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Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
Material Culture Research Methods
The field of material culture studies emerged primarily within the discipline of Anthropology
over the course of the 20th century, particularly as anthropological research practices moved
away from the sphere of museum collecting and into a new paradigm of ethnographic
fieldwork. Its emergence was also closely correlated with Archaeology’s developing
perspectives on the material world (Hicks 2010). Today, the scholarly study of material culture
encompasses a full range of potential objects of enquiry: from artefacts to buildings, landscapes
and environments. It thus straddles multiple scales of analysis, from cuisine and clothing to the
infrastructural scales of roads, airports or cities, and the question of methodology is,
understandably, complex. Nevertheless, beneath a nebulous realm of perspectives and
approaches, the field of material culture studies remains rooted in the unshakable
anthropological prejudice that the purpose of examining the nonhuman world is to better
understand humanity. The more closely we attend to the nonhuman the more human our
account of the world becomes. That nonhuman world has expanded over the past century of
anthropological thinking to include not just material form but also visual and digital culture.
In the first section of this chapter we briefly unpick what is meant by ‘methods of analysis’ in
material culture studies, noting the plethora of methods that are deployed across the various
disciplines that seek to examine the material world. However, rather than devoting substantial
space to exploring these diverse methods in detail, the chapter moves on to orient its analysis
around the broader set of analytical paradigms of which these various methods are a part. We
do this by progressing through three central themes in the contemporary study of material
culture: Objects, Environments and Immateriality, outlining some of the major bodies of work
that have emerged within each of these over the past century and the ways in which they have
fed into, and been challenged by, contemporary modes of analysis. A short conclusion reflects
on future methodological challenges for material culture studies.
Methods of Analysis
Material culture studies has underpinned and provoked an abundance of theoretical
developments and critical discussions across Archaeology, Anthropology, Geography, Art
History, and beyond. This diversity of research traditions and disciplinary histories now
constitutes a wide-ranging and comprehensive tool-kit that might be deployed by researchers
seeking to investigate and understand the material world. In the field, geographers and
archaeologists explore and document landscapes by means of geophysical survey and the
mapping of earthworks, visible ruins and standing buildings, drawing on evidence collected
through field walking and the examination of aerial photography and satellite imagery.
Archaeologists meticulously excavate material evidence from the past, recovering everything
from pits, postholes and other features at the trowels edge to micro botanical remains through
dry sieving and flotation. Geologists, on the other hand, have in recent years worked to
quantitively assess the collective body of material culture that constitutes archaeological
stratigraphy. In so doing they have conceptualised it as ‘artificial ground’ and described it as a
signifier for a new geological epoch - the so-called ‘Anthropocene’.
In the laboratory, the fabric of material culture is analysed through a diverse set of scientific
techniques that stem from developments in materials science. Such methods aim to create a
richer understanding of the source, production, function and age of artefacts and building
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
materials through the detailed examination of their chemical makeup. Neutron activation
analysis, for example, is used to source materials such as clay; atomic absorption spectrometry
to distinguish gold alloys; and x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to source rock such as obsidian.
Depending on the composition of the material under investigation, the ages of objects and
structures are calculated using techniques such as dendrochronology, radio carbon dating
(accelerator mass spectrometry), thermoluminescence and potassium argon dating, amongst
many others.
In instances where a qualitative lens of analysis is more explicitly adopted, many
anthropologists, historians and archaeologists seek to examine the production, consumption
and changing role of material culture in social life via exhaustive ethnographies, participant
observation, interviews, archival research and experimental re-creations of past activities and
technologies. Visual anthropologists have critically engaged with, and harnessed, visual
aspects of material culture through the media of film and photography (Pink 2012) and the
implementation of both archival and contemporary images and objects during interviews with
subjects. Visual activism has reimagined the status of the image as documentation, a clear
example of this is Nick Mirzoeff’s (2017) account of Black Lives Matter. Visual culture,
traditionally catalogued, conserved and displayed in museums, continues to pose many
methodological and theoretical challenges in postcolonial museum ethnography and in the
digital era more generally (McFadyen and Hicks 2019).
Evidently, modes of enquiry into material culture are shaped both by differing research agendas
and by differing forms of materiality itself. In this sense, the most important questions to ask
when it comes to the analysis of material culture relate less to which specific methods are being
employed by the researcher and more to the conceptual and analytical frameworks in which
the research is situated. Indeed, different frameworks enrich our understanding of objects,
landscapes and the materials that constitute them in their own unique ways, from the broad
comparisons across space and time facilitated by traditional archaeological typologies to the
rejection of the idea that human consciousness and experience precede the material world that
has been engendered through the recent exploration of ‘object-orientated ontologies’. This
chapter, therefore, does not set out to simply catalogue and describe existing research methods
such as those listed above. Instead, it seeks to give a sense of the diverse set of analytical
paradigms employed for conceptualising what material culture is, what it does and what it
means. In order to achieve this, we want to think about material culture studies via three
themes: objects, environments and the immaterial. In each of these areas we explore the major
bodies of work that have emerged over the past century and the ways in which they have fed
into, and in many cases been challenged by, contemporary modes of analysis and thought.
Objects
The collection, classification and study of objects has remained an integral component of both
archaeology and anthropology since the inception of both disciplines in 19th-century museums.
The idea of object typologies as a lens through which to comprehend socio-cultural change
paved the way for the emergence of theories of socio-cultural evolution that predominantly
defined and ordered human history within the parameters of technological change (Hicks
2010). Artefact typologies and ‘series’, such as those produced by Augustus Henry Lane Fox
Pitt-Rivers (1891), presented models of cultural change through the analysis of both
archaeological and ethnographic objects according to perceived common types. During the
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
time of its emergence, this approach was tightly bound up with a suite of deeply problematic
theories and ideals that emerged from the belief that non-industrialised societies in regions
remote to the sphere of Western influence were ahistorical and in occupation of regressive
stages on a linear scale of socio-cultural development that culminated in Western civilization.
