Summary
Material Culture:
Habitats and Values
The relationship between historically different analyses of commodity exchange
and of those objects designated as "art" was the subject of a seminar
titled "Material Culture: Habitats and Values." Participants from
the U.S., England, and Australia discussed recent research in several intersecting
arenas of material culture: exchange theory, which asks how value is constituted;
the movement of objects in a cultural hierarchy from things to artifacts to
fine art; and the circulation of objects between cultures. "Our central
theme was material culture and its transformation of value through movement
between contexts," said Fred Myers of New York University, who organized
the seminar with Annette B. Weiner, also of NYU.
Material culture studies traditionally have focused
on the technologies of production and the physical qualities of material objects.
More recently, anthropologists have begun to explore material culture as an expression
of social relationships. "In part, this is a result of the reintroduction
of concerns about what objects communicate," Myers said. "Museum exhibitions
were reinvigorated as problems of representation, and objects came to be seen
as embedded in more complex social relations."
At the same time, anthropological work on exchange had
become concerned with such issues as what it meant for objects to move between
contexts, how giving and receiving defined relationships between people, and
how material objects could communicate identity. The goals of the seminar were
to generate a set of underlying relationships from these separate theoretical
frameworks, to develop a language to talk about the relational properties of
material culture, and to map out a deeper understanding of how things acquire
meaning in production, circulation, and consumption.
By the end of the seminar week, according to Myers, "all
categories had been revised." The gift/commodity dichotomy, for instance,
in which gifts are presumed to be more the bearers of social identity, was found
to be no longer a meaningful distinction. Rather than talking about gift economies
and commodity economies, participants agreed that different kinds of exchange
were concentrated in different arenas of social life within every society. The
issue of how objects are classified within different regimes of value, and what
they stand for, was identified as an important site for study.
Seminar discussions focused on connecting cutting-edge
work on exchange theory with the problem of the boundaries between high and low,
addressing questions such as: How do objects become art? How has art appropriated
and reproduced national identities? "We were trying to arrive at a common
set of theoretical issues and develop a language to talk about the relational
properties of material culture," Myers said. "That sounds abstract,
but the papers themselves were very concrete. It's the linkage between the worlds
that was difficult."
The most exciting moment of the week, Myers reported,
came with the recognition that nationalism and modernity were at the heart of
both exchange theory and art hierarchies. "We were struggling to understand
what nationalism is and how art as a category of object can become the vehicle
of national identity. The interest in material culture and exchange really grew
out of the development of capitalism in the West and the increasing emphasis
placed on commodities. The same is true of our understanding of art since 1850."
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