architecture
archival interpretation
archival research
archival studies
archives
art history
Category=AB
Category=AGA
Category=AK
Category=CB
Category=GLC
Category=GLZ
Category=JNU
Category=NHTB
collecting
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
material culture
material culture perspectives
material culture studies
material exchange
material objects
material turn
material variety
museum studies
popular culture
popular culture studies
public humanities
social history
structural critique
University of Delaware
visual culture
Product details
- ISBN 9781644532249
- Weight: 653g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Aug 2021
- Publisher: University of Delaware Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.
This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.
This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.
MARTIN BRÜCKNER is the director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and a professor in the English department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His books include The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity.
SANDY ISENSTADT is a professor and chair of the art history department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His most recent book, Electric Light: An Architectural History, is the first sustained examination of the architectural spaces generated by the introduction of electric lighting.
SANDY ISENSTADT is a professor and chair of the art history department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His most recent book, Electric Light: An Architectural History, is the first sustained examination of the architectural spaces generated by the introduction of electric lighting.
