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63. What Objects Mean, Second Edition by Arthur Asa Berger, 62–79. © 2014 . All rights reserved.

4. Sociological Analysis of Material Culture

We’ve already dealt with two theoretical approaches to material culture: psycho- analytic theory and semiotic theory. To this list we now add sociological theory, which deals with a�empts that sociologists and other scholars have made to understand how institutions, as described by the Bergers above, function in society. Sociology is, technically speaking, the study of human beings in groups and institutions. �e focus is on the way society functions and includes such areas as marriage and the family, class systems, race, gender, religion, and other aspects of collective behavior. In this chapter I will focus on sociological theories and concepts that help illuminate material culture.

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Sociological Theory

�e French philosopher August Comte (1798–1857) used the term “sociology” to integrate theoretical and practical studies of human beings. His goal for sociology was “to know in order to predict in order to control.” He wanted to discern the laws by which people organize their lives so he and other sociologists could help create a more humane and rational social order.

Another French scholar, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who is generally considered to be the founder of French sociology, argued that the relationship that exists between indi- viduals and society is very complicated. As he explained in his book, �e Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915/1965:29):

�ere are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation—I mean society. �is duality of our nature has as its consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility of reason to individual experience. In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts.

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�is helps explain what Peter and Brigi�e Berger were writing about in the passage that opens this chapter. We have individuality, which is based on our physical endowments, the fact that we are an “organism,” and we are also, at the same time, social beings, whose ideas and values are shaped, to varying degrees, by the social order.

We are in society and society is in us, and it is simplistic to neglect either of these two sides to our nature. We can say the same thing about artifacts: they are in society and society is re�ected in them. �at is why artifacts are not only reluctant witnesses to the past but also valu- able witnesses to the present.

Functionalism

Many sociologists are structural-functionalists, who base their investigations on the notion that the institutions in society are part of an ongoing system of institutions, each of which is connected to all the others. �ey focus on whether an institution (or something else) helps contribute to the stability and maintenance of society, in which case the institution is “functional,” or helps contribute to the destabilization and breakdown of society, in which case the institution is “dysfunctional” or “disfunctional.” If an institution plays no role, it is “non-functional.”

�ere is, we can see, a conservative bias to structural-functional- ism, since it posits the maintenance of society as the primary consid- eration rather than focusing on change and the evolution of institu- tions and societies. We can also apply functionalism to components of institutions and to all kinds of di�erent entities, including artifacts, asking what function the artifact has for people. Functionalists also distinguish between latent functions, which are not intended and of which we are not aware (but which may be very important), and man- ifest functions, which are intended and of which we are conscious.

�e manifest function of cell phones is to be able to make phone calls just about everywhere. �e latent functions of cell phones may involve anything from helping deal with loneliness and keeping track of chil- dren to making people feel powerful by being able to summon others at their command, so to speak, by punching a few numbers in a cell phone.

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Our dependence on cell phones is so great that Barack Obama refused to give up his beloved Blackberry when he became president, and the secret service had to make arrangements so he could use it.

�ere are six aspects of functionalism that are of interest to theo- rists of material culture:

Functional Helps maintain the entity

Dysfunctional Helps destabilize the entity

Non-functional Plays no role in the entity

Functional alternative Substitutes for original function

Manifest function Obvious, stated reason for using something

Latent function Unconscious factors involved in using something

Aspects Smartphone

Functional connects with others

Dysfunctional disturbs others, wastes time

Non-functional n/a

Functional alternative substitutes for traditional phone

Manifest function makes phone calls, sends texts to other

Latent Function controls others, avoids loneliness

From a functionalist perspective, we can then ask a number of questions about artifacts. I will take smartphones as the subject for a functional analysis.

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The first signs of the next shift began to reveal themselves to me on a spring afternoon in the year 2000. That was when I began to notice people on the streets of Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them. The sight of this behavior, now commonplace in much of the world, triggered a sensation I had experienced few times before—the instant recognition that a technology is going to change my life in ways I can scarcely imagine. Since then the practice of exchanging short text messages via mobile telephones has led to the eruption of subcultures in Europe and Asia. At least one government has fallen, in part because of the way people used text messaging. Adolescent mating rituals, political activism, and corporate management styles have mutated in unexpected ways.

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

(2003:xi)

Rheingold’s insight that smartphones would change the way we live has been born out as these devices and their smartphone successors have become ubiquitous and now play a major role in the social lives of young people all over the world. In many third world countries, cell phones and smartphones have enabled people to communicate with one another and connect to the internet for the first time, since there are few land lines or personal computers available.

