scholarly journals Ontology in Neolithic Britain and Ireland: Beyond Animism

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 249
Author(s):  
Chris Fowler

A combination of new animism and new materialism has influenced recent interpretations of the Neolithic archaeology of Britain and Ireland, including decorative and figurative productions often referred to as ‘art’. This article critiques the appeal to animism in some of this work and considers four alternative ways to address the critique. First it considers contextualizing animism by discussing Descola’s identification of four kinds of ontologies—animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism–outlining examples of practices and material culture involved in each. After examining the effect of applying these to the Neolithic archaeology of Britain and Ireland, it then considers identifying Neolithic practices which seem at odds with animism without boxing these as indicative of other categories of ontology. After noting the wide range of Indigenous ontologies such models attempt to characterize, the article advocates an emphasis on ontological difference and attends to ontological diversity within the Neolithic.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manek Kolhatkar

Describing cultural change and variability and inferring sociocultural dynamics about past people and communities may be among archaeology’s main goals as a field of practice. In this regard, the concept of skill has proved its usefulness to, time and again, expand the breath of archaeologists and lithic technologists’ analyses. It covers a wide range of applications, from apprenticeship, cognition, paleo-sociology, spatial organization. It is one of the main causes for material culture variability, up there with raw material constraints, design, technological organization or cultural norms. Yet, while skill has certainly been the focus of some research in the last decades, it remains quite peripheral, when considering how central the concept should be to technological inquiries. Whatever the reasons may be, this book, edited by Laurent Klaric and fully bilingual (French and English), aims at changing that, and argues for skill to become a central concern in lithic technology. Its chapters do so strongly and the end-result is a book that should become a reference for lithic technologists, whatever their research interests or schools of thought may be.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojun Zhang

<div>This thesis researches the translation of Chinese culture-specific items in <em>Red Poppies</em> from the perspectives of Eco-translatology. Eco-translatology, which was put forward by Chinese scholar Hu Gengshen, adopts some concepts of ecology in translatology and provides a new perspective for translation study and practice. <em>Red Poppies</em> is a novel by Alai whose contents covers a wide range of Tibetan culture and history, which is praised as Tibetan encyclopedia. On one hand, the study focuses on the definition and features of culture-specific items, and their classification of in Red</div><div>Poppies. Based on Nida’s classification of five categories of sub-culture, those culture-specific items are classified into five groups, namely linguistic culture-specific items, material culture-specific items, ecological culture--specific items, social culture-specific items and religious culture-specific items. On the other hand, this thesis explores how Goldblatt deal with those culture-specific items from the perspective of three-dimension transformation in eco-translatology, and it finds translator adopts a combination of foreignization strategy and domestication strategy, and the former plays a dominating role. Besides, various translation methods are adopted such as free translation, transliteration, transliteration plus annotation, and amplification and so on.</div>


Author(s):  
Pavlo Nechytaylo ◽  
◽  
Olena Onohda ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

The paper analyses ceramics and buildings remains of the second half 13th – first half 15th centuries, coming from excavations in Kamianets-Podilskyi. It aims to introduce materials into scientific circulation, to compare the collection with synchronous objects from adjacent territories, to trace interactions in the material culture development in late medieval towns. Ceramics of the Golden Horde and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania times began to be systematically researched relatively recently in Ukraine. Thus, the materials from Kamianets-Podilskyi contribute to deepening our knowledge of less-known periods in the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Materials analyzed were obtained during rescue archaeological research on the Polish Market square in Kamianets. These were fragmented parts of underground and aboveground building structures, as well as a collection of various household items. Building materials were mostly local clays and loam, less often wood and stone were used. A set of clay ‘roll’ blocks set in one of the pits allows us to assume similarity with the Golden Horde building technologies. Finds of coins and Crimean polychrome bowls fragments also indicate the complex emerged during the Golden Horde period. However, certain groups of pottery and coins of European minting define the complex upper date within the first half 15th century. Diverse ceramic types range from the complex is an interesting local typological phenomenon. It reflects mutual influences of the pottery traditions development both in time and space. After processing artefacts collection, the main groups of pottery were identified according to technological features. Some of them are rooted in the local ancient Rus’ traditions, others were formed under the influence of Western trends, while samples of a ‘specific’ group were common for almost the entire territory of modern Ukraine during Late Middle Ages. Pots collection was preliminary systematized up to 5 most common types selection, based on rim profiles. Many of them have a wide range of analogies, locally from Kamianets, as well as from the Western Ukraine, in Poland, Moldova and Romania. In addition to pots, the collection includes other types of kitchen and tableware, such as makitras, lids, jars and other single samples of ceramics. The typological diversity correlates with the multi-layered processes which took place in Kamianets-Podilskyi life during the Golden Horde and the Lithuanian periods. Materials from the complex, as well as other finds from synchronous objects within the city, deepen our understanding of the city’s development large-scale picture, which, however, requires further research.


