Material culture Books

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Book SynopsisPeter Fine''s innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form. Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.Trade ReviewThis profound, arresting, and beautiful study makes us see things differently. Made for graphic designers and accessible to fascinated readers far beyond that field, it demonstrates how deeply influenced by embedded relationships of race and power that creative and commercial work in design has long been. The resulting familiarities with images of racial hierarchies become less so as we read, look, and come to view matters through the brilliant critiques provided by contemporary Black artists. -- David Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, USATo really understand how race shapes US culture past and present, we must get to grips with the ways it patterns everyday life. Peter Claver Fine demonstrates the centrality of race to US graphic design, and the ways in which the visual language of commercial culture remains a key site for the reproduction - and the contestation - of racism. The Design of Race will be of great value to students of design, fine art, and popular culture. -- Ben Pitcher, Reader in the Sociology of Race at the University of Westminster, UKFine’s book is a ground-breaking analysis of the power of graphic design and its culpability in the constructions of race in America. The Design of Race is a timely and well-researched work that eloquently unpacks the complexities of visual culture, racial identity and the affordances of race as a designed object for consumption. -- John Jennings, Critical race design scholar and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside, USATable of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface Introduction 1. Vestiges in Word and Image 2. Typography and Type 3. First Impressions: Lithography and the Packaging of Race 4. Photography by Design 5. Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time Conclusion

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

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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.

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

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Book 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

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Book SynopsisWhen Technocultures Collide provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. The adventures and exploits of computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, ""CrackBerry"" users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, chess geeks, and a range of losers and tinkerers feature prominently in this volume. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users.The author provides critical accounts of highly specialized attributes, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info-addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. Beyond resistance, however, the goal of this work is to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of small cultures, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of RIM's BlackBerry and Julian Assange's WikiLeaks website.Trade Review"Gary Genosko has written a book that is conceptually dense and exceptionally timely. 'When Technocultures Collide' deals with the most up-to-date subjects concerning technology, communication, and politics. Whoever wants to talk about these subjects must read it." -- Franco Bifo Berardi, author of 'After the Future' (2011) and 'The Uprising' (2012)"Gary Genosko remediates the technoculture of the '80s and '90s from below. In the process he takes the reader on a wild ride through hacking, phreaking, and other modes of political resistance to 21st-century digital hegemony, sometimes following a theoretical map drawn up by the likes of Félix Guattari and Bifo Berardi and other times going off-road to blaze his own autonomous trail." -- Richard Grusin, director, Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; author of 'Remediation: Understanding New Media' (with Jay David Bolter, 1999) and 'Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11' (2010)"Gary Genosko's new book is again a demonstration of his theoretical flair. From big toes to global media politics, whistling to WikiLeaks, his interventions into the technocultural condition are enjoyable to read and insightful to think-along. Genosko knows how to write transversal theory, and how to weave together media studies with politics." -- Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art; author of 'Insect Media' (2010) and 'What Is Media Archaeology?' (2012)Table of Contents When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below and the Struggle for Autonomy by Gary Genosko Acknowledgements Introduction 1: Beyond Hands Free: Big-Toe Computing 2: Cultures of Calculation: William Gibson Collects 3: Rebel with an IV Pole: Portrait of Ninjalicious as an Urban Explorer 4: Home-Grown Hacker 5: Hacking the Grid: Does Electricity Want to Be Free? 6: Whistle Test: Blindness and Phone Phreaking 7: In Praise of Weak Play: Against the Chess Computers 8: CrackBerry: Addiction and Corporate Discipline 9: WikiLeaks and the Vicissitudes of Transparency Conclusion References Index

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Book SynopsisPart adventure story, part maritime archaeological expedition, part historical look into ninth-century Chinese economy, culture, and trade, Shipwrecked is a fascinating journey back in time.Twelve centuries ago, a merchant ship—an Arab dhow—foundered on a reef just off the coast of Belitung, a small island in the Java Sea. The cargo was a remarkable assemblage of lead ingots, bronze mirrors, spice-filled jars, intricately worked vessels of silver and gold, and more than 60,000 glazed bowls, ewers, and other ceramics. The ship remained buried at sea for more than a millennium, its contents protected from erosion by their packing and the conditions of the silty sea floor. Shipwrecked explores this precious cargo and the story of the men who sailed it, with more than 250 gorgeous photographs and essays by international experts in Arab ship-building methods, pan-Asian maritime trade, ceramics, precious metalwork, and more.

