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    Materiality of Cultural Construction

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    Paul Yeboah
    This document discusses the importance of studying material culture and visual culture to understand how culture is constructed. It makes three key points: 1) Studying what people say and write is important, but understanding the relationship between words and objects/actions is also needed. Studying material culture allows us to understand how meaning is created through interactions with objects. 2) Examining the social lives and circulation of objects provides insights into how they acquire meanings as they move between people and settings. 3) A focus on material culture moves beyond prior approaches that emphasized discourse, words, and taxonomy to instead examine how people engage with objects and the embodied, interactive processes through which cultural realities are constructed.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Materiality of Cultural Construction

    Uploaded by

    Paul Yeboah
    160 views3 pages
    This document discusses the importance of studying material culture and visual culture to understand how culture is constructed. It makes three key points: 1) Studying what people say and write is important, but understanding the relationship between words and objects/actions is also needed. Studying material culture allows us to understand how meaning is created through interactions with objects. 2) Examining the social lives and circulation of objects provides insights into how they acquire meanings as they move between people and settings. 3) A focus on material culture moves beyond prior approaches that emphasized discourse, words, and taxonomy to instead examine how people engage with objects and the embodied, interactive processes through which cultural realities are constructed.

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    Materiality of cultural construction

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    This document discusses the importance of studying material culture and visual culture to understand how culture is constructed. It makes three key points: 1) Studying what people say and write is important, but understanding the relationship between words and objects/actions is also needed. Studying material culture allows us to understand how meaning is created through interactions with objects. 2) Examining the social lives and circulation of objects provides insights into how they acquire meanings as they move between people and settings. 3) A focus on material culture moves beyond prior approaches that emphasized discourse, words, and taxonomy to instead examine how people engage with objects and the embodied, interactive processes through which cultural realities are constructed.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    160 views3 pages

    Materiality of Cultural Construction

    Uploaded by

    Paul Yeboah
    This document discusses the importance of studying material culture and visual culture to understand how culture is constructed. It makes three key points: 1) Studying what people say and write is important, but understanding the relationship between words and objects/actions is also needed. Studying material culture allows us to understand how meaning is created through interactions with objects. 2) Examining the social lives and circulation of objects provides insights into how they acquire meanings as they move between people and settings. 3) A focus on material culture moves beyond prior approaches that emphasized discourse, words, and taxonomy to instead examine how people engage with objects and the embodied, interactive processes through which cultural realities are constructed.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3
    At a glance
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    The key takeaways are that the author argues for understanding culture as embodied practices involving things rather than just discourse, and that the study of material culture examines how people interact with and imbue meaning in objects through their use and circulation.

    Some examples of material culture discussed in the text include things, feelings, values, fears, obsessions, practices, objects, environments, histories, words, and ideas.

    The author defines material culture as any aspect of world-making activity that happens in material form, including both things as well as feelings, values, fears, and obsessions that inform one's understanding and use of things.

    Material Religion

    The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

    ISSN: 1743-2200 (Print) 1751-8342 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmr20

    The materiality of cultural construction

    David Morgan

    To cite this article: David Morgan (2008) The materiality of cultural construction, Material Religion,
    4:2, 228-229, DOI: 10.2752/175183408X328334

    To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175183408X328334

    Published online: 01 May 2015.

    Submit your article to this journal

    Article views: 127

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    Citing articles: 7 View citing articles

    Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at


    http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmr20

    Download by: [Ashesi University College] Date: 24 March 2017, At: 01:47
    felt-knowledge that looking, touching, shopping,
    the materiality of cultural revering, or praying constitutes. The context for
    construction understanding things, in other words, is practice.
    But practice understood as the cultivation of
    david morgan embedded or embodied ways of knowing.
    What do I mean by material culture? If
    The appeal of the turn to material culture culture is the full range of thoughts, feelings,
    consists at a theoretical level in the opportunity objects, words, and practices that human beings
    to understand in much more concrete ways use to construct and maintain the life-worlds in
    how the cultural construction of everyday life which they exist, material culture is any aspect
    actually happens. Hitherto, cultural construction of that world-making activity that happens
    meant something imprisoned in the “discourse” in material form. That means things, but it
    on culture. The product of literary studies, also includes the feelings, values, fears, and

