Objects in the World Townsend Working Group

Objects in the World Townsend Working Group

Reference Syllabus

Texts from Recent Anthro230 Seminar on New Materialisms

Sara Ahmed Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway

Jane Bennet Vibrant Matter

William Connolly The Fragility of Things

Manuel de Landa 1000 Years of Nonlinear History

Brian Massumi What Animals Teach Us About Politics

Timothy Morton Realist Magic

Pierre Descola

Beyond Nature and Culture

The Ecology of Others

Eduardo Kohn How Forests Think

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Cannibal Metaphysics

Radical Dualisms

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

(Open Access Humanities):

http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-materialism.html

Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (eds) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

Texts from History of Art203 Seminar on Material Culture and Interpretation of Objects

Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” from The

Social Life of Things (1986).

Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” from A.

Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (1986).

Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight," Daedalus (1972)

Jules Prown, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,"

Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 1982).

Sophie Thomas, “Feather Cloaks and English Collectors: Cook’s Voyages and the

Objects of the Museum” in Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, eds, Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 69-87.

George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962).

Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard (1928).

M.M. Lovell, “Food Photography: Inverted Narratives of Desire,” Exposure 34: ½

(Summer 2001).

Craig Clunas, "Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art," in Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations

of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (1997).

Timothy O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990), pp. 1-26, 67-85, 117-31.

Karen Lucic and Bruce Bernstein, “In Pursuit of the Ceremonial: The Laboratory of

Anthropology’s ‘Master Collection’ of Zuni Pottery,” Journal of the Southwest, v. 50, no.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 1-102.

Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting, " from

Illuminations, Jarry Zohn, translator (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).

(High and Low (academic and folk art); Original and Replica; Crafting the Object)

Henry Glassie, "Tradition," Journal of American Folklore 108/430 (Fall 1995).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "An Indian Basket," from The Age of Homespun (2001).

Patricia Berger, "Pious Copies," from Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political

Authority in Qing China (2003).

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (London: Cambridge U. Press, 1968).

(Collecting and Exhibiting)

Susan Stewart, “The Souvenir,” from On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the

Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984).

John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting (1994)

Judith Zeitlin, "The Petrified Heart," Bulletin of Sung and Yuan Studies (1995).

James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” from The Predicament of Culture

(1988).

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), translated by James Benedict (2000).

(Theorizing Consumerism I)

Grant McCracken, “The Evocative Power of Things,” “Diderot Unities and the Diderot

Effect,” and “Consumption, Change and Continuity,” from Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (1990).

T.J. Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” from Richard Wightman Fox and T. J.

Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-90 (1983).

Lothar Ledderose, “Casting Bronze the Hard Way,” in Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things:

Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (2001), Chapter 2.

Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern

China (1991), Chapters 5-6.

(Gender)

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Introduction.

M.M. Lovell, “The Empirical Eye: Copley’s Women and the Case of the Blue Dress," in

Art in a Season of Revolution (2005), pp. 49-93.

Angela Zito, “Signifying Emperorship: Of Portraits and Princes,” from Of Body and

Brush (1997) .

Bernard Herman, “Tabletop Conversations: Material Culture and Everyday Life in the

18thc Atlantic World,” in John Styles and Amanda Vickery, ed., Gender, Taste, and (Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (2006).

(Theorizing Consumerism II)

Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (1979).

M.M. Lovell, “The Forest, The Copper Mine, and the Sea: The Alchemical and Social

Materiality of Greene and Greene,” in A. Mallek and E. R. Bosley, eds.,A ‘New and Native’ Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene (2008), pp. 84-109.

Mimi Hellman, “The Joy of Sets: The Uses of Seriality in the French Interior,” in

furnishing the 18th c: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (2007).

(Space Culturally Constructed)

W.D. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene," from The

Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (1979).

Dell Upton," Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New

York,” in C. H. Voorsanger and J. K. Howat, Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-61 (2000), pp. 3-46.

Steven West, “Playing with Food: Performance, Food and the Aesthetics of Artificiality

in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57/1 (1997).

(The Interpreting Project)

Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," from Pragmatist

Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (2000).

Wu Hung, “Introduction: The Screen” and “The Night Entertainment of Han Xizai,” from

The Double Screen (1998).

Patricia Berger, “The Problem of Authenticity: A Historical Geography of Buddhist Art

in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and its Conservation, ed. David Park, Kuenga Wangmo and Sharon Cather (London: Archetype Publications, 2013).

Margaretta Lovell, “Dashing for America: Frederic Remington, National Myths,

and Art Historical Narratives” (draft).

