Material Culture

Material Culture Studies: History and Ideology

The titles, topics and contents of the academic disciplines are generally received as though they were a logical, or at least reasonable, outcome of a division of academic labour into relatively discrete categories. We have literature therefore we have English, we have universal properties of materials therefore we have Physics. We assume there ought to be a discipline that studies language, even though this discipline has changed radically from one that a century ago was concerned largely with the evolution and the dispersal of languages and at another stage was almost entirely concerned with grammar. It seems reasonable that both are called linguistics, not because these approaches had much in common, but because of the object, language, that seems to require academic attention. Yet we do not assume that there must be a discipline concerned with the topic of artefacts – that is, objects created by us – even though one might have imagined that subjects as diverse as architecture and design, archaeology and indeed human geography would require such a discipline to exist.

So the study of material culture can be approached from the perspective of what would have existed if disciplines had been created according to a more reasonable allocation of academic endeavour. This may or may not coincide with the description of the nascent sub-discipline of material culture that currently does exist, mainly under the auspices of anthropology. To move from the merely extant to the contemplation of the counter-factual, to question what might have been, raises some fundamental issues. Can one have theories of material culture in much the same way that one has theories of language or space? How would such a discipline complement others and contribute to their relationships one with another?

Putting a counter-factual perspective on this issue also raises a further question. Is it indeed merely fortuitous historical developments that account for the absence of an established discipline of material culture, or might there be some particular reason why this possible discipline became in some way an impossible discipline? I intend to argue the latter: to suggest that it is not just that we don't have material culture, but that we have taken huge steps to try to ensure that we don't have [Page 272]it, and that the grounds for this lie deep in the fundamental ideologies by which we live and construct our secular and religious cosmologies. Thus, to construct this counter-factual material culture we need first to acknowledge and then to confront the visceral distaste that is elicited by its very existence. This is why, before embarking on a description of material culture, I will first address the issue of materiality itself and the reasons why it has evoked such ambivalence. I will then examine how material culture studies evolved as much through a shifting set of re-alignments with other disciplines, such as anthropology and the emergent cultural studies, as through any established core concern. This then raises the question of whether we could or should look to such a core theory, as for example a theory of objects per se, and if so what such a theory might look like. Following this I will turn to current studies of material culture and try to characterize these through three brief case studies: research on housing, on clothing and on new media. Finally I will fly the kite for one radical implication of taking materiality as central to the study of humanity, which would be the dethronement of social studies and social science.

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