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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Voice as Something More starts from the paradox that voices nowadays are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. It tackles this paradox by looking at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a starting point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic approach around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice, whether talking about sounding voices, vocal metaphors, vocal owners, and mimics, or myths of voice, gendered voices, the uncanny voice, and vocal technologies. Included is an interlude by film and sound theorist Michel Chion that reflects on the gendering of voice in the audio-logo-visual form of vowels and consonants in words on screen. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that reflects on vocal aesthetics, the echo, and various vocal paradoxes, this collection ranges from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from the fields of classics and music to film and literature.

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.

The book is an exercise in thinking about and writing about a particular place - the Maxwell Street area of Chicago. It is divided into three sections which address the process of writing about place, the history of the area surrounding Maxwell Street market in Chicago, and the theorization of place. The book adopts a hybrid writing technique informed by montage and contemporary cross-overs between poetry and prose in order to more fully and accurately reflect the nature of being in, and thinking about, place. The first section explores the process and practice of writing a place and outlines the thinking behind the form that the book takes. The second, and largest, section is a sustained engagement with the 100 year history of Maxwell Street. Along the way a number of key tangents are explored including such themes as value, materiality, practice, meaning, waste, the senses, forms of writing, urban renewal, photography, ethnography, tax increment financing, lists, and the urban novel. The third section offers a meso-theory of place drawing on the lessons from Maxwell Street. The book is thus both an exploration of a particular place and an exercise in developing ways to think and write about place that draws on both the deep history of place-writing and place-theory in geography (and beyond) and more recent attempts at experimental writing.

This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.

This book gathers 14 voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. By transversally crossing disciplinary boundaries, new and profound insights into contemporary thinking and creating architecture emerge. The book is at the forefront of the current contemplation on matter and its significance for and within architecture. The premise is that matter in posthuman times has to be rethought in the rich and multifaceted context of contemporary computational architecture, and in the systemic and ecological context of pervasive computer simulations. Combining the dynamism of materiality and the capacities of nonhuman machines towards prototyping spatiotemporal designs and constructs, leads to alternative conceptions of the human, of ethics, aesthetics and politics in this world yet-to-come. The reader, through the various approaches presented by the authors’ perspectives, will appreciate that creativity can come from allowing matter to take the lead in the feedback loop of the creative process towards a relevant outcome evaluated as such by a matter of concern actualised within the ecological milieu of design. The focus is on the authors’ speculative dimension in their multifaceted role of discussing materiality by recognising that a transdisciplinary mode is first and foremost a speculative praxis in our effort to trace materiality and its affects in creativity. The book is not interested in discussing technicalities and unidirectional approaches to materiality, and retreats from a historical linear timeline of enquiry whilst establishing a sectional mapping of materiality’s importance in the emergent future of architecture.