Material turn

As a material turn (Engl., German about turn of the material ) the increase in weighting is material culture in the humanities and cultural studies designated. The term is - like that of the iconic turn - formed in analogy to the linguistic turn .

The question of how knowledge works in culturally created and used objects or things is increasingly being asked. There is a stronger focus on empiricism . What do artifacts say about a society and its history or what meanings do they transfer? These are questions that are traditionally dealt with primarily in cultural studies (e.g. folklore and ethnology ), art history , archeology , museology as well as in museums of the history of culture and technology and in libraries . In addition, other branches of science, such as the history and social sciences, are now turning back to object research.

An example of interdisciplinary research on materiality is the Collaborative Research Center 933 “Material Text Cultures” at Heidelberg University. In Germany, research is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research , among others . A university treatment of material culture takes place in the German-speaking area, for example, in the courses "Museology and Material Culture" (BA) and "Museum Science / Museum Studies" (MA) at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg .

“The interest of the humanities and cultural sciences in material and in materiality has grown steadily in recent years, so much so that there has already been talk of a material turn . From the original endeavor to re-focus on the materiality of things, which has long been neglected in anthropology, history and art history, diverse approaches have developed. "

- Martin Schubert : Materiality in Edition Studies

Debates on the material turn are often based on considerations formulated within the framework of praxeology , but sometimes also go beyond that insofar as they no longer think of the social as merely or unconditionally human, such as in the actor-network theory or the affordance theory , who consider “non-human beings” such as artefacts or animals (cf. also Human-Animal Studies ) as essential components of the social. Recently, the historian Jan Keupp has expressed doubts about the usefulness of the concept and, in his opinion, dubious developments in the course of its practical implementation.

See also

• New materialism

literature

• Matthias C. Hänselmann: What is made as consciously made. Productive and receptive dimensions of materiality and material transparency in the film. In: Aesthetics of the Made. Interdisciplinary contributions to animation and comic research. Edited by Hans-Joachim Backe et al. Berlin / Boston 2018, pp. 27–52, ISBN 978-3-11-053872-4 . ( OpenAccess ).
• Zeithistorische Forschungen 13 (2016) H. 3: The value of things , ed. by Simone Derix, Benno Gammerl, Christiane Reinecke and Nina Verheyen.
• Michael R. Ott , Rebecca Sauer , Thomas Meier (Eds.): Materiale Textkulturen. Concepts - Materials - Practices. de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston / Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-037128-4 . ( OpenAccess ) (= MTK 1).
• Markus Hilgert : "Text Anthropology". The exploration of the materiality and presence of the written as a hermeneutic strategy. In: Communications of the German Orient Society in Berlin 142, pp. 87–126.
• Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce: Material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn . London [u. a.]: Routledge, 2010, ISBN 978-0-415-60314-0 .
• Daniel Miller (Ed.): Anthropology and the Individual, a Material Culture Perspective . Oxford, NY: Berg, 2009.
• Daniel Miller (Ed.): Materiality . Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8223-8671-1
• Alfred Gell: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
• Daniel Miller (Ed.): Material Cultures. Why some things matter . London: UCL Press, 1998.
• Bruno Latour : We have never been modern . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005 (German by Gustav Roßle, A new sociology for a new society. Introduction to the actor-network theory. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007).
• Christine Löw / Katharina Volk / Imke Leicht / Nadja Meisterhans (eds.): Material turn. Feminist Perspectives on Materiality and Materialism , Opladen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8474-0576-4 .
• Arjun Appadurai : The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1986.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.materiale-textkulturen.de/teilprojekte.php
2. ^ Announcement of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of funding guidelines "The language of objects - material culture in the context of social developments". Federal Ministry of Education and Research, April 12, 2012, accessed June 24, 2014 . 
3. ↑ Museology and material culture at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg ( Memento of the original from April 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Museum Studies / Museum Studies at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Martin Schubert: 'Materiality in Editionswissenschaft', Berlin [u. a.]: de Gruyter, 2010. ISBN 978-3-11-023130-4 , Introduction, p. 1, at Google Books
6. ↑ Cf. Jan Keup: The non-representational nature of the material: What makes the material turn a turn-off .
7. ↑ Andrea Lauser, Peter J. Bräunlein: The "language" of things. On the 'material turn' in cultural theory. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on August 7, 2015 ; accessed on June 24, 2014 (lecture, summer semester 2013, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.