Some objects seem especially personal and important to us - be it a quickly packed suitcase, an inherited vase, or a photograph. In Sensitive Objects the authors discuss when, how, and why particular objects appear as 'sensitive'. They do so by analyzing the objects' affective charging in the context of historically embedded practices. Sensitive Objects is a contribution to the upcoming field of 'affect research' that has so far been dominated by psychology and cultural studies, and the authors examine the potential for epistemic gain by connecting the studies of affect with the studies of material culture. The contributors, predominantly ethnologists and anthropologists, use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects embody or trigger affects and produce affective atmospheres.
How are love and emotion embodied in material form? Love Objects explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times. Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, Love Objects explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.
Some objects stand out as personal and important to us. A packed suitcase, an inherited vase, the remains from a humanitarian aid packet – things can be stored with affects. In Sensitive Objects the authors focus on material culture and on practice – on what affect does. Some of them place the issue of sensitivity in a wider frame of professional interest in innovation and culture-tourism. The volume is a contribution to the upcoming field of ‘affect research’ that has so far has been mainly explored in psychology and cultural studies. In their texts ethnologists and anthropologists involved show how established ways of analysing culture benefit from achievements in this field. They use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects trigger affect. The editors hope that this book will be read across disciplines, not only to promote the value of ethnographic work, but also to incite further theoretically informed creative empirical approaches to affects and material culture.
Material objects must always be seen in context with the humans who created and used them. It is only possible to recognize and evaluate material culture in connection with human thought and behavior. The material world depends on the immaterial one, and vice versa. Neither sphere can exist without the other. In historical research, however, such contexts have not been considered regularly. In particular, the inter-connections between emotions and material culture have not been taken sufficiently into account in research. This was the reason for the "Institut fur Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der fruhen Neuzeit" to organize a round-table-discussion on "Emotions and Material Culture" and to publish its proceedings. The volume contains eleven contributions by specialists from eight countries. They show various possibilities to contextualize the material world and emotional behavior. They may be seen as a first step towards a "material emotionology" of the past. The complex results are intended to serve as a further impetus towards the systematic and comparative research into "emotional communities" and their material life in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.
Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.
This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.
A large-scale investigation into grave goods (c. 4000 BC-AD 43), enabling a new level of understanding of mortuary practice, material culture, technological innovation and social transformation.
This book focuses on men's bodies, emotions and material culture to offer a new understanding of masculinities in Britain in the long nineteenth century. Using objects as well as texts and images, it shows how idealised and ugly bodies, and the feelings they stimulated, helped convey ideas about manliness and unmanliness across society.
