I found Miller’s “Theories of Things” the most enjoyable and readable article of the semester thus far. Miller presents an argument for the significance of material things, of ‘stuff’ to culture. For him the very fact that academics fail to give credence to material cultures is indicative of how embedded these things are in our everyday norms, “the more we fail to notice them, the more powerful and determinant of us they turn out to be” (54). Miller integrates theory across disciplines in making his argument. In the first section he says he is articulating Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (53). Next he takes up Marx and Hegel, and reads Hegel against Simmel who is becoming a now familiar name in studies of material culture. As an introduction to the reasons for studying material culture—stuff, and its significance to culture and anthropology Miller’s approach sat with me much better than Appadurai’s, Carrier’s, or Thomas’.

Yet in a sense Miller is also appealing to a sort of progression in academic discourse, that we are now able to “see” the importance and significance of material culture where we once failed to analyze or theorize it. Miller’s reader feels a sense of coming out of a theoretical progression in Western thought towards an inevitable acknowledgement of the significance of material culture. The nature of his arguments and presentation is satisfying because it is teleological but also comforting to be building off of the ideas of renowned thinkers like Hegel, Marx, Bourdieu, and Simmel. As Marx took Hegel’s work and acknowledged basic principles and took them in another direction, towards the material, Miller does the same does the same with Marx by introducing a dialectical and more complex relationship between the base and superstructure. I don’t mean that this is a problem, or that it lessens the value of what he is saying or arguing, but I think it says a lot about academia and so forth that I found it convincing. This method of argumentation gave his work a presence, place, and significance in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t employed historical theories and contextualized his arguments in relation to them.

What Miller and Thomas have in common is a desire to disrupt the romanticization of tradition as a site free from materiality. Miller argues that objectification is not unique to capitalist culture, rather culture is itself dialectical and contradictory. He examines religious material cultures noting “the fundamental contradiction whereby religions find that the best way to express immateriality is through materiality” (70). Thomas critiques the ideology of primitivism which glorifies simple traditional societies and portrays the way of life they offer as utopian as opposed to that of mechanized, impersonal capitalist societies. Thomas is also critical of the binary distinction made between the traditional and the modern, which relates to what we discussed last week. He raises the point that this sort of categorization has in many cases “taken by-products of colonialism to be the core structures or hallmarks of tribal or Asiatic authenticity” (27). Like Miller, Thomas is arguing against “grand polarities” in the experience and meaning of material culture. This also relates to discomfort with the Maussian trajectory from pre-capitalist to commoditized culture, and to Appadurai’s focus on the commodity-potential of objects, where commodity status is recognized to be in flux or a series of phases. Together these articles offer convincing critiques of Marx’s basic view of historical materialism, while also building off of this perspective.

Thomas’s struggle is to recognize difference between cultures and societies without reifying and polarizing what he terms “partial or contingent difference” (34). This issue spans across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in research and field work.

1. How can we engage in ethnographic study to be sensitive to social/cultural differentiation without also reifying difference?
2. Both articles acknowledge the importance of framing in academic inquiry, as well as a willingness to name the frames that we use as oppsed to norming and masking them. Can we be aware of these, or are we too culturally embedded to recognize them?