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

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

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years—but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the household refrigerator with the aim of preventing its users from ever taking it for granted again. No mere container for cold Cokes and celery stalks, the refrigerator acts as a mirror—and what it reflects is chilling indeed. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewDoes life exist without refrigerators? For most of us, the answer is no. How this common kitchen appliance achieved its indispensable status in less than a century is an amazing tale filled with surprising twists and unexpected connections. Refrigerator is a delight to read. Bravo! * Andrew F. Smith, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America *Allow Jonathan Rees to re-introduce you to the most underappreciated appliance in your kitchen: the refrigerator. Despite its recent and as yet patchy arrival on the world stage, the humble fridge has transformed how and what we eat, for better and for worse. This concise overview should be required reading for the 99.5 percent of Americans who own a refrigerator. * Nicola Twilley, author of Edible Geography and contributing writer at The New Yorker *Jonathan Rees’s Refrigerator offers a meticulously observed history of the ‘cold chain’ of industrialized food webs, explains how refrigeration works; and goes so far as to imagine life with and without it. Beyond this mini-historical account, the real heft to this title lies in the implied ecological impact of what doing without refrigeration might mean for those in the West for whom it has become taken for granted. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Object Lessons’ describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I'll say, amen. … [I]t is in this simplicity that we find insight and even beauty. … In Refrigerator, historian Jonathan Rees asks us to look again at an object many of us take for granted as it hums away in our kitchens. When's the last time you looked at that thing? Did you contemplate how the refrigerator may have done more to extend the human lifespan than any other piece of technology? … If you read enough ‘Object Lessons’ books, you'll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones — caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though, in the tradition of McPhee's Oranges, they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we've taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look. * Chicago Tribune *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: How Refrigerators Work Chapter Two: How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out Chapter Three: Are the Benefits of Refrigeration Worth the Costs? Chapter Four: Waste and Wants Chapter Five: Freezing and Freezers Conclusion Notes Index

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisThis edited collection opens a window into the world of Byzantine and post-Byzantine textiles by exploring the different traditions that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern era. The book’s editors and contributors have created a complex scientific canvas, based on their complementary interests and expertise. The book, which aspires to fill a significant void in Greek literature, is characterized by this spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration; it offers an overview of the most important local textile products, together with the Eastern and Western imports that used to reach the busy markets of Byzantium and Ottoman Greece. The aim is to showcase this important, yet still obscure, facet of material culture. Within this frame, its chapters discover different aspects of economic, social, religious and artistic history; most of them interwoven in the study of textiles, much like a loom’s warp and weft for the production of elaborate designs.

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

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Book SynopsisFrom the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. This book sheds new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience.Trade Review"This book persuasively addresses one of the key questions in modern history: how human experience has been reshaped by mass marketing. It includes but goes beyond attention to advertising, to a fascinating exploration of technology's impact on products and packaging, and how the result has transformed sensory response. A groundbreaking effort." -Peter N. Stearns, author of The Industrial Revolution in World HistoryTable of Contents1. The Carrot and the Candy Bar 2. Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 3. The Cigarette Story 4. Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 5. Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 6. Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 7. Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 8. Pleasure on Speed and the Calibrated Life: Fast Forwarding through the Last Century 9. Red Raspberries All the Time? Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women through the making and circulation of wax cloth became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth's unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women's identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics,

