History
The study of material culture has always been a component of anthropology’s interdisciplinary surface. So it is perhaps not surprising that, as the twentieth century morphed into the twenty-first and the humanities and social sciences became more interdisciplinary and less concerned with policing their own identities, material culture began to move from the periphery towards the centre of anthropological discourse. Material culture had been an integral part of nineteenth-century anthropology. As a distinct discipline anthropology arose in the age of the Enlightenment, and the ethnographic collections and information brought back from voyages of discovery made museums a main site for anthropological discourse. Definitions of culture lumped material objects together with customs in a ragbag of cultural traits. The culture trait method in anthropology was a reflection both of methodological limitations of the discipline and the dominant theoretical paradigms of the time. Data was obtained through questionnaires and not by intensive fieldwork, and the comparative frameworks provided by evolutionary and diffu-sionist theory were suited to the sequential rankings and overlapping distributions produced by the formal typologies of cultural traits. Read in retrospect there appears to be incommensurability between social and cultural traits and material artefacts recorded in the inventories — there is disconnection between marriage, spiritual beliefs and fish traps.
The fieldwork revolution at the turn of the twentieth century shifted focus towards the study of culture and society in context. There was a move away from a focus on culture traits to behaviour and social organization. In American anthropological definitions of culture shifted away from traits to ideas and bodies of knowledge. The study of material culture should have benefited equally from the fieldwork revolution in producing more richly documented analyses of objects in context. Instead a divide opened up between museum anthropology, which studied material culture, and social and cultural anthropology. Perhaps the study of material culture was too closely associated with the now rejected evolutionary and diffusionist paradigms. Certainly for a while, under the functionalist paradigm, British anthropology shifted its core focus to social relationships and was less concerned with history and the material world (for overviews of the history of material culture studies see Stocking 1985 and Tilley et al. 2006).
Perhaps the problem with material culture was that it combined two terms — the material and the ideational – that could be seen to be opposed, and at the same time neglected to include the social. Indeed a possible reading of the history of the study of material culture in recent times is as a process of the re-inclusion of the ideational and the social. And to an extent that is true. But equally there has always been a recognition that making and using material culture is an integral part of being human, and consequently that it is an essential part of the evidence for researching human societies.They failed to understand the extent to which material culture objects were an integral part of the value creation processes that linked the social with the ideational.
1960s and after
In the 1960s material culture became once again a part of mainstream anthropology when a number of factors came together. Anthropologists of religion and ideational systems brought material culture to the fore in the study of symbolism, and the development of structuralism and semiotics under the influence of Levi-Strauss emphasized the role of material culture in systems of thought. Everything from ritual paraphernalia and sacra to dwellings and technical processes was subject to structural and symbolic analysis and, from a more phenomen-ological perspective, was seen as being integral to people’s sense of being in the world. Marxist theory and environmental anthropology also made material culture and systems of production central to theory, in particular in relation to understanding long-term social processes (Friedman and Rowlands1977). The input from archaeology was crucially important. Archaeologists depended on the analysis of material culture in archaeological contexts in order to abstract data about social structure and ideational systems.
In ethnographic contexts that are potentially much richer in information, material culture provides an independent source of data for the analysis of social and cultural processes. Ethnographic research into contemporary material culture also provides the means to connect the present to the past and can be supplemented by archival records, museum collections and archaeological data. By combining different sources of information about objects, analysis of material culture provides a means for potentially reconstructing regional systems and their trajectories over time.
The history of research in the Massim, for example, provides an excellent case study of the way in which engagement with the study of material culture has contributed to the development of theoretical ideas. Building on the ethnography of Malinowski and the analyses of Mauss, subsequent ethnographers have used material culture to delineate the regional system of trade, exchange and gender relations and value creation processes (Munn 1986). Research on material culture in the Highlands region of New Guinea has been equally productive in the areas of embodiment, gender and exchange (Strathern 1988).
