Twenty Years On

Abstract

In 1996, the first editorial in the first issue of this Journal defined material culture studies as the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two. Defined in this manner, the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences themselves. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5) In this way, the editors staked a ground for a non-sectarian, undisciplined approach to the study of the material world that they construed as inherently social. They also proposed that the methods, and theoretical frames, to draw out meaning from within objects, be grounded with relational perspective that they framed as a dialectic-in which persons and things are involved in a cyclical process of mutual constitution. The first issue contained articles on art and agency, landscape, pottery, consumption and religion, written by anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. Twenty years on, much has changed but the original ethos of the Journal-a commitment to a broad-based, undisciplined, global perspective on material culture-has remained. Since this initial framing, the analytic scaffold for understanding material culture studies has greatly expanded. It is not an exaggeration to say that an appreciation for material culture has become mainstream in many fields, from sociology to art history, philosophy and science studies. This remarkable growth of interest in and thinking about material culture has allowed us to refine several of the frameworks established in the first editorial. In the first instance, the language that we use to describe things, objects and artefacts has itself come under scrutiny. The frameworks we might draw on for the interpretation of the relations between people and things (broadly conceived) has been enriched by work that insists on not just a dialectical model, but rather draws on concepts of materialism (Fowler and Harris,

A palace as legacy: The former French colonial museum – perspectives from the inside

“…What does ‘permanent’ then mean? In formulating such a question, we contribute to addressing ‘the complex immaterialities and absences yet to be brought into … theoretical paradigms’ of material culture studies (Geismar et al, 2016: 5). Permanency characterizes all types of ‘heritagized’ elements of material culture, whose definition as heritage includes being supposedly preserved forever.…”