Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 DOI 10.1007/s11133-015-9311-6 BOOK REVIEW Material Evidence and Evidentiary Reasoning Robin Bartram 1 Published online: 28 June 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age. Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, 2015. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780857857316, 240 pp. Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice. Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie (eds.), 2015. Routledge, New York and London. ISBN 978–0415837460, 400 pp. The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA. Sarah Lynn Lopez, 2015. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978–0226202815, 336 pp. Sociologists of material culture place the materiality of objects at the center of their analyses (see Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen 2012; McDonnell 2010; Mukerji 1994; Zubrzycki 2013). Bartmanski and Woodward’s Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age and Lopez’s The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA are recent testaments to this trend. Bartmanski and Woodward and Lopez offer an investigation into the importance of material objects in their research on the resurgence of vinyl and building projects funded by remittance dollars, respectively. Both books provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters, from the mediation of cultural meaning in Berlin’s electronic music scene, to the reproduction of social relations in Mexican villages. In dealing with material culture, the authors, by necessity, make decisions about what objects can (and cannot) tell them. This kind of evidentiary reasoning—how analysts use objects as evidence—receives little attention in sociology. Archaeologists, however, are well disposed to investigate how the construction of knowledge relies on material objects because material evidence is so central within the discipline. In this essay, I discuss archaeological theory alongside Bartmanski and Woodward’s account of the resurgence of vinyl and Lopez’s investigation of remittance building projects. Doing so illuminates the importance of reflexivity and clarity in material evidentiary reasoning. Chapman and Wylie’s Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice brings material evidentiary reasoning to the forefront of archaeological practice, and lays out some * Robin Bartram rbartram@u.northwestern.edu 1 Department of Sociology, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208, USA 350 Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 insights from archaeology that might help render explicit the processes that underlie how any analyst relies on objects as evidence. The overarching argument of Material Evidence is that evidentiary reasoning should be explicit and Bresolutely case-based^ (7). In other words, different artifacts, sites, questions, and techniques can and should yield different findings, issues, and solutions, which likely stem from different kinds of evidentiary reasoning. The contributions in Chapman and Wylie’s volume each identify a particular aspect of evidential reasoning, such as conventions of recording data in the field, engagements with other disciplines and the related challenges, and broad presuppositions of archeological practice. Within these chapters, archaeologists raise questions about how to conceive of the variable credibility of archaeological evidence, and how the conceptual difference between describing artifacts as Bfragments^ and Brelics^ might affect evidentiary claims. Another contribution, which may be of more direct relevance to sociologists, describes research projects when archaeological evidence does not align with knowledge gained from local informants or ethnographic accounts. These authors provide strikingly reflexive details about the decisions, assumptions, and technologies that underlie claims about material evidence. The discussion of re-excavations, for example, highlights how any archaeological artifact is a product of the technology, existing knowledge, and intentions of its excavation. Rose-Greenland’s (2013) recent article in Qualitative Sociology also focuses on how circumstances of excavation shape objects’ meanings. As a whole, Material Evidence stresses that recognizing the role of interpretation does not mean that artifacts are unreliable or useless going forward, but rather that archaeologists should be aware of the provenance of any material evidence. Archaeological metaphors about Bdigging^ for second hand vinyl abound in Bartmanski and Woodward’s account of the recent renewed popularity of vinyl records. The authors argue that the resurgence of vinyl is rooted in a Bseries of genuine cultural and sensual motivations nested alongside the material object itself^ (xiii) rather than from either Ban ephemeral retro mania inspired by a digital ennui^ (pxiii) or a case of Bourdieusian distinction and taste. In short, the materiality of vinyl matters in its own right for the revival of this cultural medium. Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled. Specifically, Bartmanski and Woodward point to implications of vinyl’s physical properties. For listeners, the fact that an album needs to be turned over periodically, the authors claim, requires a level of attention that means the medium cannot be ignored (as it may be with a digital mp3 file). The authors also point to the fact that vinyl allows listeners to get to know music in Bvisual ways^ because they can watch a song’s progression as the needle moves across the grooves. The material capacity of the vinyl record has had implications for artists too. Bartmanski and Woodward describe how, because the frequency decreases as a needle reaches the center of a record, the vinyl format encourages artists to order track lists so that songs in middle of the record have less complex sound arrangements and are mellower and less crisp. Since the double-sided character of LPs also dictates that albums are split into two halves, artists plan song order and write songs to fit the format. The authors also point out that the large size of an LP means artists are more prone to want Bgood art^ on the covers of their releases. One of Bartmanski and Woodward’s central claims is that material affordances such as these not only mediate the experience of music itself, but also contribute to the ritualization of playing, handling, buying, and caring for vinyl. Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 351 The authors cite recent work in cultural sociology that frames such material affordances as relational—tied to specific capacities (in terms of capital or status, for example) of people (e.g., McDonnell 2010). One question unanswered in the book, however, is the extent to which the authors base their claims about these relational material affordances on the physical properties themselves, or on what they learned from informants about how physical properties shape their experience of music. While both are crucial parts of an analysis of relational materiality, they are not necessarily complimentary sources of evidence. Lopez exemplifies this point in her analysis of building projects. In The Remittance Landscape, Lopez—a historian of the built environment—takes up how remittance building projects reflect and reproduce the social condition of migrants. The remittance buildings that Lopez studies are built in Mexico, but with dollars Mexican migrants have earned in the United States and sent back to Mexico for the construction of dream houses or civic projects. Using interviews and architectural analysis, Lopez conducts what she calls Bbuilding ethnographies^ to investigate aspirations of migrants, and how both the construction process and the built result influence social relations, local political economies, and daily life. The chapters in the book detail remittance projects in villages in the rural Jalisco region of Mexico. Lopez describes how a remittance rodeo arena both bolsters Branchero masculinity^ and destabilizes gender roles, how new privatized civic centers replace outdoor communal plazas, and how old age homes and burial grounds built with dollars expose the Mexican government’s neglect of its elderly. At the heart of Lopez’s interrogation of remittance building, however, are the implications of remittance houses. These homes—which are usually rather more elaborate than traditional houses in Mexican villages—are emblems of the rising social status of once impoverished rural farmers, and their production and architectural form have unintended consequences. The cost of preferred building materials means that homes remain incomplete and uninhabited, when homeowners find themselves having to return to the US unexpectedly to work when repairs are needed. Lopez describes how new kitchens remain unused and bedrooms are not slept in, as people default to their habitual way of doing things. Sometimes modern bathrooms have no running water; residents have to utilize buckets of water to maintain suburban-style front lawns that nobody drives past to admire; homes have mailboxes though there is no mail route and doorbells that neighbors refuse to ring. Overall, Lopez documents a distinct disjuncture between material aspiration and use, symbolism and functionality. She identifies this disjuncture by triangulating multiple sources of evidence. In addition to interviews with migrants and their families, Lopez calculates indicators of costs and consequences of remittance landscapes, such as the number of abandoned houses, types of remittance architecture projects, spatial arrangements of projects, geographic locations, use of remittance architecture, roles of institutional actors in production, and building styles. Her treatment of remittance houses as material objects opens a new window onto migrant life; her insights would not be possible by focusing exclusively on architectural form. Importantly, Lopez’s combination of various sources does not only demonstrate academic rigor, but also affords a scrutiny that has real world implications by challenging dominant narratives about the success of remittances as a means of poverty alleviation (32). In purely academic terms, her book provides an exemplar of evidentiary standards in material analysis. She is thorough in her attention to objects and people and the multiple discordant relations in which they are entwined, and her methodological breadth evades Breading^ the affordances of material things in and of themselves. Thus, while Bartmanski and Woodward stress how specific material properties afford certain cultural engagements, Lopez points out that objects can produce unexpected 352 Qual Sociol (2015) 38:349–352 consequences that may not be visible without a very thorough analysis. To be sure, analysts do not always have manifold data sources at their disposal and thus may need to interpret material culture with little data about its use or provenance. The crucial thing is that any such study makes underlying material evidentiary reasoning explicit. One way researchers could do this is by bringing sociology and archaeology into conversation. Though archaeologists and sociologists may ask different questions of and do different things with material objects, both disciplines make claims resting on or bolstered by material evidence. As this is a central component of archaeology, Chapman and Wylie’s volume is in a good position to make apparent some of the processes of evidentiary reasoning that are present in all social scientific treatment of material things. To be sure, scholars from both disciplines have long encouraged such a project (e.g., Mukerji 1994; Shanks and Tilley 1987). The task facing social scientists now is to develop (or borrow) analytic and conceptual apparatus and assemble standards for material-based analysis. Ways to move forward could involve using tools from science and technology studies to interrogate the ontological networks of cultural objects (e.g., Griswold et al. 2013); or theorizing levels of entropy (McDonnell 2010). Above all, however, to move forward analysts must be reflexive and clear about how they use objects as sources of evidence. Failing to do so risks losing the means to be able to say how materiality really matters and how it might not. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Wendy Griswold and Fiona Rose-Greenland. References Alexander, Jeffrey, Dominik Bartmanski and Bernhard Giesen (eds). 2012. Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. Palgrave Macmillan. Griswold, Wendy, Gemma Mangione, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2013. Objects, words and bodies in space: Bringing materiality into cultural analysis. Qualitative Sociology 36(4): 343–364. McDonnell, Terrence. 2010. Cultural objects as objects: Materiality, urban space, and the interpretation of AIDS campaigns in Accra, Ghana. American Journal of Sociology 115(6): 1800–1852. Mukerji, Chandra. 1994. Toward a sociology of material culture: Science studies, cultural studies and the meaning of things. In The sociology of culture: Emerging theoretical perspectives, ed. Crane Diana, 143– 162. West Sussex: Blackwell. Rose-Greenland, Fiona. 2013. Seeing the unseen: Prospective loading and knowledge forms in archaeological discover. Qualitative Sociology 36(3): 251–277. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilley. 1987. Social theory and archaeology. Oxford: Polity Press. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2013. Aesthetic revolt and the remaking of national identity in Quebec, 1960–1969. Theory and Society 42(5): 423–475. Robin Bartram is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University. Her dissertation investigates how building inspectors rely on the social characteristics of residents as well as the physical characteristics of buildings when evaluating violations, and how the conflation of physical and social knowledge reproduces inequality within cities. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
