Materials against materiality

The ever-growing literature in anthropology and archaeology that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials. An example of the kind of slippage, from materials to materiality, can be found in an article by sociologist Kevin Hetherington, on the role of touch in everyday practices of placemaking. Although insects are among the most prolific producers in the animal kingdom of materials subsequently taken up for human use, a full inventory of such materials would be virtually inexhaustible. Plants, too, provide an endless source of materials for further processing and transformation. This chapter redirects the attention from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials. James Gibson’s whole point, of course, was that the surface separates one kind of material (such as stone) from another (such as air), rather than materiality from immateriality. He distinguishes three components of the inhabited environment: medium, substances and surfaces.