Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (review)

In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin invites readers to rethink fundamental relationships between people and material culture. With indifference to disciplinary boundaries, her highly original synthesis shows how the material world “plays and has long played a fundamental role in shaping human thought, society and, over the long term, evolution” (p. 225). A post-processualist archaeologist trained at Cambridge University, Boivin became adept at treating material culture as a symbolic medium. Her specialty, however, is geoarchaeology, the study of soils. Through immersion in this science-heavy specialty and repeated visits to Balathal, a village in India, she came gradually to appreciate that symbolic interpretation leaves out what is material about soils—and material culture generally. This problem, she believes, is endemic in the soft side of the academy, and I agree.

To most social scientists and humanists, our material life is relatively invisible. She attributes this to the deeply rooted idealism of Western intellectual culture, which has passed down from Plato the dogma that material things are mere projections of concepts and ideas. Material culture, if treated at all, is regarded as a symbolic system like language, whose underlying grammar or code can be teased out. Consequently, scholars need not confront the diverse physical interactions that take place between people and things, and most ignore artifacts altogether. Citing Joseph Corn’s analysis of articles published in Technology and Culture (which appeared in a 1996 volume edited by W. D. Kingery, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies), Boivin highlights the irony that even historians of technology seldom deal with actual objects.

Boivin aims to restore materiality to material culture, arguing the likelihood that the “material world . . . evoke[s] experiences that lie beyond the verbal, beyond the conceptual, and beyond even the conscious . . . [artifacts] do not necessarily symbolise anything else: their very power may lie in the fact that they are part of the realm of the sensual, of experience, and of emotion, rather than a world of concepts, codes, and meaning” (pp. 8–9). The emotive performance of material culture has an affinity with David Nye’s notion of “technological sublime,” the ability of grandiose constructions to inspire a sense of wonder, but Boivin insists that any artifact—whether religious icon or clay pot—can have emotive effects. More general still is her insistence that people, depending on their past experiences, may be engaged by artifacts in any sensory mode, from touch to taste. Clearly, the sensuous engagement of people with things—the very materiality of human life—eludes idealist conceptions. Even so, as behavioral archaeologists have demonstrated, a materialist perspective does not preclude a concern with symbolic meanings.

Boivin argues that material culture also exercises agency—i.e., plays a causal role—in human affairs. To take the poignant example satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we note that factory workers’ interactions are caused by the arrival of particular parts on a moving assembly line. Exploring wider implications of artifact agency while questioning social constructivism, Boivin elaborates Langdon Winner’s concept of autonomous technology, which underscores the potential of technologies to reshape society. (She does of course reject simplistic technological determinism.)

Applying niche-construction theory from biology, Boivin shows how changes in material culture also affect human biological evolution. Humans create, through material culture, the niches to which they adapt as biological beings. She rehearses the textbook case of how dependence on dairy farming caused genetic change in humans. (Prior to the advent of dairy farming, adults did not drink milk and the production of lactase, needed for digesting milk sugar, diminished greatly. In societies that became dependent on dairy farming, however, adults continued to drink milk, which eventually led to genetic changes that prolonged the production of lactase.) Also, Boivin maintains, our big brain with its extraordinary executive functions evolved under the selective pressures created by tool use.

Boivin believes, and I agree...