The Cultural Power of Personal Objects: Traditional Accounts and New Perspectives

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Traditional Accounts
	Chapter 1 Mereology: Wholes, Parts, and the Big Thicket
		Posing a Problem
		The Thicket: A First Look
		Detour: Remarks on Mereology
		Forests as Wholes
		Some Philosophical Reflections
		Kinds of Organisms
		The Big Thicket: A Second Look
		Concluding Quasi-Scientifical Conclusions
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 2 Personality in Seagoing Ships
		Some Personalizing Human Tendencies
			Movement
			Adjustment and Correction
			Growth and Decay
			Aging and Liability to Aging
			Amenability to Multiplicity of Interpretation
		From Human Person to Objective Personality
		Personal Objects
		The Sailing Ship as a Personal Object
			Movement
			Adjustment and Correction
			Growth and Decay
			Aging and Liability to Aging
			Amenability to Multiplicity of Interpretation
		Conclusion: or Why a Ship Is “She”
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 3 Personified Objects and Objectified Persons in Ancient Egypt
		Introduction
		Statues of Gods and the Deceased as Manifestations of the Divine
		Ka and Ba—Vehicles of Syncretism and Group Identity
			KA
			BA
			Summary
		Ancient Egyptian Temple Rituals
		Mythic Precedents of the Daily Cult Ritual
		Opening of the Mouth Ritual (wepet-ra)
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 4 Seeing and Time: Personal Divinity in the Object of Hindu Devotion
		The Argument
		Darśan
		Anticipations of Darśan
		Preparation for Darśan
		Prepared for Darśan
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 5 Convergence and Divergence of Spirit: Tsukumogami and the Personality of Objects
		Buddhism and the Path East
		Kami and Tsukumogami
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 6 The Journey of the Javanese Keris
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 7 Cherokee Nonhuman Persons in Dual Realms
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 8 The Quilt as Personal Object
		Quilt as Visual-Historical Documentary
		Efficiency and Beauty
		The Story Quilt
		Contemporary Activist Quilts
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Bibliography
Part 2: New Perspectives
	Chapter 9 The New Materialism: A Critique
		Melquíades’s Magnets
		Object Relations Theory
		Being and Having
		Container and Contained
		Acting and Being Acted Upon
		Closing Remarks
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 10 Constituting Personal Objects, Constituting Persons
		Introduction
		Personalizing Things, Constituting Personal Objects
		Personal Identities Personalizing One’s World
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 11 A Personalized Cultural World: A Cassireran Phenomenology of Personalized Intuition
		Personalized Space: Responsibility
		Personalized Time: Hope
		Personalized Number: Community
		A Further Concrete Example of Personalized Intuition: Alice in Wonderland
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 12 The Comfort of Things: Personal Objects, Possession, Dwelling, and the Desire to Be God in Sartre and Levinas
		Sartre: Cartesian Freedom, the Desire to Be God, and the Awareness of Infinity
		Cartesian Infinity in Levinas and the God “Who Comes to Mind”
		Possession: Sartre and the Comfort of Things
		The Desire to be God and Possession: The Dark Sense of Personing the World
		Levinas: Dwelling, Possessions, and the Personing of Things
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 13 Have We Effectively Made Money a Person and Ourselves Its Corporeal Embodiment?
		Money
			Money Forms
			Money Functions
			Commodity Theories of Money
		Problems with Commodity Theories of Money
			Credit Theories of Money
		Personhood
			Personhood as an Evolving Concept
		Money and Personhood
			Unpacking the Universality of Natural Rights
			Unpacking Locke’s Labor Justification of Private Property
			Credit-money and Radical Inequality
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 14 Wampum, Person, and the Life of Exchange
		Wampum
		The Gift of Wampum
		Collective Persons
		Mythic Consciousness
		Total Prestation
		The Workings of Wampum
		Waste Management
		Exchanging Persons
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 15 How My Piano Uses Gendlin’s Focusing Method
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 16 Meditating on the Vitality of the Musical Object: A Spiritual Exercise Drawn from Richard Wagner’s Metaphysics of Music
		Overture: The “Wagner Chord” for Our Reflection
		Act 1: Wagner Finds a Book
		Intermezzo: Musical Objects
		Act 2: The Prophecy of Beethoven
		Act 3: Music’s Magic
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 17 Bring Out Your Dead: Human Bodies, Cultural Objects, and Personality
		The People We Don’t Eat
		Persons, Dignity, and Personality: People and Objects
		Object-personality: Cultural Objects and Bodies
		Animal Symbolicum and Cultural Objects
		Notes
		Bibliography
	Chapter 18 Sex Robots and Solipsism: Towards a Culture of Empty Contact
		Human-Robot Relations: Levy’s Reasoning
		Shallowing the Self: Carr’s Concerns
		The Problem of Other Minds
		Notes
		Bibliography
Contributors
Index