Meredith McGuire
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195305418
- eISBN:
- 9780199785094
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195305418.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Eschewing the notion that people’s spirituality and their bodily materiality are in binary opposition, this chapter examines how people engage their material bodies in their religious and spiritual ...
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Eschewing the notion that people’s spirituality and their bodily materiality are in binary opposition, this chapter examines how people engage their material bodies in their religious and spiritual practices. Rather than looking at the practices of religious institutions, it asks: What might we see differently if we focused on the ordinary, everyday embodied practices by which people, individually and collectively, literally live their religions? Bodies (e.g., senses, postures, gestures, and voices) are at the very core of individual religious experience, as well as at the center of shared religious expression and community. Examples of specific embodied practices in gardening and dancing suggest how many contemporary patterns of lived religion involve embodied practices.Less
Eschewing the notion that people’s spirituality and their bodily materiality are in binary opposition, this chapter examines how people engage their material bodies in their religious and spiritual practices. Rather than looking at the practices of religious institutions, it asks: What might we see differently if we focused on the ordinary, everyday embodied practices by which people, individually and collectively, literally live their religions? Bodies (e.g., senses, postures, gestures, and voices) are at the very core of individual religious experience, as well as at the center of shared religious expression and community. Examples of specific embodied practices in gardening and dancing suggest how many contemporary patterns of lived religion involve embodied practices.
Anderson Blanton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469623979
- eISBN:
- 9781469623993
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469623979.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
In this work, Anderson Blanton illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and material culture in the charismatic Christian worship of southern ...
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In this work, Anderson Blanton illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and material culture in the charismatic Christian worship of southern Appalachia. From the radios used to broadcast prayer to the curative faith cloths circulated through the postal system, material objects known as spirit-matter have become essential since the 1940s, Blanton argues, to the Pentecostal community's understanding and performances of faith. Hittin' the Prayer Bones draws on Blanton's extensive site visits with church congregations, radio preachers and their listeners inside and outside the broadcasting studios, and more than thirty years of recorded charismatic worship made available to him by a small Christian radio station. In documenting the transformation and consecration of everyday objects through performances of communal worship, healing prayer, and chanted preaching, Blanton frames his ethnographic research in the historiography of faith healing and prayer, as well as theoretical models of materiality and transcendence. At the same time, his work affectingly conveys the feelings of horror, healing, and humor that are unleashed in practitioners as they experience, in their own words, the sacred, healing presence of the Holy Ghost.Less
In this work, Anderson Blanton illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and material culture in the charismatic Christian worship of southern Appalachia. From the radios used to broadcast prayer to the curative faith cloths circulated through the postal system, material objects known as spirit-matter have become essential since the 1940s, Blanton argues, to the Pentecostal community's understanding and performances of faith. Hittin' the Prayer Bones draws on Blanton's extensive site visits with church congregations, radio preachers and their listeners inside and outside the broadcasting studios, and more than thirty years of recorded charismatic worship made available to him by a small Christian radio station. In documenting the transformation and consecration of everyday objects through performances of communal worship, healing prayer, and chanted preaching, Blanton frames his ethnographic research in the historiography of faith healing and prayer, as well as theoretical models of materiality and transcendence. At the same time, his work affectingly conveys the feelings of horror, healing, and humor that are unleashed in practitioners as they experience, in their own words, the sacred, healing presence of the Holy Ghost.
François G. Richard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226252407
- eISBN:
- 9780226252681
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226252681.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Reluctant Landscapes analyzes the political history of rural communities in the Siin province (Senegal) over the last 400 years. Much of Africa’s global history has been told from the standpoint of ...
