Situated on an intersection between Material Culture Studies, History and Museum and Archival Studies, this book investigates the material world of the Icelandic population in the late Modern Era.
Utilizing the great wealth of inventories of household goods stored at The National Archives of Iceland in conjunction with material objects, the book highlights new paths and insights into understanding people’s possessions and material relations, and the entwined biographies of people and things. It shows how people shaped their own lives by means of things and how these material relations are “archived” and represented in heritage and museum spaces. The book is divided into two parts that explore how material culture contributes to history, the relationship between things and text, and the practice of collecting things and address the process of assembly, or how things gather. Micro and macro methods of investigation tease out new approaches to debates around human–thing relationships, acknowledging ideas about material agency and social significance and that the human–material relation is reciprocal.
This volume will appeal to students and researchers within the field of archaeology, material culture studies, museum studies, heritage, and the history of material culture.
Edited by:
Kristján Mímisson,
Davið Ólafsson
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9781032395586
ISBN 10: 1032395583
Pages: 222
Publication Date: 06 February 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. Introduction: What Are Our Favourite Things and Why; Objects of Expression –Expressing Objects; 2. Probate Records and Private Property in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Iceland; 3. Wool Socks, Silk Scarfs, Needles, and Wood Saws: Material Culture on the Margins of Icelandic Society; 4. Lending and Borrowing of Books and Manuscripts: Sharing Economy and the Material Culture of Text in Nineteenth Century Iceland; 5; The Speech of Spindle Whorls: Words on Things and Things in Words; 6. The Affect of Relating: On the Various Manifestations of Things; 7. And Old Manuscript, Leather Shoes, and a Walking Stick: The Role of Material Agency in Literary Criticism; Objects of Gathering – Gathering Objects; 8. In Pursuit of Modernity? On Collecting and Aesthetics in Iceland; 9. The Icelandic Turf House as Skin: Archive, Anarchy, Heritage; 10. The ‘Archive’: Things to Consider; 11. Buried Archives: The Multiple Curators of Waste; 12. In the Nude, Without Archive: Recollecting Traces of Holmegaard; 13. Icelandic Cake Fight: History of an Immigrant Recipe; 14. Collecting Bald Cypress Knees: An Exercise in Symbiotic Interaction; 15. Epilogue: Things on a Wall: Potential History
Kristján Mímisson is an archaeologist and editorial curator at the National Museum of Iceland. Davið Ólafsson is a historian and associate professor at the University of Iceland.
