In Favor of the Cultural Approach to Material Culture Studies: A Critical Analysis

Holly McWhorter

Things of Value: Topics in Material Culture

State University of New York, Empire State College, School of Graduate Studies

Dr. Rihanna Rogers

October 20, 2014

 The field of material culture studies, as an independent course of study seen as on a parallel with other

fields such as anthropology, sociology, archaeology, history and (nonmaterial) cultural studies, is a relatively new

one. Scholars have of course long examined material artifacts, including works of art, in search of cultural

meaning--but up until the 1980s,1 this type of research was considered only a sometimes necessary subset of

more encompassing general work in one of the fields mentioned above. The multidisciplinary roots of material

culture studies as we now define it lie within all of these fields, but it is now considered a field on its own terms,

separate from them.

Given the interdisciplinary origins of the field, and its gradual emergence and separation from its root

disciplines and separation from them over time, it is not surprising that there are a number of different theoretical

approaches to the work. Each developed more or less in sequence, with its proprietary set of scholars having

built upon and/or altered the theoretical approach of those who came before. Within this sequence, the three

most distinct categories among are the Marxist/critical approach, the semiotic/structuralist approach, and the

cultural approach. In this essay, I will give a brief overview of each approach, and then outline why I believe the

cultural one is the most appropriate in most contemporary analyses of the cultural signif icance of material

objects.

The Marxist approach, from which the other critical approaches stem, views objects and material

possessions primarily through the lens of a socioeconomic framework, referring to them strictly as commodities,

and focusing only on their role as "embodied human labor," 2—in other words, the physical output resulting from

the efforts of the person or people who contributed to their manufacture. Marx was not particularly interested in

the nature of objects as material manifestations of culture, but rather his understanding of what he saw as the

inevitable connection between the production of commodities and the resulting sense of exploitation,

estrangement and alienation felt by the worker(s) who produced them. 3 A number of other critical schools of

thought, with roots in Marxist theory, also examine material culture with a focus on this causal relationship

between commodities and human alienation: the Frankfurt School and theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, Fromm

and Marcuse and others approached the topic through such lenses as psychoanalysis, Enlightenment ideology

consumer studies.4

The semiotic/structuralist approach stems from the Saussurian semiotics-based concept 5 that an object

functions not only in literal functional terms, i.e. as a tool that serves the purpose for which it was created, but

also as a sign of something other than itself.6 Barthes pointed out a well-known example of this phenomenon in a

bunch of roses serving as a sign or symbol of romance.7 Where structuralism comes in is with the idea that these
1 Woodward, 5.
2 Ibid., 36.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 38.
5 Ibid., 61.
6 Ibid., 57.
7 Ibid., 58.
objects and signs create a system of reference to one another, or a structure, against which the signif icance of a

given object can be construed—or read, as a "text." The major figures among the scholars who take the

structuralist approach to material culture are Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Baudrillard and Hebdige.

Most recently, an approach to material culture has emerged that, in common with the structuralist

approach, acknowledges the existence of objects within a structure of semiotic signs and meanings—but does

not hold that structure to be as rigid, or nearly as important, as the structuralist theorists might. The cultural

approach, as it is called, focuses more on the role objects play as markers and delineators of culture, while often

making up the very substance of culture itself, as well. 8 The two most contemporary proponents of this approach

are Mary Douglas and Daniel Miller, whose work (along with others who take the cultural approach) rests on a

theoretical foundation set by Durkheim and Mauss in their work on the topic of culture and classif ication. 9

For my own studies concerning product, interior and architectural design of domestic environment from

the second half of the 20th century forward, the cultural approach, out of the three discussed above, is by far the

most useful as an analytic tool—particularly in work where I trace the changes in style and

construction/manufacturing of a particular aspect of the home over a series of decades. This is because the

Marxist/critical approach is too limited in its view of how people interact with the physical environment and

objects, and the structural approach allows for too few meanings to be associated with a particular object: only

one. I will discuss the shortcomings of each of these two approaches below.

In Understanding Material Culture, Ian Woodward outlines a number of reasons that the Marxist/critical

approach has fallen out of favor in material culture studies, and I find all of them relevant. The first is rather all-

encompassing, and important: that rather than looking at materiality (the relationships between people and

objects), which is central to any study concerning material culture, Marxist and critical approaches focus on

social modes of acquisition and consumption (materialism) and on the relationship between the producers of

commodities and those who own the means of production (materialist issues). 10 One of the problems with this is

that while the phenomena behind materialistic value systems and the examination of materialist relationships are

without question worthy of consideration, at this point in cultural history, the tenets of Marxist thought have been

well established—and comprise their own field of study (and contemporary further elaboration) that is quite

distinct from contemporary material culture studies.

