Preface

Margaret W. Conkey

The anthropological study of material culture has had a long but erratic history. In the
19th cenury crucible of scholarship within which "Anthropology" as a discipline was formed,
the material world and the world of "things" played a central, if not defining, role. The
identities of many non-western human groups, the many ethnographic identities that were
being framed, were framed through the medium of material culture. Objects came to stand not
only for certain ethnographic groups and archaeological cultures, but objects came to be the
defining attributes of certain stages in the 19th century unilineal evolutionary schemes. In
some ways, there are lingering traces of these views, and there may even be a continued
unspoken reticence to engage with material culture because of these longstanding connections
to what are now clearly seen as limited and limiting perspectives. Even art history has come
to grips with the object fetishism that has dominated that field.

Although there are some notable early 20th cenuy examples of anthropological studies
of material culture, such as Boas' Primitive Art, there is little doubt that it has only been in
the last several decades that material culture has been taken more seriously by anthropology as
a whole. This renewed interest may, in part, be related to new theoretical frameworks, such as
the symbolic and structural anthropology of the 1960s. To many, the inclusion of a study of
Northwest Coast Indian art in Levi-Strauss' 1963 Structural Anthropology was a significant
indication of how the structuralist frame encouraged the analysis and interpretation of art and
architecture as well as myth and kinship. By the 1970s, there was a notable increase in the
number of compendiums concerned with the study of "primitive art", and, in some places
(e.g., University College, London), there were programs being established that took material
culture as a central focus of anthropological inquiry, incorporating both the ethnographic and
archaeological views.

By the 1980s, the domain of material culture was being theorized in new ways. In some
fields (e.g., archaeology), there has been much discussion over the "active" role of material
culture: how social life and our social constructions are actively constituted by the material
worlds we create, transform, and deploy. New dialogues emerged about the role of "objects"
and "things", in both the societies we study and in the construction of anthropological
knowledge. Because archaeology has long had a serious and deeply engaged concern with the
materials of past societies being studied, archaeology has played a particularly central role in
the renewed theories of material culture. Innovative links between certain theoretical
perspectives, such as Marxist or structuration, and the materials of the past have been made in
some archaeological and ethnoarchaeological studies. The emergence and development of
historical archaeology has enhanced these material culture studies by being able, on the one
hand, to use historic documentation to provide more sustained links to the past, while on the
other hand, to show how the material world is not a mere reflection of the world as portrayed
in texts but is, rather, a crucial and often independent - if not even contradictory - line of
evidence.

The papers of this volume attest to the rich and emergent theorization of material culture, and
to the diversity of materials and contexts that can be illuminated by this theorization: from
Paleolithic "figurines" to the gift shops of California missions, from the 19th century

Margaret W. Conkey, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA
94720

Nos. 73-74

architectured landscapes of colonizing British in South Africa to the contemporary use of
archaeology in the construction of Mexican national identity. Most of these essays employ a
view of material culture that considers it to be a dynamic if not moulding force in human daily
life; while recognizing that humans are deeply involved with the symbolic worlds they
construct., these essays elucidate the ways in which the strategies of symbolism are just as
much material strategies. Humans, these essays argue, are symbolists and materialists
simultaneously. The recursive nature of material culture and the recursive nature of the
anthropological analysis of material culture are highlighted here. Just as we may consider, for
example, the production of meanings by Upper Paleolithic peoples through the making,
viewing, using of female figurines, we must also consider the ways in which we produce
meanings for ourselves through the analysis and study of these same female figurines.

Taken together, the essays highlight what are some of the more exciting and
provocative directions that material culture studies are moving. Although there may be some
regret that the central question of our inquiry may be shifting away from "what do these
materials mean?" to "what makes these materials interesting?", this is, for now, a question
that is ultimately more anthropological, more historical, more contextual. As we probe this
question, through papers such as those in this volume, it is clear that we come to grips with
the processes through which humans produce meaning and through which we engage not only
with the material world but with the particular historic and social situations that are "at work",
in the every day as well as in the special circumstances of ceremony and ritual. By explicitly
confronting our theoretical possibilities and by expanding the category of "materials" to
include, as we see here, the industrial as well as the social knowledge systems, the essays in
this volume open a variety of new doors onto the anthropological enterprise.

Preface

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