Download or read book The Social Life of Materials written by Adam Drazin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Materials play a central role in society. Beyond the physical and chemical properties of materials, their cultural properties have often been overlooked in anthropological studies: finished products have been perceived as ‘social’ yet the materials which comprise them are considered ‘raw’ or natural’. The Social Life of Materials proposes a new perspective in this interdisciplinary field. Diverting attention from the consumption of objects, the book looks towards the properties of materials and how these exist through many transformations in a variety of cultural contexts.Human societies have always worked with materials. However, the customs and traditions surrounding this differ according to the place, the time and the material itself. Whether or not the material is man-made, materials are defined by social intervention. Today, these constitute one of the most exciting areas of global scientific research and innovation, harboring the potential to act as key vehicles of change in the world. But this ‘materials revolution’ has complex social implications. Smart materials are designed to anticipate our actions and needs, yet we are increasingly unable to apprehend the composite materials which comprise new products.Bringing together ethnographic studies of cultures from around the world, this collection explores the significance of materials by moving beyond questions of what may be created from them. Instead, the text argues that the materials themselves represent a shifting ground around which relationships, identities and powers are constantly formed and dissolved in the act of making and remaking.
Download or read book The Social Life of Materials written by Adam Drazin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Materials play a central role in society. Beyond the physical and chemical properties of materials, their cultural properties have often been overlooked in anthropological studies: finished products have been perceived as ‘social’ yet the materials which comprise them are considered ‘raw’ or natural’. The Social Life of Materials proposes a new perspective in this interdisciplinary field. Diverting attention from the consumption of objects, the book looks towards the properties of materials and how these exist through many transformations in a variety of cultural contexts.Human societies have always worked with materials. However, the customs and traditions surrounding this differ according to the place, the time and the material itself. Whether or not the material is man-made, materials are defined by social intervention. Today, these constitute one of the most exciting areas of global scientific research and innovation, harboring the potential to act as key vehicles of change in the world. But this ‘materials revolution’ has complex social implications. Smart materials are designed to anticipate our actions and needs, yet we are increasingly unable to apprehend the composite materials which comprise new products.Bringing together ethnographic studies of cultures from around the world, this collection explores the significance of materials by moving beyond questions of what may be created from them. Instead, the text argues that the materials themselves represent a shifting ground around which relationships, identities and powers are constantly formed and dissolved in the act of making and remaking.
Download or read book The Social Life of Books written by Abigail Williams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post
Download or read book The Social Life of Things written by Arjun Appadurai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-01-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.
Download or read book The Social Life of Pots written by Judith A. Habicht-Mauche and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The demographic upheavals that altered the social landscape of the Southwest from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries forced peoples from diverse backgrounds to literally remake their worlds—transformations in community, identity, and power that are only beginning to be understood through innovations in decorated ceramics. In addition to aesthetic changes that included new color schemes, new painting techniques, alterations in design, and a greater emphasis on iconographic imagery, some of the wares reflect a new production efficiency resulting from more specialized household and community-based industries. Also, they were traded over longer distances and were used more often in public ceremonies than earlier ceramic types. Through the study of glaze-painted pottery, archaeologists are beginning to understand that pots had “social lives” in this changing world and that careful reconstruction of the social lives of pots can help us understand the social lives of Puebloan peoples. In this book, fifteen contributors apply a wide range of technological and stylistic analysis techniques to pottery of the Rio Grande and Western Pueblo areas to show what it reveals about inter- and intra-community dynamics, work groups, migration, trade, and ideology in the precontact and early postcontact Puebloan world. The contributors report on research conducted throughout the glaze producing areas of the Southwest and cover the full historical range of glaze ware production. Utilizing a variety of techniques—continued typological analyses, optical petrography, instrumental neutron activation analysis, X-ray microprobe analysis, and inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy—they develop broader frameworks for examining the changing role of these ceramics in social dynamics. By tracing the circulation and exchange of specialized knowledge, raw materials, and the pots themselves via social networks of varying size, they show how glaze ware technology, production, exchange, and reflected a variety of dynamic historical and social processes. Through this material evidence, the contributors reveal that technological and aesthetic innovations were deliberately manipulated and disseminated to actively construct “communities of practice” that cut across language and settlement groups. The Social Life of Pots offers a wealth of new data from this crucial period of prehistory and is an important baseline for future work in this area. Contributors Patricia Capone Linda S. Cordell Suzanne L. Eckert Thomas R. Fenn Judith A. Habicht-Mauche Cynthia L Herhahn Maren Hopkins Deborah L. Huntley Toni S. Laumbach Kathryn Leonard Barbara J. Mills Kit Nelson Gregson Schachner Miriam T. Stark Scott Van Keuren
Download or read book Media and Social Life written by Mary Beth Oliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our use of media touches on almost all aspects of our social lives, be they friendships, parent-child relationships, emotional lives, or social stereotypes. How we understand ourselves and others is now largely dependent on how we perceive ourselves and others in media, how we interact with one another through mediated channels, and how we share, construct, and understand social issues via our mediated lives. This volume highlights cutting edge scholarship from preeminent scholars in media psychology that examines how media intersect with our social lives in three broad areas: media and the self; media and relationships; and social life in emerging media. The scholars in this volume not only provide insightful and up-to-date examinations of theorizing and research that informs our current understanding of the role of media in our social lives, but they also detail provocative and valuable roadmaps that will form that basis of future scholarship in this crucially important and rapidly evolving media landscape.
