Contains essays on food and material culture presented at the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

We often hear that selves are no longer formed through producing material things at work, but by consuming them in leisure, leading to 'meaningless' modern lives. This important book reveals the cultural shift to be more complex, demonstrating how people in postindustrial societies strive to form meaningful and moral selves through both the consumption and production of material culture in leisure. Focusing on the material culture of food, the book explores these theoretical questions through an ethnography of those individuals for whom food is central to their self: 'foodies'. It examines what foodies do, and why they do it, through an in-depth study of their lived experiences. The book uncovers how food offers a means of shaping the self not as a consumer but as an amateur who engages in both the production and consumption of material culture and adopts a professional approach which reveals the new moralities of productive leisure in self-formation. The chapters examine a variety of practices, from fine dining and shopping to cooking and blogging, and include rare data on how people use media such as cookbooks, food television, and digital food media in their everyday life. This book is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the meaning of food in modern life.

Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

The first encyclopedia to look at the study of material culture (objects, images, spaces technology, production, and consumption), and what it reveals about historical and contemporary life in the United States. Reaching back 400 years, Material Life in America: An Encyclopedia is the first reference showing what the study of material culture reveals about American society—revelations not accessible through traditional sources and methods. In nearly 200 entries, the encyclopedia traces the history of artifacts, concepts and ideas, industries, peoples and cultures, cultural productions, historical forces, periods and styles, religious and secular rituals and traditions, and much more. Everyone from researchers and curators to students and general readers will find example after example of how the objects and environments created or altered by humans reveal as much about American life as diaries, documents, and texts.

Provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. This handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes a fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human.

This volume, a compilation of original papers written to celebrate the outstanding contributions of Jonathan Mark Kenoyer to the archaeology of South Asia over the past forty years, highlights recent developments in the archaeological research of ancient South Asia, with specific reference to the Indus Civilization.