Try to imagine a person engaged in any activity. Now list the objects that are included in this scene. There are always things. The clothes we wear, the surfaces we touch, what we can see, our own body, the smells, the sounds. Even in philosophies that try to keep to only the bare essentials, let us say for example Zen Buddhism, a great concern with objects, in Zen the simplicity and crudeness of artifacts used for tea ceremony, has taken much attention and work. Material culture is everywhere, but not enough in academic work, say the authors of the volume reviewed here.
Material Culture as a major field of research in the humanities and social sciences has been on the rise in the past several decades. Although many think that mass production, media advertisement, and urbanization made our life more material in nature, the works presented and discussed in this volume often relate to rural or past societies. Therefore, the renewed interest in artifacts should probably be credited to the deconstructionist turn in verbal analysis that led scholars to look for more grounded, substantial sources of data.[1] This compendium is mainly written from anthropological perspectives and includes both a critical analysis of past and present scholarly attention to artifacts, and suggestions for future engagements with this topic. It is a not a book one can gulp in one sitting, or in two or three, but it is a helpful collection of explanations, debates, and bibliographies of the various approaches in this interdisciplinary field of interest. The book is divided into five parts. While the first is titled "Theoretical Perspectives" and includes a critique of well-established theories related to material culture, the others offer alternative models for approaching things. The essays are by scholars from various countries, which is refreshing in our regrettably too continent-contained academic world.
Part One, “Theoretical Perspectives,” surveys the theories that created and influenced the field of material studies from the late nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the past forty years. The conclusion that emerges from reading this part is that current research on objects would benefit best from choosing an adaptable theoretic stance, which would enable scholars to use various concepts at will and according to specific contexts on which they write. To emphasize this de-fetishization of theory, Christopher Tilley writes in his introduction that “Theories are like toolboxes” (10). The authors of the chapters term this mode of academic flexibility “theoretical pluralism” (Tilley ,11), “performative scholarly engagement” (Maurer, 25), and “a bricoleur attitude” (Olsen, 98). They provide serious consideration of theoretical perspectives including Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, phenomenology, objectification, agency and biography, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism. All authors emphasize the importance of grounding theoretical conclusions in deep analysis of concrete human practices and manifestations of values and thought. They demonstrate that in recent academic discourse material entities have been increasingly seen as inseparable players in the creation of social structures and meanings, and have been assigned an active rather than passive role in these processes.
Part Two, “The Body, Materiality, and the Senses,” is still on the theoretical side of material culture, but offers a counter-perspective, maybe an alternative theorizing model. It diverges from the verbally-based theories in that it engages with the sensual dimension of objects, their visual, tactile, olfactory, and sounded qualities, and does not hope to convey their meaning in full by the mediation of words. This part of the book is especially stimulating in view of the convincing arguments of Patricia Spyer in her introduction to it that most scholars conducting research on material culture tend to theorize material culture while often completely ignoring the sensuous particularities of the objects they investigate. For the authors in this part, “the evidence of our senses is equally worthy of attention” (Howes, 162), and artifacts may even “serve as ‘extensions of the senses’” (Spyer, 125). They lament that most scholarly representations of material culture have been based on vision and have neglected the other senses. This criticism includes also museum displays, which usually prevent their audiences from touching or smelling the objects they see. These chapters deal with the ways visual culture has been put to the fore as the most meaningful part of material culture research; how food works as an agent in social worlds through its sensuous traits; how synaesthesia, a combined sensual perception, can help us understand the nature of things; the importance of colors; and the interplay between outer and inner in objects of investigation. However, Part Two of the Handbook lacks a discussion of the academic tendency to represent research findings almost solely in verbal mode, and the authors here still hope to manage to embody the sensory meanings and importance of things through a written essay. Few photographs have been placed in this chapter, and there is no thorough discussion of alternative, more sensory-oriented ways to present studies on objects.
Part Three of the Handbook, “Subjects and Objects,” offers to broaden the commonly-used approach, featuring active subjects who create passive objects, to a more dynamic view that includes possibilities of agency that objects might embody. It emphasizes how materials can actually alter people, as when a person uses drugs, or when objects become inseparable from identities, for example, the weapon of a soldier. Webb Keane introduces this part by listing four common approaches that focus on different aspects of object-subject relations: how artifacts are produced, how objects serve as representations, how human subjectivities are developed in relation to objects, and how the material characteristics of objects are bundled with the context in which they exist. However, these approaches limit the discussion to artifacts, and exclude materials which have not been modified by people, mainly because it is very difficult to discuss objects which have not been experienced and interpreted yet. Such things, suggests Keane, retain latent possibilities, which can be investigated when materiality itself becomes a research concern. The chapters here include several case studies and discussions of relevant theories on cloth and clothing from the courtly systems of production to capitalistic times; home interiors and furnishing as space considerations that modify human behavior; vernacular architecture and its interaction with scholarly work and with preservation systems; architecture and modernist ideas of domesticity and progress, primitivism as a category in art evaluation and display; networks of commodities translocated in global arenas; relationships between landscapes and identities; and how memory is constructed with relation to material experiences.
Part Four, “Process and Transformation,” is based on what Susanne Küchler calls in her introduction “preoccupation with the fluidity of process, practice, and performance, which acknowledges the transformation of objects and persons” (326). The chapters in this part discuss: technology as a powerful cultural actor; how negative moral stances on consumption have blurred the realities behind human consumption behavior; how choice and verbal metaphors are key aspects in understanding style, design, and function in material culture; how exchange has been dealt with in anthropological work and how people understand the exchanges in which they are involved through past and present contexts of artifacts; what roles artifacts play in the transformation of body, things, and space during extraordinary performances and their effects on everyday life; how ethno-archeologists use insights from present-time societies to better understand communities long gone; and how objects can create categories and forms of thought when they are grouped as communities and investigated in the long term. However, this chapter touches few of the transformations that new media have introduced to material-culture-related behaviors.
Part Five, “Presentation and Politics,” offers a review of different modes of collection, exchange, display, and preservation of objects and how they are related to power struggles between interest groups. The editor of this part, Michael Rowlands, writes in his introduction that “[M]aterial culture is treated here therefore as knowledge, either objectified or experienced that can be defended and protected against abuse, exploitation, and loss” (443). The importance of analyzing the ways in which specific artifacts are chosen for special treatment also includes those objects which are forgotten or neglected in the process. The chapters deal with the contested nature of intellectual property rights; historical and memorial approaches to heritage; museum criticism and suggestions for the reconfiguration of museums as institutions that foster social and political awareness; how monuments and memorials are related to the construction of social identities and memory in different styles of histories; how conservation is material culture in action and the debates around it; and how collecting might be regarded as an act of anti-materialism in that it enshrines objects which have been mere commodities in new and personal creations--the collections.
In conclusion, this book allows the reader a stimulating reconsideration of categories and approaches to things, artifacts, and material spaces. It deals most concretely with the emerging new forms of production, circulation, and display of material culture within previous and late-modern social and cultural arenas. However, it discusses only in passing digital media and their effects on material culture studies. Future theoretical and methodological efforts should also be directed toward creating alternative means of representation for scholarly inquiries on material culture, in order to address issues like attending to all the sensory aspects of materiality, problems of preservation and property rights, and false object-subject distinctions, which have been aptly reviewed and discussed by the authors of this book.
[1] Other recent collections of essays include The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, edited by Fred R. Myers (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001); Things, edited by Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); and of course the ever-so-quoted The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). However, neither these nor other similar works come close to the breadth and diversity of the Handbook of Material Culture.
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[Review length: 1643 words • Review posted on November 20, 2007]