Description:
- An exciting and innovative addition to the study of material culture, art and aethetics.
- Comprised by accomplished, previously published scholars in the field of art history and social anthropology.
- Explores how we conceptualise our social surroundings through the framework of the imaginary.
Brief description:
Leon Wainwright is Kindler chair in Global Contemporary Art at Colgate University, New York and Reader in art history at the Open University, UK. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Open Arts Journal. His publications include Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011) and numerous writings on modern and contemporary histories of art and global change. He is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for the history of art.
Review Quotes:
"In this volume, Fuglerud and Wainwright and their contributors break new theoretical ground in the study of human-object relationships in a synthesis of ideational and material studies. The new material perspective of Objects and Imagination succeeds in synthesizing physical and ideational perspectives with a collection of ethnographic studies grounded in social imaginaries which lays new foundations for the study of human-object relations." - Anthropological Forum
"All in all, Objects and Imagination is a compelling collection of perspectives and understandings of the relationships between humans and objects that accounts for both materiality and collective imaginaries." - Social Anthropology
"The volume offers a valuable new addition to recent publications on material culture by introducing the concept of the imaginary as a framework for the study of objects...With a variety of case studies in different regional settings it deals with the 'enchantment of materiality' (Naguib in the volume), the meaningfulness of objects, their sensual and emotional capacities, and the negotiation of value in their representation or movement across cultural regimes." - Barbara Plankensteiner, Weltmuseum Wien