Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays rethinking the current uses of material culture study in anthropology, including engagements with art, science, and technology.
Trade Review“A milestone collection. Of all of the recent works on material culture available, this is the one that exposes the complete range of perspectives and theoretical strategies that the most noted scholars are trying out and the interdisciplinary connections and alliances that are shaping the field.”—George Marcus, Rice University
“There have been many recent stabs at the idea of materiality. With both authority and intellectual generosity, these anthropologists and their colleagues take us beyond ‘things’ and ‘objects’ to ask about concrete presences, qualities, surfaces, and the formation of phenomena. A magisterial and highly original collection.”—Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
“This is first-class scholarship: lively, consequential, engaging, informed, and lucid. Daniel Miller and his colleagues explore—with imagination, ethnographic insight, and remarkable clarity—a range of related issues central to current debates within and beyond cultural anthropology.”—Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Table of ContentsMateriality: An Introduction / Daniel Miller 1
Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer Than They Are / Lynn Meskell 51
A Materialist Approach to Materiality / Michael Rowlands 72
Some Properties of Art and Culture: Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange / Fred Myers 88
Sticky Subjects and Sticky Objects: The Substance of African Christian Healing / Matthew Engelke 118
Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms / Bill Maurer 140
The Materiality of Finance Theory / Hirokazu Miyazaki 165
Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things / Webb Keane 182
Materiality and Cognition: The Changing Face of Things / Susanne Kuchler 206
Beyond Meditation: Three New Material Registers and Their Consequences / Nigel Thrift 231
Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come? / Christopher Pinney 256
Contributors 273
Index 277
