Materiality and history: some reflections

Marcelo Rede

The relations between historical studies and materiality oscillate from precariousness to rejection. The
schism between them is ancient, deep-seated, and difficult to overcome. In general, historians despised
or failed to consider the connections between social life and materiality. Notwithstanding their great
diversity, rarely do theories of historical experience recognise the importance of the material dimension
of human existence. Historiography was timid or totally inept in incorporating material sources in its
knowledge generating process. Since its origins and due to a strongly entrenched vocation,
historiography opted to privilege written sources of all types, granting material culture an illustrative
role or a secondary place as corroboration of the contents of textual sources. It is worth adding that in
reverse the situation is not much better. In many areas such as archaeology and art history, as well as
anthropology and technology studies, analyses centred on material culture focused too much or even
exclusively on the physical attributes of objects, their technical or aesthetic characteristics. Fundamental
dimensions of the historiographical approach have been neglected, such as social context and temporal
dynamics. The results were occasionally very useful in relation to forms and styles, materials and
techniques, typologies and seriations, but frequently disappointing in terms a historical comprehension
of societies.
Problems can thus be found in the ontological level about the nature of societies, as well as in the
epistemological level regarding the conditions for constructing historical knowledge about past societies.
Both deficiencies are intimately linked, and confronting them implies a dual effort: the reconsideration
of ideas about the materiality of the social and, equally, the proposition of approaches that permit the
definitive integration of material culture into the heuristic operation of historiography.
Among the social sciences, there have been many attempts to mobilise the physical realities (from
artefacts to landscapes, and bodies to urban structures) for the production of knowledge. Significantly,
the principal efforts occurred at the margins of historiography, and were more fruitful in anthropology,
sociology, or even in philosophical reflections of nature, and the connections between the human and
non-human.
The nineteenth century was marked by a sharpened sensitivity towards the material ingredients of the
social trajectory (which was equally valid for the biological life of the species, as shown by the first
steps in the theory of evolution by Darwin and others). On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution
confronted part of Europe with an unprecedented volume of goods, turned into commodities bearing the
marks of a fabulous technological process, since they circulated in an internally consolidated market in
global expansion, and also because they were part of a circuit of discarding, replacing, and overcoming
innovation that had never been seen at such a speed, and finally, because they represented the
materialisation of a socially valued ideal of progress. It is difficult to conceive such a new world without
taking into account ideas such as those of Marx, which addressed the impact, and eventually the malaise,
generated by the spectacle of production, circulation, and consumption. On the other hand, colonisation
placed Europeans in a position of continuous contact with distant peoples, e.g. Africans, Asians, and the
peoples of Oceania. The emergent anthropology, which closely followed and even was part of the
expansion process, was responsible for the intellectual effort of inserting these societies, seen as
‘primitive’ into an evolutionary line that tended to be universalising and placed Europe at the peak of
civilisation. The great flow of objects—axes, canoes, totems, vessels, necklaces, bows, plumages etc.—

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which formed and enriched the collections of the European centres, served as material basis for
scholarly interpretation. Objects decisively became evidence of social formations, and their positioning
on a scale was considered to be scientific. They offered tangible proofs for many of the current
propositions of contemporary cultural theory, e.g. Henry Lewis Morgan and Edward Tylor.
The expansion of the explanatory potential of objects is well known. In previous centuries, the cabinets
of curiosities were driven by the search for the extraordinary, for what broke with conventional
categories through the ‘exoticness’, singularity, or distance from the ‘normal’ world. In nineteenth
century ethnographic collections the logic of taxonomy prevailed, the establishment of standards that
would give a concrete expression to ideas about the social organisation of peoples under the observation
of European scholars. An acute scientism guided the whole effort and inspired the natural sciences,
already well advanced in terms of verifiable criteria of knowledge. One of the institutional consequences
of this logic was the fact that ethnographic collections were housed in natural history museums. This is
how geology’s stratigraphy, or the mutations of fossils in biology, the stylistic studies of technology etc.
offered the organising principles of ethnographic collections, archaeological excavations, studies of
‘primitive art,’ and, more generally, for the social sciences (Buchli, 2004a, 180; Hicks 2010, 30s).
