940 (2021) *This is a wonderful book which will become the standard work on Scotland’s jewellery craft for many years to come. Thorough and meticulous research is blended with eloquent prose and an array of splendid images to enchanting effect. * Professor Emeritus Sir Tom Devine, University of Edinburgh, UK *From Cairngorm pebbles and Perthshire pearls to Edinburgh goldsmiths and the craftswomen of Inverness, Laurenson shows us the places and people of Scotland in vivid and innovative ways that will inspire all readers to see the past afresh. * David Gange, author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge (2021), joint winner of the Highland Book Prize, and Associate Professor of History, the University of Birmingham, UK *Essential reading for all who seek to understand the role of jewellery, and why it matters, in a period of huge social change. Bristling with new research, this engaging and highly original account takes cultural history deep into Scotland and far beyond. * Judy Rudoe, Curator, 1800 to the present, British Museum, UK *This book is a highly original account full of new information from contemporary letters, newspapers, novels, and paintings. It is essential for anyone interested in jewellery and wearable ornaments or in Scotland’s cultural history … As a keen mountain lover, she brings a palpable love of the materials that makes the book a joy to read ...This compellingly written and well-illustrated book is one you will return to repeatedly and is unquestionably worth the outlay. -- Journal of the Decorative Arts Society * Judy Rudoe, British Museum Curator *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Revealing Craft: Fusing Nature and Culture Chapter 1: Making Things: In the Jewellery Workshop Chapter 2: New-Old Objects: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Past Chapter 3: Metals: Landscape and Memory in Gold and Silver Chapter 4: Minerals: Crafting Colour Worlds in Stone Chapter 5: (Un)Living Things: Material Afterlives in Pearls, Shells and Taxidermy Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis edited collection aims to reimagine and extend ethnography for a data-saturated world. The book brings together leading scholars in the social sciences who have been interrogating and collaborating with data scientists working in a range of different settings. The book explores how a repurposed form of ethnography might illuminate the kinds of knowledge that are being produced by data science. It also describes how collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists might lead to new forms of social analysisTrade Review'Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is a must-read for researchers, students and professionals outside academia wishing to understand what digital data means for our contemporary world. It brings our attention to a burgeoning field of research and practice which unites ethnography and data science on a number of levels. This book takes us into the world of digital data in a mode and depth that only the particular sensibilities of ethnographic research can offer. Its editors and authors collectively provide a new and global vision through ethnographic studies of how the worlds of data scientists are constituted, the ways of knowing and forms of expertise that digital data analysis involves, and the methodological challenges and achievements of work that has created new modes of collaboration between ethnography and digital data analysis. Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is at once a substantive, theoretical and methodological book. It is brimming with significant ethnographic insights and findings about the worlds it examines, it offers an array of different and disciplinary specific modes of thinking theoretically about digital data from anthropology and sociology, and it interrogates the modes of knowing that are implicated in both digital data collection and analysis and in ethnographic practice, as well as the possible connections between them.'Sarah Pink, Professor of Design and Media Ethnography, RMIT University -- .Table of Contents1 Introduction: ethnography for a data-saturated world – Hannah Knox and Dawn NafusPart I: Ethnographies of data science2 Data scientists: a new faction of the transnational field of statistics – Francisca Grommé, Evelyn Ruppert and Baki Cakici3 Becoming a real data scientist: expertise, flexibility and lifelong learning – Ian Lowrie4 Engineering ethnography – Kaiton WilliamsPart II: Knowing data 5 ‘If everything is information’: archives and collecting on the frontiers of data-driven science – Antonia Walford6 Baseless data? Modelling, ethnography and the challenge of the anthropocene – Hannah Knox7 Operative ethnographies and large numbers – Adrian MackenziePart III: Experiments in/of data and ethnography 8 Transversal collaboration: an ethnography in/of computational social science – Mette My Madsen, Anders Blok and Morten Axel Pedersen9 The data walkshop and radical bottom-up data knowledge – Alison Powell10 Working ethnographically with sensor data – Dawn Nafus11 The other ninety per cent: thinking with data science, creating data studies – Joseph Dumit interviewed by Dawn NafusIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies –often working-class ones – and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.Trade Review'Joanne Begiato’s Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 breaks new ground in exploring manliness in Britain as an expansive body of gendered meanings that was most fully elaborated by representatives of the middle class but was also deeply resonant with the working class. [...] Overall, this is a virtuoso deployment of three interlinked strands in the new cultural history: the somatic, the material, and the emotional. That conceptual range has made possible a book on manliness unrivaled in its contextual range and its interpretive insights.'Journal of British Studies -- .Table of ContentsMaking manliness manifest: an introduction1 Figures, faces, and desire: male bodies and manliness2 Appetites, passions, and disgust: the penalties and paradoxes of unmanliness 3 Hearts of oak: martial manliness and material culture4 Homeward bound: manliness and the home5 Brawn and bravery: glorifying the working bodyThe measure of a man: an epilogueIndex

