Material Culture

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Material culture is a broad and interdisciplinary field that explores the cultural meanings objects acquire in context. It does not impose a hierarchy on what is included; anything that is made from a particular material can be seen as material culture. The implication, however, is that raw materials and natural commodities are, on the whole, excluded, and that there is a certain emphasis on the ways in which things have been made. In the case of tea, for example, the plant itself is perhaps not seen as part of material culture, but its methods of cultivation, the ways in which tea is brewed, the various attributes required in the preparation and consumption of the beverage, and all practices surrounding tea are all part of the material culture. There are fruitful overlaps with numerous other fields: with art history, where that discipline explores the so-called decorative arts; with history, where objects form a supplement and/or alternative to written documentation; with anthropology, where objects are part of social practice; and with (prehistoric) archaeology, where objects often are the only available source in the absence of written materials. The emphasis on objects has been useful in a number of areas, especially where written sources are difficult to access. In the field of women and gender, for example, the study of material culture has allowed a different kind of access to the experiences that shaped the lives of men and women who did not leave documentation in writing. In global history, material culture and the use of objects provide ways of overcoming the challenges of materials written in different languages. While material culture has become an important part of numerous academic fields in Europe and North America, in Asia the transition has been slower. The main developments in this area have come from Taiwan, where a number of scholars have made important contributions in this field. This bibliography includes not only materials conceived specifically from within a material culture context, but also work produced within disciplines such as archaeology and art history. Methodologically, they may differ from the study of material culture, but in terms of the source materials they present for the scholar interested in material culture, they are indispensable.