Event: Friday Seminar: "About-Faces in the Anthropology of Material Culture: Implementing Mauss' Program At Last"

Speaker: Dr. Pierre Lemmonier, Centre National de Rechereche Scientifique

Technologie culturelle designates the strain in the anthropology of objects and techniques first developed in France in the early 1970s. This approach gives a prominent place to the physical actions of people making and doing things, to the way things are made and physically used, and to technological processes. This talk deals with contemporary methods and results in the field.

After a series of trials, errors, and dead-ends – notably the difficulty of combining Leroi-Gourhan’s methodological propositions with Marxism and structuralism – technologues, and later scholars in “material culture studies” have produced hundreds of useful and remarkable studies of the “effects” of objects and techniques on social life, and analysis of the “style-related” inscriptions in objects (in materials, form, decoration) of identity, power, gender, etc.

For decades, however, when it came to materiality, scholar had simply no idea of the kind of material item – materials, gestures, actions on matter, mechanical principles, physical characteristics, etc. – that might “say” something about a social organization, sets of cultural practices, or representations. In other words, Mauss’ program on techniques: Why and how this way of making, producing, physically using things, here and now? The question of what people do with objects, including “merely” building or reinforcing social relations through the use of artefacts, was left aside.

Recently, a series of scholars showed that some objects, their physical properties, and their material implementation are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking. Those objects and practices are even sometimes the only means of rendering visible pillars of social order that are otherwise blurred, if not hidden. Mauss’ program is at last implemented. But those studies also deal with a very general issue in anthropology: that of understanding the specific ways in which the spheres of our social existence, that we scholars arbitrarily compartmentalize, interact.

It has now been shown how particular objects, in their very materiality and physical use, help the members of a society perceive and share the life they live collectively; how they conceive their unique world of rules and unspoken social givens, their unique system of ideas and ways of doing things, their unique material world, as well as how they conceive itsjustifications. Among other such objects, the talk will focus on Ankave mortuary drums and ceremonies.