The Materiality of Nothing

The Materiality of Nothing PDF Author: Helen Holmes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000917940
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Materiality of Nothing explores the invisible, intangible and transient materials and objects of everyday life and the relationships we have with them. Drawing on over 15 years of original, empirical research, it builds on growing research on the everyday, and unites the established field of material culture and materiality with emerging sociological studies exploring notions of nothing and the unmarked. The chapters cover topics such as lost property, museum curation, plastic microfibres, thrift, music and even hair, illuminating how invisible and intangible materials conjure memories, meanings and identities, inextricably binding us to other people, places and things. In turn, the book also engages with issues of sustainability and consumption, raising questions regarding society’s increasing need for material accumulation and posing some alternatives.

The Materiality of Nothing

The Materiality of Nothing PDF Author: Helen Holmes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000917940
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Materiality of Nothing explores the invisible, intangible and transient materials and objects of everyday life and the relationships we have with them. Drawing on over 15 years of original, empirical research, it builds on growing research on the everyday, and unites the established field of material culture and materiality with emerging sociological studies exploring notions of nothing and the unmarked. The chapters cover topics such as lost property, museum curation, plastic microfibres, thrift, music and even hair, illuminating how invisible and intangible materials conjure memories, meanings and identities, inextricably binding us to other people, places and things. In turn, the book also engages with issues of sustainability and consumption, raising questions regarding society’s increasing need for material accumulation and posing some alternatives.

Nothing Happens

Nothing Happens PDF Author: Ivone Margulies
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822317234
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of that decade. In Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies presents the first comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker. Margulies grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman's work--from Saute ma ville, a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968, through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman's everyday experience in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies brings the history of social and progressive realism and the filmmaker's work into perspective. Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the feminist rewriting of women's history in the seventies. She then shows how Akerman's "corporeal cinema" is informed by both American experiments with performance and duration and the layerings present in works by European modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman's minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard's anti-illusionism, and reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman's films as either simply modernist or feminist. An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman's work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular PDF Author: Martin Demant Frederiksen
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178535700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

The Materiality of Res Publica

The Materiality of Res Publica PDF Author: Dominique Colas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443810789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
For the last 100 years, political science has traditionally concentrated on the publica part of the expression res publica, conceiving this notion as a form of government opposed to, say, monarchy. However, the Ancients and citizens of Renaissance republics were just as attentive to the res part of the expression. The goal of this richly illustrated volume—containing 94 images—is to draw attention to this res, things and affairs that bring people together. The book first focuses on the central role played by the Rialto Bridge in Venice and by the main bridge in Novgorod the Great in the lives of the respective republics. It includes studies of res in other res publicae: an analysis of the republican icon of a woman crowned with ramparts found in three European cities; and a detailed study of iconography figuring Hobbes’ theory of res publica.

Stuff

Stuff PDF Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745654967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.

The Open Court

The Open Court PDF Author: Paul Carus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description


The Materiality of Color

The Materiality of Color PDF Author: Andrea Feeser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351542737
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on the diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind the production and application of these colors; the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region to another. By emphasizing color's materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts. This book captures color's global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the 'discovery' of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techn?and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color's capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare's sonnets, red threads in women's needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages. The purpose of this book is to recover color's complex-and sometimes morally troubling-past, and in doing so,

Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature

Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature PDF Author: Onno Oerlemans
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802086976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Oerlemans extends current eco-critical views by synthesizing a range of viewpoints from the Romantic period.

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory PDF Author: Derek Ryan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748676457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf's writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter.

The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters

The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004326820
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script.The approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives. Scholars have long recognized a gap between the practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. The question is what impact this gap should have on our conception of ‘the text’. Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese script has been put in the context of ceremonial rites? What ideas of materiality, power and agency are at work in the production and preservation of palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed amulets and other script-bearing instruments? Contributors include: Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, Richard Fox, H.I.R. Hinzler, Annette Hornbacher, Thomas M. Hunter and Margaret Wiener.