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SOC 480 - Material Culture Course Syllabus

Halide Veliolu
halidev@yahoo.com

A growing interest with the materiality and the troubling category of things have been
occupying the agenda of social thinking in the last decade as an unequivocally interdisciplinary
endeavor involving sociology, anthropology, archaeology, art history, literary criticism and
philosophy. The new venue of research in material culture has turned around the ripened study of
how people make things by inquiring also the ways in which things make people, how objects
mediate social relationships and lastly, how the non-human objects can have a life and agency of
their own. Works by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Arjun
Appadurai, Bruno Latour, Daniel Miller, Susan Stewart, Web Keane, Bill Brown, and Tim
Ingold will constitute the major part of the reading material we will be exploring in this course.
Each seminar participant is asked to construct two object ethnographies (60 % of the total
grade). The exercise is about pushing the limits of classic way of approaching the world
primarily through the thoughts, experiences, and actions of agents. Rather, the participants are
asked to depict the object agents as their entrance point into the cultural. The primary
ethnographic gaze that should attend to an individual object, a class of objects, or a cluster of
objects needs to use these ethnographic sketches as a platform for reflecting on issues of
identity, meaning, structure, representation, social critique, materiality, etc.
Object ethnographies will be presented at the middle and the end of the term.
A group of participants will be presenting the readings of the week at each session. Presentations
are expected to be no longer than 20 min. The text of the presentation with a list of discussion
questions are required to be posted to the instructor by 5p.m. each Sunday.
Grade distribution:
Object ethnographies (60 %)
Weekly reading presentations (30% )
Participation (10% )
Weekly schedule:
Week 1: Introduction
Week2: Fetishism
Marx, Karl. 1990 [1865]. The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof. In Capital, vol. 1,
pp. 125-. Penguin Classics.
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Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1927]. Fetishism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XXI, edited by James Strachey. The Hogarth Press. pp. 152-157.
Stallybrass, Peter. 1998. Marxs coat. In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable
Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer. Routledge, pp. 183-207.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. The rhetoric of iconoclasm: Marxism, ideology and fetishism. In
Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 160-208.
Week 3: matters of tactile intimacy
Taussig, Michael. 1991. Tactility and Distraction. Cultural Anthropology 6(2): 147-153.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation. Pp.217-252.
Buck-Morss Susan. 1977. Dialectics without Identity: The Idea of Natural History and A Logic
of Disintegration: The Object. In The Origin of Negative Dialectics. The Free Press. Pp. 43-82.
Week 4: Matters of habit and desire
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press Books. Pp1-38.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. Objects of desire. In On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic,
the souvenir, the collection, pp. 132-170. Duke University Press.
Velioglu, Halide. 2011. Chocolate and the Maiden: Prelude to Sentimental, Habitual and
Aesthetic Registers of Belonging among Bosniaks. In Bosniak Sentiments: Poetic and Mundane
Life Of Impossible Longings. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Texas at Austin
Week 5: Social life of things I
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In The Social Life
of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, pp. 3-63.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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, pp. 64-
94. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Fehervary, Krisztina. 2002. American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a
Normal Life in Postsocialist Hungary. Ethnos 62(3): 369-400.
Week 6: Objectification
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Best, Stephen M. 2004. The Slaves Two Bodies and Fungible Personhood, Evanescent
Property. The Fugitives Properties: Law and Poetics of Possession. University of Chicago
Press. Pp. 1-100.
Tilley, Christopher. 2006. Objectification. In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by C. Tilley,
W. Keane, Susanne Kchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, Sage Publications, pp. 60-73.
Week 7: Materiality as an effect
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2005 [1987]. The Prejudice of Perception and the Privilege of Things.
In The Imaginary Institutions of Society. Polity Press. Pp.329-335.
Meskell, Lynn. 2005. Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer than They Are. In Materiality. Daniel
Miller (ed.) Duke University Press. Pp.51-71.
Inoue, Miyako. 2007. Things that Speak: Peirce, Benjamin, and Kinesthetics of Commodity
Advertisement in Japanese Womens Magazines, 1900 to the 1930s. positions:east asia cultures
critique 15(3):511-522.
Week 8: Potency of objects
Mauss, Marcel. 2002[1922]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Taylor&Francis. Pp.1-59.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift.
Baudrillard, John. 1988. From the System to the Destiny of Object. In The Ecstasy of
Communication. Pp.75-95.
Week 9: Probing the limits of representation I
Foucault, Michele. 2002 [1966]. Limits of Representation. In The Order of Things: An
Archeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge. Pp. 235-271.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things. Journal of
Material Culture 11(3): 318-338.
Edensor, Tim. 2005. Materiality in the Ruin: Wastes, Excess and Sensuality. Berg. Pp.97-124.
Hill, Jude. 2007. The Story of the Amulet: Locating the Enchantment of Collections. Journal of
Material Culture 12(1): 65-87.
Week 10: Probing the limits of representation II
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Lacan, Jacques. [1986, 1992] 1997. Courtly Love as Anamorphosis. In The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, Volume 7 of The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Norton & Company.
Pp.139-142.
Zizek, Savoj. [1991] 2008. Much Ado About a Thing. For They Know Not What They Do:
Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Verso. Pp. 229-278.
Aretxaga, Begona. 1995. Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern
Ireland Ethnic Violence. Ethos 23(2):123-148.
Hanks, William. 2004. Explorations in the Deictic Field. Current Anthropology 46(2): 191-220.
Week 11: Corporeal matters
Irigaray, Luce. 1984. Love of Same, Love of Other and An Ethics of Sexual Difference. In
An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press. Pp.97-132.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Lived Spatiality (The Spaces of Corporeal Desire). In Architecture
from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. MIT Press.Pp.31-47.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality. In On Female Body Experience. Oxford University
Press. Pp.27-45.
Lingis, Alphonso. 1994. The Force of the Body. In Foreign Bodies. Routledge. Pp.3-52.
Week 12: Materialities of Nature, Science, and Technology
Latour, Bruno. 1988. Mixing humans and nonhumans together: the sociology of a door-closer.
Social Problems 35(3):298-310.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. Tools, minds and machines: an excursion in the philosophy of technology. In
The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, pp. 294-311.
Routledge, London.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Can the Mosquito Speak? In Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-
Politics, Modernity. University of California Press. Pp.19-53.
Week 13: Material Agency
Heidegger, Martin. [1971] 2001.The Thing. In Poetry, Language and Thought. Harper Perennial
Modern Classics. Pp.161-184.
Gell, Alfred. 1998.Art and Agency: An Anthropological Approach. Oxford Uni. Press. Pp.1-28.
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Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern. Critical Inquiry 30(2): 25-48.
Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de. 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of
Objects into Subjects in Amarindian Ontologies. Common Knowledge 10(3): 463-484.
Week 14: Material agency II
Cetina, Karin Knorr. 1997. Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge.
Theory, Culture& Society 14(4):1-30.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Posthuman, all too human: towards a new process ontology. Theory,
Culture & Society 23(7-8):197-208.
Malafouris, Lambros. 2008. All the Potters Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In
Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Springer. Pp. 19-36.