Download or read book Material Methods written by Sophie Woodward and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Methods brings together resources for researchers investigating both the material, as well as the social world through material objects we design, buy, make, exchange and collect. It covers the whole research process, from theoretical underpinnings, selection of methods and their possible uses, as well as representing and analysing data. It introduces students and researchers to the wide range of cross-disciplinary methods which help us to approach and interpret material culture and materials. The book also provides students and researchers with the tools to critically reflect upon pre-existing methods to see their limitations as well as possibilities, and apply them to their own research practice.
Download or read book The Social Life of Water written by John R. Wagner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.
Download or read book The Social Life of Nothing written by Susie Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena – no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places – that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader.
Download or read book The Social Life of Fluids written by Jules David Law and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Victorians were obsessed with fluids—with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel. Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids—blood, breast milk, and water—in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.
Download or read book Researching Social Life written by Nigel Gilbert and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `This new edition of this excellent guide maintains the standard of the original whilst taking full account of developments in both methodological discussion and the techniques of social research. The organization of the text around the research process is a great strength of the text' - David Byrne, University of Durham Preview the Third Edition's opening chapter and guide to its teaching and learning features designed to stimulate student engagement with the content here The Third Edition of Nigel Gilbert's hugely successful Researching Social Life covers the whole range of methods from quantitative to qualitative in a down-to-earth and unthreatening manner. Gilbert's text offers the best coverage of the full scope of research methods of any of the leading textbooks in the field, making this an essential text for any student starting a research methods course or doing a research project. This thoroughly revised text is driven by the expertise of a writing team comprised of internationally-renowned experts in the field. New to the Third Edition are chapters on: - Searching and Reviewing the Literature - Refining the Question - Grounded Theory and Inductive Research - Mixed Methods - Participatory Action Research - Virtual Methods - Narrative Analysis A number of useful features, such as worked examples, case studies, discussion questions, project ideas and checklists are included throughout the book to help those new to research to engage with the material. Researching Social Life follows the 'life cycle' of a typical research project, from initial conception through to eventual publication. Its breadth and depth of coverage make this an indispensable must-have textbook for students on social research methods courses in any discipline.
Download or read book The Material Culture of Failure written by David Jeevendrampillai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when objects behave unexpectedly or fail to do what they ‘should’? Who defines failure? Is failure always bad? Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to social life, this innovative new book examines the unexpected and surprising ways in which failure can lead to positive and creative results. Combining both theoretical and ethnographic approaches to failure, The Material Culture of Failure explores how failure manifests itself and operates in a variety of contexts. The editors present ten ethnographic encounters of failure – from areas as diverse as design, textiles, religion, beauty, and physical failure – covering Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Gulf. Identifying common themes such as interpersonal, national and religious articulations of power and identity, the book shows some of the underlying assumptions that are revealed when materials fail, designs crumble, or things develop unexpectedly.The first anthropological study dedicated to theorizing failure, this innovative collection offers fresh insights based on the latest scholarship. Destined to stimulate a new area of research, the book makes a vital contribution to material culture studies and related social science theory.
Download or read book Social Change in a Material World written by Theodore R. Schatzki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Change in a Material World offers a new, practice theoretical account of social change and its explanation. Extending the author’s earlier account of social life, and drawing on general ideas about events, processes, and change, the book conceptualizes social changes as configurations of significant differences in bundles of practices and material arrangements. Illustrated with examples from the history of bourbon distillation and the formation and evolution of digitally-mediated associations in contemporary life, the book argues that chains of activity combine with material events and processes to cause social changes. The book thereby stresses the significance of the material dimension of society for the constitution, determination, and explanation of social phenomena, as well as the types of space needed to understand them. The book also challenges the explanatory significance of such key phenomena as power, dependence, relations, mechanisms, and individual behavior. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, organization studies scholars, and others interested in social life and social change.
Download or read book Prehistory written by Chris Gosden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent archaeological discoveries from China and central Asia have changed our understanding of how human civilization developed in the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history. In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Chris Gosden explores the current theories on the ebb and flow of human cultural variety.
Download or read book The Social Life of Emotions written by Larissa Z. Tiedens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-27 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases new research and theory about the way in which the social environment shapes, and is shaped by, emotion. The book has three sections, each of which addresses a different level of sociality: interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup. The first section refers to the links between specific individuals, the second to categories that define multiple individuals as an entity, and the final to the boundaries between groups. Emotions are found in each of these levels and the dynamics involved in these types of relationship are part of what it is to experience emotion. The chapters show how all three types of social relationships generate, and are generated by, emotions. In doing so, this book locates emotional experiences in the larger social context.
Download or read book Impact of Materials on Society written by Sophia Krzys Acord and published by Library Press at Uf. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook supports the Impact of Materials on Society course and teaching materials, developed with the Materials Research Society. The textbook, which is freely available online (https: //ufl.pb.unizin.org/imos/) and for purchase in print-on-demand format, offers an exploration into materials and the relationship with technologies and social structures. The textbook was developed by an interdisciplinary team from Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences, including anthropologists, sociologists, historians, media studies experts, Classicists, and more. Chapters include coverage of clay, ceramics, concrete, copper and bronze, gold and silver, steel, aluminum, polymers, and writing materials. Supplemental materials, including lecture slides, assignments, and exams, may be accessed in a companion volume: https: //ufl.pb.unizin.org/imosinstructorguide
Download or read book The Social Life of Trees written by Laura Rival and published by Materializing Culture. This book was released on 1998-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a host of answers from an anthropological perspective on the symbolic meanings of trees. Shows the astonishing ways we use species, coconuts, bananas, cedars. Symbols such as the American sequoia and U.K. oak tree.
