The Material Culture Reader

Victor Buchli

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Material culture has finally earned a central place within anthropology. Emerging from the pioneering work done at University College London, this reader brings together for the first time seminal articles that have helped shape the anthropological study of material culture. With topics ranging from the anthropology of art to architecture, landscape studies, archaeology, consumption studies and heritage management, this key text reflects the breadth of material culture studies today. The authors, who discuss field sites as distant as Vanuatu, New Ireland, Trinidad and Soviet Russia, show how material culture provides a new lens for viewing the world around us and effectively bridges the gap between theory and data. Providing the first-ever synthesis of these ground-breaking essays in an easily accessible volume, this book will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the subject and a valuable reference guide for anyone interested in material culture, anthropology, art and museum studies.

-1- Introduction

Victor Buchli

This reader is a compilation of some of the representative works of the Material Culture Group at University College London. It is by no means exhaustive and representative, but it does provide an idea of the range of subjects, contexts and problems material culture studies at University College have addressed ov the years and at present. The works here are a sampling of some of the dominant concerns of the contributors. In turn, each contribution is preceded with an introduction by the author placing the work within broader themes relevant to the study of the material world. As a result the compass of these works is quite dive giving the reader a sense of the broad and at times conflicting issues in which material cultures studies as a whole participates. What might appear an unruly collection of works is united by an abiding concern for the materiality of cultural life and its diverse and at times conflicting vitality.

Up to now there has never been a ‘snapshot’ of the work of this group, so the introduction to such a compilation offers a place to look back and try to place this ‘snapshot’ within the larger scheme of things. As such, this provides the oppor tunity to examine in general the trajectory of development of material culture studies through a particular cohort of scholars. It also affords the opportunity attempt and delineate some of the overall issues affecting material cultures studies from this writer’s perspective and from there, hopefully, offer some suggestions as to where we are now and where we might be going next.

The particular cohort of which we are speaking are the contributors: Barbara Bender, Victor Buchli, Susanne Küchler, Daniel Miller, Christopher Pinne Michael Rowlands, Nicholas J. Saunders and Christopher Tilley. It is very obvious that this cohort represents a viewpoint that is distinctly British despite Buchli and Küchler being from the United States and Germany respectively (though they both received their doctorates from British universities). In terms of the British academic traditions of which this group is a part, the cohort is quite firmly situated within the Universities of London and Cambridge and their schools, departments and institutes of archaeology and anthropology. This immediately distinguishes this cohort from scholars of material culture in the United States who, in addition to coming out of the traditions of archaeology and anthropology, are strongly influenced by the tradition of American folklore studies. Bender and Rowlands received their doctorates in archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, and Saunders from Southampton. All are closely associated with the Institute’s current director, Peter Ucko and the legacy of its former director, the Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe. Similarly, Buchli and Tilley received their doctorates in archaeology from Cambridge having both been supervised by Ian Hodder, who was originally a student of David Clarke ’s. Miller received his doctorate in oriental studies from Cambridge, but he is closely associated with the group of post-processualist archaeologists who gathered around Ian Hodder. This archaeological leaning within the group is complemented by Küchler and Pinney who both received their doctorates in anthropology from the London School of Economics under the supervision of the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell, a student of Anthony Forge of the London School of Economics.

Material Culture and the Work of Culture

We first encounter the use of the term ‘material culture’ in English in the nineteenth century. The origins are murky, the first reference to such a concept according to the Oxford English Dictionary was made in 1843 by Prescott on in reference the ‘material civilization’ of Mexico in his travelogue. The intellectual history of this concept regrettably is beyond the scope of this introduction, except to say that the study of material culture itself became one of the cornerstones of the nascent independent discipline of anthropology (for a history of the role of material culture in the growth of anthropology see Steadman 1979 and Lowie 1937). In fact, in the late 1800s the concept and its study was almost entirely inseparable from anthropology itself: the so-called ‘object-lessons’ described by Edward Tylor in his foreword to Ratzel’s monumental treatise on the ethnographic study of artifacts, The History of Mankind (Ratzel 1896).

However, nineteenth century Victorians who coined the term ‘material culture’ were by no means the only people preoccupied with artefacts per se. People have always been under their thrall, from palaeolithic assemblages, which seem suggest an early propensity for collecting, to Babylonian temple collections, ancient Chinese and Roman antiquarians and the cabinets of curios established by Europeans during the Renaissance (Schnapp 1996). In the European context it was these cabinets of curios which were the ancestors of our museums and our preoccupation with objects in themselves. The history of such collections have been dealt with elsewhere (Belk 2001, Pearce 1994, Thomas 1997). For our purposes here, it is necessary to note that the great Euro-American museums were the institutions in which material culture studies as we know it originally found their home and thrived.

