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

OBJECTS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Affective objects

Attfield, J. (2000). Wild things: The material culture of everyday life. Oxford: Berg.

Attfield’s work is grounded in material culture studies, with which it shares the exploration of how modern artefacts are appropriated by consumers and thus transformed from manufactured products to become the stuff of everyday life, and how they have a direct involvement with matters of identity. However, this book centers more on the design stage of objects, the study of which Attfield wants to dislodge from traditional aesthetic frames devised by conventional art and to present as just one more aspect of the material culture of the everyday. Moreover, while acknowledging that design in this context refers not to a good design aesthetic but to a form of objectifying sociality, she also posits that things remain wild because they never merely “do what they are told;” that is, they fail to always act as their makers intended because things have an attitude and they talk back in their dynamic existence in the material world.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Halton, E. (1981). The meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge University Press

The meaning of things is, essentially, an empirical analysis of the interactions between persons and objects. As a whole, this work is representative of studies of material culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s in that it seeks to demonstrate that objects do not merely reflect culture but actively contribute to meaning processes. Its greatest contribution is the schematization of object-person relationships in 3 levels, the one pertaining to the individual self (things express and anticipate qualities of the self), the social self (objects as symbols of social integration and differentiation, as well as role models of socialization) and the cosmic self (they also signify broader, more existential meanings). Moreover, although race and class difference are absent from analysis, there is a good discussion on the relations of people with objects as they grow older and why that might be. However, while this book grants objects agentic capacity, as makers and users of the humans who make them and use them, it fails to consider the ontology of objects outside the specific instances in which those are made meaningful to persons. And even when it does, it concentrates solely in the symbolic meaning of things as applied to the development of self- and social psychic consciousness.

Edwards, E. (1999). Photographs as objects of memory. In Candlin, F., & Guins, R. (Ed.s) (2008). The object reader. Routledge

The focus of this chapter is on the photograph and its presentational forms as material culture because, Edwards argues, it is precisely that materiality what grants photographs a privileged position as conduits of memory. Put differently, it is not just the image that is contemplated but the material form in which it is presented what works to make photographs a socially salient object, one specifically created to remember. Thus, far from considering this materiality as neutral support, Edwards delves on its plasticity as an object that can be handled, framed, crumpled, caressed, put under a pillow or wept over, which ultimately makes it an intrinsically active thing that demands a physical engagement. Overall, this chapter is a great addition to material culture studies as it presents photographs in a new light that, without discounting the image itself, adds a new layer of complexity to these everyday, fascinating objects.

Hallam, E., & Hockey, J. (2001). Death, memory and material culture. Oxford: Berg Publishers

The starting point for this work is that facing death, ours or that of a loved one, entails ritualized social practices that mobilize domains of material objects, visual images and written text. This sets the tone, as the rest of the book focuses on artifacts and embodied social practices, both of which are crucial ways of producing and sustaining memories that, by connecting our present with the past, provide a sense of recovery of those lost. While the authors cover a spectrum of materials and detail how they were employed in specific cultures and times, they also stress the role of space - the spatial context of objects and the spatially located practices - as yet another fundamental dimension of material cultures of death. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the material dimensions of memory making are significant because they constitute social and cultural processes through which lives are remembered (and futures, imagined) and also because they mark our deaths and remind us of our own mortality. Although the elaborate articulation of these terms marks this book as a unique contribution to the field of material studies, other salient contributions of this book include: 1) the recovery of marginalized memory practices via its attention to what occurs in domestic spheres; 2) its demonstration of the flexibility of (many different) objects to be re-contextualized and made to signify different things; and 3) the acknowledgment of the disturbing and powerful social agency that materialities can have.

Memento mori: small two-sided ivory pendant produced in the Netherlands around 1500. View of young woman / View of cadaver ‘Ecce Finem’ © Trustees of the Wernher Foundation

Miller, D. (2008). The comfort of things. Cambridge: Polity.

Although this book follows a similar methodology to The meaning of things (see above), its output is entirely different. Here, Miller has transformed the information his team gathered on a random street in London about the stuff that people have in their homes into a rich ethnographic account broken into thirty individual stories. Clearly aligned with his dialectical conceptual perspective, these “portraits” explore the roles of objects in our relationships to each other and to ourselves, ultimately showing that the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer those are too with people. 

Moran, A., & O'Brien, S. (Eds.). (2014). Love objects: Emotion, design and material culture. London: Bloomsbury.