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Reluctant Landscapes analyzes the political history of rural communities in the Siin province (Senegal) over the last 400 years. Much of Africa’s global history has been told from the standpoint of states, but less is known about peasants, whose past has often been written as a tale of political rupture or cultural persistence. Drawing on archaeology, history, and anthropology, this book charts how Siin villagers variably accommodated, resisted, or evaded the incursions of indigenous states, the Atlantic economy, colonialism, and postcolonial government. It pays particular attention to the role of material world – both the landscapes crafted by farmers over generations, and the systems of objects with which they interfaced through trade – in mediating between villagers and broader historical forces, and in shaping their political experiences. Over time, these material worlds incorporated the coordinates of a changing political economy, yet they also conserved certain principles of political life, whose expressions continue to orient collective expectations about politics today. Grounded in Siin’s history and cultural geography, the book not only intends to sharpen historical understanding of peasant communities in Senegal, but it also essays wider critical reflections about capitalism, international slavery, colonial governance, and post-independence statecraft in rural West Africa.Less
Reluctant Landscapes analyzes the political history of rural communities in the Siin province (Senegal) over the last 400 years. Much of Africa’s global history has been told from the standpoint of states, but less is known about peasants, whose past has often been written as a tale of political rupture or cultural persistence. Drawing on archaeology, history, and anthropology, this book charts how Siin villagers variably accommodated, resisted, or evaded the incursions of indigenous states, the Atlantic economy, colonialism, and postcolonial government. It pays particular attention to the role of material world – both the landscapes crafted by farmers over generations, and the systems of objects with which they interfaced through trade – in mediating between villagers and broader historical forces, and in shaping their political experiences. Over time, these material worlds incorporated the coordinates of a changing political economy, yet they also conserved certain principles of political life, whose expressions continue to orient collective expectations about politics today. Grounded in Siin’s history and cultural geography, the book not only intends to sharpen historical understanding of peasant communities in Senegal, but it also essays wider critical reflections about capitalism, international slavery, colonial governance, and post-independence statecraft in rural West Africa.
Mikael Wiberg
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262037518
- eISBN:
- 9780262344692
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262037518.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Design
Computing is increasingly intertwined with our physical world. From smart watches to connected cars, to the Internet of Things and 3D-printing, the trend towards combining digital and analogue ...
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Computing is increasingly intertwined with our physical world. From smart watches to connected cars, to the Internet of Things and 3D-printing, the trend towards combining digital and analogue materials in design is no longer an exception, but a hallmark for where interaction design is going in general. Computational processing increasingly involves physical materials, computing is increasingly manifested and expressed in physical form, and interaction with these new forms of computing is increasingly mediated via physical materials. Interaction Design is therefore increasingly a material concern. In this book, “The Materiality of Interaction – Notes on the Materials of Interaction Design”, Mikael Wiberg investigates this trend towards material interactions. In doing so he describes how the field of human-computer interaction has moved, through the material turn, from a representation-driven design paradigm, towards a paradigm which he calls material-centered interaction design. Wiberg examines what this emergent paradigm implies for the practice of doing interaction design, he proposes a design method for doing material-centered interaction design, and he discusses the implications for moving forward given an interaction design paradigm that focuses on the materiality of interaction.Less
Computing is increasingly intertwined with our physical world. From smart watches to connected cars, to the Internet of Things and 3D-printing, the trend towards combining digital and analogue materials in design is no longer an exception, but a hallmark for where interaction design is going in general. Computational processing increasingly involves physical materials, computing is increasingly manifested and expressed in physical form, and interaction with these new forms of computing is increasingly mediated via physical materials. Interaction Design is therefore increasingly a material concern. In this book, “The Materiality of Interaction – Notes on the Materials of Interaction Design”, Mikael Wiberg investigates this trend towards material interactions. In doing so he describes how the field of human-computer interaction has moved, through the material turn, from a representation-driven design paradigm, towards a paradigm which he calls material-centered interaction design. Wiberg examines what this emergent paradigm implies for the practice of doing interaction design, he proposes a design method for doing material-centered interaction design, and he discusses the implications for moving forward given an interaction design paradigm that focuses on the materiality of interaction.
