Transcript Chapter One introduces the key concepts and questions that

Chapter One
introduces the
key concepts and
questions that
underlie Lycra:
How a Fiber
Shaped America.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
What is stuff?
• We live in a material world – a world made of
mass-produced stuff. The formal term for stuff is
‘material culture’.
• The clothes we wear, the things we eat and
drink, all the everyday things we take for
granted, are all examples of ‘stuff’.
• How and why did this stuff get to be there, and
what does it say about us and our society? That’s
where the Anthropology of Stuff begins. .
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Why does stuff matter?
• Anthropologists like to say – ‘we make things,
and things make us’.
• Meaning that while we make stuff, stuff has an
effect on us too, changing the ways we think
and behave, how we see the world and
ourselves, and the ways others see us.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
Anthropology ‘at home’
• Anthropology used to be about what
happened to people on the other side of the
world.
• Increasingly it is about how we live, ‘at home’,
using the classic techniques of anthropology,
but applying them to our own society.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
• For example, in Bronislaw Malinowski’s
ethnographies of the Trobriand Island group, he
showed how the traditional valuables circulated
through the kula ring linked all the islanders.
• In the same way, the Anthropology of Stuff aims to
show how stuff makes networks or webs that link
producers, distributors, marketers, retailers and
consumers at different levels, beginning with the
local and ending with the global.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
How does stuff come into being?
• Stuff doesn’t just happen – it gets made, and
becomes popular or unpopular, because it
reflects or embodies things that are important
to individuals and to society as a whole.
• As anthropologists put it – ‘Stuff carries or
embodies meanings and values.’
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Stuff: meanings and values
• In’ and ‘out’, ‘cool’ and ‘uncool’ are about
more than taste. They are about normative
values, the way things ‘ought’ to be – the way
we ‘should’ look, behave, eat, about the ‘right’
sports to play, clothes to wear and cars to
drive.
• The anthropology of stuff is about looking for
the meanings and values embodied in stuff.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Finding values and meanings
Stuff tells stories – stories about who and what we are,
where we are and why. These stories – often called
‘narratives’ by anthropologists – contain and convey
values and meanings. It is the everyday stuff – the
stuff that we so take for granted that we hardly ever
notice it – that often has the most interesting stories
to tell, and has the greatest effect on our daily lives.
It is through the stories told by everyday stuff – much
of it seemingly superficial – that we can connect with
deep underlying issues, and with the dynamics of
political economy and cultural relativity.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Doing the Anthropology of Stuff
Studying stuff is one of the best ways of finding out
about ourselves and the society we live in, but how
do we do it?
The wonderful thing about the anthropology of stuff
and the material culture of everyday life is that you
don’t have to go halfway around the world to do it –
it’s all around you, 24/7 – and you can do it for free.
Just keep your eyes, ears and mind open, and use the
following methods.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Three key methods
Three key methods of the anthropology of stuff
and of material culture studies are:
• ethnography,
• archival research and
• what is now called ‘netnography’ or ‘digital
ethnography’.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Ethnography
Ethnography is direct first-hand observation,
including participant observation and
interviewing. It is the core research method of
traditional anthropology.
If you are studying your own culture, you are
already a ‘participant observer’ in it.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
The ‘emic’ view
• In doing ethnography, you are aiming to
understand the ‘emic’ view – the way things
look from the inside, to the people involved.
• Why do they do what they do, and how do
they see and think about things?
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Multi-site ethnography
Traditional anthropology used to be ‘single site,
carried out in one place. Today, much ethnography
is carried out in multiple sites.
An excellent academic article on doing multi-site
ethnography is George Marcus’s Ethnography In/Of
the World System:
http://www.sociol.unimi.it/docenti/semi/documenti/
File/Marcus.pdf
©2011 Taylor and Francis
Archival research
• Archival research involves working with
documentary sources, like newspapers,
magazines, advertisements, photographs,
films and archival collections of business and
other papers.
• Archives are still under-used by
anthropologists, for two reasons:
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
• First, the pioneering anthropologists usually
worked with peoples who had no writing
systems and no written archives, obliging
anthropologists to rely solely on observation
and oral tradition.
• Second, there is a widespread belief that
archives – particularly business archives – are
‘advertising in disguise’. This is unfounded: if
you want to know how a business operates
from the inside, you should use its archives.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
Business archives
A unique archive for the history of business enterprise in
America is the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington,
Delaware, where the papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours
and Company, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and
many other companies that had a formative effect on the
cultural, social and political dimensions of American life
from the 18th century to the present are housed. Research
in the Hagley Museum and Library provided much of the
original material used in Lycra: How a Fiber Shaped
America.
• Link to Hagley website:
http://www.hagley.org/library/
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
‘Netnography’ or digital ethnography
• With globalisation and the growth of the internet,
face-to-face ethnography and traditional archival
work have been supplemented by various forms
of doing ethnography on or through the internet.
Here is a link to a piece on ‘netnography’ from
the Technology Review. This is still a controversial
technique in the social sciences, but research is
moving in this direction:
• http://www.technologyreview.com/business/264
34/?p1=A4
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
The ‘cultural biography’ of stuff
• As stuff moves from person to person and
place to place over time, its meaning and
value change, even its appearance can
change. To really understand material culture,
you have to find out about stuff in the past as
well as in the present.
• This is called a ‘longitudinal’ approach, and it
involves ethnography, archival work and
netnography.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Kopytoff’s Cultural Biography of a Thing
• An excellent technique developed by Igor Kopyoff is to
compile a ‘cultural biography, which follows stuff from
it’s beginnings, through all its changes across time and
space, the technique I used in constructing a cultural
biography of Lycra for Lycra: How a Fiber Changed
America.
• This is the key article in which Kopytoff describes the
method in detail:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdflibrary/Kopytoff_CulturalBiography.pdf
©2011 Taylor and Francis
Discussion questions - Chapter One
1) What are the relative strengths of ethnography,
archival research and netnography? How would
you combine them?
2) What do you see as the special challenges and
ethical issues involved in netnography?
3) Discuss the various strategies for carrying out multisite researched discussed by Marcus in
Ethnography In/Of the World System – which are
particularly suitable for the anthropology of stuff?
© 2011 Taylor and Francis