Nevertheless (and perhaps not entirely unproblematically), the idea of seriation (the
identification of sequence through typological analysis) remains an important foundation of
archaeological methodology in relation to material culture. Indeed, organising typologies into
morphological or functional categories facilitates cross-regional comparison and the
exploration of diachronic relationships between objects, people and the built environment. It
also allows for the compilation of relative chronologies - an enduringly useful framework for
the dating of artefacts.
The explication and interpretation of broader cultural sequences over wide spans of time and
space were cemented as fundamental features of archaeological practice with the emergence
of ‘culture-historical archaeology’ in the first half of the 20th century. During this period such
analyses were predominantly descriptive in nature but before long they came to move far
beyond simplistic comparison and categorisation. The ‘New Archaeology’ that developed in
the 1960s advocated a far more positivist approach to material culture, conceptualising it
chiefly as evidence of human behaviour and adaptation. The developing suite of methods and
theories, which were deployed to examine the position and function of objects across different
cultures, conceived of material culture as a factor that contributed to the functioning of social
systems and the negotiation of environmental variation. Perhaps the most central method to
develop during this period (although it had existed in one form or another since the turn of the
20th century) was ethnoarchaeology, an approach that revolved around the examination of the
construction, use and discard of material culture in various contemporary populations as a
means of better understanding the past through analogy.
During the 1970s and 1980s, structuralism, semiotics, and practice theory asserted themselves
as dominant theories in archaeology and anthropology and a distinct phase of material culture
studies began to emerge. The roots of this ‘material-cultural turn’ (Hicks 2010) can perhaps be
traced to Lévi-Strauss' structural anthropology. With the emergent framework of structuralism
asserting that culturally significant objects and actions derived their meaning from their place
in a cognitive system, structural anthropology inspired a range of studies that explored the style
and form of different artworks. Nancy Munn’s (1973: 3) study of Walbiri iconography in
central Australia, for example, aimed to better understand ‘significance and function in Walbiri
cosmology and society’ in relation to ‘the semantic structure of the graphic representation’.
Similarly, the work of American archaeologist James Deetz drew upon structural and semiotic
trends to comprehend artefacts as ‘fossilized ideas’ that are conceived in the human mind
before taking their material form. In his book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of
Early American Life, Deetz (1977) sought to conduct structuralist and semiotic analyses of
everyday objects in order to understand different world views that existed in the past, ultimately
introducing a historical element to structuralism and contributing to the development of
historical archaeology. In more recent years, the attribution of priority to everyday, mundane
objects has come to be a central feature of studies examining the ‘archaeology of us’ (Gould
and Schiffer 1981). Schiffer (1991) investigated the portable radio in American life throughout
the 20th century, elaborating on a rich history of technological ingenuity whilst acknowledging
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
how the public’s general ignorance of the origins of everyday things puts consumers in a
position of vulnerability to the ‘crypto-histories’ created by multinational corporations.
Schiffer undertook his exploration of the life-histories of different contemporary and historical
artefacts alongside the emergence of various similar self-termed ‘biographical approaches’ to
objects, which were broadly interested in the idea that things can both create and be created
practically, socially and symbolically at different points throughout their lives through
successive re-contextualisation (Kopytoff 1986). Anthropological perspectives on human lives
have been used to elucidate the ways in which objects move between social contexts and gain
new meanings through the idea of ‘object biographies’. Laura Peers’ (1999) study of the
embroidered S BLACK bag originating from the fur-trade in North America in the early 1840s
is a case in point. Her exploration of the biography of this object category demonstrated how
its social context and meaning has shifted substantially over the course of its existence. Initially
serving to create affectionate ties between their makers and recipients, S BLACK bags came
to embody the denigration of Native women and their spouses by external populations, they
were later collected as English Victorian household souvenirs and have more recently been
incorporated into various museum collections, seen by many to convey tribal identity.
The notion that objects can be inherently meaningful rather than passive reflections of human
behaviour was the backbone of archaeology’s post-processual turn in the 1980s. Ian Hodder’s
(1982) seminal book Symbols in Action examined the boundaries between and within different
ethnic groups in Baringo, western Kenya, documenting differences in material culture in order
to understand the role of objects and patterns in the structuring of identity. Hodder concluded
that material culture is actively involved in masking, amplifying and contradicting types of
information flow and social relationships between and within groups. He argued, for example,
that the symbols on calabashes (vessels for storing and drinking various liquids) were used by
women to negotiate power relationships with men by means of creating a ‘silent disruption’ of
social control.
The active role of objects in social life was by no means a novel motif within the social sciences
when it came to be explored and developed by post-processual archaeological theorists, it had
in fact been a subject of substantial consideration and debate within a phenomenological
framework that reached back to the work of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the
early 20th century. Husserl focused on creating a philosophical paradigm that examined the
structures of subjective consciousness as experienced from the first person. It was Martin
Heidegger, however, whose phenomenological work would come to have the most significant
impact on material culture studies. Heidegger saw the world not as the blueprinting of human
mental states and actions upon a separate material surrounding, but rather a continuously
unfolding mutual coexistence of humans with their world. For Heidegger, the notion of ‘being-
in-the-world’ was critical, and he argued that human knowledge was rooted in practice —
something that arose by means of the different tasks one enters into on a daily basis. One of
his classic examples was that of a hammer. Heidegger outlined how the status of a hammer can
initially be seen as ‘present-at-hand’, whilst the individual contemplates it in its own right as a
separate object before a task is undertaken. As a particular task begins to unfold, however, the
hammer transforms into being ‘ready-to-hand’. At this stage it is no longer a singular object,
but rather one part of an ‘equipmental totality’ comprised of the person, hammer, nail and wall.
In doing so he posited that things are in fact gatherings of emerging relationships rather than
discrete objects set apart from each other. In recent decades Heidegger’s ideas have been
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
developed by archaeologists such as Julian Thomas (1996) and used to interrogate implicit
understandings of artefacts as items representative of technological change, symbolism or
group identity. In his study of the Late Neolithic period in Britain, Thomas instead proposed
that in order to better understand the ‘being-in-the-world’ of Neolithic communities, different
artefacts such as antler mace heads or polished knives must be considered as gatherings of
relationships that were entangled with the people that had made and used them.
