Cultural History and the Material(s) Turn

Abstract

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, the parameters and paradigms of cultural history, while clearer than a generation ago, are still shifting as we examine them. A generation removed from the publication of The New Cultural History (1989), Reading Material Culture (1990) and, more recently, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), many historians recognize the cultural turn as an established redirection in historical methodology. Copies of these books sit on their bookshelves, having achieved the status of venerable sources, full of marginal notations, while slowly acquiring the patina of browned pages and tattered covers. Material culture-based history, however, seems a recent and perhaps fleeting phenomenon, the flowering of an exotic annual plant in history’s otherwise hardy perennial garden of the written word. In this article I argue that there is both a material culture element to the ‘cultural turn’, and, to a lesser extent, a material(s) ‘turn’. After defining material culture, I will demonstrate that the study of things and their relationship to human history has in fact deeper roots than recent methodological developments might suggest, visible only if we excavate in a broader area of disciplinary ground. I then highlight important recent works that suggest such a turn is underway and conclude with a brief analysis of works directed at examining specific materials in history. Material culture – the study of the made and built world – includes academic and vernacular architecture, the ordinary artefacts of human and animal history, the history of the natural and altered landscape, the interactions between humans and flora and fauna, photography and visual material from mass media, works of art, and the artefacts of technology. Material culture challenges the historian to discover the