Material Culture Studies: An Annotated Bibliography (1 of 2) Soledad Altrudi

I am often asked about the “stuff” in the title of my new book, Comics and Stuff. While work on material culture is now common place across many different fields in the humanities and social sciences (from Literary studies to art history to sociology and anthropology), it is still less well known in media studies or more broadly in the study of popular culture. So one goal of my book is to open up space for interdisciplinary discussions between scholars of popular media and scholars of material culture. I have found digging into this “stuff” illuminating in part because it helps us to map the relations between popular culture and everyday life through a lens other than (though not necessarily excluding) fandom studies. Stuff, like other aspects of culture, is “ordinary” in the ways that Raymond Williams famously used that term. We use our stuff to map our identities, to express our pleasures, to make meaning and order of our lives. There are many schools for thinking about material culture but I have found that focus on “stuff” as resources from which identity construction and meaning making emerges to be the most generative for my own work. The following bibliography was produced by Soledad Altrudi, one of my PhD candidates, as the end product of an independent readings semester she did with me last fall. This is a somewhat different mix of scholarship than I drew upon in my book, though many of the readings overlap. I wanted to share it with my blog readers to suggest the wide array of working being done today on material culture and everyday life and to provide some potential background reading that might help expand and inform the conversations my book hopes to initiate. Dig into this stuff and share your thoughts—Henry Jenkins

————————

Material Culture Studies – An Annotated Bibliography

Soledad Altrudi

The term “material culture” and “material culture studies” (MCS) appeared during the 20th century from within the fields of archeology and socio-cultural anthropology, although its roots can be found in museum-based studies of technology of the 19th century. Back then, artifacts like spears, knives or shields were taken as material vehicles through which different cultures were retroactively understood and ordered across time and space in a “scientific manner.” However, MCS’s emergence as a distinct field of study can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when a battle was fought against mainstream social science to try to demonstrate that things did matter; that is, that focusing on material things was not synonymous with fetichizing them but rather that material forms constituted a key mechanism for social reproduction and ideological dominance.

Despite its narrow origins, MCS presently involves researchers from a wide range of fields, making interdisciplinarity one of its salient characteristics. But not all theoretical traditions engage with material culture in the same way. For example, “classic” critical approaches rooted in Marxist theory are concerned with production-based analyses that present material culture solely as an instance of capitalist ideology, as commodities that alienated subjects are no longer able to appropriate through consumption. Structuralist and semiotic analyses give more capabilities to objects and instead approach them as signs that refer to something other than themselves, as signifiers that point to culturally created and sustained signifieds. There are also more “radical” approaches to the study of things, such as actor-network-theory, which significantly extend the concept of agency beyond the human actors and make it a property of ‘non-humans’ too.

The bibliography you will find below focuses on cultural approaches to material culture, which share with the semiotic-structural tradition an insistence on objects as holders of important cultural meanings that do some sort of “cultural work,” like establishing identity or social status (although it also it breaks apart from that tradition because it is not equally committed to a strong model of linguistic structuralism). The study of objects within the realm of cultural studies is situated in a world that is filled with ongoing, local and vernacular processes of reinterpretation and appropriation, regardless of the intention of material goods as manufactured. In this context, culture is dynamically constituted through meaningful people-object interactions. 

This post intends to be an annotated, in-depth exploration of the study of material culture, mostly from this perspective. Thus, it reviews the field of “material culture studies” as an interdisciplinary space that takes things as its object of study. The first part is intended to cover the theoretical foundations of cultural approaches to the study of stuff, although it also includes more “radical” approaches. The second leaves the high theoretical ground to explore the roles that both objects in general and technological artifacts in particular play in everyday life. Finally, the last section concentrates on the connections of MCS and the field of communication, and considers the materiality of media technologies.

1) Theoretical Foundations:

Cultural approaches to material culture

Appadurai, A. (1986). The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

The contributors in this volume set out to reexamine commodities and the cultural determination of their value, conceiving them neither as value-free objects nor as just the result of human labor. In the introduction, Appadurai lays the theoretical ground on which the essays stand on, namely the idea that objects have social lives (or “cultural biographies”) and that what he calls the “commodity situation” is but one aspect of it, “the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature.” In this biographical approach, things move in and out of the commodity state, depending on certain standards that define its exchangeability and the social environment or arena in which they are situated and exchanged. Although the idea of studying things through the idiom of life histories has a complex history of its own, this edited collection has been very influential in the study of material things because of its embrace of a cultural perspective for the analysis of objects and their meanings through successive recontextualizations.

Daston, L. (2004). Things that talk: Object lessons from art and science. New York: Zone Books.

