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28 maj 2013 · The study of material culture centers upon objects, their properties, and the materials that they are made of, and the ways in which these material facets are central to an understanding of culture and social relations.
Material Culture Definition: The physical objects, resources, and spaces reflecting a society's culture, values, beliefs, and traditions. Examples of Material Culture: Includes pottery, tools, jewelry, clothing, art, and architectural structures like temples and homes.
23 lip 2021 · An anthropological rethinking of contemporary material culture must steer clear of attributing agency, accountability, and animateness to artifacts, yet the modern gadgets with which our lives are entangled do unsettle the Cartesian sequestration of nature and society.
Material culture consists of the tools, art, buildings, written records, and any other objects produced or used by humans. If all the human beings in the world ceased to exist, nonmaterial aspects of culture would vanish, but the material culture would still be present until it disintegrated.
The innovative ways to do ethnography, the broadened field of empirical studies, and the tentative contribution to fundamental questions show the potential of material culture in anthropology. However, none of these achievements should be considered as exclusively relevant for anthropology.
Technology, defined anthropologically, is not material culture but rather a total social phenomenon in the sense used by Mauss, a phenomenon that marries the material, the social and the symbolic in a complex web of associations. —Bryan Pfaffenberger, Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology, 1988, p. 249.
Material culture studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the relation-ships between people and their things: the production, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects. It draws on theory and practice from disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as anthropology, archaeology, history, and museum studies.