Claudia Brodsky
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823230006
- eISBN:
- 9780823235285
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823230006.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
The “place” in the title of this book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The “referent” the book describes is ...
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The “place” in the title of this book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The “referent” the book describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. The book develops a theory of the “referent” that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with “Being.” Challenging these equally naïve views of language—as essentially immaterial or the only essential matter—the book investigates the interaction of language with the material that literature represents. For literature, it argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable, discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history “takes place” and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history, the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its oblivion, and the future of its unearthing.Less
The “place” in the title of this book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The “referent” the book describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. The book develops a theory of the “referent” that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with “Being.” Challenging these equally naïve views of language—as essentially immaterial or the only essential matter—the book investigates the interaction of language with the material that literature represents. For literature, it argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable, discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history “takes place” and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history, the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its oblivion, and the future of its unearthing.
Janice Carlisle
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195165098
- eISBN:
- 9780199787685
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195165098.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Surveying the representation of odors in eighty British novels written in the 1860s, this study provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and ...
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Surveying the representation of odors in eighty British novels written in the 1860s, this study provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit, and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveal the status of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than in others olfactory proof of their materiality. Drawing upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses, this study establishes the subtlety with which fictional representations distinguish between characters who give off odors and those who do not. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, this study argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure current understandings of the values typically attached to different classes and different genders in Victorian culture, specifically by presenting women as the bearers of materiality and genteel men as their insubstantial counterparts.Less
Surveying the representation of odors in eighty British novels written in the 1860s, this study provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit, and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveal the status of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than in others olfactory proof of their materiality. Drawing upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses, this study establishes the subtlety with which fictional representations distinguish between characters who give off odors and those who do not. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, this study argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure current understandings of the values typically attached to different classes and different genders in Victorian culture, specifically by presenting women as the bearers of materiality and genteel men as their insubstantial counterparts.
Helen Smith
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651580
- eISBN:
- 9780191741654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651580.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as ‘grossly material things’, rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf’s brief hint as its starting point, ...
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In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as ‘grossly material things’, rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf’s brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books themselves, this book moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women’s textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women went about the business of making, the book offers a new perspective on the history of books and reading. Where Woolf believed that Shakespeare’s sister, had she existed, would have had no opportunity to pursue a literary career, the book paints a compelling picture of Judith Shakespeare’s varied job prospects, and promises to reshape our understanding of gendered authorship in the English Renaissance.Less
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as ‘grossly material things’, rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf’s brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books themselves, this book moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women’s textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women went about the business of making, the book offers a new perspective on the history of books and reading. Where Woolf believed that Shakespeare’s sister, had she existed, would have had no opportunity to pursue a literary career, the book paints a compelling picture of Judith Shakespeare’s varied job prospects, and promises to reshape our understanding of gendered authorship in the English Renaissance.
Fred H. Degnan
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195326864
- eISBN:
- 9780199870325
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326864.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Should the food label serve to communicate required information about whether food is the product of biotechnology or contains ingredients that are produced using biotechnology? Unlike most other ...
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Should the food label serve to communicate required information about whether food is the product of biotechnology or contains ingredients that are produced using biotechnology? Unlike most other regulatory authorities throughout the whole world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has resisted the urgings of interested parties to require such information to appear on a broad-scale basis. This position finds root in both science and law. Specifically, from a scientific perspective, FDA has concluded that there is nothing inherently unsafe or mysterious about food biotechnology. As a result of this conclusion, any effort by FDA to require biotechnology-related information to appear on the food label would be inconsistent with FDA's statutory authority and with the labeling policies and precedents that have derived from that authority. At the heart of these policies and precedents is the notion that to be required to appear on the food label, information must be essential and material to a consumer's ability to choose food wisely.Less
Should the food label serve to communicate required information about whether food is the product of biotechnology or contains ingredients that are produced using biotechnology? Unlike most other regulatory authorities throughout the whole world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has resisted the urgings of interested parties to require such information to appear on a broad-scale basis. This position finds root in both science and law. Specifically, from a scientific perspective, FDA has concluded that there is nothing inherently unsafe or mysterious about food biotechnology. As a result of this conclusion, any effort by FDA to require biotechnology-related information to appear on the food label would be inconsistent with FDA's statutory authority and with the labeling policies and precedents that have derived from that authority. At the heart of these policies and precedents is the notion that to be required to appear on the food label, information must be essential and material to a consumer's ability to choose food wisely.
Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061122
- eISBN:
- 9780813051406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061122.001.0001
- Subject:
- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
Using the concept of materiality as an interpretive framework, Carrie Sulosky Weaver presents an interdisciplinary examination of the Passo Marinaro necropolis (ca. 5th to 3rd c. BCE) for the purpose ...
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Using the concept of materiality as an interpretive framework, Carrie Sulosky Weaver presents an interdisciplinary examination of the Passo Marinaro necropolis (ca. 5th to 3rd c. BCE) for the purpose of reconstructing the synchronic dynamics, state of health and mortuary practices of Kamarina, an ancient Greek city-state in southeastern Sicily. By considering material evidence from the necropolis together with findings from the biological study of the human remains, a more complete portrait of the Kamarinean people emerges. The majority of people did not live past young adulthood, and throughout their lives, most experienced dental diseases, some developed degenerative joint disease, anemia and bone infections, others possessed physical deformities, and a few were the victims of interpersonal violence and possibly cancer. Kamarina was a place where magic and surgery were practiced, and individuals of diverse ethnicities and ancestries were united in life and death by shared culture and funerary practices. Through the combination of methods drawn from classical archaeology and physical anthropology, this study, the first of its kind for Greek Sicily, sheds new light on the life- and deathways of Kamarina in the 5th through 3rd c. BCE.Less
Using the concept of materiality as an interpretive framework, Carrie Sulosky Weaver presents an interdisciplinary examination of the Passo Marinaro necropolis (ca. 5th to 3rd c. BCE) for the purpose of reconstructing the synchronic dynamics, state of health and mortuary practices of Kamarina, an ancient Greek city-state in southeastern Sicily. By considering material evidence from the necropolis together with findings from the biological study of the human remains, a more complete portrait of the Kamarinean people emerges. The majority of people did not live past young adulthood, and throughout their lives, most experienced dental diseases, some developed degenerative joint disease, anemia and bone infections, others possessed physical deformities, and a few were the victims of interpersonal violence and possibly cancer. Kamarina was a place where magic and surgery were practiced, and individuals of diverse ethnicities and ancestries were united in life and death by shared culture and funerary practices. Through the combination of methods drawn from classical archaeology and physical anthropology, this study, the first of its kind for Greek Sicily, sheds new light on the life- and deathways of Kamarina in the 5th through 3rd c. BCE.
Farah Karim-Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748619931
- eISBN:
- 9780748652204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748619931.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Most critics who have examined the theological and misogynistic opposition to cosmetics argue that the dramatic representation of cosmetics is grounded in a fundamental devaluation of beautification. ...
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Most critics who have examined the theological and misogynistic opposition to cosmetics argue that the dramatic representation of cosmetics is grounded in a fundamental devaluation of beautification. The painted iconography of Queen Elizabeth I was simultaneously an emblem of political potency and a marker of an unmistakable femininity. Cosmetic ingredients and the metaphorical language offered by cosmetic discourses provided dramatists with crucial and vividly dramatic materials for their art. Dramatists saw fit to transport the notion of beautification out of the domestic space into the theatrical space, recognising the performative value of cosmetic materiality and the poetic richness of cosmetic metaphors.Less
Most critics who have examined the theological and misogynistic opposition to cosmetics argue that the dramatic representation of cosmetics is grounded in a fundamental devaluation of beautification. The painted iconography of Queen Elizabeth I was simultaneously an emblem of political potency and a marker of an unmistakable femininity. Cosmetic ingredients and the metaphorical language offered by cosmetic discourses provided dramatists with crucial and vividly dramatic materials for their art. Dramatists saw fit to transport the notion of beautification out of the domestic space into the theatrical space, recognising the performative value of cosmetic materiality and the poetic richness of cosmetic metaphors.
