Table of Contents

1. Objects and Materials: An Introduction Part I: Material Qualities Part I Introduction 2. An Interview with Artist Helen Barff 3. A Poor Workman Blames His Tools or How Irrigation Systems Structure Human Actions 4. The Material Construction of State Power: Artifacts and the New Rome 5. The Material Politics of Solid Waste: Decentralization and Integrated Systems 6. From Stone to God and Back Again: Why We Need Both Materials and Materiality 7. New Materials and Their Impact on the Material World 8. Decay, Temporality and the Politics of Conservation: An Archaeological Approach to Material Studies Part II: Affective Objects Part II Introduction 9. Boxing Films: Sensation and Affect10. Tactile Compositions 11. Bodies and Cadavers 12. Domination and Desire: The Paradox of Egyptian Human Remains in Museums 13. A Dream of Falling: Philosophy and Family Violence 14. Sarah Kofman’s Father’s Pen and Bracha Ettinger’s Mother’s Spoon: Trauma, Transmission and the Strings of Virtuality 15. Spectral Objects: Material Links to Difficult Pasts for Adoptive Families Part III: Unsettling Objects Part III Introduction 16. Haunting in the Material of Everyday Life 17. The Fetish of Connectivity 18. Useless Objects: Commodities, Collections and Fetishes in the Politics of Objects 19. The Unknown Objects of Object-Orientation 20. How Things Can Unsettle 21. Objects Are the Root of All Philosophy Part IV: Interface Objects Part IV Introduction 22. True Automobility 23. The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Re-connecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things 24. Interfaces: The Mediation of Things and the Distribution of Behaviours 25. Idempotent, Pluripotent, Biodigital: Objects in the ‘Biological Century’ 26. Real-ising the Virtual: Digital Simulation and the Politics of Future Making 27. Money Frontiers: The Relative Location of Euros, Turkish Lira and Gold Sovereigns in the Aegean 28. Algorithms and the Manufacture of Financial Reality Part V: Becoming Object Part V Introduction 29. Animal Architextures 30. Objects Made Out of Action 31. Quantitative Objects and Qualitative Things: Ethics and HIV Biomedical Prevention 32. Potentialities and Possibilities of Needs Assessment: Objects, Memory and Crystal Images 33. Digital Traces and the ‘Print’ of Threat: Targeting Populations in the War on Terror 34. Intangible Objects: How Patent Law is Redefining Materiality 35. Thinking through Place and Late ANT Spatialities 36. What Documents Make Possible: Realising London’s Olympic Legacy

About the Author

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Director of CRESC, the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Eleanor Conlin Casella is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Manchester.

Gillian Evans is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Hannah Knox is a Research Fellow at CRESC, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester.

Christine McLean is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester.

Elizabeth B. Silva is Professor of Sociology at the Open University.

Nicholas Thoburn is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University.