Material Culture

Understanding Culture through Material Artifacts

The lives of preliterate and other past cultures are often visible only in the remains of their material culture: the shards of pottery; the burial mounds that have preserved weapons and jewelry; the unearthed traces of homes, grain stores, middens; the wrecks of ships and their contents. When recovered from beneath the ground or the sea, these artifacts become the treasures studied by ethnologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists and often classified, cataloged, and preserved in museums. The material culture of past societies can be consumed in the activities of collecting old things or simply through visiting museums and looking at the objects while imagining a different form of life. Archaeology is the study of the physical remains of earlier human societies, and while much of its focus is on the form of artifacts, the precise dating of objects and the environmental context in which they existed are as important.

Anthropology, the study of humankind, has a similar interest in the material life of different cultures but extends beyond those that have ceased to exist. The modern approach to ethnographic study within anthropology can be traced to Bronislaw Malinowski's work with the Trobriand Islanders during the First World War. Malinowski described the shells, the armbands, and the canoes of the Kula exchange system, the status economy of the Trobriand Islands. What is distinctive about Malinowski's ethnographic account is that it has to do with the social activities in which things were bound up rather than of things as objects—he describes what people did with the things and how they came to be vehicles for meaning and significance. The material stuff of shells and canoes that he describes is embedded within the cultural practices of magic and ritual, as well as those of manufacture, bartering, and exchange. The material objects of the Kula are analyzed by Malinowski as entwined in the people's culture of myths and beliefs, so, for example, he describes the canoes of the Trobrianders as items of “material culture” that are defined by their purposes, their ownership, and the ceremonies and customs associated with them: “A craft is surrounded by an atmosphere of romance, built up of tradition and of personal experience. It is an object of cult and admiration, a living thing, possessing its own individuality” (1932, 105). A special creeper, called the wayugo, is used for tying the [Page 917]decking to the hulls and outriggers, but this is also the name used for the magic and the spells that are cast during canoe building. These include rituals that call on ancestors to sit in the canoes and invoke the spirit of a mythical “flying canoe.”

...