front cover of Material Cultures
Material Cultures
Why Some Things Matter
Edited by Daniel Miller
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in Material Cultures. A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad.

The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, Material Cultures emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.

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front cover of Objects, Commodities and Material Cultures in the Dutch Republic
Objects, Commodities and Material Cultures in the Dutch Republic
Exploring Early Modern Materiality Across Disciplines
Judith Noorman
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
How did objects move between places and people, and how did they reshape the Republic’s arts, cultures and sciences? ‘Objects’ were vitally significant for the early modern Dutch Republic, which is known as an early consumer society, a place famous for its exhaustive production of books, visual arts and scientific instruments. What happens when we push these objects and their materiality to the centre of our research? How do they invite us to develop new perspectives on the early modern Dutch Republic? And how do they contest the boundaries of the academic disciplines that have traditionally organized our scholarship? In Objects, Commodities and Material Cultures, the interdisciplinary community of specialists around the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of Early Modernity innovatively explores the diverse early modern world of objects. Its contributors take a single object or commodity as a point of departure to study and discuss various aspects of early modern art, culture and history: from natural objects to consumer goods, from knowledge instruments to artistic materials. The volume aims to unravel how objects have moved through regions, cultures and ages, and how objects impacted people who lived and worked in the Dutch Republic.
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