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    Stories from Things
    Stories from Things
    Stories from Things
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Stories from Things

    By Sultan Somjee

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This book is about how to show and tell your story from the things around you – in your living room, in your bedroom, in your kitchen and garage. Your things have stories to tell if you give them a voice. In other words the objects carry stories of your life and could represent a legacy that could be passed along. It is often the object world that is created out of the fashionable, the functional, the ornamental and the necessary items that brings forth memories of gifts, purchases, homes, holidays, family and relations. Many things emotional that we have encountered in life are embedded in the displayed and hidden ‘put away’ objects.

    The book walks the reader through the ten steps like a journey that begins with how to locate the object to how to unlock your memories held in the bits and pieces of your collection of things. Each step gives illustrations drawn from personal and family things.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSultan Somjee
    Release dateAug 2, 2011
    ISBN9780986927331
    Stories from Things
    Author

    Sultan Somjee

    After I completed my first degree in Product Design my interest shifted from designing products to what stories were told in products - about people’s lives and how they reflected on the individuals, their families, cultural or faith groups and in general on the human society, values and culture. Hence my MA and PhD lead me into the study of art and material culture. I see material culture traversing over almost all social disciplines. In short material culture is the prevalence of the presence of the object in fashioning our social and art world. After graduation I continued in the same line from 1972 to 2002. learning, researching, teaching, publishing and curating exhibitions on material culture. The objects projected many contexts: culture, history, identity, art and craft, migration and settlement, religion and oral traditions, dialogue and community building and even peace and conflict resolution traditions. For almost ten years I worked on community participatory exhibitions so the owners of the artifacts were also co-curators of the exhibitions with me. My inspirations came from ethnographic and folk museums where I saw the sights and heard the sounds in objects of daily use of ordinary folk’s lives. Things made my life: My career, tastes in clothing and furnishing, my life style and I think even my world view has been molded by things. I came to realize that Material Culture, a discipline in the Social Sciences, draws on artifacts to tell stories combining facts with myths, geography with history, art with politics, poetry with traditions across generations and cultures turning stories into legends. The ten steps in Stories from Things are written out of this experience.

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      Book preview

      Stories from Things - Sultan Somjee

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