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Book SynopsisMummified explores the curious, unsettling and controversial cases of mummies held in French and British museums. From powdered mummies eaten as medicine to mummies unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and DNA-tested in modern laboratories, there is a lot more to these ancient remains than first meets the eye.This book takes you on a journey from Paris to London, Leicester and Manchester, from the apothecaries of the Middle Ages to the dissecting tables of the eighteenth century, and finally behind the screen of today’s computers, to revisit the stories of these bodies that have fascinated Europeans for so long.Mummified investigates matters of life and death, of collecting and viewing, and of interactions – sometimes violent and sometimes emotional – that question the essence of what makes us human.Trade Review‘Who would have thought that Egyptian mummies are alive and well all around us? Angela Stienne’s book helps us to see the ancient mummy in the brown paint of gallery paintings, in anatomy lectures, even in modern discussions of race and ethnicity. This brilliantly written book proves that the mummy has reawakened within our own social spaces as a material link between past and present. A must read.’Kara Cooney, Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art & Architecture, University of California Los Angeles'Mummified is a refreshing take on ancient Egyptian human remains. Inviting readers to reflect on and question the history behind the modern Western fascination with "mummies", it will help museum visitors see them as human beings rather than objects of display.'Dr Heba Abd el Gawad, Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage Project, University College London‘A compelling, captivating and complete book: it takes us on a journey through which we discover, enchanted, what it is about Egyptian mummies that has captured our imaginations and the imaginations of those who preceded us.’Dario Piombino-Mascali, Research Professor in Anthropology, Vilnius University‘Stienne's book is important because it takes seriously the perspective of the observer rather than attempting to reconstitute the ancient person. This results in some fascinating and genuinely insightful reflections on the reception of the ancient Egyptian dead in museums.’Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, Manchester Museum'This rather unusual book is a very personal exploration of a major ethical and philosophical study. [...] The author explores the history of the displacement of ancient Egyptian individuals, always treating each as a real person.' Ancient Egypt magazine -- .Table of ContentsForeword by John J. JohnstonPrologueIntroduction: The mummy1 The mummy as medicine, the mummy in medicine2 The displayed mummy, the displaced body3 Mummies buried in a garden, and other incidents4 The mummy’s foot5 Mummies unrolled6 The White mummy7 The (White) mummy returns8 The mummy of the futureEpilogueIndex

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Book SynopsisTranscultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance.These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation.The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.Trade Review‘Debates over originality and cultural distinctness have been studied outside art history for more than forty years, yet have still barely made a dent in the national culture model of the discipline. Grusiecki's intervention is especially welcome for its nuanced critical framing and the depth of his knowledge of a rich body of material evidence.’Claire Farago, Professor Emerita, University of Colorado Boulder -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: between worlds1 Where is Sarmatia?2 How do you dress like a Pole?3 Who speaks for Poland?4 Where do Polish carpets come from?Epilogue: beyond the binaryIndex

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Book SynopsisThis study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Providing case studies from four parts of the French empire, the book draws on illustrative evidence from the French archives in Aix-en-Provence and Paris as well as local archives in each colonial location. The case studies, in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, each examine building projects to show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Building the French empire1 Colonial enclosure: Fortification and castles on the Lesser Antilles 2 Ambitions to empire in India: Pondichéry as an imperial city in the Mughal state system 3 Decay and repair: Fort Royal as a perennial construction site on Martinique 4 Mixed society and African “Rococo”: ‘French’ style in Saint-Louis and on Gorée Island 5 Variegated engineering: The builders of the Caribbean empire 6 Community and segregation in Louisbourg: An ‘ideal’ colonial city in Atlantic Canada 7 Motley style: Affective buildings and emotional communities on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti Conclusion: The empire as a material construct Archival Sources Published Sources Bibliography

