Material culture Books

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisTaking us from the beginning of our story to the present day, A Cold Spell examines how ice has shaped our thoughts, actions and societies – and what it means for us that it is rapidly disappearing from our planet 'A warm-hearted tale of the bizarre, something to cuddle up with in the bleak midwinter . . . Astonishing' THE TIMES 'Bracingly original . . . As the earth warms threateningly, there could hardly be a more pertinent time for a story like this’ MICHAEL PALIN 'A book of limitless fascinations' OLIVIA LAING 'Brightly written, nimbly researched and really quite delightful' LITERARY REVIEW Ice has confounded, delighted and fascinated us since the first sparks of art and culture in Europe and it now underpins the modern world. Without ice, we would not feed ourselves or heal our sick as we do, and our towns and cities, countryside and oceans would look very different. Science would not have progressed along the avenues it did and our galleries and libraries would be missing many masterpieces. A Cold Spell uses this vital link to understanding our past to tell a surprising story of obsession, invention and adventure – how we have lived and dreamed, celebrated and traded, innovated, loved and fought over thousands of years. It brings together a sacrificial Incan mummy, Winston Churchill’s secret plans for unusual aircraft carriers, strange bones that shook Victorian beliefs about the world and a macabre journey into the depths of the human body. It is an original and unique way of looking at something that is literally all around us, whose loss confronts us daily in the news, but whose impact on our lives has never been fully explored. [An] extraordinary, complete and utter history of the human experience of the cold stuff' JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL, COUNTRY LIFE ‘A thought-provoking chronicle of humanity . . . Leonard consistently frames ice in surprising and insightful ways, and in doing so lends it a magical quality’ GEOGRAPHICALTrade ReviewCharming and quirky . . . This is a warm-hearted tale of the bizarre, something to cuddle up with in the bleak midwinter . . . It’s astonishing how Leonard has managed to cram so much into such a relatively short volume -- Gerard DeGroot * The Times *A fascinating exploration of how ice has shaped human existence . . . Ranging from the last ice age to the Anthropocene, Max Leonard’s beguiling history considers the nature of ice as well as its place in “the popular imagination” -- William Atkins * Guardian *[An] extraordinary, complete and utter history of the human experience of the cold stuff . . . Max Leonard is the most assiduous researcher and has scratched down to the very base of the ice-berg -- John Lewis-Stempel * Country Life *‘A Cold Spell appears when even the most boneheaded climate sceptics are conceding that something is up. Max Leonard, naturally, engages with this. Climate change provides a political dimension, but the book is about far more than that . . . Brightly written, nimbly researched and really quite delightful . . . A Cold Spell brims with such colourful stories -- Peter Moore * Literary Review *A thought-provoking chronicle of humanity through an icy lens. From its hand in shaping the birth and birthplace of the human race to its modern status as a metaphor for civilisation, Leonard charts the role ice has played, and continues to play, in our lives with great curiosity. The book’s success is rooted in Leonard’s ability to weave something so ubiquitous into a journey of twists and turns. Traversing history, culture, language, science and human nature via evocative tangents, he consistently frames ice in surprising and insightful ways, and in doing so lends it a magical quality. Nowhere is this truer than in stories of icy obsession – adventurers sacrificing their lives to navigate its polar domains, scientists dedicating theirs to unravelling the secrets it holds * Geographical *Leonard’s charting of the history of humanity’s interactions with ice is a brisk and fascinating piece of work, encompassing the last hours of Ötzi the Iceman, polar tourism, George Mallory’s Everest camera, and the man who almost two centuries ago came up with the wheeze of exporting ice from America to India. Climate change obviously thrums through the narrative but this is not a didactic read, rather a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing one * New European *Despite its single subject, this is a book that thinks big – or at least, widely and in unexpected places . . . An unusually wide-ranging cultural and intellectual journey . . . Max Leonard’s writing is engaging and well-paced, and he breezily summarises the fruits of voluminous research with a deft touch . . . [A book] of striking revelations, intriguing connections and thought-provoking questions about how the human relationship with ice might yet develop -- Jonathan Dore * TLS *As this entertaining tale reveals, ice has the power to grind mountains to dust, destroy ships – and even swallow up a secret American nuclear bunker . . . This is a book about the marvel of nature and our intrepid, frequently crazy efforts to understand and harness that marvel -- Simeon House * Mail on Sunday *In a bracingly original book, Max Leonard makes something we all take for granted into an absorbing pathway into history, geography and science . . . A highly readable feast of insights and surprises . . . As the earth warms threateningly, there could hardly be a more pertinent time for a story like this -- Michael PalinA book of limitless fascinations, an elegant and subtle accounting of how ice has shaped and changed human life, and how in turn humans have imperilled the existence of icy places -- Olivia LaingA brilliant and surprising book on unexpected ways ice has influenced not just Western thought but the way we live now. Come for the research, stay for the unexpected cameos -- Jennifer Lucy AllanA pleasure on every page. It's packed with fascinating stories and unexpected connections. What you’ve done so successfully is to give the reader the chance to care for ice and to understand the role it’s had in our lives, real and imaginary. Everybody who reads your book will be captivated each time ice chinks and bobs in a glass. Ice is now our destiny. By melting en masse, it is bringing chaos to Earth systems -- Nicholas CraneBeautiful, thoughtful and utterly fascinating on everything from cave paintings to Captain Birdseye – the kind of book you feel compelled to share bits from as you’re reading -- Felicity CloakePut everything on ice and read this book - a wonderful history of ingenuity, wanderlust, preservation and exploitation. Max Leonard has written an original chronicle of human nature, and you’ll skate through it with enduring insight and pleasure -- Simon GarfieldFrom Otzi the Iceman to Alpine adventurers, the invention of the cold chain to cloud seeding, A Cold Spell fills the cryosphere with stories to reconnect us to this all-too-fragile, frozen world. Europeans may have sought mastery over ice for hundreds of years, but Leonard shows how ice has shaped us too: in his deft hands it becomes a mirror revealing "the extraordinary in the ordinary", bringing home both the awe and the unease of the Anthropocene -- Jay Owen

Read more less

Book Synopsis‘Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating‘ The TimesOn 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, wonderful things.’In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt – its geography, history, culture and legacy.One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again – not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact.Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs.‘I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people‘ The Sunday TimesTrade ReviewBeautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating and the work of a man who is practised at explaining the past to the present. -- David Aaronivitch * The Times *The cleverness of the book lies in how individual grave goods are used to crack open the mindset of a civilisation . . . This book thrums with life. To the ancient Egyptians, a pharaoh’s tomb was a “resurrection machine” and, in a sense, they were right. The dead cannot be resurrected but, through the artefacts they used, we can sense the lives they lived. I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people. -- James McConnachie * The Sunday Times *The Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes 100 of the most curious of those finds and uses them to unlock the mysteries of Egyptian history and culture. -- Andrew Holgate and Laura Hackett * The Times '100 Best Books for Summer' *

Read more less

Book Synopsis‘Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating‘ - The TimesOn 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, wonderful things.’In Tutankhamun’s Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt – its geography, history, culture and legacy.One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again – not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact.Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs.‘I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people‘ - The Sunday TimesTrade ReviewBeautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating and the work of a man who is practised at explaining the past to the present. -- David Aaronivitch * The Times *The cleverness of the book lies in how individual grave goods are used to crack open the mindset of a civilisation . . . This book thrums with life. To the ancient Egyptians, a pharaoh’s tomb was a “resurrection machine” and, in a sense, they were right. The dead cannot be resurrected but, through the artefacts they used, we can sense the lives they lived. I’ve read many books on ancient Egypt, but I’ve never felt closer to its people -- James McConnachie * The Sunday Times *The Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes 100 of the most curious of those finds and uses them to unlock the mysteries of Egyptian history and culture. -- Andrew Holgate and Laura Hackett * The Times '100 Best Books for Summer' *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis is a detailed analysis of how understanding of health management past, present and future has transformed in the digital age. Since the mid-20th century, we have witnessed ‘healthy’ lifestyles being pushed as part of health promotion strategies, both via the state, and through health tracking tools, and narratives of wellness online. This marks a seismic shift from a public welfare state responsibility for health towards individualised practices of digital self-care. Today health has become representative of ‘lifestyle correction' which is performed on social media. Putting the spotlight on neoliberalism and digital technology as pervasive tools that dictate wellness as a moral obligation, Rachael Kent critically analyses how users navigate relationships between self-tracking technologies, social media, and everyday health management.Table of Contents1. Transformations of Health in the Digital Society 2. Understanding Our Bodies through Datafication 3. Surveillance Cultures of the Digital Health Self 4. Discipline and Moralism of Our Health 5. Health ‘Disciples’: Technology ‘Addiction’ and Embodiment 6. Sharing ‘Healthiness’ 7. Future Directions for the Digital Health Self

