Theories and Things:
An Introductory Bibliography for Material Culture Studies
(compiled by Janet C. Berlo, July 2007)
Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things, Cambridge U. Press, 1988
Berlo, Janet C., and Patricia Crews, Wild By Design: Two Hundred Years of
Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts, Seattle: U. Washington Press,
2003
Bowe, Stephen and Peter Richmond, Selling Shaker: The Commodification of
Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2007.
Bronner, Simon, Grasping Things, 1986.
---, ed. American Material Culture and Folklife. A Prologue and Dialogue. Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Brown, Bill, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical
Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006), pp. 175-207.
--- “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001), pp. 1-16.
---“How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry 24 (4),
Summer 1998, pp. 935-964.
Buchli, Victor, ed., The Material Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg Press, 2002
Buchli, Victor and Gavin Lucas, eds., Archaeologies of the Contemporary
Past, London: Routledge, 2001
Busch, Akiko, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, New York:
Metropolis Books, 2004.
Carson, Cary. “Material Culture History: The Scholarship Nobody Knows.”
in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. Eds. Ann Smart
Martin, and J. Ritchie Garrison. Knoxville: U. Tennessee Press, 1997.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Rochberg, Eugene. The Meaning of Things:
Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1981.
Daston, Lorraine, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and
Science. MIT Press/ Zone Books, 2004.
Douglas, Mary, “The Genuine Article,” in The Socialness of Things: Essays on
the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Ed. Stephen H. Riggins. New York: Mouton
de Gruyter, 1994. pp. 9-22.
Frankl, David, When This You See…the Art of Elaine Reichek. New York:
George Braziller, 2000.
Geismar, Heidi, “What's in a Price? An Ethnography of Tribal Art at
Auction," Journal of Material Culture, 6:1 (March 2001), pp. 25-49.
Reprinted in N.Thrift and A. Amin (Eds.), The Blackwell Cultural Economy
Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2003.
Glassie, Henry, Material Culture, Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1999.
Hodder, Ian, ed. The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic
Expression. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Jurgena, Melissa and Patricia Crews, “The Reconciliation Quilt: Lucinda Ward
Honstain’s Pictorial Diary of an American Era,” Folk Art Magazine, 28 (3),
2003, pp. 38-47.
Kingery, David, ed., Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material
Culture Studies, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Inst. Press, 1996
Kubler, George, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1962.
Kuechler, Suzanna and Daniel Miller, eds. Clothing as Material Culture ,
Oxford: Berg. 2005.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the
Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988.
Miller, Daniel, “Material Culture: the social life of external objects,” British
Journal of Psychotherapy (14), 483-492, 1998.
-- Ed. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford:
Berg. 2001
--Ed. Materiality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005
Myers, Fred, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material
Culture, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001.
Parker, Rozsika,The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the
Feminine, New York: Routledge, 1989
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts –
From Forks to Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They are. New
York: Vintage, 1994.
Phillips, Ruth, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American
Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900, Seattle: U Washington Press, 1998.
Phillips, Ruth and Christopher Steiner, eds. Unpacking Culture: Art and
Commodity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
Pocius, Gerald L. ed. Living in a Material World: Canadian and American
Approaches to Material Cultures. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of
Social and Economic Research, 1991.
Priddy, Sumpter, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts 1970-1840,
Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum and Chipstone Foundation, 2004.
Prown, Jules, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory
and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no.1, (1982)
Prown, Jules and Kenneth Haltman, eds., American Artifacts: Essays in
Material Culture, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000.
Przybysz, Jane, ‘Quilts, Old Kitchens, and the Social Geography of Gender’,
in K. Martinez and K. Ames (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender/ The
Gender of Material Culture, Winterthur, Delaware: the Winterthur Museum,
1997, p. 411-441.
Rowley, Sue. “Craft, Creativity and Critical Practice.” Reinventing Textiles.
Vol. 1. Telos, 1999. p. 1-20.
Schlereth, Thomas J. ed. Material Cultures Studies in America: An
Anthology. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History,
1982.
Schwenger, Peter, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the
Creation of an American Myth, New York: Knopf, 2001