Material Culture after Text:Re-Membering Things

BJØRNAROLSEN

Why have the social and human sciences shown such disinterest in materialculture? How has this neglect affected archaeology? How do things andmateriality at large relate to human beings and ‘social life’? These questionsare addressed in this article which also critically examines socialconstructivist and phenomenological approaches to material culture. Arguingagainst the maxim that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, it is claimed that tounderstand important aspects of past and present societies, we have to relearnto ascribe action, goals and power to many more ‘agents’ than the humanactor — in other words, to re-member things.

INTRODUCTION

In his book from 1987,Material Culture andMass Consumption, Daniel Miller refers tomaterial culture as ‘a surprisingly illusivecomponent of modern culture’, which ‘hasconsistently managed to a evade the focus ofacademic gaze, and remains the least under-stood of all central phenomena of the modernage’ (1987:217). Twelve years later, MichaelSchiffer wrote that social scientists have‘ignored what might be the most distinctiveand significant about our species: (that)human life consists of ceaseless and variedinteraction among people and myriad kinds ofthings’ (1999:2). Neither of these statementsis based on world-wide surveys,1 of course,and there are probably also some elements of‘tribal songs’ attached to them. Nevertheless,I think it can still be argued forcefully that themateriality of social life has been margin-alized — even stigmatized — in scientific andphilosophical discourses during the 20thcentury.

Why has this marginalization taken place?

Why has the physical and ‘thingly’ compo-nent of our past and present being becomeforgotten or ignored to such an extent incontemporary social research? And how hasthis attitude affected those disciplinary fieldsstill devoted to the study of things, mostnotably archaeology? With the possible ex-ception of the last one, these questions are ofcourse not novel to material culture studies(cf. Miller 1987:3ff., Dant 1999:9ff.). Myown motivation for readdressing them ispartly based on the simple fact that fewconvincing answers have been provided sofar. More importantly, however, is that thesequestions are pertinent to a fundamentalontological inquiry central to my research:how do things, objects — the material worldin general — relate to human beings and whatgenerally is thought of as ‘social life’. I amrevealing no great secret if I admit that thisresearch has been provoked by an increasingdiscomfort not only with the dominant anti-material conception of culture and societywithin the human and social sciences, but also

Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2003ARTICLE

DOI: 10.1080/00293650310000650� 2003 Taylor & Francis

Bjørnar Olsen, Institute of Archaeology, Faculty of Social Science, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway. E-mail:bjornaro@sv.uit.no

with the way archaeology and the ‘new’material-culture studies (including landscapestudies) — despite their self-proclaimedsuccess (cf. Miller 1998:3, Buckli 2002) —have moved away from thing’s materialityand subsumed themselves to hegemonic anti-material and social constructivist theories.2

Thus, the following observation made bySchiffer constitutes an adequate starting-pointfor my discussion:

. . . beyond being marginalized material-culturestudies often suffer from a more severe problem:they simply project conventional ontology andtheories into new empirical domains, treatingpeople-artefact interaction as secondary to pro-cesses of culture. The manufacture and use ofartefacts is regarded, for example, as just one morearena in which people negotiate culturally con-stituted meanings . . . (Schiffer 1999:6).

NOT ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTSINTO AIR

First, a few confessions: My approach is arealist one in the sense that I do believe thematerial world exists and that it constitutes afundamental and lasting foundation for ourexistence. Things, objects, landscapes, pos-sess ‘real’ qualities that affect and shape bothour perception of them and our cohabitationwith them. A large proportion of recentstudies in archaeology and the social sciences,however, seem to have been guided by a kindof ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur1970), in which ‘all that is solid melts intoair’,3 including the hard physicality of theworld which sometimes is reduced to littlemore than discursive objects or ‘phenomena’of the subjects’ cognitive experience (e.g.Holtorf 2002).4 Despite the timely advent ofthe body in social studies, one often gets thefeeling that the human body is the only fleshof the world and that this spiritual lived-inbody continues to roam around rather un-constrainedly in an intentional world heldtogether almost solely by human cognition(e.g. Williams & Bendelow 1998, cf. Attfield

2000:16, 42, Ingold 2000:40 for relatedcriticism).

I propose a more egalitarian regime, asymmetrical archaeology, founded on thepremise that things, all those physical entitieswe refer to as material culture, are beings inthe world alongside other beings, such ashumans, plants and animals. All these beingsare kindred, sharing substance (‘flesh’) andmembership in a dwelt-in world. They are, ofcourse, different, but this is a difference thatshould not be conceptualized according to theruling ontological regime of dualities andnegativities; it is a non-oppositional orrelative difference facilitating collaboration,delegation and exchange. However far backwe go into ‘talkative history and silentprehistory’ (Serres 1987:209), humans haveextended their social relations to non-humanagents with whom they have swapped proper-ties and formed collectives (Latour 1999:198;cf. Shanks 1998:22–23). If there is one historyrunning all the way down from OlduwaiGorge to Post-Modernia, it must be one ofincreasing materiality — that more and moretasks are delegated to non-human actors;more and more actions mediated by things(Fig. 1).

