Material Turn Bibliography

BENNETT, Tony, JOYCE, Patrick, (2010), Material powers: cultural studies, history and the
material turn, London [u.a.] : Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-60314-0.
Abstract: This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a material
turn in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how
power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the
organisation of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organisation of
colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating
these concerns from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France
through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations
between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts
examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution
of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonised in French colonial
practices to the part played my the relations between museums and expeditions in the
organisation of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major
critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the
logic of the cultural turn. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars
whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture
studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.

BERGTHALLER, Hanne, (2014), Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a SystemsTheoretical Perspective: Iovino S. & Oppermann S. (Eds.), Material Ecocriticism Indiana
University Press, pp. 37-50.
Reviews: "References and engages with the major works and writers on the new materialism
with its focus on material entanglements and material agency... The quality of the essays
ensures that this will be a useful volume for both undergraduate and graduate courses."
Anne Elvey, Monash University
"The contributions to this collection are consistently well-written, balancing technical
language, poetic vividness, and accessibility. Of interest to literary scholars and readers
throughout the environmental humanities and theoretical sciences." Scott Slovic, Idaho
State University
"An extremely valuable resource for anyone seeking an advanced introduction to the
conversations and controversies animating the new material turn in ecocriticism."
Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
"This book is not an extension of spirituality to the boring domain of materiality, and it is not
the opposite either, the humbling appeal to material infrastructure in order to dampen the
dreams of scholars, priests, ecologists, and militants for a more uplifting world of meanings
and beauties. It is the exploration of how many dimensionsmany indeed spiritualhave
been lost in not taking materiality seriously enough. A move that meets scientists half way to

help them profit from their science so as to explore in common what geophysicitsis now call
'critical zones.' Critical zones indeed!" Bruno Latour, Universit Sciences Po Paris
"With its wide array of topics and theoretical influences, Material Ecocriticism is a helpful
starting point for those wondering how new materialist thinking can inform ecocriticism; it
would also serve as a pertinent addition to graduate seminars." Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and the Environment
First Paragraph: If one had to choose an epigraph for the new materialisms, one could do
worse than settle for the closing lines of The Order of Things. The new materialist thought
takes as a given the crumbling of the conceptual foundations of modern humanism that
Foucault anticipated; its intellectual project is a redescription of the world that dissolves the
singular figure of the human subject, distinguished by unique properties (soul, reason, mind,
free will, or intentionality), into the dense web of material relations in which all beings are
enmeshed. This move cuts two ways. On the one hand, the new materialists...
Content:
Part I. Material Ecocriticism: Theories and Relations
1. Serpil Oppermann.- From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative
Materiality and Narrative Agency
2. Hannes Bergthaller.- On the Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a
Systems-Theoretical Perspective
3. Hubert Zapf.- Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary
Creativity
4. Wendy Wheeler.- Natural Play, Natural Metaphor and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic
Realism
5. Heather Sullivan.- The Ecology of Color: Goethes Materialist Optics and Ecological
Posthumanism
Part II. Narratives of Matter
6. Serenella Iovino.- Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity
7. Lowell Duckert.- When It Rains
8. Simon C. Estok.- Painful Material Realities, Avoidance, Ecophobia
9. Timo Maran.- Semiotization of Matter: A Hybrid Zone between Biosemiotics and Material
Ecocriticism
Part III. Politics of Matter
10. Catriona Sandilands.- Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees
11. Dana Phillips.- Excremental Ecocriticism and the Global Sanitation Crisis
12. Stacy Alaimo.- Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea
13. Eli Clare.- Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure

Part IV. Poetics of Matter

14. Cheryll Glotfelty.- Corporeal Fieldwork and Risky Art: Peter Goin and the Making of
Nuclear Landscapes

15. Jane Bennett.- Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman

16. Joni Adamson.- Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia, and an Ecology of Selves
17. Timothy Morton.- The Liminal Space between Things: Epiphany and the Physical
Coda: Open Closure
A Diptych on Material Spirituality
18. Kate Rigby.- Spirits that Matter: Pathways towards a Rematerialization of Religion and
Spirituality
19. Greta Gaard.- Mindful New Materialisms: Buddhist Roots for Material Ecocriticisms
Flourishing
Another papers:
-IOVINO, Serenella (2012), Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature About
the New Materialisms and Its Implications for Ecocritical Theory, en Ecozone, Vol. 3, No.
1, pp. 134-145.
BREU, C., (2014), Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. University of
Minnesota Press. 264 pp.
Abstract: This book takes materiality as its object. In doing so, it is, by necessity, inadequate to
this object. One of the central arguments of Insistence of the Material is that the various forms of
materiality in contemporary social existencethe materiality of the body, the object world of
late-capitalist life, the material elements of political-economic production, the various forms of
materiality we group under the signifier naturecannot be adequately or completely
accounted for by language. Insistence of the Material takes this contradiction between language
and nonlinguistic forms of materiality as its fundamental preoccupation.
Review: Insistence of the Material engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to
provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth
century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works,
Christopher Breu examines this literatures focus on the material conditions of everyday life,
from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production.
In Insistence of the Material, Breu rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics,
affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic
manipulation. Breu considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a
biopolitical era, including William Burroughss Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchons V., J. G.
Ballards Crash, Dodie Bellamys The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silkos
Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and
biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Breu reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world
devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence.
Taking his analysis beyond the boundaries of literature, Breu argues that both materiality and
subjectivity form sites of resistance to biopolitical control and that new developments in
materialist theory advance a conception of social existence in which materialityrather than
language or cultureis the central term.

Content:
Introduction: Theorizing Materiality in the Age of Biopolitics
1.
2.
3.
4.

The Novel Enfleshed: Naked Lunch and the Literature of Materiality

Vital Objects: Materiality and Biopolitics in Thomas Pynchons V.
The Late-Modern Unconscious: The Object World of J. G. Ballards Crash
Disinterring the Real: Embodiment, AIDS, and Biomedicalization in Dodie Bellamys The
Letters of Mina Harker
5. Almanac of the Living: Thanatopolitics and an Alternative Biopolitics in Leslie Marmon
SilkosAlmanac of the Dead
Conclusion: Tarrying with the Material

CLEVER, Iris, RUBERG, Willemijn, Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn, Praxiography,
and Body History: Humanities, Volume 3, DOI: 10.3390/h3040546, pp. 546-566.
Abstract: The body came to be taken seriously as a topic of cultural history during the
corporeal or bodily turn in the 1980s and 1990s. Soon, however, critique was raised
against these studies conceptualization of the body as discursively shaped and socially
disciplined: individual bodily agency and feeling were felt to be absent in the idea of the
material body. This article critically analyzes new approaches in the field of body history,
particularly the so-called material turn. It argues that the material turn, especially in the
guise of praxiography, has a lot to offer historians of the body, such as more attention to
material practices, to different kinds of actors and a more open eye to encounters. Potential
problems of praxiographical analyses of the body in history include the complicated
relationship between discourses and practices and the neglect of the political and feminist
potential of deconstructive discourse analyses. However, a focus on the relationship between
practices of knowledge production and the representation of the body may also provide new
ways of opening up historical power relations.

(*)CONNOLLY, William E. Materialities of Experience. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency,

and Politics. Ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. 178-200.
-COOLE, Diana, and Samantha Frost. Introducing the New Materialisms. New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2010. 1-43.
Abstract: New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative
materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering
essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this
important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions,
contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing
ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost
highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new
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materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as

lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday
life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures.
Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and
technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political
relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate
to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of
twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental
questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we
produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment.
Content:
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost.- Introducing the New Materialisms / 1
The Force of Materiality
Jane Bennett.- A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism / 47
Pheng Cheah.- Nondialectical Materialism / 70
Diana Coole.- The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh / 92
Melissa A. Orlie.- Impersonal Matter / 116
Political Matters
Elizabeth Grosz Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom / 139
Samantha Frost.- Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy / 158
William E. Connolly.- Materialities of Experience / 178
Rosi Braidotti.- The Politics of "Life Itself" and New Ways of Dying / 201
Economies of Disruption
Rey Chow.- The Elusive Material: What the Dog Doesn't Understand / 221
Sara Ahmed.- Orientations Matter / 234
Sonia Kruks.- Simon de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms / 258
Jason Edwards.- The Materialism of Historical Materialism / 281

