Material Cultures

Why Some Things Matter

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135361631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume is an ethnographic study of material cultures. Incorporating local and global dimensions, a team of scholars explore the changing experiences of cultures in locations as disparate as the Philippines and Northern Ireland. Material culture and consumption studies have undergone something of a renaissance recently. This study provides an up-to-date analysis of a developing field in sociological and anthropological based courses.; This book is intended for undergraduate/MA courses on material culture and consumption within cultural studies and anthropology degree schemes.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Why some things matter

Daniel Miller

The title of this chapter is intended to be taken quite precisely. It is as different from the question “Why things matter”, as it is from the question “Why some things are important”. It is these differences that represent the original contribution of this volume. The question “Why things matter” would have led to the general study of materiality and the foundation of material culture studies in the insistence upon the continued importance of material forms. This was in effect the battle fought against mainstream social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s and the insistence that taxonomies of material forms were often of significance precisely because being disregarded as trivial, they were often a key unchallenged mechanism for social reproduction and ideological dominance.

The development of material culture studies may then be seen as a two-stage process. The first phase came in the insistence that things matter and that to focus upon material worlds does not fetishize them since they are not some separate superstructure to social worlds. The key theories of material culture developed in the 1980s demonstrated that social worlds were as much constituted by materiality as the other way around (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987). This gave rise to a variety of approaches to the issue of materiality varying from material culture as analogous with text (e.g. Tilley 1990, 1991) to applications of social psychological models (Dittmar 1992).

This book represents a second stage in the development of material culture studies inasmuch as the point that things matter can now be argued to have been made. This volume, by contrast, concentrates on something different and equally important. The volume demonstrates what is to be gained by focusing upon the diversity of material worlds which becomes each other’s contexts rather than reducing them either to models of the social world or to specific subdisciplinary concerns such as the study of textiles or architecture. It will be argued, by example, throughout this volume that studies of material culture may often provide insights into cultural processes that a more literal “anthropology” has tended to neglect.

A volume called Material cultures is obviously situated within what may be easily recognized as a general renaissance in the topic of material culture studies. After several decades in the academic doldrums this has re-emerged as a vanguard area liberating a range of disciplines from museum studies to archaeology. Although there are a large number of volumes and articles which together constitute the evidence for this development in academic interests, there are still relatively few publications that have as their particular concern the nature of material culture or material culture studies. This is in part because the subject does not exist as a given discipline, and it is not part of this volume’s agenda to propose or attempt to legitimize any such discipline. As has been argued in the introductory editorial to the new Journal of Material Culture, there are many advantages to remaining undisciplined and many disadvantages and constraints imposed by trying to claim disciplinary status.

This freedom from disciplinary foundations and boundaries is used to considerable effect by the contributors to this volume. Together they demonstrate the excitement and rewards of taking an unshackled approach to the topic of material culture. More specifically this is expressed in a freedom from reductionism. Studies of the house do not have to be reduced to housing studies, nor studies of design to design studies. By the same token studies of the transnational identity of commodities do not have to be reduced to kinship, class or gender.

Prior to the very few works that act as precedents to the current volume, most works in material culture are best understood in relation to the issues that they address. In effect they make up relatively discrete bodies of texts formed around particular problematics. An early example was a series of works that centred upon historical archaeology in the USA and that was influenced by structural analysis but applied this to diachronic data (such as the work of Glassie 1975; Deetz 1977). This paralleled the concern for objects that was arising within European historical studies that conjoined macro-surveys of material culture, both at the regional level as advocated by Braudel (1981) and at the temporal level as advocated by Friedman and Rowlands (1977), with the micro-studies of specific context exemplified by Schama’s (1987) work on Amsterdam (see also Brewer & Porter 1993). One of the most influential bodies of work has arisen from the discipline of anthropology and has been primarily concerned with the nature of commodities and consumption (Miller 1995a, 1995b). Key works include Douglas and Isherwood (1978), Appadurai (1986) and Bourdieu (1984). Another trend was the analysis of visual materials as pseudo-texts which, through journals such as Screen, dominated media studies for more than a decade. One of the most recent examples has emerged from a new self-consciousness within museum studies, and in particular, the focus upon collecting as a more general activity within industrialized societies (Belk 1995; Pearce 1995).

Indeed these few conspicuous examples of literatures that involved taking a stance with respect to material culture studies can easily turn into a flood depending upon how inclusive one is prepared to be. At the centre there is a continuity of tradition within the many European institutions of ethnology (Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Rogan 1992), as well as a continuous production of exemplary studies within more mainstream anthropology and sociology (Forrest 1988; Guss 1989; MacKenzie 1991). But on the margins there are a vast number of studies which range from obvious parallels with much of the work that has been developed through cultural studies (e.g. Grossberg et al. 1992) to some of the concerns within geography on space and place, or within architecture and design on the materiality of buildings. These also include many individual essays that seem to have arisen out of some particular eye for detail on artefacts such as record sleeves (Gilroy 1993) or other minutiae of everyday life (Baker 1986).

Each of these literatures contributes to the sense of vitality within material culture studies as a whole. Some, such as the work of Bourdieu (1977) in Outline of a theory of practice, have remained key texts for two decades. But in many cases material culture is better identified as a means rather than an end. Furthermore it was most often a means that emerged pragmatically from other concerns with little self-consciousness about the implications of this particular technology of investigation. There are exceptions, for example, the work of Ian Hodder (1982) and his students within which, although the initial agenda was archaeological interpretation, much of the work did focus on general issues within material culture studies (e.g. Hodder 1982; Moore 1986; Tilley 1990, 1991). One of the reasons that material culture was avoided as the primary focus of attention was that it invited the accusation of fetishism. It was assumed that the ideals of social analysis would be so usurped by the means of artefact analysis that this would prevent rather than enhance the study of cultural life that has been the avowed aim of all those who study material culture, including the contributors to this volume.

This legacy of these academic studies mainly conducted since the mid-1970s is the context for the present work. Our aim is to steer a course which unlike most of the work just reviewed, does indeed take as its immediate focus the study of material culture per se. But in using the term “material culture” we believe that there are many ways in which the results can be far less fetishistic than many of those works that do not purport to have such an object focus. At the same time the intention is to focus upon the artefactual world without this being founded in any general theory of artefacts or material culture. The next section is intended to indicate how this might be accomplished.

The diversity of material domains

Material culture differs from, for example, linguistics partly in the sheer diversity of its subject matter. In the case of language many of the most interesting things that an academic can address relate to the generality of linguistic phenomena. In material culture, by contrast, although this is also a possible strategy there is a great deal more potential in looking at the diversity of material form than would be the case with linguistics.

Languages consists of relatively few specific domains. These might include the written word, speech and grammar. Each divides up the larger sense of linguistics into domains with their own specificity. These remain relatively restrained and encompassable differences. By comparison, material culture virtually explodes the moment one gives any consideration to the vast corpus of different object worlds that we constantly experience. Within an hour of waking we move from the paraphernalia of interior furnishing through the decisions to be communicated over choices of apparel through the moral anxieties over the ingestion of food stuffs out into the variety of modern transport systems held within vast urban architectural and infrastructural forms. Each of these domains possesses considerable specificity in comparison to the others, and in turn generates considerable internal diversity.

For this reason the current volume attempts no general theory of the object world as an abstract set of relationships to be applied indiscriminately to a plethora of domains. Instead what this book addresses is perhaps rather more useful and exportable to the wide range of people who work with material culture though not necessarily within material culture studies. Unlike language we cannot hope even to enumerate the types and varieties within which the object world might be categorized and we are soon aware that any attempt imposes various arbitrary classifications over what is actually an endless creative and hybrid world. This problem of unordered diversity is perhaps one of the main stumbling blocks in the formation of a material culture studies as against linguistics, but it also offers a huge potential if we try to consider what it might offer academic analytical concerns. The clear imperative then is to turn what at first seems daunting and problematic into the very significance and interest of material culture studies.

To do this, I want to suggest that the generality of materiality, that is any attempt to construct general theories of the material quality of artefacts, commodities, aesthetic forms and so forth, must be complemented by another strategy that looks to the specificity of material domains and the way form itself is employed to become the fabric of cultural worlds. To a degree this has arisen by default. We have already constructed in academia specific journals and academies concerned with the study of food, of clothing, of architecture and so forth. Each of these takes as axiomatic the particular character of their domain. But because these have arisen by default through pragmatic and increasingly commercial concerns, they do not perceive themselves as part of a larger study of material culture and therefore at present do not even much concern themselves with how the specificity of each particular material domain might add up to the larger, as it were, generality of difference.

