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Artefacts between disciplines. The toothbrush and the axe
Article in Archaeological Dialogues · December 2007

DOI: 10.1017/S1380203807002267
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discussion article
Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 117–131

C 2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1380203807002267 Printed in the United Kingdom
Artefacts between disciplines. The toothbrush and the axe

Duncan Garrow and Elizabeth Shove
Abstract
This paper takes the form of a dialogue between an archaeologist and a sociologist.
In recent years, interdisciplinary working has become increasingly fashionable within
academia. The aim of our exchange was to establish exactly what implications this way
of working has for understandings of material culture. Our methodology was simple,
involving the ‘archaeological’ and ‘sociological’ analysis of two different objects. In
undertaking this work, we hoped to bring about new or different understandings of the
objects under scrutiny. The process was indeed successful, but not necessarily in the
ways we had expected. Ultimately, it revealed a complex set of questions about how
the materials of culture are conceptualized and understood, and led us to a renewed
appreciation of the theoretical and methodological qualities of what we do within our
respective disciplines.
Keywords
interdisciplinary working; material culture; archaeology; sociology; toothbrush; axe
How thoroughly interdisciplinary is it possible to be? Are we lightly

transferring a set of terms from one practice to another, as metaphor, façon
de parler? Are we appropriating materials hitherto neglected for analysis of
the kind we have always used? Or are we trying to learn new methods and
skills fast, which others have spent years acquiring?
(Beer 1996, 115; original emphasis)
Introduction
This paper takes the form of a dialogue between an archaeologist and a
sociologist. In recent years, interdisciplinary working has become increasingly
fashionable within academia – on paper at least. The exchange presented here
aims to establish exactly what implications this way of working has for our
understandings of material culture. Within the paper, we work across and
between our respective subjects through an exercise in studying two objects.
In fact, the paper might be seen not just as a dialogue between two people,
118 discussion
but between two academic disciplines, two frames of reference, and indeed
two objects.
The result is a somewhat contrived and on occasions forced analysis, the
very artificiality of which has proved to be an extremely useful attribute,
serving to highlight issues which in normal circumstances would almost
certainly have remained invisible. Our self-set challenge was to explore the
viability, the problems and the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogues. In doing
so, we also hoped to produce understandings of our objects that would be
different to accounts produced by either a sociologist or an archaeologist
alone. In Beer’s terms (ibid.), we did indeed ‘appropriate’ each other’s
materials. However, as will become clear, the process was by no means as
straightforward as simply ‘learning new methods and skills’. The result is an
experimental and relatively open-ended paper, designed to raise a series of
questions for further discussion about the nature of interdisciplinary working
rather than to produce a definitive account of either of the artefacts or the
disciplines on which we focus.
Our method was simple: we each selected a piece of material culture
and gave it to the other person to ‘analyse’. We adopted this strategy in
order to make ourselves think critically about the selected objects and about
archaeology and sociology. In ‘applying’ distinct approaches, we expected to
reveal different methods of conceptualizing and describing each object, and
to use any surprising and intriguing observations to reveal otherwise taken-
for-granted features of our own ways of working. We wanted to establish
approximately what it means to engage with an object archaeologically or
sociologically. The fact that the objects under discussion came to occupy
unusual locations during the course of our work was also significant for the
ways in which they were understood. Questions of geographical origin and
experiments in viewing ‘matter out of place’ were variously influential in
how we approached our respective objects. That said, the driving ambition
of this paper is not one of material geography; rather it is an experiment
in challenging and in connecting methodological and academic spaces of
enquiry.
As mentioned above, the paper takes the form of a conversation between
Elizabeth (sociologist) and Duncan (archaeologist) about an axe (selected
by Duncan) and a toothbrush (selected by Elizabeth). The plan was to
start by simply describing each of the objects in question, but it was
immediately apparent that the disciplines of archaeology and sociology
provided significantly different ways of seeing. No simple description was
possible because we each had different versions of ‘the same’ artefact. This is
to be expected; after all, description is unavoidably ‘theory-laden’ (Hanson
1981; Shanks and Tilley 1987), freighted with prior knowledge of context and
relational significance. A less expected problem was that in thinking about
what these objects ‘were’, how they might be analysed and why they might
be interesting, we quickly ran into disciplinary dead ends. We both ran out
of things to say. In each case, this was arguably because we reached the limits
of our familiar territory, running out of context – not only with respect to
the object, but also in terms of an organizing thread of theoretical debate and
a guiding logic of enquiry. What started as a simple exercise, a game even,
Artefacts between disciplines 119
Figure 1 A Neolithic stone axe ‘roughout’ from the Great Langdale axe quarry in Cumbria.
therefore opened up a rather more complex set of questions about how the
materials of culture are conceptualized and understood.
The objects
The axe Duncan gave me (Elizabeth) a lump of blue-grey stone, wedge-shaped,
flat on one side and marked with little swirls along the ridges, carefully
wrapped in a slightly worn plain grey ‘Habitat’ tea towel. This intriguing
combination – a rock covered in a tea towel – has been sitting on a table
in my office for some six months. It has attracted attention. Stones are not
commonly located in offices (especially sociologists’ offices) and numerous
people have reached out and picked it up, whether invited to do so or not.
It has prompted several to talk about geology, one person thought it was a
piece of clay, and others have immediately wielded it as if it were a weapon.
The piece of stone fits the hand quite well. It is heavy and puzzling.
For me and sometimes for other observers too, the tea towel is at least as
odd as the rock. The stone is not dirty and it is not flaking. The tea towel is not
there to protect the world from the rock so it must be the other way around.
But why should a stone need the protection of a tea towel? Sociologically, the
most plausible explanation is that the wrapping signifies that the object is a
gift (Cheal 1988). This is partially correct; although it is a loan and not a gift,
there was an element of ‘handing over’ involved.
What have the visitors to my room, some of whom are students of material
culture, made of this object? What is there to say about it? The more perplexed
have asked, ‘What is this thing?’, and most have been satisfied with my answer.
120 discussion
I have said what I was told: that it is a ‘blank’, an unfinished stone axe from a
local axe factory at Langdale in the north-west of England.1 This explanation
has almost always brought the conversation to a close: idle distraction over,
my visitors and I turn to the business of sociological research. Why is there
no more to say? Apart from the obvious reason that the real purpose of
the meeting was always something else, there is no more to say because my
visitors have no further access either to the rock or to the world from which
it came. As an abstracted lump it is surely material but it seems to have lost
its culture. In my office at least, it is literally homeless.
There are two aspects to this. First, there is nothing more we can gain
through close inspection. When it comes to stones, sociologists are generally
blind: we cannot tell for sure if those little ridges are natural or man-made,
we do not know whether it is common or distinctive as a type of rock, we
do not know its origins and we have no more data to process. Second, if we
were to make any headway at all with a raw-material cultural analysis of this
item, we would need to locate the stone in relation to a problem and then
in relation to other things and people and to the various practices and social
arrangements of which it has been a part.
Analysis cannot proceed without a question and without some line
of enquiry the stone is nothing. This is normal. In sociological and
anthropological writing, material artefacts are important not in their own
right, but as part of some other narrative. Coca-Cola matters because of
globalization (Miller 1998), sugar is interesting for the relation between
sweetness and power (Mintz 1985), dirty socks indicate the dynamics of
becoming a couple (Kaufmann 1998), shells reveal and reproduce the politics
of value (Appadurai 1986), the mass production of cotton clothing provides
insight into systems of provision and technology (Fine and Leopold 1993),
door closers help in demonstrating human delegation to non-human actors
(Latour 1988), and so we could go on. The stone could figure in a number of
these stories: globalization, family relations, identity and innovation are all
possibilities, but which is an appropriate frame? If the stone is some kind of
evidence, then what is it evidence of?
The stone, plus the explanation ‘this is a blank, an axe head in the making,
from Langdale’, do not help. On the other hand, the explanation itself points
to a simple common-sense question. What went wrong? Having asked, ‘What
is it?’, the visitors to my office are most interested to know how the stone
fell from the pathway of axe-dom, how did it become a residue of failed
accomplishment, ending up as a non-axe?
In framing their enquiry this way, my visitor–analysts define and frame
the object in front of them in relation to the enterprise of effective axe-
making. For them, the stone is important as a tangible record of past practice.
Not all dimensions are visible but this one item represents a quite specific
configuration of material, image and competence. For example, it involves
and embodies reference to an image of a ‘finished’ axe (which it is not), it
represents the skills (or incompetences) of ‘stoneys’ (Crace 1988) in turning
rock to axe, and it reveals qualities of the material itself – which might be
flawed and which might not fit the bill. If it is an unfinished blank, why
was the work of fashioning it into an axe begun and then abandoned?
By whom and for what reasons? Which link broke? For the sociologists
who call by, it is possible to imagine an inquisition, as in Latour’s (1996)
discussion of a failed technological system, Aramis: what killed the axe? But
it is impossible to conceive of how the detective work would proceed: how
would one discover the kinds of relations and sociotechnical networks that
would have meant the stone became a finished axe, and how to get access to
relevant concepts of competence, to regimes of valuing or to images of good-
axe-ness?
Another approach, and one that is perhaps better suited to the discarded
status of this unfinished thing, is to view the stone as a material record of
the social organization of rejection, or of waste-making. The stone could
perhaps be situated in terms of the processes of meaning-making described
by Thompson in his analysis of the creation and destruction of value (1979),
or with reference to waste as a necessary dimension of consumption and
production (Strasser 1999).
Alternatively, we could treat the rock not as a trace of something that once
took place, the material remains of a once vibrant social practice, but as an
object that is now the focus of attention. In which case the question might
be, how on earth did it find its way into Lancaster’s sociology department?
Contemporary enquiries of this kind would reveal that the stone had been
selected by an archaeologist in order that it might feature as the centrepiece
of a so far inconclusive game of interdisciplinary flailing around.
These somewhat limited options suggest that it was possible to generate
broadly sociological questions prompted and inspired by the stone but not
to provide a ‘sociological analysis’ of it. Not as it stood. An archaeological
account of this same item comes later, but first we introduce the other object
of this discussion: a toothbrush.
The toothbrush Elizabeth gave me (Duncan) a pink and white toothbrush.2

Like the axe, it is also sitting in an office, prominently displayed on a desk
next to the phone. Although this is again an unusual spatial arrangement,
in the several months it has been in that position, not a single person has
commented on it.
In trying to think about why this should be so, especially when a ‘lump
of rock’ attracts so much attention, I was immediately confronted by one
important sense in which archaeology and sociology work in different ways.
That toothbrush seems, most definitely, to be of our time and our place, not
another. As a result, unlike Elizabeth, I was able to interpret and categorize
this piece of material culture immediately; it required no ‘expert’ translation.
It might, I suppose, have crossed people’s minds for a second to wonder why
I should have a toothbrush in my office at all, especially sitting on my desk.
But, ultimately, the familiarity of the object overpowered those questions, and
no one ever asked. The Neolithic axe, on the other hand, does not ‘belong’
in the same way. While it is not far from its own place, having moved only
from the Lake District to Lancaster (even if, with me, via various other places
on the way), it is definitely not of our time. The unfamiliarity of the object
made people ask questions. Why? What? How?
122 discussion
Figure 2 A 1995 (?) pink and white plastic ‘Signal EXPERT’ toothbrush from (?).
Putting aside the slight feelings of jealousy that arose because of the
differences between our parallel projects – people were helping Elizabeth to
think about the axe, but I was entirely on my own with my toothbrush –
I reminded myself to think, archaeologically, about the artefact I had
been given. The object’s familiarity placed me in an unfamiliar position
in this regard: I had to describe it ‘archaeologically’, but it was not an
‘archaeological’ artefact in any straightforward way.
The first thing that struck me about it was its slightly unpleasant colour –
it would probably be called a dusky pink, on white. My toothbrushes at
home are always blue. Overall, the brush measures 19 cm long, and at its
widest is 12 mm across. Most of it is manufactured from a very shiny white
plastic, in which a seam (probably from a mould) can be made out running
down its length. At the business end, the head is rectangular, although at the
very tip it tapers in. Eleven rows of bristles echo the shape of the head, and
when observed in cross-section form a zigzag, presumably to help its user
get into those awkward and troublesome gaps. Most of the handle of the
brush is covered in a pink rubbery substance, front and back. On the front,
the words ‘Signal EXPERT’ are printed in white, in what seems a slightly
outmoded font. Four upstanding curved lines stand proud from the rubber at
the top end of the handle, presumably designed to stop your thumb slipping
whilst you brush. They are matched by four straight lines on the reverse;
and above them, four more, moulded this time into the brilliant white. A
dimple at the other end of the rubber handle seems to be a further trace of the
manufacturing process, the point where the pink stuff was poured into a void
Figure 3 Toothbrush dial detail.
in the white. If you look very closely, next to the dimple, a number – 4283 –
can be made out, stamped (not moulded) into the white plastic. It does not
seem to be a use-by date, but can each brush really have its own number? If
so, it is good to know that – in some small way – these stereotypically mass
produced objects are more individual than we think.
Technologically, it does not strike me as particularly ‘advanced’ in
comparison to the rows of toothbrushes that confront you in chemist shops
nowadays: toothbrushes are now made in five different colours, not just two;
with batteries that make them vibrate as you brush; and with bristles (no
longer perhaps the right word) of three separate materials, some of which
warn you when it’s time to change to a new model.
This latter feature, a prime example of objects having agency (Gell 1998),
brings me to the only really outstanding feature of my particular brush –
a curious little dial at the bottom end of the handle (Figure 3). The dial
comprises primarily a small plastic disc with scalloped edges. It measures
approximately 6 mm across. Three-quarters of its face are red, the remaining
quarter is white. With a bit of effort and some sharp finger nails, the disc can
be made to rotate. Printed onto the handle of the brush around the disc are
a series of lines and dots which resemble the face of a clock: two lines where
12 would be; one line at 3, 6 and 9; dots for all of the other numbers.
The dial reminded me, if anything, of a similar feature on the lid of a tupper-
ware box I once owned. That artefact had been designed to go in the freezer,
and the ‘clock’ was used to remind you of how long it had been in there.
The numbers represented months, not hours. This, I assumed, was essentially
what I had on my toothbrush – a reminder of when to change to the next
one.3 As dentists say, you must change to a new brush every three months. It
struck me as a much less effective reminder than bristles that change colour:
they are able to exert their agency all on their own. And who would ever
remember to turn the dial to two-o-clock on purchasing a brush in February?
My archaeological tendency to use the comparable features of objects to
cross-reference their dates seemed to have got me somewhere. The dial added
weight to my general impression that the object as a whole was slightly
antiquated, confirming my suspicions that this model – the Signal EXPERT –
was not quite so contemporary after all. Was it turning out, however slightly,
to be archaeology of a sort? At a guess, I would put it at perhaps ten or
fifteen years old. Not quite young enough to be contemporary, but not yet
old enough to seem out of place on my desk. Had I had a 1940s toothbrush
next to my phone, people might well have asked me what it was.
124 discussion
Having satisfied the archaeologist in me by describing my artefact, and

then working out its date, I began to think what to do with it next. After
establishing these basics, archaeologically we would try to move on, to find
out about the dynamics – social and material – that a given object had
been caught up in. Unlike sociologists, archaeologists usually have no people
immediately in sight; most of the time we are forced to begin with ‘just
objects’. That is what we do.
However, in this case, I faltered. The toothbrush seemed to be, literally,
just a toothbrush. Whereas the potsherds and flint flakes I am used to dealing
with normally come as part of an assemblage of other similar (and different)
objects, this one was alone. While we often investigate refitting pieces of
pottery across a site (to tell us which pits had been filled at the same time, and
what tasks people had carried out where), or try to analyse the ‘use-wear’ on
a flint (looking for diagnostic microscopic traces that could tell us if it had
been used to cut meat or harvest wheat), the toothbrush offered little hope
in this regard. It had no material allies, and had never been used. As with
Elizabeth’s axe, the lack of any obvious signs of use raised the question of
how this brush had fallen from the pathway to toothbrushdom.
Nor did the toothbrush have a place. While those flint flakes and potsherds
are found somewhere – in a rubbish pit or a posthole or a ditch – this object
had arrived alone in the post. A toothbrush in a bathroom cabinet, or a
supermarket, or a living room, or a suitcase, or a bin, has a physical/material
context. This one had none. It was an artefact devoid of context, an
‘unstratified find’.
Occasionally, of course, archaeologists also find completely unused objects,
and what we would call ‘stray finds’ (an arrowhead found by a farmer whilst
ploughing, a gold torc dug up by a metal-detectorist in a field). In the case
of the former, usually, the presence of a context enables us to move on from
the artefact itself: a pristine pot or perfect flint knife – in a grave – suggests
that the object may have been made specifically for the burial, for example.
In the case of stray finds, it is more difficult to say something meaningful. But
not impossible. The project I am currently working on involves vast numbers
of Iron Age objects with no context – iron swords dredged out of rivers,
bronze horse harnesses found on the surface of fields. But even in these cases,
we usually have a ‘find spot’. We can tell that a sword came from the River
Witham near Washingborough in Lincolnshire, or that a bridle bit was found
in the Polden Hills in Somerset. It then becomes possible to compare the
location of that sword, or that bridle bit, to those of all of the others that
have been found. And from there it is always possible to move on. Even stray
finds can be given a context of sorts.
I had no such information about my toothbrush. Without a particular
location, it seemed to have little more to tell me. My frustration with the
toothbrush’s placelessness made me worry. I was becoming daunted by this
supposedly ‘sociological’ object with its lack of context.
Elizabeth’s toothbrush In thinking about what to provide for ‘archaeological’

analysis I wanted to introduce something made of synthetic materials: plastic
was as good a case as any. So why the toothbrush? The capacity to produce
nylon bristles made it possible to mass produce toothbrushes – not just

this one, but the toothbrush as a class of object – and this close-coupled
relation between material and artefact would seem to be interesting for any
archaeologist. Any plastic toothbrush would do, but I happened to have this
pink-and-white one with the unusual little dial at the end. As Duncan spotted,
this dial represented an attempt to script or ‘configure’ (Woolgar 1991) the
toothbrush-user and ‘tell’ him or her that it was time for a change. It was
because this effort at sociotechnological configuration had failed that the
Signal EXPERT toothbrush came into my possession. It was given to me
by someone working for Unilever who used it to illustrate the difficulty of
effective material inscription.
For me, the object fitted perfectly into an ongoing debate about the relation
between design and everyday life, and about the relation between material
artefacts and practices including those of brushing teeth (Shove et al. 2007).
Setting aside the sub-plot of the dial and the prompt to replace, the object
raises all kinds of questions about what else the social and material world
must be like in order that the brush makes sense. For example, how are
the brush and associated practice (the brush-in-use) positioned with respect
to changing ideas and understandings of science (it is the Signal EXPERT),
health and beauty, not to mention an array of related ‘technologies’ ranging
from toothpaste through to the bathroom itself.
In the event, Duncan’s account skips over almost all of these themes.
Because he instantly recognizes the object as a toothbrush he thinks there
is nothing left to explain. Potential lines of enquiry are cut short by focusing
on the brush and not on the brush in actual or potential action.
Further, he is for some reason interested in details of origin and production.
He tries to work out when the toothbrush was made, and where it came from
(its ‘find spot’) and he looks for signs of use. He also provides a detailed
description of the item itself: how long is it, how many bristles does it have,
even giving dimensions in millimetres. I had never even thought to do so for
the axe or the tea towel – for me it was enough to say the stone ‘fitted the
hand quite well’.
Other aspects of Duncan’s description are just as intriguing. For example,
he does not hold back on matters of aesthetics: he does not like the pink
or the outmoded font. And he is happy to subscribe to a linear narrative of
technological progress in which he positions the hapless brush, referring to it
as ‘not particularly advanced’. By contrast, I would not even try to locate the
axe in such a scheme – not only because I lack the necessary knowledge
of what came before or of what came later, but because technological
progression would be a less compelling (possibly even suspect) theme than
the more practice-oriented questions identified above. On the other hand, I
recognize and sympathize with his frustrations at the lack of context and the
slightly ‘unreal’ way in which the toothbrush just arrived in the post. Knowing
more about the world of goods to which our objects belong(ed) is important
for us both.
Duncan’s axe In picking an object to hand over to Elizabeth I did not have a
wide array of choices. Archaeological objects, especially those I come across
126 discussion
in my work, do not generally reside in private hands – they sit in museums and
public archives, on dusty shelves. The axe was one of the few ‘archaeological’
things I actually own. Nevertheless, it did seem a very suitable object of
study – it is clearly old, being Neolithic (the period I have most written
about before). It also had an appropriate air of mystery about it, not even
resembling something that would be made today; as Elizabeth said, it is
‘heavy and puzzling’. In addition, I liked the idea of the axe returning home –
as we have said already, it comes originally from an axe quarry in the Lake
District, not too far at all from where it is currently sitting on Elizabeth’s
desk.
For me, the axe is significant for a number of reasons. The place it comes
from, a spectacular and precarious outcrop high above the Great Langdale
valley (see Edmonds 2004) is somewhere I have visited several times. The
hillside around the spot where people quarried the distinctive blue-grey stone,
from about 4000 B.C., is littered with the scars and flakes of Neolithic
stoneworking – scree slopes created entirely through the process of making
axes. Langdale axes, like those from numerous other stone sources around
Britain and Ireland, seem to have been important objects in the Neolithic.
They were moved from Scotland to Cornwall and from Cumbria to the Fens,
perhaps even acquiring value as a result of the distance over which they were
exchanged (Bradley and Edmonds 1993). The issue of place has been a very
important line of enquiry in relation to Neolithic axes – one reason why I felt
frustrated with the toothbrush’s placelessness.
The axe itself is an interesting piece of stone. The places where flakes have
been knapped from its surface are clear (to the trained eye). However, one
section remains untouched, where a vein of brown can be discerned running
through the otherwise smooth and faultless stone. It is this vein, I imagine,
that made someone in the Neolithic cast this piece aside; it was this that ended
its path to axe-dom. Presumably the vein was perceived as a weakness, a fault
in both senses, making this roughout either difficult to work any further or
impossible to use with any force once made.
Thus, for me, the axe is able to speak about its past. The distant places in
which similar axes have been found suggest that people moved or exchanged
objects over very wide distances; these material objects may have been used as
much as tokens of social relationships as for cutting down trees. The fact that
Neolithic people chose to quarry these tools from such a spectacular spot,
when other less precarious outcrops were readily available, suggests that an
element of danger during their manufacture may even have been an important
aspect of their mystique (Edmonds 2004). The fact that a fault in the stone
brought this not-quite-axe’s life to a premature end suggests that either its
aesthetics, or functionality, or perhaps an element of both, were viewed as
not quite right by the people that made it; we get an insight into someone’s
way of thinking, nearly 6,000 years ago. Despite appearances, this axe was
actually far from being ‘just an axe’.
In Elizabeth’s version of the axe, which she persistently refers to as a lump
of rock, perhaps unsurprisingly its present-day context is immediately evoked,
the ‘Habitat’ tea towel surrounding it being seen as ‘at least as odd as the rock’.
While, in many ways, this is of course true, archaeology has long recognized,
and necessarily come to terms with, the strangeness of both its subject matter
(oddly shaped stones) and its practices in the present – which deem those
stones precious enough to be ‘protected from the world’ (see, for example,
Holtorf 2002). The frustrations that Elizabeth felt with the materiality of
the axe made clear to me just how important archaeological knowledge is,
in terms of understanding materials: having some idea of the multiplicity
of ‘things’ that this object fitted into, of roughly when it was made, that
the flake scars are indeed human-effected. In terms of the object’s context,
I became acutely aware of the amount of work upon which archaeological
understandings are built. Over the past 150 years or so in which archaeology
has existed, huge effort has been invested in understanding the Neolithic (as
a period in the past), in recognizing these rocks not as a ‘faerie’s weapons’
or ‘lightning bolts’ but as tools (see Trigger 1989, 52–55), of plotting all of
the known Langdale axes across Britain so that patterns of exchange become
visible. Only as a result of this work has it become possible to move beyond
these objects and their mystique, to discuss issues – such as ‘the various
practices and social arrangements of which it was a part’ – that, for Elizabeth,
seemed to be entirely absent. It is possible for questions to emerge from the
material at many different levels. But these are not given to you lightly. When
you are not dealing with the present, context and understanding only come
through attention to the material: measuring, describing, plotting, identifying
technological change (which in no way implies technological progress, as
Elizabeth accused) – the archaeology I tried to ‘do’ on the toothbrush.
Discussion: artefacts between disciplines