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We can see, then, that there is more to an object than its primary function, and the most interesting aspects of many kinds of material culture involve their covert and o en unrec- ognized functions.

Taste Cultures

Sociologists and social scientists in all �elds love to develop typologies—that is, classi�cation schemes—that they believe help us be�er understand the way societies, institutions, and other phenomena function. One of the most interesting typologies was done by sociologist Herbert J. Gans in his book, Popular Culture and High Culture. Gans wanted to defend people who like popular culture against a�ack by elitists who like high or “elite” culture.

He did this by suggesting that in America (and by implication in other societies as well) there are a number of di�erent popular cul- tures and elite cultures, and each of them is part of what he described as a taste culture. �ese taste cultures entertain us, inform us, and beautify our lives. As he explains (1974:10):

Taste cultures, as I de�ne them, consist of values, the cultural forms which express these values: music, art, design, literature, drama, comedy, poetry, criticism, news and the media in which these are expressed— books, magazines, newspapers, records, �lms and television programs, paintings

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and sculpture, architecture, and insofar as ordinary consumer goods also express aesthetic values or functions, furnishings, clothes, appliances, and automobiles as well.

He then discusses the relationship between popular culture and elite culture and various problems associated with both, before o�er- ing a list of �ve American taste cultures. �ey are, he points out, very general and do not deal with religious, ethnic, and regional variants. His book was published in 1974, so many of his examples are dated or no longer exist, but Gans’s theory, that there are �ve distinct taste cultures in America, o�ers us a way of thinking about who uses what kind of material culture.

Gans also points out that choices people make about the objects they purchase are connected to one another. �at is, as he explains, people who read �e New Yorker or Harper’s also tend to like foreign �lms, listen to classical music, eat gourmet foods, and choose contemporary (once this was Danish modern) furniture.

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�ese �ve American taste cultures are based on ma�ers such as socio-economic class, religion, age, education, ethnic and racial back- ground, and personality factors. �ey are listed below with examples of each. I have limited the examples to objects and material culture he mentions in his book:

1. High Culture (socioeconomic-cultural elites, creative types) Primitive Art and Abstract Expressionist Art New York Review of Books

2. Upper Middle Culture (executives, professionals, managers, and spouses) Time, Newsweek Harper’s, New Yorker, Playboy, Ms, Vogue

3. Lower Middle Culture (older lower-middle class people) Holly wood Modern furniture (very ornate) Confession magazines

4. Quasi-Folk Low Culture (unskilled blue collar and service workers) Tabloids Comic books

5. Youth, Black, and Ethnic Cultures Psychedelic and multimedia art Tie-dyed and unisex clothing Paraphernalia of drug culture

W hile we may question Gans’s division of American consumers into �ve, and only �ve, taste cultures (or taste subcultures), it seems reasonable to suggest that there are a number of di�erent somewhat amorphous cultural and socio-economic groupings in America, each of which has certain notions about what they like and don’t like in art and, for our purposes, in the objects and artifacts they purchase.

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W hat Gans does in his book is defend the di�erent taste cultures and argue for aesthetic pluralism, pointing out that each of these taste cultures �nds media and fashions appropriate to its interests, edu- cational level, and aesthetic sensibilities. He tells us that the Lower Middle taste culture is the dominant one in America—or was in 1972 when he wrote his book.

�e typology that Gans uses varies slightly from a classical portrait of American society made by W. Lloyd Warner 20 years before Gans wrote his book. In his 1953 book, American Life: Dream and Reality, Warner suggested that there are six classes in America:

Upper-Upper: 1.4% Lower-Upper 1.6% Upper-Middle 10% Lower-Middle 28% Upper-Lower 33% Lower-Lower 25%

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He said that the Lower-Middle and Upper-Lower classes represent the common man and woman in America. Although these �gures are more than 50 years old, they are not too far removed from the eco- nomic makeup of American society today, with the top one percent or so owning the lion’s share of America’s wealth.

A great deal of the reading we do in books and newspapers and magazines serves the purpose of giving us notions about what objects and other kinds of material culture are appropriate for individuals who are members of each socioeconomic class or taste culture. �at is one of the functions of advertising, which teaches us how to evaluate objects and read people in terms of the objects they wear and own. Advertising teaches us to be “discriminating” consumers and to rec- ognize what brands go with what kind of people.

For example, we generally scrutinize people we see (in real life, in movies, on television, in commercials and print advertisements) in terms of the brands they are wearing of products such as eyeglasses, sunglasses, shirts, ties, sweaters, coats, pants, jackets, shoes, sneakers, pocketbooks, briefcases, backpacks, and so on ad in�nitum. Many of these products carry logos and other markers that people can see to facilitate the process. �ey are “status symbols,” and will be discussed in the chapter on economics, Marxism, and material culture. One thing that wearing name brand and expensive brands seems to do is make us feel good about ourselves and about the image we project to others, because, in our minds, these name brand objects are indica- tors that we are successful. �is leads to my next topic, the uses and grati�cations that artifacts provide.

