Chapter 9 Outline

Materiality: Constructing Social Relationships and Meaning with Things

Introduction

Many of us take for granted historical markers and monuments as a natural, obvious, or somewhat uninteresting background to our daily lives. When we actually look closely at them as objects—asking who made them, and with what purpose—we can begin to appreciate how objects carry subtle social and political messages, and objects can tell us a lot about social relationships between groups of people.
The physical presence of an object gives it a concreteness that the same text read over the radio might not. We call this concrete, physical presence its materiality: Having the quality of being physical or material.
At the heart of anthropological interest in materiality is this question: What is the role of objects and material culture in constructing social relationships and cultural meanings? Embedded within this larger question are several more focused questions:

Why is the Ownership of Artifacts From Another Culture a Contentious Issue?
How Should We Look at Objects Anthropologically?
Why and How Do the Meanings of Things Change Over Time?
What Role does Material Culture Play in Constructing the Meaning of a Community’s Past?

Of special interest to both cultural and archaeological anthropologies is the examination of material culture: the objects made and used in any society.
Traditionally the term referred to technologically simple objects made in preindustrial societies, but material culture may refer to all of the objects or commodities of modern life as well.
Here we look at how objects shape meaning for people and allow us to communicate meaning.

Why Is The Ownership Of Artifacts From Other Cultures A Contentious Issue?

In the United States, the discipline of Anthropology began in museums, arising amidst the scramble for collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data. Most of the early material culture was from Native American in the Western states, and much was held in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
By 1893, the Smithsonian’s curators had assembled impressive anthropological exhibits. Rather than rely exclusively on this collection, efforts were made in the World’s Fair to organize anthropological exhibits to present the cultures and prehistory of the New World. At the closing of the fair, a new museum appeared: The Field Museum—on the site of the Fair Grounds—which purchased the artifacts and exhibits.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City then hired Franz Boas, who immediately began building its collections. He organized a series of collecting expeditions to the Northwest Coast and brought back objects for display as well as volumes of myths and fieldnotes about local customs to help interpret these collections.
All of this activity became an international scramble for collections from societies around the world that Western scholars thought of as “primitive” in an effort to document the lives, economic activities, and rituals of peoples around the globe. Possession of more of these exotic objects set one museum apart from the others.
These objects clearly meant something different to the museums than they did to the native peoples who had used them. What emerged from all this is that the major American museums actively competed with one another for objects, in the process employing a lot of anthropologists. For a long time, nobody was concerned about who owned all of these objects, since in a legal sense they belonged to the individual museums. But in recent decades, questions of ownership and control over these objects have become a contentious issue. Shouldn’t the people whose direct ancestors made or used these objects have some rights over these collections? Who has the right to sell them to museums? Who has the moral right to display and interpret them?
For many years the U.S. had only a few basic laws to protect archaeological sites, mostly on government lands. Among these was the Antiquities Act of 1906, requiring permission for excavations on government lands; the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 requiring government agencies to consider the effects of development projects on historical or archaeological sites.
The “Tragedy of Slack Farm” in Uniontown, Kentucky, led to changes. Here, the state police arrested site looters on the misdemeanor charge of desecrating a venerated object, a charge used primarily when gravestones and cemeteries are damaged. Negative publicity put pressure on lawmakers to do something about looting. The Kentucky legislature passed a bill making it a felony to disturb any and all burial sites. This incident was so offensive to American Indian groups that it gave them further impetus to lobby the federal government, which the following year passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA: the 1990 law that established the ownership of human remains, grave goods, and important cultural objects as belonging to the Native Americans, whose ancestors once owned them.
These problems are not limited to the United States. Many countries have implemented legislation and programs of their own, and most governments support UNESCO’s World Heritage Site program: which provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.
Most of the 802 currently recognized cultural sites have played a key role in human history, and the sites include early fossil hominids and key archaeological sites. UNESCO cannot force countries to protect these sites, but it can formally delist a site if the host countries fail to protect it from any destruction.
“The Tragedy of Slack Farm” aggravated long-brewing tension over who had a moral right to examine, study, and possess the artifacts and bones recovered from archaeological sites. On the one hand, many archaeologists felt that as scientists they had the moral right to excavate, while pot hunters had no rights because they were simply out to make money. Laws governing excavations of human remains were highly discriminatory, treating Native Americans differently than Euro-Americans.
During the 1970s, some activists began to protest how national, state, and local officials treated Indian remains, asserting that treatment of Indian remains was an element of a larger pattern of disrespect for Indian cultures. Many of these activists were part of AIM, the American Indian Movement: the most prominent and one of the earliest Native American activist groups, founded in 1968.
Their efforts came to stand for something much more important than the objects themselves, leading to demands for repatriation: the return of human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged.
Repatriating artifacts became a material symbol of Indian identity itself. Archaeologists have always held a range of views on whether prehistoric bones should be studied scientifically, reburied after examination, reburied without being studied, or never excavated at all. Some Indian groups took more radical positions, asserting their right to rebury all Indian bones found in any museum, whether or not the bones had any connection to their own tribe.
Some archaeologists and anthropologists worried that information about the prehistory of Native Americans, an important part of the heritage of all humans, would be lost if reburial became commonplace, and that scientists have a moral and professional obligation to the archaeological data with which they work as well as to the broader public good which can benefit from such studies.
Following the Slack Farm Tragedy, Congress passed two acts: National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989, which established a new museum for preservation and display of American Indian artifacts, and in 1990 NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA mandated that museums notify tribes about the cultural objects they hold in their collections—particularly human remains, grave goods, and religious objects. It also gives tribes the right to request the repatriation in any public museum collection.
Since NAGPRA, repatriation has proceeded reasonably well. Most museums have notified tribes about their holdings and Indian tribes have become empowered to make claims that in the past might have been ignored. However, some museums have taken too long to comply with these mandates, and the regulations weren’t always clear about which objects are covered by NAGPRA and which groups can submit repatriation requests—which is only federally-recognized tribes. Some museum skeletal collections are so poorly documented that nobody knows which tribe the remains may have belonged to originally.
The issue of rights of indigenous peoples to their cultural resources is an ongoing topic for discussion at the international level as well.

See “Anthropologist as Problem Solver: John Terrell, Repatriation, and the Maori House at the Field Museum”

NAGPRA has helped clarify that American Indians own the bones of their ancestors as well as any grave goods found with these remains, but each new excavation or older museum collection presents new dimensions to the question of ownership that need to be negotiated through ongoing dialogue.
In response, archaeologists in the United States have taken a leading role in managing and preserving prehistoric and historic heritage. These efforts are often referred to as CRM or Cultural Resource Management: research and planning aimed at identifying, interpreting, and protecting sites and artifacts of historic or prehistoric significance.
CRM’s goal is to protect and manage the cultural resources of every community, especially important prehistoric sites and structures.
Many Indian groups criticize archaeologists as doing little to help their communities and disturbing the bones of their ancestors. An increasing number of Indians have earned postgraduate degrees in archaeology and use the techniques of CRM to preserve their tribe’s cultural heritage. Nearly all tribes that use CRM view heritage management differently than most federal government agencies. Non-Indian agencies nearly always see heritage resources as tangible places and things, and scientific study as a way of finding a middle ground between the heritage resource and some other use. Tribes tend to prefer avoiding the disturbance of the heritage resource altogether, including scientific investigation, emphasizing their spiritual connections to the past. Social conflicts around objects are complex, suggesting that the meanings and uses of objects are not such straightforward matters.

How Should We Look At Objects Anthropologically?

Until the 1980s anthropologists tended to look at the study of objects as evidence of cultural distinctiveness, approaching cultural and artistic objects as expressions of a society’s environmental adaptation, aesthetic sensibilities, or as markers of ethnic identity. Arts and craftwares were considered an expression of a particular tradition, time, or place, an expression of the individual creativity of the artist or craftperson. In the mid-1980s anthropologists started to recognize that objects were capable of conveying meaning in many different ways simultaneously.
George W. Stocking argued that objects are multidimensional, and to understand them, we have to recognize and try to understand not just their three basic physical dimensions—height, width, depth—but four others as well, among them time (history), power, wealth, and aesthetics.
The dimension of time or history refers to the fact that objects in museums came from somewhere and each had an individual history. In part this asks when, by whom, and how were they produced, and how did they get to the museum or their current location, and how have interpretations of the object changed over time?
The dimension of power reveals the relations of inequality reflected in objects, especially why the objects of non-Western people sit in ethnographic museums, while very few non-Western peoples have museums or repositories where local people can view Western objects.
The dimension of wealth reflects how people use objects to establish and demonstrate who has wealth and social status as seen in how the American museum directors saw showy and impressive objects as being quite valuable for their museums and the museums’ reputations.
The dimension of aesthetics is reflected in the fact that each culture brings with it its own system or patterns of recognizing what is pleasing or attractive, which configurations of colors and textures are appealing, and which are not.
Stocking felt that collections of objects in museums were a historical archive in multiple dimensions and tell us a great deal about the cultures that made and used these objects as well as the relationships between the collectors’ societies and the communities who originally used them. Objects could offer a window for understanding local symbolic systems of meaning.
The bicycle example demonstrates that any mundane object can help us imagine ourselves, our past, and where we are headed. We may use objects to attract the attention and admiration of others. And our objects may be used by others to classify and stereotype us.
Stocking’s seven dimensions do not cover all the aspects or dimensions suggested about the shiny bicycle, but do offer a simple first glance at how we feel we should look at objects anthropologically.
By studying the art traditions and objects of non-Western peoples, anthropologists have learned that the complex ideas and understandings about the gods, ghosts, spirits, and other supernatural beings who inhabit their cosmologies are embodied in the physical representations we see in carvings.
There is every reason to believe that carvers and other people alike imagined that their spirits and demons looked like the carvings. But if the only depiction of a particular spirit is the mask or carving that represents the spirit, one will likely understand the spirit to look just like the carvings. Anthropologists have long considered the relationship between aesthetics, symbolism, and the meaning of objects.
Just as the aesthetic dimensions of objects shape an object’s meaning, powerful people use aesthetics in ways to demonstrate and legitimate their social, political, or religious power. Similarly, in many religions, authorities employ aesthetics to indicate that the holder of an item possesses divine power as well as power here on earth.
What sets these objects of power apart is in part their aesthetic style that establishes the objects, and by extension their owners, as important and special. But it is also true that the aesthetic settings and ways in which such objects are used and displayed can also symbolically communicate the power of their owners.
Veneration of objects with particularly strong symbolic meaning, such as cult leader Barjani’s hat in the Walis Islands, do not only tell us something about relations of power between people, but also provide us historical context.
Archaeological objects and artifacts also have many dimensions and are unique among objects because they usually come from excavations.
A key consideration in interpreting archaeological objects is how they were situated in an excavation site, particularly in relation to other objects.
Excavated artifacts need to be examined at the microscopic level, in the context of a particular pit, a particular site, and across similar sites in a given region. Methods for such analysis have changed dramatically over the last several decades and continue to advance.
Context here means the several dimensions or aspects of any object found in an excavation or on a site, including the geographic location, the nature of the object found in the site, and its spatial relation with respect to other parts of the site, including what was deposited near it, above it, and below it.
Archaeologists are particularly attentive to the how locational context relates to major site features, attributes found in an excavation, such as a pit, fireplace, or wall, that was formed, created, or modified by humans.

As seen in the example of Robert Goodby’s site at Tenant Swamp, interpretations of archaeological objects are made possible in large part by the context of those objects.

Why And How Do The Meanings Of Things Change Over Time?

Anthropologists study the same museum collections they studied over a century ago, but often come to very different conclusions about the people who made and used the objects in those collections. What has changed is how the object is interpreted. All objects change over time, if not in their physical characteristics, then in the significance we give to them.
Concurrently with development of the framework for understanding objects in seven dimensions, another set of complementary theories and techniques for analyzing in depth this issue of how objects change over time which looked at what we now call the social life of things.
The idea that inanimate things have social lives is based on the assumption that things have forms, uses, and trajectories that are intertwined in complex ways with people’s lives. Objects undergo a progression, with recognizable phases, from their creation, exchange, and uses, to their eventual discard. This progression makes it possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that influence each period in this career. Across cultures, these relationships and ideologies can vary drastically.
All objects change over time, but they can do so in different ways. Most objects age and weather with time, of course, usually becoming less significant because they get old and worn out. But for the purposes of understanding the social life of things, there are three major ways that objects change over time:

The form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation.
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 product has changed over time as styles and social preferences have changed. While we usually understand these changes as gradual improvements in form or technology, they are just as often due to introducing innovations or differences in style, simply to be different. This can be understood in Richardson and Kreober’s analysis of skirt length in women’s dresses over the previous 300 years. There are actually at least two causes for the cyclicality they discovered:

Fashionable women want to wear the latest fashion, and this desire encourages many others to follow their lead.
Factories and seamstresses that have been making women’s dresses for 300 years have a vested interest in these objects changing in order to sell dresses.

