1st Edition
The Meanings of Things Material Culture and Symbolic Expression
Edited By I. Hodder
Copyright 1989
296 Pages
by
Routledge
296 Pages
by
Routledge
296 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This unique and fascinating book concentrates on the varying roles and functions that material culture may play in almost all aspects of the social fabric of a given culture. The contributors, from Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea, India, South America, the USA, and both Eastern and Western Europe, provide a rich variety of views and experience in a worldwide perspective. Several of the... Read more
List of contributors; Foreword, P. Ucko; Preface, Ian Hodder. The political use of Australian Aboriginal body painting and its archaeological implications, Robert Layton; Terracotta worship in fringe Bengal, D.K. Bhattacharya; Iron and beads: Male and female symbols of creation. A study of ornament among Booran Oromo, Aneesa Kassam & Gemetchu Megersa; The messages of material behaviour: A preliminary discussion of non-verbal meaning; Roland Fletcher; Religious cults and ritual practice among the Mendi people of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, Theodore Mawe; Sites as texts: An exploration of Mousterian traces, Lucy Jayne Botscharow; Style and changing relations between the individual and society, Polly Wiessner; Post- modernism, post-structuralism and post-processual archaeology, Ian Hodder; 'We, the post-megalithic people...', Felipe Criado; The diffusion of religious symbols within complex societies, L. Charles Hulin; Social evidence from the interpretation of Middle Minoan figurines, Angeliki Pilali-Papasteriou; The Priestess Figure of Malta, Christina Biaggi; Ethno-archaeological cognition and cognitive ethno-archaeology, Zbigniew Kobylinski; Heresy and its traces: The material results of culture, E. Melas; Bark capes, arrowheads and Concorde: On social representations of technology, Pierre Lemonnier; The artefact as abbreviated act: A social interpretation of material culture, Miles Richardson; The material symbols of the Winnebago sky and Earth moieties, Robert Hall; Interpreting material culture, Christopher Tilley; Divine kingdoms in northern Africa: Material manifestations of social institutions, Else Johansen Kleppe; Towards and archaeology of thought, Whitney Davis; Tusona ideographs - a lesson in interpretive objectivity, Gerhard Kubik; Organizational constraints on tattoo images: A sociological analysis of artistic style, Clinton Sanders; A semiotic approach in rock-art analysis, Ana Maria Llamarzares; Habitus and social space: Some suggestions about meaning in the Saami (Lapp) tent ca. 1700-1900, Timothy Yates; Index
Biography
I. Hodder
`In sum, in form and content this book represents the current state of the art; and, as its most interesting papers make clear, that art is the broad field of structuralist and semiotic investigation.' - MAN
`Clearly, The Meanings of Things is a thought-provoking volume.' - American Antiquity
