Handbook of Material Culture

This popular and critically acclaimed Handbook is now available in paperback.

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed.

The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections.

- Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field.

- Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses.

- Section III focuses on subject-object relations.

- Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term.

- Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity.

The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer
Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton
Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas
Objectification - Christopher Tilley
Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins
Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjørnar Olsen
Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies
Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen
Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations
THE BODY, MATERIALITY AND THE SENSES
Four Types of Visual Culture - Christopher Pinney
Food, Eating, and the Good Life - Judith Farquar
Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia - David Howes
Intersensuality and Material Culture
The Colours of Things - Diana Young
Inside and Outside - Jean-Pierre Warnier
Surfaces and Containers
SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS
Cloth and Clothing - Jane Schneider
Home Furnishing and Domestic Interiors - Robert St George
Vernacular Architecture - Suzanne Preston Blier
Architecture and Modernism - Victor Buchli
"Primitivism," Anthropology and the Category of "Primitive Art" - Fred Myers
Tracking Globalization - Robert Foster
Commodities and Value in Motion
Place and Landscape - Barbara Bender
Cultural Memory - Paul Connerton
PROCESS AND TRANSFORMATION
Technology as Material Culture - Ron Eglash
Consumption - Daniel Miller
Design, Style and Function - Meg Conkey
Exchange - James Carrier
Performance - Jonathan Mitchell
Present to Past - Paul Lane
Ethnoarchaeology
Material Culture and Long-term Change - Chris Gosden
PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
Intellectual Property and Rights - Marilyn Strathern
An Anthropological Perspective
Heritage and the Present Past - Beverley Butler
Museums and Museum Displays - Anthony Shelton
Monuments and Memorials - Michael Rowlands & Christopher Tilley
Conservation as Material Culture - Diana Eastop
Collectors and Collecting - Russell Belk