Appropriately titled, this anthology focuses on material embodiments of love and, like Miller, explores the potency of objects in our lives and the relationships that exist between people and them. Additionally, although it does look at objects as symbols and representations, it also casts them as active participants in and mediators of our relationships. However, the contribution that this work makes to this list is a gender studies perspective to the analysis of a set of less studied objects, such as the playboy’s pipe, sex shops for women in London or amateur female shoemaking, as well as objects traditionally linked with the female, domestic sphere. 

Turkle, S. (2008). “Objects inspire”. In Candlin, F., & Guins, R. (2008). The object reader. London: Routledge.

This is a short article that explores the role of objects as things that inspire, focusing specifically in the importance of objects in the development not just of an interest but a love for science. After relaying the overdetermined stories of Lacan (who was inspired by knots) and Sacks (who found reassuring stability in the periodic table), Turkle explains that those objects that "speak to" a child are important not because of the ideas they inspire but because they provide children with the feeling of having a "charge," a "thrill" or a "secret theory" that leads them to want to have more. This emotion constitutes the transitional space of learning. 

Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

This book is a fundamental resource in material culture studies as it contributed to popularizing the study of objects as things that are part of ourselves (and vice versa). Organized as a series of brief autobiographical essays, this collection explores in-depth how objects can be companions to our emotional lives as well as provocations of thought processes. In addition to providing a detailed examination of objects in their connections to daily life, the book also engages with them as intellectual practice and so intersperses excerpts from other theorists, from Levi-Strauss to Sontag to Piaget, to add to the analysis. The piece, as whole, effectively demonstrates the potency of objects in our everyday lives as they bring together intellect and emotion.

Clockwise: A comic, a rolling pin, a suitcase. In Turkle (2007), Evocative objects

TECHNOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS AS MATERIAL CULTURE

Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Eds). Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994

This text is part of the cluster of works that constitute a more radical approach to the study of things, such as that represented by Actor Network Theory, in that Akrich posits technical objects as full participants in the building of heterogenous networks that bring together human and nonhuman actants. Moreover, this is a good piece to engage with notions of user appropriation, namely how those who interact with, in this case, technical objects are able to invent new practices and applications and thus alter the “script” inscribed in those objects by designers.  

Eglash, R. (2006). Technology as material culture. In Tilley, C., S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands, & P. Spyer (Eds.), Handbook of material culture (pp. 329-340. London: SAGE. 

In this piece, Eglash provides an overview of the history of social analysis of technology. Although to certain audiences this might be too brief and elementary of an overview, its strength lies in the useful mapping of fundamental thinkers and key works. After describing the more commonly known perspectives of technological determinism and social construction, Eglash focuses on actor-network-theory as a site of postmodernist analysis, and ends with a rather abstract discussion on complexity theory and its synthesis with technological analysis. 

Latour, B.  (1994). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Eds). Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The missing masses the title mentions refers to the sum of those nonhumans that, although hidden, make up our morality and constrain our daily activities in the world (which is reminiscent of Miller’s theoretical insight about the humility of things). From doors to speed bumps, these objects have been recipients of force as well as values, duties and ethics. Thus, the premise of this short text is that we need to rethink society by adding to it the facts and the artifacts that make up large sections of our social ties (which also means revising traditional social theories where the missing masses truly are). 

Magaudda, P. (2014). The broken boundaries between science and technology studies and cultural sociology: Introduction to an interview with Trevor Pinch. Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 63-76

Although this piece has a strong focus on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and musical technologies, it is a good resource to understand how this field and cultural studies intersect when it comes to the analysis of things. In particular, it highlights the centrality of objects and materiality in classical STS empirical studies, even if those are sometimes solely read as signifiers of a complex social world (which is also the case in some cultural studies works), as well as the key role material culture—and technical objects in particular—plays in shaping social processes and cultural universes.

Kline, R. and Pinch, T. (1996). Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States. Technology and Culture 37(4), 763–795

This work takes the case of the introduction of the car in rural Unites States to demonstrate an empirical application of the authors’ model of social construction of technology (known as SCOT, developed elsewhere) and as such represents a seminal piece in the field of STS. Like Akrich’s, this text highlights how manipulation and physical engagement with objects by users can altogether expand the repertoire of things’ purposes, abilities or even identities—like a car becoming a butter churner. Moreover, it also shows not only how gender norms are reified through objects, but how institutional power can constrict and limit the fungibility of objects.

