Material Culture: Ancestries and Trajectories in Material Culture Studies

18 Material Culture: Ancestries and Trajectories in Material Culture Studies PAUL BASU The point is sometimes made that, like language, material culture is a ubiquitous feature of human life. Indeed, material culture may be regarded as one of the defining charac- teristics of being human: it has long been a convention to assert that to be human is to speak, and to make and use tools (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5; cf. Gibson and Ingold 1993). But whereas the systematic study of language has been codified in the academic discipline of linguistics, or deconstructed in literary and translation studies, it is inter- esting to note that no equivalent discipline has emerged to address the systematic study of human artifacts. The study of material culture has, rather, been scattered across a number of disciplines and, as a result, is presented as a somewhat “undisciplined” field of academic inquiry. In the inaugural editorial of the Journal of Material Culture, something of a mani- festo for contemporary material culture studies, these undisciplined possibilities were embraced by the editors as an advantage. As well as offering an array of new issues to ex- plore, and methodologies to draw upon, this would encourage “the cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches between people concerned with the material constitution of social relations,” and ensure a commitment to “a politics of inclusion” (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5–6). Thus conceived, material culture studies is said to thrive “as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline” (Miller 2010: 1), unfettered by the conservatism that can blight established disciplines, “with their boundary-maintaining devices, institutional structures, accepted texts, methodologies, internal debates and circumscribed areas of study” (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5). The interdisciplinarity of approaches to material culture studies seems to be born out in practice: among the contributors to the Journal of Material Culture are to be found geographers and historians, archaeologists and museologists, sociologists and psycholo- gists, art historians and students of design, as well as anthropologists. Yet, despite this 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 370 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 371 eclecticism, the claim that material culture studies has “no obvious genealogy of ances- tors,” “no obvious disciplinary home” (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5), can be questioned and its position in relation to the broader anthropological project reassessed. An objective of the first half of this chapter is, therefore, to trace something of the anthropological pedigree of the study of material culture. To acknowledge this heritage is not to undermine the cross-fertilization characteristic of contemporary material cul- ture studies, but it does enable us to recognize that this is a significant area in which anthropological ideas and approaches have taken root and have been influential in shap- ing wider academic debates within, between, and across disciplinary orientations. Due to the limitations of space, this will necessarily be a partial history, and one that fore- grounds the development of the influential “school” of material culture studies associ- ated with the Department of Anthropology at University College London (the editorial base of the Journal of Material Culture). There are, of course, other ancestors and lineages that a more comprehensive account would need to explore, not least greater attention to distinct Continental and North American traditions. The chapter is not, however, in- tended primarily as a historical contribution. Hence, the second part goes on to discuss some of the more important trends and debates within material culture studies today. PART I: ANCESTRIES The Rise and Fall of Museum Anthropology The association between anthropology and material culture studies can be traced to the very origins of the anthropological discipline (origins that are largely shared with at times congruent, at times convergent, disciplines such as ethnology, archaeology, and folklore studies). Indeed, anthropology was a museum discipline prior to its migration to the university. As such, the collection, classification, and analysis of material culture lay at the heart of anthropological studies throughout its development late in the nine- teenth century and early in the twentieth, with many of the founders of academic an- thropology also holding museum positions. This “museum period” in anthropological history (Sturtevant 1969: 622) was also the era of “salvage ethnography,” during which there was a concern to rescue what were perceived to be the surviving vestiges of “primi- tive societies” before they were either transformed or made extinct by the relentless march of “civilization” in the form of Western colonialism. At this time vast collections of ethnographic materials were assembled, both through museum-sponsored collecting expeditions and via an expanding trade in ethnographic specimens supplied through colonial networks (Thomas 1991; Corbey 2000; Gosden and Knowles 2001). The histories of ethnographic collecting and the museological origins of professional anthropology have been well researched and documented in recent years (e.g., Stock- ing 1985; Ames 1992; Coombes 1994; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2000; Shelton 2001a, 2001b; Penny 2002; Gosden and Larson 2007). Regarded, in turn, as laboratories for anthropological theorizing, showcases of empire, and halls for the edification of the 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 371 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  372 ISSUES public, the ethnographic museum fulfilled multiple functions and became the chief site through which knowledge of colonized peoples was both constructed and displayed (Cohn 1996), their collections providing “the empirical basis for grand schemes of so- cial evolution, diffusion, acculturation and change” (Tilley et al. 2006: 2). Within the dominant cultural-evolutionist paradigm late in the nineteenth century, for example, ethnographic artifacts acted as indices of the evolutionary status of different societies and provided a tantalizing glimpse into Western society’s own “prehistoric” past—a clas- sic instance of the “denial of coevalness” discussed by Fabian (1983) that then clouded the anthropological imagination. A result of this was a continuing contiguity between ethnographic and archaeological collections in Western museums at a time when an- thropology and archaeology were, as yet, indistinguishable academic disciplines (Gos- den 1999). A sense of the prevailing attitudes and complex interactions between material culture collections, anthropological