Read more less

Book Synopsis'Geeks triumph over the forces of darkness: nothing could have given me greater pleasure. Combining an exciting story with scrupulous research, Caroline Shenton has done her unlikely heroes proud' - Lucy WorsleyAs Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London's museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation's highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation's greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures. National Treasures highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler. Caroline Shenton shares the interwoven lives of ordinary people who kept calm and carried on in the most extraordinary of circumstances in their efforts to save the Nation's historic identity.Trade ReviewGeeks triumph over the forces of darkness: nothing could have given me greater pleasure. Combining an exciting story with scrupulous research, Caroline Shenton has done her unlikely heroes proud -- Lucy WorsleyAn engrossing and uplifting story of how some of the greatest treasures of Britains museum, gallery and library collections were protected and preserved during the darkest days of WWII -- Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the BooksAn engrossing and uplifting story of how some of the greatest treasures of Britains museum, gallery and library collections were protected and preserved during the darkest days of WWII -- Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the BooksShenton has the archivist's unerring eye for detail and the storyteller's instinct for what will make a compelling tale. It is brought to life with energy and confidence -- Julie Summers, bestselling author of JambustersEntertaining, surprising and full of brilliant vignettes, Shenton does justice to one of the great untold stories of the Second World War -- Josh Ireland, author of Churchill & SonFascinating, engaging and often eye-stretching, Caroline Shenton's account of the battle to save the nation's greatest treasures during wartime features a wonderfully eclectic cast of oddballs, bluestockings and endearingly eccentric aristocrats. A cracking read -- Giles MiltonShenton manages to combine scholarly and diligent research with a powerful narrative drive and a hugely entertaining taste for the anecdotal. Moreover, her cast of characters wouldn't disgrace an Ealing comedy. I haven't enjoyed a book so much in years -- Adrian TinniswoodReveals the wonderfully inventive ways Britain's great museums hid their priceless exhibits from Hitler's bombs -- Daily MailVigorously researched and highly entertaining -- Daily Telegraph

Read more less

Book SynopsisA beautiful memoir, travelogue and meditation on stone by artist and stone mason Beatrice Searle.'Extraordinary' Guardian‘A magnificent book’ Alex Woodcock‘Exceptional’ Kerri Andrews‘Luminous’ SpectatorAt the age of twenty-six, artist and Cathedral stonemason Beatrice Searle crossed the North Sea and walked 500 miles along a medieval pilgrim path through Southern Norway, taking with her a 40-kilogram Orcadian stone.Fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world, stones closely associated with travellers, saints and the inauguration of Kings, she follows in their footsteps as her stone becomes a talisman, a bedrock and an offering to those she meets along the way.Stone Will Answer is an unusual adventure story of journeys practical, spiritual and geological, of weight and motion, and an insight into a beguiling craft.Trade ReviewExtraordinary... Confessional, elemental and at times moving, this is a memorable and unique celebration of the power and beauty of stone. * Guardian *Searle is an excellent storyteller... [and Stone Will Answer] make[s] for gripping reading... it's the human spirit that emerges triumphant in this sparky blend of memoir and travelogue... Above all, this is the story of a young woman's astonishing feat of endurance * Herald *A gifted writer, capable of luminous description * Spectator *Subtle and thought-provoking * TLS *Illuminating... I was quickly taken in by Beatrice Searle's distinctive voice, and by the end I couldn't help but feel very differently about stones, rootedness, belonging, and indeed what walking might mean. Beatrice's story is exceptional, and she is an exceptional story teller. -- Kerri Andrews, author of Wandering: A History of Women WalkingA magnificent book. Written with the eye of a poet and the heart of an artist, Stone Will Answer is both a moving account of an unconventional journey and a testament to the power of stone in finding anchorage in an uncertain world -- Alex Woodcock, author of King of DustA story of dedication and tenacity that is deeply moving and utterly captivating. Stone Will Answer is a truly remarkable book, a beautifully crafted tale of an artist's extraordinary journey. Searle seamlessly contemplates the meaning of craft, ancient myths, the mutability of stone and the transformations within her own life. Its rare to read a story of such artistic integrity. I felt bereft when I finished but also buoyed by a new found fascination with stone and all its many meanings. -- Sally Huband, author of Sea BeanAn astonishing mission with huge integrity in the telling. -- Linda Cracknell, author of Writing LandscapeA story of determination and soul-searching... Compellingly narrated, entertaining and thought-provoking... treat yourself to a copy of this book and enjoy the journey * Natural Stone Specialist *A moving testimony to the power of art, of finding the extraordinary in the everyday and acting upon your instinct. To walk with Searle in its pages is to experience stone within a new light... as a part-knowable, ever-shifting medium in the process of slow but perpetual change, one long work-in-progress. -- Alex Woodcock * Caught by the River *

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisStuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and is thus the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home décor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object. Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.Trade ReviewBoscagli’s readings of objects are genuinely exciting ... For anyone interested in consumer capitalism, mediation, the cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, or objects in art, however, Stuff Theory is a necessary read. Boscagli’s writing throughout has verve, and the analyses are sharp, incisive, and often surprising. * U.S. Studies Online *The hinge between [modernist and new materialism] is supplied by the endlessly suggestive writing of Walter Benjamin who acts as the richest example of what can be gleaned when these two worlds are entangled ... Boscagli both follows Benjamin and pushes his work into new arenas ... Stuff Theory’s engagement with ‘new materialism’ is wide ranging. * New Foundations *New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading. -- Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, CanadaAt one point in David Fincher's 1999 cult film Fight Club, Brad Pitt's rascally Tyler Durden mocks a minor character who states vaguely that in college he studied "stuff." Maurizia Boscagli’s dazzling Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism shows how Tyler might have taken this utterance seriously: "stuff" is indeed worthy of study. Each page brimming with fresh examples drawn from literature, art, and culture, and carefully informed by intellectual precursors from Marx to the new materialists, Boscagli's theory ultimately illuminates the practice of stuff, and suggests that this practice may be due for revision. -- Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of FlightMatter is desire. Whether conceived as an object that can be represented and appropriated or as force whose unpredictability and vitality throws life wide open, matter never leaves us in peace. In this wonderful book Maurizia Boscagli explores how the everyday is shaped by these tantalizing movements of matter. Beyond the capitalocentricism of historical materialism and the detached hype of new materialism Stuff Theory proposes an experimental materialist practice that works with matter to remake the stuff that power and politics are made of. * Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation, University of Leicester, UK, author of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century *Boscagli offers an exhilarating genealogy of the commodity in order to open up a questions that neither presuppose the old distinction between subject and object nor revel in the sheer plasticity of things. I especially admire the case that Stuff Theory makes for dialectic as the necessary means of thinking our way through and beyond the 19th-century opposition of materialism (which now includes cyborgian hybrids) to idealism (which has always included aesthetic expression). Bocagli's "radical materialism" shows that only a critique of post-commodity things can tell us how to read them as transformations of "stuff" that expresses the people and selves to which neo-liberalism denies subjectivity. * Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes—Matter in the Moment 1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter 2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault 3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution 4. “You Must Remember this:” Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory 5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff? Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is about machines: those that have been actualized, fantastical imaginal machines, to those deployed as metaphorical devices to describe complex social processes. Machines argues that they transcend time and space to emerge through a variety of spaces and places, times and histories and representations. They are such an integral fabric of daily reality that their disappearance would have immediate and dire consequences for the survival of humanity. They are part and parcel to our contemporary social order. From labor to social theory, art or consciousness, literature or television, to the asylums of the 19th century, machines are a central figure; an outgrowth of affective desire that seeks to transcend organic limitations of bodies that whither, age and die.Machines takes the reader on an intellectual, artistic, and theoretical journey, weaving an interdisciplinary tale of their emergence across social, cultural and artistic boundaries. With the deep engagement of various texts, Machines offers the reader moments of escape, alternative ways to envision technology for a future yet to materialize. Machines rejects the notion that technological innovations are indeed neutral, propelling us to think differently about those “things” created under specific economic or historical paradigms. Rethinking machines provides a rupture to our current technocratic impetus, shining a critical light on possible alternatives to our current reality. Let us sit back and take a journey through Machines, holding mechanical parts as guides to possible alternative futures.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is about machines: those that have been actualized, fantastical imaginal machines, to those deployed as metaphorical devices to describe complex social processes. Machines argues that they transcend time and space to emerge through a variety of spaces and places, times and histories and representations. They are such an integral fabric of daily reality that their disappearance would have immediate and dire consequences for the survival of humanity. They are part and parcel to our contemporary social order. From labor to social theory, art or consciousness, literature or television, to the asylums of the 19th century, machines are a central figure; an outgrowth of affective desire that seeks to transcend organic limitations of bodies that whither, age and die.Machines takes the reader on an intellectual, artistic, and theoretical journey, weaving an interdisciplinary tale of their emergence across social, cultural and artistic boundaries. With the deep engagement of various texts, Machines offers the reader moments of escape, alternative ways to envision technology for a future yet to materialize. Machines rejects the notion that technological innovations are indeed neutral, propelling us to think differently about those “things” created under specific economic or historical paradigms. Rethinking machines provides a rupture to our current technocratic impetus, shining a critical light on possible alternatives to our current reality. Let us sit back and take a journey through Machines, holding mechanical parts as guides to possible alternative futures.

