Nesta tese analisamos as nuances que o conceito de leste assumiu nas fontes escritas da Escandinávia e Islândia dos séculos XIII e XIV. De início, procedemos na observação de como a historiografia referente às interações entre povos da Escandinávia e do Nordeste Europeu produziu extenso debate de implicações políticas, conhecido como a Controvérsia Normanista. Neste capítulo salientamos também os impactos que o estudo do medievo teve nos tempos contemporâneos. A seguir, efetuamos uma síntese baseada na interpretação da Cultura Material sobre os movimentos escandinavos a leste no período viking, que forneceram material para os próprios historiadores e autores na Escandinávia e Islândia dos séculos XIII e XIV. Até então demonstramos que, a despeito da Controvérsia Normanista, há evidência convincente e suficiente para demonstrar que a presença escandinava no leste foi deveras significativa. Os capítulos posteriores centralizam-se na análise das fontes primárias. Dividimo-las em fontes que apresentam material cartográfico e geográfico, obras de cunho historiográficoe sagas voltadas ao entretenimento; como seleção de obras representativas de tais grandes grupos analisamos o Mappamundi islandês Gks 1812, 4to, 5v-6r., o prólogo da Edda Menor, a Heimskringla, a Gesta Danorum e a rvar-Odds Saga. A análise dessas fontes demonstrou que entre o século XIII e o XIV ocorreu na produção escrita escandinava uma bifurcação entre o conhecimento produzido com objetivos de instrução e aquele com intuitos de entretenimento. O uso do leste na primeira vertente é livresco, inserindo muito do saber acumulado do Medievo Ocidental e ressignificando o leste segundo parâmetros das terras bíblicas e dos autores clássicos. Nas fontes de intuito de entretenimento o uso do leste é também ressignificado, mas desta feita de acordo com material mais ligado à cultura e às narrativas populares, empregando o leste na materialização de temas do fantástico e da mitologia. / In this thesis we analyze the nuances assumed by the concept of east in the primary sources of Scandinavia and Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Initially, we proceeded in the observation of how the historiography related to Northern and Eastern Europe have produced extensive debate of political implications, named the Normanist Controversy. In thischapter we have stressed also the impacts that Medieval Studies may assume in Contemporary milieu.Hereafter we build a synthesis based on Material Culture -in the archaeological sense -of the Scandinavian movements in East in the Viking Age, interactions that already had provided inspiration for authors inXIII-XIVs. At this point we have showed successfully that there is enough evidence to demonstrate the relevance of the Scandinavian presence in medieval Eastern Europe.The later chapters deal with the analysis of several kindsof primary sources. We have gathered and organized it in geographical and cartographical works, writings of historiographical nature and entertainment aimed sagas.As a selection of representative works of such large groups we studied the Icelandic Mappamundi of manuscript Gks 1812, 4to, 5v-6r, the Prologue of Edda Minor, the Heimskringla,the Gesta Danorum and the rvar-Odds SagaThe analysis of these sources showed that between the thirteenth and the fourteenth century a bifurcation occurred in Scandinavian written sources between the knowledge produced for the purposes of instruction andthe one with the goal of entertainment.The use of the East in the first group is highly scholar, re-elaborating the East in the light of accumulated knowledge of the Western Middle Ages, as well as redefining it within parameters coherent with christian and classical authors.The sources aimed to entertainment, however, employed the eastern areas in connection with a different kind of knowledge. Folk narratives and popular lore gained prominence in the reshaping of eastern region, transforming it in anauspicious place to the materialization of the fantastic and the mythical.

