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Baird, Ileana, and Hülya Yağcıoğlu, eds. 2021. All Things Arabia: Arabian Identity and Material Culture. Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World 16. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 269 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-43591-9.

Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: This is a much valuable collection of essays and articles grounded more or less explicitly in the interconnected theories and research concepts called thing theory, new materialism, material culture studies and memory studies.All of them are part of the broader postconstructionist paradigm change in the humanities which looks on human-object relations in daily life, in literature and in culture in an innovative way that allows to perceive objects and things not as being simply inanimate or lacking agency, but as part of a dialogue between thing-in-itself and thing-asused (and also thing-as-remembered) on the one hand, and a part of a dynamic human-thing interactions on the other.Those studies emphasise the role of the material objects, as well as human and animal bodies in their social and cultural interactions.The mere objects around us turn into 'things' because of their cultural significance without which they are voiceless.In this sense the 'things' speak, and they also speak to us in this book which comprises a vast spectrum of objects and artefacts, from cultural objects and commodities through historical and ethnographic artifacts to imaginary things.They played various cultural roles and functions both in the material history of the Peninsula as well as in the Western world where they became part of the Orientalised imagination.The book contains 12 articles and is provided with Introduction (Ileana Baird), Afterword (Hülya Yağcıoğlu) and a useful index of names, places, subjects and terminology.One of its great assets are several dozens of illustrations (photos, R e v i e w s
DOI: 10.24425/for.2024.152395
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4408620116
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