Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Øivind Fuglerud & Leon Wainwright
PART I: MUSEUMS
Chapter 1. Contemporary Iroquois Art between Ethnographic Museum, Art Gallery and Global Market Place: Reflections on the Politics of Identity and Representation
Sylvia S. Kasprycki
Chapter 2. De-connecting Relations: Exhibitions and Objects as Resistance
Peter Bjerregaard
Chapter 3. Materializing Islam and the Imaginary of Sacred Space
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib
PART II: PRESENCE
Chapter 4. Visible While Away: Migration, Personhood and the Movement of Money amongst the Mbuke of Papua New Guinea
Anders Emil Rasmussen
Chapter 5. Being there while Being here: Long-distance Aesthetics and Sensations in Tamil National Rituals
Stine Bruland
Chapter 6. Food Presentations Moving Overseas: Ritual Aesthetics and Everyday Sociality in Tonga and among Tongan Migrants
Arne Aleksej Perminow
Chapter 7. Imaginations at War: The Ephemeral and the Fullness of Life in Southwest China
Katherine Swancutt
Chapter 8. How Pictures Matter. Religious Objects and the Imagination in Ghana
Birgit Meyer
PART III: ART
Chapter 9. Art as Empathy: Imaging Transfers of Meaning and Emotion in Urban Aboriginal Australia
Fiona Magowan
Chapter 10. Transvisionary Imaginations: Artistic Subjectivity and Creativity in Tamil Nadu
Amit Desai and Maruška Svašek
Chapter 11. An Indian Cocktail of Value/s and Desire: On the ‘Artification’ of Whisky and Fashion
Tereza Kuldova
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Øivind Fuglerud is professor of social anthropology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests include Diaspora formations, politics of cultural representation and aesthetics. He has published a number of works on the conflict in Sri Lanka and its consequences, including Life on the Outside – the Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance Nationalism (Pluto Press 1999).
Review :
“In this volume, Fuglerud and Wainwright and their contributors break new theoretical ground in the study of human-object relationships in a synthesis of ideational and material studies. The new material perspective of Objects and Imagination succeeds in synthesizing physical and ideational perspectives with a collection of ethnographic studies grounded in social imaginaries which lays new foundations for the study of human-object relations.” · Anthropological Forum
“All in all, Objects and Imagination is a compelling collection of perspectives and understandings of the relationships between humans and objects that accounts for both materiality and collective imaginaries.” · Social Anthropology
“The volume offers a valuable new addition to recent publications on material culture by introducing the concept of the imaginary as a framework for the study of objects…With a variety of case studies in different regional settings it deals with the ‘enchantment of materiality’ (Naguib in the volume), the meaningfulness of objects, their sensual and emotional capacities, and the negotiation of value in their representation or movement across cultural regimes.” · Barbara Plankensteiner, Weltmuseum Wien
