Material Culture

Abstract

The study of material culture centers upon objects, their properties, and the materials that they are made of, and the ways in which these material facets are central to an understanding of culture and social relations. It challenges the historical division between the natural sciences as being the place for the study of the material world and the social sciences as being where society and social relations can be understood. Instead, culture and society are seen as being created and reproduced by the ways in which people make, design, and interact with objects. It also challenges the assumption, perpetuated by disciplinary divisions and also philosophical trajectories, that the object and subject are separate, wherein the latter is assumed to be immaterial, and the former is assumed to be inert and passive. In seeing the material properties of things as central to the meanings an object might have, much work within material culture studies is critical of the idea that objects merely symbolize or represent aspects of a pre-existing culture or identity. A key area of contestation in the literature on material culture is the question of agency and the ways in which objects can produce particular effects or allow and permit certain behaviors or cultural practices. This is developed through the concept of objectification, which is central to many studies of material culture—albeit differently conceived dependent upon the disciplinary and theoretical stance taken—which explores the intertwined, and often dialectic, relationships between people and things. Those who study material culture are situated in a wide range of disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, design, and sociology. Although material culture studies cross many disciplines, there are still theories, methods, and perspectives that are firmly located within particular disciplines. Understandings of material culture have been central to anthropology since its inception; during the late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists primarily collected material culture (Kroeber, Boas) that was displayed in museums in Europe and North America. It was only with the start of ethnographic fieldwork that the study of the material culture became less important. This bibliography of material culture will not focus primarily upon the study of ethnographic museums (with the exception of the section on Display) but more on the so-called new material culture studies that have developed since the 1980s and that are characterized by combining ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological debate. Within this field, empirical research explores specific genres of material culture, such as food or clothing, and empirical and theoretical work extends this to consider categories of objects, such as gifts and commodities, as situated within wider systems of exchange. There is also a concern with how objects “move” between domains and different value systems as the practices and meanings surrounding physically changing objects themselves change.