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chapter 2
.............................................................................................

T H E M AT E R I A L-
CULT URAL TURN
EVENT AND EFFECT
.............................................................................................

dan hicks

I N T RO D U C T I O N : E XC AVAT I N G ‘ M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E ’
................................................................................................................
The terms ‘material culture’ and ‘material culture studies’ emerged, one after
another, during the twentieth century in the disciplines of archaeology and
socio-cultural anthropology, and especially in the place of intersection between
the two: anthropological archaeology. Today, ‘material culture studies’ is taught in
most undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in archaeology and anthropol-
ogy. In Britain and North America, four distinct traditions of material culture
studies in archaeology and anthropology might be discerned. In the eastern United
States, one tradition, associated especially with the work of Henry Glassie and his
students, including Robert Saint George, Bernard Herman, and Gerald Pocius
(e.g. Glassie 1975, 1999; Pocius 1991; Herman 1992, 2005; Saint George 1998), has
developed from American folklife studies and cultural geography (see Saint George

I am grateful to Mary Beaudry, Victor Buchli, Jeremy Coote, Inge Daniels, Jonathan Friedman, Chris
Gosden, Tim Ingold, Andy Jones, Danny Miller, Josh Pollard, Gisa Weszkalnys, Sarah Whatmore,
Laurie Wilkie, Chris Wingfield, and Steve Woolgar for discussions and comments that have informed
the argument set out in this chapter.
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26 dan hicks

this volume, Chapter 4). This field has developed to include studies in architecture,
landscape, and historical archaeology, especially through the work of Dell Upton
and James Deetz (e.g. Deetz 1996; Upton 1998, 2008). Secondly, a parallel tradition
of thought, which might be termed the ‘decorative arts’ approach, has been closely
associated with the graduate programme at the Winterthur Program in Early
American Culture in Delaware. Including scholars such as Barbara Carson, Jane
Nylander, and Arlene Palmer Schwind (Carson 1990; Nylander 1990; Palmer 1993),
this tradition has worked more with art historians and historians of the domestic
interior, and also with the commercial antiques trade. Thirdly, during the 1990s a
group of British archaeologists and anthropologists at University College London
(UCL), including Danny Miller, Chris Tilley, and Mike Rowlands, developed, espe-
cially through the Journal of Material Culture and a popular graduate programme, an
influential model for material culture studies, grounded in anthropology but self-
consciously interdisciplinary in outlook (Tilley et al. 2006). Fourthly, a much looser,
more widespread, and less often explicitly discussed body of material culture work
ranges from the physical examination and scientific analysis of objects in laboratories
and museums, to the material engagements of archaeological and anthropological
fieldwork (including collecting and fieldwork, see Lucas this volume).
Given the currency of the idea of material culture in these fields over the past three
decades, it is to be expected that archaeologists and anthropologists might have a
clear and distinctive contribution to make to the interdisciplinary study of material
things in the social sciences, and especially to a Handbook of Material Culture Studies.
This chapter considers the potential nature of that contribution. This is not,
however, a straightforward task. The varieties of ‘material culture studies’ that
emerged in the 1980s built upon the emergence of ‘material culture’ as an object of
enquiry for twentieth-century archaeology and anthropology, which in turn devel-
oped from museum-based studies of ‘technology’ and ‘primitive art’ during the late
nineteenth century. The idea of ‘material culture studies’ gained a sense of coherence
and significance because it was deployed to solve a number of quite specific, long-
standing archaeological and anthropological problems. These related to the idea of
relationships between the ‘social’/‘cultural’ and the ‘material’. It is in relation to these
problems that the field came to acquire during the 1990s a kind of paradigmatic
status: falling across, but never quite integrating, archaeological and anthropological
thinking. Moreover, it is against the continued relevance of these problems—the idea
of relating human and non-human worlds—that the contemporary value of the idea
of ‘material culture studies’ must be considered, especially at a time in which there
are so many reasons for turning away from the very idea of studying something
called ‘material culture’. Central here is the question recently posed by Amiria
Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell: ‘What would an artefact-oriented
anthropology look like if it were not about material culture?’ (Henare et al. 2007a: 1).
The contemporary discomfort with the idea of ‘material culture’ in archaeolo-
gy and anthropology has three dimensions. First is the idea of culture. The past
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the material-cultural turn 27

two decades have seen a range of postcolonial, feminist, and historical critiques of
the essentialist, static, synchronic, and normative tendencies of the ‘culture
concept’, and its place within the discipline’s colonial legacies (Clifford 1988;
Abu Lughod 1991a; Daniel 1998; Trouillot 2003). Secondly, there are the long-
standing arguments over the utility of a separate category of the ‘material’:
whether it is helpful, or even possible, to define some form of ‘culture’ that is
not materially enacted (Olsen 2006, 2007; Ingold 2007a). Thirdly—a complement
to these tendencies to reduce explanation to the human, or to the non-human—
is the nature of the connection, relationship, or boundary between the two halves
of this unhyphenated term—‘material culture’ (Miller 2007: 24; see Pinney 2005).
Or, of course, the very idea of the existence of such a fundamental boundary in
the first place, apart from in certain modernist discourses that beyond their
textual accounts could only ever be partially enacted, rather than fully realized
(Latour 1993a).
The purpose of this chapter, however, is to excavate the idea of ‘material culture
studies’, rather than to bury it (cf. Miller 2005a: 37). Excavation examines the
remains of the past in the present and for the present. It proceeds down from the
surface, but the archaeological convention is to reverse this sequence in writing:
from the past to the present. In the discussion of the history of ideas and theories, a
major risk of such a chronological framework is that new ideas are narrated
progressively, as paradigm shifts: imagined as gradual steps forward that have
constantly improved social scientific knowledge (Darnell 1977: 407; Trigger 2006:
5–17). Noting this risk, nevertheless archaeologists and anthropologists cannot
divorce the kind of histories that they write of their own disciplines from the
conceptions of time that characterize their own work. As an anthropological
archaeologist, my focus here is upon the taphonomic processes of residuality,
durability, and sedimentation of the remains of past events. Such processes con-
stantly shape the intellectual landscapes of archaeology and anthropology. In
seeking to generate knowledge of the world we encounter these processes, just as
we do any chunk of the landscapes in which we live our everyday lives, in the
present as a ‘palimpsest’ of layered scratches (Hoskins 1955: 271). Archaeological
accounts of historical processes operate by slowly working through, documenting,
and making sense of the assemblage, rather than standing back and explaining the
whole (Hicks and Beaudry 2006b). By undertaking such an iterative process, the
chapter explores how the ideas of ‘material culture’ and ‘material culture studies’
are themselves artefacts of particular disciplinary conceptions of ‘the social’. In
conclusion, discussing the current reception of actor-network theory (ANT) in
archaeology and anthropology, the chapter explores the limitations of the ideas of
the ‘actor-network’ and of ‘material culture’ for archaeology and anthropology,
especially in relation to their interdisciplinary contribution.
The process of excavation is, however, a time-consuming one. The reader will
forgive, I hope, the length and the pace of this chapter. The purpose of working
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28 dan hicks

back over disciplinary histories will, I also hope, become apparent as the chapter
proceeds.

***
Virtually no historical overviews of this very recent episode in archaeological and
anthropological disciplinary histories have been previously attempted (but see
Buchli 2002a, 2004 and Schlereth 1981 for North America). Nevertheless, anthropo-
logical archaeology routinely explores the very recent and contemporary past, rather
than waiting until ‘after the dust settles’ (Rathje 2001: 67; Hicks and Beaudry 2006b:
4). The chapter is written in the conviction that such excavation of recent disciplin-
ary histories is not only possible, but is an essential first step in thinking through the
contribution of archaeological and anthropological thinking about things beyond
these two disciplines. My focus is explicitly upon British debates where the emer-
gence of material culture studies from archaeological and anthropological thought
has been particularly strong, and upon Cambridge-, London-, and Oxford-based
researchers because of their central role in the emergence of the idea of ‘material
culture studies’; however, the international dimensions of the shifting debates over
the study of things will be considered along the way. Like all anthropological writing,
it is both a situated and a ‘partial’ account in the sense evoked by Marilyn Strathern
(2004a): neither total, nor impartial (cf. Haraway 1988).
The main argument of the chapter relates to the distinctive form taken by the
‘cultural turn’ in British archaeology and social anthropology during the 1980s and
1990s. For both fields, the cultural turn was a material turn. An explicit and rhetorical
use of the study of ‘the solid domain of material culture’ (Tilley 1990a: 35) was deployed
in order to shelter research into humanistic themes such as consumption, identity,
experience, and cultural heritage from the accusations of relativism or scholasticism
that accompanied the cultural turn during the late twentieth-century science wars
between ‘relativism’ and ‘realism’. In other words, whereas in many disciplines the
cultural turn was characterized by a shift from objectivity to subjectivity, the situation
was more entangled in British archaeology and anthropology, because considerable
intellectual effort was focused on the idea of relationships between cultural subjects
and cultural objects. The legacy of this epistemological move, which I shall call the
‘Material-Cultural Turn’, has in practice reinforced earlier divisions between archaeo-
logical and anthropological thinking—between the ‘material’ and ‘cultural’. I shall
argue that these distinctions derived in turn from an earlier set of debates, which had
led to the emergence of the idea of ‘material culture’ during the second quarter of the
twentieth century. Thus, the chapter seeks to document what remains after this
Material-Cultural Turn, and how these remains might be put to work today.
A longer-term perspective, as this chapter suggests, reveals that the contested
place of material objects in the study of human cultures or societies has represented
a fault-line running throughout interactions between British archaeological and
anthropological thought and practice. By working back and forth across this
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the material-cultural turn 29

fault-line, rather than down towards any solid bedrock, I shall argue that the idea of
distinguishing between the material and the cultural, and of distinguishing rela-
tionships between them, was a distinctive artefact of modernist anthropology and
archaeology. The challenges for the two disciplines today, therefore, lie neither in
sketching out such dualisms, nor in seeking to overcome them, but more funda-
mentally in shaking off those modernist representational impulses of which the
very concept of ‘material culture’ is an effect.
The rest of this chapter falls across five broadly chronological sections, and a
concluding discussion. The first section (pp. 30–44) considers the development of
the idea of ‘object lessons’ during the late nineteenth century, and traces the
subsequent terminological shift from ‘primitive art’ and ‘technology’ to ‘material
culture’ during the second quarter of the twentieth century in British anthropology
and archaeology. It examines the relationships of this shift with the emergence of
structural-functionalist anthropology and (later) the ‘New’ or processual archae-
ology. I shall argue that, counterintuitively, the idea of ‘material culture’ emerged
at precisely the same moment as a very significant hiatus in the anthropological
and, to a lesser extent, the archaeological study of objects and collections took
place. Thus, the emergence of the idea of ‘material culture’ was from the outset
intimately bound up with a radical shift away from the study of things. The legacies
of these debates continue to shape discussion of the idea of ‘material culture’ today.
The second section (pp. 44–64) considers how the development of structuralist
and semiotic approaches in both fields brought a new attention upon the study of
material culture. I shall argue that the emergence from the 1970s of the idea of
‘material culture studies’ developed especially from a desire to reconcile structur-
alism and semiotics. Tracing the alternative influences upon British archaeology
and anthropology, this section a shift from the late nineteenth-century idea of
‘object-lessons’ to the new conception, derived especially from practice theory, of
‘object domains’. Just as practice theory emerged from two principal thinkers—
Bourdieu and Giddens—so its reception in British archaeology and anthropology
was mapped out through the work of two scholars and their students: Ian Hodder
at Cambridge and Daniel Miller at UCL. This body of work used the idea of
‘material culture studies’ to craft the cultural turn in British archaeology and
anthropology as a Material-Cultural Turn.
A shorter third section (pp. 64–68) outlines the ‘high period’ of British material
culture studies since the early 1990s, outlining the principal themes in this field
during that period. It also explores alternative conceptions of disciplinarity in this
period, and especially the idea of material culture studies as a kind of post-
disciplinary field. The fourth section (pp. 68–79) traces the gradual unfolding of
the idea of ‘material culture’ as a fixed and coherent object of enquiry: in debates
over the idea of objects as texts, various uses of phenomenology, and the idea of
‘material agency’. Discussing the critique of the idea of ‘materiality’ by Tim Ingold,
a fifth section (pp. 79–94) explores how two themes in his recent work—formation
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30 dan hicks

and skill—might be reoriented in the light of recent work in historical anthropology

and historical archaeology, to account for the positionality of the researcher in
material culture studies. Central here is an understanding of both things and
theories as simultaneously events and effects: rather than as passive objects, active
subjects, or caught up somehow in the spectral webs of networks (Latour 2005a),
meshworks (Ingold 2007c), or dialectical relations (Miller 2005a). In this light, a
concluding section (pp. 94–98) takes stock of prospects for the idea of material
culture studies in anthropological archaeology after the Material-Cultural Turn.

I: F RO M ‘ T E C H N O LO G Y ’ TO ‘ M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E ’
................................................................................................................
The idea of studying technology in archaeology and anthropology crystallized
during the two disciplines’ ‘Museum Period’ in the last third of the nineteenth
century from earlier Western colonial and antiquarian collecting practices (Sturte-
vant 1969: 622; Stocking 1985: 7). Between c.1865 and c.1900, when firm boundaries
between the two disciplines had not yet emerged, material things—especially human
‘technology’—came to be central to attempts to order human cultures across time
and space in a scientific manner: in self-conscious contrast with earlier antiquarian
collecting practices. However, although it has often been used with reference to
nineteenth-century museum anthropology or ethnographic collecting, the term
‘material culture’—the definition of a ‘super-category of objects’ (Buchli 2002a:
3)—was not current in British archaeology and anthropology until the inter-war
period of the early twentieth century. This section traces the emergence of evolu-
tionary, diffusionist, and culture-historical models of technology, and the intellec-
tual contexts in which gradual replacement of the term of ‘technology’ with that of
‘material culture’ took place, especially as part of the critique presented by structur-
al-functionalist and early processualist approaches between the 1920s and 1950s.

Evolutionary, diffusionist, and culture-historical studies of

technology
During the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘Three Age’ system, in which the techno-
logical use of different materials (stone, bronze, iron) defined changing time
periods of Old World prehistory, gave structure to the earliest integrative accounts
of European prehistory (Worsaae 1849; Lubbock 1865). During the 1870s and 1880s
ideas of artefact typology (the analysis of archaeological and ethnographic objects
according to type) emerged. These new schemes came to be used as the basis for
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the material-cultural turn 31

new progressivist schemes of technological change, most famously in Augustus

Lane Fox Pitt Rivers’ account of ‘the evolution of culture’, which presented a
gradualist, linear model of cultural change (Pitt Rivers 1875) in which, unlike
Henry Lewis Morgan’s (1877) similar contemporary scheme of social evolution,
material things were central (Figure 2.1). The application of evolutionary thinking
to human technologies such as that exemplified by Pitt Rivers’ thinking was
paralleled by Marx’s slightly earlier suggestion about studying ‘the history of
human technology’, highlighted by Tim Ingold, in Capital:
Darwin has aroused our interest in the history of natural technology, that is to say in the
origin of the organs of plants and animals as productive instruments utilised for the life
purposes of those creatures. Does not the history of the origin of the production of men in
society, the organs which form the material basis of every kind of social organisation, deserve
equal attention? Since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history
and natural history is that the former is the work of man and the latter is not, would not the
history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology?
Marx (1930 [1867]: 392–393, footnote 2; quoted by Ingold 2000a: 362)

As a classificatory project, Pitt Rivers’ scheme was tangibly realized in the organi-
zation of his first museum collection. Opened in 1884, the Pitt Rivers Museum at
Oxford University was originally organized by both evolutionary and typological
principles (Pitt Rivers 1891), and was constructed as an extension to the University’s
Museum of Natural History (Gosden and Larson 2007). The museum made a
connection between human technology and Edward Tylor’s notion of ‘culture’, as
set out in his book Primitive Culture (1871). Such thinking was expanded in Oxford
by Henry Balfour in his study of The Evolution of Decorative Art (Balfour 1893) and
in Cambridge by Alfred Cort Haddon in his Evolution in Art (1895), for both of
whom the idea of the development of artefact sequences or ‘series’ over time, rather
than a rigid theory of evolutionary change as we might understand it today, was
important (Morphy and Perkins 2006a: 5).
The publication in 1896 of the English translation of Friedrich Ratzel’s The History
of Mankind (the German edition of which had been published in 1885–1888) was
an important milestone in the use of ethnographic and archaeological collections
to study human cultures. Echoing earlier developments in geology, and then evolu-
tionary natural history, Ratzel argued that such studies could go beyond written
histories:
We can conceive a universal history of civilization, which should assume a point of view
commanding the whole earth, in the sense of surveying the history of the extension of
civilization throughout mankind . . . At no distant future, no one will write a history of the
world without touching upon those peoples which have not hitherto been regarded as
possessing a history because they have left no records written or graven in stone. History
consists of action; and how unimportant beside this is the question of writing or not writing,
how wholly immaterial, beside the facts of doing and making, is the word that describes them.
Ratzel (1896: 5)
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Fig. 2.1 ‘Clubs, Boomerangs, Shields and Lances’: Pitt Rivers’ scheme for Australian weapons showing forms
PLATE III.

SHIELD

emerging in series from the centre outwards, from a hypothetical single form (from Pitt Rivers 1875).
UB
CL
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LANCE
MUSHROOM CLUB

IA
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[P.R.I.G.B., VII, Pl. iii.]

ED
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BOOMERANG
LEANGLE
WAR PICK OR MALGA
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the material-cultural turn 33

Fig. 2.2 ‘Zulu wooden vessels from the Museum of the Berlin Mission’, from Ratzel
1897 (vol. 2), p. 413.

The introduction by Tylor to Ratzel’s very richly illustrated volume—containing

some 1,160 illustrations—captured the confidence of this late nineteenth-century
conception of the study of artefacts (Figure 2.2). Describing the richness of these
illustrations, Tylor argued that they
are no mere book-decorations, but a most important part of the apparatus for realising
civilisation in its successive stages. They offer, in a way which no verbal description can
attain to, an introduction and guide to the use of museum collections on which the Science
of Man comes more and more to depend in working out the theory of human development.
Works which combine the material presentation of culture with the best descriptions by
observant travellers, promote the most great object of displaying mankind as related
together in Nature through its very variation.
Tylor (1896: v)

Tylor contrasted biological and linguistic approaches to ‘the classification of

peoples’ with the ‘fuller though less technical treatment of the culture-side of
human life’: ‘the material arts of war, subsistence, pleasure, the stages of knowledge,
morals, religion, may be so brought to view that a compendium of them, as found
among the ruder peoples, may serve not only as a lesson-book for the learner, but
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34 dan hicks

as a reference-book for the learned’ (Tylor 1896: vi). The centrality of the classifi-
cation of technological objects (e.g. Haddon 1900), combined with the curator’s
sense of the distinctive knowledge that can emerge from the study of material
things, was captured in Tylor’s coining of his famous phrase ‘object-lessons’:
In our time there has come to the front a special study of human life through such object-
lessons as are furnished by the specimens in museums. These things used to be little more
than curiosities belonging to the life of barbarous tribes, itself beginning to be recognised as
curious and never suspected as being instructive. Nowadays it is better understood that they
are material for the student ‘looking before and after’.
Tylor (1896: vi, my emphasis)

Tylor’s fin-de-siècle argument about ‘looking before and after’ represented a re-
markably confident statement of the potential of the curation and study of objects:
as not only documenting the past or understanding the present, but also envision-
ing the future: ‘not only as interpreting the past history of mankind, but as even
laying down the first stages of curves of movement which will describe and affect
the courses of future opinions and institutions’ (Tylor 1896: xi).
In the study of European prehistory, the idea of ‘seriation’ (the identification of
a series or sequence through typological analysis) was during the 1880s and 1890s
combined with a diffusionist approach to cultural change by Oscar Montelius,
based at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm (Montelius 1903).
Such work inspired what came to be known as ‘culture-historical archaeology’,
providing very different accounts from earlier evolutionary studies of technolog-
ical change that now led to the first overall accounts of the sequence of Old World
prehistory by archaeologists such as John Myres (1911) and Gordon Childe (1925).
These new culture-historical accounts of the prehistoric past were, however,
associated especially with the identification of particular artefactual types with
particular normative ethnic or cultural groups, in order to trace their migration
or diffusion through detailed typological study (Figure 2.3). They also focused
upon the socially determining role of technology: for example, in Childe’s com-
bination of Marxist notions of technology and production with a distinctive use
of the idea of ‘revolution’ to underline the significance of the emergence of
metallurgy in the long-term developments of European prehistory (Sherratt
1989: 179).
However, such confidence in the study of technology did not continue in British
anthropology. The early twentieth century saw the emergence of radical new forms
of integrative, book-length writing in British archaeology and anthropology. These
were both associated with the professionalization of the disciplines as academic
subjects, new models of fieldwork, and new distinctions between ethnographic and
archaeological knowledge. These distinctions were centred to a large extent on the
place of the study of technology. The changing conceptions of ‘technology’ and
‘material culture’ are considered in the next section.
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CRETAN NEOLITHIC CLAY FIGURES KNOSSOS

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European Civilization (Childe 1925: 18, figure 8).

