PART ONE: LOCATING MATERIAL CULTURE The Material as Culture Definitions, Perspectives, Approaches Studying Material Culture Origins and Premises PART TWO: THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING MATERIAL CULTURE The Deceptive, Suspicious Object Marxist and Critical Approaches The Object as Symbolic Code Structural and Semiotic Approaches The Material Representing the Cultural Universe Objects, Symbols and Cultural Categories PART THREE: OBJECTS IN ACTION Objects and Distinction The Aesthetic Field and Expressive Materiality Material Culture and Identity Objects and the Self Material Culture, Narratives, and Social Performance Objects in Contexts PART FOUR: CONCLUSION Conclusion: Objects and Meaning in Consumer Culture

Understanding Material Culture

This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night-time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post-industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post-industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move away from the traditional managerial functions of local service provision, towards an entrepreneurial stance primarily focused on the facilitation of economic growth. Central to this new economic era is the identification and promotion of liminality. The State's apparent inability to control these new leisure zones constitutes the creation of an urban frontier that is governed by commercial imperatives.

Receiving shadows: Governance and liminality in the night-time economy

Traditionally drama in schools has been seen either as a learning medium with a wide range of curricular uses or as a subject in its own right. This paper argues that the importance of drama in schools is in the processes of social and artistic engagement and experiencing of drama rather than in its outcomes. The paper contrasts the pro-social emphasis in the ensemble model of drama with the pro-technical and limited range of learning in subject-based approaches which foreground technical knowledge of periods, plays, styles and genres. The ensemble-based approach is positioned in the context of professional theatre understandings of ensemble artistry and in the context of revolutionary shifts from the pro-technical to the pro-social in educational and cultural policy making in England. Using ideas drawn from McGrath and Castoriadis, the paper claims that the ensemble approach provides young people with a model of democratic living.

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Acting together: ensemble as a democratic process in art and life

Relying on the analysis of ethnographic and documentary data, this article explains how U.S. White Power Movement (WPM) activists use music to produce collective occasions and experiences that we c...

UNDERSTANDING MUSIC IN MOVEMENTS: The White Power Music Scene

This paper is our concerned response to the tendency in critical studies of physical culture and alternative sport to reduce experience to language, discourse, texts or representation. We consider ...

Jamake Highwater

Papers

The Future of Ritual