ABSTRACT

This chapter examines popular culture as material culture. Culture is about making the world signify. It matters because signification helps organize and regulate social practice. According to actor-network-theory popular culture is not just people acting and interacting, it is people acting and interacting with material objects and material objects interacting with each other. In a network all the actors act: there is movement not between intermediaries but between mediators. Materiality is mute and outside culture until it is made to signify by human action. Material objects have to be realized as meaningful by social practice. It is this process; human acts of making things mean that transforms them into cultural objects. When different cultures share the same material objects, what marks cultural difference is obviously not these objects but the different meanings of these objects and how these meanings are realized in social practice.