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36 dan hicks

Social anthropology or material culture

In the early twentieth century a fundamental change in ethnographic field prac-
tices, which had over the previous two centuries shifted through ‘the voyage [to]
the collection of curios [to] the field trip’ (Defert 1982: 12), formed a new horizon in
the anthropological study of artefacts. Mainstream British anthropological inter-
ests shifted from museums and objects (especially technology and ‘primitive’ art)
to extended, direct contact through fieldwork with living societies, unmediated by
collections (Miller 1987: 111). This change is generally described as a shift to
‘functionalist’ and gradually, from the 1940s, ‘structural-functionalist’ approaches.
The focus of field activity by anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown became the generation of field notes, based on participant
observation, rather than collections of objects for museum curation. Fieldwork was
undertaken for longer periods of time, and led to the production of a new written
form: the ethnographic monograph. Evolutionary schemes for studying material
culture were rejected as part of what developed into a broader critique of the
writing of ‘conjectural history’ of social institutions (Radcliffe-Brown 1941: 1).
Thus in Radcliffe-Brown’s 1922 monograph on The Andaman Islanders, ‘tech-
nology’ was simply listed in the appendix (Tilley 2006a: 2). Radcliffe-Brown did
study and collect objects, but he wrote about them only as evidence of ‘racial’ and
cultural history, rather than of the contemporary society encountered by the
ethnographer. The presence of such appendices is instructive: since the functional-
ism as set out by Malinowski understood each element of culture, such as institu-
tions or practices, to be understood as performing a function, the study of objects
could still be accommodated. Increasingly, however, structural-functionalism
sought to relate the functions of the phenomena encountered by the ethnographer
purely to social structure. Structural-functionalist anthropology developed as a
comparative sociology, on a Durkheimian model. It was integrative like the new
culture-historical archaeologies, but was distinct in its frustration with the techno-
logical focus of a previous generation of museums—rather than field-based re-
searchers. Thus, Malinowski famously complained that:
As a sociologist, I have always had a certain amount of impatience with the purely
technological enthusiasms of the museum ethnologist. In a way I do not want to move
one inch from my intransigent position that the study of technology alone is . . . scientifi-
cally sterile. At the same time, I have come to realise that technology is indispensable as a
means of approach to economic and sociological activities and to what might be called
native science.
Malinowski (1935: 460)

The accommodation of objects within such writing was by understanding their role
in social institutions: most influentially in the study of exchange in Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). This engendered a gradual dematerializa-
tion of social anthropology, which was closely bound up with a move away from
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the material-cultural turn 37

concerns with historical process, towards the study of ‘social facts’. In Britain, this
gradual rise of a Durkheimian model for social anthropology witnessed a change in
terminology, from ‘technology’ to a new compound term: ‘material culture’. This
change in the vocabulary of British anthropology between the 1920s and 1940s was
very little discussed at the time.
In many ways, the shift from ‘technology’ to ‘material culture’ was a desirable
one for both museum- and fieldwork-focused anthropologists. On the one hand,
for social anthropologists working in a structural-functionalist model the idea of
museum-based anthropology as studying ‘material culture’ allowed a separation
off of collections, as a legacy of earlier times, from the emerging modern field of
British social anthropology. In this respect, the terminological shift from ‘technol-
ogy’ to ‘material culture’ was comparable with a broader shift in modes of
‘objectivity’ identified by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (1992, 2007), from
the ‘mechanical objectivity’ of the late nineteenth century to the ‘trained judge-
ment’ of the twentieth century. Such a move distinguished a modernist social
anthropology from earlier technological determinism, such as that found in one of
the earliest volumes to use the term ‘material culture’: Leonard Hobhouse, Gerald
Wheeler, and Morris Ginsburg’s combination of evolutionary and early function-
alist approaches with statistical analysis to examine The Material Culture and Social
Institutions of the Simpler Peoples, which focused on how ‘material culture, the
control of man over nature in the arts of life’ might ‘roughly, but no more than
roughly, reflect the general level of intellectual attainment’ in the society in
question (Hobhouse et al. 1915: 6; Penniman 1965: 133n1).
On the other hand, the new term ‘material culture’ was equally attractive to
museum-based anthropologists wishing to underline that their collections were
more than simply assemblages of objects—the legacy of a previous intellectual
tradition—and to revive Tylor’s conception of culture in order to do so. In this
view, it provided a curatorial refuge from that other compound term of the period,
‘structural-functionalism’. Thus, J. H. Hutton writing in 1944 on the theme of ‘The
Place of Material Culture in the Study of Anthropology’ expressed his ‘dissent most
emphatically from the functionalist point of view that the study of “material
culture” is of value only, or even primarily, as an approach to the study of economic
and social activity’ (Hutton 1944: 3). As Mike Rowlands has put it, the idea of
material culture represented a place of retreat for museum anthropology during the
mid-twentieth century:
Material culture in an anthropological context is scarcely ever about artefacts per se. The
term connotes instead the ambivalent feelings that anthropologists have had towards their
evolutionist and diffusionist origins and towards museum studies, reflecting also their
concern that the subject, in an age of specialization, should still aspire to be a totalizing
and integrative approach to the study of man. The term is therefore metaphorical rather
than sub-disciplinary and survived as a conceptual category to allow certain kinds of study
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38 dan hicks

to be practised that would not fit any of the canons established during the hegemony of
British social anthropology in the inter-war years.
Rowlands (1983: 15)

The creation of the new category of ‘material culture’ was thus closely bound up
with the emergence of British social anthropology, which increasingly compre-
hended object-based research as ‘clearly subordinated to sociology’, and defined
itself as fundamentally distinct from archaeology (Stocking 2001: 187, 192–193).
British anthropology was concerned with difference in the contemporary world
across space (between Western and non-Western situations), rather than with
change over time (Rowlands 2004: 474). In a shift often lamented by the increas-
ingly peripheral voices of museum anthropologists (Sturtevant 1969; Reynolds
1983; see Stocking 1985: 9), British social anthropology sought to move its subject
matter past objects, to people.

New archaeology and material culture

The implications for archaeology of this shift away from objects in structural-
functionalist social anthropology were at first felt less sharply in Britain than in
North America. But in the United States similar ideas of lifting the archaeology
out of purely descriptive and antiquarian accounts of the past came to be
developed by two key thinkers: Walter Taylor (in the 1940s) and Lewis Binford
(from the 1960s). Both Taylor and Binford presented critiques of culture-histori-
cal archaeology as privileging the study of typology above that of human beha-
viour in the past, in which new approaches to the study of archaeological material
culture were set out. The work of these two archaeologists formed an important
context for the reception of structural-functionalism, especially in relation to its
implications for the study of ‘material culture’, in British archaeology during the
1950s and 1960s.
Walter Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology (1948), was based on a Ph.D. written at
Harvard between 1938 and 1942. It was strongly influenced by the emerging
cultural-ecological models of Clyde Kluckhohn and Julian Steward, and especially
by Talcott Parsons’ (1937) vision of structural-functionalist sociology as a science of
human action. Taylor presented a ‘conjunctive approach’, which foregroun-
ded archaeological methods to argue that archaeological research leads not to
‘reconstructions’ but active, scientific ‘constructions’ of the past (Taylor 1948: 35–36):
it had
as its primary goal the elucidation of cultural conjunctives, the associations and relation-
ships, the ‘affinities’, within the manifestation under investigation. It aims at drawing the
completest possible picture of past human life in terms of human and geographic environ-
ment. It is chiefly interested in the relation of item to item, trait to trait, complex to
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the material-cultural turn 39

complex . . . within the culture-unit represented and only subsequently in the taxonomic
relation of these phenomena to similar ones outside of it.
Taylor (1948: 95–96; original emphasis)

The distinctive identity of archaeology as a discipline was a crucial element of

Taylor’s argument: ‘Archaeology is neither history or anthropology. As an autono-
mous discipline it consists of a method and a set of specialized techniques for the
gathering or “production” of cultural information’ (Taylor 1948: 44). Thus, Taylor
criticized Alfred Kidder’s study of archaeological objects in his study of The
Artifacts of Pecos (1932):
there is neither any provenience given for the vast majority of artifacts, nor any consistent
correlation of these specimens with the ceramic periods. The description of the artefacts
seems to be for its own sake and for the sake of comparative study on a purely descriptive
level with similar artefacts from other sites. It may well be asked whether the meaning of the
artefacts for the culture of Pecos is thought to lie in their form and classification of form, or
whether it lies in their relations to one another and to the broad cultural and natural
environment of Pecos.
Taylor (1948: 48)

While Taylor’s study concluded with a lengthy ‘Outline of Procedures for the
Conjunctive Approach’, which argued that ‘an archaeological find is only as good
as the notes upon it’ (Taylor 1948: 154), the outspoken attacks in A Study of
Archaeology upon many of the most senior figures in American archaeology at
the time severely limited its impact for a generation (Leone 1972): a fact later of
considerable regret to Taylor himself (Taylor 1972; Maca et al. 2009).
During the 1960s Lewis Binford developed the line of thought begun by Taylor
into a more direct critique of culture-historical archaeology. Binford’s work
inspired the development of ‘processual’ or ‘New’ archaeology during the 1970s.
But where Taylor had argued for a strong archaeological disciplinarity, Binford’s
commitment (which he shared with Taylor) to a focus on behaviour rather than
typology led him instead to define ‘Archaeology as Anthropology’: repeating
Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips’ contention that ‘archaeology is anthropology
or it is nothing’ (Willey and Phillips 1958: 2; Binford 1962: 217), and extending Leslie
White’s neo-cultural evolutionary argument that ‘culture is the extra-somatic
means of adaptation for the human organism’ to ‘material culture’ as an ‘extra-
somatic means of adaptation’ (White 1959: 8; Binford 1962: 217–218).
Binford distinguished between ‘three major functional sub-classes of material
culture’: technomic (‘those artifacts having their primary functional context in coping
directly with the physical environment’, socio-technic (‘the extra-somatic means of
articulating individuals one with an-other into cohesive groups capable of efficiently
maintaining themselves and of manipulating the technology’, such as ‘a king’s
crown’), and ideo-technic (‘items which signify and symbolize the ideological ration-
alizations for the social system and further provide the symbolic milieu in which
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40 dan hicks

individuals are enculturated’, such as ‘figures of deities’) (Binford 1962: 217, 219–220).
He argued that such distinctions would allow archaeologists to develop distinctive
theoretical perspectives on the significance of certain material items in social life, and
to distinguish alternative methods for the study of past environmental adaptation,
social relations, and ideas or beliefs through material culture:
We should not equate ‘material culture’ with technology. Similarly we should not seek
explanations for observed differences and similarities in ‘material culture’ within a single
interpretative frame of reference. It has often been suggested that we cannot dig up a social
system or ideology. Granted we cannot excavate a kinship terminology or a philosophy, but
we can and do excavate the material items which functioned together with these more
behavioral elements within the appropriate cultural sub-systems. The formal structure of
artifact assemblages together with the between element contextual relationships should and
do present a systematic and understandable picture of the total extinct cultural system.
Binford (1962: 218–219)

Thus, Binford argued that archaeological material culture should be understood as

evidence of human behaviour and adaptation, operating in different cultural registers
from the practical to the social to the ideational, rather than more general reflections
of particular culture-historical traits (Figure 2.4). He developed this positivist view
through the use of ethnographic analogy and a method of making general statements
about the systematic relationships between human behaviour and material culture,
which he termed ‘middle range theory’ (Binford 1983). In his classic critique of
culture-historical archaeology, Binford argued that an analysis of the stone tools
associated with the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, in which François Bordes
suggested that difference in tools represented could be understood as different tradi-
tions that he labelled ‘Mousterian’, ‘Acheulian’, etc., should instead be understood as
the evidence of different behavioural adaptations rather than different cultural groups
(Binford 1973; Bordes 1973). The materialism of the New Archaeology drew from the
contrasting ecological perspectives of Julian Steward and the technological focus of
Leslie White: both of which tended, under the banner of neo-evolutionism, towards a
materialist determinism for social structure (Trigger 1984: 279).
In Britain, a similar direction to that of the Americanist New Archaeology had
begun to be explored by Graham Clark at Cambridge. Clark’s transitional ap-
proach, which has been described as ‘functional-processual’ (Trigger 2006), made
use of ‘systems’ approaches and an emphasis upon ecological adaptation in the
reconstruction of past societies, as set out in his Archaeology and Society (1939).
However, the reception of structural-functionalist social anthropology among
British archaeologists did not lead in the same way to the development of the
positivist scientific models that came to characterize the Americanist processual
archaeology. This was for two principal reasons: contemporary debates in British
social anthropology about historical change, and the early response to Walter
Taylor’s arguments from the perspectives of British culture-historical archaeology.
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the material-cultural turn 41

Fig. 2.4 ‘Close up of the butchering area at the Anavik Springs site [Alaska]
showing the circular areas in which the caribou were dismembered and the location
of the waste by-products’, from Lewis Binford’s In Pursuit of the Past (Binford
1983: 123, figure 61).

In British social anthropology, the shift in the structural-functionalist anthropology

away from interests in change over time, which had accompanied its shift from earlier
evolutionary and diffusionist approaches, came to be critiqued. A seminal contribu-
tion to this critique was Evans-Pritchard’s Marrett Lecture of 1950, which described the
anthropology of Malinowski and (by implication) Radcliffe-Brown as characterized
by an ‘insistence that a society can be understood satisfactorily without reference to its
past’ (Evans-Pritchard 1950: 120). Evans-Pritchard suggested that social anthropolo-
gists write ‘cross-sections of history, integrative descriptive accounts of primitive
peoples at a moment of time’, arguing that anthropology should be located within
the humanities rather than the sciences (Evans-Pritchard 1950: 122, 123–124).
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42 dan hicks

Meanwhile, in archaeology the transatlantic reception of Walter Taylor’s argu-

ments was framed by Christopher Hawkes’ paper ‘Archaeological method and
theory: a view from the Old World’, written during a stay in the United States in
1953–4. Hawkes addressed ‘Taylor’s claim that if archeology limits itself to a mere
external chronicling of material culture traits, it will be stopping short of its proper
anthropological objective, and will be simply compiling statistics when it ought to
be revealing culture’ (Hawkes 1954: 156). Focusing upon the study of a period for
which documentary sources are not available (later European prehistory), Hawkes
described the archaeological process of inductive reasoning, ‘from comparison and
analysis of observed phenomena to the human activity that once produced them’.
Such reasoning, Hawkes argued, involved four levels of increasingly difficult ‘in-
ferences’: from understanding the ‘techniques’ producing such phenomena (the
most straightforward) to information about ‘subsistence-economics’, ‘social/polit-
ical institutions’, and finally ‘religious institutions and spiritual life’. Moving from
inference to narrative, Hawkes echoed Evans-Pritchard in his criticism of the
ahistorical approach of structural-functionalism as ‘scientifically indefensible’,
but also argued for the importance of acknowledging human movements and
diffusion in the past (Hawkes ibid). These last themes had been important for
the culture-historical archaeology of Childe and others (Hawkes 1954: 161–165), but
shaped Graham Clark’s later use of scientific dating techniques to generate new
accounts of World Prehistory (Clark 1961).
Hawkes’ model of archaeological inference from material remains to technolog-
ical, economic, political and then ideational dimensions of past societies was
rightly critiqued by the ‘contextual archaeology’ of the 1980s as grounded on an a
priori distinction between technological and symbolic objects (see below). But for
our present purposes it is sufficient to note that Hawkes’ reception of Taylor’s
arguments led him to two positions. First, he foregrounded archaeological meth-
odology, and especially its engagement with the material remains of the past, as a
central problem: a position quite possibly inspired by his early professional ex-
periences as Assistant, and then Assistant Keeper, at the British Museum (1928–
1946). At the same time, Hawkes retained earlier geographical and historical
interests that contrasted with synchronic structural-functionalist approaches:
echoing Evans-Pritchard in his criticism of the ahistorical approach of structural-
functionalism as ‘scientifically indefensible’ (Hawkes 1954: 163).
While at Oxford the arguments of Hawkes (from archaeology) and Evans-
Pritchard (from social anthropology) both resisted the model of social structure
presented by structural-functionalism, at Cambridge from the late 1960s the
Binfordian model of the New Archaeology was taken up and reworked by David
Clarke. In contrast with Binford’s approach, Clarke’s Analytical Archaeology (1968)
strongly restated Taylor’s commitment to archaeology as a discipline distinct from
both history and social anthropology. Clarke developed an account of how
archaeological knowledge develops from archaeological methods as applied to
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the material-cultural turn 43

archaeological materials. Central to his model was a concern about a division

of disciplinary labour between the material practices of fieldwork or lab-based
research and the scholarly writing of integrative accounts of the past:
There is currently a tendency to take the term prehistorian as meaning ‘a writer of history
covering periods without written records’, with the implication that the ‘prehistorian’ is an
armchair synthesiser of the analytical work of the ‘archaeologist’. Here the term archaeolo-
gist is warped to mean the unintelligent ‘excavator’ or the narrow-minded ‘specialist’—the
term prehistorian thus acquiring a rosy flush of dilettante value at the expense of the
devalued archaeologist. The danger of historical narrative as a vehicle for archaeological
results is that it pleases by virtue of its smooth coverage and apparent finality, whilst the
data on which it is based are never comprehensive . . . Archaeological data are not historical
data and consequently archaeology is not history. The view taken in this work is that
archaeology is archaeology is archaeology (with apologies to Gertrude Stein).
Clarke (1968: 11)

In presenting a vision of archaeology as ‘a discipline in its own right’—‘concerned

with the recovery, systematic description and study of material culture in the past’
(1968: 12)—Clarke sought to move forward the line of enquiry begun by Taylor by
calling not only for a shift from the ‘common sense’ description of material culture to
a disciplinary ‘self-consciousness’, but further to the development of a distinctive
body of archaeological theory that would shift the field from a ‘self-consciousness’ of
materials and methods to ‘critical self-consciousness’. Clarke (1973) described this
process as archaeology’s ‘loss of innocence’. With reference to the radical revisions of
prehistoric chronologies that resulted from the scientific use of radiocarbon dating
(Renfrew 1973a), Clarke argued for the contingency of archaeological knowledge
upon materially-situated scientific practice, suggesting that ‘a new environment
develops new materials and new methods with new consequences, which demand
new philosophies, new solutions and new perspectives’ (Clarke 1973: 8–9). The
continuing significance of these arguments for archaeological conceptions of material
culture and fieldwork will be seen towards the end of this chapter.

***
This section has traced the layered sequence through which the sociological model of
British anthropology that emerged during the early twentieth century led to a shift in
terminology from ‘technology’ through the invention of the idea of ‘material culture’.
This change was a central part of a division of disciplinary labour (and disciplinary
influence) between museum and the collection on one hand, and the field site and
the ethnographic monograph on the other. Thus, the idea of ‘material culture’
emerged at precisely the moment in anthropology’s history in which a particular
focus upon social structure as the object of ethnographic enquiry ‘effectively banned
artifact study to the comparative isolation of the anthropological museum and
relegated its practitioners to a peripheral position within the discipline’ (van Beek
1989: 91). However, the influence of these sociological approaches upon archaeology
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44 dan hicks

was mitigated by a continued focus upon the engagement with both artefacts and
sites or landscapes in the study of the past. Unlike the positivist models that
developed in the work of Binford and his students in the United States, the reception
of the New Archaeology and the development of ‘systems’ approaches in the UK
built, especially through the work of David Clarke, on Taylor’s focus upon the
development of archaeological knowledge from the rigorous application of archaeo-
logical methods: methods that involved ‘inference’ as well as excavation.
The sociological and humanistic critique of the excessively descriptive focus of
previous materially-focused approaches was thus mediated in Clarke’s work by an
awareness of the active role of the archaeologist and the contingent nature of our
knowledge of the past. In this sense, the New Archaeology in Britain held much in
common not only with the historical focus of Evans-Pritchard, but also with the
Manchester School’s call for social anthropology to be grounded in detailed case
studies (e.g. Gluckman 1961). This sense of importance of fieldwork in which
contingent, material conditions were implicated did not, however, characterize
the manner in which the new ideas of structuralism, semiotics, and practice theory
were received during the 1970s and early 1980s in British archaeology and anthro-
pology. This Material-Cultural Turn is considered in Section II of this chapter.

II: T H E M AT E R I A L -C U LT U R A L T U R N : F RO M
‘ O B J E C T - L E S S O N S ’ TO ‘ O B J E C T D O M A I N S ’
................................................................................................................
In the discussion of excavated sequences, archaeologists commonly group series of
layers, cuts, and fills into a broader chronological sequence of ‘phases’. The second
phase that we can identify in this excavation of ‘material culture studies’ begins
with the strong influence upon social anthropology, from the 1960s, of two new,
inter-related bodies of thought. The first of these was the application of structural-
ist analysis, developed especially by Claude Lévi-Strauss from Saussurean linguis-
tics (de Saussure 1959 [1916]), to the study of social structure (Leach 1961; Lévi-
Strauss 1963). The second was a focus upon interpretation and the study of
meaning and social practice, developed especially by Clifford Geertz (1973),
which represented the development of a Parsonian, and ultimately Weberian,
hermeneutic model for social science, but that was also paralleled by new Dur-
kheimian accounts of the anthropology of ritual performance and ‘symbolic
action’ (Turner 1975: 159; see Turner 1967). The focus in both the structuralist
and interpretive anthropologies on themes such as ritual practice, symbolism, and
myth provided space for a gradual refocusing of anthropological research interests
upon objects. As will become clear, however, this focus on objects was concerned
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the material-cultural turn 45

quite specifically with the identification and comparative study of abstract schemes
of form, style, and design, and with the relationships of such phenomena with
meaning and use in practice.
The publication in 1963 of the English translation of the first volume of Lévi-
Strauss’ Structural Anthropology was a watershed for anthropologists studying
material culture. Here, Lévi-Strauss presented analyses of the underlying ‘gram-
mars’ of artefact designs, as part of a more general account of the structures that he
understood as lying behind all manifestations of culture: from ritual masks to
kinship proscriptions (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1982). For example, in his study of ‘Split
Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, Lévi-Strauss applied approaches
from structuralist linguistics to ethnographic objects in order to develop new kinds
of comparative studies of ‘primitive art’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 245). In doing so, he
built upon the sociological study of Primitive Classification that had been estab-
lished by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss at the start of the twentieth century
(Durkheim and Mauss 1963 [1903]). The reception of this French structuralist work
alongside American interpretive anthropology in British anthropology inspired a
range of structuralist and semiotic anthropological studies of style and form in
artworks and the built environment (e.g. Munn 1973; Humphrey 1974), and the
beginnings of studies of material culture as a kind of communicative system,
analogous to, but not reducible to, language (Rowlands 2004: 475–476). This was
also developed in New Archaeology through Martin Wobst’s idea of ‘stylistic
behaviour’ concerned with ‘information exchange’ (Wobst 1977).
It was in this context that British archaeology and anthropology witnessed a
second major shift in the study of material things, which culminated during the
1980s as what I want to call the ‘Material-Cultural Turn’. Where the various responses
to the sociological model of structural-functionalism had been united in a termino-
logical shift from ‘technology’ to ‘material culture’, the responses to structuralist and
interpretive approaches led to the emergence of the idea of ‘material culture studies’.
The idea of material culture studies emerged from the desire to bring the structural
and the meaningful together in a single analysis in archaeology and anthropology.
For this reason, it can be understood to be closely associated with the reception of the
‘practice theories’ of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in archaeology
and anthropology. However, French structural Marxism, American historical
archaeology and ‘modern material culture studies’, and the ‘ethnoarchaeology’ that
developed in American New Archaeology also represented important influences.