Concerned with how talkativeness and thingness hang together, this book tries to “make things eloquent,” that is to make things talk without resorting to ventriloquism. In this sense, the essays in this collection aim to transcend the opposition between matter and meaning, and thus take for granted that things are simultaneously material and meaningful—that matter constrains meanings and vice versa. Some chapters focus on malleable things, like the Rorschach test, to show that even those have a bony materiality that needs to be accounted for, while others look at more stolidly functional things, like soap (and its bubbles), but highlight the “aura of the symbolic” they also radiate. Therefore, by emphasizing that things communicate by what they are as well as by how they mean, Things that talk constitutes a fantastic (and much needed) addition to the study of material culture.

Hicks, D. (2010) ‘The material-cultural turn’. In Hicks, D., & Beaudry, M. (2010). The Oxford handbook of material culture studies (pp. 25–98).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This chapter offers a very detailed yet effective historical overview of the study of “material culture,” from the early stages in museum-based studies of “technology” and “primitive art” to current debates over this idea, such as considering things as events and things as effects. This makes The material-cultural turn an excellent resource for continuous reference for those interested in this “field” as it excels at tracking important developments, punctuated as “turns,” in academic conceptions (from structuralist and semiotic approaches to practice theory and more agential approaches) as well as maps key scholars whose contributions have shaped material culture studies (such as Chris Tilley, Arjun Appadurai, Ian Hodder, Daniel Miller, Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold, among others).

Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. In Appadurai, A. (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–91). Cambridge University Press

Although the entire work edited by Appadurai became a seminal resource for the study of material culture, Kopytoff’s chapter is particularly salient as it complements the idea of the “commodity situation” (as opposed to a fixed condition) by continuing to adopt a biographical line of analysis. In particular, he focuses on “the common” and “the singular” as it pertains to objects, and introduces the notions of saleability as the indicator of commodity status as well as non-saleability, which is what imparts to a thing a special aura of apartness from the mundane and the common. The main argument is that commodities can be singularized by being pulled out of their commodity sphere, particularly in the context of complex societies that present a clear yearning for singularization.

Mauss, M. (2009). Gifts and the obligation to return gifts. In F. Candlin & G. Raiford (Eds.), The object reader (pp. 21–31). London: Routledge.

This short text provides a detailed account of the rationale behind the system of exchange and obligation that constitutes the focus of the book The Gift. Building on the idea that gifts given among people in Polynesia and the American Northwest have to be reciprocated, Mauss locates the operating figure in the hau, the spiritual power of the thing (known as toanga), which always seeks to return to original owner and place of origin. Underlying these exchange patterns is the belief that things themselves are actually a part of the giver, which means that to give something is to give a part of oneself. Thus, the exchange is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons thus yielding proper human relationships.

McCracken, G. (1988). Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Building from the fields of consumer behavior and anthropology, this book focuses on the inter-relation between culture and consumption, and provides a "systematic enquiry into the cultural and symbolic properties of consumer goods." After a historical overview of the making of the modern consumer with stops in the XVI, XVIII and XIX centuries, the book arrives at its linchpin: McCracken's model of how the meanings that operate in the culturally constituted world are transferred to consumer goods via certain mechanisms (advertisement and fashion) and then transferred to consumers via symbolic action (certain rituals). A crucial contribution this book makes to the study of material culture is its analysis on how material objects substantiate the cultural categories that organize everyday experience in the world. However, in McCracken's framework, things just signify -ideas, values, cultural properties, etc.; that is, they act as the vessels through which cultural principles and categories are made visible. In this sense, this book represents earlier stages in the study of stuff that disregard not just the material specificity of things but also how things can enact reality.

Miller, D. (1987). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell

Although rather abstract and highly theoretical, this earlier work by Miller comes as a response to the prevailing structuralist approach to consumption at the time of publication. Focused on material culture, mass consumption and theories of objectification, this book also outlines some of Miller’s key concepts including the humility of things (that apparently banal everyday objects order our world and mediate social relations silently), the idea of context in the study of material culture (that the pervasive presence of artifacts constitutes the context for modern life) and the extended application of anthropological studies of objects to the world of modern industrial capitalism (as opposed to the predominant focus on pre-industrial and non-Western situations). Overall, by departing from Marxist critical readings of objects as alienating commodities, this book highlights the productive nature of consumption as it discusses how modern consumers constantly transform those commodities into things of everyday use beyond what their intended, manufactured purpose was.

Miller, D. (2005). Materiality: an introduction. In Miller, D. (Ed.). (2005). Materiality. Duke University Press.

In this introduction to the homonymous book, Miller relies on philosophy to theoretically transcend the duality of subject–object as part of a wider attempt to distance himself from theories of representation (like semiotic analysis) that appreciate objects as signs and symbols that represent subjects (which reduces the former to the latter). Building on the work of Goffman, Gombrich, Hegel, Marx, Simmel, Maus and Bourdieu, among others, Miller revisits his argument about “the humility of things,” discusses the process and dialectics of objectification as well as how notions of agency and power affect materiality and material culture, and ultimately argues that it is necessary to show how the things that people make, make people.

Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity.

Building on previous insight and ethnographic studies, Stuff continues to make the case for the replacement of a theory of stuff as representation with stuff as one part of a process of objectification—objects make us as part of the very same process by which we make them. Less theoretical and more empirical, Miller exemplifies his exploration through discussions of particular forms of clothing, housing, the Internet and cell phones, and life-stage shifts in relationships with the inanimate. Through these explorations, the book charts a path towards material culture studies not only by rejecting the popular view of stuff (as objects signifying) but also by presenting theories of material culture and demonstrating how those can be applied to the messy world of everyday life.

Woodward, I. (2007). Understanding material culture. London: SAGE

Also embracing a more positive/productive account of consumption and an approach that studies objects and people’s relations with them, this book seeks to demonstrate that “people require objects to understand and perform aspects of selfhood, and to navigate the terrain of culture more broadly.” However, what sets this book apart is the useful review of the diverse theoretical approaches to material objects as culture it provides, which transforms into a very valuable (and didactic) resource.

New Materialisms: Others as Agents

Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Here the authors turn to the figures of "ghosts" and "monsters" to unsettle the human and its presumed center stage in modern life by highlighting the web of histories and bodies from which life emerges, and by attuning us to worlds otherwise. Thus, by paying attention to how subjects become with others, they partake in an analysis that resembles Miller’s discussion of objectification and that ultimately displaces the human subject from the center stage.  In its place, the authors place “open-ended assemblages,” gatherings that coalesce in coordination across many kinds of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs, always in flux, always remaking us as well as our others.

Mitman, G., Armiero, M., & Emmett, R. (2018). Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Organized as a collection of objects found in a "Cabinet of Curiosities form the Anthropocene," this book is a good contribution to the study of things because it invites readers to see objects not just through the lens of human agency but through the lives of nonhuman beings who also shape and are shaped by those relationships and processes embodied in material forms. The essays rely on a multitude of artifacts, from a recycled kimchi jar to a documentary to the pesticide pump, to highlight how human hubris informs those material forms (as well as how other forces at play also get inscribed). Other emotional responses to the Anthropocene, such as acceptance, guilt and ingenuity are evoked in the chapters that discuss how artifacts, from cars to marine animal satellite tags, impact the bodies of nonhuman others both intentionally and not. Although eclectic by design, this juxtaposition feels somewhat disjointed at times, and some of the works seem too broad or focus more on the Anthropocene as a complex trope. However, as a collection of curiosities dotted with emotional investment, the items unsettle culture/nature binaries and provoke wonder-full thinking.

Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

In this book, Mol sets out to demonstrate that it is possible to engage in an ethnography of disease. Describing this effort as a study in empirical philosophy, her epistemology is based on focusing on the daily practices of patients and doctors, which are the "who" that enacts the "what." This constant foregrounding of practicalities and events (the reason why she calls the work a praxiography instead of ethnography) renders an account of a disease as a story about practices that develops over multiple sites and that entails vascular doctors and patients, but equally so a patient’s dog, microscopes, tints, knives, tables, etc. This multiplicity is not synonymous with plurality, however; in the ontology of medical practice that Mol proposes, there is one disease with many accounts that eventually coordinate (in various ways) as there is only one body that is multiple but that hangs together. The author’s insistence on objects as part of events aligns her work with newer approaches to the study of material culture, particularly those informed by Ingold. Overall, this is a remarkable book that seeks to transcend the subject/object divide but that does so by looking at the medical field.

Olsen, B. (2006). Scenes from a troubled engagement. In Tilley, C., S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands, & P. Spyer (Eds.) (2006), Handbook of material culture (pp. 85-103). London: SAGE.

In this book chapter, Olsen effectively traces the influence of post-structuralism in material culture studies and offers a nuanced account of this influx. He specifically focuses on the post-structuralist contributions of textualism and intertext as they apply to the study of objects, which ultimately permitted the understanding of material culture as a text that can be re-read by different people in new contexts. While this represents a significant source of theoretical inspiration, Olsen notes that it ultimately conflates text and materiality as ontological entities, failing to fully appreciate that material culture is in the world in a fundamentally different way from text and language. Olsen also discusses the contribution of post-structuralism to academic writing, which allowed a questioning of how literary forms intervened in the construction of the object. However, he Olsen quickly points out that in celebrating new ways of writing as they try to let complexity and hybridity shine through, there is a risk of creating a representational form that tries to be isomorphic with the represented, which is odd given the legacy that questions such mimicry.

————————————-

Soledad Altrudi is a PhD candidate at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she works at the intersection of STS and media studies, and explores the various effects that technology has on our environment as well as on human/non‐human‐other entanglements. Her dissertation focuses on Parque Nacional Patagonia as a case of rewilding in the Anthropocene, one that entails not only a conservation strategy but also works as a device for ordering human-nonhuman interactions in a highly mediatized environment.