Description
Book SynopsisBody Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from anthropology, archaeology and medieval studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body; the chapters come together to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding readers of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate that bodies not only seep into (and are part of) the landscape, but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.
Table of ContentsList of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Preface Chapter 1: Introduction - Luci Attala and Louise Steel Chapter 2: Bodies that co-create: The residues and intimacies of vital materials - Eloise Govier Chapter 3: I am apple - Luci Attala Chapter 4: Cooled, cured and sedimented: Reforming and edifying the hydrocentric infants of northwestern Amazonia - Elizabeth Rahmen Chapter 5: Embodied encounters with the ancestors- Louise Steel Chapter 6: `They roll around in the mud!': Becoming a community of substance - Kate Nialla Fayers-Kerr. Chapter 7: The resuscitation of the twice-hanged man: Miracles and the body in medieval Swansea - Harriett Webster Chapter 8: Dead and dusted: Exploring the mutable boundaries of the body - Ros Coard Chapter 9: A cup for any occasion: The materiality of drinking experiences at Kerma - Carl Walsh Chapter 10: All fingers, no thumbs: the materiality of a medieval relic - Janet Burton. Glossary Index