knowledge construction, modes of colonial governance and exploitation, and the competitive display of imperial prestige in this period, is conveyed by the government anthropologist Northcote Thomas (1906: vi), in the preface of a book series he edited in 1906–1907 concerned with “The Native Races of the British Empire”: Germany awoke many years ago to the importance of the study of native races from a political and commercial, no less than from a scientific point of view. In twenty- five years the Berlin Museum [i.e., the Museum für Völkerkunde, founded by Adolf Bastian in 1873] has accumulated ethnographic collections more than ten times as large as those of the British Museum, and the work of collection goes on incessantly. England, with the greatest colonial empire which the world has ever seen, lags far be- hind. Money will perhaps be forthcoming in England for work in anthropology when savage life and savage culture has disappeared for ever from the earth before the on- ward march of so-called civilisation. If, one hundred years hence, English anthropolo- gists have to go to Germany to study the remains of those who were once our subject races, we shall owe this humiliation to the supineness of England at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The past, once lost, can never be recovered; we have before us, in the subject races of our Empire, a living memorial of the past, and if England does her duty, she will lose no time in organising an Imperial Bureau of Ethnology, and thus enable English anthropologists to hold up their heads before their more fortunate German and American brethren. This passage speaks volumes about the collusions between anthropology, colonialism, and evolutionist ideology at the turn of the twentieth century (Asad 1973; Kuklick 1991: 182–241; Thomas 1994). It also demonstrates how central ethnographic collec- tions and museums were to this project (Bennett 2004). Pressing the case for the intro- duction of an Imperial Bureau of Ethnology, Thomas alludes not only to the remarkable collections being assembled in Germany, but also to the state-sponsored collecting 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 372 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 373 activities of the Bureau of Ethnology in the United States, which had been authorized by Congress in 1879 and was instrumental in the development of anthropology as an ac- ademic discipline in that country. Regardless of the inertia of the British government in this respect, the next generation of British anthropologists had a rather different project in mind of course, one that would widen the gap between British and American schools of anthropology, not least in their stance towards material culture. In Britain, then, according to the discipline’s own origin myth, the definitive closure of the era of museum anthropology came with the functionalist revolution of Bronisław Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the 1920s, and its associated emphases on social structure and the method of participant-observation (Young 1979; Kuper 1983; Stock- ing 1984, 1995). Despite amassing a substantial collection of Trobriand material culture while engaged in his paradigm-shifting fieldwork between 1915 and 1918 (see Young 2000), Malinowski was keen to distance himself and his new school of social anthro- pology from what he (1930: 408) characterized as “antiquarian anthropology,” with its institutional base in the museum. He (1935: 460) inveighed against what he regarded as the “purely technical enthusiasm” of the museum ethnologists, dismissing their “fetish- istic reverence” for material culture as “scientifically sterile.” Yet it is possible to overstate Malinowski’s rejection of the study of material culture; or, rather, to take Malinowski’s own overstatement out of the polemical context in which it was expressed. Few students of material culture today would disagree with his dec- lamations against the evolutionary assumptions and diffusionist theories “born of the dust and welter” of Victorian ethnographic museums and epitomized in the comments of Northcote Thomas (Young 2000: 183). In fact, most would agree with the argument with which Malinowski (1922: 80) prefaces his discussion of the Trobriand canoe in Ar- gonauts of the Western Pacific: while a canoe, as “an item of material culture,” “can be de- scribed, photographed and even bodily transported into a museum,” the “ethnographic reality” of the canoe “lives in the life of its sailors” and in the lives of those for whom it is more than “a mere bit of shaped matter” (1922: 80). Malinowski’s argument is simply that a technical analysis of material culture is not in itself adequate, and that the canoe needs to be understood in its social context. As such, Malinowski’s account of the Tro- briand canoe, or his later analysis of the construction of the Bwayma yam storehouse in Coral Gardens and Their Magic (Malinowski 1935), might be regarded as exemplary studies in material culture of their period. Indeed, the continuing significance of material culture is evident in the work of many of those associated with the functionalist and structural-functionalist schools of British social anthropology: Firth’s life-long interest in Pacific art (e.g., 1925, 1936, 1947, 1973); Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of cattle, or the spatial dimensions of kinship, in Nuer society (1940, 1951); Richards’s examination of land, labor, and food among the Bemba (1939). The fact that a discussion of material culture was relegated to an ap- pendix of Radcliffe-Brown’s classic The Andaman Islanders (1922) is sometimes taken as evidence of the declining interest in this field (Tilley et al. 2006: 2); yet, equally, the fact 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 373 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  374 ISSUES that a lengthy appendix was included also suggests a continuing engagement or, at the very least, ambivalence. Transatlantic Genealogies Whereas Malinowski and his students at the London School of Economics (LSE), who would go on to form the mainstream of British social anthropology, spurned the nineteenth-century conceptualization of anthropology as “a comprehensive science of man,” there were, of course, others who pursued this project. In the United States, under the influence of Franz Boas, anthropology had remained a much broader subject, em- bracing the four subfields of biological or physical anthropology, sociocultural anthro- pology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology (see Vann, Chap. 1). Firmly rooted in the European ethnological tradition, Boas had originally served as Adolf Bastian’s as- sistant at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, and, after emigrating to the United States, held positions at Chicago’s Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History before taking up a lectureship