Esta dissertação trata de alguns dos principais elementos da cultura material da África antiga reveladas pela arqueologia, destacando os sitos arqueológicos de que provêm. Os sítios abordados encontram-se na Nigéria (Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ifé, Benin, Owo), no Congo (Sanga e Katoto), e no Zimbábue (o \"Grande Zimbábue\"). Algumas dessas produções se veem representadas nas coleções africanas do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da Universidade de São Paulo-MAE/USP através de objetos oriundos de complexos culturais do presente - caso dos iorubás, Nigéria. Esses objetos do acervo MAE/USP são aqui analisados junto a outros, provenientes de escavações, conservados em grandes museus internacionais e publicados como obras-primas na literatura especializada. Esta dissertação levanta questões relativas à memória e ao patrimônio, como sugere seu título, enquanto que seu subtítulo é uma referência ao catálogo que dela faz parte. Este catálogo tem por finalidade reunir, de forma didático-pedagógica, dados sobre os sítios selecionados e culturas africanas correspondentes, em torno de narrativas, que nos parecem sugestivas para o ensino-aprendizagem de elementos da história das descobertas e das escavações arqueológicas, assim como dados estilísticos e tecnológicos das produções materiais relacionadas. / This dissertation addresses some of the main elements of the material culture of ancient Africa revealed by Archaeology, highlighting the archaeological sites in which they arise. The sites approached are in Nigeria (Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ife, Benin, Owo), Congo (Sanga and Katoto), and Zimbabwe (the \"Great Zimbabwe\"). V Some of these productions are seen represented in African collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo-MAE / USP through objects coming from cultural complexes of this of the present - case of the Yoruba, Nigeria. These objects MAE / USP collection are reviewed here along with others, from excavations, preserved in major international museums and published as masterpieces in specialized literature. This dissertation poses questions about the memory and heritage, as suggested by its title, while its subtitle is a reference to the catalog which forms part. This catalog is intended to gather, didactic and pedagogical way, data on the selected sites and corresponding African cultures around narratives that seem suggestive for the teaching-learning elements of the history of discoveries and excavations, as well as stylistic and technological data of related materials productions.

Esta pesquisa propõe analisar o papel o dos artefatos na promoção da sociabilidade no Jardim da Luz, entre os anos de 1870 a 1930. As decisões políticas sobre os espaços públicos verdes tiveram suma importância, pois eram responsáveis pela inserção, reforma ou demolição de artefatos no espaço. Os artefatos, por sua vez, foram muito utilizados na composição das imagens presentes nos cartões postais e circularam pela cidade com o objetivo de exaltar os pontos modernos de São Paulo. No caso do Jardim da Luz, os postais circulados colaboraram para criar o imaginário a respeito do espaço como um local moderno e de sociabilidade. O local passou a ser usado para apresentações musicais, festas e encontros. Foram estudados três principais grupos no espaço: a elite paulistana, os trabalhadores e os fotógrafos lambe-lambe. O Jardim se tornou local representativo para esses grupos, um espaço de festas para alguns e para outros, ambiente de trabalho. Esta pesquisa, pelo estudo da cultura material, pretende compreender os usos dos espaços do Jardim da Luz como um espaço de sociabilidade e suas transformações ao longo do período em questão. / This research intends to analyse urban artifacts\' influence on Jardim da Luz\'s sociability from 1870 to 1930. Political decisions concerning green public spaces had extreme importance on it, as responsibles for artifacts insertion, reform or demolition ion the garden. Artifacts, in turn, were largelly used as background for postcard\'s which circulated through the city to exalt São Paulo\'s modern sights. In Jardim da Luz, Tthose postcards helped to create the ideia of a modern and social place in Jardim da Luz. It had begun to host musical presentations, parties and meetings. In this workstudy, were studied examined three major social groups which attended those events: elite from São Paulo, workers and street photographers. Jardim da Luz became a representative local for those groups, a party place for some and a work site for others. This research, through the study of material culture, intendsaims to understand Jardim da Luz\'s social usage and its transformation through the study of material culture through during the time studied.

Esta tese apresenta uma análise das relações das pessoas de camadas populares com a casa em que moram e os objetos que a compõe para compreender como se dão os processos de construção da identidade para essa camada da população tomando como objeto suas relações com a moradia e seus objetos. A hipótese do trabalho é a de que o espaço da casa expressa processos de construção da identidade. Esta pesquisa entende que os membros de uma mesma casa não se relacionam com o espaço da mesma forma. Na verdade, acredita-se que o espaço da casa seja negociado, renegociado e apreendido, de acordo com os projetos individuais. Para tanto foram pesquisadas quatorze casas cujas famílias moram numa favela da cidade de São Paulo. / This thesis intends to analyze the relationship between working classes with the place where they live as well as the role of the respective objects that make up their homes. The aim of this study is to comprehend the way that the dwellers identities are built taking into consideration their residences and also the respective objects. The main hypothesis of this work is that the space at home expresses the construction process of identity. This research understands that the members of a family have a different ways of interacting with the home. As a matter of fact, it is believed that the space occupation in the houses is subject to negotiation, re-negotiation and then assimilated according to plans of life of each individual . To write this thesis I carried out a research among 14 families that live in a slum area situated in São Paulo.

This thesis investigates elite and genteel women’s production and consumption of material objects in Britain during the period 1750-1830. Each of its four chapters identifies a central process that characterised these engagements with material culture, focusing on ‘Migration,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Translation,’ and ‘Exchange’ in turn. The Introduction examines each of these with regard to the historiography of eighteenth-century material culture and its relationship with gender, social relations, domesticity, and materiality. It argues that by viewing material culture through the lenses of microhistory and the case study, we might gain a sense not only of how individual women acquired, used, and conceived of objects, but also how this related to the broader processes by which material culture functioned during this period. Chapter 1 identifies the importance of needlework in the construction of prescribed feminine identities, and focuses on representations of needlework in portraiture, genre prints, and conduct literature. The chapter argues that such objects created a ‘grammar’ of respectable domestic femininity that migrated through visual, literary, and material genres, reflecting the permeability of cultural forms during this period. Chapter 2 examines the role of description in the journals and correspondence of the travel writer Caroline Lybbe Powys, concentrating on her 1756 tour of Norfolk. Following the work of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the chapter argues that the ‘thick description’ that characterises Lybbe Powys’s accounts of domestic visiting and tourism locates both the homes of her hosts and her own epistolary practices within an interpretative framework of hospitality, sociability, and materiality in which description was central. Chapter 3 considers the interior decoration of A la Ronde, the home of the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, located in Exmouth in Devon. The chapter argues that the processes of translation that characterised the Parminters’ acquisition and display of their collection of souvenirs transformed these objects both physically and semantically, allowing the cousins to co-opt them into personal narratives, redolent of travel, the home, and the family. Chapter 4 focuses on Plas Newydd, the home of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. It examines how the gift exchange enacted at the house facilitated the creation of ‘gift relationships,’ which both reflected and constituted the connections between Butler and Ponsonby, their numerous friends and visitors to their home, between Plas Newydd and the surrounding landscape, and between material culture, experience, and sentiment, more broadly. Together, the constituent chapters of the thesis demonstrate that there was no simple connection between gender and material culture. However, by interrogating the key cultural processes in which this relationship operated, the thesis hopes to demonstrate the complexity and fluidity of its manifestations.

Household inventories record objects that can be compared with surviving artefacts contributing to the study of material culture and social history. However, this thesis shows how heterogeneous inventories found in early modern Scottish sources resist quantification and aggregation. Instead, qualitative use of inventory evidence is advocated. Inventories can contribute information on the locations of activities in the home. These activities may be preferred to the object as evidence of historical change and as units of international comparison. Furnishing a house was cultural activity, and a construction of culture. In this study, objects are regarded as participants in cultural activities, strategies, and the construction of values. Sixteenth-century inventories are often impersonal and tend to show similarities in content, encouraging mechanistic interpretations of domestic life. The seventeenth century saw a proliferation of household equipment and furnishing for elites throughout Europe due to changes in production and consumerism. Some of this new furnishing was bought in London, some in France. While national difference was apparently maintained in architecture, new furnishings may have effaced distinctions within elite rooms. Scottish and English culture was merged by aristocratic intermarriage. This new culture is seen in the inventories of Mary, dowager Countess of Home. She maintained houses in England and Scotland. Some of her furnishings represented the style of an inner circle at court. Her inventories are also significant because they detailed equipment for a range of activities. She personally prepared medicines and sweetmeats, and had a number of scientific instruments. Pursuits reconstructed from the detail of later inventories can illuminate other domestic situations where clues are more subtle or absent. The level of autonomy Lady Home and her daughters exercised over their homes is a reminder of the agency exercised by women over furnishings, gardens, architecture, and estate policy.

O objetivo geral da dissertação é compreender a vida social na cidade de São Paulo ao longo do século XVIIII e inícios do XIX em suas dinâmicas históricas, tomando as fontes de cultura material como disparadoras das problematizações, especificamente o mobiliário doméstico. Para tanto usamos exames formais e da Arqueometria balizando suas potencialidades com outras categorias de documentos. Considerando o mobiliário como produto e vetor de relações sociais, buscamos informações sobre a sua produção, consumo e circulação, de maneira a compreender o status social de seus artífices, o perfil dos consumidores e as transformações dos espaços domésticos, das sociabilidades e das formas de distinção pelo uso social dos objetos. Desta maneira agregamos informações multidisciplinares à historiografia no esforço de reavaliar visões consolidadas sobre a cidade. / The general objective of this dissertation is to understand the social life in the city of São Paulo through the 18th and the beginnings of the 19th centuries by its historical dynamics, using the material culture resources as the trigger of the problematizations, more specifically the domestic furniture. Therefore we used formal examination and the Archaeometry balancing its potentialities together with other categories of sources. Considering the furniture as products and vectors of social relations, we searched for information about its production, consuming and 10 circulation, comprehending the social status of the artisans, the consumer profiles and the transformation of the domestic environments, of the sociabilities and the distinction by the social use of the objects. In this way we added multidisciplinary information to the historiography in our effort to reevaluate consolidated visions about the city.

