Material culture Books

Book SynopsisVictorian Liberalism and Material Culture' assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisToday Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities. This book gathers and presents these holdings.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDraws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones.Trade ReviewWere this book simply a portrayal of the diamond business, it would have been outstanding. It is far more. It is an innovative study of a commodity that must be as unique as the relationship it celebrates and memorializes. It challenges many of the basic assumptions of marketing by describing the consumers paradoxical responses to its strategies. A truly remarkable book. -- Vincent Crapanzano,Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology, CUNY Graduate CenterA fascinating study of the absolutely powerful but ambiguous symbolism attached to diamonds: value, romanticism, permanence, devotion, and shining are part of the instantly recognized language for diamonds, but it is an ambiguous and evocative vocabulary. The ethnographic stories in Falls account emphasize that we have become comfortable with consuming these ambiguous signs. Even people disinterested in diamonds seem persistently curious about and perhaps even silently obedient to a rock cast as a symbol of love, heritage, and permanence. -- Paul R. Mullins,Indiana University-Purdue University, IndianapolisFalls delivers an intriguing and insightful foray into multiple ways in which diamonds acquire and deploy deep, cultural meaning and thus maintain their economic heft. Through social and semiotic analyses of this most sought after gem, Clarity, Cut, and Culture illustrates the interlacing practices and multifaceted interpretations that play out in the arenas of commerce, romance, politics and status. -- Daniel Thomas Cook,author of The Commodification of ChildhoodFall's research indicates the breadth and depth of the penetration of diamonds among American consumers. * Public Books *[The] book tells the story of the remarkable rise of the modern diamond industry, which proceeded via a series of gold-rush-like crazes that began in India, peaking there in the late 1600s before shifting to Brazil. . . . As the titleClarity, Cut, and Culturesuggests, Ms. Falls book spends considerable time on the production and marketing of finished stones, taking readers inside Manhattans famous Diamond Row, on 47thStreet, for example. There, in tightly policed cutting schools, students work in blue-carpeted rooms under special fluorescent lights practicing their craft that is, after providing a credit card to guarantee payment for the loss of any stone they handle. * Wall Street Journal *In Clarity, Cut, and Culture, Susan Falls tackles a critical question about modernity andmeaning: Why, when marketers spend billions of dollars cloaking their products withpositive meanings, do people buy them even when they say they are not influenced bywhat the marketer is trying to do? * American Anthropologist *In this excellent, new contribution to research on the diamond industry, consumer behavior, and the social lives of things, Susan Falls addresses the & many meanings of diamonds While Clarity, Cut, and Culture certainly addresses what diamonds mean to various consumers, its most important contributions lie in its detailed accounting of how people make things like diamonds meaningful. * Anthropological Quarterly *SCAD anthropology professor Dr. Susan Falls has spent the past decade researching these most precious stones and parsing their value. But along with exploring their economic and anecdotal worth in her book,Clarity, Cut and Culture,Falls also examines diamonds through the lens of semiotics, the study of meaning. * Connect Savannah *A prime and important message is how this highly symbolic rock can stand for, contain, and reference diverse, sometimes conflicting, messages. Falls devotes chapters to the history and manufacture of diamonds and the levels of meanings diamonds signify about emotions, love, continuity, relationship, status, and prestige. An absorbing chapter concerns how traditional meanings of diamonds have been riffed on and subverted in bling. Chapters & From Rock to Gem and & Valuing Diamonds stand out as accessible and strong. Summing Up: Recommended. * Choice *[]Clarity, Cut, and Cultureis a helpful and detailed study of & the many meanings of diamonds in the society. It could be useful to scholars of culture studies, American studies, popular culture studies, sociology, and related disciplines, and those interested in the symbolic influence of diamonds and their historical use and meanings. * Journal of Popular Culture *[Falls] interviews experts and ordinary people about their relationships to diamonds, and finds a perfect case of the contradictory and random nature of our preferences. Women who consider expensive rings signs of being 'owned'nevertheless covet them. Men who think mining diamonds in Africa causes unconscionable misery nevertheless want to give them to women. Pretty much everyone seems to understand that the industry is corrupt and that diamonds prices are unrelated to their supposed scarcity, yet they still cherish the stones as heirlooms and tokens of love. * Pacific Standard *Falls discusses how the industry should be talking about its product, why the hip-hop community embraced bling, and why even people who have mixed feelings about diamonds will buy them anyway. * JCK Magazine *Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface: The Emptiness of Diamond Acknowledgments Introduction: Little Rocks 1. From Rock to Gem 2. Valuing Diamonds 3. A Diamond Is Forever 4. Diamonds and Emotions 5. Diamonds and Bling 6. Diamonds and Performance Conclusion: The Fullness of Diamonds Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Read more less

Book SynopsisThings become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? This book deals with these questions.Trade Review"Were this book simply a portrayal of the diamond business, it would have been outstanding. It is far more. It is an innovative study of a commodity that must be as unique as the relationship it celebrates and memorializes. It challenges many of the basic assumptions of marketing by describing the consumers paradoxical responses to its strategies. A truly remarkable book." -- Vincent Crapanzano,Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center"A fascinating study of the absolutely powerful but ambiguous symbolism attached to diamonds: value, romanticism, permanence, devotion, and shining are part of the instantly recognized language for diamonds, but it is an ambiguous and evocative vocabulary. The ethnographic stories in Falls account emphasize that we have become comfortable with consuming these ambiguous signs. Even people disinterested in diamonds seem persistently curious about and perhaps even silently obedient to a rock cast as a symbol of love, heritage, and permanence." -- Paul R. Mullins,Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis"Falls delivers an intriguing and insightful foray into multiple ways in which diamonds acquire and deploy deep, cultural meaning and thus maintain their economic heft. Through social and semiotic analyses of this most sought after gem, Clarity, Cut, and Culture illustrates the interlacing practices and multifaceted interpretations that play out in the arenas of commerce, romance, politics and status." -- Daniel Thomas Cook,author of The Commodification of Childhood"Fall's research indicates the breadth and depth of the penetration of diamonds among American consumers." * Public Books *"[The] book tells the story of the remarkable rise of the modern diamond industry, which proceeded via a series of gold-rush-like crazes that began in India, peaking there in the late 1600s before shifting to Brazil. . . . As the titleClarity, Cut, and Culturesuggests, Ms. Falls book spends considerable time on the production and marketing of finished stones, taking readers inside Manhattans famous Diamond Row, on 47thStreet, for example. There, in tightly policed cutting schools, students work in blue-carpeted rooms under special fluorescent lights practicing their craft that is, after providing a credit card to guarantee payment for the loss of any stone they handle." * Wall Street Journal *"In Clarity, Cut, and Culture, Susan Falls tackles a critical question about modernity andmeaning: Why, when marketers spend billions of dollars cloaking their products withpositive meanings, do people buy them even when they say they are not influenced bywhat the marketer is trying to do?" * American Anthropologist *"In this excellent, new contribution to research on the diamond industry, consumer behavior, and the social lives of things, Susan Falls addresses the & many meanings of diamonds While Clarity, Cut, and Culture certainly addresses what diamonds mean to various consumers, its most important contributions lie in its detailed accounting of how people make things like diamonds meaningful." * Anthropological Quarterly *"SCAD anthropology professor Dr. Susan Falls has spent the past decade researching these most precious stones and parsing their value. But along with exploring their economic and anecdotal worth in her book,Clarity, Cut and Culture,Falls also examines diamonds through the lens of semiotics, the study of meaning." * Connect Savannah *"A prime and important message is how this highly symbolic rock can stand for, contain, and reference diverse, sometimes conflicting, messages. Falls devotes chapters to the history and manufacture of diamonds and the levels of meanings diamonds signify about emotions, love, continuity, relationship, status, and prestige. An absorbing chapter concerns how traditional meanings of diamonds have been riffed on and subverted in bling. Chapters & From Rock to Gem and & Valuing Diamonds stand out as accessible and strong. Summing Up: Recommended." * Choice *"[]Clarity, Cut, and Cultureis