However, the ethnographic collectionism, which marked the formation of anthropology, did not last as
the guiding principle of the new discipline. Here the first important schism occurred, which has been
already verified in historiography. In history, the choice of literate societies as a zone of interest and,
consequently, the affirmation of the privileged status of the written document, prolonged a secular
inheritance from the biblical exegesis and the erudition of Greco-Latin textual studies. A division of
labour was imposed, with the result that societies without writing migrated into the orbit of
archaeologists and pre-historians. In anthropology, the initial tendency—which had found its framework
with Pitt Rivers (his works were heavily supported by the empirical studies of objects and his
ethnographic collection became the eponymous Museum in Oxford University in 1884)—gave way to
an era of monographs about the social organisation of human groups. The study of objects was gradually
marginalised and circumscribed to the universe of museums, where there prevailed the logic of
collection, classification, and analyses whose scope consisted of the artefacts themselves. Artefacts
which in exhibitions continued to fulfil their function of making visible and tangible the programmatic
spectacle in which Europe and, subsequently, the US reinforced the superiority of its civilised identity,
heirs of the Greco-Roman civilisations. Similarly, the field of folklore was for much of the twentieth
century a refuge for studies of material culture, especially popular culture. Generally speaking, its
pretension only rarely exceeded the limits of empirical properties of artefacts to historical analyses of
everyday life.
In the initial decades of the twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brow, Franz
Boas, and a large part of Anglo-Saxon anthropology, privileged fieldwork and consecrated themes such
as religious or ritual forms, economic or symbolic exchanges, and institutional organisation, not to speak
of myth and kinship, which would quickly become the driving problems of the discipline. The
displacement was broad and coincided roughly with the move from a diffusionist perspective (in which
the identification of origin and the monitoring of the migration of techniques through the analysis of
objects were central) to the functionalist approach (which emphasised the social behaviour captured by
‘participant observation’ without much intermediation of material documents). Afterwards, the great
influence of the French anthropology of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss imposed a largely abstract,
institutional, and relational conception of the social fact. Consequently, during the first half of the
twentieth century, material culture remained on the margins of the prevailing pathways in the social
sciences.

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As expected, material things remained at the centre of archaeology. However, here the situation varied.
A dominating and traditional strand extended the object-centred view. Its main contribution was to
establish the relations between archaeological materials and the cultural profiles to which they belonged,
adjusting the chronology and the spatial distribution of what was discovered. This archaeology still had
little impact on the interpretation of the social system and its mutations. There were, however,
alternative efforts: for example, the 1930s and 1940s saw the emergence of V. Gordon Childe’s theories
on the ‘agricultural and urban revolutions’ which made use of evolutionism and diffusionism, with
Marxist influences, to explain the Neolithic transition process and the emergence of complex societies in
the Ancient Near East. Even Childe’s approach remains an exception within the archaeology of the
epoch, it is with no doubt the greatest example of analytical effort towards material culture.
In the 1960’s the New Archaeology rebelled against everything associated with a descriptive and
classificatory modus operandi. For the new archaeologists the equation between typologies of objects
and cultures or ‘peoples’ appeared simplistic and insufficient. Their ambition was wider in the sense of
considering archaeology not only a technique for obtaining information, but also a true social science,
whose efforts had to explain the transformation processes of societies, hence the designation Processual
Archaeology. Special attention was paid to the connections between society and the environment and the
role of culture, including material culture as an adaptation mechanism. In a 1962 article entitled
‘Archaeology as anthropology,’ Lewis R. Binford, the patron of the new school, stated the intimate
relationship between the two fields. It was in anthropology (particularly a cultural anthropology based
on Leslie White) that archaeologists needed to seek the theoretical tools for building explanation
(Watson, Leblanc and Redman 1971).
The advent of New Archaeology had the effect of a resounding paradigm shift, potentialised by the
strong evangelising feature of its proponents. It also provoked reactions as relevant as the impact, both
favourable and critical. For material culture studies and history, the first implication provoked by New
Archaeology is probably a positive and practically unprecedented achievement with regard to the
formation of the document. Singular objects and the site as a whole were usually interpreted as statistical
data, without any consistent reflection on the process which had transformed them from live realities,
functioning in a social context, to an archaeological deposit. New Archaeology introduced a
fundamental concern with the composition of the material record. Reflections on the trajectory of
artefacts and structures towards the formation of the archaeological record (Schiffer 1987) were
supported by the ethnographic observation of the utilisation of material elements (inclusively disposal
patterns) in living societies. Similarly, laboratory experiments aimed at verifying the physical behaviour
of materials, processes of decomposition and preservation, which allowed a fine-tuning of the
understanding of the residual universe that the researcher had under their eyes. It was thus sought not
only to better understand the heuristic field of the discipline, but also to provide a more solid basis for
the explanatory reasoning that assumed a shift in the attention of the archaeological site as a
documentary locus to settlement as a sociological locus of human activity (David and Kramer 2001).