Since 1986, the Catholic Our Lady of Victory (OLV) parish of Lackawanna, NY and the diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization for Father Nelson H. Baker (1842-1936), founder of the North American branch of the Association of Our Lady of Victory and the OLV Basilica and Institutes, which, among other services, included a hospital, orphanage and school. Lackawanna is also the site of the Bethlehem Steel Plant closings of the early 1980s, which have come to symbolize the Buffalo region's difficult and troubled transition to a post-industrial economy. Thus, I frame my dissertation with the overall idea that the possibility of Baker's sainthood offers hope for economic recovery to the city of Lackawanna. Specifically, this work seeks to combine the study of material history with the study of lived religion by using performativity as a theoretical tool. Through a comprehensive presentation of the material history of Father Nelson H. Baker from the 1880s to 2006, I demonstrate that material history is a significant, integral and vital component of lived religion. Further, I make the case that devotional practices include creative acts that both provide evidence of Baker¹s sanctity for his cause and contribute to the performative nature of his material history. As such, this work attempts 1)to fill in a gap in the scholarship about contemporary Catholic sainthood in the U.S. by focusing on a specific cause for sainthood, 2) to further develop an understanding of the communal processes of representing sanctity,3) to offer a way of combining analyses of the built environment, material, print and visual culture with the study of lived religion, and 4) to expand the scope of scholarly approaches to Catholic devotional practices by demonstrating that in the Baker case, devotional practices involve a cooperative effort by both official and popular agents in the creation of material items to promote and further a cause. Visual materials are presented in the body of the text in JPEG format

Musical instrument makers in the state of West Virginia in the United States pursue “singing,” lively instruments that capture ideals of musical tone and “re-enchant” their work and lives through relationships with craft materials and the forest landscape. Suitable tonewoods that grow in the region, such as red spruce (Picea rubens), intersect with makers’ desires to craft instruments in the style of famed makers such as the C.F. Martin Company and the Gibson Company as well as provide instruments imbued with a sense of place. While the demand for and symbolic import of instruments made with local wood seems to grow, the availability of the requisite tree species is dominated by resource materialities and temporalities of large land-owners and timber producers that privilege timber harvest in short cycles that clash with the needs of musical instrument crafters. As a result, makers also look to other global forests, such as those of the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, as sources for tonewood capable of becoming a singing instrument. Employing a theoretical framework that emphasizes the relationality of human actors and nonhuman materials, I argue that the work of instrument makers is rendered meaningful in part by a co-constructive process of becoming both instrument and maker. I show how this relationship extends to the forest environment, spiritual and philosophical discourse, and transnational networks that continually re-enchant the work of musical instrument makers in a region questioning the future and sustainability of economic and environmental processes. I join efforts to explore and analyze the political ecology of musical instruments through the affective material relationships and global flows of craft materials placed in an environmental locus of local, regional, and national imaginaries and the futures and failures of capitalist modes of production. By presenting narratives collected through ethnographic apprenticeships, interviews, and archival research, I argue that these makers navigate unique approaches to the forest environment, the global exchange of sonic craft materials, and meaning of their work through the craft of musical instruments.

This dissertation examines how resilience against disaster is produced on a daily basis by Emergency Managers and private sector continuity professionals working in New York City. Drawing on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, it uses disaster anticipation as a case study in inter-organizational reliability and the interplay between materiality and culture in the processual reproduction of social life. I find that disaster risk managers conceptualize disasters as situations of abrupt mismatch between available material resources and the exigencies of critical tasks and routines. They use three interrelated types of strategies to anticipate these crises: (1) conducting persistent active monitoring and routine intervention in the organizational environment; (2) planning for the consequences, rather than triggers, of disasters; and (3) building a creative capacity to preserve or restore access to resources critical for the reproduction of social and organizational routines. Taken together, I argue, these strategies shed new light on how organizations collaborate across boundaries to build resilience against unexpected shocks. The empirical data provides a lever into deeper puzzles in sociology: how can we account for both the durability of social structures and sudden social change? In other words, what can we learn about the way social life is reproduced by better understanding the work of professionals employed by the state and major corporate firms to proactively manage the events that threaten to punctuate that continuity? This research advances the literature on organizational reliability, as well as the material turn in institutional theory, drawing attention to the role of material resources in the production and reproduction of cultural schemas.