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Why do people go to exhibitions, and what do they hope to gain from the experience? What would happen if people were encouraged to move freely through exhibition spaces, take photographs and be playful? In this book, Inge Daniels explores what might happen if people and objects were freed from the regulations currently associated with going to an exhibition. Traditional understandings of exhibitions place the viewers in a one-way communication form, where the exhibition and those behind its creation inform their audiences. However, motivations behind exhibition-going are multiple and complex and frequently the intentions of curators do not match the expectations of their visitors. Based on a...
In the West the Japanese house has reached iconic status in its architecture, decoration and style. Is this neat, carefully constructed version of Japanese life in fact a myth? Inge Daniels goes behind the doors of real Japanese homes and examines every aspect of the home and daily-life.
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.
In the West, the Japanese house has reached iconic status in its architecture, decoration and style. Is this neat, carefully constructed version of Japanese life in fact a myth? Inge Daniels goes behind the doors of real Japanese homes to find out how highly private domestic lives are lived in Japan. The book examines every aspect of the home and daily life-from decoration, display, furniture and the tatami mat, to eating, sleeping, gift-giving, recycling and worship. For students and researchers in anthropology and architecture, The Japanese House re-evaluates contemporary Japanese life through an ethnographic lens, examining key topics of consumption, domesticity and the family. Highly illustrated throughout, the book will appeal to all who those are interested Japanese culture, and in how and why people live the way they do in modern Japan.
Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.
Has material civilization spun out of control, becoming too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet? This book confronts these anxieties and examines the changing rhythms and temporal organization of everyday life. How do people handle hurriedness, burn-out and stress? Are slower forms of consumption viable? This volume brings together international experts from geography, sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. In case studies covering the United States, Asia and Europe, contributors follow routines and rhythms, their emotional and political dynamics and show how they are anchored in material culture and everyday practice. Running themes of the book are questions of coordination and disruption; cycles and seasons; and the interplay between power and freedom, and between material and natural forces. The result is a volume that brings studies of practice, temporality and material culture together to open up a new intellectual agenda.
Informative as well as entertaining, this volume offers many interesting facets of the first hundred years of anthropology at Oxford University.
Introduction: living, not merely surviving -- The communication landscape -- Display and disguise -- Crime and carelessness -- Love and deceit -- Sex and money -- Truth and willful blindness -- Conclusion: mobile phones and the demands of intimacy
The story of the world's first fashion-obsessed society in eighteenth-century London - and the colourful tales of extravagance, vanity, intrigue, and sexual indiscretion that accompanied it
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption offers a timely overview of how our understanding of consumption in history has changed in the last generation.