Twenty Years On

In 1996, the first editorial in the first issue of this Journal defined material culture studies 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. Defined in this manner, the 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. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5)

In this way, the editors staked a ground for a non-sectarian, undisciplined approach to the study of the material world that they construed as inherently social. They also proposed that the methods, and theoretical frames, to draw out meaning from within objects, be grounded with relational perspective that they framed as a dialectic – in which persons and things are involved in a cyclical process of mutual constitution. The first issue contained articles on art and agency, landscape, pottery, consumption and religion, written by anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists.

Twenty years on, much has changed but the original ethos of the Journal – a commitment to a broad-based, undisciplined, global perspective on material culture – has remained. Since this initial framing, the analytic scaffold for understanding material culture studies has greatly expanded. It is not an exaggeration to say that an appreciation for material culture has become mainstream in many fields, from sociology to art history, philosophy and science studies.

This remarkable growth of interest in and thinking about material culture has allowed us to refine several of the frameworks established in the first editorial. In the first instance, the language that we use to describe things, objects and artefacts has itself come under scrutiny. The frameworks we might draw on for the interpretation of the relations between people and things (broadly conceived) has been enriched by work that insists on not just a dialectical model, but rather draws on concepts of materialism (Fowler and Harris, 2015), ontology (Rio, 2009), vibrancy (Bartolini, 2015), affect (Born, 2011), and valency (Taylor, 2015) in order to describe the multilayered ways in which persons and things might be drawn into relations with one another. Lively debates have ensued as to the proper ‘subject’ of material culture studies, which range from Ingold’s (2007) advocacy of a focus on materials instead of materiality to a turn towards ontology that has suggested the decomposition of the very master categories in favour of multiple and different object worlds (Henare et al., 2007). It is clear from these debates that material culture studies is linked to what some have termed ‘the crisis of representation’ and, for many, subject–object relations has become a shorthand for a way of talking about the interconnection between the material world and the ways in which we describe it.

The Journal’s initial intention was

not to draw together studies of contemporary consumer goods, landscapes, archaeological finds, studies of architecture, artworks or ethnographic collections into a new, ‘disciplined’ subject area, or even a subdiscipline, but to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches between people concerned with the material constitution of social relations. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5)

A scan of the Journal’s author list, and the choice to keep the editorial base within the anthropology department at UCL, exposes how much this cross-fertilization in fact relies on and converses with the critical perspectives and methodological rigours of anthropology. The Journal has intentionally privileged ethnographically rich methodological enquiry in which grand claims and social theory must be drawn into dialogue with real world evidence, drawn not simply from case studies but from deep and qualitative engagement. However, by being deliberately agnostic beyond these general principles, and in the absence of a canonized body of texts that encode theory and disciplinary method, the Journal has also been able to carve out a space for the working up of new theoretical and methodological thinking grown out of an intense scrutiny of material worlds, their idiosyncratic normalcies and perplexing distinctiveness. In this way, the Journal has been at the vanguard of emerging shifts in theory, from a focus on production and consumption to divestment (Norris, 2004; Reno, 2009), and for the generation of a nuanced perspectives on materials and substances (Ferme and Schmitz, 2014; Weismantel and Meskell, 2014), or theorizing the nuanced materiality of digital archiving practices (Christie and Verran, 2013; Ngata et al., 2012).

The third contribution that the Journal has made has been perhaps more subtle and certainly was an unintended consequence of its undisciplined yet ethnographic stance. By publicly framing material worlds and the manifold and complex semiotic relations they harbour as worthy of critical inquiry, the Journal has brought together diverse disciplines from across the social and historical sciences, in a move that we hope will eventually spark a radical rethinking of the proximity of disciplines that presently are still researching and teaching alongside each other in a more parochial manner, rather than critically engaging across fields. This special issue presents a series of curated articles, chosen by the editors at the time (Geismar and Küchler) in order to spur on nascent fields of enquiry that will help shape the ongoing discussions in the pages of this Journal regarding the nature of relations between and within people and things. These selected articles invite us to consider the material qualities of social lives, the interpretive and methodological issues that arise from working directly with material culture, and the complex immaterialities and absences yet to be brought into our theoretical paradigms. The articles presented here were chosen deliberately to present what we consider to be models of different perspectives on material culture studies that embody the commitment of the Journal to be both non-disciplinary and intellectually rigorous.

We start the collection with Severin Fowles’ account of recent debates around interpretation and materiality within archaeology and ethnography. Fowles offers a detailed historical account of the growth of material culture studies in relation to the crisis of representation. He locates a correlation, if not the causation, of the material turn in the context of the post-colonial problems of representation and the imperialist heritage of anthropological enquiry and objectification of the Other. Fowles polemically critiques the entire project of material culture studies as it is defined by archaeology and anthropology and their colonial legacies. In doing so, he opens up a critical dialogue concerning the state of our non-disciplinary project. What, we might ask, would material culture studies look like if it was properly decolonized?

