Elusive Archives: Material Culture in Formation (Material Culture Perspectives)

By: Julian Yates and Wendy Bellion and Julie L. McGee and Torsten Cress and Cindy Ott and Laura E. Helton and Jennifer Van Horn and Kiersten Thamm and Alexandra Ward and Alexander Lawrence Ames and Halina Adams and Rosalie Hooper and Sarah Wasserman and Spencer Wigmore and Catherine Morrissey and Michelle Everidge and Kaila T. Schedeen and Lu Ann Cunzo and Natalie Elizabeth Wright and Oliver Scheiding and J. Ritchie Garrison and Jesse Kraft and Michael J. Emmons and Jessica Conrad and Bernard L. Herman

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Synopsis: The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor. This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9781644532041
Related ISBNs:: 9781644532249, 9781644532034
Publisher:: University of Delaware Press
Date of Addition:: 11/10/21
Copyrighted By:: the University of Delaware Individual essays copyright
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Education, Social Studies, Language Arts
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.
Edited by:: Martin Brückner
Edited by:: SANDY ISENSTADT