Introduction
Material Culture Studies is an interdisciplinary field that in its origins was influenced greatly by Archaeology and its involvement in the materiality of antiquity in the research of the social importance and impact of objects in these societies. Artefacts were one of the initial fields of research, such as the Boasian case in the USA, that anthropologists delved themselves into in order to trace the evolutionary linear progression of societies based on materiality and craftmanship. Soon, however, their main interest shifted into the fields of kinship, religion, and power as a means of constitution of the social reality, both in functionalist and structuralist rhetorics.
This shift resulted into a partial abandonment of materiality only to be revitalized again in the late 60’s with the Marxist-structuralist turn of the French “Etnologie”. The French scholars, in the European tradition, proved to be very insightful occupying some of their publications with material culture and its significance, with prominent case that of Claude Levi-Strauss and his very famous structuralist dichotomies of opposition, such as in the case of Masks (1975), and that of Raw and Cooked food (1964), in his attempt to depict a universal structure of mind.
Even though their contribution was influential to the field, the actual revitalization of Material Studies in Anthropology was possible in the 1980s with a series of publications of scholars from the UK and the English-speaking world in general. This spring of interests once again in materiality, with a very different scope this time, was not a random event, but coincided closely with the general change of anthropological paradigm, namely the “Ontological Turn”, that challenged the very core, research methods and outcomes of the discipline. According to that dogma, anthropology seemed to be biased both in the way it conducted fieldwork and in the results it produced, as it was heavily influenced by a Eurocentric model of knowledge production and understanding of the society.
In the remaining of my paper, I will address a selection of authors and the contributions their work brought to the contemporary Material Culture Studies. Of course, the contributors I shall mention will be limited since it is impossible to name every author, but my goal is to create a representative list that will highlight important milestones in the discipline from 1980s onwards. It is also important to mention that I find of little scientific value to present them in a chronological order where my intention is to follow a dialectic approach, a virtual conversation between the scholars as they discuss about one of the most important advancements this subdiscipline offered, namely the dialysis of the dichotomy of subject-object.
Subject – Object: Dichotomy of Structure
The material world for the greatest part of the history of Anthropology was conserved as “being out there”, as the concrete material world that people live in and interact with to benefit for their own goals, needs and aspirations. Societies were the epicenter of the human activity and the frame in which they formed their lives and social relations. The objects or things that literally materialized society were considered as objective, inanimate, and raw materials only to be used according to their own will. In this regard, the ontological dichotomy between the subjective human experience and the objective material world was cemented. Scholars of Material Culture, since the 1980s, challenged this duality in their attempt to reevaluate that relationship and offer new ways to view the interconnectedness of these phenomenological distinct worlds. One of the most important contributions in this field of scholarship was the idea that objects, just like humans have a social life, that they are not teleological things meant to be created, used, and then destroyed.
Arjun Appadurai in his introduction of the collective volume The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, addresses objects as having different trajectories and regimes of values (1986 :10,15) only to continue by showing how commodity is simply a stage in the “biography” of an object, that can start as raw material, turn into commodity, turn into present, turn into item of display and affection, turn into heirloom, and so on. “In this processual view, the commodity phase of the life history of an object does not exhaust its biography; it is culturally regulated; and its interpretation is open to individual manipulation to some degree” (1986: 17).
That idea of social life of things is more extensively developed in Igor Kopytoff’s contribution to the same volume where he points out that commodities are a universal category, but objects tend to be heavily culturally informed (1986: 68). This means that objects pass through different stages in their social life, much like humans, but they are also imprinted in the cultural perspective the people who use them have about them. What these two scholars show is that objects do not exist outside of the realm of social reality but are a part of it and through the course of their lives they can change meanings and uses and have an impact to the lives of people in the way they are manipulated each time.
A different approach was that of Alfred Gell, who throughout his work and most importantly in his book Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, popularized the notion of things as social agents. Talking about the art objects and the power they have to the viewer as the artistic expression of the artist he goes into an extensive analysis about the notion of Index interrelated with that of Agency. According to him “An agent is one who 'causes events to happen' in their vicinity” (1998 :40). Objects are but a nexus of social relationships, in the sense that they embody intentionality. Objects, and in his case, art objects, should not be valued by their aesthetic purposes, but by the social relations they produce. By that, he means that objects have an actual effect on people through their social agency.