Location: https://www.dukeupress.edu/new-materialisms

COOTER, R., STEIN, C., (2013), The New Poverty of Theory: Material Turns in a Latourian
World, In Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine, Yale University Press, pp. 205-228.
Abstract: This chapter presents an analysis of an essay on the material turn in history. It
offers a commentary on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood and
criticizes Patrick Joyce's February 2010 article in a leading history journal which was meant
to be a historiographically cutting-edge overview of the material turn in history. It considers
Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the dominance of neoliberal philosophy of
history in the academy.

Keywords: material turn, history, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, Patrick Joyce, Bruno
Latour, Actor-Network Theory, neoliberal philosophy.
Location: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bk3x

DOLPHIJN, Rick, VAN DER TUIN, Iris (2012), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies,
Ann Arbour: Open Humanities Press, University of Michigan Library, Series: New Metaphysics,
ISBN-10 1-60785-281-0.
DRAZIN, Adam, KCHLER, Susanne (Eds.) (2015), The Social Life of Materials. Studies in
Materials and Society, Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN: 9781472592637, 336 pp.
Abstract: Materials play a central role in society. Beyond the physical and chemical
properties of materials, their cultural properties have often been overlooked in anthropological
studies: finished products have been perceived as 'social' yet the materials which comprise
them are considered 'raw' or natural'. The Social Life of Materials proposes a new perspective
in this interdisciplinary field. Diverting attention from the consumption of objects, the book
looks towards the properties of materials and how these exist through many transformations
in a variety of cultural contexts.
Reviews: During a moment in which materiality is casually invoked across the humanities
and social sciences, this vibrant volume demands that we take seriously both the specific
properties of materials themselves and the social relationships activated through their
technical use and circulation. It thereby firmly stakes a place for anthropology and
ethnographic methods in the so-called material turn. Aaron Glass, Bard Graduate
Center, USA.
Drazin and Kchler have assembled an innovative collection which consolidates and extends
work in this new "science of the concrete". Collectively, the authors succeed in showing the
value of looking beyond objects and things to the materials which constitute them. The
theoretical and empirical work presented here establishes a rich and authoritative range of
intellectual innovations and approaches. It will interest researchers across the social sciences,
arts and design studies, and the humanities. Ian Woodward, University of Southern
Denmark, Denmark,
During a moment in which materiality is casually invoked across the humanities and social
sciences, this vibrant volume demands that we take seriously both the specific properties of
materials themselves and the social relationships activated through their technical use and
circulation. It thereby firmly stakes a place for anthropology and ethnographic methods in the
so-called material turn. Aaron Glass, Bard Graduate Center, USA,
The Social Life of Materials proves beyond a doubt that anthropologists cannot rest with an
anthropology of objects because objects are compositions and transformations of materials
that have their own biography, meaning, and morality. The chapters here are a successful
commencement of a much richer anthropology of materials. Anthropology Review
Database
Content:
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Part I: Introduction
1. To Live in a Materials World
Adam Drazin, University College London, UK
Part II: On Materials Innovation
2. What's in a Plant Leaf? A Case Study of Materials Innovation in New Zealand
Graeme Were, University of Queensland, Australia
3. Pharmaceutical Matters: The Invention of Informed Materials
Andrew Barry, Oxford University, UK
4. Towards Designing New Sensoaesthetic Materials: The Role of Materials Libraries
Mark Miodownik, University College London, UK
5. The Science of Sensory Evaluation: An Ethnographic Critique
David Howes, Concordia University, Canada