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Harry Brown explores the composition, history, kinetic life, and the long deterioration of golf balls, which as it turns out may outlive their hitters by a thousand years, in places far beyond our reach. Golf balls embody our efforts to impose our will on the land, whether the local golf course or the Moon, but their unpredictable spin, bounce, and roll often defy our control. Despite their considerable technical refinements, golf balls reveal the futility of control. They inevitably disappear in plain sight and find their way into hazards. Golf balls play with people. Harry Brown's short treatise on the golf ball serves up surprising lessons about the human desire to tame and control the landscape through technology. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewGolf Ball is a funny, smart, and charming meditation on an unlikely subject. Who knew that the story of this humble little white sphere could tell us so much about our history and culture? Brown weaves cultural history, literary criticism, physics, and philosophy into this wonderful book. His meditation on the golf ball deserves a place on the reading list of the curious golfer and cultural critic alike. * Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, USA, and author of The Passion of Tiger Woods *Brown starts where the curious amongst us always seem to—by taking things apart. Departing from the physical dissection of a single ball, performed as a boy, Brown rollicks through a detailed and highly entertaining exploration of the history of the game of golf. Golf Ball will fill the air of the 19th Hole with questions answered and stories told. * Tom Chiarella, Visiting Writer, Esquire Magazine, and Award-Winning Member of the Golf Writers Association of America *An intriguing mix of history, personal anecdote and cutting-edge philosophy, carrying the reader aloft over a range of courses and discourses past and present … In Golf Ball, Brown has some fun with contemporary thinking whilst never getting too bogged down in the sand trap of theory … leaving us with some intriguing questions to ponder about the objects we use, lose and overlook every day. * Neil Fitzgerald, LapsedHermit.com *Golf Ball… begins with Harry Brown explaining how his object chose him. As an eight-year-old homegrown Heideggerian of a boy, he claims, he sliced a golf ball in two to inquire into its hardness. The book derives from this severing. It inhabits the ‘glimpse of internal structure’ that it offered, unfolding in two parts: ‘Out: Thing,’ and ‘In: Phenomenon.' -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Part One: Out: Thing 1. How I cut a golf ball in half, and found a lot of things inside 2. How the golf ball keeps holy the Lord's day 3. How an empire made the golf ball, and the golf ball made an empire 4. How the golf ball blew up America and made golf more fun 5. How the golf ball went ballistic 6. How the golf ball reached détente 7. How the court decided custody of the golf ball 8. How the golf ball became the #1 ball in golf 9. How the golf ball got so cool Part Two: In: Phenomenon 10. How the golf ball vanishes before your eyes 11. How the golf ball makes us feel fulfilled, for a millisecond 12. How to control the unruly golf ball 13. How to hit the golf ball by not hitting it 14. How the golf ball looks into the abyss, and the abyss looks back 15. How the golf ball won the Golden Fleece 16. How the golf ball went to the moon 17. How the golf ball makes friends with animals 18. How the golf ball prepares for doomsday Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAn entertaining and enlightening exploration of the cultural history of the phone booth and a lament for the loss of these spaces. * WPR: BETA *In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation—hanging wires and scratched glass—to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout. * Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way. * Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USA, and author of The Telephone Book *[Phone Booth] inclines us towards nostalgia, toward urgent questions of what remains when objects disappear, of re-use, and shelter. If phone booths today have receded into the interstices of our built worlds… then that freeing of the object from its use enables Arianna Kelly to tell a different story, a story about what these telephonic leftovers might become, what they now are and what they anchor. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of Contents1. Disconnected 2. Hermit’s Hut 3. Our Speed 4. The Phantom Phone Booth 5. Say Anything 6. Fortress of Solitude 7. Significant Portals 8. A Fine and Private Place 9. Glass Case of Emotion 10. The God Booth 11. Only Connect Acknowledgements Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Pause and look around: you will see that you are surrounded by glass. It reflects and refracts light through your windows; it encircles a glowing filament above you; it’s in a mirror hanging on the wall; it lies shattered in a dented corner of an iPhone—you’re drinking water out of a pint glass. Taking up a most common object, rarely considered because assumed to be transparent, John Garrison draws evocative connections between historical depictions of glass and emerging visions that see it as holding a unique promise for new forms of interaction. Grounded in everyday examples, this book offers a series of surprising insights into how we increasingly find ourselves living in a world made of glass. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade Review[Glass] distills the essence of a substance that offers itself as something to be looked through, giving a shine to its contents, and as something that occupies our view, as something we have to take note of and interact with. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *[A] book that can be read in a fascinated hour, but will influence your reading and your looking for the next month. * Times Literary Supplement *This brilliant book takes us through the looking glass, allowing us to see an everyday material in a whole new light. Glass, no matter how transparent it may seem, is always coated with many layers of meaning. In this scintillating account, John Garrison shows how the cultural framing of glass has repeatedly opened windows to other worlds, from the microscopic depths to the far reaches of the cosmos, from the imagined futures of science fiction to the bizarro-worlds of our own bathroom mirrors. * Colin Milburn, Professor of English and Science and Technology Studies, University of California Davis, USA *Table of ContentsPreface “A Day Made of Glass” Macbeth Minority Report Microscopic Vision Telescopic Vision Earrings and Landscapes Photography Shakespeare’s Sonnets “Heart of Glass” Sea Glass Google Glass Trademark Microsoft HoloLens Strange Days A Glass, Darkly Surfaces “A World of Glass” Postscript: What’s in My Pocket? Further Reading Acknowledgements Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years—but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the household refrigerator with the aim of preventing its users from ever taking it for granted again. No mere container for cold Cokes and celery stalks, the refrigerator acts as a mirror—and what it reflects is chilling indeed. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewDoes life exist without refrigerators? For most of us, the answer is no. How this common kitchen appliance achieved its indispensable status in less than a century is an amazing tale filled with surprising twists and unexpected connections. Refrigerator is a delight to read. Bravo! * Andrew F. Smith, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America *Allow Jonathan Rees to re-introduce you to the most underappreciated appliance in your kitchen: the refrigerator. Despite its recent and as yet patchy arrival on the world stage, the humble fridge has transformed how and what we eat, for better and for worse. This concise overview should be required reading for the 99.5 percent of Americans who own a refrigerator. * Nicola Twilley, author of Edible Geography and contributing writer at The New Yorker *Jonathan Rees’s Refrigerator offers a meticulously observed history of the ‘cold chain’ of industrialized food webs, explains how refrigeration works; and goes so far as to imagine life with and without it. Beyond this mini-historical account, the real heft to this title lies in the implied ecological impact of what doing without refrigeration might mean for those in the West for whom it has become taken for granted. -- 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. … In Refrigerator, historian Jonathan Rees asks us to look again at an object many of us take for granted as it hums away in our kitchens. When's the last time you looked at that thing? Did you contemplate how the refrigerator may have done more to extend the human lifespan than any other piece of technology? … 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 Chapter One: How Refrigerators Work Chapter Two: How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out Chapter Three: Are the Benefits of Refrigeration Worth the Costs? Chapter Four: Waste and Wants Chapter Five: Freezing and Freezers Conclusion Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies—the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewWalsh’s writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... Hotel is a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading. Its semiotic wordplay, circling prose and experimental form may prove a refined taste, but in its deft delineation of a complex modern phenomenon — and, perhaps, a modern malaise — it’s a great success. * Financial Times *[A] slyly humorous and clever little book ... [Walsh moves] effortlessly and imaginatively from one thing to the next ... with utter conviction in each step. I loved Hotel and would read it again. -- Marina Benjamin * New Statesman *A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire. ... Walsh invokes everyone from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Marx Brothers. She's funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish place. * The Paris Review *Evocative ... Walsh's strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution. * Publishers Weekly *Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers. Hotel is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas. * Deborah Levy, author of Black Vodka *Subtle and intriguing, this small book is an adventure in form. Part meditation on hotels, it mingles autobiography and reflections on home, secrets, and partings. Freud, Dora, Heidegger, and the Marx Brothers all have their moments on its small, intensely evocative stage. * Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion *Featured in The Literary Hub * The Literary Hub *[Walsh] is the author of a short book in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series called Hotel. With Heidegger, Freud, and Greta Garbo as touchpoints, the pieces use details from her job reviewing hotels and her unraveling marriage to meditate on desire, aphonia, immobility, and isolation. [T]he book is driven by an intense self-consciousness, but perhaps because it doesn’t need to make even a gesture toward fiction, there’s more linguistic play in here, more aphorisms you want to copy onto a postcard and send to your unhappiest smart friend. * Darcie Dennigan, The Rumpus *Walsh has been praised to the skies by Chris Kraus and Jeff Vandermeer, and it isn’t hard to see why. Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if it’s hovering between this world and another. -- Jonathan Sturgeon * Flavorwire *Object Lessons is ‘an essay and book series on the hidden lives of everyday things’ which takes quotidian objects as a starting point for analysis. … Hotel joins other intriguing, minimalist non-fiction titles such as Remote Control, Silence, and Phone Booth. Part personal reflection, part semiotic and symbolic interrogation, Hotel takes on a playful format. ... Alongside the intelligent analysis and playful structure, Joanna Walsh captures something innately surreal and peculiar about hotels. * Glasgow Review of Books *Walsh brings together autobiographical experience and reflection ... [to] illuminate aspects of the experience of the hotel: from Freud to Groucho Marx, from Mae West to Heidegger. * Corriere della Sera (Bloomsbury translation) *Writer Joanna Walsh, after the collapse of her marriage, became a hotel reviewer. She recounts the experience of staying in and reviewing hotels in Hotel, published by Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. … The hotel stands in for what should be, or simply what was, but is no longer. ‘A hotel sets itself apart from home and, in doing so, proves rather than denies home’s existence,’ Walsh writes. Ruminating on what went wrong in her marriage, she realizes at its center is the idea of what makes something — or someone — a home. * Jessica Ferri, Barnes and Noble Review *It's a knock out. Completely engaging, juicy and dry—such a great book. * Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick *Hotel, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series about “the hidden lives of ordinary things” (other books are about everything from dust to shipping containers and refrigerators)… is a clean, almost geometric work, the breakdown of the personal sphere encased in the sanitised environment of the hotel.… Such descriptions may make Walsh’s work seem overly theoretical, which would belie the pleasures that can be found in virtually every sentence. One of the singular joys in Walsh’s prose is how she questions and twists language systems until familiar words and expressions become uncanny, portals to a stranger world... * Agri Ismaïl, Minor Literature[s] *Object Lessons is ‘an essay and book series on the hidden lives of everyday things’ which takes quotidian objects as a starting point for analysis. … Hotel joins other intriguing, minimalist non-fiction titles such as Remote Control, Silence, and Phone Booth. Part personal reflection, part semiotic and symbolic interrogation, Hotel takes on a playful format. ... Alongside the intelligent analysis and playful structure, Joanna Walsh captures something innately surreal and peculiar about hotels. -- Laura Waddell * Glasgow Review of Books *…For all the apparent personal revelations, the bond we form with [Walsh’s] persona remains profoundly casual, bound only by the time and space delimited by the number of hours, days, and nights we spend with her Hotel. The book takes the form of a series of snatched conversations in and around hotels with characters fictionalized from Freud, the Marx Brothers, and the cast of Grand Hotel (1932). Walsh disappears or retreats into this series of disconnected texts, postcards, and overheard conversations. Ultimately the lesson resides in this combination of intimacy and distance, of narrative lack and narrative fantasy, as constituted by the hotel, an object, symbolized best by the revolving door of Grand Hotel. ‘Grand Hotel ... always the same,’ opines Dr. Otternschlag. ‘People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.’ -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons - a series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things - Hotel by Joanna Walsh defies genre categories, much like Walsh herself. ... Just as Hotel defies genre in its moving between essay, meditation and memoir, its subtle and slippery content can’t be contained in a single review. Each reader will take something different from it, relate to a different experience or nod to a different allusion. Hotel is a clever little book that packs a punch, and Walsh is a writer whose sparse prose and contained voice endlessly surprises. -- Sian Norris * openDemocracy 50.50 Magazine *It feels like something you want to endlessly quote: sharp, knowing, casually erudite... there is power and an affecting gravitas in what Walsh does with detail. The actual operates in the book as lonely gesture, deprived of the clammy self-revelation that a lesser writer might emphasise in a desperate bid to hold the reader’s attention. Instead, we sift the fragments through other fragments: as sharp as her riffs on Freud and Heidegger are (and she’s calmly mocking and irreverent at times too, which helps) what a reader truly returns to is a more open, personal writing... It’s a formal victory, an accurate rendering of a scattered emotional state. -- Adam Rivett * Sydney Review of Books *Hotel … is essentially a memoir in the context of visits made to hotels by a reviewer who is at that time undergoing a personal marital breakdown. Many thoughts about the distinctions between hotel and home arise and are investigated, at the same time as an examination of Freudian theory. … These seemingly separate areas within the text of Hotel are blended together smoothly, to illuminate their connection, or sometimes are discordant and sharply juxtaposed. -- Jay Merill * Berfrois *Underneath Walsh’s clever wit and wordplay is a vein of melancholy that runs through the book. … Hotel…does not endeavor to explore all facets of hotel life. For instance, Walsh has little to say about hotel staff and writes sparingly about the decor; rather, she tells us what a hotel isn’t. Walsh mixes travel writing, pop culture, and personal narrative to great effect to underscore her own discontent. * San Diego City Beat *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. … Hotel by Joanna Walsh is essentially a memoir as she escapes to hotels as a way to avoid a failing marriage and contemplates who we are and what we do in these dwellings that are not ‘home.’ … 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 *Haunting and meditative: more about moods than about facts. * Book Riot *Table of ContentsPart I. Hotel Haunting 1. Hotel Haunting Part II. Fragments from a Hysterical Suitcase 2. Hotel Freud 3. Marriage Postcards 4. Hometel 5. Hotel Diary 6. In A German Pension 7. The Talking Cure 8. Hotel Marx 9. Postcards from 26 Hotels Notes Acknowledgements Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture. It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAdam Rothstein’s primer on drones covers such themes … as the representation of drones in science fiction and popular culture. The technological aspects are covered in detail, and there is interesting discussion of the way in which our understanding of technology is grounded in historical narratives. As Rothstein writes, the attempt to draw a boundary between one technology and another often ignores the fact that new technologies are not quite as new as we think. * Times Literary Supplement (reviewed by Christopher Coker) *Readers interested in technology and/or warfare will very much enjoy reading Drone… Adam Rothstein did an admirable job, writing about every aspect of drones in detailed and organized fashion… [T]hose keenly interested in the subject will gobble this up. -- George Erdosh * San Francisco Book Review *[Rothstein's] book is a rich collection of vignettes about how to imagine and comprehend the drone ... [Drone] really excels in tackling the multiple meanings, symbols, and narratives attached to drones, all of which provide a bird’s eye view (drone’s eye view?) of the terrain of contemporary debate ... for those beginning a research project, or just the curious, this small book packs a big punch. -- Ian G. R. Shaw, University of Glasgow * Antipode *Adam Rothstein's Drone presents this iconic figure of contemporary warfare-the disconcertingly alluring autonomous airborne machine-through the lens of a different kind of history. Privacy and tracking algorithms run side by side with the ethics of self-guided munitions, activist political programs butt heads with emerging corporate business strategies, and all of it is tied back to the earliest experiments in driverless vehicles, quaint ancestors of today's over-mythologized UAVs. In the end, Rothstein's book is an exploration of technical agency: Where did drones come from-and what do they want? * Geoff Manaugh, Editor of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions and Author of the website BLDGBLOG *This lucid, visionary work is as close as one can get to science fiction without the baggage of science and/or fiction. Adam Rothstein's Drone will be a wonderful cultural artifact in twenty years. It will be like a broken pomegranate of contemporary speculations and anxieties. * Bruce Sterling, Author of The Zenith Angle and Professor of Internet Studies and Science Fiction at the European Graduate School, Switzerland *Portland writer and artist Adam Rothstein’s contribution to Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series digs into the history and meaning of autonomous aircraft—the ways they work, the tasks they perform, where they come from, and how the way we talk about them reflects the priorities and anxieties of our age. -- Ben Waterhouse * Oregon Humanities *Adam Rothstein’s Drone test[s] the water on what this technology might yet prove to be as it is successively explored and its limits and possibilities (military and civilian) discovered. What shall drones be? -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Four Technology Stories Chapter Two: The Military Drone Chapter Three: The Commercial Drone (or the hole where it ought to be) Chapter Four: Blinking Lights Chapter Five: Software and Hardware Chapter Six: The Non-Drone Chapter Seven: What the Drone is For Chapter Eight: The Drone in Discourse Chapter Nine: Drone Fiction Chapter Ten: Ourselves and the Drone Chapter Eleven: Aesthetics of the Drone Chapter Twelve: The Drone as Meme List of Images Bibliography Notes

