Style, Design, And Function

Handbook of Material Culture

Style, Design, and Function

Contributors: Christopher Tilley & Webb Keane & Susanne Küchler & Michael Rowlands& Patricia SpyerPrint Pub. Date: 2006Online Pub. Date: June 22, 2009Print ISBN: 9781412900393Online ISBN: 9781848607972DOI: 10.4135/9781848607972Print pages: 355-373

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Chapter 23: Style, Design, and Function

How can one address these three topics – style, design and function – in a singlechapter? Of course they are interrelated; perhaps one cannot really discuss one withoutboth of the others? How can there be style without a function? How can there be stylewithout design and design conventions? These three entangled concepts have beencore concepts, but with a variable history of use and centrality in our study of materialculture. They have been addressed in a multiplicity of ways, and have been bothresponsive to and, less frequently, defining of many shifts in material culture theory andinterpretation over the past century or more. The primary players in the study and usesof style and design have been art historians and, within anthropology, archaeologists.Social and cultural anthropology has been less concerned with such concepts, if onlybecause their engagement with the material world of human life has been notablyerratic, coming to some fruition and promise primarily in the past few decades.

The main objective of this chapter is to provide historical perspectives on howdesign and style have been used in the study of material culture, especially within ananthropological and cultural framework. I will suggest that this history has been directlyinfluenced by shifting anthropological approaches to the study of both technology and‘art’. These trends have also directly impacted the place and understandings of thefunction(s) of material culture. I will conclude with just a few of the social and culturalinsights that have been generated through the study of design and style, with particularreference to recent studies of cloth.

Although there has been an impressive ‘turn’ to the object world in the past twodecades, the social scientists who study material culture have primarily beenconcerned with the relationships between people and things, more so than in the thingsthemselves. Thus, it is not surprising to see fewer studies of design and style thanmight be expected with this new materiality. As the title of Sillitoe's (1988) article saysso succinctly, our concerns have shifted ‘from [the] head-dress to head-messages’,

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and Ingold (2004) has expressed concern that we have often lost the material inour studies of materiality. Additionally, recent studies have also been more focusedon how objects construct and express social identities without, however, simplyreferring to these as the functions of the objects. This is primarily because the studieshave simultaneously been concerned with the social practices in which objects areembedded, and, in a quite new direction, with ‘the dynamics of recontextualization,valuation and reinterpretation they (objects) undergo along their trajectories throughdifferent cultural and historical contexts’ (Leite 2004). In a way, objects today are more‘on the move’ and ‘in circulation’; they are not standing still long enough, perhaps,for a more traditional (and often static?) stylistic analysis, functional interpretationand/or capturing of principles of design. As Wobst says so succinctly in his importantreassessment of his own very influential work on style (Wobst 1977), style ‘never quitegets there’, it ‘never stays’. It is ‘always in contest, in motion, unresolved, discursive, inprocess’ (Wobst 1999: 130).

While the trajectories of material culture and objects have been revealed and inferredwith new theoretical perspectives (e.g., Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Thomas 1991;Miller 1998; Spyer 1998; Phillips and Steiner 1999; [p. 356 ↓ ] Myers 2001), therehas also been a theoretical trajectory of material culture studies themselves withinanthropology and related fields, including an important new kind of connection betweensociocultural anthropology/ethnography and archaeology (Brumfiel 2003). Theseoften mutual dialogues may perhaps best be seen in the approaches to the study of‘technology’ (see Eglash in Chapter 21 or in Dobres and Hoffman 1999), and to thestudy of ‘art’ or image making. Intra- and interdisciplinary connections may also beheightened by the current widespread recognition, and perhaps growing importance inour globalized worlds, of the increased value and power of objects from the past or from‘the other’ (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Lowenthal 1985; Handler 1988; Price1989), especially in the creation and support of national and other political identitiesand negotiations. Although this chapter will dwell more on the anthropological trends,concerns and accomplishments, it goes without saying that the re-engagement withthe object world has been strikingly – but not surprisingly – interdisciplinary; just notethe ‘disciplines’ represented by the authors of articles in the Journal of Material Culture(Leite 2004).



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One reason to focus primarily on the anthropological approaches to material cultureand the object world is because anthropology has had an erratic history, an on-again/off-again, often distancing relationship with ‘things’. This makes for a interesting inquiryinto why it was distanced and then re-engaged: what are the theoretical or disciplinaryinfluences or promoters of such re-engagement that might yield insights into the field ofmaterial culture studies? There will also be a tendency toward the anthropological herebecause anthropological inquiry distinctively balances (or tries to) two dimensions: onthe one hand, the local-level, small-scale studies using most often (in ethnography andethnoarchaeology) the participant observation method. On the other hand, anthropologyattempts a holism that prefers to not take separate slices of the cultural ‘pie’ but tounderstand the intersectionalities and situatedness of human life, behaviors andmeanings in an as-complete-as-possible social and cultural context (after Pfaffenberger1988: 245), That is, the very multi-scalar nature of the anthropological enterprise allowsus to consider the material world and objects at multiple scales as well. And, as manyrecent studies have shown, this is precisely one fascination and excitement of materialculture studies at the turn of the twenty first century.

Something of a Historical Overview

Of course, Franz Boas (1927, see also Jonaitis 1995) is usually the anthropologicalbaseline for the study of objects and ‘primitive art’, although contemporary materialculture studies today would go back to major theorists of culture (e.g., Marx, Veblen,Simmel). Even though Boas's (1927) chapter 5 was on ‘style’, anthropologists usuallytrace their roots in the study of style to Kroeber (e.g., 1919, 1957) and the art historicalroots to scholars such as Wölfflin (1932; see also Gombrich 1960; Saüerlander 1983).Lemonnier (1993b: 7) identified the 1930s as the period when there is a noticeabledecline in an interest in material culture; it was only in France, he points out, that aninstitutionalized study of the anthropology of techniques took hold. Thus, the workof Mauss (e.g., 1935) on techniques du corps as well as his more well known studyThe Gift (1967/1925) may provide an important bridge between this time period andwhat would become, by the 1980s, an increasingly robust field of technology studies(e.g. Lemonnier 1986, 1993a; Pfaffenberger 1988, among many; see Eglash, Chapter21 in this volume). Lemonnier notes (1986: 181 n. 3) that in one valiant attempt at









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recuperating the anthropological study of material culture, Reynolds (1983) astutely‘marvels justly at the immediate disinterest of ethnologists for the objects they confer onmuseums as soon as they are deposited’.

