Journal of

MATERIAL
Introduction to Special Issue CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture

Materializing identities:
16(4) 347–357
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183511424835
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Christopher Tilley
Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Material Culture (JMC) arise from a
conference entitled ‘Materializing Identities’ held in the Department of Anthropology,
University College London, on 11 November 2010. The conference was held to celebrate
the work of Mike Rowlands on his retirement from the Department. He is a founding
editor of the JMC and over the 16 years since its inception has put an enormous amount
of work into guiding its direction and, more broadly, promoting material culture studies
internationally. This issue is a celebration of his life and work.
I cannot remember precisely when I first met Mike, but it was probably around 1980,
when I was a graduate student, at a conference in Cambridge about economic archaeology.
A few years previously, Mike had edited The Evolution of Social Systems, together with
Jonathan Friedman (Friedman and Rowlands, 1977). This book had an enormous
influence on me and my own research: a kind of structural-Marxist anthropological and
archaeological bible; reading and rereading it assured me that my own research was
going along the right lines. In short, Mike was a kind of god, and it is always somewhat
difficult talking to a deity. Although I have subsequently come to realize that Mike is a
mere mortal, I have never ceased to be influenced by him and his work, like all the other
contributors to this special issue.
The title of the conference, and of this issue of the journal, attempt to capture the
extraordinary breadth of Mike’s work in an inclusive manner, which everyone might be
able to relate to in some way, ranging from considerations of social evolution to heritage
to theoretical and philosophical discussions of the nature of materiality. Only some of
this is reflected and refracted in the articles collected here, but to fully encompass Mike’s
range of interests and expertise would require much more than a single issue of the JMC.
All but one of the contributions, that of Jean-Pierre Warnier, a long-standing colleague of
Mike’s, have been written by former PhD students.

Corresponding author:
Christopher Tilley, Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London
WC1H 0BW, UK.
Email: c.tilley@ucl.ac.uk

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348 Journal of Material Culture 16(4)

Since the mid-1970s, Mike has been largely responsible for creating the internationally
respected subfield of material culture studies in the Department of Anthropology at UCL,
from an initial base of only one lecturer, Peter Ucko, back in the late 1960s. In that time,
material culture studies have moved from being very much of peripheral concern to the
discipline of anthropology to being very much part of the mainstream and a key area for
innovation and debate. Working within an anthropology department, Mike has always
regarded the anthropological analysis of material culture, past or present, as a very
different field of study than a standard anthropological perspective with its focus on
social and political relations. By instead putting material culture at the centre of research
and analysis, one could produce a rather different kind of understanding of social
reproduction and transformation. This meant taking material worlds as seriously as
language or socio-political relations as a medium through which people came to know
and understand themselves, a means of creation and self-creation, one in which a
consciousness of the thing was a fundamental part of social being. So, for example,
prehistoric Bronze Age smithing technologies and processes of exchange were not
peripheral and subsidiary to what really mattered – kinship and social organization – but
formed the very basis for understanding long-term social change and the manner in
which those social relations came into being and played themselves out. People transmit
ideas of identity and culture over time. Notions of cultural transmission, memory,
remembering and forgetting are actively transmitted through perceived material worlds
that people are not necessarily making themselves or are responsible for, but which they
inherit and transmit for future generations. Temporalities thus shape people, but within
these temporalities people also shape the future. Material culture materializes identities,
but it is also a medium for understanding the processes by means of which those identities
are transmitted.
Throughout his career Mike has maintained a resolutely interdisciplinary focus
combining archaeological and anthropological research, the twin pillars of contemporary
material culture studies and this journal. He has been absolutely exemplary in this
respect, as most scholars with interdisciplinary interests remain largely entrenched on
either side of the disciplinary divide.
His research can be very broadly, if somewhat crudely, divided into three overlapping
areas and phases. His initial research was concerned with Middle Bronze Age metal
working in southern Britain, tracing connections to developments in France and the rest
of Europe (Rowlands, 1976), a landmark study in the social anthropological interpretation
of prehistoric material culture. From this initial research another focus emerged: the
understanding of smithing technologies and exchange in ethnographic contexts
(Rowlands, 1971, 1973), and the development of models of long-term change and
processes of social evolution in prehistoric Europe and globally from a broadly structural-
Marxist perspective (e.g. Friedman and Rowlands, 1977; Frankenstein and Rowlands,
1978; Kristiansen and Rowlands, 1998; Rowlands, 1980, 1987; Rowlands et al., 1987).
These studies have been widely influential and have transformed our theoretical and
social understanding of later European prehistory. Despite several decades of subsequent
research by others, the models of social process developed have hardly been bettered.
Most recently, he has returned to a consideration of the long term in a re-evaluation of
the nature of civilization (Feuchtwang and Rowlands, 2010; Rowlands and Fuller, 2009).