Within anthropology, studies exploring how identities, institutions and practices do not simply
serve to produce objects, but are rather themselves constituted through the production, use,
exchange and consumption of material things (Tilley et al. 2006) owe much to the ‘practice
theories’ of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Both Giddens and Bourdieu explored the
relationship between human agency and the structures of social institutions. Giddens’ ‘theory
of structuration’ sought to understand how practices engrained in everyday life occur largely
on the level of ‘practical consciousness’, something that straddles conscious actions and
unconscious motivations or habitual rhythms. Similarly, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus
amounted to ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ that are inculcated from birth and
inform individuals’ behaviour and interactions with their surroundings without their conscious
acknowledgement or a rigid system of rules. Bourdieu argued that the habitus is both
constructive of, and influenced by, structuring principles of society, shaping and being shaped
by social practice in a recursive manner. Bourdieu (1977: 72) also explored how space and
objects become ‘structuring structures’ encoded with meaning through certain practices. He
illustrated this idea with his classic study of the Kabyle house of the Berber people in Algeria,
where the organisation of the house is intrinsically linked with daily activities and the
understanding of gender roles (Bourdieu 1977: 90–95). A significant consequence is that ‘the
house is not some natural emanation. It is created by artisans of greater or lesser skill to become
the cultural object within which these same artisans see their own identity as Kabyle reflected
and understood’ (Miller 2005: 12).
The concern for habit and practice in anthropological explorations of material culture also ties
in closely with the enduringly prominent concept of ‘objectification’, which first surfaced in
the early 19th century in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s theory of objectification
sought to deconstruct the generally-presumed divide between humanity and the material world.
Objectification — the embodiment or materialisation of ideas — envisaged human subjects as
being crafted by means of the image created and reflected by the very act of producing material
forms. Hegel’s work has more recently been expanded by Miller (2005), who has explored the
ways in which social relations are created through consumption. Objectification, in Miller’s
(2005: 9) view, does not seek to explain the mutual constitution of supposedly prior forms (i.e.
subjects and objects) but is rather a process by which ‘the very act of creating form creates
consciousness or capacity such as skill and thereby transforms both form and the self-
consciousness of that which has consciousness, or the capacity of that which now has skill’.
In many respects the ‘Material-Cultural Turn’ (Hicks 2010) has primarily been concerned with
demonstrating the diverse ways in which subjects and objects co-produce each other, a notion
that contradicts the precept that human consciousness precedes the creation of form. The
fallacy of the subject-object dichotomy has also been central to works seeking to move beyond
a simplistic distinction between things and people altogether, turning instead to chart the
dynamic patterns of interaction between them. Alfred Gell (1998) tackled this by
conceptualising how objects, specifically art, distribute agency throughout society by acting as
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
an extension or an index of the human agent. Gell’s work emerged from a dissatisfaction with
prior attempts to understand art based on linguistic semiotic notions of representation and
meaning. Instead, Gell viewed artwork not as being encoded with symbolic propositions, but
as a system of action that can change the world. His theory of art thus hinged upon a specific
definition of agency as ‘attributable to those persons (and things…) who/which are seen as
initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or
intention, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events’ (Gell 1998: 16). Humans are
seen as ‘primary’ agents categorically distinguished from objects or artefacts (‘secondary’
agents) that nevertheless serve as an extension of human action and/or intentionality when
gazed upon by a human ‘patient’. In this vein, Gell’s work proposes a more dynamic approach
to an object’s biographical ‘agency’, in which objects may not only accumulate different
identities through successive re-contextualisation, but may also freight the social relations of
humans.
Gell’s approach has been critiqued from a number of perspectives, particularly for his
misreading of semiotic processes and for his overly-anthropocentric account of human-object
relations. Some researchers have proposed that materials can indeed have their own ‘agency’,
which is not merely the extension of human action. Malafouris (2013) argues that in the same
way that agency and intentionality are not inherently the properties of materials, they are also
not properties purely attributable to humans. Instead, they are the properties of material
engagement. Such material engagement can be seen at the potter’s wheel, where at any one
time the clay and the potter are involved in a kind of ‘dance’, the wet clay enabling and
constraining the potter’s actions as much as the potter is moulding the pot. Thus, from
Malafouris’ perspective, agency is an emergent property that cannot be attributed to any single
human or nonhuman component.
A more ‘symmetrical’ approach to comprehending the active role of materials and objects in
social life has been advocated by Bruno Latour (2005) through the concept of Actor-Network
Theory (ANT). By way of example, Latour refers to a gun being used to shoot someone. He
argues that when a fatal shooting occurs the shooter and the gun both act together as a kind of
human-gun hybrid within a broader network of other actants. The significance of ANT for
material culture studies does not necessarily stem from the idea that objects have ‘agency’
(Latour 2005: 63), but rather that the integrated network of ‘non-humans’ and humans as
actants are equally involved in the shaping of social and material life. ANT and symmetrical
archaeology have been characterised as being part of the ‘New Materialism’, the main axioms
of which suggest that human thought and the surrounding world are inseparable and that
everything is constantly in flux, existing as a part of a complex relational web where no discrete
boundaries and cut-off points can be drawn (Harman 2016: 14). These approaches start with a
‘flat ontology’, a form of philosophical investigation that initially treats everything, humans
and objects alike, as having the same ontology rather than assuming that there is a strict division
between the ontology of human consciousness and that of the material world.
Despite its far-reaching influence, ANT has not gone without criticism, particularly from the
anthropologist Tim Ingold. The problem with ANT, Ingold (2011: 91) argues, is that by
focusing upon the human and non-human nodes that constitute a given network, the lines along
which activity is carried out are ignored. When considered more closely, any given node in a
network does not simply exist as a discrete entity set against other nodes with which it can be
conjoined in some form of hybrid. Instead, humans and objects are a part of a broader
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
meshwork of tangled threads and pathways that flow in and out of one another. The very
materials that objects and organic matter are made of are variable, transformative and
constantly in flux. Take, for example, a stone dipped in water that gradually begins to dry.
