ABSTRACT
This chapter examines popular culture as material culture. Youth subcultures are an obvious example of the visibility of materiality in popular culture. There are different ways to think theoretically about the materiality of popular culture. The chapter reviews just three: actor-network-theory, cultural studies, and material culture studies. 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. Those working in material culture studies often accuse cultural studies of ignoring the materiality of things to focus instead on their meanings. Contrary to cultural studies, they seem to think that objects exist in the world as meaningful before they are made meaningful by human practice. Material culture studies seem to take for granted the material object as only ever a thing in itself.