Vannini, P. (Ed.). (2009). Material culture and technology in everyday life: ethnographic approaches. New York: Peter Lang.

In conversation with modern material culture studies, Material culture and technology in everyday life conceives "material culture" and "technology" as one overlapping generative site from which to study the "attitude" of everyday life and the practices it manifests (sometimes known as techne). In other words, to study material culture is to look at the technology underpinning our culture, and to study technology is to study the material characteristics of everyday life. The interesting thing about the book is the multiple perspectives it encompasses as it provides accounts of different treatments of nonhuman others and their materiality, from SCOT and ANT to approaches that see objects as acquiring cultural meaning via narratives, to the author's preferred understanding: interactionist approaches that see material technoculture residing neither in nonhuman objects nor in human actors, but instead in the emergent product of their interaction. Additionally, the work includes more explicitly methodological and empirical chapters, as well as longer empirical studies, in line with the importance that the author assigns to ethnography as the method par excellence to study the mundane of everyday life.

COMMUNICATION MEDIA & MATERIALITY

Bazin, A. (1960). The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly, 13(4), 4–4.

In this piece, Bazin reflects on the idea of the preservation of life by a representation of life and, by discussing mummies, statuettes, paintings and ultimately photographs in these terms, he is exploring the role that material objects play in memory keeping and death related rituals. Additionally, this work reflects on the photographic camera as a nonliving agent able to automatically form a realistic, objective image of the world, which ultimately enables photography to embalm time and grants it a heightened quality of credibility.

Brown, B. (2015). Other things. Chicago [Illinois]: The University of Chicago Press

Extending his theoretical interest centered on the thingness of things (which is different from objecthood), Brown attempts here to connect that line of work with renewed interest and newer approaches to the study of things (some of which are mentioned here) while providing a historical analysis of the literary and visual arts’ approach or apprehension of the object world in the form of a series of broad-ranging readings on “other things,” from Achille’s shield, a piece of sand glass to a cellphone. Overall, while he recognizes the fact that, no matter how banal, objects have unanticipated force, Brown rejects a “flat ontology” and challenges the retreat into the object characteristic of posthumanist approaches.

Garvey, E. (2012). Alternative histories in African-American scrapbooks. In Writing with scissors: American scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (pp. 131–171). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

This chapter in Garvey’s book is a significant addition to this list of material culture studies because it demonstrates a comparatively less explored facet of stuff, which is that things that circulate can also create communities. While the histories those scrapbooks told in the 19th and early 20th century were meant to fill the gaps in mainstream accounts that failed to properly assert African American importance in the country’s history, the scrapbooks themselves had a life and presence within black communities as they were made available for others to read in people’s homes or passed hand to hand. In this context, these mediated interrelationships in a way that not only helped nurture and sustain a shared identity but also created a counterpublic.

Left to right: Page of Alexander Gumby’s scrapbook. In Garvey (2012), Writing with scissors. Reel to Reel, installation by Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher. On the cover of Sterne (2012), MP3.

Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P. J., & Foot, K. A. (Eds.). (2014). Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Understading media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena, this book seeks to shed light on the often-understudied materiality of devices and networks (without disregarding its relationship and strong linkages with the symbolic) following approaches that stem from the meeting point between communication and media studies on the one hand and science and technology on the other. Of more relevance for this list is this book’s Part I, which specifically focuses on the materiality of mediated knowledge and expression, and considers how communication technology studies might also engage more fully with the materiality of the devices themselves without necessarily opening itself to charges of simple technological determinism.

McLuhan, M. “The medium is the message.” In, McLuhan, M. A., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

With his now over-cited phrase “the medium is the message,” McLuhan’s work is another cornerstone of a list that wants to bring together material culture and communication studies together in dialog.  Treating the sign as the thing, media appear in this analysis as constitutive of civilization and of being itself, as extensions of ourselves and our senses, rather than as mere holders of (or means for) content.

Sterne, J. (2012). MP3 the meaning of a format. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.

In this account, Sterne goes over the mutual-shaping process by which the development of the MP3 influenced and was influenced by cultural shifts, one that extends back to the early days of psychoacoustics at AT&T’s Bell Labs, while simultaneously highlighting the interconnected histories of sound and communication in the 20th century. This book works to demonstrate how analog but also digital things (because software and data have their own materialities) like compression and formats shape the cultural practices of listening to music, communicating and representing, and how communication technologies, in all their physicality as well as their articulation with particular practices, are a fundamental part of what it means to speak or hear.

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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.