a helpful and detailed study of & the many meanings of diamonds in the society. It could be useful to scholars of culture studies, American studies, popular culture studies, sociology, and related disciplines, and those interested in the symbolic influence of diamonds and their historical use and meanings." * Journal of Popular Culture *"[Falls] interviews experts and ordinary people about their relationships to diamonds, and finds a perfect case of the contradictory and random nature of our preferences. Women who consider expensive rings signs of being 'owned'nevertheless covet them. Men who think mining diamonds in Africa causes unconscionable misery nevertheless want to give them to women. Pretty much everyone seems to understand that the industry is corrupt and that diamonds prices are unrelated to their supposed scarcity, yet they still cherish the stones as heirlooms and tokens of love." * Pacific Standard *"Falls discusses how the industry should be talking about its product, why the hip-hop community embraced bling, and why even people who have mixed feelings about diamonds will buy them anyway." * JCK Magazine *Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface: The Emptiness of Diamond Acknowledgments Introduction: Little Rocks 1. From Rock to Gem 2. Valuing Diamonds 3. A Diamond Is Forever 4. Diamonds and Emotions 5. Diamonds and Bling 6. Diamonds and Performance Conclusion: The Fullness of Diamonds Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Read more less

Book SynopsisOn March 11, 2004, Islamist terrorists carried out a massive bombing on Madrid’s largely working-class commuter trains, leaving 191 people dead and more than 1,500 others wounded. This event, known in Spain as 11-M, was the second of three highly visible jihadist attacks on the West between 2001 and 2005, and the first in Europe, occurring just days before the national elections in Spain. Arguing that 11-M marked a critical turning point in Spanish society, this book reveals how poetry played a unique role and reflected a new political and cultural sensibility defined by informal and non-hierarchical networks of communication and memorialization. After the attacks, poems circulated in public spaces in unexpected ways, creating links and relationships that were binding: they were inscribed on banners and monuments; musicalized in anthems, protest songs, and hip-hop music; reproduced on manifestos and blogs; sent by email and text; scribbled on scraps of paper and postedTable of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Poetry, Politics, Performance 1. Rhetoric and Ideology in Grassroots Memorials and Official Monuments 2. Circulation and Performance in Memorial and Media Sites 3. Archives and Grassroots Anthologies: Preservation, Social Action, and Affect Part 2: Poets, Cultural Politics, and Crisis 4. Body, Affect, Flesh 5. Pixel, Bar Code, Algorithm Conclusions Notes Works Cited Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight. 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin's book illuminates the development of containerizationincluding design history, standardization, aesthetics, and a surprising speculative discussion of the futurity of shipping containers.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewCraig Martin has brought real love and insight to the logistical life of the shipping container. He reveals its role in the distributive space of extensive global networks and other dark places and their knotty politics, without ever losing track of our personal attachment and alienation to this box of ubiquity, this vessel of choreographed capitalism. Shipping Container is an efficient little package, calculating, brisk, economical, and yet, it is anything but a standardized account; it just sings. * Peter Adey, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK *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. Shipping Container by Craig Martin asks us to contemplate an object on which we depend to move 90 percent of what goes from point A to points B through Z on the globe, but also with which very few of us have had direct contact. 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 *Shipping Container discusses in detail the mechanics of this object. It broadens this out to reflect on the significance of design and the efficiencies of standardization. Verdict: Borrow. Shipping Container is impressive in the way it manages to spin an apparently dull object into intelligent and interesting explanations of design and commerce. * Book Riot *Table of Contents1. Introduction: Packaging Stuff 2. 20 x 40 x 8 feet: Design and Development of a Global Object 3. Twist Lock: Global Object of Capitalism 4. Breaking the Seal: Illicit Lives of the Container 5. Four Walls: Container Afterlives: 6. Conclusion: Global Object to Come Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Jonathan Maskit takes us on an interdisciplinary ride to see what makes the bicycle a magical machine that could yet make the world a safer, greener, and more just place.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewIn his insightful contribution to the Object Lessons series, Jonathan Maskit dives deep into this great yet humble human invention and its role in transportation. After reading Bicycle, you’ll never think of cycling the same way again * Sanna Lehtinen, Research Fellow, School of Arts, Design, and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland *Table of ContentsList of Figures 1. A Tale of Two Cyborgs 2. A Brief History 3. The Magical Machine 4. The Death Machine 5. What Does It Mean to Share the Road? 6. Right of Way 7. Bicycle Diaries 8. Motorism and Motorists 9. The Visible and the Invisible 10. Ghost Bikes 11. Idaho Stop 12. Space 13. History Repeats Itself 15. Dark Clouds, Silver Linings Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have been replacing and improving upon the real thing for millennia from wooden toes found on Egyptian mummies to the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. So why do people have such disdain for so-called fakes? Kati Stevens''s Fake discusses the strange history of imitations, as well as our ever-changing psychological and socioeconomic relationships with them. After all, fakes aren''t going anywhere; they seem to be going everywhere. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFake aims to interrogate what it is we think we’re getting from the ‘real’ thing and what we’re searching for either by clamoring for ‘real’ things or by accepting their imitation … If you revel in the critical examination of objects around you and criticism of commonly accepted attitudes, this book will be your new friend. * Seattle Book Review *Fake is fascinating, clever, and utterly perspective-altering. Kati Stevens is the genuine article. * Emily Anthes, author of Frankenstein’s Cat (2013) *Table of Contents1. The Start of Something Fake 2. That Which Is Fake May Never Die 3. Quorn for Lunch; Oreos for Dessert 4. What Was Never Real Can(not) Be Faked 5. Hippopotamus Teeth 6. Davids 7. Ovid and the Real Girl 8. The Start of Something Fake, Part 2 Acknowledgments Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisClaire Moran is Senior Lecturer in French, Queen's University Belfast, UK.Trade ReviewThis volume contributes remarkably to the field of research on domestic space. It is an essential contribution to the discussion of spatiality of France and Belgium through its innovative and multidisciplinary themes and approaches. -- Camilla Murgia * Modern Language Review *This brilliant and impressively edited anthology encompasses an eloquent analysis of how literature and art reflected the transience in domestic interiors. The chapters of this absorbing and revealing book portray domesticity as a main narrative via the distinctive contributions by the valuable eminent scholars in the field. -- Esra Bici Nasir * Journal of Design History *Table of ContentsList of Plates List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Cultures of Domestic Space in the Nineteenth Century Claire Moran 1. ‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’: The Emergence of the Modern Interior in the Visual Culture of the July Monarchy Matteo Piccioni 2. Shattered Spaces: The Domestic Interior in Nineteenth-Century French Literature Anne Green 3. Art and Domestic Space: Continuity and Change in Private Collectors’ Interiors in Belgium, c. 1830-1930 Ulrike Müller and Marjan Sterckx 4. Inside/Out: Modernity and the Domestic Interior in Belgian Art and Literature Claire Moran 5. A Place to Grieve: Georges Rodenbach, Marcel Proust Nathalie Aubert 6. ‘Cromedeyre tout entier est une seule maison.’ The Domestic Interior in Jules Romains’ Cromedeyre-le-vieil Dominique Bauer 7. Impressionist Interiors and Modern Womanhood: The representation of domestic space in the art of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt Sinéad Furlong-Clancy 8. Bricolage and the domestic interior in the French feminine press of the 1860s and 1870s, from La Ménagère to Stéphane Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode Caroline Ardrey 9. The Bourgeois, their Homes and Sexualities in Colette’s Claudine Aina Marti 10. Missing Affinities? Brussels Art Nouveau and Belgian Symbolism Aniel Guxholli 11. Villa Khnopff: The Home of an Artist and the Palace of Art Maria Golovteeva 12. The Bedroom as Metonymic Portrait: Ekphrasis, Balzac and Impressionism in the Nineteenth Century Jill Owen 13. Private Rooms of the Cubist Still Life Anna Jozefacka Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's Office narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy. During the post-war decades of the 20th century, the office rose to prominence in culture, achieving an iconic status that is reflected in television, film, literature, and throughout the history of advertising. Most people are well versed in the clichés of office culture, despite evidence that an increasing number of us no longer work in offices. With the development of computing technology in the 1980s and 90s, the office underwent many changes. Microsoft debuted its suite of multitasking applications known as Microsoft Office in 1989, firing the first shot in the war for the office's survival. This book therefore poses the question: how did culture become organized aTrade ReviewWhile most of us are all too familiar with the computer screens and supply closets of our own offices, Sheila Liming reintroduces us — through literature, film, television, historical research, and personal memoir — to those other bureaucratic objects that define the office as a distinctive environment: from office plants and office parties to typing pools and networking clubs. In sparkling and witty prose, Liming diagrams the office’s anatomy and social ecology as it has evolved from the mid-19th century to today — and as we reassess its relevance in a future defined by freelancing and social distancing. * Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology, The New School, USA, and author of Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media *Office is a feat of delightful prose and a suite of engrossing stories: a mini history of labor, architecture, and pop culture; a stirring analysis of social hierarchies; a smart study of physical spaces that is also a necessary critique of economic ideology. Liming’s lithe book is unputdownable! * Anna Kornbluh, Associate Head and Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA, and author of Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury, 2019) *The author draws on both literature and personal experience to make an accessible and thought-provoking read that in effect poses the question: How did culture become organised around the idea of the office, and how will it change? * Work & Place *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Office as Space 2. The Office as Stockpile 3. The Office as Hierarchy 4. The End of the Office Acknowledgments Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisMark Ledbury is Power Professor of Art History & Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of James Northcote, History Painting, and the Fables (2014) and Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of Genre (2000). He is also the editor of three books, including Fictions of Art History (2013).Robert Wellington is Senior Lecturer in Art History & Art Theory at the Australian National University, Australia. He is an art historian with a special interest in the role of material culture in history making and cross-cultural exchange at the Court of Louis XIV. Prior to receiving a PhD in Art History from the University of Sydney, he has ten years' experience in various roles in the contemporary arts sector. He is the Book Placement Editor for Early Modern Art History Studies (1500-1800) for H-France, and on the advisory board for Bloomsbury's Material Culture of Art & Design book series. HTrade ReviewVersailles has come to connote not just a physical space but also the model of court society and an enduring cultural myth. This flexibility of associations is captured in the subtitle to this imaginative edited volume: ‘objects, lives, and afterlives’. * French Studies *With its emphasis on artistic process and collaboration, as well as on questions of race and gender, The Versailles Effect rewrites our understanding of Versailles as both a real and imagined place, from its construction in the seventeenth century to its reverberations in contemporary culture. Its lucidly written essays by leading scholars in the field are an indispensable resource for understanding the Château and its global artistic and political networks. * Amy Freund, Kleinheinz Family Endowment for the Arts & Education Endowed Chair of Art History and Associate Professor, Southern Methodist University, USA *This splendid anthology will fascinate all students of Versailles and Court culture more generally. By revealing new facets (and inhabitants) of an ostensibly familiar site, it opens fresh vistas on the role of visual and material culture in the palace’s enduring life. * Jeffrey Collins, Professor of Art History & Material Culture, Bard Graduate Center, USA *The refreshingly original and broad-ranging essays assembled in this volume eloquently demonstrate that Versailles was so much more than the magnificent palace of the Sun King. It was a domain, physical, cultural, artistic, political; an experience, and an idea, whose power, meanings, and effects still resonate today. * Melissa Hyde, Professor of Art History and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, University of Florida, USA *Table of ContentsEnduring Versailles Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia and Mark Ledbury, University of Sydney, Australia PART ONE: MAKING THE PALACE 1. The Other Palace: Versailles & the Louvre, Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University, UK) 2. The grands décors of Charles Le Brun: between plan and serendipity, Bénédicte Gady (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, France) 3. Artisans du roi: Collaboration at the Gobelins, Louvre and the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture under the Influence of the Petite Académie, Florian Knothe (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) 4. Rough Surfaces: Etching Louis XIV’s Grotto at Versailles, Louis Marchesano (Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA) PART TWO: VERSAILLES LIFE 5. Porcelain and Power: The Meaning of Sèvres Porcelain in ancien regime France, Matthew Martin (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia) 6. Hair, Politics, and Power at the Court of Versailles, Kimberly Chrisman Campbell (Independent scholar, USA) 7. The Politics of Attachment: Visualizing Young Louis XV and his Governess, Mimi Hellman (Skidmore College, USA) 8. Courting favour: the apartments of the princesse de Lamballe at Versailles, 1767-1789, Sarah Grant (Victoria and Albert Museum, UK) PART THREE: OUTSIDERS 9. Enslaved Muslims at the Sun King’s Court, Meredith Martin (New York University, USA) and Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University, USA) 10. A Turk in the Hall of Mirrors, David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) 11. Cornelis Hop (1685-1762), Dutch Ambassador to the Court of Louis XV, Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA) VERSAILLES NOW 12. Melancholy, Nostalgia, Dreams: Adventures in the Grand Cimetière Magique, Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney, Australia) 13. American Versailles: from the Gilded Age to Generation Wealth, Robert Wellington (Australian National University, Australia) Bibliography List of Contributors Index

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisNew Directions in Print Culture Studies features new methods and approaches to cultural and literary history that draw on periodicals, print culture, and material culture, thus revising and rewriting what we think we know about the aesthetic, cultural, and social history of transnational America. The unifying questions posed and answered in this book are methodological: How can we make material, archival objects meaningful? How can we engage and contest dominant conceptions of aesthetic, historical, and literary periods? How can we present archival material in ways that make it accessible to other scholars and students? What theoretical commitments does a focus on material objects entail? New Directions in Print Culture Studies brings together leading scholars to address the methodological, historical, and theoretical commitments that emerge from studying how periodicals, books, images, and ideas circulated from the 19th century to the present. Reaching beyond national boTrade ReviewNew Directions in Print Culture Studies delivers on the promise to make its reader see the field anew. This volume's illuminating case studies are deeply researched and theoretically sophisticated, intellectually honest and, at moments, delightfully weird. A wonderful overview for seasoned and curious scholars alike. * Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham University, USA *This rich collection both argues for and amply demonstrates the centrality of print culture to scholarship and pedagogy in the 21st century. In this volume, Schwartz and Worden give us an edgily political, unabashedly nerdy, and theoretically capacious conception of what print culture studies is and can be. The engaging and provocative essays found therein take up objects of inquiry from cartes de visites to bullet journals, from story papers to multimodal websites. They consider capitalism and counterpublics, comics and collections, sound and medium, celebrity and canonicity, multilingualism and hemispheric studies, pedagogy and activism. The clarity and precision of the chapters make this collection classroom-ready. These provocations will also serve as inspirations and entry points for scholars in the field hungry for just such an invitation to connect the print artifacts of the past in all their formal and material specificity to the urgent matters of the present. These “new directions” are awfully fun to explore. * Catherine Keyser, Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA *An indispensable guide, New Directions in Print Culture Studies gathers 16 case studies that feature inventive enactments of and critical reflections on the methodologies that have enabled this radically interdisciplinary mode of analysis to transform scholarly production across the humanities and social sciences. * Donald E. Pease, Ted & Helen Geisel Professor of the Humanities, Dartmouth College, USA *Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (Jesse W. Schwartz, LaGuardia Community College, USA, and Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA) I. Print Culture's Past and Presents 1. Story-Paper Origins in the US: The Unknown Public and The New York Ledger (Ayendy Bonifacio, University of Toledo, USA) 2. “And They Think A Strike Is War”: John