Contexts often change as environments and technologies change as well. The example of Tahitians, who had no knowledge of iron until Europeans first visited their islands, is useful here. After learning about iron tools, Tahitian men started plotting ways they could get access to it. The traditionally stodgy and sexually restrained Tahitian society became transformed almost overnight as men sent their wives, daughters, and sisters to engage in sex in exchange for any sort of iron tools. These interactions created the stereotype that Polynesians were traditionally very promiscuous, when in fact it was the horny sailors, combined with the Tahitian desire for iron, that transformed Tahitian society and introduced sexual license to these islands. Something as simple as a new technology can have profound impacts on local communities.
Archaeological specimens also change over time, which is one reason why museums so carefully care for artifacts. What once may have been seen as unique may become commonplace with more excavations or what once seemed unintelligible may become a key piece in contextual analysis. Moreover, technological developments allow us to learn new things about artifacts we may have studied before.

What Role Does Material Culture Play In Constructing The Meaning Of A Community’s Past?

Objects found in archaeological sites are not just data for scientific analysis; they contribute to public discourse on social and political issues relevant to our present-day concerns, especially how people view their own past. Nobody can own the past, but many will claim it because it fits their ideas of what the past is supposed to be like. The effect for archaeologists is that their interpretations of the past can provoke public controversy and draw them into political battles, many of which are not of their own making and others that are.
Archaeologists encounter situations that challenge the images we have come to accept about strands in our nation’s history. The construction of a new federal office building in lower Manhattan in New York City serves as an example. An archaeological assessment of the site using test pits revealed human skeletal remains, which was a long-forgotten burial ground for African slaves used from the late 1600s till 1796. Construction teams pressured the archaeologists to excavate the graves as quickly as possible, so they could complete the office building on time and within budget. This rapid excavation led to the loss of considerable contextual data. Black community leaders demanded that the remains be reinterred and a landmark established. Black leaders wanted to use the facts of slavery and history—as well as this physical site—to help Americans understand the experience of their African slave ancestors, and to publicize the contributions of Africans to the city and its history. Uncovering the past can challenge our understandings of the world in unexpected ways and provoke social controversy in which different groups lay claim to the past.
Archaeology plays a role in politics, and politics plays a role in archaeology. We may want to think of archaeology as just about the facts, and nothing but the facts, but what is considered a fact has to do with the concerns and agendas of the times in which we live. Ultimately these factors affect the conditions under which archaeological knowledge about the past is produced.

See “Classic Contributions: Margaret Conkey and the Gender Politics of Understanding Past Lives”

This is demonstrated in the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá. Different interested parties have used this archaeological site to construct various images of the ancient Maya. It was not just Americans who warmed to these images. Yucatec intellectuals also used them to establish a Mayan cultural heritage to further their goal of an independent state. In the 1920s, American researchers transformed Chichén Itzá from an archaeological site to a factory of knowledge, strengthening Mexico’s legitimacy as a country with an ancient heritage. This knowledge became the basis for transforming the site into a tourist attraction that could support both the project and the local Maya people. Archaeologists have played a central role in explaining Chichén Itzá’s ancient past and using the site to promote their scientific credentials. But this work has always existed alongside and been influenced by others to legitimize their own national and ethnic identities, economic interests, and religious perspectives.
All anthropologists are immersed in such political and social realities.

Conclusion

Facts of history are sometimes presented to the viewer in a clear and straightforward manner. But as we know, those facts can focus on certain themes that a dominant social group wants to present, while other more unsettling or complicated stories go unrecognized.
The issues raised by a historical marker are but one example of a broader dynamic that also affects the social and cultural construction of meaning. Control over the past is a highly contentious issue, but control of the meaning of objects from the present such as a smart phone is equally contentious. This dynamic has two dimensions:

Who has control over access to the resources, both historical and archaeological, from which we can document and uncover the story of how things came to be.
Interpretations of the material world, whether from the past or our own very modern present, differ according to social interests. So the interpretation of objects, artifacts, archaeological sites, and human remains always has a wide variety of legal, moral, and political implications.

These implications are constructed by many different people, each with a different set of personal and social agendas. We call this the cultural construction of meaning, whether applied to objects, bodies, practices, or human experiences, and it is this that defines what anthropology is all about.