Download or read book Artefacts as Categories written by Daniel Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-11-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of Artefacts as Categories is to ask what we can learn about a society from the variability of the objects it produces. Dr Miller presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery produced in a single village in central India, drawing together and analysing a whole range of aspects - technology, function, design, symbolism and ideology - that are usually studied separately. Using the concepts of 'pragmatics', 'framing' and 'ideology', the author points to the insufficiency of many ethnographic accounts of symbolism and underlines the need to consider both the social positioning of the interpreter and the context of the interpretation when looking at artefacts. His invigorating study cogently questions many assumptions in material culture studies and offers a whole range of fresh explanations. Archaeologists in particular will welcome the discussion of familiar materials such as pottery rim shapes, body forms and decoration. However, the book will have a broad appeal to researchers in cultural studies, social anthropology and psychology and will attract all those interested in the problem of relating objects and society.

Download or read book Artefact Kinds written by Maarten Franssen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with two intimately related topics of metaphysics: the identity of entities and the foundations of classification. What it adds to previous discussions of these topics is that it addresses them with respect to human-made entities, that is, artefacts. As the chapters in the book show, questions of identity and classification require other treatments and lead to other answers for artefacts than for natural entities. These answers are of interest to philosophers not only for their clarification of artefacts as a category of things but also for the new light they may shed on these issue with respect to to natural entities. This volume is structured in three parts. The contributions in Part I address basic ontological and metaphysical questions in relation to artefact kinds: How should we conceive of artefact kinds? Are they real kinds? How are identity conditions for artefacts and artefact kinds related? The contributions in Part II address meta-ontological questions: What, exactly, should an ontological account of artefact kinds provide us with? What scope can it aim for? Which ways of approaching the ontology of artefact kinds are there, how promising are they, and how should we assess this? In Part III, the essays offer engineering practice rather than theoretical philosophy as a point of reference. The issues addressed here include: How do engineers classify technical artefacts and on what grounds? What makes specific classes of technical artefacts candidates for ontologically real kinds, and by which criteria?​

Download or read book Classification of Lithic Artefacts from the British Late Glacial and Holocene Periods written by Torben Bjarke Ballin and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a system for the hierarchical classification of British lithic artefacts from the Late Glacial and Holocene periods, and it is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for, for example, archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts.

Download or read book Object Categories written by Pekka Harni and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finnish architect Pekka Harni runs a design and architecture practice in Helsinki together with industrial designer Yuka Takahashi. Their collaboration results in a variety of work, of which this book on the classification of objects is just one part. Based on a morphological-functional consideration of the properties of household objects, the study proposes to organise the forms of artefacts, determine the significance of their parts and explain the relationships between objects and the environment, thus describing their most important basic properties while exploring the realm of functional form.

Download or read book Artifact Classification written by Dwight W Read and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists have been developing artifact typologies to understand cultural categories for as long as the discipline has existed. Dwight Read examines these attempts to systematize the cultural domains in premodern societies through a historical study of pottery typologies. He then offers a methodology for producing classifications that are both salient to the cultural groups that produced them and relevant for establishing cultural categories and timelines for the archaeologist attempting to understand the relationship between material culture and ideational culture of ancient societies. This volume is valuable to upper level students and professional archaeologists across the discipline.

Download or read book Creations of the Mind written by Eric Margolis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour. Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen

Download or read book Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society written by Michael G. Shafto and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features the complete text of the material presented at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Papers have been loosely grouped by topic and an author index is provided in the back. As in previous years, the symposium included an interesting mixture of papers on many topics from researchers with diverse backgrounds and different goals, presenting a multifaceted view of cognitive science. In hopes of facilitating searches of this work, an electronic index on the Internet's World Wide Web is provided. Titles, authors, and summaries of all the papers published here have been placed in an online database which may be freely searched by anyone. You can reach the web site at: www-csli.stanford.edu/cogsci97.