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Book SynopsisEn Sofía mathitéfsantes: Essays in Byzantine Material Culture and Society in Honour of Sophia Kalopissi-Verti contains a collection of thirty studies dedicated to Sophia Kalopissi-Verti by her students which celebrate the multifaceted academic and teaching career of Professor Kalopissi-Verti, Emerita of Byzantine Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The contributions cover a large variety of topics presenting unpublished archaeological material, suggesting new approaches to various aspects of Byzantine archaeology, material culture and art history. Geographically topics span a vast area from Constantinople to South Sinai and from Cyprus and Antiocheia to the Aegean Islands, continental Greece and Italy. Covering the period from the Early Byzantine to the Post-Byzantine period, they are organised in seven thematic sections: Urbanism and Architecture; Painting and Iconography; Stone Carving and Sculpture; Ceramics; Bone, Metal and Textiles; Coinage and Sigillography; Inscriptions, Portraits and Patronage. The broad thematic, chronological and geographic scope of the volume’s essays reflects the wide range of Kalopissi-Verti’s pioneering research and her own interests, to which she introduced her students and with which she inspired them.Table of Contents‘Aspects of Medieval Secular Imagery’: Representations of Warriors in Byzantine Glazed Pottery from Argos and Nauplio (12th-13th centuries) (Anastasia Vassiliou) [Open Access: Download]

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Book SynopsisTraditionally history is cerebral: what did they believe, what did they think, what did they know?Woodsmoke and Sage is not a traditional book. Using the five senses, historian Amy Licence presents a new perspective on the material culture of the past, exploring the Tudors’ relationship with the fabric of their existence, from the clothes on their backs, the roofs over their heads and the food on their tables, to the wider questions of how they interpreted and presented themselves, and what they believed about life, death and beyond.Take a journey back 500 years and experience the sixteenth century the way it was lived, through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

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Book SynopsisThe sword is an important and multi-faceted symbol of military power, royal and communal authority, religion and mysticism. This study takes the sword beyond its functional role as a tool for killing, considering it as a cultural artefact, and the broader meaning and significance it had to its bearer. It should be on the bookshelf of anybody who claims to be interested in the importance of the sword in medieval life and thought and their cultural significance in the past - and present. Robert Woosnam-Savage, Royal Armouries. We see the sword as an object of nobility and status, a mystical artefact, imbued with power and symbolism. It is Roland's Durendal, Arthur's Excalibur, Aragorn's Narsil. A thing of beauty, its blade flashes in the sun, and its hilt gleams with opulent decoration. Yet this beauty belies a bloody function, for it is also a weapon that appears crude and brutal, requiring great strength to wield: cleaving armour, flesh, and bone. This wide-ranging book uncovers the breadth of the sword's place within the culture of high medieval Europe. Encompassing swords both real and imagined, physical, and in art and literature, it shows them as a powerful symbol of authority and legitimacy. It looks at the practicalities of the sword, including its production, as well as challenging our preconceptions about when and where it was used. In doing so, it reveals a far less familiar culture of swordsmanship, beyond the elite, in which swordplay was an entertainment, taught in the fencing school by masters such as Lichtenauer, Talhoffer, and Fiore, and codified in fencing manuals, or fechtbücher. The book also considers how our modern attempts to reconstruct medieval swordsmanship on screen, and in re-enactment and Historical European Martial Arts (or HEMA), shape, and have been shaped by, our preconceptions of the sword. As a whole, the weapon is shown to be at once far more mundane, and yet just as special, as we imagine it.Trade ReviewIt should be on the bookshelf of anybody who claims to be interested in the importance of the sword in medieval life and thought and their cultural significance in the past - and present. -- Robert Woosnam-SavageTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Mystical Blade 2. The Powerful Sword 3. The Falchion: A Case Study of Form, Function, and Symbolism 4. The Civilian Sword 5. Learning the Sword 6. Using the Sword 7. Recreating Medieval Swordsmanship Conclusion Glossary Bibliography

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Book SynopsisWhen people encounter consumer goods—sugar, clothes, phones—they find little to no information about their origins. The goods will thus remain anonymous, and the labor that went into making them, the supply chain through which they traveled, will remain obscured. In this book, Tad Skotnicki argues that this encounter is an endemic feature of capitalist societies, and one with which consumers have struggled for centuries in the form of activist movements constructed around what he calls The Sympathetic Consumer. This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Offering a comparative historical study of consumer activism the book shows, in vivid detail, how activists wrestled with the broader implications of commodity exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki provides a framework to identify a capitalist culture by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to it.Trade Review"A path-breaking work. This book contributes significantly to scholarship on consumer society and to broader debates about how to understand the economic culture of capitalism."—Lyn Spillman, University of Notre Dame"This fascinating comparative account reveals striking similarities and interesting differences between three social movements across two centuries. Skotnicki relates these to the form of capitalism itself, thus making the book an excellent companion for teaching Marx's Capital."—Andreas Glaeser, The University of Chicago"This book is a joy to read for many reasons, but mostly for its careful work in identifying the moral appeals of consumer activism and what the sympathetic consumer tells us about capitalism."—Caroline Heldman, American Journal of SociologyTable of Contents1. The Rise of the Sympathetic Consumer 2. Abolitionist Visions 3. Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Visions 4. Practicing Sympathetic Consumption 5. Moral Arguments 6. The Sympathetic Consumer, Challenged 7. Whither the Sympathetic Consumer?

