Method evidence record

Material Culture Analysis

Material culture analysis is the systematic study of physical objects and artefacts — tools, clothing, buildings, gifts, commodities, everyday possessions — as evidence about the people and societies that make, use, exchange, and discard them. It treats things not as inert backdrop but as active participants in social life, carrying meanings, structuring practices, and binding people into relationships. Drawing on object-biography thinking and on Ian Hodder's account of human–thing entanglement, it asks what an object's form, history, and circulation can reveal about culture that words alone cannot.

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Source record

Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Material Culture Analysis: Objects, Biographies, and Social Relations

Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / anthropology

Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. · ISBN 9780470672129
Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. · ISBN 9780759112421

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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyEthnographic Researchmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyMulti-Sited Ethnographymachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familySensory Ethnographymachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyVisual Anthropologymachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.