Introduction to New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation. Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, Dubliners, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural materialists believe that “literature can serve as an agent of change”, since a culture`s hegemony is unstable. Raymond Williams views culture as a “productive process” that is, part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called “residual”, “emergent” and “oppositional” cultural elements. Seemingly, James Joyce`s Dubliners pertains to the notion of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices within the framework of cultural materialism. This study aims to clarify how James Joyce`s Dubliners reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation. Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, Dubliners, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural materialists believe that “literature can serve as an agent of change”, since a culture`s hegemony is unstable. Raymond Williams views culture as a “productive process” that is, part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called “residual”, “emergent” and “oppositional” cultural elements. Seemingly, James Joyce`s Dubliners pertains to the notion of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices within the framework of cultural materialism. This study aims to clarify how James Joyce`s Dubliners reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author,s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation. Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, Dubliners, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural materialists believe that “literature can serve as an agent of change”, since a culture’s hegemony is unstable. Raymond Williams views culture as a “productive process” that is, part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called “residual”, “emergent” and “oppositional” cultural elements. Seemingly, James Joyce’s Dubliners pertains to the notion of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices within the framework of cultural materialism. This study aims to clarify how James Joyce’s Dubliners reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

Reviewed by: What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole Paul Westover (bio) Tom Mole. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 317. $45. Prominent theorists of reading, reception, memory, and critical practice have argued that literary scholarship too often privileges contexts of origin (that is, histories of composition, publication, and initial reading). Several have called for rigorous approaches that account for literature’s movement across time and its downstream ability to engage new readers and even non-readers. Tom Mole has taken up the challenge; in resistance to what he calls “punctual historicism”—something like the “box” historicism Rita Felski has criticized—Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism extends the catalogue of recent studies that take seriously the mobility of Romantic writing across generations. Other important studies in this vein include [End Page 135] Heather Jackson’s Those Who Write for Immortality (2015), Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen (2017), Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott (2012), and Catherine Robson’s Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (2012)—books quite different from one another yet sharing a strong trans-temporal orientation that illuminates how literature “resonates,” to borrow a term from Wai Chee Dimock. These books may not tell us what specific texts mean in the way of interpretive criticism, but they do pursue the question of what literature as a whole means, or has meant, to people. At the same time, by focusing on the paths by which literature has made itself part of people’s lives, these studies combat pure methodological textualism, insisting that “literature” in the broad sense operates far beyond the page. It isn’t that questions of long-term reception are new to scholarship, but rather that fresh attention to media ecology, book history, material culture, and cultural practices opens new ways to think about them. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism aims to expand the literary field to include the whole “web of reception,” which for Mole includes human actors—readers, adapters, repurposers—as well as all sorts of books (not just early editions), multiple media channels, and a world of literary things. We have long known that works of literature and authors’ reputations do not “survive” without help, but Mole’s research highlights some of the forms that help has taken at particular historical junctures. On some level, Mole’s work might be understood as the latest major book in the mode of “(Insert Author) and the Victorians” (e.g., Andrew Elfenbein on Byron [1995], Stephen Gill on Wordsworth [1998]) to the extent that it traces the late-nineteenth-century reception histories of Scott, Byron, Shelley, Hemans, and Wordsworth. Mole asks how these writers became newly relevant for certain kinds of Victorian readers even as they seemed in danger of being forgotten. However, in its focus on (re)mediation, this study is more accurately thought of as a sequel to Mole’s earlier books on Byron, book history, and celebrity. As Mole clarifies from the outset, “I’m mainly interested in what the Victorians made of Romanticism rather than what they wrote about it” (3). Mole’s five section titles offer a sense of the book’s scope: “The Web of Reception,” “Illustrations,” “Sermons,” “Statues,” “Anthologies.” Each section contains three chapters, evocative case studies that spar entertainingly with critical conversations in related fields. The range of materials determines the range of methods: bibliography, influence history, media theory, tourist history, “distant reading,” and so forth, all blending to match the mix of visual, material, and textual artifacts. While a table of contents listing fifteen chapters plus introduction and coda might give some readers pause, Mole’s book does not in fact over-whelm [End Page 136] with its scale. The average chapter length, excluding the shorter introduction and coda, is under fourteen pages, and the longest chapter comes in at nineteen. Lively, economical divisions offer packages of thought for a single sitting, though significant arguments cross chapters. Generally, Mole launches each section by describing a key historical shift and offering an overarching claim concerning...

