Routledge Series for Creative Teaching and Learning in Anthropology
1 total work
"The Anthropology of Stuff" is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each "Stuff" title is a short (100 page) "mini text" illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world. This short book examines the iPod and other portable media technologies as vehicles for critical inquiry into American culture. It looks at their utility in understanding technological design and shaping it for democratic and socially just ends, and also their relevance to perceiving "ourselves" culturally, a crucial dimension of sound global citizenship.
The book begins in the tradition of Horace Miner's classic by examing the "d'Opi" - a remote island community that has developed an intricate complex of beliefs, exchange practices, ornamentation, and trance-like rituals built around a single large shipment of artifacts washed upon its shores from distant, more technologically "advanced" societies.
The book begins in the tradition of Horace Miner's classic by examing the "d'Opi" - a remote island community that has developed an intricate complex of beliefs, exchange practices, ornamentation, and trance-like rituals built around a single large shipment of artifacts washed upon its shores from distant, more technologically "advanced" societies.