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In addition to his academic studies of prehistory, Mike has actively participated in

archaeological excavations throughout his career. As a young man in the early 1960s he
was suspended on ropes to dig out the extraordinary, 30m deep Wilsford Shaft near
Stonehenge in Wiltshire, cut into the chalk and down to the water table (Ashbee et al.,
1989). Most recently, since 2008, he has been participating in the excavation of Bronze
Age cairns and pebble platforms in East Devon, southern Britain (see www.
pebblebedsproject.org.uk), a kind of symbolic return to the intellectual origins of his own
research trajectory.
Side by side with Mike’s interest in long-term change, always claimed to be one of
the major strengths and distinctive features of the discipline of archaeology, he developed
a whole series of anthropological research projects in West Africa, in particular
ethnohistorical studies of the relationship between material culture, technological
processes and social identities in the Cameroon Grassfields (e.g. Kristiansen and
Rowlands, 1998; Rowlands, 1979, 1986; Rowlands and Warnier, 1988, 1995). More broadly,
he has contributed to anthropological debates about the significance of consumption in
relation to modernity in an African context (Rowlands, 1994); to an understanding
of architecture (Rowlands, 1985); considerations of the nature of cultural memory
(Rowlands, 1993, 1999); the material culture of loss in a consideration of the elderly and
care homes in the UK (Rowlands, 2007a); to studies of shopping, place and identity
(Miller et al., 1998); the significance of soundscapes and conceptualizations of witchcraft
(Rowlands, 2007b); the nature of chiefly power (Rowlands, 1998); and to the social and
material effects of colonialism (Rowlands, 1989).
A third and very much ongoing area of his research, partly reflected in some of the
individual contributions to this special issue, has been concerned with understanding the
practices and politics of cultural heritage and museums in the contemporary world (e.g.
De Jong and Rowlands, 2007; Rowlands, 1999, 2002, 2008; Rowlands and Butler, 2007;
Rowlands and Tilley, 2006). The heritage industry, its products, displays and practices in
the West has been extensively deconstructed within academia (e.g. Hewison, 1987;
Krauss, 2004; Smith, 2004; Walsh, 1992) for creating a superficial commodified portrayal
of the past, ultimately separating people from their present and therefore making that
past largely irrelevant. The role of museums in post-colonial contexts has been understood
in similar fashion. But the issue of what cultural heritage is and what effects it has are not
so simple, and Mike’s recent work has been directed to developing a more subtle and
nuanced approach to cultural heritage. Understood in another way, heritage and its
contemporary significance can be regarded in a deeply Heideggerian sense as having
ontological and moral significance, being in one sense an expression of care, care of the
self and care for others (Rowlands and Butler, 2007). Heritage, ostensibly about the past,
is actually related to the present and to the creation of a desirable future. Those excluded
or marginalized from such a discourse are being denied one (Rowlands, 2002).
Furthermore, what museums and heritage mean has to be considered in the manner in
which global processes become locally transformed and refracted in the active production
of localities (Appadurai, 1996). In a recent study of substances, palaces and museums
in Cameroon, Mike has demonstrated the manner in which thinking through the
materiality of the museum space and in particular the relationship between visibility and
invisibility, allows us to come to radically different conclusions with regard to the

