Author: Arthur Asa Berger Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315415844 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Arthur Asa Berger is back with the second edition of his popular, user-friendly guide for students who want to understand the social meanings of objects.
Author: Glenn Adamson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1632869667 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects that have nurtured human development for thousands of years. The objects are still here, but we seem to care less and know less about them. In his presentations to groups, he often asks an audience member what he or she knows about the chair the person is sitting in. Few people know much more than whether it's made of wood, plastic, or metal. If we know little about how things are made, it's hard to remain connected to the world around us. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them. Reading this wise and elegant book is a truly transformative experience.
Author: Katharine Weber Publisher: Broadway Books ISBN: 0307587940 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Harriet Rose, 26, is an American photographer just winning recognition for her work. A travel fellowship brings her to visit her best friend and former roommate, Anne Gordon, in Switzerland. In an ongoing letter to her boyfriend, Harriet reports on strange developments in Anne's life, most notably her affair with a much older married man, which seems to be leading to a disastrous conclusion. Before she can rescue Anne, events take a series of unexpected turns, and Harriet must reexamine her own life and past, and come to terms with the difficulties and possibilities of human relationships. Already excerpted in The New Yorker, Katharine Weber's witty first novel of attraction and deception, a tale with the sensibility of a Margaret Atwood, pulses with cultural references and word games that echo Nabokov.
Author: Peter N. Miller Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501708236 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
Weaving together literary and scholarly insights, History and Its Objects will prove indispensable reading for historians and cultural historians, as well as anthropologists and archeologists worldwide. — Nathan Schlanger, École nationale des chartes, Paris Cultural history is increasingly informed by the history of material culture—the ways in which individuals or entire societies create and relate to objects both mundane and extraordinary—rather than on textual evidence alone. Books such as The Hare with Amber Eyes and A History of the World in 100 Objects indicate the growing popularity of this way of understanding the past. In History and Its Objects, Peter N. Miller uncovers the forgotten origins of our fascination with exploring the past through its artifacts by highlighting the role of antiquarianism—a pursuit ignored and derided by modem academic history—in grasping the significance of material culture. From the efforts of Renaissance antiquarians, who reconstructed life in the ancient world from coins, inscriptions, seals, and other detritus, to amateur historians in the nineteenth century working within burgeoning national traditions, Miller connects collecting—whether by individuals or institutions—to the professionalization of the historical profession, one which came to regard its progenitors with skepticism and disdain. The struggle to articulate the value of objects as historical evidence, then, lies at the heart both of academic history-writing and of the popular engagement with things. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that our current preoccupation with objects is far from novel and reflects a human need to reexperience the past as a physical presence.
Author: Liana Chua Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 0857457438 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.
Author: Daniel Z. Korman Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198732538 Category : Metaphysics Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
What sorts of material objects are there? Many philosophers opt for surprising answers to this question that seem deeply at odds with how we ordinarily think about the material world. Some embrace radically eliminative views, on which there are far fewer objects than we ordinarily take there to be, while others go in for radically permissive views on which there are legions of extraordinary objects that somehow escape our notice, despite being highly visible and right before our eyes. In this book, Daniel Z. Korman defends our ordinary, intuitive judgments about which objects there are. The book responds to a wide variety of arguments that have driven people away from the intuitive view: arbitrariness arguments, debunking arguments, overdetermination arguments, arguments from vagueness and material constitution, and the problem of the many. It also criticizes attempts to show that permissive and eliminative views are, despite appearances, entirely compatible with our ordinary beliefs and intuitions.
Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107392829 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling.
Author: Leora Auslander Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501720090 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 398
Book Description
The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.― Utah Public Radio Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word. Contributors: Noah Benninga, Sandra H. Dudley, Bonnie Effros, Cathleen M. Giustino, Alice Goff, Gerdien Jonker, Aubrey Pomerance, Iris Rachamimov, Brandon M. Schechter, Jeffrey Wallen, and Sarah Jones Weicksel
Author: Pierre Lemonnier Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 131542424X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
This concise book shows the importance of objects that are considered ordinary by cultural outsiders and scholars, yet lie at the heart of the systems of thought and practices of their makers and users. This volume demonstrates the role of these objects in nonverbal communication, both in non-ritual and in ritual situations. Lemonnier shows that some objects, their physical properties and their material implementation, are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking, as well as sometimes the only means of expressing the inexpressible. Through the study of the most mundane technical activities such as fence building, creating models cars, or trapping fish, we often gain a better understanding of what these objects mean and how they work within their cultures of origin. In addition to anthropologists and archaeologists, this book will also be of interest to sociologists, historians, philosophers, cognitive anthropologists and primatologists, for whom the intertwining of “function” and “style” is the very mark of all cultural behavior.
Author: Laura Levitt Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 027108877X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 104
Book Description
On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.
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Author: Arthur Asa Berger
Author: Glenn Adamson
Author: Katharine Weber
Author: Peter N. Miller
Author: Liana Chua
Author: Daniel Z. Korman
Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Author: Leora Auslander
Author: Pierre Lemonnier
Author: Laura Levitt