Today it has become a commonplace to saythat society is constructed, even far outsidethe relativist settlement (cf. Hacking 2001 fora general discussion). However, few havedevoted time to analyse the building materials— the concrete and steel, rebar and pillars —involved in its construction; the brigades ofnon-human actors that constrain, direct andhelp our day-to-day activities; the materialagents that constitute the very condition ofpossibility for those features we associatewith social order, such as asymmetry, dura-bility, power and hierarchy (Latour1999:197). As Michel Serres has noted(1995:87), ‘Our relationships, social bondswould have been airy as clouds were thereonly contracts between subjects. In fact, theobject, specific to the Hominidae, stabilizesour relationships, it slows down the time ofour revolutions’. To understand how collec-

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tives — societies — work, we have to relearnto ascribe action, goals and power — or to usethat old mantra,agency— to many moreagents than the human subject, as well as toballast epistemology — and ontology — witha new and unknown actor; the silent thing (cf.Latour 1993:83).5

What about archaeology . . .

But has my mise-en-sce`ne thus mortified thequartz, drained it of any material vitality, its veryshimmer dulled by being subjected to an archaeo-logical epistemology where its role, within this tooharmonious scene we call history, is never to beitself but always, always to represent somethingelse? (Bill Brown,A Sense of Things(2003))

Saying that material culture has been ignoredin the social and human sciences, leaves outone discipline that has stubbornly continuedto deal with things: archaeology. Recently,

material culture studies have also beenreinvented in the compounds of anthropologyand cultural studies, and I shall visit thesesites briefly.

Archaeology is, of course, the discipline ofthingspar excellence. There was a time in thepast when archaeologists loved materialculture — one might even recall a certainobsession. In fact, it was a concern shared byseveral disciplines. However, as soon as ourformer allies abandoned the world of thingsand embraced the world of cultures, socialsystems and ideas, accessible only, as wewere told, through dialogue and participantobservation, a certain embarrassment wasassociated with those who studied ‘justthings’. Gradually, a change could be dis-cerned in the archeological rhetoric: thematerial was only a means to reach somethingelse and more important — cultures andsocieties: the lives of past peoples. The social

Fig. 1. “If there is one history . . .”. Bay Bridge and San Francisco. Image by: Wernher Krutein/photovault.com.

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scientists remained rather unimpressed, how-ever, and even after the discipline had turned‘new’, Edmund Leach continued to instruct usthat ‘in the last analysis, archaeology must beconcerned with people rather than withthings’ (Leach 1973:768) (at least if it shouldharbour any hopes of attention from Britishsocial anthropologists. . .).

Irony aside, looking back on the past 40years of theoretical discourse in archaeology,two main identities ascribed to materialculture can be discerned: one concerned withits functional, technological and adaptiveimportance, the other with its social andcultural meaning (its role as sign, metaphor,symbol). Although the differences betweenthem were considered to be essential — as thevague memories from the science war remindus — what was shared in most processual andpost-processual approaches was a longing forrealms beyond the material itself. Materialculture became a contradictory term forreaching a culture that is not material. Thingsare studied primarily as a means to revealsomething else, something more important —formerly known as ‘the Indian behind theartefact’. The material is a source material, anincomplete representation of the past, tracesof an absent presence — not part of the past(or society) itself.

The following quotation may be seen asrepresentative (if not exhaustive) of thegeneral archaeological attitude towards ma-terial culture:

The main aim in archaeology is to write culturehistory. Our primary data for this reconstructionare the artifacts, or the material remains of pasthuman activity. This material is the product ofpeople’s ideas (culture). To understand the rela-tionship between the material remains and thecultural processes which produced their distribu-tion is the critical problem in archaeology (Ha˚land1977:1).

Thus, things are primarily studied for meth-odological and epistemological reasons, toreveal the extra-material cultural processesthat produced them (behaviour, action, mind).

Contrary to the accusation of being tooconcerned with things (pace Leach), I claimthat archaeology rather suffers from beingundermaterialized. The materiality of pastsocieties is mostly seen as the outcome ofhistorical and social processes that are not inthemselves material, leaving materiality itselfwith little or no causal or explanatory powerfor these processes.6

Some familiar memories: In the early1980s we learned about material culture asactive and communicative, as symbols inaction. Later on, pots, megaliths and rockcarvings were written into the limitless text ofpost-structuralism and late hermeneutics.Literary analogies abounded: reading the past(Hodder 1986), reading material culture(Tilley 1990), material culture as text (Tilley1991), and so on. Now don’t get me wrong, Ithink this development was an importantintellectual enterprise towards maturing thediscipline — and at least it made us realizethat practically all material culture conveyssocial meanings and — perhaps more im-portantly — that the production of meaning isan ongoing process, depending as much onthe reader and the reader’s context as on theproducer(s). Unfortunately, this knowledgedid little to help us understand what materialculture is, the ‘nature’ of it so to speak, or tounderstand the role it plays in humanexistence on a more fundamental ontologicallevel. Although the textual analogy wasimportant and productive, we come to ignorethe differences between things and text: thatmaterial cultureis in the world and plays afundamentally different constitutive role forour being in this world than texts andlanguage. Things do far more than just speakand express meanings (cf. Joerges 1988:224);and at some point it just stopped being funconceiving everything as a text that writesitself, the past as a never-ending narrative, anendless play of signifiers without signifiedes(e.g. Olsen 1987, 1990).