Janice Carlisle
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195165098
- eISBN:
- 9780199787685
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195165098.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter takes up Meredith's Evan Harrington and Oliphant's Salem Chapel, but deals in this case with their principal female characters, as it also considers the heroines of Yonge's The Clever ...
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This chapter takes up Meredith's Evan Harrington and Oliphant's Salem Chapel, but deals in this case with their principal female characters, as it also considers the heroines of Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family, Eliot's Felix Holt, and Trollope's Miss Mackenzie. Through comparative encounters that become exchanges, such women prove their superiority to their men: because these female characters are marked as matter through their association with the aromas of flowers, they are represented as having the capacity to offer their men the substance not only of their reproductive bodies but also of their property, their money, and their land. A woman's attempt to treat the ills of her melancholic man in the context of the domesticity that they share, however, often merely reveals that his cure must be sought elsewhere.Less
This chapter takes up Meredith's Evan Harrington and Oliphant's Salem Chapel, but deals in this case with their principal female characters, as it also considers the heroines of Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family, Eliot's Felix Holt, and Trollope's Miss Mackenzie. Through comparative encounters that become exchanges, such women prove their superiority to their men: because these female characters are marked as matter through their association with the aromas of flowers, they are represented as having the capacity to offer their men the substance not only of their reproductive bodies but also of their property, their money, and their land. A woman's attempt to treat the ills of her melancholic man in the context of the domesticity that they share, however, often merely reveals that his cure must be sought elsewhere.
Janice Carlisle
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195165098
- eISBN:
- 9780199787685
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195165098.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This afterword comments briefly on Eliot's Middlemarch to indicate the political conclusion to which the argument of this study leads. Although the preceding chapters analyze the plots of the fiction ...
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This afterword comments briefly on Eliot's Middlemarch to indicate the political conclusion to which the argument of this study leads. Although the preceding chapters analyze the plots of the fiction of the 1860s by treating the politics of class in relation to the practices of everyday life, Middlemarch, a novel begun in the last years of that decade, suggests the extent to which such texts also open themselves to more institutionally specific political readings. The debates surrounding the 1866 and 1867 franchise reform bills involved on a national scale the kind of exchange that Victorian novels enact on the level of relations between individuals, and the argument with which this study concludes, like those in the previous chapters, is based on the olfactory data provided by the many novels surveyed earlier and the perspectives on materiality that they offer. The evocative smells of Middlemarch exemplify the relationship between matter and spirit in high-Victorian fiction, and the case of one of its characters connects olfactory experience to the larger, presumably inodorate arena of institutional politics.Less
This afterword comments briefly on Eliot's Middlemarch to indicate the political conclusion to which the argument of this study leads. Although the preceding chapters analyze the plots of the fiction of the 1860s by treating the politics of class in relation to the practices of everyday life, Middlemarch, a novel begun in the last years of that decade, suggests the extent to which such texts also open themselves to more institutionally specific political readings. The debates surrounding the 1866 and 1867 franchise reform bills involved on a national scale the kind of exchange that Victorian novels enact on the level of relations between individuals, and the argument with which this study concludes, like those in the previous chapters, is based on the olfactory data provided by the many novels surveyed earlier and the perspectives on materiality that they offer. The evocative smells of Middlemarch exemplify the relationship between matter and spirit in high-Victorian fiction, and the case of one of its characters connects olfactory experience to the larger, presumably inodorate arena of institutional politics.
