ABSTRACT
The point is sometimes made that, like language, material culture is a ubiquitous feature of human life. Indeed, material culture may be regarded as one of the defining characteristics of being human: it has long been a convention to assert that to be human is to speak, and to make and use tools. The study of material culture has, rather, been scattered across a number of disciplines and, as a result, is presented as a somewhat “undisciplined” field of academic inquiry. The interdisciplinarity of approaches to material culture studies seems to be born out in practice: among the contributors to the Journal of Material Culture are to be found geographers and historians, archaeologists and museologists, sociologists and psychologists, art historians and students of design, as well as anthropologists. The association between anthropology and material culture studies can be traced to the very origins of the anthropological discipline.