Throughout this process, the stone begins to feel different, appears to become matt and even
produces a different sound if hit against the ground. The properties of a material like stone,
something that at face value appears an immutable object, turn out to vary depending on the
relationships in which the stone is caught up at any one time. In short, the stone is not a static
object, but has a sort of history.
Ingold’s focus on material properties is markedly distinct from a range of other
anthropological and archaeological studies that have concerned themselves with the materiality
of things (Miller 2005). Many of these studies use the term materiality as a heuristic tool to
encapsulate the physicality of material forms whilst at the same time emphasising their
significance in social relations. However, Ingold argues that to frame materiality in this way is
to create a separation of the mental and physical world, ultimately harking back to the age-old
dualisms of nature and culture and mind and matter (Ingold 2000). Ingold’s argument that
things are active by means of their particular entanglements with the ‘currents of the lifeworld’
is contingent upon a shift in focus from the materiality of things towards the materials that
constitute things themselves. His work also moves beyond both the argument that things are
an index of human agency (Gell 1998) and from the notion that they possess an agency of their
own as a kind of extension of human thought (Malafouris 2013) toward the conclusion that
things are rather ‘brought to life’ through the flux of, and interaction between, the different
substances, surfaces and materials that constitute the various worlds of which humans are a
part.
Echoing Ingold’s (2011) meshwork is ‘assemblage theory’, a paradigm that adopts a flat-
ontology in order to conceptualise the relationships between things via the philosophical
writings of Deleuze and Guattari. At its most basic, and beyond more traditional archaeological
uses of the term, assemblages are understood as ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of
vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to
function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within’ (Bennett
2010; 23-24). They are comprised of materials, symbols, beliefs, emotions and memories at
multiple scales, from the molecular through to the cosmological. The electric power grid, for
example, is an assemblage comprised of electrons, electromagnetic fields, pylons and power
stations as well as various social constructions such as energy policy. The widespread blackout
across parts of North America in August 2003 was due to an emerging assemblage, with
different components taking effect over different timescales, from the Energy Policy Act of
1992 that regularised the grid and increased the load on transmission wires, to the understaffing
of power station and the more immediate outburst of a brush fire in Ohio (Bennett 2010). The
strength of assemblage theory is that any component can join or leave the assemblage without
ceasing to exist as an historical actor, although writers like Tim Ingold have questioned how it
accounts for how assemblages are composed and actually fasten to each other.
The differences between ANT, the meshwork and assemblage theory (and indeed other
conceptualisations of human/thing relationships) are relatively obscure, and ultimately their
uses and efficacies must be evaluated in relation to the particular research agenda at hand in
any given time or place. Having said this, it is significant to point out that they all recognise
the common overarching principle that objects do not exist as singular entities separated from
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
each other but are rather inextricably bound up in complex relational webs. One important
ramification of this common perspective is that scales of analysis within material culture
studies cannot be limited to discrete objects and artefacts. There must be room for
considerations of the built environment and other larger landscapes.
Landscapes and the Built Environment
From Bourdieu’s abovementioned study of the Kabyle house or indeed Bennett’s discussion
of the power grid, it should already be clear that the study of material culture can extend to
large entities, from buildings through to the wider landscape. This section traces how
materially-centred forms of analysis facilitate a richer understanding of the complex and
diverse ways in which the built environment is enmeshed with social life.
The concept of landscape is itself interdisciplinary in nature and often contested, laying claim
to an array of literature that reviews its etymological and conceptual roots. Indeed, the
geographer John Wylie (2007: 1) states that ‘landscape is tension’ between ‘proximity and
distance, body and mind, sensuous immersion and detached observation’. Nevertheless, many
scholars have recognised the useful vagueness of the term, studying it from numerous angles
and acknowledging the diversity of practices that engage with landscapes. Having
predominantly emerged from artistic movements in northern Italy and Flanders during the 15th
century, the notion of the landscape as we know it today was cemented in the philosophy and
poetry of the Romantics and imagined, described and depicted in the arts and literature long
before it was interrogated in academic contexts. It was not until the early 20th century, when
the geographer C.O. Sauer envisaged landscapes as the modification of nature by humans, that
the term came to be studied more systematically. Sauer’s work set out the concept of the
‘cultural landscape’, the idea that the natural environment is a pristine foundation for human
life into which the cultural landscape is inscribed through the activities generated by human
culture. His notion of landscape has largely been discarded on account of its dependence upon
the implicit separation of the categories of nature and culture, a dichotomy that has since come
to be strongly challenged. However, it was significant in its pioneering insistence that humans
are important actors in landscape creation and modification (Wylie 2007).
Another body of work that left a lasting impression on the study of landscapes in geography
was that of J.B. Jackson, who envisaged landscapes as being comprised of the everyday things
that constitute the world, including houses, gardens, cars and roads. He developed the concept
of ‘the vernacular landscape’, an idea referring to the world as constructed, understood and
experienced by ‘ordinary’ Americans. A major feature of Jackson’s work was its focus on areas
that had been neglected and overlooked by planners and politicians – locations also referred to
as ‘interstitial places’ and investigated by archaeologists of the contemporary past (see below).
Jackson’s enthusiasm for examining the vernacular landscapes of contemporary America in
conjunction with his pursuit of how memory and meaning comprise a part of a landscape’s
material existence helped lay the foundations of the ‘new’ cultural geographies of the 1980s
and 1990s, which came to understand landscapes as representative of cultural meaning and
power relations. Such work was in part spearheaded by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels
and ultimately paved the way for an interpretation of the landscape not simply as a physical
environment to be described, but rather as a symbolic entity to be interpreted.