Part III: From Substance to Form

6. Wild Silk Indigo Wrappers of Dogon of Mali: An Ethnography of Materials Efficacy and
Design
Laurence Douny, University College London, UK
7. Fashioning Plastic: Changing Materials in Design
Tom Fisher, University of Nottingham, UK
8. Dressing for God: Cloth as Material of Religious Subjectivity in a Hindu Group
Urmila Mohan, University College London, UK
Part IV: The Subversion of Form by Substance
9. Introducing Fairtrade and Fairmined Gold: An Attempt to Reconfigure the Social Identity
of a Substance
Peter Oakley, Royal College of Art, UK
10. Subversive Plasticity: Materials' Histories and Cultural Categories in the Philippines
Deirdre McKay, Keele University, UK
11. Diamonds, Machines and Colors: Moving Materials in Ritual Exchange
Filipe Calvao, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
Part V: Ecologies of Materials' Social Lives
12. Sustainability and the Co-constitution of Substances and Subjects
Sarah Wilkes, University College London, UK
13. The Peony and the Rose: Social Change and Fragrance Marketing in China's Bath Market
Chan Chow Wah, independent scholar, Singapore
14. The Woollen Blanket and its Imagined Values: Material Transformations of Woollen
Blankets in Contemporary ARt
Fiona P. McDonald, University College London, UK
The Implications of Materials Innovation and Disposal
15. Materials: The Story of Use
Susanne Kchler, University College London, UK Location: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-social-life-of-materials-9781472592668/
#sthash.JMZV9yCG.dpuf
7

GRAVES-BROWN, P. M. (Editor) (2000), Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, New York:
Routledge, ISBN: 0-415-16705-1
Content:
0. Paul Graves Brown.- Introduction
1. Bruno Latour.- The Berlin key or how to do words with things
2. Beth Preston.- The functions of things: a philosophical perspective on material culture
3. Tim Ingold.- Making culture and weaving the world
4. Micheal Brian Schiffer.- Indigenous theories, scientific theories and product histories
5. Emma Williams & Alan Costall.- Taking things more seriously: psychological theories
of autism and the material-social divide
6. George Nash.- Pomp and circumstance: archeology, modernity and the corporatisation of
death: early social and political Victorian attitudes towards burial practice
7. A.J. Schofield.- Never mind the relevance? popular culture for archaeologists
8. Paul Graves-Brown.- Always crashing in the same car

HICKS, Dan, BEAUDRY, Mary C. (eds.) (2010), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture
Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0-19-921871-4.
Content:
Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry.- Introduction: Material culture studies: a reactionary
view
PART I: DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
2. Dan Hicks.- The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect
3. Ian Cook and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly.- Material geographies
4. Robert Saint George.- Material culture in folklife studies
5. Ann Brower Stahl.- Material histories
6. John Law.- The material of STS
PART II: MATERIAL PRACTICES
7. Andrew Pickering.- Material culture and the dance of agency
8. Michael Dietler.- Consumption
9. Gavin Lucas.- Fieldwork and collecting
10. Hirokazu Miyazaki.- Gifts and exchange
11. Howard Morphy, Art as action, art as evidence
12. Rosemary Joyce with Joshua Pollard.- Archaeological assemblages and practices of
desposition
PART III: OBJECTS AND HUMANS
8

