This chapter retraces the evolution of Arabic print culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, challenging Eurocentric narratives that prioritize Western technologies and ideologies. It demonstrates how local actors in the Arab world adapted and integrated printing practices with traditional scribal methods. Through a close reading of early sources, particularly the encyclopedia entry on printing in Kitab Daʼirat al-Maʻarif, the chapter emphasizes the material, visual, and technological dimensions of Arabic print culture, arguing that printing was not merely a tool for modernization or nationalism, but a complex cultural practice shaped by aesthetics, labor, and local knowledge systems. It ultimately considers the implications of new media for the preservation and interpretation of Arabic print traditions, urging a re-evaluation of how digital technologies reshape scholarly engagement with historical texts.

In Singaporean Chinese funerals, small patches of fabric, pinned to the bereaved’s sleeves, have replaced elaborate mourning gowns. Anthropologists, examining the transformation of ritual in similar contexts – supposedly secularizing, rationalizing, post-industrial, late-capitalist worlds – have read such changes as evidence of the simplification of ritual and of ritual’s declining centrality in the marking of death. In this chapter, however, I argue that the shift from gowns to patches is more complex, inextricably linked to the policies of the Singaporean state regarding identity. Gowns were linked to the complexities of Chinese folk religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship that linked Singaporeans to their histories in Mainland China. The patch, however, articulates a unified Singaporean Chinese identity, described as “Buddhist bland.” Broadly, I address why, when rituals change, some elements are abandoned, seemingly without regret, while others are retained, becoming orthopraxy. While we might expect that the ritual elements that are retained are those that carry the most meaning, in this example, I suggest, the opposite is the case.

This section explores the dead body – its parts, its distillations, its residues, and traces – as synecdoche and catalyst, and as a medium of exchange and thus broker of reciprocity. By drawing together scholars working on different aspects and temporal registers of material-corporeal transformation, this selection of essays considers the different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) through which the corpse (or organ, bone, or ash) is produced, altered, acted upon, or signified, the larger social context in which the dead exist as generative material, and the relationship between processes of subjectification and objectification (Dziuban 2017). The emphasis on materiality and the “work of the dead” (Laqueur 2015), in whatever fragmentary or residual form, also illustrates how a more expansive anthropology of death includes not only canonical death studies’ considerations of the corpse as locus of social action – a thing to be overcome—(Durkheim [1912] 1995; Hertz [1907] 2009), or an agent of social transformation (Bloch and Parry 1982), but challenges to and movements beyond this expected theorizing. In tracing how anthropology has analyzed death’s materiality, we find disciplinary fissures and silos

This chapter reevaluates William Burroughs’ cut-up fictions through the lens of repetition, textual variation, and the limits of intertextual theory. Benoît Delaune argues that Burroughs’ compositional method – especially in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express – exceeds traditional literary frameworks such as Kristeva’s intertextuality or Genette’s transtextuality. Drawing on the restored editions of Burroughs’ work and early collaborations like Minutes to Go, the chapter shows how Burroughs employed chance procedures alongside careful editorial strategy to create complex recursive networks of affective resonance. Rather than merely remixing texts, Burroughs generated a form of material autotextuality that destabilizes meaning, challenges linear reading, and undermines authorial intention. Through comparisons to avant-garde practices in music and poetry, Delaune situates Burroughs’ writing as a radical alternative to literary production – a practice that treats language as sensory and viral, foregrounding affect, repetition, and disruption over interpretation or reference.

This chapter examines “opportunistic” uses of “natural” objects and structures in data-rich science and explores what these imply for scientists’ trust in the work of other researchers. It argues that a discipline’s objects of inquiry are not only topics of research but may also function as resources for its conduct. These objects and their relations can be resources for intersubjective coordination that become available through their mediation and materialization. Drawing on two cases from astronomy, this chapter demonstrates how researchers resort to what sociologist Melvin Pollner called “mundane reasoning”: practices for resolving disjunctive experiences that assume a shared public and objective world. Recognized for their task-specific affordances, disciplinary objects become resources for data analyses. There is a trade-off between epistemic uses of stable material objects and the placement of trust. In astronomical research, the sky is not only an ordering device for assessing and using data of various origin – it is also a resource for the partial relief from trust in data makers.

This chapter posits that risk assessment necessary as a condition precedent to settlement requires evidentiary transparency as to all stakeholders, including the arbitral tribunal. Moreover, this chapter discusses and asserts that settlement and mediation techniques are futile absent a thorough understanding of the underlying evidence, and objective procedural methodologies governing admissibility, relevance, materiality, and weight of the evidence. Thus, the chapter analyzes features and possible amendments to the rules of the leading ICA institutional administrative bodies that would enhance the predictive value of determinations based on existing evidence. Consequently, the evidential framework of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC), the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), and the German Arbitration Institute (DIS) rules are analyzed.

Chapter 2 looks in detail at some of the ways in which Keats directly addresses the question of letter-writing. It proposes that a careful analysis of key letters can bring to light a Keatsian epistolary poetics. Keats is particularly alert both to the materiality and to the practical aspects of epistolarity, and his letters are characterized by frequent moments in which his interest in what letters are and how they work is foregrounded. He is specifically interested in how letters are constructed and in the tools and materials that form them, as well as more generally in the practical circumstances or contingencies by which they are determined and circumscribed. The chapter proposes that in their inventive and often playful explorations of epistolarity, Keats’s letters display an impulse to push against the generic and formal limits of the mode.

Race-making is an inherently embodied activity, rooted in the senses and predicated on corporeality. As a result, visuality and materiality are central to processes of race-making, and studies of ancient visual and material culture therefore have much to contribute to modern scholarship on ancient race-making. This chapter explores what can be learned from visual and material culture about processes of race-making in the ancient Greek world, considering a series of examples. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, these examples demonstrate a variety of potential approaches, as well as highlighting some of the key challenges and limitations of working with visual and material culture.

Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of their spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts. At the sanctuary of Dodona, this perspective has also been applied to a great variety of structures and objects. The present paper offers new ways of looking at one of the most intriguing classes of objects found at the sanctuary, the lamellae on which were written the questions for and answers from the oracle. Consistent with the growing interest in the materiality of writing, we discuss the physical properties of the lamellae and the contexts in which they were used with respect to their adoption at the sanctuary during the Archaic period. We argue that the ease with which lead tablets can be inscribed, folded, and transported made this material more suitable for the context of the sanctuary than ostraca, another inexpensive medium often used for writing in ancient Greece.

The essay explores pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Dodona, in Epirus, through a phenomenological lens, aiming to reconstruct the experience of ancient pilgrims. The study highlights the significance of landscape, movement, and motivation, on the basis that Dodona’s natural features and architectural layout deeply influenced pilgrims’ perceptions. The phenomenological approach draws on landscape archaeology, analyzing human interaction with sacred spaces. The analysis examines not only motivations behind oracular activity, but also other purposes, such as attending the Naia festival, and emphasizes the interplay of visibility and movement as pilgrims approached the sanctuary. Although reconstructing individual experiences is challenging, common patterns in collective behavior, such as rituals, processions, and religious practices, offer insights into the ancient pilgrimage experience. In short, the study uses literary, epigraphic, and material evidence to discuss how Dodona’s sacred landscape shaped its visitors’ religious and emotional experiences, contributing to a broader understanding of Greek pilgrimage traditions.