This dissertation investigates how collectibles are made meaningful within collecting communities in order to better understand the intricate processes by which lead soldiers, toy trains, dolls, Dinkie cars, Star Wars figurines, and teddy bears come to be so enchanting for their collectors. An ethnography of toy collecting, including interviews with toy collectors, and observations at toy fairs and gatherings, this project contributes to debates on the use and role of material goods in practices of meaning making and social reproduction. In contrast to theories of material culture, this project aligns itself with consumer theories of the cultural constitution of objects. Emphasizing that object-centered analyses provide little insight on the value of collectibles, it advocates, instead, the centrality of perception and imaginative practice in the hold collectibles come to have over collectors. Drawing from consumer culturalists work on processes of identification; Bourdieus theory of consumption; Foucault on the archive; as well as Marxist inspired theories of the fetish, this project engages with nostalgic practice, the collectible market, judgments of authenticity, practices of ordering, as well as the complicated rules governing collecting. Working from collectors own stories, debates, contradictions, discussions and imaginative engagements this study uncovers that the mutability of the meanings assigned to collectibles is at the heart of collectors enchantment with their collectibles, and a central factor in how collecting becomes an eminently political activity. Collectors are not free to construct meanings for their collectibles at will but subject to community constraints, markets and battles of legitimacy. The various mystifications and social maneuverings present in their collecting practices imply that an objects value is the outcome of a careful mediation of both personal and wider cultural meanings. Mobilized to particular ends however tenuously held their meanings may be, material goods become powerful components to the wider cultural, social and economic fields in which they circulate. / Sociology

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of History and School of Education. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 1998. / "A dissertation in history and education." Advisor: Lawrence H. Larson. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Nov. 13, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-254). Online version of the print edition.

Thesis (M.A. in anthropology)--Washington State University, December 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-146).

In recent years, historians have attempted to reassess the image of sectarian Ireland by offering an ethnically and religiously complex narrative of social intersection. Due to the changing intellectual and political climate in Ireland, archaeologists and historians can now begin revaluating the myths of the conquered and conqueror. As settlers poured into the Irish landscape to carry out the English government’s plantation schemes, they brought traditions and goods from home, and attempted to incorporate these into their lives abroad. Woodland clearance supplied timber and destroyed the wood kerne-infested fastness, and new houses erected on plantation settlements rattled a landscape still speckled with the wattle huts of its native inhabitants. Using the 1641 Depositions as the core of this dissertation, this research endeavours to contextualise evidence of material culture embedded within the written testimonies, beginning with the private world of the home and ending with the public devotional space of the church. Evidence found in the depositions will be placed alongside archaeological evidence, cartography, a small collection of wills and inventories, and seventeenth-century trade records. This thesis investigates the extent in which the English and Irish communities were at conflict in a material way: in their homes, local economy, clothing, household goods and religion.

This dissertation has two results. First, I argue that each of the two basic components of technological determinism (TD)—what I call the inexorability thesis and the autonomy thesis—are plausible claims on a naturalistic stance. Second, I argue that a normative model for the design of cognitive systems can guide the practice of cognitive engineering, e.g. the task of building cognitive aids and enhancements. TD conjoins two logically independent but empirically related claims. The inexorability thesis is the claim that technology change is an evolutionary process. I defend this claim against considerations raised by Lewens, most notably the lack of a robust account of artifact reproduction that would underwrite genuine transmission. I consider (but reject) the solution of memeticists to this problem. I find that theorists of cultural evolution, e.g. Boyd and Richerson (among others), do present a plausible response. Technologies can be said to evolve via the cumulative selective process of cultural retention. The autonomy thesis is the claim that features of human cognitive agency arise from material culture. I argue for this thesis through a consideration of the merits of Preston’s theory of material culture. Her sociogeneric approach attributes human cognitive agency to a material cultural genesis, and this approach is backed by strong anthropological evidence. Preston would not accept the thesis but she does not manage to exclude it, despite an admirable attempt to develop an account of innovation. I also consider the design of technologies in the practice of cognitive engineering and propose adopting a normative theory of factitious intellectual virtue as a model to guide design in this arena.

This thesis explores how familiar objects such as the homely recipe book hold our affection and shape our personal worlds. It takes its inspiration from a body of literature that only recently has explored in detail our relationship to mundane objects, subjecting these objects - and our feelings about them - to a serious scrutiny. The thesis is concerned with a material culture that takes us into domestic space, and to the objects within it to which we attach importance. Specifically, the inquiry explores the cultural mores surrounding the practice of cooking and writing food. It considers the interplay between public and private, male and female, self and other and the significance of the domestic space in each case. It asks how the culture of the recipe book helps shape female domestic identity, that is, the personae of women within the home, and as wives and mothers, as opposed to their public personae. This thesis studies the (until-recently) under-researched yet broad field - previously regarded as both too trivial and too formulaic to merit study - of homely recipe books. It considers the large collection of historic manuscripts of this genre available at the National Library of South Africa, in particular the collection of Louis C Leipoldt, and it regards these as part of a continuum with my own mother's recipe book. An important leitmotif of the study is the evolution of the recipe book from manuscript to printed, and from single copy to mass-produced text. On the one hand using recipe books as historical sources for the study of food and material culture, this study is also concerned with the affective impact of these texts, and more specifically what they say about the individuals and societies that made them. A central theme of the study is the role played in women's lives by the collecting and archiving of recipes through hand-written texts. My purpose is twofold: first, to bring these hidden histories to light, opening the kitchen door to the lives of ordinary women through their private writings; and second, to explore why the practice of writing food continues to be relevant into the present. I trace how homely recipe books are both exercises in personal authority as well as material traces of women's internal worlds and archives of the communities in which they exist. This study ultimately sees the return of the personalised recipe book as a route back to a positive and affirming female domestic identity, through a practice which is both therapeutic and self-actualising and which, through the act of archiving, brings together both past and present.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University, 2004. / Adviser: Kenneth E. Lewis. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis is a northern response to the dwelling culture and housing shortage of the Cree community in Moosonee, Ontario, located on the Western James Bay. The program of this thesis centres on housing, shared workshop space, and a public room, all designed specifically for those with the greatest need, multi-generational families, the elderly, and single parents with children. By anchoring the project with the premise of home as a zero point, a necessary place of beginning, I examined the typology of the house and its ability to respond to both landscape and culture. The housing responds to existing patterns in material culture, social structure, and ways of experiencing the land. Through this project I have investigated the myriad ways in which architecture can act as a cultural tool that reaffirms a sense of place and responds to living patterns and the northern climate.