Handbook of Material Culture. Edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb
Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer. 2006.
Sage Publications Ltd. 576 pages. ISBN: 1-4129-0039-5 (hard cover).


Reviewed by Liora Sarfati, Indiana University

[Word count: 1643 words]


Try to imagine a person engaged in any activity. Now list the objects
that are included in this scene. There are always things. The clothes
we wear, the surfaces we touch, what we can see, our own body, the
smells, the sounds. Even in philosophies that try to keep to only the
bare essentials, let us say for example Zen Buddhism, a great concern
with objects, in Zen the simplicity and crudeness of artifacts used
for tea ceremony, has taken much attention and work. Material culture
is everywhere, but not enough in academic work, say the authors of
the volume reviewed here.

Material Culture as a major field of research in the humanities and
social sciences has been on the rise in the past several decades.
Although many think that mass production, media advertisement, and
urbanization made our life more material in nature, the works
presented and discussed in this volume often relate to rural or past
societies. Therefore, the renewed interest in artifacts should
probably be credited to the deconstructionist turn in verbal analysis
that led scholars to look for more grounded, substantial sources of
data.[1] This compendium is mainly written from anthropological
perspectives and includes both a critical analysis of past and
present scholarly attention to artifacts, and suggestions for future
engagements with this topic. It is a not a book one can gulp in one
sitting, or in two or three, but it is a helpful collection of
explanations, debates, and bibliographies of the various approaches
in this interdisciplinary field of interest. The book is divided into
five parts. While the first is titled "Theoretical Perspectives"
and includes a critique of well-established theories related to
material culture, the others offer alternative models for approaching
things. The essays are by scholars from various countries, which is
refreshing in our regrettably too continent-contained academic world.


Part One, "Theoretical Perspectives," surveys the theories that
created and influenced the field of material studies from the late
nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the past forty years.
The conclusion that emerges from reading this part is that current
research on objects would benefit best from choosing an adaptable
theoretic stance, which would enable scholars to use various concepts
at will and according to specific contexts on which they write. To
emphasize this de-fetishization of theory, Christopher Tilley writes
in his introduction that "Theories are like toolboxes" (10). The
authors of the chapters term this mode of academic flexibility
"theoretical pluralism" (Tilley ,11), "performative scholarly
engagement" (Maurer, 25), and "a bricoleur attitude" (Olsen, 98).
They provide serious consideration of theoretical perspectives
including Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, phenomenology,
objectification, agency and biography, post-structuralism, and
post-colonialism. All authors emphasize the importance of grounding
theoretical conclusions in deep analysis of concrete human practices
and manifestations of values and thought. They demonstrate that in
recent academic discourse material entities have been increasingly
seen as inseparable players in the creation of social structures and
meanings, and have been assigned an active rather than passive role
in these processes.

Part Two, "The Body, Materiality, and the Senses," is still on the
theoretical side of material culture, but offers a
counter-perspective, maybe an alternative theorizing model. It
diverges from the verbally-based theories in that it engages with the
sensual dimension of objects, their visual, tactile, olfactory, and
sounded qualities, and does not hope to convey their meaning in full
by the mediation of words. This part of the book is especially
stimulating in view of the convincing arguments of Patricia Spyer in
her introduction to it that most scholars conducting research on
material culture tend to theorize material culture while often
completely ignoring the sensuous particularities of the objects they
investigate. For the authors in this part, "the evidence of our
senses is equally worthy of attention" (Howes, 162), and artifacts
may even "serve as 'extensions of the senses'" (Spyer, 125). They
lament that most scholarly representations of material culture have
been based on vision and have neglected the other senses. This
criticism includes also museum displays, which usually prevent their
audiences from touching or smelling the objects they see. These
chapters deal with the ways visual culture has been put to the fore
as the most meaningful part of material culture research; how food
works as an agent in social worlds through its sensuous traits; how
synaesthesia, a combined sensual perception, can help us understand
the nature of things; the importance of colors; and the interplay
between outer and inner in objects of investigation. However, Part
Two of the Handbook lacks a discussion of the academic tendency to
represent research findings almost solely in verbal mode, and the
authors here still hope to manage to embody the sensory meanings and
importance of things through a written essay. Few photographs have
been placed in this chapter, and there is no thorough discussion of
alternative, more sensory-oriented ways to present studies on
objects.

