Introduction

In the Beginning was material, from matter, from mater or mother earth. Material is the substance or substances out of which something can be made. In the subsequent millennia a great variety of human groups in many different geographic and environmental circumstances devised, improvised, and passed on to their descendents, tools, cultigens, ways of cooking and building, the techniques of creating a myriad of goods and objects, to make our existence on the planet possible, comfortable, rewarding, and destructive. These objects include grinding stones, jade figurines, the spinning jenny, and the internal combustion engine together with their corresponding societies. A little over a century ago, the practice of all this was given a name, "material culture," and has since become a field of academic endeavor.

The study of the way people have gone about creating the early layers of material life has long been the province of archeologists sifting through the debris of lost worlds. Research on the rudimentary remains of human cultures reveals what might be called the "supply side" of material life; that is, an account of things produced; often, as much for use-value as for exchange-value. In his sweeping account of early modern Europe, Fernand Braudel coined the additional expressions, "material life" or "material civilization" to describe "that dense zone . . . basically lying below the market, close to the earth . . . of self-sufficiency, of the exchange of products and services in a very reduced area. . . ." ¹

Archaeological research has been impressive in establishing the presence of these early goods but less successful in interpreting their meaning because there is a limit to the knowledge that can be squeezed from stones. When "thin orange" pottery, for example, is found in both ninth-century Teotihuacan on the outskirts of present-day Mexico City, and Kaminaljuyu in central Guatemala, does it mean that that particular artifact was a tribute, a status, or a common trade, good? ² On the other hand, archaeological research on the more visible culture of fifteenth-century Peru combined with early European chronicles can show that where markets and monetary incentives are weak, the symbolic value of goods is particularly important and drives the "growth of wealth and power." The extraordinary volume of textiles found in storage sites in the high Andes, it is now clear, was primarily used by the Incas as gifts to cement alliances or to coax labor services from local villages. ³

Material culture also refers to the creation of more well-known items such as hautecouture or cluster bombs. In research on more recent centuries, historians and anthropologists have employed new techniques for the study of material culture, scanning, for example, the archival records of wills, testaments, and notarial documents to demonstrate the existence of table settings, or cloth and clothing, in written inventories. An illustrative example of this may be found in the work of Neil McKendrick and others. Their research, however, was less concerned with the mere presence of certain objects than why the goods were acquired—that is, with the demand side of the material world. They argue for the importance of a "consumer society" as an important element in developing the eighteenth-century British textile economy. In this view, it's not just innovative production—the genius of invention together with the application of water and steam power to machinery—that accounts for economic development; but also increased demand in the form of a growing mass of middle and working class consumers, anxious to emulate the styles—the cloth and dress, the Wedgwood "china"—of their social betters, that helped drive the Industrial Revolution. ⁴

In the past two or three decades, material overflow, pushed on by explosive technological innovation and higher incomes in the industrial countries, has generated a veritable tsunami of consumer goods that floods the malls and markets of rich countries, and washes in smaller eddies into even the most remote corners of the globe. Consequently, observers of material life, now including critical theorists, urban anthropologists, sociologists, cultural historians, and even some neo-liberal economists, have turned...