Download or read book The Book as Artefact Text and Border written by Anne Mette Hansen and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books do not just contain texts: books themselves are cultural artefacts, which convey many meanings in their own right, meanings which interact with the texts they contain. Awareness of the many significances of books as cultural and textual objects reshapes the traditional disciplines of textual theory, analytic bibliography, codicology and palaeography, while the advent of electronic books, and digital methods for representing print books, is introducing a new dimension to our understanding. Seven essays in this volume, ranging over medieval Portuguese and Swedish manuscripts, eighteenth-century Icelandic editions, Australian playtexts, Thackeray and Anita Brookner, and Stefan George, consider these questions from the broad perspective of textual scholarship. Texts may exist on the borderland of word and not-word; or they may spring from borderlands of nation or culture; or they may be considered from the margins of neighbouring disciplines. So readers must set the texts within contexts, to see the play of text against border. Essays in this volume explore different texts against varying backgrounds -- Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, Trollope's An Eye for an Eye, Woolf's The Waves -- while essays by McGann and Lernout argue the dimensionality of text on the intersection of print and digital media. Implicit in all these essays is the contention, that textual scholarship must influence literary interpretation. Two final essays focus directly on this, in the cases of Melville's Moby-Dick and Emily Dickinson's late fragments. An extensive reviews section completes this volume.

Download or read book World Art written by Ben Burt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean by 'art'? As a category of objects, the concept belongs to a Western cultural tradition, originally European and now increasingly global, but how useful is it for understanding other traditions? To understand art as a universal human value, we need to look at how the concept was constructed in order to reconstruct it through an understanding of the wider world. Western art values have a pervasive influence upon non-Western cultures and upon Western attitudes to them. This innovative yet accessible new text explores the ways theories of art developed as Western knowledge of the world expanded through exploration and trade, conquest, colonisation and research into other cultures, present and past. It considers the issues arising from the historical relationships which brought diverse artistic traditions together under the influence of Western art values, looking at how art has been used by colonisers and colonised in the causes of collecting and commerce, cultural hegemony and autonomous identities.World Art questions conventional Western assumptions of art from an anthropological perspective which allows comparison between cultures. It treats art as a property of artefacts rather than a category of objects, reclaiming the idea of 'world art' from the 'art world'. This book is essential reading for all students on anthropology of art courses as well as students of museum studies and art history, based on a wide range of case studies and supported by learning features such as annotated further reading and chapter opening summaries.

Download or read book The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts written by Peter Kroes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-01-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the question: to what extent does it make sense to qualify technical artefacts as moral entities? The authors’ contributions trace recent proposals and topics including instrumental and non-instrumental values of artefacts, agency and artefactual agency, values in and around technologies, and the moral significance of technology. The editors’ introduction explains that as ‘agents’ rather than simply passive instruments, technical artefacts may actively influence their users, changing the way they perceive the world, the way they act in the world and the way they interact with each other. This volume features the work of various experts from around the world, representing a variety of positions on the topic. Contributions explore the contested discourse on agency in humans and artefacts, defend the Value Neutrality Thesis by arguing that technological artefacts do not contain, have or exhibit values, or argue that moral agency involves both human and non-human elements. The book also investigates technological fields that are subject to negative moral valuations due to the harmful effects of some of their products. It includes an analysis of some difficulties arising in Artificial Intelligence and an exploration of values in Chemistry and in Engineering. The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts is an advanced exploration of the various dimensions of the relations between technology and morality

Download or read book Roman Artefacts and Society written by Ellen Swift and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ellen Swift uses design theory, previously neglected in Roman archaeology, to investigate Roman artefacts in a new way, making a significant contribution to both Roman social history, and our understanding of the relationships that exist between artefacts and people. Based on extensive data collection and the close study of artefacts from museum collections and archives, the book examines the relationship between artefacts, everyday behaviour, and experience. The concept of 'affordances'-features of an artefact that make possible, and incline users towards, particular uses for functional artefacts-is an important one for the approach taken. This concept is carefully evaluated by considering affordances in relation to other sources of evidence, such as use-wear, archaeological context, the end-products resulting from artefact use, and experimental reconstruction. Artefact types explored in the case studies include locks and keys, pens, shears, glass vessels, dice, boxes, and finger-rings, using material mainly drawn from the north-western Roman provinces, with some material also from Roman Egypt. The book then considers how we can use artefacts to understand particular aspects of Roman behaviour and experience, including discrepant experiences according to factors such as age, social position, and left- or right-handedness, which are fostered through artefact design. The relationship between production and users of artefacts is also explored, investigating what particular production methods make possible in terms of user experience, and also examining production constraints that have unintended consequences for users. The book examines topics such as the perceived agency of objects, differences in social practice across the provinces, cultural change and development in daily practice, and the persistence of tradition and social convention. It shows that design intentions, everyday habits of use, and the constraints of production processes each contribute to the reproduction and transformation of material culture.