It is true that a shift away from thissomewhat one-sided focus on the symbolic-communicative and representational aspects

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of material culture gradually emerged, parti-cularly reflected in studies of landscapes andmonuments in compartments of British ar-chaeology (see also Shanks 1995, 1998, Boast1996, Pearson & Shanks 2001). Based partlyon phenomenology, partly on a wide range ofsocial theory running from Bourdieu toFoucault, several archaeological studies fromthe mid-1990s onwards seem to be foundedmore on people’s practical being-in-the-world(e.g. Barret 1994, Bradley 1998, 2003, Tilley1994, Thomas 1996). Attention turned to-wards how materials and landscape, throughactive interaction with humans, served toshape experience, memories and lives. This isclearly an important and promising move,though there is still a tendency in manystudies to overemphasize the human-subjec-tive and mental dimension of how peoplerelate to landscapes and monuments.

In introducing her edited book,Landscape:Politics and Perspectives, Barbara Benderstates that ‘Landscapes are created by people— through their experience and engagementwith the world around them’ (1993:1). In arecent paper she claims that ‘An experientialor phenomenological approach allows us toconsider howwemove around, howweattachmeaning to places, entwiningthem withmemories, histories and stories, creating asense of belonging. . . We have seen thatlandscapes are experimental and porous,nested and open ended’ (2002:136–137,emphases added). In their edited book,Archaeologies of Landscape, Ashmore andKnapp announce that “today . . . the mostprominent notions of landscape emphasize itssociosymbolic dimensions: landscape is anentity that exists by virtue of its beingperceived, experienced, and contextualisedby people” (1999:1). But what do landscapesand places have to offer us? How dotheymake us move around and affect our being-in-the-world? (Fig. 2) In the celebration oflandscapes and matters as plastic and alwaysconstructed (‘. . . as something open-ended,polysemic, untidy, contestational and almostinfinitely variable’, Bender 2002:137), there

seems to be little concern for the propertiesand competences possessed by the materialworld itself — qualities that become ‘effec-tive’ through people’s concrete and entangledcohabitation with it.

. . .and consumption studies?Some words, too, about the new interests inmaterial culture studies in anthropology —after all, we are no longer alone in the trade.7

Probably the most influential brand of anthro-pological studies of modern material cultureare consumption studies (also performed inseveral other disciplines than anthropology)(cf. Miller 1987, 1998a, 1998b, 2002, Dant1999, Attfield 2000, Buchli 2002). A mainconcern has been how artefacts, primarilyconsumer goods, are actively used in socialand individual self-creation in which they aredirectly constitutive of our understanding ofourselves and others. According to advocatesof this approach, people appropriate objectsfrom the manipulative forces of productionand commerce and turn them into potentiallyinalienable and creative cultural productsvital to their own identity formation:

The key (criterion) for judging the utility ofcontemporary objects is the degree to which theymay or may not be appropriated from the forceswhich created them, which are mainly, ofnecessity, alienating. This appropriation consistsof the transmutation of goods, through consump-tion activities, into potentially inalienable culture(Miller 1987:215, cf. Miller 1998a:19, 2002:238–239).

This and related approaches to modernmaterial culture within anthropology, culturalstudies, sociology and other disciplines haveproduced a wealth of studies of importantmatters such as graffiti, kitsch, surfboards,rugs, greeting cards and home decoration —filling up the pages of theJournal of MaterialCulture. Increasingly so since the late 1990s,when consumption studies became more andmore narrowed towards shopping, the ex-change of goods, the desire for objects, theiraestheticization and the media image of them

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Fig. 2. How do landscapesmake us move around and affect our being-in-the-world? Stetind, Tysfjord,Northern Norway. Photo: Marte Spangen.

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(cf. Miller 1998b), rather than their uses andthe ways material objects arelived with(Dant1999:37, cf Attfield 2000:136ff., Brown2003:4). As noted by Glassie (1999:77–84),within anthropology and modern material-culture studies, things are read asgoods— ascommodities and possessions (cf. Appadurai1986, Miller 1998).

It seems that very little can be said aboutthe hard and dull materiality that we areengaged with: walls, streets, fences, parkingspaces and landfills. How do we consume ahighway or a subway system? How do we‘sublate’ the sewer pipes or a rusty harbourterminal in a northern Russian port? (Fig. 3)The critical comments are few, but in a braveone the Swedish ethnologist Orvar Lo¨fgrenquestioned the overwhelming focus on theparticular and the symbolic: ‘In these studies

of teenagers, home-makers and shoppers’, hewrites, ‘you sometimes feels that you aredrifting through a symbolic forest or watchingan exhibition of signs and messages. . . Andin this focus on the symbolic, there is also atotal dominance of sight as the mediumthrough which we experience the world. Likeflaneurs and tourists — we are not in theworld, we are only looking or gazing at it’(Lofgren 1997:102–103, cf. Welsch 1997,Ingold 2000).8 For Lofgren, it is a paradoxthat the return to material-culture studies didnot bring back the material to a greater extent.At the same time as our lives are increasinglycaught up with the material, studies ofmaterial culture are increasingly focused onthe mental and representational — materialculture as metaphor, as symbol, icon, messageand text — in short, as something other than

Fig. 3.Harbour materiality. Port of Murmansk, Northwest Russia. Photo: Nordfisk.

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itself (Lofgren 1997:103). Actually, manystudies of modern material culture makethemselves strangely vulnerable to Simmel’scritique of the modern tendency to fragmen-tize and aestheticize the material world (as ameans to escape it) (1907):

The present vividly felt charm for the fragment,the mere allusion, the aphorism, the symbol. . .place us at a distance from the substance of things;they speak to us ‘as from afar’; reality is touchednot with direct confidence but with fingertipsthat are immediately withdrawn (Simmel1978:474).