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350 Journal of Material Culture 16(4)

meaning of that relationship and its significance in a West African context (Rowlands,
2011). The argument that the colonial museum has failed and that few people want to
visit such a place misses the point. It is the existence of such spaces that matters to socio-
political elites, not that they are actually used or appreciated. Through the creation and
manipulation of exhibition and display, the powerful can intervene in what really matters
to them, the control of invisible worlds essential for the reproduction of their authority
and status.
Going beyond the quite extraordinary breadth and depth of Mike’s substantive studies,
what has been important above all to the general development of material culture studies
as a whole, is the manner in which Mike has consistently created a philosophy, or
philosophical understandings, from and of the thing and demonstrated the profound
significance of things in terms of the manner in which they materialize and transmit
identities. This is a bottom-up rather than top-down approach, building on the profound
consequences and ramifications of our co-presence and co-existence with a material
world of things. He has shown the manner in which the things with which we live are not
only a medium through which to think the world, but also form an integral part of living
and acting and doing in that world. From a consistently Marxist and materialist
perspective, Mike has demonstrated that things are part and parcel of society, culture,
politics and values, and constitute a key medium through which we can understand and
analyse social identity, change and transformation. Mike has consistently and powerfully
demonstrated the various powers of material forms and their sensory attributes in relation
to the construction and reproduction of individual and social identities in an exemplary
way, such that his work has been at the cutting edge of conceptualization and debate in
the field for nearly four decades.
But all material things, like all material people, are not equal. Some are more equal
than others. Some things, indeed, to paraphrase Mike, are more material than others
(Rowlands, 2005). And it is to a consideration of the powers and attributes of the thing
in relation to the formation, reproduction or transformation of identities to which the
individual contributors in this collection of articles return over and over again.
Jean-Pierre Warnier emphasizes the position that the body, subjectivity and processes
of subjectification are key issues in understanding the significance of material forms.
Embodiment extends to material culture, its uses and relationships to the body as an
integrated continuum. The subject, Warnier argues, is shaped, subjected and subjectified
by embodied material culture but often in a manner that is difficult to analyse and express
in language. The fighter’s body and its relationship to weaponry are exemplary in this
respect. Wooden implements typically employed in fighting within the kingdom of
Mankon in the Cameroon Grassfields of West Africa only bruise the body on the outside.
They do not enter the body or spill substances that would enter the soil of the kingdom
and thus be highly polluting. The wooden clubs employed required very close contact
with the enemy, and the club itself is very clearly an extension of the fighter’s body. By
contrast, iron weapons used in fighting between kingdoms are so powerful and dangerous
because they cut and enter the skin, a container of life substances. They drain the body
of blood and integral life-forces, and weapons such as the spear can be used to inflict
harm on the enemy at a greater distance. The use of wood or iron weaponry thus mirrors
a distinction between inside and outside, closeness and distance, and the fighter’s