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver’s license re-designs. The driver’s license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of contemporary American culture—freedom and security, mobility and checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in flux. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewRanging across the 20th century and between continents, Castile teaches a fundamental 'lesson' about the license: what's meant to fix an identity in fact generates competing meanings and values. Freedom and control, security and vulnerability, authenticity and fakery, youth and maturity. The book's Kerouacian opening and mix of pop culture references, personal anecdote, and philosophical musings invite attention to this overlooked but ever-present object. * Heather Houser, Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA, and author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction *In Driver’s License, Meredith Castile… draws six lessons: on national identity, on the culture of faked documents, on design, teen culture, identity, and civics. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Driver’s License is almost two short books in one. One part contains several personal stories, which evoke the much-mythologized independence of American teenagers now free to drive themselves. The other part becomes, like Hood, a condemnation of racial injustice. This section describes the de facto disenfranchisement of minority groups in the U.S. It explains how this disenfranchisement – not only when it comes to voting, but also for accessing basic social services – depends on the bureaucratic mechanics of the driver’s license and other forms of ID. Being undocumented or unable to afford driving lessons are just two of the obstacles to exercising full citizenship, and Driver’s License takes some interesting left turns to arrive at this message. Verdict: Buy. American culture so heavily fetishizes the car, yet the driver’s license is also hugely important to a sense of identity and possibility. * Book Riot *Table of ContentsAmerica Fake Design Teen Identity Civics

