An introduction to material culture

# Making assumptions

## Activity 5

You should allow 15 minutes for this activity. Take a look at the following list of ten objects and then spend some time jotting down your reflections on what the list suggests about the gender, age, beliefs, likes, dislikes or interests of a person who owns them. What might the list allow you to surmise about the owner’s social and economic background?

- 42-inch flat TV
- Porsche 911 car
- golf clubs
- rosary beads
- laptop computer
- screwdriver
- bicycle
- tennis racket
- tennis ball
- hammer

Once you have completed this activity, you might want to make your own list of ten objects that you own and then find out what other people think of your list of things. You could then show your list to family or friends, asking whoever you share your list with to comment on what clues they can glean from the list to guess what sort of person owned them. Do you agree with other people’s analyses?

## Discussion

It is interesting to reflect on the assumptions we feel we can make about people based on the objects they own or use. Although there is nothing in the list above which specifies the owner’s gender, it seems to me to indicate the sort of objects which a man might aspire to own – the large-screen television, the sports car, the sporting equipment. (Would such an assumption be sexist? How often do we make similar judgements about what men or women are likely to buy, own and use? The toys we buy for male and female children are one good example.) Similarly, we might surmise that the owner of the objects on this list is of reasonable means, in order to be able to afford such expensive consumer items. There are a number of pieces of sporting equipment on the list, which might suggest the owner likes to play outdoor sports. The rosary beads might indicate that the owner is a Roman Catholic. We don’t really know anything about the hypothetical owner, but already we have begun to form a series of opinions about who they are, and what they like and dislike, based on the things they own. Objects are integral to the way we view others and the assumptions we make about them.

If you decide to take this activity further and share your own lists with others, you might find that some of the objects that people mention will (like those discussed in the previous activity) be very generic and shared by many members of your group, in which case it might be difficult to surmise anything about the identity of the owner(s). By contrast, other objects will strike you as interesting or noteworthy, in which case you might see them as indicating something about the identity of the owner. Such observations do not always turn out to be true – as I am sure this exercise will demonstrate – but nonetheless this indicates the power of objects to stand in for and symbolise particular groups of people and the ways in which they are represented (for instance in the media and in popular culture). Many people will show an implicit awareness of this through the selection of objects they choose to compile for the activity. Obviously, this won’t be a randomly selected representative sample list of objects people own and use; rather, it will be a carefully considered collection which has been compiled with the aim of presenting oneself in a particular way to one’s peers, a bit like a Facebook profile. Once again, an important aim of this course is to provide you with ways of thinking critically about the sort of assumptions we reach based on the objects people make, own, display and use, and how those assumptions are formed.

I hope these activities have helped you appreciate that different kinds of objects are used by people in different societies, and how it has become normal for us to think of similarities and differences between human groups across time and space through a study of the objects they use. How often have we heard the term ‘Stone Age’ used to describe people who live as hunter-gatherers? And how often do we think of ourselves as living in a ‘computer age’? But it is important to realise that people haven’t always been so closely defined by the objects they use – in other words, their material culture. This idea developed as part of the origins of the study of anthropology and archaeology in western Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is closely linked to the development of modern museums.

OpenLearn - An introduction to material culture
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