Exploring materialism and social relationships in modern culture Material Culture and Mass Consumption offers an in-depth exploration of objects, objectification, ideology, and materialism in modern society. Drawing from Hegel, Marx, Munn, and Simmel, the discussion delves into the physicality of the material world and attempts to understand materialism as a form of cultural expression. Targeting mass production as the root of mass consumption, rather than the result, this book positions material goods at odds with genuine (...) social interaction and questions these relationships from the abstract to the intensely specific. (shrink)

Material culture and technoculture not only provide openings to study culture, but raise questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well. Material culture tells a story, though usually not the whole story. The meanings of things are various, and finding out what they are requires a variety of approaches, from simply asking people what their things mean or observing how they use or don’t use them, to backtracking their history, or contextualizing them in (...) broader cultural context. The transition from hunter-gatherer life to that of agriculturally-based civilization some twelve thousand or so years ago was a great watershed of consciousness, not only radically altering the relation to the living environment, but also producing the origins of materialism. One of civilization’s dubious distinctions was to introduce poverty as well as property and wealth. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be. The problem of materialism is not whether to have materials for living, but in allowing them to become goals in themselves. (shrink)

This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation (...) for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itself—its functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features of function in material culture. These two parts of the project are held together by a trio of overarching themes: the relationship between individual and society, the problem of centralized control, and creativity. (shrink)

Many have interpreted symbolic material culture in the deep past as evidencing the origins sophisticated, modern cognition. Scholars from across the behavioural and cognitive sciences, including linguists, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, primatologists, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have used such artefacts to assess the capacities of extinct human species, and to set benchmarks, milestones or otherwise chart the course of human cognitive evolution. To better calibrate our expectations, the present paper instead explores the material culture of three contemporary African (...) forager groups. Results show that, while these groups are unequivocally behaviourally modern, they would leave scant long-lasting evidence of symbolic behaviour. Artefact-sets are typically small, perhaps as consequence of residential mobility. When excluding traded materials, few artefacts have components with moderate-strong taphonomic signatures. Present analyses show that artefact function influences preservation probability, such that utilitarian tools for the processing of materials and the preparation of food are disproportionately likely to contain archaeologically traceable components. There are substantial differences in material-use between populations, which create important population-level variation preservation probability independent of cognitive differences. I discuss the factors — cultural, ecological and practical — that influence material choice. In so doing, I highlight the difficulties of using past material culture as an evolutionary or cognitive yardstick. (shrink)

The Material Culture of the Northern Sea Peoples in Israel. By Ephraim Stern. Harvard Semitic Museum Publications, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013. Pp. ix + 74, illus. $29.50.

Malgré l’accent porté sur les aspects publics, ritualistes de la pratique ancienne, les images et les objets grecs attestent des rencontres privées et personnelles avec des dieux. Cet article recourt à la documentation archéologique pour explorer les traits personnels, vécus, de la vie religieuse de l’Athènes attique. Bien qu’elles soient parfois décrites comme des « transactions », le développement des relations personnelles avec les dieux et de la manipulation de choses matérielles semble être l’un des éléments les plus saillants de (...) l’expérience religieuse des Grecs. Cette étude examine la matérialité religieuse et l’attitude dévotionnelle telle qu’elle existait en dehors de systèmes rituels organisés et des espaces sacrés. La documentation grecque suggère que la culture matérielle était « de la religion » sous forme physique et une part des méthodes des dévots pour développer des relations remarquablement intimes avec des figures sacrées dans un processus appelé « dévotionalisme ». Les femmes athéniennes utilisaient un objet commun de la vie quotidienne comme une forme de médium religieux: la tainia (ruban). Les femmes l’employaient dans tous les lieux de leur vie, y compris les maisons, les lieux de fêtes et les sanctuaires. La céramique suggère que les Athéniens ont employé de tels média dévotionnels pour interagir avec les défunts dans les cimetières. (shrink)

Culture has traditionally been considered as a set of knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, norms, and morals, acquired by a human being as a member of a group. Some anthropologists interpret this as a set of abstract representations, such as information or knowledge, while others interpret it as behavioral control mechanisms. These views assume that the contents of a particular culture must be processed by the minds of individuals, either in a direct way or by resorting to learned mental (...) structures in processes of symbolic socialization. Some critics suggest a problem with these perspectives since they do not provide a convincing explanation of the enculturation process beyond metaphorical images of transfer or internalization of symbolic cultural contents through linguistic transmission. The new embodied theories of cognition, especially enactivism, could give new ideas about what enculturation processes are like, through the concept of participatory sense-making in material culture environments. In this essay, we discuss how an enactive vision of culture could be, and what advantages it would have, as well as the challenges and weaknesses in explaining the culture and its learning processes. (shrink)

Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

This article examines the Dobsonian Telescope as an object of material culture, showing how starting with the materiality of a scientific instrument opens up new perspectives that are lost by focusing purely on its instrumentality. It argues that the simple design and homely materials of the Dobsonian telescope, as well as the gestures that it requires from its users, are at the core of its significance to the popularization of amateur astronomy and amateur telescope making.

Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

Images can be studied in many ways--as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive--they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the (...) divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work, one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents--human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual--become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't always describe"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

‘I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.’Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language.When asked to write for a special issue of Diogenes to be entitled ‘Anthropology: The Reluctant science?’ I was reminded of a remark made to me over dinner by my friend of more than (...) fifty years, the late Eric Wolf. It was the last time I saw him: the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, in November 1998. (shrink)

Humans have cognitive mechanisms that allow them to keep track of time, represent past events, and simulate the future, but these capacities have intrinsic constraints. Here, we explore the role of material culture as an extension of internal time representations through anthropological and archeological case studies, focusing on Upper Paleolithic material culture. We argue that calendars complement and extend internal time representations, because they enable humans to project past events into the future more accurately than is (...) possible with episodic memory alone, making them one of the factors that significantly improved foraging success during the Upper Paleolithic. We discuss the implications of the epistemic use of material culture for our understanding of the causes of shifts in human behavior during the Upper Paleolithic. (shrink)

Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audio-visual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of (...) cinematic objects and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen to reveal hidden dynamics to characters’ relationship and overarching narratives off-screen. (shrink)

The essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images (...) to the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture. (shrink)

The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in (...) human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. The discussion presents the results of a focused study of the long-term development of regional social networks in the Near East, using the distribution of different forms of material culture as a proxy for the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices. (shrink)

Shipped but Not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee. By Nancy Um. Perspectives on the Global Past. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 198, illus. $64.

Fourteen enjoyable papers, from the Theoretical Archaeology Conference held in Oxford in December 2000, which reflect on the relationship between archaeology and the outside world' and investigate the meaning of archaeology to the general public and the relevance of archaeology to society. Essays examine the development of archaeology as a discipline through the medieval, Romantic and Post-Modern eras, looking, for example, at the treatment of archaeological themes in the works of Mary Shelley and Byron. Contributors also consider the impact of (...) Stonehenge on astronomical studies, the influence of Roman finds and sites, including Bath and Caerleon, on Edwardian jewellery and children's stories and the dramatisation of the Iceman's' discovery in a recent play. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

Since its foundation in the mid-nineteenth century, the University of Toronto has accumulated a substantial number of historically-significant scientific objects. As Canada’s largest research university, much of this material is of national significance. Despite numerous attempts since the late 1970s to establish a universal policy for the preservation and safeguarding of scientific apparatus, the survival of Toronto’s scientific material heritage has depended partly on the initiatives of dedicated individuals, partly on luck.The following examination seeks a comprehensive history of (...) the material culture of science at the University, focussing on scientific instrumentation and natural history collections. It examines the circumstances under which some material survives and traces efforts to develop a curated collection, concluding with some recent progress in acquiring storage and developing an online catalogue. It argues that early university science museums formed an important venue through which the University fulfilled its public function of studying the frontier and assisting the expansion of the colonies. The display and interpretation of scientific material culture had an important impact on the University’s early history. (shrink)

The automobile is a key artifact for understanding the relationship between technology and society. As it has developed into a mass-produced and mass-consumed commodity, it has played an increasing role in social life and its built environments. In its most exaggerated manifestation, in parts of the United States, the car is a singular transport mode for expansive urban regions. This social formation, often referred to as “urban sprawl,” has been cited for its environmental and energy impact. Here, the focus is (...) on its social structural impact on motorists as well as on nonmotorists. The auto is a prime example of how material technologies have dynamic and reciprocal relationships with their social contexts. These relationships raise significant ethical issues with regard to the development and application of technology. (shrink)

This article treats the intellectual problem of revolution, agency, and the advent of liberal democracy from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth century France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. After a discussion of the theoretical and historiographical problem—in particular the relevance for this period in history of science studies—the article discusses the views of former Saint-Simonian and political economist, Michel Chevalier, eventually turning to the debate over the free market of goods and labor between the early French socialist Louis Blanc (...) and Chevalier in Chevalier’s new role of liberal free trade activist who trumpeted the ideology of the mass marketplace. Chevalier’s engagement of the social question turned on a distinctively moral, ideological, and, ultimately, technocratic defense of the free market—this free market utopianism became both starker and more ideologically refined as a result of Chevalier’s engagement with Blanc, especially in regard to worker-education. Both referred to the new mass marketplace of cheap, retail goods created by the rapid advance of mass transport, modern logistics, as le bon marché. French political economists went so far as to invoke a new way of life: la vie a bon marché (literally, “life on the cheap”). This notion of work and life was opposed by Blanc on the grounds of fraternal social solidarity. Finally, and potently, the moral virtues of the free market were conceived by Chevalier as a direct answer to social revolution, a means for affording social stability. (shrink)