Read more less

Book SynopsisThroughout life black Africans in the Bahamas worked, voluntarily or not, and possessed material items of various degrees of importance to them and within their culture. St. Matthews was a cemetery in Nassau at the water's edge--or sometimes slightly below. This project emerged from archaeological excavations at this site to identify and recover materials associated with the interred before the area was completely developed. The area has been -collected- for decades--both professionally and by interested citizens, and Dr. Turner, a native Bahamian, coupled the results of her research excavations with the collections and archival material, to provide insight into the lives and deaths of the interred.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments.In 1899, Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe status-seeking in the obscenely unequal world of late-nineteenth century America. Many of the aspects he described in The Theory of the Leisure Class are still evident in our world today. While Veblen’s crude denunciation of material extravagance finds echoes in media exposés about the lifestyles of the rich worldwide, it is particularly recognisable in reporting on Africa. Here, images of conspicuous consumption have long circulated in local and global media as indictments of political corruption and signs of moral depravity.The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, drawing on theorists like Mbembe, Guyer and Bayart by way of critique or addition. They delve into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. The authors resist the trap of easy moralisation, pointing to more complex ethical and political registers of analysis and judgement. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.Trade ReviewThis fascinating, nuanced and persuasive volume combines sophisticated theoretical expositions with a high level of empirical inquiry. Taken together, the essays provide an important entry into the study of consumption in Africa, and indeed make a serious intervention into current socio-political concerns. — Robert Ross, Professor of African History Emeritus, Leiden University, the Netherlands. This volume offers a summary of the relevance of consumption as a terrain of meaningmaking to South African public debates. It will convince readers that much more is going on with consuming practices than the media sometimes solicits. In particular, it brings attention to an abiding tension in discussions around `consumption’: normative expectations of societal values entailed in such phenomenon as `conspicuous consumption’ are set against the symbolic practices illustrated through the performative, visual presentation of status (and claims and counterclaims to it). — Bridget Kenny, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, JohannesburgTable of Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Thinking with Veblen: Case Studies from Africa’s Past and Present - Deborah Posel and Ilana van Wyk Chapter 2 Changes in the Order of Things: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Cape Town – Deborah Posel Chapter 3 Conspicuously Public: Gendered Histories of Sartorial and Social Success in Urban Togo – Nina Sylvanus Chapter 4 Etienne Rousseau, Broedertwis and the Politics of Consumption within Afrikanerdom – Stephen Sparks Chapter 5 Recycling Consumption: Political Power and Elite Wealth in Angola – Claudia Gastrow Chapter 6 Chiluba’s Trunks: Consumption, Excess and the Body Politic in Zambia – Karen Tranberg Hansen Chapter 7 Jacob Zuma’s Shamelessness: Conspicuous Consumption, Politics and Religion – Ilana van Wyk Chapter 8 Precarious ‘Bigness’: A ‘Big Man’, his Women and his Funeral in Cameroon – Rogers Orock Chapter 9 Young Men of Leisure? Youth, Conspicuous Consumption and the Performativity of Dress in Niger – Adeline Masquelier Chapter 10 Booty on Fire: Looking at Izikhothane with Thorstein Veblen – Jabulani G Mnisi Chapter 11 Conspicuous Queer Consumption: Emulation and Honour in the Pink Map – Bradley Rink Chapter 12 The Politics and Moral Economy of Middle-Class Consumption in South Africa – Sophie Chevalier Chapter 13 Marigold Beads: Who Needs Diamonds?! – Joni Brenner and Pamila Gupta Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collaborative collection considers the packaging, presentation and consumption of medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Europe 1350–1550. It showcases innovative research on the history of the book from a range of established and younger scholars from the US and Europe in the fields of English and French Studies, History, Music, and Art History. The collection falls naturally into three sections: • Packaging and Presentation: The physical context of the manuscript and printed book including its binding, visual presentation and internal organization • Consumers: Producers, Owners, and Readers • Consuming the Text: The experience of the audience(s) for books These three strands are interdependent, and highlight the materiality of the manuscript or printed book as a consumable, focusing on its ‘consumability’ in the sense of its packaging and presentation, its consumers, and on the act of consumption in the sense of reading and reception or literal decay.Trade ReviewReviews 'The individual essays are all very well contextualised within their own specific fields, and, significantly, they are aided very substantially by the construction of this volume... This book forms a very valuable contribution to current scholarship in the field of medieval and early modern book production, consumption and reception.'Elisabeth Salter, English Historical Review'This volume highlights the wealth of research output from a number of different fields, as well as the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in producing synergistic outcomes.'Erin Connelly, Nottingham Medieval StudiesTable of Contents Acknowledgements - Emma Cayley and Susan Powell Preface - Derek Pearsall List of Figures Section I: Packaging and Presentation: The Materiality of the Manuscript and Printed Book • Anne Marie Lane: ‘How can we Recognise “Contemporary” Bookbindings of the Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries?’ • Matti Peikola: ‘Guidelines for Consumption: Scribal Ruling Patterns and Designing the mise-en-page in later Medieval England’ • Kate Maxwell: ‘The Order of the Lays in the “Odd” Machaut MS BnF fr. 9221(E)’ • Sonja Drimmer: ‘Picturing the King or Picturing the Saint: Two Miniature Programmes for John Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund’ • Yvonne Rode: ‘Sixty-three Gallons of Books: Shipping Books to London in the Late Middle Ages’ Section II: Consumers: Producers, Owners, and Readers • Anna Lewis: ‘“But solid food is for the mature, who …have their senses trained to discern good and evil”: John Colop’s Book and the Spiritual Diet of the Discerning Lay Londoner’ • Anne Sutton: ‘The Acquisition and Disposal of Books for Worship and Pleasure by Mercers of London in the Later Middle Ages’ • Martha Driver: ‘“By Me Elysabeth Pykeryng”: Women and Printing in the Early Tudor Period’ • Shayne Husbands: ‘The Roxburghe Club: Consumption, Obsession and the Passion for Print’ Section III - Consuming the Text: Writing Consumption • Carrie Griffin: ‘Reconsidering the Recipe: Materiality, Narrative and Text in Later Medieval Instructional MSS and Collections’ • Anamaria Gellert: ‘Fools, “Folye” and Caxton’s Woodcut of the Pilgrims at Table’ • John B. Friedman: ‘Anxieties at Table: Food and Drink in Chaucer’s Fabliaux Tales and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Der Ring’ • Mary Morse: ‘Alongside St. Margaret: The Childbirth Cult of SS Quiricus and Julitta in Late Medieval English Manuscripts’ • Emma Cayley: ‘Consuming the Text: Pulephilia in Fifteenth-Century French Debate Poetry’ Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisUses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture. Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period. The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Conventions List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Tradesmen, Collecting Networks and Curious Ephemera 2. Visual Culture, Medleys and Partisanship 3. Popular Politics, Ballads and the Tragic Revolution 4. Historical Collections, Impartiality and Antiquarian Nostalgia 5. Advertisements, Life-Writing and Scrapbooks Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Miniature is a delightful, entertaining and illuminating investigation into our peculiar fascination with making things small, and what small things tell us about the world at large.Here you will find the secret histories of tiny Eiffel Towers, the truth about the flea circus, a doll's house made for a queen, eerie tableaux of crime scenes, miniature food, model villages and railways, and more. Simon Garfield brings together history, psychology, art and obsession, to explore what fuels the strong appeal of miniature objects among collectors, modellers and fans, and teaches us that there is greatness in the diminutive.Trade ReviewA rare treat, convivial and smart and brimming with intrigue. Simon Garfield excavates the curiouser of small worlds where not all is as it seems - obscure and wondrous, a bit bonkers and totally fascinating, and just my cup of tea -- KEGGIE CAREW, author of DadlandGarfield's book is thrilling, touching and very, very funny -- NINA STIBBEThis intriguing study of our urge to make scale models is full of bizarre stories and poignant insight . . . engaging and exuberant . . . The moral seems to be that we're all small, relatively speaking, which is perhaps why In Miniature is not only highly entertaining; it is also moving * * Observer * *If you are someone who appreciates the quirkier byways of human endeavour, there's plenty to surprise and delight in this compendium * * The Times * *Fascinating and often funny . . . As a (scaled-down) book, In Miniature is a well-built, highly polished entity. It is full of evocative sentences [and] amusing drive-by thwacks . . . But what he also shows in abundance is the sympathetic understanding of the needs and travails of "ordinary" people that lit up his previous books * * Guardian * *In Miniature is a delicious read; quirky, unpredictable and written with a genuine savour for the subject * * Mail on Sunday * *Simon Garfield's enthusiasm . . . is irresistible . . . Garfield offers not just intriguing snapshots of curiosities but some rather interesting history lessons * * Spectator * *Delightful . . . In Miniature is fascinating, funny and, in places, unexpectedly moving . . . This book is proof of the old adage that good things come in small packages * * Literary Review * *Garfield's intelligent exploration of mankind's passion for making small versions of large objects is meticulously researched * * Daily Express, Books of the Year * *Fashioned with as much love of, and relish for, the telling detail as many of the scaled-down creations it surveys, In Miniature finds Simon Garfield at both his wittiest and his most profound and philosophical. It is a book that puts the little things into the big picture, its perspective generous and its scope wide; you will never look at a doll house or model train quite the same again. Were I not an atheist I would proclaim him the god of small things -- TRAVIS ELBOROUGH