There is a line of argument running deeplythrough consumption studies and ‘social’archaeologies of different kinds: that socialrelations are objectified — or ‘embodied’ inartefacts or monuments.9 People establish‘quasi-social’ relationships with objects inorder to live out in a ‘real’ material form theirabstract social relationships (Dant 1999:2). Sowhen we encounter burials, figurines andlandscapes — or home decorations — whatwe are confronted with are really nothing butourselves and our social relations (Latour1999:197). Things just ‘stand in for’ andbecome nothing but a kind of canvas for thesocial paint we stroke over them to provide acultural surface of embodied meanings (Boast1996:174). As noted by Tim Ingold,

the emphasis is almost entirely on meaning andform — that is, on culture as opposed tomateriality . . . culture is conceived to hover overthe material world — but not to permeate it . . .culture and materials do not mix; rather, culturewraps itself around the universe of material things,shaping and transforming their outward surfaceswithout everpenetrating their interiority” (Ingold2000:340–41).

Matter becomes nothing but a thin transparentfilm situated between us and our culture.

WHY THINGS WERE FORGOTTEN

Shifting the focus back on my own worries:why is it that things, the material world, haveescaped the attention of the contemporary

social and human sciences? One reasonfrequently given is that things do not callattention to themselves — they are sointegrated in our lives, being at the sametime the ‘most obvious and the best hidden’(Lefevbre 1987:8). Even if this undoubtedlyis relevant for our everyday dealing withthings, it is difficult to understand why thisshould make scholars ignore precisely them.Most of us do not see Y-chromosomes,witches or social structures, we are notconscious of grammar, the transcendentalEgo, not to mention the unconscious, butnothing has prevented science and philosophyfrom producing tons of research on theseissues.

Another and more convincing line ofargument is the very strong negative attitudein modern critical (and not-so-critical) think-ing towards the material (e.g. the Frankfurtschool, Heidegger, Popper, Sartre). Themachine, the instruments, the cold and in-human technology became the incarnation ofour inauthentic, estranged and alienatedmodern being. This attitude produced apowerful and persistent definition of freedomand emancipation as that which escapes thematerial (cf. Latour 1993:137–138, 2002).This again, of course, is closely related to thewhole notion of reification and the problem ofthe fetish running deep in modern criticalthought all the way from Marx: objectifica-tion, reification,versachlichungor dinglischmachen— making into a thing — absolutelythe worst that could ever happen to a personor a social relation. To be too closelyembedded with things may cause you toconfuse social relations, reserved for humansonly, with object relations and to ascribehuman properties to objects! As noted byMiller, most critics of mass culture andtechnology tend ‘to assume that the relationof persons to objects is in some way vicarious,fetishistic or wrong; that primary concernshould lie with direct social relations and“real people” ’ (Miller 1987:11).

There is something strange going on here.We all know that we can feel affection for an

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artefact, fall in love with a jacket, a newPorsche 911 or a teddy bear — we mournwhen they fall to pieces — when they die (cf.Gell 1998:18–19). One thousand years agothe Vikings ascribed personality, intentionand social identity to their swords, givingthem names such asTyrving, Kvernbit, Gram,Skrep (Gansum & Hansen 2002:16–17).However, all this can be written off socio-logically as fetishism — that we — and theyhave misunderstood the world and haveprojected onto empty things properties andrelations that can correctly only be attributedto human beings. On the other hand, nosuspicion arises when we establish intimaterelations with a human subject, fall in lovewith a girl, or honour our parents. Nomisplaced emotions, no conspiracies here.So we have one set of relations that are takenfor granted as real, authentic and honest;another set that a priori are false. Thefalseness seems to arise when we transgressa certain border, between the ‘us’ and the ‘it’,projecting relations prescribed for one realmonto another. In my opinion, it is preciselythis border that more than anything else needsto be examined as a possible suspect in theambivalent attitude towards things in thesocial sciences.

In his bookWe Have Never Been Modern,Bruno Latour writes that the advent ofmodernity (or the modern) led to the creationof two fundamentally different ontologicalzones: that of human beings, on the one hand,and that of non-humans, on the other. This‘Great Divide’ placed the power, interests andpolitics of humans at one end of the pole,while knowledge about objects and the non-human was placed at the other end. Latourwrites that modernity has been celebrated asboth the origin and the triumph of humanism,as the ‘birth of man’ and the subject. But, heclaims, there is less talk about the fact that italso meant the simultaneous birth of non-humanity, of things, that is, of objects andbeasts as something fundamentally differentfrom ‘us’ and securely separated from thehuman and social realm (Latour 1993:13ff.).

From this moment on, the human and thenon-human were drafted into different onto-logical and disciplinary fields. Things endedup on the other side of the rift, securelyseparated from the free society of speakingand thinking subjects, from those concernedwith the power and interests of humans-among-themselves. This brutal deportationalso produced another fence: it created a newborder, separating us, the modern, from therest. The pre-modern did not understand howto draw the first line and messed it all up in anappalling mixture of people and things,cultures and natures (Latour 1993:97–103).Unaware of their ontological blunders, theSaami reindeer herders of northern Scandina-via hugged and greeted the pine tree on theirreturn from the mountains to the winterpastures in the forest; had long conversationswith drums and stones; treated the brown bearas a relative and buried dead bears as humans(Demant-Hatt 1913, Myrstad 1996, Kalstad1997). Unable to recognize where reality endsand its metaphorical representation begins, itwas left to the anthropologist to draw thedividing line, to purify this entangled mess,and to reassemble the entities in their properplaces (Ingold 2000:44). It is because we areable to distinguish between people and things,culture and nature, that we differ from them.

