An introduction to material culture

# Everyday objects

How did you start the day this morning? You might have started it, like I did, to the sound of a clock radio alarm, with the handle of a teacup in one hand and a bowl of cereal in the other. These objects – the clock radio, the teacup, the bowl – are unremarkable objects, in the sense in which I use them every day and have given them very little thought since I first purchased them. Yet they are integral to defining who I am (both physically and socially) as a human being, acting as a daily physical interface between myself and the world. While these objects may have been manufactured by acts of human agency, they also in turn shape me as a user and consumer of them. They mediate a wide range of interactions between myself and other objects and human beings, while themselves constituting a part of my physical world. For example, when I make a cup of tea and hand it to a family member in the morning, the teacup helps mediate a gesture of care and affection. Years of use of similar teacups mean that my hand has grown accustomed to the shape and feel of the cup, which I handle with adeptness and ease, without having to think of how to balance it between thumb and forefinger while I rush about the house. Furthermore, these objects are loaded with particular symbolic meanings within my own society which allow other people inside my culture to ‘read’ things about me from them. The radio station I listen to, the design of the cup and the brand of cereal in the bowl all mark me out and help define who I am socially, and all of these things contribute to the way in which I am represented to my colleagues, friends and family.

One important aim of this course is to help you learn to shift focus, so that you bring those objects which are normally part of the background into the foreground for critical scrutiny. This means beginning to see things simultaneously as solid (in the sense in which they are composed of matter which impacts on us and others as we interact with them) and mutable (in the sense in which we attribute particular meanings to them, and their meanings change depending on the contexts through which they travel); as both tangible and symbolic. Having learned to do this, you will then be able to start thinking of these things as source materials for your studies in the arts and humanities.

## Activity 4

Think about what you did in the last hour before beginning to read this course, and make a list of all of the objects which you used in that time. What does your list say to you about your relationship to things? How important are these relationships to the ways in which we live our lives and conduct our daily activities?

## Discussion

In answering this question, I drew up a table, listing actions in the first column and the objects which were involved in them in the second. Because I wrote this in the morning, I thought back over the process of waking up and getting out of bed, taking a shower, drying myself with a towel, brushing my teeth, getting ready for work and – because I was working from home this morning – walking into my home office and turning on my computer to start writing. So my table looked like this:

##

Action | Objects
--- | ---
Wake up | Bed (and indeed the bedroom and the flat that contains it, which might also be considered to be objects in their own right, as might the floor across which I walked to turn the doorknob to open the bedroom door).
Shower | Boiler, shower cubicle, showerhead, taps, shampoo, soap, towel.
Breakfast | Pantry, refrigerator, kettle, teacup, teabag, milk, cereal box, cereal bowl, spoon, chair, table.
Brush teeth | Sink, tap, tube of toothpaste, toothbrush.
Start working | Chair, table, telephone line, computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, books, pen, notebook.

My first reaction when looking back at this list was surprise at the sheer number of objects involved in the simple operations of starting my day. But the list of objects also very much defines me as an Anglophone living in the early twenty-first century in the city of London. In addition to the variations which exist within my own cultural context, parts of this list would potentially be very different for people living in different times and places. For example, if I was waking up in a village in Myanmar (Burma) my bed might look different, I might be using different utensils to prepare and eat my breakfast, and I might have chosen to eat rice instead of processed breakfast cereal. But by the same extension, many of these objects would be shared among people living across the contemporary world. Most people, for example, know and use soap, even in non-modern societies remote from urban centres. However, if I was waking up in London in the thirteenth century, for example, my list of objects would probably be even more different. Obviously I would not have had the computer, or running water, and I wouldn’t have been drinking tea or eating processed breakfast cereal, as neither was known in England at that time.

One important point to note here is that no matter how distantly we cast our eyes across time and space, objects support our daily lives and many of these objects go unnoticed as we undertake everyday activities such as those described above.

OpenLearn - An introduction to material culture
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