Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains, and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of "things." This cutting-edge work examines the current state of material culture as well as how this field of study may be extended and developed in the future.
Objectification
Objectification
The concept of objectification may be held to be, in a profound sense, at the heart of all studies of material culture. A concern with objectification is simultaneously a concern with the nature of materiality itself. Is the very notion of a category, ‘material culture’, misguided and essentially arbitrary, an eclectic grouping together of very different kinds of things or objects whose only superficial resemblance is that they share a property of materiality? Or is the materiality of things a significant and important attribute that makes, say, a consideration of houses and pianos, glass beads and food intrinsically important and meaningful in itself, a category to be taken seriously in social analysis? An objectification perspective provides an answer to both these basic questions, as ...
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