Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselves through writing and material culture.

Communication, Literacy, Materiality, Material Culture

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This volume addresses the dynamics of materiality over time and space. In cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary studies the authors examine how things gain meaning and status, generate a multitude of emotions, and feed into the propagation of myths, narratives and discourses. The book is divided according to four themes: soft objects, stoic stories, consuming and the collectable, and waste and technologies. The first section discusses the meanings of the lived environment on the individual and national levels. The second section provides specific examples on the role of things in identity construction. The third section focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of consumption and collecting. The phenomena under scrutiny in the fourth section are moral dilemmas associated with and representations of dirt/waste and advancements in science and technology. Presenting diverse case studies of material culture, the volume points to rich interdisciplinary approaches in cultural theory.

material culture --- technologies --- consumption --- collecting --- waste --- home

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.

Calais Jungle --- collecting --- contemporary archeology --- material culture --- memeory --- refugee camp

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her new husband, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville. For the next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband’s work at two mission houses, Norway House and then Berens River. Unprepared for the difficult conditions and the “eight months long” winter, and unimpressed with “eating fish twenty-one times a week,” the young Upper Canada wife rose to the challenge. In these remote outposts, she gave birth to three children, acted as a nurse and doctor, and applied both perseverance and determination to learning Cree, while also coping with poverty and short supplies within her community. Her account of mission life, as seen through the eyes of a woman, is the first of its kind to be archived and now to appear in print.Accompanying Elizabeth’s memoir, and offering a counterpoint to it, are the reminiscences of her eldest son, “Eddie.” Born at Norway House in 1869 and nursed by a Cree woman from infancy, Eddie was immersed in local Cree and Ojibwe life, culture, and language, in many ways exemplifying the process of reverse acculturation often in evidence among the children of missionaries. Like those of his mother, Eddie’s memories capture the sensory and emotional texture of mission life, providing a portrait that is startling in its immediacy.Skillfully woven together and meticulously annotated by Jennifer Brown, these two remarkable recollections of mission life are an invaluable addition to the fields of religious, missionary, and Aboriginal history. In their power to resurrect experience, they are also a fascination to read.

Egerton Ryerson Young, Rossville Mission, Norway House, Methodist missionary, Cree, Ojibwe, material culture

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"The study of affect has become a dynamic field spanning a range of disciplines from psychology over neuroscience to philosophy and cultural studies. Little attention however has been payed to material culture. This book presents an innovative set of ethnographies of the affective relations between people and things. It tackles the sensual experiences of materiality, through taste, sounds, smells and touch that are hard to verbalize or represent in images. Evocative situations are detailed, like for instance the packing of a suitcase at the splitting of a marriage; how people in the besieged Sarajevo were both helped and humiliated by the aid received from abroad; how the parting of objects after the parents’ death may result in siblings never talking to one another again. These ethnographies from Scandinavia, the Balkans and the US, focus on what affects do in everyday life rather than what they are. The volume is also provided with chapters that put the studies of affects in ethnology and anthropology in a wider scholarly frame and discuss theories and methods applied in the book.
Sensitive Objects in the first place addresses scholars and students in Ethnology, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, as well as other readers interested in affects and emotions, material culture, tourism, innovations, and post-socialism.

material culture --- distribution of estate --- affect --- post-socialism --- phenomenology --- tourism --- traveling --- museum studies