Reed, Metropolitan Magazine, and Radical Seriality Against the Editors (Jesse W. Schwartz, LaGuardia Community College, USA) 3. Laying the Type of Revolution: Historicizing US Feminism in and through Print Culture (Agatha Beins, Texas Woman’s University, USA) 4. The Instant Classic in the Age of Digital Print Culture: Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille (Gary Edward Holcomb, Ohio University, USA) 5. The Real Productivity: Creative Refusal and Cultish Tendencies in Online Print Journal Communities (Michelle Chihara, Whittier College, USA) II. Archives, Exhibits, Images, and Sounds of Print Culture 6. Hold Still: "Redeemed" and Coming Undone (Monica Huerta, Princeton University, USA) 7. Engraving Class: Gender, Race, and the Pictorial Politics of the 1877 General Strike (Justin Rogers-Cooper, LaGuardia Community College, USA) 8. Sounding: Black Print Culture at the Edges of the Black Atlantic (Kristin Moriah, Queen’s University, Canada) 9. “A Traveling Exhibition”: Magazines and the Display and Circulation of Art in the Americas (Lori Cole, New York University, USA) 10. Comics in the Archive: Approaches to the April 1956 Newsstand (Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA, and Rebekah Walker) 11. Icons and Archives: James Baldwin and the Practice of Celebrity (Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Harvard University, USA) III. Print Culture Studies in Practice 12. Reimagining Literary History and Why It Matters Now (Kelley Kreitz, Pace University, USA) 13. Anthologizing Alternatives: June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara’s Publishing Pedagogies (Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland, USA) 14. Hybrid Scholarly Publishing Models in a Digital Age (Krystyna Michael, The CUNY Graduate Center, USA, Jojo Karlin, The CUNY Graduate Center, USA, and Matthew K. Gold, The CUNY Graduate Center, USA) Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive bottle of perfume at a high-end department store. Perhaps it reminds us of our favorite aunt. A memory in a bottle is a powerful thing. Megan Volpert''s Perfume carefully balances the artistry with the science of perfume. The science takes us into the neurology of scent receptors, how taste is mostly smell, the biology of illnesses that impact scent sense, and the chemistry of making and copying perfume. The artistry of perfume involves the five scent families and symbolism, subjectivity in perfume preference, perfume marketing strategies, iconic scents and perfumers, why the industry is so secretive, and Volpert''s own experiments with making perfume. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic<Trade ReviewFascinating. * Zoomer *Perfume is an enthusiastic exploration worthy of its complex subject, pointing to mysteries related to the art and science of fragrance and welcoming newcomers to revel in them — with the understanding that some may never be solved. * Elizabeth Barrial, Founder and Head Perfumer, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab *A well-researched delight. * Glam Adelaide *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Science 2. Literature 3. Space 4. Time 5. Technology 6. Performance 7. Self 8. Other Selected Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisA unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history. - Publisher's WeeklyA book that sticks with you long after you've read it. Volume 1 BrooklynHoke's writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth keeping. Southern Review of BooksI will never forget this book. - T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless GirlsFunny, nostalgic, and weird in the best possible way. - Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My MonticelloFeatured in Electric Lit's The Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2022Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Stickers adorn our first memories, dot our notebooks and our walls, are stuck annoyingly on fruit, and accompany us into adulthood to announce our beliefs from car bumpers. They hold surprising power in their ability to define and provoke, and hold a stranTrade ReviewHoke (The Groundhog Forever) offers up an evocative reflection on queerness, race, and his hometown of Charlottesville, Va., in this conceptual 'memoir in 20 stickers.' .” Part of Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, his book uses the humble sticker as a metaphorical linchpin for a series of essays that [offer] a unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history. * Publishers Weekly *We’re not entirely objective here, but we’re quite fond of the Object Lessons series — and Henry Hoke’s contribution might boast the most striking cover design the series has had to date. Hoke’s book uses stickers to chronicle everything from queer identity to the recent history of Charlottesville, Virginia — all of which should make this a book that sticks with you long after you’ve read it. (Pun intended, oh yes.) * Volume 1 Brooklyn *Hoke’s keenly constructed memoir-in-essays is really a memoir-in-stickers, from the glow-in-the-dark stars and coveted Lisa Frank unicorns of childhood to a Pixies decal from his teenage years. The book also peels back the complicated notoriety of the author’s hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, juxtaposing Dave Matthews’ fire dancer emblem against a truck emblazoned with the words “Are You Triggered?” on its back window heralding the infamous white supremacist march. * Electric Lit *Sticker is a trove of Millennial nostalgia. Its uniqueness lies not only in Hoke’s unabashed storytelling but also in its critical analysis of American current events and its brutal honesty about a city rooted in racism. In Sticker, Hoke’s Charlottesville morphs into a scrapbook, one where Hoke places many of the literal and metaphorical stickers significant to his past and his identity, one in which America memorializes some of its questionable, inhumane history and many of its darkest days. Possessing the evocative power of Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland, Hoke’s writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth keeping. -- Nicole Yurcaba * Southern Review of Books *Funny, nostalgic, and weird in the best possible way, Henry Hoke's Sticker weaves evocative personal moments with hometown lore and racial reckoning, all while making you want to dig up your old-school sticker collection—the puffy, the glowy, especially the scratch and sniff. * Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello *Henry Hoke examines gender, sexuality, music, and the depths of humanity with exuberant whimsy and charm. Sticker pulses with ghost stories, lamplit streets and pine, boyhood, blood. Startlingly original and gorgeously rendered, I will never forget this book. * T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls *Table of ContentsMr. Yuk Unicorn Wahoowa Gold Star Constellation Chiquita Reinforcer Proud Parent Parental Advisory Explicit Content Rotunda Anarchy Blueberry Death to the Pixies Pink Circle Heart Fire Dancer Be Nice to Me I Gave Blood Today Are You Triggered? Hail Satan HH Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAdopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and profound ways.Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic, informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles, trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs, and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov, Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material culture. Nabokov's writings are analyzed against a broad context of prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the poetics of urbanism in literature. Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibranTrade ReviewLeving has ‘broken the mould’ of Nabokov scholarship. He gives us a dynamic Nabokov who embraced modernity rather than hid from it. The visual richness of this book is stunning; it is both the highest form of scholarship and a kind of pedagogic aid to the experience of travel in Russian modernity. * Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and author of Nabokov, Perversely *What emerges through an accumulation of a very great number of facts and examples in Nabokov in Motion is a feeling that one has almost visited the world of the early 1900s and felt firsthand the thrill of contemplating the final glory of rail travel and the arrival of automobiles and airplanes as the transportation of the future. Yuri Leving does an excellent job of subjecting bygone days to philological science while completely avoiding the all-too-common structuralist flaw of stripping the old world of all of its charm. Here, charm is ever-present. * Stephen H. Blackwell, former president of the International Nabokov Society and the co-editor of Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art *This book is absolutely brilliant. The entire Russian literature of the early 20th century (including the nearly forgotten authors) is analyzed in the context of symbols of urbanization and new industrial aesthetics. Masterly layering associations, intersections of images, and plots, Leving convincingly demonstrates Russian literature as a single metatext. * Alexandra Selivanova, Director of the Avant-Guard Center Museum, Moscow, Russia *Table of Contents1. Chaos and Order On the Poetics of Urbanism Bodies and Texts From Chaos to Order The Urban Infrastructure, or “What Lies Beneath the Asphalt of the Text?” The Resurrection of Electricity Buildings, Stairs, Elevators The Life of Things The Telephone: A Conduit to the Other World The Street Advertisement The Shop Window of Metatexts 2. The Train as a New Locus of Myth Creation in Literature The Topos of the Beginning The Railroad as a Metaliterary Device The Railroad Metaphor Childhood and the Locomotive: A Model of the World Toys and Reasons The Station/Depot The Hierarchy of Classes The Existential Nature of the Journey by Rail The Killing Power of the