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles. This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies. The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.

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Book SynopsisAlison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010. This is her first book.Table of ContentsIntroduction One: Fashion Photography and the Myth of the Unified Subject Two: Inspiring Desire: The Case for Haute Couture Three: Queering Fashion, Dressing Transgression Four: Fashion, Text, Symptom Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe verb declutter has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it's only a matter of time. The author finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America.Trade Review"My high expectations were fulfilled and indeed exceeded by Herring's brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating, and lucid book. In traversing his rich and well-researched archive in the series of case studies that make up the book, Herring examines how and why hoarders have been stigmatized in a number of different contexts through the twentieth century. In doing so, he mounts a sustained and significant challenge to the pathologizing discourses about hoarding." (Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University)"

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Book SynopsisA vivid exploration of the evolution of reading as an essential social and domestic activity during the eighteenth century Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the time, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life.Trade Review“A lively survey. . . . Williams’s book is welcome because her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, New York Times Book Review“Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes, as revealed in diaries, letters and marginalia, conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—Washington Post“The inestimable value of Williams’s book is that it offers us, beyond the shrewd and apt commentary, new things to understand and to feel among the sheer diversity and number of its eloquent lives.”—Min Wild, Times Literary Supplement“This lively and original study, richly documented and happily free of jargon… has brought to life the story of how print worked on people in the past.”—Toby Barnard, Dublin Review of Books“The Social Life of Books ranges confidently and with fascinating detail over a great number of types of reading venues, reading materials, and readers.” —James Raven, American Historical Review“This book confidently explores a fascinating topic. Its strength lies in its sheer wealth of examples, especially the many cases recovered from provincial archives that freshly illustrate the habits and eccentricities of eighteenth-century readers. This is a book that any reader with an interest in the eighteenth century will enjoy and value.”—John Mullan, University College London"A comprehensive account, impressively documented and vividly illustrated, of the social history of reading, by an author whose own reading skills are matched by her brilliantly mastered erudition."—Claude Rawson, Maynard Mack Professor of English Emeritus, Yale University“The Social Life of Books is a magnificent, genuinely innovative achievement that will appeal not only to scholars of literature and book history, not only to historians, but to all lovers of books and reading.”—Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London “This is a magnificent achievement. Williams approaches the history of reading from a wide purview, offering research into the price of books, on literacy, and on circulating libraries, book shops, book clubs and other forms of book sharing, including book theft. It makes a very compelling case for the cultures of sociable reading in eighteenth-century Britain.”—Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back on the remote control’s material and cultural history to explain how such an innocuous media accessory has changed the way we occupy our houses, interact with our families, and experience the world. From the first wired radio remotes of the 1920s to infrared universal remotes, from the homemade TV controllers to the Apple Remote, remote controls shape our media devices and how we live with them. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewThe remote control encourages us to take it for granted. It's ubiquitous but easy to misplace. An essential convenience but still an overly complicated nuisance. But in this compelling history, Caetlin Benson-Allott places remote controls at the center of our media universe, demonstrating how profoundly these devices shape contemporary media practices and our everyday lives. You'll never surf the same way again. * Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA, and author of Television and American Culture *While promising control, the remote often fails to recognize commands or deliver our desires. Caetlin Benson-Allott shows how the history of the remote, including its affordances and burdensome proliferations, can help us better understand contemporary media technologies. * Michele White, Associate Professor of Communication, Tulane University, USA, and author of Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay *Caetlin Benson-Allott offers an analysis of ‘remote control’ as a ‘technology and a cultural fantasy.’ …What was once a fantasy, a thing of the imagination, becomes instead an instrument, but by that instantiation it scrambles and reduces the myriad imaginative uses it once anchored — realizes some, sends others packing, or separates them out. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Object Lessons’ describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I'll say, amen. … [I]t is in this simplicity that we find insight and even beauty. … Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott is another pleasure, walking us through the history of one of my favorite objects, with a history dating to the 1920s. In the middle to late 1970s, I was actually employed as a remote control, as my father would say, "John, change the channel to 7," or "Put it on 9," and my job would be to get up and change the channel to 7 or 9. I was relieved to be replaced by an infrared model in the 1980s. … If you read enough ‘Object Lessons’ books, you'll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones — caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though, in the tradition of McPhee's Oranges, they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we've taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look. * Chicago Tribune *Table of ContentsIntroduction: What a Mess! Chapter 1: Changing Volume Chapter 2: Switching Channels Chapter 3: Comprehensive Control Conclusion: Material Literacy Index

