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How should a historian study a teapot, a spinning wheel, or a child's shoe? Are these objects merely illustrations of a period's taste or economic conditions, or do they actively shape the lives of the people who made and used them? The history of material culture has wrestled with this question for over a century, moving through a series of frameworks that have progressively redefined the relationship between people and things. What began as a practice of elite attribution has become a field where objects are treated as agents, networks, biographies, and even vibrant matter.
The earliest systematic approach to material culture, Connoisseurship (1900–1950), was rooted in the world of museums, art dealers, and wealthy collectors. Its practitioners focused on attributing objects—paintings, furniture, ceramics—to specific artists, workshops, periods, and regions. The connoisseur's eye, trained through close visual examination, could distinguish a genuine Rembrandt from a studio copy or date a piece of silver by its hallmark. This framework treated objects primarily as bearers of style and authenticity, valuable for establishing provenance and market value. It was a method of classification rather than interpretation, and it largely ignored the lives of ordinary people or the social contexts of production and use.
A sharp alternative emerged from France with the Annales School (1929–1980). Annales historians rejected the connoisseur's focus on elite, singular objects. Instead, they turned to the material conditions of everyday life for entire populations: what people ate, how they heated their homes, what tools they used in the fields. Fernand Braudel's monumental study of capitalism and material life, for instance, examined the slow rhythms of pre-industrial economies through the spread of maize, the design of ships, and the layout of villages. For the Annales, objects were evidence of deep structures—demographic, economic, technological—that changed only over centuries. This was a democratizing move: the humble plow became as historically significant as a royal portrait. Yet objects themselves remained passive indicators of larger forces; they were symptoms, not causes.
Marxist Cultural History (1960–1990) shared the Annales interest in ordinary life but added a sharp political edge. Objects, in this view, were embedded in class relations and systems of production. A cotton shirt was not just a garment; it was a commodity whose value came from the labor of exploited workers, and whose consumption signaled social status. Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm studied material culture to reveal class formation, resistance, and the experience of industrial capitalism. The focus shifted from what objects meant to how they were made, exchanged, and used within unequal power structures. This framework brought a critical vocabulary—commodity fetishism, alienation, mode of production—that earlier approaches lacked. But it also tended to reduce objects to expressions of economic relations, leaving little room for the specific material properties of things or for meanings that did not align with class struggle.
Around 1980, the field underwent a major reorientation. Three frameworks emerged more or less simultaneously, each challenging the idea that objects were merely passive carriers of human meaning. They shared a conviction that things mattered in their own right, but they pursued this conviction in different directions.
Material Culture Studies (1980–Present) grew primarily out of anthropology and archaeology. Scholars such as Daniel Miller and Arjun Appadurai argued that objects are not just reflections of society but are constitutive of it. People make themselves through the things they own, exchange, and discard. Appadurai's concept of the "social life of things" showed that commodities could move in and out of different regimes of value—a sacred relic could become a tourist trinket, then a museum piece. Material Culture Studies emphasized ethnographic fieldwork and the close analysis of consumption, gift-giving, and everyday practice. Unlike the Annales School, which saw objects as evidence of structures, this framework saw them as active participants in the creation of social identities and relationships.
Object Biography (1980–Present) took the insight that things have "lives" and turned it into a narrative method. Igor Kopytoff, building on Appadurai's work, proposed that objects could be studied as if they were persons, tracing their trajectories through different hands, contexts, and meanings. A single object—a Benin bronze, a slave's shackle, a missionary's Bible—could accumulate a biography that revealed shifting power relations, cultural encounters, and regimes of value. This approach was especially useful for studying colonialism and global exchange, where objects moved across vast cultural distances. Object Biography differed from Material Culture Studies in its emphasis on the singular object's journey rather than on general patterns of consumption. It also offered a direct challenge to Connoisseurship: instead of fixing an object's identity (artist, date, origin), it showed that identity was multiple and unstable.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (1980–Present), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law in science and technology studies, made the most radical claim. ANT argued that objects—or "nonhumans"—are actors in networks alongside humans. A speed bump, a ship's anchor, or a laboratory instrument does not simply carry human intentions; it shapes action, constrains possibilities, and even has a form of agency. For ANT, the social is not a pre-existing context that contains objects; it is an effect of associations between humans and nonhumans. This framework rejected the Marxist and Annales tendency to treat objects as expressions of deeper social forces. Instead, it insisted on symmetry: the historian should follow the actors—human and nonhuman—and describe how they assemble into temporary, fragile networks. ANT's influence has been strongest in science studies, but it has also reshaped material culture by forcing scholars to take the material properties of things seriously.