Things are, therefore, not just materials, or simply vehicles of symbols and representations, but indexes. By the latter he explains that Indexes are material objects that permit a particular cognitive operation which is defined as the “abduction of agency”. Objects become indexes of social actions for the viewer, and hence acquire social agency themselves. Let us consider the famous example of Olly. “The car does not just reflect the owner's personhood; it has personhood as a car. I possess a Toyota which I esteem rather than abjectly love, but since Toyotas are 'sensible' and rather dispassionate cars, my Toyota does not mind... this Toyota has a personal name, Toyolly, or 'Olly' for short. My Toyota is reliable and considerate; it only breaks down in relatively minor ways at times when it 'knows' that no great inconvenience will result. If, God forbid, my Toyota were to break down in the middle of the night, far from home, I should consider this an act of gross treachery for which I would hold the car personally and morally culpable…” (1998 :18-9).That extensive example proposes that things do not only have a biography, but for their owners, or people that use them in general can have a personality and traits which influence the people they encounter. According to Gell there are two forms of social actors, the primary, which are the humans, and the secondary, which are the objects in the way it was briefly explained above.
His contribution to material culture studies was very impactful since the idea of agency was another big nail in the coffin of our initial essentialist dichotomy of subject-object. Many scholars came to understand that by focusing on the materiality and social agency of things they can come to understand aspects of the social relationships and surrounding that otherwise could be salient since they are not mentioned or perceived by the participants. This “humility of objects” (Miller 2010 :47), allows them to have agency on their own inside the social relationships we form, exactly because they are “blindly obvious” (2010 :48).
We come now to one of the most inspirational and influential figures of the recent decades in the field of Material Culture, Daniel Miller. While his work is extensive, scattered throughout a series of publications, varying from material culture, archeology, digital anthropology, the Internet, etc., I will mention his book Stuff (2010), which was an attempt to summarize his general theories concerning objects and things in the last 30 years. In this book he explains one of his most impactful contributions in the field. That is the idea of Objectification. According to him the essence of this theory is that people cannot develop themselves as social beings in the lack of objects, in other words object make us who we are. Following his logic things are not mere objects that we construct to use in order to suit our needs, but at the same time they are independent actors in the social sphere and could shape us. The simplest example, in which he often refers to is that of the cell phone.
According to him, humans who lived before the invention of the telephone are not like the humans that live after that invention. Mobile has become an extension not only of our hand, but nowadays with the smart phone technology, it has become an extension of our very self in a multiplicity of ways. Thus, we can conclude as Miller puts it, that the very materiality, meaning literally the “being there” of the objects, allows them to act upon us and shape us accordingly.
Of course, this theory, like all in any kind of science was not based on thin air but in many different theories that preceded Miller, such as the Hegelian “Geist” (1807), the Marxist historical materialism, the Maussian “Hau” (1922) together with the theory of “habitus” and “practice” by Pierre Bourdieu (1972). Following the latter, children express themselves first by the manipulation to of the material they come to possess and only later with the development of speech objects pass into the background of cognitive expression but are not nevertheless extinguished as a means of communication. Moreover, people become members in a system of thing that are given to them and can act with them accordingly without paying attention to the medium itself.
To conclude this section of the paper, we came to understand that material culture scholars very actively offered different paths of anthropological analysis of the social environment we live by “giving voice” to the things that surround us. Not only things are mere objects to be manipulated, but have social life, are actors and can be independent of our own will while at the same time have the power to shape us by their “quite” influence that is radiant through their ever-presence. Upon these basic theories the scholars of the next section advanced the dialogue, either by affirming what I have so far presented, or even by challenging it.
Things-People: Dialogue of Process
Having in mind the previous theories we can continue in this section with the overview of a series of papers that advance the anthropological research even further as they propose more ways on how anthropological research can benefit engaging with the study of things. As I have mentioned in the introduction of this essay the Ontological Turn that took place in the 1980s challenged the ways of conducting anthropological research, when many new approaches sprung up, offering alternatives in the way scholars should approach both their participants and the material world that they came in contact within their field work. In this section we will touch upon three contemporary approaches that we can argue were heavily influenced by the theories presented in the previous sections and in their respect assisted in the advancement of the subdiscipline.
One such approach was proposed by the editors and the contributors of the collective volume called Thinking Through Things: Theorizing Things Ethnographically that was published in 2007. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, the editors of the volume, in the introduction address the main methodological contribution this book attempts to popularize, which is of course as written in the title, for ethnographers to “Think through things”. According to them, even nowadays the a priori distinction between subject-object holds strong and researchers tend to presuppose and assume what the objects come in contact within the field symbolize or mean. Even in the case that they pay close attention to the narratives of the inhabitants, the former transcribes these meanings into their own cultural system of symbols or even translates them in pure theoretic schemes, differentiating them dramatically from the initial meaning that is in the mind of the locals.
Instead of this “radically essentialist” methodology, which can prove to be highly problematic in the long run, the editors propose that anthropologists should go to the field and engage with the local terminology and system of symbols and indexes, with out prior assumptions, but let the fieldwork lead the importance and social position and meaning of the things they face there. As Ingold puts it, anthropologists tend to focus on the meaning of things and not the things themselves (2000 :34). Meaning is not attached to things but are part of their identity as social actors and as such we must face them and include them in our research. As the philosopher Karl Popper (1959) claims, observation can falsify the theory, if empirical data disprove the theory, then the theory has to change and not the data that is collected. We should not form our theories and interpretations based on what we think we know from the various case studies we have already looked but let the things we observe guide us into the realm of endless possibilities of meaning and social understanding.
They propose, therefore, a methodology where things themselves “dictate” a plurality of possibilities. These possibilities can be very different worlds for the one we visually instantly observe, but nevertheless are present inside the things themselves as a conceptual creation and not just as a mental operation. Following Marylin Strathern’s (1988) argument that the individual is Distributed or Dividual among a plethora of things, they come to understand that things are an integral part of one’s own identity formation since people cannot be characterized and described without their social relations and material culture that surrounds them.
One indicative case study of the above-mentioned methodological proposal can be found in the first chapter of the volume, where Adam Reed, discusses the effect smoke has on the inmates to a maximum-security prison in Papua New Guinea. According to him, the inmates believe that smoke it the king in the prison since it dictates a great part of their life in the enclosure, from socialization to exchange of goods and meditation as a factor of relaxation. Prisoners passivize themselves and acknowledge how smoke influences them and helps them cope with everyday reality and makes them to forget the struggles and hardships of the life in prison. Here we can see how the inmates bodily experience the effect that cigarettes and smoke have into their body and mind, in other words the agent these objects have and, in a sense, it appears that cigarettes consume the man and not vise versa as we can observe with the first glance. They have a unique form of materiality in the people’s enclosure, which the ethnographer must understand as it is expressed by the latter and not form a general theory of things as social actors and impose it into the field.
A similar approach is also presented in the article of James Leach in the same volume, in which he takes as a case study the “New Technologies Arts Fellowship” (2002), NTAF in short. In this project artists and researchers had to create teams of two in an attempt to develop an artwork or a new technology. Leach argues that both parties involved had often troubles collaborating and the end result was presented by both sides in a different way focusing each time on the field that was more relevant to their discipline, art, or science. Having as a guide in his article the study of Gell, he concludes that the moment an object is produced, it has an immediate effect on its creator, and thus it is presented by them in a different way since they are engaged with them and the latter in return effect the notion of involvement of the former, by claiming ownership and appropriate in their own terms the creativity it took to manifest the artwork. Hence, we can read this case study with the interesting quote of Gell that “The person is thus understood as the sum total of indexes which testify, in life and subsequently, to the biographical existence of this or that individual.” (1998:222-3).
One other contemporary approach in material culture studies is that of affect which discusses that ability of things to affect people in a pre-cognitive level that is embodied and hard to describe. One book that offers a great introduction to this analytical approach is called Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture, edited by Jonas and Maja Frykman. In the introduction they attempt to decipher the meaning of the word “affect” by tracing its etymology to the Latin afficere, connecting it with the notions of passivity and embodiment. They argue that affect is an innate, embodied sense that is cause by a social stimulus, in our case things and objects, while they differentiate it from emotion that is, according to them, the cultural expression of the initial affect. For that reason, the explanation what affect is challenges scholars, because every attempt of categorization is seen as a cultural appropriation of the emotions which result of it. Put simply, researchers can trace is by what affect does to people and not by determining what it is by giving a universal definition to it as an analytical category.
Let us move then to an example of affectivity since, as we mentioned above, an attempt of a concrete definition would prove to be inadequate. In their contribution of the volume, Nevena Škrbić Alempijevič and Sanja Potkonjak, researching Tito’s memorabilia in two open flea markets in Zagreb chatted with many locals, who shared their views and stories about these objects and Tito in general. The discussions that arose concerning the past had as a starting point the relationship people had with the particular objects. This shows that socialism was not “dead” just because the regime fell, but that these objects embody exactly a form of cultural “Afterlife of Socialism” in post socialist, independent Croatia. So, beginning with these objects we come to understand how “Titoaffect”, as they propose, functions. Collective memory is heavily influenced by the state, which often decides what should be remembered and what should be forgotten, but also by the people and their memories that are enhanced by the material presence of objects as silent indexes of the past events. As they put it, objects “serve as a stimulus to express something that would otherwise have remained concealed.” (2016 :120). Just discussing about the objects people get attached to them because of their shared history during Yugoslavia. As a result, affectivity according to them, can be manifested without even the presence of the objects themselves, just by their mental image and recollection.