Despite the fact that our society is increas-ingly based on mixes of cultures-natures, onincreasingly more complex hybrid relations(in fact, the mess has never been greater —thus ‘we have never been modern’) — themodern regime came to acknowledge onlythose entities that can be firmly situated; thatis, as dwelling either in culture or in nature.This ‘discrepancy between self-representa-tion and practice’ (Latour 2003:38) has beenmade possible by applying the same acts ofpurification that social scientists have used tocleanse the illusions of those ‘others’ whoclaim to inhabit but one world — encom-passing relations with humans, animals andthings on an equal footing. Thus, the modernattitude is characterized by cleansing, bysplitting the mixtures apart in order to extract

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from them what comes from culture (thesocial, the episteme, theGeist) and whatcomes from nature (Latour 1993:78).

This desire for an immediate world emp-tied of its mediators, assigned to things anambiguous position within the modern con-stitution. They are located outside the humansphere of power, interests and politics — andstill not properly nature. Although prescribedfor the non-human side, material cultureended up with not occupying any of the twopositions prescribed by the modern constitu-tion, as either culture or nature. Being amixture of culture-nature, a work of transla-tion, and itself increasingly mediating suchrelations, material culture become a matterout of place — part of the ‘excluded middle’(cf. Grosz 2002:91–94).

REMEMBERING THINGS:PHENOMENOLOGY. . .

In trying to overcome this rift and theconstraining ontologies of modern thinking,phenomenology has lately become an impor-tance source of inspiration for many archae-ologists and anthropologists (cf. Gosden 1994,Tilley 1994, Feldt & Basso 1996, Thomas1996, 1998, 2000, Karlsson 1998, Ingold2000). Phenomenology, after all was launchedas a way of ‘relearning to look at the world’(Merleau-Ponty), a return to ‘the thingsthemselves’ (Husserl), that is, to a practical,lived experience, un-obscured by abstractphilosophical concepts and theories. Even ifto most of us the experience of readingHeidegger appears to be a continuous falsifi-cation of that statement, there are some veryvaluable insights even in his dense version ofphenomenology. Such as his notion of ‘throw-ness’: that we are always-already in the world,the world is part of our being — not somethingexternal, ‘out there’ to eventually be em-bodied. We are not detached observers ofobjects, but concerned users of things: ‘. . .ineveryday terms, we understand ourselves andour existence by way of the activities wepursue and the things we take care of’

(Heidegger 1982:137). These things are soclose to us, our being-in-the-world is so en-meshed in networks of things, that we do notsee them unless they call attention to them-selves by breaking down, are in the wrongplaces or are missing. Heidegger’s concept of‘care’ relates to all beings we engage with, ourbeing is a ‘dwelling alongside’ (and a ‘beingtowards’) other beings. Despite the limita-tions of his philosophy (such as the nostalgiafor an authenticHeimat and his reactionarycontempt of modernity, masses and massculture), Heidegger clearly challenges us toconsider our attitude towards things and theanthropocentric ontology it is based on.

Far more influential, however, is the morereadily digested phenomenology of MauriceMerleau-Ponty, attractive especially amongthose large crowds recently preoccupied withthe body. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty isconcerned with our practical experience ofbeing-in-the-world and the body is the site ofthis experience (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It isthrough our bodies that we as human beingsare placed in a world, and this bodily being-in-the world must be understood throughtasks and actions that have to be carried out,and through the spatial and material possibi-lities that are open to the body. Merleau-Ponty claims that prior to the Cartesian ‘Ithink’ it is necessary to acknowledge an‘I can’ or ‘I do’; that is: a practical, non-discursive consciousness which governs myrelationship with the world and which isexpressed in routinized practices and actions,in bodily habits (Merleau-Ponty 1962:137ff,Macann 1993).

According to Merleau-Ponty knowledge isstored in our bodies, once learned we onlyneed a short time to familiarize ourselves witha new city, a new car — another archaeo-logical museum. The time is too short todevelop completely new sets of conditionedreflexes — our familiarity with organizedspaces, with materiality and things; in short,our material habitual competence permits usto project a potential for movement andactions which can rapidly be modified to

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accommodate specific differences (such ascoming to a new city) (Merleau-Ponty1962:145–147, Macann 1993:176). As thefamous American phenomenologist JohnTravolta stated after returning to Americaafter three years of fieldwork in Amsterdam:‘It’s the same as here, but different’ (J.T.teaching his gangster buddy about culturaldifferences in Pulp Fiction, cited afterLofgren 1997:106).

All this sounds good. However, there issomething missing in Merleau-Ponty (as wellas in most papers on the body which you willfind in journals likeBody & Society, cf. alsobooks such as Williams & Bendelow (1998)):the materiality that the body relates to; thematerial world it is being-in. One onlyvaguely realizes that this world has otherinhabitants than the humans. Merleau-Pontytalks about an oriented space in which thebody is situated (1962:99ff), but he does notseem very concerned with what orients it. Thematerial inhabitants provide a context, but sitin silence, have no purpose or agency; muchlike the servants in the Victorian novels:there, but unaccounted for except as a usefulpart of the setting (Said 1989:219).