Structural Marxist anthropology: beyond ‘vulgar materialist’

approaches
The first attempts to reconcile grand narratives of structuralism with the more fine-
grained account of interpretive and symbolic anthropology developed through the
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46 dan hicks

reception of French structural Marxist anthropology (Meillassoux 1972; Terray

1972, 1975; Godelier 1977) by British anthropologists, and especially those such as
Jonathan Friedman and Mike Rowlands who were associated with UCL (Bloch
1975; Friedman 1974, 1975; Rowlands and Gledhill 1976). As Sherry Ortner (1984:
140) has argued, the British structural Marxist anthropology of the 1970s repre-
sented ‘an explicit mediation between the “materialist” and “idealist” camps of
sixties anthropology’: a mediation captured by Maurice Godelier’s study The
Mental and the Material (1986).
Structural Marxists such as Friedman and Rowlands critiqued ‘functional ecol-
ogy’ and the ‘cultural materialism’ of American neo-evolutionist anthropology
(Harris 1968; see Patterson 2003: 102–112) as a ‘simple programmatic materialism’: a
‘vulgar materialism’ that represented an ‘empiricist ideology’ based on ‘the a priori
reduction of relatively autonomous phenomena . . . to a single phenomenon’. In-
stead, Friedman sought to offer a more ethnographic account of materialism, using
Marx but grounded in the anthropological study of social relations: beginning
‘with the assumption of disjunction between structures in order to establish the
true relationships that unite them’ (Friedman 1974: 466; Rowlands and Gledhill
1976: 31). British structural Marxist anthropology argued that, especially through
its sense of historical process, distinctions between the material and the ideational
could be overcome through a focus on social relations, rather than the static
conception of ‘social structure’ that had characterized both structural-functional-
ism and structuralism. Similar arguments developed in American Marxist anthro-
pology, especially the final chapter of Marshall Sahlins’ book Culture and Practical
Reason (1976), which moved radically beyond the historical materialism of his
earlier Stone Age Economics (1972). In Sahlins’ new argument,
One evident matter—for bourgeois society as much as for the so-called primitive—is that
material aspects are not usefully separated from the social, as if the first were referable to the
satisfaction of needs by the exploitation of nature, and the second to problems of the
relations between men . . . [M]aterial effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The
very form of social existence of material force is determined by its integration in the cultural
system. The force may be significant—but significance, precisely, is a symbolic quality.
Sahlins (1976: 205–206)

British structural Marxist anthropology led to a distinctive way of envisaging the

relationship between archaeology and social anthropology:
The material culture record in archaeology has been interpreted as a hierarchical set of entities
to be ordered taxonomically. In the last analysis, archaeologists have not so much neglected
the socio-historical meaning of material culture assemblages (since, in general, it has always
been assumed that the ordering of material would lead to inferences about people) as
displayed a timidity towards it which has much in common with that displayed by the
Boasian school in ethnography. Implicit is the faith that ‘understanding’ will arise out of
its own motion from the accumulation of fact upon fact with increasing refinement of
detail . . . [But] even the development of ways of making truly ‘objective’ statements about
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the material-cultural turn 47

the intrinsic properties of artefacts, through for instance the use of geophysical techniques,
has simply underlined the need for systematic social interpretation. The more patterns
archaeologists discern in their data, the more questions will be forced upon their attention.
Rowlands and Gledhill (1976: 25)

Here, the idea of a ‘relation between archaeology and anthropology’ mapped directly
on to a conviction in ‘the linkage of the material culture record to the socio-cultural
system’ (Rowlands and Gledhill 1976: 23, 26). In this view, just as archaeology
and anthropology were complementary rather than distinct disciplines, so the
relationships between artefacts and social structure were a crucial area of study
(Rowlands and Gledhill 1976: 37).

Historical archaeology and ‘modern material culture studies’

As with the development of the New Archaeology in the 1960s, in the 1970s the
significance of transatlantic exchanges was critical in the development of archaeo-
logical material culture studies. The reception of structuralism in American histor-
ical archaeology, especially in James Deetz’s discussion in his Invitation to
Archaeology (1967) of the ‘analysis of form’, was based on the idea of the ‘mental
template’:
Artefacts are man-made objects; they are also fossilized ideas . . . [T]he making of a proper
form of an object exists in the mind of the maker, and when this idea is expressed in tangible
form in raw material, an artifact results . . . [T]he form of an artifact is a close approxima-
tion of this template.
Deetz (1967: 45)

Deetz sought, for example in his discussion of the making of a Chumash basket, to
combine the structuralist analysis of artefacts with the study of long-term change: a
focus on the making of artefact forms as influenced by tradition, but also other
factors such as ‘technology, function, innovation’, and the importance of the idea of
context in the study of material culture (Deetz 1967: 47, 67–74).
The new term ‘material culture studies’ came to be used to define a set of
research practices rather than just the object of enquiry defined by the term
‘material culture’. During the late 1970s, this new term emerged from American
historical archaeology through the idea of ‘modern material culture studies’ (but
see Fenton 1974), and a more general interest in ‘the importance of material things’
in historical archaeology (Ferguson 1977). This American literature was significant
for British archaeology and anthropology because of how two of its characteristics
were refracted into debates over the relationships between archaeology and an-
thropology at Cambridge during the 1970s.
First, the term ‘modern material culture studies’ was used to describe the
archaeological study of the contemporary Western world, whether as part of
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ethnoarchaeology (South 1979: 213), or more commonly to describe projects such

as William Rathje’s ‘garbology’, which undertook an archaeology of the contempo-
rary world—‘the archaeology of us’ (Gould and Schiffer 1981), which in Rathje’s
case involved the excavation of contemporary landfills in order to learn about the
environmental dimensions of modern life (Rathje 1979). While such approaches
were often characterized by the scientific field approaches of the New Archaeology,
they also included a range of alternative interpretive or ‘behavioural’ views (Ascher
1974a, 1974b; Schiffer 1976).
Secondly, work such as Rathje’s and Gould’s extended perspectives from a new
wave of interpretive Americanist historical archaeology, in particular, as developed
by James Deetz (1977) in the study of early modern America, which had during the
previous decade developed anthropological approaches to material culture studies
that contrasted with the use of the term ‘material culture’ in folklife studies,
decorative arts traditions, and historical archaeology in the United States (Quimby
1978). Defining ‘archaeology as a social science’, Deetz (1972) crucially used the
study of material culture as a way of reconciling structuralist and semiotic ap-
proaches in anthropology. Deetz’s definition of material culture, set out in his
studies Invitation to Archaeology (1967) and In Small Things Forgotten: an archaeol-
ogy of early American life (1977), was famously very broad:
Material culture is usually considered to be roughly synonymous with artifacts, the vast
universe of objects used by mankind to cope with the physical world, to facilitate social
intercourse, and to benefit our state of mind. A somewhat broader definition of material
culture is useful in emphasising how profoundly our world is the product of our thoughts,
as that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined
behavior. This definition includes all artifacts, from the simplest, such as a common pin, to
the most complex, such as an interplanetary space vehicle. But the physical environment
includes more than what most definitions of material culture recognise. We can also
consider cuts of meat as material culture, since there are many ways to dress an animal;
likewise plowed fields and even the horse that pulls the plow, since scientific breeding of
livestock involves the conscious modification of an animal’s form according to culturally
derived ideals. Our body itself is part of our physical environment, so that such things as
parades, dancing, and all aspects of kinesics—human motion—fit within our definition.
Nor is the definition limited only to matter in the solid state. Fountains are liquid examples,
as are lily ponds, and material that is partly gas includes hot air balloons and neon signs.
I have suggested in Invitation to Archaeology that even language is part of material culture, a
prime example of it in its gaseous state. Words, after all, are air masses shaped by the speech
apparatus according to culturally acquired rules.
Deetz (1977: 24–25)

Deetz’s work combined structuralist and semiotic analyses of this very wide range of
‘material culture’ in order to gain a sense of the ‘world views’ of people in the past
through the apparently inconsequential modern fragments studied by historical
archaeology. It sought to introduce a historical dimension into structuralist ana-
lyses by studying changing world views over time. This interpretive approach bore
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the material-cultural turn 49

some resemblance to the Annales historians’ study of French material culture in

relation to mentalité, and was directly inspired by Deetz’s colleague Henry Glassie’s
(1975) structuralist study of vernacular buildings in Virginia in relation to the
emergence of the ‘Georgian Order’ as a historically situated structuring principle
for late eighteenth-century material culture. But Deetz also used part-fictional
interpretive tableaux to evoke a kind of Geertzian ‘thick description’ of the material
dimensions of human life in relation to significance and meaning (Geertz 1973). This
similarity possibly derived from the common training received by Deetz and Geertz
at Harvard during the mid-1950s, where the influence of Talcott Parsons was still
strongly felt, along with more recent influences, such as Dell Hymes’ nascent socio-
linguistics (Hymes 1964). In the influence upon British archaeology and anthropol-
ogy of Geertz’s approach to interpretive anthropology, and of Deetz’s combination of
structuralism with a focus on historical change, their shared commitment to under-
standing ‘human behavior [as] . . . symbolic action’ (Geertz 1973: 10; my emphasis)
laid the foundations for the later reception of practice theory (discussed below).

The emergence of material culture studies:

Cambridge and UCL
It was in this intellectual context that the Material-Cultural Turn in British
archaeology and anthropology emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s at
the two centres for the development of British material culture studies in the 1980s:
Department of Archaeology at Cambridge and the Department of Anthropology at
University College London (UCL). The arguments of both structural Marxism and
Deetzian historical archaeology/modern material culture studies, which were
united by a desire to reintegrate in a single analysis of structuralist and interpretive
anthropology, the material and meaningful aspects of social life—‘to connect
people and things’ (Deetz 1967: 138)—were received in different ways in these
two departments.
In London they dovetailed with an emergent body of thinking about ‘material
culture studies’ that developed at UCL through the work and teaching of Peter
Ucko and Daryll Forde (e.g. Ucko 1969; see Rowlands 1983: 16; Buchli 2002a: 11).
Especially important here was the development of teaching on material culture and
‘primitive art’ by Peter Ucko after his appointment in 1962 (Layton et al. 2006: 1–3),
the influence of British symbolic-structuralist anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966;
Douglas and Isherwood 1979), and the influence of Anthony Forge at the London
School of Economics. The desire among this group to combine structuralist and
semiotic approaches was exemplified by Forge’s discussion of the study of ‘Primi-
tive Art and Society’ (Forge 1973a, 1973b). Forge drew upon approaches in Ameri-
can archaeology to the study of ‘iconics’ and the ‘grammar’ of ‘classes of objects or
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graphic signs’, ‘the analogy being with rules for sentence production in a language’
(citing the work of Dell Hymes), arguing that such ‘descriptive models’ should be
combined with the study of meaning and aesthetics (Forge 1973a: xvi–xvii): ‘to
concentrate on the aspect of style as a system, a visual system, but also a system of
meaning’ (Forge 1973b: 191). Such work provided the basis for Robert Layton’s
semiotic approach to The Anthropology of Art (1981).
At Cambridge, the idea of ‘material culture studies’ provided one way of
answering two strong challenges: from Edmund Leach’s structuralist anthropology
(discussed further below) and from archaeologist Colin Renfrew’s (1973b) concep-
tion of ‘social archaeology’, to a new generation of Cambridge archaeologists, in
particular Ian Hodder and Daniel Miller, to build an archaeology that could
account for the place of the meaning of objects in social life.
In the early 1980s two responses to these challenges to accommodate both
structuralist and interpretive approaches in British archaeology and anthropology
made particular use of a new body of sociological thinking about the relationships
between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’: the practice theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1977)
and Anthony Giddens (1979). First, at Cambridge, Ian Hodder and his students
developed a new ‘contextual archaeology’, informed especially by Bourdieu’s no-
tion of habitus (Hodder 1982a, 1982b, 1986). Secondly, leaving Cambridge for UCL,
and gradually framing their work as anthropological rather than archaeological,
Daniel Miller and his students developed a model of ‘material culture studies’ as
the anthropology of consumption, which drew strongly from Giddens’ notion of
‘structuration’. Giddens’ (1979, 1981, 1984) arguments presented a model of the
‘duality of structure’ involving a mutually constitutive relationship between ‘agency’
and ‘structure’. In new studies in anthropological archaeology, Hodder and Miller
sought to use what Giddens had described as ‘object domains’ (Miller 1987: 158) and
what Bourdieu had termed habitus to explore the idea of relationships between
cultural and material worlds.

***

Archaeological excavation often encounters horizons, caused for example through

the ploughing of a field, in which earlier features are truncated, mixed, and redepos-
ited. Such processes bring a levelling-out of surfaces. They draw a line in the sequence
of formation, but walking across them the archaeologist will always encounter the
abraded residual materials from earlier periods. In our excavation of material culture
studies, it is this kind of reordering and persistence that characterizes the second
phase of our stratigraphic sequence. Together, two bodies of thinking—Hodder’s
contextual archaeology and Miller’s archaeological anthropology of mass consump-
tion—constituted the Material-Cultural Turn in British archaeology and anthropol-
ogy. Its emergence through works that combined ethnoarchaeological with
structuralist and semiotic perspectives are considered below.
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the material-cultural turn 51

The Material-Cultural Turn: Ethnoarchaeology

The idea of ‘ethnoarchaeology’—the comparative archaeological study of contem-
porary human societies to inform the archaeological explanation of the past—
emerged during the 1970s from the desire in Binfordian New Archaeology to
develop testable correlations between material remains and human behaviour
(Binford 1978; Gould 1978; Kramer 1979; but see the earlier arguments of Ascher
1961, 1962). Developing the idea of ‘the archaeology of a contemporary community’
(Ascher 1968) as a kind of ‘living archaeology’ (Gould 1980), ethnoarchaeology
contributed to the development of a principal theme of New Archaeology: the
challenges of relating patterns in the material record to patterns of human beha-
viour in the past, read through the alternative ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ processes that
lead to the formation of the archaeological record (Schiffer 1972). Such ‘archaeo-
logically oriented ethnographic work’, therefore, focused on the material dimen-
sions of human actions, from the manufacture and use of objects to their being
discarded, in the present, such as the production of ceramics (Kramer 1985: 77), and
was used to contribute to the New Archaeology’s aim of generating universal
models for ‘material correlates’ of human behaviour (Lane 2006: 404).
In the early 1980s, two contributions to the Cambridge University Press series ‘New
Studies in Archaeology’, by Ian Hodder (1982a) and Daniel Miller (1985), laid the
foundations for the Material-Cultural Turn in British archaeology and anthropology.
These works combined the idea of ethnoarchaeology from New Archaeology in the
United States with structuralist approaches to the interpretation of symbols and
categories. The choice of ethnoarchaeology—‘a processual subdiscipline par excel-
lence’—as a place from which to develop a critique of the New Archaeology, was as
David van Reybrouck has observed, at first glance a strange one (van Reybrouck 2000:
40). However, the field provided an opportunity for archaeologists to seek to
link structuralist studies of material culture with interpretive ethnographic accounts
of living populations: developing case studies that explored further Hodder’s early
critiques, in his reorientation of David Clarke’s model of ‘spatial archaeology’, of ‘simple
correlations between material culture and society’ (Hodder 1978a, 1978b). In this sense,
the British ethnoarchaeology of the early 1980s was closer to the sociological idea of
‘ethnomethodology’ (Garfinkel 1967) than it was to processual ethnoarchaeology.
In Symbols in Action: ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture Ian Hodder
(1982a) described the results of fieldwork that focused on the relationships between
ethnic identity and stylistic variations in the design of items of material culture. His
fieldwork was conducted among a range of groups in various locations in eastern
Africa: in Kenya (among Tugen, Pokot, and Njemps groups in the Baringo district,
and among Samburu agriculturalists and Dorobo hunter-gatherers on the Leroghi
Plateau); western Zambia (in the Lozi kingdom); and in two Nuba communities
in central Sudan. Discussing decorative symbolism in a wide range of objects
from carved calabash milk containers to stools, spears, and cooking pots
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Fig. 2.5 ‘Artefacts from the Lozi Area [western Zambia]. Wooden bowls (mukeke
wa kota), spatula (foreground) and spoon (centre), knife, “A” basket and “B” pot’,
from Ian Hodder’s Symbols in Action (Hodder 1982: 112, figure 50).

(Figure 2.5), and inspired in particular by the social anthropology of Mary Douglas
(1966), Hodder argued that rather than reflecting cultures (as a passive by-product
of social life), variability in the symbolic aspects of material culture should be
interpreted from the perspective that objects are actively and meaningfully used in
social life. He was particularly interested here in the role of material culture in the
establishment and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. Hodder argued, in contrast
with the processual archaeology of Binford, that ‘culture is not man’s extrasomatic
means of adaptation but that it is meaningfully constituted’ (1982a: 13), and that
‘material culture transforms, rather than reflects, social organization according to
the strategies of groups, their beliefs, concepts and ideologies’ (1982a: 212):
‘M’aterial culture is meaningfully constituted. Material culture patterning transforms
structurally rather than reflects behaviourally social relations. Interpretation must integrate
the different categories of evidence from different subsystems into the ‘whole’ . . . Each
particular historical context must be studied as a unique combination of general principles
of meaning and symbolism, negotiated and manipulated in specific ways.
Hodder (1982a: 218)

In keeping with its ethnoarchaeological aims, Symbols in Action concluded with

an attempt to apply Hodder’s perspective to late Neolithic material from Orkney
(Hodder 1982a: 218–228): a direction that was more fully explored in his development
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the material-cultural turn 53

of ‘symbolic and structural archaeology’ into the ‘contextual archaeology’ that was to
radicalize British archaeological engagements with material culture (discussed below).
In contrast, Daniel Miller’s ethnoarchaeological study of ceramics in a rural
village in the Malwa region of central India, Artefacts as categories, was focused not
on the identification of meaning and human identity in material culture, but on
the more cognitive idea of ‘categorization’, and how it related to social practice. But
like Hodder, Miller (1985: 5) sought to work between structuralist and semiotic
approaches, moving beyond their tendency towards an ‘extreme reduction’ of ‘social
structure and cultural forms’ to abstract classificatory schemes. For this reason,
Miller’s use of ethnoarchaeology was based on the argument that ‘material culture
sets reflect the organizational principles of human categorization processes, and that
it is through the understanding of such processes that we may best be able to
interpret changes in material culture sets over time’ (Miller 1982a: 17).
In his account of fieldwork in a rural village, Miller (1985: 197) argued that the
study of ‘artefact variability’ across technological and cultural categories could
reveal how social competition between castes was expressed through ceramics. By
treating ‘material objects [as] a concrete lasting form of human categorisation’, he
sought to connect structure with material practice, to ‘link langue with parole and
provide explanations in a “realist” mould’, since ‘categorisation processes mediate
and organise the social construction of reality’ (Miller 1982a: 17, 23). In doing so,
Artefacts as Categories was a transitional work that started to move beyond the
normative behavioural studies of artefact style that had characterized the New
Archaeology (e.g. Wiessner 1984; see Boast 1996). By undertaking ‘the micro-
analysis of the material world . . . in conjunction with archaeology’, Miller (1985:
205) focused not on meaning and symbols, but instead began to use social theory
to extend the scope of what Colin Renfrew (1973b) had, a decade earlier, termed
‘social archaeology’.
However, a certain frustration not only with the aims of processual ethnoarch-
aeology, but also with archaeology’s methods for studying material culture more
generally, emerged in Miller’s study. The focus was not on artefacts per se, but on
‘artefacts as categories’, and on the identification of ‘a pottery code’ the structure of
which could be related to ‘the various structural positions held by individuals in
society’ (Miller 1985: 201–202). In an editorial decision that recalled Radcliffe-
Brown’s treatment of technology in his study of the Andaman Islanders, a ‘Detailed
Description of Pottery Manufacture’ was provided as an appendix (Miller 1985:
207–232; Figure 2.6). In a reversal of Hawkes’ hierarchical metaphor, the attraction
of ethnoarchaeology had been that ‘it was usually impossible to ignore the social
basis of material culture’ (Miller 1987: 112; my emphasis). Accordingly, Miller’s
subsequent contributions to archaeological theory related to the uses of social
theory, and especially the potential of critical theory to reveal ideology and power
(Miller and Tilley 1984; Miller 1989), rather than further studies of ceramic
manufacture.
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Fig. 2.6 ‘A complete set of paddles and anvils’: from the ‘Detailed description of
pottery manufacture’ in the Malwa region of central India in the Appendix to Daniel
Miller’s Artefacts as Categories (Miller 1985, figure 55).