In approaching the ‘problem’ of interdisciplinary enquiry, we chose not to
transfer a set of terms as Beer suggests in the quote at the beginning of this
paper, but instead swapped materials which would act as ‘boundary objects’
(Strathern 2004). While questions of epistemology and ontology are never far
away, and while they lie behind much of the conversation sketched above,
it was never our intention to explore these in any great depth. It would
certainly be possible to provide a more philosophically detailed analysis of
the theoretical and methodological positions juxtaposed in this article but
our more modest aim was simply to take a break – to cast new light on our
respective disciplines and on the branches of archaeology and sociology that
we inhabit, by making short journeys into neighbouring territory.
We end by commenting briefly on those aspects that were indeed thrown
into sharp relief by this exercise in intellectual tourism, exploring the
implications it has in relation to interdisciplinary working more generally.
In confronting the axe and the toothbrush, we both enacted and tacitly
reproduced many normally unspoken conventions of description and analysis.
Duncan reached for a ruler. Elizabeth used the axe-rock as the centrepiece
of a social survey, focusing more on responses to the object than on the
artefact itself. Other differences emerged when taking photos: what should
be foregrounded, and how should these items be framed? In short, the
process of analysing unfamiliar objects – which at times strayed almost
into methodological pastiche – brought familiar ways of working into
focus, revealing sets of normally unthinking methodological reflexes. In
128 discussion
‘appropriating’ these artefacts, as Beer would have it, we were not so much
learning new methods as relearning old ones, which we ourselves had spent
many years acquiring.
In terms of the intellectual focus of the two disciplines, our study
demonstrated that in many ways we both wanted to address essentially similar
questions: what is (or was) the social, cultural and material world in which our
objects made sense, and why was this so? For both of us, investigation of the
artefact alone was a dead end. Although the toothbrush is recognizable and
familiar, whereas the axe requires a trained eye to identify it, in neither case
do we really know what each object is ‘for’ or into what sets of practices
it fits. More is required to locate, position, frame and interpret or attribute
meaning: ‘contexts and the clarity they bring do not just happen, they have
to be discovered’ (Barrett 2006, 194); or, perhaps more accurately, they have
to be constructed.
When dealing both with the past and with the present, insights into material
culture are the result of intellectual labour, but, as this exercise suggests, the
nature of the heavy work involved is indeed somewhat different. Despite
sharing the same question, our reflex methodologies reflect and embody
different traditions born of working either with the past or with the present.
We are actually dealing with substantially different worlds, which seemingly
require different ways of working. As a result, temporary interdisciplinary
transgression was not as easy as we had at first hoped.
For many sociologists, the people, practices and context of an object are
routinely taken for granted or folded into the background of their enquiry.
Others view artefacts as ‘congealed social relations’ (Grint and Woolgar 1997,
97) and it is in the spirit of this approach that our specific object, a Signal
EXPERT toothbrush, was actually asked to stand for a whole series of other
practices. Elizabeth wanted the toothbrush to be situated in terms of broader
traditions of practice and networks of technologies. It was in some senses used
as a metonym – a single object which could represent many other things and
other ideas (the ‘affordances’ of different materials, concerns about health,
beauty in the modern world).
Within an archaeological framework, it is more difficult to situate
individual artefacts within their wider context in such a straightforward way.
As a result, specific objects – like the Langdale axe under discussion here –
come to be scrutinized in detail. Analysis is focused much more on the artefacts
themselves because past practices cannot be assumed; they need to be inferred
from direct material evidence (either on the object itself, as with the flake scars
on the axe, or in the relationships between artefacts). In the same way, because
we are not dealing with globalized distributions and mass consumption in the
Neolithic, networks of objects are not immediately visible. As a result, the
measurement, dating and distribution of material culture takes on greater
significance – it simply matters much more.
Our study raised further questions in terms of the relation between physical
space and temporality. Whilst the axe on Elizabeth’s desk evoked comment
from almost everyone who saw it, Duncan’s toothbrush – also on a desk – was
totally ignored. Although both objects were in equally unusual or unexpected
places, they prompted quite different types of reaction. This brought home
the extent to which temporality informs our understanding of objects and the
spaces they occupy and make: the contemporary toothbrush was capable of
travelling (from bathroom to office) without comment but not the axe. Was
it the movement from the Neolithic to the present day that made this stone
more visible, was it a matter of size, or of incongruity? The point is not to
answer these questions but to notice that items can be ‘out of place’ because
they are also ‘out of time’, and that the relation between these two dimensions
is relevant for the status and visibility of material culture.
It was an accident that the toothbrush and the axe were both sociotechnical
‘failures’, but this aspect prompted us both to reflect on the erosion of material
culture. Duncan’s toothbrush is no longer made and has failed as a design,
yet toothbrushes – as a generic class of goods – continue to be produced in
very large numbers. This is not so for stone axes in Britain (if not in other
parts of the world – see, for example, Pétrequin 1993), an observation which
begs the further question, what led to the demise not just of this one axe,
but of axe-based society in general? Thinking ahead, it is conceivable that
archaeologists of the future might find themselves asking similar questions of
a pink and white brush (and other versions made in blue) turned up in 20th-
century landfills. It is possible that they may ask what it was that killed brush-
based society. Was it the development of genetically engineered teeth, new
technologies and conventions of beauty, a change in diet, or social disapproval
of putting filthy objects into the mouth on a regular basis? However, it is
equally possible that toothbrushes will never come into focus for the present
in the way that axes have done for the Neolithic. There are so many objects
now, distributed across the globe, that our focus, our scales of enquiry, may
have to change and adapt in order to answer different questions (see Strathern
1991 for a discussion of the implications of working at different scales).
This consideration of ‘future archaeologies’ (Brace and Harvey 2006)
brings us back to the role of the past in our work: a superficially obvious
attribute of one of our two disciplines at least. At one level, it could be argued
that while archaeology is easily able to draw on the antiquity of its finds
and the mystery of the unknown, sociology has to work harder at creating
alterity. For sociology, mystery is not created by time but resides even in the
most familiar, everyday objects – like a plastic toothbrush. Making seemingly
normal arrangements strange is stock in trade, and an often essential part
of sociological enquiry (Becker 1998). By contrast, it might be argued that
much archaeological work is about making strange things ordinary: all of the
plotting, measuring and describing does indeed serve to render the unusual
and diffuse coherent. However, that is not where archaeology necessarily
ends. Part of the attraction of the past – of the axe – is its strangeness,
and we must be careful not to erode that (Thomas 1999, chapter 1). It can
even be argued that archaeology has a political duty to convey that sense of
otherness in order to challenge the present (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987). Both
disciplines therefore have a role to play in making the present unfamiliar.
Concluding comments
Our interdisciplinary experiment – and the dialogue that resulted from it –
revealed both similarities and differences in the aims and methods of our
130 discussion
respective subjects. The first, and in many ways firmest, conclusion to emerge
out of our conversation is that interdisciplinary dialogue presents specific
challenges. Whilst, in some senses, archaeology and sociology have similar
goals – to make the familiar strange, to understand objects’ contexts, to
appreciate the materials of culture and the relation between things and
practices – we came to realize that the ways in which they achieve these
are in fact very different. These differences are not, however, an accident of
disciplinary separation or a case of parallel evolution, but have come about
for very good reasons. Each discipline (and each sub-discipline within) deals
with a very different set of materials and concepts, and can and therefore
does take entirely different things for granted. Being already framed this way,
the materials of different subjects resist ‘inappropriate’ forms of analysis:
techniques cannot simply be transferred. Similarly, the learning of different
analytical methods and skills cannot be an immediate process: there are
good reasons why others have spent years acquiring them. It is important
to approach interdisciplinary work with these observations in mind; as we
discovered, slipping into another discipline is not necessarily something that
can just be ‘done’.
A second, in some ways more positive, conclusion is that interdisciplinary
dialogue can have significant benefits. For a start, our conversation revealed
some of the well-founded reasons why we do feel at home in our respective
disciplines. In venturing briefly into another world, we both learnt much
about our own ways of operating; the familiar was made unfamiliar in that
sense too. As a result, we will now approach our axes and our toothbrushes,
as archaeological and sociological objects, with a renewed appreciation of
the theoretical and methodological qualities of what we do. In addition,
despite the fact that we both quickly ran into disciplinary dead ends, we did
learn things from each other’s ways of working. Duncan, for example, will
approach his archaeology reminded of the fact that new materials (such as
plastic ‘bristles’) can themselves have serious effects on the distribution of
‘their’ respective objects. He will also take care to consider the macro-scale
trajectories (globalization, power, love) in which seemingly straightforward
objects (Coca-Cola, sugar, dirty socks, axes even) are caught up. Elizabeth on
the other hand has a renewed interest in objects as ‘traces’ of social relations
and in the everyday materials of material culture. Also curious about the
potential of what were, to her, new techniques of description, representation
and measurement, she will now carry a ruler with her at all times.
Finally, it is important to recognize that this has been a highly restricted
dialogue involving only two objects, disciplines and authors. Having started
like this, it is tempting to speculate on the kind of conversation that might
have ensued had other things, theories and people been involved. What
if sociology had been replaced by geography, or if geology had stood
in place of archaeology? What new points would have emerged had we
included a historian and an anthropologist in our discussion? Would a
four-way debate have generated substantially different observations from
those identified above, and if so, what would they have been? Fundamental
questions of theory and method are the stuff of philosophical debate and
there is a sense in which such debates resolve or at least outline familiar
Objects as such and objects in contexts 131
tramlines of enquiry. Our exercise has probably not generated any really
new philosophical challenges, yet our more practical and also more playful
approach suggests that there is scope for undertaking experiments and
exercises that revisit such territory from different points of view. By using
objects, rather than concepts or terminologies as our initial point of departure,
we have found new ways of enjoying and appreciating features of method and
orientation, catching glimpses of the everyday significance of difference that
are paradoxically but typically obscured by heavy-duty theory. This is not
meant as a criticism of the philosophy of enquiry: abstraction and reflection
of this kind are surely important. But in everyday research, and especially
in relation to interdisciplinary enquiry, it is important to develop ways of
making these positions tangible, accessible and therefore amenable to review
and innovation. It is in this spirit that we end with a practical suggestion:
next time you embark on an interdisciplinary project, start by swapping
some small object and spend a moment discussing and describing it as we
have done above. If our experience is anything to go by, this method, derived
more from the school playground than from the lecture room, promises to be
intriguing, surprising and intellectually rewarding.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Matthew Barac and Lesley McFadyen for inviting
us to speak at Connected Space (University of Cambridge, May 2005),
the conference where our interdisciplinary conversation first began; Anwen
Cooper, Mark Gillings, Lesley McFadyen and Thomas Yarrow for their
comments on an earlier version of this paper; and the Archaeological
dialogues editorial committee and other referees for their more recent insights
and suggestions.
Notes
1 In what follows, I believe this story but I have no basis on which to do so other than trust.
2 The fact that Duncan’s toothbrush was pink, and Elizabeth’s rock blueish grey, was
entirely coincidental. We were not intending to introduce, or indeed subvert, any gender
stereotypes.
3 This interpretation was subsequently confirmed by Elizabeth.