This is not to say, though, that within this so-called ‘gap’ there was little being done; it'sjust not of major focus in an anthropology of objects that is waiting backstage for certaintrends to pass on and for the curtain to be opened on to a more robust engagementwith the object world. First, archaeology does not really experience a gap, but thisis not surprising, given its dependence on material culture. However, despite themomentum established with the rise of the so-called New (or processual) Archaeologywith its emphasis on understanding the nature and significance of variability in thearchaeological record (Binford 1962, 1965), and the studies that linked stylisticattributes to social phenomena (e.g., Hill 1970, Longacre 1970 and chapters in Binfordand Binford 1968), the primary flurry of archaeological discussion and debate on style,for example, came in the two decades between 1970 and 1990. In fact, if we look forreview or overview articles on the concepts, use, and study of ‘style’, for example, theseare primarily (only?) in archaeology (e.g., Plog 1983; Hegmon 1992; Conkey 1990;Boast 1997; [p. 357 ↓ ] Wobst 1999) and in art history (e.g. Schapiro 1953; Saüerlander1983; Davis 1990).

However, with some notable exceptions, archaeological studies of style, design,function, material culture and technology can be said to share with other approachesthe general characteristic that they have tended to look primarily (and sometimesonly) at the effects of material culture systems (style, design, technology) on cultureor society or, more often, to look primarily for what/how/why humans communicatewith material culture and artifacts. That this has changed as a primary approach willbe considered below, and a notable early exception, at least in regard to technologies,would be the pioneering work by Heather Lechtman (1977) that identifies and illustratesthe concept of ‘technological style’ (see also Lechtman 1984; Dobres and Hoffman1994; Stark 1999; Dobres 2000), that is, that the technologies, materials and making ofobjects themselves have ‘style’.

In cultural anthropology, the development of structuralism (e.g., in Lévi-Strauss 1963)brought forth a spate of material culture studies (e.g., Fernandez 1966; Munn 1966;Faris 1972; Adams 1973), which linked objects and other dimensions of culture.






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Semiotic approaches, broadly speaking, were also being developed (e.g., Forge 1966;1970; Munn 1973) stressing how fundamental concepts could be visibly encodedin artifacts, objects and art. In fact, there was a notably renewed interest in the‘anthropology of art’ (e.g., edited volumes by Jopling 1971 and Otten 1971a). In eachof these volumes, for example, the editor has brought together articles primarily datingto the 1950s and 1960s, suggesting that the so-called ‘gap’ is one of quantity andattention, not complete absence. Otten (1971b) suggests that the renewed engagementwith art was stimulated by the then current interests in the nature and evolution ofhuman communication and in the approach to culture as a human value system. A keypaper in 1969 that signaled an emergent engagement with an anthropologically moreproductive approach to material culture would be that by Ucko on penis sheaths. Hisconcern ‘was to unite the social and technological approaches to the study of materialculture such that a detailed examination of the material object would lead to informationabout the non-material aspects of the producing culture’ (MacKenzie 1991: 23).

However, as will be discussed further below, the ways in which anthropologists nowview ‘art’ and how to study it – as a (problematic) ‘category’ of the material world – haveshifted since this 1970s reappearance on the anthropological stage (e.g., Sparshott1997; Gell 1998; Townsend-Gault 1998; Graburn 2001). By the 1990s anthropologicalstudies of art (despite many differing definitions), nonetheless ‘become more numerousand informed by theoretical concerns such as gender and colonialism (Morphy 1991;Thomas 1991)’ (Cannizzo 1996: 54). Of course, this is not the first appearance of atheoretically informed approach, but the theoretical approaches now at hand are onesthat do more than look only at the effects of the objects and forms (whether they arecalled ‘art’ or not) on culture or society. This itself derives from ‘a revival of interestin material culture as exegesis and evidence’ (Cannizzo 1996: 54). With the widerdevelopments in the study of material culture, ‘things’ and/or representations havebeen shown to be crucial to the articulation of debates on gender, power relations,colonialism, exchange, possession, consumption, tourism, perceptual knowledge, andmore (after Townsend-Gault 1998: 427).

Thus, while one would be hard-pressed to find, in the cultural anthropologicalliterature, many (or any?) overviews that summarize the state of approaches to andunderstandings of the study of style and design, much less the relationships to function,there is a burgeoning literature both on the anthropology of ‘art’ and, even more so, on






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the anthropology of material culture, which, perhaps like technology, has fortunatelybecome less likely to be taken as a given and lacking intrinsic value (as Pfaffenbergersuggests in 1988 for the anthropology of technology).

Above All, There is Style

Even a brief survey of the literature will confirm that the subject of ‘style’ is the mostprominent of our three concepts to be treated on its own, with individual articles (e.g.,Plog 1983; Hegmon 1992), especially in archaeology and art history, or as an importantsubheading in a review article (e.g., in Silver 1979; Schneider 1987). Recall thatKroeber considered ‘Style’ to be important enough to warrant its own chapter in hisAnthropology Today volume (Schapiro 1953), even though the author is an art historian,not an anthropologist. Although there are fine studies that focus on design (e.g., Schevill1985; Washburn 1977), ‘design’ and ‘function’ are not likely to be individual headingsor topics to be covered in encyclopedias of anthropology or the social sciences. Formany, [p. 358 ↓ ] style itself is methodologically taken as a set of ‘design conventions’or ‘formal attributes’. There are no major volumes addressing the concept and theoryof design or function, but such do exist for ‘style’ (e.g., Conkey and Hastorf 1990; Carrand Nietzel 1995). Yet, most discussions of style almost inevitably engage with designor aspects of it. So many studies of material culture are concerned with function(s),even if the authors prefer a more complex understanding of the use(s), context(s)and significance(s) of material objects or forms. Assessments of style are usually inagreement that style is a central concept in any analyses of the material world; ‘style isinvolved in all archaeological analysis’ (Conkey and Hastorf 1990: 1).

Yet to take this foundational concept apart is a major historical and epistemologicalendeavor. At one level, it is a ‘self-evident’ concept (after Gadamer 1965: 466, citedby Sauerländer 1983: 253), but few seem to be able to agree on what it ‘means’. Formany studies up to the 1960s, style was taken as some sort of a ‘key’ that made culturalmaterials accessible to us, and in some sort of cultural ways. This was especiallythe case in archaeological studies, as the understandings and delineations of stylewere usually the foundation on which typologies and classifications were constructed.And, until the 1960s, at least in Anglo-American archaeologies, classifications andtypologies, as well as their use in defining ‘culture areas’, were absolutely originary in






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any understandings of culture and culture history. With interpretive goals more focusedon establishing chronologies and on tracing interactions, influences and pathways ofdiffusion, style was a crucial component of any culture historian's repertoire.