The suggestion by Hodder and Miller that ethnoarchaeology was particularly

well-positioned to combine structuralist and symbolic approaches through a
‘materialist’ focus was shared elsewhere in the field, especially in African archaeol-
ogy (Schmidt 1983). But British archaeology and social anthropology both shifted
away from ethnoarchaeology from the mid-1980s (van Reybrouck 2000). Ian
Hodder came to suggest that ethnoarchaeology should ‘disappear, to be replaced
by or integrated with the anthropology of material culture and social change’ (1986:
108). Nevertheless, the influence of ethnoarchaeology was fundamental to the
emergence of contextual archaeology, offering a field (both human and material)
from which to critique the focus in processual archaeology upon methodology.
This led to a long-standing debate over theory and practice in British archaeology
(Hodder 1992), and to an active turning away from archaeological methods in the
anthropological material culture studies conducted by those trained in archaeology
(but see Hodder 1999). Distancing himself explicitly from the perspectives of David
Clarke, Miller expressed discomfort with what he saw as the fetishizing of the
archaeological object:
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the material-cultural turn 55

Stone tools and ceramic sequences were increasingly studied in themselves. This resulted in
a kind of fetishism that archaeology is always prone to. Objects start by standing for
prehistoric peoples, who are the intended subject of study, but the symbolic process is
easily inverted, and peoples under terms such as ‘cultures’ become viewed principally as
labels for groups of artefacts, which are the immediate subjects of analysis. The focus is then
on the relationship between the objects themselves, which in the 1960’s became the centre of
interest (e.g. Clarke 1968).
Miller (1983: 5–6)

The long-term influence of this early 1980s British ethnoarchaeological work relates
also, however, to the different directions in which contextual archaeology and anthro-
pological material culture studies developed thereafter. One factor here is the
significance of area studies. Richard Fardon has highlighted the dependence of
the shift from structural-functionalism to structuralism in British social anthro-
pology upon the hegemonic shift from regional schools of ethnography in eastern
Africa, to India and South-east Asia (Fardon 1990; see discussions in Dresch 1992;
Hicks 2003: 325). It is notable that this geographical distinction was precisely
reproduced between the ethnoarchaeological studies of Hodder and Miller. As
Hodder developed contextual and interpretive archaeology and Miller combined
structuralism and practice theory in anthropological material culture studies
from the late 1980s, a parallel distinction emerged in their alternative approaches
to the relationships between the social and the material. Although, as will become
clear, both fields moved strongly away from the idea of ethnoarchaeology, the
replacement of the field of enquiry with prehistoric archaeology on the one hand
and modern consumption on the other allowed the distinction between these two
visions of material culture studies (one apparently archaeological, one avowedly
anthropological) to persist.

The Material-Cultural Turn: Contextual archaeology

The development of a body of new thinking in British archaeology, which came to
be known as ‘contextual archaeology’, and later ‘post-processual archaeology’ (due
to its critique of the New or processual archaeology of Binford and others), took
place from about 1978 in Cambridge, principally through the work of Ian Hodder
and his students. The publication of the proceedings of a conference at Cambridge,
held in April 1980, on the theme of ‘Symbolism and Structuralism in Archaeology’
(Hodder 1982b) was a landmark in the emergence of this critique (Hodder et al.
2007). The diverse contributions to the volume were united in aiming to move
beyond what they identified as a persistent functionalist approach in the New
Archaeology towards society and culture, including material culture (Hodder
1982c: 2). As David van Reybrouck has summarized, during the mid-1980s very
much of the thinking that came to characterize British contextual archaeology
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56 dan hicks

Fig. 2.7 Examples of 1980s British and Swedish beer cans, from Michael Shanks
and Christopher Tilley’s archaeological study of ‘the design of contemporary beer
cans’ (Shanks and Tilley 1987a: 178, figure 8.4).

developed through applying ‘an archaeological approach to the present’, in Western

(and, specifically, British) as well as non-Western field locations (Figure 2.7):
[Henrietta] Moore worked on settlement layout and refuse disposal with the Marakwet in
Kenya (Moore 1986). Furthermore, [Ian] Hodder [1982a, 215–216] drew attention to the
material culture items appropriated by punks, [Mike] Parker Pearson (1982) researched
contemporary mortuary behaviour in Britain, [Michael] Shanks and [Chris] Tilley [1987a:
172–240] studied differences in design between Swedish and British beer cans, and [Daniel]
Miller (1984) analysed contemporary suburban architecture in Britain. The industrialized
world was considered an equally promising field for material culture studies. On top of that,
the volumes edited by Hodder [1982b, 1987a and 1987b] and Miller and Tilley (1984) all
contained parts devoted to studies in ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory and modern material
culture.
van Reybrouck (2000: 40)

Such ‘contextual ethnoarchaeology’ provided the impetus for a shift that Ian
Hodder described as a more general disciplinary move beyond archaeology’s ‘loss
of innocence’ (Clarke 1973) ‘towards a mature archaeology’ (Hodder 1981), which
he set out in his book Reading the Past (Hodder 1986). The definition of material
culture as ‘meaningfully constituted’ (Hodder 1986: 4), rather than passively
reflective of behaviour, was the central argument of contextual archaeology. This
emergence of material culture studies at the core of archaeological debates can be
understood as a response to an explicit challenge set for archaeology by structural-
ist anthropologist Edmund Leach in a series of papers during the 1970s (Leach 1973,
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the material-cultural turn 57

1977, 1978). In 1973, Leach’s concluding remarks for The Explanation of Culture
Change: Models in Archaeology (Renfrew 1973c) had called for archaeology to
embrace structuralism, and thus to move beyond what Leach had defined as a
residual functionalism in the New Archaeology:
Do not misunderstand me. Functionalism is ‘old hat’ in social anthropology; it is ‘new hat’ in
archaeology . . . [T]he paradigm which is currently in high fashion among the social anthro-
pologists, namely that of structuralism, has not yet caught up with the archaeologists at all.
Don’t worry, it will! But meanwhile interdisciplinary communication is rather difficult.
(Leach 1973: 762)

In Leach’s view, a shift to structuralism in archaeology would involve a new set of

approaches to material culture, since ‘functionalist proto-man is a tool-maker
whereas structuralist proto-man is a user of language’ (Leach 1973: 762):
Am I making my point? Ideas are more important than things; . . . archaeologists need to
appreciate that the material objects revealed by their excavations are not ‘things in them-
selves’, nor are they just artifacts—things made by man—they are representations of ideas.
(Leach 1977: 167)

Leach’s challenge for archaeology was for the field to reconcile structuralist and
symbolic approaches to material culture. In undertaking the task set by Leach—
critiquing the New Archaeology as retaining many of the characteristics of functional-
ism (Leach 1973), and seeking to accommodate both structuralist and symbolic ap-
proaches (Leach 1977)—contextual archaeology came to use a wide range of theoretical
arguments. It aimed to ‘superced[e], while simultaneously integrating, structuralism’,
in studies undertaken by archaeologists that were ‘not concerned with the abstract
principles of mind, as they would be if literal structuralists’, but were ‘concerned with
context, meaning and particular historical circumstances, as well as with the generative
principles which unify particular cultures’: with ‘particular structures but within their
historical, i.e. material, context’ (Leone 1982: 179). Thus, Ian Hodder’s key statement of
the aims and approaches of a contextual archaeology, Reading the Past, identified ‘four
general issues of post-processual archaeology’ which were expressed in terms of
bilateral relationships (Hodder 1986: 188). These relationships were between ‘norm
and individual’ (and an interest in individual agency rather than behaviour); ‘process
and structure’ (a focus on historical change rather than static models); ‘ideal and
material’ (and a critique of Hawkes’ model of inference as a ‘ladder of inference’ that
distinguished between the ideational and technological dimensions of the material
remains of the past); and ‘subject and object’ (a focus on the cultural meaning rather
than the social function of objects, and the idea that ‘both material items and their
deposition are actively involved in social relations’) (Hodder 1982a: 6).
Hodder addressed these relationships through an archaeological process that
was defined as ‘interpretation’—an idea read through R. G. Collingwood (1946)—
rather than ‘explanation’ (Renfrew 1973a) or a positivist philosophy of science (which
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Hodder associated with Binford 1983). Hodder argued that interpreting material
culture was analogous to reading texts, and distinct from straightforwardly ‘reading
off’ from evidence through middle range theory. The contextual focus on material
culture as text was, Hodder argued, distinct from a conventional structuralist focus
on language (Hodder 1989). Thus, while contextual archaeology moved strongly
away from the idea of ethnoarchaeology, it retained a strong sense of the contempo-
rary nature of archaeological practice: interpreting what remains of the past in the
present, working in a different sense from ethnoarchaeology on ‘the present past’
(Hodder 1982a).
Contextual archaeology’s critique of the ahistorical character of the New Archae-
ology (Hodder 1991a: 12) did not extend to its own reception of structuralism, despite
the static nature of structuralist models (Ucko 1995: 14). Instead, contextual archae-
ology sought to accommodate historical change—clearly so necessary for any mean-
ingful study of the past—through the use of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The
English translation of Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice had been published
in 1977, and called for ‘a debate in archaeology concerning structuralism . . . and its
various critiques’ (1982a: 229). Bourdieu’s theory of practice attempted to reconcile
structuralist and phenomenological perspectives, and was grounded in the idea of
the habitus. Bourdieu’s term habitus referred to human dispositions gained through
living in the material environment, which he understood as central to the repro-
duction of social structures. This work led Hodder to his definition of the inade-
quacy of structuralism as a failure to accommodate agency and meaning—‘to
develop an adequate theory of practice’ (Hodder 1982a: 8)—rather than a failure
to accommodate historical change. Hodder’s use of Bourdieu provided one solu-
tion to a perceived inability ‘of both functionalism and structuralism . . . to explain
particular historical contexts and the meaningful actions of individuals construct-
ing social change within those contexts’ (Hodder 1982a: 8–9). Historical process
was thus accommodated, and ‘long-term change’ read through Annales historians’
ideas of ‘the structures of everyday life’ (Braudel 1981), in terms of a changing of
contexts, which both shaped and resulted from practice itself (Hodder 1987b).
Accordingly, the first book-length study that applied the principles of contextual
archaeology, Ian Hodder’s examination of The Domestication of Europe (1990), set
out a series of changing structures in Neolithic Europe, which he termed domus,
agrios, and foris. This approach directly echoed (but did not cite) Bourdieu’s
conceptions habitus and unconscious doxa (Bourdieu 1977), and explored relation-
ships between cultural and natural material environments. This focus on practice
(as generating changing social contexts and new material culture), theories of long-
term change, and the analogy of archaeological interpretation with the reading of
texts, allowed the contextual archaeology to work with both symbolic and structur-
alist approaches—but also allowed the persistence of the structuralist analysis of
particular artefacts and sites within an overarching chronological narrative, most
vividly through the dualistic model of domus and agrios (Figure 2.8).
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the material-cultural turn 59

figurines decoration

female chairs and tables

house ‘signs’
Domus oven
plant food pottery use
storage
grinding and weaving and spinning
cooking
plant foods child burial
skulls of animal
ancestors figurines
bucrania
pottery production
burial axes weapons

Agrios
masks copper

? animals hunting
exchange male
stone tool
production

Fig. 2.8 Ian Hodder’s model of ‘Associations of the domus and agrios in [Neolithic]
SE Europe’ (from Hodder 1990: 68, figure 3.5).

The Material-Cultural Turn: the anthropology

of mass consumption
A third trajectory of thought within the Material-Cultural Turn, which emerged
from ethnoarchaeology and the ‘symbolic and ssructural archaeology’ of early 1980s
Cambridge, was Daniel Miller’s conception of ‘material culture studies’ as a social
anthropology of consumption. This focus on consumption was an active inversion
of the focus upon production in structural Marxist anthropology, and a comple-
ment to the focus on exchange in economic anthropology. It was centred on a
Hegelian notion of self-creation. Miller’s work in contextual archaeology (1982a,
1982b, 1982c, 1984) and ethnoarchaeology (1985) was now extended into the study of
material things in the contemporary West, which was characterized by a gradual,
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60 dan hicks

but active, turning away from archaeology. In his early statement of the potential of
an anthropology of material culture, the title of which—‘Things Ain’t What They
Used To Be’—indicated how the study of the contemporary world might move away
from archaeological studies of past material culture, Miller suggested that studying
things might complement the structuralist study of language: ‘Even in anthropolo-
gy, which prides itself on the subtlety of its enquiry, the basic construction of self
and social relations as they are mediated by images in clothes, household furnish-
ings and such like, may be relatively neglected because they are relatively coarsely
articulated in language’ (Miller 1983: 6–7).
Anthropological material culture studies was defined from the outset by Miller as
an ‘integrative’ field, drawing across disciplines to examine ‘a core relationship
between objects and people’ (Miller 1983: 7). The study of material culture was defined
as ‘simply the study of human social and environmental relationships through the
evidence of people’s construction of their material world’ (Miller 1983: 5). With his
1987 study Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Miller used ideas ‘adapted from
social archaeology’, which he ‘redefined and theorised to apply to modern society’
(Attfield 2000: 35). The book was read by many as a kind of ‘archaeology of modern
life’ (Weatherill 1989: 439). It was published in the Blackwell series ‘Social Archaeolo-
gy’, just as Artefacts as Categories had been published in the Cambridge University
Press series ‘New Studies in Archaeology’. But archaeological methods and practice
played no role in Material Culture and Mass Consumption, due to a dissatisfaction with
the continued influence of processual archaeology that had characterized Americanist
‘modern material culture studies’: exemplifying ‘the kind of fetishism to which
material culture studies is always prone, when people are superseded as the subject
of investigation by objects’ (Miller 1987: 143).
Presenting an alternative vision from such materially focused ‘fetishism’, Material
Culture and Mass Consumption was instead a highly abstract and theoretical study
that responded to the growing literature on the consumption of everyday objects in
the modern world, which had developed through the structuralist and semiotic
treatment by Roland Barthes (1972 [1957], 1977) and Jean Baudrillard (1983), and
especially the anthropological consumption studies developed in Mary Douglas and
Baron Isherwood’s The World of Goods (1979). The study of objects and commodities
had, during the 1970s, represented a central theme for the new discipline of ‘cultural
studies’: later inspiring studies such as Doing Cultural Studies, which focused on the
study of the Sony Walkman (Du Gay et al. 1997). In such work, the conventional
sociological (especially Marxist) focus upon objects only in relation to production
and exchange was reversed through the active reception of mass-produced items by
consumers. Regardless of the intention or purpose of material goods as manufac-
tured, the world was filled with ongoing, local, and vernacular processes of reinter-
pretation and appropriation. Miller’s idea was that the archaeological sense of the
significance of objects in social life could be developed through a social anthropology
that concentrated on ‘the social symbolism of the material world’ (Miller 1987: viii).
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the material-cultural turn 61

The argument of Material Culture and Mass Consumption fell across three
sections, which related to theories of ‘objectification’, the idea of ‘material culture’,
and the anthropological study of ‘mass consumption’.
Miller’s conception of objectification adapted a Hegelian model of the dialectical
relationships between subjects and objects. Working through elements of Hegel,
Marx, and Simmel, along with anthropologist Nancy Munn’s structuralist study of
Walbiri Iconography (1973), Miller defined his own concept of objectification as
referring to ‘a process of externalization and sublation essential to the development
of a given subject’, in which ‘the concrete material object’ was ‘one particular potential
medium or vehicle’ (Miller 1987: 85). Through what he described as a ‘violent
abstraction’ of the Hegelian theory of the subject, Miller theory of objectification
was used to make a more general contribution to anthropological theory, based on the
idea that ‘the human subject cannot be considered outside of the material world
within which and through which it is constructed’ (Millers 1987: 86, 214).
Miller’s discussion of material culture, which formed the central section of the
book, considered ‘the social implications of things’ (1987: 85). It did so through
discussion of the communicative dimensions of objects, rather than simply of
language (drawing from Piaget’s and Melanie Klein’s stucturalist–psychological
and psychoanalytical theories of child development; Miller 1987: 85–98) and
through a call for the study of ‘artefacts in their contexts’ (drawing from Gom-
brich’s studies of design, Erving Goffman’s idea of ‘frame analysis’, and the practice
theories of Giddens and Bourdieu; Miller 1987: 98–127) and the structuralist
analysis of form and style (Miller 1987: 127–129). Such material culture studies
would be distinct from linguistic models, since ‘the physicality of objects makes
them much harder than language to extricate from the particular social context in
which they operate, and for that reason they pose a particular problem for
academic study’ (Miller 1987: 109).
The concluding section of the book was a programmatic statement for the
anthropological study of mass consumption, combining ideas drawn from Baudril-
lard, Hebdige, and especially Bourdieu and Giddens to aim to achieve a ‘balance
between objectivist approaches, such as those found in archaeology, and subjectivist
approaches, the most extreme of which would be design history’ (Miller 1987: 157). In
developing this anthropological ‘theory of seek to consumption’ (Miller 1987: 178),
Miller used practice theory to seek to achieve ‘a balance between objectivism and
subjectivism’ (1987: 167). He introduced the ideas of ‘object domains’ and the idea of
the ‘object world’ (Miller 1987: 158, 166), both of which were terms drawn from
Giddens (1984) and which echoed Bourdieu’s description of ‘domains of practice’
created through the habitus (Bourdieu 1977: 20).
***

While the uses of psychology and a dialectical model of objectification drawn from
Hegel were idiosyncratic and their implications for understanding the world
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were sometimes hard to grasp (Mukerji 1989), Material Culture and Mass Con-
sumption made three arguments that were central to British social anthropology’s
Material-Cultural Turn.
First was Miller’s idea of ‘the humility of things’: the recognition of the influence
of apparently banal everyday items, those things ‘usually regarded as trivial’, upon
social life (Miller 1987: 5). Directly echoing James Deetz’s evocation of ‘small things
forgotten’ a decade earlier, Miller argued that such objects mediate social relations
silently, in a kind of ‘ordering of the unconscious world’ (Deetz 1977; Miller 1987:
99). The reception of Artefacts as Categories in social anthropology had seen the
criticism of a lack of ethnographic detail, and concerns over the idea of an
archaeological focus on the modern world as simply obsessed with irrelevant detail
(Moeran 1987). But Miller’s earlier discussions of the ‘trivial nature of pottery’
(Miller 1985: 204) led him to use an archaeological metaphor—‘to excavate certain
areas of investigation formerly branded as “trivial” or “inauthentic”’ (Miller 1987:
viii)—to explain the distinct challenges and potentials of the study of ‘objects in
everyday interaction’, especially when compared with the study of language (Miller
1987: 98).
Secondly, there was the idea of context in the study of material culture. Here
Miller’s arguments were developed directly from contextual archaeology, but
unlike the cultural focus upon ‘text’ in the work of Ian Hodder, Miller’s perspec-
tives here were closer to Giddens than Bourdieu. Miller used Gombrich’s (1979)
evocation of the ‘anonymous and modest presence’ of a picture frame (Miller 1987:
101) and Goffman’s (1974) ‘frame analysis’ to argue that processes of objectification
constituted contexts: so the ‘pervasive presence’ of ‘artefacts as objects’ could be
understood ‘as the context for modern life’ (Miller 1987: 85). This change in Miller’s
focus from that of the contextual ethnoarchaeology might be compared with a
longer-term shift in anthropological thinking about museum objects: ‘from cate-
gorical thinking to relational thinking’ (Gosden and Larson 2007: 242). In this
respect, Miller’s approach was much closer to the long-standing focus since
structural-functionalism upon the analysis of social relations, rather than types
and categories in their own right.
Thirdly, there was the extension of anthropological studies of objects from pre-
industrial and non-Western situations into the world of modern industrial capital-
ism. During the 1960s and 1970s, debates in economic anthropology had been
dominated by discussion of the differences between Western and non-Western
economies. Arguments over the applicability of Western conceptions of economics
to non-Western or precapitalist societies had raised distinction between ‘formalist’
and ‘substantivist’ economies, in which material goods were understood to be
‘disembedded’ from, or ‘embedded’ in, social structure respectively (Polanyi et al.
1957; see Wilk and Cliggett 2007: 3–15). These debates used a long-standing distinc-
tion in economic anthropology between ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’, which had under-
pinned Marcel Mauss’ comparative study of The Gift (Mauss 1990 [1922]), and
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the material-cultural turn 63

which was grounded in an account of the modern world as engendering a schism

between society and economy, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In contrast, Miller’s
(1987: 17) use of anthropological perspectives to study the modern world was based
on the idea that consumption could ‘produce an inalienable culture’: in other words
modern consumers were constantly transforming commodities into things that
they used in their own social lives, and thus breaking down any a priori distinction
between gifts and commodities.
Here, in contrast with conventional Leftist accounts of the rise of capitalism as
alienating, and their focus on production, Daniel Miller’s decision ‘to investigate,
and to assess the consequences of the enormous increase in industrial production
over the last century’ (1987: 1) led him to highlight the productive nature of
consumption, as it were. Critiques of capitalism, he argued, should not lead to ‘a
critique of mass industrial culture per se, which has had the effect of stifling any
positive advocacy of a potential popular alternative which remains within the context
of industrial culture’ (Miller 1987: 176). Thus, Material Culture and Mass Consump-
tion made an important contribution to conceptions of the modern that did not use
grand narratives of disenchantment (via Weber) or alienation (via Marx).
Material Culture and Mass Consumption’s call for a new social anthropology of
consumption contributed to a general rise in consumption studies in sociology,
geography, history, and cultural studies during the 1980s and early 1990s (McKen-
drick et al. 1983; Mintz 1985; Campbell 1987; Brewer and Porter 1993). In his edited
volume Acknowledging Consumption (Miller 1995a), Daniel Miller presented his
perspectives as shifting away from the study of ‘the category of “material culture”’,
which links anthropology ‘with archaeological concerns’, towards a new ‘category
of consumption studies’. Miller argued that this development represented a ‘trans-
formation of anthropology’ because it extended anthropological ideas into the
modern world, as an ‘authentic’ object of study (1995b: 263, 268).
Miller’s suggestion that the extension of anthropological perspectives into the
modern world was radically new was overstated. The ethnoarchaeology of early 1980s
Britain had represented the extension of two long-standing traditions of ‘auto-
anthropology’. One was the folklife studies that developed, especially in museums,
during the 1880s (Jackson 1985), at precisely the same time as the emergence of new
studies of technology described at the start of this chapter, which continued through-
out the first half of the twentieth century. The other was a subsequent post-war
‘sociological rediscovery of British society from the 1950s’, much of which ‘was made
by people trained in social anthropology’ (Hawthorn 1972), and which built to some
degree upon the establishment in 1937 of ‘Mass Observation’ as a kind of anthropol-
ogy of modern life undertaken by amateur researchers, combining surrealism with
popular anthropology (MacClancy 1995; cf. Miller 1988: 356). UCL-based anthro-
pologists had played a significant role in these post-war developments (e.g. Firth et
al. 1970), which related especially to a conception of ‘applied’ anthropology as a
relevant part of the discipline (Goody 1995: 74).
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64 dan hicks

In the structural Marxist anthropology of the 1970s, Maurice Godelier’s (1975)

critique of empiricism was grounded in a commitment to a historical perspective
that used a common set of ethnographic approaches to non-Western and to Western
situations, and the different forms that ‘production’ might take. Meanwhile, despite
the continuing use of the gift/commodity distinction in some Marxist anthropology
(Gregory 1982), anthropological studies of exchange increasingly questioned the firm
distinction between gifts and commodities (Strathern 1988; Gell 1992a). As will be
seen below, this latter work led to the questioning of the a priori differences between
subjects and objects in social anthropological research.
However, the focus of anthropological material culture studies as it developed
after Material Culture and Mass Consumption, especially through the radical shift
away from archaeological approaches, came to be upon ‘ideas about what people
do with objects, essentially as a theory of culture rather than material culture’
(Rowlands 2004: 477). This focus on the meaningful use of material things in social
relationships, rather than upon their detailed empirical examination, was charac-
terized by a latent structuralism that anthropological material culture studies
shared with the contextual archaeology. This framed the development of the
‘high period’ of British material culture studies during the 1990s.

