ABOUT THIS BOOK

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor, Bard Graduate Center.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction: The Culture of the Hand – Peter N. Miller

Part 1. Art’s Challenge

Chapter One – Design History and the Decorative Arts – Glenn Adamson

Chapter Two – The Materiality of Art – Philippe Bordes

Part 2. The Place of the Material

Chapter Three – Mutually Contextual: Materials, Bodies, and Objects – Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

Chapter Four – Museum Display, an Algonquian Bow, and the Ship of Theseus – Ivan Gaskell

Chapter Five – Cultural Histories of the Material World: Whose Material World? – Sabine MacCormack

Chapter Six – The History of Facebook – Daniel Miller

Chapter Seven – Dirty, Pretty Things: On Archaeology and Prehistoric Materialities – Lynn Meskell

Chapter Eight – Archaeology and Design History: A Thesis and Nine Theses – Michael Shanks

Part 3. Experience and Material

Chapter Nine – Swelling Toads, Translation, and the Paradox of the Concrete – Bernard L. Herman

Chapter Ten – Materiality and Cultural Translation: Indigenous Arts, Colonial Exchange, and Postcolonial Perspectives – Ruth B. Phillips

Chapter Eleven – The Antiquarian, the Collector, and the Cultural History of the Material World – Alain Schnapp

Chapter Twelve – Mountain as Material: Landscape Inscriptions in China – Robert E. Harrist, Jr.

Chapter Thirteen – Objects and History – Jaś Elsner

Chapter Fourteen – Beyond Representation: Things—Human and Nonhuman – Ittai Weinryb

Chapter Fifteen – Materialities of Culture – Bill Brown

Part 4. Future Histories

Chapter Sixteen: Toward a Cultural History of the Material World – Juliet Fleming

Chapter Seventeen: Thoughts on Cultural Histories of the Material World – Nancy J. Troy

Chapter Eighteen – The History of Science as a Cultural History of the Material World – Pamela H. Smith

Chapter Nineteen – Reflecting on Recipes – Deborah L. Krohn

Chapter Twenty: Music in the Material World: Cultural Traces and Historical Cases – Elaine Sisman

Chapter Twenty-One: A Cultural History of the Material World of Islam – Jonathan M. Bloom

Twenty-Two - Franz Kugler and the Concept of World Art History – Horst Bredekamp

Chapter Twenty-Three – The Missing Link: “Antiquarianism,”“Material Culture,” and “Cultural Science” in the Work of G. F. Klemm – Peter N. Miller

Contributors

Index

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