Materiality And Society

Materiality And Society PDF Author: Dant, Tim
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 033520855X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This book examines the relationships between society and material culture: the interaction between people and things. Tim Dant argues that the traditional approach to material culture has focused on the symbolic meanings of objects, largely overlooking the material impact that objects have on everyday life in late modernity.

Materiality And Society

Materiality And Society PDF Author: Dant, Tim
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 033520855X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This book examines the relationships between society and material culture: the interaction between people and things. Tim Dant argues that the traditional approach to material culture has focused on the symbolic meanings of objects, largely overlooking the material impact that objects have on everyday life in late modernity.

Media Technologies

Media Technologies PDF Author: Tarleton Gillespie
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262525372
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena. The contributors first address the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The contributors then highlight media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive. Contributors Pablo J. Boczkowski, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory J. Downey, Kirsten A. Foot, Tarleton Gillespie, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher M. Kelty, Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner

Materiality

Materiality PDF Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386712
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human. Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift

National Matters

National Matters PDF Author: Geneviève Zubrzycki
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503602761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
National Matters investigates the role of material culture and materiality in defining and solidifying national identity in everyday practice. Examining a range of "things"—from art objects, clay fragments, and broken stones to clothing, food, and urban green space—the contributors to this volume explore the importance of matter in making the nation appear real, close, and important to its citizens. Symbols and material objects do not just reflect the national visions deployed by elites and consumed by the masses, but are themselves important factors in the production of national ideals. Through a series of theoretically grounded and empirically rich case studies, this volume analyzes three key aspects of materiality and nationalism: the relationship between objects and national institutions, the way commonplace objects can shape a national ethos, and the everyday practices that allow individuals to enact and embody the nation. In giving attention to the agency of things and the capacities they afford or foreclose, these cases also challenge the methodological orthodoxies of cultural sociology. Taken together, these essays highlight how the "material turn" in the social sciences pushes conventional understanding of state and nation-making processes in new directions.

Practicing Materiality

Practicing Materiality PDF Author: Ruth M. Van Dyke
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531277
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Practicing Materiality focuses on the job of applying materiality to anthropological investigations. It demonstrates a practical way to focus on the entangled lives of things without losing sight of their political and social implications.

Materiality and Social Practice

Materiality and Social Practice PDF Author: Joseph Maran
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9781782975410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology's approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.

Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture

Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture PDF Author: Paul Graves-Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135107998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture offers a new approach to the study of contemporary objects, to give the reader a new understanding of the relationship between people and their material world. It asks how the very stuff of our world has shaped our societies by addressing a broad array of questions including: * why do Berliners have such strange door keys? * should the Isle of Wight pop festival be preserved? * could aliens tell a snail shell from a waste paper basket * why did Victorian England make so much of death and burial?

Architecture, Materiality and Society

Architecture, Materiality and Society PDF Author: Anna-Lisa Müller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137461136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book examines the extent to which the insights of STS can be used to analyse the role of architecture in and for social life. The contributions examine the question of whether architecture and thus materiality as a whole has agency. The book also proposes a theoretical and methodological approach on how to research architecture's agency.

Materiality, Techniques and Society in Pottery Production

Materiality, Techniques and Society in Pottery Production PDF Author: Daniel Albero Santacreu
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311042729X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Daniel Albero Santacreu presents a wide overview of certain aspects of the pottery analysis and summarizes most of the methodological and theoretical information currently applied in archaeology in order to develop wide and deep analysis of ceramic pastes. The book provides an adequate framework for understanding the way pottery production is organised and clarifies the meaning and role of the pottery in archaeological and traditional societies. The goal of this book is to encourage reflection, especially by those researchers who face the analysis of ceramics for the first time, by providing a background for the generation of their own research and to formulate their own questions depending on their concerns and interests. The three-part structure of the book allows readers to move easily from the analysis of the reality and ceramic material culture to the world of the ideas and theories and to develop a dialogue between data and their interpretation. Daniel Albero Santacreu is a Lecturer Assistant in the University of the Balearic Islands, member of the Research Group Arqueo UIB and the Ceramic Petrology Group. He has carried out the analysis of ceramics from several prehistoric societies placed in the Western Mediterranean, as well as the study of handmade pottery from contemporary ethnic groups in Northeast Ghana.

Iconic Power

Iconic Power PDF Author: J. Alexander
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137012862
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A collection of original articles that explore social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called 'linguistic turn', sociology has recently acknowledged a need to further expand its horizons.