This essay reprises the status of objects in relation to critical conversations that favor things and thing studies over other methodologies of material culture studies. Recent discussions have dismissed objects as passive foils that lack in meaning. Glossing the factor of representation, however, these discussions have also glossed over a factor crucial in shaping the way in which the distinction between objects and things is made accessible in theory and practice. Two examples taken from eighteenth-century American literary culture, an anecdote by Benjamin Franklin and a sales ad published by the Pennsylvania Gazette, illustrate how in the process of representation objects become imbued with significance that reaches beyond mere signification and object classification. Once conceived as ‘material signs,’ objects become participants in cognitive environments in which seemingly meaningless symbols foster meaningful engagement with materiality.

The study of cultural objects and their materiality has moved to the center of cultural sociology. This review synthesizes the work of this third wave of cultural sociology, demonstrating how insights from the study of cultural objects and their mechanisms of meaning-making deepen our theories of culture in action, culture and cognition, and the production and reception of culture. After placing this third wave in the historical context of cultural sociology, this review clarifies three concepts: cultural objects, material culture, and materiality. This review then makes a series of interventions around meaning-making and action based on insights from scholarship on cultural objects and materiality. First, it advocates attention to qualities in addition to symbols. Then it examines how object affordances constrain and enable meaning and use and how objects have material agency. Then the role of cultural objects in stabilizing and destabilizing meaning and social arrangements is discussed. Finally, cultural power—whether and how cultural objects shape belief and behavior—is considered through the orienting concepts of figure and ground.

This free course, An introduction to material culture, introduces the study of material culture. It asks why we should study things and outlines some basic approaches to studying objects.

Material culture refers to the objects created and kept by ancient societies, that hold a wealth of information about the people who made them.