The Socialness of Things

Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Edited by Stephen Harold Riggins.

Not how or even whether things get along with each other, but the integration of objects into the social fabric of everyday human life is the subject of the 17 essays focusing on artifacts as agents and process, the built environment and the political ecology of artifacts, and the skin of culture as expressed in clothing and adornment. The volume is divided into three parts: I. The dialogic object: Artifacts as agents and processes; II. The built environment and the political ecology of artifacts; III. Clothing and adornment: The skin of culture. - Contents: Stephen Harold Riggins: Introduction. - Mary Douglas: The genuine article. - Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel: Glorious obsessions, passionate lovers, and hidden treasures. Collecting, metaphor, and the Romantic ethic. - Vera Mark: Objects and their maker. Bricolage of the self. - Stephen Harold Riggins: Fieldwork in the living room. An autoethnographhic essay. - George Park: Bridewealth revisited. - Nick Stanley: Melanesian artifacts as cultural markers. A micro-anthropological study. - Rob Shields: The logic of the mall. - Adolf Ehrentraut: The ideological commodification of culture. Architectural heritage and domestic tourism in Japan. - Valda Blundell: "Take home Canada". Representations of aboriginal peoples as tourist souvenirs. - Peter R. Grahame: Objects, texts, and practices. The refrigerator in consumer discourses between the wars. - Eugene Halton: Communicating democracy: Or shine, perishing republic. - Joan M. Vastokas: Are artifacts texts? Lithuanian woven sashes as social and cosmic transactions. - Michèle Kérisit: Feathers and fringes. A semiotic approach to powwow dancers' regalia. - Kathy M'Closkey: Navajo weaving as sacred metaphor. - Betsy Cullum-Swan and Peter K. Manning: What is a t-shirt? Codes, chronotypes and everyday objects. - Peter Corrigan: Interpreted, circulating, interpreting. The three dimensions of the clothing object. - John O'Neill: Psychoanalytic jewels: The domestic of Dora and Freud. VIII,482 Seiten mit 49 Abb., Leinen (Approaches to Semiotics; Vol. 115/Walter de Gruyter Verlag 1994) angeschmutzt