Author : Lorraine Daston
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 14,30 MB
Release : 2000-06-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226136721
Looks at how whole domains of phenomena come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific study. With examples from the natural and social sciences, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical.
Author : Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.)
Publisher : Menil Foundation
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 17,38 MB
Release : 2021
Category : Art, Ancient
ISBN : 9780300250879
A revealing look at ancient art in the Menil Collection that addresses the problem of objects lacking archaeological context This innovative anthology discusses a diversity of ancient Mediterranean objects--a Mesopotamian votive figure, a Egyptian relief from the New Kingdom, and a Greek Geometric fawn among them--in the Menil Collection and three other US museums. It offers new models for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. Essays by 13 authors written with the layperson in mind employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and modern provenance research to gain insight into the meaning of the objects themselves and what they can teach us more broadly aboutarchaeology, art history, and collecting practices. They take on complex issues of cultural heritage, legality, and taste to bring to life works that are often consigned to either the imperial past or a conceptual limbo. Essays on related groups or single objects introduce fresh frameworks to engage with the multilayered history these objects represent. The eight object biographies on ancient artifacts in the Menil are the first in-depth studies published on the collection. Essays by seven university professors probe works in their areas of expertise, while those by seven curators lay bare one object biography; frame provenance studies at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Getty Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and survey war's effect on ancient works. The editors' introduction and an epilogue responding to the other 13 texts review theoretical and practical issues in the study of artifacts lacking archaeological findspots (provenience). Recommended for programs and libraries in museum studies, archaeology, and art history; art and heritage law programs; and readers fascinated by cold-case detective work on the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Distributed for the Menil Collection
Author : Janet Hoskins
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 34,59 MB
Release : 2013-09-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1136678646
In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and self-historicizing. Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways. Biographical Objects is an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.
Author : Kate Hill
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 48,24 MB
Release : 2014
Category : Art
ISBN : 184383961X
Exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, this collection of essays examines examples from the early 19th century to the present day.
Author : Lynn Meskell
Publisher : Berg Publishers
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 44,23 MB
Release : 2004-07-02
Category : History
ISBN :
From the Valley of the Kings to Las Vegas, Egypt looms large in the Western imagination. So why are we intrigued by pyramids and practices of mummification? Is it because the ancient Egyptians fetishized material objects? And what do Egyptian remains tell us about biography, embodiment, memory, materiality, the self, and, indeed, ourselves? This book considers how excavated objects reveal ancient Egyptians' experiences of their material world. It also explores existential questions that not only preoccupied ancient Egyptians, but continue to fascinate people today. What is the essence of persons and things? How might we understand the situated experiences of material life? How might objects successfully mediate between worlds? Meskell ultimately moves forward through time and examines the consumption of Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world, including Las Vegas. Meskell provides an elegant analysis of the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian material culture and insights into its mysteries, including our own ongoing fascination.
Author : Christian Forstner
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 21,11 MB
Release : 2020-07-22
Category : Science
ISBN : 3030485099
This book sheds new light on the biographical approach in the history of physics by including the biographies of scientific objects, institutions, and concepts. What is a biography? Can biographies also be written for non-human subjects like scientific instruments, institutions or concepts? The respective chapters of this book discuss these controversial questions using examples from the history of physics. By approaching biography as metaphor, it transcends the boundaries between various perspectives on the history of physics, and enriches our grasp of the past.
Author : Alex Burchmore
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 29,91 MB
Release : 2024-10-31
Category : Art
ISBN : 1350416452
What do Persian robes of honour, 20th-century still-life painting, fur garments, and 18th-century porcelain all have in common? Prized, possessed and modelled, they highlight the deep connections we share with cultural objects. Establishing new connections between people and things via artistic media and material culture, this highly interdisciplinary volume brings together both established and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, material culture, museum and heritage studies and literary studies to investigate the intersection of the personal with the material. Raising vital questions of cultural identity, belonging and selfhood, Material Selves is the first book of its kind to consider the relationship between people and things across transcultural and transhistorical contexts. It employs innovative methodologies across ten chapters and critically expands on current models for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and things by tracing the central role objects have played in the construction, creation and performance of identity throughout history. Structured around four key sections exploring biography and narrative; adornment and ornament; reclamation and intervention; and subjects and objects, the volume presents a global selection of case studies that explore, amongst other things, Margaret Olley's enduring fame, the significance of the Khil'a in Safavid Persia and early modern Europe, and 17th-century French painter Charles LeBrun's royal portraiture. Fusing these with contemporary theories of identity, the contributors provide analyses informed by posthumanism, the environmental humanities, race and gender. At the same time, they confront vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, and highlight the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. In doing so, the book illuminates a wide range of cultural and chronological settings whilst giving close attention to the mobility of people and things between, across, and through time and place.
Author : Roberta J. M. Olson
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 28,96 MB
Release : 2006-06-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781405139557
Material culture is not static: objects are created, used and re-used, sometimes for centuries, and their lives interact with those of the people who made and used them. The essays in this book discuss the ‘social lives’ of objects in late-medieval and renaissance Italy, ranging from maiolica, through sculpture and prostitutes’ jewellery, to miraculous painted images. Demonstrates the continued life of these objects well past the deaths of their creators and patrons. Contains a series of original contributions by young scholars, representing a broad range of approaches.
Author : Timothy Carroll
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 46,51 MB
Release : 2020-11-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000182630
This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a new analytical approach. The case studies draw from a range of contexts, including digital objects, infrastructure, data, extraterrestriality, ethnographic curation, and medical materiality. They include timely reappraisals of now-classical analytical models that have shaped the way we understand the object, the discipline, knowledge formation, and the artefact.
Author : Dana Arnold
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 29,41 MB
Release : 2007-12-11
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1134215355
Bringing together a collection of high-profile authors, Biographies and Space presents essays exploring the relationship between biography and space and how specific subjects are used as a means of explaining sets of social, cultural and spatial relationships. Biographical methods of historical investigation can bring out the authentic voice of subjects, revealing personal meanings and strategies in space as well as providing a means to analyze relations between the personal and the social. Writing about both actual (architectural) and imagined (pictorial) space, the authors consider issues of gender, childhood, sexuality and race, highlighting an increasing fluidity and interaction between theory, methods and history. Biographies and Space is an original and exciting new book, with direct relevance to both architectural and art history.