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

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Book SynopsisAlthough much has been written on the making of art objects as a means of engaging in creative productions of the self (most famously Alfred Gellâs work), there has been very little written on Orthodox Christianity and its use of material within religious self-formation. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is renowned for its artistry and the aesthetics of its worship being an integral part of devout practice. Yet this is an area with little ethnographic exploration available and even scarcer ethnographic attention given to the material culture of Eastern Christianity outside the traditional âhomelandsâ of the greater Levant and Eastern Europe.Drawing from and building upon Gellâs work, Carroll explores the uses and purposes of material culture in Eastern Orthodox Christian worship. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a small Antiochian Orthodox parish in London, Carroll focusses on a study of ecclesiastical fabric but places this within the wider context ofTable of ContentsPrologue; Introduction; Part I – People and place; Chapter 1: British Orthodoxy; Chapter 2: Coming to the Orthodox temple; Chapter 3: Here and There; Part II – Materials; Chapter 4: Making sacred space; Chapter 5: Materials of transformation; Chapter 6: Materials of ikonicity; Part III – Making heaven; Chapter 7: Becoming an ikon; Chapter 8: Ikonicity; Chapter 9: Becoming Orthodox, making heaven; Epilogue: All Saints Barking of the Spice Rack; Diagram of St Æthelwald’s Parish Church; Bibliography; Glossary; Index

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Book SynopsisArab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre.This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts? The book opens up the ways that we discuss Arab American literary and fine arts, so that we understand how Arab American identity and experience begets Arab American artistic enterprise. Split into three sections, the firstTrade ReviewThis volume initiates an important and original conversation about Arab American aesthetics, particularly the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Arab American writing and cultural productions. It is sure to make a significant impact in Arab American Studies. - Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media Table of ContentsIntroduction: What’s (Identity) Politics Got to Do With It? Therí A. Pickens Part One: Literary Aesthetics 1. The Poetics of Torture in Philip Metres’ Sand Opera, Carol N. Fadda 2. An Aesthetics of Haunting: Negotiating Borders and Loss in Arab American Poetry, Sirene Harb 3. Unfixing the Autobiographical Subject: Fragmentation as Aesthetics and Identity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine, Leila Moayeri Pazargadi Part Two: Material Culture 4. "Serving Arabness": Imagery and Imagination of Arab-themed Restaurants, Matthew Jaber Stiffler Part Three: Film & Theatre 5. Beyond First Responders: Politics, Racism, and the Aesthetics of Arab American Theatre, Jamil Khoury 6. Acting Arab/Arab Acting: Reclaiming the Arab American Identity Through Aesthetic Choices, Michael Malek Najjar

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Book SynopsisThis volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now-classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact.Table of Contents1. IntroductionTimothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, andShireen Walton2. Extra-terrestrial methods: toward an ethnography of the ISS Victor Buchli3. Being, being human, becoming beyond humanTimothy Carroll and Aaron Parkhurst4. ‘Things ain’t the same anymore’: Toward an anthropology of technical objects (or ‘When Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon meets MCS’)Ludovic Coupaye5. The object biographyAdam Drazin6. A new instrumentalism?Haidy Geismar7. Objects of desire: Sexwork and its objectsDavid Jeevendrampillai, Julia Burton, and Eva Sanglante8. Digital devices: Knowing material cultureHannah Knox9. Rethinking objectification and its consequences: From substitution to sequenceSusanne Küchler10. Looking at thingsDelphine Mercier11. Making things matterDaniel Miller and Laura Haapio-Kirk12. Prophetic pictures: Or, What time is the visual?Christopher Pinney13. Held in Amma’s ight: The enchantment and political efficacy of gopurams in TamilnaduJill Reese14. A curatorial methodology for anthropologyRafael Schacter15. Data aestheticsAntonia Walford16. Place-objects: Anthropology of digital photography/sShireen Walton