Objects as such and objects in contexts. Things and equipment

Hans Peter Hahn
In the last two or three decades, material culture as a topic of scientific study
has experienced a real boom. Focusing on everyday objects, their contexts and
meanings, material culture studies offers important approaches for several
disciplines within the humanities. The aim of this new wave of research
132 discussion
is to improve the understanding of social practices in a wider sense and

thereby contribute to the understanding of societies themselves. Given this
ambitious goal, and the wide range of disciplines engaged in studying material
culture, the new approach will only have a future if interdisciplinary debates
are initiated and succeed in making reciprocal benefits. In particular, the
complementarities of different disciplinary methodologies should result in
useful synergies. If material culture studies is seen only as a domain within
anthropology (or any other discipline) then we risk it coming to a dead end
(Bertrand and Jewsiewicki 1999, 181; Hahn 2005, 12). This is the larger
context in which I see the relevance of the present essay and, before going
into details, I would like to express my support to the ideas expressed by
Garrow and Shove.
As a matter of fact, it is difficult to imagine greater differences in the
methodology of studying material culture than those between sociology and
archaeology. On the one hand, archaeology is concerned with distributions of
artefacts, their chronologies and technologies. On the other hand, the domains
of material-culture research in sociology deal with lifestyles, social status and
meanings of things. In the context of this disciplinary gap, the courageous
undertaking by the authors of the present article has particular merits. If we
accept, just for the purpose of making the disciplinary gap clearer, an equation
of sociology with anthropology, the dispute between the anthropologist
Polly Wiessner (1985) and the archaeologist James Sackett (1985) makes
obvious how differently objects may be perceived from different disciplinary
perspectives. Wiessner and Sackett debated the relevance of specific material
forms to ethnic identity. They both did field research among the !Kung bush
people in Southern Africa, but their perspectives on the arrowheads they
observed in the field and the role of these objects in ethnic identity are
quite different. The focus of Wiessner’s interpretation is discourse about the
weapons (this is ‘speaking about things’), and she describes different styles
as ‘isochrestic variations’. In contrast, Sackett restricts his view to the objects
themselves. He holds that objects are part of a ‘style’ and that there is no
need to investigate discourse. Wiessner’s approach uses contexts; in contrast,
the archaeologist Sackett rejects the assumption that contexts are necessary
to identify ‘ethnic styles’, as evidence comes from the objects themselves. But,
Wiessner (1989) replies, how could people themselves consider an object as
being part of a particular style without having an idea about what she calls
‘an ideal form’?
Obviously there are great differences between how things are perceived
by archaeologists and by anthropologists. As Kobylinski (1989) states,
archaeologists tend to adopt the image of the ‘passive object’ – the continuous
presence of the object (in a given society and at a given time) is taken as a
primary evidence of its relevance and meaning. The paradigm of the ‘active
object’, in contrast, corresponds with the anthropologists’ point of view.
Ethnographic objects do not explain themselves but, in order to be explained,
they need the documentation of activities: contexts and meanings. This very
brief characterization of the disciplinary approaches makes somewhat clearer
what happened to the toothbrush (a scientific description was produced) and
to the stone axe (people were asked what they thought about it). So far,
Objects as such and objects in contexts 133
both scientists intuitively followed the lines of their disciplinary traditions

and both showed how limited these approaches are when it comes to totally
unfamiliar objects. It is obvious that a widening of the disciplinary approach
may enhance the methodology in anthropology and in archaeology. So my
first comment on the interdisciplinary experiment is this: it is not so much
a question of ‘slipping into another discipline’ as of understanding other
disciplines’ methods as an option to enlarge one’s own methodology.
But, beyond the effects of what I call the disciplinary gap, the overall setting
of the authors’ experiment merits a closer look. The authors claim to have
a spontaneous and unbiased perspective. My impression is that they proceed
in a very particular way: they practise a radical isolation of the single object,
thereby assuming that material culture’s most elementary units of research
are isolated objects. This is not always the case – not in archaeology and not
in sociology. Isolating an object might have been a popular method in earlier
times of the disciplines’ development, but today it must be considered as a
specific approach, which needs to be justified. This is how I understand the
authors’ argument that their approach might help to preserve the ‘unfamiliar
position’ of the things.
This particular aspect of Garrow and Shove’s approach reminds me of
the methods of ‘objective hermeneutics’, long practised by Ulrich Oevermann
(1987). He and members of his research group showed by various examples
(of archaeological artefacts as well as of contemporary objects; cf. Jung 2003;
2005) the possibilities and limits of an approach centred on an isolated
object. Oevermann holds that the interpretative act, based on an object’s
physical properties alone, may pass through different stages, each time
integrating different horizons of technology, everyday experience and free-
floating associations, and finally reaching a valid and specific interpretation.
Oevermann and his disciples voluntarily strip an object of any
accompanying text or oral explanation. Thus they achieve an objectivity,
which, they claim, is of universal relevance, which applies for people in any
society. Oevermann’s approach has been much debated and his claim to limit
the scope of information to ‘what is in the object per se’ may not convince
everyone. But the parallels with the interdisciplinary experiment of the present
authors are obvious. The merits of ‘objective hermeneutics’ are close to what
the authors call ‘making the present unfamiliar’. So my second comment on
the experiment is that a particular approach has been chosen. This approach
focuses on the object per se, a strategy which is not congruent with the range
of methods used in material-culture studies in either of the disciplines. But this
strategy is legitimate if it is in the interest of understanding the particularities
of a given object.
I have already mentioned the two dominant methods exercised in the
experiment: documenting discourses about things; and establishing a scientific
description of things by observing and measuring. Oevermann’s idea about
objective hermeneutics provides an approach reaching beyond this, and I
will add a second perspective, which merits a mention because it takes
isolated objects as a starting point: the phenomenological approach of Martin
Heidegger (Heidegger 2002; Harman 2007), who distinguished between
‘things’, ‘works’ and ‘equipment’. In Heidegger’s thought, the differentiation
134 discussion
is based upon the relationship established between people and the particular
element of their material environment in question. Thus ‘things’ and ‘works’
seem to have an autonomous existence, like rocks being shaped by nature and
masterpieces of art, being works which remain unchanged, receiving attention
over time. But, not astonishingly, both objects in the interdisciplinary
experiment would have been classified by Heidegger not as things but as
‘equipment’; that is, things which are best explained not by their intrinsic
properties but by the uses people make of them. Heidegger argues that
whatever is ‘equipment’ should be approached by looking at the moments
of their practical usage.1 This is close to the idea of contexts, but not the
same. Contexts may be understood as something meaningful ascribed to a
thing; Heidegger’s ‘moments of practical usage’ are more implicit – they do
not always comprise what we call ‘meaning’. Objects like the toothbrush
and the stone axe are usable equipment, i.e. devices or tools, which probably
never had much meaning beyond their uses. This is why things are of relevance
beyond their design or semiotics (Attfield 2000, 50).
Thus the potential usages, rather than the measurable aspects of the object’s
form and the discourses, should be placed in the middle of the examination.
Some potential uses are discussed by the authors, but their analysis somehow
misses the most obvious. Taking the example of the toothbrush, what does
it mean to use an object twice a day, to use it in a bathroom, being the most
private area of the home? What is the intimacy of a toothbrush, which is
probably never touched by another person after being used for the first time?
Garrow seems to be disappointed that everybody took familiarity with the
toothbrush for granted. But is this kind of regular use of an everyday tool
not something that always ‘goes without saying’? Does the bodily experience
count less because it is not a topic of explicit reflection? I do not think so and
a close description should consider even the emotional relationship between
the user and the object (Slater and Miller 2007).
Returning once again to the disciplines and their standard methods of
describing objects, more similarities come into view. As a matter of fact, in
both disciplines observing practical usage is at the heart of the methodological
approaches. Thus archaeologists treat excavation sites as informants, and
anthropologists or sociologists will interview and observe users and owners
of objects as sources of information. In both cases it is not the object itself but
its contexts and usages which are in the focus of investigation. Garrow and
Shove did not explore this dimension here: they did not use the toothbrush
to clean the teeth and they did not try to cut a branch of wood with the
help of the stone axe. This kind of experiment would have led them to a
closer description of how this equipment influences the interaction between
people and their environments. But probably this was not the intention of the
dialogue between disciplines as the authors had designed it.
My remarks should be understood as an encouragement to intensify and to
enhance the authors’ approach, not as a criticism. The authors’ undertaking
has all the merits of initiating a debate about the limits of different disciplinary
methodologies. I therefore understand this contribution as a beginning of a
growing exchange about what is needed to understand material culture. In
conclusion I wish to express once again my full support of the authors’
dialogue, which should be continued.
Artefacts in quarantine? 135
Note
1 ‘It must be in this process of usage that the equipmentality of the equipment actually
confronts us. But on the contrary, as long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general,
or merely look at the shoes as they stand there in the picture, empty and unused, we will
never learn what the equipmental being of equipment in truth is’ (Heidegger 2002, 13).