Melissa Mueller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226312958
- eISBN:
- 9780226313009
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226313009.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Since Aristotle, text has been considered the essence of Athenian tragedy, while theatrical props have been relegated to the category of mere spectacle, external to the text. Objects as Actors argues ...
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Since Aristotle, text has been considered the essence of Athenian tragedy, while theatrical props have been relegated to the category of mere spectacle, external to the text. Objects as Actors argues that far from being inanimate, ancillary “things,” props are fully integrated in tragic text, agents that spark surprising plot turns and unexpected reactions from viewers inside and outside the theatrical frame while furnishing some of the genre’s most purely thrilling moments. Whether it’s the uncanny sword or the diachronic shield of Sophocles’ Ajax, the visually overpowering tapestry of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, the mythically and politically charged recognition tokens of Euripides’ Ion, the canonical urn of Sophocles’ Electra, or the metatheatrical tablet of Euripides’ Hippolytus, props demand our attention. They bridge—even as they disrupt—time, space, and genre; they manipulate even as they are manipulated. Combining theater studies with cultural poetics, this book proposes a new dimension in the study of how tragic plays communicate with each other: not just intertextually, but also intertheatrically. Through their compelling presence and associative power, props provide the key to a new way of looking at the central tragic texts—and, indeed, at theater as a whole.Less
Since Aristotle, text has been considered the essence of Athenian tragedy, while theatrical props have been relegated to the category of mere spectacle, external to the text. Objects as Actors argues that far from being inanimate, ancillary “things,” props are fully integrated in tragic text, agents that spark surprising plot turns and unexpected reactions from viewers inside and outside the theatrical frame while furnishing some of the genre’s most purely thrilling moments. Whether it’s the uncanny sword or the diachronic shield of Sophocles’ Ajax, the visually overpowering tapestry of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, the mythically and politically charged recognition tokens of Euripides’ Ion, the canonical urn of Sophocles’ Electra, or the metatheatrical tablet of Euripides’ Hippolytus, props demand our attention. They bridge—even as they disrupt—time, space, and genre; they manipulate even as they are manipulated. Combining theater studies with cultural poetics, this book proposes a new dimension in the study of how tragic plays communicate with each other: not just intertextually, but also intertheatrically. Through their compelling presence and associative power, props provide the key to a new way of looking at the central tragic texts—and, indeed, at theater as a whole.
Helen Smith
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651580
- eISBN:
- 9780191741654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651580.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The Introduction makes the case for the intersection between feminist literary history, history of the book, and the study of materiality, briefly outlining these fields by analysing Woolf's ...
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The Introduction makes the case for the intersection between feminist literary history, history of the book, and the study of materiality, briefly outlining these fields by analysing Woolf's foundational plea for A Room of One's Own. It explores the different models offered recently for the study of the material text, particularly the circuit and the map, and suggests that the spider's web may provide a more compelling framework. The web or network, the introduction suggests, better reflects the contingencies and collaborations of authorship, making, and reception and coincides in productive ways with recent sociological and anthropological work on the study of ‘stuff’. The introduction closes by briefly describing the chapters which follow, urging the need to foreground women's textual labours and to rethink the sex/gender of the text.Less
The Introduction makes the case for the intersection between feminist literary history, history of the book, and the study of materiality, briefly outlining these fields by analysing Woolf's foundational plea for A Room of One's Own. It explores the different models offered recently for the study of the material text, particularly the circuit and the map, and suggests that the spider's web may provide a more compelling framework. The web or network, the introduction suggests, better reflects the contingencies and collaborations of authorship, making, and reception and coincides in productive ways with recent sociological and anthropological work on the study of ‘stuff’. The introduction closes by briefly describing the chapters which follow, urging the need to foreground women's textual labours and to rethink the sex/gender of the text.
Helen Smith
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651580
- eISBN:
- 9780191741654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651580.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
A brief epilogue outlines some uses of the early modern book in which reading was not the only, nor necessarily the most important, way of engaging with the material text. Briefly surveying some of ...
