Collecting Across Cultures

Collecting Across Cultures PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes—personal, imperial, missionary, or trade—and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.

Collecting Across Cultures

Collecting Across Cultures PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes—personal, imperial, missionary, or trade—and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.

The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures

The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures PDF Author: Michelle Ying Ling Huang
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868558
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures is a collection of essays examining the ways in which Chinese art has been circulated, collected, exhibited and perceived in Japan, Europe and America from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. Scholars and curators from East Asia, Europe and North America jointly present cutting-edge research on cultural integration and aesthetic hybridisation in relation to the collecting, display, making and interpretation of Chinese art and material culture. Stimulating examples within this volume emphasise the Western understanding of Chinese pictorial art, while addressing issues concerning the consumption of Chinese art and Chinese-inspired artistic productions from early times to the contemporary period; the roles of collector, curator, museum and auction house in shaping the taste, meaning and conception of art; and the art and cultural identity of the Chinese diaspora in a global context. This book espouses a multiplicity of aesthetic, philosophical, socio-cultural, economic and political perspectives, and encourages academics, students, art and museum practitioners to re-think their encounters with the objects, practices, people and institutions surrounding the study of Chinese art and culture in the past and the present.

The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology

The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology PDF Author: N. J. Enfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992325
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 910

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Book Description
The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.

Cultures of Collecting

Cultures of Collecting PDF Author: Roger Cardinal
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189421X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures – the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth – and the more recent collectors of popular culture, be they of Swatch watches, Elvis Presley memorabilia or of packaging and advertising. With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.

Collecting in a Consumer Society

Collecting in a Consumer Society PDF Author: Russell W. Belk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134575998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This groundbreaking book examines the relationship between the development of the consumer society and the rise of collecting by individuals and institutions. Rusell Belk considers how and why people collect, as individuals, corporations and museums, and the impact this collecting has on us and our culture. Collecting in a Consumer Society outlines the history of museum collecting from ancient civilizations to the present. It also looks at aspects of consumer culture - advertizing, department stores, mass merchandizing, consumer desires, and how this relates to the activity of collecting. Collecting in a Consumer Society is the first book to focus on collecting as material consumption. This is a provocative and engaging book, essential reading for anyone involved with the process of collecting.

On Collecting

On Collecting PDF Author: Susan Pearce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135908168
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
On Collecting examines the nature of collecting both in Europe and among people living within the European tradition elsewhere. Susan Pearce looks at the way we collect and what this tells us about ourselves and our society. She also explores the psychology of collecting: why do we bestow value on certain objects and how does this add meaning to our lives? Do men and women collect differently? How do we use objects to construct our identity? This book breaks new ground in its analysis of our relationship to the material world.

Contraception across Cultures

Contraception across Cultures PDF Author: Andrew Russell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000210944
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Contraception is an issue of considerable concern to a great many heterosexually active people. Yet the impact of contraceptive technologies in the world today, in particular their implications for kinship, gender relations, and other aspects of social life, receives relatively little scholarly attention. This book brings a new perspective to the study of contraception, by collecting together in one volume leading experts in the fields of contraception, family planning and reproductive health. Contributors look at the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which contraceptive providers and recipients make decisions about whether and what forms of contraception to use. User perspectives (whether those of recipients or providers of contraceptive services) are taken seriously, as are the perspectives of policy-makers and development experts. With its in-depth, case-study approach, this challenging book will appeal to practitioners and planners in the fields of family planning and reproductive health, as well as to students and academics of applied and medical anthropology, health studies, gender and development studies, or anyone interested in the social, cultural and ethical issues raised by contraceptive technologies.

Possessing Nature

Possessing Nature PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

Cataloguing Culture

Cataloguing Culture PDF Author: Hannah Turner
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774863951
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions. As Indigenous communities encounter the documentary traces of imperialism while attempting to reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on access to and return of cultural heritage.

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Dana Leibsohn
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409411895
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures shows how distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had profound implications-in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. Beyond their interest in visual culture, the essays here expand our understanding of transcultural encounters and the history of vision.