Consider the concept of habit memory, avery important concept we owe to HenriBergson (Mullarkey 2000:48–55, see alsoMerleau-Ponty 1962:22, 137–45, 264–266).Habit memory refers to how memories arestored in the body, as practices or habits. Incontrast to so-called cognitive or re-collectiveremembering, habitual memories are livedand acted, rather than represented (cf. Casey1984, Connerton 1989). Biking is often usedto exemplify this type of memory: even after along pause we master the ability to bicycleagain — our clever body still remembers howto bike ten years after we climbed off the bike.But again, something is missing in this story:the bike. The other half of the story isentombed in this celebration of the body andwe are once again left with the ‘sound of onehand clapping’ (Bateson). But try to bikewithout a bike; try to think of your day-to-daypractices without things. Think how the

routines, movements, and social arrange-ments of our daily lives are increasinglyprescribed, defined and disciplined, as well ashelped or encouraged, by networks of materi-al agents. Acting increasingly imperatively,these agents tacitly demand certain beha-viours, impose certain socio-spatial config-urations (Johansen 1992:108–125, Joerges1988). All we need to do is to think aboutmoving around a house, a university campusor a city, to realize how they prescribe pro-grammes of action that schedule and monitorour day-to-day activities (Boast 1996:188). Inthis respect a late 19th-century sociologistlike Emile Durkheim was more sensitive andhumble towards the material world than hislater fellow sociologists and philosophers (cf.Joerges 1988:224). InThe Suicide(1897)Durkheim wrote that

. . . it is not true that society is made up only ofindividuals; it also includes material things, whichplay an essential role in common life. The socialfact is sometimes so far materialized as to becomean element of the external world. . . in houses andbuildings of all sorts which, once constructed,becomes autonomous realities, independent ofindividuals. It is the same with avenues of com-munication and transportation, with instrumentsand machines used in industry and private life. . .Social life, which is thus crystallised, as it were,and fixed on material supports, is by just so muchexternalised, and acts upon us from without(1951:313–14).

For Durkheim, artefacts were also socialfacts.

In all fairness it should be added that in hislatest and unfinished works,The Visible andthe Invisible, Merleau-Ponty seems to accom-modate the material world in a more symme-trical way (Merleau-Ponty 1968). He nowinsists that even to speak of ‘subjects’ and‘objects’ implies a gap between them, suchthat the relation between them can only bethat of contemplation. The concept of being-in-the-world has more radical implications, itis not at all talk of a relation betweenourselves and our world, since our own beingcannot be separated from that of the world we

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inhabit (Matthews 2002:161). He refers to the‘crude’ experience of being in direct contactwith things: a wild, uncultivated and barbar-ian experience (talks about carnal beings, andthe flesh of the world). We can touch and betouched, see and be seen, act upon things andat the same time being acted upon by them —all this due to our common ‘fabric’ as flesh(Merleau-Ponty 1968:133–147). This inti-macy is nicely captured in a scene in HenryJames’s novelThe Spoils of Poynton,whereMrs Gerets explains to her son how herattention to objects is mediated: ‘They’reliving things to me, they know me, they returnthe touch of my hand’ (cited after Brown2003:149).

Being flesh among flesh, the limits betweenthe body and the world break down: ‘Whereare we to put the limit between the body andthe world, since the world is flesh?’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968:138). Merleau-Ponty (ibid.:146)talks about ‘the pact’ between us and thethings, the intertwining, the chiasm (theintersection or cross-over). As beings of atactile world, belonging to ‘their family’, weare intimately connected to things, our kin-ship welds us together; and ‘things them-selves’, Merleau-Ponty now says, are ‘not flatbeings but beings in depth, inaccessible to asubject that would survey them from above,open to him alone that. . . would coexist withthem in the same world’ (ibid.:136).

Well, like most philosophers he died whenhe started to become interesting — leaving uswith a pile of incomplete notes to ponderover. And perhaps it would not have differedthat much if he had completed his work,beyond making our claims better ‘networked’by having another ‘citation friend’ to help uson the rhetorical battlefield (cf. Latour 1987,ch. 1). As Latour argues (1999:176), perhapsthe lines of philosophy are just too straightand clean to prove very helpful when wecome to those muddy and crooked paths ofthings and soil?

. . .and beyondThen, don’t you have any theory? No — I

don’t have a theory, but an important sourceof inspiration for my work comes from thenetwork-approaches (formerly known asActor-Network-Theory, ANT), developedwithin science studies (Latour 1987, 1993,1999, 2003, Callon & Law 1997, Law &Hassard 1999, Law & Mol 2002). Accordingto John Law, network theory may be under-stood as ‘a semiotics of materiality. It takesthe semiotic insight, that of the relationality ofentities, the notion that they are produced inrelations, and applies this ruthlessly to allmaterials — and not simply to those that arelinguistic’ (Law 1999:4). Instead of reducingthe world to the regime of two opposingontological realms, culture-nature, this ap-proach claims that nearly everything happensbetween the two extremes, happens by way ofmediation and translation, by heterogeneousnetworks linking all kinds of materials andentities. Reality is not to be found in essences,but in imbroglios and mixtures, the seamlessand rhizome-like fabrics of culture and naturethat link humans and non-humans in intimaterelationships. It is a democratic and inclusiveregime, everything can become actors (oractants) by being included into a network andassigned properties to act. It is a regime thatcares for the hybrids and those hybridrelations that other systems (be they socialor natural) largely have ignored. Thus, it suitsmaterial culture, the thing, very well. A homeat last. The forgotten transcending andgathering properties of the thing are finallyreleased. Properties so well expressed in itsetymological roots (the Old Norse/OldEnglish þing and Old High GermanThing):assembly, gathering, duration (Falk & Torp1906:903, Bjorvand & Lindeman2000:939ff., cf. Heidegger 1971:170–172,Glassie 1999:67–68). Thus, the thing is thatwhich gathers, which brings together andwhich lasts: in other words, it relates qualitiesin time and space: the ideal node in a network.

