Things in Culture, Culture in Things

This volume addresses the dynamics of materiality over time and space. In cross-cultural, multi-temporal and interdisciplinary studies the authors examine how things gain meaning and status, generate a multitude of emotions, and feed into the propagation of myths, narratives and discourses. The book is divided according to four themes: soft objects, stoic stories, consuming and the collectable, and waste and technologies. The first section discusses the meanings of the lived environment on the individual and national levels. The second section provides specific examples on the role of things in identity construction. The third section focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of consumption and collecting. The phenomena under scrutiny in the fourth section are moral dilemmas associated with and representations of dirt/waste and advancements in science and technology. Presenting diverse case studies of material culture, the volume points to rich interdisciplinary approaches in cultural theory.

CONTENTS

Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects / Patrick Laviolette

SOFT OBJECTS
The natural order is decay: the home as an ephemeral art project / Stephen Harold Riggins
Placing objects first: filming transnationalism / Carlo A. Cubero
Beware of dreams come true: valuing the intangible in the American Dream / Rowan R. Mackay

STOIC STORIES
The travelling furniture: materialised experiences of living in the Jewish diaspora / Susanne Nylund Skog
A hard matter: stones in Finnish-Karelian folk belief / Timo Muhonen
An embroidered royal gift as a political symbol and embodiment of design ideas in 1885 / Kirsti Salo-Mattila

CONSUMING AND THE COLLECTABLE
The ‘vintage community’ in Bucharest: consumers and collectors / Maria Cristache
The visual form of newspapers as a guide for information consumption / Roosmarii Kurvits
Design for individuality: the Jordan Individual toothbrushes and interpassivity in material culture / Visa Immonen
Collecting the Nagas: John Henry Hutton, the administrator-collector in the Naga Hills / Meripeni Ngully

WASTE AND TECHNOLOGIES
Waste and alterity in ‘speculative fiction’: an assessment of the de- and re-evaluation of material objects in selected dystopian novels / Brigitte Glaser
Toilet cultures: boundaries, dirt and disgust / Remo Gramigna
The social childhood of new ambivalent objects: emerging social representation of new biotechnologies / Maaris Raudsepp, Andu Rämmer

REVIEWS

“There are some fascinating chapters here. The content is extremely varied and shows the complexities inherent in interdisciplinary material culture. Whilst it is difficult to find continuity in the volume this is not surprising and perhaps less problematic if one considers it as a diverse posthumous collection of work rather than one which is meant to work together. The occasionally eccentric content of the book is amusing in the narrative context in which the volume is set.” — Emily Brennan, Material World Blog