III: T H E ‘ H I G H P E R I O D ’ O F M AT E R I A L
C U LT U R E S T U D I E S
................................................................................................................
The third phase of the archaeological sequence identified here is one of rapid and
self-confident construction, built on foundations laid in earlier periods: the ‘high
period’ of ‘material culture studies’ in British archaeology and anthropology. With
the publication of Interpreting Archaeology: finding meaning in the past in 1995 (based
on a conference held at Cambridge in 1991) and the launch of the Journal of Material
Culture, edited from UCL, in 1996, the ideas that had emerged in the Material-
Cultural Turn were put into practice (Hodder et al. 1995a; Miller and Tilley 1996).
Both interpretive archaeology and material culture studies witnessed the emergence
of book-length studies: especially works by Ian Hodder (1990), Julian Thomas (1991a)
and John Barrett (1994) in archaeology; and in anthropology Daniel Miller’s (1994,
1997, 1998a) studies in Trinidad and North London and a growing number of
contributions to the ‘Materializing Culture’ series published by Berg since 1998. By
understanding objects as ‘cultural forms’ (Miller 1987: 110), this work built upon the
identification of the different contextual uses of material culture in social life that had
been highlighted by the contributions to Arjun Appadurai’s seminal collection The
Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986a; Kopytoff 1986).
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the material-cultural turn 65

The use of detailed case studies in these works, based on ethnographic and
archaeological fieldwork, contrasted with older concerns with style and design that
derived from the study of objects in isolation from their social uses (Conkey 2006:
356–359). However, the exchanges between archaeology and anthropology in eth-
noarchaeology that led of a common adoption of elements of practice theory and
the bringing together of structuralist and interpretive approaches, gave way during
the early 1990s to a radical difference between anthropological and archaeological
material culture studies in Britain.
Having shifted away from the New Archaeology’s concerns with method, and
disillusioned with the results of ethnoarchaeology, British archaeologists and anthro-
pologists who identified themselves as working on ‘material culture studies’ came to
define their field by its object of enquiry: ‘material culture’. However, their fieldwork
was conducted in different spheres: the material dimensions of the contemporary
world on the one side, and the remains of the prehistoric past on the other. A model
of radical alterity emerged in archaeological discussions of ‘theory and practice’
(Hodder 1992) in the definition of archaeology as a kind of distanced interpretation.
For example, the extension of interpretive archaeology into the modern period was
understood as requiring the making of the familiar unfamiliar, to allow interpreta-
tion to take place (Tarlow and West 1999). Meanwhile anthropological material
culture studies worked in the opposite direction: bringing ethnographic methods
developed for the study of non-Western societies to bear upon the modern Western
world: problematizing any general distinction between the modern and the premo-
dern/non-Western, but dispensing with earlier discussions of method.
During the 1990s, British post-processual archaeology developed a series of new
studies informed by the idea that ‘material culture is actively involved in the social
world’ (Shanks and Tilley 1987b: 116–117). Michael Shanks and Chris Tilley sought
to shift back and forth between ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ approaches. In their 1987
study Social Theory and Archaeology, the chapter about ‘material culture’ asked
‘two basic questions’ about objects: ‘First, how do we interpret material culture;
what meaning, if any, does it possess? Secondly, how does material culture pattern-
ing relate to the social?’ (Shanks and Tilley 1987b: 79).
The idea of interpretation was used to define archaeology as a process of
revealing the implication of material culture in human meaning and social rela-
tions. Thus, the title of the introduction to Interpreting Archaeology was ‘Archaeol-
ogy and the interpretation of material culture: a report on the state of the
discipline’ (Hodder et al. 1995b: 1). The empirical focus was, however, almost
exclusively upon the study of prehistory, especially Neolithic and Bronze Age
Europe (and especially Britain). The rural locations of the sites and landscapes
studied were just like the periods of time that were focused upon: as far away as
possible from the modern world, and thus from the material studied by anthropo-
logical material culture studies. The purpose of interpretive archaeology was thus
to ‘attend to difference’ (Shanks and Hodder 1995: 9). On those occasions on which
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the modern period was studied by post-processual archaeologists (e.g. Johnson

1996), no connections with socio-cultural anthropology were made.
In British anthropology, the effect of associating the movement of anthropological
perspectives into the modern western world with a simultaneous movement away
from archaeological perspectives was an isolation of the study of modern material
culture from the potential archaeological contribution to the study of the modern
period and the contemporary world (Hicks and Beaudry 2006b): despite the influence
of James Deetz’s historical archaeology upon the development of British anthropo-
logical material culture studies (Miller 1982c: 96; 1987: 140–142). The concerns with the
empiricism or fetishism of archaeology were, however, concerns quite specifically
with the New Archaeology, which had dominated both ethnoarchaeology and Amer-
icanist modern material culture studies in the early 1980s. Despite the archaeological
training of those who developed anthropological material culture studies (Miller
1980; Tilley 1981), the twin directions of the Material-Cultural Turn—post-proces-
sual/interpretive archaeology and the anthropology of consumption—were parallel,
rather than overlapping. This meant that the potential for exchanges between archae-
ological and anthropological perspectives in the study of the material dimensions of
the modern world were not explored (Cochran and Beaudry 2006).
The significance of practice theory for both fields was considerable. However the
anthropological material culture studies played Giddens to interpretive archaeol-
ogy’s Bourdieu: echoing Giddens’ critique of the ‘concern with “meaning” to the
exclusion of the practical involvements of human life in material activity’ in
interpretive sociology and ethnomethodology (Giddens 1976a: 155; see Giddens
1976b). This distinction between ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ models of practice theory
formed the basis of John Barrett’s critique of Ian Hodder’s conception of context-
ual archaeology from a structuration perspective:
Archaeologists do not enter into a dialogue with the people they study, but our obligations
to those people do remain. Can we really claim to be able to understand how they saw their
world? This seems both dubious and unnecessary. Instead we can learn something, through
the surviving evidence, of how their knowledge was gained in the routine practices by which
they lived their lives.
Barrett (1987a: 472)

Barrett (1987b) called for a shift from a focus on archaeological material culture as
text to the idea of ‘fields of discourse’. He argued for a distinctive archaeological
reorientation of the nature of ‘structure’ in Giddens’ model of agency and struc-
ture, which more adequately accounted for ‘material conditions’:
Giddens has stated that ‘structure exists only as memory traces’ meaning, I take it, that action
draws initially upon, and is guided in anticipation by, the subject’s memory of previous
experience. Important although this point is, an equal, if not greater, emphasis must be placed
upon the particular material conditions within which social practices are situated.
Barrett (1987b: 8)
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the material-cultural turn 67

Meanwhile Bourdieu’s focus on the lived domestic environment, most famously

explored in his 1970 structuralist study of the Algerian Kabyle house, which described
the lived environment as structured by a series of binary oppositions experienced
through domestic life (Bourdieu 1990), was significant in the particular range of field
sites or ‘artefactual domains’ (Miller 1998b: 10) chosen for the new anthropological
material culture studies. The domestic home was pre-eminent among these (Miller
1988, 2001b, 2006a: 348–349, 2008), as ‘the context in which most other material culture
is used, placed and understood’ (Buchli 2002b: 207; cf. Humphrey 1988). Alongside the
home, anthropological material culture studies in this period focused especially upon
supermarkets (Miller 1998c; Miller et al. 1998), domestic gardens, catalogue shopping
(Clarke 1998), party selling, car boot sales, private cars, and clothing as well as the
consumption of heritage at museums and historic sites (Rowlands 1998). In a related
body of work, the anthropological study of artworks was increasingly understood as
focusing on ‘visual culture’ (Pinney 2006: 131), building on studies such as Howard
Morphy’s engagement with Yolngu (Australian aboriginal) art, which used ethnogra-
phy to examine the social contexts in which artworks were created, used, and under-
stood: an approach that he argued could highlight the ambiguity consciously brought
about through non-representational art forms (Morphy 1991; cf. Layton 1991: 1).
The attraction of material culture studies to such themes has been criticized as
providing uncritical accounts of ‘[Western] teenagers, home-makers and shoppers’,
in which anthropologists operate ‘like flâneurs or tourists . . . not in the world, [but]
only gazing out at it’, while readers find themselves ‘drifting through a symbolic
forest or watching an exhibition of signs and messages’ (Löfgren 1997: 102–103). Tim
Ingold (2007b: 316) has argued that these choices of field sites, and especially the
‘twin obsession with museums and department stores’, limited material culture
studies to places in which things are ordered in quite specific ways: where ‘we
confront things as objects’. This, however, was precisely the point that these works
were making: that anthropology can examine contemporary processes of objectifi-
cation, the social processes through which people come to define and understand
things as objects. The narrative here usually concerned the enrolment of commod-
ities into social relationships: most clearly stated in Miller’s (1998c) ‘theory of
shopping’ in which the idea of ‘sacrifice’ was seen as a creative rather than a
destructive process. Here, Miller followed Alfred Gell’s observation that
Very recognizable forms of consumption . . . may mislead us into making the false equation
‘consumption equals destruction’ because on these occasions meat, liquor and other valued
substances are made to vanish. But consumption as a general phenomenon really has
nothing to do with the destruction of goods and wealth but their reincorporation into
the social system that produced them in some other guise.
Gell (1986: 112)

Miller’s work on shopping also involved a collaboration between anthropology and

cultural geography in a study of the Brent Cross shopping centre in North London
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to identify ‘the investment in social relationships that takes place during the
apparently mundane work of shopping’ (Miller et al. 1998: 23). In such views, the
consumer’s decision to purchase one item of grocery rather than another could
represent evidence of quite intimate social relationships: ‘making love in super-
markets’ by transforming the can of soup, purchased to be shared at home, into
part of a loving relationship (Miller 1998b, 1998c), viewing consumption as a
‘technology of love’ (Miller 2006a: 350), and studying the anthropology of ‘thrift’
in which ‘the desire to save money arise principally out of the moral imperative
which dominates ordinary shopping, where the shopper stands for the interests of
family and household’ (Miller 2003: 362).
Similarly, global processes involving apparently homogenized cultures of com-
modities were shown to involve quite distinctive local enactments: as with Daniel
Miller’s identification of Coca-Cola as ‘a black sweet drink made in Trinidad’
(Miller 1998a). This focus on the place that mass-produced commodities can
play in particular social relations facilitated, Miller argued, a ‘transformation of
anthropology’ in that it broke down ‘an explicit, or even implicit, culture concept
as a definitional premise of anthropology’ (Miller 1995b: 264) through an awareness
of the active role of material culture in social life (cf. Lucas 2001a: 121–122). These
were powerful and important arguments that moved away from an anthropological
conception of society as purified of everyday things. However, as is explored in the
next section, more recently this breaking down of the culture concept has spilled
over into the material culture concept itself.

IV: T H E U N F O L D I N G O F M AT E R I A L
C U LT U R E S T U D I E S
................................................................................................................
The process of excavation often identifies moments of recurrence and similarity in
the ways in which particular landscapes have been inhabited and reconfigured in
different periods. In this sequence of disciplinary thinking and practice from the
1970s to the 1990s, we might suggest that the fin-de-siècle optimism over the study
of ‘object domains’ during the ‘high period’ of material culture studies echoed the
confidence of Tylor’s arguments about ‘object lessons’ a century before. This time,
however, it sought to fulfil the long-standing modernist ambition of British
anthropology to become a comparative sociology. This was precisely the ambition
that had replaced the museum collection with ethnographic participant observa-
tion as the subject of enquiry 80 years previously. Material culture studies’ model of
objectivism—for example, in the aspiration for ‘a theory of consumption’ (Miller
1987: 178–217)—involved a critique of the culture concept ‘as a definitional premise
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the material-cultural turn 69

of anthropology’ (Miller 1995b: 265): focusing instead upon vernacular practices in

which people enrolled objects in social relations. Gradually, however, the responses to
calls for a focus upon material culture as ‘the least understood of all the central
phenomena of the modern age’ (Miller 1987: 217) started to reveal the programme of
material culture studies as itself an artefact of modernist thought (sensu Ardener
1985). Central here has been the emergence of the strangely abstract, dematerialized
quality of many material culture studies, in which things appear to disappear into
spectral fields of social relations or meanings, and the complexities of materials and
their change over time are not accounted for. While material culture studies had
turned away from archaeology, and had been isolated from historical anthropology, it
was in these fields that the narratives told by material culture studies started to unfold.

Humanism and positionality

The lasting successes of the ‘high period’ of material culture studies lay for
anthropology in the acknowledgement of the potential significance of objects in
human social relations, especially those objects that appear banal or inconsequen-
tial: providing a sense of the unspoken things that constitute the everyday dimen-
sions of social life that have become especially important in sociology through the
work of writers such as Michel de Certeau (1984; cf. Highmore 2002). Such an
approach placed the everyday—or ‘the blindingly obvious’—at the centre of the
analysis (Miller and Woodward 2007: 337–339). For archaeology, these successes
involved new contributions to a long-standing humanistic perspective in archae-
ology: the desire to get past things to people that had been expressed throughout
the second half of the twentieth century, even, for example, in the words of
Mortimer Wheeler (1954: v): ‘The archaeologist is digging up not things but
people . . . In a simple direct sense, archaeology is a science that must be lived,
must be “seasoned with humanity”. Dead archaeology is the driest stuff that blows.’
The Material-Cultural Turn problematized the study of the socio-cultural and
the material in isolation from each other. Its solution was to document how they
were ‘related’, so as ‘to transcend subject–object dualities’ (Miller and Tilley 1996: 7)
created by the modern world. Material culture studies documented, to use the
standard parlance, ‘relational’ processes (Miller 2007: 25): that is, it was concerned
with the relationships between objects and people. The physical form of things was
thus reduced to a distinctive kind of conduit for social relations, which were the
proper object of enquiry:
An analysis of an artefact must begin with its most obvious characteristic, which is that it
exists as a physically concrete form independent of any individual’s mental image of it. This
factor may provide the key to understanding its power and significance in cultural con-
struction. The importance of this physicality of the artefact derives from its ability thereby
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to act as a bridge, not only between the mental and physical worlds, but also, more
unexpectedly, between consciousness and the unconscious.
Miller (1987: 99)

The heuristic distinction between materials and culture implied by the use of the
term ‘material culture’ was justified through the idea of objectification (Miller
1987): the argument that under the conditions of capitalism and/or modernity,
distinctions between objects and people are made. In this view, ‘capitalism splits
culture and person apart into commodities separated from their intrinsic person-
making capacities, and the illusion of pure humanism outside of materiality’
(Miller 2005a: 17). Similarly, Julian Thomas argued that archaeology needed ac-
tively to reconnect across a Newtonian ‘separation between the human and non-
human worlds, culture and nature [which has] provided the principal basis for
ordering collections of material things’ (Thomas 2004: 26). In practice, a focus on
relatedness or ‘relationality’ sought to avoid what was understood as a long-standing
tendency, identified especially in archaeology and museum studies, to become
‘obsessed with objects as such, . . . treating them as having an independent behaviour
in a manner which separated them from any social context and which amounted to a
genuine fetishism of the artefact’ (Miller 1987: 111–112; cf. Miller 1990).
But a further problem—that of the distinctions between the researcher as subject
and the object of enquiry—has called into question the sure-footedness of material
culture studies as a modernist, representational project, working with the remnants
of comparative sociology, and applied structuralism. A gradual unfolding of the
idea of ‘material culture studies’ took place. The humanism of the Material-Cultural
Turn—anthropology’s ‘translating objects into people’ (Miller 1985: ix) or archae-
ology’s ‘fleshing out in cultural terms of the basic data’ (Deetz 1967: 138)—came to
form the basis for critiques of normative conceptions of human identity, especially
in relation to gender (Gilchrist 1994), sexuality (Voss 2008a), ethnicity (Jones 1997),
and life-course (Gilchrist 2004), and the slow development of third-wave feminist
perspectives in archaeology (Gilchrist 1999). The political engagement of feminist and
gender archaeology, and of movements such as the World Archaeological Congress
(Ucko 1987) and developments in indigenous archaeology, African-American histori-
cal archaeology and museum anthropology, meant that in interpretive archaeology
issues of the positionality of the researcher studying material culture were interrogated.
At first this was worked out through the ideas of ‘critical reflexivity’ or ‘self-reflexive
archaeology’ (Shanks and Tilley 1992: 62; Hodder 1997), but increasingly it has
developed into critiques of the way in which the Material-Cultural Turn in both
archaeology and anthropology sought to stand upon that non-existent hyphen in
‘material culture studies’, so as to document traffic between two different domains, the
material and the socio-cultural, while remaining detached from them both.
The risk was ever-present that detailed ethnographies of consumption (e.g.
Miller 1994) or large-scale studies of the use of material culture over the long
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the material-cultural turn 71

term (Hodder 1990) would give way to the uncritical presentation of appropriate
case studies in what Max Gluckman would have called the ‘apt illustration’ of
particular models of social relations (Gluckman 1961: 7). This is what George
Marcus has identified as a tendency to allow social theory to ‘stand in for the
macro-social’, with which ‘micro-cultural analysis’ might then be related (Marcus
2000: 17), as if these two scales of analysis operated in different worlds. Material
culture studies narrated objects in particular ways. In social anthropology, the
emplotment was often the appropriation of modern, apparently ‘alienable’ goods
through consumption to transform them into ‘inalienable’ items, for instance
through household DIY (Miller 1988). In archaeology, the story usually involved
the identification of artefact patterning as evidence of human social relations and
‘traditions of practice’ in which, it was asserted, a meaningful material world played
a significant role, through ‘ritual practice’ for example (Thomas 1991a: 80–84, 187).
Clearly in both cases, the focus upon human practices in relation to the material
world was a long way from the identification of normative cultures or cultural
behaviours reflected in artefacts. But what was at stake here was the uses to which
social theory and linguistic analogy are put in archaeology and anthropology.
Through a residual structuralism, the richness and complexity of the knowledge
that derives from fieldwork was often reduced to the illustration of particular
models of ‘the material constitution of social relations’ (Miller and Tilley 1996: 5;
see Pinney 2005): looking from an impossible vantage-point between materials and
culture, erasing any trace of standpoint (which includes not only the researcher,
but the complex human and material practices that all fieldwork involves). Knowl-
edge of material culture appeared to emerge from somewhere outside of the
ethnographic situation.

