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Sites, Traces, and Materiality proposes a new materialist model for archaeology that brings together the concept of site ontology from geography, a novel analysis of archaeological materiality as traces, and engagement with the concept of animacy hierarchy, in order to explore how geological materials can be reconceived as active. Using a sustained analysis of ancient Honduras, the book provides a contribution to global medieval studies showing how the concept of alchemy can help foreground the kinds of experiential knowledge indigenous people used to advance their technological engagements with mineral matter. Addressing a concern often raised with new materialist work in archaeology, the book relies on indigenous philosophy of the contemporary and historic Lenca people-- the descendants of the people who created the archaeological locales the book examines-- for guidance on how to think about minerals as lively. Taking seriously contemporary Lenca concerns with threats to water and land from global industries, the book links the archaeological case study to the present day politics of mineral extraction. Intended for readers interested in history, archaeology, and cultural studies, the book is accessibly written and appropriate for students as well as academics.
This volume brings together three areas of scholarship and practice: rhetoric, material life, and ecology. The chapters build a multi-layered understanding of material life by gathering scholars from varied theoretical and critical traditions around the common theme of ecology. Emphasizing relationality, connectedness and context, the ecological orientation we build informs both rhetorical theory and environmentalist interventions. Contributors offer practical-theoretical inquiries into several areas - rhetoric’s cosmologies, the trophe, bioregional rhetoric’s, nuclear colonialism, and more - collectively forging new avenues of communication among scholars in environmental communication, communication studies, and rhetoric and composition. This book aims at inspiring and advancing ecological thinking, demonstrating its value for rhetoric and communication as well as for environmental thought and action.
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.
This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.
Inspired by the philosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to affect, Affective Connections disavows the dominant oppositional discourse around representation to offer an affirmative approach to perception, cognition and experience. It advances a new materialist concept of synaesthetic perception, where synaesthesia is understood as a union of senses. This idea offers a new figuration for thinking about our cognition, exploring the role of embodied experience and the agency of matter in the production of knowledge. Looking at a number of memorials, memory sites and artworks relating to the Holocaust the book uses this idea of synaesthetic perception to explore trauma, memory and the production of art in relation to painful memories. In doing so, it demonstrates that modes of interacting with the past and encountering the lived experience of trauma can trigger a deeper understanding of these events and produce more complex forms of affective connections. It proposes a shift away from empathy towards sympathy (understood in new materialist terms), not just as a sentimental response to trauma but as an affective notion that allows for a more comprehensive grasp of experiences of discrimination, exclusion, suffering, or pain.
What happens when a monumental thing is physically destroyed? Is its "life" as a socially significant, presencing thing at an end? Or might the process of destruction work to enhance its symbolic force, mediating work and presencing power? In this book Andrea Connor traces the ‘afterlife’ of two exemplary examples of monumental destruction and their re-investment with cultural value and symbolic significance. In 1993, during the Bosnian war, the Mostar Bridge was completely destroyed. Reconstructed in 2004, as an exact copy of the original, this "new Old Bridge" has assumed an afterlife as an intentional monument to reconciliation. The World Trade Centre, in New York, has also been transformed since its destruction in 2001, as a place of national mourning and remembrance, a symbolic void marking a singular act of terrorism. Using recent work on affect and object agency Connor considers their contested reconfiguration as sites of collective remembering and forgetting in new highly charged political contexts. She argues for a more expansive notion of reconstruction – encompassing not only the material and symbolic afterlife of both things but also their affecting afterlives as they are re-assembled in the present. Provoking a reconsideration of the way monuments and heritage sites, even in their absence, become powerful agents of historical narrativization, this work will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields including international relations, cultural studies, critical heritage studies, and material culture studies.
This volume advances the data-based study of multimodal artefacts and performances by showcasing methods and results from the latest endeavors in empirical multimodal research, representing a vibrant international and interdisciplinary research community. The collated chapters identify and seek to inspire novel, mixed-method approaches to investigate meaning-making mechanisms in current communicative artifacts, designs, and contexts; while attending to their immersive, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions. Each contribution details innovative aspects of empirical multimodality research, offering insights into challenges evolving from quantitative approaches, particular corpus work, results from eye-tracking and psychological experiments, and analyses of dynamic interactive experiences. The approaches and results presented foreground the inherent multidisciplinary nature and implications of multimodality, renegotiating concepts across linguistics, media studies, (social) semiotics, game studies, and design. With this, the volume will inform both current and future developments in theory, methods, and transdisciplinary contexts and become a landmark reference for anyone interested in the empirical study of multimodality.
Focussing on the Australian South Sea Islander minority community this volume employs a variety of theoretical arguments in order to contribute a new method for comprehending the many interleaving aspects of memory spaces, and should be of interest to heritage professionals, local councils and governing bodies, and members of the general public.
- How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies? - How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories? - Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making? Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending. Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being ‘invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.