The Cultural Power of Personal Objects
The Cultural Power of Personal Objects

Author: Jared Kemling

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 1438486189

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The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"—they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.

The Lives of Objects
The Lives of Objects

Author: Maia Kotrosits

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-09-07

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 022670758X

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Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.

Sensitive Objects
Sensitive Objects

Author: Jonas Frykman

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 918816862X

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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.

Objects of War
Objects of War

Author: Leora Auslander

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1501720090

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The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.― Utah Public Radio Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word. Contributors: Noah Benninga, Sandra H. Dudley, Bonnie Effros, Cathleen M. Giustino, Alice Goff, Gerdien Jonker, Aubrey Pomerance, Iris Rachamimov, Brandon M. Schechter, Jeffrey Wallen, and Sarah Jones Weicksel

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World
Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World

Author: Ralph D. Ellis

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2023-10-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1438494734

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Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World combines embodied consciousness research, existential phenomenology, Gendlin's "focusing" concept, and recent self-organizational work on basic emotions (e.g., Panksepp, Frijda), to explore the way patterns of motivated action shape our interpretations of reality—personally, biologically, and within a sociopolitical community. Like a bat projecting sonar, we understand our world by sensing patterns of resistance against our own self-initiated actions. If hammering is the action, we find "nails" and "non-nails." Actions in turn express a self-organizing process rooted in motivational structures that presuppose values. These patterns of motivation therefore prefigure the shape of what we think or perceive. But the emotions, feelings, "sensings" through which we discern motivation are never just about what they seem, especially given ample incentives to distortion and self-deception. The "trigger" is the tip of an iceberg. This book works toward a coherent method for getting at the basement level of the action trajectories that motivate exploration, selective attention, and thus interpretations of reality—a crucial question in an age of motivated disinformation.

Designing Spatial Culture
Designing Spatial Culture

Author: Roderick Adams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1000957853

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Designing Spatial Culture investigates a powerful experiential dialogue formed between the habitation of space and a diversified cultural realm. This creative proposition binds and positions human activity and experience framing its histories, currency and future. Whilst the book distinguishes between the conditions of the existing urban/ architecture/ interior canon, it embraces a new agency of space, showcasing the encounters, assemblies and designs that shape human behaviours and the cultural forms of the built environment. Using authoritative case studies, the book examines many locations and spaces, ranging from new urban landscapes, historical domestic spaces and contemporary architecture. It embraces the most lavish and flamboyant to the most simplistic and minimal, establishing a connected cultural narrative. The book shifts the focus in the spatial realm from an object-based experience (where space is filled with things) to a more complete immersive experience (combining physical and digital). A key part of this exploration is the relationship between the architecture and the interior which is often the most predominant spatial experience and fundamental to the understanding spatial experience and existing cultures. Without the architectural enclosure, the interior would lose its site context and structure for its existence. Without an interior, architecture would not fully develop an engaging spatial experience for the user. The book rationalises this through extended use of a spatial probe which documents and summarises an evidence-based research project capturing spatial culture data from a predominantly domestic setting. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in architecture, interior design and urban design.

The Social Life of Things
The Social Life of Things

Author: Arjun Appadurai

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-01-29

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1107392977

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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.

Journeys of Soviet Things
Journeys of Soviet Things

Author: Sudha Rajagopalan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-03

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1000848493

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At the intersection of cultural history, material culture studies, memory studies and feminist geopolitics, Journeys of Soviet Things is an oral history of socialist globalisation constructed around the journeys of Cold War era Soviet objects in India and Cuba. During the Cold War, an important means to perpetuate Soviet ideals of modernisation and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world was the circulation of ‘banal’ objects, produced in the Soviet Union and purchased, awarded, and gifted for use in homes across the world. Based on oral accounts of Indian and Cuban interlocutors, this book examines the itineraries of Soviet objects such as cars, washing machines, cameras, books, nesting dolls, porcelain, and many other things. Explored this way, the Cold War is a matter of personal, affective, everyday experience. At the same time, by indicating the cohabitation of things in their home from around the world, interlocutors also go on to undercut simple geopolitical binaries that pit Soviet against American techno-politics. Accounts of Soviet objects in India and Cuba reveal a bricolage of preferences that crisscrossed ideological dualities of East vs West, communist vs capitalist, making for an alternative cosmopolitanism that was in equal measure shaped by personal, local, and national histories and experiences. This book will appeal to readers interested in Cold War history, the history of transnational solidarities, and Soviet material culture.