Towards a holistic view of material culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Material culture surrounds us and yet it is usually overlooked. Although it is an integral part of our daily lives, we take it for granted. This attitude has also influenced academic consideration of material culture, although this is now beginning to change, with material culture recently emerging as a dominant field of research in its own right in the social sciences. Carl Knappett seeks to contribute to this emerging field by adopting a broad interdisciplinary approach that builds on archaeology and incorporates anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology, and cognitive science. His approach is that people act and think through material culture. Modes of knowledge and modes of practice are deeply rooted in even the most common objects. This requires us to adopt a relational perspective on material artefacts and human agents as a means of characterising their complex interdependencies. In order to illustrate the resulting networks of meaning, Knappett discusses examples ranging from prehistoric Aegean ceramics to Zande hunting nets to contemporary art.

The book Towards a Holistic View of Material Culture. Interdisciplinary Approaches [Thinking Through Material Culture] argues that, although material culture is the cornerstone of archaeology, the discipline has only recently begun to address how fundamental artefacts are to human cognition and perception. This idea of the interdependence between mind, action and matter paves the way for a new and dynamic approach to all material culture, both past and present.