Material Culture

Material culture consists of the material things people make and use. Sometimes examples are called artifacts. Their material aspect is concrete or manifest physically in ways we can perceive through our senses. Their cultural aspect indicates material culture is an integral part of a way of life. Material culture embodies and also gives rise to consciousness, ideas, and spirituality—factors that contribute to one's identity. A major focus of contemporary material culture studies is everyday life and lived experience. This contrasts historical assessments of the material culture of everyday life as inauthentic, trivial, and false and therefore unworthy of serious study.

Material culture includes examples that one may think lack physical substance. Space is an example. It may not seem as tangible as an engineer's blueprint or the tools, machines, wood, brick, steel, and glass construction workers use; yet architects treat space in terms of weight, density, and shape, which they form as they design buildings to contain and interact with it. Additionally, together with regional, environmental, and landscape planners, architects elicit from space a particular character, even a sense of time and quality of movement. Think of the spaces you inhabit—the interior of your home, a classroom, or a car. Material qualities of the spaces result from the ways economic, social, and cultural forces along with our uses of the spaces and their interrelation with other features of the material environment render them intimate or formal, serene or bustling, dull and heavy or dynamic.

Material culture also refers to a methodology—in other words, a set of principles underlying the study [Page 437]of artifacts. Art historian Jules Prown studied artifacts as primary data. According to Prown, features such as the arrangement and appearance of the materials of which artifacts consist reveal the mind of an individual creator and something about her or his society. According to Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, in this way artifacts provide valuable bridges between our mental and physical worlds, as well as between individuals and groups and present and past ways of life. Beliefs and consciousness cannot be divorced from the material world because they help shape the appearance and use of artifacts, which in turn contribute to the ideas, feelings, and actions that constitute ways of life.

This entry explores the use of material culture in various academic disciplines and the study of identity within the context of material culture.