Full Description
In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological states, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying.
Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures; the Malagasy people of Madagascar; craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania; amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea and within the folds of books, screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and are reborn through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect.
The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies, but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in neighbouring scientific fields of archaeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world.
Contents
1 Introduction: turning to surfaces
2 On opening the book of surfaces
3 Air, smoke and fumes in Aymara and Mapuche rituals
4 In light and shadow: surfaces and polarities in rituals of second burial in Central East Madagascar
5 Re-animating skin: probing the surface in taxidermic practice
6 The temporality of surfaces
7 Threshold as social surface
8 Vital surfaces and the making of urban architecture
9 On the substance of surfaces: situating materials and design in Melanesian environments
10 On knitted surfaces-in-the-making
11 A life surficial: design and beyond
12 Epilogue
