Material Worlds: Art and Agency in the Near East and Africa: Materiality: ethnographies of material culture

Questions, ideas, notes for discussion

Archaeology and ethnographies of material culture operate from the idea that humans construct their social world by making and using things, constructing buildings and dwelling in them. Reciprocally things, artifacts and objects, and spaces construct human subjects, our personhood, our identity. We make things, things make us. What does this mean exactly, how does it work? Is it possible to critique this approach in thinking about the strict Cartesian dsitinction between objects and subjects as isolated, coherent and holistic beings, about which we talked about last week? Let's reconsider Baron Kempelen's Automatic Turk! Is it possible to maintain the boundaries between our bodies, our personhood and things, their objecthood?

What are the most fundamental disagreements between processual and postprocessual archaeologies, as discussed in Meskell & Preucel and Hodder? How do they approach material culture?

Hodder argues that "material culture is not simply reflective of social practice, but rather constitutive of it" (7) and that "material culture has a meaning which goes beyond the physical properties of an object, and derives from the network of social entanglements and strategies within which the object is embroiled" (28). Let's unpack these.

How do people define agency? How is it possible to consider the agency of inanimate objects, consider them as active agents in the making of our social world?

Do things communicate meaning like a language? Can we read material culture as text? What are the pros and cons of such an approach? Semiotic and symbolic readings of artifacts have had a strong impact on material culture studies, especially supported by art-historical methodologies. But when we turned to objects of our everyday life, the symbolic models start to crumble. Ideas?