Artefacts in quarantine? Carl Knappett
Encountering affordances
As the authors situate the discussion in their offices, let me also begin in mine.
On my way home from the office there will be many things around me. They
will mostly be familiar and go largely unnoticed. I will take my keys off the
desk and lock the door behind me. I will walk along the corridor, through the
swing doors, down the stairs, unlock my bike, and so on. Desk, keys, door,
carpet, windows, stairs, lock, bike – these are all objects with which I interact.
But do I necessarily notice them? As long as there is ‘smooth coping’, as long
as these objects are ready to hand (Wheeler 2005, 129), then they remain in
the background. These are not objects that hold me in their gaze; I do not
‘encounter’ them, in the sense of encountering, meeting or bumping into a
person.
But in some, perhaps relatively rare, circumstances we do ‘encounter’
artefacts. This might occur in a museum, an art gallery, a shop or even
in an archaeological excavation. We might look, touch, smell, listen or
even taste – attempting to make an object of a thing (on transformations
of ‘things’ into ‘objects’, and on ‘thing theory’, see Brown 2001; 2003;
and Sev Fowles’s website http://www.columbia.edu/∼sf2220/TT2007/web-
content/index.html). We might be faced with something unfamiliar, and
struggle to make sense of it in isolation, or the thing might be familiar but in
an unlikely setting. These are encounters. In Heidegger’s terms they would be
classed as ‘present at hand’.
What Duncan Garrow and Elizabeth Shove have set up is a series of
encounters. On the one hand they have selected an unfamiliar artefact
category (unfinished Neolithic axe) and set it up for viewing; on the other a
familiar artefact category (toothbrush) is chosen, albeit placed in an unlikely
location on an office desk. Their experiments are thus not designed in such a
way that they might explore the phenomena of smooth coping or readiness
to hand. This is not to say that their endeavour is irrelevant or invalid, simply
that it can only speak to a limited register, that of the encounter. I say limited,
because I imagine that most human interaction with material culture takes the
form of smooth coping, such that artefacts are experienced not ‘as aggregates
of natural physical mass, but rather as a range of functions or effects that we
rely upon’ (Harman 2002, 18; original emphasis).
136 discussion
Let me elaborate a little further, employing the concept of affordances. It is

relatively rare to interact with an artefact in an isolated, decontextualized
way. My stapler sits on my desk in front of me, ready to hand, full of
staples (usually), and makes sense in my paper-bound office, through which
drafts blow when I open the window, and where I do not wish to get papers
mixed up. The stapler has its own particular material affordances – weight,
flexibility, staple size and so on – but just as importantly the overall situation
has affordances too (see also Knappett 2004). If affordances for skilled,
directed action are to a large extent contextual and relational, then it will
clearly be difficult to understand an object’s identity when its relations are
removed or obfuscated. Furthermore, to understand an artefact we often draw
upon both ‘first-hand’ and ‘second-hand’ experience (Windsor 2004). Given
the considerable range of second-hand or ‘indirect’ experience available to
most adults, there must presumably be some prompts in the situation to hint
at which might be most relevant. Remove those situational prompts, and it is
difficult then to find the appropriate second-hand experience for the situation.
I think it is everyday settings of these kinds that are truly challenging when
it comes to trying to understand material culture. I therefore find it a little
disappointing that the experiment here simply cannot begin to access these
registers. Nonetheless, there is considerable interest to be found in the register
of the encounter. We should just not be surprised that, when confronted with
any artefact ripped away from its relationships, whether a toothbrush or an
axe, we struggle to make much sense of it. And this isolation and displacement
intrinsic to Garrow and Shove’s exercise reminds me of the work of some of
the surrealists.
Surreal objects
Garrow selects a ‘strange’ object that he, as an archaeologist, is able to make
‘ordinary’, but which to a non-archaeologist, such as Shove, seems destined
to remain strange. Shove takes a familiar object, but this becomes strange to
Garrow in the unfamiliar context of this exercise and his (archaeological)
office. This represents in microcosm what each author says about their
respective disciplines: the need in archaeology to make the strange ordinary,
and in sociology vice versa. We should not omit anthropology from this,
as a similar experiment has recently been conducted within the pages of
Archaeological dialogues by anthropologist Tim Ingold (Ingold 2007). He
places a wet stone on his office desk, and urges readers to do the same.
Over time the stone changes as it dries; Ingold seeks to show how material
surfaces are affected not only by substance but also by the medium in which
the substance is immersed. Is this playful displacement of an artefact – which
Garrow and Shove reprise in uncanny fashion – a step towards a ‘surrealist’
methodology in the social sciences?
This desire to transform the strange or ordinary status of artefacts
reprises the surrealist practice of taking familiar objects and making them
unreal and fantastical. One need only think of Oppenheim’s ‘Objet’ (a fur-
covered teacup, saucer and spoon), Duchamp’s Bottle Rack or Dali’s Lobster
Telephone. In the encounter with these startling objects we not only look at
them, but they project their gaze back on us (Elkins 1997; Mitchell 2005).
Artefacts in quarantine? 137
Concocting new encounters, such that an uncontemplated physical thing

becomes a dream object that turns its own desires onto us, forces us to
realize that our perception of things is always incomplete – and Schwenger
argues that this gives rise to melancholy (Schwenger 2006). Our authors
may confess to a playful approach, but is there some sadness, frustration
and melancholy too, at the incompleteness of their perception of axe and
toothbrush, staring back at them from their desks?
Interdisciplinarity
This playful approach extends from the artefacts themselves to the nature of
their interdisciplinary project as a whole. I believe it is a valuable, albeit risky,
take on interdisciplinarity that can very easily provoke strong reactions: some
see playful dialogues of this kind as ‘extremely personalised and subjective
meditations that ultimately reflect little upon ancient experience’ (Meskell
2004, 1). Such accusations do hold some truth, but at the same time can seem
a little dismissive in closing down our options for discussing material culture.
The light touch adopted by Garrow and Shove may not appeal to the more
self-consciously serious scholar, but they nonetheless succeed in conveying
a number of important points about both materiality and interdisciplinarity
that might not have emerged from a different kind of study.
Perhaps one victim of this light tough is the lack of discussion in their paper
of the wider literature on the nature of interdisciplinarity. As has recently
been highlighted by Isayev (2006), there have been a number of initiatives
tackling this problem, from the 1996 Gulbenkian Commission through to the
2006 British Academy Workshop. Isayev refers to a distinction between two
modes of collaborative research: ‘Mode One’ is long-term and is predicated
on ‘the framing of new questions through an integrated approach from the
outset’ (Isayev 2006, 600). Outcomes may be of a new kind unanticipated in
either discipline, with the potential for paradigm shifts. ‘Mode Two’ research
is short-term and addresses predetermined questions, with the disciplines
keeping parallel trajectories. Considered in this context, the study of Garrow
and Shove falls into the Mode Two category, which is evidently more limited
than Mode One. However, there is no reason why an initial pilot project
of Mode One type should not beget a Mode Two project. Were Garrow
and Shove to develop a long-term project, with an integrated sociological–
archaeological approach from the outset, then we might see the depth of fresh
insight that can only really come from such concerted long-term projects. The
difficulty of such projects, yet also their necessity, is underlined by Van der
Leeuw and Redman (2002). The Archaeomedes research programme, which
ran from 1992 to 2000 under Van der Leeuw’s direction, focusing on land
degradation in south European countries, brought together 65 researchers to
develop an integrative perspective on socio-natural systems. This integrative,
Mode One research is also seen in a subsequent EU project ‘The Information
Society as a Complex System’ (ISCOM), running from 2002 to 2006 and
integrating dozens of physical and social scientists (Lane et al. in press). The
new insights emerging have demanded considerable time, investment and
patience.
138 discussion
To conclude, it seems that the ‘artefacts between disciplines’ contemplated

by Garrow and Shove are artefacts that have been marooned between
disciplines, as if held up in customs or quarantined. But with further work,
more integrative in character, artefacts might actually be more successfully
and smoothly transferred between disciplines than is currently the case.