Hermeneutic phenomenology
One solution to this problem of standpoint and positionality has been the distinc-
tive kind of hermeneutic phenomenology developed in archaeological and anthro-
pological material culture studies. Such approaches have sought to locate the lived,
bodily experience of the world at the centre of the interpretation of the material
world, and to relocate the focus of material culture studies upon concrete human
experience. Chris Tilley and Julian Thomas have, since the early 1990s, led the way
in this field, through studies of the monumental landscapes of British and Scandi-
navian Neolithic and Bronze Age. Using ideas from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
Lefebvre, Thomas (1993, 1996, 2000a, 2000b, 2006) and Tilley (1994, 1996, 2006b)
have tried to account for the bodily, meaningful, thoughtful, and reflective en-
counters between humans and the non-human world.
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Tilley has sought to build upon the literary and linguistic analogy of material
culture studies that lay at the heart of the contextual archaeology, and which he
explored through studies such as Reading Material Culture (1990a), Material
Culture and Text (1991), and Material Culture and Metaphor (1999), and his defin-
ition of interpretive archaeology as a kind of ‘poetics of the past’ (1993). He has
continued to explore the idea that emerged in the 1970s of material culture studies
as analogous, but not reducible, to the study of language: the idea that ‘artefacts
perform active metaphorical work in the world in a manner that words cannot’
(Tilley 2002: 25). In contrast to the use of abstract models that New Archaeology’s
conception of ‘spatial archaeology’ had borrowed from 1960s New Geography
(Clarke 1977), Tilley has developed ‘a phenomenological perspective linked to a
concept of materiality’ (Tilley 2007a: 19) that seeks to account for the embodied
experience of landscapes as material culture:
From a phenomenological perspective landscape is ‘platial’ rather than ‘spatial’. It is not
something defined by space as an abstract container but by the places that constitute it and
make it what it is. Landscape thus sits in places, is a reflexive ‘gathering’ and set of relations
between those places, background and foreground, figure and frame, here and there, near
and far. Landscape is thus always both objective physical place and a subjective cognized
image of that place.
Tilley (2006b: 20)

For Thomas, the significance of phenomenological approaches lies in their ability

to move beyond modern distinctions between nature and culture in archaeology
(Thomas 1996: 3). By studying barrows, cairns, megalithic tombs, and other sites
and monuments from British prehistory, this branch of material culture studies has
been ‘concerned with the human encounter, experience and understanding of
worldly things, and with how these happenings come to be possible’ (Thomas
2006: 43).
In practice, however, it is very difficult to comprehend what these accounts have
added to our understanding of the prehistoric past or contemporary heritage
landscapes. The two-way encounter between the human body and the landscape,
focused on interpretation and the representation of meaning, has retained much of
what Tilley (1982: 26) described as the ‘dialectical structuralism’ of contextual
archaeology. Too often, hermeneutic phenomenology has descended into a
hyper-interpretive romanticism, most vividly in the study of the Bronze Age
landscape of Leskernick in Cornwall, which combined photo-essays with fragments
of diary entries, snatches of conversation, poetry writing, and forms of ‘archaeo-
logical artworks’ (Bender et al. 2007; see Hicks 2009).
In their privileging of human experience and cognition these texts have pro-
duced strangely dematerialized, reflective accounts of the world, resorting to the
human body as a stable point of reference in precisely the same way as the idea of
‘material culture’ has been used: to stand impossibly between alternative domains
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the material-cultural turn 73

in order to represent the world. Human bodies, of course, are just as diverse as
material things: and the principal critiques of phenomenological perspectives have
come from feminist studies of embodiment (see Crossland this volume, Chapter 16).
The positionality and perspective of the researcher remains an unresolved problem
because the purpose of archaeology and anthropology remains defined in herme-
neutic phenomenology as interpreting and representing the socio-cultural dimensions
of the material world. In the politics of archaeology and of museum anthropolo-
gy, objects are not straightforwardly involved in social relations or contested
meanings: the actions of the researcher or curator, working within particular
disciplinary, institutional, or historical circumstances or accidents, are always
involved (Hodder 2004). The same, of course, is true for vernacular practice as
for academic practice. Here two broader problems with British archaeological
and anthropological material culture studies are made clear: a disregard for
the significance of method, and a strong presentism, even in relation to the
prehistoric past.
Meanwhile, the definition of the purpose of material culture studies as repre-
senting meaning or social relations has seen more successful critiques, which have
been central to the process of unfolding, especially in relation to discussions of
materiality and material agency, as the next section shows.

Meaning, materiality, and material agency

The shift beyond contextual and interpretive archaeology has increasingly led to a
reconsideration of the limitations of the analogy of things with texts, which had
allowed for the persistence of the structuralist definition of material culture studies
as a complementary field of enquiry to the study of language. The textual metaphor
in contextual archaeology, and the focus on human meaning as the ultimate object
of enquiry in interpretive archaeology, built on a long-standing sense that the
material evidence of the past was for British prehistory an equivalent of a historical
text (Lucas 2001a: 111), which could be used to generate accounts of the human
past. The idea of the landscape as a text had in the mid-twentieth century been
associated especially with the explicitly counter-modern model of ‘local history’
developed by writers, such as W. G. Hoskins (1955) in his idea of the English
landscape as a vulnerable ‘palimpsest’ wrought through centuries of human life
(Hicks 2008a). The romanticism of these approaches, grounded in a counter-
modern sensibility of the past as radically different from the present, informed
many of the British models of ‘interpretive archaeology’: that of especially herme-
neutic phenomenology (Hodder 2004).
The textual analogy, and the explicit idea of archaeology following a broader
interdisciplinary ‘linguistic turn’ (Thomas 1991b: 9), led to an increasing
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dematerialization as contextual archaeology developed into interpretive archaeol-

ogy. Such approaches were informed by particular bodies of literary theory (Tilley
1990a), the logic of which was that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Thomas 1990:
19), since ‘space is like a page on which human action writes’ (Thomas 1991b: 9) and
the study of material culture involved the same critical awareness as any kind
of reading (Hodder 1986). In such work, material culture studies became, as Evans-
Pritchard wrote of functionalist anthropology, ‘little more than a literary device’
(1950: 120). But a number of archaeologists have argued that the physical form of
things, and in particular their durability, presents particular problems for the
textual analogy: paralleling the observation from cultural geography that ‘objects
do far more than represent’ (Thrift 2007: 239). These arguments have often been
developed in terms of a shift from the study of ‘material culture’ to that of
‘materiality’—a word that attempts to move away from the idea of a separation
between different material and cultural domains, and to accommodate the material
form of things.
As Ian Hodder argued two decades ago, ‘perhaps because material culture is
often more practical and less immediately concerned with abstract meaning, the
meanings it does have are often non-discursive’ (1991b: 73). Victor Buchli took
this argument forward in his suggestion that ‘the trouble with text’ in contextual
archaeology lay in the ‘constituted and evocative physicality’ of material culture
(1995: 191). Buchli’s argument was paralleled by Webb Keane’s (1997) discussion of
semiotics, representation, and material culture in relation to Indonesian ethnog-
raphy, which demonstrated how any account of meaning and materials must
account for the refraction that occurs through material things. This growing
awareness of the importance of ‘the very physicality of objects’ (Rowlands 2004:
478), has led to an increased interest in the physical properties and effects of
materials.
For some, this has inspired the use of Peircean semiotics to highlight the
contingency of how certain objects come to hold certain meanings (see discussion
by Jones 2009: 95–96), an idea that develops earlier recognitions of the ‘resistance’
of material culture to being freighted with meaning (Shanks and Tilley 1989: 5).
This moves beyond the observation that the passing of an object between different
‘regimes of value’ means that meanings are contingent on social contexts (Appa-
durai 1986b), by suggesting that certain physical or functional properties of objects
also define how they are understood, and how they operate in social life (see Gell
1996b). Equally, however, such arguments highlight how such properties of things
might be understood as non-discursive: falling outside of a focus upon ‘reading’
material culture, and beyond the limits of a purely ‘interpretive’ archaeology,
concerned only with ‘finding meaning in the past’ (Hodder et al. 1995a) or the
idea that material culture represents a form of metaphor (Tilley 1999).
More radically, others have pointed to the many materials in the world that
require archaeological and anthropological attention, but which are not just those
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the material-cultural turn 75

things that ‘matter’ to humans that are highlighted by mainstream material culture
studies (e.g. Miller 2001a) or a reflexive interpretive archaeology (e.g. Hodder
1999). Things can matter, we might suggest, even when people do not say that
they matter. The human significance of meaningful ‘material culture’ is, of course,
a crucial element of accounting for the material world: but the physicality of things
calls into question the idea of ‘material culture’ as an excessively anthropocentric
definition of the field of enquiry: delimited by those moments in which things are
meaningful or filled with cultural significance. At the same time, the idea of
materiality risks slipping into the idea of kind of universal quality of material-
ness that is even more abstract than the idea of material culture (Ingold 2007a).
Approaches to what material things ‘do’, rather than just what they mean or how
they are ‘entangled’ in social relationships (Thomas 1991) require a more adequate
account of the role of the material dimensions of the world in social life than, for
example, a Foucauldian notion of the ‘material constraint’ of architecture would
provide (Foucault 1977b: 67; Foucault and Rabinow 1984). But the consequences or
effects of things clearly require us to move beyond imagining social life as worked
out in an isomorphic world of stuff. The efficacy of things relates to material
durability, as explored above, but also to the effects of residuality (Lucas 2008;
Miller 2001a: 109–111; Olivier 2001), decay (Küchler 2002b; DeSilvey 2006), destruc-
tion (Collorado-Mansfeld 2003), rarity (Pels 1998), fragmentation (Chapman
2000a), and the situations in which the enchantment or dazzling effects of the
material world lead to ‘stoppages’ (Gosden 2006: 430; Gell 1992b; cf. Coote 1992;
Saunders 1999) or particular engagements of the human senses (Jones and
MacGregor 2002; Edwards et al. 2006) and the affective charge of things. Daniel
Miller (2001a: 119–120) has expressed similar effects through the term ‘posses-
sion’—how ownership of objects can also lead to the ‘possession’ of humans by
objects in social situations that exist within ‘networks of agents that include both
animate and inanimate forms’. Following Miller we could term such effects ‘the
consequences of materiality’ (Miller 2005a: 3): foregrounding ‘a concern with how
the material world is manifest’ and ‘the transformative processes that shape the
material world’ (Buchli 2004: 183).
The awareness of the limitations of the textual analogy that developed from a
new attention to the physicality of things might at first glance appear to be in
keeping with Giddens’ critique of hermeneutics, as expressed in archaeology by the
papers by John Barrett (1987a, 1987b) discussed above. This would lead us back to a
consideration of the relationships between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, which has stood
for so long in the background of the dialectical model of ‘material culture studies’.
But more radical critique of the idea of material culture has emerged from a loose
body of thought that has sought to combine elements of the hermeneutic phe-
nomenology described above with perspectives from Bruno Latour’s conception of
ANT, as it has emerged since the early 1990s after social constructivism (Latour
2005a; see Law this volume, Chapter 6).
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These arguments have typically begun with the assertion that material culture
studies have somehow ‘forgotten’ about things: ‘moved away from things’ materi-
ality and subsumed themselves to hegemonic antimaterial and social constructivist
theories’ (Olsen 2003: 88). Several writers, especially from an archaeological per-
spective, have called for a new focusing upon things, asserting that the discipline of
archaeology represents ‘the discipline of things par excellence’ (Olsen 2003: 89).
Most recently such arguments have taken place under the banner of a ‘symmetrical
archeology’, a term inspired by Bruno Latour’s early accounts of ANT (Olsen 2007;
Witmore 2007; Webmoor and Witmore 2008; see Latour 1993a). They have also,
however, led to Daniel Miller and others responding to the work of ANT by
replacing the term ‘material culture’ with ‘materiality’ (Miller 2005a), and to Tim
Ingold arguing for a focus upon ‘materials’ rather than some generalized essence of
‘materiality’ (Ingold 2007b).
The significance of ANT for material culture studies lies mainly in its theory of
agency, which it suggests—in an extension of this concept beyond the human
actors that we would encounter in structuration theory for example—is a property
of ‘non-humans’ as well as humans. This is a more radical argument than the more
light-touch ethnographic sense of the use of objects in human social relations, and
it involves a questioning of conventional Durkheimian models of the social (as
excessively anthropocentric). Latour has famously suggested that the most impor-
tant part of the name ‘ANT’ is the hyphen between the ‘actor’ and the ‘network’
(Latour 1999a). In its reception of ANT, the unhyphenated field of material culture
studies has been pressed, therefore, to examine quite what it might mean when it
refers to the existence of ‘relations’ between the material and cultural worlds: since
ANT seems to some to be effectively ‘reinventing the very subject [of anthropolog-
ical material culture studies]’ (Miller 2005b: 3), through ‘an extension . . . of ap-
proaches to objectification that arise out of dialectical theory’ (Miller 2001a: 119,
2005a: 12). But for ANT, relations are not simply bilateral: they are much more far-
ranging networks that emerge through the actions of both humans and non-
humans.
The reception of ANT thinking was slow in anthropological material culture
studies (Miller 2005a; but see Boast 1996; Miller 2002), but aspects of it were clearly
directly developed (although never cited) in Alfred Gell’s (1998) study Art and
Agency: an anthropological theory, perhaps read especially through the arguments
of Marilyn Strathern (1996) and Robin Boast (1996). Gell (1992b) developed a line of
thought about the social use, rather than the aesthetic content, of artworks as
distinctive items of ‘technology’, the powers of which served to ‘enchant’. He likened
his approach to the ‘methodological atheisim’ adopted by anthropologists studying
religion: in the same way, studying artworks required a ‘methodological philistin-
ism’ (Gell 1992b), focused on the work that artworks do in social life, rather than
what they mean. In an account of the use of artworks by social actors (‘art as a
system of action’; Gell 1998: 6), Gell argued that artworks, and by extension
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the material-cultural turn 77

other items of material culture, could be used to extend or distribute human social
agency: a model that also drew from Peircian ideas of ‘abduction’ and Strathernian
ideas of ‘distributed personhood’ (Strathern 1988; Jones 2009: 95–97). This shift
from what artworks mean to what they do wove a Latourian sense of the powers of
things together with an anthropological account of social relations in a tradition
that drew from Mauss’ study of the gift (Küchler 2002a: 59). Unlike ANT, Gell’s
argument did not extend agency to non-humans, but instead suggested that objects
could be deployed by social actors as secondary agents: ‘indexes’ of human agency.
While Gell’s argument has been critiqued from a number of perspectives (Layton
2003; Leach 2007; Morphy 2009), the influence of his book and of ANT has
combined in archaeology with the extension of the discussion of the idea of
‘agency’ as it is theorized in practice theory (e.g. Dobres and Robb 2000a) away
from ‘a human-centred view of agents and artefacts’ through the idea of ‘material
agency’ (Knappett and Malafouris 2008a: ix). Using the more radical extension of
agency beyond humans presented by Latour, and presenting a critique of archaeo-
logical uses of practice theory as failing to acknowledge the influence of material
things, this work argues that ‘no distinctions between human and non-human
entities can be sustained in terms of agency’ (Knappett and Malafouris 2008a: xii;
cf. Knappett 2002). In a similar approach, Nicole Boivin (2008) has built on the
discussions of the physicality of things outlined above to combine the shift away
from the textual analogy of contextual archaeology towards a Gellian model of
‘material agency’.
The idea of material agency has been critiqued by anthropologist Tim Ingold, as
part of his concerns about the ideas of material culture and ‘materiality’. In
the ‘materiality debate’ between Ingold and Miller (Ingold 2007a, 2007b, 2007d;
D. Miller 2007), Ingold has built on his earlier complaints that the very idea of
material culture studies relied upon ‘the Cartesian ontology . . . that divorces the
activity of the mind from that of the body in the world’ (2000a: 165):
In the extensive archaeological and anthropological literature on material culture . . . [t]he
emphasis is almost entirely upon issues of meaning and form—that is, on culture as opposed
to materiality. Understood as a realm of discourse, meaning and value inhabiting the
collective consciousness, culture is conceived to hover above the material world but not
to permeate it.
Ingold (2000a: 341)

Ingold has argued that the idea of ‘materiality’ (e.g. Miller 2005a) has tried to do in
one word what material culture did in two—to express relationships between two
different worlds or domains, the social world and the object world—while material
agency simply reorients these anthropocentric relationships. Ingold’s alternative
to models of material agency is to see ‘things in life’ rather than ‘life in things’,
to avoid anthropological archaeology ‘turning to stone’ by understanding
material culture in purely abstract, sociological, or literary terms (Ingold 2005:
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122). Ingold (2007b, 2007d) argues that the ideas of ‘materiality’ and ‘objectness’
only emerge as a question or a problem from an academic practice that
in its isolation of the object, necessarily ruptures the flows of materials by which it came
into being. It is as though the world came ready-made, already precipitated out of the
currents, mixtures and transmutations of materials through which it was formed. To follow
the materials, by contrast, is to enter a world-in-formation. In this work, things do not
appear, in the first instance, as bounded objects, set over against their surroundings, but
rather as specific confluences of materials that, for a moment at least, have mixed and
melded together into recognisable forms.
Ingold (2007b: 314–315)
Ingold’s alternative, however, is simply another account of networks and relations,
which he calls a ‘meshwork of interwoven substances’ (2007c: 35). Ingold’s ap-
proach, which we might call, for lack of a better term, ‘meshwork studies’, main-
tains the integrity of those elements that interact across this ‘meshwork’ is through
his resistance of the idea of ‘hybridity’, because such a concept presupposes the
existence of two distinct forms prior to mixing, or hybridization (2008: 211).
Ingold’s critique of the uses of ANT in material culture studies is grounded in
his concept of ‘meshwork’, which inspires an alternative and contrapuntal acro-
nym—the web-weaving SPIDER (‘Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Em-
bodied Responsiveness’). Ingold’s focus is not upon social relations that constitute
a network of humans and non-humans, but upon ‘the lines along which [humans,
animals and others] live and conduct [their] perception and action in the world’
(Ingold 2008: 211; see Ingold 2007c). Ingold argues that a focus on ‘skill’ rather than
‘agency’ is required, since ‘to attribute agency to objects that do not grow or
develop that consequently develop no skill and whose movement is not therefore
coupled to their perception, is ludicrous’ (2008: 215).
However, the direction in which archaeologists such as Jones, Boivin, Knappett,
and Fowler are travelling leads to doing more than (or, perhaps better, less than)
argue that objects can count as subjects, or to illustrate how material things can be
involved in the ‘distribution of personhood’. It leads towards doing more than
simply continuing the impulse in modernist anthropology now to relate across,
now to refuse distinctions between ‘the material’ and ‘the socio-cultural’. After all,
why is ‘agency’ a problem at all? Because what is meant is social agency: the
Giddensian counterpoint to structure. Agency must only be solved as a problem if
we hold on to a particular model of society in which, in the terms of dialectical
material culture studies, the question of locating the actions that generate, and are
shaped by, social structure is significant. Like the textual analogy, the debates
about agency remain too often solidly anthropocentric: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency
moved from the meaningful to the social, but retained humans as the proper
object of enquiry for anthropology. Perhaps, indeed, the logic here is to turn
completely away from the idea of material culture studies, since as Tim Ingold
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the material-cultural turn 79

asks, ‘Are there contexts that are not social, or worlds that are not material?’ (2007c:
32). Or from anthropology, which we could suggest should properly study only
humans. Questions about ‘meaning’ and agency have persisted because of the
assumption that the alternative is simply incoherence. Daniel Miller once gave the
example of a gas cloud that emerges ‘as an unpredicted by-product of a technologi-
cal process’. For Miller, this was ‘only marginally an artefact’ and therefore of little
concern to social anthropology or social archaeology, despite being a ‘product of
human labour’ (1987: 112–113). The logic here is a belief that ‘objects are made of
social ties’ (Latour 2005a: 248–249), rather than accounting for the much messier
and fragmented materials with which archaeologists routinely work. But while
‘anthropology’ and ‘material culture studies’, like ‘archaeology’, are awkward
terms, there is no need to dispense with them because of what they are called,
since what they actually do is far more nuanced. We might suggest that both
archaeology and anthropology accommodate the majority of the world, which is,
as John Law puts it, neither coherent nor incoherent but ‘indefinite or noncoherent’
(2004: 14). The majority of archaeology’s slow, descriptive techniques attend pre-
cisely to such otherwise unspoken fragments. Research practices in archaeology and
anthropology routinely do more (or less) than focus upon accounting for human
understanding: ‘the understanding of the meaningful relationship between persons
and things’ (Tilley 2007a: 18–19). This is especially true when things are analysed
over time, rather than in the ethnographic present. Theorizing agency and meaning
provides solutions only to the sociological and literary problems of representing the
world: documenting ‘relations’ between different domains. Two complementary
approaches, which involve moving beyond the representational approaches that
characterized the Material-Cultural Turn, its critique by Ingold, and conventional
accounts of ANT, are explored in the next section. Central here is the observation
that archaeology and arthropology enact, rather than purely represent, the world.

V: T H I N G S A S EV E N T S , T H I N G S A S E F F E C T S
................................................................................................................
While writing this chapter, I shared a draft with a number of archaeologists and
anthropologists involved in current debates over the idea of material culture. The
comments of one colleague were especially informative:
This chapter portrays the history of material culture studies as an elaborate academic game
in which renowned contestants play off their positions vis-à-vis one another. The reader,
offered a spectator’s seat in the back row, is afforded the dubious privilege of listening in on
the contest, as words like structuralism, semiotics, practice theory and agency get batted
around. The game is punctuated by ‘Turns’, after each of which the words get reshuffled
(sometimes with prefixes such as ‘neo’ and ‘post’ attached) and play starts all over again.
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From time to time, the players refer to a mysterious planet called ‘the material world’, which
all claim to have visited at one time or another. But if they have any knowledge of this world
they take care not to reveal it to uninitiated spectators, lest by doing to they would expose
the game as the charade it really is.
Tim Ingold pers. comm. (23 March 2009)

The aim of this excavation has been to reimagine George Marcus’ vision of an
itinerant ethnography of ‘complex objects of study’ in the practice of disciplinary
historiography: to ‘follow the metaphor’ (Marcus 1995: 95, 108–109). As Tim Ingold
rightly observes, the sequence that is revealed is one of a constant reshuffling and
re-articulation of the boundaries or connections between the ‘material’ and the
‘cultural’ or the ‘social’ (cf. Ingold 2000a). This reshuffling began (with the
invention of the term ‘material culture’) in precisely the period in which the
Durkhei mian idea of anthropology as comparative sociology emerged in the
‘structural-functionalist’ approaches of Radcliffe-Brown and others. ‘The material’,
thus, became a problem because of a particular model of ‘the social’, and the term
‘material culture’, as opposed to the ‘social’ in social anthropology, represented a
useful compromise. Then, since the mid-1980s the most recent layers of this
sequence are characterized by another critique of the distinction between the
‘material’ and the ‘cultural’ that is implied by the idea of material culture, most
commonly using practice theory to reconcile semiotic analysis with structuralism.
While the idea of a distinction between the material and the human has often been
critiqued as a modern Western imposition, beyond which anthropology must seek
to move, the rhetoric of counter-modernism has in practice been a central charac-
teristic of modernist thinking, especially in narratives of loss or erasure seen for
example in the conservation movement, rather than an alternative to it (Hicks
2008a; pace Thomas 2004). In long-term perspective, modernist anthropology has
traced and re-traced the idea of reconciling the material with the socio-cultural as
its central question.
Ingold’s arguments raise serious concerns about the place of material culture in
social anthropology. But, informed to a large extent by a hermeneutic phenome-
nology similar to that outlined above, meshwork theory itself too often simply
repeats the familiar complaints about the segregation of the social/cultural from
the natural/material. The practical distinction between ANT and SPIDER is ob-
scure, especially since both distinguish between theory and practice, ethnography
and anthropology, positionality, and knowledge (pace Ingold 2007e). This distanc-
ing effect, between scholar and object, is reinforced by the fact that without
exception Ingold’s case studies remain as far away as possible from the contempo-
rary world: leading to the strange situation where modern or non-modern objects,
like cell phones or woven baskets, have gained a kind of rhetorical power in the
‘materiality debate’ between Ingold and Miller. Unlike the wide range of ethno-
graphic fieldwork that has been carried out by those working in material culture
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the material-cultural turn 81

studies, Ingold’s arguments have been developed theoretically, in isolation from

fieldwork. In doing so, they reproduce precisely the tendency to seek to explain the
world by holding it at a sufficient distance, despite the logic of his arguments to
move away from such approaches.
In this section, I want to use two of Ingold’s principal ideas—formation
and skill—as ways of thinking about how archaeologists and anthropologists
have started to focus upon objects (including objects of enquiry) as emergent
through time, and as the effects of enactment, rather than bound up in
webs of representation and meaningful social action. Through this discussion,
I want to consider what the critique of material culture studies, from the
perspective of meshwork studies but also from more general concerns about
the reduction of things to meanings, or to the social, might mean in practice
for archaeologists and anthropologists who continue to see value in the field
that has come to be known as material culture studies (however flawed that
term might be).

