The Meanings of Things (eBook, PDF)

Material Culture and Symbolic Expression
Redaktion: Hodder, I.

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

This unique and fascinating book concentrates on the varying roles and functions that material culture may play in almost all aspects of the social fabric of a given culture. The contributors, from Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea, India, South America, the USA, and both Eastern and Western Europe, provide a rich variety of views and experience in a worldwide perspective. Several of the authors focus on essential points of principle and methodology that must be carefully considered before any particular approach to material culture is adopted. One of the many fundamental questions posed in the book is whether or not all material culture is equivalent to documents which can be 'read' and interpreted by the outside observer. If it is, what is the nature of the 'messages' or meanings conveyed in this way? The book also questions the extent to which acceptance, and subsequent diffusion, of a religious belief or symbol may be qualified by the status of the individuals concerned in transmitting the innovation, as well as by the stratification of the society involved. Several authors deal with 'works of art' and the most effective means of reaching an understanding of their past significance. In some chapters semiotics is seen as the most appropriate technique to apply to the decoding of the assumed rules and grammars of material culture expression.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. November 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781317762324
• Artikelnr.: 40022705

Autorenporträt

I. Hodder

Inhaltsangabe

List of contributors; Foreword, P. Ucko; Preface, Ian Hodder. The political
use of Australian Aboriginal body painting and its archaeological
implications, Robert Layton; Terracotta worship in fringe Bengal, D.K.
Bhattacharya; Iron and beads: Male and female symbols of creation. A study
of ornament among Booran Oromo, Aneesa Kassam & Gemetchu Megersa; The
messages of material behaviour: A preliminary discussion of non-verbal
meaning; Roland Fletcher; Religious cults and ritual practice among the
Mendi people of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea,
Theodore Mawe; Sites as texts: An exploration of Mousterian traces, Lucy
Jayne Botscharow; Style and changing relations between the individual and
society, Polly Wiessner; Post- modernism, post-structuralism and
post-processual archaeology, Ian Hodder; 'We, the post-megalithic
people...', Felipe Criado; The diffusion of religious symbols within
complex societies, L. Charles Hulin; Social evidence from the
interpretation of Middle Minoan figurines, Angeliki Pilali-Papasteriou; The
Priestess Figure of Malta, Christina Biaggi; Ethno-archaeological cognition
and cognitive ethno-archaeology, Zbigniew Kobylinski; Heresy and its
traces: The material results of culture, E. Melas; Bark capes, arrowheads
and Concorde: On social representations of technology, Pierre Lemonnier;
The artefact as abbreviated act: A social interpretation of material
culture, Miles Richardson; The material symbols of the Winnebago sky and
Earth moieties, Robert Hall; Interpreting material culture, Christopher
Tilley; Divine kingdoms in northern Africa: Material manifestations of
social institutions, Else Johansen Kleppe; Towards and archaeology of
thought, Whitney Davis; Tusona ideographs - a lesson in interpretive
objectivity, Gerhard Kubik; Organizational constraints on tattoo images: A
sociological analysis of artistic style, Clinton Sanders; A semiotic
approach in rock-art analysis, Ana Maria Llamarzares; Habitus and social
space: Some suggestions about meaning in the Saami (Lapp) tent ca.
1700-1900, Timothy Yates; Index