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relationship to the kingdom. This, in turn, is linked to another and contrasting set of
bodily practices used in iron production technologies that are inherently non-violent in
nature, preventing any ill feeling on the part of the smith from entering the weapon and
creating accidents that might spill bodily substances.
In the Cameroon Grassfields, the weapons used in fighting and their efficacy cannot
be understood apart from magical practices and production technologies. Warnier
contrasts this situation with the employment of weaponry in the First World War. What
might a highly unusual and carefully crafted hand-made dagger signify in the context of
a war using industrially produced weapons for mass killing? Its only possible use was to
kill in close combat and it was personally fashioned to be highly effective in such
circumstances by someone with experience. Such a dagger has to be considered in the
context of hundreds and thousands of cutlasses and hunting knives used by soldiers that
could only have a similar purpose in the war. Yet there is virtually no historical
archaeological or forensic evidence for their use and a similar lack of witness testimony,
a collective amnesia with regard to their use. Here we have a fascinating case of the
material evidence pointing to a style of close combat killing hitherto virtually unknown
from other sources, signifying a very different relationship between bodily practices and
weaponry used to portray the war. Consideration of the material evidence allows us to
tell a different kind of story with regard to the body in warfare and the subjectivity of
the fighter.
Georgina Born opens her conceptual paper by pointing out that although music is a
thoroughly material medium it differs radically from other forms of material culture in
that it leaves no tangible physical trace beyond the performance. This underlines the
significance of immateriality in relation to a consideration of materiality. While musical
sound is non-representational, it typically engenders a plethora of connotations that may
act in a fundamental way to create and reproduce identities across a range of sensual,
emotional and intellectual planes and act so as to mediate subject–object relations.
Music produces its own set of social relations in performances and musical practices
among musicians. It can powerfully constitute an imagined community among those
who listen to it, reinforce class, gender and age divisions in society and serve to produce
and reproduce the social and institutional forms through which it is mediated. In these
ways, music generates particular sociabilities in musical practice and experience, and in
much wider institutional and social settings. There may be reproductive homologies
between these different vectors of experience or contradictions and conflict in which
musical performance and its reception can be a medium for resistance and social
transformation.
Music is both empowering and infused with power relations; recording practices, for
example, may therefore become sites of struggle in the studio, played out in shifts of
intonation or timbre. Musical practice can act so as to challenge broader structures of
social power. Born argues that it is the relative autonomy of the socialities of musical
performance that is crucial for rendering them effective as potential vehicles for social
critique. Musically imagined communities may reproduce extant structures of power, but
crucially they may also create a medium for the collective imagination of compensatory
or utopian social spaces and for new forms of identity formation, effectively reconfiguring
boundaries between pre-existing, dominant and dominating, social categories.

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Charlotte Joy discusses the UNESCO World Heritage site of Djenné, Mali, where the
official policy is to protect forever all the town’s residential buildings and the great
Mosque to maintain their exceptional mud architecture. This, she shows, has widespread
ramifications and effects in relation to social identities and the manner in which they are
materialized and objectified. On the one hand, restoration and conservation are essentially
future-orientated insofar as tourists can be attracted to visit the town and surrounding
‘ethnic’ villages. On the other hand, the town becomes frozen in a particular backward-
looking vision of the past, inhibiting social development, a classic clash between tradition
and modernity. Grins (boys’ houses located within each district of the town) are
architecturally very different and have replaced sahos (traditional young men’s houses);
their members actively embrace a modernizing, creolized African-American culture. The
overwhelming desire of these young men is for an income sufficient to support a wife
and family and for status emulation through the acquisition of Western goods. In effect,
given that tourism is almost the only means to acquire money and consume goods, these
young men must live in the past in order to prosper in the present. The social and political
effect of UNESCO’s heritage policies, here as in many places elsewhere in the world, is
essentially to valorize and preserve buildings, taking much care in preserving their
material forms, without adequate consideration of the identities of the inhabitants. This
shows the manner in which questions of heritage and conservation are entangled at the
local, ethnic, national and global level.
Cloth and clothing have long being recognized to be of fundamental significance in
relation to the manner in which identities become materialized (e.g. Goody, 1982;
Küchler and Miller, 2005; Weiner and Schneider, 1989). While much has been made of
the socio-semiotics of cloth and clothing, Laurence Douny takes a different, ‘praxeological
approach’ (Warnier, 2001) and considers in detail the operational chains involved in the
production, transformation and articulation of the raw materials, linking this to techniques
of the body in her discussion of Hausa wild silk embroidered gowns and the manner
in which they materialize identities. These gowns objectify both individual and social
power, prestige and fame, in a variety of ways: through the production and use of wild
silk, forms of embroidery and layering of designs, the cut and form of the gown,
articulating power in relation to the body and persona of the wearer, intimately related to
group identity and the networking of Hausa social relations. They express Hausa identity
in an emphatic manner that requires no verbalization. The garments, made of superimposed
layers, create an effect of bigness, a direct projection of the power and significance of the
wearer. The gown flows in the slow movement of the wearer, another significant
charismatic visual attribute signifying status. Both expand and develop the ‘vocabulary’
of the wearer’s body. Elaborate silk embroidery and the use of ink also materialize power,
status and social leadership. African wild silk is of particular significance because of its
origins in distant forests, its rarity, and the difficulties involved in procuring it,
necessitating magical protection, and the protracted and involuted production processes
that are required. The shininess of the thread displayed on the back and chest of the
wearer is highly prized, a feature that has some considerable cross-cultural significance
in terms of a contrast between dull and brilliant (e.g. Morphy, 1992; Saunders, 2002).
The fractal-like shapes and geometrical patterns of the embroidery of the gown are also
of great significance, taking an enormous amount of time, skill and effort to achieve,