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
Pre-print
The development of landscape studies in archaeology was heavily influenced by the 20th
century landscape historian W.G. Hoskins (1955). Hoskins understood the landscape as the
material embodiment of past activities, describing it as a palimpsest that could be read in order
to untangle the etchings left behind. The palimpsest as a metaphor for interpreting landscapes
became particularly potent during the development of British landscape archaeology in the
1970s, when a variety approaches were deployed to document their transformation over time,
including archival work, field surveys, cartographic analysis and more intrusive methods such
as excavations. Whilst the palimpsest continues to be employed as a useful heuristic device
(see below), for some these earlier archaeological studies were too empiricist and dehumanised
in nature, ignoring the ongoing human experience of landscape in the present. One alternative
took the form of landscape phenomenology, as developed most influentially in Chris Tilley’s
A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994). Tilley critiqued the ways in which landscapes have
been studied, arguing that archaeology in particular had become fixated upon the creation of
diagrams, maps and measurements that view the world from above. This view, he argued, is
not how people see or experience their worlds. Instead, people engage with their surroundings
through their bodies by walking, running, building, looking and so on. It follows that engaging
with the qualitative aspects of landscapes by visiting them in person and experiencing them
through one’s own senses can help to create richer understandings of how places relate to the
human experience. Taking the basic biological makeup of humans as a starting point, Tilley
argued that through our own bodily engagements in the present we can interpret how people
would have experienced their world in the past. In other words, we can share spatial
experiences — encounters with things that are in front and behind, above and below, up or
down, near or far — with prehistoric populations (Tilley 1994: 74).
Phenomenological approaches to landscape were highly influential but also came to be
criticised as both methodologically unstructured and conceptually problematic: because of the
problems with presenting the body as universal, lone, able and ungendered. For many, the claim
that we can share experiences with past peoples on account of a common biology invokes the
premise that humankind possesses a shared nature and yet is comprised of different cultures.
In this framing, the phenomenology of landscape appears to rest on the timeworn nature-culture
dualism that earlier phenomenological reasoning aimed to dissolve.
Within anthropology, perhaps one of the most influential contributions to the study of
landscape is Ingold’s paper The Temporality of the Landscape. Ingold outright rejected any
division between the physical and mental world. Instead, he set out to link the notion that life
is experienced temporally with the idea that ‘this life-process is also the process of formation
of the landscapes in which people have lived’ (Ingold 2000: 189). Through this exercise, Ingold
challenged both the view that landscapes are neutral, external backdrops to human activities
and the idea that landscapes are culturally constructed as the cognitive or symbolic ordering of
space. Instead, he argued that landscapes are temporal entities continually unfolding and
emerging through the rhythmic patterns of their inhabitants’ dwelling activities — what he
termed the ‘taskscape’.
Ingold (2000: 193) suggested that ‘the landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell
therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them’. This statement
can be seen as a part of Ingold’s broader approach, termed the ‘dwelling perspective’, which
stands in contrast to the ‘building perspective’. In this latter view, worlds are built conceptually
before they are lived in, a notion that reinforces dualistic perceptions of humans being separate
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
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Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
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to, and enacting their lives upon, a physical world ‘out there’. In a fundamental sense, the
building perspective is at odds with studies of material culture, such as many of those discussed
in the previous section, that understand human and non-human forms as mutually constructive.
An alternative view that foregrounds method and practice, set out by Dan Hicks, has underlined
the ‘double historicity’ of archaeological landscapes that are understood only through the
creation of documentation, rather than through any kind of direct experience, suggesting that
‘archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind’ (Hicks 2016).
Ingold’s dwelling perspective has its foundations in Heidegger’s conception of ‘dwelling’. For
him, the different forms that people build, whether conceptually or physically, arise as the
products of activities that mutually unfold with the material landscape. As such, building
should not be interpreted as a mere copy of a conceptual design projected onto a separate
material world. Instead, the envisioning of form in advance of implementation can only be
carried out by people already living as a part of the environment, through their being-in-the-
world. This can be understood by way of comparison between a house and an oak tree. The
initial question that Ingold poses here is which of these should be seen as architecture? The
house is clearly a product of intentional human design, whilst the tree may seem to be ‘naturally
there’. But on closer inspection, the tree itself is lived in by countless creatures as well as other
plants that have grown on, in and around it. Particular trees may house different organisms,
such as bees that are attracted to certain pollen types, creating large hives and creating their
own architectural structures in or on the tree. Rodents may burrow dens under the roots,
caterpillars eat the leaves and form cocoons, birds build nests on its branches and moss and
lichen grow on its trunk. In this way, each tree is shaped into a different form over the years
through the activities of the organisms that dwell within it.
A broad interest across the social sciences in the temporality of the built environment has also
engendered approaches that envision objects and landscapes as being multi-temporal in nature.
In particular, Lucas (2005) has argued that greater emphasis must be placed on the complexity
of different forms of time such as duration or lived experience, which are not encapsulated by
the broad linear sequences that have traditionally typified archaeological chronologies. The
metaphor of a ‘palimpsest’ is pertinent to this line of thought in the sense that the materiality
of the landscape is seen to be constituted by a ‘palimpsest of multiple-temporalities’ (Lucas
2005: 43). Consider Stonehenge for example, a monument that is presented and appreciated as
a remainder from the Bronze Age, something that we are encouraged to imagine within a
Bronze Age landscape detached from later periods. In this view, the contemporary landscape
appears as an amalgamation of discrete residues from successive periods layered sterilely on
top of each other. On the other hand, if we are to recognise the multiple temporalities of the
landscape in which Stonehenge is situated we must acknowledge that all components of the
landscape (including the controversial A303 road that passes by the Bronze Age monument)
have their own intricate and mutually-entangled histories of construction, use, change and
degradation, all resonating in the present in various ways. In this sense, the materiality of the
contemporary landscape is not constituted by the static layering of different periods, it is rather
a historical process that reverberates in the present (Lucas 2005: 26).
