Insignificance
On the Unobtrusiveness of Material Things
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6044864 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Thomas (0000-0003-3933-1264, University of Manchester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 149-153 |
| Publication date | 2020-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cambridge Archaeological Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0959-7743 • E-ISSN: 1474-0540 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0959774319000507 |
| OpenAlex | W3003708344 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 14 |
In their introduction to the discussion ofBeiläufigkeitin archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis 2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Humility · Insignificance · Miller · Pollock · Sight · Theology · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Technology, Environment, Urban Planning
The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies
Making sense of Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of the inconspicuous’ or inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren)
Assemblage Theory
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
Heidegger’s influence on posthumanism
Poetry, language, thought
The Malice of Inanimate Objects
Toward an Ecology of Materials
On the nature of empiricism in archaeology
Human-thing entanglement
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |