Material Culture

Definition of material culture (Darvill 2008)

-any physical object that is produced by humans

-(could be argued objects not produced by humans but interacted with also part of material culture)

Definition of materiality (Tilley 2006)

the quality of being a “thing,” as having substance and being comprised of matter

Problems with materiality (Ingold 2007)

-borderline cases, ex: the human body both material and a vessel for the immaterial, complicates the dichotomy between subject and object, material and immaterial

-anthropologists’ fixation on the concept of “materiality” is detrimental to the field as it shifts the focus to hypotheticals and theory rather than the understanding of objects themselves

-useful instead to focus on things in terms of their material qualities and how they are transformed and intertwined with other things, such as in production

“Signs are not the Garb of Meaning” (Keane 2005)

-taking each and every manmade artifact and object of the human landscape as a message about society that must be decoded is misrepresentative

-human culture tends to treat anything we deem symbolic as a shroud for a “meaning that must be stripped bare”

-material signs mean nothing without human interpretation and the outcome of interpretation is never settled, but can change depending on the context and the interpreter

-objects cannot directly act on people (critiques Gell), instead can only invite a certain form of action

Case study: tapa cloth (Thomas 1999)

-tapa cloth/bark cloth produced throughout Polynesia from the bark of Ficus and mulberry trees and is worn for ceremonial purposes and historically in everyday life

-Christian missionaries in 1800s brought religion and new “social habits” regarding modesty

-Tahitian teachers and catechists were enlisted in converting people of other Polynesian islands to Christianity, brought the tiputa (tapa cloth poncho) with them

-Cook Islanders adopted tiputa not as a garment of Tahitian culture but of Christianity: covered top for modesty and its white color was associated with chastity and purity, associated it with wealth of Europeans

-ex of how objects can help to reinforce socialities and cultural norms

Art and Agency (Gell 1998)

-asserts that things are made as a form of instrumental action: art (and other objects) is produced in order to influence the thoughts and actions of others

-ability to challenge us and captivate us visually

-material objects thus embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency

-suggests a more active model of objects biography, ‘interacts’ with the people who gaze upon it

-notion of the ‘distributed mind’

Social Death of things in South London (Miller and Parrott 2009)

-look at single street in South London

-all relationships as consisting of a tension between idealized and actual categories: use objects to portray and encourage idealized form

-divestment from objects controls and extends process of separation from persons

-ex: after death, during breakups

Tro-tros in Ghana (Beisel and Schneider 2012)

-driver acquired the car from his father who lives in Germany who bought it from Ghanaian car dealer after it was in an accident which made the Red Cross retire it from use

-cars cost up to 1000 euros to ship to Africa, often more than bought for in Germany

-flipped and refurbished with windows and benches into tro-tros, kind of mini bus

-transformed from German waste into Ghanaian cultural object

-named Dr.JESUS: references past as an ambulance as well as its good work transporting people, providing livelihood for driver as well as danger as an old vehicle prone to accidents that may necessitate religious protection

The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986)

-things can metaphorically have a social life just as people have social lives

-objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time (eg commoditization, decommoditization)

-need to follow the things themselves for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, uses, and trajectories

-politics: what links social life and exchange in the social life of commodities

Biographies of objects (Kopytoff 1986)

-can learn about society by looking at commoditization as process

-can ask about status, origin “ages” in its life, end of life etc= biography of things

-meaning, value, and status not static over time, constant processes of commoditization and decommoditization

-tension between collective commoditization and individual tendencies to make things singular

-however ultimately while following object we are still following a social process (commoditization)

Industrial ruins (Edensor 2005)

-looks at industrial ruins like abandoned factories in the North of England

-increasingly disintegrating, become process rather than bounded entities

-building becomes entangled with whole ecology of plants, organisms, bugs, animals, weather, etc

-attention towards not just fabricated objects but other kinds of presences within environments

Idea of Affordances (Gibson 1979)

-what the environment offers the individual

-eg a chair affords sitting, a button affords pushing

-humans modify their environment as to change its affordances to better suit them

-Norman: affordances “suggest“ how an object may be interacted with

Ekuecici masks (Picton 1990)

Who: Ebira people

Where: North-central Nigeria

When: 1990

What: Ekuecici: ’eku of rubbish’, represent servants of the domain of the dead, duty of policing crowd during festivals and funerary ceremonies. Masks themselves can gain reputation for healing, become ‘big eku’ (ekuobanyi). Blood or other sacrifices made to the mask itself, magic medicines attached

Significance: Objects have ability to act that is not imbued by a human actor if we are to take emic understandings as means of analysis

Social life of things critical considerations (Appadurai 1986)

-Social life of things is a metaphor (obviously), not saying that they actually have it

-Appadurai considers only how social life is enacted through exchange, only looks at value of commodities

-Ultimately we can follow the object to understand the social relations and politics it is tied up in, but the social lives we understand through attention to objects are human

Agency of objects (Gell 1998 Chapter 2)

-art objects have agency/’cause events to happen’ but only as secondary agents

-socially embedded in a certain forms of interactions

-critique: kind of takes ambiguous stance as to how agency different, not enough attention to the source of secondary agency b/c not necessarily the artists when expanded to other sorts of things

Materials against materiality (Ingold 2007)

-materiality has become too abstract and meaningless, need to return to materials themselves

-all things degrade: materials always win out over materiality in the end

-critiques Gell: argues materiality made the world stagnant then brought it back to life with the ‘magical mind dust’ of agency that people sprinkle on objects

-things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which caught up in these currents of the lifeworld

-critique: is this a relevant anthropological approach? Would we not need to return right back to materiality to then understand impact of materials on sociocultural matters?