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carrying a heavy load of symbolic, cultural and historical meanings referring to religious
and political and ethnic identities that become personified by the wearer. Inked, magically
loaded Qu’ranic verses worn on the inside charm gown are another materialization of the
power of the wearer and afford supernatural protection for the body of the wearer.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault explores visual imagery in relation to ethnic identities in
contemporary British Columbia, a classic and foundational domain of material culture
studies. She argues that status display within indigenous cultures has its other side or
face, the disguise of status. That which is made visible serves to render other aspects of
status invisible. The use and display of materials such as animal parts, fur, feathers and
shells is indexically tied to status and the restoration of status hierarchies among the
First Nations. But what is significant here, Townsend-Gault argues, is not what visual
art means in this context, its semiotic code, but what it does, in other words its agency
in relation to persons (Gell, 1998; Pinney, 2004; Tilley, 2008), its socio-political effects
and ramifications in the play of relations between Native and non-Native in western
Canada today.
In the recent historical past, the skills and technologies required to work prestigious
raw materials employed in the status displays of the potlatch at the heart of native social
distinctions became devalued. By contrast, in the contemporary context a re-emerging
exoticism is working to overturn this loss of status with ‘traditional’ artists now acquiring
high status. Historically, the values attached to raw materials that were difficult to acquire
and difficult to work were controlled by chiefly lineages and hereditary leaders because
they were manifestations of status.
Sea-lion whiskers and spray-crete, a sprayable liquid concrete, seem to be worlds
apart in the terms of traditional/modern, authentic/inauthentic binaries asserting the
value of some things versus the worthlessness of others in the contemporary world. Yet
Townsend-Gault shows that they are both imbricated in the production of status. Crests
made of spray-crete affixed to a modern shopping mall are as significant in this regard
as traditional artefacts and materials. These signs of difference point in two ways,
externally in relation to the wider non-Native population and internally in relation
to native Others. They assert distinction and power in markedly different ways but
the common thread that links them is the negotiation of status and its protection. The
external effect of both in relation to non-Native populations invites an affective response,
asserting difference in a generalized and generic us/them kind of way. But this visible
difference deflects attention away from another kind of affect which is about the
maintenance of power and clan hierarchies. The visible is directed towards the control
and mastery of the invisible (Rowlands, 2011).
Giovanni Kezich considers another way in which social identities are materialized in
his discussion of ethnographic museum policies in the Italian Tyrol of north-eastern Italy.
The Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina (Museum of the Usages and
Customs of the People of Trentino) was founded as part of the legacy of political struggles
for independence and a clash of identities between Italian- and German-speaking peoples
in the region. This happened in the context of contrasting types of rural settlement, land
use and collectivized versus individual expressions of identity, modes of furnishing the
home and relating to the past and tradition on either side of the ethnic divide. The
founding imperative of the museum display rooted a regional identity in a timeless past