Thing Theory (1990–Present), associated primarily with literary scholar Bill Brown, introduced a philosophical distinction that reframed the entire discussion. Brown distinguished between an "object"—a thing we use without noticing it, a tool that disappears into its function—and a "thing"—the moment that object asserts its material presence, often by breaking, failing, or becoming obsolete. A hammer is an object when it drives a nail; it becomes a thing when its handle snaps and we suddenly feel its weight and grain. Thing Theory drew on Heidegger's philosophy and on psychoanalysis to argue that things are what resist our intentions, what remain opaque and excessive. This framework offered a critique of both Material Culture Studies and ANT, which in Brown's view had domesticated objects by treating them as social actors or network nodes. Thing Theory insisted on the irreducibility of matter: things are not just meanings or relations; they are also brute, silent, and sometimes threatening presences.
New Materialism (2000–Present) pushed the argument further. Thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Manuel DeLanda argued that matter itself has agency, vitality, and creativity. Bennett's concept of "vibrant matter" proposed that all material things—metal, bacteria, electricity—have a kind of life and capacity to act, independent of human intention or social construction. New Materialism drew on Spinoza, Deleuze, and contemporary physics to challenge the human-centered assumptions of earlier frameworks. It differed from Thing Theory in a crucial way: where Thing Theory focused on moments of breakdown that reveal material resistance, New Materialism argued that matter is always active, always in process, always generating effects. It also differed from ANT by making a stronger ontological claim: ANT treated agency as a relational effect of networks, but New Materialism located agency in the intrinsic properties of matter itself. This framework has been especially influential in environmental humanities, feminist theory, and posthumanist thought.
Today, the history of material culture is a field of productive coexistence and sharp disagreement. The five frameworks that remain active—Material Culture Studies, Object Biography, ANT, Thing Theory, and New Materialism—do not compete for a single throne; they occupy different methodological niches.
Material Culture Studies remains the most widely applied framework in anthropology, archaeology, and museum studies. Its strength lies in its ethnographic richness and its ability to connect objects to social identities, consumption patterns, and everyday practice. Actor-Network Theory dominates in science and technology studies and has growing influence in sociology and geography, where its relational ontology and methodological symmetry offer tools for studying infrastructure, technology, and environmental assemblages. Object Biography is a favored method for historians of colonialism, global exchange, and art history, precisely because it can track the shifting meanings of a single object across time and space. Thing Theory has found a home in literary studies, visual culture, and critical theory, where its focus on material resistance and breakdown provides a counterweight to more sociological approaches. New Materialism is the most philosophically ambitious framework, driving debates in feminist theory, environmental humanities, and posthumanism.
What do these frameworks agree on? Nearly all reject the older view that objects are passive reflections of human society. They share a commitment to taking materiality seriously, to attending to the specific properties of things, and to recognizing that objects shape human experience in ways that cannot be reduced to economic or social structures. They also share a suspicion of grand narratives—whether Marxist, Annales, or connoisseurial—that assign objects a fixed place in a predetermined story.
Where they disagree is equally important. The most fundamental debate concerns agency. For ANT, agency is a relational effect of networks; for New Materialism, it is an intrinsic property of matter; for Thing Theory, it is a fleeting eruption when things break. A second debate concerns humanism. Material Culture Studies and Object Biography remain largely human-centered, treating objects as meaningful within human social worlds. New Materialism and, to a lesser extent, ANT challenge this humanism, arguing that the human is not the measure of all things. A third debate concerns method. Material Culture Studies favors ethnography and thick description; ANT favors network tracing and symmetrical analysis; Thing Theory favors close reading and philosophical reflection; New Materialism favors speculative ontology and interdisciplinary synthesis.
These disagreements are not signs of weakness. They reflect the vitality of a field that has moved from asking "What is this object?" to asking "What does this object do?" and finally to "What is matter capable of?" The history of material culture has become a space where historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary scholars wrestle with the most basic question of all: what it means to live in a world of things.