The built environment and landscapes more generally have also been explored at length by a
wide variety of studies and projects collectively identified as ‘the archaeology of the
contemporary past’, which have introduced case studies ranging in focus from the debris of
war to the ruins of failed development schemes, abandoned council houses and derelict
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
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industrial sites (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2014). Echoing Jackson’s
‘vernacular landscapes’, many of the locations explored by these studies might be described as
interstitial places — spaces that defy conventional categorisation, having been overlooked by
planners and academics alike. A core interest in the archaeology of the contemporary past, and
particularly in the studies discussed by Olsen and Pétursdóttir (2014), is the process of
‘ruination’, with attention often being concentrated on the materiality of modern ruins and their
affective qualities as experienced by humans. In comparison to classical ruins, often envisaged
as ‘clean’ and ‘fossilised’, modern ruins are in a process of becoming ruined, comparable to
that of a rotting corpse, that can be ‘difficult to cope with’ and ‘disturbing’ (Pétursdóttir and
Olsen 2014: 7).
However, investigations of the built environment and architecture need not only be concerned
with ruins, they might also consider the broader lifespans of architectural forms over the long
term. Indeed, archaeology traditionally addressed architecture within an evolutionary
framework, with structures conceptualised as basic or ‘primitive’ (those seen to perform only
the essential function of providing shelter from the elements) placed at the bottom of a
progressive scale (Buchli 2013). Methodologically speaking, these approaches focused almost
exclusively on physical form and function, creating architectural typologies that allowed for
comparisons across time and space. Alternative approaches to the study of architecture have
developed in tandem with the cultivation and expansion of analytical frameworks applied to
material culture more broadly (as discussed above), many of these uncovered new ways of
thinking about the built environment as indicative of societal attitudes to, and relationships
with, space.
This theoretical shift can be identified most clearly in the development of anthropological and
archaeological studies of the house. Stemming from Lévi-Strauss’s notion of a house society
(sociétés à maison), the house as a metaphor and symbol has become particularly potent within
anthropological thought, with some arguing that houses play an active role in the construction
of social life, paying particular attention to the processes of building and maintaining houses
alongside the temporality and materiality of household composition – the sense of the built
environment as existing in constant flux, growing in strength and changing in material
composition intertwined with the biographies of humans and communities. Through human
life, buildings – their layouts, materials, symbolic components and placement within the wider
landscape – thus not only reflect but also shape and constitute the activities and beliefs of their
inhabitants and of the community at large.
As highlighted by the architectural theorist Albena Yaneva (2012: 25–37), however, many of
these investigations appear to explore the relationship between social conditions and
architectural form through a system of explanation centred on cause and effect. Take for
example Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century concept of the panoptic prison, where prisoners are
constantly aware that they may be under surveillance because of the circular design of the
building. The prisoners’ behaviour is influenced via the effects of space and the unique set of
power relations between guards and prisoners that this facilitates. In other words, the form and
layout of architecture is understood as crucial for generating particular experiences and social
relationships. Whilst this may often be the case, the problem with such an understanding is that
in searching for a causal relationship between architecture and social practice the ‘multiple
dimensions of materiality, the pitfalls of design and construction, the technological challenges
of building processes’ are ignored (Yaneva 2012: 37). In short, when the material is used to
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. Shakshaug and R. Williams (eds.). SAGE Research
Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
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explain the social (or vice versa), buildings are simplistically rendered as mere instruments that
either create or reflect social conditions.
Alternative conceptualisations of architecture have viewed it as a dynamic and unpredictable
process that is never finished — architectural entities are always in the making, even when they
begin to decay or are actively destroyed (Buchli 2013). In contemplating different temporal
and material aspects of architecture, Mikkel Bille and Tom Flohr Sørensen (2016) draw upon
assemblage theory, describing it as an ‘assemblage of elements’. Their use of the term
‘elements’ is twofold, not only referring to the ‘material fragments’ that constitute aspects of
the built environment, but also the elemental – light, air, water, fire, temperature and so on. In
order to envision the built environment in this way we must, to a certain extent, look beyond
the material configuration of buildings to less tangible phenomena such as the weather. Writers
such as Ingold have proposed that light and air are as much a part of architectural form as the
very walls, floors and ceilings that constitute buildings – emphasising that the world is not
condensed into fixed form but is rather in continuous flow and always becoming as what he
terms a ‘weather-world’. His ideas bring the notion of ‘atmosphere’ into focus, a term that
refers both to meteorological processes as well as affective and aesthetic qualities of space
(Bille and Sørensen 2016). With roots in the work of the German philosophers Hermann
Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, studies have utilised the concept of atmosphere to explore the
phenomenological or affective aspects of architecture and urban materialities. In essence, these
forms of investigation are about ‘sensuous, ephemeral matter, such as sound, light, smell,
humidity, draught, temperature’ (Bille and Sørensen 2016: 156).
Going a step further and attempting to forge new understandings of the sensory and
atmospheric dynamics of buildings, architects constructed an experimental temporary structure
called ‘Blur’ during the 2002 National Expo at Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. With no walls
or floors, except a walkway for visitors to traverse, this structure was 100 metres wide, 60
metres deep and 20 metres high and was predominantly constituted by an artificial fog created
by a veil of water vapour sprayed into the air through nozzles in a steel scaffolding system. In
creating Blur, the architects aimed to downplay the solidity of architectural form, stating that
‘Blur is not a building, Blur is pure atmosphere, water particles suspended in midair. The fog
is a dynamic, constant battle between artificial and real weather forces’ (Diller and Scofidio
2002: 325). In many respects, Blur is a case study that explicitly brings together the concept of
atmosphere in a meteorological sense (i.e. as comprised of air and water particles) with the
appreciation of its affective qualities.
Considering atmosphere from the perspective of material culture theory and analysis unravels
significant implications for general conceptualisations of what actually constitutes material
culture. However, it also invokes questions about how we might seek to comprehend and
document the complex intangible meanings that are located in and entangled with the material
world. After all, analyses in the social sciences of the various roles, positions and impacts of
objects, buildings and landscapes do not remain circumscribed by the physicality of material
form. Arguably, their objective is always to uncover immaterial connotations, ramifications
and implications that are in many ways excessive to physical matter. In the final section we
discuss these immaterial aspects of material culture via the literature, debates and case studies
that have come to be most dominant.