Author(s):  
Laura Varnam

The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.


Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.


Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell

Archaeology’s focus on material culture provides it with unparalleled opportunities to investigate the entire span of the human past. For periods for which historical records (verbal as well as textual) exist, this includes its ability to deliver insights into the lives of individuals and communities only partially represented, if at all, in those records. Its remit ranges from individual sites requiring excavation to surface scatters of artifacts, from upstanding monuments to entire landscapes. Interpreting archaeological observations depends upon establishing that they are in valid association with each other and can be accurately dated. In both cases the principles of stratigraphic superimposition, association, and context are key concerns. While analogies derived from ethnographic data sustain many archaeological interpretations, individual finds and assemblages of finds are also investigated using a wide range of scientific and other techniques.


Author(s):  
C. Kurt Dewhurst ◽  
Marsha MacDowell

This chapter addresses the wide range of folk art and crafts related to the study of those who make, use, and find meaning in the handmade object in America. The definitions of folk, popular, visionary, outsider, and fine arts have long been challenged and reassessed by scholarly and public communities, communities that sometimes but not always overlap. Debates have raged over the boundaries between art and craft, the viability of the handmade traditional object in the digital, postmodern age, and the discernible distinctive aesthetic characteristics of this body of American expressive culture. This chapter presents a flexible, interdisciplinary perspective on defining folk art and craft in America. It also offers avenues for folk art and craft scholarship such as relationships of aging, human rights, migration, sexuality and gender, and health to the study of folk artists and their communities, and encourages building on the legacy of material culture scholarship from the collections and research of museums and governmental agencies in addition to higher education institutions.


Author(s):  
Supriya Varma

The Harappan Civilization came up in the mid-third millennium bce over an area that extended over much of the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. This chapter will specifically focus on two major cities, Mohenjodaro and Harappa, to discuss material culture and childhood in Harappan South Asia, including the wide range of arguably child-related objects found at these sites which provide a lens through which we can get a glimpse of quotidian activities within these two cities. Many of the artefacts that have been categorized as toys represent household chores that took place around children as well as objects (such as wheeled vehicles), animals, and birds that they routinely encountered.


Author(s):  
Joseph Shatzmiller

Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, this book combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture. The book focuses on communities in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies where Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries, and it synthesizes the most current research to describe the daily encounters that enabled both societies to appreciate common artistic values. Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, the book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security for loans, and aesthetic goods given up by the Christian well-to-do who required financial assistance. The work also explores frescoes and decorations likely painted by non-Jews in medieval and early modern Jewish homes located in Germanic lands, and the ways in which Jews hired Christian artists and craftsmen to decorate Hebrew prayer books and create liturgical objects. Conversely, Christians frequently hired Jewish craftsmen to produce liturgical objects used in Christian churches. With rich archival documentation, the book sheds light on the social and economic history of the creation of Jewish and Christian art, and expands the general understanding of cultural exchange in brand-new ways.


The figure of Spartacus often serves as an icon of resistance against oppression in modern political movements, while his legend has inspired numerous receptions over the centuries in many different popular media. This new book brings together a wide range of scholarly perspectives on the four seasons of the acclaimed and highly successful premium cable television series STARZ Spartacus (2010–13), with contributions from the fields of classics, history, gender, film and media studies, and classical reception. The book uncovers a fascinating range of topics and themes within the series such as slavery, society, politics, spectacle, material culture, sexuality, aesthetics, and fan reception.


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