Description: |
Publisher's text about this book: his volume comprises the papers of a lecture series presented at Heidelberg University’s Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Shifting asymmetries in Cultural Flows”. It aims at describing the role of things, artefacts, luxurious objects, and ideas in cultural processes from a wide range of disciplines, including art history, history, anthropology, cultural and literature studies. The central theme of the contributions to this volume is the power of things — works of art, luxury goods, and ideas — in cultural processes. Material artefacts, as well as the imagining of things and ideas, are exchanged between cultures and historical times, are integrated and reassembled, and change their meaning in new cultural contexts. The authors in this volume describe the efficacy of these things and their transformations from their respective disciplinary perspectives, which range from anthropology and history to literary studies and the history of art and music. |