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Book SynopsisThis book introduces the critical concepts and debates that are shaping the emerging field of game studies. Exploring games in the context of cultural studies and media studies, it analyses computer games as the most popular contemporary form of new media production and consumption. The book: Argues for the centrality of play in redefining reading, consuming and creating culture Offers detailed research into the political economy of games to generate a model of new media production Examines the dynamics of power in relation to both the production and consumption of computer games This is key reading for students, academics and industry practitioners in the fields of cultural studies, new media, media studies and game studies, as well as human-computer interaction and cyberculture.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Computer Games as New MediaThe Ludological Turn: What Play Theory Brings to the Analysis of New Media Why We Get the Games We Get: The Political Economy of GamesNetworks Of TechnicityUnderstanding Games as ‘Texts’Cyborg Spectatorship: Untying the Knots of GameplayInterventions and Recuperations

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabate combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewRabate counters our instinctively negative view of rust with a surprisingly wide variety of examples drawn from philosophy as well as the arts and sciences for a strikingly and broadly convincing argument as to the merits of rust … Rabate presents rust as an imperfection with unlimited possibilities. He clarifies its role in our lives and complicates how we value its role. He brings readers his family rouille recipe and the news that someday soon, science may give us a green rust capable of cleaning our water and soil … He provides plenty of food for thought as we run into these references across daily life. * PopMatters *This is a witty, delightfully eclectic fantasy and fugue on the theme of rust, which, it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for an aesthetics of metamorphosis in and after modernism. Rust has the ruddy glow of active thinking in the process of self-transformation. Rust not only doesn’t sleep, it never stops giving off sparks. * Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA *Through his elegant alchemical associations, Rabaté spins Rust to gold. * Vanessa Place, artist and criminal defense attorney *Rust has its fascinating moments, those deeply poetic instants where metaphor becomes real and you get a tiny glimpse of the wonder that can reside inside seemingly ordinary items. * San Francisco Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. How to Live with Global Rust 2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic 3. Interlude: Blood-work 4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal 5. Aesthetics of Rust Conclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille? Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn a volume that brings together a wide range of disciplines - art history, sociology, architecture, cultural anthropology, and environmental psychology - Irene Cieraad presents a collection of articles that focuses on the practices and symbolism of domestic space in Western society.Trade ReviewThis volume on domestic space brings together research traditions that have never mingled before: art history, social history, women's studies, design history, architectural history, cultural anthropology, ethnology, sociology, housing sociology, environmental psychology, material cultural studies and consumer studies.... The book displays the varied approaches that can be taken when studying domestic space and is a very interesting read. - Area ""Amsterdam anthropologist Irene Cieraad edits this interdisciplinary collection of articles looking inward at Western urban living and examining what our homes reveal about our cultures and societies." - Today's Books

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Book SynopsisAlmost three tons of concrete are produced each year for every person on the planet; only water is consumed more per head of population. Now used almost universally in modern construction, concrete polarizes opinion: provoking intense loathing and fervent passion in others. Concrete and Culture breaks new ground by charting concrete's effects on culture since its reinvention in the modern period, examining the ways it has changed our understanding of nature, of time and of materiality. This book discusses architects' responses to and uses of concrete while also taking into account the role it has played in politics, literature, cinema and labour relations, as well as in present day arguments about sustainability.

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Book SynopsisTextile has been used as a medium of communication since the prehistoric period. Up until the 19th century, civilizations throughout the world manipulated thread and fabric to communicate in a way that would astound many of us now. Unlike text and images, textile is haptic and three-dimensional. Its meaning is unfixed, constantly shifting as it circulates between different owners and creators. In How Textile Communicates, Ganaele Langlois dissects textile's unique capacity for communication through a range of global case studies, before examining the profound impact of colonialism on textile practice and the appropriation of this medium by capitalist systems. A thought-provoking contribution to the fields of both fashion and communication studies, Langlois' writing challenges readers' preconceptions and shines new light on the profound impact of textiles on human communication.Trade ReviewA major contribution to intercultural and decolonial studies as it examines how the communicative capacities of textile have been taken for granted across boundaries, borders, disciplines and technologies. * Janis Jefferies, Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Textile as Communication Winding Back Textile as a Medium Textile Making as Mediating Textile Making and Power Decolonizing Media and Communication Book Overview Part 1: Communicative Power 1. Unraveling Textile from Commodity to Communication A Plural Medium Textile as Communication Medium: Historical Pointers Two Common Understandings of Communication through Textile: as Representation and Information Towards a Third Aspect: textile as binding worlds through space and time Global Textile, or Communication as Expressive Power Textile, a Medium of Struggle 2. Quechua Textility Pre-Columbian Textiles: Media and Power Indigenous Identities in Contemporary Peru The Revival of Quechua Textiles Confronting Appropriation Part 2: Technology and Imagination 3. Jacquard and the Creativity of Extensions The Jacquard Mechanism, Automation and Digital Media Weaving Digital Images Weaving as Extension 4. Communicating Across the Abyss Of the Meanings, Symbols and Patterns in Diasporic Textile Mathematics, Rhythms and Signs The Values of Making Part 3: Transformative Entanglements 5. Reweaving the Interface Domestic Textiles and Power Marking Subjects Reading through the Lines: The Evanescent Maker Portable Technologies of Making “Where Am I going?”: Creative Meandering 6. Kené, or the Promise of Unknowing Shipibo-Conibo Textiles and Perspectival Anthropology Kené in the Global Market Delineating the Space of Unknowing and Potentials Back to the Basics Part 4: Cosmomedia 7. Cosmomedia - the Tale of Two Indigos Cosmotechnics and Ecosophical Media Combinations and Recombinations: Indigo dyeing and the making of worlds Colonizing Indigo Indigo and Collectives of Humans and Non-Humans Japanese Indigo and Natural Dyes as Cosmomedia Conclusion: The Shape of Things to Come

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Book SynopsisIllustrates how our consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste. This book provides explanations to show us why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays.Trade Review"Leave it to an economist to make an impassioned argument for why we shouldn't give gifts, especially during the holidays."--Los Angeles Times "[A] small but very well-written and well-argued book which makes some serious points as well as poking fun at the nightmare of Christmas shopping... Point by point the author demolishes the case for giving gifts. In fact, this is a very sensible book on every level."--Times Literary Supplement "Waldfogel delivers a badly needed poke in the eye at holiday-time consumer madness, positing that not only is compulsory gift giving stressful and expensive, but it's economically unsound... This lively, spot-on book may be the one gift that still makes sense to buy come Black Friday."--Publishers Weekly "Scroogenomics is a quick read. Not only is it well under 200 pages, but the book can easily fit in your pocket. This is no think volume intended to scare off non-economists. Better still, Scroogenomics is almost entirely free of jargon. And when technical terms do appear, they are immediately explained."--Ryan Young, Washington Times "Another huge, value-destroying hurricane is about to slam America, destroying billions of dollars of value. Another Katrina? No, another Christmas. This voluntary December calamity is explained in a darkly amusing little book that is about the size of an iPhone. Scroogenomics comes from a distinguished publisher, Princeton University Press, and an eminent author, Joel Waldfogel of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school."--George Will, Washington Post "In his new book, Scroogenomics--a perfect stocking-filler--Waldfogel argues that buying presents is no longer a luxury but a necessity because the social pressure is immense."--John-Paul Flintoff, Sunday Times "Waldfogel assesses holiday gift giving though the lens of economic tenets such as opportunity costs and deadweight loss. The result is a short but engaging manifesto on the inefficiency of the tradition, concluding with several solutions to increase satisfaction for both givers and receivers. Although his own suggestions mandate that you not buy this book for someone who wanted something else, fans of Freakonomics and The Economic Naturalist may love it."--Library Journal "[A] handsome little book... Waldfogel is, if not a unique, then certainly a rare economist."--Australian "Nobody has done more to damage relations between the joyous commercial festival that is Christmas and the economics profession than Joel Waldfogel. Long-term readers of this column will be well aware of Professor Waldfogel's research paper, 'The Deadweight Loss of Christmas'. Ever since it was published in 1993 it has been taken out by economic journalists and displayed like last year's decorations. Waldfogel--a witty writer himself--has evidently decided that if everyone is going to discuss the idea, he may as well get in on the act, so has published Scroogenomics, a book that--dare I say it--looks like it would make a terrific stocking-filler."--Tim Harford, Financial Times "And now, in a new book called Scroogenomics, a U.S. economist has helpfully done the math on the holiday he declares, as only an economist would, an 'organized institution for value destruction.'"--Erin Anderssen, Globe & Mail "You would have thought that a book entitled Scroogenomics, which has been published in a recession and exhorts us to give up buying presents this Christmas, would do so from a spirit of, if not outright meanness, then at least heartfelt thrift. But Professor Joel Waldfogel instead uses a rather arch economic formula to explain why giving presents is a complete waste of time."--Rosie Millard, New Statesman "[A]n interesting and provocative book."--Times Higher Education "[Scroogenomics] is a nicely-timed stocking filler from the man who estimates that badly-chosen Christmas presents will waste the equivalent of $25bn across the world this year."--Tim Harford, Prospect "Written in a breezy, engaging style (he quotes Homer Simpson, not Friedrich von Hayek), Waldfogel's book attempts to quantify the cost to society of millions of Grandmas, Aunt Beas, and Uncle Charlies bestowing incorrect sweaters, candles, and other dud gifts, and presents a couple of options to reduce that loss."--Baltimore City Paper "[F]ar from being Scrooge-like, Scroogenomics points out that we could do something much more useful with our money, such as redistribute it to those who really need it."--The Age "Leave it to an economist to trample on a cherished year-long tradition. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, has written a book that promoters hype as one 'Santa doesn't want you to read.' Scroogenomics is a brief but biting little book about how our obsession with holiday spending generates some $85 billion dollars of economic waste each winter... Waldfogel doesn't just stomp on tradition. He offers solutions, such as charity gift cards that can be used as a force for good, and suggests transferring balances on regular store gift cards to charities after a certain time rather than let them go unredeemed."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution "If you're heading for the stores today, keep one thing in mind: Many of the gifts you buy today are likely unwanted. In his new book Scroogenomics, University of Pennsylvania economist Joel Waldfogel warns that most of us are not so great at gift-giving. He has data to back it up, and he offers a solution."--Fort Worth Star-Telegram "Joel Waldfogel has meticulously quantified the spirit of Christmas, giving in to a set of numbers and percentages that may discourage even the most enthusiastic Black Friday shopper this year. In his book Scroogenomics, he tells you why you should think twice before your holiday shopping spree, and why it's not better to give an unwanted beaded sweater or talking fish than no present at all."--Deseret News "My enthusiasm for buying gifts has been greatly reduced ... after reading Scroogenomics."--Shanghai Daily "This 186-page pocketbook measures just 4 by 6 inches in size, and invites readers to think just as small when it comes to holiday excess. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, goes beyond the obvious in arguing against habitual gift-giving."--Mark Jewell, Associated Press "This is a serious study of the economics of Christmas. It looks at the huge waste involved, looks back to earlier times and how previous generations celebrated the festive season, even suggests that buying presents should stop and then attempts to offer some solutions as to how Christmas can be a time of giving without being a time 'to max out our credit cards to finance the gift storm.'"--Sydney Morning Herald "Oftentimes in days of yore, I would sit by the fireside at Noel, glass of sherry I hand, warm, confused feeling in head, and survey the detritus of a Christmas-morning blitzkrieg of unwrapping and the shrapnel of packaging genocide and think: what a waste of money. Being of a naturally grump disposition, my attitude was habitually put down to an anti-Christmas 'Bah! Humbug!' tendency. But now here comes Joel Waldfogel to barge his way to the top of my (short) Christmas-card list telling everyone who sneered at my festive dispiritedness that I was right all along."--Stephen McCarty, South China Morning Post "It's blinding. Put it on your Christmas list."--Dan Douglass, Marketing Direct "[I]n his recent book Scroogenomics, Professor Waldfogel makes a knowingly provocative case for changing the entire cursed gift system."--Guardian "If Joel Waldfogel is correct, the Three Wise Men were just the sort of people who should not have bought Christmas presents."--Irish Times "If you enjoy the title, you will enjoy the book."--Declann Trott, Economic RecordTable of ContentsPreface ix CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO: Spending and Satisfaction 6 CHAPTER THREE: U.S. Holiday Spending 23 CHAPTER FOUR: How Much Waste Occurs at Christmas? 29 CHAPTER FIVE: Why We Do It: Are Gift Recipients Crackheads, or What? 41 CHAPTER SIX: Giving and Waste around the World 57 CHAPTER SEVEN: A Century of American Yuletide Spending 71 CHAPTER EIGHT: Have Yourself a Borrowed Little Christmas 78 CHAPTER NINE: Is Christmas Like Spam, Underwear, or Caviar? 89 CHAPTER TEN: Christmas and Commercialism: Are Santa and Jesus on the Same Team? If So, Who's Team Captain? 99 CHAPTER ELEVEN: Stop Carping; It's All for the Best 104 CHAPTER TWELVE: Making Giving More Effi cient with Cash and Gift Cards 113 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Giving and Redistribution 120 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Solutions --Making Gift Giving a Force for Good 134 Notes 147 Index 171