I chose to include Tim Ingold as the last scholar I shall mention in this paper because, like Daniel Miller, he is a very influential figure for me and his theoretical approach on materiality and position of people in the environment offers a starting point for many different paths of knowledge and perception, such as embodiment of space, contemporary phenomenology, ethnoarchaeology, etc.
In his article Bringing things to life: Creative Entanglements in a Worlds of Materials, as the title suggests, he attempts to bring things to life by discussing the various flows a thing can have, abandoning the raw materiality of its form and objectivity. The main distinction between objects and things is that the latter are not mere objects. They have a life, resembling breathing organisms, and hence they are not just filled with a presupposed humanly imposed social action, as other scholars claim. By making these points he attempts to put the focus of our research in the creative flows as a thing can have a series of entangled lines that have innumerable variations and orientations. A world without things, for him, is unlivable, but things are not just to be used.
Things, he argues, are a certain gathering that makes life come together, while objects are just the outer objective surface, the end product in other words. To better illustrate this claim he gives the example of a tree and all the components and living organisms that rest upon it. Where a thing is processual and interconnected, the object is seen as stable and concrete. Things should not be examined backwards by abduction of what they do to what they mean for humans, but instead we must be attentive in the creative flows they follow on every occasion.
Furthermore, we must observe the meshwork they leave behind them when they “leak” in the social environment into various directions. It is this leakage of various direction in the live of things that is crucial in the rejection of the social action of things, as it was discussed by previous scholars. According to him, things do not act back to people, as it is generally proposed, but instead simply exist. For this point he mentions kites, and how they simply make sense only if there is wind for them to fly. Kites, for him, do not have agency, but are alive. To summarize his main argumentation, where most scholars examine the agency of objects, Ingold is interested in the life of things in what he calls the EWO, Environment Without Objects, but full of things.
These things as they leak into various orientations do not create closed or distinct networks but flow creatively inside a meshwork of interrelated and interconnected knots that to decipher simply does not make any sense. What is of outmost importance in this Meshwork, a terminology that was first developed by Henri Lefebvre (1974), is that lives of things can flow into different directions while we have to keep in mind that all the potentiality that stems from the meshwork is essentially part of the thing’s identity. Where Latour (2005) proposes the Actor Network Theory, ANT, calling us to understand the hybrid models of humans and non-humans as social actors inside a network of interconnected points, Ingold proposes to view things as a SPIDER, where the web it produces is essentially part of its body and identity and is the complex interconnected points that create the meaning and life of the thing. This analytical approach is more extensively developed in his books called Lines (2007) and is not limited to things. People also tend to follow a kind of meshwork in the way they live their lives as “wayfarers” as he calls them, from one point to another, with different intensities, pauses, and shifts of direction while at the same time they experience their journey in a phenomenological sense through their movement upon the surface of the earth. For the former he says that “The wayfarer is a being who, in following a path of life, negotiates or improvises a passage as he goes along. In his movement as in life, his concern is to seek a way through not to reach a specific destination or terminus but to keep on going…” (2010 :126). So, as a concluding remark for Ingold, it seems that humans and things are not so different after all in the way they exist in the social surrounding they occupy, heavily influenced by phenomenology.
Conclusion
In this paper we have seen a somewhat abbreviated overview of some of the most influential points, proposed methodologies and analytical turns scholars of Material Culture Studies have offered since the 1980s. This progression and deviation of theories have one thing in common. We have discussed here the social life of things, the secondary social action they possess, their objectivity, together with the notions of their identity in the field as distinct in each case, their affectivity and lastly the meshwork they act upon as living organisms inside the social sphere.
What all these points and views have in common is their attempt to surpass the ontological predisposition that things are mere materials that have no significant effect in the lives of people they meet. What each scholar attempted was to put materiality and things in the foreground of anthropological research and knowledge by showing their significance in better understanding the social reality each anthropologist faces into the field. Having these scholars and their work in mind we can advance the subdiscipline into various directions, such as post-humanism, in order to provide better tools for research in anthropology and effectively fight future methodological or analytical pathogens that may arise.
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