Download or read book Materializing the Nation written by Robert J. Foster and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Foster shows us how seemingly banal activities like making a phone call, chewing betel nut, watching a Coke commercial may give important insights into the ways in which the nation is constructed, materialized or contested."—Orvar Löfgren, author of On Holiday: A History of Vacationing Why, in the current era of globalization, does nationality remain an important dimension of personal and collective identities? In Materializing the Nation, Robert J. Foster argues that the contested process of nation making in Papua New Guinea unfolds not only through organized politics but also through mundane engagements with commodities and mass media. He offers a thoughtful critique of recent approaches to nationalism and consumption and an ethnographic perspective on constructs of the nation found in official policy documents, letters to the editor, school textbooks, song lyrics, advertisements, and other materials. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the links among nationalism, consumption, and media, in Melanesia and elsewhere.
Download or read book Materializing Difference written by Péter Berta and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture - such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories - play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects - defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania - is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.
Download or read book Materializing Identities in Socialist and Post Socialist Cities written by Jaroslav Ira and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the materialization of identity in urban space. Urban spaces played an important role in the formation of national identities in post-socialist successor states, whereas the articulation of national identities markedly affected the appearance of the post-socialist cities. Opened by an overview of the research on (post)socialist cities in recent urban history, the book traces the post-socialist intertwining of space and identities in case studies that include Astana and Almaty, Chisinau and Tiraspol, and Skopje, while also linking it to the socialist urbanism, exemplified by the case study on postwar Minsk.
Download or read book Materializing Democracy written by Russ Castronovo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term “democracy.”/div
Download or read book Materializing Poverty written by Erin B. Taylor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty is generally defined as a lack of material resources. However, the relationships that poor people have with their possessions are not just about deprivation. Material things play a positive role in the lives of poor people: they help people to build social relationships, address inequalities, and fulfill emotional needs. In this book, anthropologist Erin Taylor explores how residents of a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures.
Download or read book Oy My Buenos Aires written by Mollie Lewis Nouwen and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1905 and 1930, more than one hundred thousand Jews left Central and Eastern Europe to settle permanently in Argentina. This book explores how these Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi immigrants helped to create a new urban strain of the Argentine national identity. Like other immigrants, Jews embraced Buenos Aires and Argentina while keeping ethnic identities—they spoke and produced new literary works in their native Yiddish and continued Jewish cultural traditions brought from Europe, from foodways to holidays. The author examines a variety of sources including Yiddish poems and songs, police records, and advertisements to focus on the intersection and shifting boundaries of ethnic and national identities. In addition to the interplay of national and ethnic identities, Nouwen illuminates the importance of gender roles, generation, and class, as well as relationships between Jews and non-Jews. She focuses on the daily lives of ordinary Jews in Buenos Aires. Most Jews were working class, though some did rise to become middleclass professionals. Some belonged to organizations that served the Jewish community, while others were more informally linked to their ethnic group through their family and friends. Jews were involved in leftist politics from anarchism to unionism, and also started Zionist organizations. By exploring the diversity of Jewish experiences in Buenos Aires, Nouwen shows how individuals articulated their multiple identities, as well as how those identities formed and overlapped.
Download or read book Anthropology and the Individual written by Daniel Miller and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology is usually associated with the study of society, but the anthropologist must also understand people as individuals. This highly original study demonstrates how methods of social analysis can be applied to the individual, while remaining entirely distinct from psychology and other perspectives on the person. Contributors draw on approaches from material culture to create fascinating portraits of individuals, offering analytical insights that convey ethnographic encounters with often extraordinary people from Turkey, Spain and Britain to Albania, Cuba, Jamaica, Mali, Serbia and Trinidad. Exploring relationships to places and spaces such as social networking sites, to persons such as parents, to ethical concerns such as fairness and to concepts such as the ideology of struggle, Anthropology and the Individual shows how the study of the individual can provide insights into society without losing a sense of the particularity of the person.
Download or read book Objects and Imagination written by Øivind Fuglerud and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.
Download or read book Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific written by Martha Macintyre and published by University of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea, collectivities in rural Solomon Islands, gambling in the Cook Islands, and the Vanuatu tax haven—all feature in the interface between Pacific and global economies. Since the 1970s, Melanesian countries and their peoples have been beguiled by the prospect of economic development that would enable them to participate in a world market economic system. Access to global markets would provide the means to improve their standard of living, allowing them to take their places as independent nations in a modern world. Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific takes a broad sweep through contemporary topics in Melanesian anthropology and ethnography. With nuanced and rigorous scholarship, it views contemporary debate on modernity in Melanesia within the context of the global economy and cultural capitalism. In particular, contributors assess local ideas about wealth, success, speculation, and development and their connections to participation in institutions and activities generated by them. This innovative and accessible collection offers a new intersection between Western Pacific anthropology and global studies.
Download or read book Materializing Southeast Asia s Past written by Veronique Degroot and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest historical and anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history on Southeast Asia, these articles offer new understandings of classical Hindu and Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia and their relationship to the regionÍs medieval cultures. The articles are presented under four headings: Art, religion and politics (Buddhist monuments in Java and Cambodia); Southeast Asian transformations (cultural exchange with South Asia); Technology (workmanship in art and material culture); and Southeast Asia between past and present.
Download or read book Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture written by Laszlo Muntean and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality, this book applies recent theories of new materialism to explore the material dimension of memory in art and popular culture. The book’s underlying premise is twofold: on the one hand, memory is performed, mediated, and stored through the material world that surrounds us; on the other hand, inanimate objects and things also have agency on their own, which affects practices of memory, as well as forgetting. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.
Download or read book Materializing the Bible written by James S. Bielo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that “materialize the Bible,” including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the late 19th-century to the present. Composed as 20 short chapters that may be read in any order, the book is divided into three sections. Section I, “Variations on Replication,” analyzes examples that recontextualize elements from the (actual or imagined) biblical past. Section II, “The Power of Nature,” turns to the natural world associated with Christian scripture and how it is mobilized as a privileged media. Section III, “Choreographing Experience,” examines lived interactions with the affordances of materializing the Bible. Bielo argues that materializing the Bible works as an authorizing practice to intensify intimacies with scripture and circulate potent ideologies. Performed through the sensory experience of bodies, physical technologies, and infrastructures of place, Bielo illustrates how this phenomenon is always, ultimately, about expressions of power.
Download or read book Materializing Difference written by Péter Berta and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture – such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories – play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects – defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania – is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.
Download or read book Materializing New Media written by Anna Munster and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to investigations of the social and cultural impact of new media and digital technologies
Download or read book The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society written by Beverly Lemire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, fashion has emerged as one of the most powerful driving forces determining the political, economic and social ramifications of the production, distribution and circulation of goods. Indeed fashion, especially in relation to clothing and textiles, shapes the relationship between self and society in unique ways. In this light, the collected papers in this volume position fashion as the lens - the critical mediating force - through which to analyse and understand cultural, economic and political shifts within a broad spectrum of societies in Europe, Asia, Africa and America from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. Topics include a seventeenth-century failing fashion region, the material politics of marketing American abolitionist fashions, the construction of a fashionable ethos for French perfumes, and the use and meanings of clothing and textiles in the politics of Nigerian silk robes and early modern domestic décor in Europe. This volume represents an important shift in scholarship towards a more in-depth understanding of the role of fashion in early modern and modern times and will appeal to international readers interested in material culture, fashion, consumer studies and cultural anthropology, among other areas.
Download or read book The Inbetweenness of Things written by Paul Basu and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography written by Matthew Himley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled. The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life. This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.