This is a postulate which can be generalised, with obvious gains for the entire field of material culture
studies.
In relation to history, to a certain extent, New Archaeology reacted to a traditional perspective which
privileged ‘civilizational’ configurations and chronological successions, as opposed to an emphasis on
the cultural system. New Archaeology also sought a holistic appreciation of societies and gave
importance to the mechanisms of interaction between humans and the environment. In opposition to a
merely descriptive narrative which privileged idiosyncratic events from documentary inductions (which
New Archaeology identified as a mark of historiography, not without some militant exaggerations), the
new archaeologists proposed an analytical procedure, largely based on the deductive models of the

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social sciences, inspired in turn by the natural sciences. Two collateral effects should be noticed by the
historian: in the first place, the weakening of a diachronic perception, the reduction of the capacity to
perceive and explain the dynamics of social mutation to the benefit of a more systemic and structural
view, which allowed even the characterisation of Processual Archaeology as anti-historical. The second
problem is the marginalisation of the ideological dimensions of reality, or symbolic systems. The lack of
importance given by the first generation of new archaeologists to social representations in general would
prove to be essential to the understanding of the developments of New Archaeology and the new trends
in the study of material culture.
Signs of a profound shift in the consideration of material culture had accumulated since the late 1960s
and stemmed from the combined influences of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Ferdinand de Saussure’s
linguistic-based semiology. French authors were precursors of the movement. Despite many differences,
the works of Jean Baudrillard (Le système des objets, 1968) and Abraham Moles (Théorie des objets,
1972) shared the intention of describing the role of material things in modern consumer society and,
above all, the appreciation of the symbolic function of objects. In this perspective, material culture is
equated with a system of communication, through which societies create and express discursive
contents, similar to what occurs with verbal codes. The analytical tools of linguistics are thus considered
the best equippiment to unravel their meaning. Meanings that now present themselves as the true object
of study, regardless of whether their support is material, iconographic, or verbal. Thus, the same
pansemiotism that positively raised the problem of meaning in the humanities contributed for diluting
the specificities of the various discursive mechanisms under an intended homogeneity of a general
grammar.
The two elements above—the focus on more contemporary societies and the semiotic approach—have
also penetrated archaeology. To cite a pioneer, James Deetz’s work on the material culture of the North
American colonial past (In small things forgotten: an archaeology of early American life, 1977) not only
sought to reconstitute worldviews of the community from artefacts that had merited the attention of
traditional classics and scholarship in the decorative arts and vernacular architecture only for
classificatory and non-interpretive attention, but also encouraged archaeologists to explore chronological
and societal profiles previously reserved for historians who had limited themselves to written
documentation. The way was thus opened for the consolidation of historical archaeology, which allowed
the overcoming of some entrenched but unproductive dichotomies. The study of modern and
contemporary societies could also benefit, in the same way as prehistoric groups or ancient civilisations,
from the analysis of material culture (cf. Orser and Fagan 1995).
It is no exaggeration to say that in the 1970’s, material culture was brought to the attention of various
fields, from American studies to the sociology of consumption, amalgamating tendencies that
contemplated the growing interest in everyday relationships, the sharing of less erudite or formalised
values and behaviour of the lower layers of social scale (Harvey 2010, 3). Evidence that concerns
material culture were not confined to the tribes of anthropologists or to the disappeared societies of
archaeologists. The consolidation of a mass consumer society after World War II had already
encouraged scholars to consider the universe of material things, particularly in their commodity form.
Now the concern with the symbolic meanings of consumption is what is presented to some extent as a
novelty.
Another change was the shift in focus from the productive process and circulation—until then the centre
of attention of economics and sociology, both classic and Marxist—to consumption, understood not only
as the final act within a productive chain, dedicated to meeting needs, but also a moment for the
reception of messages and the expression of values in a communication system. Mary Douglas and

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Baron Isherwood in their equally pioneering work of 1979, precisely sought to make advances in
relation to aspects of consumption that had remained obscure in traditional sociological theories (in spite
of Thorstein Veblen’s early and instigating propositions about conspicuous expenditure as a marker of
class, dating from 1899), such as the ways of constructing personality and social identity through the
consumption of goods or even ritual aspects which, far from being confined to so-called ‘primitive’
societies, enabled the modern consumer to position themself in an unchecked and emotionally
destabilising capitalist system for the movement of goods (Douglas and Isherwood 1996)
The consideration of consumption as a social act creating meaning strongly marked the anthropology of
consumption in the 1980s and 1990s, reinforcing the semiological dimension of studies of material
culture of modern and contemporary societies. In the view of one of its main exponents, Daniel Miller,
consumption is a phenomenon of interpretation, generation, and the appropriation of meanings through
the mobilisation of goods in a market with a wide-ranging scale; a phenomenon of masses, which is not
limited to the preferences, tastes and choices of an elite; a phenomenon that is no longer regarded with
the mistrust of some previous economists, who considered it as the basis of the process of alienation; a
phenomenon to be treated in its creative and positive nature (Miller 1987).
