博客來We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of ’animate’ and ’inanimate’, ’human’ and ’non-human’, ’natural’ and ’supernatural’, ’self’ and ’other’, ’authentic’ and ’inauthentic’. However, these categories are based on false essentializations and overlook the indeterminacy that often animates social and material worlds.
The Inbetweenness of Things rejects Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects according to bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues for the normalization of a paradigm in which objects are not ’one thing or another’ but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an ’object-centred’ approach, the book is conceived as an exhibition – a cabinet of curiosities – in which anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and museologists debate a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, they explore how ’things’ mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody such mediation in their form. Featuring an impressive range of international contributors, each essay grounds explorations in cutting-edge material culture theory in concrete case studies.
An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.
