Full Description
Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the "material turn" in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Øivind Fuglerud & Leon Wainwright
PART I: MUSEUMS
Chapter 1. Contemporary Iroquois Art between Ethnographic Museum, Art Gallery and Global Market Place: Reflections on the Politics of Identity and Representation
Sylvia S. Kasprycki
Chapter 2. De-connecting Relations: Exhibitions and Objects as Resistance
Peter Bjerregaard
Chapter 3. Materializing Islam and the Imaginary of Sacred Space
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib
PART II: PRESENCE
Chapter 4. Visible While Away: Migration, Personhood and the Movement of Money amongst the Mbuke of Papua New Guinea
Anders Emil Rasmussen
Chapter 5. Being there while Being here: Long-distance Aesthetics and Sensations in Tamil National Rituals
Stine Bruland
Chapter 6. Food Presentations Moving Overseas: Ritual Aesthetics and Everyday Sociality in Tonga and among Tongan Migrants
Arne Aleksej Perminow
Chapter 7. Imaginations at War: The Ephemeral and the Fullness of Life in Southwest China
Katherine Swancutt
Chapter 8. How Pictures Matter. Religious Objects and the Imagination in Ghana
Birgit Meyer
PART III: ART
Chapter 9. Art as Empathy: Imaging Transfers of Meaning and Emotion in Urban Aboriginal Australia
Fiona Magowan
Chapter 10. Transvisionary Imaginations: Artistic Subjectivity and Creativity in Tamil Nadu
Amit Desai and Maruška Svašek
Chapter 11. An Indian Cocktail of Value/s and Desire: On the 'Artification' of Whisky and Fashion
Tereza Kuldova
Notes on Contributors
Index