13. Kacy L. Hollenback and Michael Brian Schiffer.- Technology and material life
14. Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin.- The malice of inanimate objects: material
agency
15. Chris Fowler.- From identity and material culture to personhood and materiality
16. Zo Crossland.- Materiality and embodiment
17. Tatyana Humble.- Material culture in primates
PART IV: LANDSCAPES AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
18. Lesley Head.- Cultural landscapes
19. Sarah Whatmore and Steve Hinchliffe.- Ecological landscapes
20. Roland Fletcher.- Urban materialities: meaning, magnitude, friction, and outcomes
21. Carl R. Lounsbury.- Architecture and cultural history
*HICKS, Dan (2010), The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect, Mary C. Beaudry & Dan
Hicks (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/
9780199218714.013.0002.
Abstract: The terms material culture and material culture studies emerged, one after
another, during the twentieth century in the disciplines of archaeology and socio-cultural
anthropology, and especially in the place of intersection between the two: anthropological
archaeology. The purpose of this article, however, is to excavate the idea of material culture
studies, rather than to bury it. Excavation examines the remains of the past in the present and
for the present. It proceeds down from the surface, but the archaeological convention is to
reverse this sequence in writing: from the past to the present. In the discussion of the history
of ideas and theories, a major risk of such a chronological framework is that new ideas are
narrated progressively, as paradigm shifts. The main argument of the article relates to the
distinctive form taken by the cultural turn in British archaeology and anthropology during
the 1980s and 1990s.
Keywords: material culture, material culture studies, anthropological archaeology, cultural
turn, socio cultural anthropology,

MILLER, Daniel, (Editor), (2005), Materiality, Durham NC, Duke University Press, ISBN
9780822386711
Abstract: Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief
whether religious or secularhave ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which
transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not
easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their
expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore
varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the
fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the
social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material.
Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors
most of whom are anthropologistsexamine the many different ways in which materiality
9

has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that
the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of
ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an
unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking,
Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their
environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a
profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human.

Content:
(*) Daniel Miller.- Materiality: An Introduction / 1
Lynn Meskell.- Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer Than They Are /51
Michael Rowlands.- A Materialist Approach to Materiality / 72
Fred Myers.- Some Properties of Art and Culture: Ontologies of the Image and Economies of
Exchange / 88
Matthew Engelke.- Sticky Subjects and Sticky Objects: The Substance of African Christian
Healing / 118
Bill Maurer.- Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial
Forms / 140
Hirokazu Miyazaki.- The Materiality of Finance Theory / 165
Webb Keane.- Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material
Things / 182
Susanne Kuchler .- Materiality and Cognition: The Changing Face of Things / 206
Nigel Thrift.- Beyond Meditation: Three New Material Registers and Their Consequences /
231
Christopher Pinney.- Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come? /
256
Location: https://www.dukeupress.edu/materiality

MILLER, Peter N., (Editor) (2013) , Cultural Histories of the Material World, University of
Michigan Press, ISBN 978-0-472-02935-8.
Abstract: 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 fieldsfrom Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics,
Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophyto 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.
Reviews: This sparkling and provocative collection showcases the range and innovation of
scholarship on material culture today. It should appeal to scholars already working in the
field, and to their students looking for the sorts of questions that can be asked of objects, and
10

how answers to those questions might be framed.

William Stenhouse, Yeshiva University
This book brings into focus an important new approach to understanding cultural artifacts
which emphasizes their various contexts of creation and multiple aspects of their materiality.
Leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore how this approach can yield new
insights into the history of material culture around the world. More broadly, this inspiring
collection of essays points the way to a critical rethinking of the traditional research
categories and canons in the humanities.
Thomas Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute
(*) Content (resume):
Introduction: Peter N. Miller.- The Culture of the Hand
1.- Arts Challenge
Glenn Adamson.- Design History and the Decorative Arts/ 33
Philippe Bordes.- The Materiality of Art/ 39
2. The Place of the Material
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak.- Mutually Contextual: Materials, Bodies, and Objects/ 47
Ivan Gaskell.- Museum Display, an Algonquian Bow, and the Ship of Theseus/ 59
Sabine MacCormack.- Cultural Histories of the Material World: Whose Material World? / 74
Daniel Miller.- The History of Facebook /81
Location: http://www.press.umich.edu/5927536/cultural_histories_of_the_material_world/?
s=description

LATOUR, Bruno, (1993), We have never been modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
ISBN: 9780674948396
(*)LATOUR, Bruno. Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

RAPPAPORT, Erika, (2008), Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn:
Victorian Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2, Papers and Responses from the Fifth Annual Conference of the
North American Victorian Studies Association, Held Jointly with the Victorian Studies Association
of Western Canada, Winter, pp. 289-296.
Location: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060328?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

TOREN, Christina (1999), Mind, Materiality and History. Explorations in Fijian Ethnography,
New York: Routledge, ISBN: 0-415-19576-4.
11

Abstract: "Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Historiography" is the

outcome of over a decade's research into how Fijians live their lives and constitute their
knowledge of the world. Through this exploration, the author aims to derive a new theory of
embodied mind that works as well for explaining ourselves as it does for explaining others.
Investigating the processes by which humans interact with the material world of objects and
with other people, the book addresses the issue of how we form our identities in connection
with, and in contrast to, the identities of those around us. "Mind, Materiality and History"
demonstrates that the human mind is "the" fundamental historical phenomenon.
Content: Introduction: mind, materiality and history
PART I.- Objectifyng history, material mind
1. Drinking cash: the purification of money through ceremonial exchange in Fiji
2. Making the present, revealing the past: the mutability and continuity of tradition as process
3. Seeing the ancestral sites: transformations in Fijian notions of the land
PART II.- The material basis of meaning
4. Sign into symbol, sumbol as sign: cognitive aspects of a social process
5. Making history: the significance of childhood cognition for a comparative anthropology of
mind.
6. Ritual, rule and cognitive scheme
PART III.- Living history, material mind and the stuff of the world
7.Transforming love: representing Fijian hierarchy
8. Cosmogonic aspects of desire and compassion in Fiji
9. All things go in pairs, or the sharks will bite: the antithetical nature of Fijan chiefship
VAN DYKE, R. (Ed.), (2015), Practicing Materiality. University of Arizona Press, ISBN:
978-0-8165-3233-9, 224 pp.
Abstract: It is little wonder that relationships between things and humans are front-and-center
in the contemporary social sciences, given the presence of technologies in every conceivable
aspect of our lives. From Bruno Latour to Ian Hodder, anthropologists and archaeologists are
embracing "thing theory" and the "ontological turn." In Practicing Materiality, Ruth M. Van
Dyke cautions that as anthropologists turn toward animals and things, they run the risk of
turning away from people and intentional actions. Practicing Materiality focuses on the
practical job of applying materiality to anthropological investigations, but with the firm
retention of anthropocentrism. The philosophical discussions that run through the nine
chapters develop practical applications for material studies, including Heideggerian
phenomenology, Gellian secondary agency, object life histories, and bundling. Seven case
studies are flanked by an introduction and a discussion chapter. The case studies represent a
wide range of archaeological and anthropological contexts, from contemporary New York
City and Turkey to fifteenth-century Portugal, the ancient southwest United States, and the
ancient Andes. Authors in every chapter argue for the rejection of subject/object dualism,
regarding material things as actively involved in the negotiation of power within human social
relationships. Practicing Materiality demonstrates that it is possible to focus on the entangled
lives of things without losing sight of their political and social implications.
12

Content:
1. Ruth M. Van Dyke.- Materiality in Practice: An Introduction
2. Sule Can.- Talk to It: Memory and Material agency in the Arab alawite (Nusayri)
Community.
3. Erina Gruner.- Replicating Things, Replicating Identity: The Movement of Chacoan
Ritual Paraphernalia Beyond the Chaco World
4. Tanya Chiykowski.- Animay of the everyday: Materiality, Bundling, and the Production of
Quotidian Ceramics
5. Rui Gomes Coehlo.- An Empire of Clay: Ceramics and Discipline in the early Modern
Portuguese Empire
6. Brittany Fullen.- Quotidian Agency and Imperial Agendas: A Study of Andean Middle
Horizon Huamanga Ceramics
7. Halona Young-Wolfe.- The Work They Do: Phenomenology and Monumentality in the
Late Archaic of Peru
8. Jessica Santos Lpez.- From Banned Bodies to Political Subjects: Immigrants in Protest
Bundles
9. Mark W. Hauser.- Materiality as Problem Space.
Location: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/42011

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