Similarly, in the field of social psychology, the roles of material culture in the social production of the
individual were insisted upon. Even as an element of stabilisation from the self, since by definition
material culture is endowed with a relatively fixed and lasting physicality, capable of guaranteeing
constancy of relations: in the light of the psychic dependence of goods and the need to anchor the
personality through acquisition, possession, use, disposal, exhibition etc., the study of interactions
between the individual and society through material culture allows access to important phenomena,
usually neglected by the social sciences (Csikszentmihalyi 1993). One aspect that needs to be
emphasised is the tendency to go beyond a more restrictive view, but one with a long course in the
psychological discipline, which tends to encapsulate the problems mentioned above in the sphere of the
individual. What is increasingly seen is, to the contrary, a questioning of the social connections which
configure individual expression and, at the same time, the mechanisms by which individuals construct
images of self-definition from external references, including material ones (Dittmar 1992).
In parallel, the reaction to New Archaeology or Processual Archaeology was also characterised by the
influence of linguistically oriented approaches and by a focus on the universe of meanings. More than an
element of adaptation in relation to the environment, with mainly technical and economic
functionalities, material culture began to be considered as a priority because of its potential to create and
communicate meaning. In other words, through its discursiveness. However, other elements have made
contributions: in the early 1980s, Ian Hodder—an author who would later play a great role as a theorist
of Post-Processual Archaeology—sensed the excessively static limits of structuralist models for the
analysis of historical dynamics. This led the new approach to seek in authors such as Pierre Bourdieu
and Anthony Giddens a theory of social practice that could give individuals the performance capacities
for acting and more active interactions with established structures, as well as an approximation with the
historiography of the Annales, which began to give greater prominence to the studies of representational
phenomena (Hodder 1982). Nevertheless, the analogy between material culture and texts and its
implications in the methodological level prevailed: the use of the tools of linguistics and semiotics for
the ‘reading’ of material elements. Hereafter, material culture was seen as a language whose code had to
be deciphered. The textual metaphor largely prevailed in the later variations of studies of material
culture, whether in archaeology (cf. Tilley 1990), or in anthropology (cf. Miller 1998).
Moreover, under the influence of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and authors such as Derrida and
Foucault, explanation, based on objective scientific models, gave way to interpretation, a more fluid

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notion that allowed multifocal approaches, contemplating differentiated perceptions. As a result, from an
ideological and even political point of view, the imposition of a single view of science was questioned as
too unequivocal and too Eurocentric. Similarly, the belief that objective data could be compared to
verify the validity of explanatory hypotheses, something which had guided Processual Archaeology, was
seriously called into question by the Post-Processualists’ conviction that the material record was
sufficiently ambiguous and that its perception depends on subjective and cultural variants. In a cognitive
process in which the elements of understanding an object are constructed, an object thus stops being
considered as inert data in order to be seen as result of interventions by a subject—similarly to the
meanings created by readers in dynamic interactions with texts. This was not an isolated case, but the
irremediable connection of various disciplines with the intellectual environment influenced by the
linguistic turn, especially since the 1980’s. The criticism which gave rise to this perspective will be
returned to in the second part of this chapter.
Despite being predominant, the consideration of material culture as having a discursive nature and the
concern with symbolic phenomena were not exclusive, and it is worth mentioning a French perspective
that sought to recover aspects of the materiality of things, particularly in their relation to the corporeality
of human agents. Jean-Pierre Warnier (Warnier 1999) proposed returning to a suggestion of Marcel
Mauss that, undeservedly, had had little repercussion in French anthropology. In a 1936 text in the
Journal of Psychology, Mauss sought to lay the groundwork for an analysis of body habits and postures.