in anthropology at Columbia University. Much like Malinowski’s students in Britain, Boas’s students would go on to establish anthro- pology departments throughout the United States; the most strongly Boasian school being that established by Alfred Kroeber at the University of California. Kroeber be- came both Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley and Director of the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology, and his reputation rested equally on his cultural- anthropological and archaeological fieldwork. Together with Robert Lowie, another of Boas’s students who came to Berkeley in 1917 after several years at the American Museum of Natural History, Kroeber created a highly influential school of anthropology that retained the breadth so reviled by the Brit- ish social anthropologists. Among Kroeber’s and Lowie’s students was Julian Steward, for example, whose work marked a shift away from Boasian diffusionism, but for whom material culture remained central in his concept of cultural ecology, which explored the relationships between environment, technology, and social organization (Steward 1955). Steward retained an archaeological and museum-orientated focus through much of his career, not least while based at the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smith- sonian Institution (Kerns 2003). Later, appointed as Professor of Anthropology at Co- lumbia, Steward went on to supervise another generation of anthropologists such as Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, and Roy Rappaport, who have all been influential on material culture studies. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1986), for example, had a key influence on the rise of consumption studies in material culture. The distinct trajectories of academic anthropology in Britain and the United King- dom did find synthesis in one particular individual, however, and this would have a sig- nificant impact on the development of material culture studies. That individual is Daryll Forde, the founder of the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). Forde’s academic training was multidisciplinary, with an undergraduate degree 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 374 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 375 in geography, a doctorate in prehistorical archaeology (obtained while lecturing in ge- ography at UCL), and two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthro- pology at Berkeley, where he worked closely with Kroeber and Lowie. Forde’s synthetic approach, embracing geography, anthropology, archaeology, and cultural ecology, with a strong focus on technology and environmental adaptation, is articulated in his Habitat, Economy and Society (Forde 1934). Anthropology and Material Culture Studies at UCL In 1945, when he became the first Professor of Anthropology at UCL, Forde delib- erately set about establishing a department that would provide an alternative to the British social anthropology tradition associated with the LSE. As such he followed the American four-field approach, initially teaching social and physical anthropology in the department, while courses in linguistics and archaeology were provided by other institutions within the University of London (the School of African and Oriental Stud- ies and the Institute of Archaeology, respectively). All students were taught courses on “primitive technology,” for which Forde assembled a material culture collection within the department. This was supplemented with collections-based teaching from colleagues in the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum, notably the Keeper of Eth- nography, Adrian Digby, and his Assistant Keeper, Bryan Cranstone (who would later become Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford). Regarded by those within Ma- linowski’s circle as “a human geographer with ethnological interests” (Fortes 1976: 459), Forde nevertheless earned their respect, not least through his long service as Director of the International African Institute. Forde also served as President of the Royal Anthro- pological Institute between 1947 and 1949, and he used the opportunity of his 1948 presidential address to again press for the reintegration of the discipline. It was, Forde (1948: 4) argued, the capacity of anthropology to provide “an integrative framework for the study of human groups” that distinguished the discipline from narrower sociologi- cal perspectives: a framework that integrated biological, environmental, and technologi- cal factors alongside the economic and political in the analysis “of form and function in human cultures, social systems and bodies of belief.” This integrative approach was reinforced at the UCL department with the appoint- ment of Peter Ucko, in 1962, as the first permanent lecturer specializing in primitive technology. Ucko completed a first degree in anthropology at UCL in 1959, before transferring to the Institute of Archaeology to write a Ph.D. on prehistoric human figu- rines. He would continue to bridge anthropological and archaeological worlds through- out his career, subsequently becoming Director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, founder of the World Archaeological Congress, and Director of the Institute of Archaeology (by then incorporated within UCL). During his ten years of teaching at the UCL department, Ucko succeeded in transforming an inherited focus on primi- tive technologies into a broader approach to material culture studies, including teaching 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 375 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  376 ISSUES courses, with Anthony Forge, on the anthropology of art, and convening a series of in- terdisciplinary research seminars that would lead to influential edited volumes such as The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (Ucko and Dimbleby 1969) and Man, Settlement and Urbanism (Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby 1972). Although demonstrating the masculinist bias typical of the era (Buchli 2002: 11), Ucko’s Curl Lecture of 1969 is widely regarded as a key text of contemporary material culture studies. Like Forde before him, Ucko (1969: 27) argued against the trend that had made the study of material culture “the poor handmaiden of other aspects of an- thropology.” Using the example of the penis sheath, he (1969: 61) showed how a par- ticular category of material object could open up “many areas of investigation of interest to a wide range of anthropological enquiry.” Significantly, he (1969: 29–30) defended the value of “morphological studies” and the study of “technological processes” along- side analyses of the social function and context of material culture. He (1969: 30–31) also stressed the importance of cross-cultural analyses (including both synchronic and diachronic comparisons), which were by then long out of favor among British social anthropologists. After Ucko’s departure for Australia in 1972, it was left to one of his students, Mi- chael Rowlands, then a newly recruited lecturer, to fight for the survival of material culture studies in the UCL department, at a time when it was dominated by social an- thropologists. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, with the recruiting of John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, and Daniel Miller, the current reputation and distinctiveness of UCL material culture studies was, however, beginning to assert itself. By the middle of the 1990s, joined by Susanne Küchler, Howard Morphy, and Christopher Tilley, and with the launch of the Journal of Material Culture in 1996, it was firmly established. As Vic- tor Buchli (2002: 1–2) notes in the introduction to an edited collection of the group’s work, this distinctiveness emerged from the confluence of a number of influential tribu- taries: the Fordean legacy within UCL anthropology (Ucko); Marxist-inspired social archaeology, originally associated with Gordon Childe, at London’s Institute of Archae- ology (Rowlands, Bender); anthropological studies of art and aesthetics associated with Anthony Forge and his student Alfred Gell at the LSE (Morphy, Küchler, Pinney); and emergent structuralist and poststructuralist schools of anthropological archaeology that coalesced around Ian Hodder at Cambridge from the late 1970s to the early 1990s (Miller, Tilley, Buchli). PART II: TRAJECTORIES Having explored something of the genealogy of contemporary material culture stud- ies, with a particular focus on the development of the influential school that emerged at UCL, the objective of the second part of this chapter is to introduce a number of key de- bates in the field. To give a sense of the shifting focus of these debates, and the dynamics of their interaction, these might be approached as a series of intersecting trajectories. A more comprehensive survey of the field is provided in the recently published Handbook 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 376 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 377 of Material Culture (Tilley et al. 2006). One task of the present, more modest discussion is to signal some of the accepted texts in material culture studies, questioning again the claim that material culture escapes such disciplinary conventions. From Exchange to Entanglement: The Social Life of Things Given his trumpeted antipathy towards material culture, it is ironic that Malinowski perhaps did most to place the transaction of things at the center of social anthropologi- cal research. Prior to his study of the kula in Argonauts (Malinowski 1922), anthropolo- gists had shown scant interest in the mechanisms of exchange in small-scale societies, regarding it generally as primitive forms of commerce akin to barter (e.g., Seligman 1910). The significance of Malinowski’s work was its recognition of both the complex sophistication of such exchange systems and the ways in which they function to create and maintain relationships within and between social groups. One legacy of Malinows- ki’s work has been its capacity to inspire later generations of anthropologists to revisit this paradigmatic case study, reinterpreting it in the light of subsequent social and eco- nomic theories and, indeed, reanalyzing kula exchange to develop new theories of reci- procity, relationality, and value (e.g., Mauss 1924; Leach and Leach 1983; Munn 1986; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; see Gregory, Chap. 10). Together with Argonauts, Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don” (1924; The Gift, 1954) was significant in establishing gift exchange as a core concern of social anthropology. Written partly in response to Malinowski’s study, Mauss was interested in examining the distinctions between preindustrial clan-based societies and Western industrial societies through their exchange practices, identifying different forms of exchange with different stages in societal evolution. In this way, Mauss contrasted the transactions of “societies of the gift,” which are characterized by the exchange of objects that are inalienably as- sociated with the gift-giver and entail a moral responsibility to reciprocate, with “com- modity transactions” between self-interested individuals in which objects are alienable and defined by their use or exchange value. As Carrier (2006: 376–77) notes, accord- ing to this convention, gift societies “are orientated toward the social reproduction of people . . . as members and embodiments of kin groups,” whereas “commodity societies are orientated toward the social production of things,” of objects that are separate from people and relationships. By the middle of the 1970s, with the rise in structural Marxist, feminist, and postco- lonial anthropology, there was a desire to reconsider exchange theory and question some of its, by now, taken-for-granted assumptions, including the conventional dichotomi- zation between gifts and commodities. In this context, one critique was to challenge the strong sociological orientation in much analysis of exchange systems (a Maussian legacy), and call for a return to a more object-centered approach. In the introduction to The Social Life of Things, a canonical work in material culture studies if ever there was one, Arjun Appadurai (1986: 5) posits that the observation “that things have no mean- ings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 377 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  378 ISSUES them with” is not in itself particularly illuminating. Instead, he (1986: 5) argues, we must “follow the things themselves” in order to grasp the meanings that are “inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.” It is only through engaging with these tra- jectories “that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things” (1986: 5). Indeed, it can be argued that it is this theoretical and methodological turn toward understanding “things” as “things-in-motion” that, in part, distinguishes contemporary anthropological approaches to material culture from other disciplinary perspectives. Drawing inspiration from Simmel, and acknowledging that value is not an inher- ent property of objects but rather emerges reciprocally through exchange, Appadurai is concerned with tracing the circulation of things as they pass through different spatial and temporal “regimes of value.” These regimes may or may not equate with other cul- tural boundaries, and the circulation of things may involve different kinds of pathways, diversions, and trajectories, perhaps entailing multiple processes of commoditization and decommoditization. In this way, objects may be said to have “life histories” and, methodologically, Appadurai and his colleagues promote a “biographical” approach to studying their various translations and transformations. In contrast to a