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Book SynopsisHow do people communicate their romantic feelings? Gift giving is one way. Giving and receiving of gifts is a characteristic of intimate relationships. Gifts are a message, a form of communication with a tangible material object, about love, affection, or concern for the recipient. The romantic gift evokes a multitude of intertwined meanings: passion, intimacy, affection, persuasion, care, celebration, altruism, and nostalgia. They can also connote the negative images of obligation and reciprocity. Romantic gift giving may be practiced at rituals, during rites of passage, or for casual occasions, to affirm the continued importance of the romantic relationship. We may even romanticize the giving of gifts to the self, to nonhuman companions, and to others we do not know personally. If loving and giving are a practice, then romantic gift giving is a practice of loving with intimateor would-be intimateothers.This book addresses gift giving among consumers attempting toTable of ContentsList of Tables and Figures Foreword Preface Part I Overview 1. Romantic Gift Giving and Consumer Culture: An Introduction Yuko Minowa and Russell W. BelkPART II Romantic Gift Giving: The Nature of Love 2. Are We a Match? Perfect Gifts, Romantic Love, and Living Organ Donation Tonya Williams Bradford 3. Romantic Gift Giving of Mature Consumers: A Storgic Love Paradigm Yuko Minowa and Russell W. Belk 4. Surprise in Romantic Self Gifts Aditya Gupta and James Gentry PART III Romantic Gift Giving: Exchange and Reciprocity 5. Practicing Masculinity and Reciprocation through Gendered Gift Giving: White Day in Japan Yuko Minowa, Russell W. Belk, and Takeshi Matsui 6. The Lover and the Saviour: Gift Giving within Mother-Daughter Dyads Chihling Liu, Xin Zhao, and Margaret Hogg 7. Crunch My Heart! It Falls for You: Re-theorizing Chocolate Gift Giving as Carnal-Singularity across Language Context Marjaana Mäkelä, Shona Bettany, and Lorna Stevens PART IV Romantic Gift Giving: Unselfishness and Self-Interest 8. Giving Credit to the Poor: Romanticizing Money, Capital and Credit Domen Bajde9. Why do I Self-gift? Self-Gifts as Romantic Gifts to Cope with Struggles Saori Kanno and Satoko Suzuki PART V Conclusion 10. Four Poems on Gifts John F. Sherry, Jr.References Index

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Book SynopsisThis edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasises the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of the main drivers of innovation, whilst sharing knowledge is enabled and limited by the extent of associated social networks in place. Archaeological research has often been limited to studying objects made of one particular material in depth, be it lithic materials, ceramics, textilesTable of Contents1. Material Crossovers: An Introduction Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Ann Brysbaert and Lin Foxhall 2. Material and Craft Networks in the Prehistory of Asia Minor: Transformations in Values and Societies Bleda S. Düring 3. Buildings that Wrap Objects and Objects that Wrap Buildings Lesley McFadyen and Ana Vale 4. Talking Shop: Multicraft Workshop Materials and Architecture in Prehistoric Tiryns, Greece Ann Brysbaert 5. Temporality, Materiality and Women’s Networks: The Production and Manufacture of Loom Weights in the Greek and Indigenous Communities of Southern Italy Alessandro Quercia and Lin Foxhall 6. Cloth Worth a King’s Ransom: Textile Circulation and Transmission of Textile Craft in the Ancient Mediterranean Margarita Gleba 7. Interactions Between Basketry and Pottery in Early Iron Age Attica, Greece Judit Haas-Lebegyev 8. Craftsmanship at Athens in the Eleventh Century BCE: Improvisation, Networking and Pottery Making Rik Vaessen 9. Skeuomorphic Pottery and Consumer Feedback Processes in the Ancient Mediterranean Justin St. P. Walsh 10. Materials Make People: How Material Properties and Technologies Contribute to Figurine Shapes in Early Iron Age Central Europe Katharina Rebay-Salisbury 11. A Bronze Age Ornament Network? Tracing the Herzsprung Symbol across Europe Marion Uckelmann 12. Concluding and Future Thoughts on Material Crossovers Marcia-Anne Dobres

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Book SynopsisBeyond Recycling critically explores unasked questions around recycling and its prominent position in contemporary thinking about sustainability. It examines and challenges assumptions about why we appear to have so wholeheartedly committed to recycling as a cultural project.Recycling has become a commonplace notion and widespread practice. Yet its social, cultural and even environmental value has not been considered carefully enough. This book considers recycling as a contemporary cultural idea related to but not wholly defined by our response to material waste. It seeks to reclaim recycling from the environmentalists and waste management specialists, to explore the role it plays in wider contemporary discourse. As we become increasingly satiated, and in many cases sickened, by the excesses of modern consumerism, we are rethinking our relationship with the physical stuff that fills our lives. Dissatisfied with empty materialism, we seek new ways to reuse ouTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Language 2. Things 3. Symbols 4. Sustainability 5. Futures