Let me exemplify all this with a well-known archaeological example. In his book,In Small Things Forgotten, James Deetz(1997) discusses important changes that took

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place in the colonies along the easternseaboard of North America from the secondhalf of the 18th century onwards. In hismasterful dealing with the material culture heshows a clear tendency: the communal andcommon was losing ground to the individual.This production of a society that increasinglycared for personhood, privacy and purity, isidentified in a number of changes taking placein burial practices, architecture, furniture,ceramics and eating habits. For instance, thecommunal infrastructure of eating was re-placed by individual plates and cutlery, andby individual chairs for people to sit onaround the table. As this took place, con-gested communal burial grounds were gradu-ally replaced by small, individual familygraveyards. Houses were divided into sepa-rate rooms, separating public spaces from theprivate. Bunks were replaced by beds. Clothesbecame increasingly differentiated; peopleacquired personal effects, chamber pots,musical instruments, books, etc.

Deetz saw this as an idea of individualityand privacy being carved out and embodied insolid materials — that a mental conceptexisted prior to (and consequently was thereason for) its material realization (see alsoDeetz & Deetz 2001:173). Within the per-spective outlined above, the notion of ‘priorto’, become quite meaningless, and at least farless important than the ‘how to’. How could asubject-centred society emerge; how manydifferent kinds of actors were gathered, whatculture-natures were mobilized? Instead of acentral hero subject, we should envisage awhole brigade of actors: plates, forks, grave-stones, humans, garbage pits, chamber pots,law books, musical instruments, etc., actingtogether in a relational web. Through pro-cesses of delegation and translation, formingmany and complex hybrid relations, theseactors effectuated and over time stabilized anew social configuration. They made newbodily practices necessary, prescribed newprogrammes of action. Any mental concep-tion of the individual, the private, and thepure, may as well be seen as the outcome of

these programmes rather than their cause (cf.Olsen 1997:211–216). Such ideas wouldanyway have been as ‘airy as clouds’ withoutthe collaboration of material actors, creatinginnumerous webs also ranging far beyond thelocal communities. Thus, and not without acertain irony, the individual was madepossible by the collective work of a brigadeof actors.

According to network theory, a character-istic aspect of networks in the process ofstabilization is that important parts of theirfunctioning become hidden (‘blackboxed’)and the focus is directed toward a few actorsthat receive all the rewards and fame for thework done by all those sweating along theassembly lines (think of the attention (not)given to telephone lines, roads, printingmachines, geological surveys and trigono-metric points in nation-building). An anec-dote exemplifies this: In Norway there is acertain obsession with re-enacting our past as

Fig. 4. Alone to the South Pole? Resting actorsdepicted by two of them. Reprinted from Kagge1993.

Material Culture after Text: Re-Membering Things99

a polar and explorer nation, re-living the hero-spirits of Amundsen and Nansen, in whichyoung men and woman commit themselves toinsane tasks such as skiing across the Arcticor the Antarctic. Some years ago, one of thebravest published his account as “Alone to theSouth Pole” (Kagge 1993), advertised as theaccount of ‘the first solo and unsupportedexpedition to the South Pole’. And you start towonder — alone? Solo? Unsupported? Didn’the have the help of a pair of skis, the companyof a sledge, the protection of some clothes, thecomfort of a tent and a sleeping bag, nutritionfrom some freeze-dried food, the ‘eyes’ of anavigator, communication links to somesatellites crossing the sky above his head,etc, etc? (Fig. 4) Of course he had — but allthe honour and fame is once again claimed bya single actor, the human subject, when inreality a whole company of actors actuallycrossed the Antarctic.

CONCLUSION

Archaeologists should unite in a defence ofthings, a defence of those subaltern membersof the collective that have been silenced and‘othered’ by the imperialist social and huma-nist discourses. I am tired of the familiar storyof how the subject, the social, the episteme,created the object; tired of the story thateverything is language, action, mind andhuman bodies. I want us to pay more attentionto the other half of this story: how objectsconstruct the subject. This story is notnarrated in the labile languages, but comesto us as silent, tangible, visible and brutematerial remains: machines, walls, roads, pitsand swords (Latour 1993:82). As noted byMichel Serres (1987:216):

You can’t find anything in books that recounts theprimitive experience during which the object assuch constituted the human subject, because booksare written to entomb this very experience, toblock all access to it, and because the noise ofdiscourse drowns out what happened in that uttersilence (cited after Latour 1993:82).

