Material Culture (Sociology)

Introduction

Beginning with many of its earliest writings, sociology has a long tradition of theorizing the role of objects and material culture in social life. In the middle of the 20th century, these themes were taken up again by major sociological and anthropological thinkers who inspired a resurgence of interest in the study of objects. The sociology of culture and art began to address the production and reception of objects, while scholars from anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies began to develop a robust body of work around material culture. These two fields have somewhat different takes on the study of objects. Sociological accounts tend to be people focused, examining how institutional characteristics of art worlds shape the objects produced, and focusing explanations of meaning-making on the social position of the audience more so than the symbolic qualities of the object. Alternatively, material culture approaches tend to be object focused, engaging objects as symbols that help explain how people organize subcultures, create solidarity through exchange, or express social status. A turn toward materiality, originating from anthropology but taken up more recently in sociology, privileges the material qualities of objects and how they shape the use and symbolic meaning of objects. This work on objects raises the question of how sociologists should incorporate objects into accounts of action. This question has sparked an ongoing cross-disciplinary debate about whether objects have agency. Research in science and technology studies, alongside studies of craft and sport, have brought attention to how objects act back, shaping how knowledge is produced. Objects have also been understood as mechanisms of power, by shaping categories and morality, ritualizing icons, stabilizing social relations as instruments of the states and institutions, and structuring action through the built environment. These robust and vibrant areas of research make a strong case for the incorporation of objects into theories of power and knowledge.

Journals and Textbooks

A number of journals from diverse fields have set the standard for work on material culture, namely the Journal of Material Culture; Science, Technology, and Human Values; the Journal of Consumer Culture; Social Studies of Science; and Environment and Planning. Cultural Sociology and Theory, Culture, and Society are two cultural sociology-oriented journals that also publish on material culture. For a textbook, see Woodward 2007, Understanding Material Culture.

Cultural Sociology.
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First published in 2007, Cultural Sociology is an official journal of the British Sociological Association. Published quarterly, it features research concerning the sociological analyses of culture.
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Environment and Planning.
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Environment and Planning comprises four interdisciplinary journals that focus on urban planning, the built environment, infrastructure, and human geography. Of particular interest is Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, though all four have published research of interest to scholars of material culture.
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Journal of Consumer Culture.
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This interdisciplinary journal is published three times per year. The Journal of Consumer Culture was first published in 2001, and features work on consumption and consumer culture.
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Journal of Material Culture.
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The Journal of Material Culture was first published in 1996. Based in the United Kingdom, this interdisciplinary journal features research on the relationship between artifacts and social relations. Published quarterly.
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Science, Technology, and Human Values.
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First published in 1976, Science, Technology, and Human Values is the journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Published bimonthly, it features articles in the field of science and technology studies.
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Social Studies of Science.
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This highly ranked, bimonthly journal was first published in 1971. Social Studies of Science is a multidisciplinary journal that features social analyses of science, technology, and medicine.
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Theory, Culture, and Society.
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Publishes original work on the relations between culture and society. First published in 1982, it appears bimonthly.
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Woodward, Ian. 2007. Understanding material culture. London: SAGE.
DOI: 10.4135/9781446278987Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A textbook that provides a helpful and coherent organization of the field. It brings perspectives from a diversity of disciplines and scholars into dialogue, and offers summary key points and recommendations for further reading.
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Theoretical Foundations

The foundation of material culture and materiality studies is built upon the insights of many of the canonical sociological and anthropological thinkers, including the role of objects in ritual (Durkheim 2008), exchange (Mauss 2000), political and economic life (Marx 1978), and status (Veblen 2009) and differentiation (Simmel 1957). This work made clear how objects were essential to establishing solidarity and trust, but also in structuring and reinforcing inequalities. What these early works often elided, in favor of analyzing the social consequences of objects, were the qualities of objects. What was exchanged didn’t matter as much as the exchange itself. The qualities of the totem didn’t matter as much as its utility in focusing the group’s attention on itself and participants’ shared beliefs. An object’s use and material qualities mattered less than its symbolic value. Work from the middle of the 20th century both develops these early ideas and extends beyond them. Kopytoff 1986 and Kopytoff 1986 extend early work on the exchange of objects by considering how objects fluctuate in their status as a commodity, orienting scholarship to how objects change in value across situations through the process of exchange. To understand how the relationship between an object and its value demands a “biographical approach” that considers how value shifts over time as objects become commodities or resist commodification (Kopytoff 1986). In developing symbolic interactionism, Blumer 1969 viewed objects as symbols: their meaning was a product of social interaction, not inherent in the object. Bourdieu 1984 examined the “economy of cultural goods” to develop a theory of taste and distinction, extending earlier work on how people use objects to mark status and differentiation.

Blumer, Herbert. 1969. The methodological position of symbolic interactionism. In Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. By Herbert Blumer, 1–60. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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Classic articulation of symbolic interactionism. Blumer introduces the concept of “object worlds”: All kinds of objects—physical, social, abstract, and even the self—are the symbolic product of interaction, and individuals’ actions must be understood within specific object worlds. Objects have no fixed status; their meaning is established and sustained through interaction.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Landmark work in cultural theorizing. Advances understanding of the reproduction of social inequality by showing how cultural tastes correlate with class. Bourdieu describes how tastes are shaped by class-based experiences, and then mobilized in struggles to establish and maintain distinction and status.
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Durkheim, Emile. 2008. The elementary forms of religious life. Edited by Mark S. Cladis. Translated by Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Originally published in 1912. Foundational investigation of how rituals produce solidarity among members of society. These rituals are often centered around sacred objects or totems. By participating in ritualized interactions around these symbolically potent objects, individuals experience “collective effervescence” and reaffirm their connection to the group.
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Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819582.004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Anthropological perspective. Introduces influential concept of the “biography of things,” highlighting the trajectory of objects through different types of social functions. Objects move through processes of commodification and singularization such that an object that was once exchanged as a commodity may later be valued as a gift or singular object.
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Marx, Karl. 1978. The fetishism of commodities and the secrets thereof. In The Marx-Engels reader. 2d ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton.
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From chapter 1 of Capital. Theorizes commodities and their role in the economic system: use-value is inherent in an object’s material properties, while exchange-value is determined by an object’s position in the market. Identifies the “fetishism” of commodities, wherein the comparative market value of objects is perceived as real, and masks the social relations of labor.
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Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. Introduction by Mary Douglas. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Originally published in 1954, and stands as a classic anthropological work. The first comprehensive and systematic investigation of the nature and role of gifts in social systems. Updated edition with helpful introduction from anthropologist Mary Douglas.
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Simmel, Georg. 1957. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology 62.6: 541–558.
DOI: 10.1086/222102Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theorizes the role fashion plays in society: fashion facilitates both social equalization and individual differentiation. Individuals gain a sense of group membership when they conform to a group’s fashions, but they may also distinguish themselves from their group by personalizing the fashions they adopt. Fashions are passed down through class structure.
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Veblen, Thorstein. 2009. The theory of the leisure class. Edited by Martha Banta. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Originally published in 1899; offers an early critique of consumption practices. Standards of consumption are determined by one’s community or class position. Introduces the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” and emphasizes how consumption decisions function as public assertions of social status as people seek to be compared favorably to their peers.
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Material Culture

