What Objects Mean

An Introduction to Material Culture

Arthur Asa Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611329032
• eBook ISBN: 9781315415833
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Arthur Asa Berger, author of an array of texts in communication, popular culture, and social theory, is back with the second edition of his popular, user-friendly guide for students who want to understand the social meanings of objects. In this broadly interdisciplinary text, Berger takes the reader through half a dozen theoretical models that are commonly used to analyze objects. He then describes and analyzes eleven objects, many of them new to this edition—including smartphones, Facebook, hair dye, and the American flag—showing how they demonstrate concepts like globalization, identity, and nationalism. The book includes a series of exercises that allow students to analyse objects in their own environment. Brief and inexpensive, this introductory guide will be used in courses ranging from anthropology to art history, pop culture to psychology.

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Part I

Theoretical Approaches to Material Culture

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The objects which surround us do not simply have utilitarian aspects; rather, they serve as a kind of mirror which reflects our own image. Objects which surround us permit us to discover more and more aspects of ourselves. Owning a boat, for example, for a person who did not own a boat before, produces new understandings of aspects of his own personality; and also a new bond of communication is established with all boat owners. At the same time some of the power strivings of the individual come out more clearly into the open, in the speed attained, the ability to manipulate the boat; and the conquest of a new medium, water, in the form of lakes and rivers and the ocean, becomes a new discovery.

In a sense, therefore, the knowledge of the soul of things is possibly a very direct and new and revolutionary way of discovering the soul of man. The power of various types of objects to bring out into the open new aspects of the personality of modern man is great. The more intimate knowledge of as many different types of products a man has, the richer his life will be….

The things which surround us motivate us to a very large extent in our everyday behavior. They also motivate us as the goals of our life—the Cadillac that we are dreaming about, the swimming pool that we are working for, the kind of clothes, the kind of trips, and even the kind of people we want to meet from a social-status viewpoint are influencing factors. In the final analysis objects motivate our life probably at least as much as the Oedipus complex or childhood experiences do.

Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire

1.
Making Sense of Material Culture

Every day we swim in a sea of images and navigate our way through a world of things, and many of the images we look at are of the things we have, want to have, or believe (thanks to advertising) that we need to have. Everyone has certain basic needs, such as housing, clothing, and food, but most people want many other things: automobiles, tools, accessories to our clothing, television sets, food products, computers, tablets, smartphones… the list goes on, almost endlessly. From our childhood until our old age, we are given things or continually buying things that we hope will make us healthier and more attractive, will show our love to someone—our partners, our children, our parents—and will enrich our lives and those of our loved ones. What Dichter points out in the quotation that begins this chapter is that the objects we own also reveal a great deal about ourselves, and that studying objects is a useful way to find out about people and gain insights into, as he puts it, “the soul of man.”

Defining Material Culture

The things we buy or are given are known as “objects” and “artifacts” in scholarly discourse, and these objects and artifacts form what social scientists call material culture. Material culture is the world of things that people make and things that we purchase or possess, so it is part of our consumer culture. Material culture is a subject of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and many other kinds of social scientists and scholars because these objects provide information about what we are like and how we live now—and how we lived in earlier times. Some scholars use the term “object” for more or less contemporary material culture and “artifact” for the material culture of earlier times, but like many scholars of material culture, I see them as interchangeable.

In his book, Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past, Chris Caple defines objects and artifacts (2006:1):

The word “artefact” is derived from the Latin terms ars or artis, meaning skill in joining, and factum meaning deed, also facere meaning to make or do…. Thus an artefact can be considered to mean any physical entity that is formed by human beings from a nail to the building it is in. The term “object” is also widely used to refer to any physical entity created by human beings…. For the purpose of this book, the terms “artefact” and “object” can be used interchangeably.

Caple uses the British spelling for “artefact.” For our purposes, I will define artifacts as relatively simple objects showing human workmanship. Automobiles and airplanes may have materiality, but they are very complex and complicated machines and, in fact, have many different smaller and less complex artifacts in them. Scholars may argue about definitions of material culture. Generally speaking, we can say that if you can photograph it and it isn’t too large and complicated, we can consider it to be an example of material culture.

Material culture, we must recognize, is a kind of culture—a term that has hundreds of definitions. One definition of culture I like, because it shows the relationship between culture and artifacts, is by Henry Pratt Fairchild and is found in his Dictionary of Sociology and Related Sciences (1966:80):

A collective name for all the behavior patterns socially acquired and transmitted by means of symbols, hence a name for all the distinctive achievements of human groups, including not only such items as language, tool-making, industry, art, science, law, government, morals and religion but also the material instruments or artifacts in which cultural achievements are embodied and by which intellectual cultural features are given practical effect, such as buildings, tools, machines, communication devices, art objects, etc.

This definition is useful because Fairchild points out that culture is based on communication and argues that artifacts embody and concretize various cultural values and achievements. Culture is passed on from one generation to the next and is, to a great degree, symbolic in nature. Cultural values and beliefs take form or are manifested in artifacts and objects—that is, in material culture. What this suggests is that we can use artifacts to help us gain insights into the cultures that produced them, if we know how to interpret or “read” them. Material culture gives us a means of understanding better the societies and cultures that produced the objects and used them.

Frank Nuessel offers another, more up-to-date definition of the term culture:

The world “culture” comes from the past participle cultus of the Latin verb colere, which means “to till.” In its broadest sense, the term refers to recurrent patterns of human behavior and associated artefacts that reflect the beliefs, customs, traditions, and values of a particular society or group of people. This behaviour includes oral and written symbols such as language (folk talks, proverbs) as well as other traditions including dress, religion, ritual (dance, music, and other culture-specific rites), and so forth. Artefacts may include the representational arts such as paintings, pottery, sculpture, written literature, architecture, and the tools necessary to create them—all of which are transmitted from one generation to another. (2013:207)

Nuessel’s article appeared in a book edited by Marcel Danesi, Encyclopedia of Media and Communication (2013), and offers us an insight into where the term “culture” comes from and into the way it has been understood by social scientists. My focus in this book is on the way that objects (he calls them “artefacts”) reflect beliefs, attitudes, and values found in various so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Theoretical Approaches to Material Culture
• Part II: Applications
• Part III: Material Culture Games
• References
• Index
• About the Author