Material Geographies

Abstract

Geographers' engagements with materiality over the past decade have become the topic of widespread and sometimes heated debate. A steady trickle of articles has appeared critiquing the ‘dematerialization’ and advocating the ‘rematerialization’ of social and cultural geography, and claims have been made that wider ‘materialist returns’ are under way across the discipline. In the introduction to his edited collection on materiality, anthropologist Daniel Miller discusses how ethnographers constantly encounter the contradictory juxtaposed and incommensurable in their work. This article elaborates upon the concepts of landscape, commodities, and creativity at length and with special reference to the Napoli wreck. This article also discusses the Napoli event which gives coherence to this article that the literature did not seem to possess, while also providing a vivid sense of its disparate nature. This article very skillfully uses the example of Napoli to explain everything related to culturalism.