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A brief epilogue outlines some uses of the early modern book in which reading was not the only, nor necessarily the most important, way of engaging with the material text. Briefly surveying some of the circumstances in which texts were worn upon the body and displayed (or hidden) in a variety of locations, the epilogue returns to the questions of materiality and the mutual shaping of books and bodies raised in the introduction, and suggests that critical practice must do more to account for women's presence in the printed text.Less
A brief epilogue outlines some uses of the early modern book in which reading was not the only, nor necessarily the most important, way of engaging with the material text. Briefly surveying some of the circumstances in which texts were worn upon the body and displayed (or hidden) in a variety of locations, the epilogue returns to the questions of materiality and the mutual shaping of books and bodies raised in the introduction, and suggests that critical practice must do more to account for women's presence in the printed text.
Simone Tosoni and Trevor Pinch
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035279
- eISBN:
- 9780262336550
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035279.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social ...
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Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.Less
Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.
Mechthild Fend
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719087967
- eISBN:
- 9781526120724
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719087967.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Throughout the history of European painting, skin has been the most significant surface for artistic imitation, and flesh has been a privileged site of lifelikeness. Skin and flesh entertain complex ...
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Throughout the history of European painting, skin has been the most significant surface for artistic imitation, and flesh has been a privileged site of lifelikeness. Skin and flesh entertain complex metaphorical relationships with artefacts, images, their making and materiality: fabricated surfaces are often described as skins, skin and colour have a longstanding connection, and paint is frequently associated with flesh.
This book considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse and focuses on seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. It describes a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period and argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body’s substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. This shift is traced in the terminology of art theory and in the practices of painting, as well as engraving, colour printing and drawing. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing and theorising painterly skills and a site where the body and the image made of it become equally expressive.Less
Throughout the history of European painting, skin has been the most significant surface for artistic imitation, and flesh has been a privileged site of lifelikeness. Skin and flesh entertain complex metaphorical relationships with artefacts, images, their making and materiality: fabricated surfaces are often described as skins, skin and colour have a longstanding connection, and paint is frequently associated with flesh.
This book considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse and focuses on seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. It describes a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period and argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body’s substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. This shift is traced in the terminology of art theory and in the practices of painting, as well as engraving, colour printing and drawing. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing and theorising painterly skills and a site where the body and the image made of it become equally expressive.
Simon Coleman
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195393408
- eISBN:
- 9780199894390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393408.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
Focusing on the Word of Life, founded by Ulf Ekman in Uppsala, Sweden, this chapter explores tensions and affinities between health-and-wealth aspects of the Prosperity Gospel. Both health and wealth ...
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Focusing on the Word of Life, founded by Ulf Ekman in Uppsala, Sweden, this chapter explores tensions and affinities between health-and-wealth aspects of the Prosperity Gospel. Both health and wealth activate forms of materiality that challenge ascetic ideals and ritually constitute Charismatic personhood through transactions and mediations. Charismatic subjects are formed not only as individuals, but also—as “dividuals”—out of engagement with others through material exchanges, on local and global levels. Physical and financial entrepreneurship act as ritual complements, permitting reflection and action in relation both to the intimate self and to a wider, unbounded world. Materiality is in motion or contributes to motion; it does not accumulate for the sake of accumulation; it is both index and means of spiritual progress. People themselves form the most valued mediators of spiritual power, through touch and other semiotic forms, such as spoken words, books, or television images.Less
Focusing on the Word of Life, founded by Ulf Ekman in Uppsala, Sweden, this chapter explores tensions and affinities between health-and-wealth aspects of the Prosperity Gospel. Both health and wealth activate forms of materiality that challenge ascetic ideals and ritually constitute Charismatic personhood through transactions and mediations. Charismatic subjects are formed not only as individuals, but also—as “dividuals”—out of engagement with others through material exchanges, on local and global levels. Physical and financial entrepreneurship act as ritual complements, permitting reflection and action in relation both to the intimate self and to a wider, unbounded world. Materiality is in motion or contributes to motion; it does not accumulate for the sake of accumulation; it is both index and means of spiritual progress. People themselves form the most valued mediators of spiritual power, through touch and other semiotic forms, such as spoken words, books, or television images.