Following this piece, Natasha Eaton presents us with an alternative genealogy of the connection between colonialism and material culture studies (as an appreciation of objects) seen through the lens of pearls and their shining quality or ‘pearlescence’. Eaton’s attention to the problem of context, both in the European and traditionally colonial settings, unpacks the richness of the artefact of the pearl not only as an object but as a space of enquiry with its own contexts and recontextualizations. Drawing on the kind of material flux suggested by Taussig (2008) with regard to indigo, wherein the polymorphous qualities of the material reverberate out into social, material and ideological spheres, Eaton paints a rich picture of the material culture of pearls, both historic and contemporary. For Eaton, the colonial frame is opened up by the objects themselves that resist, counterbalance and insistently intervene into this context.

Next in the sequence, Fernando Dominguez Rubio also reclaims colonial (in this case museum) space, by shifting analysis to a context harboured inside the art object. Dominguez Rubio examines closely the intricate artificial nature by which art objects are stabilized and maintained as ‘objects’. This highly detailed account allows Dominguez Rubio to articulate a clear distinction between ‘thing’ – as a material entity that changes through time – and ‘object’ – as a set position held by that thing. Through his analysis of the social and material orchestration needed to maintain an art piece in an object position, Dominguez Rubio draws our attention to the critical role of an ecological approach to material things, exemplified by the conservator, rather than the art historian, or anthropologist. The situated practice of conservation provides a very different vantage point, and creates a different kind of thing. The Mona Lisa is as much a technique of stabilizing the visitor through the careful conservation of oil paint on wood as it is a work of the genius of Leonardo da Vinci.

Max Liboiron’s article explores the nature of plastic pollution and the interpretive issues that it raises for our understanding of the relations between materials and the wider social, economic and legal frameworks that have been developed to understand and regulate these materials. Working within an ecological approach that links the microscopic to the epochal, Liboiron addresses the problems relating to how plastics operate as an insidious material, moving well past its intended purposes, and how legislative policy across the global north is not, at present, capable of grappling with the real, yet difficult to demonstrate, toxic causal and correlative impact of plastic polymers, monomers and associated chemicals. Her article highlights the problematics of the affective space of materials – unintended, empirically difficult (or impossible) to demonstrate a causal link, and lasting far longer than the human subject. In the age of the Anthropocene, Liboiron asks, should we have a material culture approach which looks well beyond the presence of humans.

Following this, Jennifer Deger’s article addresses the contemporary practices in Aboriginal Australia in which people use mobile phone photo technology in order to re-mediate the ancestral and familial presence. Taking a cue from Geertz, Deger offers us an account of ‘thick photography’ in which photographs bring together cultural meanings, social relations, symbolic and material forms to form themselves as total social facts. Deger demonstrates how Yolngu family members create the affective space within mobile phone photo apps, collapsing the distances between geographically removed kin and living and deceased relatives. Deger’s ethnography offers us a ‘robust materialism’ that at once explores the interocular subjectivity of images passed between phones and placed in the context of montage images downloaded from the internet, but does so in a way that squarely situates the very human sensibility of maintaining kin relations at the very centre of these practices.

Finally, Carlo Severi provides a detailed comparative ethnographic account that revisits the classic case of the nail fetish. In this piece, we highlight our commitment to present works in translation, in an attempt to overcome the Anglocentricity of the Journal (see also Galliot, 2015). Severi asks how authority is produced in a context that, in contrast to the European classical tradition, does not have received traditions of canonical text. By examining the chimeric qualities of masks, Fang music and fetish production, Severi thinks against the grain of the singular artefact by exploring its inherent multiplicity, exposed in linguistic, musical and material registers, condensing multiple identities into a single one rather than enacting a single identity in several material instantiations.

Taken in total, the six articles in this special issue offer a highly diverse array of perspectives and analytical styles. In one reading of the collection, Fowles’ article opens the debate with a strong problematization of the project of material culture itself: Is it possible for us to avoid the process of objectification, exoticization and (more implicit than explicit in his article) the dominance of the Western scholar over the (now post-)colonial subject within the analytic frame? To this problem, each successive article could be read as an answer, as each proposes in its own way that material culture studies can proceed outside the confines of representational crisis, whether it is in the use of material qualities to critique the colonial project (Eaton), the illusion of artistic genius (Dominguez Rubio), the insertion of Aboriginal cosmology into cell phones (Deger), the problem of plastics for our representation of pollution (Liboiron), or the fashioning of multiplicity (Severi).

Each of these articles is drawn from a different discipline – art history, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, science and technology studies. The articles – and the conversation that unfolds between them – accentuate the ways that artefacts, as concretizations of relations, are engaged in the production of possible futures for material culture studies. This collection demonstrates the success of the Journal in generating cross-disciplinary conversation and consolidating a perspective on material culture that is multiple, comparative, global, ethnographic, historical and engaged.