University of Heidelberg

New Book on Materiality and Social Practice

Mar 16, 2012

“Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters” is a new book edited by Prof. Joseph Maran and Dr. Philipp Stockhammer. In the book, scholars investigate the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations.

The contributions in the volume are based on papers delivered at the conference “Materiality and Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters”, which took place at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg (IWH) in 2010. It was the final conference of the Cluster’s research project D2 “Materiality and Practice: Cultural Entanglements of 2nd millennium BC East Mediterranean Societies”.

In the book, the approach of the researchers takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology as well as a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces them to change archaeology’s approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.

“Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters” has been published by Oxbow Books, Oxford (UK) in 2012. It contains 17 contributions by several international researchers.

Dr. Philipp W. Stockhammer is postdoctoral researcher and former member of project D2 "Materiality and Practice" coordinated by Prof. Joseph Maran, Prof. Markus Hilgert, Prof. Peter A. Miglus and Prof. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos. In his habilitation thesis, he focuses on "Material Entanglements: The Appropriation of Foreign Pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age". In 2011, he edited the book "Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization", which was published as a volume of the Cluster's book series "Transcultural Research - Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context".

Prof. Dr. Joseph Maran is Professor of Pre- and Protohistory at Heidelberg University. He is Principal Investigator of the Research Cluster “Political Space” of the German Archaeological Institute and the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context", where he also coordinates project D2 "Materiality and Practice".

For further information on "Materiality and Practice", visit Oxbow books.

Read the content and introduction of the book (pdf, 250kb)