Although Mauss intended to distance himself from traditional approaches to archaeology and technology
studies, centred on techniques of instrument use, and preferred to emphasise ‘body techniques’, Warnier
considers the dichotomy to be more pedagogical than ontological, and that Mauss’ efforts had laid the
groundwork for an examination of social practices based on the connections between the body and
material culture. This did not involve focusing only on situations in which the body directly manipulated
physical realities, but also inserting in the field of observation relations that are less noticeable in
everyday life, such as the spatial arrangement of elements in the environment the body inhabits. The
notion of motricity thus insists on the fact that the corporal conduct does not take place in a vacuum, but
in terms of material parameters, which offer possibilities and impose limits. Moreover, in the conception
defended by Warnier, it is not a question of analysing two distinct poles, which are defined by the
exteriority of one in relation to the other: to the contrary, the material universe can be considered part of
its own corporeality in a synthesis that, far from being static, implies dynamic interaction between body,
space, and objects.
Hence, the focus of analysis is the process of incorporation, understood as the appropriation of the
physical universe mediated by the body: a multiple appropriation which emerges in psychic, social and
biological dimensions. In addition, in Mauss’ conception as adopted by Warnier, it is the subject who
operates the connections: if society establishes the reference schemes for the individual to position
himself before the collective, individual psychology provides the mechanisms of interaction between the
corporal subject and society. For scholars, what is most interesting is the singular way in which the
subject appropriates the different variants and reproduces existence in their own manner. One can
recognise here a departure from all forms of determinism (present in several versions of Marxism) and
also from the postulate of a homology between structures (as in Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus). It
is also recognisable a attempt to create a distance from the lineage of French anthropology from
Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, who had prioritised shared representations to the detriment of other
dimensions of social action. Being attentive to the practices exercised by the body and being based on
the materiality of the objects would therefore allow, if not an overcoming, at least a complementation of
discursive analyses.
It is difficult to assess the approaches to material culture in historiography. Contacts have been sporadic

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and fragmentary. Nothing equivalent to the archaeological or anthropological debates has occurred
among historians. Let us take a case that may be illustrative of the situation of precariousness: the
Annales School. Not because it is representative of the entire discipline—which would be a rather
erroneous judgment, somewhat stimulated by its widespread diffusion around the world—but since the
Annales was a hotbed of methodological experiments and intense theoretical discussions, it would be
expected that, among its followers, material culture would have been seriously considered as an element
of the historiographical operation. Nothing, however, would be more false, and the examples that can be
evoked reinforce this unease. Obviously, no one forgets Fernand Braudel’s contributions in his
monumental 1979 work Civilisation Matérielle, économie et capitalisme, in which there is a decisive
insertion in the horizons of a socio-economic history of the palpable dimension of the goods that
compose it. However, above all, this involves a thematic incorporation of the attention that emphasises
the material elements behind the abstract notions of capitalism, commodity, circulation, etc., without
implying an analysis of material culture itself, and without making it a documentary source with the
right to full citizenship. In 1978, the collective work organised by Le Goff, Chartier and Revel, and
which at times serves as a group manifesto, Jean-Marie Pesez’s chapter on material culture, limits itself
to argue for an enlargement of documentary corpora by the inclusion of material culture and the new
possibilities that would be opened with this, but without providing any more guidance for more
consistent treatment, or any reflection about the resulting theoretical implications or methodological
needs. It seems to rely quite simply on the more or less generic transposition of archaeological
procedures to the historiographical field (Pesez 1978).
In the following years, many works, generic or more monographic, indicated that Nouvelle Histoire’s
appeal for a renewal of themes, including material culture, had been met, though without a profound
reformulation of the historian’s analytical arsenal being necessary. Daniel Roche’s book on the
emergence of modern forms of consumption is very characteristic of this: a strong attention is given to
the universe of material things and its role in the game of new sociabilities which emerged in modern
times (something already well explored by the work of Michel de Certeau) coexists with a traditional
methodology, based mainly on written documentation (Roche 1997). In another well-known case, the
inclusion of a particular kind of material segment, the iconographic, through the work of Michel
Vovelle, was oriented, first of all, by the expansion of the list of sources considered of greater potential
to approach the mentalities and other related themes, such as the visions of death, the same logic which,
in fact, led him to rely heavily on notary records (Vovelle 1974). The impact of the renewal of the
thematic repertoire suggested by Vovelle—and accompanied by many of his colleagues in the
Annales—is limited, however, by the reproduction of a semiotic method that contributed little to the
renewal of iconographic analysis in the historiographic field, even if another point emphasised by
Vovelle can be considered an advance, i.e. serial treatment.
Here New French History did not differ much from the general situation of historiography: little
commitment to reflecting on the material dimensions of social organisation and timidity in relation to
the insertion of material culture in the historiographical operation.
A fundamental problem in assessing the possibilities of relation between history and material culture
rests on the actual appreciation of the material dimension of social reality. How does the material
existence of this set of actions and relations we call society occur? Somewhat paradoxically, the physical
nature of human phenomena is so ubiquitous and imposing that we tend to neglect it as an obvious fact.