Material culture now
Material culture as a form of evidence is now generally recognized by anthropologists across the discipline; though engagement has been greater in some areas than others. Material culture studies have been a springboard for an anthropology of the senses, connecting theories of embodiment — with their origins in phenomenology, semiotics and post-structuralism — to the properties of the material world (Howes 2004). In connecting material culture to the person and to social life the sensual properties of form — surface, texture, colour, smell, sound — and the means of perception become central topics. The anthropology of the senses has reinforced the synergies between the study of material culture, art and visual anthropology. The links have been reinforced by another strand of common interest — an increased recognition of film and photography as resources for anthropological research and historical analysis and interpretation. Photographs and films are relevant both as material culture items in their own right and as sources of information about past and present words. They fit within the rubric of material culture partly because sensitivity to their material form is vital in opening up avenues to research. Material culture in this context, either in the forms of objects themselves or in the form of films and photographs, provides an entree to the experiential dimension of cultural life and theorising how this may influence sociocultural trajectories and cross-cultural relationships.
Style in material culture is recognized as being an important marker of identity and status.
Distinctions between objects often reflect factors such as class, religious affiliation, group identity, age status or occupation. Categories of people can literally be objectified through the uniforms that they wear, the way their bodies are painted, the ceremonial objects they carry and so on. Dress codes in this context can provide information on the structure of society and group identity. Fashion — what people wear — can clearly be a function of how they see themselves in the world, and may reflect both broad social factors and yet simultaneously be a means of expressing individual identity. Similar considerations apply to other aspects of material culture, from home decor to motor vehicles. The distinctions may be evident in the form or properties of the objects themselves – in the qualities of the raw materials, the cost of production and so on – or, as some have argued in the cases ranging from artworks to house locations, in more subjective evaluative criteria or markers of status. In Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of artworks, value lay as much in the discourse about artworks as in the objects themselves and reflected the underlying class divisions in French society. Usually both factors operate, since there is likely to be something about the form and composition of the object or the location of the property that marks an index of its scarcity. An important area of the study of material culture that links the material with the social is researching how objects gain in value and processes of value transformation in space and time. Such studies of patterns of material consumption have proved a rich vein in the study of complex societies.
Trade and exchange have been particularly productive areas for the anthropology of material culture both within societies, as in the case of the kula, and between societies – though increasingly that very division is seen as being problematic. Through trade and processes of globalization, material culture blurs as much as it defines boundaries. Kopytoffs (1986) trope of the social life of things has proved a particularly productive idea, tracing the journeys of objects across boundaries and adopting an almost biographical perspective on the histories of objects as if they were the histories of lives. These approaches have powerfully drawn attention to the affective dimension of material culture, to the association of objects with memory and their close association with people’s lives – often drawing on the metaphors that people themselves use (Hoskins 1998). There is sometimes a slippage between the human actors and their conceptual world to the objects themselves -extending the metaphor too far by treating them analytically as if they were agents. However few today would argue against an action-oriented approach to material culture.
Methodologically the study of material culture adds an important dimension to anthropological research. The form of the object can be interrogated in an attempt to uncover material composition, manufacturing processes, and functional and semantic attributes which can then be explored with members of the producing societies to document systems of knowledge, trading patterns or semiologic systems. Observation of the processes of manufacturing and the techniques of using material culture objects can provide a data on the transmission of knowledge and pedagogical techniques. It can also be a means of gaining access to processes of bodily learning – in weaving or pottery, for example -that influence cultural dispositions in ways that cannot easily be spoken. Such understandings may be essential to elucidating conceptual aspects of the objects and the value creation processes associated with them. Collections of material culture objects from the past in museum collections can provide, retrospectively, vital sources of information about processes of social change, patterns of trade and colonial histories. The methodological shades into the theoretical in the concept of objectification explored by Miller (1987). The question of what it is that the form of objects reveals about their makers shades into the question of how objects themselves reflect, represent and are indexical of human beings acting in the world. Recognition of this dialogical relationship makes material culture a rich resource for studies across the humanities and social sciences.
Interest in material culture as a form of evidence has recently grown into the contemporary project of material culture studies as its own broad field of study, bringing together archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, cultural researchers and psychologists. The editors of the Handbook of Material Culture referring to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject,conclude that ‘such an intellectual field of study is inevitably eclectic: relatively unbounded and unconstrained, fluid, dispersed and anarchic rather than constricted. In short undisciplined rather than disciplined’ (Tilley et al. 2006: 1). However, precisely because of this it can be argued that its coherence must be in the end lie in its dialogical relationship with material form. Materiality is the fulcrum, the locus of the nexus of interconnections that creates the links across disciplinary boundaries.
