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The history of Material Culture
Analysing objects is not a recent way to understand other communities, as it has always been implied in the ethnographic work. However, its consideration as a discipline may only be dated from the late 1990’s with the creation of the Journal of Material Culture in 1996 firstly edited by members of the UCL department of Anthropology. Here it points out that academicians started to share about their conception of material culture and thus it evidences its beginning as a proper discipline.

At first, in anthropological researches, material culture studies’ aim was to prove the ‘modernism’ of western culture through the comparison between their evolved objects and ‘primary’ objects of the non-western ones: European culture is showed as superior. Thus, due to colonialism the supremacy of Western assumptions exists, which also lead to a ‘masculine’ hierarchy of senses placing the visual sense at the top of the scale. This traditional ‘ocular centrism’s mode of analysis has been questioned from the assertion of non-Western cultures thanks to decolonization and the emergence of material culture studies as a peculiar discipline. The development of material culture studies allows to not discriminate any culture, ethne by criticizing a single approach of objects. The social change with those new pluricultural communities, lead to increasingly challenge the foundational way of interacting with objects especially in museums where only the Sight is engaged. Although each culture has its own sensory model, only the Western model was considered relevant, which showed again the desire to distinguish European culture from others. Material culture studies as a discipline want to teach people in a crossed senses’ manner how to apprehend objects coming from different societies, “not only to see objects but to sense objects” as said in Sensible Objects Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture.

Thereby material culture studies will keep changing, challenging its traditional ways of analysis based on colonialism history. The question of changing the only visual approach of artefacts exhibited in museums is complexed, since the physical preservation aspect has to be raised.