The study of material culture centers upon objects, their properties, and the materials that they are made of, and the ways in which these material facets are central to an understanding of culture and social relations. It challenges the historical division between the natural sciences as being the place for the study of the material world and the social sciences as being where society and social relations can be understood. Instead, culture and society are seen as being created and reproduced by the ways in which people make, design, and interact with objects. It also challenges the assumption, perpetuated by disciplinary divisions and also philosophical trajectories, that the object and subject are separate, wherein the latter is assumed to be immaterial, and the former is assumed to be inert and passive. In seeing the material properties of things as central to the meanings an object might have, much work within material culture studies is critical of the idea that objects merely symbolize or represent aspects of a pre-existing culture or identity. A key area of contestation in the literature on material culture is the question of agency and the ways in which objects can produce particular effects or allow and permit certain behaviors or cultural practices. This is developed through the concept of objectification, which is central to many studies of material culture—albeit differently conceived dependent upon the disciplinary and theoretical stance taken—which explores the intertwined, and often dialectic, relationships between people and things. Those who study material culture are situated in a wide range of disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, design, and sociology. Although material culture studies cross many disciplines, there are still theories, methods, and perspectives that are firmly located within particular disciplines. Understandings of material culture have been central to anthropology since its inception; during the late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists primarily collected material culture (Kroeber, Boas) that was displayed in museums in Europe and North America. It was only with the start of ethnographic fieldwork that the study of the material culture became less important. This bibliography of material culture will not focus primarily upon the study of ethnographic museums (with the exception of the section on Display) but more on the so-called new material culture studies that have developed since the 1980s and that are characterized by combining ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological debate. Within this field, empirical research explores specific genres of material culture, such as food or clothing, and empirical and theoretical work extends this to consider categories of objects, such as gifts and commodities, as situated within wider systems of exchange. There is also a concern with how objects “move” between domains and different value systems as the practices and meanings surrounding physically changing objects themselves change.

In the late 1950s, Jacob Kaplan recognized the Wadi Rabah culture as a distinct cultural entity of the southern Levant, and suggested possible interconnections to the northern Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. This volume examines Kaplan’s suggestion in detail and explores the cultural entities of northern Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt between ca. 5800 and 5200 cal BC, and the interactions between them. In this process, the 6th millennium BC witnessed a densely woven network of trade and cultural interactions that formed the first known transregional cultural entity. This faded in the following period as its component regions reverted to cultural individuality, and was not seen again in this intensity until the Bronze Age. This examination crosses over modern political boundaries and different academic traditions, research emphases and methodologies. Based on a firm chronological framework, developed for each region based on Bayesian modeling of available radiocarbon dates, the main traits in settlement patterns, material culture, funerary rites, art, and subsistence strategies are outlined in order to analyze previously unnoticed parallels in material culture and cultural practice between the four regions systematically. Evidence of imported raw materials or finished goods is reviewed in detail, all of these collected links and interactions are discussed in a wider geographic context. Mechanisms that could underlie this interactions are examined and possible transregional dynamics are proposed. It is suggested that the center of the culture that influenced the region lays in the northern Levant and northern Mesopotamia.

Este artigo tem como propósito apresentar parte da pesquisa de campo sobre o processo de afirmação étnica dos Tapuia-Kariri de São Benedito ─ comunidade coletiva indígena do estado do Ceará. A análise resulta de uma etnografia entre os Tapuias e das observações realizadas junto a outras comunidade indígenas do Ceará, na condição de docente do magistério indígena da Secretária de Educação do Estado do Ceará (SEDUC). Os Tapuias-Kariris constituem o grupo mais recente a autoafirmar-se como indígena. No processo de autoafirmação e reconhecimento, a primeira dificuldade que o grupo enfrenta é a negação social em reconhecê-los enquanto indígenas. Diante dessa rejeição, o grupo está constantemente negociando e afirmando sua identidade. Esse processo é realizado por meio da reelaboração das imagens, da cultura material e das práticas culturais, elementos coletivos que passam a ser concebidos pelo prisma de pertença étnica. A cultura material e o conjunto de práticas e de saberes a ela incorporada ocupam um lugar central no cotidiano desses grupos indígenas. Advindos de conhecimentos ancestrais, os objetos, assim como as danças, as músicas e os rituais, narram de modo particular a vida e a concepção cosmológica. Analisar o processo de afirmação, suas dificuldades intrínsecas, bem como o papel das manifestações culturais e das imagens, é o objetivo deste trabalho.

