Social Life of Things
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A teaching resource for material culture theory related to "The Social Life of Things"
This paper constitutes a self-critical appraisal on the current understanding of the archaeological record during the last centuries of the Cogotas I Culture in inland Iberia. Several socio-political dynamics argued for this context, such... more
In 2050, the amount of waste generated in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to triple current levels. Waste disposal coupled with urbanisation has led to environmental and social issues in rapidly developing African countries. An analysis... more
Typically, the auction house salesroom has been conceived of as an exemplary market: a place in which ultimate price is fixed by persons at a particular moment. This perspective relies on a static a-historical view of an isolated... more
This paper presents the preliminary findings of an in-depth investigation of a pair of wooden book covers, each inscribed on the inside, which a Russian diplomat brought from the Tarim Basin to St. Petersburg. Pinpointing the find-spot of... more
Apstrakt: Od 1952. godine u FNRJ sve su glasniji diskursi o podruštvljavanju i racionalizaciji kućnih poslova i novoj podeli rada u domaćinstvu. Ideološki, novonastalo slobodno vreme žena bi mogla da iskoristi za samousavršavanje,... more
This study aims to show the life history of playing cards as a fascinating interplay between cultures and concepts. That interplay concerns the cultural meaning that is not given but created and developed when human and non-human agents... more
Resultado de dos temporadas de trabajo de campo antropológico (2015 y 2019) y de la revisión exhaustiva de fuentes secundarias, el presente artículo propone una pesquisa sobre la etnohistoria del algodón, con especial atención en su... more
Apstrakt: Polazeći od koncepta "socijalnog života stvari" Ardžuna Apaduraja u radu se razmatra "ukupan put" odevnih predmeta od proizvodnje, preko distribucije do potroš-nje u posleratnoj Jugoslaviji. Iako je racionalisanje odeće i obuće... more
This paper develops an anthropological approach in order to examine the collecting of "ordinary things" as a private, home-based, leisure activity. The research was conducted in the region of Nouvelle Aquitaine, located in the southwest... more
Este artículo es un primer acercamiento a la configuración del campo del tatuaje en México. Se centra en el tatuaje como una mercancía y en la modificación en sus trayectorias (de producción, circulación y consumo). Se centra en las... more
Seventy years after the Nakba, what does it mean to commemorate 1948? This introduction to three articles drawn from the 2018 New Directions in Palestinian Studies workshop at Brown University, “The Shadow Years: Material Histories of... more
As in many parts of western Europe, the later prehistoric record in inland Iberia hardly ever displays apparent and unambiguous purposeful depositions providing information on past social practices. This paper discusses one such... more
Jinghong Zhang's Puer Tea is a book about a particular kind of tea that is cultivated in the hills of southwest China's Yunnan Province and consumed especially by urbanites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and eastern Mainland China. The book... more
Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community... more
Through a multi-sited physical and virtual ethnography of Chinese migrant women’s entrepreneurship in Taiwan, this paper illuminates the role of digital migrant entrepreneurship in the making of globalisation. In the digital age of... more
In this chapter, Tilo Renz explores the essential roles that objects play in the formation of the utopian medieval community of Crisa in Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius von Tyrland. He shows that ANT’s claims that objects both gain... more
Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la emergencia y el desarrollo del arte dongba contemporáneo en la sociedad naxi de Lijiang (R.P. China). La categoría “Arte Dongba Contemporáneo” surgió a principio de los años ochenta y consiste... more
Student work from a class I co-taught. The object biographies of several works of art from the collection of the Walters Art Museum are mapped into Google Earth. A description of the project, with comments from some of the students,... more
This article elaborates the usefulness of material culture studies for research on contemporary cultural products by representing books as transformable objects with social lives, the investigation of which is needed to better understand... more
In various regions of the Iberian Peninsula, prehistoric communities made decorated stelae and statue-menhirs to recollect their past. These monuments were set up in the landscape, in carefully selected places in which, as some evidence... more