So what has happened in terms of the changing fortunes of material culture studies since the mid nineteenth century? Why was this super-category of objects needed in the first place and why has it fallen in and out of use within anthropology? From its beginnings, material culture as a category and as a field of study was intimately related to larger cultural projects. In the nineteenth century it was used as a way of gauging the degree of technical and social sophistication of given group. Within these schemes of unilineal evolution European Victorian society was on the top of the scale as the most modern and progressive while other non-European societies descended downwards with various hunter-gatherer groups at the bottom of the scale of human social and technical evolution. This naturally justified European dominance in expansionist imperial affairs, but also served liberal notions of Enlightenment thought which advocated the universality of human experience and justice. The various ‘uncivilized’ peoples of the world were all subject to the same technical and social processes albeit at different levels, thereby ensuring European imperial dominance. All of humanity’s inventions and institutions could be used as an indicator of this inexorable dynamic of inclusive progress.

The emergence of material culture studies was an innovation arising from earlier Enlightenment era preoccupation with the materiality of social life. As Michel Foucault argued in Space, Knowledge and Power, the interest in the various material components of social life (i.e. architecture as an aspect of governance) is an eighteenth century preoccupation where ‘One begins to see a form of political literature, that addresses, what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order . . .’ (Rabinow 1984:239). The ethnographic urge to order, manage and constitute new political subjects (typically colonial and subject to the principles of universality to which all could aspire to), maintained unilinealism as just such a demonstration of this universal progression. Statecraft, the formation of nationhood and empire were inextricably bound to these quasi-archaeological and ethnographical impulses (Schnapp 1996). These ‘objects’ of knowledge were vital for establishing the building blocks statecraft. In short the super-category of objects: material culture, has had from the beginning a utility with specific cultural work to do. As Edward Tylor observed in thinking about the future of material culture studies on the eve of the twentieth century: ‘In the next century, to judge from its advance in the present, it will have largely attained to the realm of positive law, and its full use will then be acknowledged not only as interpreting the past history of mankind, but as even laying down the first stages of curves of movements which will describe and affect the courses of future opinions and institutions’ (Tylor in Ratzel 1896: xi) .

This emerging understanding of human progress was best expressed in American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s monumental work Ancient Society which laid out the stages of human social and technical evolution from savagery to civilization. Each stage was characterized by a particular level of social and technical achievement which incorporated all peoples and races in the trajectory of human progress. All peoples were alike and uniform and would respond in similar ways given the same technical limitations. Morgan was acutely aware that old life ways were passing through his close work with Native Americans. could directly witness how older indigenous technical and social achievements were succumbing to the relentless march of Euro-American expansion and progress. Existing peoples in isolation, resembling the earlier stages of humans social evolution existed in Morgan’s schema as ‘monuments of the past’ that is as a living archaeology of early forms of human life. As Karl Marx ( a keen reader of Morgan) stated: ‘Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals ’(Marx 1986: 78). The level of a society was intimately linked to its level of material culture. Thus social organization, social progress could be ‘read’ from the material culture of a particular people or nation as a fossil could be read to determine stages of the evolution of life on earth. Non-European peoples encountered could be understood within this schema and the differences between nations (especially European nations) could be understood in terms of the differences in their material culture. Thus objects were intimately connected with notions of progress – historically, technically and socially – in short, material culture as it was conceived in the nineteenth century was the modernist super-artefact and the supreme signifier of universal progress and modernity.

