Studied by 4 people
Looks like no one added any tags here yet for you.
Importance of material things (Miller 2005)
-in economic thought material commodities are considered the “source of our extended capacity as humanity”
-a means of realizing ourselves in the form of self-expression
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
Berber House (Bourdieu 1970)
-Kabyle house in Algeria
-divided into two parts, upper and lower
-lower part of the house associated with women, the dark, things that are moist, green or raw, used for sex, birth and death
-upper part of the house associated with men, light, the guest, fire and the objects it creates, the weaving loom, and cooking
Berber House and Berber gender roles (Bourdieu 1970)
-women in Berber culture considered both sacred and something to keep hidden
-Berber women rarely leave the house: “Woman has only two dwellings, the house and the tomb”
-Berber men expected to work and often sleep outside, not considered socially acceptable to spend too much time in the house as a man
“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
Case study: the Sari (Banerjee and Miller 2003)
-”lived garments”
-use and associations convey topics such as what it is to be a woman in Indian society, tradition, and patriarchy
-can be used both as a practical alternative to and a form of resistance against westernization and Western clothing
Case study: Furniture reorganization in Norwegian homes (Garvey 2001)
-transitory and banal nature of furniture reorganization can help us to better understand domesticity, self-identity, means of self-actualization, gender, and empowerment
-in contrast to redecoration, reorganization spontaneous, noncommittal, and processual
-gendered associations: men tend to see home as a break from work and therefore value its stability and continuity, women value reorganization as a means of breaking up the monotony of domestic life
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 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
-ex of how objects can help to reinforce socialities and cultural norms
Case study: domestic interiors in England (St. George 2006)
-from 1580-1640 great shift in property management and land ownerships in the region with the rise of bourgeois landowners as a new upper middle class
-new societal view of “enclosure” reflected in homes: objects and rooms within houses became more compartmentalized into specific forms
Social lives of things
-just as human persons have social lives, so do materials
-1980s in work of Appadurai- objects become endowed with meanings and values as they circulate
-Kopitov: objects have biographies: made/born/produced then change across time as they are used
‘Humility of things’ (Miller 1987)
the recognition that everyday mundane things can have a major impact on human experience and sociality which often goes unnoticed
Agency of objects (Ahern 2001 in: Hoskins 2006)
-agency: ‘the socioculturally mediated capacity to act’
-not restricted to persons and may include spirits, machines, signs, collective entities, etc
-raises question of what exactly is meant by the agent
Art and Agency (Gell in Hoskins 2006)
-art is produced in order to influence the thoughts and actions of others
-art thus embodies complex intentionalities and mediates social agency
-things have agency because they produce effects: they cause us to feel happy, angry, fearful, etc
-art can captivate viewer
-can be extended beyond art to other objects of material culture
Distributed Personhood
-Munn (1986): skilled Kula operator’s personhood distributed through a series of objects linked by his strategic and calculated actions during Kula trade
-Gell: ouerve of a Western artist can be seen as a form of distributed personhood, a way of collecting a ‘life’ through collecting representations which cull the memories of that life and give them visual expression
Case study of Distributed Personhood: Land Mines (Gell 1998)
-Pol Pot’s soldiers who laid landmines responsible for crimes against innocent people
-mines themselves just ‘instruments’ or ‘tools’ of destruction
-soldier’s weapons parts of him which make him what he is
-capable of being the kind of agents that they were only because of the weapons, wouldn’t have this kind of agency without them
-soldiers possessed ‘distributed agency’: their agency was in different places separate from their body at the same time
Case studies for distributed personhood
-Kula exchange (Munn 1986)
-Landmines (Gell 1998)
-Tiputa (Thomas 1999)
Case studies for agency of objects
-Gosden (2005) new materials
-Berber house (Bourdieu 1970)
-Italian Maiolica (Tite 2009)
-Landmines (Gell 1998)
Differences between archaeological and anthropological approaches to studying material culture
-arch: reliant on scientific analysis
-anth: reliant on ethnography and interview that show interactions
-principle subject: object-centered (arch) vs. person-centered (anth)
-different theory (although some of the same)
