Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materializing the transient

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representing disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, contemporary archaeology, curatorial studies, history and human geography. The ethnographic nature of the chapters and the focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the broader conditions and tangible experiences of migration

Material culture

The study of material culture is one the core fields that characterize ethnology as a discipline. This year’s volume of Ethnologia Fennica presents contemporary ethnological research on material culture

Metaphor and Materiality in Early Prehistory

In this paper we argue for a relational perspective based on metaphorical rather than semiotic understandings of human and hominin1 material culture. The corporeality of material culture and thus its role as solid metaphors for a shared experience of embodiment precedes language in the archaeological record. While arguments continue as to both the cognitive abilities that underpin symbolism and the necessary and sufficient evidence for the identification of symbolic material culture in the archaeological record, a symbolic approach will inevitably restrict the available data to sapiens or even to literate societies. However, a focus on material culture as material metaphor allows the consideration of the ways in which even the very earliest archaeological record reflects hominins’ embodied, distributed relationships with heterogeneous forms of agent, as will be demonstrated by two case studies

A FORMAL CONCEPT OF CULTURE IN THE CLASSIFICATION OF ALFRED L. KROEBER AND CLYDE KLUCKHOHN

The objective of this article is to analyse definitions of culture gathered by Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn and published in Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions in 1952. This article emphasizes a possibility of re-analysing the material collected by these researchers (Kroeber–Kluckhohn Culture Classification, hereinafter referred to as KKCC). The article shows that the KKCC material constitutes a coherent conceptual and theoretical paradigm. This paradigm was subject to contextual, frequential and conceptual (Formal Conceptual Analysis, hereinafter referred to as FCA) analyses. The obtained research results enabled the author to develop a formal concept of culture of KKCC, which could be used as a model for further analysis. The final conclusions are as follows: (1) the notion of "culture" is definable only within the frameworks of a conceptually coherent paradigm; (2) determination of a paradigm requires material repository (resp. text corpus); (3) contextual and frequential analyses enable one to index that kind of repository in order to determine general categories which will be used to develop a formal concept; (4) the formal concept of culture of KKCC constitutes the framework of all possible theoretical analyses concerning the meaning of the notion of "culture" in anthropology; (5) KKCC constitutes a representation of one theory of culture

Digitizing Material Culture

Archaeology has always centred on material studies and has a long tradition of establishing methods for addressing the vast source material at hand. Typology is one of the most prominent of these methods, where the material is categorised into types according to morphology and geometry. There is an ongoing debate regarding the subjectivity of the typological approach and the problems that follow this issue. In recent years, there has also been an increase in the use of digital methods in archaeology to tackle many of the problems present in previous archaeological work, but this has mostly focused on field and buildings archaeology. This thesis therefore aimed at testing and discussing the application of digital methods of documentation and analysis within the field of material studies. It was investigated how a digital approach could aid and solve some of the current issues of the field of study, but also how it can further improve the science. This was done by establishing a digital work-flow, conducting analyses and discussing the theoretical and methodological aspects of the digital approach. It was concluded that there are several advantages to be gained from using the digital method, especially in detail-oriented studies and surface analyses, and that it can also be employed to greatly improve the typological method in regards to the debate of subjectivity, but that the method must be used in a proper way for this to be achieved. It can also aid in the spread of knowledge and documentation within the archaeological discipline, as well as providing the tools for deeper analysis and understanding into the material culture

Asian material culture

This exciting, richly illustrated volume gives the reader a unique insight into the materiality of Asian cultures and the ways in which objects and practices can simultaneously embody and exhibit aesthetic and functional characteristics, everyday and spiritual aspirations. Material culture is examined from a variety of perspectives and the authors rigorously investigate the creation and meaning of material object, and their associated practices within the context of time and place. All chapters in this volume are representative, rather than exhaustive, in their portrayal of Asian material culture. Nevertheless, they clearly demonstrate that the objects, seen as material evidence of culture, are entities that resonate with discourses of human relationships, personal and group identity formation, ethics and values, histories, determination of ethnicity, local and international trade, consumption and above all distinctive futures. 1 Asian Material Culture in Context / Marianne Hulsbosch, Elizabeth Bedford & Martha Chaiklin 2 Moon Cakes and the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival: A Matter of Habitus / Elizabeth Bedford 3 Up in the Hair: Strands of Meaning in Women’s Ornamental Hair Accessories in Early Modern Japan / Martha Chaiklin 4 Nonya Beadwork and Contemporary Peranakan Chinese Culture in Singapore and Malaysia / Hwei-Fe'n Cheah 5 Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: The Lion Dance and Chinese National Identity in the 19th and 20th Centuries / Heleanor B. Feltham 6 Works Like a Charm: Cultural Tourism, Colour and its Efficacy in Chinese Miao Traditional Dress / Samantha Hauw 7 Fluttering Like Flowers in a Summer Breeze: Hair Jewellery of Christian Moluccan Women of the Dutch East Indies / Marianne Hulsbosch 8 Tension on the Back-Strap Loom / Audrey LowDeze geC/llustreerde uitgave geeft de lezer een uniek inzicht in de betekenis van Aziatische materiC+le culturen en de manier waarop voorwerpen en gebruiken individuele en collectieve identiteiten, esthetische en functionele kenmerken, menselijke en geestelijke aspiraties aanduiden. Zeven internationaal befaamde auteurs laten met hun onderzoek de unieke aspecten van de Aziatische materiC+le cultuur zien; deze worden vanuit verscheidene perspectieven belicht. Elk hoofdstuk geeft een introductie op het ontstaan, de betekenis en de bijbehorende gebruiken van specifieke materiC+le voorwerpen. De onderzochte objecten variC+ren van populaire Maankoekjes uit China, haarornamenten uit Japan, textiel uit het zuiden van China en MaleisiC+ tot de rijkelijk geborduurde pantoffeltjes van de Paranakan vrouwen uit Zuidoost-AziC+. Dit boek is onmisbaar voor iedereen die geC/nteresseerd is in Aziatische kunst en design, culturele studies, archeologie en sociale studies

The Sacred Engagement: Outline of a hypothesis about the origin of human ‘religious intelligence’.

The question that motivates the central hypothesis advanced in this paper regarding the emergence of early religious thinking is the following: ‘why does religion need material\ud culture?’ What basic functional or symbolic need renders material culture an indispensable and universal component of religion and ritual activity? A common temptation, obvious in a number of recent archaeological and anthropological studies, is to seek an answer in the field of memory (Boyer 1993; 1996; 1998; 2001; McCauley and\ud Lawson 2002; Whitehouse 2000; 2004; Mithen 1998a). This paper argues that material culture does much more than simply offer a symbolic channel for the externalization,\ud communication, and thus successful cultural transmission, of religious ideas. Although the mnemonic significance of the ritual object is not denied, it is proposed that the\ud argument from memory, as traditionally premised, fails to provide a cognitively adequate account of the complex affective ties and multimodal interactions that characterise the distinctive phenomenology of religious experience. Moreover, and from a long-term\ud evolutionary perspective, it is argued that the commonly implied ontological priority of the religious idea, over its material expression, leaves us with no explanation about why,and how, religious concepts emerge in the context of human cognitive evolution. Drawing on the theoretical lines of the Material Engagement approach (Malafouris 2004;\ud Renfrew 2004) I want to advance a different hypothesis that places material culture at the heart of the human capacity for religious thinking (cf. Day 2004)

Etruscan Settlement, Society and Material Culture in Central Coastal Etruria

This volume includes a description, and the results, of a field survey in the Albegna Valley and Ager Cosanus area of southern Tuscany, focusing on evidence from the first millennium BC. Philip Perkins describes the methodology, aims and GIS approaches to the field study and then presents the evidence in terms of the Etruscan settlement patterns, burials, farming and subsistence, ceramic evidence, finally reconstructing a population and economic history for the study area. The survey project has revealed a highly organised and hierarchical settlement pattern in the Etruscan period, with an evolving and diversifying agricultural system

Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation