Guest Editorial: Matter in Place (special issue of SITES 2009 6(2):1-177) (original) (raw)

Matter(s) of material culture - 2020

What is striking in equal measure, reaching towards the end this volume, are the diversity and the coherence of its contributions. The 'fieldworks' or 'terrains' explored by the authors reach far and wide, both geographically and thematically. Besides France (and Switzerland), they range from North and Sub-Saharan Africa to the Indian sub-continent and the islands of the Far East, and from the lingering odours surrounding municipal divers and waste managers to the rarefied atmosphere of Parisian museums, from the transmission of skills among Swiss watchmakers to the swapping of shirts among suburban teenagers. Inbetween we encounter, weavers of spirited fabrics, wearers of charismatic silks, dressers of altar deities and upholders of royal powers. In a broad spectrum spanning from behaviourism to phenomenology, the contributions we have just read, and more generally the Matière à Penser (MaP) approach they exemplify, are all situated far closer to the latter pole. To be sure, a range of 'objective' measures are at hand, epistemologically and methodologically speaking, including field enquiries, participant observation, pseudonymised interviews and apprenticeship immersion, as variously attested in the chapters by Céline Rosselin-Bareille, Marie-Pierre Julien, Urmila Mohan, Hervé Munz or Geoffrey Gowlland. Granted that, these are quite manifestly subjects-and more specifically subjects-in-becoming, acting, with and on their bodies, with and on things-that occupy here pride of place. Put otherwise, the chapters across this volume convey a diversified and stimulating array of material culture-aided introspections, whereby subjects-be they scavengers, believers, craftspeople or dressed-up kids (and grown-ups)-performatively incorporate the material world into their beings. Alongside Marcel Mauss' famous homme total, fleshed out already in the inter-war years as a fusion of physiological, psychological and social realms (as recalled in the introductory chapter by Laurence Douny and Urmila Mohan), the thread linking most contributions together resides in their phenomenological reliance, so to speak, on material culture, lived and thought-with. Rather than being reduced to the mere provision of 13 9781350077362_voucher_proofs.indb 199 18/09/20 9:59 PM

Material Culture (syllabus, 2025)

This graduate seminar provides an introduction to the study of material culture. This is an enormous topic that can be approached from many different angles. Over the course of the semester, we will sample a number of these options, dipping our toes here and there into a lively, multi-disciplinary conversation about the relationship between humans and the broader material world. We will engage with the work of historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, geographers, philosophers, political theorists, and more, all of them committed to the interrogation of specific case studies but many also seeking to break new theoretical ground or clarify the particular methodological challenges that one encounters when approaching the world of things. Our itinerary will include excursions into object biography, thing theory, new materialism, archaeologies of the contemporary, social memory, affect, cultural heritage conflict, the ethics of museum display, and recent efforts to more fully incorporate non-human living beings in the stories that we tell about the past and present. Throughout, our attention will be focused squarely on the historical dimension, that is, on the connection between material culture, the writing of history, and the politics of the past.

Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view.

Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-21.

MatteRealities: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies

Open Cultural Studies, 2019

No ideas but in things!" William Carlos Williams's leitmotif for the modernist epic Paterson seems to anticipate the current renewal of academic attention to the materialities of culture: When the Smithsonian Institution accounts for The History of America in 101 Objects (Kurin) or when Neil MacGregor, designated director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, aims at telling The History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), they use specimens of material culture as register and archive of human activity. Individual exhibitions explore the role of objects in movements for social and political change (Disobedient Objects, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Large-scale national museum projects like the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., draw attention to the long existence of collections in Western institutions of learning and reveal the inherently political character of material culture-be that by underscoring the importance of institutional recognition of particular identities or by debates about provenance and restitution of human remains and status objects. The plethora of objects assembled in systematic as well as idiosyncratic collections within and outside the university is just beginning to be systematically explored for their roles in learning and education, funded by national research organizations such as the German BMBF.1 In theatrical performances, things function as discussion prompts in biographical work (Aufstand der Dinge, Schauspielhaus Chemnitz) or unfold their potential to induce a bodily experience (The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, GK Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY). Things are present: as heritage, as commodities, as sensation; they circulate in processes of cognition and mediation, they transcend temporal and spatial distantiations. Things figure in narration and performance, in our everyday life practices, in political activism. They build knowledge of ourselves and others, influence the ways in which we interact with our fellow human beings, and in which we express or control our feelings. They combine the apparently concrete and the fleetingly abstract. Overall, things make us do things.

AH 466 Material Worlds: Topics in Material Culture Studies

Things, artifacts, objects... These are our intimate companions as we live in and make sense of the world. We tend to categorize them as fetishes, souvenirs, heirlooms, tools, knick knacks, voodoo dolls, marionettes, toys, furniture, relics, object d’art, rocks, fossils, buildings, landscapes, amounting to what we cumulatively call “material culture”. Art historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians among others have attempted to make sense of the past (and the present) through the material residues, artifacts, remnants of human practices. Things, fetishized or not, become protagonists in our reconstructions of the past, as we increasingly believe that societies construct their world through the making of things, their use, circulation, discard. However, are things happy about such instrumentalization, categorization and secondary positioning as inanimate and silent members of the world? The recent interest in the academia on materiality has brought about a new age of things, the so-called “material turn,” revisiting old theories of materialism and asking fresh questions about alternative, object-oriented ontologies. In this course we will explore new work on thing theory, materials and materiality, the social life and the cultural biography of objects, their ability to configure social realities, human subjectivities, and cultural identities.

Material Culture and Other Things - Post-disciplinary Studies in the 21st century

"More than twenty years after the Cambridge school of contextual archaeology challenged processual archae- ology, one may ask where post-processual archaeology stands today. Where is archaeology situated in the aca- demic landscape of the 21st century? Material Culture and Other Things aims to broaden up the fields of inquiry in archaeology through a post- disciplinary approach to the study of material culture and other things. The contributors in this book lay em- phasis on the varying roles of materialities in the con- stitution of social life, offering new perspectives on both the present and the past, and hence, exploring what "archaeology" can be in the 21st century."