Material Culture: Understanding the Relationship Between People and Things, Lecture notes of Network Theory

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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?