Linda Young Review of Handbook of Material Culture
Christopher Tilley et al. (eds), London, Sage, 2006, 576pp.
This is the kind of handbook that is more of a brick than a handy read; at 550 pages, information technology needs to be solidly propped on the desk-bound. I constitute I needed start, a pencil to underline the main ideas, and second, a handy laptop to transcribe them immediately into meaningful summary. My reading was oftentimes adorned with jotted marginalia and muttered invocations: 'er...', 'ah!', 'what???' It's stimulating reading.
A hefty compendium of ideas about the written report of material civilization, the Handbook's framework is firmly anthropological, reflecting the field of study that invented material civilisation study. I suspect that many readers of this journal could find themselves daunted by the references to theorists they've always meant to read and awed by the references to authors they've never heard of. Australian historians' approaches to cloth civilisation tend to be informed by historical archaeology and art history more than anthropology, and are still lit by the sputtering candle of American material history efforts that flickered in the 1980s–90s but never quite went anywhere. The Handbook is therefore a refreshing and challenging source.
It's refreshing because fabric culture studies re-emerged as a modern field in the 1990s in Britain, nurtured into contemporary manifestations by anthropologists and archaeologists, many of whom contribute to the nowadays volume. Information technology's challenging because the new British school focuses on popular culture, aboriginal archaeology and the classical anthropology of the Other, just rarely the celebrated globe. Meanwhile, historians' appointment with material civilisation has concentrated in the subset of the history of consumption, which has been fruitful in terms of knowledge production, merely owing to large reliance on documentary lists, fails to grapple with the materiality of objects. Museum historians are therefore nevertheless without many direct models of material history — though the Handbook should aid anyone seeking a theoretical structure in which to think about historic objects.
If this sounds shallow, the comment is prompted by the smorgasbord structure of the book, which invites sampling. Merely it is a very substantial smorgasbord, laid out with purpose and intellect, in which I'm sure there is notwithstanding more for me to find.
First-upwardly, the theoretical and conceptual field of material culture studies is reviewed via a range of belittling tools: semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, mail service-colonialism, etc. Some of these contributions are more reader-friendly than others. I was engaged by Janet Hoskins' survey, 'Bureau, biography and objects', in which she introduces the recent 'agentive plow' in social theory, comprising several forms of argument nigh the relative and interactive bureau of objects and people, singular and mass-produced, exotic and familiar. In the manner of handbook-surveys, information technology's useful to read overview analyses such as the apparently oppositional perspectives on writing object biographies — ethnographically-rendered narratives or 'make-them-speak' interrogations via contextualisation. It's a useful stardom.
One of the boldest structures of the Handbook is the 2nd section, 'The body, materiality and the senses'. It confronts textuality and visuality as our civilization's ascendant modes of understanding material civilisation, and suggests that the embodied subject and its multiple, concomitant ways of sensing, feeling, knowing, performing and experiencing, offer dynamic routes to different perceptions of the human relation to the material. Studies of nutrient and eating feature here, and of synaesthesia, and of colour – the latter by Diana Young, drawing on her work in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands, where seasonal alter is sometimes experienced in wearing clothing the colour of the plant growth. Corporeality and sensuality open up up to the concept of sense-scapes – an enticing notion.
The most familiar meat and potatoes of material civilisation studies comes in office three, 'Subjects and objects', the well-nigh mutual frame of cloth culture studies. Within this field, Webb Keane identifies four perspectives on the relation of subject to object in social theory: 1. Production; 2. Representation; 3. Evolution; 4. Extension of subjects by objects. The first of these is probably the predominant context of the tradition of object studies: who made information technology, and how? Marxism offered a powerful political theme in which to analyse these findings, just information technology simultaneously introduced a moralistic implication that the other side of the human activity of production, viz, consumption, was exploitative and cocky-indulgent. This poisoned an otherwise potent tool until the cultural studies turn legitimated consumerism as a hot mail-industrial topic in history, and archaeologist Daniel Miller liberated it as a function of subjective self-development. The former has taken off in a large way; the latter less then.
Past dissimilarity, Keane'southward second category of 'representation' continues to be the other ascendant mode of object studies, showing how objects serve every bit representation of/for subjects in anthropology, archæology and fine art history. It usually requires the analyst to 'see through' the object to grasp an abstract structure — the kind of heroically insightful scholarship that is not and so easy to sustain these days.
Means to move beyond the opposition object:subject are suggested past the concept of objects every bit extensions of subjects, eg soldier and weapon, where the object is a necessary element of the subject's agency. This shifts analysis away from objects in self-cognition, towards objects' role in mediating actions, where the bailiwick is non constituted via opposition to or encompassing of goods, but is amplified past merging with them. Context is clearly a critical element of such scenarios, and irresolute contexts open up up further meanings in studying the extended object:field of study pair.
That said, the case report capacity in this section exemplify the risks of multi-author, multi-topic encyclopedias. Information technology begins with a wonderful survey of anthropological theories of material and wearable, past Jane Schneider — just the resource that curators of 'costume' need to jolt us out of the infinitesimal habits of cloth and manner chronology. Perhaps because it's my own speciality, I was less impressed past the chapter theorising dwelling house furnishing and domestic interiors. The affiliate on vernacular compages is a bibliographical gem, and those on architectural modernism and on 'primitivism' in anthropology and art nowadays comprehensive reviews.
The concluding part of the Handbook carries material culture study into the realm of 'Presentation and politics', where the modern need for identities (individual and group) drives expressions in museums, heritage sites, memorials, etc. It posits the ownership of cultural goods every bit primal to identity assertions, in lodge to control admission — admittedly to authorised, structured manifestations that may contain as much amnesia as retentivity. The institutional and professional complicity necessary to present civilisation in an age of these legal and therapeutic rights to cultural differences generates much of the grist of daily museum concern. This is discussed most interestingly in Beverley Butler's contribution, 'Heritage and the present past'. She wryly traces the shift in the past xxx years from museums as a 'whipping male child' of fake consciousness to a favourite child of academe. As always, the frame is anthropological, only this is the field where theoretical anthropology has come closest to professional practice, where directors and curators have been compelled by Indigenous interests to scissure open the museum equally symbol of dispossession, with both successful and less successful outcomes.
Butler concludes with a theme present in several other contributions to the Handbook: the desirability of a humanistic frame of purpose in material culture report and its manifestations including museums and heritage. 'Heritage discourse is uniquely placed not only to address claims about identity, beginnings and cultural transmission just is equipped to accept on the key moral-ethical issues of our times, and to fully engage with and aid the definition of emergent global futures.' (p. 476) Bravo, say I!
Linda Young is director of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne.
Source: https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/book_reviews/handbook_of_material_culture
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