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Technology and Culture 47.4 (2006) 823-824


Reviewed by
Marcia-Anne Dobres
Materiality. Edited by Daniel Miller. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 294. $22.95.

In the interdisciplinary world of material-culture studies, "materiality" is the buzz word of the last decade, especially in anthropology and technology studies. This edited volume takes on the question of materiality and consists of an outstanding introduction by Daniel Miller and ten (mostly intriguing) case studies. Not satisfied with standing on the cutting edge of materiality studies, it advances a far more compelling agenda: to theorize precisely what materiality is in order to transcend the hackneyed duality of subjects and objects and comprehend how and why people simultaneously engage with and try to transcend their material existence. Miller and his contributors take the reader on an exhilarating voyage across and through the immaterial boundaries of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, theology, politics, and technology. This is Miller's vision at its characteristic and eclectic best, for he has been thinking, analyzing, and writing about material culture—and inspiring researchers across the social sciences—for more than two decades.

Miller's introduction is more than worth the price of this book. He starts (not ends!) by defining materiality with clarity and nuance. Materiality is more than artifacts and their agency—it encompasses that Pandora's box we call "culture." It takes Miller fifty pages to explain what he means, for he builds his argument carefully. He starts with Arjun Appadurai's path-breaking theory of "the social life of things," then interjects the foundational ideas of Erving Goffman, E. H. Gombrich, and Pierre Bourdieu. From this standpoint, he wends his way through the material processes of objectification, agency and habitus, power, and representation to get to the heart of the matter—immateriality. The volume's three goals are then carefully explicated: 1) to acknowledge the universal human desire to transcend and repudiate materiality; 2) to understand the relationship between materiality and immateriality; and finally 3) to "bury" the privileged phenomenological status of the subject over the (techno)object. Materiality is all about grappling with the "interdigitating" of persons, bodies, things, and cognition.

Although all are stimulating, the case studies range from the immediately comprehensible to the tough-going. In the first category are: Fred Myers's essay on the "relative materiality" of Australian aboriginal dreamtime in contemporary legal battles for property and copyrights on modern aboriginal art; Suzanne Küchler's analysis of technologized clothing, or "intelligent fabrics," which explores the relationship between Homo sapiens and sapient tools that actually think for themselves; and Nigel Thrift's similar interest in the "sapient materiality" of computer software and screens. [End Page 823] More difficult were Bill Maurer's and Hirokazu Miyazaki's analyses of the ways in which (immaterial) monetary value is materialized in modern-day financial encounters. For example, while Maurer explores how, through "adequation," twenty-first-century Islamic coins act as a technology that materializes the divine in mortgage transactions, Miyazaki looks at the material and secular effects of Japanese arbitrage.

The remaining chapters are on more familiar ground. Lynn Meskell discusses the materializing of ancient Egyptian beliefs in the afterlife through the monumentality of the Pyramids; Michael Rowlands analyzes how the personification of Cameroonian Fons (chiefs) in postcolonial settings requires the infusing of material things with chiefly and spiritual, hence immaterial, power; Matthew Engelke explores the (im)materiality of the Masowe weChishanu Church in Zimbabwe, which repudiates the materiality of the Bible in favor of the spiritual power of everyday objects; and Webb Keane considers the "openness of things" in what he calls the semiotic ballet of Sumbanese cloth, clothing, bodies, signs, "objectualization," and their meanings. The final chapter, by Christopher Pinney, is both a case study (of Hindu chromolithographs) and serves as a conclusion to the volume. It provides a sustained critique of the very core of the book by questioning the mutuality of objects and subjects. While Pinney agrees with Miller's argument about the need to overthrow the phenomenological tyranny of the subject in current material-culture...

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