Train and Engine The Train Wreck Conductor to Immortality The Mythology of the Train The Esoteric Language of Trains Train. Love. Fate The Boredom of the Road An Erotic Encounter Violence and the Railroad The Poetics of Description Personification and Animation Cliches: Russians and the Railroad On the Road and Longing for Russia Nabokov and Tsvetaeva: Synoptic Chart of a Dialog The Beckoning Distance Telegraph Poles The View from the Train Window The Underground 3. The Automobile in the Works of Nabokov: The Semantics of Driving and the Metaliterary Process Auto vs. Train The Ride to School The Nabokovs’ American Cars Driving Experience The Model Car controls (a Novel on Wheels) “Crossroads of Life”: The Symbolism of Driving Worlds Unknown to Each Other Metaphysics of the Garage The Route Through the Text The Automobile in the Landscape Vehicular Mimicry Sex in a Car An Incident on the Street Forewarnings The Car Accident Death of the Hero The Furniture Truck 4. Symbolism of the Airplane: Breakthrough to Another Dimension The Airplane Schematic Flight in the Russian Periodical Press in the 1910s “And the Steel Bird Will Fly”: The Airplane in Russian Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century The Magic of Names Insects, Birds, and Fish On the Genesis and Context of Nabokov’s Poem, “The Airplane” The Music of Flight Flight and Performance The Aesthetics of Public Death Death of the Pilot War in the Air The Futurist Thesaurus Overcoming Gravity: Hymn to the Airplane Flights, Dreaming, and Waking The Last Station Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the...Trade ReviewWaste makes an outsized contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history will be essential reading for students of modern Japan as well as our current era more broadly. * The Journal of Asian Studies *Siniawer's book is a moving and meaningful cultural history relevant to Critical Discard Studies, rooted in the specific time and place of postwar Japan, and extends to the twenty-first century. * Situations *Eiko Maruko Siniawer's study of waste in postwar Japan is history writing at its very best: expansive in scope, richly textured, compellingly narrated, and convincingly argued. This summary hardly does justice to the richness of the material discussed in the book, nor does it fully convey Siniawer's thought-provoking analysis throughout. Thanks to its breadth, the richness of its content, and the sophistication of its analysis, the book will be essential and compelling reading for anyone interested in the postwar history of Japan as well as notions of waste in the contemporary world. * Social Science Japan Journal *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Meaning and Value in the Everyday Part One: Re-Civilization and Re-Enlightenment: Transitions of the Early Postwar Period, 1945-1971 1. The Imperatives of Waste 2. Better Living through Consumption Part Two: Shocks, Shifts, and Safeguards: Defending the Middle-Class Lifestyles, 1971-1981 3. Wars against Waste 4. A Bright Stinginess Part Three: Abundant Dualities: Wealth and its Discontents in the 1980s and Beyond 5. Consuming Desires 6. Living the Good Life? 7. Battling the Time Thieves Part Four: Affluence of the Heart: Identities and Values in the Slow-Growth Era, 1991-Present 8. Greening Consciousness 9. We Are All Waste Conscious Now 10. Sorting Things Out Afterword: Waste and Well-Being Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of thingsfrom spoons to tanksto show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians.Through a fascinating examination...Trade ReviewWith this original approach—in itself an amazing achievement given the immense literature in this historical field—Brandon Schechteruses the material culture of the Red Army to trace the makeover of Soviet life and politics brought about by the war. * Foreign Affairs *The Stuff of Soldiers is a well-written, wide-ranging, novel approach for understanding the social and military history of the Soviet Army. [It] is an excellent addition to the historiography of the Great Patriotic War and to the general study of how material culture can reflect how soldiers and their societies have experienced war throughout time. * Journal of Military History *The Stuff of Soldiers has much to offer those with an affinity for cultural history studied through objects and for others who want a basic introduction to the quotidian of the Red Army during the Second World War... it takes the reader into the daily life of the Soviet soldier during the war in a way that no other work in the field does. * The Russian Review *Few, if any, thinkers have sought to view [the materiality of the human being] through the prism of an army, its weaponry, the environment it shaped and the objects its soldiers used, cherished or robbed. Brandon M. Schechter is the first to embark upon this intellectual adventure. * The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies *This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Soviet history and World War II but also to everyone interested in the experience of life during wartime. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *Schechter's ability to analyze the everyday minutiae of soldiers' lives to tell both personal stories of what it meant to be a member of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War with careful attention placed on differing perspectives based on class, gender, and nationality, and a broader narrative of state-directed (if not always followed) social transformation is inspiring. * Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia *Given the author's lively and accessible style this is surely a work that will reach an audience outside of academia, while the deeply-researched and insightful content equally makes it an invaluable addition to scholars of both the Soviet Union and those interested more broadly in the history and legacies of the Second World War. * British Journal for Military History *A beautifully written, sweeping and nuanced history of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War through the lens of objects and material culture. The Stuff of Soldiers is not only a major contribution to the history of the war; it is also a stimulating attempt to overcome disciplinary boundaries and long-lasting debates about the Soviet project through an ethnographic focus on objects and practices of everyday life. * Cahiers du monde russe *Schechter elegantly intertwines individual stories, context, and analysis taking the reader to the most intimate parts of soldiers' everyday lives. The interested audience of this work will be very large, spanning individuals interested in military history broadly defined, in the history of the Soviet Union, and in material culture. * Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (JSPPS) *Brandon Schechter has written a tour-de-force volume that presents an innovative approach to the history of the Second World War in the Soviet Union. [O]ne of the main contributions of this work is Schechter's success in offering a new and fresh analysis of these sources from the perspective of material culture. * English Historical Review *Table of ContentsPrelude: Outgunned and Outmanned Acknowledgments List of Archival Sources and Their Abbreviations Terms and Abbreviations Explanatory Notes Introduction: Government Issue 1. The Soldier's Body: A Little Cog in a Giant War Machine 2. A Personal Banner: Life in Red Army Uniform 3. The State's Pot and the Soldier's Spoon: Rations in the Red Army 4. Cities of Earth, Cities of Rubble: The Spade and Red Army Landscaping 5. "A Weapon Is Your Honor and Conscience": Killing in the Red Army 6. The Thing-Bag: A Public-Private Place 7. Trophies of War: Red Army Soldiers Confront an Alien World of Goods Conclusion: Subjects and Objects Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this age of globalization, many countries and U.S. states are worried about the tax flight of the rich. As income inequality grows and U.S. states consider raising taxes on their wealthiest residents, there is a palpable concern that these high rollers will board their private jets and fly away, taking their wealth with them. Many assume that the importance of location to a person's success is at an all-time low. Cristobal Young, however, makes the surprising argument that location is very important to the world's richest people. Frequently, he says, place has a great deal to do with how they make their millions. In The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight, Young examines a trove of data on millionaires and billionaires—confidential tax returns, Forbes lists, and census records—and distills down surprising insights. While economic elites have the resources and capacity to flee high-tax places, their actual migration is surprisingly limited. For the rich, ongoing economic potential is tied to the place where they become successful—often where they are powerful insiders—and that success ultimately diminishes both the incentive and desire to migrate. This important book debunks a powerful idea that has driven fiscal policy for years, and in doing so it clears the way for a new era. Millionaire taxes, Young argues, could give states the funds to pay for infrastructure, education, and other social programs to attract a group of people who are much more mobile—the younger generation.Trade Review"Young debunks the widely-held myth that raising taxes on the wealthy inevitably prompts their out-migration and ultimately reduces tax revenue. His sophisticated analysis convincingly demonstrates the opposite. This is a tour-de-force that should be read by policymakers and taxpayers everywhere." -- Douglas S. Massey * Princeton University *"While the rich become richer, state governments strain to fund critical services. Young shows states can tap rich citizens' resources to bolster state government and enhance the common good. With grace, sophistication, and unprecedented data, this important book feeds