Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

by Carl Knappett

Material culture surrounds us and yet is habitually overlooked. So integral is it to our everyday lives that we take it for granted. This attitude has also afflicted the academic analysis of material culture, although this is now beginning to change, with material culture recently emerging as a topic in its own right within the social sciences. Carl Knappett seeks to contribute to this emergent field by adopting a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in archaeology and integrates anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology, and cognitive science. His thesis is that humans both act and think through material culture; ways of knowing and ways of doing are ingrained within even the most mundane of objects. This requires that we adopt a relational perspective on material artifacts and human agents, as a means of characterizing their complex interdependencies. In order to illustrate the networks of meaning that result, Knappett discusses examples ranging from prehistoric Aegean ceramics to Zande hunting nets and contemporary art.

Thinking Through Material Culture argues that, although material culture forms the bedrock of archaeology, the discipline has barely begun to address how fundamental artifacts are to human cognition and perception. This idea of codependency among mind, action, and matter opens the way for a novel and dynamic approach to all of material culture, both past and present.

Genres: Archaeology, Material Culture

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2005

Reviews

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting example of the ways that things themselves shape and are shaped by cultural contexts of a key from a Berlin apartment house studied by Bruno Latour (2000): "This door key technology also incorporates strong semantic and cultural constraints -- it inculcates the idea that hte resident should unfailingly bolt the door at night and never during the day (the apartment block concierge only locks the door in this way after 10 PM.) If an individual (an outsider) is unaware of this conceptual model, even given the strong physical constraints, it is hard to make sense of the technology and make it work . . . Latour's point . . . is that this technology, through its very materiality, engenders a strong collective discipline among the residents . . . it is not as if the idea of collective discipline was constructed internally in the mind and then externalized in the form of the key -- "the very notion of discipline is impracticable without steel, without the wood of the door, without the bolt of the locks" (Latour 2000, 19) . The key is simultaneously and individsibly material, agent, and idea.

And another thing about the social nature of learning that makes you think academics never leave their homes or interact with others: Citing Dietrick Stout's study of Indonesian stone adze makers, it is "common for knappers to osbserve and comment on the work of their neighbours . . . and even to give aid by taking over for a while from another individual who is having difficulties: individual skills originate in cooperative activity." (58). Well, duh. Has he never sawed a board or hemmed a seam with others and noticed how they hold the tool, or had someone comment on how they're doing it?