Module 6: Material Culture

Basel, ca. January 2009

Organizers: Prof. Walter Leimgruber (Seminar für Kulturwissenschaft und Europäische Ethnologie, UniBas) & Dr. Anna Schmid (Museum der Kulturen, Basel)T

The objects with which somebody surrounds him/herself always tell a lot. Their function as transporters of values, meanings and memories makes them a part of and a product of cultural practice. In ethnology, even more than a hundred years ago objects from foreign societies played a crucial role as witnesses of the historical development of cultures. In cultural anthropology too, the interest in the "small, seemingly trivial and valueless things" (Orvar Löfgren) has a long standing.

Since the 1980s the number of material culture studies has increased exponentially. This is illustrated by the key word "material turn", which mirrors the meaning of material culture as one of the key concepts of the social and cultural sciences. The anthropologist Denis Chevallier found a "new concept of preserving" in the cultural studies. But there has been a change in research perspectives: the initial focus on the meaning of single objects was abandoned in favour of a concentration on an object’s surroundings - how it is embedded in and connected with other objects - thereby forming a net-like structure. Modern social and cultural sciences perceive the objects of everyday life as signifiers and bearers of meaning which help their owners and users to transfer messages and express their identities within their social surroundings.

In the module Material Culture we will look into this social and cultural life of everyday things and artefacts. Our concept of material culture comprises both the objects’ own visibility and materiality and the various ways in which they are put to use and applied in everyday life, between strategies of consumption on the one hand and allocations of new meanings on the other hand. In this we will concentrate on:"The Social Life of Things" (Arjun Appadurai), "The Meaning of Things" (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi/Eugene Rochberg-Halton) and "The Socialness of Things" (Stephen Harold Riggins).

Object - as all source material - need methodical reflection and interpretation which do justice to their characteristics and ambiguities. Things may be inanimate, but they are not dumb: they give out messages, which are multi-layered because they also represent ideas, and we can learn something from them. The module Material Culture will offer a forum for a number of research perspectives. We will look for instance into the shifting proportions of local and global goods in different geographic connections. Or ask about the role of material culture in constituting the identity of groups in various social and cultural contexts, like migration, generation or gender. We will discuss a number of processual, practical and biographical concepts for investigating material culture.