Formation and material histories: things as events

One central element of Ingold’s contributions to debates about ‘materiality’ is his
call for anthropologists to understand things in formation (Ingold 2007c). The
sociological processes through which things are formed as objects were, of course, a
central element of the Material-Cultural Turn (Miller 1987). A counterpoint to this
discussion of objectification was provided a year after Miller’s study by Marilyn
Strathern’s book The Gender of the Gift (1988), which was concerned with the
production of subjects: specifically, upon ideas of ‘personhood’ in the classic ‘gift
societies’ of Melanesia. Strathern argued that through exchange and the creation of
analogies between different objects in ‘inter-artefactual domains’, human subjects
and objects were not in this ethnographic situation understood as distinct. The
exchange of objects led two simultaneous processes: the ‘distribution’ of person-
hood, and a change in the ontological status of humans as ‘dividuals’ rather than
‘individuals’. This argument has more general implications not just for how we
comprehend personhood but also, as Donna Haraway would have it, ‘what counts
as an object’ (Haraway 1988: 588): and, of course, what counts as a subject. At stake
here is much more than the social construction of identities, or the contextual
construction of meaning, but the contingent permeabilities of boundaries between
humans and non-humans: how subjects and objects are emergent. One way of
expressing this is to consider things as events.
The representational impulse in material culture studies has resulted from efforts
to fix the meaning or social use of objects in particular moments in time. This is
an old complaint about ethnographic and archaeological museums, but is also one
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that can be extended to mainstream material culture studies, which have been
characterized by a deep-rooted ethnographic presentism, usually justified through
a belief of the exceptionalism of the contemporary material world. It is also a
characteristic of the strong tendency in interpretive archaeological thinking to
ascribe particular social functions to objects, and to privilege moments at which
social relations or particular meanings can be identified.
The idea of ‘life histories’ in archaeology and anthropology is significant here.
Conventional interpretive archaeologies that focus on change over time (e.g.
Hodder 1990) are better described as ‘agency histories’ or ‘meaningful histories’
rather than ‘life histories’: since life, as Tim Ingold (2000a) reminds us, involves
much more than simply humans and their concerns. Life also, of course, involves
constant change and flux. This includes not only social change, or the shift in the
meaning of an object but the ‘transformation of substance’: through decay,
fragmentation, residuality, etc. (Pollard 2004). It is conventional for material
culture study to focus only on those moments when things (even banal, everyday
things such as soup cans or sherds of pottery) become important for humans:
involved in social relationships, or charged with meaning. Sometimes, it accounts
for material restriction and restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977a). More recently, as we
have seen, in some studies it suggests ‘material agency’ (Knappett and Malafouris
2008b). These ideas, however, do not allow for what we might call ‘the humility
of changes’: the kind of apparently obscure and inconsequential changes in the fill
of a pit, or the silting-up of a ditch, which archaeologists spend large periods of
time documenting. Life histories of things at any scale, however, routinely
accommodate what we might term material histories, rather than purely social
histories.
This disciplinary excavation has reminded us how the rise of contextual archae-
ology coincided with a range of parallel interests in the ‘social life of things’ in
social anthropology. In the 1980s the renewed study of exchange, and especially the
publication of a new English translation of Marcel Mauss’ comparative study of
gift exchange in 1990, brought new life to debates in economic anthropology. This
atmosphere was captured in Arjun Appadurai’s influential edited collection The
Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, which examined how
anthropological perspectives could be used to study the ways in which objects
move between social contexts, gaining new meanings through successive recon-
textualizations (Appadurai 1986a). Igor Kopytoff ’s idea of the ‘cultural biography
of objects’ set out in that volume has been influential in both archaeology and
anthropology (Hoskins 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999). However, the idea of
studying things through the idea of life histories has a much more complex life
history of its own, which stretches back to Haddon’s evolutionary idea of ‘the life
histories of designs’ (Haddon 1895). One particularly influential use of the idea of
the life histories of things was developed in the New Archaeology in Michael
Schiffer’s account of the idea of tracing an artefact’s ‘life history’ from production,
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the material-cultural turn 83

through use, to deposition, in order to comprehend the formation of the archae-

ological record (Schiffer 1972). Like many other archaeological methods, from
landscape survey to excavation recording, if you were to place your finger at any
point on Schiffer’s drawing (see Figure 23.1), it would be difficult uniformly to
assign meaning or involvement in social agency: and yet the thing would be ‘doing’
something, such as passing from one form to another as it decayed, or simply lying
below the ground or on the surface of a ploughed field. Tracing such life histories
is always the product of the slow and painstaking putting of archaeological
methods into practice, for apparently inconsequential materials. As Appadurai
argued, the idea of ‘the social lives of things’ required a degree of ‘methodological
fetishism’:
Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have
no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions and motivations
endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illumi-
nate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things
themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It
is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human
transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical
point of view human actors encode things with meaning, from a methodological point of
view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. No social
analysis of things (whether the analyst is an economist, an art historian, or an anthropol-
ogist) can avoid a minimum level of what might be called methodological fetishism. This
methodological fetishism, returning our attention to the things themselves, is in part a
corrective to the tendency to excessively socialize transactions in things, a tendency we
owe to Mauss.
Appadurai (1986b: 5)

The discussion above might encourage us to extend Appadurai’s argument to

suggest that it is not only ‘human and social contexts’ that are visible by tracing
things-in-motion. This argument about objects’ life histories has implications for
ethnographic, as well as archaeological, fieldwork. The reduction of objects’ life
histories to their enrolment in the lives of humans is clearly questioned by such
work, such as that of Schiffer (cf. Gosden 2006). Equally, we might question the a
priori distinction between human lives and objects’ lives. Indeed, in many archae-
ological and ethnographic studies, the intertwined nature of human and material
life—whether through the extension of life courses through mementoes (Hallam
and Hockey 2001), the role of things in human memory (Jones 2007) the intimacy
of ownership and ‘possession’ of things that persist over time (Miller 2001b)—have
been a central contribution of archaeological and anthropological material culture
studies.
In these cases, things themselves can come to constitute contexts, which are by
no means purely human or social contexts. The work of museum ethnographers
such as Nicholas Thomas and Amiria Henare in extending material culture studies
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into historical anthropology has been particularly important here (N. Thomas
1999, 2000; Henare 2005a, 2005b; cf. Haas 1996; Colchester 2003). Such work builds
on Marilyn Strathern’s (1990) seminal study of ‘artefacts of history’, in which the
material enactment of history was foregrounded. In practice, this means that
historical anthropology cannot understand artefacts as the illustrations of social
history, from which they are separated. Objectification or subjectification requires
work; such processes must be made to happen and maintained. Thus, things are
always events—more or less visible depending on the constant changes in the
human and non-human world. Thomas’ study of the changing uses of indigenous
and introduced textiles in the history of the conversion to Christianity in nine-
teenth-century Polynesia is of significance here. Tracing the adoption of the
Tahitian practice of wearing barkcloth ponchos (tiputa) more widely in Polynesia,
he suggests that artefacts of this kind ‘were much more than mere markers of
identity’. Instead, he demonstrates ‘how adapted and introduced types of cloth
perhaps worked as a technology that made religious change, that is, conversion
to Christianity, visible as a feature of people’s behaviour and domestic life’
(N. Thomas 1999: 16, 6). By focusing on the effects of the physical properties of
tiputa—which allowed for parts of the body to be covered—Thomas suggests that
in such situations, ‘the interpretative strategy of regarding things essentially as
expressions of cultural, subcultural, religious, or political identities, depends on
too static and literal an approach to their meanings’ (N. Thomas 1999: 16). Thus,
the Polynesian ponchos to some extent ‘made’ contexts themselves, rather than
simply being received within particular socio-cultural (human) contexts. The
implications for the writing of colonial history are significant, since alternatives
to conventional social or cultural histories of colonial histories are made possible
through a kind of material history:
This way of seeing things perhaps also helps us move beyond the long-standing dilemma of
historical anthropology in Oceania, which has lurched between emphasis on continuity and
discontinuity, between affirmation of the enduring resilience of local cultures, and critique
of the effects of colonial history. Artifacts such as tiputa are neither inventions of tradition
nor wholly unprecedented forms. They are at once implicated in the material history of
Polynesian societies and departures from that history . . . More often than we have acknowl-
edged, the indigenous peoples of the region have been concerned not to ‘contextualize’
things, but to use things to change contexts.
N. Thomas (1999: 18–19)

Thus, Thomas shows that things contribute to the formation of contexts, as well as
simply fitting into contexts in which they can be used or understood, that this
formation is contingent, and that this contingency includes the physical affordances
of things and even the materials they are made from. As Chris Pinney has argued, this
leads a long way away from the understanding of things as infinitely malleable for
human ends (Pinney 2005: 268), and away most strongly from the timelessness that
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the material-cultural turn 85

resulted from the dematerialization of material culture studies that reduced things to
social relations, or reduced them to human meanings.
These developments in historical anthropology are taken a step further by new
developments in British archaeology (see discussions by Pollard 2001, 2004). In
historical archaeology, for example, ‘material histories’ involve not simply under-
standing the changing social uses or meanings of artefacts, but also those aspects of
the life histories of things, buildings, or landscapes that are more accurately
described as non-coherent, rather than socially significant or culturally meaningful
(Hicks 2003, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Hicks and Beaudry 2006a; Hicks and McAtackney
2007; cf. Shanks 1998; Holtorf 2002; Holtorf and Williams 2006). The very idea of
historical archaeology becomes meaningless if it is not grounded in the sense that
so much happens that is unspoken and undocumented, but that is far from
insignificant and that leaves material traces. But more than that, ideas and dis-
courses are revealed from an archaeological perspective to require material enact-
ment: to be fitted, usually quite awkwardly, into the world.
The point can be made by returning to the idea of capitalist processes of
objectification (Miller 1987). The justification for setting up research between the
‘material’ and the ‘cultural’ was that large-scale forces (modernity, capitalism, etc.)
create subjects and objects, and 50 anthropology should study the processes
through which this takes place. But the implication of Bruno Latour’s contention
that We Have Never Been Modern (Labour 1993a) is that modernity was an idea that
was never totally and coherently enacted. For the archaeologist, for instance
studying the decaying concrete and steel of modernist architecture (Buchli 1999),
theories of objectification serve to overdetermine the power of the modern, of
capitalism, etc. (cf. Buchli and Lucas 2001a, 2001b; Hicks 2008a). Thus, one of the
principal contributions of the archaeology of the modern period, as it has emerged
since the early 1980s, has been to demonstrate that there was no sudden or
fundamental transformation of the material world at any point in the emergence
of the modern. Any model of radical difference between the premodern and the
modern, and between anthropological and archaeological studies of material
culture, is thus unhelpful (Hicks and Beaudry 2006b). Instead, a distinctive kind
of historiography, which relates to material change, is involved (Hicks 2003,
2008b). Such material histories do not deny or critique social histories. They are
perhaps best understood as ‘less-than-social’ histories. We could equally call them
material culture studies.
Historical archaeology has often studied situations in which particular under-
standings of a distinction between persons and objects have been held, most clearly
perhaps in the treatment of people as objects in the archaeology of slavery (cf.
Kopytoff 1986). But at its best its contribution is considerably more nuanced:
describing how such ideas are worked out in particular places and particular
lives, rather than illustrating social history (Wilkie 2003). And it is from the
intimate depictions of human and material situations in the archaeology of
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the recent past that the most effective alternatives to sociological studies of material
culture informed by practice theory have emerged (Buchli 1999, 2002c): undertak-
ing, as the strongest contributions in material culture studies do, a kind of
‘archaeology of modern life’ (Weatherill 1989: 439).
Taken together, recent research in historical anthropology and historical and
prehistoric archaeology suggests that the longstanding concern with overcoming
overarching dualisms between subjects and objects has derived to a considerable
extent from the synchronic nature of British material culture studies: both in the
ethnographic present, and in the tendency in interpretive archaeology to privilege
particular moments of social agency or meaning. Human and material lives are not
ontologically different: they exist in the same world. They do, however, operate at a
variety of paces. Imagine screwing a manual camera to a tripod in a dimly lit lecture
theatre. The longer the exposure, the more will be visible in the photograph. But
equally, the more blurred human actions will be, as walls and windows stand out,
unmoving. It is not, of course, that buildings are not undergoing constant change.
Rather, they are moving at a different pace: all buildings will fall down eventually.
Moreover, the pace of change in materials is contingent upon not only their mainte-
nance by humans—for a building, repointing a wall, or keeping a roof intact—but
also upon the materials involved. Constructions out of timber decay faster than stone.
As I have argued with Audrey Horning in relation to the archaeology of buildings,
such perspectives require a distribution of analysis across time that parallels the
distribution of intentionality, thought, or agency over time that appeared in study
of the Maori meeting house in the final chapter of Alfred Gell’s study Art and Agency
(Gell 1998: 221–258; Hicks and Horning 2006). Unravelling the arguments about
artworks and social agency set out in the earlier chapters of his book, Gell considered
how particular material forms emerge from traditions of practice. The logic of this
argument is to suggest that a diachronic approach, which understands things as
involved (as well as humans) in the making of time and of contexts, must allow that
‘material culture has a dangerous potentiality that it has never acquired in social
theory’ (N. Thomas 1999: 7). But it also means that we must allow for the time spent
in the camera exposure: which implicates the researcher within the event, rather than
being distanced from it, as I shall explore in the next section.

Skill and disciplinarity: things as effects

Having made this argument about things as events in what would usually be under-
stood as the object of enquiry—the archaeological site, or the Maori meeting hut
studied by the ethnographer—I now want to use Tim Ingold’s arguments about skilled
practice to extend precisely the same argument to theories. Theories, we might suggest,
emerge in precisely the same manner as things. Things and theories are not simply
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the material-cultural turn 87

events, however; they are also effects. This requires us to move anthropological
interests in practice beyond human and material practices as an object of enquiry,
to incorporate our own material practices as researchers. It requires more than a
purely reflexive awareness of fixed and timeless positionality, since positions emerge
as events in precisely the same manner as things. The conceptual and practical tools
for going beyond reflexivity already exist within material culture studies, and might
be freed up by the unfolding of the idea of material culture studies to include the
academic subject, as well as the academic object (and thus to move beyond the
‘science wars’ of the 1980s between subject-ivity and object-ivity, relativism and
realism). In this section, I want to suggest that an understanding of things
(and theories) as events can be complemented by an understanding of things
(and theories) as the effects of material practice. This line of enquiry is inspired
especially by current thinking in historical archaeology. Here, the extension of
archaeological research into the recent past and the contemporary world means
that archaeology can no longer be defined by its object. Where archaeology used to
be a discipline that examined particular key sites or objects, the ‘canon’ of archaeo-
logical material is broken down by the extension of the field into the nineteenth,
twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: there is simply too much for any such defini-
tion to have coherence (Hicks 2003). Either archaeology is no longer a useful idea,
or we must look at archaeological practices—how archaeology enacts things—to
understand what archaeology is. This raises much broader issues of the aspiration
of material culture studies to be a post-disciplinary field. Before discussing
interdisciplinarity, however, I want to make the case for understanding things and
theories as effects, as well as events.
There is a strong line of enquiry in material culture studies that relates to the
skilled use of things. This runs from Marcel Mauss’ (1973) account of ‘techniques of
the body’, through Leroi-Gourhan’s (1993) account of chaı̂nes opératoires (opera-
tional sequences) and his classification of techniques and gestures ‘derived from the
kinds of action on materials which they employ’ (Lemonnier 1986: 150), to Pierre
Lemonnier’s vision of an anthropology of technology, moving away from ‘the
study of lifeless objects’ (1986: 147). Attention to ‘the peeling of sweet potatoes,
the washing of children, or the sharpening of stone axes’, to ‘the observation and
the transcription of operational sequences, in particular, is an indispensable part of
any fieldwork. Not to do so is to treat objects as hardly less isolated and lifeless as
those in a museum’ (Lemonnier 1986: 181). We might locate aspects of Bruno
Latour’s thinking in this tradition (e.g. Latour 2000b), and certainly Tim Ingold’s
focus on the idea of ‘skill’, which is so central to his ideas of meshwork and weaving
(Ingold 2000a: 289–293) and his distinction between ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’. By
extending such ideas to field practice, as Ingold (1993) did to some degree in his
examination of ‘the temporality of the landscape’, we might underline the perfor-
mative and situated dimensions of our understanding of the contemporary world,
and of how we enact the past in the present (cf. Strathern 1990).
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One of the distinctive characteristics of interpretive archaeology, especially as it

was developed by Ian Hodder, was a self-awareness of archaeology as a contempo-
rary practice, in which field methods should be thought through (Shanks and
McGuire 1996; Hodder 1999). For the archaeologist, however, the contemporary
must be an event, emergent, and contingent (Buchli and Lucas 2001b). In American
cultural anthropology, the reflexive awareness of ethnographic monographs as
written texts (Marcus and Cushman 1982) was summarized in the influential
collection Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). In contrast, the publication
in the same year of Reading the Past described the reverse process: a passive reading
from the material record, rather than the practices of writing from fieldwork
(Hodder 1986). However, in the 1990s, an increasing desire to think through the
processes of uniting ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (Hodder 1999) came to generate a
distinctive alternative from the turning away from method and fieldwork that
characterized some other approaches in interpretive archaeology, such as Julian
Thomas’ argument that discussions of methods were of limited significance be-
cause ‘New Archaeology was methodology’ and a scepticism that knowledge might
emerge quite precisely from method rather than the abstractions of interpretation
(Thomas 2000c: 3). While much of this discussion related to the idea of ‘reflexivity’,
which often simply reinforced the interpretive concept of a distance between
scholar and object (Hicks 2005), a new body of writing about archaeological
practice emerged (Edgeworth 1990, 2003, 2006a; Lucas 2001a; Yarrow 2006, 2008),
especially in relation to the situated and iterative processes through which archae-
ological knowledge comes about (Hicks 2005). The distinction here with conven-
tional models of social science is clear: where structuration theory suggested that
‘all social actors . . . are social theorists’, a focus on field practice involves awareness
of ‘the specificity of techniques, as far as “knowledge” is concerned’ is crucial
(Giddens 1984: 335; Strathern 1987: 30).
Such perspectives have not been applied to anthropological material culture
studies, despite the important acknowledgement that ‘anthropology, which grew
up in cousinhood with archaeology, takes to the analysis of the minutiae of practice
in a manner akin to that of an excavation’ (Miller and Woodward 2007: 337), and
the call from archaeologists working on the ‘contemporary past’ for a kind of
‘critical empiricism’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001a: 14; Buchli 2002b: 16). Indeed the
Manchester School’s arguments about the particular perspectives provided by
extended case method and situational analysis were not important to anthropol-
ogy’s Material-Cultural Turn. But just as in archaeology, the potential in the
anthropology of things for a foregrounding of the empirical work of fieldwork to
bring about, in practice rather than in theory, a collapsing of object and subject, is
directly related to avoiding the choice between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, which
the Material-Cultural Turn was trying to do from the outset. As Tom Yarrow
has recently argued, ‘whilst archaeologists frequently assert and demonstrate
the objectivity of the artefacts and contexts they unearth as distinct from
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the material-cultural turn 89

