Fashion and Material Culture: Fashion and History

This book uses familiar objects of our everyday environment to look at how our taste has become a gendered issue in our culture. It asks whether male and female tastes are really different, who says it is, and why it would matter.

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of on-going global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Based on intensive field work in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward focus on an everyday item--blue jeans--to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of "the normative." Miller and Woodward argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term "the ordinary." Miller and Woodward demonstrate that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

"In this book, Tim Edwards applies a sociological approach to our understanding of men's fashion, which he perceives to be significant in the nexus of masculinity and society, past and present, rather than simply an artistic of aesthetic interest, usually denoting effeminacy or homosexuality.In the 1980s, changes in demography, economics and ideology gave certain men greater freedom and spending power than ever before. Edwards investigates how these men, clearly distinguished by age, class and sexual orientation, were seduced by advertisers with sexy images of suited city gents and body-beautiful boys in Levis, and how the resultant process of consumption was facilitated through developments in the practice of shopping itself, such as easy access to credit. He examines the influence of the advertisers' message in creating of hierarchy of masculinity in which some men are valorized and others denigrated.

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. 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."

An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed, rather than brain-bound, "all in the head." This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body.

This book is available in print only.

This book is available in print only.

v. 1. The ancient world -- v. 2. Early cultures across the globe -- v. 3. European culture from the Renaissance to the modern era -- v. 4. Modern world part I:1900-1945 -- v. 5. Modern world part II: 1946-2000

Scanned swatches and technical specifications for common fabrics in production when the manual was printed in 1952.

Is challis light or heavy? What fabrics are similar to seersucker? Find out here!