However, starting with the corporal constitution itself—of this body which is the first physical level to
be dealt with and which people are conscious of—passing through the landscape, natural and artificial,
and the plethora of objects. Instruments, machines, and so on, the totality of human action is endowed
with a physical dimension. In other words, materiality underlies biological, psychic, and social life.

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Trivialisation of this physicality brings with it, however, the risk of it being disregarded in the cognitive
level. Aimed at dealing with social relations, human actions, and abstract phenomena (even if they are
related to the most palpable concreteness), the social sciences reverberated, each in their own way, the
tendency to dematerialise their objects.
The problem is embedded in the long tradition in Western thought in general, not only of a dualism
between materiality and immateriality (manifested differently: material versus ideal, matter versus mind,
sensory versus abstract, and so on), but also of a hierarchy that gives superior status to the second term
of the equation, to the detriment of the former, with important repercussions in the way we perceive the
world (Prown 1982, 2). In fact, to a large extent the triumphant march of the linguistic turn in the final
decades of the twentieth century and its manifestations in the field of symbolic anthropology, Post-
Processual Archaeology and multiculturalism in general—with its emphasis on discourse,
representational meanings, and phenomena, and its focus on linguistic analytical tools and subjective
interpretation—planted deep roots in idealist thought (Boivin 2008, 13). Precedence is conferred to
thought, which, in turn, is conceived as an instance in which behaviour is generated; only from then on
interaction with the material world starts to be taken into consideration, situated in the end of the chain:
thought-behaviour-matter. Cartesian dualism and some of its implications are thus reproduced by
conceptually separating the mind, thought, and language and, on the other hand, the body, practice, and
material (Knappett 2005, 3; 6).
Another parallel aspect to be noticed is the centrality of the human. It may seem natural that in the social
sciences the human occupies a place that is not only axial, but also one that orders, in the sense of
establishing the subordination and the peripheral position of other elements. It is, however, an
anthropocentrism artificially constructed by the subject of the act of knowledge and not by a condition
inscribed in reality itself. Moreover, the ‘human’ we are talking about is an abstract, conceptual entity,
set apart from its own materiality, even corporeal, and set aside and above the animal world within
which it should be considered. It is a supraorganic and supramaterial human, based on which theoretical
notions of society and culture have been constructed, as well as their necessary counterpoints: the
animal, the material, the natural (Boivin 2008, 15).
Overcoming this situation is the main and most recent frontier in the debate on material culture, and has
been particularly intense since the final years of the twentieth century. The movement of reaction is
widespread, because it is a question of, faced with social sciences that are too humanised, recovering the
biological and ecological dimensions of human, and in relation to what we are most interested in here,
reconsidering the social in its interaction with materiality. Opposed to the empire of the ‘linguistic turn’,
is thus a ‘material turn’. In several domains, culturalism has tended to dematerialise objects (also
understood as objects of study), and has been confronted by appeals in the sense of a rematerialisation of
realities, the formulation of object-oriented theories, the valuation of nonhuman actors, whether they are
animals or materials, overcoming the opposition between things and relations. In short, the incorporation
of material sources in the process of knowledge (cf. Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 3). By extension, it has
been advocated by approaches which have gone beyond the textual analogy to an understanding of the
role of material things, not only because of the intrinsic methodological limitations that a semiology of
linguistic origin presents when applied to material culture (or images), but also because, ontologically,
this conception places the process of signification in an autonomous cultural site, disembodied from the
(physical and imaginary) elements that vectorise the senses. Therefore, the idea that interaction with the
physical universe is secondary is attacked, an act that only a concretised communication formulated in a
purely mental instance, in which meanings were culturally condoned (Olsen 2003, 88).
It can be seen that, based on all the difficulties, there is recurrent schism between, on the one hand,

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culture or society and, on the other, the material. Furthermore, it can be seen that an entire tradition has
located the active principle, the generator of human action, in a highly mentalised sphere of cultural
patterns or largely abstract social interactions. Material culture has thus been reduced to passivity: not
being endowed with the capacity of action alone, it is only the physically fulfilled reflection of the
impulses of a matrix that precedes and is external to it. For example, if we return to the problem of
meaning, we can reencounter the opposition between the conceptual representation of meaning, the
attribute of an immanent human intelligence, and the resulting material manifestations of the signifier.
