Material Culture = People

Kate asked a very interesting question about what academics study vs what the public will accept as worthy... 

I've always thought that the study of material culture should appeal to everyone because it is the study of things, and everyone has a relationship with things.  Of course there are many different kinds of things (and people), and often atypical things are more interesting to study... Also, many everyday things are difficult to study because they were so ordinary that no one thought to write about them...  Either way, the public is not predisposed to like academic scholarship, so we have to entice them, draw them in.

My approach has been to try and study things that are familiar, like objects used for travel, in an effort to unravel the relationships between people and their stuff and the historical moment that they live in.  Although I don't often think directly about the method underpinning this approach, there are many scholars from whom I have modeled my approach after.  The first thing that comes to mind is historicism, defined in the OED as an attempt by 19th c. German historians "to view all social and cultural phenomena, all categories, truths, and values, as relative and historically determined, and in consequence to be understood only by examining their historical context, in complete detachment from present-day attitudes."  I'm not sure if it's possible to detach ourselves or our histories from the present day, but I see my job largely as an effort to understand people on their own terms and in their own time.

Many scholars of "material culture" talk about using theory to understand and interrogate objects.  They can list dozens of theorists, and apply all kinds of theoretical "tools" to looking at objects like artists books.  Maybe it's an intellectual deficiency on my part, but I've never been comfortable using theories as "tools," largely because I find that focusing on theory widens the distance between me, the object, and the people I'm trying to learn about.  My eyes tend to glaze over when scholars talk about theory.  But I am also a scholar, so I'm just as likely to use complicated approaches to make sense of complicated things.  Historicism doesn't sound like theory to me... but is it?  

I wonder if public engagement requires a kind of magician's approach, where the mechanism is not visible.  As academics, we always want to be upfront about our scholarly apparatus, so that everyone can see that we've done our homework.  But there must be a way to do that without alienating the public.  When I try to imagine "the public," and consider what they might be interested in, I fall back on the idea that people are naturally interested in other people's lives.  And since everyday lives are literally filled with material culture (I'm thinking of the clothes I'm wearing, the chair I'm sitting in, the desk I'm leaning on, the computer I'm typing on and looking at, the fan that's blowing cool air around, the house I'm in, etc.) - why shouldn't our histories be filled with material culture too?