Earlier European collections of objects sought to gather the curiosities the world, both natural and manmade, in cabinets of curiosities. These we not systematized in any particular way, except that they represented everything that was out of the ordinary, exceptional, that is not conventional, be it a tool from a distant society, an unusual rock formation, or natural deformity. The early ethnographic collections that formed the basis of material culture studies in the nineteenth century often contained souvenirs accumulated by sailors on expeditions that one way or another made their way back to the European capitals, forming parts of cabinets of curios or collections dedicated to artefacts of far-flung peoples (Thomas 1991). Beyond mere curiosity, these artefacts and their collections served as proof of an event and contact and knowledge of the peoples encountered. Artefact collections essentially were objectifications of authoritative knowledge (Thomas 1991: 141–3) – and more rarely along with the importation of actually indigenous peoples – no other could possibly do in light of the intellectual and technical circumstances of the time. Thus, as these forms of objectified authoritative knowledge became increasingly unsatisfactory, the random collections of curiosities were superseded by the more systematic collections of later scholars, Haddon, Pitt-Rivers, Boas, etc., These collections were to be rejected again during the careers of pivotal figures such as Boas for not being sufficient objectifications of authoritative knowledge. These objectifications were then supplanted by the ethnographic monograph as it began to emerge through the development of British social anthropology as a source of authoritative knowledge about other societies (Thomas 1991: 141–3). Earlier objectifications of authoritative knowledge were simply superseded by more satisfying techniques – more satisfying in terms of its being able, as Pomian suggests, to render the invisible visible, which he describes as the primary impulse of collecting (Pomian 1990). If initial collections were an attempt to bring such exotic, invisible and otherwise unknowable realms into being for Europeans, then these attempts at knowledge of other realms of experience found more satisfactory expression in the ethnographic monograph which was based on direct field work and participant observation – the souvenir club would no longer suit as an indicator of authoritative knowledge of another realm of experience. As such this requirement has never really been exhausted within anthropology as every Ph.D. student who undergoes the rite de passage of fieldwork knows so well.

I do not wish to go over the critical ground covered by others who have emphasized the indisputable ills that have been a consequence of unilinealism and the role of material culture studies within it, except to say that the constitution of mere objects into systems of ‘material culture’ represented a particular intellectual and political project that required a new kind of conceptual tool: the super-category of objects ‘material culture’ itself. This project proceeded to materialize precisely such a super-category of objects that never existed before and which was meaningless to the individuals who actually produced these objects. Cook Islanders were hardly producing ‘material culture’ for the consumption of sailors, travelers, administrators and scholars (as we know from Thomas, Pacific Islanders had very different purposes in mind; see Thomas 1991: 131). Similarly, archaeological excavations constituted a category of objects as ‘material culture’ entirely foreign to the past producers of these objects. To insist otherwise and claim its ahistorical universality, as many still do, is the act of ‘retrofitting’ (using Bruno Latour’s language) that naturalizes a particular ‘concresence’ of institutionalized and historically contingent knowledge, which results in his felicitous neologism a ‘factish’: ‘a sustained mode of existence for facts’ within a specific ‘spatiotemporal envelope’ (Latour 1999). This super-category materializes something entirely new and uniquely Victorian and Western, as modern as the artefacts of industrialism display at the Great Exposition of 1851 from which our more systematic nineteenth century collections of ethnographic material culture took their inspiration. At the Great Exposition all of humanity ’s technical achievements were to be assembled under one roof – one universal and fully encompassing schema which excluded no one and not one thing from its purview. More significantly it was intended to edify and instruct the visiting public – provide them with a view of universal order, prosperity and progress which no theology up to this point had ever been able to do to such a telling degree. Thus the Great Exhibition served – to follow Pomian – as a window onto a universal realm of progress and prosperity just within everyone’s reach, especially the inhabitants of the capital of the British Empire. The items on display became, using Pomian ’s term, semiophores – objects which do not have, or no longer have, a general practical use ‘. . . but which, being endowed with meaning, represented the invisible ’ (Pomian 1990) – the promise of a world of universal progress. Pitt-Rivers ’s famous and foundational collection for anthropology was first inspired by his visit to the Great Exhibition (Chapman 1985: 16). Even though something as ostensibly exotic as a neolithic axe found in Britain or an Aboriginal spear seemed to be as far removed as possible from the latest technical triumphs of nineteenth century industrialization, they all serve together to emphasize a political, intellectual and cultural project based empiricism, progress and perfectible unlineal evolution. As much as this justified European superiority, it also insisted on the perfectibility of all peoples (under European guidance) within the tradition of Enlightenment era liberalism and the universality of Man. The legacy of this impulse is still very much with us as rising nation states and creative ethnic self-determination assert claims towards inclusion and modernity, as Rowlands so cogently discusses in his contribution here.

There is a social reformist agenda here, which is often overlooked. These exhibitions not only brought in ‘primitive’ peoples within the unversalizing schema of European thought, but also brought in and edified the less enlig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation
• 3 The Anthropology of Art
• 4 Visual Culture
• 5 Heritage and Cultural Property
• 6 Landscape and Politics
• 7 Memory and Conflict
• 8 Architecture and the Domestic Sphere
• 9 Consumption
• Index