Adapted syllabus from Image, Object, and Being in Latin America (600-1650 CE) course courtesy of Lisa Trever, History of Art

the Iconic Turn, the Ontological Turn

--- Benjamin Alberti and Tamara L. Bray, “Introduction” to Special Section “Animating Archaeology: Of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3: 337–343.

--- Benjamin Alberti, Severin Fowles, Martin Holbraad, Yvonnne Marshall, and Christopher Witmore, “‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference,” Current Anthropology 52, no. 6 (2011): 896–912.

--- Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008):131–146.

--- Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): 174–208 [on the “linguistic turn”].

--- W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” in Picture Theory; Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11–34.

Pictures and Things in Literary Studies

--- Bill Brown, A Sense of Things; The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago 2003).

--- Bill Brown (ed.). Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

--- Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 “Things” (2001): 1–22.

--- Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 175–207.

--- Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art; An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis an Chicago: Hackett Publishing, 1976).

--- W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory; Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

--- W.J.T. Mitchell, “Pictures and Paragraphs. Nelson Goodman and the Grammar of Difference,” in Iconology; Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 53–74.

--- W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 28–56.

Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour, and Hans Belting: Anthropology of Art, Science Studies, and Bildwissenschaft

--- Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter; A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

--- Bruno Latour, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans; Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth,” in Pandora’s Hope; Essays on the Reality of Science Studies” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 174–215.

--- Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social; An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

--- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

--- Alfred Gell, Art and Agency; An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 1–72.

--- Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net; Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of Material Culture 1, no. 1 (1996): 15–38.

--- Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 302–319.

--- Hans Belting, Anthropology of Images; Picture, Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

--- Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence; A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

--- Liana Chua and Mark Elliott (eds.), Distributed Objects; Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (New York: Berghahn, 2013).

--- Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things that Talk; Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

--- Lorraine Daston (ed.) Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

--- Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner (eds.), Art’s Agency and Art History, New Interventions in Art History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

Animism, Agency, Objects, and Materiality in Archaeology and Anthropology

--- Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. S1, Special Issue “Culture—A Second Chance?” (1999): S67–S91.

--- Linda A. Brown and William W. Walker, “Prologue: Archaeology, Animism, and Non-Human Agents,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15, no. 4 “Archaeology, Animism, and Non-Human Agents” (2008): 297–299.

--- Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (eds.), The Object Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

--- Michael Carrithers et al. “Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture. Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), University of Manchester,” Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2010): 152–200.

--- Phillipe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

--- Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb, “Agency in Archaeology; Paradigm or Platitude?,” in Agency in Archaeology, edited by Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 3–17.

--- Paul Graves-Brown (ed.), Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

--- Graman Harvey (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Acumen, 2013).

--- Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.), Thinking through Things; Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

--- Ian Hodder (ed.), The Meaning of Things; Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

--- Ian Hodder, Chapter 1 “Thinking about Things Differently,” Chapter 5 “Entanglement,” and Chapter 10 “Conclusions,” in Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley, 2012), pp. 1–14, 88–112, 206–222.

--- Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” [and the responses by C. Tilley, C. Knappett, D. Miller, and B. Nilsson and the reply by T. Ingold] Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (2007), 1–38.

--- Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Reanimating thought,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71, no. 1 (2006): 9–20.

--- Tim Ingold, Making; Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Milton Park: Routledge, 2013).

--- Carl Knappett and Lambro Malafouris (eds.), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach (Berlin: Springer, 2008).

--- Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present (London: Berg, 2006).

--- Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archaeologies of Materiality (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

--- Lynn M. Meskell and Rosemary A. Joyce, Embodied Lives; Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

--- Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

--- Christopher Y. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone; Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004).

--- Christopher Y. Tilley, Body and Image; Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2 (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008).

From Art History to Visual Studies

--- Svetlana Alpers et al. “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (1996): 25–70.

--- Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

--- Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds.), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, NH: Published by University Press of New England [for] Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

--- Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).

--- Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images; Questioning the End of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

--- Georges Didi-Huberman, “Preface to the English Edition: The Exorcist,” in Confronting Images; Questioning the End of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), pp. xv–xxvi.

--- James Elkins, Chapter 1 “Art History and Images that are not Art” and Chapter 4 “What is a Picture,” in The Domain of Images (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 3–12 and 52–67.

--- David Freedberg, Chapter 1 “The Power of Images: Response and Repression,” in The Power of Images; Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 1–26.

--- James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global? (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

--- James Elkins and Kristi McGui (eds.), Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2013).

--- James Elkins and Maja Naef (eds.), What Is an Image? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

--- E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956, Bollingen Series XXXV:5, Millennium edition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).

--- Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002).

--- Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (eds.), Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (Aldergate, England: Ashgate, 2006).

--- Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).