Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies

by W. David Kingery (Editor)

Learning from Things presents the methods and theories underlying the many ways in which material objects - things of all kinds from all periods of history - can reconstruct and interpret lifeways of the past. This collection of essays links material culture studies with art history and the history of technology, as well as with archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, folklore studies, and other fields that use material evidence.
The thirteen contributors - among them Jules D. Prown, Don D. Fowler, Steven Lubar, Joseph J. Corn, and Michael B. Schiffer - examine both the processes of forming historical and archaeological records and collections and how those processes influence, and even distort, conclusions made by scholars. The book also deals with the role of optical and electron microscopy, radiocarbon dating, and other tools of material science in material culture studies.
Citing various processes - from microwear analysis of Paleolithic stone tool surfaces to the impact of mechanized metal cutting on nineteenth-century gun production - the contributors argue the importance of multidisciplinary participation for accurately analyzing objects. Bringing together the approaches of both "hard" systematic scholars and "soft" humanists concerned with aesthetics and cultural belief systems, the book provides a foundation for the further evolution of material culture studies.

262 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 1998

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection features studies in material culture and archaeological discussions on theorizing things, technology, and what they say about human cultures. This volume is a little bit more technical that expected and written for archaeologists. However, despite the technical aspect of some of the essays, the idea that things can inform us in ways that archives and scientific methods cannot is a very commonsensical proposition and it's actually surprising that things are not taken more seriously in theoretical works. The experience we have of things tends to be dismissed as "unscientific" in our explorations of things and their cultural relevance. There is a scientific bias against sensory, subjective experience of things (in this case) that is unfortunate, particularly for archaeologists who must decipher the function of things and technological apparatuses outside of a social context, sometimes with fragmentary remains and little documentation about scientific inventions, or even spatial contexts (when studied in institutions). Corn makes an insightful argument for his personal connection and attraction to technological things being based on his early curiosity of planes, and specifically, model planes. This experience had to be downplayed in his later theoretical analyses of technological inventions for not being scientific enough.

The post-modern turn and the post-processual school of thought has presented a challenge to the ways in which cultural products were to be interpreted. The aim of the book is to challenge archaeologists to be better material culturalists and it urges historians of science and technology, archaeologists, etc., to take learning from things seriously. Things are a reflection of societies and it is not so much that technology shapes history, but that history itself shapes the course of innovation. This tends to disappear in studies of objects and Western cultures place too much of an emphasis on the role of technological creations in altering the course of history. "... [W:]e might accept that the warm emotional and aesthetic content of objects should share the spotlight with their cold practical and cognitive aspects in a holistic approach to material culture" (Kingery, 5).