In the case of my own interests, it is all well and good to question how the producers of a particular sofa

relate to the owner of the factory (a materialist issue), and how the owner of a particular home thinks and feels

about the process of acquiring a sofa in general (consumption studies). Those kinds of questions have been

asked and answered many times before, however, and what I can bring to the table that might be new is an

examination what kinds of values and impressions the purchaser of that sofa associates with its particular

8 Woodward, 85.
9 Ibid., 84.
10 Ibid., 54.
materials, fabric pattern(s), price range, brand, and style. In other words, I see value in exploring what cultural

phenomena came into play with regards to its presence in that particular person's home—and what other

impressions, values, ideas, and other cultural phenomena might have played a role if he or she had selected

another sofa of a different type or style, or even no sofa at all. How might that have affected the owner's social

life? Or his or her understanding of his or her own financial success, or social status? What kinds of values and

ideals might one sofa or the other have given visitors the impression of the owner espousing? These questions

are far more interesting to me, for I find them far more relevant to our increasingly objects-and-aesthetics-

oriented (in the "developed" world, at least) everyday lives than questions relating to the sofa's role in the

foundations of our fairly inalienably capitalist economy.

Woodward goes on to mention another major criticism with the Marxist/critical approach, one which is

discussed at further length by Miller in his seminal work Material Culture and Mass Consumption: the fact that it

completely overlooks the all-important element of agency 11 in our relationships with the commodities we acquire.

It may or may not be true that (as Marxist thought asserts) all commodities embody the output of an exploited

laborer, and are thereby suspect. If we stop the discussion there, however, we miss the rich cultural material to

be found in observing how people choose to use, display and otherwise interact with the commodities they

acquire—i.e., how they make use of their innate agency, and what that does or doesn't mean in terms of society

and/or culture. Furthermore, as Miller also asserts, the idea that we should be primarily concerned with the

problematic nature of capitalist society—rather than focusing instead on what it enables us to do 12—is not

necessarily sound.

The structural approach at least deals with more hands-on, real-time, everyday-life-oriented issues, with

its exploration of what the various objects in our lives symbolize in the social and cultural arenas. This alone

makes it more relevant to my own work, but two major flaws stand in the way of it making as good of an

approach as the cultural one. These are again outlined by Woodward in Understanding Material Culture. The

first is that similar to the Marxist/critical approach, the structural approach overlooks agency. 13 A structural

theorist may present a good case for a particular object representing a particular set of concepts or values to

people in general, as, for example, Barthes does in his essay about the Eiffel Tower. In reality, however, any

number of real people have their own reasons and outside influences that may make Barthes' reading of the

Eiffel Tower non-applicable for them. To limit the discussion to a single given assessment of the sociocultural

signif icance of an object may be useful for the purpose of theorizing, but to not provide a framework (which the

structural approach does not) for examining other possible signif icances it may embody for others—whose

agency comes into play in their conception of it, and/or actual interaction with it—is like failing to mention the

11 Woodward, 55.
12Miller, 1987: 167
13 Woodward, 81.
proverbial elephant in the living room.

The other more signif icant criticism of the structural approach, at least for the analysis of material culture

from the past few decades, is that it depends on objects residing within a stable system of semiotic codes. The

idea of such a set, language-style structure of signs and meanings even existing has now become outdated—

and thus the idea of it being transferrable to the world of objects is now flawed. There may (or may not) have

been a time when most things had either one or one of a known few cultural signif icances for most people in a

given society. If that was ever the case, however, that time has now passed. The very nature of contemporary

life in the developed world, with our ever-evolving, meta-meta, multilayered interpretations of life and its

accoutrements, infused with a destabilizing sense of irony and comprised of a mega-multitude of subcultures

within each culture, has generated an endlessly growing group of signs and signif iers—thus calling into question

the idea that any given object can usefully be assigned a meaning at all. 14 Taste itself has possibly never been

more subjective than it is now, so the very mechanism by which things might be assigned meaning 15 in the first

place is more unstable than ever.

The primary benefits of the cultural approach is that it allows for a more expansive and much more

nuanced examination of the many ways people can and do relate to objects than either the Marxist/critical or

structural approach. At a time when the globalization of culture in general seems to be increasing, in effect

creating more complex, more numerous and more frequently changing subcultures within every individual

culture, the material culture scholarly community needs the flexibility and adaptability of the cultural approach.

While it is undeniably important to have established the broad-stroke and arguably negative effects of capitalism

on society, the seeming permanence (at this point) of capitalism in the developed world—not to mention the

explosive proliferation of the number and types of objects available to more and more people than ever, here in

the early 21st century—necessitates a move beyond Marxist concerns and toward an examination of what is

happening on an emotional level between us and our things, on an ongoing basis. The cultural approach alone,

out of the three examined here, allows for this.

14 Woodward, 83.
15 Ibid., 86.
 WORKS CITED

Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. London: Sage Publications, 2007.