Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

Swift’s world was a material one, influenced by his experiences of the institutionalisation of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, science, medicine, philosophy, the book trade, party politics, and aesthetics. This chapter focuses on a single category of material culture of especial importance in Swift’s writings: consumer goods. The early part of this chapter sets out the essential background on the ‘consumer revolution’ in the early eighteenth century, before addressing its influence on Swift’s writings: in particular the pamphlets concerned with Irish manufacturing, and his fascination with the material culture of women’s dressing rooms.

Chapter 6 provides a detailed explanation of the practical and political challenges faced by the projects to introduce nutmeg (and clove) into Mauritius. It is about the experiential and unsettled knowledge mobilised in the French attempts to acclimatise spices. It engages with the material practices associated with transportation and acclimatisation. The chapter explores various examples of highly ambivalent strategies for the transport on ships and cultivation in foreign soil of the spices. All of these were by no means initiated in the metropolis. This chapter is primarily concerned with natural obstacles, or rather how local actors in Mauritius sought to overcome them by employing non-conventional strategies and initiatives. Using the example of grafting, it argues that techniques and methods were developed independently in different parts of the world, and were not ‘transferred’ from Europe to the colonies, or vice versa. The sketchy and uncertain knowledge of the French remained fragmented until at least the 1780s, which led to miscalculations and an eventual failure of the project to establish a spice trade. Exploring the reasons for this failure, the last chapter reinforces calls to understand the decentred, complex, and slow process of plant knowledge in the making.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

Chapter 3 describes perspectivism’s world of objects and its concept of materiality, including the material implications of its notion of reality and the practices in which the material plays a key role. Assumptions about materiality in archaeology are revised by taking the conception of matter in perspectivism and putting it in dialogue with theories of matter in material culture studies. The critical question of material agency in perspectivism, including the possibility of object agency, is taken up. Objects and materiality, under certain circumstances and in specific relational contexts in perspectivism, affect humans and non-humans through a capacity that belongs to them. Two other agencies concerning objects can be identified: the first, proper to objects as things, is their capacity as intermediaries between humans and non-humans; the second is the agency of things as non-human objects rather than as inert things. Lacking a native concept of materiality proper to a case of study in the southern Andes, perspectivism provides a stand-in; its concept of objects as possessing their qualities, and instances in which they are in active relations with humans and other non-humans, enables the analysis of the ontological status of objects in the past.

An example of another way of working with perspectivism is developed in Chapter 6, in which specific principles from the theory are adapted to specific problems based on geo-ethnographic affinity with current native ontologies. How far can one go with an interpretation of the archaeological record from that starting point? Two more examples are presented. First are the relationships between people and material culture in central Argentina’s pre-colonial societies (ca. 1200–1500 CE). In a characteristically perspectivist fashion, the use of referential fields on different media highlights a way of being in the world that was experienced as inherently unstable. The second example focuses on the relationship between people and landscape in the initial peopling of the same region at the beginning of the Holocene. What would the relationship with the landscape have been for a perspectivist people populating a space absent of humans but with other entities that had the capacity to be subjects? The relationship turns out to have been more social than ecological, established prior to any given interaction, which comes into conflict with the conventional idea of archaeological landscape as empty space.

Nicole Loraux’s understanding of ideology as a system of representations and her analysis of the beauty of the dead would all seem to offer an opening for the incorporation of material culture into an analysis of the funeral oration. In spite of this, images had almost no function in her The Invention of Athens. For Loraux, the denial of an oracular spectacle of the body offered a contrast with Homeric valuations of death. She charted a move from the beautiful dead to the beautiful death that entailed a shift from aesthetics to morals. Loraux denied any role for visual culture in the funeral oration because, she argued, hearing had replaced sight. While Loraux’s analysis emerged from iconographic and structuralist approaches that implicitly contrasted abstraction and figuration, a conception of material culture that incorporates materiality and phenomenology offers important new perspectives. The funeral oration was only one component of a ritual that moved through spaces that were laden with objects and images articulating, manipulating, appropriating and, at times, rejecting the funeral oration’s beautiful death. Considering this wider material frame allows us to nuance some of Loraux’s central arguments.

Chapter 5 studies the reach of print by looking into modes of acquisition, various owners, and the uses of books in the viceroyalty of Peru. It shows how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale, figuring as objects in the inventories of petty merchants, artisans, rural clerics, some women, and others who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess books. Focusing on the traces of usage and the material environment, this chapter illustrates book use, which took place indoors as well as outside, solitarily and in groups, and was led by practices different from today’s, characterised above all by intensive reading, particular emotions, and interactions as well as reading aloud. Such an analysis allows a more nuanced assessment of the many protagonists from different backgrounds who participated in the colonial book market and had access to the contents of print publications.

The manner in which Die Zauberflöte established itself as a cultural icon in late-eighteenth-century German society is remarkable. It permeated daily life in countless ways: fashion, pet naming, board games, risqué party entertainments, mechanical toys, children’s playlets, and whistling birds. While this represents the escapism of the opera’s fairy-tale plot, darker strands are woven into the fabric of its early reception. It swept across Europe during a period of bloody revolutionary war, and all sides made use of it in their political propaganda. Papageno was ensconced at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when one of his tunes was added to the carillon of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche. At the same time, his music, under the banner of freedom, entered the republican song repertoire. After Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat near Leipzig in 1814, a satirist was quick to wish him a derisory farewell as he sailed back across the Rhine. What better choice than the language of the opera: auf wiedersehen!

This chapter offers a different take on the standard teleological story of Christianization in the Lushai Hills by focusing on what the missionaries themselves deemed an utter failure: their first decade of mission work. It views the earliest foreign missionaries to the Lushai Hills as uplanders did: first, as ‘sap vakvai’ - strange and insignificant wanderers; and, later, as ‘zosap’ - usable and incorporable newcomers, asking not what foreign missionaries wanted from highland people, but what highland people wanted from missionaries. The weakness and vulnerabilities of foreign missionaries opened up space for a first generation of young people with sensibilities spanning the Lushai Hills District and the globe. Upland populations became interested in Christianity - a new yet combinable spiritual power - as well as the knowledge dispensed on the mission compound because they were completely and inherently involved in its interpretation and dissemination. Everyday technologies, the studies and movements of students, regional meetings of nascent Christian groups, and ‘celebrations’ of empire began synchronizing time and both connecting and circumscribing space, all with profoundly far-reaching and unpredictable effects. Maps, schools, and the harmonization of space and time would help spark ideas about a wider, more integrated ‘Mizo’ identity. Children, adolescents, and youth were not only critical partners but also often operated in networks completely unmediated by the white missionaries, in channels of circulations that generated important redefinitions of space, time, and ethnicity in the uplands.

The Introduction sets out the methodological approach of the book, and the major themes to be addressed. It is a ‘history in art’, a notion that provides for a primary focus on the evidence adduced from material culture (archaeology, standing remains and their decoration, surviving objects including manuscripts) integrated with information derived from written sources (in this instance primarily the series of papal biographies known as the Liber pontificalis, supplemented by other documents such as the Ordines Romani and the chronicles of Frankish and Italian historians). The two other overarching themes are the gradual decline of the Roman economy, and the resulting impoverishment of the Roman Church over the course of the ninth century and its effects on papal patronage, and the continuing adherence of Roman artistic production to the broader context of Mediterranean Christian visual culture. A historiographical survey/analysis is also included.

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.