Writing the Materialities of the Past PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Writing the Materialities of the Past PDF full book. Access full book title Writing the Materialities of the Past by Sam Griffiths. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Sam Griffiths Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429804059 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 183
Book Description
Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.
Author: Sam Griffiths Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429804059 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 183
Book Description
Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.
Author: Anne Murphy Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199916276 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.
Author: Anne Murphy Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199916292 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.
Author: Daniel Miller Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822386712 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human. Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift
Author: Christina Toren Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134645155 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
How do we become who we are? How is it that people are so similar in the ways they differ from one another, and so different in the ways they are the same? Christina Toren's theory of mind as not only a physical phenomenon, but an historical one, sets out to answer these questions by examining how the material world of objects and other people informs the constitution of mind in persons over time. This theory of embodied mind as a microhistorical process is set out in the first chapter, providing a context for the nine papers that follow. Questions explored include the way meaning-making processes reference an historically specific world and are responsible at once for continuity and change, how ritual informs children's constitution of the categories adults use to describe the world, and how people represent their relationships with one another and in so doing come to embody history. Mind, Materiality and History has direct relevance to current debates on the nature of mind and consciousness, and demonstrates the centrality of the study of children to social analysis. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in anthropological theory and methodology, as well as those engaged in material culture studies.
Author: Dick Houtman Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823239454 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 501
Book Description
The relation between religion and things has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, privileging spirit above matter, belief above ritual and objects, meaning above form and 'inward' contemplation above 'outward' action. This book addresses these issues.
Author: Ivan Gaskell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197500129 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 696
Book Description
Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.
Author: Christoph Klaus Streb Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000460800 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
Death, dying and burial produce artefacts and occur in spatial contexts. The interplay between such materiality and the bereaved who commemorate the dead yields interpretations and creates meanings that can change over time. Materiality is more than simple matter, void of meaning or relevance. The apparent inanimate has meaning. It is charged with significance, has symbolic and interpretative value—perhaps a form of selfhood, which originates from the interaction with the animate. In our case, gravestones, bodily remains and the spatial order of the cemetery are explored for their material agency and relational constellations with human perceptions and actions. Consciously and unconsciously, by interacting with such materiality, one is creating meaning, while materiality retroactively provides a form of agency. Spatiality provides more than a mere context: it permits and shapes such interaction. Thus, artefacts, mementos and memorials are exteriorised, materialised, and spatialized forms of human activity: they can be understood as cultural forms, the function of which is to sustain social life. However, they are also the medium through which values, ideas and criteria of social distinction are reproduced, legitimised, or transformed. This book will explore this interplay by going beyond the consideration of simple grave artefacts on the one hand and graveyards as a space on the other hand, to examine the specific interrelationships between materiality, spatiality, the living, and the dead. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Mortality.
Author: Lieven Ameel Publisher: Routledge Advances in Urban History ISBN: 9780367343293 Category : Cities and towns Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History explores a variety of geographical and cultural contexts to examine what literary texts, grasped as material objects and reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history. The contributing writers' approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history is summarised within the conceptualisation 'materiality in/of literature' the way in which literary narratives at once refer to the material world and actively partake in the material construction of the world. This book takes a geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary approach to discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France whilst examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has three areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.
Author: Zahra Newby Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351127640 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
Tangible remains play an important role in our relationships with the dead; they are pivotal to how we remember, mourn and grieve. The chapters in this volume analyse a diverse range of objects and their role in the processes of grief and mourning, with contributions by scholars in anthropology, history, fashion, thanatology, religious studies, archaeology, classics, sociology, and political science. The book brings together consideration of emotions, memory and material agency to inform a deeper understanding of the specific roles played by objects in funerary contexts across historical and contemporary societies.
Author: Sam Griffiths
Author: Sam Griffiths
Author: Anne Murphy
Author: Anne Murphy
Author: Daniel Miller
Author: Christina Toren
Author: Dick Houtman
Author: Ivan Gaskell
Author: Christoph Klaus Streb
Author: Lieven Ameel
Author: Zahra Newby