Uses and rati cations Provided by Artifacts

�e uses and grati�cation theory was developed, originally, by media theorists who were interested in why people listened to soap operas or watched certain television programs. Instead of trying to �nd out the e�ects of media usage, they focused on the uses people made of the media they consumed and the grati�cations the various media genres provided. We can do the same thing for artifacts and theorize about

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the uses people make of the objects they have and the grati�cations these objects have for them. To do this we have to modify the original list of uses and grati�cations so they can be applied to the consumption and possession of artifacts.

To Have Beautiful Things

�is is a variation of the grati�cation involved with experiencing the beautiful. �ere is a kind of psychological reward we get from having desired and beautiful things to wear and to have in the house, in that possessing “beautiful” or desired objects enhances a feeling of wellbeing in people and makes us feel that we have been successful.

To Find Diversion and Distraction

Here we �nd the process of purchasing objects enables us to escape from our mundane preoccupations in an e�ort to enhance—we believe—the quality of our lives. Also, the act of purchasing things gives us, if only for a short while, a sense of power and an escape from the anonymity that we �nd so troubling. And the objects we buy, such as smartphones, TVs, and tablets are o en ones that we can use to entertain ourselves, though they may have other functions as well.

To Imitate Models We Respect

Many of the artifacts and products we purchase are due to a desire to imitate others. A French scholar, René Girard, has suggested in his book, A �eater of Envy: William Shakespeare, that we purchase things advertised using movie stars and celebrities because we imi- tate their desires, as re�ected by their participation in advertisements and commercials.

To Af rm Aesthetic Values

Every choice we make of a tie, a shirt, a piece of jewelry or any other article of clothing or other kind of possession re�ects our “taste,” our aesthetic values and, in the case of conspicuous consumption, our status. We will see later, in the work done by Mary Douglas in

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the chapter on anthropology, that our choice of objects may be more connected to our lifestyles—the groups with which we identify— than to our personalities and taste.

Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Race involves categorizing people by their genetic heritage. Traditionally, social scientists o�ered three racial categories: Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasian. �is theory has come under a�ack in recent years by scholars who argue that race is not really a biological category but is, instead, a socially constructed one. And as more people from di�erent races marry one another and have mixed-race children, the utility of race as a construct seems questionable.

Ethnicity refers to groups such as Jews, Italian-Americans, and Hispanics that share certain religious, racial, national, and cultural traits and cuisines. In some cases, such as the bagel, a food that origi- nates with one ethnic group, Jews, becomes widely popular and loses its original ethnic identity. During a recent trip to Japan I saw bagels being sold in some bakeries.

It is possible to suggest that race and ethnicity play an important role in the choice of artifacts people purchase, and marketers have dis- cerned that di�erent races purchase di�erent brands of alcohol, kinds of cigare�es, and food products. For example, African-Americans show a strong preference for menthol cigare�es (70 percent of African Americans prefer menthol cigare�es compared to 25 to 30 percent of white Americans), and Asian-Americans and Hispanics consume much more rice than Caucasians do.

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Marketers use race and ethnicity to plan advertising campaigns. �ere is a book, Racial and Ethnic Diversity: Asians, Blacks, Hispan- ics, Native Americans and Whites (5th edition), that marketers can pur- chase, along with another similar book, Who’s Buying by Race and His- panic Origin. Both of these books, and others on teenagers, women, and baby boomers, are published by New Strategist Publications.

�ere is some question as to whether race, age (generation), gender or socio-economic class or other factors are the dominant motivators behind the purchases of food products, clothes, and other artifacts and products people make. Some objects are gender speci�c, such as birth control pills (although there are now some made for men) and nylon stockings, and some objects migrate between genders, such as earrings, which used to be only worn by women but are now worn by many men as well.

Status

We can de�ne status as the position an individual has in some group, or that a group has relative to other groups. One of the ways we demonstrate our status to others is by purchasing objects that function as status symbols, artifacts that suggest our wealth and socio- economic class. Sociologists suggest there are two kinds of status. �e �rst kind, ascribed status, is based on factors such as our gender, our age, and the status of the family in which we are born. Achieved status is based on our merits, our abilities, and our success in various endeavors. Traditional societies are those in which ascribed status is dominant. In modern societies, achieved status tends to be the rule, but since some children are born into wealthy families and have be�er life chances than children born into poor families, achieved status means that many people who aren’t �nancially successful su�er from alienation and a sense of relative deprivation.