Part Three of the Handbook, "Subjects and Objects," offers to broaden
the commonly-used approach, featuring active subjects who create
passive objects, to a more dynamic view that includes possibilities
of agency that objects might embody. It emphasizes how materials can
actually alter people, as when a person uses drugs, or when objects
become inseparable from identities, for example, the weapon of a
soldier. Webb Keane introduces this part by listing four common
approaches that focus on different aspects of object-subject
relations: how artifacts are produced, how objects serve as
representations, how human subjectivities are developed in relation
to objects, and how the material characteristics of objects are
bundled with the context in which they exist. However, these
approaches limit the discussion to artifacts, and exclude materials
which have not been modified by people, mainly because it is very
difficult to discuss objects which have not been experienced and
interpreted yet. Such things, suggests Keane, retain latent
possibilities, which can be investigated when materiality itself
becomes a research concern. The chapters here include several case
studies and discussions of relevant theories on cloth and clothing
from the courtly systems of production to capitalistic times; home
interiors and furnishing as space considerations that modify human
behavior; vernacular architecture and its interaction with scholarly
work and with preservation systems; architecture and modernist ideas
of domesticity and progress, primitivism as a category in art
evaluation and display; networks of commodities translocated in
global arenas; relationships between landscapes and identities; and
how memory is constructed with relation to material experiences.

Part Four, "Process and Transformation," is based on what Susanne
Küchler calls in her introduction "preoccupation with the fluidity
of process, practice, and performance, which acknowledges the
transformation of objects and persons" (326). The chapters in this
part discuss: technology as a powerful cultural actor; how negative
moral stances on consumption have blurred the realities behind human
consumption behavior; how choice and verbal metaphors are key aspects
in understanding style, design, and function in material culture; how
exchange has been dealt with in anthropological work and how people
understand the exchanges in which they are involved through past and
present contexts of artifacts; what roles artifacts play in the
transformation of body, things, and space during extraordinary
performances and their effects on everyday life; how
ethno-archeologists use insights from present-time societies to
better understand communities long gone; and how objects can create
categories and forms of thought when they are grouped as communities
and investigated in the long term. However, this chapter touches few
of the transformations that new media have introduced to
material-culture-related behaviors.

Part Five, "Presentation and Politics," offers a review of different
modes of collection, exchange, display, and preservation of objects
and how they are related to power struggles between interest groups.
The editor of this part, Michael Rowlands, writes in his introduction
that "[M]aterial culture is treated here therefore as knowledge,
either objectified or experienced that can be defended and protected
against abuse, exploitation, and loss" (443). The importance of
analyzing the ways in which specific artifacts are chosen for special
treatment also includes those objects which are forgotten or
neglected in the process. The chapters deal with the contested nature
of intellectual property rights; historical and memorial approaches
to heritage; museum criticism and suggestions for the reconfiguration
of museums as institutions that foster social and political
awareness; how monuments and memorials are related to the
construction of social identities and memory in different styles of
histories; how conservation is material culture in action and the
debates around it; and how collecting might be regarded as an act of
anti-materialism in that it enshrines objects which have been mere
commodities in new and personal creations--the collections.

In conclusion, this book allows the reader a stimulating
reconsideration of categories and approaches to things, artifacts,
and material spaces. It deals most concretely with the emerging new
forms of production, circulation, and display of material culture
within previous and late-modern social and cultural arenas. However,
it discusses only in passing digital media and their effects on
material culture studies. Future theoretical and methodological
efforts should also be directed toward creating alternative means of
representation for scholarly inquiries on material culture, in order
to address issues like attending to all the sensory aspects of
materiality, problems of preservation and property rights, and false
object-subject distinctions, which have been aptly reviewed and
discussed by the authors of this book.

[1] Other recent collections of essays include The Empire of Things:
Regimes of Value and Material Culture, edited by Fred R. Myers (Santa
Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001); Things, edited by Bill
Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Materiality,
edited by Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); and of
course the ever-so-quoted The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986). However, neither these nor other similar
works come close to the breadth and diversity of the Handbook of
Material Culture.