Just consider how the history of archaeologyis narrated. Like all such historiographies itbecomes the history of thought, a history ofhow great minds — or society, politics andideologies — have invented theories, shapeddiscourses and created paradigms. The manynon-humans mixed into our collective dis-ciplinary life through fieldwork, museumsand laboratories are rarely assigned any rolein the story (see, however, Yarrow 2003).Think of the socialization and disciplining —and the transmission of knowledge and skills— that take place in the field throughrelational webs linking instruments, people,theories, methods, localities, soils and arte-facts in intimate and translating practices. It isinteresting, and probably rather revealing,too, that the discipline known as the disciplineof things, even as the ‘discipline of the spade’,devotes so little time, so little place, to its owninstruments, equipments and dirty practices,when recollecting its own past. This mundanetrivia of the practical world, this repugnantkitchen of dirt and soil, becomes a source ofembarrassment for a discipline aspiring to theranks of the social sciences. Instead, attentionturns to thought, meta-theories, politics andsociety, in short, to the ‘noise of discourse’.Thus, the need for a new regime, ‘ademocracy extended to things’ (Latour1993:12), becomes ever more evident.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several people have commented on earlierdrafts of this paper. I especially thank EwaDomanska, Bill Rathje and Chris Witmore fortheir toil. I thank Ewa for making me aware ofBill Brown’s A Sense of Things. Previousdiscussions with Hein Bjerck, Terje Brattli,Axel Christophersen (in the ‘material culturework group’) and Kerstin Cassel have alsobeen of great value. I also thank Einar Østmofor providing etymological information. Thepaper originates from a presentation given atStanford University in May 2003. I thank theArchaeology Center, SU, for granting me

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access to their facilities during my sabbaticalin 2003.

NOTES

1 Within Scandinavian sociology, for example,there have been scholars focusing explicitly onthe relationship between material structuresand social conditions (Østerberg 1975, 1985,1986, Andersson et al. 1985, Johansen 1992).

2 This clearly includes a good portion of my ownwork (e.g. Olsen 1987, 1991).

3 The phrase originates from Marx but has takenon its own ‘effective history’ since then.

4 In this paper Cornelius Holtorf states that in anearlier work about megaliths (Holtdorf 1998)he came to the conclusion that ‘whatever we dowith, andto, these monuments today is simplyour own contribution to their lives (. . .) Likeothers before us, we ‘happen’ to ancientmonuments or indeed other things, makingsense of them and reinterpreting themas welike’ (2002:54, last emphasis mine). This,however, ‘was perhaps not radical enough. . .the material essence of the things remainedunchallenged. We may be able to interpret and‘construct’ the meaning of a thing in any waywe like, but we are seemingly unable toconstruct the thing “itself ” ’ (op. cit.). Thushe now claims that things are ‘much morecontingent’, and makes the following points tosupport his position ‘1. Material identities ofthings can change quickly and without warn-ing, right in from of our eyes — think ofmagician’s show. . .2. Widely known materialidentities of things can begin or end by a fewpeople saying and arguing so. . .’ (Holtorf2002:55). Paraphrasing Judith Attfield, thematerial world has become dematerialized tothe extent that we can no longer ‘believe oureyes’ (Attfield 2000:42). In fact, it comes closeto a kind of Berkeleyean idealism — matter ismere surface, has no powers or potentials.According to Berkeley, matter is not unreal(Holtorf’s ‘magican’ even contests this) but allqualities and ideas about it have to be locatedin the thinking human subject (cf. Hacking2001:24, Pearson 2002:142–144).

5 As noted by Serres, it is rather ironic that whilethings are seen as characteristic and diagnosticof humanity (‘humanity begins with things;

animals don’t have things’) they play no role inthe study of this humanity. Thus, ‘in thecurrent state of affairs the so-called human orsocial sciences seem at best to apply only toanimals’ (Serres/Latour 1995:165–166,199–200).

6 This is a paraphrasing of Edwards Soja’sclosely related claim that ‘even the field ofurban studies has been underspatialized untilrecently, with the spatiality of urban lifepredominantly seen as the mere adjunct oroutcome of historical and social processes thatare not in themselves intrinsically spatial, thatis, with spatiality in itself having little or nocausal or explanatory power’ (Soja 2000:7).

7 For some reason ‘material culture studies’ inanthropology seem very reluctant to assignarchaeology any credit. Thus, the ‘social’ studyof material culture is narrated as an almostnon-archaeological field (cf. Appadurai 1986,Miller 1987:110). Although claimed to unfoldin a ‘healthy interdisciplinarity’, archaeology israrely listed among the allies (cf. Miller2002:240). This despite the fact that, forseveral decades, archaeological approaches tomaterial culture have also included analyses ofcontemporary societies. One pertinent exampleis William Rathje’s garbage project (Rathje1984, 1991, 1996).

8 This criticism is relevant also to recent‘phenomenological’ approaches to landscapesand monuments in archaeology, which despiteacknowledging perception also as a ‘somaticengagement’, continue to privilege visualperception and contemplation (cf. Tilley1994, Tilley et al. 2000).

9 With the possible exception of ‘agency’,embodiment has become the main mantra forthose who delight in adding the affix ‘social’ totheir approaches. This process of inscribingpersonhood, culture and society in somethingconcrete — things or human bodies — seemsto imply that there was a prior phase ofseparation (‘non-embodiment’) when mind andmatter existed apart. That things and bodies,originally, were not part of the social, but mayeventually be included and endowed withhistory and meaning by some human generos-ity: a donor culture! It is, at least partly, due toa preconceived ontological split (subject–object) that we can talk of embodiment.

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