Material Evidence and Evidentiary Reasoning

Abstract

Sociologists of material culture place the materiality of objects at the center of their analyses (see Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen 2012; McDonnell 2010; Mukerji 1994; Zubrzycki 2013). Bartmanski and Woodward’s Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age and Lopez’s The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA are recent testaments to this trend. Bartmanski andWoodward and Lopez offer an investigation into the importance of material objects in their research on the resurgence of vinyl and building projects funded by remittance dollars, respectively. Both books provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters, from the mediation of cultural meaning in Berlin’s electronic music scene, to the reproduction of social relations in Mexican villages. In dealing with material culture, the authors, by necessity, make decisions about what objects can (and cannot) tell them. This kind of evidentiary reasoning—how analysts use objects as evidence—receives little attention in sociology. Archaeologists, however, are well disposed to investigate how the construction of knowledge relies on material objects because material evidence is so central within the discipline. In this essay, I discuss archaeological theory alongside Bartmanski and Woodward’s account of the resurgence of vinyl and Lopez’s investigation of remittance building projects. Doing so illuminates the importance of reflexivity and clarity in material evidentiary reasoning. Chapman and Wylie’s Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice brings material evidentiary reasoning to the forefront of archaeological practice, and lays out some Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 DOI 10.1007/s11133-015-9311-6