'This should become a core text for second year courses in sociology and cultural studies...it synthesizes a vast body of literature and a complex range of debates into a text which is at once accessible, engaging and stimulating...it will lead to students seeing and thinking about the material world in a totally new light and can be used as a way into key theoretical debates' ...(展开全部)

Material culture has finally earned a central place within anthropology. Emerging from the pioneering work done at University College London, this reader brings together for the first time seminal articles that have helped shape the anthropological study of material culture. With topics ranging from the anthropology of art to architecture, landscape studies, archaeology, consum...(展开全部)

Noted scholar Henry Glassie (Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Turkish Traditional Art Today), directs his attention to reinventing and reinvigorating thistory and art through the study of material culture. As Glassie puts it, "The concept of culture seems a secure achievements. In the future, history and art, as well as science and philosophy, will be understood to be, like cul...(展开全部)

柯律格（Craig Clunas）1954年出生于英国苏格兰阿伯丁，现任英国牛津大学艺术史系讲座教授，曾任伦敦维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（Victoria & Albert Museum）中国部资深研究员兼策展人15年，并自1994年起先后执教于萨塞克斯大学（University of Sussex）艺术史系及伦敦大学亚非学院（SOAS）。柯律格是当前从物质文化角度研究中国文明史的重要学者，自1991年起陆续出版《长物：早期现代中国的物质文化与社会状况》（Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, 1991）、《丰饶之地：明代中国的园林文化》（Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty Chin...(展开全部)

Summary Focusing on the material as culture from newer perspectives applied to contemporary consumption, Woodward (cultural sociology, Griffith U., Australia) surveys diverse approaches (e.g., sociological, psychological, marketing, cross-disciplinary) to studying people-object relations as a lens on the values of modern consumer society. Case studies (e.g., of homes, objects i...(展开全部)

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture, and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunti...(展开全部)

Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be ...(展开全部)

Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be ...(展开全部)

In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning “all under heaven,” has co...(展开全部)

One of our most original thinkers addresses the scientific world's premier question: What is the nature of consciousness? In recent years the nature of consciousness-our immediately known experiences-has taken its place as the most profound problem that science faces. Now in this brilliant and thoroughly accessible new book Colin McGinn takes a provocative position on this per...(展开全部)