Download or read book Artefacts of Writing written by Peter D. McDonald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relationship between literature and international relations and considers how writing resists norms and puts any fixed or final idea of community in question. Part I examines the European context (1860 to 1945) and Part II analyses the traditions of disruptive writing that emerged out of sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia after 1945.

Download or read book Americanist Culture History written by R. Lee Lyman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americanist Culture History reprints thirty-nine classic works of Americanist archaeological literature published between 1907 and 1971. The articles, in which the key concepts and analytical techniques of culture history were first defined and discussed, are reprinted, with original pagination and references, to enhance the use of this collection as a research and teaching resource. The editors also include an introduction that summarizes the rise and fall of the culture history paradigm, making this volume an excellent introduction to the field's primary literature.

Download or read book Interpreting Objects and Collections written by Susan Pearce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together for the first time the most significant papers on the interpretation of objects and collections and examines how people relate to material culture and why they collect things. The first section of the book discusses the interpretation of objects, setting the philosophical and historical context of object interpretation. Papers are included which discuss objects variously as historical documents, functioning material, and as semiotic texts, as well as those which examine the politics of objects and the methodology of object study. The second section, on the interpretation of collections, looks at the study of collections in their historical and conceptual context. Many topics are covered such as the study of collecting to structure individual identity, its affect on time and space and the construction of gender. There are also papers discussing collection and ideology, collection and social action and the methodology of collection study. This unique anthology of articles and extracts will be of inestimable value to all students and professionals involved in the interpretation of objects and collections.

Download or read book Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture written by Linda Hurcombe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction to the study of artefacts, setting them in a social context rather than using a purely scientific approach. Drawing on a range of different cultures and extensively illustrated, Archaeological Artefacts and Material Culture covers everything from recovery strategies and recording procedures to interpretation through typology, ethnography and experiment, and every type of material including wood, fibers, bones, hides and adhesives, stone, clay, and metals. With over seventy illustrations with almost fifty in full colour, this book not only provides the tools an archaeologist will need to interpret past societies from their artefacts, but also a keen appreciation of the beauty and tactility involved in working with these fascinating objects. This is a book no archaeologist should be without, but it will also appeal to anybody interested in the interaction between people and objects.

Download or read book The Organisation of Conceptual Knowledge in the Brain written by Alex Martin and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Category-specific knowledge disorders are among the most intriguing and perplexing syndromes in cognitive neuropsychology. The past decade has witnessed increased interest in these disorders, due largely to a heightened appreciation of the profound implications that an understanding of concept representation has for such diverse topics as object recognition, the organisation of the lexicon, and storage of long-term memories. Until recently, information about the representation of concepts was limited to findings from patients with brain injury and disease. This state of affairs has now changed with the advent and wide-spread availability of functional imaging for studying cognition in the normal human brain. The purpose of this special issue is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brain imaging studies. The contributions, all from major investigators in the field, range from studies of specific object categories such as animals, tools, fruit and vegetables, and faces, to the more general domains of number processing, social interaction, and mechanical knowledge. A unifying theme of these papers is the extent to which the findings can be best understood within the context of models that posit an innate, domain-specific organisation, those that appeal to an organisation by sensory- and motor-based features and properties, and those that propose an undifferentiated, distributed neural organisation.

Download or read book Aristotle s Ontology of Artefacts written by Marilù Papandreou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough reconstruction of Aristotle's account of artefacts that is sensitive to modern debates.