public debates on inequality, public policy, and the health of American democracy." -- Martin Gilens * author of Affluence and Influence *"Whether taxing millionaires will cause them to flee is an important policy issue dominated by unsupported rhetoric. This clearly written and carefully researched book sheds new light on the question by looking soberly at the facts while exposing popular views as myths." -- Joel Slemrod * University of Michigan *"Young reveals the extent to which much political rhetoric around taxes and the rich rests on unfounded anecdotal assumptions. [The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight] is an important book which contributes much to political and economic sociology, as well as the growing field of fiscal sociology. It is written in a non-technical prose, making it also accessible for policymakers and non-scholarly audiences alike. In a moment of increasing inequality and near permanent austerity, Young's analysis will hopefully inspire more research on the wealthy and taxes." -- Daniel R. Alvord, Social ForcesTable of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Millionaire Taxes in a World with Few Borders chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the central questions of the book. In the age of globalization, what is the connection between the rich and the places where they live? Is place a temporary convenience for the rich and powerful—readily switched out when the tides change? Or is place a deep foundation for their success? Are top income earners mobile millionaires searching for low-tax places to live, or are they embedded elites reluctant to move away from the places where they have become highly successful? This chapter also introduces the main empirical data for the book—big administrative data from the tax returns of U.S. millionaire income earners over more than a decade. Finally, the structure and organization of the book is summarized. 2Do the Rich Flee High Taxes? chapter abstractThis chapter explores the empirical evidence for the mobile millionaires versus embedded elites debate. Drawing on the tax returns of U.S. millionaires, this chapter focuses on these questions: To what extent do top income earners migrate away from places with high income taxes? Are millionaires especially concentrated in low-tax states? Do they tend to move from high-tax to low-tax states? What about along the narrow geographic borders of states? In border county regions, do the rich tend to cluster on the low-tax side of the border? This chapter also moves higher up the food chain to look at the location and migration of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. Finally, the chapter examines the social demography of the rich: considering how their family and business responsibilities, as well as their age and education levels, can help explain their overall migration patterns. 3Global Billionaires and International Tax Havens chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the global migration of the world's elites, as well as the use of tax havens that allow the rich to move their money abroad. First, the world's billionaires offer an international look at the mobile millionaire thesis. How often do billionaires move to low-tax countries? Are billionaires a transnational capitalist class? Or do they just live in the country where they were born? The analyses here give a clear view into the geographic mobility of the richest people in the world. The second half of the chapter continues the global focus by examining international tax havens. Rather than moving themselves, can the rich achieve tax savings by moving their money into offshore shell companies? The chapter examines how the offshore economy works and what shell companies and tax havens can and cannot do. It also explores which countries are more likely to use offshore accounts. 4Place as a Form of Capital chapter abstractThis chapter explores why place is still important for the rich. The income of the rich depends in part on where they live. Peak performance does not necessarily travel with the individual when the person moves away. Top incomes are sustained not simply through individual brilliance and hard work, but also through collaborative relationships and social networks that depend on being in a shared place. People at the top are deeply embedded insiders who earn economic rewards because their social networks place them close to the action. Top income earners have accumulated much home-field advantage that would be diluted by moving away. It is important to disentangle the idea of travel, which often signifies wealth and status, from the idea of migration, which is often less glamorous—reflecting hardship or entry-level status. The chapter concludes with case studies of open borders in Europe and the United States. 5Millionaires and the Future of Taxation chapter abstractThis chapter revisits the central findings of the book and develops the conceptual and policy implications. How should states set their tax policies? What are the benefits and costs for states that have high income taxes on the rich? The chapter emphasizes that states have little ability to attract the highest income earners, but they can attract a pipeline of future high income earners. These are young professionals—those not yet established in their careers; they are the most mobile individuals, they still have relatively low incomes, and they will not be paying top-bracket tax rates for many years. Progressive taxes are paid by people with late-career success. The revenues pay for education, infrastructure, and services that are most attractive to young, early-career individuals. In this sense, millionaire taxes are an intergenerational transfer.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLooking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary social interactions, The Moral Power of Money investigates the forces of power and morality at play, particularly among the poor. Drawing on fieldwork in a slum of Buenos Aires, Ariel Wilkis argues that money is a critical symbol used to negotiate not only material possessions, but also the political, economic, class, gender, and generational bonds between people. Through vivid accounts of the stark realities of life in Villa Olimpia, Wilkis highlights the interplay of money, morality, and power. Drawing out the theoretical implications of these stories, he proposes a new concept of moral capital based on different kinds, or "pieces," of money. Each chapter covers a different "piece"—money earned from the informal and illegal economies, money lent through family and market relations, money donated with conditional cash transfers, political money that binds politicians and their supporters, sacrificed money offered to the church, and safeguarded money used to support people facing hardships. This book builds an original theory of the moral sociology of money, providing the tools for understanding the role money plays in social life today.Trade Review"Wilkis set out to study the power and politics in greater Buenos Aires, but what he discovered was money: money's morality, variegation, and fragmentation. This remarkable ethnography opens a window into everyday popular politics and solidarities, offering lessons beyond the case of Argentina and into people's moneyworlds and moral orders more broadly." -- Bill Maurer * author of How Would You Like To Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money *"Thanks to Ariel Wilkis for bringing compelling insight into our understanding of how money really works. Gracefully blending theoretical analysis with fascinating ethnographic observation, The Moral Power of Money makes a stellar contribution to economic and cultural sociology. A book that will inspire researchers and fascinate general readers." -- Viviana A. Zelizer * Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, author of The Social Meaning of Money and Economic Lives *"Ariel Wilkis offers a richly detailed ethnographic exploration of all the different and co-existing ethical frames within which money is judged by the poor, and on 'how money connects them.' We hear many people's own moral language, in their own life situations. These accounts will provoke yet further research in many other places, and Wilkis's approach will become exemplary." -- Jane I. Guyer * Johns Hopkins University *"The primary material makes the book an engaging read. One of the effects of looking at the various pieces of money important to villeros is that it gives us a better understanding of how interdependent they are in real life, and how individuals and families strategize. The attention to family is welcome and helps highlight relations of cooperation, power, and hierarchy on the ground; not just between poor communities and the larger society, but also within these homes and communities....The book will be of interest in the fields of international development, sociology, and anthropology....The book will be of interest to scholars of Argentina, money, the urban poor, and grass roots politics. It is suitable both for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses." * Lindsay DuBois *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Money and Moral Capital chapter abstractMoney is an insightful way of understanding the relations between macro-social processes and the experiences of the poor. Understanding these dynamics helps to identify the current conditions for social integration among those who have the least to benefit from processes like globalization, financialization and neoliberalism. This book reveals that sociology is interested in the social realities money helps to shape. Money is morally ubiquitous because it has a hand in social orders, moral hierarchies and power relations. No piece of money is more moral than the next: all revolve around the efforts to establish, appropriate and accumulate moral capital. Money appears as a conceptual and methodological tool. This book offers a new focus for interpreting the multiple power relations that configure the world of the poor. The moral dimension of money plays a critical role in forging economic, class, political, gender and generational bonds. 