Images can be studied in many ways--as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independe...(展开全部)

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies introduces and reviews current thinking in the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. Drawing together approaches from archaeology, anthropology, geography, and Science and Technology Studies, through twenty-eight specially commissioned essays by leading international researchers, the volume explores contemporary is...(展开全部)

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies introduces and reviews current thinking in the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. Drawing together approaches from archaeology, anthropology, geography, and Science and Technology Studies, through twenty-eight specially commissioned essays by leading international researchers, the volume explores contemporary is...(展开全部)

Exploratory sex magic. Experimentation with mind-altering drugs. Astral travel. Alchemy. Alex Owen's new book, The Place of Enchantment, situates these seemingly anachronistic practices squarely alongside revolutionary understandings of rationality in a compelling demonstration of how a newly psychologized magic operated in conjunction with the developing patterns of modern lif...(展开全部)

In our 2005 monograph Kengo Kuma: Selected Works, celebrated architect Kengo Kuma boldly declared that his ultimate aim was to "erase architecture" so that his buildings became one with their surroundings. In recent years he has pursued this goal by focusing primarily on imaginative and unexpected use of materials, creating hypnotizing surfaces that evoke subtle visual sensatio...(展开全部)

Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002 What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects after the check-out reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for the real thing become so important because the high tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropolo...(展开全部)

We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times.... —from The Soul at Work Capi...(展开全部)

Although craftspeople and artists often work with natural materials, the notion that making art can constitute a means of knowing nature is a novel one. This book, with contributions from historians of science, medicine, art, and material culture, shows that the histories of science and art are not simply histories of concepts or styles, but histories of the making and using of...(展开全部)

“Making” and “knowing” have generally been viewed as belonging to different types and orders of knowledge. “Craft” and “making” have been associated with how-to information, oriented to a particular situation or product, often informal and tacit, while “knowing” has been related to theoretical, propositional, and abstract knowledge including natural science. Although craftspeop...(展开全部)

Ben Okri, winner of the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, now gives us Songs of Enchantment, and it is hard to imagine a more gloriously written novel. Azaro, the spirit-child, is a reluctant traveler in the realities of this world. In this moving story of live and transformation, his adventures begin with the disruption of his family. Under the pressure of poverty and myth, ...(展开全部)