Material Cultures

The Material Cultures series will maintain a productive dialogue with developments in Marxist, as well as structuralist, post-structuralist adn phenomenological thought, through focusing on the specificity of the material world and its particular forms and contents. Yet we recognize that it is the very materiality of that world which often presents a challenge to theory and promotes a critical approach to analysis.
Many of the disciplines which have a particular concern with material culture, such as museolgoy and consumption studies, have tended to feel that their own developments in tehory and analysis have been neglected over previous decades. They have become, relatively speaking, backwaters of the social sciences. This series is launched at a tiem when there are signs that this about to be radically changed. There are new advances in cultural theory which are not merley fetishistic adn do not posit the object as distinct from social and cultural context. Advances in post-structuralism which have challenged the notion of the subject mean that we are now free to conceive of a nwe approach to material culture, which does not priviliege of reify either objects or persons.
In planning and co-ordinating the series we wish to demonstrate, above all the current intellectual excitement and potential for working within this field. Creating meaning from the material fragments of the past and the present now provides an arena for addressing some of teh fundamental theoretical and philosphical issues of our time. THE GENERAL EDITORS
Daniel Miller is Reader in Anthropology at University College London. He has published widely on modern material culture and carried out field work in the Solomon Islands, India and Trinidad.
Michael Rowlands is Reader in Anthropology and head of the material culture section at UCL. He has written widely on theoretical aspects of archaeology and anthropology, carried out extensive fieldwork in West Africa and Lectured in the Unived States and Europe.
Christopher Tilley is lecturer in Archaeology at Saint David's University College, Wales. He has written much on the relatonship between social theory and archaeological practice, carried out fieldwork in Britain and Sweden and lectured in Scandinavia, Spain and the United States. anthropology at St