Of tribes and territories Paul Graves-Brown
Introduction
Do good fences make good neighbours? According to their account, Duncan
Garrow and Elizabeth Shove each inhabit ‘neighbouring territory’ (p. 127)
and are undertaking an exercise in ‘intellectual tourism’ (p. 127). In the
process, they find that they live in ‘substantially different worlds’ (p. 128). It
is not for me to cast doubt on the veracity of their personal experience, but
I do not think it is representative of the state of ‘interdisciplinary working’.
Disciplines do inhabit different territories, some are quite distinct; physics and
French probably share few boundaries. Others – archaeology, sociology and
anthropology – constantly rub up against each other. Boundedness can be
emphatic where disciplines are more ‘urban’, clustered tightly around specific
methodologies and data; others are more ‘rural’, with a diversity of topics,
methods and theories which are likely to overlap with other disciplines (Becher
1989). Archaeology falls into the latter category; there are wide differences
of approach between prehistory, classical archaeology, Egyptology, historical
archaeology or archaeological science. My impression is that sociology would
also fit the rural description.
The problems arise when we try to define the boundaries of such territories,
and situate ourselves within them. Do neighbours really inhabit different
worlds where things, physical objects, have quite different meanings? Or is it
more a matter of how academics construct their professional identities, how
they define their tribal allegiances? Let us consider the toothbrush and the axe.
Having an axe to grind

From the outset, Garrow and Shove appear to have set up a straw man
to exaggerate their differences. They play off the quotidian nature of the
toothbrush and the oddness of the axe, despite the fact that both toothbrushes
and axes exist in the modern world. By comparing a ‘finished’ toothbrush
with a ‘lump of rock’ they are smuggling in a distinction which only serves
to obscure the comparison of sociology and archaeology. Garrow could have
provided a finished, hafted Neolithic axe. Shove could have provided a bag of
PVC pellets (the raw ingredients of a toothbrush). Even a finished axe head
would only be a component of a ‘finished’ artefact; what if Shove had only
supplied the bristles of a toothbrush? Unfinished, raw materials are not the
sole province of the past.
Of tribes and territories 139
Most people today are not likely to encounter a stone axe, but a ‘finished’
Neolithic axe would at least resemble a modern axe, especially if it were
hafted. A naive individual can recognize an axe head as an artefact, even
if they do not understand its purpose (Costall 1995, 471); as Garrow and
Shove mention, stone axe heads were once considered ‘faerie’s weapons’
(p. 127). They attempt to underline their distinction by claiming that
anything not totally ‘modern’ is likely to seem ‘out of place,’ even a ‘1940s
toothbrush’ (p. 123). Yet the basic design of the toothbrush has remained
pretty much the same since those manufactured by William Addis in the
1780s. Toothbrushes also have an archaeology – they are documented in
accounts of the 19th-century bourgeoisie of Columbia (Gaitán 2005) or
in the archaeology of the First World War (Saunders 2004). They may
be unfamiliar, professionally, to a prehistorian who does not work with
historical and contemporary archaeology, but this is more a product of the
‘rural’ character of archaeological territory than it is a matter of terra nova
for archaeology. Similarly, once you get past the fact that the specific ‘axe’ in
question is just a ‘lump of rock’, there is plenty for the sociologist to draw on
in thinking about axes. The authors themselves mention Pétrequin’s (1993)
work on contemporary stone axe-makers in Irian Jaya; one might also look
at other sociological studies of cutting tools (e.g. Sigaut 1991).
In setting up the dichotomy – axe vs. toothbrush, past vs. present – Garrow
and Shove seem to me to be importing a whole lot of assumptions about
progress and obsolescence. With the possible exception of some indigenous
peoples, contemporary societies are not stone ‘axe-based’, but they are still
axe-based in the same way that they are screwdriver-based, ceramic-based,
computer-based or plastic-based (see Latour 1991, 75). People still use axes.
The article seems to fall foul of what Edgerton (2006) calls ‘innovation-
centric’ thinking. The pink and white plastic is modern, if already of a slightly
dated design, the stone axe totally of the past. But in reality, where technology
is in use, we find a mixture of old and new alongside one another. Modern
steel axes often have plastic handgrips; the toothbrush is injection-moulded
using pump technology 350 years old. Even the use of stone as a raw material
is not entirely obsolete or archaic: obsidian blades are still used in surgery, the
manufacture of gun flints continued into the 20th century and in some parts
of Britain stone is still knapped for the facing of traditional-style buildings.
Fundamentally these artefacts do not, at least in practical terms, derive from
different worlds which should confound the archaeologist or sociologist.
Who are we, where do we come from?

As distinct disciplines both archaeology and sociology emerged in the mid-
to late 19th century. Indeed it would probably be fair to say that this was
the period in which most of the map of intellectual territory was carved up
into the basic disciplinary structures we are familiar with today. Yet it would
be wrong to see the disciplines as ever having had hard boundaries between
them. Whilst Max Weber, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim might be iconic
figures for sociologists (Becher 1989), their portraits would not look out
of place in an archaeologist’s office. The fact is that sociology, archaeology
and anthropology, not to mention psychology, history or geography, share a
140 discussion
great deal of intellectual heritage, and currently they are seeing convergences
of interests: ‘Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in technology as
an object of sociological investigation . . . during the 1990s technology took
on a new lease of sociological life in the form of “social studies of science
and technology”’ (Hutchby 2001, 441). With respect to material culture,
according to Featherstone (1991) the American Sociological Association
finally acquired a section dealing with ‘culture’ in 1987.
Archaeology has, of course, always been concerned with material culture,
but the areas of legitimate archaeological concern have changed markedly.
Beginning with the classical world, archaeology extended its interests into
prehistory and later into the medieval period. Yet, until recently, post-
medieval or industrial archaeology were considered peripheral, and despite
the growth in the study of 20th-century (often military) sites, there still seem to
be some that consider the contemporary past as beyond the pale. Nevertheless
archaeologists have been studying ‘modern material culture’ since the 1970s
(cf. Rathje 1979).
Thus, whilst sociology has only recently moved onto the nitty-gritty of
material culture, archaeology has only recently concerned itself with material
culture in modern contexts. In the UK at least, both are new arrivals in this
particular piece of the map. However, the permeability, not to say arbitrari-
ness, of disciplinary boundaries is emphasized if we consider the international
perspective. In the USA archaeology and anthropology are effectively parts of
the same discipline. In France the material-culture theories of archaeologist
André Leroi-Gourhan have been a defining influence on a wide variety of
disciplines, including sociology, for nearly 40 years (Graves 1994).
The Other
Where I can concur with Garrow and Shove is in the matter of alterity.
The need to get past the familiarity of the contemporary Western world is a
problem encountered by archaeologists (Graves-Brown 2000; West 1998) and
anthropologists (Jackson 1987) as well as sociologists. Indeed the problem has
social as well as intellectual dimensions: ‘For the informants, anthropologists’
accounts of the home society may be regarded as partial, obvious, repeating
what is known, but also idiosyncratic and trivial’ (Strathern 1987, 26). Yet if
we can overcome our embarrassment at specializing in the obvious, it becomes
clear that ‘the informants’ are often mistaken, and that ‘indigenous theories’
can be challenged by taking contemporary material culture seriously (Rathje
1992; Schiffer 2000).
However, I think Garrow and Shove are wrong to assume that difficulty in
establishing a viable sense of alterity is confined to the contemporary world.
Archaeologists are always being cautioned against uncritically applying their
understanding of the present in the past. Neolithic axes have been found
hafted, so some kind of assumption of axe-ness seems appropriate. Conversely
the Palaeolithic hand axe probably is not an axe at all, indeed it might not
even be a tool in any conventional sense.
The basis for finding a sense of the other lies, I think, in setting aside what
we know or think we know, and concentrating on the materiality of the things
and places we study. What concerns me in the account given by Garrow and
Of tribes and territories 141
Shove is that they seem to suggest that there are different ‘materialities’ for ar-
chaeologists and sociologists (in other words, the kind of social constructivism
espoused by Grint and Woolgar (1997) where meaning is ‘inscribed’ into arte-
facts) and hence that archaeologists and sociologists are making fundamen-
tally different inscriptions. Garrow and Shove themselves seem confused on
this point. Whilst they cite Woolgar’s ideas and mention ‘material inscription’
(p. 125), they also refer to ‘the “affordances” of different materials’ (p. 128),
a term borrowed from J.J. Gibson’s ‘ecological’ and decidedly realist or prag-
matist account of perception (see Costall 1995; Hutchby 2001). I suggest that
their own account, their engagement with the physical properties of the axe
and the toothbrush, confirms that while sociologists and archaeologists may
have different perspectives, they still inhabit the same material world. Iron-
ically, the debate between constructivism/relativism and realism is itself an
intellectual issue which archaeology and sociology share (see Graves-Brown
2001; Hutchby 2001; 2003; Jones 2004; Rappert 2003; Thomas 1998).
However, this does not mean we should ignore differing intellectual
traditions, techniques and bodies of knowledge. In archaeology there has
often been a tendency towards uncritical borrowing. To take a topical
example, the concept of affordance is widely used by archaeologists and
anthropologists, but I get the feeling that many who use the concept are
not totally familiar with Gibson’s oeuvre. Gibson’s work dealt with the
psychology of visual perception, and should be understood in its dialectical
opposition to the prevailing ‘cognitivist’ episteme within psychology (Costall
1995; Still and Costall 1991a). Others have worked to develop Gibson’s ideas
and at the same time he has been widely criticized, particularly, and probably
quite rightly, for the failure of the ecological approach to encompass any kind
of social dimension (Costall 1995; Noble 1991; Still and Costall 1991b). To
appreciate fully the intellectual and disciplinary context of Gibson’s ideas of
affordance may take some effort but it is not rocket science. Not to make
the effort is misguided; granted that different readers will form different
interpretations, there is no point in reinventing the wheel.
Once we set issues of perspective aside, the real problem comes down
to treating each other as the ‘Other’. Disciplinary boundaries are not
created by ideas, but by mystification of academic tribal practices (Becher
1989; Strathern 1987); only the appropriate rites of passage can allow
us access to the intellectual sanctum that endows us with the mantle of
archaeology or sociology. These authors in particular seem uncomfortable
with interdisciplinary working; their frequent references to games, the ‘school
playground’ and so on suggest a degree of nervousness, an uncertainty when
stepping beyond the familiar tribal domain. Yet it seems to me that the
essentially social and institutional bonds that define a discipline should not
be ‘inscribed’ upon the subject matter or the intellectual history that underpins
our ideas and practices. Even within disciplines, especially those of a ‘rural’
character, there are whole areas of which any one of us is ignorant. Trained
as a prehistorian, I would not claim any in-depth knowledge of classical
archaeology. Working with modern material culture, I often feel that I know
far too little about historical archaeology. The things that I am ignorant of are
extremely numerous, but they are not necessarily bounded by the perceived
142 discussion
limits of a discipline. Indeed it can be the case that sub-tribal boundaries

within disciplines are more of an obstacle than those between disciplines
(Jones 2004), and we may find at times that we have more in common with
researchers in other disciplines than we do with those in our own.
Conclusion: some practical consequences of tribalism

Despite my reservations about their paper, I should congratulate Garrow
and Shove for venturing into the murky waters of interdisciplinary work. It
just seems to me that they have misinterpreted the nature of the problem.
In reality it is not any form of intellectual boundary that confronts us,
but rather a system of social, tribal boundaries. As such the real problems
are mostly practical. Most higher-education institutions retain a traditional
departmental structure, albeit that one or two (e.g. Sussex University and the
University of Linköping) have experimented with interdisciplinary teaching
structures. These department-based structures necessarily mean that funding
interdisciplinary work is always a problem since it will be judged peripheral
or liminal. Similarly, interdisciplinary work can be considered of lower
prestige than getting to grips with the ‘core issues’ of a given discipline. The
academic struggle often seems to resemble natural selection, where the fiercest
competition is between conspecifics, rather than between different species.
This pattern is naturally reflected in publication. Many if not most journals
will tend to be discipline-specific, with those that accept interdisciplinary
contributions being in the minority. Equally, anyone attempting to publish
articles or books which break new ground outside of traditional academic
territories may well fall foul of the conservatism of peer reviewers. Indeed,
by its very nature, any interdisciplinary project will find it hard to identify
appropriate peers.
Given these practical obstacles, one might be led to despair, yet I think that
in the specific case of material-culture studies the very range of disciplines
that are involved in the subject holds some basis for optimism (see e.g. Brown
2004; de Léon 2001; Gracyk 1996; Jones 2004). There must be some powerful
reasons why material culture attracts such a diversity of scholarship. The
real question is how we go about sharing this increasingly crowded piece of
academic territory.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Alan Costall for some suggestions regarding this
commentary.

