Finding the Future in the Past (original) (raw)

The (After) Lives of Things: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Material Culture

Session Abstract: Material things have been used to fashion identities and form social relationships throughout history. This panel seeks to shed light on the intersecting histories of materiality and process in the production and consumption of material culture. It invites papers that examine how physical and intellectual practices such as collecting, repurposing and remaking conveyed materially embedded messages about the subjective experience of their owner-makers, as well as the period in which they were undertaken more broadly. Such practices performed not only physical but semantic changes upon these objects which, due to their revised contexts, reciprocally enacted changes upon their possessors. Examining how these processes allowed individuals to construct identities, spaces, and social bonds, this panel will address issues central to the 'material turn' that has characterised recent scholarship within the humanities and, in particular, that of art history. Papers included within the session will examine issues such as object biography, construction and reconstruction, adaptation and alteration, collage and assemblage, display, and the transformative potential of acquisition, with a broad focus on objects between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

AH 466 Material Worlds: Topics in Material Culture Studies

Things, artifacts, objects... These are our intimate companions as we live in and make sense of the world. We tend to categorize them as fetishes, souvenirs, heirlooms, tools, knick knacks, voodoo dolls, marionettes, toys, furniture, relics, object d’art, rocks, fossils, buildings, landscapes, amounting to what we cumulatively call “material culture”. Art historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians among others have attempted to make sense of the past (and the present) through the material residues, artifacts, remnants of human practices. Things, fetishized or not, become protagonists in our reconstructions of the past, as we increasingly believe that societies construct their world through the making of things, their use, circulation, discard. However, are things happy about such instrumentalization, categorization and secondary positioning as inanimate and silent members of the world? The recent interest in the academia on materiality has brought about a new age of things, the so-called “material turn,” revisiting old theories of materialism and asking fresh questions about alternative, object-oriented ontologies. In this course we will explore new work on thing theory, materials and materiality, the social life and the cultural biography of objects, their ability to configure social realities, human subjectivities, and cultural identities.

Material Culture and Other Things - Post-disciplinary Studies in the 21st century

"More than twenty years after the Cambridge school of contextual archaeology challenged processual archae- ology, one may ask where post-processual archaeology stands today. Where is archaeology situated in the aca- demic landscape of the 21st century? Material Culture and Other Things aims to broaden up the fields of inquiry in archaeology through a post- disciplinary approach to the study of material culture and other things. The contributors in this book lay em- phasis on the varying roles of materialities in the con- stitution of social life, offering new perspectives on both the present and the past, and hence, exploring what "archaeology" can be in the 21st century."