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ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to reflect critically on the kind of anthropological understanding a specific material culture approach grants to ethnography. First, I will discuss the ways in which a particular theory of material culture attempts to understand the social. I will then discuss substantive examples from my own ethnographic work in rural southeast Romania in order to present some of the potential pitfalls and challenges this method could entail. Exploring local attitudes and perspectives regarding value, work, and modernity, I will show what kind of particular knowledge an anthropological theory of material culture can facilitate.
Keywords: material culture, ethnography, modernity, Romania
Introduction
There are many ways to describe material culture. For academic disciplines as diverse as archaeology, architecture, history, psychology and media studies, it is both a theoretical framework and a method. While the theoretical implications stem from a particular philosophical understanding of the world, the methods represent the various ways in which these disciplines approach, explore and become aware of the materiality they normally engage with. I will start this paper by discussing one particular method of understanding materiality developed within the material culture school at University College London where I was trained in the last five years.1 I will then discuss some of the key notions in my fieldwork in rural Romania2 in relation with the material culture theory. I will explore the local notions of value, work, and modernity neither in a critical nor in a polemical way. Rather, the main motivation of this paper is to contribute to the diversity of understandings that are possible in social sciences, as this methodological forum attempts to portray.
Material culture, some fundaments
I will start by looking at the way we usually perceive or claim to understand the world. As it has been noted (e.g. Buchli, 2002, Miller, 2005), people tend to have a minimalistic and even negative view of materiality. From the majority of world religions to present critiques of mass consumption and media in different elitist spaces, materiality has always been presented as being, for example, simply naïve or unworthy to represent more fundamental issues at stake for societies. On the other hand, societies have always favoured in many ways materiality, as a sort of privileged and...