History Through Material Culture by Leonie Hannan and Sarah Longair (review)

This useful primer treats the growing interest in studying history through material culture. Although the authors are based in Britain, they are familiar with a wide range of Anglo-American material culture, making this book suitable for many audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The book is targeted at those who are new to the field, but it also contains helpful methodological and theoretical topics that will interest more experienced scholars.

The authors handle the main themes of this handbook with considerable skill. Many scholars trained in documentary history often employ objects as illustrations of ideas and evidence derived from archives. Hannan and Longair emphasize a contextual approach to situate objects and behaviors in cultural patterns. They maintain that treating objects as a form of evidence requires disciplined study and methodologies more often associated with archaeology and art history than documentary history. They present a number of short case studies to make their points, embracing nuance and complexity. Although the majority of their case studies focus on topics associated with Western European history in the early modern and modern eras, the authors are careful to include examples from other places and times.

One of the most impressive features of the book is the effort in Chapter 1 to explore “Approaches to the MaterialWorld” (15–42). Compressing more than a century of methodological and interpretive historiography across multiple disciplines is challenging under any circumstances; it requires a clear vision of meta-themes rather than detail. To a remarkable extent, the authors succeed in this task by concisely exploring the academic origins of the field in anthropology, archaeology, and art history before shifting to the more recent engagements with “materiality” embraced by historians and literary scholars. Historians and literary theorists have tended to conceptualize the study of objects via semiotics and textual approaches. The chapter also includes a brief but rich discussion of what Harmon has referred to as “Object Oriented Ontology,” a recognition by a wide range of scholars that organic and inorganic matter impinges on, and shapes, human behavior, ideas, and practices (19).¹

The rest of the book focuses on teaching about, and researching with, things. Knowing where to start is often bewildering. Because modern marketing and consumer shopping is so pervasive in many parts of the world, it is easy to forget that few people are trained systematically in the history of objects or the critical interpretation of cultural behavior through them. Objects, environments, and cultural landscapes are all around us, but old and rare artifacts are typically located in museums or heritage organizations where access is restricted for reasons of conservation and security. The authors therefore devote about three-quarters of the book to demystifying the process of doing material-culture research, analyzing sources, and writing up findings. The emphasis is on the practical. The advice is sound.

This book is an excellent addition to the pedagogy of material-culture training. The authors have condensed the philosophical complexities into a readable format with prescriptions for how to conduct research. The irony is that we communicate this information in the format of text and a few illustrations, flattening the material world. Like all guidebooks, the recommendations are a means to the end; we cannot study the world from our armchairs and the internet. At some point, the authors remind us, we must go out into the world to interact with, understand, and make things.