This edited volume is the first to engage with material culture in the Tricontinent comprising Asia, Africa and Latin America, interrogating how objects help trace an alternate history of these locales. The potential of material culture to redefine postcolonial subjectivities is explored here through an analysis of various objects, both tangible and intangible. The book serves to subvert Eurocentric formulations of material culture and arrives at a uniquely Tricontinental model of material culture studies. The essays gathered here engage with an entire gamut of issues pertaining to the perception and significance of object-oriented ontologies from a multifaceted perspective. The book offers a glimpse into the vast field of material cultural studies through an engagement with various geopolitical locales in Asia, Africa and Latin America, thereby familiarizing the reader with the nuances of non-European material culture(s).

People live in a world surrounded by stuff. Yet few of us are taught to understand it or to think very deeply about it at all. "Material Culture" refers to the objects and artifacts that populate our environment that we can see and feel. It is through these objects and images of objects that people learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. Understanding Material Culture is an introduction to Material Literacy--the skill of being able to read and interpret material culture. It is a primer for understanding objects as the evidence of our way of life. The book explains the major theories, issues, and diverse viewpoints and practices of the field of material culture, and demonstrates how to use them through historical examples pulled from the vast collections of the Smithsonian. Perfect for students of history or museum studies, Understanding Material Culture is also helpful for anyone who's ever wondered what their stuff says about them.

Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002 What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects after the check-out reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for the real thing become so important because the high tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point in objects lives. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings that reflect and assert who we are. Defining design as things with attitude differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary artefacts that are taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to clutter, the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. But beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

This volume offers a novel philosophical thesis on the ontology of religion, and proposes a new conceptual repertoire to deal with supernatural religion. Jibu Mathew George offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the source and dynamics of religious ideation upon which belief and faith are based, at the fundamental levels of human reasoning. Using Max Weber’s concept of “Disenchantment of the World” as a point of departure, this book endeavors to provide a pioneering philosophical and psychological understanding of the nature of enchantment, disenchantment, and possible re-enchantments as they pertain to the occidental cultural history in Weberian retrospect.

This book presents a multi-pronged inverse historical analysis of Joyce's high-modernist magnum opus Ulysses, foregrounding the historicity of its unapologetic subject matter - the quotidian. It argues that the everyday life depicted in Ulysses espouses alternative historical trajectories neglected by traditional historiographic paradigms, which largely deal with great personages and momentous events. The sphere of ordinary life is also where lasting changes must be accomplished if transformations are to happen at all in what gets written or accepted as a posteriori 'history.' Across eight elaborate chapters, the book reconstructs quotidian 'micro-histories' surrounding work and income, material objects and practices, everyday relationships, body and health, ideologies and power, socio-psychological resources, and, in one of the many internal heterogenizations of the everyday, gender issues.

'Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies' takes up key meta-questions in the humanities, with focus on contemporary literary studies, philosophically examines the nature of knowledge therein as well as the implications of certain popular critical approaches, and addresses the effervescent question of 'relevance'. In contrast to usual works on literary theory, or on philosophy of literature for that matter, this book presents an integrated meta-reasoning on the foundational questions of literary studies from an interdisciplinary perspective - in a manner of intertextual informality. It endeavours to articulate a rationale for the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. It philosophically examines the implications of, and assumptions behind, three popular tendencies in contemporary literary criticism - textual deconstruction, ideological criticism and constructivism. It also introduces the reader to possibilities of non-reductive reasoning with regard to the relation between the aesthetic and the political. With his multidisciplinary background, doctoral degree on an encyclopedic author (James Joyce) and past engagements with vital issues in the humanities/literature, Jibu George is in a position to deal with foundational questions therein.