social-historical approach, which may examine the development of classes or types of things, or may consider larger-scale dynamics, a cultural-biography approach “is appropriate to specific things, as they move through different hands, contexts and uses” (Appadurai 1986: 34; see also Hoskins 2006). In his important contribution to The Social Life of Things, Igor Kopytoff provides a succinct demonstration of the value of this approach: Biographies of things can make salient what otherwise might remain obscure. For ex- ample, in situations of culture contact, they can show what anthropologists have so often stressed: that what is significant about the adoption of alien objects—as of alien ideas—is not the fact that they are adopted, but the way they are culturally redefined and put to use. The biography of a car in Africa would reveal a wealth of cultural data: the way it was acquired, how and from whom the money was assembled to pay for it, the relationship of the seller to the buyer, the uses to which the car is regularly put, the identity of its most frequent passengers and of those who borrow it, the frequency of borrowing, the garages to which it is taken and the owner’s relation to the mechan- ics, the movement of the car from hand to hand over the years, and in the end, when the car collapses, the final disposition of its remains. All of these details would reveal an entirely different biography from that of a middle-class American, or Navajo, or French peasant car. (Kopytoff 1986: 67; for an elaboration of such an analysis, see Miller 2001a) The project, begun in The Social Life of Things, of reevaluating the relationship between material culture and exchange theory, continues in sociocultural anthropology, with re- searchers engaging increasingly with the materiality of exchange valuables alongside their social function in reciprocity or their purely symbolic meanings (e.g., Myers 2001a). 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 378 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 379 As the ethnographic focus of anthropologists has shifted to embrace what Appadurai (1990) has characterized as the “new global cultural economy,” with its array of com- plex, overlapping, and disjunctive “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “financescapes,” and “ideoscapes,” so the metaphor of “entanglement” becomes more appropriate than that of the balanced reciprocity connoted by “exchange.” Indeed, an increasing number of anthropologists have recognized that transcultural complexity at a global scale is noth- ing new and have criticized anthropological discourses that have constructed such “uni- tary conceptions” as gift economies, arguing instead that indigenous economies have long been entangled in other systems, not least colonial trade. Thus, Nicholas Thomas, in Entangled Objects (1991), explores the impact of colonialism on the dynamics of in- digenous exchange practices in the Pacific. Arguing for the “promiscuity” of objects, in which European things are appropriated into indigenous exchange systems (as both gifts and commodities), and indigenous things are appropriated by Europeans (to fill, for example, those ethnographic museums discussed earlier), Thomas criticizes the very notion of “the gift” and its part in the colonial and anthropological construction of the alterity of colonized peoples and places. From Mind to Body, from Signification to the Senses As Christopher Tilley (2006: 7) argues, “it is impossible to imagine either the existence of a notion of materiality or a field labeling itself material culture studies” without ref- erence to the “foundational” theoretical perspectives of Marxism, structuralism, and phenomenology. While Marxist perspectives have grounded the study of material cul- ture in relation to material resources, labor, production, consumption, and exchange, structuralist and semiotic approaches have stressed issues of cognition, symbolism, and representation. And, while structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives have engaged with material culture as if it was a text, a system of significations, that could be read, interpreted, and deconstructed, phenomenological approaches have emphasized the ex- periencing body over the thinking mind, and have encouraged ethnographic attention to multisensory engagements with the material world (e.g., Howes 2003; Edwards, Gos- den, and Phillips 2006). While the dominance of Marxist and structuralist schools in sociocultural anthropol- ogy (including material culture studies) has passed, their legacy continues in many areas of material culture studies, not least in discussions of gift and commodity exchange (see Gregory, Chap. 10), and theories of objectification (see below). Structuralist analyses have long been out of fashion, yet interesting work continues to be generated by mate- rial culture scholars drawing upon linguistic and textual analogies. For example, while Tilley has become a major proponent of phenomenological approaches to material cul- ture studies, notably in relation to landscape, his explorations of metaphor and mate- rial culture, and his pursuit of the Lévi-Straussian idea of the “science of the concrete,” have also opened up new ways of understanding how and what objects mean. On the one hand, Tilley (1999: 103) defends the value of semiotic and symbolic approaches: an 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 379 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  380 ISSUES artifact, “through its silent ‘speech’ and ‘written’ presence,” thus “speaks what cannot be spoken, writes what cannot be written, and articulates that which remains conceptually separated in social practice.” On the other hand, however, he resists a purely mentalist conceptualization of the world, recognizing that even linguistic metaphors are grounded in the human body and in bodily experiences. Examining transformations in the an- thropomorphic form of Melanesian canoes, for example, Tilley (1999: 129) argues that “contemporary canoe building involves the material surfacing and articulation of a series of material metaphors bound up with the creation of social identities and intertwined male and female essences.” This is not merely about the expressiveness of symbolic form. In a social world constituted by extreme male–female sexual antagonism, the canoe per- forms active metaphorical work by resolving, or at least containing, gendered contradic- tions in social life that cannot be discussed in language or negotiated in social practice (1999: 130). Just as Tilley, alongside Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks, was responsible for intro- ducing a generation of archaeologists to structuralist and poststructuralist theory (e.g., Hodder 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1990; Shanks 1992), so his A Phenom- enology of Landscape (1994) has introduced the phenomenological thought