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| Dublin Core |
PKP Metadata Items |
Metadata for this Document |
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| 1. |
Title |
Title of document |
14. The Way Things Are... - Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity |
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| 2. |
Creator |
Author's name, affiliation, country |
A. Bernard Knapp; University of Glasgow; |
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| 3. |
Subject |
Discipline(s) |
Archaeology |
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| 4. |
Subject |
Keyword(s) |
John F. Cherry; Appadurai; The Social Life of Things; archaeometallurgy; Bronze Age Cyprus; material agency; material culture |
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| 5. |
Subject |
Subject classification |
archaeology |
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| 6. |
Description |
Abstract |
Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things (1986) first sought to highlight multiple ways in which ‘things’, like people, have active social lives, even biographies. Since then, this train of thought has taken multiple turns, and gone through many diversions and amplifications to, amongst others, agency, materiality and object/material agency, the ‘cognitive life of things’, human-thing ‘entanglements’, ‘symmetrical’ archaeology and the ‘new materialisms’. The end result appears to be a sweeping critique of ‘anthropocentricity’, in which it is argued that the archaeological study of cultures need not have any reference to humans, whether agents, individuals, subjects, or collectivities, but instead must focus on the nexus amongst things. Things, then, are not just tokens or surrogates for human acts or activities, but rather act as material agents in their own right. Taking some materials from archaeometallurgy — specifically that of Bronze Age Cyprus as known from regional archaeological survey and excavation — as my point of discussion, this paper critiques the overall notion of ‘material agency’ and considers the cultural biography of metallurgical ‘things’, seeking to separate the chaff of materiality from the wheat of material culture. |
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| 7. |
Publisher |
Organizing agency, location |
Equinox Publishing Ltd |
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| 8. |
Contributor |
Sponsor(s) |
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| 9. |
Date |
(YYYY-MM-DD) |
01-Jan-2018 |
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| 10. |
Type |
Status & genre |
Peer-reviewed Article |
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| 11. |
Type |
Type |
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| 12. |
Format |
File format |
PDF |
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| 13. |
Identifier |
Uniform Resource Identifier |
https://journals.equinoxpub.com/books/article/view/30817 |
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| 14. |
Identifier |
Digital Object Identifier |
10.1558/equinox.30817 |
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| 15. |
Source |
Journal/conference title; vol., no. (year) |
Equinox eBooks Publishing; Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity |
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| 16. |
Language |
English=en |
en |
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| 18. |
Coverage |
Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.) |
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| 19. |
Rights |
Copyright and permissions |
Copyright 2014 Equinox Publishing Ltd |