Abstract
Material culture, strictly speaking, is substance culture. Nevertheless, studies on material culture are almost exclusively concerned with things. The specificities in the perception of substances and the related everyday practices are rarely taken into consideration. Although this can be explained by the history of anthropology, the bias towards associating material culture with “formed matter” is a foundational shortcoming. In consequence, particular perspectives on the material remain understudied, and the cultural relevance of substances as such is rarely taken into consideration. Taking a perspective grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, this article intends to provide new approaches to substances that elucidate the particular modes of their perception, reveal their characteristics and reflect on particular notions implicit to substances. The final section of this contribution discusses two exemplary studies on substances and proposes transformation and incorporation as new fields of research that would contribute to a more explicit engagement with substances in material culture studies.
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Notes
For lifestyle, or milieus and the role of objects, see Bourdieu (1979).
An exception are the lucent remarks of the historian Christoph Maria Merki on the European history of gasoline, cf. Merki (2008: 391–402).
The so-called “criterion of the form” that dominated German-speaking ethnology's engagement with material culture included the possible transmission of formal elements from one substance to another, whereby historical continuity was tied to the abstract form as such (Zwernemann 1983).
More recent ethnographic studies on the structure of the everyday world incorporate substances implicitly in that they assign them a place in higher-level symbolic systems. This is the case, for example, with the raw materials used by craftspeople, such as iron or clay. For the symbolism of pottery clay in Algeria, see cf. Bourdieu (1972) or by the Dowayoo in Cameroon cf. Barley (1983).
The rise of the idea of “clean air” (which is odourless) has been examined by Corbin (1982).
It appears as if anthropological research regarding substances is at a stage analogous to that of art history in the 1990s, a period described by Monika Wagner as one of a “marginalisation of materials”: Key methods of research, such as iconology, were developed on the basis of photographs of the art objects. Perceptions of materials were thus mediated and did not play a significant role. Using photographs may be an advantage when consulting worldwide image databases, but photography destroys the original materiality of a work and thereby reduces the art object to its form. Without data on the substances of which a work is made, it is impossible to determine from a photo if a given statue is made out of Parisian marble, plaster, cement or Styrofoam.
A popular criticism of consumer culture focuses on the lack of appreciation for substances and materials. It seems as if a trust in brand names has come to replace specific knowledge of the qualities and characteristics of substances. This increasing “superficiality” of perception further reduces the perspective to a matter of forms and colours (Asendorf 1984). The aesthetics of consumption thus leads to the “atrophy” of perceptive capabilities (Haug 1971).
The definition is worked out in a much more technical vein in Soentgen (2008).
It is not only in daily life that the tendencies of substances seem to be an obvious property; these tendencies are also named by science, such as the chemical potential of substances “μ”, measuring the transformation tendencies of specific substances.
This is very close to the findings of Hermann Bausinger (1961, 1981), who emphasises that appropriation always means a radical limitation of perception and a renunciation of many alternative methodologies. Going beyond the findings of Bausinger, the example of water shows that the process of cultural appropriation also implies the emergence of new properties like “purity”. Appropriation is thus not only selection but also the creation of new properties previously hidden, irrelevant or even unknown.
Hirschberg and Janata (1966) differentiate between the extraction of substances and their processing. Their (outmoded) terminologies limit the meaning of “technology” to substance preparation. Accordingly, the manufacture of things is referred to as “ergology”. Hirschberg and Janata's notion of substances today may be considered as a precursor to the study of substances as part of material culture.
Joachim Radkau has examined such values with respect to wood. He concludes that the substances' valuations are gender-biased: “The present history, sensitised to gender differences, must probably take it more exactly and specify that above all, the typically male access to technology goes via woodworking, while female access developed more through forming, joining and tying activities like the preparation of food, clothing and ceramic wares” (Radkau 2007: 43).
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Hahn, H.P., Soentgen, J. Acknowledging Substances: Looking at the Hidden Side of the Material World. Philos. Technol. 24, 19–33 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-010-0001-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-010-0001-8