Following and Analyzing an Artifact: Culture-through-Things

Drawing on contemporary research on the hybrid constitution of social realities, this chapter focuses on the theoretical and methodological challenges of assuming and tracking the role of things in mediating cultural knowledge and everyday praxis. We advance that artifacts participate in the constitution of meaningful realities because they embody and display cultural meanings. Whether participants make them relevant in the course of the interaction or not, objects and the material dimensions of everyday life are never neutral. Rather they are semiotic artifacts provided with meanings and condensing social discourses and world visions. How can we analyze and make sense of them? We identify (and analyze examples of) three clusters of empirical cases that are distributed along a continuum from those whose meaning can be traced from the members’ point of view to those whose meaning cannot but be advanced from the analyst’s point of view. In the conclusion we plead for a renewed legitimation of “outsiderism”, i.e. the analyst’s view from afar, to make sense of the constitutive meaning-making labor accomplished by things.