Reading the Material

Reading The Material

Material Culture

Material World

- world of things/money

definitions of material culture

Archaeology

artefacts/concrete things left by past cultures

Art Historians

an object with environmental + cultural context

Social Sciences

relationship between artefacts + social relations

Mike Parker Pearson

tools are just as much a product of ideology as were a crown/law code 

ideology - how society sees things

archaeologists - Matthew Johnson

anthropologist - Claude Leui-Strauss

"being depends on having" Rowlands, 2002, 127

Folklorists 

MC > a culture made material

includes everything consciously made to sustain ourselves throughout existence

Material Culture - relationship between people and objects

see - meaning perceive/understand > used since 1200

way we talk about mental behaviour - use physical words

Rene Descartes - 'The Father of Modern Philosophy'

> 'Discord on the Method' - book

"cogito ergo sum"

"I think therefore I am" 

non-materiality

- body works like a machine

binaries - opposites

mind better than body

10,000 hour rule - to be good at something you must 10,000 hours practising it

creative grammar

accretion - practice it

omission - if it goes really well - you can leave things out

nihilism - don't bother with accretion

knowledge/skills transfer

world of experience is multidimensional

"live + move in a 3D world + pictures are flat the world doesn't look like a picture but a picture can look like the world"  - Ernst Gombrich

rule of the body - tacit understanding

explicit - know what

tacit - know how

Vionett

Ian Hankey

'I hear I forget,

I see I remember,

I do I understand'

Confucious

The great reskilling

'We see and understand things not as they are but as we are'

Anais Nin