The Immaterial, Absence and Intangibility
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
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In order to explain the ways in which the immaterial has been theorised it is first necessary to
return to the ‘New Materialism’. We outlined above that ANT and other related theories offer
a ‘flat ontology’ where all objects are considered as actors within complex relational webs.
Under this criterion, equal weight is given to all actants, regardless of size or location – a gun
is as much an actor as a stone, a ruined building or an entire power grid. Graham Harman
(2016) argues that the problem with such a perspective is that when considering the active role
or agency that an object has, the question of what objects are when not acting is completely
overlooked. If we envisage objects solely as actors, we are forgetting that ‘a thing acts because
it exists rather than existing because it acts’ (Harman 2016: 7). In contemplating the reality of
things through what they do rather than what they are, Harman accuses proponents of ANT
and the New Materialism more generally of ‘overmining’ objects through their needless
emphases on the active role and life-like behaviour of things. At the other end of the spectrum
lies the equally problematic tendency to ‘undermine’ objects in traditional materialism, where
objects are reduced to their basic composition — a set of building blocks in the form of atoms,
strings and quarks. Such reductions cannot account for how objects amount to more than their
constituent pieces, an idea epitomised by the philosophical paradox of the Ship of Theseus,
which questions whether a ship as a whole can be considered the same if each plank is replaced
over time. Harman proposes immaterialism as an antonym to the ‘undermining’ and
‘overmining’ (what he collectively calls ‘duomining’) of traditional materialism, ANT and the
New Materialism. Immaterialism is an ‘object-orientated ontology’ that broadly understands
objects as entities that have their own existence beyond their physical building blocks and their
relational effects. With this approach, Harman reasons that more abstract entities such as the
Dutch East India Company or events such as the American Civil War are just as much objects
as the components that constitute them (boats, buildings, people, guns, treaties and so on).
In using immaterialism as a counterpoint to the New Materialism, Harman has not investigated
the role of the immaterial in social life per se, but has rather interrogated the philosophical
underpinnings of what an object actually is. For a better understanding of the former, and how
various cosmologies and worldviews hinge upon an understanding of life as a scale between
the material and the immaterial, scholars of material culture studies have grappled with a wide
range of ethnographic and archaeological case studies. Indeed, Miller (2005: 28) has noted how
humanity ‘constantly returns to vast projects devoted to immateriality, whether as religion, as
philosophy, or... as the practice of finance’. In a similar vein, Victor Buchli (2016: 1) argues
that questions surrounding immateriality should focus on ‘those aspects of human activity that
consciously attempt to intervene within the material world in order to deny it – to actively reject
or mortify it’. Such interventions are particularly obvious in religious contexts, such as early
Christian traditions of asceticism, for example, which entailed the rejection of the material
world through the mortification of the ascetic body, or the Byzantine iconoclastic disputes of
the eighth and ninth centuries, which strived to presence the divine through the active rejection
and destruction of religious iconography.
Outside of a religious context, Buchli (2016) has also observed the importance of the notion of
immateriality in the utopian ideologies of the Soviet Union. Marxist revolutionaries, for
instance, aspired to reduce the assemblage of objects (and the associated commodity fetishism)
created and sustained by capitalist systems in order for material culture to be ‘de-objectified’
and for a radical new system of labour and consumption to be permanently established (Buchli
2016: 133). The existing body of material culture had facilitated what were perceived as
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inappropriate petit-bourgeois attachments that could hinder the advancement of socialism, a
preoccupation thus emerged amongst avant-garde practitioners who strived to create a new
body of material culture that would be devoid of a new fetishism. This ideology came to be
manifested in much soviet-era architecture, which in many cases was constructed using
materials selected for their flexible, transparent, reflective or metallic properties in a way that
rendered the material presence of the structures evanescent. In utilising these materials to
construct buildings and broader infrastructure, the Soviet Union sought to engender a common
lived experience that was not engrossed in the material world, and a society in which people
could look beyond their bonds to the material toward the larger, immaterial socialist collective
(Buchli 2016: 136).
These examples highlight some of the ways in which scholars have examined how people, both
past and present, have actively rejected material culture in attempts to foreground ideologies
that are centred on the immaterial. However, these are not the only ways of conceptualising the
immaterial that have emerged within material culture studies. Others have turned more
explicitly towards things that are literally not there – the implications and connotations behind
the absence of material form. Indeed, in An Anthropology of Absence, Bille et al. (2010)
propose that the vast array of theoretical concepts surrounding agency and the efficacy of things
already discussed throughout this chapter are just as relevant when exploring absence, be it in
the form of destroyed monuments, the loss of human life or any other manifestation. One only
needs to turn to the material culture and practices associated with death to understand their
point. Memorials and cemeteries are often places where groups and individuals engage in
practices such as the placing of objects on graves to remember that which is no longer present.
To a certain extent, such observations illuminate a paradox of immateriality and absence —
i.e. that the immaterial can only be expressed and engaged with through the material world.
The existence of such a paradox was conjectured by Miller (2005: 21) in his development of
the previously discussed concept of objectification when he observed that a ‘theory of
objectification leaves very little space to a concept of the immaterial, since even to
conceptualize is to give form and to create consciousness’.
The idea of making the absent present was central to Buchli and Lucas’s (2001) edited volume
The Archaeology of the Contemporary Past, in which many of the contributing authors
attempted to foreground or materialise the absent (things that had been overlooked, forgotten,
concealed or obscured by the dominant narratives of contemporary society). Buchli and
Lucas’s ‘excavation’ of an abandoned 1960s council house was a key illustration of this idea.
They adopted an explicitly archaeological methodology to examine the material remains of
recent livelihoods, photographing the deposits left behind and systematically surveying and
cataloguing objects. Their approach not only helped to provide a provisional interpretation of
the livelihoods pursued by the house’s occupants, but can also be viewed as a ‘creative act’ or
‘therapeutic encounter’ that facilitated an engagement with the lives of those who lived there
and their otherwise unrecorded voices.