The article explores how collective memory shapes a unique cultural environment within the modern Ukrainian state. National identity is presented as a key condition for the survival of the Ukrainian people and the preservation of their cultural and historical heritage. One of the study's central themes is the Orthodox tradition, which has religious and cultural potential that extends beyond a purely religious framework. The historical development of Orthodox influence is evident in local educational practices, political life, and Ukrainians' self-determination across different periods. The article also examines the impact of Catholic dominance on the collective memory and self-consciousness of the local population during engagements with the Western world. It highlights the responses of Orthodox communities, particularly their efforts to safeguard spiritual traditions in reaction to Catholic expansion in the region. Key concepts such as "memory space," "cultural memory," and "reference points" are analyzed to explain the mechanisms through which traditional ways of life are preserved via texts, rituals, holidays, and other cultural practices. Particular emphasis is placed on the ethno-mental triangle of "paganism - Byzantine Christianity - religious syncretism in the form of Ukrainian Orthodoxy" and the triad "empire - Soviet period - independence," which is proposed as a framework for interpreting Ukraine's extended cultural and historical periods. The article also highlights the unique characteristics of restoring religious structures in the post-Soviet era and examines their connections to Eastern European religious and cultural traditions. In spiritual culture, sacred texts are emphasized, while in material culture, differences in architectural styles reflecting various cultural traditions are analyzed. These buildings showcase aesthetic preferences and the ideological and value orientations of their respective eras. Finally, the article emphasizes the cultural potential of national memory in shaping new ideological concepts. This is exemplified by the celebration of Kyiv's 1500th anniversary in 1982 and the contemporary Ukrainian state's use of Cossack heritage, which remains highly relevant in addressing modern challenges.

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation. Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. Proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, <i>Dubliners</i>, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural This study aims to clarify how James Joyce`s <i>Dubliners</i> reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

The author introduces the concept of “cultural and communicative space of folk medicine” based on the cultural practices of the Mordovian ethnic group. The structure of the cultural and communicative space includes folk knowledge and skills, communication skills (verbal and non-verbal), a number of cultural symbols and codes that contribute to the effective transmission and interpretation of information to preserve life and health of the ethnic community. The article analyzes the influence of ethnopsycholinguistic features of people on the translation, perception and preservation of information in the area under study. Knowledge is translated through the components of material and spiritual culture, which are semiotically loaded in accordance with the ideological foundations of the Mordvins. Material culture (housing, food, household utensils and clothing) is considered as an analog communication, where the elements are analyzed in terms of their semiotic content as a message. Spiritual culture in the context of the study is considered as a system of knowledge and beliefs. It influences the perception and interpretation of cultural codes of ethnomedicine. The author also regards terminology and folklore texts (in this case, Mordovian folk tales and incantations) as part of spiritual culture. The author concludes that in the cultural and communicative space of traditional medicine of the Mordvins, the differentiation of the role of material and spiritual culture is difficult due to the inseparable connection of their semantic meanings. The article analyzes: 1) the transformations of the cultural and communicative space of traditional medicine of the Mordvins that occurred under the influence of intercultural communication (interaction with neighboring ethnic groups); 2) popularization of traditional medicine through mass media; 3) special literature on ethnomedicine; 4) digital technologies as an information channel for the acquisition and popularization of cultural knowledge. Finally, the author concludes that modern sources of information and qualitative changes in material and spiritual culture in the direction of unification in accordance with modern socio-economic trends lead to the transformation of the cultural and communicative space of folk medicine.

An Interview with Paula Garrett-Rucks, Georgia State University

This article argues that Orhan Pamuk’s literary innovations bring formations of religion and secularism separated by ideologies of Turkish modernization and cultural revolution into productive parity. Pamuk’s depictions of the Ottoman Islamic past and its legacies—including its material culture, everyday practices, and Sufism—articulate mystical and religious tropes along with the material and secular culture of the nation-state. His eleven novels published between 1982 and 2022 dramatize what I term Turkish “postsecular imaginaries,” in which cultural representations and practices of religion and state are increasingly reinterpreted as being synchronic, interrelated, and imbricated. These manifestations of postsecularism inform both contemporary Turkish literary modernity and the conditions of a debated Turkish postcoloniality, which interrogates sites of European, Ottoman, and Turkish Republican state power.