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Book SynopsisMobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates â and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today.In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza E. Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces â that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relatiTrade Review"Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces presents an insightful analysis of how mobility affects behavior in public settings, and how public settings affect communication behavior. The authors cast their net broadly, encompassing a range of significant issues including voice and sound, privacy and publicity, and norms and policies." –James E. Katz, Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies, Rutgers University 'An incredibly clear and useful guide to how mobile technologies are re-shaping our connections to locations and to other people. In considering devices that range from the paperback book to the portable music player to the smartphone as different kinds of "interfaces" with public space, the authors offer great insight into how we filter, control, and manage our relations with spaces and social situations that blur the boundaries between private and public. This is a much-needed contribution to the literature on the new location-based technologies that will become increasingly significant in the coming decade. Consider it an operating manual for the future.' – Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University'Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces is an historically situated and nuanced account of the role interfaces – from books and Walkmans to iPods and mobile phones – play in our relationships to self, others and everyday urban life. Connecting contemporary practice with classic social theory, this evocative and engaging book is a much needed contribution to this cutting edge field of research.' – Heather A. Horst, RMIT University, Australia'Highly recommended...In this thought-provoking volume, Silva and Frith consider the impact of location-aware mobile technologies on the human sense of identity, privacy, and control in public spaces. The authors effectively address this emerging area of scholarship, providing insight and discussing relevant theory...Extensively sourced and well written, this engaging title, part of the "Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies" series, is a welcome addition to the scholarship in this area.' – CHOICE magazine, D. D. Tritt, University of South Carolina Aiken, USATable of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Mobile Media History 1. Personalization 2. Privacy Part 2: Location-Awareness in Public Spaces 3. Mobile Phones 4. Location-Aware Media 5. Control and Personalization 6. Privacy and Surveillance 7. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisPerishable Material Culture in Prehistory provides new approaches and integrates a broad range of data to address a neglected topic, organic material in the prehistoric record. Providing news ideas and connections and suggesting revisionist ways of thinking about broad themes in the past, this book demonstrates the efficacy of an holistic approach using examples and cases studies.Table of ContentsPreface 1. The holistic approach to material culture 2. The materiality of plants 3. The materiality of animals 4. Intimate relationships between plants, animals and people 5. Integrating craft and subsistence needs 6. Integrating organic and inorganic material culture 7. Conclusions Endnotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisMaterial Connections eschews outdated theory, tainted by colonialist attitudes, and develops a new cultural and historical understanding of how factors such as mobility, materiality, conflict and co-presence impacted on the formation of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Fighting against hyper-specialisation' within the subject area, it explores the multiple ways that material culture was used to establish, maintain and alter identities, especially during periods of transition, culture encounter and change. A new perspective is adopted, one that perceives the use of material culture by prehistoric and historic Mediterranean peoples in formulating and changing their identities. It considers how objects and social identities are entangled in various cultural encounters and interconnections.The movement of people as well as objects has always stood at the heart of attempts to understand the courses and process of human history. The Mediterranean offers a wealTable of Contents1. Material connections: mobility, materiality and Mediterranean identities A. Bernard Knapp and Peter van Dommelen 2.Classifying an oxymoron. On black boxes, materiality and identity in the scientific representation of the Mediterranean Carlos Cañete 3.Reproducing difference: mimesis and colonialism in Roman Hispania Alicia Jiménez 4.From colonisation to habitation: early cultural adaptations in the Balearic Bronze Age Damià Ramis 5.Social identities, materiality and connectivity in Early Bronze Age Crete Marina Gkiasta 6.Foreign materials, islander mobility and elite identity in Late Bronze Age Sardinia Anthony Russell 7.Negotiating island interactions: Cyprus, the Aegean and the Levant in the Late Bronze to Early Iron Ages Sarah Janes 8.Entangled identities on Iron Age Sardinia? Jeremy Hayne 9.Iron, connectivity and local identities in the Iron Age to Classical Mediterranean Maria Kostoglou 10.Mobility, materiality and identities in Iron Age east Iberia: on the appropriation of material culture and the question of judgement Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz 11.Trading settlements and the materiality of wine consumption in the north Tyrrhenian Sea region Corinna Riva 12. Concluding thoughts Michael Rowlands