The study of material culture is predominantly organized around how identities and group cultures emerge around the consumption of objects such as clothing, vinyl records, Italian scooters, furniture, art, and more. Central to the work in material culture is a focus on the relationships that develop between people and things, such as the establishment and negotiation of meanings, the coordination of practices, the consumption of shared tastes, and the subcultural commitments that develop around objects. Influential early work in this area include Douglas and Isherwood 1979, a critique of economic-rational approaches to the consumption of goods that argues instead for goods as modes of expression; Hebdige 1983, a work on identity and motor scooter subculture; and Csikszenthmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, a study of objects around the home and people’s development of the self and belonging. A major theme in this body of work is the agency of people’s participation in material cultures (Campbell 2005)—rather than cultural dupes, people actively create, negotiate, and contest meaning. Studies of material culture extend from personal items and identity (Csikszenthmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, Miller 2008), to subcultures (Hebdige 1983), to regimes of value (Myers 2002). Recent work blends studies of material culture with recent work on materiality, with Auslander 2012 offering an excellent review. This is manifest in Bartmanski and Woodward 2015, a monograph explaining the resurgence of vinyl records and the urban scenes that sustain the market. The practices of and commitments to collecting vinyl records, they argue, are informed by the material properties of the records and the aural experience of listening.

Auslander, Leora. 2012. Material culture and materiality. In Travelling concepts for the study of culture. Vol. 2. Edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nunning, 353–369. Hawthorne, NY: Walter de Gruyter.
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Traces the concept and study of material culture across disciplinary boundaries and national borders. Notes debates around what constitutes material culture and how it diverges from linguistic culture. Great resource for finding work outside sociology that addresses material culture.
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Bartmanski, Dominik, and Ian Woodward. 2015. Vinyl: The analogue record in the digital age. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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In-depth analysis of the resurgence of one cultural object—the vinyl record—and its production and use in situated locales. Cultural objects are not only utilitarian or symbolic, but also experiential. The status of vinyls cannot be understood without attending to their material properties and listeners’ embodied experience of those properties.
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Campbell, Colin. 2005. The craft consumer: Culture, craft and consumption in a postmodern society. Journal of Consumer Culture 5.1: 23–42.
DOI: 10.1177/1469540505049843Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A good example of how material culture can be investigated through types of consumers and practices of consumption. Craft consumers’ goal is self-expression and creativity, and so they apply their skills, knowledge, judgment, and passion to products of mass consumption in order to transform them into personally meaningful objects.
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Csikszenthmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. 1981. The meaning of things: Domestic objects and the self. London: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139167611Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Early study of people’s relationships to their things. Domestic objects are not only used as class status markers—people’s belongings are charged with emotional significance, connect them to their sense of self, and anchor their social history and networks. The home acts back upon its inhabitants, shaping their emotional state and interactions.
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Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The world of goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption. London: Allen Lane.
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Argues for an anthropology of consumption that does not abstract out consumers and poverty from the social world. Rather than mere subsistence or competitive status displays, consumption practices are communicative: Goods display and establish cultural categories, and consumption is a primary way to enact social involvement.
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Hebdige, Dick. 1983. Travelling light: One route into material culture. Rain 59:11–13.
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Demonstrates how material culture is significant for identity and identity boundaries by tracing the use of cultural objects by youth subcultures. The struggle for social power between groups is projected onto objects of consumption and worked out through the negotiation of the meaning of those objects.
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Miller, Daniel. 2008. The comfort of things. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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In this anthropological study of the households on a diverse London street, Miller finds that people’s relationship to and interactions with material objects run parallel to their social relationships and interactions. People’s lives conformed to certain styles of interaction that encompassed both the social and material worlds.
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Myers, Fred R., ed. 2002. Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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Volume of essays considering material culture in an expanding transnational and global context. Essays focus on either exchange (with its gift/commodity dichotomy) or art, using an emphasis on the materiality of objects to open up new theorizing on material culture. Helpful introduction that traces the trajectory of material culture research.
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Material Qualities and Affordances

A more recent turn in the study of materiality focuses analysis on “objects as objects” (McDonnell 2010), examining how material qualities of objects shape action and interpretation. In this sense, objects are more than just sign carriers, but also have tangible effects on social life, depending on the qualities of the object. Mukerji 1994 lays out the groundwork for insights around meaning and materiality by looking to how objects endure and shape us “long after they have ceased to ‘make sense’” (p. 145). Miller 2005 echoes this sentiment when he says “objects are important . . . precisely because we do not ‘see’ them” (p. 5). Though objects’ power to shape social life can come from their “humility” (Miller 2005) and their role in social reproduction, the materiality of objects can also make them variable in their effects. Much of this literature points toward how objects—given their specific material qualities—are incorporated into everyday experience, inconsistent in their effects, and dynamic over time and space. Central to this work are insights from “affordance theory” (Gibson 2014, DeNora 2000), an account of how people’s capacities interact with qualities of objects to make possible particular constellation of meanings and uses. An affordance approach is inherently relational, considering how people with particular abilities, cognitive capacities, and interests differentially attend to particular qualities of objects. Rather than engaging in close readings of music, DeNora 2000 asks how particular qualities of music lead people to put that music to use in practice. Noë 2004 draws upon the philosophical implications of affordance theory to consider the importance of perception in organizing our relations to the material world. A parallel approach from anthropology considers how the materiality of objects is essential to understanding meaning-making. Keane 2005 sees objects as “bundles of qualities,” suggesting an object’s meaning is always contingent on the qualities audiences attend to. Recent work has given increasing attention to the effects of materiality. McDonnell 2010 suggests that material qualities of objects and their settings make them enunciable, turning AIDS campaigns to unintended uses. Taking a field approach, Dominguez Rubio and Silva 2013 traces how the physical properties of artworks at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) enable particular object-trajectories, shaping subject-trajectories across the field. These insights have paved a way toward exciting new research directions that place materiality at the center of cultural explanation.

DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489433Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Example of the transition from semiotic analyses of cultural objects to analyses grounded in practice. Audiences work out musical meaning in everyday practice and settings. People interpret music based on its affordances, and this interpretation is importantly shaped by the broader context of the interaction between the individual and the musical form.
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Dominguez Rubio, Fernando, and Elizabeth B. Silva. 2013. Materials in the field: Object-trajectories and object-positions in the field of contemporary art. Cultural Sociology 7.2: 161–178.
DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473287Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Emphasizes the materiality of artworks and the way they intervene in institutional processes, shaping boundaries and individuals’ positions in the field; draws attention to the role objects—and their material particularities—play in the dynamics of fields.
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Gibson, James J. 2014. The ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Psychology Press.
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Psychological perspective. First published in 1986. Ecological emphasis on relationships within an environment. Gibson’s concept of “affordances” has been picked up by many scholars writing on objects and meaning. Affordances are the possible actions an object provides to an actor, and they are limited by the object’s material properties.
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Keane, Webb. 2005. Signs are not the garb of meaning. In Materiality. Edited by Daniel Miller, 183–205. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Keane is grounding meaning in the material world: objects’ material qualities are inextricably connected to the meanings produced in interactions with that object. Introduces the concept of the “bundling” of qualities within objects, and notes that attending to different qualities leads to different meanings in interactions.
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McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. Cultural objects as objects: Materiality, urban space, and the interpretation of AIDS campaigns in Accra, Ghana. American Journal of Sociology 115.6: 1800–1852.
DOI: 10.1086/651577Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Introduces the concept of “object-settings” to highlight how material conditions structure audience interpretations of cultural objects. Focusing on object-settings reveals the importance of the perceptibility, legibility, and enunciability of cultural objects, all of which are shaped by objects’ material qualities and their material environment. Attends to audience interpretations in everyday practices.
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Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality: An introduction. In Materiality. Edited by Daniel Miller, 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822386711-001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theoretical investigation of the relationship between the material and immaterial, and the false dualism between subjects and objects. Objects delimit expectations and possibilities of action within social settings. Objectification is not a unilateral act of subject objectifying object, but instead the two are mutually constitutive, and both emerge changed by the process.
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Mukerji, Chandra. 1994. Toward a sociology of material culture: Science studies, cultural studies and the meanings of things. In The sociology of culture: Emerging theoretical perspectives. Edited by Diana Crane, 143–162. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
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Suggests that if cultural scholars want to understand the powerful role that science and technology play in society, then they must attend not only to their influence as knowledge systems, but also to the material culture and practices associated with them and the ways these material factors organize social action.
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Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Presents an argument that perception is a process that happens not only in the brain, but involves the whole person, and their sensori-motor knowledge. Highlighting the importance of practice and the bodily grounding of people.
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Production and Reception of Cultural Objects

As the sociology of culture coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s, much of the field was organized around explaining the production and reception of cultural objects—“shared symbols embodied in a tangible or expressive form,” to use Griswold’s definition (Griswold 1987). This was an important corrective to work in the humanities that privileged the close reading and interpretation of texts. Seeking to distinguish between humanities and social scientific approaches, sociologists’ analyses of objects emphasized social dimensions of cultural objects: how institutional logics, conventions, and processes shaped the production, design, and circulation of objects (Becker 1982, Molotch 2003), or how group identities constrain how people interpret objects (Griswold 1987, Radway 1991, Halle 1993). Understanding how meaning is embodied in objects, and for what purposes, is crucial for understanding how culture works. For instance, this work has brought insight into how conventions guide the production of art objects and their ultimate character, but also structure expectations for audiences who later interpret those objects (Becker 1982). It has also emphasized how meaning is not inherent in objects—something to simply be decoded—but a social fabrication (Griswold 1987). Once understood as fabricated, understanding how people make meaning in the production and consumption of objects becomes essential to understanding culture. More than just how meaning is made, Schudson 1989 orients to how and when cultural objects “work,” considering mechanisms such as resonance and institutional retention. More recently, studies have bridged these approaches, looking at how everyday objects are designed and consumed through a material culture lens. In their analysis of fashion, Crane and Bovone 2006 make explicit the link between material culture approaches and those of the production and consumption of culture perspectives. Molotch 2003 similarly synthesizes these traditions in an accounting of how the contingent design of everyday goods stabilize and undergo revision, and organize social life—often with moral import.

Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Direction-setting organizational study of art. Uncovers the collective action underlying the image of the autonomous artist and the finished art object: Conventions organize the activities of art world participants, and become entrenched in institutions and embodied in the equipment of the art world, increasing the difficulty and cost of innovation.
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Crane, Diana, and Laura Bovone. 2006. Approaches to material culture: the sociology of fashion and clothing. Poetics 34.6: 319–333.
DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2006.10.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that studying clothing and fashion is an excellent way to investigate how symbolic value is produced and attached to cultural objects. Suggests potential analytical approaches for unpacking social phenomena through the study of the production and consumption of material culture.
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Griswold, Wendy. 1987. The fabrication of meaning: Literary interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies. American Journal of Sociology 92.5: 1077–1117.
DOI: 10.1086/228628Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Presents a theory for how the interpretation of cultural objects generates meaning: meaning emerges at the intersection of individuals’ presuppositions about an object and the object’s actual qualities. Objects may be innately more or less culturally powerful, but this power is only activated through interactions with people.
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Halle, David. 1993. Inside culture: Art and class in the American home. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Analyzes the art and cultural artifacts people use to decorate their homes. Compares homes across upper-and middle-class homes, and along urban and suburban contexts. An excellent example of work that bridges material culture and reception theory.
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Molotch, Harvey. 2003. Where stuff comes from: How toasters, toilets, cars, computers, and many other things come to be as they are. New York: Routledge.
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Working from an anthropology of consumption perspective, Molotch traces the social and material forces that shape which objects get produced. Investigates the influence of design processes, geography, venues for the sale of objects, fashion and style, organizational structures, the tension between form and function, and moral implications. Accessible and comprehensive.
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Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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Analyzes the practice of reading romance novels among women. Emphasizes that the meaning of the physical act of reading is distinct from the meaning of the text, and notes that reading’s privacy and quietude are significant elements of women’s enjoyment of the practice. Highlights the important material concerns of book distribution and publisher practices.
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Schudson, Michael. 1989. How culture works: Perspectives From media studies on the efficacy of symbols. Theory and Society 18.2: 153–180.
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Investigates the potency of cultural objects, and identifies five dimensions of potency. Does not assign all of the power to either the object itself or to the audience—the audience and object influence each other. Cultural potency is also shaped by the broader context of interaction.
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Objects as Agentic

Can things act? Can objects be subjects? Do objects have influence and engender effects above and beyond the intentions people imbue them with? Do objects have moral responsibilities? Or desires? These questions are at the center of debates over whether objects have agency. Within anthropological and archeological circles, arguments elevate the importance of objects and question purely human-centered accounts. Gell 1998 argues for considering objects as “secondary agents” imbued with intention from primary agents that people can abduct and act in response to (see also Morphy 2009 for a critique). Ingold 2007 emphasizes the dynamism of objects and their properties, independent of human intention. Henare, et al. 2007 intervenes within anthropology, using an artifact-oriented approach that collapses the distinction between meanings and things, to ask whether “things might be treated as sui generis meanings” (p. 3). Scholars from an actor-network tradition consider how objects and people operate in “assemblages” that influence action (Callon 1986, Latour 2005, Bennett 2010). Actor-network theorists argue for a “generalized symmetry” in which humans and nonhumans are given equal attention in their explanation of phenomena (Callon 1986). Importantly, Latour argues that this does not necessarily mean humans and nonhumans are equal in their effects (Latour 2005). Latour, in tracing associations of actants, seeks to move away from intentions, instead including “any thing that does modify a state of affairs” in the analysis (Latour 2005, p. 71). In political theory, Bennett 2010 takes up ideas from actor-network theory to consider the vibrancy of objects, embracing notions of chance and enchantment, and considering the efficacy, trajectory, and causality of objects. In parallel but distinct ways to actor-network approaches, Barad 2003 draws on theories of performativity to see agency in discursively and materially enacted phenomena. Regardless of their stance, those engaged in this debate share a commitment to the belief that social theories of action are impoverished without including objects.

Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28.3: 801–831.
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Presents an “agentic realist” approach that collapses subject/object and human/nonhuman distinctions, viewing reality as comprising locally stabilized phenomena. Phenomena are enacted through co-constitutive discursive practices and materiality, and Barad sees the “reconfiguring” that results from these “agential intra-actions” as a way to take matter seriously.
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Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Bennett builds a “theory of assemblages” that emphasizes congregational—rather than atomistic—agency. This “distributive agency” emerges as all the members of an assemblage work together. Objects have “thing-power,” a vibrancy and life beyond how humans conceptualize and use them. Humans and objects are part of an interconnected web, sharing a “vital materiality.”
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Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? Edited by J. Law, 196–223. London: Routledge.
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Important early presentation of Actor Network Theory (ANT) principles. Presents sociology of translation as strategy for identifying dynamics of power in the processes of assigning and enacting roles in networks of action. Argues for a generalized symmetry in which all potential actors and both natural and social events are analyzed on the same terms.
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Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Oxford, Univ. Press.
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In building his “anthropology of art,” Gell rejects a notion of art as primarily semiotic or aesthetic, and emphasizes the social agency of art objects. People distribute their will through material objects, giving objects secondary agency. Agency is determined by social and relational context, so objects may be agents in certain contexts.
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Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell. 2007. Thinking through things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge.
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Edited volume centered on the turn to an object-oriented ontology in anthropology. Authors seek to break down the object/meaning dichotomy and present ethnography as a particularly well-suited method for doing so.
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Ingold, Tim. 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14.01: 1–16.
DOI: 10.1017/S1380203807002127Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for understanding things as active because they are composed of constantly changing materials, rather than because their materiality imbues them with agency. Ingold draws attention to the properties of objects and asserts that materials are always in flux and moving through their environment in a process independent of human interaction.
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Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Actor Network Theory approach to action and agency. In this approach, the social world consists exclusively of networks of actors, and the goal is to discover what accounts for social structure. Anything that modifies a state of affairs is an actor or actant, and all potential actants are approached with analytical symmetry.
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Morphy, Howard. 2009. Art as a mode of action: Some problems with Gell’s art and agency. Journal of Material Culture 14.1: 5–27.
DOI: 10.1177/1359183508100006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that Gell’s framework for understanding art objects obscures the very factors that make it possible for members of society to use objects as agents or to conceive their potential agency. Suggests object-centered frameworks miss the broader context of social interaction and are ill-equipped to address questions of supra-individual influences.
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Objects, Technology, and Knowledge

Objects are repositories of knowledge and are essential to the production of that knowledge. Insights from this literature tend to take a more ontologically grounded approach. Research on objects and technologies, mostly from science and technology studies, reveal how knowledge production and diffusion are inflected by material culture. Scientists do not simply discover objective truths through a linear process of inquiry, but rather participate in an iterative interaction with their material environments and tools, ultimately “creating” objects and technologies that allow them to extract the knowledge they seek. Knorr Cetina 1999 is especially important here, introducing the idea of “epistemic cultures” and investigating the “contemporary machineries of knowing” through analysis of objects and processes of labs and experiments. Pickering 2010 similarly examines the production of science and the material agency of knowledge objects, what Pickering calls the “dance of agency,” by examining the process of “tuning” as scientists respond to the problems object create in response to scientists’ actions. Both Knorr Cetina and Pickering rely on insights from the work of actor-network theory (see Callon 1986 and Latour 2005, both cited under Objects as Agentic) in making their arguments. Actor-network approaches come under scrutiny in Casper and Clarke 1998, which adopts a “social-worlds” approach while maintaining the importance of both humans and nonhumans, and Frickel 1996, which proposes renewed attention to context. Just as important as the process of knowledge production is how people extend their knowledge and cognitive schema into objects. Hutchins 1995 considers how cognition is a cultural process, engaging a larger system outside people’s heads and cognitive capacities that is “distributed” across people and objects. Similarly, Clark and Chalmers 1998 sees the world of objects as an “extended mind,” an external cognitive scaffolding that is just as important to understand as the internal cognitive processes typically the focus of psychology. Clark 2004 continues this link of argument, considering humans capacities to extend themselves through technologies, making us “natural-born cyborgs.” Akrich 1992 argues for analyzing the process of inscribing visions of the world into technical objects, which then define a framework of action.

Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. The de-scription of technical objects. In Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change. Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 205–224. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Uses original research to build upon insights from science and technology studies. Technological objects bring together a diverse group of actants, and therefore can be a fruitful way to study the formation of social relations and knowledge, particularly by moving between the designer, user, and object iteratively in one’s analysis.
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Casper, Monica J., and Adele E. Clarke. 1998. Making the pap smear into the “right tool” for the job: Cervical cancer screening in the USA, circa 1940–95. Social Studies of Science 28.2: 255–290.
DOI: 10.1177/030631298028002003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Emphasizes “social worlds” rather than actor networks; within social worlds one can determine the significance of all human and nonhuman actors, and attend to their multiple perspectives. Traces the historical trajectory of the pap smear through its social worlds, revealing how it became embedded and reified in women’s health practices.
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Clark, Andy. 2004. Natural-born cyborgs. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Offers a useful explanation of distributed cognition. Argues against posthumanist perspectives by emphasizing the specifically human capacity to bring nonbrain resources into cognition and problem solving. As humans create smarter technologies with which to build cognition coalitions, the boundary between humans and technologies becomes more fluid. Clearly written and conceptually accessible.
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Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58.1: 7–19.
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Clark and Chalmers argue that cognition should not be considered as happening only inside the brain; rather, when features of the environment aid or participate in processes like recognition, comprehension, and memory, they should be considered part of cognition, and should be studied as such.
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Frickel, Scott. 1996. Engineering heterogeneous accounts: The case of Submarine Thermal Reactor Mark-I. Science, Technology & Human Values 21.1: 28–53.
DOI: 10.1177/016224399602100102Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Helpful interrogation of Actor Network Theory (ANT), using an empirical case to clarify the role of social context in ANT analyses: In certain moments, a network of relationships may stabilize, and smaller networks of action may form within it. Actors in the embedded network are influenced by and connected to the broader network.
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Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Early synthesis of cognitive science and anthropology that lays the groundwork for research on distributed cognition. Argues that culture is a process that takes place both within and outside of people’s minds. Calls for cognitive ethnography.
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Knorr Cetina, Karen. 1999. Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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While others have investigated the production of knowledge by trying to untangle its many social, structural, and material influences, Knorr Cetina goes a step further to describe specific knowledge systems in which discovery is embedded. Knowledge cultures are characterized by different structural forms—such as the laboratory—and generate corresponding practices and knowledge.
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Pickering, Andrew. 2010. The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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While Pickering aligns with Actor Network Theory in his emphasis on action, he departs from the semiotic vein of ANT—which implies an arbitrariness or interchangeability of actors—and introduces a performative view. Material agency lacks the intentions and goals particular to human agency, but both types are constitutive, iterative, temporally emerging, and unpredictable.
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Objects, Bodies, and Embodied Knowledge

Objects are not simply carriers of symbolic content, but also things we rely on and incorporate into our everyday lives. Understanding how bodies and objects interact is crucial for understanding material cultures. Bodies make objects, consume objects, work with objects, and are themselves objects. Practice theory is especially important for understanding how interactions with objects are stabilized in embodied knowledge. Connell’s notion of “body-reflexive practices” (Connell 2005) suggests that people reflexively learn about their bodies through physical interactions with objects and other people, thus developing gender and sexual identities based on how they throw a ball or through their sexual experiences. The notion that repeated interactions with objects constitute embodied action, but also refine one’s understanding and skill with those objects, is essential to practice theory. As Bourdieu 1990 argues, the acquisition of habitus is “a question of mechanical learning by trial and error” (p. 74). Most practices rely heavily on one’s embodied knowledge, with experience being the best way to develop such knowledge. Ingold 2000 argues against the notion that ideas precede the act of making, suggesting that materials come before design, examining instead how materials and tools interact with people throughout the making process. Hoffman 2006, a study of boxing, reveals just how important objects are in simulating the experience of being in the boxing ring for a fight, an event that is relatively rare. In this sense, objects discipline bodies, forcing people to adapt to the qualities of those objects. Similarly, Wacquant 2004 argues that learning how to box requires practice hitting a speed bag rather than reading a book on boxing, memorizing its abstract knowledge, and jumping in the ring. That embodied knowledge is hard to articulate, or “tacit,” is the focus of much research, especially in research that seeks to understand craft and the production of material culture (Sennett 2008, Mukerji 2014). The Bourdieusian threads of this work tend to emphasize how social orders are reproduced through position and embodied knowledge. Importantly, Mukerji 2014 considers how tacit knowledge can lead to innovation by embedding complex engineering challenges into architectural drawing. New materialist approaches, and their fruitful application to feminist thinking, offer an exciting avenue of research on material culture that undermines divisions among siloed accounts of sex and gender (e.g., the biological, social, physical, and discursive). Instead, the posthumanist vision of new materialism offered by Coole and Frost 2010 seeks to account for the complex interactions among these dimensions to account for matter in ways that resist these divisions (see also Barad 2003 and Bennett 2010, both cited under Objects as Agentic).

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. “Structures, habitus, practices.” In The logic of practice. By Pierre Bourdieu. Translated by Richard Nice, 52–65. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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See also “Belief and the Body” in the same volume (pp. 66–79). In these two chapters, Bourdieu presents his practice-based theory of culture. Institutions rely upon the successful embodying of an appropriate habitus by their members—bodies must be conditioned through the development of “practical sense” to comply with the demands of fields, Through this sense, one’s body anticipates and responds to social cues without conscious deliberation.
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Connell, R. W. 2005. Masculinities. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Bodies are primary to our understanding and perception of the essence of masculinity; they shape this perception through the interplay of the social and physical in our actual experiences. Connell calls this “body-reflexive practice,” and argues that bodies are both agents and objects of practice.
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Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822392996Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume offers a helpful entrance into the literature on feminist and new materialisms. The entries share a conception of matter as lively and agentic, an interest in reexamining the status of life and humanity, and a focus on the political relationship between material life and geopolitical and economic structures.
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Hoffman, Steve G. 2006. How to punch someone and stay friends: an inductive theory of simulation. Sociological Theory 24.2: 170–193.
DOI: 10.1111/j.0735-2751.2006.00287.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Develops a group level theory of simulation, or a theory of how a group directs bodies to distinguish between what is “real” and what is not real, and in their preparation for the “real” in the future. Objects and bodies in the gym are organized to establish a desired practice: competent boxing.
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Ingold, Tim. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203466025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Interrogates notions of technology and the relationship between humans and machines, knowledge, and skill. Undermines the typical conception of making that assumes ideas and designs precede the act of making. Rather, the qualities of materials constrain and channel the making process, and an object’s creation is a temporal and unfolding process.
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Mukerji, Chandra. 2014. The cultural power of tacit knowledge: Inarticulacy and Bourdieu. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2.3: 348–375.
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Critiques Bourdieu’s emphasis on the social reproductive nature of tacit knowledge. Behavioral change and innovation do not only come through instruction, but also through practice, as individuals shore up the gaps between what is articulable and what is actually effective in practice. New practices can yield new imaginative possibilities.
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Sennett, Richard. 2008. The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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Examines the nature of tacit knowledge, including the progression from cold technique to the mastery of expression. Discusses concepts—like prehension and focal awareness—that describe the evolving relationship between perception, action, and objects as one develops tacit knowledge.
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Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 2004. Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Highlights the difference between objective knowledge and embodied knowledge by studying boxers in training. Abstract knowledge is illegitimate because it is not in space and time; practices are structured to help boxers embody the rhythm and tempo of boxing matches. Like Hoffman, Wacquant emphasizes the organization of space, objects, and time.
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Categorization and Morality

The categories we use to make sense of the world come from our sorting of objects. In this way, objects are inflected with morality and help establish and undergird moral order. Through their design and use, objects become inflected with regimes of value. Douglas 2003 is an important origin point for this work. Douglas considers how categorization links up with moral systems by showing that objects that defy easy categorization become viewed as dangerous and polluting. De Laet and Mol 2000, an analysis of the Zimbabwe Bush Pump, demonstrates how the Bush Pump constitutes categories of both community and citizen, engendering both a sense of nation and a moral commitment to it. Latour 1992 describes how objects and technologies, such as seat belt systems that beep until drivers buckle up, attempt to impose moral order upon users in their design. Latour argues that if we want to explain how moral orders are upheld, we need to consider how objects and people (seat belts, engineers, police officers) prescribe morality, making it more difficult to be immoral than moral. The power of categorization is further articulated by Bowker and Star 2000, who show how standards and classifications, like codifications of diseases, are built into our infrastructure, making them seem objective and rendering their logics of production invisible. Epstein 2007, a study of changes in medical research—no longer studying only white men and generalizing these findings to the broader population—engages the ethics of overgeneralizing categories. Category boundary maintenance is also a major issue in this field. Nippert-Eng 1996 makes an important contribution to this work by showing how people establish and negotiate boundaries of work and home through their use of objects. Rather than clarifying and affirming boundaries, some work suggests the importance of hybridity. Haraway 1993, a “cyborg manifesto,” subverts taxonomic categories, like the difference between humans and objects, orienting identity around coalitions of “affinities.” Latour 1992 and actor-network theory similarly embrace notions of hybridity, suggesting that traditional categories (nature and society) lead us to misrecognize the way humans and nonhumans associate and shape events.

Bowker, Geoffrey C, and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting things out. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Presents a framework for understanding social membership as the socialization into and acceptance of the categorization system of a community of practice: members come to see a group’s categories as natural. Considers how marginal objects and people can denaturalize accepted categories and reveal hidden dynamics of power.
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de Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. 2000. The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology. Social Studies of Science 2 (April):225–263.
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Traces the fluidity of the Bush Pump’s boundaries, functions, and trajectories of action to demonstrate that a fluid technology may be a “good” technology. They use this fluidity and the “dissolved” role of the pump’s creator to discuss a different possibility for what might be “good” for a community and country.
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Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and danger. London: Routledge.
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Originally published in 1966. Argues against a strict divide between sacred and profane (as suggested by Durkheim), asserting instead that cultural classification systems are the key to understanding social phenomena like religion, morality, profanity, and norms of etiquette and hygiene. The meaning of actions and objects depends on their alignment with these systems.
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Epstein, Steven. 2007. Inclusion: The politics of difference in medical research. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226213118.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Interrogates the rise of the inclusion-difference paradigm in medicine, with attention to supporting and dissenting voices, policy and institutional transformations, and outcomes both intended and unforeseen. Argues that this shift reified certain categorical identities—like race and gender—while ignoring other social practices and structures that lead to health disparities.
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Haraway, Donna. 1993. A cyborg manifesto. In The cultural studies reader. Edited by Simon During, 271–291. New York: Routledge.
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Focuses discussion of categorization on humans: In light of the link between systems of categorization and power, Haraway argues for identity based on affinity, rather than category. Asserts that all people are combinations of categories, and this blurring and confusion should be embraced.
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Latour, Bruno. 1992. Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change. Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 151–180. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Actor Network Theory perspective. Argues that nonhumans are the missing piece in explanations of the social world. Nonhumans are important actants that enforce social values, ethics, and duties. Latour does not distinguish between human and nonhuman actors analytically or ontologically, emphasizing instead the ways they exchange properties across interactions.
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Nippert-Eng, Christena E. 1996. Home and work: Negotiating boundaries through everyday life. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226581477.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigates how individuals navigate the boundary between the spheres of home and work through their everyday practices. Objects in individuals’ material environments constrain, direct, and offer opportunities for this boundary negotiation, and individuals use objects to help them integrate or the keep spheres separate, as well as to move between spheres.
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Icons and Aesthetics

Images sometimes appear to have power over us; as the focus of ritual, they affect us emotionally and demand veneration. Such icons concentrate dense social meanings into symbolic form. Early work from Benjamin 1968 points to the “auratic” power of art, organized around the religious incorporation of art in ritual. Benjamin saw the mechanical reproduction of art as reducing aura, but he also saw the dangers of aestheticizing politics. Bonnell 1999 studies exactly this with a monograph on the iconography of Soviet political posters. Bonnell suggests that Soviet posters created a visual language by celebrating Bolshevik heroes and established a shared public mentality and identity. Cerulo 1995 takes a formal approach to national symbols, comparing the structures of flags and anthems to draw out the deeper patterns of meaning inherent in the field. More recently, Zubrzycki’s work on nationalism and national identity have brought a material lens to bear on the study of icons. Studying how Polish national mythology is incorporated into material culture and performances, Zubrzycki 2010 shows how this “national sensorium” made nation real for citizens. Zubrzycki 2013, a study of the rise and fall and reinterpretation of French-Canadian icon Saint John the Baptist, describes how audiences engage in “aesthetic revolt” to redefine national identity. Jeffrey Alexander and Dominik Bartmanski have also raised important attention to the materiality of icons with concepts of iconicity, iconic consciousness, and iconic power. Alexander 2008 embraces the “sensuous surface” of things, suggesting that aesthetic experience is essential to morality and the self. Bartmanski and Alexander 2012 seeks to denaturalize iconic power by understanding the processes by which how “aesthetic surface must stand for an invisible discursive depth” (p. 4). Considering individual feelings that emerge in the image encounter, Sonnevend 2012 considers the felt experience of the iconic ritual.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2008. Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26.5: 782–794.
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Icons are not simply symbols to be read and decoded, but are experienced through the senses, and felt as well as understood. Icons are aesthetic, and interacting with them takes one out of merely instrumental action. Icons bring the aesthetic into everyday life, and are therefore connected to morality, reason, and the self.
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Bartmanski, Dominik, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. 2012. Materiality and meaning in social life: Toward an iconic turn in cultural sociology. In Iconic power. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmanski, and Bernhard Giesen, 1–12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137012869_1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Develops the concepts of icon, iconicity, and iconic power. Authors argue for applying cultural analyses to material life, particularly through investigations of icons in everyday life. Emphasizes that studying icons requires connecting their aesthetic surface to their symbolic and discursive depth.
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Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. By Walter Benjamin. Edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books.
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Describes how technologies that enable the reproduction and circulation of art objects shape people’s habits of perception and the ways they interact with art. Mechanical reproduction facilitates mass reception of art, but also distances and disengages the audience. Reproduction undercuts art’s relationship to tradition and enables its political implications.
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Bonnell, Victoria E. 1999. Iconography of power: Soviet political posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Explores how icons reinforce and channel power in political propaganda. Uses the case of Soviet political posters, and traces their evolution during the first half of the 20th century. Reveals how these posters were used by Soviet leaders to provide citizens with a visual language that consolidated the national narrative and identity.
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Cerulo, K. A. 1995. Identity designs: the sights and sounds of a nation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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Creative and exhaustive analysis of the material and symbolic expression of national identity as represented in national anthems and flags. Traces the relationship between the material realities in a nation, the construction of a national identity, and the embodiment of that identity into material objects.
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Sonnevend, Julia. 2012. Iconic rituals: Toward a social theory of encountering images. In Iconic power. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmanski, and Bernhard Giesen, 219–232. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137012869_14Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Develops concepts of the “image encounter” and the “iconic ritual.” Image encounters are negotiated meetings between people and images, a sensory experience that engages perception and context. Iconic rituals are exceptional image encounters in which the image takes on greater significance and emotional connection.
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Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2010. History and the national sensorium: Making sense of Polish mythology. Qualitative Sociology 34.1: 21–57.
DOI: 10.1007/s11133-010-9184-7Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the nature of national mythology; notes that, in Poland, the national mythology was embodied in material objects and linked to religious and memorial practices that connected people to the idea of Poland. Emphasizes that myths are seen, practiced, and interacted with through objects.
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Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2013. Aesthetic revolt and the remaking of national identity in Québec, 1960–1969. Theory and Society 42.5: 423–475.
DOI: 10.1007/s11186-013-9199-7Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Identifies the significance of icons in representing and instantiating national ideals, and also in giving citizens something to act against in the process of aesthetic revolt. When citizens contest and alter icons in the public sphere, this can pave the way for new meanings, national identity shifts, and institutional reform.
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(De)Stabilizing Social Relations