    The Materiality of Cultural Constuction


    cultural studies, gender and feminist analysis, obsessions that inform one’s understanding and
    culture often tended to be understood as what use of things. But that’s not all. As I understand
    people said or wrote about themselves or it, the study of material culture gives special
    others. Analysts spent their time scrutinizing attention to the scrutiny of practices, that is,
    discourse and writing as the principal artifacts of what people do with things. As a field of inquiry,
    culture, which they imagined as a kind of mental material culture assumes that meaning does
    substance—religion as a web of meanings, a not inhere in things, but is activated by them.
    cultural system, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz; Meaning is a complex process of interaction in

    David Morgan
    or scholarship focused on the poetics of which people, objects, environments, histories,
    ethnography, to invoke a major work by James words, and ideas take part. To be sure, some
    Clifford and George Marcus. Think of the legacy objects seem to function only as denotations
    of structuralism’s analysis of stories and myths of codes. Like traffic signs: once you know the
    or the complicated verbiage of semiotics, where code, the signifier is devoid of interest. The sign
    the anatomy of discourse is analyzed in terms of tells you to stop or go, nothing more. But most
    signs and signifiers. things aren’t so ancillary to meaning-making.
    Without question, what people say and They enter into it much more integrally, messily.
    write is very powerful and deserving of the Most objects acquire their significance through
    most careful study. The degree to which the engagement with people and an object user’s
    nomenclature and methods of semiotics and interaction with other people and objects.
    structuralism, not to mention the work of Geertz, This means at least two very important
    have been absorbed not only by anthropologists, things for the study of material culture. First,
    but also by art historians and other scholars it foregrounds the study of exchange and
    suggests just how useful they have proven to its complicated and varied forms since the
    be. The challenge, it seems to me, is to think value of an object will draw powerfully from
    about the relationship of words to actions and its social career, that is, its circulation among
    things. The point is not to extract ideas from people. As an object moves from one person
    what people do, which returns us to the spirit to the next, from one social setting or one
    versus matter model of studying religion. But culture to the next, it acquires different values
    the turn to materiality today does not mean a re- and associations, negotiating differences and
    turn to an object-centered study like traditional carrying with it veneers of significance that will
    models of art history or archaeology, where tell us much about what objects do. Second,
    classifying objects according to taxonomies rather than understanding objects as projectiles
    Volume 4
    Issue 2

    of taste or technological achievement was bearing the intentions of their makers, it is more
    228 the principal concern. Nowadays scholars of productive to study the response to objects as
    material culture are much more intrigued by the they are displayed, exchanged, destroyed, and
    circulated in order to determine what they mean
    to people, that is to say, how they build and
    maintain life-worlds. Meaning is not only abstract
    and discursive, but embodied, felt, interactive,
    David Morgan is Professor of Religion at Duke University.
    and cumulative. This means that the cultural
    He is author most recently of The Lure of Images: A History
    of Religion and Visual Media in America (Routledge, 2007) construction of reality is not a wispy evocation
    and editor of Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture of words about objects, but a concrete process
    that invites us to take a careful look at objects.
    Material Religion

    (Routledge, 2008).
    In Conversation

    Material Religion volume 4, issue 2, pp. 228–229


    DOI: 10.2752/175183408X328334
    Material culture is a fruitful way to analysis. This tends to exclude popular
    understand how religion works since many imagery and any kind of pictures that do not
    scholars have come to regard belief as shifting conform to the canonical constraints that art
    sets of practices, as what people do rather than history traditionally imposed on its subjects
    only or primarily the creeds or doctrines and practitioners. Film, cartoons, television,
    to which they assent. Even when some pornography, posters, photography, popular
    believers castigate, proscribe, or destroy prints, commercial advertising, and many
    objects such as images we have the other kinds of images were commonly ignored
    opportunity to see material culture at work. or included only insofar as they illuminated
    Visual culture is a vital subset of material the understanding of fine art. But the study
    culture and conforms as a focus of study to of material culture, to which visual culture
    everything I’ve said here about material culture. belongs as a subfield, has moved beyond such
    As an art historian, I find traditional approaches limitations. People make their worlds from
    to the study of images of limited value since anything at hand, so if we wish to understand
    they tend to scrutinize images as message- the architecture of their lives, we must consider
    bearing devices whose meanings can be everything they use to build it and keep it in
    extracted by iconographical and stylistic working order.

    229

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