Read more less

Book SynopsisA beautiful memoir, travelogue, and meditation on stone by artist and stone mason Beatrice Searle.'What are you doing? If you don't mind me asking?'I say that we are taking this stone to Trondheim. I continue to tell her the story of Magnus and ancient Kings.'Would you like to stand in it?' I ask. 'That is what it is for.'At the age of twenty-six, Beatrice Searle crossed the North sea and walked 500 miles through Southern Norway on a medieval pilgrim path to Nidaros Cathedral, taking with her a 40-kilo stone from the West coast of Orkney.She had recently completed her masonry training at Lincoln Cathedral and become fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Scandinavia, Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world; stones closely associated with travellers, saints and the inauguration of Kings. Following in their footsteps, her stone becomes a talisman of sorts, a bedrock on the move, and an offering to those she meets along the way.Stone Will Answer is an unusual adventure story of resilience and homecoming, of weight and motion, of rediscovering love and faith, and of journeys practical, spiritual and geological. A captivating blend of exploration, memoir and myth, and an insight into a beguiling craft, it asks what lessons might be learned from stone, what we choose to carry with us and what we return to put down or pick up again.Trade ReviewExtraordinary... Confessional, elemental and at times moving, this is a memorable and unique celebration of the power and beauty of stone. * Guardian *Searle is an excellent storyteller... [and Stone Will Answer] make[s] for gripping reading... it's the human spirit that emerges triumphant in this sparky blend of memoir and travelogue... Above all, this is the story of a young woman's astonishing feat of endurance * Herald *A gifted writer, capable of luminous description * Spectator *Subtle and thought-provoking * TLS *Illuminating... I was quickly taken in by Beatrice Searle's distinctive voice, and by the end I couldn't help but feel very differently about stones, rootedness, belonging, and indeed what walking might mean. Beatrice's story is exceptional, and she is an exceptional story teller. -- Kerri Andrews, author of Wandering: A History of Women Walking

Read more less

Book SynopsisIconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Private Lives of Pictures offers a new history of British art, seen from the perspective of the home. Focusing on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the book takes the reader on a tour of an imaginary Victorian or Edwardian house, stopping in each room to look at the pictures on the walls. The book opens up the intimate history of art in everyday life, and examines many issues including how pictures were chosen for each room, how they were displayed, and what role they played in interior design. Superbly illustrated, The Private Lives of Pictures appeals to readers interested in both art and social history, and the history of interiors.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis edited collection explores a subject of great potential for both art historians and museologists – that of the nature of the specimen and how it might be reinterpreted. Through its cross-disciplinary contributions, written by a team of art historians, artists, poets, anthropologists, critics and curators, this book looks at how artistic encounters in museums, ranging from anatomy museums to contemporary cabinets of curiosity, can provoke new modes of thinking about art, science and curating. Museological literature in the past focused on artefacts or objects; this is an original contribution to the field and offers new readings of old issues, inspiring new understandings of the relationships between art, science and curating. Brings together international expertise from art practitioners, historians, creative writers and theorists in France, the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Contributions from creative practitioners draw upon their own experience of producing artworks in response to specific scientific collections while historians, anthropologists, critics and writers examine how museums stimulate, incite and otherwise inspire artistic awareness of science and its specimens. One of the most important contributions this book will make is drawing together several threads of research and practice to encourage interdisciplinary discussion. It provides new ways of thinking about the relationships between art, science, museums and their objects. It concentrates on the ways in which scientific collections kindle novel aesthetic strategies and inspire new scholarly interpretations of art, science, curating and epistemology. In so doing it will make a considerable contribution to the fields of art writing, creative practice, art theory, the history of science and curating. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, undergraduates and postgraduates studying fine art, curating, museology, art history, the history of science, creative writing; visual artists, curators, and other creative practitioners. Also of interest to museum audiences. Reading list potential.Table of ContentsIntroduction Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson 1: Narratives of the ‘Fetish’ John Mack 2: Curating Interobjectively in Museums Alistair Robinson 3: ‘A Readiness to Find What Surrounds Us Strange and Odd’: Objects in the Relational Curiosity Museum Marion Endt-Jones 4: Art, Science and the Mutant Object Rahma Khazam 5: Models of Subjectivity: Surrealism, Physics and Psychoanalysis Gavin Parkinson 6: Glimpsed Phantoms of Sensation: Or, a Psychogeographical Investigation of Various Anatomical Specimens with Reference to Christine Borland’s Cet être-là, c’est à toi de le créer! Edward Juler 7 … as far back as I will remember Nadia Lichtig 8: Poetry and the Pathology Museum: A Model of Difference Christy Ducker 9: The Scientist and the Magician Irene Brown 10: Choosing, Unpicking and Connecting: On Drawing Museum Objects Richard Talbot 11: Post-Specimens and Present Ancestors: Passing Fables and Comparative Readings at the Wildgoose Memorial Library Jane Wildgoose 12: Moving beyond the Specimen (From Drawing Objects to Drawing Processes) Gemma Anderson 13: Desiccation, Suspension, Extraction: The Inhuman Art of Christine Borland Andrew Patrizio Afterword: What’s at Stake? Ludmilla Jordanova

