Theory & Method
Although a great deal of pioneering work has been done in the field of Material Culture Studies, there is no broad understanding of the nature of the information we can extract from objects, the methodology to be applied to artifact studies, nor the kinds of 'history' that can be written from the information so gleaned. Nevertheles, it is something of an article of faith amongst practitioners in the field that every artifact is the product of the culture in which it was created and in which it is consumed - which is not necessarily the same thing: consider the Japanese export industry in porcelains at the turn of the century.
As William Hesseltine pointed out thirty years ago, there is still no widely accepted 'vocabulary' or 'grammar' for use in the direct interpretation of material objects. What I would like to suggest is that we do have an increasingly workable framework available today through the fields of symbolic interactionism, marketing research, iconography and semiotics. Taken together, these perspective provide the tools to both identify the non-verbal components of objects and to chart at least some of the ways these in which the symbolic meanings of these physical attributes are transmitted to the individual. While it may be true that in all these approaches symbolic meaning is still moderated through language, this does not, I would argue, negate their existence as symbols.
A major part of the present exercise is the attempt to extend the dominant methodologies of Material Culture Studies by the application of these other approaches, in order to more fully analyze the complete cycle of meaning in the context of twentieth-century consumer goods. As part of this integrated method, I have considered the packaging and advertising of the goods ("context") on a par with the artifacts themselves. A working methodology is outlined graphically below:
Last updated: 1 November 1998