The recording of and engagement with absence has become highly relevant to heritage
discourse with regard to what has been termed ‘absent heritage’ — places and objects that have
been destroyed or disappeared, often following an act of political, ideological or religious
rejection and forgetting (Harrison 2012). Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century,
the visual trope of the mutilated and humiliated monument has been a metaphor for defeat, re-
enforcing absent parts of monuments and buildings as important ‘intangible’ memorials in their
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own right. The fall of Communism marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is a clear
example of this; statues of Stalin and other Communist leaders were defaced or completely
destroyed. The heritage of the Berlin Wall itself played out in different ways in different
material registers, from the chipping and distribution of small segments, to the complete
preservation of certain sections and to the double cobblestone line that traces the wall’s entire
boundary, all of these contribute to its ‘multi-layered material and spectral memorialisation’
(Harrison 2012: 182; see also Buchli 2013: 173).
The idea that heritage is something more than the material presence of monuments contributes
to much broader discussions surrounding intangible cultural heritage. Stemming from the 2003
UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the notion of
intangible heritage (also referred to as immaterial heritage) pushes heritage discourse beyond
the idea of material things that need to be conserved or spectacles that might be visited (as had
previously been formed and promoted through the World Heritage List) to notions of heritage
as something that is embedded in practice, knowledge, skill and memory. Whilst the shift to
intangibility initially aimed to provide a more inclusive understanding of heritage, taking into
account ‘non-Western’ understandings, the concept has now contributed to a more fundamental
paradigm shift towards the subjective nature of human experience away from the ostensibly
objective nature of material form.
Laurajane Smith (2006: 11) has argued that all heritage is intangible when understood as
dynamic cultural processes, stating that ‘there is, really, no such thing as heritage’. Smith
highlights this point by reciting the contention generated by the ‘re-painting’ of rock art sites
in Western Australia during the 1980s, when Aboriginal custodians were accused of defacing
ancient rock art when re-painting sites in an ‘untraditional’ manner. In reaction, the custodians
highlighted that, from Aboriginal perspectives, the maintenance of cultural practice,
knowledge and meaning through the act of re-painting was much more significant. In other
words, it was not a specific site constituted of certain artwork produced with particular
materials, but rather the actual practice of re-painting that re-produced meaning and cultural
knowledge and that should therefore be safeguarded.
Intangible heritage thus emerges as a relational concept centred on knowledge and practice,
stressing that things or sites in themselves are not necessarily imperative to heritage processes,
instead existing as representations or manifestations of social values. However, concerns with
this approach have been raised, not least because of its tendency to create a dualism between
intangibility and tangibility and, in the process, privilege the former over the latter. Thus, for
some the materiality of things should not be forgotten in heritage discourse given that ruination,
decay and the material character of things can be thought of as active and generative processes.
Perhaps a more pertinent point for material culture studies that arises from such debates is that
immateriality, absence and intangibility should not be treated as antitheses to materiality,
presence and tangibility. Indeed, as this discussion has shown, all of these concepts have been
theorised to have forms of agency, affective presence, aesthetic value or performative roles in
larger relational webs. Furthermore, it is increasingly difficult to disentangle material things
and their collective role in shaping social life with immaterial forms of knowledge, practice
and sensory engagement. It may thus be more productive, as Buchli (2016: 67-68) asserts, to
push beyond presence and absence to notions of ‘propinquity’ or nearness which can be
grasped in ways other than the mere physical co-presence of things. In other words, the
Lunn-Rockliffe, S., Derbyshire, S. and Hicks, D. (2019) Material culture, analysis of. In P.
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Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036843497.
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dichotomy of presence and absence is built upon ideas surrounding the visual and physical
existence of material form without taking into account other, less tangible forms of presence
that are experienced in terms of relation, analogy and temporal proximity. In framing the
‘absent present’ in terms of propinquity we can begin to push beyond what seem to be implicit
dichotomies and more rigorously interrogate the boundaries between the material and
immaterial.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how a wide diversity of methods for the study of material culture
has developed hand-in-hand with changing conceptions of materiality, ever since the early
twentieth century when anthropologists aimed to present their collections as more than mere
assemblages of objects. Importantly, the physical things with which humans surround
themselves are not passive entities that create a backdrop to the actions of human life. Nor are
they the mere products of human consciousness projected upon a separate material world.
Rather, in theorising how material culture can have agency, aesthetic value, performative roles
and affective presence, it is evident that physical matter is actively involved in the structuring
of social life in multifaceted ways. Furthermore, when considered collectively, objects do not
exist as singular entities ruptured from each other but are instead intimately bound up in
complex relational webs. Such conceptualisations have ultimately led scholars of material
culture to consider and document the more ephemeral aspects of material form in an attempt
to uncover the immaterial connotations, ramifications and implications that are in many ways
excessive to physical matter.
The themes that we have explored here — objects, built environments and immateriality —
highlight the challenges from adopting any single methodological approach to the study of
material culture. Instead, we might imagine that the recent, and indeed more distant,
disciplinary histories of Archaeology and Anthropology provide a toolbox of potential
methods, to be applied in new and creative universes as what counts as the material world
continues to morph and expand across the visual, digital and cognitive. The ‘praxiographic’
approach of Annemarie Mol (2002), for example, placed the researcher’s own body at the
centre of an analysis of a disease. Malafouris’ (2013) account of How Things Shape the Mind
has elided any methodological distinction between thought and materiality. Pierre Lemonnier’s
(2012) study of Mundane Objects has developed a new approach to studying the significance
of material culture for ‘non-verbal communication’. In this vein, as the category of the material
continues to break down through new visual, digital and even ontological changes in the world,
the humanity of a methodological focus upon materiality – as a nonhuman lens for seeing the
human with greater clarity and in new perspective – will, we hope, continue to grow.
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