Based on fieldwork in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, I examine the locally-sourced pigment Mawoondool for Gija people in the community of Warmun, and intervene in theories related to art and agency. I discuss Mawoondool as a medium used in art, material culture and cultural practices. Through ethnography, I argue the significance of Mawoondool is bound to the cultural processes that govern its collection, distribution and application, which connect with Gija understandings of goodness and improvement and manifest visually as white dots. As such, I argue in favour of a culturally specific form of aesthetics and that Mawoondool is a substance activated by Gija people. In demonstrating that Mawoondool white dots are inseparable from Gija cosmological attunement and epistemic practice, I suggest that Mawoondool is mobilised in Warmun as a material and conceptual medium for sustaining Gija life-worlds and negotiating the Australian Aboriginal art economy.

Multi-isotope analysis of dietary variation among the early Christian communities of northern Sudan

Decorating the Divas of Renaissance Society Carole Collier Frick (bio) Bella Mirabella's Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Beginning with a clever play on Said's Orientalism as her title, editor Bella Mirabella's Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories obliquely manages to consider the construction of the Other in this interdisciplinary anthology focused on cultural practices in dress as part of the material culture of early modern European society. Sporting over sixty color illustrations attractively placed in a central choir that show accessory pieces ranging from ambergris-centered pomander beads to an ivory dildo with a butterfly bag at the other, this beautifully executed book intrigues. In the elegantly written initial chapter, Mirabella introduces this collection of studies on accessories such as pearls and jewelry, starched linen ruffs, codpieces, platform shoes, and veils, with the intent of bringing the topic of the accessories worn by men and women in Renaissance Italy and England "to the center of a discussion about material culture and social practice." Mirabella also questions the limits of any definition of what an accessory is by arguing that they are "multivalent objects, with multiple uses and meanings mediated by practice and context" (1). Thus perfume, scissors, dildos, personal wax seals, and even boys become "accessories," expanding our usual notion of the term in interesting and often intellectually challenging ways. Mirabella elides the word accessory with access, noting how these objects allowed wearers access to desired situations (like making a fortuitous marriage) not normally available to them, if they were accessorized impressively. She also points out that some accessories held their value and therefore became strategic investments for the future. Moreover, they created beauty, which is one reason why there are records of human beings [End Page 315] accessorizing as early as forty-five thousand years ago. Excessive decoration, however, could lead to accusations of deception, distortion, and even sinfulness, and therefore a proper balance was crucial to successful ornamentation. Beginning with an essay by Evelyn Welch on "stink"—scent and perfumed objects such as beads, buttons, and gloves—this text is coherently organized into five parts, the first of which is titled "Dressing Up," and also contains a piece on veils by Eugenia Paulicelli and a consideration of handkerchiefs by editor Mirabella. Each of these three chapters takes up the contradictory possibilities of its particular object of discussion. As a case in point, Paulicelli associates veils with both the Madonna and prostitutes, handkerchiefs with both flirtation and bodily fluids. The slippage between the sublime and disgusting is ingenious. Part 2 then investigates "erotic attachments"; in this section three lively studies engage the titillating trilogy of busks, codpieces, and dildos. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass explore the meaning of the busk, an intimate object of ivory, wood, metal, or whalebone that was worn inside the central seam of a woman's corset to flatten her stomach while pushing up her breasts. Next, Will Fisher looks at how the male accessory of the codpiece helped to materialize "competing ideologies of masculinity" by taking on two distinct forms that favored different parts of the male genitalia (102). Liza Blake rounds out this section with an examination of the use of early modern dildos as fashionable accessories, making a distinction between the dildo as the "sign" of a penis and as a "thing" in its own right, while arguing for its "thingness." The accompanying illustrations showing the actual objects as well as representations of them (including a 1795 frontispiece showing group sex from de Sade's La philosophie dans la boudoir) make for truly enlightening reading. Opening part 3 entitled "Taking Accessories Seriously," is Karen Raber's thought-provoking study of the many layers of meaning in Elizabeth I's conspicuous display of herself in "a bushel of pearls" (159). This is followed by Catherine Richardson's examination of the significance of the movement of jewelry in early modern society and personal relationships. Finally, Joseph Loewenstein' considers the complex meanings of the wax seal (as imprinted by a signet ring or seal matrix) in the material culture of early modern England and as demonstrated in the work of Shakespeare. Here, each...