Material Culture Studies and the Sociology and Anthropology of Technology

Abstract

The article is based on the introductory part of the collection on “Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches” (2009). The author presents a brief review of concepts that have been lately employed in research on material or technological culture. He attempts to show that different disciplines do in fact use adjacent notions and concepts in thinking about materiality, and tries to delineate ways of bringing the different research traditions to a unified platform that could serve as a theoretical foundation for the complex materialistic study of technological culture.