their own subjective interpretations, the work required to achieve this distinction
is not reducible to the distinction itself ’ (Yarrow 2008: 135–136).
In this conception, fieldwork is not usefully understood as purely ‘relational’,
but as constituted by moments of permeability between fieldworker, place, things,
and people. Field sciences, such as archaeology, anthropology, geography, and
science and technology studies (STS), enact knowledge. We cannot, therefore, fail
to theorize methodology (Henare et al. 2007a: 27). That is why it is these four
particular disciplines that are gathered in the present volume about studying
things. This implication of the fieldworker in the emergence of the material
studied, and the definition of material culture studies as a series of practices
for enacting knowledge about things, requires an extension of that argument,
from material culture studies, about the humility of things to the potential of the
apparently banal to the apparently tedious work of post-excavation or museum
ethnography. After all, ‘knowing’ as Chris Gosden and Frances Larson have
recently argued, ‘takes time and effort and people and things’ (2007: 239). Rather
than reflexivity, an awareness of the emergent situatedness of knowledge can
achieve what Marilyn Strathern has described as ‘a certain brand of empiricism,
making the data so presented apparently outrun the theoretical effort to compre-
hend it’ (1999: 199).
The difference from previous conceptions of material culture studies is critical: a
foregrounding of disciplinarity, rather than undertaking ‘an anthropology of ’ this
object or that. Such a move is close to what Annemarie Mol has termed a shift from
‘ethnography’ to ‘praxiography’—in which the practices of the fieldworker are
implicated too, since ‘praxiographic stories have composite objects’ (2002: 156).
Where the cultural turn across the social sciences is in so many places ‘still
dominated by tired constructivist themes’ (Thrift 2000: 2), and since the Material-
Cultural Turn in British archaeology and anthropology too often used objects to
argue that its research was not, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, ‘merely cultural’
(Butler 1998), the challenge lies in collapsing the gap between anthropological
archaeology’s acknowledgement of ‘the humility of objects’ and Donna Haraway’s
conception of knowledge practices as acts of ‘modest witnessing’ (Miller 1987:
85–86; Haraway 1997: 24–25).
If we understand things as events and effects, rather than fixed and solid,
then ‘material culture’ has unfolded to the point that material culture studies
can no longer be defined by its object. The ‘materiality debate’ sketched above
demonstrates that the idea that material culture might represent ‘the concrete
counterpoint to the abstractions of culture’ (Yarrow 2008: 122) is long behind
us. Along with it, however, any unifying model of networks and relations
between bounded entities is also lost. The material effects highlighted above
demonstrate how permeabilities, as well as just relations, constitute the
emergence of the world as assemblage. And they indicate that the Durkheimian
conception of social agency, revived in material culture studies through
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practice theory in order to reconcile the structural and the semiotic, is no longer
adequate: simply extending it to objects will not do (pace Gell 1998). Life, both
human and non-human, as it is encountered in archaeology and anthropology
involves not relations between fixed entities, but life as the ongoing flow of perme-
abilities, and the emergence of worlds. These issues have begun to be addressed in
material culture studies in examinations of immateriality (Buchli 2004: 187–191), in
the consumption of apparently intangible media such as the internet (Miller and
Slater 2000) or radio (Tacchi 1998) and to some extent in Miller’s account of
‘virtualism’ (Carrier and Miller 1998; D. Miller 2000). But there are ontological,
rather than purely epistemological, ramifications of the unfolding of material culture
as a coherent object of enquiry: as researchers we do not mediate between two
ontological domains, but find ourselves quickly in the complexities of fieldwork.
The implications for material culture studies’ ambitions to create a kind of post-
disciplinary field are profound. Since the 1970s, many observed that the study of
material culture might unite ‘archaeologists with certain kinds of cultural anthro-
pologists’ (Appadurai 1986b: 5). However, despite the regular inclusion of literature
surveys in the relatively high number of many closely argued, programmatic
statements of what ‘material culture studies’ might represent or aspire to (e.g.
Miller 1983, 1987, 1998b, 2005a; Miller and Tilley 1996), the 1990s was rarely
characterized by genuine collaboration and exchange between British anthropolo-
gy and archaeology. Where collaboration did occur, as in Chris Tilley’s idea of An
Ethnography of the Neolithic, they were restricted to a particular vision of archaeol-
ogy: as distant as possible from the present, and as method-less phenomenology
rather than employing archaeological techniques. Similarly, in North America the
development by Mike Schiffer of a ‘behavioural archaeology’, using the techniques
of New Archaeology to study modern material culture such as radios and cars, has
had little impact on socio-cultural anthropology. The diversity of methods
involved in what Appadurai termed, as we saw above, the ‘methodological fetish-
ism’ required to write life histories of things has rarely been considered. Instead, the
vision of material culture studies as it developed in Britain was from the outset a
self-consciously hybrid field, underlining its potential as a kind of post-disciplinary
field. Unlike in interpretive archaeology, there has been virtually no interest in
discussions of field practice, apart from in the eclecticism of hermeneutic phenom-
enology sketched above. Thus, in the first editorial for the Journal of Material
Culture Daniel Miller and Chris Tilley argued that:
The study of material culture may be most broadly defined as the investigation of the
relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective
adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation
between the two . . . [T]he potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some
way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural
sciences themselves.
Miller and Tilley (1996: 5)
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Material culture studies in this period witnessed regular expressions of ‘the ad-
vantages of being undisciplined’ and celebrations of an ‘eclecticism [which would
in the past] have been frowned upon as diluting and undisciplined’ (Miller and
Tilley 1996: 12; Attfield 2000: 1). At the same time, the potential of the field
becoming a discipline in its own right became a concern: there was a sense of the
‘many disadvantages and constraints imposed by trying to claim disciplinary
status’ led to calls for ‘remaining undisciplined and pursuing a field of study
without respect to prior claims of disciplinary antecedents’ (Miller 1998b: 4; Tilley
2006b: 12–13). As Peter Van Dommelen observed in study of contributions to the
Journal of Material Culture, ‘the lack of a “home base” for material culture studies’
was also ‘a point repeatedly made and frequently emphasised’ (2000: 409).
With a division of disciplinary labour between the prehistoric and the modern
world, a relational conception of the potential connections between archaeology
and anthropology, and between materials and culture, which had characterized the
debates in structural Marxist anthropology two decades earlier, was effectively
reinforced. This relational model of interdisciplinary exchanges had been part of
a call for collaboration between archaeology and anthropology:
Although disciplinary specialization is a necessary response to the complexity of knowl-
edge, the institutionalization of disciplines in a pedagogic context naturally leads their
members to be over-conscious of the uniqueness of their subject-matter and the rigour of
their techniques to elucidate and critically examine their objects of analysis, which become
too often badges of corporate identity. This tends to obscure the fact that at a higher and
more abstract level it may be more pertinent to be involved in a unifying dialogue so as to
share equally in the resolution of theoretical problems and to avoid a reaction to what is
perceived to be a one-sided theoretical indebtedness to other disciplines.
Rowlands and Gledhill (1976: 37)

This position was in contrast with the continued strength in contextual archaeolo-
gy of David Clarke’s vision of the distinctiveness of archaeological perspectives:
Archaeology is neither ‘historical’ nor ‘anthropological’. It is not even science or art.
Archaeology’s increasing maturity allows it to claim an independent personality with
distinctive qualities to contribute.
Hodder (1986: x)

In this context, the suggestion in 1998 by Chris Tilley, one of the few archaeologists
working in both traditions of interpretive archaeology and anthropological mate-
rial culture studies, that a loss of ‘disciplinary isolation’ had led to the end of
archaeology as a coherent discipline at all, is informative (cf. Hicks 2003):
there could be nothing distinctive about archaeological theory when it went beyond a
concern with appropriate methodologies for excavation, fieldwork and conceptualization of
factors affecting the physical survival of archaeological evidence . . . The irony [in Clarke’s
work] is that the death of archaeology could only result from the conceit of distinctiveness
. . . How could an archaeological theory of society or human action be produced that would
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not simultaneously be a social and anthropological theory? . . . A loss of innocence is

dependent on the end of disciplinary isolation and, in this sense, archaeology no longer
continues to exist.
Tilley (1998: 691–692)

This is the editorial direction of the recent sage Handbook of Material Culture
(Tilley et al. 2006). It builds within social anthropology on his complaint about the
idea of disciplinarity in archaeology:
Why is teaching so much bound up with promoting disciplinary allegiance and asserting
distinctiveness? Why are courses in archaeological institutions labelled as being archaeo-
logical theory, rather than social theory? Why should archaeologists think they can learn
more from each other in their conferences, seminars, workshops, lectures and publications
rather than by talking with outsiders (so-called inter-disciplinary interactions being the
exception rather than the norm)? Is this anything much more than a kind of ancestor- and
hero-worship . . . and part of a struggle for resources between competing disciplines in
universities with artificial boundaries? Leaving to one side the politics and pragmatism
inevitably required for the disciplinary survival of archaeology, is it any longer intellectually
necessary, or sufficient, for us to be disciplined ?
Tilley (1998: 692, original emphasis)

This post-disciplinary conception of material culture studies led to very little

consideration of disciplinary histories, allegiances, and intellectual debts, creating
the impression that material culture studies is now, as it were, independently re-invented by
the same theoretical discussions that earlier have tended to regard them as irrelevant. The
picture created in this way is essentially a-historical, in that it reconstitutes the study of the
artifact in its new domain as apparently separated from its historical roots.
van Beek (1989: 95)

It is this gap in self-awareness of disciplinary historiography that this chapter has been
working to plug. If research is an event, and the objects of enquiry are effects rather
than prior entities, then the contingencies of the event must be accounted for. These
contingencies include disciplinary traditions: the questions that we ask of things,
from which things emerge. An awareness of these histories allows the nature of the
emergence of material culture studies—as the distinctive cultural turn of British
archaeology and anthropology—to be situated and reflected upon. As we have seen,
material culture studies were the principal element of ‘postmodern anthropology’
(Rowlands 2004: 474) and archaeology in Britain, but they retained very many of the
elements of structuralism. The few attempts to build post-structuralist archaeologies
in Britain (Baker and Thomas 1990; Bapty and Yates 1990) comprised second-hand
reviews of the literature of other fields rather than genuine contributions to archaeo-
logical thinking (Shanks 1990), while the anthropology of consumption actively
distanced itself from the perceived ‘nihilism’ of post-structuralist thinking (Miller
1987: 165, 176). The Material-Cultural Turn thus operated by ‘placing the object
squarely in the centre of culture theory’ (van Beek 1989: 94), forming part of a broader
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the material-cultural turn 93

process in which post-processual archaeology sought a kind of ‘compression’ of

structuralist and post-structuralist approaches (Olsen 2006: 86).
While material culture studies was forged in British archaeology and anthropol-
ogy as a kind of post-disciplinary field, in the ‘materiality debate’ this approach to
disciplinarity has become more complex. For example, in his response to Tim
Ingold’s critique of the idea of ‘materiality’, Daniel Miller has underlined diversity
by suggesting that the idea of ‘a fixed object like a genre called “material-culture
studies” is unsustainable’ (Miller 2007: 24), but has at the same time suggested that
a distinctive contribution of material culture studies is ethnographic:
[W]e are not philosophers . . . Instead we are anthropologists constantly engaged in eth-
nography . . . Most of those working in material-culture studies, including almost everyone
I work with at UCL, come from a tradition more aligned with the ethnographic study of
practice—that is, the actual use of materials by people—but above all study of the way the
specific character of people emerges from their interaction with the material world through
practice . . . [O]ur profession demands an encounter with the world as we find it. My heart
is in contemporary ethnography, and I do not feel the need to apologize for a material
culture that has changed in recent decades largely because today it is, while a few decades
ago it manifestly was not, central to this contemporary ethnography.
Miller (2007: 24–27)

This perspective contrasted markedly with earlier contentions that ‘material cul-
ture studies is not constituted by ethnography, but remains eclectic in its methods’
(Miller 1998b: 19).
Miller’s new argument inspires two responses. The first is that when material
culture studies was defined by its object, a false division between past and present,
formed especially after the abandonment of ethnoarchaeology, bounded off ar-
chaeology from anthropology. British archaeology has throughout the majority of
literature in British material culture studies been understood in relation to prehis-
tory rather than the archaeology of historical periods or the contemporary world
(e.g. Miller 1987: 124–125). Taken together, these current debates seek to respond to
what is perceived as a current interdisciplinary ‘return to things’ in social scientific
research (Witmore 2007: 559), and are characterized by a pressing desire to make a
contribution from the perspective of material culture studies, or from archaeology,
to broader debates.
However, secondly, the particular ways in which interdisciplinarity was en-
visaged in material culture studies might be reoriented. As Andrew Barry,
Georgiana Born, and Gisa Weszkalnys have argued, working across disciplines
need not lead to a loss of coherence, but can allow a form of ‘interdisciplinary
autonomy’ to emerge (Barry et al. 2008), which can ‘attend to the specificity of
interdisciplinary fields, their genealogies and multiplicity’ (Barry et al. 2008: 42).
The Material-Cultural Turn associated ‘disciplines’ with constraint (perhaps even,
subconsciously, with punishment, since Foucault 1977a). But as Marilyn Strathern
has argued, ‘disciplinary awareness—that is, a sense of the regional and
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intellectual histories within which our research is conducted, and upon the
putting of particular methods into practice—is a crucial element in achieving a
clarity in the contingency of the knowledge that we create upon materially-
situated practices’ (Strathearn 2004b: 5).
The tendency to define archaeology and anthropological material culture studies
by its object led to a particular conception of post-disciplinarity (e.g. Fahlander
and Oestigaard 2004). Rather than the distinctions between archaeology and
anthropology as defined by their objects of enquiry—the science of things or the
science of people—a sensitivity to field practice (rather than just the use of practice
theory) could allow new kinds of cross-disciplinary work in ‘material culture
studies’ to emerge. In this sense, the field of material culture studies holds in its
hands the toolkits required to move beyond not only the representational impulse
in the Material-Cultural Turn, but that in ANT as well, which too often in its
interdisciplinary reception operates as an abstract theory distanced from the world
just like the Durkheimian model of the social, and like structuralism. Insofar as
ANT represents a third major interdisciplinary contribution from anthropology,
this time involving the accommodation of ‘non-humans’, its transdisciplinary
reception as a new representational model could be reoriented from the perspective
of material culture studies.

C O N C LU S I O N S : F RO M T H E H U M I L I T Y O F T H I N G S
TO M O D E S T W I T N E S S I N G
................................................................................................................
The social sciences become devoted to the study of all phenomena that stand for what we
now call society, social relations, or indeed simply the subject. By whichever name, these are
the terms that describe the contents of the coffin we are about to bury. Miller (2005a: 36)

It is conventional in British field archaeology, after the layers are drawn and
recorded, recording sheets completed, artefacts gathered, bagged, and labelled,
and the stratigraphic sequence constructed, to sit on the side of the evaluation
trench with a cup of tea, to light a cigarette and, staring at the spoil heap, think the
foregoing process through for a final time before filling the hole back in. A similar
process seems appropriate after this exercise in disciplinary excavation: a counter-
point to Daniel Miller’s ‘rites of burial’ for ‘the twin terms society and social
relations’ (Miller 2005a: 37). The excavation has, after all, encountered only frag-
ments of ‘culture’, of ‘materials’, and of any clear set of relationships between them.
But archaeology is different from grave digging, and this evaluative trench is not a
grave for material culture studies, but a glimpse of its stratigraphy.
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the material-cultural turn 95

The archaeological process yields not just fragments of abraded and residual
ceramic sherds, but mud on the boots and dirt under the fingernails. It is generally
conducted outside, and so involves experience of the wind, rain, or heat. It is
itinerant, in that the site must be chosen, arrived at, and time spent there, and
iterative in that it involves the repeated application of a particular bundle of
methods and, in Britain at least, a distinctive range of tools (pointing trowels,
coal shovels, marker pens, manual cameras, biros, ring-binders, permatrace, hazard
tape, hard hats, masking tape, zip lock bags, large plywood boards, 4H pencils, line
levels, high visibility jackets, string, etc.). In other words, the practice of archaeol-
ogy reminds us of something that is more generally true of field sciences such as
anthropology, geography, STS, and archaeology: that we enact knowledge of the
world, rather than straightforwardly represent it. These enactments are always
messy. At their best, these fields collapse any division between this enactment—
the status of the knowledge that emerges from them as event and effect—and the
humans and materials studied. But this requires a leaving behind of the represen-
tational impulses that continue to characterize the diverse work of Miller, Ingold,
and Latour. No new grand theory of material culture is required: instead, a more
modest acknowledgement of how our knowledge is formed through material
practices, which are always historically situated.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to critique the assertion that ‘material
culture studies may be claimed to be in the vanguard of creative theory and debate
in the social sciences today’ (Tilley 2006c: 5). But the coherence of the field defined
according to its object is hard to perceive today: given the questioning of ideas of
cultures, materials, and especially of the relationships between the two, which have
emerged from material culture studies itself (cf. D. Miller 2007: 24). This, I believe,
is the point that Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell are trying to
make in their rather abstract and confusing answer to the pressing contemporary
question: ‘What would an artefact-oriented anthropology look like if it were not
about material culture?’ (Henare et al. 2007a: 1).
In his discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) study Distinction, Daniel Miller
once argued that while it represented ‘surely the most significant contribution to
the study of consumption made by any anthropologist’ to date, its principal
weaknesses related to the methodology employed (which involved the sociological
use of a questionnaire rather than ethnographic participant observation) and the
failure to situate mass consumption ‘as an historical phenomenon’ (Miller 1987:
154–155). Re-reading these lines, it is difficult, especially from the vantage point
offered by the side of this trench on which I am sitting, to comprehend the
discomfort in anthropology’s Material-Cultural Turn with issues of historical
contingency and research practice since that time:
the possibility of material culture studies lies not in method, but rather in an acknowledge-
ment of the nature of culture . . . We as academics can strive for understanding and empathy
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through the study of what people do with objects, because that is the way that the people
that we study create a world of practice.
Miller (1998b: 19)

At the same time, the very idea of ‘interpretive archaeology’ presented the material
and the past as distant: in different worlds from the contemporary researcher. The
‘soft focus’ that such imagined distance creates has led to the false impression that
the dirt on my hands is somehow ontologically different from my hands them-
selves. We do not need to return to Mary Douglas (1966) to realize that such
perspectives are the legacies of structuralism (and are concerned with a kind of
epistemological purity).
Such views limit practice to those whom we observe. They distance the research-
er as subject from the object of enquiry (even when that object is defined as
processes of objectification). They conceive of the fieldworker as a ‘participant
observer’, on the model of structural-functionalism and its particular Durkheimian
view of the social, rather than as what folklorist John Messenger (1989) once called
an ‘observant participator’. This holds back the potential, which I take to be the
central contribution of archaeology and anthropology to the social scientific study
of material things, of the description and discussion of how alternative ontologies
emerge, in a contingent manner, as particular sites and situations are enacted
(Hicks and McAtackney 2007): whether in everyday life, or in academic research.
The implications of such a view is to allow the metaphysics to emerge from the
material as it is studied: a position that demands a theoretical eclecticism, but also a
clarity about the nature of disciplinary and material positionality.
In 1985 geographer Nigel Thrift concluded his assessment of Giddens’ model of
practice theory, after the publication of The Constitution of Society (Giddens 1984),
by imagining the next book that he would have liked to see Giddens write:
one for which The Constitution of Society would serve as a prolegomenon. It would consist
of the development of structuration ‘theory’ in the arena of a particular place in a particular
historical period of time, showing structuration in process, contextualising in context. The
book would have to show how structuration ‘theory’ can act as a basis for challenging
existing interpretations of historical events. It would therefore show whether structuration
‘theory’ was viable. Of course, this may sound like a plea for Giddens to do some ‘empirical
work’. But it seems to me that, more than most other social theories, that is the import of
structuration theory. After all, it is not possible to expose the importance of context and
then ignore it. At some point conceptual salvoes must hit particular places or disappear
back into the thin air of high theory.
Thrift (1985: 621)

Giddens never wrote that book. However, this precise task was, we might suggest,
taken up with considerable energy in the ‘high period’ of British material culture
studies. Material culture studies, as an interdisciplinary project defined by a
common object of enquiry, emerged from particular efforts to solve a series of
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the material-cultural turn 97

quite specific disciplinary problems in anthropology and archaeology. It came to be

an effect of those problems: which led to fieldwork both in modern shopping
centres and in Neolithic monumental landscapes. With the unfolding of that
object, as both event and effect, we can no longer continue simply to resort to
using practice theory to reconcile structuralism and semiotics, through case study
after anthropological case study. By understanding itself as theory rather than
effect, the Material-Cultural Turn has simply made the transition, as Edwin
Ardener (1985) explained all modernist theories must do, from ‘life’ to ‘genre’.
What the development of practice theory in material culture studies has shown,
however, is that the dialectical model of agency and structure, and the literary
model of langue and parole, have allowed a further distinction between subjects
and objects to be reinforced: the difference between researchers and their materi-
als. I must underline that I undestand this to be the central contribution of the
‘field sciences’ of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and STS. We are united
in having distinctive ways of putting methods into practice in order to enact the
world. That is how we make knowledge: things emerge from our practices in
precisely the same way they do through the vernacular practices of humans, or
lives of things, that we study. As Daniel Miller has recently argued in his account
of material culture on a south London street, material culture studies lead away
from a Durkheimian model of social anthropology (Miller 2008: 282–297). But
they also lead away from the latent structuralism in mainstream dialectical and
‘relational’ models of our strangely unhyphenated term, ‘material culture’, and
more generally from modernist definition of academic practice as distanced
representation. This shift, which we could describe as from epistemology to
ontology (Henare et al. 2007a), is a reminder that an archaeologist gets dirt
under the fingernails. That dirt and my fingers exist, after all, in the same
world; the traces of practice until the fingers are scrubbed.
So just like any thing, the Material-Cultural Turn was both an event and an
effect. As all archaeological material culture studies reveal, we build the future
with the remains of the past, often the very recent past. Where, then, is the idea of
‘material culture studies’ left? I have tried to offer some provisional answers. The
argument takes unfolding of the idea of ‘material culture’ in precisely the opposite
direction from the phenomenological critique, which seeks to avoid ‘a tendency to
ontologise the status of material evidence’ by comprehending ‘culture as a prac-
tice’ (J. S. Thomas 2007: 11), towards acknowledging the contingency of our
knowledge of the world upon situated material practices that derive from distinc-
tive disciplinary methods and traditions, rather than representing a particular
brand of social theory. As an anthropological archaeologist, I know that I have
distinctive ways of talking, listening, photographing, drawing, excavating, curat-
ing, etc. I put these into practice in certain landscapes, with certain artefacts, in
particular museum and other institutional contexts, in particular human and
political situations. That is how, as an archaeologist, with colleagues and
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collaborators I make knowledge of the world: in precisely the same manner in

which any thing is formed. Archaeology is ‘a way of doing’ rather than just ‘a way
of thinking’ (Edgeworth 2006b: xii). The same can be said of anthropology. In this
sense, methodology and disciplinarity can be emancipatory, rather than restrict-
ing: allowing a kind of shifting, always messy positionality to emerge around
which the idea of material culture studies can cohere. Aware that, while we are
stuck with an awkward phrase, the idea of ‘material culture studies’ can highlight
how both things and theories are always both events and effects: collapsing the
idea of the ‘humility of things’ to encompass our own practices of witnessing,
which must always be modest and provisional as they work from particular
situations (both human and non-human): since that emergent positionality is
precisely the contribution that studying things, whether small or large, in the first
place can make.