This entire chapter could be taken up with the relatively recent history (post-1960s) ofthe concepts and uses of style, especially as they have been the subject of definitionaldebates and reworkings by archaeologists alone (e.g., Plog 1983; Hegmon 1992; Carrand Nietzel 1995; Boast 1997; Conkey 1990; Wobst 1999). Perhaps this is because ofthe archaeological dilemma – or challenge – in the study of the material world, given theabsence of informants and often, the absence of texts or other documents. Perhaps it isbecause of greater dependence upon providing a plausible and compelling ‘reading’ ofthe material record. Or perhaps it is because archaeologists have long been concernedwith both epistemological and ontological premises and practices. It was not until the1960s that archaeologists really began to ‘push’ with style – into an arena wherebymore social and cultural inferences were attempted and sought, using style and design.The inferences of interest were now at a more refined scale than the general ebb andflow of ‘cultures’. One might say that this was the time when style was seen as a ‘key’ tothe social, and it was the social that was of particular interest.

These 1960s were the heady days of suggesting such things as how we could revealpost-marital residence practices using distributional patterns of variation in ceramicdesigns both within and between sites, assuming that mothers taught the designs totheir daughters. As is now well documented, many of these early ‘ceramic sociology’projects (e.g., Deetz 1965; Hill 1970; Longacre 1970) had problematic assumptions(e.g., Stanislawski 1969, 1973; Friedrich 1970). And, as Graves (1998) details sowell, there were numerous precursors in such design and stylistic analyses in theUS Southwest. Nonetheless, they set into motion core debates about what stylemeasures, what it reflects, or can be used for in archaeological interpretations, as wellas what the relationship between style and function was all about (e.g., Sackett 1982;Dunnell 1978). Style, well into the 1980s, was often taken to be (in what we now see asrather depersonalized and objectifying jargon) one aspect of coded information aboutvariability in the functioning of past cultural systems.

In his 1979 review of ‘Ethnoart’, Silver is one of the relatively rare culturalanthropologists to address the topic of ‘Style’ under its own heading (but see in Layton






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1991: 150–92, an entire chapter on ‘Style’ in a text on the anthropology of art). Silvernoted the two problems of style for the social scientist, with its definition being one. But,unlike for most archaeologists, the definition of style is not the problem he will addressexplicitly. Rather, he prefers to wrestle with the problem of the relationship between artstyles and the civilizations that produce them (Silver 1979: 270). He recognizes style asbeing operative at different levels, and refers the reader to Bascom's (1969) systematicoverview for types of style. Silver's own preference is to consider the general theoreticalapproaches that would link style to its ‘civilization’: diffusion and evolution (e.g., Munro1963); style, psyche and civilization (e.g., Bunzel 1927; Kroeber 1957); and the cross-cultural approach (e.g., Fischer 1961; Barry 1957; Wolfe 1969). As is evidenced in othercultural anthropological approaches to style (e.g., Schneider 1987), Silver comfortablyaccepts and works with the ‘intensive’ treatment of the concept of style put forth by arthistorian [p. 359 ↓ ] Schapiro (1953) in Kroeber's Anthropology Today. Layton's (1991:150) introductory text also follows Schapiro. Other studies (e.g., Van Wyck 2003) neverdefine ‘style’ or ‘design’ but assume it.

In concluding his section on style, Silver anticipates what we see today were perhapsthe two major dimensions that characterize the concern with style in the 1970s and1980s, no matter what the field or sub-field. First is the emergent recognition that,while a style may be conveying ‘considerable information about its producers andtheir culture’, there is not yet a firm differentiation between the audiences to whomthis information is being conveyed: to the other members of the cultural group underconsideration or to the anthropologists who are using the style to infer information(see also the Sackett-Wiessner debate in Sackett 1985)? This query, as phrasedin the information theory jargon that Silver also anticipates, would be ‘To whom isthe style signaling, and what is it signaling?’ (e.g., Sterner 1989). Thus, the seconddimension to the study of style at this time was the convergence of thinking aboutstyle in anthropological contexts with the parallel developments in information theoryand linguistic metaphors for the interpretation of culture. In the 1970s and 1980s,for example, it would have been hard to miss the idea that style in material culturewas transmitting information (for the classic expression of this, see Wobst 1977), anapproach that has not disappeared but only, perhaps, become more nuanced (e.g.,Van Wyck 2003). Not surprisingly, more recent studies of material culture – its styles,designs and functions – have challenged (or eschewed) the primacy of the linguistic






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and language metaphors (e.g., artifact as text), and a somewhat bald communicationapproach (e.g., McCracken 1988; Dietler and Herbich 1989; Conkey 1990: 10–11;MacKenzie 1991: 24–5; Gell 1998; Stahl 2002).

The Story of Style, Bringing along Designand Function

It seems that there have been two recent trends in the study of style that followedthe foundational uses of style by culture historians. At first, there were those whoconsidered style explicitly and definitionally and who therefore set out specific concerns:how to analyze style, where to locate style in specific objects or forms; what, in fact, isstylistic variation (e.g., Plog 1983)? Are there different classifications or types of style(e.g., Bascom 1969, Plog 1983)? Does style have any function or is style a primary wayto ‘do’ certain cultural things, such as communicate, negotiate, or reinforce ethnicity oridentities? Can we use style to classify different so-called ‘cultures’ and to chart themthrough space and time?

The second trend has been either to not worry about any definitions of or specificanalytical methods for the study of style and just assume it, and go on to otheranthropological questions, or to reconceptualize style completely. Two innovative andintriguing approaches here would be Wobst's (1999) notion of style as ‘interventions’,or Wilk's (1995, 2004) concept of ‘common difference’. As well, some other theoreticaltrends, such as the uses of practice theory, have implications for concepts, such as thatof ‘traditions’, which have long been rooted in concepts of style (e.g., Lightfoot 2001).Let us first turn to one summary historical account, starting with the foundational culturehistory approaches and then move to consider ‘what's new?’

As noted above, style became rooted in anthropological analyses with the culturehistorical approaches of the 1930s to 1960s, approaches that have not really goneaway. To culture historians (e.g., Kreiger 1944) style was in the service of chronologyand the typologies that were developed to order the material world were explicitly time-sensitive. For both art history and anthropology, ‘stilus’ (style) and ‘chronos’ (time)would intersect (Sauerländer 1983). Style was a self-evident concept upon which






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historical understandings were based. Archaeologists, at least, still depend upon theproducts of the culture-history approach and its concept and uses of style: the past,and even ‘other cultures’ ethnographically are often divided into spatial and temporalunits with labels and these, in turn, have allowed the construction of unquestionedperiodizations (e.g., the Mesolithic) that are based on and thus privilege certain tools,technologies, ‘styles’ of ceramics or of other materials.

The ethnographic study of ‘things’ was somehow delegated or fell to the museologicalworld, which had similar concerns to diligently catalog material objects, with, perhaps,an overemphasis on the form of the objects, with function or context infrequently ofconsideration. With such approaches, there are elegant typologies and closely honedstudies of the formal relationships among the material objects themselves, but, ingeneral, ‘the artefact becomes recontextualized as an object of scientific analysiswithin a Western discourse, and its meaning is divorced from its origin as an [p. 360

↓ ] indigenous product’ (MacKenzie 1991: 23). Style has continued to be a specificanalytical tool but beyond just to locate social units and to chart them through time andspace or in order to organize objects in museums. Style was used to infer, measure orinform on more specific social and cultural processes, such as social interaction (e.g.,Friedrich 1970) and social exchange (see Plog 1978 for a review). In archaeology,at least, the debates were more about what the given ‘formal variation’ that is stylereferred to or derived from.

There seem not to be many debates these days about how to ‘measure’ style, whereto ‘locate’ style, or the function(s) of style. On the one hand, some have suggested twodismissive directions: Boast (1997) is ready to get rid of style; it is ‘not a meaningfulanalytical category in the hermeneutic account of social action’ that he outlines (Boast1997: 189). Or, according to many (but not all) contributors to one edited volume(Lorblanchet and Bahn 1993), we have moved into what they call the ‘post-stylistic era’,at least in the study of rock art. This is attributed not so much to any new theoreticalframeworks, but to such things as more viable dating techniques, pigment studies,and questions that go beyond establishing artistic chronologies based on mere stylisticimpressions (Lorblanchet 1990: 20). This is a reaction to the persistence of how ‘stilus’and ‘chronos’ have intersected; how chronologies have been all too unquestionablybased on assumed notions and identifications of style. Some studies explicitly refuseto produce a chronological scheme based on changes in style, which had led previous






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researchers away from careful study of the content of images or ‘arts’ (e.g., Garlake1995).

On the other hand, perhaps ironically, there is something of a return to some of themore culture-historical understandings of style and variation in material culture, and aless programmatic approach to the uses and concepts of style. First, the very generalidea of style as being ‘a way of doing’ has reappeared (e.g., Wiessner 1990, butcontrast with Hodder 1990), if it ever really went away. This, however, is a notion thatis much more complex than a passive normativism that perhaps prevailed in traditionalculture-historical studies. Style is taken now as ‘a way of doing’ but also as somethingmore than that; style is part of the means by which humans make sense of their worldand with which cultural meanings are always in production.

To a certain extent, these approaches, concerns, new labels and even dismissalsactually signal a continued engagement with ‘style’ – how could we ever not work withaspects of variation in material culture that are produced in and constitutive of humancultural and social life? These trends are a quiet way of rethinking style, and of framingit within new theoretical approaches (e.g., practice theory, culture-as-production,technological and operational choices, communities of practice), new methodologicalpossibilities (e.g., chronometric dating techniques), and richer and more nuancedunderstandings of material culture, of humans as being simultaneously symbolists andmaterialists, and of the ‘social life of things’ (e.g., Appadurai 1986). But, once again,there is no one comprehensive theory of style, nor a call for one; neither is there aspecific analytic tool kit that one can just pick up and apply to a set of things.

This is not, however, to abandon discussion and suggestions for how to use someunderstandings about style in the study of material culture. Taking the extremeapproach of Boast (1997), for example, one could argue that he is not really dismissingstyle completely, but, rather, critiquing that the past uses of the concept of style haveperpetuated the Cartesian boundaries between humans and objects, ‘between theactive us from an inactive its’ (1997: 190; see also, he suggests, Latour 1992 and Akrich1992). He is not alone in arguing for a different and more ‘active’ or agential dimensionto objects, images and things (e.g., Gell 1998). He is also suggesting that a conceptof style is ‘dependent upon a specific set of assumptions about how the social worldworks’ with ‘little conceptual use beyond a vernacular distinction between social forms






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distinguished within a consumerist society’ (Boast 1997: 190, 191). Both concerns areworth discussion; some of us can readily accept the first but perhaps not the second.In any event, such ideas have found their way from Boast and from other authors intocontemporary debates and studies (e.g., for discussions and critique of Gell's agencytheory of art, see in Pinney and Thomas 2001 or Layton 2003).

So what's new? Here again, although the focus is on style, it is not really possible toavoid inquiries into function and studies of design. First, there are several intriguing newways of conceptualizing ‘style’, and I mention only two here. In the long awaited updatefrom Wobst (1999) concerning his contemporary thoughts about ‘style’ now that we aresome twenty-five years from his paradigm-setting paper of 1977, he embraces stylemore ambitiously and enthusiastically: style is that aspect [p. 361 ↓ ] of our materialworld that talks and interferes in the social field (1999: 125); ‘stylistic form on artifactsinterferes materially with humans’ (p. 120, emphasis his). Since his original viewstressed the communicative functions of style, style as ‘messaging’ through especiallyvisible features, Wobst reports now on his ‘mellowed functionalism’ (1999: 124). Hetakes up Giddens's notion of enstructuration, which ‘allows for contemporaneoussocial actors to arrive at different optimal solutions (even in the same social context),something that is very difficult to accommodate in many of the overly functionalistparadigms’ (Wobst 1999: 125). He elaborates as to how even the most obviousand apparent functional aspects of an object (such as the working edge of a tool)are inseparably interwoven with social dynamics; after all, these functional featuresthemselves help ‘constitute, constrain or alter the social field’ (1999: 126). Lastly,his discussion on the deeply problematic implications of the effects of certain long-standing methodological approaches to style, especially in archaeology, is particularlyprovocative, although substantive consideration here is not possible. Wobst shows howthe predominant uses of style have promoted a focus on ‘sameness’ (‘structuring datainto internally homogeneous types’ and the ‘suppression of variance’), and this has notjust reduced social variance in the human past, but serves certain social and politicalagendas in the present (1999: 127–9). After all, don't administrators of all sorts strive for‘docile underlings’ who manifest ‘similarities in template, action and symbols’?

Another provocative approach is that by Rick Wilk (e.g., 1995, 2004) in which he seeksto understand the processes whereby what is often called ‘style’ comes into existenceand is worked out and appears to ‘spread’ or, as we used to think, ‘diffuse’. Rather






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than invoking ‘style’, Wilk coins the term of ‘common difference’, which is a code anda set of practices that narrow difference into an agreed-upon system, whereby somekinds of difference are cultivated and others are suppressed. An art style, especially awidespread one (his 2004 example is the famous Olmec style in early Meso-America)is really an arena within which differences can be expressed, yet many of these aredelimited, and a system of common difference is produced. And the really interestingquestions are the agential ones: who controls what the ‘rules’ will be, and how arethese accepted and agreed to? His own ethnographic work (on beauty pageants inBelize) suggests that there may be what appears as a resulting hegemony of formbut not necessarily of significances. What might appear as some sort of ‘tradition’ oreven a cultural adoption may well be much more dynamic, and such a concept – aselucidated in the specifics (e.g. Wilk 2004) – resonates with the rethinking of the veryconcept of tradition (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Pauketat 2001). Traditions,styles and systems of common difference are being shown as diachronic phenomena,as loci for political innovation and even resistance, as cultural productions through dailypractices (e.g., Brown 1998; Lightfoot 2001). As we recognize that globalization is justa current variant of the long-standing circulation of objects within and through socialforms and social relations, we are increasingly drawn to more dynamic notions aboutthe ‘mutability of things in recontextualization’ (Thomas 1989: 49).

Thus, things and styles are not the (essential) things they used to be. The pervasiveunderstandings of objects as being referable to some (usually single) essentialcategories or phenomena has been quite successfully challenged, at least amongmany scholars. It is difficult to sustain, for example, that all the Neolithic figurines offemales can be referred to some essentialized, transhistorical concept of ‘fertility’ (e.g.,Conkey and Tringham 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998), that Paleolithic cave art is allreferable to (hunting) ‘magic’, or that string bags (bilum) among the Telefol-speakingpeople of the Mountain Ok (New Guinea) are merely women's (and therefore unvalued)‘things’ (MacKenzie 1991). The long-standing tendency to view objects, through theirstyles and forms, as absolutes of human experience has given way to the idea thatobjects, forms, styles and functions are evolving, more mutable, and multivalent, withoutessential properties. And while this has certainly made the interpretive task morecomplicated and challenging, it nonetheless has simultaneously opened the door to newand hopefully more enlightening perspectives. For example, rather than assuming that






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many objects and forms cannot be explained because we cannot readily substantiateempirically such things as symbol and meaning – especially in archaeological contexts– it is now possible to use empirical work – such as in technological processes (e.g.,Lechtman 1984; Dietler and Herbich 1998; Stark 1999) or studies of pigments andcolors (e.g., Boser-Sarivaxévanis 1969) – to reconceptualize objects, forms and imagesas material practices and performances with linkages to social facts and cultural logics(e.g., Ingold 1993, among many).

[p. 362 ↓ ]

Recent Approaches to Technology and ‘Art’that Have Influenced Understandings andUses of Style, Design and Function

As already suggested, trends in the study of our three characters – style, design,and function – have been integrally enmeshed in, produced by and yet contributed toshifts and concerns in the broader anthropological and cultural interests in the study oftechnology, on the one hand (e.g., Lemonnier 1986, 1993a; Dobres and Hoffman 1999;see Eglash, Chapter 21 in this volume) and ‘art’, on the other (e.g., Morphy 1994). Insome ways, the trends in the study of technology may have had more of an impact onour three characters; perhaps this is due to the growth of social studies of science andtechnology (e.g., Jasanoff et al. 1995). From Lechtman's (1977, 1984) important workthat argued for the place and power of technological practice and therefore of veritabletechnological styles in the making and meanings of objects, to the engagement withtechnology (sensu latu) as cultural productions, material culture has not been thoughtof in quite the same way, and certainly no longer as just the ‘forms’ or end productsof previously unspecified, often assumed or ignored practices and social relations ofproduction. For a concept of ‘style’ in the manner of Schapiro (1953), with a focus onforms, on form relationships, there was no immediate attention to an understanding ofthe practices and social relations that brought such forms into existence. One illustrativecase study that might attest how far we have come in the integration of technologies,productive practices and social contexts in the making of ‘things’ and in the definition







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of style would be the continuing work by Dietler and Herbich (e.g., 1989, 1998) on Luopottery making. Here, they remind us of not just the distinction between things andtechniques (cf. Mauss 1935), but of the two (often conflated) senses of style: style ofaction and material style. From several decades of new approaches to understandingtechnology (e.g., Lemonnier 1986, 1993a; Pfaffenberger 1988, 1992; Ingold 1993;Dobres and Hoffman 1994; Dobres 1995, 2000), and from Bourdieu's (1977) conceptof habitus, Dietler and Herbich (1998) put together a compelling case study of a moredynamic and deeply social understanding of what had previously often been a focuson a static concept of style and a mechanistic set of assumptions about the uses ofstyle either to ‘mark’ social boundaries or, on the part of the analyst, to infer them (seealso, e.g., Hegmon 1998, among others). In fact, to talk today about an understandingof ‘style’ cannot be separated from our understandings both of ‘technology’ and of thepractices and production of social relations. And, as Dietler and Herbich discuss, theseapproaches extend to the design conventions and decorations that so often stand for‘style’: ‘An understanding of the social origins and significance of material culture willnot come from ‘reading’ the decorations as text (see Lemonnier 1990). It requires adynamic, diachronic perspective founded upon an appreciation of the contexts of bothproduction and consumption (see Dietler and Herbich 1994)…’ (Dietler and Herbich1998: 244). Because of the intertwined reconsiderations of style and of technology,neither will be understood in the same ways again.

Especially since the 1950s, anthropological approaches to art, especially in small-scale societies, have focused on ‘the mechanisms and nature of the messagescarried by art’, drawing upon either psychological or linguistic (textual, semiotic,communication) models, and following in ‘the functionalist and structuralist modes ofanthropology’ (Graburn 2001: 765). Many of these were, of course, more synchronic,ahistorical and normative, and the diachronic, temporal and historical potentials ofmaterial culture were yet to be recognized, much less realized. With psychologicalapproaches, style might be conceptualized as ‘aestheticized versions of socialfantasies’ (Graburn 2001: 765) that give security or pleasure, as in Fischer (1961), whoproposed that different (evolutionary) types of societies (egalitarian or hierarchical)tended to produce designs that were material and visual correlates of their prevailingsocial structure. However, it has been the linguistic approaches in art, as well as tomaterial culture more broadly, which have prevailed, including structuralist (inspired by






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Lévi-Strauss 1963: 245–76); semiotic (e.g., Riggins 1994); and art-as-communication(e.g. Forge 1970, Munn 1973 as early, if not somewhat precocious, examples).Morphy (1994) identifies two primary influences that fostered the re-entry of art into theanthropological mainstream. On the one hand, a more culturally oriented archaeologywas spawned, especially at Cambridge in the 1980s; many of today's most activematerial culture researchers have had this kind of archaeological background. On theother hand, but not, in fact, distinct from the so-called ‘post-processual’ archaeologies,was the expansion of an anthropology of meaning [p. 363 ↓ ] and symbolism: ‘contentwas joined with form’ (Morphy 1994: 659).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the ‘turn’ to art and material culture has been theconjuncture with what we might call colonial and postcolonial sensibilities, which havepromoted, first, the ‘ah ha’ understandings that much of the material world observed byanthropologists could not be considered in ahistorical, static or normative terms (e.g.,Graburn 1999); the ‘arts’ were already enmeshed in colonial projects and trajectorieswhen they were first encountered. (See especially Thomas 1991, who notes that hisown project on ‘entangled objects’ was necessarily about ‘recasting [these] issuesin historical terms and with respect to the cultural constitution of objects’, 1991: xi.)Beginning perhaps with the pioneering work of Graburn (1976) on ethnic and touristarts, one might say that the anthropology of material culture, and all that it entails,including style, design and understandings of function, itself experienced a ‘colonialencounter’: a more widespread recognition of the previously unconsidered contexts ofcolonial domination. Not only has there been more attention to the historical depth andsociocultural complexity of art production in colonial and postcolonial, often touristic,contexts (e.g., Marcus and Myers 1995; Phillips and Steiner 1999), but fundamentalconcepts such as the functions of objects, the maintenance of or changes in style,and the cultural generation and deployment of designs, have had to be rethought.Furthermore, any studies of style, function and design have benefited from thesedeeper understandings of historically situated cultural practices, including observationson the ways in which local styles, for example, are actively reworked for new markets,global desires, and ever shifting political and cultural audiences and goals. Thus,approaches such as Wobst's notions on style-as-interventions, or Wilk's interest in theconstructions of common difference, resonate with these new directions.






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Certainly, Stahl's elegant (2002) critique of the prevailing (logocentric) linguistic andmeaning-based models for understanding material culture, and her emphases onthe practices of taste (after Bourdieu 1984), especially in understanding colonialentanglements, attest that what initially may have stimulated renewed interest in theanthropology of art and the object world – namely, the engagement with meaning andsymbolism – has now been challenged and soundly critiqued. From both archaeologicaldirections (e.g., Dietler and Herbich 1998) and those of a more historical anthropology(e.g., Phillips and Steiner 1999; Stahl 2002) art, style, design and functions have beenreframed away from such a focus on finding ‘the’ meaning(s). Even those still engagedwith a semiotic preference have advocated not the Sassurian semiological approaches,but those of C.S. Peirce (e.g., Peirce 1955; Singer 1978; Parmentier 1997; Preucel andBauer 2001; Layton 2000, 2001: 329). What is heralded about such an approach isthe way in which it almost necessarily ‘accounts for and directs inquiry into the multiplemeanings of a single artefact or sign’ (Preucel and Bauer 2001: 91). In an interpretiveworld where inferring or understanding the possible functions and meanings of thingsis now thoroughly more open-ended and multivalent, discussions are necessarily moredirected to the ‘limits of interpretation’ (e.g., Eco 1990, 1992).

On Design

The debate and shifts in our understandings about style, the influences from technologystudies and the new approaches to the anthropology of art have all made theirmark on the study of design. The studies of designs and decorations on objects areobviously integral to most ways in which style has been approached. There is often anunconscious slippage from one to the other. Pye (1982) argues that anyone studyingmaterial culture must understand the fundamentals of design; without design – insome form or another – one cannot really make anything. This is to consider designat the highest level; that is, how an object is conceived of and put together. In adifficult and somewhat classic essay, Pye proposed six requirements for design. Asstated in the helpful editorial notes by Schlereth that precede Pye's essay, what Pyewants to do is to ‘distinguish design as philosophical concept from solely sociologicalconsiderations’. In particular, Pye challenges the presumedly uncomplicated and causalrelationship between design and function; design is not conditioned only by its function.






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Furthermore, it's not clear there even is such a thing as the ‘purely functional’. How anumber of factors affect design are Pye's focus: use, ease, economy and appearance.An early archaeological study of this type of design (McGuire and Schiffer 1983) wantedto focus on design as a social process, while noting that the treatment of the designprocess is usually subsumed by discussions of either style or function (1983: [p. 364

↓ ] 277–303). McGuire and Schiffer are intentionally, as is Pye, considering design at ahigher level than those who study ‘the designs’ incorporated into baskets, pots, maskspainted on to houses, and the like.

For these latter designs, there are classic studies of material objects of ethnographyand archaeology, such as Barrett's 1908 Ph.D. dissertation ‘Pomo IndianBasketry’ (republished 1996). Today this kind of work is hailed, including bycontemporary Pomo Indian basket makers, for its relative lack of theoretical overburden;it is thoroughly a descriptive exposition on the designs of a certain set of Pomo baskets(Smith-Ferri 1996: 20). To this day, there are comparably meticulous studies of design,with lists of motifs, technologies and materials used, but most of them have a muchwider tale to tell, an account of how such designs and their making are embeddedin and constitutive of social relations (e.g., DeBoer's, e.g. 1990, excellent ethno-archaeological work with Shipibo-Conibo designs; MacKenzie 1991 on string bags andgender dynamics in central New Guinea; and Chiu 2003 on Lapita pottery designs and‘house societies’ in Polynesia).

Among the more persistent approaches to design over the past several decades hasbeen the study of symmetry (Washburn 1977, 1983; Washburn and Crowe 1988, 2004),which owes its heritage to structuralist approaches to material culture. Washburn begantrying to access underlying cultural concepts in archaeological contexts by developingan analytical system based on universal principles of plane pattern symmetry (1977;for another example, see Fritz 1978 or in Washburn 1983). This has continued incollaboration with a mathematician as to ‘how to’ undertake such analyses (Washburnand Crowe 1988), leading to an edited volume with a wide variety of case studies(Washburn and Crowe 2004). In his somewhat radical challenges to the anthropologyof art, the late Alfred Gell (e.g., 1998) accepts the idea of a universal aesthetic basedon patterned surfaces – such as the symmetry analyses – even if one of his primarychallenges is to aesthetics as the basis for a theory of art (contra Morphy 1994, Coote1992, 1996, Price 1989; see Layton 2003). In fact, Gell can accept this because he






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views ‘relationships between the elements of decorative art… [as] analogous to socialrelationships constructed through exchange’ (Layton 2003: 450).

Although Gell is perhaps even more radical in his rejection of the view of art as a visualcode, as a matter of communication and meaning (after Thomas 1998: xi-xiii; see alsoLayton 2003: 449), he does accept some studies of decorative art and design as beingof anthropological interest (e.g., Kaeppler 1978; Price and Price 1980; Hanson 1983).Furthermore, decoration, to Gell, is often an essential aspect of what he terms the‘technology of enchantment’; it is the decorations on objects and their designs that canweave a spell (see also Gell 1992; Layton 2003: 450)!

As already noted, one can properly credit the emergence of structuralism with apowerful rejuvenating effect upon material culture studies, including such approachesto design as symmetry analysis. In fact, linguistic approaches to design have beenparamount since the early 1960s, at least. Munn's classic (1973) work on the designelements of Walpiri art suggests in this case that the designs are, in fact, parasitic onthe language for the ‘telling’ of the sand drawing stories. Other early approaches todesign include Bloch's (1974) ideas that designs and their organizational principles(such as repetition, symmetries, fixed sequences, delimited elements) may be some ofthe formal mechanisms whereby cultural ‘authorities’ may be empowered and might beenabled to control ritual, rhetoric and the arts, and may enact power over those who areenculturated to the patterns (after Graburn 2001). Another early and important use ofthe linguistic models was the work of Friedrich (1970), who viewed design generationand design sharing as part of interaction communities and how design makers (in thiscase, ethnographically produced designs on ceramics) did or did not participate inlearning communities that themselves were specified sets of social relations. This kindof work anticipates one of the current very useful approaches based on the concepts of‘communities of practice’ (after Lave and Wenger 1991).

Yet such structuralist, linguistic, communication and correlative approaches have beenset to one side with the lure of context, the destabilization of the so-called ‘conceptof culture’ (e.g., Fabian 1998: xii), and an engagement with history in a world oftransnationalisms and globalized commodities where material objects are not, and havenot been, just caught up in an ever shifting world but are actually creating, constituting,materializing and mobilizing history, contacts and entanglements.






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One of the more interesting approaches to design in these contemporary circumstanceswithin which material culture studies are situated is that by Attfield (1999, 2000),who comes to a material culture approach (as she calls it) from the perspective ofprofessional designer herself, an approach that for her avoids the duality between artand design and makes central [p. 365 ↓ ] such issues as materiality and experience(Attfield 2000: xii). Attfield is particularly interested in the issues of identity and evenindividuality within a cultural context, even if these are not the usual domains of concernfor the study of design. With an approach that is specifically focused on ‘understandingdesign as an aspect of the material world as a social place’, where we have as muchto learn from rubbish and discarded things as from things of value, Attfield's book isexplicitly and celebratorily interdisciplinary, bridging the views from the history of designand material culture studies. Her introduction provides a most useful understandingof design history and, by the end of Chapter 3 design has come to life. By placing theunderstanding of design in the contexts of time, space and the body, Attfield opens upthe study of design to dimensions not often considered over the years of anthropologicaland archaeological studies of design.

On Function

Some of what there is to say about function is mentioned above, and yet this is agrand topic in any aspect of the social sciences and in the study of the material world.This is notably so due to the importance of functionalism as an approach for manydecades (e.g., Eisenstadt 1990). If one goes looking for ‘function’ as a topic, thereare instead plenty of references to ‘functionalism’. On one hand, the study of ‘art’and the material world was not very central to mainstream developments (such asstructural functionalism) in anthropological theory until the 1990s, and, on the otherhand, there's very little material culture in classic functionalist social anthropology (butsee, e.g., Firth 1936). As well, most anthropological definitions of ‘art’ have to do withthe aesthetic, rather than sacred or functional qualities (Graburn 2001). Yet much workwas concerned with how art styles, designs and forms function, particularly how theyfunction to maintain the social (e.g., Sieber 1962; Biebuyck 1973).

In the debate over the function(s) of style, style came to take on communication as oneof its functions. And style became more substantive than ‘just’ a residual dimension







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of material culture that was left over once we had identified what was functional aboutan object or class of objects (e.g., Wobst 1977; Sackett 1982, contra Dunnell 1978).Although early attempts at using style in this way often produced quite functionalistinterpretations where style was assumed to be ‘adaptive’ or functioned to maintaincultural equilibrium, further analyses have suggested how, in some cases, a materialistview on style in societies – as a means for political manipulation, for example – can beput to work (e.g., Earle 1990). A great deal of ethnographic work with art took this turn(see in Anderson 1989: 29–52): art and objects as a means for social control, art andobjects as homeostasis, objects and the social order, objects as forms of legitimation,objects as symbols of power.

Nonetheless, there persisted a view that the object/artifact is almost autonomous andthat stylistic analysis was primarily about the analysis of patterns of material culture,patterns often floating free of anything other than a generalized notion of ‘function’. Itwas a view like this that accentuated some of the gaps between archaeology (often withits head in the stylistic sand) and sociocultural anthropology and ethnography (oftencompletely unaware of the material world).

MacKenzie, in her brilliant study of string bags and gender in New Guinea (1991), notesthat when anthropologists approached the study of artifacts from the perspective oftheir social functions in exchange systems, they often focused not so much, if at all,on the things that are exchanged, but on the social context of the transactions. Theiremphasis on function, context and relations was at the expense of any consideration ofthe objects themselves (see, e.g., in Sieber 1962).

In contrast, archaeologists were perhaps over-dependent upon the objects and theirinferred functions in overly generalized cultural or ‘processual’ terms (exchange,interaction, political manipulation) at the expense of objects-in-social-action. Given apredilection for categories and types, archaeologists have generated ‘types’ of function.For example, Binford (1962) suggested ideotechnic or sociotechnic objects and theirimplied functions (in a systems view of culture). Schiffer (1992) is even more specificwith his categories of technofunction, sociofunction and ideofunction. For the morephilosophically inclined, Preston (2000) brings in the philosophical studies of functionin relation to how materiality matters, with particular reference to archaeology Sheweds two different philosophical conceptions of function: Millikan's (1993) theory of






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‘proper function’ and Cummins's (1975) conception of ‘system function’ that are not rivalconceptions but instead complementary ones; both are ‘required for an understandingof function in material culture’ (Preston 2000: 46). Proper function, she reports, isfunction as a [p. 366 ↓ ] normative phenomenon – as a matter of what artifacts aresupposed to do. Whereas system function is function as a matter of what artifacts in factdo in the way of useful performance.

As recently as 1994, Morphy suggests that ‘the most productive initial approach tothe explanation of form is through function’ (1994: 662), hoping to ‘wed content withform’ (p. 659). But two divergent approaches can perhaps best sum up attitudes todaytowards function. On the one hand, there is the pervasive critique by Gell (1998), whobases his attitudes towards function through the lens of his primary objection, that is,to aesthetics as a foundation for a theory of art. Thus, because art is not always aboutaesthetics, the function of art is not to express a culturally specific aesthetic system.The anthropology of art and of objects should be interested, then, in how aestheticprinciples are mobilized in social action. In fact, Gell's theory, as one rooted in socialrelationships and on ‘the social’ (rather than on culture; Gell 1998: 7), provides animportant (albeit often conceptually challenging) new approach to ‘the social’ that, asLayton writes (2003: 448), differs from structural functionalism in important ways (seealso Thomas 1998).

On the other hand, the reframing of ‘the social’ is also heralded in the view articulatedby MacKenzie (1991: 27): the value of an object and even its function(s) are notinherent in the object but are ‘multivalent and variously realized’. It is objectsthemselves that give value to social relations, yet the social values of objects areculturally constructed. Function, then, like style and design, is integrally caught up inexpanded views on the ways that objects are linked to concepts of the world throughcultural praxis (Morphy 1994: 664), and not just through but as social action.






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Something of a Summary: The Study ofCloth

In this section, I want to point to two primary features of current studies of the style,design and function of material culture: the centrality now of attending to issuesof ‘choices’, and the destabilization of the communication functions and languagemetaphors. Embedded in the recent trajectory of material culture studies have beennew approaches to and debates about the anthropology of cloth, where both of thesefeatures can be seen clearly. In the key volume that took up the ‘social life of things’,edited by Appadurai (1986), three (of eight) chapters on specific materials focus oncloth. The study, analysis and interpretation of cloth have been a bridge betweenanthropology, art history and semioticians (Schevill 1992: 38), and the literature on clothis enormous and instructive (e.g., Cordwell and Schwarz 1979; Tedlock and Tedlock1985; Schneider 1987; McCracken 1987, 1988: 62 f.f; Weiner and Schneider 1989;Hendrickson 1993; Renne 1995; Eicher 2001). Additionally, the metaphors of textiles,and especially of weaving, are common in the study of material culture (e.g., Jarman1997; Ingold 2000).

This multitude of publications on cloth since the mid-1980s conveys the shifts in howdimensions like style and design, even function, are conceptualized, especially asmore nuanced and complex phenomena. Style cannot be ‘read’ in some of the moreessentialized ways. Rather than a focus on the identification or characterization of ‘astyle’, it is the dynamics of style or the mutability of style as embedded in contexts ofsocial life and social relations that has captured the attention of and been elaborated bymost cloth researchers. In what can be characterized as a key article, Schneider andWeiner (1986) make the point that while cloth is an economic commodity, it is also –and often just as much – ‘a critical object in social exchange, an objectification of ritualintent, and an instrument of political power’ (1986: 178). It is simultaneously a mediumfor the study of style, technology, function and design! In a subsequent review article,Schneider (1987) explicitly takes on what she calls the ‘dynamic of style’, drawing forher baseline concept on that put forth by Schapiro (1953). Those concepts of styleas a homogeneous and uncontested expression of a discrete culture's world view, or






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‘as propelled by its own logic’, obscure the ways in which such materials as cloth arerelevant to the enactment of power through time. Schneider is particularly concerned(1987: 420–4) with the aesthetic options in cloth production; options that are tied in, tobe sure, with ‘designs’ and ‘technological style’ (loom types, fiber types, etc.). What arethe aesthetic choices that shape historical cloth styles?

This issue of ‘options’ or ‘choices’ is perhaps the key aspect in the contemporaryapproaches to style, design, and function. Although long recognized as one way to thinkabout style (e.g., Sackett's isochrestism 1977, 1982), it is now the particular conjunctureof, on the one hand, a concern with choices all along the trajectory of material culture– from materials, aesthetics, technologies, production and consumption – with, on theother hand, a concern for cultural [p. 367 ↓ ] praxis, habitus and the dynamics of tastethat best characterizes current approaches to style, design and function. A ‘starter’reading list here would include Schneider (1987), Lemonnier (1993b), Dietler andHerbich (1989, 1998) and Stahl (2002), and the references therein.

The second feature of present approaches to our three characters of style, designand function would be the critique and alternatives to the communication modelsand the linguistic metaphors. The issue of using clothing as a metaphor for language(or vice versa) has both its supporters and its critics, but all might agree by now thata communication system cannot work without ‘contextual knowledge’. Schevill, forexample (1987, 1992), is motivated to ‘rehabilitate’ the approach to cloth and clothingas a communication system as an expressive system (1992: 9). But material culturetheorists, such as McCracken, would disagree (1987; see his chapter ‘Clothing aslanguage’ in McCracken 1988), even if a ‘rehabilitation’ of this concept is one of hisoptions. He argues that we need to jettison the metaphor (clothing as language, ascommunication), which has been so over-used (and putatively without any depthor critical assessment) that it is, to McCracken, a ‘dead metaphor’ and a ‘fixity ofconventional wisdom’ (1988: 62).

In the study of cloth and clothing, we can see how an approach to one kind of materialculture embodies many of the issues being discussed and debated in regard to otherkinds of material culture. The point that McCracken insists on is one reaction to asomewhat simplistic view of ‘X as communication’, especially as understood throughits style and design. The McCracken view holds that it is precisely because material






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culture, in its styles, designs and even functions, is more limited than language inits expressive possibilities that it instead holds power; it is ‘inconspicuous’, has thepotential to convey in more subtle ways, and allows a certain ambiguity that can bemobilized situationally and even more efficiently than language.

The domain of style, design and function is today more mutable, and ripe with morechoices for us to make in how we study and understand it. There is no single new‘paradigm’ and, if anything, our understandings are necessarily more nuanced, complexand situational. History has made a strong appearance, and our key concepts havebeen complicated. Style can no longer be equated with decoration; choices in thetechnologies of production must be attended to. Material culture ‘does’ much more thancommunicate, and the agency of both people and the objects that are used to interveneinto everyday practices, identities and social worlds is now in focus.

Margaret W. Conkey

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Wobst, M. (1977) #Stylistic behavior and information exchange# , in C.E. Cleland (ed.),Papers for the Director: Research Essays in Honor of James B. Griffin . Papers of theMuseum of Anthropology 61. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, pp. pp. 317–42.

Wobst, H.M. (1999) #Style in archaeology or archaeologists in style# , in E. Chilton(ed.), Material Meanings: Critical Approaches to the Interpretation of Material Culture .Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, pp. pp. 118–32.

Wolfe A. #Social structural basis of art# Current Anthropology vol. 10 (1969) pp. 3–44http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/201008

W#lfflin, H. (1932) Principles of Art History, 7th edn . London: Bell.

10.4135/9781848607972.n24



http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605304039851

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605304039851

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/201008

Style, Design, And Function

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