Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains, and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of "things." This cutting-edge work examines the current state of material culture as well as how this field of study may be extended and developed in the future.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Theoretical Perspectives
• In the Matter of Marxism
• Structuralism and Semiotics
• Phenomenology and Material Culture
• Objectification
• Agency, Biography and Objects
• Scenes from a Troubled Engagement
• Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies
• Colonial Matters
• Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations
• The Body, Materiality and the Senses
• Four Types of Visual Culture
• Food, Eating, and the Good Life
• Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia
• Intersensuality and Material Culture
• The Colours of Things
• Inside and Outside
• Surfaces and Containers
• Subjects and Objects
• Cloth and Clothing
• Home Furnishing and Domestic Interiors
• Vernacular Architecture
• Architecture and Modernism
• "Primitivism," Anthropology and the Category of "Primitive Art"
• Tracking Globalization
• Commodities and Value in Motion
• Place and Landscape
• Cultural Memory
• Process and Transformation
• Technology as Material Culture
• Consumption
• Design, Style and Function
• Exchange
• Performance
• Present to Past
• Ethnoarchaeology
• Material Culture and Long-term Change
• Presentation and Politics
• Intellectual Property and Rights
• An Anthropological Perspective
• Heritage and the Present Past
• Museums and Museum Displays
• Monuments and Memorials
• Conservation as Material Culture
• Collectors and Collecting

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

While material culture remains an analytical element or field of study within a number of disciplines, 24 of this handbook's 36 contributors are anthropologists and 5 are archaeologists. The editors proclaim theirs as the "primary disciplinary ‘home' and point of origin" of material culture studies, and have built their handbook around home base. The contributors pay serious attention to older and newer theoretical perspectives from a wide variety of sources, including literary currents of the 1990s. They offer a series of snapshots that assess the virtues and deficits of these theories and provide, in effect, annotated bibliographies for the more interesting and important relevant applications that have been made of them. Chapters slice perspective in different ways. Some of the less-usual topics are scent and sound, cultural memory, technology, performance, and intellectual property. Occurring largely within the culture of contemporary anthropology, the discussions typically attempt to rise above European American and Western colonial prejudgments to find the subject in the object, to search for agency, to reduce the focus on materialism in material culture, and to emphasize basic continuity more than change over time. Architects, economists, and historians are largely welcome as visitors to this handbook. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. L. Cooper emeritus, DePauw University