Nicholas Bauch
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262029407
- eISBN:
- 9780262331166
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029407.003.0009
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Programming
This chapter takes a geographical perspective on a medical biotechnology known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBANs generate, transmit, store, and retrieve information about the biological ...
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This chapter takes a geographical perspective on a medical biotechnology known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBANs generate, transmit, store, and retrieve information about the biological functioning of patients from any location, allowing doctors to watch their symptoms from computer screens at different locations. The chapter asks what happens to the body when millions of data points are collected from it, and are stored in data center facilities that are increasingly altering urban and rural landscapes. The chapter builds from an ontology based in object relations (e.g. bodies and material, digital information) to propose a different ontology based in extensibility. The political project is potentially vast. When data centers and the landscapes in which they are situated become pieces of the body itself, they must be given greater care and protection by the law.Less
This chapter takes a geographical perspective on a medical biotechnology known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBANs generate, transmit, store, and retrieve information about the biological functioning of patients from any location, allowing doctors to watch their symptoms from computer screens at different locations. The chapter asks what happens to the body when millions of data points are collected from it, and are stored in data center facilities that are increasingly altering urban and rural landscapes. The chapter builds from an ontology based in object relations (e.g. bodies and material, digital information) to propose a different ontology based in extensibility. The political project is potentially vast. When data centers and the landscapes in which they are situated become pieces of the body itself, they must be given greater care and protection by the law.
Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262035750
- eISBN:
- 9780262338332
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035750.001.0001
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Macro- and Monetary Economics
For over a hundred years, many have envisioned a cashless society, whether utopian or dystopian. Now, in an era of mobile money and Bitcoin, it seems that cashlessness might not be far off. In recent ...
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For over a hundred years, many have envisioned a cashless society, whether utopian or dystopian. Now, in an era of mobile money and Bitcoin, it seems that cashlessness might not be far off. In recent years, there has been a flurry of payment innovation. Many of these new technologies offer a dream of money as pure information: seamless andinstantaneous. But instead of becoming dematerialized, new money technologies rely on as much, if not more, stuff than cash ever did. This book investigates the material of money past, present, and future. It is a collection of essays by scholars across fields, including anthropology, archaeology, media, technology, history, as well as journalists and industry professionals. Each essay focuses on one transactional object, including cash, checks, cards, and cryptocurrencies. Some of these items are valuable (such as bits of silver traded by libertarians), some are obsolete (such as first generation ATMs), and some are trash (such as receipts carefully collected in a cigar box). By attending to the stuff of money, these scholars investigate questions of value, authority, community, identity, and materiality.Contributors: Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Baurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O’Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary UrtonLess
For over a hundred years, many have envisioned a cashless society, whether utopian or dystopian. Now, in an era of mobile money and Bitcoin, it seems that cashlessness might not be far off. In recent years, there has been a flurry of payment innovation. Many of these new technologies offer a dream of money as pure information: seamless andinstantaneous. But instead of becoming dematerialized, new money technologies rely on as much, if not more, stuff than cash ever did. This book investigates the material of money past, present, and future. It is a collection of essays by scholars across fields, including anthropology, archaeology, media, technology, history, as well as journalists and industry professionals. Each essay focuses on one transactional object, including cash, checks, cards, and cryptocurrencies. Some of these items are valuable (such as bits of silver traded by libertarians), some are obsolete (such as first generation ATMs), and some are trash (such as receipts carefully collected in a cigar box). By attending to the stuff of money, these scholars investigate questions of value, authority, community, identity, and materiality.Contributors: Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Baurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O’Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary Urton
