Introduction: Turning to surfaces / Mike Anusas and Cristián Simonetti -- On opening the book of surfaces / Tim Ingold -- Air, smoke and fumes in Aymara and Mapuche rituals / Juan Carlos Skewes and Debbie Guerra -- In light and shadow : surfaces and polarities in rituals of second burial in central east Madagascar / Christel Mattheeuws -- Re-animating skin : probing the surface in taxidermic practice / Petra Tjitske Kalshoven -- The temporality of surfaces / Cristián Simonetti -- Threshold as social surface / Ray Lucas -- Vital surfaces and the making of urban architecture / Anuradha Chatterjee -- On the substance of surfaces : situating materials and design in Melanesian environments / Graeme Were -- On knitted surfaces-in-the-making / Lydia Maria Arantes -- A life surficial : design and beyond / Mike Anusas -- Epilogue / Susanne Küchler.

"In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological sates, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying. Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures, the Malagasy people of Madagascar, craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania, amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea, and within the folds of books, screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and rebirth through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect. The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies, but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in neighbouring scientific fields of archeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world"-- Provided by publisher.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.