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Book SynopsisThis book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture.Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itselfâits functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features ofTrade Review"[...] a good book for archaeologists and anthropologists interested in theory [...and] for the philosophers of technology and the theory of action." --Barry Allen, McMaster University for Notre Dame Philosophical ReviewsTable of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Action in Material Culture 1. The Centralized Control Model 2. Taking Improvisation Seriously 3. Coming to Terms with Collaboration 4. How to Improvise Part 2: Function in Material Culture 5. Proper Function and System Function 6. The Use and Abuse of Intention 7. Reproduction and Innovation. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe iPhone represents an important moment in both the short history of mobile media and the long history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman of the 1980s, it marks a juncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle and sociality require rearticulation. this book explores not only the iPhone's particular characteristics, uses and affects, but also how the iPhone moment functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change. In the iPhone moment, this study considers the convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhoneas a symbol, culture and a set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile mediathe essays collected here explore the most productive theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture and networked communication in the twenty-first century.Trade Review"Through a review of theories past and present, as well as various case studies into already visible change, this book lays a foundation for further scholarship in mobile media and sociotechnical query in general. Because of its focus on the iPhone as a context, the text has a grounding and certain familiarity that will likely give it wide appeal." -- Zack O'Leary, University of Edinburgh, review in First MondayTable of ContentsSelected Contents: 1. Studying the Mobile: Locating the Field Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess and Ingrid Richardson Part 1: iPhone as a Cultural Moment 2. The iPhone and Communication Gerard Goggin 3. The iPhone Moment, the Apple Brand and the Creative Consumer: From "Hackability and Usability" to Cultural Generativity Jean Burgess 4. Ambient Intimacy: A case study of the iPhone, Presence, and Location-based Social Networking in Shanghai, China Larissa Hjorth, Rowan Wilken and Kay Gu 5. "In bed with the iPhone"—The iPhone and Hypersociality in Korea Dong-Hoo Lee Part 2: iPhone as a Platform and Phenomenon 6. iPhone Photography: Mediating Visions of Social Space Daniel Palmer 7. Between image and information: the iPhone camera in the history of photography Chris Chesher 8. A Logic of Layers: Indexicality of iPhone Navigation in Augmented Reality Nanna Verhoeff 9. Touching the Screen: A Phenomenology of Mobile Gaming and the iPhone Ingrid Richardson Part 3: iPhone and Labor 10. The iPhone as an Innovation Platform: Reimagining the Videogames Developer John Banks 11. Network labor: Beyond the shadow of Foxconn Jack Linchuan Qiu 12. iPersonal: A Case Study of the Politics of the Personal Larissa Hjorth 13. Four ways of listening with an iPhone: From sound and network listening, to biometric data and geolocative tracking Kate Crawford 14. How a University Domesticated the iPhone Ilpo Koskinen

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Book SynopsisUnconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min'an's work centres on the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang's discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic lifeits founding moral, aesthetic, political valuesis tremendously useful and enlightening.In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work is not a China book, but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang exTable of Contents1. Washing Machine 2. Refirgerator 3. Radio 4. Television 5. Cellphone 6. Computer 7. Electric Light 8. Contemporary Household Spatial Production 9. Postscript

