Trabajo de dramaturgia sobre el personaje

Every day we use objects, see objects, buy objects. Objects tell a story. For a long

time “Material culture was the manifestation of other cultures, other worlds, and was

sufficient alone to capture the interest and imagination of a public audience” (Haas 1996, 7). Often anthropological or ethnographic museums were the warehouses of these objects. Material culture is a term that arrived in the 20th _{century within archeology and cultural} anthropology and the study of it grew during the 1980s and 90s (Appadurai 1986; Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 25; Ter Keurs 2011). In 1996, the ‘Journal of Material Culture’ was first

There are discomforts with the idea of material culture that can be identified. Firstly,

the idea of culture: can we speak of a culture? Secondly, when we speak of ‘material’ we then also have the ‘immaterial’. The question arises if it then is useful to speak of material culture as we also categorize immaterial then. And thirdly, should we place these two, perhaps somewhat problematic terms of material and culture, together? (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 26-27). Tilley also confirms this: “Yet the ‘material’ and the ‘culture’ are commonly regarded as fundamentally opposed” (2006, 1).

Having an important role in the disciplines of archeology and cultural anthropology, material cultural studies however is interdisciplinary (Miller 2010, 2; Tilley 2006, 1). “This

field of study centers on the idea that materiality is an integral dimension of culture, and

that there are dimensions of social existence that cannot be fully understood without it”

(Tilley 2006, 1). Material culture was often seen as something that reflects a certain culture, in the sense that it thought us about a certain culture (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 354).

Miller in his book ‘Stuff’ does not give a definition of stuff and material culture, as he sees it as a hopeless task to define what stuff is and what is not (2010, 1). He argues that objects actually do not represent us, but that they create us. The dominant theory of materialism seems to be that objects are symbols of representation (Miller 2010, 12). Especially clothing would be seen as an object that is used to show a certain message, for example where you are from. Miller argues that clothes are nothing more than things

without a real meaning and therefore wonders “what and where is this self that the clothes

represent?” (2010, 13). If you would get rid of all the clothes, what would you be left with? According to Miller you would not be left with your true inner self. He therefore thinks that

“the clothes were not superficial, they actuallywere what made us what we think we are”

(Miller 2010, 13). Stuff, in this case clothes, make us something, instead of we using stuff to represent our selves.

The term function plays an important role in the study of material objects as it could explain the stuff we have and why we have it (Miller 2010, 44). However, when looking at the earlier example of clothing, we can see straight away that people do not always chose the most functional. Of course, in the first place we wear clothes to keep us warm. Miller for example asks if a function can be showing a gender? Wearing a skirt instead of trousers on a worksite, is that more functional? (Miller 2010, 46-47). It is evident that functionality is not the main role of objects.

Another important term I already touched upon during the part on identity, is agency. Agency is also important regarding material culture, and might be used to connect identity and objects together, as Hoskins showed earlier (1998, 6).

Alfred Gell is an important scholar regarding agency and his work can be used to explain this term more in-depth (1998). He has written the book ‘Art and Agency’, in which

he argues how art can be used as an instrument to influence others (Gell 1998). Objects are more than symbols. They are, according to Gell, systems of actions (1998, 5). He talks about artworks not in the aesthetic sense, but about art as social agents: “persons or ‘social agents’ are … substituted for by art objects” (Gell 1998, 5). Gell defines agency as persons and things that are “seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by

acts of mind or will or intention, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events” (1998, 16). Agent then “initiate ‘actions’ which are ‘caused’ by themselves, by their

intentions, not by the physical laws of the cosmos” (Gell 1998, 16). I believe this latter point is the most important in understanding the agency of objects. Objects hold some sort of power with which they can influence people.

Pierre Bourdieu is another important name in the study of material culture (Bourdieu 1972; Miller 2010, 51; Jenkins 1992). Miller follows the argument of Bourdieu in saying that becoming part of society, as an individual, you will not learn this by getting an education, but because people are instilled in habits of society through the way they interact with each other during everyday traditions and practices (Miller 2010, 52-53). Miller continues: “In Bourdieu’s account the key operator in making us characteristic of our own society is stuff”

(2010, 52). Bourdieu “argues that what, in industrial societies, we now tend to inculcate

through formal education happens to children born in to Kabyle society [a North African Berber community] through a process of habituation with the order of the things around

them” (Miller 2010, 52-53). Miller continues: “By learning to interact with a whole slew of

different material cultures, an individual grows up assuming the norms that we call culture”

and these things are learned through the everyday routines (Miller 2010, 53). If we follow this theory is it then possible to argue that stuff does play an important role in identity formation? As by interacting with the material culture, the objects around us, we learn norms of a culture. For example, a child of a reindeer herder, growing up with objects around him that are related to reindeer herding would identify as such much easier than someone who is not around the practices of reindeer herding. It will become visible in the

case of the Sámi that this is an interesting case as people are finding out that they have a Sámi background at a later age. They have not grown up with Sámi objects around them, and have not learned which gákti belongs to the area they live in. They are exploring this at a different stage in their lives.

As the last paragraphs have made clear, there is much more to objects than just their being. Whether you believe we use objects to represent ourselves, or the other way around as Miller argues, it has become clear that objects have an important role. The next part discusses the institutions that show and display objects and use them to represent people and cultures: museums.