Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781782975410)

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.

Author: Joseph Maran
ISBN-10: 1782975411
ISBN-13: 9781782975410
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
Language: English
Published: 01/31/2014
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 10.90h x 8.30w x 0.70d