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Book SynopsisThe Anthropology of Stuff is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each Stuff title is a short (100 page) mini text illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world. Lycra describes the development of a specific fabric, but in the process provides students with rare insights into U.S. corporate history, the changing image of women in America, and how a seemingly doomed product came to occupy a position never imagined by its inventors and contained in the wardrobe of virtually every American. And it will generate lively discussion of the story of the relationship between technology, science and society over the past half a century.Trade Review"[O'Connor] offers an intriguing, well-written study about the development of Lycra....This well-researched study draws on insights derived from ethnographic and archival evidence to describe the complex history of this specific fiber, including technology, science, corporate history, and branding and marketing strategies employed to make Lycra a successful product found in many garments. Readers interested in women's studies will appreciate the connection between this popular fiber and the changing view of women in America, including issues of gender, sexuality, aging, identity, and body image. This fascinating work will appeal to a wide range of interests as it touches on the dynamics between mass-produced commodities and the political, economic, and cultural factors that drive the production and consumption of 'stuff.' Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduate through professional readers."—CHOICE, C. B. Cannon, Savannah College of Art and Design, USATable of Contents1. Lycra, the Ethnographic Moment and the Anthropology of Stuff 2. Dupont: Culture, Kinship and Myth 3. Dupont’s Family of Fibers and the Birth of Lycra 4. Launching Lycra 5. Lycra, Aerobics and the Rise of the Legging 6. Another Ethnographic Moment

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Book SynopsisThis book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called âparticulate visionâ, involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shift our perceptions of the everyday. The book analyses the specific features of these new developments â the components of what can be called a âgeneral aesthesiaâ â and it focuses on the originality and innovation of amateur practices, developing a model for making sense of the huge proliferation of images in contemporary culture, discovering rhythms and tempo in this work and showing why it matterTable of ContentsIntroduction: The dynamic sequencing of cultural genomes? 1. Spectral Monumentality and the Face of Time: Virtuality, distortions of scale and asynchrony in postcolonial Hong Kong 2. The Surrogate Image and Blog Life: Mobility in the everyday blogosphere 3. Sounding the Image: Between Visuality and Orality 4. Particulate Vision and the Evasion of Capture 5. iPhone Girl: Assembly, assemblages and affect in the life of an image

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the relationship between art and tourism through the study of the material culture of tourism: tourist art and souvenirs. It thoroughly examines how to categorise the material culture of tourism within the discourses of contemporary art and cultural anthropology, and demonstrates that tourist art is a unique expression of place and genuine artistic style. The first investigation to consider the activity of souvenirs from both indigenous and settler tourist sites, it brings a unique addition to the existing, dated, research in the area.Working initially from Graburn's definition of tourist art, as the art of one culture made specifically for the consumption of another, Tourism Art and Souvenirs sheds light on important aspects of the souvenir that have not been widely discussed. The most recent research is used to consider how the souvenir is designed and consumed, consumer expectations and influence on the character of the souvenir, how the souvenir maker isTrade Review"Recommended".– P. Passariello, Centre College, in CHOICETable of Contents1. The Material Culture of Tourism: Souvenirs and Tourist Art -- Introduction 2. The European Collection of ‘Other’ Cultures: A Historical Structure from which to assess Tourist Art and Souvenirs 3. Souvenirs and the Anthropological Gaze: The study and reception of souvenirs over the last half century 4.The Souvenir and the Fetish 5. Contexts of Display: tourist art in recent museogallery exhibitions 6. The Language of Souvenirs: Three Discrete Groups - the Sampled, Crafted and Representative 7. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThis edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasises the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of the main drivers of innovation, whilst sharing knowledge is enabled and limited by the extent of associated social networks in place. Archaeological research has often been limited to studying objects made of one particular material in depth, be it lithic materials, ceramics, textiles, glass, mTable of Contents1. Material Crossovers: An Introduction Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Ann Brysbaert and Lin Foxhall 2. Material and Craft Networks in the Prehistory of Asia Minor: Transformations in Values and Societies Bleda S. Düring 3. Buildings that Wrap Objects and Objects that Wrap Buildings Lesley McFadyen and Ana Vale 4. Talking Shop: Multicraft Workshop Materials and Architecture in Prehistoric Tiryns, Greece Ann Brysbaert 5. Temporality, Materiality and Women’s Networks: The Production and Manufacture of Loom Weights in the Greek and Indigenous Communities of Southern Italy Alessandro Quercia and Lin Foxhall 6. Cloth Worth a King’s Ransom: Textile Circulation and Transmission of Textile Craft in the Ancient Mediterranean Margarita Gleba 7. Interactions Between Basketry and Pottery in Early Iron Age Attica, Greece Judit Haas-Lebegyev 8. Craftsmanship at Athens in the Eleventh Century BCE: Improvisation, Networking and Pottery Making Rik Vaessen 9. Skeuomorphic Pottery and Consumer Feedback Processes in the Ancient Mediterranean Justin St. P. Walsh 10. Materials Make People: How Material Properties and Technologies Contribute to Figurine Shapes in Early Iron Age Central Europe Katharina Rebay-Salisbury 11. A Bronze Age Ornament Network? Tracing the Herzsprung Symbol across Europe Marion Uckelmann 12. Concluding and Future Thoughts on Material Crossovers Marcia-Anne Dobres

