Material culture after text: re‐membering things

Abstract

Why have the social and human sciences shown such disinterest in material culture? How has this neglect affected archaeology? How do things and materiality at large relate to human beings and ‘social life’? These questions are addressed in this article which also critically examines social constructivist and phenomenological approaches to material culture. Arguing against the maxim that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, it is claimed that to understand important aspects of past and present societies, we have to relearn to ascribe action, goals and power to many more ‘agents’ than the human actor — in other words, to re‐member things.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several people have commented on earlier drafts of this paper. I especially thank Ewa Domanska, Bill Rathje and Chris Witmore for their toil. I thank Ewa for making me aware of Bill Brown's A Sense of Things. Previous discussions with Hein Bjerck, Terje Brattli, Axel Christophersen (in the ‘material culture work group’) and Kerstin Cassel have also been of great value. I also thank Einar Østmo for providing etymological information. The paper originates from a presentation given at Stanford University in May 2003. I thank the Archaeology Center, SU, for granting me access to their facilities during my sabbatical in 2003.

Notes

Within Scandinavian sociology, for example, there have been scholars focusing explicitly on the relationship between material structures and social conditions (Østerberg 1975, 1985, 1986, Andersson et al. 1985, Johansen 1992).

This clearly includes a good portion of my own work (e.g. Olsen 1987, 1991).

The phrase originates from Marx but has taken on its own ‘effective history’ since then.

In this paper Cornelius Holtorf states that in an earlier work about megaliths (Holtdorf 1998) he came to the conclusion that ‘whatever we do with, and to, these monuments today is simply our own contribution to their lives (…) Like others before us, we ‘happen’ to ancient monuments or indeed other things, making sense of them and reinterpreting them as we like’ (2002:54, last emphasis mine). This, however, ‘was perhaps not radical enough… the material essence of the things remained unchallenged. We may be able to interpret and ‘construct’ the meaning of a thing in any way we like, but we are seemingly unable to construct the thing “itself”’ (op. cit.). Thus he now claims that things are ‘much more contingent’, and makes the following points to support his position ‘1. Material identities of things can change quickly and without warning, right in from of our eyes — think of magician's show…2. Widely known material identities of things can begin or end by a few people saying and arguing so…’ (Holtorf 2002:55). Paraphrasing Judith Attfield, the material world has become dematerialized to the extent that we can no longer ‘believe our eyes’ (Attfield 2000:42). In fact, it comes close to a kind of Berkeleyean idealism — matter is mere surface, has no powers or potentials. According to Berkeley, matter is not unreal (Holtorf's ‘magican’ even contests this) but all qualities and ideas about it have to be located in the thinking human subject (cf. Hacking 2001:24, Pearson 2002:142–144).

As noted by Serres, it is rather ironic that while things are seen as characteristic and diagnostic of humanity (‘humanity begins with things; animals don't have things’) they play no role in the study of this humanity. Thus, ‘in the current state of affairs the so‐called human or social sciences seem at best to apply only to animals’ (Serres/Latour 1995:165–166,199–200).

This is a paraphrasing of Edwards Soja's closely related claim that ‘even the field of urban studies has been underspatialized until recently, with the spatiality of urban life predominantly seen as the mere adjunct or outcome of historical and social processes that are not in themselves intrinsically spatial, that is, with spatiality in itself having little or no causal or explanatory power’ (Soja 2000:7).

For some reason ‘material culture studies’ in anthropology seem very reluctant to assign archaeology any credit. Thus, the ‘social’ study of material culture is narrated as an almost non‐archaeological field (cf. Appadurai 1986, Miller 1987:110). Although claimed to unfold in a ‘healthy interdisciplinarity’, archaeology is rarely listed among the allies (cf. Miller 2002:240). This despite the fact that, for several decades, archaeological approaches to material culture have also included analyses of contemporary societies. One pertinent example is William Rathje's garbage project (Rathje 1984, 1991, 1996).

This criticism is relevant also to recent ‘phenomenological’ approaches to landscapes and monuments in archaeology, which despite acknowledging perception also as a ‘somatic engagement’, continue to privilege visual perception and contemplation (cf. Tilley 1994, Tilley et al. 2000).

Fig. 3. Harbour materiality. Port of Murmansk, Northwest Russia. Photo: Nordfisk.

With the possible exception of ‘agency’, embodiment has become the main mantra for those who delight in adding the affix ‘social’ to their approaches. This process of inscribing personhood, culture and society in something concrete — things or human bodies — seems to imply that there was a prior phase of separation (‘non‐embodiment’) when mind and matter existed apart. That things and bodies, originally, were not part of the social, but may eventually be included and endowed with history and meaning by some human generosity: a donor culture! It is, at least partly, due to a preconceived ontological split (subject–object) that we can talk of embodiment.