Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters
Author(s): Joseph Maran (Editor), Philipp W. Stockhammer
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Publication Date: 31 Jan. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1842174584
ISBN-13: 9781842174586
Book Description
Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology’s approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
Joseph Maran is Professor of pre- and protohistory at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’. His research interests relate to issues of interculturality and changing lifeworlds, relationships between architecture and social practice and between material culture and social memory in societies of the 4th–2nd millennia BC in the eastern Mediterranean.
Philipp W. Stockhammer is professor for prehistoric archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and co-director of Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, Jena. His research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounters, human-thing-entanglements, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific interpretation.
About the Author
Joseph Maran is Professor of pre- and protohistory at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’. His research interests relate to issues of interculturality and changing lifeworlds, relationships between architecture and social practice and between material culture and social memory in societies of the 4th–2nd millennia BC in the eastern Mediterranean.
Philipp W. Stockhammer is professor for prehistoric archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and co-director of Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, Jena. His research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounters, human-thing-entanglements, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific interpretation.
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