Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

Chapter 7 takes up themes developed throughout the book and summarizes how focusing on the logic of perspectivism, an Amerindian ontology, enables the archaeological record to be read differently. Perspectivism, or any other ontology taken seriously as a theory, can challenge our conceptions of objects, things and human agency. Finally, having argued that the principal challenge presented by Perspectivism in Archaeology is to find ways to understand and think about particular archaeological records in the light of a local ontology, the chapter explores how perspectivism as theory can ultimately be seen as an experiment in decolonizing archaeological thinking and situating its practices.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

This chapter considers the role of Shakespearean theater in fostering the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. Shakespeare offers an especially compelling site for investigating this topic in act 3.2 of Julius Caesar. Here, Mark Antony addresses the plebeians in the wake of Caesar’s assassination using the latter’s bloody mantle (i.e. cloak) as an object lesson in civic and moral failure. This scene, the chapter argues, has something important to teach us about the theatricality of the cardinal virtues, including, especially, the object-specific way in which particular things enable general moral insights. As this suggests, the cardinal virtues do not so much offer scripts for the cultivation of inner qualities as they do a community-oriented set of practices grounded in the capacity of humans to think, feel, and discern together. Put another way, the cardinal virtues are a social logic or dynamic, rather than personality traits or individual moral attributes. Like theater itself, they provide a linked set of frameworks for physical, emotional, and ethical participation in the world.

Chapter 4 analyses epigrams and objects between 100 ?? and ?? 100, and discusses how objects and texts engage with one another in expressing the idea of carpe diem. Rarely studied Greek epigrams from the Garland of Philip and texts by the Latin authors Martial, Pliny the Elder, and Petronius point to exciting interplay between the textuality of epigrams and the presence of objects. Besides more conventional literary sources, the analysis also includes numerous artworks and inscriptions. Particular attention is paid to cups, such as the well-known Boscoreale cups, as well as to gems. This interdisciplinary chapter makes a strong case for studying literature alongside other forms of cultural production.

The three broad classes of emotions are characterized as Event-based emotions, Agent-based emotions, and Object-based emotions. Event-based emotions consist of a Well-being group, a Prospect-based group, and a Fortunes-of-others group. Emotion types in the first two of these groups focus on the self-relevance of focal events, while those in the Fortunes-of-others group focus on the self-relevance of events that primarily affect others. In addition to Event-based emotions are the Attribution emotions, which arise from focusing on the actions of agents, and the Attraction emotions, which result from focusing on objects. Also introduced is a group of Compound emotions. These emerge when focusing at the same time on both an event and an agent held to be responsible for that event. The three broad classes of emotions are evaluated (appraised) in terms of goals, standards, and tastes, respectively, and individual emotion types are distinguished by their location within this overall global structure of emotions. A skeptical view of the notion of basic emotions is presented.

Material culture “represents” and “re-presents” people, places, other objects, taste, soundscapes, etc., in meaningful ways. Some forms of material culture exist specifically to represent or re-present; other forms involve representation more or less across time and over space and cultures. This chapter surveys how scholars from diverse backgrounds have treated “representation” and “re-presentation” in and of material culture, with a focus on literary representations.

This chapter introduces readers to conceptions of matter and materiality that shape current conversations in material culture studies, sensitive to the rise of object biographies, commodity histories, fetishism, the new materialism, and the “multispecies” or “ontological” turn in anthropology.

Chapter 5 argues that the feeling of harmony expressed by pure aesthetic judgments is to be understood as the promissory feeling that a sensible manifold can be brought under concepts. The manifold which evokes in us this particular feeling of cognitive purposiveness makes us subconsciously identify it as an object exemplary of a natural kind, even before we have found concepts under which to subsume it and its kind. Furthermore, it is only on the assumption that the same manifolds will bring about this feeling in all of us that we will be able to make cognitive judgments about the same objects. Pure aesthetic judgments underwrite our pre-conceptual identification of spatial forms as exemplary of objective natural kinds. It is a necessary condition of cognition that we carve up the manifold given to us in intuition into objects exemplary of natural kinds in the same manner. The assumption of a common sense is a necessary condition of objective empirical experience and knowledge. It grounds the appeal to universal assent, which aesthetic judgments express. The Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment is an essential part of the transcendental account of the conditions of empirical experience and knowledge.