This, however, is exactly what material culture studies should do. It is of some concern that something so obvious in the potential of material culture at present remains overlooked. One of the disadvantages of the present state of academic study is that the specificity of material forms are most likely to be of interest and concern if they happen to fall within what has already become constituted as an institutional domain such as building studies or food studies. What this book is designed to demonstrate is how much is thereby lost. The topics that this volume covers may flow in and out of such previously constituted disciplines, but the bulk of what is addressed here would probably not find any easy or evident place in any of them, with the possible exception of anthropology. It is precisely because all the contributors take their commitment and orientation from material culture as a more general phenomena that they have emerged with such a fascinating set of diverse topics of enquiry.

So the positive potential of material culture studies is presented in the form of studies that range from musical forms such as calypso through gardens to the use of paper in the office. None of these chapters have to constrain themselves to fall within an institution devoted to furnishing, clothing or the arts. But this is only the first stage of what may be perceived to be the benefits of such an approach. Merely allowing more creative selection of topics of enquiry would itself be important, but it is what one does with the topic and not merely its selection that counts. This leads to the second stage in the development of such studies which is drawn from this same emphasis upon specificity.

The materiality of specific domains

There is a marked difference between the chapters of this volume coming out of material culture studies and the way these same topics might be addressed within some other tradition, and this is simply the degree of attention given to the specific materiality of each topic investigated. Indeed that this should be so follows directly from the first stage of delineating material culture studies. If we focus directly on the materiality of things then we must immediately confront the different forms of object that they represent.

The chapters that follow bring out clearly both this diversity but also what is gained by a focus upon their specificity. Let us take as an example chapter 2 by Tacchi on radio soundscape. The author has used the very idea of material culture to interpose a key element between the more traditional studies of radio and its audience. This is textured soundscape that is emitted by radio and that is used to form a kind of space within the home. The material presence of a radio that is on is quite different from the little box constituted by a radio that is off. It fills an area with volume and substance and may be experienced as much as an emanation expressive of the associated individual as coming from the box itself. Indeed, using material culture as her foundation, Tacchi is able to make radio more like clothing than media, expressive of highly individualized presencing. At the same time she focuses on the particular qualities that radio has as radio. For example the material presence of sound is opposed to the equally material presence of silence as a form that, in relation to conditions such as loneliness, can have a quite oppressive, almost claustrophobic texture. If, as I suspect, Tacchi is able to evoke the manner in which some people can or indeed must “feel” silence with a poignancy that gives that sense of silence a particular presence for the reader, then the argument for its use as an example of material culture is surely made. Tacchi’s findings emerge directly from her sensitivity to what here is being called the specificity of materiality.

Almost exactly the same point can be made with an entirely different medium in the case of Jarman in Chapter 6. It is easy to see what others are likely to make of the banners used in the Orange Order marches in Northern Ireland. These could easily be decontextualized as an item within the discussion of politics or as an icon within a presentation of art within a gallery or museum. By insisting that first we address the materiality of the banners, Jarman manages to contribute more to both the political and the aesthetic understanding of these forms than a more direct expropriation would have done in either case. First, Jarman draws attention to what the banners are made from and argues for the centrality of such textiles to the recent social and economic history of the area, which is precisely what makes them of such significance to political debate. In this and in his more general work on the topic, it is again a focus on the precise details of what is being portrayed and how it is being portrayed that prevents the banners being superficially recontextualized as art or craft objects and forces us to engage at a more profound level with the form and aesthetics of the banners as against some other expressive form such as murals or the phenomenon of marching itself.

A third case may be made from my own study of Coca-Cola in Chapter 8. Once again the literature on this topic is voluminous. But in almost all cases Coca-Cola is flung around as some generic symbol that stands for almost anything people want to fill it with. I argue that its presence is rather like that which Quinn (1994) has argued for the European use of the swastika, a kind of meta-symbol that is dangerously separated off from the world as a symbol of symbols or in this case commodity that stands for all commoditization. My argument is intended to directly confront this kind of freefloating symbol and bring it back down to its most basic artefactual quali...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Consumption and space
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The domestic sphere
• Part III The public sphere
• Part IV The global sphere (or the World Wide West)
• Index