The precedence and ascendancy of the mental over the natural can only be overcome if we accept that
the conceptual formulation itself (of values, meanings, etc.) occurs in the interaction with materiality
and that in a framework of complex relationships, capacities are not exclusively limited to human actors.
In addition, things are endowed with vitality, they also exert motive power and act socially, shaping a
framework of references, possibilities and limits to the human agent, whether they are aware of this or
not. Far from being passively structured by man, materiality, through its own physicality, acts as a
structuring aspect of human action. The property of acting, the ability to operate (usually expressed by
the term agency), previously reserved for the human, is now extended to material culture suggesting a
connection and, why not, a more symmetrical coexistence between the various dimensions of reality. It
is in this coexistence that the material and society create each other (Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Olsen
2003; Boivin 2004; 2008).
These are recent proposals in the field of material culture studies, which make the little theorisation
about them understandable. In some other fields, however, the same impetus already has a more
consolidated trajectory, pointing to the formulation of syntheses. Two of these deserve a quick mention.
Beginning in the 1990s, science and technology studies were gradually fertilised by the sociology of
scientific knowledge. One of the consequences was the search for a better understanding of
technological objects and their active role in society, as an articulator of action in the same level as
human agents. These considerations have occurred, however in the wake of profound philosophical
inquiries. A central name here is that of Bruno Latour, a French philosopher and sociologist of science
(author, amongst others, of Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, 1991),
who proposed that the system of thought with which we have long been accustomed to has promoted an
unjustifiable ontological separation between the human and the nonhuman, choosing man as the
universal measure and principal agent in the world. However, according to Latour, it was a historically
contextualised rupture, established by modern science, albeit with earlier roots. It is a result of a triumph
of humanism which exiled nature, the animal world, and the material beyond the frontiers of social
action. In pre-modern conceptions, on the contrary, no meaningful distinction could be identified
between people and things, between culture and nature. The Actor Network Theory (Theorie de
l'Acteur-Réseau), formulated by Latour and others such as Michel Callon and John Law, seeks to
reorder the elements that compose reality in a more balanced way, through hybrid compositions, that
creates interactions between human and non-human agents. Rather than homogeneous sets (the society
of humans, for example), which relates with other more or less static sets (such as the world of objects)
the whole of reality is seen as networks where the most heterogeneous actors are associated in changing
settings. Entities including social ones exist through relationships. They do not precede them.
In the field of the study of images, similar contributions appeared, above all in the posthumous work of
Alfred Gell (Art and agency, an anthropological theory, 1998). Images, according to Gell, cannot be
considered merely as reflections of a process involving the creation and transmission of meanings; they
are endowed with the attributes of action, they are part of a system that, functioning in a network,
generates concrete effects on the agents implied. The vocation of images is to act in society and through
their own aesthetic attributes intervene concretely in the course of events. In human behaviour, Gell

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considers the image (and objects in general) as a secondary agent, whose performance comes from the
social action of humans; nevertheless, once it enters the circuit, the elements of its performance belong
to it and are not conferred from outside by the perception humans have of them. It is certainly a more
moderate position than Latour’s, but it points roughly in the same direction, even if Gell was more
concerned with the ways in which artistic objects serve as a medium for the performance of human
agents.
The impact of the ideas above has considerably altered the agenda of debates in the field of material
culture studies, shifting the emphasis from symbolic and representational questions, to the more concrete
field of the action of material things and the very materiality of society. Perhaps it is too soon to assess
the benefits of such a perspective and equally to weigh the criticisms that are already beginning to
emerge. However, it is interesting to invite the historian not to remain insensitive to its implications: in
looking at the realities under scrutiny, it is hard to see only human activity in the process of shaping and
manipulating a totally inert physical universe. Another perspective and new tools for analysis will be
necessary to create historical knowledge that will no longer be only, according to the conventional
formula, about man in time, but also about the trajectory of an alive materiality.
‘Material culture’ is an irremediably ambiguous expression and raises problems by being based on the
dichotomy between abstract and physical dimensions of reality and by suggesting that its components
arise out from a process of embodiment of an incorporeal phenomenon. Hence, the fallacious contrast
with immaterial culture; in both cases, the cultural matrix preceded its expression, which could occur
materially or immaterially. A conceptually more adequate definition could help to overcome some of
these aphorisms and point out ways for a useful insertion of material culture in the historiographical
operation.
Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses offers some consistent support for a properly historical treatment of
material culture. By defining material culture as all that “segment of the physical medium that is socially
appropriated by man” (Meneses 1983, 112), he emphasises the human intervention that operates the
socialisation of materiality. The notion of appropriation is therefore crucial, since it is through this that
society, through culturally established and shared patterns, establishes its multiple interactions with the
material universe, shaping it, giving it roles, and meaning. It is not, however, a one-way process, since
material culture is understood at the same time as a “product and vector of social relations” (Meneses
1983, 113); a product because it results from human action, from processes of social interactions that
create and transform the physical environment; but also vector because it constitutes a concrete support
and conductor for effective relations between people. It is useful to stress the fact that there is no
univocal cause-and-effect relation that places social relations at the origin of an abstractly conceived
process. On the contrary, in the act of its conception, the set of representations, values, and ideas that
will subsidise social practices bears the mark of its materiality while in the observer’s field of vision.
Initiative, the decision to act (agency), appears as an attribute of human actors, and must be recognised
as an illusion to which we have become used by the excessive concentration of our attention on human
action. Interaction between society and materiality is a two-way street and the set of representations and
practices which constitute social action is not conceivable without its physical dimension.
This interaction is still not conceivable without the temporal dimension. It is thus necessary to take in
account the dynamics of the transformations which not only human beings—in their dual biological and
social condition—go through, but also material culture. In other words, far from forming a static
scenario, physical things also have a trajectory, a social life with successive mutations. We could even
speak, without any fear of paradox, of a ‘biography of things’. In fact, as we have seen, the material
world was regarded as something fixed, without its own dynamics, with the only driving force for its

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transformation being imposed from outside. In this perspective, at the analytical level, things are
perceived in a more or less frozen state, as if their existence at any given moment were part of an
inherent and perennial condition. Authors such as Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff have
demonstrated, however, that such conditions are transient and that the predominant qualifications in
certain moments (for example, that of commodity) express stages of a process (Appadurai 1986).
Writing in the 1980s, perhaps these authors may have overemphasised that mutations in the physical
universe stem from the attributions of values of a cultural system. What is essential, however, is to retain
the extension of temporal dynamics to material things.
The work of the historian intervenes in this succession of states of material culture. Moreover, this
occurs in a dual manner: in the first place, because, observing the original context in which things have
their social existence, the scholar must be attentive to their mutations, to the fact that material culture. In
consonance with all other elements of the society of which it is part, has its historicity. Secondly, the
work of analysis itself implies one of these mutations; to consider material culture as a document is to
attribute to it a specific value as the bearer of information, placing it, at least provisionally, in a terminal
stage. The insertion of the material culture of past societies (and also of the present) into the operation of
knowledge presupposes a radical change in the very nature of things, an emptying of the predicates that
belonged to them in social contexts, and in the same movement the attribution of other potentialities of
an epistemological character. The document only exists, therefore, through the intervention of the
historian. Aware of these metamorphoses and their implications, Meneses proposes what is an
elementary methodological procedure: ‘de-documentalisation,’ in other words, through the
intermediation of an intellectual act, imagining material culture reinserted in its context, functioning as a
socially living thing. In order to, only then, explain its historical role and interactions with people
(Meneses 1983, 110). This methodological inversion, which permits moving from the decontextualised
document (or better, inserted in other contexts: the museum, the archive, etc.) to the object in its context
(or succession of them), applies to, basically, any support of information, whether material or textual,
oral or iconographic, although this is not always clear in historiographic work.
A final observation: it is necessary to be cautious to not proceed by simply replacing logocentrism with
physicentrism. The insistence on the unique nature of material culture for the proposition of new
questions and resolution of others, although positive, must be considered: in the first place, according to
its own physical specificity, material culture offers possibilities, but also presents limits, even in
comparison with other types of sources. Moreover, any superiority is circumstantial, derived from a
strategic advantage created by the kind of inquiry made by the historian. In this sense, potentialities and
limits are unequally distributed among the classes of documents, which encourages a diversified and
complementary mobilisation in which there is true interaction and not just accumulation. From the
heuristic point of view, nothing justifies certain frontiers erected between archaeologists and historians.
In the same way that nothing justifies it from the point of view of the realities to be studied. These are
only tactical choices, preferences of approach or even capabilities that are distinctly cultivated within
each of these disciplines. Similarly, the assertions that material culture offers first-hand access, without
the ideological intermediation of writings, thus with greater potential for truth, as well as the evocation
of a greater representativeness of material sources, that allows to exceed the narrow limits of literate
elites and enter the territory of the less advantaged classes (a ‘theoretical democratic advantage’ in
Prown’s words, Prown 1982, 2), are all well-intentioned postulates but must be applied with moderation.
Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Érika Maynart for translating the original text from Portuguese, and Eoin
O’Neill for reviewing the final version.

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