of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to recent archaeological and anthropological engagements with space, place, and landscape. Whereas Tilley’s skill is in applying social and philosophical theory to ethnographic contexts (his work often involves reinterpreting existing ethno- graphic data in the light of fresh theoretical perspectives), Tim Ingold’s “phenomeno- logical” approach arises from ethnographic experience and his reflections on livelihood, dwelling, skill, and environment (Ingold 2000a). Thus, when it comes to landscape, it is to the nature of dwelling that Ingold turns. Critiquing the visual approach that some- times characterizes landscape studies, Ingold reminds us that we more often perceive the landscape as participants than as spectators, and that the tasks in which we participate are temporally bound. Landscape may therefore be regarded as “taskscape,” “a pattern of activities ‘collapsed’ into an array of features” (Ingold 1993: 162). Landscape is an embodiment of those tasks, and experienced by the whole body, its contours and fea- tures felt through our “muscular consciousness” as much as perceived through the senses (1993: 167). Ingold does not, however, attend only to human tasks and perceptions, and part of his argument is to recognize the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the landscape: the human taskscape in relation to the cyclical temporalities of the seasons, for example, or to the geological processes that have shaped the surface of the world, the makeup of its soils and habitats. In a frequently cited article, “On Weaving a Basket” (2000b), Ingold criticizes the very notion of material culture, seeing it as a reification of the dichotomy between na- ture and culture. Here he seeks to break down commonsensical oppositions between naturally occurring forms and human artifacts, and to shift attention away from issues of meaning and form, issues of “culture as opposed to materiality” (Ingold 2000b: 340). He thus questions the distinction between “making” (culture) and “growing” (nature) by considering the generation of form as a reciprocal and muscular dialogue between, in 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 380 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 381 this case, weavers and the qualities of the fibers that they bend and interweave. Accord- ing to Ingold (2000b: 342), “the form of the basket emerges through a pattern of skilled movement,” and, just as routine patterns of (human and nonhuman) activity congeal into the features of the landscape, so the artifact “is the crystallisation of activity within a relational field,” the regularities of the form of the basket, for instance, “embodying the regularities of movement that gave rise to it” (2000b: 345). Elsewhere, Ingold explores how skills are learned, and he argues that this is not chiefly through instruction, obser- vation, or imitation, but through repeated trial and error working with the materials: it is the body that learns through practice, and without recourse to language. Objectification: From Alienation to Incorporation This emphasis on practical rather than discursive knowledge is central to the work of the French anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Synthesizing Marxism, structuralism, and phenomenology, his “theory of practice” has been a major influ- ence in contemporary material culture studies. Bourdieu’s most celebrated concept, elaborated in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972; Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), is a reworking of the idea of “habitus,” introduced into anthropology by Mauss (1936). Bourdieu defined habitus as a system of “durable, transposable dispositions” (1977: 72), a “mental and corporeal schemata of perceptions, appreciations, and ac- tion,” and a “generative principle of regulated improvisations” (1977: 78). In many respects, habitus links the notions of habit (behavior patterns acquired through rou- tine practice) and habitat, insofar as it is through the internalization of the physical and social environment that people inhabit that they are socialized and acquire these dispositions. From a material culture point of view, Bourdieu’s classic example of habitus is his discussion of the Kabyle house (1970). The article at first reads like classic structural- ist analysis, in which the spatial organization of the house reproduces (and at times reverses) a series of symbolic, gendered oppositions that structure Kabyle cosmology. However, Bourdieu demonstrates that this structure is malleable and contingent on the changing movements and perspectives of the Kabyle themselves. He found that mean- ings were not rigidly determined by some theoretical, disembodied structure of differ- ence, but were generated by people themselves through their everyday practices and habits. Bourdieu went on to explore how Kabyle forms of thought and action were inculcated through the “implicit pedagogy” of habitus. Just as the Kabyle shape their houses, so the house shapes the Kabyle. This process, which Bourdieu (1977: 72) refers to as “the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of inter- nality” (or “incorporation” and “objectification”), has clear ramifications for the study of material culture. Indeed, this dialectic may be said to be at the heart of contemporary material culture studies, providing a way of understanding the relationship between subjects and ob- jects, and overcoming their conventional opposition in Western thought. A large body 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 381 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  382 ISSUES of anthropological research has demonstrated the cultural specificity of regarding “ob- jects” as essentially nonhuman, inert and passive, in contradistinction to human sub- jects, which are alive and have agency. Consequently, the theoretical direction of much work in contemporary material culture studies has been to question this dichotomy and argue that subjects and objects are not separate domains at all, but in fact coconstitu- tive of one another. Things are not merely expressive of subjective states or unconscious mental structures; human subjectivities are not merely the products of particular mate- rial environments. Rather, persons and things exist in dynamic relation. As Tilley (2006: 61) puts it, “material forms do not simply mirror pre-existing social distinctions, sets of ideas or symbolic systems. They are instead the very medium through which these values, ideas and social distinctions are constantly reproduced and legitimized, or trans- formed.” Through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting, and living with things, people make themselves. This principle has been developed by Daniel Miller in a large and influential body of work concerned with objectification and consumption (e.g., 1987, 1994). The thrust of Miller’s work