Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Material Objects (material + object)
Selected AbstractsMoney and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia; Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable SpacesAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2001David Graeber Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. David Akin and Joel Robbins. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. viii. 284 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. Patricia Spyer. London: Routledge Press, 1998. vii. 262 pp., illustrations, photographs, index. [source] The Ontology of Material ObjectsANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY, Issue 4 2002Eric T. Olson Book reviewed in this article T. Merricks, Objects and Persons [source] BLONDEL, MODERN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY AND THE LEIBNIZIAN EUCHARISTIC BONDMODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 4 2007DAVID GRUMETT The category of substance is fundamental in Leibniz's philosophy, and conceived in specifically theological terms in his late correspondence with Bartholomaeus des Bosses. The exchange develops as a discussion of the bond of substance (vinculum substantiale) in the transubstantiated eucharistic host, but the bond also provides the basis for a general theory of universal substance. This eucharistic vision of the substance of the world is appropriated by Maurice Blondel as the basis of his philosophy of action, in which divine transforming activity is necessarily implied, and which he describes as a form of transubstantiation of both the subject of action and its material object. This Leibnizian-Blondelian theology of the divine transformation of the substance of the world provides eucharistic foundations for modern Catholic social teaching. [source] An extended Huygens' principle for modelling scattering from general discontinuities within hollow waveguidesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NUMERICAL MODELLING: ELECTRONIC NETWORKS, DEVICES AND FIELDS, Issue 5 2001Ronald L. Ferrari Abstract The modal fields, generalized scattering matrix (GSM) theory and dyadic Green's functions relating to a general uniform hollow waveguide are briefly reviewed in a mutually consistent normalization. By means of an analysis linking these three concepts, an extended version of the mathematical expression of Huygens' principle is derived, applying to scattering from an arbitrary object within a hollow waveguide. The integral-equation result expresses the total field in terms of the incident waveguide modal fields, the dyadic Green's functions and the tangential electromagnetic field on the surface of the object. It is shown how the extended principle may be applied in turn to perfect conductor, uniform material and inhomogeneous material objects using a quasi method of moments (MM) approach, coupled in the last case with the finite element method. The work reported, which indicates how the GSM of the object may be recovered, is entirely theoretical but displays a close similarity with established MM procedures. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Sacred Places, Domestic Spaces: Material Culture, Church, and Home at Our Lady of the Assumption and St. BrigittaJOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2009Mary Ellen Konieczny The relationship between the material culture of public worship and congregants' homes is explored in a study of two Catholic parishes,theologically liberal St. Brigitta and conservative Our Lady of Assumption. At St. Brigitta, congregants' worship space is almost devoid of religious art and ritual objects are plain, but worshippers' homes are rich in decorative objects. By contrast, masses at Our Lady of the Assumption take place in a church filled with devotional art and ornate objects, but worshippers' homes are spare, neutrally furnished, and display few decorations. Distinct congregational logics surrounding the making of the self help to explain the material culture differences: St. Brigitta parishioners value individualized self-expression whereas Assumption's members subordinate individuality to family and church identities. Individuals use material objects not only for self-expression, but also to explicitly shape identities and make the self. [source] Drama activities as ideational resources for primary-grade children in urban science classroomsJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 3 2010Maria Varelas Abstract In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science-literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary-school (grades 1st,3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity,ideational, interpersonal, and textual,to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re-articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non-living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302,325, 2010 [source] In Defence of a Doxastic Account of ExperienceMIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 3 2009KATHRIN GLÜER Today, many philosophers think that perceptual experiences are conscious mental states with representational content and phenomenal character. Subscribers to this view often go on to construe experience more precisely as a propositional attitude sui generis ascribing sensible properties to ordinary material objects. I argue that experience is better construed as a kind of belief ascribing ,phenomenal' properties to such objects. A belief theory of this kind deals as well with the traditional arguments against doxastic accounts as the sui generis view. Moreover, in contrast to sui generis views, it can quite easily account for the rational or reason providing role of experience. [source] "But the winds will turn against you": An analysis of wealth forms and the discursive space of development in northeast BrazilAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009AARON ANSELL ABSTRACT In this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Brazil by exploring how local genres of public speech articulate with categories of wealth. Although development resources cannot be easily categorized into local classes of wealth, they nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape cultivators' relations to material objects, and they also define the contours of safe and acceptable speech within the village development association. As a result, during association meetings, the villagers speak in ways that frustrate development agents seeking to generate "open" and "transparent" managerial discourse felicitous to project success,at least, external notions of project success. Appreciating the link between wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the local implementation challenges that participants in such projects face and the reason development agents frequently blame ostensive project failures on beneficiary backwardness. [wealth, Brazil, development, evil eye, peasant society] [source] Vague Singulars, Semantic Indecision, and the Metaphysics of Persons,PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2007DONALD P. SMITH Composite materialism, as I will understand it, is the view that human persons are composite material objects. This paper develops and investigates an argument, The Vague Singulars Argument, for the falsity of composite materialism. We shall see that cogent or not, the Vague Singulars Argument has philosophically significant ramifications. [source] The Inner and the Outer: Kant's ,Refutation' ReconstructedRATIO, Issue 2 2000Robert Hanna In Skeptical idealism says that possibly nothing exists outside my own conscious mental states. Purported refutations of skeptical idealism , whether Descartes's, Locke's, Reid's, Kant's, Moore's, Putnam's, or Burge's , are philosophically scandalous: they have convinced no one. I argue (1) that what is wrong with the failed refutations is that they have attempted to prove the wrong thing , i.e., that