Dear colleagues,
[With apologies for cross-posting]
Details of this new volume - Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies - which will be 
published by OUP in August, are below.

More details are here - 
http://weweremodern.blogspot.com/2009/10/oxford-handbook-of-material-culture.html

Dan Hicks
[log in to unmask]

--

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES
Edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry
(OUP 2010, xviii+790pp, 98 figures, 2 tables).


'We don't just study things. We study with things, and create new things in the process. If 
ever proof were needed, it lies in this monumental volume. Ranging across archaeology, 
anthropology, geography and science and technology studies, its contributing authors 
have worked with all sorts of things to create a text that not only places material culture 
studies on a secure footing, but will serve as a landmark for years to come.' (Professor 
Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen)

'On the evidence of this Handbook, material culture studies has resisted becoming 
reduced to a staid academic discipline. In these essays, some assertive and combative, 
others reflective and inclusive, are found instead a remarkable enthusiasm that 
transcends traditional academic boundaries and topics to try and stay at the vanguard of 
intellectual debate. Whether through theories of exchange, or deposition, of art or 
personhood, contributors to this book seek new horizons that can also create bridges 
between historical disciplines such as archaeology and history with a whole range of 
social sciences such as anthropology and geography. There is the feeling that this is the 
moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past 
and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been 
imagined: through what this volume effectively reveals is a huge amount of new 
research, which is complemented by a commitment to new thinking about the 
implications of this research. This is very exciting stuff.' (Professor Daniel Miller, UCL)


1: Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry: Introduction. Material Culture Studies: a reactionary 
view 
[Introduction posted online at - 
http://weweremodern.blogspot.com/2010/05/material-culture-studies-introduction.html ]


I. Disciplinary Perspectives
2: Dan Hicks: The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect
3: Ian Cook & Divya Tolia-Kelly: Material Geographies
4: Robert St George: Material Culture in Folklife Studies
5: Ann Stahl: Material Histories 
6: John Law: The Materials of STS 

II. Material Practices
7: Andrew Pickering: Material Culture and the Dance of Agency
8: Michael Dietler: Consumption 
9: Gavin Lucas: Fieldwork and Collecting 
10: Hirokazu Miyazaki: Gifts and Exchange 
11: Howard Morphy: Art as Action, Art as Evidence 
12: Rosemary Joyce with Joshua Pollard: Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of 
Deposition 

III. Objects and Humans
13: Kacy L. Hollenback & Michael B. Schiffer: Technology and Material Life 
14: Andy Jones & Nicole Boivin: The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency 
15: Chris Fowler: From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality 
16: Zoe Crossland: Materiality and Embodiment 
17: Tatyana Hulme: Material Culture in Primates 

IV. Landscapes and the Built Environment
18: Lesley Head: Cultural Landscapes
19: Sarah Whatmore & Steve Hinchliffe: Ecological Landscapes 
20: Roland Fletcher: Urban Materialities: Meaning, Magnitude, Friction, and Outcomes 
21: Carl Lounsbury: Architecture and Cultural History 
22: Victor Buchli: Households and `Home Cultures' 

V. Studying Particular Things
23: Rodney Harrison: Stone Tools
24: Chandra Mukerji: The Landscape Garden as Material Culture: Lessons from France
25: Douglass W. Bailey & Lesley McFadyen: Built Objects
26: Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris & Peter Tomkins: Ceramics (as Containers)
27: Peter J. Pels: Magical Things: On Fetishes, Commodities, and Computers 

28. Afterword: Nigel Thrift: Fings Ain't Wot They Used t'Be: Thinking Through Material 
Thinking as Placing and Arrangement