Chapter 14 Summary

Introduction

In 1989, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada opened an exhibit entitled “Into the Heart of Africa.” The curator, cultural anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo, organized the photographs of Africa taken by missionaries and servicemen around the words of those individuals—rather than the people depicted in the photographs.
The backlash against this approach illustrates the importance that humans place on objects. Materiality is the quality of being physical or material.

This chapter focuses on the question, What is the role of objects and material culture in constructing social relationships and cultural meanings? To address this core question, the chapter is organized around the following problems:

Why is the ownership of artifacts from other cultures a contentious issue?
How can anthropology help us understand objects?
How do the meanings of things change over time?
How do objects come to represent our goals and aspirations?

Material culture includes objects made and used in any society. Anthropologists take objects seriously and consider all the ways people use them to communicate with others, define themselves, and control others.

Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

US anthropology began in museums, focusing on collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data.

There was little concern about cultural ownership of the objectives or how the associated people were represented.

More recently, anthropologists and others have questioned the issues of ownership, rights, and protection of material culture.

The 1887 Dawes Act allowed for lands on Indian reservations to be sold to non-Indian owners.
The 1970s American Indian Movement, an early American Indian activist group, protested how national, state, and local officials treated Indian human remains.
Calls for repatriation (the return of human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people who whom they originally belonged) emerged as a symbol of respect for Indian identity.

The 1987 Slack Farm incident, where private looters destroyed an Indian burial site near Uniontown, Kentucky, galvanized support from anthropologists and archaeologists for legislation that would protect material culture. This led to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

NAGPRA calls for the repatriation of human remains and artifacts to the families of the dead. Despite protests and concerns, institutions and organizations have successfully reunited material culture with American cultural groups and learned a great deal about their collections from Native American groups.
See “Anthropologist as Problem-Solver: John Terrell, Repatriation, and the Maori House at the Field Museum.”

Historic sites around the world are protected through legislation and programs, as well as UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites program, which provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.
Legislation in the United States has allowed archaeologist and anthropologists to manage and preserve historic and prehistoric heritage.

Cultural resource management is research and planning aimed at identifying, interpreting, and protecting sites and artifacts of historic or prehistoric importance.

How Can Anthropology Help Us Understand Objects?

Prior to the 1980s, anthropologists tended to assume that objects were a unique and separate category of human life. It soon became apparent that some societies did not distinguish “objects” from other aspects of culture in the same sense as Western art scholars.
In many non-Western societies, objects are much more integrated into daily life, something that everyone participates in, not just object makers. In effect, the very category of arts and crafts was an ethnocentric projection on the whole world.
Further, many of the material objects that anthropologists found aesthetically pleasing (thus, “art”) had utilitarian and/or social functions. In other words, they were not created to be art or by people who thought of themselves as artists.
Before fieldwork became central to cultural anthropology, scholars studied museum collections and evaluated the sophistication of the cultures that had produced different objects. Yet these objects were isolated—removed from their dynamic cultural context. When anthropologists began conducting ethnographic fieldwork, the deeper meaning of objects became evident.
George W. Stocking, Jr. (1985), suggested seven dimensions through which we can examine art: height, width, depth, time (history), power, wealth, and aesthetics.

The basic dimensions of height, width, and depth are physical measurements.
Time (history) refers to an object’s individual history: where it came from, how interpretations have changed through time.
Power indicates the inequality reflected by objects. Many non-Western objects collected during the colonial era reside in ethnographic museums, but non-Western cultures rarely have museums of European and American objects.
Wealth reflects the fact that objects can be used to display wealth and social status. Many “priceless” artifacts are possessed by individuals not descended from the people who produced them.
Aesthetics is the recognition that different individuals and groups find different patterns aesthetically pleasing.

We can apply Stocking’s insights to any everyday object, including a shiny new bicycle.

The bike has physical dimensions (it must be useable by an average-sized human) but may also be viewed as an expression of artistry.
This particular bike reflects the history of all bicycles—necessary to arrive at this modern conception of a bicycle.
What associations does the bike’s owner have with it—memories, values, etc.?
The bike is also a commodity, part of a complex economic system. Its parts were likely manufactured in other parts of the world. So, the bike’s presence here reflects a journey.
Finally, the bike is practical and useful as a mode of transportation.
This simple analysis of a bike can be conducted on any mundane object.
While a bicycle is familiar to us, objects created in other cultural contexts may include meanings and symbols that are initially indecipherable to us.

