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Introduction to Material Culture
Dr Catherine Feely
Workshop Outline
• What is material culture?
• Why use material culture?
• Theoretical approaches
• Methodological approaches
• Writing an object biography
• From the particular to the general
What is material culture?
Changing relationships between:
• People
• Things
• Places
• Time
What is material culture?
“The study of material culture may be most broadly defined as the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two. Defined in this manner, the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences themselves.”
- Editorial of the first issue of the Journal of Material Culture , March 1996.
Some theoretical approaches
People and things, questions of agency, object/subject dualism, consumption, commodification.
- Actor-network theory (ANT). Key theorists: Bruno Latour; Alfred Gell; John Law.
- Non-representational theory. Key theorist: Nigel Thrift.
- ‘Thing theory’. Key theorist: Bill Brown.
- Dialectical/‘holist’ approach. Key theorist: Daniel Miller.
- Social life/cultural biography of things. Key theorists: Arjun Appadurai, Igor Kopytoff.
The theoretical ideas I explore … derive from a
dialectical perspective, in which material objects
are viewed as an integral and inseparable aspect of
all relationships. People exist for us in and through
their material presence … sometimes these
apparently mute forms can be made to speak more
easily and eloquently to the nature of relationships
than can those with persons.”
- Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (2008), pp.
Some methodological approaches
You might start with:
- People
- A group of people (ethnography)
- A particular person
- Things
- A whole class of objects
- A institutional or personal collection
- A single object (object biography)
- A particular place
- A particular time
Example: Public Parks
Could focus on:
• People’s experiences of using public parks
(interviews, diaries, films, photos …)
• The physical landscape or archaeology of the
park/the use of a particular park at a
particular time.
• The history of park benches.
• A particular park bench – its changing use and
meaning over time.
The inscription (1)
In Platt Fields
The inscription (2)
“This statue commemorates the support that the
working people of Manchester gave in their fight for
the abolition of slavery during the American Civil
War. By supporting the union under president
Lincoln at a time when there was an economic
blockade of the southern states the Lancashire
cotton workers were denied access to raw cotton
which caused considerable unemployment
throughout the cotton industry. Extracts of
President Lincoln’s letter to the working people of
Manchester thanking them for their help are
reproduced around this plinth.”
Lincoln goes ‘bling’ …
From the particular to the general
“I’d like to write something that comes from
things the way wine comes from grapes.”
- Walter Benjamin, On Hashish , 1931.
• What are the problems of using this kind of
method?
• How can we situate a single object within a
larger argument or narrative?