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Book SynopsisTraditionally, research on the history of Asian religions has been marked by a bias for literary evidence, privileging canonical texts penned in classical' languages. Not only has a focus on literary evidence shaped the dominant narratives about the religious histories of Asia, in both scholarship and popular culture, but it has contributed to the tendency to study different religious traditions in relative isolation from one another. Today, moreover, historical work is often based on modern textual editions and, increasingly, on electronic databases. What may be lost, in the process, is the visceral sense of the text as artifact as a material object that formed part of a broader material culture, in which the boundaries between religious traditions were sometimes more fluid than canonical literature might suggest. This volume brings together specialists in a variety of Asian cultures to discuss the methodological challenges involved in integrating material evidence fTrade Review"The last few years have seen growing efforts in attempting to reconstruct the social context in which ideas have been produced. This great collection of articles powerfully demonstrates how religions, philosophical doctrines, and literary works cannot be understood any longer as abstract entities developing in a vacuum, but rather as human products that have a tangible dimension and speak of the same complex realities documented in the material culture of Asia." – Pia Brancaccio, Drexel University, USATable of Contents1. Introduction: Material Culture and Religious Studies Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard D. Mann Part I: The Materiality of Writing 2. Bamboo and the Production of Philosophy: A Hypothesis about a Shift in Writing and Thought in Early China Dirk Meyer 3. Seeing in Between the Space: The Aura of Writing and the Shape of Artistic Productions in Medieval South Asia Jinah Kim 4. Manuscripts and Shifting Geographies: The Dvādaśajyotirlingastotra from the Deccan College as Case Study Benjamin J. Fleming 5. Representations of Religion in The Tibet Mirror: The Newspaper as Religious Object and Patterns of Continuity and Rupture in Tibetan Material Culture Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa Part II: Amulets, Talismans, and Religious Economies 6. An Ingestible Scripture: Qur'ānic Erasure and the Limits of “Popular” Religion Travis Zadeh 7. Buddhism on the Battlefield: The Cult of the "Substitute Body" Talisman in Imperial Japan (1890-1945) Kevin Bond 8. The Material Turn: An Introduction to Thai Sources for the Study of Buddhist Amulets Justin McDaniel Part III: Image in Context 9. Ninshô, Ryôhen, and the Twenty-Five Bodhisattvas of Hakone Hank Glassman 10. Encountering Ascetics On and Beyond the Indian Temple Wall Tamara I. Sears 11. Goddesses in Text and Stone: Temples of the Yoginīs in Light of Tantric and Purānic Literature Shaman Hatley Part IV: Trade, Travel, and Hybridity 12. Material Culture and Ruler Ideology in South Asia: The Case of Huviska’s Skanda-Kumāra with Viśākha Coinage Richard D. Mann 13. Literary and Visual Narratives in Gandhāran Buddhist Manuscripts and Material Cultures: Localizations of Jātakas, Avadānas, and Previous-birth Stories Jason Neelis 14. Reimagining the "East": Eurasian Trade, Asian Religions, and Christian Identities Annette Yoshiko Reed 15. Seeing the Religious Image in the Historical Account: Icons and Idols in the Islamic Past Jamal J. Elias

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