Different art traditions may make use of unknown (to us) cosmologies, gods, ghosts, spirits, and other supernatural beings.

Basic assumptions about an “artist’s” goals, such as “African carvers are attempting to create realistic human and animal forms,” may be completely wrong.

Powerful people in any culture can use aesthetics to demonstrate and legitimate their social, political, or religious power.

Anthropologist Robert Welsch observed the symbolic power of what would seem to us a commonplace object (a hat) on the island of Walis along the north coast of Papua New Guinea in 1993.
A century earlier, a religious prophet named Barjani foretold the arrival of Europeans. When Barjani died, his clansmen established a shrine in his honor.
When Welsch and his colleague, John Terrell, went to see the shrine, they were primarily interested in its architecture. But, surprisingly, the shrine held an old Charlie Chaplin–style bowler hat. This seemingly out-of-place object had great significance: it was Barjani’s hat and, as a European hat, a symbolic reminder of his prediction.

How Do the Meanings of Things Change Over Time?

Stocking observed that both the physical form of objects and our interpretations of their meaning and significance change over time.
At the same time as Stocking’s work, an edited volume titled The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Arjun Appadurai, ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1986) was being published. Some of the examples presented thus far have demonstrated how material objects can have social lives (from a certain point of view). Let’s examine this further.

Like people, objects have careers with recognizable phases: creation, exchanges, uses, and discard. It is possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that shape each stage of an object’s life. And the particular relationships and ideologies vary from culture to culture.
Similar to the bicycle before, let’s track the “life” of a pair of American mall shoes.
These shoes began as atoms expelled from exploding stars during cosmic formation processes, but let’s skip ahead to the stage where they are cotton and rubber in a Chinese production factory.
The mall salesperson doesn’t think of them as cotton and rubber, nor does the purchaser.
The shoes pass through many sets of hands between production and “consumption” (we don’t eat the shoes): manufacture, packaging, transport, and so on. This is likely a journey of thousands of miles and lots of hands.
That pair of shoes has a complicated life. It takes on meanings from the contexts it passes through. The sensitive observer will see a whole range of complex social relations in the process

Most objects age and weather with time, becoming less significant (“worn out”).

There are three major ways objects change over time:

The form, shape, color, and use changes from generation to generations.
An object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change.
A single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.

Nearly every manufactured object has changed over time. This may reflect technological advances or, in our consumer culture, often just change for change’s sake.

For example, see the nearly four hundred years of skirt length data described in the text.

An object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change. Such change can be abrupt.

Iron arrived in Tahiti on June 18, 1867. Social changes followed as traditionally conservative Tahitian men sent their wives, sisters, and daughters to prostitute themselves in exchange for British iron. Ironically, this nearly overnight change created a stereotype that Tahitian women were sexually promiscuous.

A single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.

A stone axe purchased for a museum quickly went from being a useful implement to being a static example of an exotic culture.

How Do Certain Objects Come to Represent Peoples’ Goals and Aspirations?

How can objects represent our aspirations? First, objects express our personal and collective pasts. Second, objects help us express and even formulate our goals and aspirations. Third, objects can be used in ways that manipulate what our goals and aspirations should be.
By studying the cultural biography of objects, anthropologists can uncover important social relationships and cultural dynamics. We surround ourselves with personally meaningful reminders that convey messages to us and to others—sometimes different, and even conflicting, messages.
People express themselves through the possession and display of objects. Many of us are part of a culture of mass consumption: a term that refers to the cultural perspectives and social processes that shape and are shaped by how goods and services are bought, sold, and used in contemporary capitalism.

People define and express who they are through consumption: their social status, economic means, gender identities, aesthetic sensibilities, individual qualities of taste and discernment, and identification with a certain social class or interest group.

The objects offered by a consumer culture offer us limitless ways to experience and project our individual narratives. But can objects, as commodities, also be used to manipulate us?

Advertising, for example, is not simply an objective, unbiased sharing of useful information. It is a targeted attempt to affect human decision-making—at best, a symbolic framing of specific products and, at worst, an attempt to translate consumers’ hopes, insecurities, and fears into money.

Conclusion

When we take seriously all the ways people project themselves onto objects and manipulate others using objects and visual images, anthropology is no longer “simply” about people but about the intertwining of people and material things.
This intertwining shows that our interpretations of things and visual images are constructed and, in that sense, artificial. But because they appear in certain cultural settings and contexts they seem natural.