Material Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7078147 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Dant (Lancaster University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | OTHER |
| Venue | The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosm046.pub2 |
| OpenAlex | W4242971648 |
| ISBN | 9781405165518 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
Material culture refers to the physical things that human beings surround themselves with and which have meaning for the members of a cultural group. Sometimes these things are simply gathered from the natural world but usually material resources are manufactured into forms that are useful or attractive or both. The clothes, tools, utensils, gadgets, ornaments, pictures, furniture, buildings, and equipment of a group of people are its material culture and for disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology provide the raw data for understanding different societies. These various types of things mediate social relationships between individual people and their society, and industrialization transformed the role of things in shaping societies. Sociology has traditionally focused on cultural forms such as ideas, images, practices, beliefs, and language that can be treated as independent from any specific material substance. But developments in three fields of sociological interest – technology, consumption, and Marx's materialism – during the last quarter of the twentieth century stimulated research on contemporary social relations with things
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Clothing · Consumption (sociology · Epistemology · Historical materialism · Industrialisation · Material culture · Materialism · Meaning (existential · Natural (archaeology · Ornaments · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Anthropology · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · History · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |