Fluent Essays

15. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 14–28. © 2014 . All rights reserved. 1. Making Sense of Material Culture Every day we swim in a sea of images and navigate our way through a world of things, and many of the images we look at are of the things we have, want to have, or believe (thanks to advertising) that we need to have. Everyone has certain basic needs, such as housing, clothing, and food, but most people want many other things: automobiles, tools, accessories to our clothing, television sets, food products, computers, tablets, smartphones… the list goes on, almost endlessly. From our childhood until our old age, we are given things or continually buying things that we hope will make us healthier and more a�ractive, will show our love to someone—our partners, our children, our parents—and will enrich our lives and What Objects Mean16. those of our loved ones. W hat Dichter points out in the quotation that begins this chapter is that the objects we own also reveal a great deal about ourselves, and that studying objects is a useful way to �nd out about people and gain insights into, as he puts it, “the soul of man.” e ning Material Culture �e things we buy or are given are known as “objects” and “artifacts” in scholarly discourse, and these objects and artifacts form what social scientists call material culture. Material culture is the world of things that people make and things that we purchase or possess, so it is part of our consumer culture. Material culture is a subject of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and many other kinds of social scientists and scholars because these objects provide information about what we are like and how we live now—and how we lived in earlier times. Some scholars use the term “object” for more or less contemporary material culture and “artifact” for the material culture of earlier times, but like many scholars of material culture, I see them as interchangeable. In his book, Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past, Chris Caple de�nes objects and artifacts (2006:1): �e word “artefact” is derived from the Latin terms ars or artis, meaning skill in joining, and factum meaning deed, also facere meaning to make or do.... �us an artefact can be considered to mean any physical entity that is formed by human beings from a nail to the building it is in. �e term “object” is also widely used to refer to any physical entity created by human beings.... For the purpose of this book, the terms “artefact” and “object” can be used interchangeably. Caple uses the British spelling for “artefact.” For our purposes, I will de�ne artifacts as relatively simple objects showing human work- manship. Automobiles and airplanes may have materiality, but they are very complex and complicated machines and, in fact, have many di�erent smaller and less complex artifacts in them. Scholars may 1. Making Sense of Material Culture 17. argue ab31. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 30–44. © 2014 . All rights reserved. 2. A Freudian Psychoanalytic Approach �e basic premise of psychoanalytic theory, as Freud explained in his essay, “Psychoanalysis” (1922), is that unconscious mental processes exist and play an important role in our lives. As he explained (1963:230): Psychoanalysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines which is gradually being accumulated into a new scienti�c discipline. Freud saw psychoanalytic theory as an interpretative art, and this mode of What Objects Mean32. interpretation can be applied, as we shall see, to artifacts and objects as well as to psychological problems. As he wrote (1963:235–236): It was a triumph of the interpretative art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto a�empted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotic: that is to say they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject, but which could easily be discovered by analytic means. Freud explained that we resist knowing the contents of our unconscious and repress recognizing the importance of the Oedipus complex and our sexuality. It is the hidden meanings and symbolic signi�cance of various artifacts of material culture that a psychoanalytic approach to the subject a�empts to discover. �e quotation by Huizinga with which this chapter begins calls a�ention to the hidden meanings and unconscious signi�cance of symbols and other aspects of life. �ere’s more than meets the eye, he argues, to all things. Artifacts and the Unconscious: Freud’s Topographic Hypothesis For Freud there are three levels to the human psyche: consciousness, pre-conscious (material we can access and of which we are dimly aware), and the unconscious, which we cannot access without guidance from psychoanalytic trained therapists. �is is known as Freud’s topographic hypothesis. It is useful to use the analogy of an iceberg to show how the three levels are related to one another. Consciousness, what we are aware of, is the part of the iceberg we see above the water. �e preconscious is what we can dimly make out a few feet below the water line. A nd the unconscious is the inaccessible dark area that makes up most of our psyches, and that is buried deep beneath the water line. �e important thing to recognize is that it is our unconscious, Freudian psychoanalytic theorists argue, that profoundly shapes our behavior. 2. A Freudian Psychoanalytic Approach 33. We can suggest, then, that there are three levels that have to be understood when it comes to 47. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 46–60. © 2014 . All rights reserved. 3. Semiotic Approaches to Material Culture Semiotics (from the Greek term for signs, sēmeîon) is the science of signs, and a semiotic approach to material culture regards artifacts as signs whose meaning and signi�cance have to be determined by the use of semiotic concepts. Signs are things that stand for other things or anything that can be made to stand for something. �ink, for example, of the American �ag. It is a sign that stands for the United States and for various values, historical events, and other ma�ers connected to the country. Words are important kinds of signs. �us the word “tree” stands for “a woody perennial plant having an elongated main stem.” Artifacts are also signs. �ere were two founding fathers of semi- otics—the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Sau- ssure (1857–1913) and the American philos- opher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). What Objects Mean48. Saussure called his science “semiology” and Peirce called his theory “semiotics.” It is Peirce’s term that has become dominant. In recent years, a number of semioticians, such as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, have used semiotic theory to analyze many dif- ferent things. Barthes’s book, Mythologies, uses semiotic theory and Marxist theory to “reveal” interesting things about contem- porary French culture, as his discussion of French toys that starts this chapter suggests. Saussure on Signs Saussure set out the fundamentals of what he called semiology in his book, Course in General Linguistics. �is book, primarily a collection of notes to his essays by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye at the University of Geneva, was published in 1915. It was translated into English by Wade Baskin and published in 1959 by �e Philosophical Library and in 1966 by McGraw-Hill. In this book is found what might be thought of as the charter statement of semiotics (1966:16): Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf- mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology 3. Semiotic Approaches to Material Culture 49. (from Greek sēmeîon “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Semiotics studies signs in society, which means it is a social science, and explains what signs are and how they function. �ese ma�ers are, it turns out, quite complicated. Saussure o�ered a de�nition of a sign, which he explained was comprised of two parts—a sound-image 63. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 62–79. © 2014 . All rights reserved. 4. Sociological Analysis of Material Culture We’ve already dealt with two theoretical approaches to material culture: psycho- analytic theory and semiotic theory. To this list we now add sociological theory, which deals with a�empts that sociologists and other scholars have made to understand how institutions, as described by the Bergers above, function in society. Sociology is, technically speaking, the study of human beings in groups and institutions. �e focus is on the way society functions and includes such areas as marriage and the family, class systems, race, gender, religion, and other aspects of collective behavior. In this chapter I will focus on sociological theories and concepts that help illuminate material culture. What Objects Mean64. Sociological Theory �e French philosopher August Comte (1798–1857) used the term “sociology” to integrate theoretical and practical studies of human beings. His goal for sociology was “to know in order to predict in order to control.” He wanted to discern the laws by which people organize their lives so he and other sociologists could help create a more humane and rational social order. Another French scholar, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who is generally considered to be the founder of French sociology, argued that the relationship that exists between indi- viduals and society is very complicated. As he explained in his book, �e Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915/1965:29): �ere are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation—I mean society. �is duality of our nature has as its consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility of reason to individual experience. In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts. 4. Sociological Analysis of Material Culture 65. �is helps explain what Peter and Brigi�e Berger were writing about in the passage that opens this chapter. We have individuality, which is based on our physical endowments, the fact that we are an “organism,” and we are also, at the same time, social beings, whose ideas and values are shaped, to varying degrees, by the social order. We are in society and society is in us, and it is simplistic to neglect either of these two sides to our nature. We can say the same thing about artifacts: they are in society and society is re�ected in them. �at is why artifacts are not only reluctant witnesses to the past but also valu- able witnesses to the present. Functionalism Many sociologists are structural-functiona81. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 80–98. © 2014 . All rights reserved. 