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of the peasantry and in terms of technologies of production. As Kezich points out, local
identity or the ‘spirit of place’ is extraordinarily difficult to capture, represent and
materialize in the museum. Its elusive nature stems from the ever present problem of
object fetishism, the relationship of emic to etic categories, shifting conceptualizations of
what identity is supposed to be, the never ending nuances of different localities,
unremarked and routinized everyday practices, political struggles endlessly deploying
and inventing different versions and visions of the past in the present, and whether social
identity has a material or immaterial essence. We return once more to an issue raised in
Mike’s recent work, discussed earlier, and in Townsend-Gault’s article in this collection,
of the relationship between the material and the immaterial, or the visible and the
invisible.
An important issue, raised in somewhat different ways in both Kezich’s and Townsend-
Gault’s papers, concerns the role of the anthropologist in relation to the materialization
of identities: should it be a matter of capturing some true and impartial essence of identity,
whatever that might be? Should it simply be a matter of documenting and understanding
people’s self-understanding of their identities and the manner in which they create them?
Should it involve a critique of identity politics? Should it go ‘deeper’ and attempt to
capture a notion of identity residing at a deeper and more abstract plane?
Titika Malkogeorgou extends the discussion to a consideration of conservation
practices in the museum context. On the one hand, such practices attempt to preserve
authentic past objects as they were, their ‘true selves’. Yet conceptually, the creation of
a thing also marks the beginning of its disintegration and, like persons, all things have
biographies that change over time (Hoskins, 1998; Kopytoff, 1988). The paradox for
conservators is that they necessarily have to perform active work on things in order to
transmit them into the future and present them to the public, and so this raises the tricky
question of what exactly the status of a conserved object is. How does it relate to the
past and to the present?
In Malkogeorgou’s consideration of the conservation of the Christie mantua in the
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, she shows the manner in which conservators have
intervened in the character, appearance and display of the garment on three occasions
spanning 30 years since its acquisition in 1969. Substantially altered before acquisition,
the aim in its initial conservation was to restore it to its earliest 1740s condition in
order to capture the ‘original truth’ of an authentic object. However, the dress contained
material which was part of it but had been thought to be later additions. Later interventions
required work on previous interventions, with particular attention being paid to stitching,
thread, seams, pleats and crease marks providing clues with regard to the likely shape
and form of the original and ‘true’ object. This required unpicking previous stitching
from earlier conservation efforts and a reinterpretation of the garment as it might once
have been, taking into account that prior to its acquisition the dress had almost certainly
been altered on at least three previous occasions. Beyond physical technical evidence –
such as identifying original stitching, fabric etc. – conservation decisions were also made
on quite different grounds, not open to direct scrutiny of the material: how the dress
might have been made in the 18th century, the kinds of processes and steps that would be
required – decisions made in the complete absence of any unaltered mantua of that
period. Malkogeorgou shows that the complexities of attempting to recover the true form
of the garment and present this to the public extend beyond the garment itself: to lace and

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accessories, whether or not, and how, these should be displayed within the museum
space. She demonstrates how conservation is a living rather than dead practice, effectively
stitching (pun intended!) together in new ways past and present, subject and object,
evidence and values, in a dynamic unity, an attempt to respect, care for and make sense
of the past in the present.

Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to all the speakers at the conference, including Nicholas Argenti, Robert Layton,
Mogens Trolle Larsen and Stephan Feuchtwang, whose papers could not be presented here, for
their enthusiasm and support of the conference. To Mike Rowlands for his consistent intellectual
support and facilitation for the event, and Chris Pinney and David Wengrow, who chaired individual
sessions.

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Biographical note
Christopher Tilley’s general research interests are archaeology, material culture and social identity,
exploring the relations between hermeneutic, structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives and
material culture. Among other areas, his recent work focuses on contemporary and prehistoric
landscapes, topography and monuments, Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art, the Neolithic in south
Scandinavia, Brittany, Britain and Malta.

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