The Material Turn: Anthropological Analysis

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The material turn
The material turn, which emerged in the 1990’s, is the result of a much older debate within archaeology and anthropology. In order to understand the meaning and the consequences of the material turn, we have first to understand the position objects and things occupied in the in archaeology prior to the material turn. During the mid-nineteenth century, archaeologists used the “Three Age” system created by Christian Thomsen to give structure to European prehistory. Within this system, objects were evaluated on their technological level and use, in order to define changing time periods in Europe. This naturally resulted in a rigorous study of objects and during the 1870’s and 1880’s ideas of artefact typology (the analysis …show more content…

However, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s more and more archaeologists objected against this approach. They argued that material culture had become little more than a literary device, which could be used to generate accounts of the human past and that objects do far more than simply represent (Hicks 2010, 73-74). These arguments generally have in common the sentiment that in the past archaeologists somehow forgot about things in their own sense. As Olsen argued: “archaeologists had moved away from things, materially and subsumed themselves to hegemonic anti-material and social constructivist theories” (Olsen 2003 in Hicks 2010, 76). This had led in the past decades to a refocus on things, which has been termed as the “material turn”. Most recently this has led to creation of various “sub-fields”, within the material turn, such as Bruno’s Latour “symmetrical arcaheology”, Daniel Miller’s replacement of “material culture” with “materiality” and Tim Ingold arguing for a focus upon “materials” rather than some generalized essence of “materiality”. I will not discuss these sub-fields in detail, however it is sufficient to say that scholars within the material turn tend to highlight the relation between the social and the material, by focusing on the role of materiality and the material agency …show more content…

This field has been greatly influenced by authors such as Foucault and Butler, since a central part of the resistance literature focusses on the notion of understanding and studying power and social change (Tornberg 2013). With such as focus on power resistance studies have been primarily been studying on how hierarchical discourses and power relations are produced, reproduced and also challenged in ordinary speech and everyday acts of resistance. Hence the main question within resistance studies has been: how do people use identities, images, symbols, different counter-discourses and resistance narratives to challenge the dominant discourses and the construction of power (Tornberg 2013). As it has become clear by now, resistance studies has been to a large extent been affected and characterized by a preoccupation on immaterial cultural processes and not-so-tangible entities such as texts, signs, symbols, identity and language. This is due to the fact that in resistance studies, the material has been treated as an outcome and/or medium in which social relations are produced or reproduced. From this perspective, the archaeological material is rendered to simply a text to be decoded or a symbolic bearer of meaning, and the material world simply to an external environment in which the “real interesting analysis” takes place (Tornberg 2013). Little

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