is to reevaluate the role of material goods in modern societies and in the production of social selves. While acknowledging that people are socialized in particu- lar cultural contexts through their routine engagements with their material world, he is particularly interested in understanding how people come to identify with and take pos- session of this culture, which subjects perceive to be external to themselves. Rather than it being a passive process, Miller argues that people actively appropriate the culture in which they find themselves through consumption, and in so doing they internalize and incorporate it into their identities. Central to Miller’s theory of consumption, however, is a Hegelian concern with the “movement by which society re-appropriates its own external form” and thereby assimilates its own culture (Miller 1994: 17). This entails a process of alienation and reappropriation, as subjects initially see the world and its ob- jects as outside and alien to them, but subsequently recognize these externalities as part of their own social being. This moment of recognition entails the subject reincorporat- ing that which was held to be external and other into itself: a collapsing of the subject– object divide. For Miller (1987: 193), then, consumption becomes the everyday site of a struggle “to appropriate goods and services made in alienating circumstances and trans- form them into inalienable culture.” In a prodigious output, Miller and his students have grounded these somewhat abstract arguments in a wide variety of ethnographic contexts, including studies of cars, clothes, personal possessions, mobile phones, and— to borrow Miller’s intentionally irreverent phrasing—lots of other “stuff ” (e.g., Miller 2001a, 2001b, 2010; Küchler and Miller 2005; Horst and Miller 2006). From Primitivism to Practice: Anthropologies of Art As Miller’s work might suggest, a material culture perspective has been applied to virtu- ally every aspect of human life and in a diversity of regional and temporal contexts. Its reach has extended far beyond the realm of “things” to engage with the materialities of, 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 382 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 383 for example, landscape (e.g., Bender 1993; Hirsh and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Bender and Winer 2001), architecture (e.g., Blier 1987; Buchli 1999), and social memory (e.g., Bahloul 1996; Sutton 2001; de Jong and Rowlands 2007). In the final section of this part of the chapter, I should like to turn to a category of material culture that has retained a somewhat distinct trajectory within anthropological studies: that of art. As with material culture, art was an important part of the broader anthropologi- cal project in the formative years of the discipline, but became marginalized, at least in Britain, with the shift toward functionalism and structural-functionalism in the 1920s and 1930s. While there were exceptions to this trend, not least in the work of Raymond Firth, in the United Kingdom, and Melville Herskovits, a student of Boas, in the United State (e.g., Herskovits and Herskovitz 1934; Redfield, Herskovitz, and Ekholm 1959), for many years the anthropology of art was relegated to the margins of the discipline. The revival of interest in art in the 1960s can be explained by a number of factors, re- flecting both theoretical developments within anthropology and the influence of anthro- pology in other disciplines including art history. Thus, with the increasing prominence of structuralist and semiotic approaches, there was a renewed anthropological interest in symbolism and the aesthetics of ritual process (e.g., Turner 1967), and hence a renewed interest in indigenous art objects used in ritual contexts. Anthony Forge’s (1967, 1973) studies of Abelam art and artists, and Nancy Munn’s (1973) work on Walbiri iconogra- phy are classics of this ethnographic genre. By the later 1970s, ethnographic studies of indigenous arts were well established, typically focusing on the distinctiveness of indig- enous aesthetics and “ways of seeing,” as well as questions of communication, represen- tation, and meaning (Coote and Shelton 1992). The anthropological study of aesthetics is concerned with investigating the culturally specific effects that formal qualities such as shape, texture, light, and shade have on the senses. It is concerned with understanding how people perceive such qualities, as well as how they evaluate, interpret, and are affected emotionally by them. There has been some debate among anthropologists as to whether aesthetics constitutes a cross-cultural cat- egory (e.g., Ingold 1996: 249–93). Howard Morphy argues that it is likely that humans universally sense some aesthetic effects—dullness and luster, for instance, or symmetry and asymmetry—but that these are experienced and interpreted differently according to cultural and social context. In his work on Yolngu art, for example, Morphy (1992: 182–83) observes that artists are clearly “concerned to produce effects on the senses by which the success of the work can be judged,” yet while Europeans might interpret this as an aesthetic effect, the Yolngu would interpret it “as a manifestation of ancestral power emanating from the ancestral past.” Closely related to aesthetics are issues of form, style, and meaning. Indeed, Morphy and Perkins (2006: 323) argue that “art can usefully be approached as the intervention and experience of expressive and meaningful forms in the context of human social ac- tion”: “The form of objects is what creates their affective potential and in part explains their meaningfulness and impact in context. Forms are a resource, forms have histories, forms may identify groups or regions, epochs, religious identities, castes and class. Form 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 383 8/10/2012 3:55:16 AM  384 ISSUES can be used to trace relationships over time, to identify cultural trajectories, to research processes of transmission, to demonstrate or problematize the boundaries around social entities” (2006: 323). Such is the potential of a consideration of art in wider anthropo- logical analyses of societies. And yet, as Nicholas Thomas (2001: 1) observes, the field remains “ ‘curiously’ situated” in relation to the discipline (2001: 1). What is curious for Thomas (2001: 1) is the failure of the anthropology of art to engage with “emerging preoccupations with the politics of art, cross-cultural relations, and representation,” and its continued confinement “not merely to ‘non-Western’ societies but more particularly to certain tribal or formerly tribal peoples, in other words to those formerly identified as ‘primitive.’ ” While museum ethnographers and anthropologists of art have attempted to restyle their object of study as “world art,” “indigenous art,” or “the art of small-scale societies,” it is the specter of primitivism that persistently haunts their endeavors. A critique of the role of anthropology in the construction of the category of “primi- tive art” and its popularization through ethnographic museums and exhibitions formed part of the wider “reflexive turn” in the discipline in the 1980s. Two prominent exhibi- tions of the time were “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinities in the Tribal and the Modern” (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984) and “ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections” (Museum for African Art, New York, 1988). They provoked the so-called primitivism debate among anthropologists, art historians, and curators that has subsequently extended into a broader postcolonial (self-)interrogation of Western practices of cultural representation and appropriation (see Clifford 1988; Danto 1988; Vogel 1988; Price 1989; Gell 1996). These debates have shaped contem- porary museological practices, involving a reevaluation of museum and “source commu- nity” relationships and an attempt to engage in more collaborative forms of curatorial and exhibition practices in partnership with representatives of indigenous and colonized populations (e.g., Kreps 2003; Peers and Brown 2003; Karp et al. 2006; Sherman 2008; Sleeper-Smith 2009). Despite these attempts to challenge Western anthropological and curatorial power, the aesethicization of the “primitive other” continues to be a domi- nant mode of ethnographic display, as evidenced in the exhibitionary approach of the recently opened Musée du quai Branly in Paris (Price 2007; Dias 2008; Shelton 2009). One way in which anthropologists have side-stepped the seemingly intractable prob- lematics of these material and ideological legacies has been, again, to stress the entangle- ment of non-Western objects within global flows, and to return agency to indigenous communities by acknowledging that such flows are two-way processes. In his book Pos- sessions (1999), for example, Thomas attempts to shift dominant views of indigenous art by exploring visual culture as a site of unpredictable cultural exchange in which contem- porary indigenous artists do not see themselves as the victims of Western appropriations, but instead freely incorporate Western art traditions within their own artistic innova- tion, experimenting with new media and materials, while affirming ancestral values and their distinct heritage. Alternatively, North American anthropologists and art historians such as Fred Myers, Christopher Steiner, and Ruth Phillips have escaped “purist” con- cerns with indigenous aesthetics and form by placing emphasis on the circulation of art 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 384 8/10/2012 3:55:17 AM  MATERIAL CULTURE 385 objects in the different regimes of value represented by institutions such as art markets, museums, galleries, and critical writing (Steiner 1994; Marcus and Myers 1995; Phillips and Steiner 1999; Myers 2001a). From this perspective, “Art is not just another example of material culture” (Myers 2001b: 29), suitable for cross-cultural analysis, but is inex- tricable from these particular institutions and the means through which they produce particular hierarchies of value. As Marcus and Myers (1995: 1) state in the introduction to their influential collection, The Traffic in Culture, “In contrast to a previous paradig- matic anthropology of art that was concerned principally with mediating non-Western objects and aesthetics to Western audiences, the work here engages Western art worlds themselves, casting a critical light on mediation itself.” Such an approach calls for a renegotiation of the relationship between art and an- thropology, and acknowledges that “anthropology is itself implicated with the very sub- ject matter that it wants to make its object of study” (Marcus and Meyers 1995: 1). Whereas the focus of this renegotiation has been to shift attention again to consumption practices (and their relation to the production of cultural difference in terms of ethnic- ity and class), an alternative trajectory has been to negotiate the relationships between practices of production in art and in anthropology. That is, to explore “the similarities and differences between artistic and anthropological methodologies and practices in representing others” (Schneider and Wright 2006: 1). This was the objective of a confer- ence organized by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright at London’s Tate Modern gallery in 2003 entitled “Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology.” In recent years, we have thus witnessed an “ethnographic turn” in contemporary art practice, alongside an increasing interest, particularly among visual anthropologists and material culture specialists, in embracing alternative representational modes. Indeed, where once the in- stitution of the museum was abandoned by anthropologists as moribund, it is proving once again to be a site of innovation and dynamism, where exhibition formats and digi- tal technologies are providing new and sophisticated ways of engaging with the media- tion of otherness (e.g., Basu and Macdonald 2007; Basu 2008). A LESSON FROM THE MARGINS? This chapter has provided a brief overview of contemporary material culture studies. A more detailed survey would certainly include a more comprehensive exploration of the relationship between anthropology and archaeology (not forgetting that archaeology remains a subdiscipline of anthropology in many North American campuses); it would widen its scope to include other schools of material culture studies, such as the French “anthropology of techniques” tradition associated with André Leroi-Gourhan, André- Georges Haudricourt, and Pierre Lemonnier (Lemonnier 1986); it would include dis- cussion of other important theories, such as Alfred Gell’s influential work on art, agency, and enchantment (Gell 1998; Pinney and Thomas 2001). My objective has, however, been more modest: to introduce a particular field of study, yes, but also to reconsider the relationship of material culture studies and the discipline of anthropology. 3085-195-P3-018-1pass-r03.indd 385 8/10/2012 3:55:17 AM  386 ISSUES Material culture studies has been presented as an undisciplined substitute for a disci- pline, a postdisciplinary field of study freed from the historical and institutional baggage that constrains many other academic subject areas. However, by investigating something of its ancestral roots and intellectual routes, one can clearly challenge this assertion (see also Hicks and Beaudry 2010). Material culture studies certainly has its “genealogy of ancestors” and its “accepted texts,” and these position it quite obviously within an an- thropological disciplinary home. This disciplinary heritage has not, however, limited its scope or methodology, or made it any less inclusive. 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