Read more less

Book SynopsisShiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad attention to popular culture – the wideness of its range is striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter, which many of today’s innovative books also have – it considers how a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful application of contemporary theory. Interesting, informative, and entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time, with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional academic scholarship. Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive; its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body, and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness and cleanliness. Examines the meanings and functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates people. The book engages primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and other areas of popular and political culture. The art world, however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored. Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles, Richard Nixon and Liberace. Will be relevant to academics, scholars and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities: philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising and marketing. It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics. It is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and theory are embodied through examples and narratives. Will be of interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff, James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit. Trade Review"Shiny Things is a smart, accessible, and often humorous, examination of the various meanings of shininess across multiple facets of culture, with a particular emphasis on the visual arts. It stands as an exemplary investigation of the meaning of an overlooked, but pervasive facet of material culture.” -- David Klamen, Dean of the School of the Arts at Indiana University Northwest

Read more less

Book SynopsisProvides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values. Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film, board games maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios and Twitter, amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal, often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context. We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use, and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media, culture, and society.Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Foreword – Nicholas Gebhardt Introduction SECTION 1: FORM Short Take 1: My Notebook – Lee Griffiths 1. Investigating the Illicit: The Material Traces of Britain’s Early Trade in Obscene 8mm Films – Oliver Carter Short Take 2: ‘Press the Start Button’ – Harrison Charles 2. On, Off, and in the Map: Materializing Game Experiences Through Player Cartography – Nick Webber Short Take 3: Making Order Out of Chaos – Hilary Weston Jones 3. The Solid State of Radio – Sam Coley Short Take 4: Materialities of Television History – E. Charlotte Stevens SECTION 2: FORMAT Short Take 5: Only Dancing. Again – Philip Young 4. Between Analogue and Digital: The Cassette Tape as Hybrid Artefact – Iain A. Taylor Short Take 6: Patch Lead Possibilities – Chris Mapp 5. ‘Because It Is Not Digital’: The Cultural Value of the Analogue Book in Digital Age – Christian Moerken Short Take 7: Materialities of Spatial Confinement: Trefeglwys Meets Beirut – Dima Saber 6. Essentially (Not) the Game: Reading the Materiality of Video Game Paratexts – Regina Seiwald Short Take 8: Materialities and Craft Value – Karen Patel SECTION 3: EPHEMERAL MEANING Short Take 9: Still Angry: Still Feeding – Matt Grimes 7. Stamp of Approval: A Prosopography of the English Midlands Videogame Industry – Alex Wade and Adam Whittaker Short Take 10: The Edward Colston Experience – Martin Cox 8. Reframing Materiality in the Caribbean Diaspora Podcast – Rachel-Ann Charles and Tim Wall Short Take 11: We’re all Victorians Now – Kirsten Forkert 9. You Can Look, Share and Comment, But You Can’t Touch: The Relationship Between the Materiality and Physicality of Photographs in an Online Community Archive – Vanessa Jackson Short Take 12: Location, Agency, and Hashtag Activism During the COVID-19 Pandemic – Yemisi Akinbobola 10. Thirty-Seven Retweets – John Hillman Conclusion: Shifting Horizons of Possibility – Susanna Paasonen Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

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]

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisIlya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. Budraitskis makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten history of the USSR's dissident left, mapping an entire alternative tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from Khrushchev's Thaw to Gorbachev's perestroika. Doubly outsiders, within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule-suggesting new paths for the left to explore.Trade ReviewBudraitskis magnificently dismantles several myths. This includes the myth that the entire socialist past can be reduced to the idea of 'totalitarianism', and the myth that Russian society is divided in two, between liberals who love freedom and the masses, mired in tradition and thirsting for despotic rule. -- Alexei Yurchak, author of Everything Was Forever Until It Was No MoreA deep analysis of contemporary Russian reality which deftly dismantles the many myths in which that reality is shrouded. Budraitskis's writings deal with several themes and periods, but common to them all is a sensitivity to the details of the context and a capacity to question dogmatic certainties. The texts are beautifully written, in a clear, precise, and stylistically fine-tuned prose. This extremely important collection allows us to look at Russian and many other post-socialist societies from a new standpoint. -- Alexei Yurchak, author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No MoreIlya Budraitskis brings immense historical knowledge, moral clarity, and political insight into these crucial essays on twenty-first century Russia. From his critical analyses of Russian culture wars and the "geopoliticization of Russia" to his path-breaking history of socialist dissidence and contemporary Left discontent, Budraitskis proves an adroit guide through the post-Soviet landscape. He directs us not simply to persistent authoritarianism and reaction but also to the unrealized political alternatives that remain to be activated by Left anti-capitalists today. -- Jodi Dean. author of ComradeIlya Budraitskis is a gifted writer- non-conformist, insightful, sharp and polemical. Essays collected in this volume succeed to challenge both liberal and illiberal clichés about Putin's Russia. -- Ivan Krastev, author of Is It Tomorrow Yet?Refusing the neo-Cold War nonsense that depicts Putin's Russia as an anti-imperialist bulwark or a reincarnation of Stalin's empire, Ilya Budraitskis has more important things to think about than this confected Clash of Civilisations. Whether uncovering the forgotten socialists among the Soviet-era dissident movement or tracing the emergence of a true post-Soviet left into the present day, his work is sophisticated, invigorating and ethically rigorous. -- Owen Hatherley

Read more less

Book SynopsisInnovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics. In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's 'politics of the dead'. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of 'traditional' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg PressTrade ReviewAn innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and post-colonial politics. * Zimbabwe Review *This very important book offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the everyday politics of the dead in Zimbabwe. The author's theorization and discussion of the typologies of death, bones, and human remains are useful to a wider audience, within and beyond Zimbabwe, including academics and graduate students within the field of anthropology and sociology of death, political and contemporary history of Zimbabwe, and spirituality and religious studies. -- Death StudiesBeyond doubt, this is a 'must-have' work for all interested in the relationship between death and the broader, intriguing Zimbabwean past. -- Journal of Southern African StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction Changing death and human corporeality across Africa and beyond The politics of the dead in Zimbabwe The power of uncertainty Sources and structure of the book 1 Liberation Heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration The burial of Gift Tandare Heritage and commemoration Heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe Liberation heritage Unsettling Bones 2 Bones & Tortured Bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence Resurfacing bones Emotive materiality, affective presence and transforming materials Tortured bodies Towards 'healing' and 'reconciliation' during the GNU 2009-2013 Conclusions 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials The Chibondo exhumations Too 'fresh', 'intact', fleshy, leaky and stinky? The torque of materiality and the excessive potentiality of human remains The politics of uncertainty Conclusions 4 Political Accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty The death of Solomon Mujuru Factionalism, rivalries and murky business dealings The inquest A particular kind of death Conclusions 5 Precarious Possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship Rotina Mavhunga - the diesel n'anga Precarious occupation 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death Towards the alterity of spirit Conclusions 7 After Mugabe Burying Bob Conclusions Bodies and spirits, change and continuity AIDS, cholera, Congo, prisons, Chiadzwa, diaspora, FTLR, and charismatic Pentecostalisms New directions for liberation heritage Ambuya Nehanda returns? Exhuming Bob?

