Material Culture Studies and Ethnocultural Identity
This chapter briefly exposes the changing focuses of material culture studies through the twentieth century. It then assesses the available corpus of studies in Borneo’s material culture, proposing a rough periodisation of the types of publications and de
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Material Culture Studies and Ethnocultural Identity Bernard Sellato
Abstract This chapter briefly exposes the changing focuses of material culture studies through the twentieth century. It then assesses the available corpus of studies in Borneo’s material culture, proposing a rough periodisation of the types of publications and describing in broad categories the material productions examined in these publications. Finally, using some examples, it endeavours to shed light on the linkages between material culture, on the one hand, and social relations and ethnocultural identity, on the other. Keywords Borneo Trade
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Material culture Ethnocultural identity Social relations
Material Culture and Material Culture Studies
Material culture, a phrase that appeared in the social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remained centred on the artefact per se up to the latter part of the twentieth century, and material culture studies were then primarily descriptive. Artefacts were (or had been) collected by explorers, colonial civil administrators or military personnel, geologists or missionaries, and stored in museums. Important studies were produced by museum curators, scholars working with museum collections and knowledgeable compilers, though often with only scant information available on the artefacts’ precise geographic and ethnic origins, vernacular names, functions, or their meaning and cultural relevance among the people who produced them. While such collections and studies remain precious assets, they provide little insight into those peoples’ social lives.
Bernard Sellato (&) Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales, Rue des Poilus, 23, Saint-Maximin 83470, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture, Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_4
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Bernard Sellato
The concept of material culture today covers a much broader scope, concerned as it is with the forms, uses and meanings of objects, images and environments in everyday life. Material culture is the product of the interaction of people and their material world, and one means by which culture is stored and transmitted. An artefact, therefore, can no longer be reduced to the status of a ‘thing’. It is, in an important way, a social rather than individual creation and, therefore, material culture as a whole reflects the conceptual context of a society. Artefacts intervene in the construction of society and of social identities (see Journal of Material Culture). Moreover, as fully fledged constitutive elements of social life they also have a social life of their own (Appadurai 1986), through the process of their creation and their use (Lemonnier 1992), hence the need to view objects as agents (Gell 1998). Material culture, therefore, must be examined with the purpose of procuring an understanding of the soc
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