Webb Keane & Susanne Kuechler-Fogden 
Handbook of Material Culture [PDF ebook] 

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed.

The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections.

• Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field.

• Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses.

• Section III focuses on subject-object relations.

• Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term.

• Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity.

The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

Mục lục

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

In the Matter of Marxism – Bill Maurer

Structuralism and Semiotics – Robert Layton

Phenomenology and Material Culture – Julian Thomas

Objectification – Christopher Tilley

Agency, Biography and Objects – Janet Hoskins

Scenes from a Troubled Engagement – Bjørnar Olsen

Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies

Colonial Matters – Peter van Dommelen

Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations

THE BODY, MATERIALITY AND THE SENSES

Four Types of Visual Culture – Christopher Pinney

Food, Eating, and the Good Life – Judith Farquar

Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia – David Howes

Intersensuality and Material Culture

The Colours of Things – Diana Young

Inside and Outside – Jean-Pierre Warnier

Surfaces and Containers

SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS

Cloth and Clothing – Jane Schneider

Home Furnishing and Domestic Interiors – Robert St George

Vernacular Architecture – Suzanne Preston Blier

Architecture and Modernism – Victor Buchli

‘Primitivism, ‘ Anthropology and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’ – Fred Myers

Tracking Globalization – Robert Foster

Commodities and Value in Motion

Place and Landscape – Barbara Bender

Cultural Memory – Paul Connerton

PROCESS AND TRANSFORMATION

Technology as Material Culture – Ron Eglash

Consumption – Daniel Miller

Design, Style and Function – Meg Conkey

Exchange – James Carrier

Performance – Jonathan Mitchell

Present to Past – Paul Lane

Ethnoarchaeology

Material Culture and Long-term Change – Chris Gosden

PRESENTATION AND POLITICS

Intellectual Property and Rights – Marilyn Strathern

An Anthropological Perspective

Heritage and the Present Past – Beverley Butler

Museums and Museum Displays – Anthony Shelton

Monuments and Memorials – Michael Rowlands & Christopher Tilley

Conservation as Material Culture – Diana Eastop

Collectors and Collecting – Russell Belk

Giới thiệu về tác giả

Professor Michael Rowlands teaches cultural heritage and museum anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, University College, London. His research interests include the theorisation and conceptualisation of cultural heritage, material culture studies and cultural property in relation to long term social and cultural change. He has conducted fieldwork research in West Africa (Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia) to investigate negotiations of material culture, heritage and museums. He currently coordinates a cultural heritage research project between China and Europe funded by the EU and works in partnership with the National Taiwan University on the revitalisation of indigenous cultural knowledge. His research also focuses on post-conflict recovery through the Global Post-Conflict Recovery Network. In 1973 he was awarded a Ph D in Anthropology by University College London.