5. Economic Theory, Marxism, and Material Culture If artifacts are simple objects showing human workmanship, it means that artifacts are made by others, either individual cra smen or, what is more usually the case, large numbers of workers in huge factories in distant places. In contemporary America, many of the objects we purchase are made in China or other cheap labor countries. �e object, then, is the tip of the iceberg, and below the seas, where we cannot see things clearly, there is human labor—labor that involves everything from designing objects, manufacturing them, transporting them, advertising them, and selling them. Needs Versus Desires: Traveling Light and Arriving Heavy Most of us have more “stu� ” (to use George Carlin’s term) than we need. How many pairs of pants, stockings, or shoes do we really need? �e fact is, we tend to accumulate more What Objects Mean82. than we need or can use. Recently, I started thinking about all the “stu� ” my wife and I have in our house: a piano, three sofas, a love seat, an old school bench, three leather Mexican chairs, two television sets, one of which is an LCD HDTV (20 inch), two desktop computers, two tablet computers, a dozen original oil paintings, one laptop computer, two cars, six clock-radios, eight pairs of old eyeglasses, three vacuum cleaners, three microwave ovens, �ve thousand books, three sets of china ware, two printers, one fax machine, one scanner, four telephones, a dishwasher, a washing machine, a dryer, a waste disposal system, four espresso machines, two co�ee grinders, two MP3 players, two hi-� sets, 200 CDs, and two cars…I could go on and on, and I haven’t said anything about my other clothes or my wife’s shoes, dresses, blouses, perfumes, or other things. I haven’t mentioned the brands of the various objects we own—a ma�er of considerable importance to many people, as we shall see. For it isn’t only the objects you have that has to be consid- ered; the brands of the objects are of major signi�cance in the analysis of material culture. We can see the list of objects in my household, incomplete as it is, and from writer R ick Moranis’s catalogue of his possessions, which I’ve only sampled, that it is easy to get lots of pos- sessions and hard to get rid of them. “Get” is a nicer word than “buy” and doesn’t suggest that you’re paying money for things. We all spend a good deal of time shopping, and when we shop we buy things—food, clothes, furniture, high-tech gizmos, CDs, stamps, cars… you name it. �is stu� ends up in our houses, and so we spend our lives surrounded by objects of all kinds that we’ve pur- chased or have been given—what we might describe as the objects of our a�ection. Our shopping and the things we buy—or things that we are given and thus possess—are one way we de�ne ourselves as persons to ourselves and to ot1 DHM 3033 Material Culture Assignment 2: Sharing, describing, & classifying a meaningful or significant object or artifact from my major and option area Multiple Deadlines: · 5pm on Sunday, March 14 · 11:59 pm on Sunday, March 14 Note: This assignment sheet is 5 pages long. This assignment is worth 75 points. ****************Consider visiting a museum for this assignment!****************** Museums are great places to learn about material culture! 5 points extra credit will be given for the selection of a museum artifact or museum interior (as related to your major and option area. Your object may be located in the museum gift shop). Do not use an object you are using for another assignment or final paper. Please allow enough time to fully complete all parts of this multi-part assignment. No credit will be given for late or incomplete submissions. Substantial points will be taken off if your submission does not allow other students time to access, review and comment on your presentation. · Post your presentation to Discussion in Canvas at absolutely no later than 5pm on Sunday, March 14 to allow for other students to respond. Final materials DUE by 11:59 PM (one minute before midnight) Sunday, March 14: · Post 3 Responses to other students’ submissions in Discussion in Canvas by 11:59 PM AND · Post your submission to Assignment submission folder in Canvas by 11:59 PM (for grading). 5\% will be subtracted from your final grade if not posted to assignments. Note: No late postings will be accepted for any reason. Purpose Upon successful completion of Assignment 2, the student will make strides towards achieving the goals of this course. The student will be able to: 1. Recognize the significance of material culture…and the significance of people’s interaction with it. 2. Demonstrate an understanding of the theories and products of the major theoretical movements and their adherents. 3. Evaluate the effectiveness of objects…relative to the needs of the users for whom they were designed. 4. …Communicate…utilizing the vocabulary developed by scholars in the design disciplines and social sciences. Instructions: Select a significant three-dimensional, man-made object or artifact of material culture related to YOUR DHM OPTION AREA (Merchandising, apparel design/fashion or interior design). (This man-made object or artifact of material culture might be something from your home, a museum (5 points extra credit for a museum object or artifact), a space or building you visit (5 points extra will be given for a museum interior if you are in interior design), your workplace, or a retail store. This cannot be merely a photograph or image you might find of an object or artifact. You must physically touch or be very close to the actual object or artifact and take a current photograph of yourself with it. Ask permission in museums!) Before proceeding, please review these defini