Experiencing material culture in the western world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Experiencing material culture in the western world
（Contemporary issues in museum culture）
Leicester University Press, 1997
- : pbk
Available at 11 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The essays commissioned for this book demonstrate the range of the work now being undertaken in the study of material culture by scholars in many different disciplines. This study can be approached from the various angles of consumption and commodity; social and political symbolism; personal experience; the museum as professional intstitution; as text in its semiotic relationship to linguistics; as narrative and as constructions of the self and the other. The foreword suggests that whichever approach is adopted, objects remain in our alter egos, embedded in a closed system of reference in which the things that touch us most nearly - objects, food, body/sex are used to describe each other and in doing so create both collective cultural, collective and individual identities.
Table of Contents
- The genealogy of material culture and culture identity
- the romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism - reflections of the reception of a thesis concerning the origin of the continuing desire for goods
- historical semantics and material culture
- virtual worlds, material worlds - the Internet, language and reality
- old masters and young mistresses - the collector in popular fiction
- Mrs Cropper and Mrs Brown - good and bad collectors in the work of A S Beat and other recent fiction
- towards a critique of material culture - consumption and markets
- a sinister way of life - a search for left handed material culture
- fantastic things
- the work of art as a gift and commodity
- the People's Show festival 1994.
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