necessarily I have veridical perceptions of distal material objects in space, and (2) that a charitable reconstruction of Kant's ,Refutation of Idealism' in fact provides a sound refutation of skeptical idealism. [source] Material civilization: things and societyTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2006Tim Dant Abstract This paper argues that although classical sociology has largely overlooked the importance of social relations with the material world in shaping the form of society, Braudel's concept of ,material civilization' is a useful way to begin to understand the sociological significance of this relationship. The limitations of Braudel's historical and general concept can be partially overcome with Elias's analysis of the connection between ,technization' and ,civilization' that allows for both a civilizing and a de-civilizing impact of emergent forms of material relation that both lengthen and shorten the chains of interdependence between the members of a society. It is suggested that the concept of the ,morality of things' employed by a number of commentators is useful in summarizing the civilizing effects of material objects and addressing their sociological significance. From the sociology of consumption the idea of materiality as a sign of social relationships can be drawn, and from the sociology of technology the idea of socio-technical systems and actor-networks can contribute to the understanding of material civilization. It is argued that the concept of ,material capital' can usefully summarize the variable social value of objects but to understand the complexity of material civilization as it unfolds in everyday life, an analysis of ,material interaction' is needed. Finally the paper suggests some initial themes and issues apparent in contemporary society that the sociological study of material civilization might address; the increased volume, functional complexity and material specificity of objects and the increased social complexity, autonomy and substitutability that is entailed. A theory of ,material civilization' is the first step in establishing a sociology of objects. [source] Houses and the ritual construction of gendered homes in South AfricaTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2003Linda Waldman This article examines Griqua women's association with houses in historic, economic, and ritual contexts during the twentieth century. Using archival data, I argue that the connection between women and houses in South Africa stems from a complex interaction between their pre-colonial Khoi origins, Christian missionary activity, and apartheid government housing policy. Ethnographic research demonstrates how, during the second half of the twentieth century, women ritually stressed their association with houses, but were unable to sustain this dominance in everyday life. An examination of ritual, gender, and housing, in relation to material objects and space, provides insights into how a series of rituals performed in Griquatown facilitates both the expression of an unambiguous Griqua identity and daily multi-ethnic interactions. [source] I,From Property Dualism to Substance DualismARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME, Issue 1 2010Dean Zimmerman Property dualism is enjoying a slight resurgence in popularity, these days; substance dualism, not so much. But it is not as easy as one might think to be a property dualist and a substance materialist. The reasons for being a property dualist support the idea that some phenomenal properties (or qualia) are as fundamental as the most basic physical properties; but what material objects could be the bearers of the qualia? If even some qualia require an adverbial construal (if they are modifications of the thing that is conscious because of them, not properties of something else to which the subject of consciousness is related), then the property dualist can be driven to speculative forms of materialism none of which, at this point, looks more likely to be true than the more modest versions of emergent dualism defended by contemporary substance dualists. [source] MAKING AN IMPRESSION: REPLICATION AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE GRAECO-ROMAN SEAL STONEART HISTORY, Issue 2 2006VERITY PLATT The debate on replication in ancient art has traditionally concentrated upon Roman ,copies' of famous Greek sculptures and paintings. This article explores a different, but no less significant, kind of replication , the use of intaglio gems as seals to create wax impressions. The mechanical transmission of a glyptic image from one medium to another played an important role in Graeco-Roman society, conferring authority upon the seal as an individual or state signature employed in legal, political and personal exchange. The direct relationship between seal and impression was also appropriated by Greek philosophers as a metaphor for unmediated sense perception , the ,impressions' made by material objects upon the soul. However, as a comparison with the ontological issues surrounding the modern photograph shows, the seemingly unproblematic relationship between image and impression is more complex than may initially seem: the seal's philosophical appeal lay ultimately more in its social significance , as a guarantor of authenticity and marker of the self , than in its true ontological status. [source] Monuments and Texts: Antiquarianism and the Beauty of AntiquityART HISTORY, Issue 4 2002Maria Grazia Lolla Maria Grazia Lolla has published articles in English and Italian on various aspects of antiquarianism, aesthetics and eighteenth,century culture, as well as on Caribbean poetry and literature. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, has been awarded fellowships from the British Council and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has held research fellowships at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. Now at work on Rivers Unknown to Song: Antiquarian Explorations of the East and West Indies, she is an adjunct professor at New York University. From the beginning of the Renaissance antiquaries had been publishing monuments at such a pace that publishing as much as collecting or studying monuments could be counted amongst the defining features of antiquarianism. However widely and routinely practised, the publication of monuments revealed substantial divisions within the world of antiquarianism. Antiquaries were faced with the choice of either textualizing monuments , turning monuments from visual or tactile objects into reading material , or attempting to reproduce their materiality , even if the monument was a text. The paper analyses Johann Joachim Winckelmann's Monumenti antichi inediti (1767) as a significant example of the former and the discussion concerning the publication of Domesday Book that took place in the rooms of the London Society of Antiquaries in 1768 as a compelling example of the latter. Juxtaposed to one another, Monumenti antichi inediti and the projected facsimile of the Domesday Book provide mutually revealing accounts of the aesthetic and intellectual complexities of eighteenth,century antiquarian practice. Where Winckelmann patently sought to rid monuments of their materiality in an effort, perhaps, to nobilitate antiquarianism , while nevertheless keeping it in a suitably ancillary position to literature , the fellows of the Society of Antiquaries chose the facsimile as the vehicle of preservation and transmission best suited to conveying their admiration of texts as material objects, indeed, as non,representational art. As necessarily (and self,consciously) imperfect attempts to reproduce original monuments, facsimiles provide both a marker of deep scepticism about the possibility of ever really knowing the past and a precious trace of past versions of the past , of what could be seen and deemed worthy of preservation, scholarly investigation and aesthetic appreciation. [source] | ||||||||||