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Role

�e concept of role is connected to status. Role refers to behavior expected of people who have a particular status. A person plays many di�erent roles in the course of a day. A woman might be a mother, an executive in a corporation, and a member of a religious organization—three di�erent roles. Our role behavior is generally unconscious, but sociologists have a concept, “dramatic role presentation,” that deals with conscious e�orts individuals make to create a positive impression among other people. For example, in a hierarchical institution such as a university, full professors have more status and play di�erent roles than those played by associate professors and assistant professors.

A problem some individuals face is that they have not learned to play certain roles cor- rectly, so, for example, young men and women who a�end college and have not learned the correct roles to play as students o en get into di culties. We use the term “socialization” to refer to teaching people what roles to play in various situations in which they �nd them- selves. Many people have been improperly socialized, which causes problems for them and others they come into contact with. Fash- ion is an area where one can display improper socialization, by wearing clothes that are not appropriate to one’s status. It is important to know how to dress correctly or appropriately for various roles we are called upon to play.

Sociologists have discovered that some

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people use fashion and other objects to imi- tate the behavior of groups with which they identify. �us, there are groups of people who look like motorcycle riders because they wear leather jackets and other paraphernalia asso- ciated with motorcycle riding, but who don’t own motorcycles. �ey are, as the semioticians would put it, “lying” with signs and symbols.

ean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French Marxist, sociologist, and semiotician, whose book, �e System of Objects (1968 French edition/1996 English translation), is considered an important contribution to understanding material culture. In the introduction to the book he discusses his perspective on material culture (1996:3–4):

Everyday objects (we are not concerned here with machines) proliferate, needs multiply, production speeds up the life- span of such objects—yet we lack a vocabulary to name them all. How can we hope to classif y a world of objects that changes before our eyes and arrive at an adequate system of description? �ere are almost as many criteria of classi�cation as there are objects themselves: the size of the object; its degree of functionality (i.e., the object’s relationship to its own objec- tive function); the gestures connected with it (are they rich or impoverished? traditional or not?); its form; its duration; the time of day at which it appears…;

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the material that it transforms…; the degree of exclusiveness or sociability a�endant on its use (is it for private, family, public or general use?); and so on.

Baudrillard alerts us to the many di�erent qualities of objects and the variety of roles they play in our lives—private and public. He pro- vides us with a list of things to think about when we start analyzing objects. He adds, shortly a er this passage, that he isn’t interested in the functions of objects or the categories into which we may put them (1996:4) “but instead with the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom.” In other words, he is interested in what objects reveal about social relations and society in general.

In a chapter on advertising, Baudrillard calls our a�ention to the role that it plays in the way we think about and relate to objects. He writes (1996:164):

Any analysis of the system of objects must ultimately imply an analysis of discourse about objects—that is to say, an analysis of promotional “messages” (comprising image and discourse). For advertising is not simply an adjunct to the system of objects; it cannot be detached therefrom, nor can it be restricted to its “proper” function (there is no such thing as advertising strictly con�ned to supplying information). Indeed, advertising is now an irremovable aspect of the system of objects precisely by virtue of its disproportionateness…. Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed.

W hen Baudrillard wrote his book, advertising may have had the role he gives it, but in recent years advertising agencies have actually played an important role in the design of objects as well as the e�ort

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to sell them to people. I have o en thought that while many people know very li�le about American history, literature, or culture, they all have an enormous amount of “product knowledge” because they are exposed to so much advertising every day—on just about every �at surface available: television screens, computer monitors, cell phone screens, the sides of buses, and so on. As we shall see in John Berger’s analysis of objects, advertising plays an all-important role in selling objects to people.

Conclusions

�e sociological perspective o�ers some interesting insights into the role that objects and artifacts play in our lives, but it also raises some questions about how these objects function for people and what motivates people to purchase these objects. �e functional perspective suggests that we cannot assume that we understand or recognize the roles the artifacts we purchase play in our lives, that quite o en there are unrecognized functions played by artifacts and a multitude of di�erent factors shaping our desire to choose and possess this or that artifact.

Sociological theory also suggests that we consider such factors as age, gender, race, social roles, status, and the uses and grati�cations provided by objects when considering material culture. �ere are, then, a number of di�erent sociological models and approaches we can use when dealing with material culture.

In the social production which men carry on they enter into de�nite relations that are indispens- able and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a de�nite state of development of their material powers of produc- tion. �e totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society— the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which de�nite forms of social consciousness correspond. �e mode of production of material life determines the gen- eral character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859:51)