The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression

ISBN-13: 9780003020656 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 296 str.

Ian Hodder

Opis

This 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 Papau New Guinea, India, South America, the USA, and both Eastern and Western Europpe, provide a rich variety of views and experience in a worldwide perspective. Some of the questions examined include: whether all material culture is equivalent to documents which can be read and interpreted by the outside observer; what is the nature of the messages or meanings conveyed in this way?; to what extent does acceptance, and subsequent diffusion, of a religious belief or symbol may be qualified by the status of the individuals concerned in transmitting the innovation.

Recenzje

`In sum, in form and content this book represents the current state of the art; and, as its most interesting papers make clear, that art is the broad field of structuralist and semiotic investigation.' - MAN

`Clearly, The Meanings of Things is a thought-provoking volume.' - American Antiquity

Spis treści

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

O autorze

I. Hodder