As extensions of ourselves and the medium through which we share meaning, objects have a central role in stabilizing meaning and social relations. Objects are essential to establishing and reproducing social order (Preda 1999). Objects can be embedded with knowledge and capacities, designed for particular uses, and possess durable qualities, thus aligning people with things in stable relations and realities over time (Cerulo 2009, Preda 1999). Of course, coming to a stable state is a negotiated process (Bijker, et al. 1987; see Callon 1986, cited under Objects as Agentic), where unstable arrangements or assemblages are rejected or retooled to make relations more stable. In this sense, we alter our objects to fit our needs, or we change how we do things to better fit the objects we have. Often, stability is not achieved by aligning people around one meaning or practice, but by objects serving as “boundary objects” that may be used by different people for different purposes, but that can ultimately coordinate divergent interests around a common project (Star and Griesemer 1989). Much work in this literature seeks to explain how stability emerges because of objects, but recent insights have interrogated how objects may also lead to instability. McDonnell 2016 suggests that even among objects that appear to have stable meanings, objects are always open to “cultural entropy.” Material qualities of objects can undermine their capacity to communicate, undermining attempts to align people and objects in shared understandings of the world. Objects are “unruly,” decaying over time and resistant to the work we ask them to do, often requiring entire organizational apparatuses to re-stabilize them (Domínguez Rubio 2014). Domínguez Rubio 2016 suggests taking an ecological approach that accounts for dynamism of objects by examining the “discursive and material conditions and practices” through which things become objects. Studying what happens to objects once they destabilize, and the work people must do to restabilize them, is an exciting new research direction (Domínguez Rubio 2014, Domínguez Rubio 2016, McDonnell 2016). From a media studies approach, Gillespie, et al. 2014 draws on science and technology studies to consider how materiality makes communication durable, but also require repair.

Bijker, Wiebe E, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch. 1987. The social construction of technological systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Argues for interpretive flexibility in analyzing the content of technological artifacts and scientific findings. Artifacts exist in different degrees of stabilization in the meanings and practices of different social groups, and they are only closed or finished when a group evaluates them as successfully solving the problem they were designed to solve.
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Cerulo, Karen A. 2009. Nonhumans in social interaction. Annual Review of Sociology 35.1: 531–552.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Helpful overview of research on the role of nonhumans in social interaction. Cerulo describes how scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives have incorporated nonhumans in their analyses, describes her own research in these terms, and suggests ripe directions for future research.
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Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2014. Preserving the unpreservable: Docile and unruly objects at MoMA. Theory and Society 43.6: 617–645.
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Argues that objects and their material properties have a dynamic role in structuring organizational practice. While Becker 1982 (under Production and Reception of Cultural Objects) reveals how conventions shape objects, Domínguez Rubio reveals how objects then shape conventions. The more meaningful an object is within an organization, the more demands upon the organization’s resources and attention it can make.
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Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2016. On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach. Journal of Material Culture 21.1: 59–86.
DOI: 10.1177/1359183515624128Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Utilizes an ecological approach to investigate the processes and conditions that transform things into objects with meaning, value, and power. Argues that maintenance is required to sustain an object’s status and meaning.
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Gillespie, T., P. J. Boczkowski, and K. A. Foot. 2014. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This collaborative edited volume is multidisciplinary. Essays are divided into two broad sections, on mediation and practices, that include discussant chapters. Of particular note is Chapter 11, “Rethinking Repair” by Steven Jackson, which demonstrates a growing attention to maintenance and repair in studies of the relationship between objects, meanings, and practices.
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McDonnell, Terence E. 2016. Best laid plans: Cultural entropy and the unraveling of AIDS media campaigns. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Develops the concept of “cultural entropy,” which explains how the intended uses of objects, in this case carefully planned media campaigns meant to reduce HIV by encouraging changes in sexual behavior, can fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, and failed interactions. Rather than a stabilizing force, objects also destabilize social relations.
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Preda, Alex. 1999. The turn to things: Arguments for a sociological theory of things. Sociological Quarterly 4.2: 347–366.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.1999.tb00552.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Draws on insights from the sociology of knowledge and science to argue that objects are social entities central to the establishment and reproduction of social order. By tracing processes of knowledge that unfold in the interaction between humans and objects, Preda identifies moments of the crystallization of practices and power.
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Star, Susan L., and Jason R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science 19 (August): 387–420.
DOI: 10.1177/030631289019003001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Applies Actor Network Theory principles. Noting that scientific progress requires both a diversity of viewpoints and collaboration, the authors develop a framework for understanding how actors deal with this tension. A primary strategy is the development of “boundary objects” that inhabit multiple social worlds and serve as points of coherence and translation.
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Objects, Institutions, and the State

States are more than just bureaucrats, politicians, and laws—they are systems of material culture. States construct buildings, plan cities, erect infrastructure, and develop technologies all in the effort of organizing and regulating social life and flexing the state’s power. Foucault 1995 focuses our attention on the ways modern institutions discipline citizens through surveillance, creating “docile bodies” by recording information in objects. Taking a Foucaultian approach, Joyce 2003 looks to how commitments to liberalism organize material instantiations of cities, paradoxically leading to more social control and reduced freedoms. Capturing information about people and their products requires that populations, resources, and goods become “legible,” leading states to impose rational systems that organize life in standardized ways, making it easier to observe and respond (Scott 1998). Systems of knowledge are inscribed into the built environment, something which, in turn, shapes the social order. Much of this work suggests that our understandings of political institutions are under-theorized, without a proper account of objects and technologies (Carroll-Burke 2002, Pinch 2008). Mukerji 1994 is especially important in this literature, given its focus on how modern systems of knowledge are expressed through humanity’s control over nature as an analog and path to state power. Material techniques permit shifts from personal rule to impersonal rule, drawing power from local elites to regional elites, expanding the power of states and the scientific reasoning that empowered them (Mukerji 2009). In a similar vein, Molnár 2013 suggests how architects in postwar Europe revised the built environment of cities, and can serve as an instrument of social reform for states seeking legitimacy.

