Beyond the ‘thingification’ of worlds: Archaeology and the New Materialisms

2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110255
Author(s):  
Eloise Govier ◽  
Louise Steel
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Material World ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Discussion Article ◽  
Epistemological Framework

This article considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion article: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), specifically his emphasis on things. This, the authors demonstrate, is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. They unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological and epistemological framework of concepts such as matter and thing. This leads them to consider some important issues that arise applying Deleuzian assemblages to the archaeological record and the potential of employing Barad’s agential realist theory instead. Barad’s concept of phenomena moves beyond the notion of things as separate, bounded entities, emphasizing entanglements of matter and illustrates how matter (including humans) co-create the material world. The authors’ aim is to demonstrate how engaging with matter rather than things enables us to better make sense of the material world and our place within it.

scholarly journals Peirce’s semeiotics: a methodology for bridging the material–ideational divide in IR scholarship

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alena Drieschova
Keyword(s):  
Social Convention ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Material World ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
The People ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Systematic Methodology

The New Materialisms in IR scholarship seek to transcend the divide between matter and ideas, with among others such concepts as practices, or artifacts. This paper makes a start in developing a systematic methodology for the New Materialisms. It proposes Peirce’s semeiotics as one way to unpack how practices and artifacts are ideational and simultaneously material. Peircean semeiotics is a semeiotics of materialism, which creates room for material constitution and analyses practices and artifacts as signs. Peircean semeiotics acknowledges that many signs are objects and practices in the material world, and therefore underlie material constraints, while they also limit and enable the possibilities for action upon the world. Simultaneously though, as signs they convey a particular meaning to the people who surround them, not always by intent. Just as language, material things can signify by arbitrary social convention, but they can also signify by resembling the object they represent, or by being causally related to it. The linguistic model is thus incomplete to study the significative role of material reality. I will illustrate the use of Peircean semeiotics on an analysis of GDP as an inscription device and a complex sign.

scholarly journals Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital Photography

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 519-530
Author(s):  
Katharina Fackler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material World ◽  
Analog To Digital ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Critical Writings

Abstract This article addresses popular claims that photography has been “dematerialized” in the digital era. It engages a wide range of critical writings about photography from the early 19th to the 21st century to demonstrate that different versions of these claims have always formed an important part of photography criticism. However, rather than doing justice to photographs’ materiality or their complex entanglements with what has been considered material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, they have tended to somewhat limit our understanding of the medium’s material, sensory, and affective valences. This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities.

scholarly journals Feats of Clay: Considering the Materiality of Late Bronze Age Cyprus

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 6942
Author(s):  
Louise Steel
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Material World ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Base Ring

This paper examines the materiality of the Cypriot Base Ring ware through the lens of the new materialisms. Specifically, it draws upon Bennett’s vibrant matter and thing-power, to explore how cultural and technological knowledges of Late Bronze Age Cyprus were informed through material engagements with clay. This approach highlights the agency of matter and illustrates how the distinct capacities of clay (working with water and fire) provoked, enabled and constrained potters’ behaviour, resulting in a distinctive pottery style that was central to the Late Cypriot social and material world. The aim is to demonstrate how people, materials and objects are all matter in relationship, drawing attention to the fluidity, porosity and relationality of the material world.

Revising Egypto-Nubian Relations in New Kingdom Lower Nubia: From Egyptianization to Cultural Entanglement

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Paul van Pelt
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
New Kingdom ◽  
General Picture ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Burial Customs ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Epistemological Framework

Building on recent criticisms of Romanization, this contribution formulates a systematic critique of the concept of Egyptianization and suggests a different theoretical approach to cultural process in New Kingdom Nubia that benefits from the insights of ‘cultural entanglement’. This approach emphasizes multidirectional and interactive perspectives that allow for a variety of acculturative outcomes rather than one-sided assimilation. A useful epistemological framework for its application in archaeology is illustrated through two case studies, focusing respectively on representations of Egyptianized Nubians in Egyptian art and Lower Nubian burial customs. The outcomes of the case studies argue for a provocative re-reading of cultural process in New Kingdom Lower Nubia, and may help to clarify the general picture of Nubian history by explaining why and how Nubian traits re-appeared in the Napatan-Meroitic Kingdom of Kush. Finally, the article considers some broader methodological and theoretical issues relating to cultural mixture in the archaeological record.

scholarly journals Materiality and Classics: (Re) Turning to the Material

2019 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Material World ◽  
New Directions ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Turn

AbstractIn this article I review 11 books published since 2010 that bring the ‘material turn’ to classics. Some start from emic ancient perspectives on matter and materiality; others take their cue from current theoretical models such as those of the new materialisms. All offer new insights into our relationship with the material world and consider the material object as active within different paradigms. In reviewing these important volumes together, I question entrenched boundaries: from those between (sub-)disciplines to those between human and non-human agents. I explore the material turn not as an isolated phenomenon, but, first, as a cyclical ‘re’-turn and, second, as an integrated set of ideas incorporating (to name but a few strands) aesthetics, cognitive humanities, embodiment, affect and the senses. The books reviewed range from literary studies to archaeology to art history to material culture to heritage. Taken together, they set new directions for classics, and indeed for our thinking about our place in the world.

Homo Microbis

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Helmreich ◽  
Sophia Roosth ◽  
Michele Friedner
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Microbiome ◽  
Material World ◽  
Microbial Life ◽  
New Materialisms

This chapter examines some of the celebratory accounts that have gathered around the human microbiome—the ecology of microbes that exist in human bodies, with a particular focus on how it is infused with older idioms of “sex” and “race.” Dissecting the idea of the species, the chapter challenges some of the new materialisms in science studies that, in the name of attending to the agency of the material world, take scientific stories as literal truths, as exhaustive of what microbial life and other material phenomena might be and mean. It argues that “biology” does not speak for itself, either about humans or nonhumans. Rather, biology is a historically crafted discipline, and its materials come thickly figured and configured by the histories and cultures through which they are imagined and inhabited.

Material world goes on camera

Nature ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Sanderson
Keyword(s):  
Material World
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