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In her 1970 book Meaning and Expression: Toward a Sociology of Art, Hanna Deinhard gives one approach: "The point of departure of the sociology of art is the question: How is it possible that works of art, which always originate as products of human activity within a particular time and society and for a particular time, society, or function -- even though they are not necessarily produced as ...
In the social sciences, materiality is the notion that the physical properties of a cultural artifact have consequences for how the object is used. [1] Some scholars expand this definition to encompass a broader range of actions, such as the process of making art, and the power of organizations and institutions to orient activity around themselves. [1]
Imageability is a measure of how easily a physical object, word or environment will evoke a clear mental image in the mind of any person observing it. [1] [2] It is used in architecture and city planning, in psycholinguistics, [3] and in automated computer vision research. [4]
Material culture is the aspect of culture manifested by the physical objects and architecture of a society. The term is primarily used in archaeology and anthropology, but is also of interest to sociology, geography and history. [1] The field considers artifacts in relation to their specific cultural and historic contexts, communities and ...
Plato famously held, on one interpretation, that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world (see theory of the forms). Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside space and time.
A prominent work in this regard is The Rules of the Sociological Method, in which Emile Durkheim suggested the dictum, "The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things." [2] This has led researchers to investigate the social and cultural contingencies of how "objects" cognitively become objects. [1]
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. [1] In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form".
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one ...