Read more less

Book SynopsisInnovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics. In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's 'politics of the dead'. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of 'traditional' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg PressTrade ReviewAn innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and post-colonial politics. * Zimbabwe Review *This very important book offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the everyday politics of the dead in Zimbabwe. The author's theorization and discussion of the typologies of death, bones, and human remains are useful to a wider audience, within and beyond Zimbabwe, including academics and graduate students within the field of anthropology and sociology of death, political and contemporary history of Zimbabwe, and spirituality and religious studies. -- Death StudiesBeyond doubt, this is a 'must-have' work for all interested in the relationship between death and the broader, intriguing Zimbabwean past. -- Journal of Southern African StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction Changing death and human corporeality across Africa and beyond The politics of the dead in Zimbabwe The power of uncertainty Sources and structure of the book 1 Liberation Heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration The burial of Gift Tandare Heritage and commemoration Heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe Liberation heritage Unsettling Bones 2 Bones & Tortured Bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence Resurfacing bones Emotive materiality, affective presence and transforming materials Tortured bodies Towards 'healing' and 'reconciliation' during the GNU 2009-2013 Conclusions 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials The Chibondo exhumations Too 'fresh', 'intact', fleshy, leaky and stinky? The torque of materiality and the excessive potentiality of human remains The politics of uncertainty Conclusions 4 Political Accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty The death of Solomon Mujuru Factionalism, rivalries and murky business dealings The inquest A particular kind of death Conclusions 5 Precarious Possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship Rotina Mavhunga - the diesel n'anga Precarious occupation 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death Towards the alterity of spirit Conclusions 7 After Mugabe Burying Bob Conclusions Bodies and spirits, change and continuity AIDS, cholera, Congo, prisons, Chiadzwa, diaspora, FTLR, and charismatic Pentecostalisms New directions for liberation heritage Ambuya Nehanda returns? Exhuming Bob?

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this intriguing insight into the work and history of a museum, V&A director and historian Dr Tristram Hunt brings together ten renowned V&A curators to tell the stories behind ten of their most treasured objects. 'Tipu's Tiger' (an almost life-size wooden semi-automaton mauling a European soldier), the 'Great Bed of Ware' (an Elizabethan bed for 8 people) and a Shakespeare First Folio are among the featured highlights whose route to the V&A collections are entertainingly revealed. Through these stories, this insightful history of museum curation - a world of careful study and sometimes remarkable fortuity - shows how the priorities of a museum are shaped and change over time. Published to explore in more depth some of the stories featured in the BBC six part series Secrets of the Museum.Trade Review'...full of fascinating, if occasionally tragic and controversial, tales of acquisitions.' Ciara Dossett, Daily Mail, 6th February 2020Table of ContentsThe Lives of the Objects, Tristram Hunt / Copy of Trajan's Column, Rebecca Knott / The Raphael Cartoons, Ana Debenedetti / Tipu's Tiger, Susan Stronge / First Folio, Geoffrey Marsh / The Rodin Gift, Alicia Robinson / The Great Bed of Ware, Nick Humphrey / Fold-up Chair, Johanna Agerman Ross / Evening Ensemble, Sonnett Stanfill / Rangoon: Signal Pagoda, Martin Barnes / Robin Hood Gardens, Christopher Turner

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe cross-cultural usage of a particular cloth type – blueprint – is central to South African cultural history. Known locally as seshoeshoe or isishweshwe, among many other localised names, South African blueprint originated in the Far East and East Asia. Adapted and absorbed by the West, blueprint in Africa was originally associated with trade, coercion, colonisation, Westernisation, religious conversion and even slavery, but residing within its hues and patterns was a resonance that endured. The cloth came to reflect histories of hardship, courage and survival, but it also conveyed the taste and aesthetic predilections of its users, preferences often shared across racial and cultural divides. In its indigenisation, isishweshwe has subverted its former history and alien origins and has come to reflect the authority of its users and their culture, conveying resilience, innovation and adaptation and above all a distinctive South Africanness.In this beautifully illustrated book Juliette Leeb-du Toit traces the origins of the cloth, its early usage and cultural adaptations, and its emerging regional, cultural and aesthetic significance. In examining its usage and current national significance, she highlights some of the salient features associated with histories of indigenisation.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisTopics covered by the papers include: Aesthetics and politics of the kitchen in fascist Italy, The bamboo tea whisk in Japanese tea culture, Cooking under fire, 1914-1918, Sugar sculpture in Italian court banquets, Mongolian milk spoons, Perfuming the table in old Baghdad.

Read more less

Book SynopsisShowcases over a hundred treasures from the collections of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, from the departments of Scottish History and Archaeology/Art and Design/Science and Technology/Natural Sciences/World Cultures. Table of ContentsForeword Scottish History and Archaeology Art and Design Science and Technology Natural Sciences World Cultures

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Lead White Zarina Bhimji explores the history of Zanzibar. Her expert curatorial eye has scoured national archives and found documents bearing witness to the country's past and by extension its present. Filtered through Bhimji's artistic vision, these documents become a poetic exploration of numerous topics including national health, education and contemporary Africa. The documents collected by Bhimji come from a wide variety of places. There are legal and constitutional documents, but also photographs and personal effects. A particular point of interest in Lead White is paper and how texture and light function as an echo of the themes investigated here. This substantial monograph marks a departure of sorts for Bhimji. In this work she incorporates to her new mediums of digital photography and the traditional craft of embroidery. This interplay, in Gallagher's words, forms a 'tension between present and past, and enhances the relationship between the specific and the universal.'

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn important book, brimming with insight.' Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse WhispererMaterial is generous, wise, fascinating and fundamentally humane.' Dan Richards, author of OutpostThrowing a pot. Building a bench. Sewing clothes. Creating a linocut illustration. Carving a spoon. What does it mean to make things with your hands in a digital age, full of mass-market, disposable items?Following the path trod by bestselling authors Lars Mytting, Robert Macfarlane and Barn the Spoon, craftsman Nick Kary explores what it means to be a maker. Through beautifully crafted writing filled with memorable craftspeople, landscapes, stories and scenery, Material is a rich celebration of what it means to imagine and create.Nick champions the voices of artisans across the UK, from potters to woodworkers, reminding us of the rich vein of knowledge and skills that d

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow do we come to know the world around us? What about worlds apart from our own—outer space, distant cultures, or even long-past eras of history? Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts explores these questions and suggests an answer: we come to know our world and worlds apart through the objects that represent them. Objects are a window, and by looking through them we can learn and understand more about the people who made them and the time and place they came from. In the pursuit of this understanding museums are invaluable; they are repositories not just of things but also of past, present, and future knowledge.   Engaging Smithsonian Objects puts these ideas into practice, using objects to bring us to new knowledge and showing how museums support us in the endeavor. The book is organized around ten objects from the Smithsonian’s vast collections. Some of the objects are iconic—the Ruby Slippers from the The Wizard of Oz or three Stradivarius string instruments—while others are more ordinary, though no less interesting—an Iron Lung or a Hawaiian gourd drum. Two different authors with expertise in different academic disciplines write about each object from their unique professional and personal perspective. Both the authors and the ten featured objects represent a range of academic disciplines, from art to anthropology to geology. Taken together, the twenty essays in the book demonstrate just how much we can learn from objects by considering their kaleidoscopic meaning and significance from a variety of viewpoints. The book’s interdisciplinary engagement with objects was inspired by the Smithsonian Material Culture Forum, now in its twenty-sixth year. For students of material culture and museum studies, this book illustrates the vitality and value of exploring material culture through the lens of intersecting disciplinary perspectives. For students of curiosity and lifelong learning, this book offers a lively and thoughtful look into the Smithsonian’s collection and the many vibrant worlds it represents. Richly illustrated with color plates and photographs throughout, Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts is a beautiful and stimulating answer to the question, “How do we know our world, and how can we know more?”

Read more less