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The Social Life of Things

Author : Arjun Appadurai

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 350 pages

File Size : 47,17 MB

Release : 1988-01-29

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1107392977

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Book Description

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.



The Social Life of Things

Author : Arjun Appadurai

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 350 pages

File Size : 35,56 MB

Release : 1988-01-29

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 9780521357265

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Book Description

Three of the papers were presented to the Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983-84; the others were presented at a Symposium on the Relationship between Commodities and Culture, held May 23-25, 1984, in Philadelphia. Includes bibliographies and index.



The Social Life of Spirits

Author : Ruy Blanes

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 312 pages

File Size : 20,33 MB

Release : 2013-11-22

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 022608180X

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Book Description

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.



The Occult Life of Things

Author : Fernando Santos-Granero

Publisher : University of Arizona Press

Page : 288 pages

File Size : 41,85 MB

Release : 2009-10-15

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0816545065

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Book Description

Native peoples of the Amazon view objects, especially human artifacts, as the first cosmic creations and the building blocks from which the natural world has been shaped. In these constructional cosmologies, spears became the stings of wasps, hammocks became spiderwebs, stools became the buttocks of human beings. A view so antithetical to Western thought offers a refreshing perspective on the place and role of objects in human social life—one that has remained under-studied in Amazonian anthropology. In this book, ten scholars re-introduce objects to contemporary studies of animism in order to explore how various peoples envision the lives of material objects: the occult, or extraordinary, lives of “things,” whose personas are normally not visible to lay people. Combining linguistic, ethnological, and historical perspectives, the contributors draw on a wealth of information gathered from ten Amerindian peoples belonging to seven different linguistic families to identify the basic tenets of what might be called a native Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood. They consider which objects have subjective dimensions and how they are manifested, focusing on three domains regarding Amazonian conceptions of things: the subjective life of objects, considering which things have a subjective dimension; the social life of things, seeing the diverse ways in which human beings and things relate as subjectivities; and the historical life of things, recognizing the fact that some things have value as ritual objects or heirlooms. These chapters demonstrate how native Amazonian peoples view animals, plants, and things as “subjectivities” possessing agency, intentionality, and consciousness, as well as a composite anatomy. They also show how materiality is intimately linked to notions of personhood, with artifacts classified as natural or divine creations and living beings viewed as cultural or constructed. The Occult Life of Things offers original insights into these elaborate native ontologies as it breaks new ground in Amazonian studies.



Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit for a Global Age

Author : Kenneth J Guest

Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company

Page : 18 pages

File Size : 43,82 MB

Release : 2016-10-11

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0393265005

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Book Description

The Second Edition of Ken Guest's Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age covers the concepts that drive cultural anthropology by showing that now, more than ever, global forces affect local culture and the tools of cultural anthropology are relevant to living in a globalizing world.



Materiality and Popular Culture

Author : Anna Malinowska

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 284 pages

File Size : 11,81 MB

Release : 2016-08-12

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1317219139

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Book Description

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.



The Social Life of DNA

Author : Alondra Nelson

Publisher : Beacon Press

Page : 218 pages

File Size : 32,24 MB

Release : 2016

Category : History

ISBN : 0807033014

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Book Description

The unexpected story of how genetic testing is affecting race in America We know DNA is a master key that unlocks medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life is both revelatory and endlessly fascinating. Tracing genealogy is now the second-most popular hobby amongst Americans, as well as the second-most visited online category. This billion-dollar industry has spawned popular television shows, websites, and Internet communities, and a booming heritage tourism circuit. The tsunami of interest in genetic ancestry tracing from the African American community has been especially overwhelming. In The Social Life of DNA, Alondra Nelson takes us on an unprecedented journey into how the double helix has wound its way into the heart of the most urgent contemporary social issues around race. For over a decade, Nelson has deeply studied this phenomenon. Artfully weaving together keenly observed interactions with root-seekers alongside illuminating historical details and revealing personal narrative, she shows that genetic genealogy is a new tool for addressing old and enduring issues. In The Social Life of DNA, she explains how these cutting-edge DNA-based techniques are being used in myriad ways, including grappling with the unfinished business of slavery: to foster reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink and sometimes alter citizenship, and to make legal claims for slavery reparations specifically based on ancestry. Nelson incisively shows that DNA is a portal to the past that yields insight for the present and future, shining a light on social traumas and historical injustices that still resonate today. Science can be a crucial ally to activism to spur social change and transform twenty-first-century racial politics. But Nelson warns her readers to be discerning: for the social repair we seek can't be found in even the most sophisticated science. Engrossing and highly original, The Social Life of DNA is a must-read for anyone interested in race, science, history and how our reckoning with the past may help us to chart a more just course for tomorrow.



The Social Life of Coffee

Author : Brian Cowan

Publisher : Yale University Press

Page : 376 pages

File Size : 12,22 MB

Release : 2008-10-01

Category : History

ISBN : 0300133502

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Book Description

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.



Abraham's Luggage

Author : Elizabeth Lambourn

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 319 pages

File Size : 11,16 MB

Release : 2018-10-18

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 1107173884

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Book Description

A single, unique document - a list of one merchant's baggage - is the starting point used to bring to life the twelfth-century Indian Ocean. Drawing connections between material culture, foodstuffs and the construction of identity, Lambourn examines notions of home and mobility at a key moment in world history.



In the Midst of Things

Author : Mike Owen Benediktsson

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 264 pages

File Size : 43,73 MB

Release : 2022-09-20

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0691174334

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Book Description

How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and regulation of the material objects we encounter on a daily basis. In the Midst of Things takes an in-depth look at the social lives of five objects commonly found in the public spaces of New York City and its suburbs, revealing how our interactions with such material things are our primary point of contact with the social, political, and economic forces that shape city life. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of original interviews, Mike Owen Benediktsson shows how we are in the midst of things whose profound social role often goes overlooked. A newly built lawn on the Brooklyn waterfront reflects an increasingly common trade-off between the marketplace and the public good. A cement wall on a New Jersey highway speaks to the demise of the postwar American dream. A metal folding chair on a patch of asphalt in Queens exposes the political obstacles to making the city livable. A subway door expresses the simmering conflict between the city and the desires of riders, while a newsstand bears witness to our increasingly impoverished streetscapes. In the Midst of Things demonstrates how the material realm is one of immediacy, control, inequality, and unpredictability, and how these factors frustrate the ability of designers, planners, and regulators to shape human behavior.