1Lent Money chapter abstractBy examining how consumer credit began expanding to low-income sectors in 2003, this chapter unveils the moral hierarchies rooted in the circulation of lent money. This chapter shows the moral ubiquity of money lent in heterogeneous situations, both formal and informal where money circulates. It also reveals how moral capital becomes a guarantee that sustains the power relations at the core of these situations. For those with scarce economic and cultural assets, the daily management of finances involves fighting to have their values acknowledged. Moral capital is their passport. However, like all forms of acknowledgment, it is rare and thus can become a form of domination that some are forced to accept in order to access the material benefits capitalism has to offer. 2Earned Money chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes how the underground economy operates as a moral space of income. This exploration will reveal the dynamics of questioning and legitimizing what has to be done to earn money. The concept of moral capital is a useful instrument for understanding how this piece circulates or is taken out of circulation in response to a moral assessment of people's actions. Having moral capital is the way in to these economic transactions that are not regulated by law. Informal and illegal markets are moral spaces where the legitimacy of money earned comes into play. To get involved in these transactions, moral hierarchies are established among participants and they are the also the prerequisites for successful participation. 3Donated Money chapter abstractConditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become the paradigm of the struggle against poverty. These programs have progressively expanded to around thirty countries in the region that has come to be known as the Global South. This expansion changed the household budgets of the poor and became a focus of public debate. The use of money donated by the State became a way to morally discredit the poor. This chapter reconstructed the place of money donated by the state in different hierarchies of money. It identifies the different strategies individuals use to elude the biases associated with this type of money such as stigma cleansing rituals, exclusion strategies and silence in response to such judgments. The reconstructed scenes show how monetary hierarchies uphold power relations among those who have the authority to judge and those who must acquiesce to such biases. 4Political Money chapter abstractThrough the processes of democratization in Argentina (and most of Latin America) that began at the beginning of the 1980s, political scientists and sociologists began examining money in political life through the financial of political parties and the political clientelism. This chapter goes beyond a narrative of money's instrumental use in politics. Has the monetization of political activities dissolved values, commitments, and loyalties among the poor? Is this corruption or an ethical exchange among people who lack cash but possess moral capital? This chapter explores how politics involves power relations that can be understood through the moral dimension of money. This chapter shows how residents of a slum made political money the accounting unit to acknowledge the fulfillment of political obligations that bind leaders and their followers together in relationships of power. To put it more succinctly, this community places political money at the core of its collective life. 5Sacrifice Money chapter abstractThis chapter narrates the competition between political and religious leaders of Villa Olimpia. It shows how these power struggles are rooted in the accumulation of moral capital associated with the pieces of money. Both religious and political networks create social distinctions among their members. While circulating, political and sacrificed money carry a series of social orders and hierarchies of money that often overlap. Each piece is indecipherable outside of the hierarchy of money and at the same time projects a social hierarchy. Between the two pieces, there is fiery competition for the range of objects and people involved. These two puzzle pieces, regulated by specific systems of feelings and perspectives, compete with one another. 6Safeguard Money chapter abstractThe pieces of money produce a hierarchy among family members to determine each family's ranking in the social order. The different pieces of money form a unit that allows us to observe and understand the family universe. On the one hand, they help us understand intergenerational relations. This piece of money shows how people create and recreate the family social order in the sphere of money, which involves both mutual assistance and conflicts, helping complete family projects or tearing them apart. On the other hand, they help us understand gender relations as well. Safeguarded money's circulation carries gendered obligations. Poor women are viewed positively when they safeguard their households both emotionally and economically. In the hands of women money had to be used to guarantee family continuity. Any other use of the money would be questionable, transforming the safeguarded money into suspicious money. Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThis book analyzes the way in which social orders founded on money come into being. Each chapter of this book contributes to a better understanding of the moral sociology of money, which in turn contributes to other areas of knowledge within sociology. These contributions from the moral sociology of money stem from an ethnographic reconstruction of the everyday life of poor people who live in Villa Olimpia. This work identified and assembled the pieces of money that best captured the dynamics of solidarity and conflict that characterized social bonds. However, this book takes the arguments, concepts and empirical evidence presented in the hope of reimagining economic sociology outside Villa Olimpia and the world of the poor. The moral sociology of money that is a theoretical and methodological toolbox that can be applied to other social worlds, establishing bridges with other areas of knowledge in sociology.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLooking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary social interactions, The Moral Power of Money investigates the forces of power and morality at play, particularly among the poor. Drawing on fieldwork in a slum of Buenos Aires, Ariel Wilkis argues that money is a critical symbol used to negotiate not only material possessions, but also the political, economic, class, gender, and generational bonds between people. Through vivid accounts of the stark realities of life in Villa Olimpia, Wilkis highlights the interplay of money, morality, and power. Drawing out the theoretical implications of these stories, he proposes a new concept of moral capital based on different kinds, or "pieces," of money. Each chapter covers a different "piece"—money earned from the informal and illegal economies, money lent through family and market relations, money donated with conditional cash transfers, political money that binds politicians and their supporters, sacrificed money offered to the church, and safeguarded money used to support people facing hardships. This book builds an original theory of the moral sociology of money, providing the tools for understanding the role money plays in social life today.Trade Review"Wilkis set out to study the power and politics in greater Buenos Aires, but what he discovered was money: money's morality, variegation, and fragmentation. This remarkable ethnography opens a window into everyday popular politics and solidarities, offering lessons beyond the case of Argentina and into people's moneyworlds and moral orders more broadly." -- Bill Maurer * author of How Would You Like To Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money *"Thanks to Ariel Wilkis for bringing compelling insight into our understanding of how money really works. Gracefully blending theoretical analysis with fascinating ethnographic observation, The Moral Power of Money makes a stellar contribution to economic and cultural sociology. A book that will inspire researchers and fascinate general readers." -- Viviana A. Zelizer * Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, author of The Social Meaning of Money and Economic Lives *"Ariel Wilkis offers a richly detailed ethnographic exploration of all the different and co-existing ethical frames within which money is judged by the poor, and on 'how money connects them.' We hear many people's own moral language, in their own life situations. These accounts will provoke yet further research in many other places, and Wilkis's approach will become exemplary." -- Jane I. Guyer * Johns Hopkins University *"The primary material makes the book an engaging read. One of the effects of looking at the various pieces of money important to villeros is that it gives us a better understanding of how interdependent they are in real life, and how individuals and families strategize. The attention to family is welcome and helps highlight relations of cooperation, power, and hierarchy on the ground; not just between poor communities and the larger society, but also within these homes and communities....The book will be of interest in the fields of international development, sociology, and anthropology....The book will be of interest to scholars of Argentina, money, the urban poor, and grass roots politics. It is suitable both for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses." * Lindsay DuBois *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Money and Moral Capital chapter abstractMoney is an insightful way of understanding the relations between macro-social processes and the experiences of the poor. Understanding these dynamics helps to identify the current conditions for social integration among those who have the least to benefit from processes like globalization, financialization and neoliberalism. This book reveals that sociology is interested in the social realities money helps to shape. Money is morally ubiquitous because it has a hand in social orders, moral hierarchies and power relations. No piece of money is more moral than the next: all revolve around the efforts to establish, appropriate and accumulate moral capital. Money appears as a conceptual and methodological tool. This book offers a new focus for interpreting the multiple power relations that configure the world of the poor. The moral dimension of money plays a critical role in forging economic, class, political, gender and generational bonds. 