Carroll-Burke, Patrick. 2002. Material designs: Engineering cultures and engineering states—Ireland 1650–1900. Theory and Society 31:75–114.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014445423909Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Emphasizes that states must be understood through their practices, and not just through discourses and ideas. Examines how social and political institutions were expressed and generated by materially grounded attempts to improve, tame, and organize life in Ireland. Conceptualizes and analyzes the state as a socio-technical/socio-material system.
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Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
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Influential work on the evolution of penal practices in particular, and the production of relations of power in general. Describes how the arrangement of physical environments and the organization of bodies within them regulate behavior without the active intervention of power holders; their power is structured into the environment.
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Joyce, Patrick. 2003. The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city. London: Verso.
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Considers freedom—or “liberalism”—as a means of rule, rather than a goal or outcome of governance; using liberalism as a governing strategy, officials organized the material characteristics of modern cities—including sewers, cemeteries, libraries, roads, and sidewalks—in ways that actually led to increased regulation of behavior.
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Molnár, Virág. 2013. Building the state: Architecture, politics, and state formation in postwar Central Europe. London: Routledge.
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Brings attention to the vital role of the built environment and material culture in state formation. Analyzes architecture as a profession and as a producer of social knowledge, and reveals that architecture does not merely represent state power, but also helps to constitute and implement it: Social and physical transformations go hand-in-hand.
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Mukerji, Chandra. 1994. The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth-century French formal gardens. Theory and Society 23 (October):651–677.
DOI: 10.1007/BF00992906Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In 17th-century France, new practices of cartography facilitated an increase of territorialism that changed the relationship of the state to material culture. The Gardens of Versailles served as both an analogy for France’s state power and as a literal display of their technologies for controlling the natural world.
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Mukerji, Chandra. 2009. Impossible engineering: Technology and territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Examines the construction of the Canal du Midi, an incredible feat of engineering at the time, and the “collective intelligence” of local peasants and state administration necessary to construct it. Excellent example of the power of “impersonal rule” and coalescing state power.
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Pinch, Trevor. 2008. Technology and institutions: Living in a material world. Theory and Society 37.5: 461–483.
DOI: 10.1007/s11186-008-9069-xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Offers a helpful and clear argument for incorporating analyses of materiality into explanations and conceptions of social action, a project in which many of the scholars in this bibliography are engaged. Emphasizes how a more robust theorization of technology can improve understandings of institutions.
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Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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Because states need to be able to read their population, they organize the population and develop standardizing tactics. Scott argues that this project of making the population legible through standardization is the primary task of state-building. This goal is pursued through spatial and material practices like architecture and city planning.
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Space, Place, and Infrastructure

How does the built environment structure our interactions with objects and other people? What meanings and uses do particular arrangement of bodies and people afford (see Gibson 2014, under Material Qualities and Affordances)? Research on space and place considers how buildings, objects, and soundscapes serve as social context. Some approaches view places as social settings, considering how the material environment cognitively cues social norms and expectations. Babon 2006 considers how the context of place mediates how people evaluate public art by cueing expectations for what belongs in particular spaces. Research on how context and place shape interpretation of objects has recently taken an explicitly material turn with work on “object-settings” (see McDonnell 2010, under Material Qualities and Affordances and Griswold, et al. 2013). The notion of an object-setting focuses attention on how the physical qualities of environments and objects interact, affording specific interpretations and uses of the object given the material constraints and possibilities. McDonnell 2010 (under Material Qualities and Affordances) considers how the meanings of AIDS media campaigns change in different object-settings nearby schools, or how the sun fades red text. Griswold, et al. 2013 examines the interactions of objects, people, and captions in art exhibitions, considering how physical “position” is of primary concern in understanding interpretation, before cognitive “location.” This question of how the physical organization of space—the arrangement of people, objects, and the built environment—mediates experience and establishes power dynamics is of central concern. Larkin 2008, on media infrastructures, articulates how the materiality of media, from radio and film, in Nigeria arose from colonial efforts at indirect rule to contemporary practices of media piracy, shaping urban life and enabling resistance. Anand 2011, on the materiality of water infrastructure in Mumbai, demonstrates how pipes, topography, settlers’ practices, and state regimes intersect to shape the politics of water access. Subjectivity and identity emerge as themes in this research, such as how the environment of objects and sounds shape people’s subjectivity in hospital settings (Rice 2003). Jansen 2008 observes the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s disruptive environment, to see how people work to reestablish a coherent sense of intersubjectivity by rerouting their way through the museum. With regard to power, Spain 1992 shows how the organization of space segregates genders and reinforces gender inequalities. Mukerji’s work on state power, material culture, and “impersonal rule” have been particularly influential in this literature, showing how the Gardens of Versailles both modeled and demonstrated state control (see Mukerji 1994 and Mukerji 2009, under Objects, Institutions, and the State).

Anand, N. 2011. Pressure: the politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology 26.4: 542–564.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigates the interplay of social, political, and hydraulic pressure in the water infrastructure of Mumbai. Marginalized groups construct citizenship through material and social practices around attaining access to water. Exemplifies social science work on infrastructure, accounting for material, cultural, and social factors.
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Babon, Kim M. 2006. Composition, coherence, and attachment: The critical role of context in reception. Poetics 34.3: 151–179.
DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2006.01.003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Highlights the significance of environmental context for people’s interpretations and evaluations of artworks. People make sense of artwork within and as it relates to the material environment; the environment shapes people’s expectations for what is appropriate or desirable for that space.
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Gieryn, Thomas F. 2002. What buildings do. Theory and Society 31 (February):35–74.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014404201290Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that artifacts stabilize social action (though they are also subject to reconfiguration by human agents) by incorporating themselves into humans’ plans and goals, by concealing the interests that motivated their design, and by raising the cost and effort of change and innovation. Illustrates concepts by investigating how buildings shape scientific endeavor.
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Griswold, Wendy, Gemma Mangione, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2013. Objects, words, and bodies in space: Bringing materiality into cultural analysis. Qualitative Sociology 36.4: 343–364.
DOI: 10.1007/s11133-013-9264-6Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Authors unpack specific mechanisms—like distance, legibility, and orientation—through which the materiality of settings influences how people interact with and interpret art. They emphasize that meaning-making is a process grounded in location and position, and argue for interrogating how materiality and cognition work together.
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Jansen, Robert S. 2008. Jurassic technology? Sustaining presumptions of intersubjectivity in a disruptive environment. Theory and Society 37:127–159.
DOI: 10.1007/s11186-007-9054-9Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In order to highlight the important—and often taken for granted—impact of the physical environment on the maintenance of intersubjectivity (the sense of a shared reality that makes interaction sensible), Jansen analyzes how people attempt to repair intersubjectivity when it has been disrupted by a disconcerting environment.
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Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822389316Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Anthropological research examining the cultural work of media technologies in producing urban Africa, specifically the changing nature and meaning of communication forms in Kano, Nigeria, over time. Includes media communication forms as part of the infrastructure of the society, highlighting both its material and cultural components.
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Rice, Tom. 2003. Soundselves: An acoustemology of sound and self in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Anthropology Today 19 (August): 4–9.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8322.00201Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A short, ethnographic account that reveals the significance of sounds for constructing understandings of oneself and one’s place in a social environment. For patients, the soundscape of the hospital continually reinforced their patient and subject status, working with visual cues to highlight their lack of privacy and constant surveillance.
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Spain, Daphne. 1992. Gendered spaces. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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Highlights the integral role of material space in processes of social stratification. Feminist and interdisciplinary perspective. Status differences between men and women lead to the formation of gendered spaces, and this separation is institutionalized over time, reinforcing gender stratification by denying women access to certain types of knowledge.