Display matters Harvey Molotch
Garrow and Shove use objects to reveal larger social and cultural patterns, in
this case – most ambitiously – epistemological and methodological practices
Display matters 143
of their respective disciplines. I think it works and I agree with their support
for future interdisciplinary object-swapping.
Speaking as a sociologist, I believe there is an asymmetry in the two
disciplines’ use of objects that the commentaries elide. While Elizabeth’s own
sociological work does indeed concentrate on artefacts, she is an exception.
She has allies and appropriately cites a number of the leaders. But the vast
sociological research enterprise treats objects, from the built form of the
contemporary city to small-scale elements like the toothbrush, as incidentals.
In most sociological work material elements arise, almost parenthetically, in
stories about the important matters like social status, demographic change
or neighbourhood organization. As silly as it may seem to readers of this
journal, the artefacts that could so enrich sociological understandings or lead
to new ones remain largely unexamined. They are still, in Latour’s term, the
‘massing masses’ (Latour 1992, 225).
The major exception in the heritage of sociology was the Frankfurt School
and modes of analysis derived from it. But commentators from this tradition
treat material goods as social bads, embedding artefacts into the larger
theoretic concerns of neo-Marxist critique. Under the aegis of the inter-
war intellectuals, many of whom emigrated to the US and UK, where their
influence spread across the social sciences, consumption was part of the
capitalist plot. Capitalism deploys consumerism to render workers quiescent.
This helped explain the lack of social revolt anticipated by Marx as well
as, in a related vein of analysis, psychological ennui and alienation among
the modern populace. This overarching product disapproval long inhibited
the kind of strategic use of goods exhibited in both Duncan and Elizabeth’s
approach to their respective objects.
Even without the Frankfurt dystopia, there are still, the experiment tells
us, disciplinary lenses (and blinders) that shape inquiry. Sociologists of
occupation have long documented the distinctive way people in particular
trades apprehend their worlds (Hughes 1984). It is an elaboration, in social
and practical terms, of the Whorfian pragmatics of cognition. The Eskimo
sees variants of snow; the carpenter takes in (and inquires about) lumber and
joins. Archaeologists and sociologists will indeed see objects differently and
lose the trail of inquiry at different points or in different ways. I was struck
by the archaeologist’s attention to concrete detail: precise measurement and
characterization (‘eleven rows of bristles’; p. 122). I take this to result from the
frequent need to make comparisons among similar but not necessarily identi-
cal objects, something that sociologists have seldom cause to do. Sociologists
might do it with types of juvenile delinquents, but not with types of objects.
When the sociologists do follow-up from the object, they look for contempo-
rary settings where the object exists in practice. Without such access, Elizabeth
and her visitors feel frustration. They lack the skills of the archaeologist more
accustomed to imputing the social from the details of the physical.
On the other hand, the standardized good seems to stymie the archaeolo-
gist; it does not enlist the skill set of identifying, classifying and comparing.
Too many toothbrushes are just the same, pre-coded by brand, model number
and even batch (the likely source of the numerical marking noticed by Duncan,
but sociologically irrelevant). This makes it an intellectual ready-made that
144 discussion
can be a basis for theorizing (as the Frankfurt people do), for observation in
use or production, or for eliciting responses in survey-like methods. Elizabeth
does fine with mass manufactured goods (as her excellent corpus of work
testifies), even trying to suck the Habitat tea towel into her line of analysis.
Garrow and Shove (and now I return to last names to shift to their
professional roles) merge their two disciplines for purposes of experiment,
displaying a common bent rather than a distinguishing one. They share in a
creative and somewhat risky empiricism, the mark of both disciplines at their
best. In that spirit, I would like to add a dimension that seems relevant to both
of their experimental settings: the displays in their two offices. All objects are
apprehended within a particular micro-context of other elements. Elizabeth
refers to the tea towel of the rock and Duncan to the desk upon which the
toothbrush sits. I would make more of this.
Both the rock and the toothbrush are looted, in the sense of being taken
away, for the purpose of an experiment, from their rightful places. The rock-
cum-axe belongs in a museum or among the archaeologists; the toothbrush
belongs on a shop shelf (and in a clamshell package), or a bathroom, or
among product-oriented sociologists like Elizabeth. The precise conditions of
their mis-placement affect how their strangeness operates.
The tea towel marks the rock as something other than a ‘real’ rock. Real
rocks live outside or under special indoor conditions, like a little landscape
at the base of house plants or somebody’s Zen garden. The towel tacitly
disrupts and signals ‘none of the above’. This helps the rock generate some
curiosity from Elizabeth’s office visitors, even as they are thwarted in further
questioning. Like the indigenous artefact moved into a museum vitrine, an
object changes meaning with its relocation to a new setting and the kind of
context its custodians provide (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). That Elizabeth
retained the conveyance cloth provided by Duncan affected the object’s
meaning even if it failed to deliver an axe head.
Now for the toothbrush on Duncan’s desk. Where is its tea towel? It needs
something – a museum mount, perhaps – to render it socially parallel to
Elizabeth’s rock. Why do people not ask about it who visit Duncan? I do
not think it is just because it is so common an item. First, the little dial
on the bottom makes it unusual, worthy of some good questions, as indeed
Elizabeth’s commentary helps to answer. People do remark on one another’s
consumer goods all the time, especially when they are distinctive in some way.
But they avoid commenting on personal items, especially when polluted or
polluting. A toothbrush on a desk is not just out of place; it is in a morally
wrong place. Something on a desk can be touched, can make contact with
dirt and germs. If that is the way Duncan wants to live, let him carry on but
there is taboo against bringing attention to such suspect ways.
So I am saying that the experiment, inventive and rich as it was, had a design
flaw. The differential response of the office visitors in the two ‘treatments’ may
be due to more than disciplinary paradigm. Some of the variation may come
from the physical specifics of exhibition. Materiality – the force that united
the two scholars in the first place – may help explain the experimental results.
At a surface level, it looks like archaeologists do not ask, at least not about
toothbrushes, and that sociologists do not look, at least not at rocks. But
as the commentaries elaborate, caution is in order on both fronts. Even if

most sociologists really do not look much, those of Elizabethan wiles are of
a different sort. And archaeologists do ask a lot of questions about social
and cultural context, at least when on more familiar product turf. More
ambitiously perhaps than envisioned by the experimenters, the next steps
are to fuse the skills and propensities to further elaborate how materiality
operates in situ and how objects can teach about society.

Artefacts between disciplines. Response to responses

Duncan Garrow and Elizabeth Shove
As is often the way, a ‘finished’ article disguises aspects of its own production
and gives an overly orderly account of theoretical and methodological moves
which were not especially planned. In responding to our commentators and
in coming clean about our own working methods we have some confessions
to make. In making these admissions we1 continue what has by now become
a conversation about matters of interdisciplinarity and about our approach
to the axe and the toothbrush.
The axe–toothbrush story developed from a casual exchange between two
strangers at a conference dinner table – the conference, Connected Space, was
designed to promote ‘interdisciplinarity’ but not in any especially organized
way. That an article emerged from this accidental encounter is itself a sign of
the serendipity of academic life and of the common and distinctive histories
and traditions on which we draw. Despite being strangers, we both belonged
to an academic community defined by common practices like going to
conferences, writing articles and responding to comments. In recognizing this
point, we also recognize that it is only because we are the academic equivalent
of Eskimos that we are willing and able to make distinctions between the
many different kinds of paradigmatic, theoretical and methodological snow.
Without shared points of reference and a relatively common language it would
have been impossible to proceed, or to develop a method of elaborating on
our differences.
This is not in itself news, so what were we really trying to do in relation
to existing debates and literature on the disciplinary structure of academic
enquiry? The honest answer is, not much. Despite some of the rather grand
claims we make in the opening section of our article (confession no. 1:
consistent with the conventions of academic writing, we use references to
‘interdisciplinarity’ to contextualize, and perhaps overplay, the significance
of our work), our ‘real’ point of entry, and in a way our real focus, was to
take seriously Hanson’s (1981) argument that observation is theory-laden.
With this in view, we wanted to reverse-engineer our different accounts of
things in order to ‘see’ the tacit framing and theoretical loading of research in
146 discussion
which we routinely engage. In other words, we wanted to focus on matters

of methodology.
Although it is true that Elizabeth identifies herself as a sociologist, and
Duncan as an archaeologist, we did not intend to write about disciplines as
such. We tried hard to avoid the traps of taking ourselves to be representative
of, or overstating the homogeneity of, either discipline. Yet there is a sense in
which the interest of the problem (what are the tacit framings that we use?)
does have to do with delineating discipline-based differences of orientation.
Now prompted to say more, we would acknowledge the institutional politics
of our ‘home’ disciplines, their ‘rural’ character and their historical and
cultural ancestry. But in venturing into this territory, it is Abbott (2001)
rather than Becher and Trowler (2001) that we take as our guide. For
Abbott, and for us, disciplinary distinctions are outcomes of political and
institutional jockeying around matters of method and epistemology. This
sometimes favours the emergence of hybrid forms like social history, women’s
studies or material-culture studies, sometimes it does not.
In Abbott’s account, branches of different disciplines often overlap with
the result that, in his example, certain sociologists have more in common with
historians than they do with other members of their ‘own’ discipline. Whether
social history then develops as a discrete ‘discipline’ in its own right (or not)
has to do with an assortment of generational and institutional features (e.g.
the availability of jobs, the ‘market’ for ideas and so forth). To return to
our own case, the ‘edge’ between forms of materially oriented sociology and
sociologically oriented archaeology is evidently blurred – it was, for instance,
genuinely surprising to discover how many of the same books and articles we
had read – but if our experience is anything to go by, there are also real and
relevant differences of craft and method. These are undoubtedly sustained
and reproduced by social institutions (most obviously those of disciplinary
training) but one of our central claims is that just as things configure those
who use them, so materiality configures lines of enquiry. On this point, it is
important to be clear: this is not at all the same as saying that things have
some kind of purity or that in concentrating on ‘materiality as such’ we set
aside what we know. We only ‘know’ materiality through paradigm and
theory-laden lines of enquiry, yet it is also the case that stuff still matters.
In this context it is intriguing to reflect on the status and future of ‘material-
culture studies’. Is this a new discipline in the making or is it better seen
as a kind of boundary space in which established agendas and methods
come into contention, leak and sometimes intersect? More normatively,
should there be some deliberate effort to invest the time and long-term
energy apparently required to arrive at ‘genuine’ interdisciplinary fusion, as
Carl Knappett suggests? We do not go along with those who want more
interdisciplinarity for its own sake, or who advocate it as a self-evident
good, like motherhood or apple pie. Instead we argue that disciplines are
necessary organizing frames without which we are blind. We also argue that
proponents of interdisciplinarity frequently overlook the similarly basic point
that problem-definitions are themselves paradigm- and theory-laden. The idea
of somehow joining together to address a ‘common problem’ or to arrive at a
‘closer description’ (see the comment by Hans Peter Hahn) routinely disguises
the prior question of the terms in which seemingly shared agendas are in fact
defined (Shove and Wouters 2006).
In this spirit we used the axe and the toothbrush as mirrors with which to
reflect and catch sight of our own (valued) paradigms and agendas.
Analysing things: accidents of enquiry

Given the weight that our commentators and to a lesser extent we ourselves
place on the characteristics of the axe and the toothbrush, we should say a
bit more about our ‘sampling’ strategy. It is time for further confessions. For
Elizabeth, it was touch and go. What would she put in the envelope? Would
it be a toothbrush or an orange plastic frog from a Christmas cracker? Both
were easy to post and both were close to hand. We each gave thought to what
to send, but those thoughts were ordered by what was only a vague sense of
the kind of discussion that might ensue (remember, we really were strangers)
and by other essentially pragmatic considerations. At this point we had no
clear intentions like those of writing about the finished and the unfinished,
or about craft and mass production, progress, or differences between things,
works and stuff. Looking back, this ad hoc approach raises an interesting
question: would our article or the comments on it have been different had
Elizabeth sent the frog, or had Duncan handed over a potsherd rather than
an axe?
It is true (though beware the risk of homogenizing disciplines and categories
of material culture) that archaeology could have something to say, generically,
about toothbrushes and that sociology could speak about axes, but for us
that definitely was not the issue. In so far as we were using the axe and the
toothbrush not as inherently revealing, interesting or important objects in
their own right, but as tools of enquiry, we hold to the view that many other
things would have served the purpose of our article just as well.
The office location of our ‘experiment’ and the reactions this generated
about matter out of place and about stripping things from context forces
another confession. We have more to say about ‘isolating’ objects, but why
the office, why did that setting matter and did it matter differently for the axe
and for the brush? The truth is revealingly but disappointingly thoughtless.
The office was simply the place in which the axe was dumped and where it
has since remained, ditto the toothbrush.
In so far as we had one at all, the plan was not to explore matter out of
place, or to study responses to it, but ‘simply’ to describe and write about
these objects – in the full knowledge that there was no such thing as ‘simple’
description. This brings us to questions of isolation and quarantine. We picked
on things with the right ‘affordances’ – they needed to be handed over or sent
in the mail. It was for this reason that Duncan was sent a toothbrush and not
an entire bathroom, complete with inhabitants. We want to make a number
of slightly but not entirely incompatible points about this feature of our work.
First, a focus on stranded artefacts does not necessarily mean that our
analysis is also denuded or stripped bare. There is, for instance, a long
tradition in science and technology studies of investigating things (the bicycle,
the electric light bulb . . .) in order to understand the social and cultural worlds
that make them possible and in which they have meaning and effect (Bijker
148 discussion
1995). Similarly, as Duncan points out in the paper, archaeologists often do

work with, and have to make something of, ‘stray finds’. Consistent with our
remarkably common interests and orientations we too spent time connecting
our objects to various social processes, real or imagined. In that sense we
resist the charge of isolationism, of analytically ignoring relations between
things or of disregarding the dynamics of practice and practical usage.
Our second comment has to do with material abstraction. In pulling stuff
like the toothbrush out of the flow and parking it in an office not on a
bathroom shelf, or in positioning the stone as a paperweight and not an
axe, are we ripping it from some true and authentic setting to which we are
consequently denied access?2 Perhaps our ‘experiment’ is better viewed as
one which, by means of association and intervention, gave these things ‘new
life’, for instance, as history, as surreal joke or ironic provocation? From this
slightly pedantic query we take the more important observation that objects
have no one identity, but an identity that is moving all the time. It is definitely
true that we are having fun – social science fluxus is an inspiring model – but
we are not at all melancholy because we do not believe in the possibility of
a ‘complete’ understanding or that things will ever be other than mute.
We are not after one ‘better’ understanding of material culture but still we
think that things matter. More generally, we share the view that the things
we study are mute but not immaterial: features like those of scale, weight
and age are of real methodological consequence (again, see Strathern 1991).
For example, we cannot send a bathroom in the post any more than we can
now observe the practices involved in making what was, in the end, not an
axe. Equally, while the toothbrush could be in use in Duncan’s bathroom
today, the axe, even if complete and finished, would have no comparably
obvious place in the routine reproduction of Elizabeth’s everyday life.
Methodologically, questions of access are important especially since traces
of material culture ‘afford’, complicate and sometimes flatly deny certain
lines of enquiry. In having our cake and eating it too, we suggest that (a)
understandings of material culture are unavoidably paradigm-bound, and
that (b) stuff structures (but does not determine) the kinds of enquiry that
can be undertaken and the kinds of question that can be asked of it.
When we first met at the conference dinner, we wondered about what an
exchange of material artefacts (rather than paragraphs, references and texts)
might reveal about familiar but usually invisible agendas, habits and practices
of enquiry. Since our commentators were invited to discuss the article, this
is what they have done. We end our response thinking about what questions
might have arisen, and what methodological changes might have been made,
had they been involved in the toothbrush or the axe exchange – either alone
or in combination with our text.
Paul Graves-Brown might have preferred it if we had sent a hafted axe and a
bag of PVC pellets, making the unfamiliarity and familiarity of our respective
objects less extreme. However, we are not sure if, in itself, this would have
produced a substantially different account. Hans Peter Hahn might have tried
to do more (but exactly what more?) to put practical usages at the centre of
his enquiry: supposing that a brush is for cleaning teeth and an axe is for
chopping trees. Carl Knappett may have wanted to view the toothbrush in
the context of its use, perhaps in circumstances similar to those of Buchli

and Lucas’s ‘excavation’ of a modern council house (Buchli and Lucas 2001).
Similarly, he might have preferred Elizabeth to have dug up the axe, perhaps
within a Neolithic enclosure or amongst other stoneworking debris in the
Langdale quarry itself. However, in providing this extra context, the ‘coping’
may well have been too ‘smooth’ (to borrow his phrase). We were glad that
our ‘experiment’ introduced a bit of roughness, its abrasive qualities bringing
the normally un-‘felt’ of routine methodology into the realm of discursive
consciousness. Harvey Molotch might have wished for a more symmetrical
arrangement in which the toothbrush was, for instance, mounted on a plinth
in a display case. This would almost certainly have elicited more responses
from visitors to Duncan’s room (if it did not, one would worry), but would
this really have produced a paper which was all that different? Perhaps not.
The swapping of toothbrush and axe was viewed from the very beginning
as a starting point. The objects began our own dialogue (at the time, we
were not sure where to begin), and that dialogue has begun an exchange now
involving four more people. While we stop short of imagining this exercise
as some kind of academic pyramid investment scheme, it is encouraging to
know that all four commentators viewed our experiment as a worthwhile
beginning from which other things might develop. As we said in our paper,
it really would be interesting to see what happened if sociology had been
replaced by geography, or if geology had stood in place of archaeology,
and what new points would have emerged had we included a historian and
an anthropologist in our discussion. So, Paul, Hans, Carl and Harvey (and
perhaps others?), do not be too surprised if a toothbrush- or axe-shaped
parcel appears in the post in the coming months. The dialogue really has only
just begun . . .
Notes
1 In this response, we take joint responsibility for ‘our’ article and therefore write as ‘we’.
2 What is the unquarantined environment that is implied by Knappett’s discussion?
Archaeology, by definition, works with objects which have been transferred to a different
world.
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Artefacts between disciplines. The toothbrush and the axe

Article in Archaeological Dialogues · December 2007

Stepping Stones to the Neolithic View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 117–131

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002267 Printed in the United Kingdom

Artefacts between disciplines. The toothbrush and the axe

How thoroughly interdisciplinary is it possible to be? Are we lightly

(Beer 1996, 115; original emphasis)

The toothbrush Elizabeth gave me (Duncan) a pink and white toothbrush.2

Figure 3 Toothbrush dial detail.

Having satisfied the archaeologist in me by describing my artefact, and

Elizabeth’s toothbrush In thinking about what to provide for ‘archaeological’

nylon bristles made it possible to mass produce toothbrushes – not just

Discussion: artefacts between disciplines

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 131–135

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002279 Printed in the United Kingdom

Objects as such and objects in contexts. Things and equipment

is to improve the understanding of social practices in a wider sense and

both scientists intuitively followed the lines of their disciplinary traditions

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 135–138

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002280 Printed in the United Kingdom

Artefacts in quarantine? Carl Knappett

Let me elaborate a little further, employing the concept of affordances. It is

Concocting new encounters, such that an uncontemplated physical thing

To conclude, it seems that the ‘artefacts between disciplines’ contemplated

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 138–142

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002292 Printed in the United Kingdom

Of tribes and territories Paul Graves-Brown

Having an axe to grind

Who are we, where do we come from?

limits of a discipline. Indeed it can be the case that sub-tribal boundaries

Conclusion: some practical consequences of tribalism

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 142–145

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002309 Printed in the United Kingdom

Display matters Harvey Molotch

as the commentaries elaborate, caution is in order on both fronts. Even if

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2) 145–153

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002310 Printed in the United Kingdom

Artefacts between disciplines. Response to responses

which we routinely engage. In other words, we wanted to focus on matters

Analysing things: accidents of enquiry

1995). Similarly, as Duncan points out in the paper, archaeologists often do

the context of its use, perhaps in circumstances similar to those of Buchli

C. Scarre (eds), Cognition and material culture. The archaeology of symbolic

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