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people fat is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank''s Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, feeling fat and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one anotherTrade ReviewThroughout Fat, Blank beautifully disrupts and destabilizes the notion of fat and, in doing so, challenged me to think deeper about the category as a whole. * Fat Studies *Hanne Blank's characteristically honest, creative, wickedly funny, and sharply insightful voice comes through on every page of this eminently readable book. Blank reveals fat as polysemic, at once mundane and hidden, sexually charged, and socially vexed. Fat is a scholarly ethnography of an everyday object that manages to be a genuine page-turner. * Quill Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, USA *Table of ContentsFrontispiece 1. Fact 2. Friend 3. Foe 4. Fetish 5. Figure Index

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisHow product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill.Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths through condemnation or indifference. When a designed product's usefulness is past, the public happily discards it to make room for the next new thing. Criticism rarely deals with how a product might be used, or not used, over time; it is more likely to play the enabler, encouraging our addiction to consumption. With Sifting the Trash, Alice Twemlow offers an especially timely reexamination of the history of product design criticism through the metaphors and actualities of the product as imminent junk and the consumer as junkie. Twemlow explores five key moments over the past sixty years of product design criticism. From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, for example, critics including Reyner Banham, Deborah Allen,

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Book SynopsisHan Material Culture is an analysis of Han dynasty (206 BCAD 220) Chinese archaeology based on a comparison of the forms of vessels found in positively dated tombs. The resultant chronological framework allows for the cross dating of tombs across China, of which approximately one thousand are documented here. In the context of this body of data, the development of not only vessel types but also tomb structure and decor is reevaluated, together with the pervasive intercultural exchange visible in all areas of this material. The Han dynasty emerges as a creative, surprisingly open society, heir to the Bronze Age and herald of what might be called the Age of Ceramics.Table of Contents1. Problems of chronology; 2. The tombs; 3. Tomb decor; 4. Vessels in the typologies; 5. Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisThe Early Formative Olmec are central in a wide variety of debates regarding the development of Mesoamerican societies. A fundamental issue in Olmec archaeology is the nature of interregional interaction among contemporaneous societies and the possible Olmec role in it. Previous debates have often not been informed by recent research and data, often relying on materials lacking archaeological context. In order to approach these issues from new perspectives, this book introduces readers to the full spectrum of the material culture of the Olmec and their contemporaries, relying primarily on archaeological data, much of which has not been previously published. For the first time, using a standard lexicon to consider the nature of the interaction among Early Formative societies, the authors, experts in diverse regions of Mesoamerican art and archaeology, provide carefully considered contrasts and comparisons that advance the understanding of the Early Formative origins of social complexity in Mesoamerica.Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Materializing the San Lorenzo Olmecs David Cheetham and Jeffrey P. Blomster; 2. Defining Early Olmec style pottery: techniques, forms, and motifs at San Lorenzo Jeffrey P. Blomster, David Cheetham, Rosemary A. Joyce and Christopher A. Pool; 3. An Early Horizon manifestation in the San Lorenzo countryside Carl J. Wendt; 4. An Early Olmec manifestation in Western Olman: the Arroyo phase at Tres Zapotes Christopher A. Pool, Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos, María del Carmen Rodríguez, Erin L. Sears, Ronald L. Bishop and M. James Blackman; 5. Early Horizon materials in the Greater Basin of Mexico and Guerrero Louise I. Paradis; 6. Materializing the Early Olmec style in the Nochixtlán Valley, Oaxaca Jeffrey P. Blomster; 7. Early Olmec style ceramics from the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec Marcus Winter, Víctor Manuel Zapien López and Alma Zaraí Montiel Ángeles; 8. Ceramic vessel form similarities between San Lorenzo, Veracruz, and Canton Corralito, Chiapas David Cheetham and Michael D. Coe; 9. 'Olmec' pottery in Honduras Rosemary A. Joyce and John S. Henderson; 10. Figuring out the Early Olmec era Barbara L. Stark.

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Book SynopsisIn this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understandinTable of Contents1. A prosopography of encounters; 2. Southern Italy, Cyprus and the Holy Land: a tale of parallel aesthetics?; 3. Deconstructing myths: transmutations of Madonna and Panagia between Italy and Cyprus; 4. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans and artistic patronage in trecento Cyprus; 5. The peregrinations of a Cypriot king in Italian material culture, 1362-1368; 6. Art in the interstices: hybrid Italian panels and Cypriot nobility.

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Book SynopsisWhile the so-called material turn in the humanities and the social sciences has inspired a vibrant discourse on objects, things, and the concept of materiality in general, less attention has been paid to materials, particularly in cultural studies scholarship. With each of its chapters taking a particular material as its point of departure, this volume offers a palette of fresh approaches to materials within the realm of cultural studies. The contributors call for a materials-based perspective on culture, which has become all the more pertinent by the need for sustainability in times of climate change, energy crisis, conflict, migration, and the lingering coronavirus pandemic.

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Book Synopsis

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