1Lent Money chapter abstractBy examining how consumer credit began expanding to low-income sectors in 2003, this chapter unveils the moral hierarchies rooted in the circulation of lent money. This chapter shows the moral ubiquity of money lent in heterogeneous situations, both formal and informal where money circulates. It also reveals how moral capital becomes a guarantee that sustains the power relations at the core of these situations. For those with scarce economic and cultural assets, the daily management of finances involves fighting to have their values acknowledged. Moral capital is their passport. However, like all forms of acknowledgment, it is rare and thus can become a form of domination that some are forced to accept in order to access the material benefits capitalism has to offer. 2Earned Money chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes how the underground economy operates as a moral space of income. This exploration will reveal the dynamics of questioning and legitimizing what has to be done to earn money. The concept of moral capital is a useful instrument for understanding how this piece circulates or is taken out of circulation in response to a moral assessment of people's actions. Having moral capital is the way in to these economic transactions that are not regulated by law. Informal and illegal markets are moral spaces where the legitimacy of money earned comes into play. To get involved in these transactions, moral hierarchies are established among participants and they are the also the prerequisites for successful participation. 3Donated Money chapter abstractConditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become the paradigm of the struggle against poverty. These programs have progressively expanded to around thirty countries in the region that has come to be known as the Global South. This expansion changed the household budgets of the poor and became a focus of public debate. The use of money donated by the State became a way to morally discredit the poor. This chapter reconstructed the place of money donated by the state in different hierarchies of money. It identifies the different strategies individuals use to elude the biases associated with this type of money such as stigma cleansing rituals, exclusion strategies and silence in response to such judgments. The reconstructed scenes show how monetary hierarchies uphold power relations among those who have the authority to judge and those who must acquiesce to such biases. 4Political Money chapter abstractThrough the processes of democratization in Argentina (and most of Latin America) that began at the beginning of the 1980s, political scientists and sociologists began examining money in political life through the financial of political parties and the political clientelism. This chapter goes beyond a narrative of money's instrumental use in politics. Has the monetization of political activities dissolved values, commitments, and loyalties among the poor? Is this corruption or an ethical exchange among people who lack cash but possess moral capital? This chapter explores how politics involves power relations that can be understood through the moral dimension of money. This chapter shows how residents of a slum made political money the accounting unit to acknowledge the fulfillment of political obligations that bind leaders and their followers together in relationships of power. To put it more succinctly, this community places political money at the core of its collective life. 5Sacrifice Money chapter abstractThis chapter narrates the competition between political and religious leaders of Villa Olimpia. It shows how these power struggles are rooted in the accumulation of moral capital associated with the pieces of money. Both religious and political networks create social distinctions among their members. While circulating, political and sacrificed money carry a series of social orders and hierarchies of money that often overlap. Each piece is indecipherable outside of the hierarchy of money and at the same time projects a social hierarchy. Between the two pieces, there is fiery competition for the range of objects and people involved. These two puzzle pieces, regulated by specific systems of feelings and perspectives, compete with one another. 6Safeguard Money chapter abstractThe pieces of money produce a hierarchy among family members to determine each family's ranking in the social order. The different pieces of money form a unit that allows us to observe and understand the family universe. On the one hand, they help us understand intergenerational relations. This piece of money shows how people create and recreate the family social order in the sphere of money, which involves both mutual assistance and conflicts, helping complete family projects or tearing them apart. On the other hand, they help us understand gender relations as well. Safeguarded money's circulation carries gendered obligations. Poor women are viewed positively when they safeguard their households both emotionally and economically. In the hands of women money had to be used to guarantee family continuity. Any other use of the money would be questionable, transforming the safeguarded money into suspicious money. Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThis book analyzes the way in which social orders founded on money come into being. Each chapter of this book contributes to a better understanding of the moral sociology of money, which in turn contributes to other areas of knowledge within sociology. These contributions from the moral sociology of money stem from an ethnographic reconstruction of the everyday life of poor people who live in Villa Olimpia. This work identified and assembled the pieces of money that best captured the dynamics of solidarity and conflict that characterized social bonds. However, this book takes the arguments, concepts and empirical evidence presented in the hope of reimagining economic sociology outside Villa Olimpia and the world of the poor. The moral sociology of money that is a theoretical and methodological toolbox that can be applied to other social worlds, establishing bridges with other areas of knowledge in sociology.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisEvery day we are inundated by propaganda that claims life will be better once we are connected to digital technology. Poverty, famine, and injustice will end, and the economy will be “green.” All anyone needs is the latest smartphone. In this succinct and lively book, Maxwell and Miller take a critical look at contemporary gadgets and the systems that connect them, shedding light on environmental risks. Contrary to widespread claims, consumer electronics and other digital technologies are made in ways that cause some of the worst environmental disasters of our time – conflict-minerals extraction, fatal and life-threatening occupational hazards, toxic pollution of ecosystems, rising energy consumption linked to increased carbon emissions, and e-waste. Nonetheless, a greener future is possible, in which technology meets its emancipatory and progressive potential. How Green is Your Smartphone? encourages us to look at our phones in a wholly new way, and is important reading for anyone concerned by the impact of everyday technologies on our environment.Trade Review“In this broad, informative, and surprisingly searing look into ‘smart’ systems, Maxwell and Miller make a compelling case for rethinking and redesigning digital technologies.”Devra Davis, author of Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation “Rigorously researched and acutely argued, this provocative book promises to take readers beyond their comfort zones, into the domain of environmental justice and sustainable development.”Jack Qiu, Chinese University of Hong Kong “How green is your phone? Encourage us to look at mobile phones from a new perspective, and also have important reference significance for thinking about the impact of daily life technology on the environment.”China Media Research “The strength of How Green Is Your Smartphone? is its critical examination of a wide range of issues generated through smartphone production and consumption. ... certainly left me thinking about the global impact generated by my own smartphone use.”Media International Australia “In How Green is your Smartphone?, the various issues around labour, environment and political economy are distilled clearly and concisely with a sharp focus. For teaching purposes, this is the book I have been waiting for. … In the spirit of a manifesto, Maxwell and Miller deploy snappy, no-nonsense language to alert us to the urgency of their call to action, namely the creation of a greener communication system.”PrometheusTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 Outsmart Your Smartphone 2 The Greatest Smartphone is the One You Already Own 3 Calling Bullshit on Anti-Science Propaganda Conclusion: What Next? References Index

Read more less

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

Read more less

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