Undoing Things : How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart

Gavin Lucas

ISBN 10: 103206417X / ISBN 13: 9781032064178

Edité par Taylor & Francis Apr 2025, 2025

A propos de cet article

Neuware - Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9781032064178

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Undoing Things : How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart
• Éditeur: Taylor & Francis Apr 2025
• Date de parution: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 103206417X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781032064178
• Reliure: Buch
• État de l'article: Neu
• Dimensions: 246 L x 174 H x 0 P (en millimètres) 246 millimètres de largeur par 174 millimètres de hauteur par 0 millimètres de profondeur
• Poids: 449 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.

Although archaeologists have long attended to the productive dimensions of materiality and material culture as a coherent phenomenon--making objects, building things, constructing identities--the discourse around undoing is more fragmented. Topics such as ruination, death, decay, demolition, and collapse are usually examined separately. Undoing Things asks what connections or continuities can be discerned in a diverse range of practices, both intentional and taphonomic, both destructive and healing. Is there a creative component to undoing? How visible are different processes of undoing? How is time implicated? Is undoing reversible? Who has the power to undo and when is undoing empowering? What does it take to undo knowledge? These and other questions are examined through archaeological studies ranging from classical Maya and colonial Caribbean examples to present-day Liberia, historical and ethnographic approaches to present-day Argentina, and the contemporary art world.

In the first quarter of the 21st century, human worlds have experienced a series of ruptures from climate-related disasters, political violence, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Undoing Things helps move us beyond a cloud of chaos with a deeper understanding of how and why things fall apart and is vital reading for archaeologists and those in related disciplines.

À propos de l?auteur

Gavin Lucas is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Iceland. He has had an enduring interest in the way archaeologists think and work, reflected in various books such as Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (2001), Understanding the Archaeological Record (2012), Writing the Past (2021), and Archaeological Situations (2022). Alongside this has been a recurrent interest in the concept of time: The Archaeology of Time (2005), Making Time (2020), and with Laurent Olivier, Conversations on Time (2021) while his main focus of fieldwork has been on the archaeology of the last 500 years.

Shannon Lee Dawdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Dawdy's fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods. Her work has focused on the history of colonialism and capitalism, human-material relations, temporality, and the archaeology of contemporary life. Her books include Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008), Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016), and American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century (2021).