This chapter starts by asking ‘What is in a Thing?’ It discusses the material presence of the past and its rediscovery, for example, in the history of commodities. Material culture history, it argues, has been critical of the linguistic turn but is still building on insights from it. It proposes that objects provide an ‘order of things’ (Michel Foucault), which is in need of examination and contextualisation. At the same time material culture history has also been in the vanguard of decentring human agency and problematising the ‘Anthropocene’. Using non-representational theory, it has been arguing in favour of recognising the agency of things and decentring human agency in history. Material culture history has also been pointing to the longevity of material objects, providing them with often malleable and multiple meanings. It is striking how prominent everyday objects are in material culture histories. Through them individual identities are often related to larger collective identities. Historians of material culture have contributed to raising our awareness of the link between objects and collective identity formation. Examples from national history, environmental history, first nations hsitory, the history of ethnic minorities, colonial history, cultural history, design history, architectural history, regional history, class history, gender history and religious history are all discussed in oder to underline the potential of material culture history to lead to greater self-reflexivity among historians about their role in constructing forms of collective identity and to deconstruct these identities.

Beth Holmgren charts the modes in which men functioned as gatekeepers in nineteenth-century professional theatre, which showed not only the parochialism of their views but a deep anxiety around sexuality that required the disciplining of women’s bodies on and offstage. She reveals how actresses pioneered new ways of living that escaped entrapments of conventional marriage and which allowed some financial autonomy. Beata Guczalska details the treatment of actors from the twentieth century to today; although not persecuted as in other European contexts, actors were still subjected to a lack of social recognition and stability, poverty and a dependence on patrons. A history of acting is also shown to be one of shifting technologies: lighting, photography, radio, illustrated newspapers and cinema. Marek Waszkiel explores both the political and satirical valences of puppets as well as their aesthetic forms. He also analyses the development of acting in relation to objects that thinks acting through dialectical relationships. In this way, the history of puppetry is embedded in a history of ‘acting’, and this offers a new mode of considering performer training, craft and profession.

In the two essays devoted to the Polish avant-garde, Dorota Jelewska and Anna R. Burzyńska argue that the heterarchical forms of the interwar and the postwar avant-gardes allow us to see these constellations both as destroying the existing topology of representation as well as constructing inter-reality in which art annexes real objects (Tadeusz Kantor), marginalized and broken objects are material witnesses to past and current events (Józef Szajna, Jerzy Bereś) and colour, sound and the body of the performers (Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ewa Partum) replace transmission of logos, which had been central to Aristotelian poetics and aesthetics. While dealing with the history of the avant-garde, Jelewska notes that, despite significant accomplishment of women artists in Poland, it was not until the 1970s that women developed their space for action and expression. Burzyńska specifically explores an acoustic history of the Polish avant-garde, breaking with artistic conventions that have traditionally excluded sound interpreted as mere noise, and considers ways in which different voices have been assimilated by or have resisted nationalist discourse.

In 1936, the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects was held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, displaying the most diverse array of material objects in the history of surrealist exhibitions to date. André Breton elaborates on this aspect of the exhibition in his enigmatic “Crisis of the Object” which was written as a text to accompany the exhibition catalog. While it has been widely read as an interpretation for a scientific reckoning of surrealism, this chapter shows that “Crisis of the Object” was rather a reflection on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and his materialist conception of poetry published fifty years before. A reconsideration of Breton’s theory of objects through the recent lens of new materialism offers insight into how the surrealist engagement with things in the 1930s was – and still is – revolutionary in that it sought to propose an antianthropocentric poetics of the world.

Although he is usually thought of as a poet who wrote for the theatre, W. B. Yeats was a theatre practitioner for almost fifty years, and was closely involved in every aspect of producing his plays.As a consummate theorist of the theatre, he thus produced theories relating to theatre space, the use of colour, and an understanding of the uncanny power of objects that prefigures later phenomenological thinking on the same subject.He formulates these precepts early in the 1900s, laying down principles for the use of colour, for instance (two main colours and an accent only), but by the time of his more mature work, he is using objects – such as the severed heads that appear in his later plays – in a way that develops his own thinking on the relation between thought and matter.Indeed, a consideration of Yeats’s understanding of the physical elements of performance shows him to be someone who thinks through the medium of theatre, to borrow a concept from Alain Badiou; using the nature of performance as a means of thought.