Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters

Edited by Joseph Maran & Philipp W. Stockhammer

City: Oxford

Year: 2011

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Description: Hardback, 224 p., b/w figures, drawings, 22x28,5 cm

Abstract

‘Materiality and Social Practice’ investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology’s approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.

Contents

1. J. Maran & P. W. Stockhammer, ‘Introduction’  [1-3]
2. H. P. Hahn, ‘Words and things: reflections on people’s interactions with the material world’ [4-12]
3. C. Gosden, ‘Magic, materials and matter: understanding different ontologies’ [13-19]
4. M. Rowlands & P. van Dommelen, ‘Material concerns and colonial encounters’ [20-31]
5. A. B. Knapp, ‘Matter of Fact: Transcultural contacts in the late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean’ [32-50]
6. D. Panagiotopoulos, ‘Encountering the Foreign. (De-)Constructing alterity in the archaeologies of the Bronze Mediterranean’ [51-60]
7. G. J. van Wijngaarden, ‘Trade goods reproducing merchants? The materiality of Mediterranean late Bronze Age exchange’ [61-72]
8. J. Rutter, ‘Migrant drinking assemblages in Aegean Bronze Age settings’ [73-88]
9. P. W. Stockhammer, ‘Entangled Pottery: Phenomena of appropriation in the late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean’ [89-103]
10. R. Jung, ‘Can we say, What’s behind all those sherds?’ [104-120]
11. J. Maran, ‘Ceremonial feasting equipment, social space and interculturality in post-Palatial Tiryns’ [121-136]
12. E. Borgna, ‘From Minoan Crete to Mycenean Greece and beyond: the dissemination of ritual practices and their material correlates in ceremonial architecture’ [137-151]
13. S. Sherratt, ‘The intercultural transformative capacities or irregularly appropriated goods’ [152-172]
14. S. Cappel, ‘Lasting Impressions. The appropriation of sealing practices in Minoan Crete’ [173-184]
15. M. Heinz & J. Linke, ‘Hyperculture, tradition and identity: how to communicate with seals in times of global action’ [185-190]
16. A. Yasur-Landau, ‘The role of the Canaanite population in the Aegean migration to the southern Levant in the late 2nd Millennium BCE’ [191-197]
17. M. H. Feldman, ‘The practical logic of style and memory in early First Millennium Levantine Ivories’ [198-212]
18. M. Maggio, ‘An Introduction to the divine statues of, and the objects belonging to, the gods in Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2000–1595 BCE)’ [213-220]