Knowledge and Society: Research in Science and Technology Studies. Vol. 10, Material Culture

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knowledge and Society: Research in Science and Technology Studies * W. David Kingery (bio) Knowledge and Society: Research in Science and Technology Studies. Vol. 10, Material Culture Edited by Shirley Gorenstein. Greenwich, Conn., and London: JAI Press, 1996. Pp. x+207; illustrations, notes. $73.25. Material culture, the study and interpretation of material objects as reflectors of the culture of their designers, manufacturers, and users, has had a mixed history of interpreters and interpretations. In this volume, eight members of the science and technology studies (STS) community contribute interesting essays on material culture from the point of view of consumers [End Page 541] and, to a lesser extent, designers. For the most part, material culture is effectively connected to the culture of consumption, less so to cultures of design and manufacture. In her preface, Shirley Gorenstein suggests that this volume reflects an “STS perspective on material culture.” In doing so, the book provides more insight into the many disciplines, approaches, and methodologies cohabitating the STS community than any clear and significant new thesis about material culture. Gorenstein proposes that the volume should focus on design, manufacture, and consumption to connect social context to technology attributes, but no coherent picture emerges. The essays contain no more than the well-accepted idea that the design of artifacts involves not only utilitarian functions but also a wide and complex variety of social, economic, cultural, political, and ideological functions. There is no discussion of the design process and little evidence that the authors of these essays have much familiarity with design or manufacturing; the book is largely a consumers’ view of technology. The introduction suggests that cultural themes are important in material culture, not a controversial view. “Cultural themes” are many; they purportedly have long or short lives, are conservative or volatile, are tacit, and include a bewildering variety of concepts. Among these concepts are functionality, speed, boundedness and unboundedness, time, mastery, progress, extending human capacity, the future, public, private, engagement and disengagement, counterculture, and self-sufficiency. The book includes a potpourri of eight essays encompassing many topics—advertising, computers, refrigerators, telephones, scientific measuring instruments, bicycles, folk culture, and automata. The topics share little except the conviction that technology is a social and cultural construct. The authors mostly depend on reflection, anecdotal discussions, and secondary references. Liv Emma Thorsen’s interesting essay on the difference between working-class and upper-middle-class recollections of 1930s material culture is based on a total of twenty-six interviews, hardly a sample with statistical significance. Pamela Walker Laird’s discussion of later nineteenth-century advertising with its gendered nature and ideals of progress informs us about how these concepts were self-reinforcing, but she tells us little about material culture that we did not already know. I particularly enjoyed Russell Mills’s extension of bicycle studies. In that essay, curiously, advertisers are assumed to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the cultural role of artifacts while somehow it must be demonstrated that designers are aware of the cultural roles of consumer products. Linda M. Strauss’s fascinating discussion of the role of automata in human form is based mostly on the imaginings of novelists. Overall, the book consists of an unconnected selection of essays, each having some considerable interest. These essays make clear that the STS community has embraced as dogma the thesis that technology is a social [End Page 542] and cultural construct. Within that framework, there is understandably little concern with artifact design or manufacture, and much is made of the social and cultural behavior of consumers and their interactions with technology. The book is not so much about technology as about consumer perceptions of technology. It is recommended for readers interested in the concerns and perceptions of the STS community as they relate to material culture studies. It will also engage those readers interested in the history of social construction of technology as it has developed from concept to dogma. W. David Kingery Dr. Kingery is Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. Footnotes * Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer. Copyright © 1998 Society for the History of Technology