Material culture studies sets off on the wrong foot. It first severs material things from the living coordination in which they are encountered, then labours to reconnect them, to meanings, persons, and the world, through successive vocabularies of signification, objectification, agency, networks, and entanglement. Reading three major material culture handbooks, this article argues that the severance should never have been made. Living Value Theory locates things within multimateriality, one of five co-constitutive mediations of living, so that nothing needs reconnecting. It also shows that things appear differently at different recursivity levels. In continuous coordination, a thing does not appear as a separate thing at all; it becomes conspicuous in breakdown, named in articulation, and classified as an ‘object’ only in institutions. The field’s object is this late appearance, mistaken for the thing itself. The article develops metabolic remediation and Ontologically Grounded Theory as alternatives to the material culture approach.
I. Two Children and a Boiler
In the middle of his chapter on objectification in the Handbook of Material Culture, Christopher Tilley quotes from his own diary. The entry records sixteen minutes on a Sunday morning in the life of his twins, then nineteen months old. Alice carries her red jacket, falls over, and bangs her head on the kitchen door: “Terrible howl.” Benjamin opens and closes the garage door, fiddles with the key, takes a yellow plastic chicken leg from a kitchen drawer, runs through to the garage and “starts altering the thermostat on the boiler. He is stopped. He starts to suck the end of the chicken leg.” Alice carries a box containing a tile cutter into the kitchen, stands on it, and jumps up and down (Tilley 2006: 62). Tilley’s interpretation follows. The children are “learning through manipulating things”, confronted with “a material world of things which objectify values, etc., through which they learn who they are and where they are” (2006: 62).
The diary and its interpretation describe two different things. The diary records two small bodies learning balance and falling, an injury and its vocal expression, the testing of surfaces that will or will not bear weight, and an encounter with the household’s heating system that someone has to interrupt. It also records, without dwelling on it, the adults. “He is stopped” is a sentence about a carer whose attention keeps the morning’s exploration possible by foreclosing one part of it. The diary itself is the trace of someone watching. The children’s activity is coordinated with the material organization of the house and with the continuous, mostly unremarked vigilance of other people, and the morning goes well because that coordination holds.
The boiler shows something further. It is the same installation that heats the house, keeps the children warm, and makes a Sunday morning in a British winter comfortable. Encountered by a toddler’s hands, the same arrangement becomes a hazard. Its consequences are settled neither by what it is nor by what it means, but by the living coordination in which it participates at a given moment. There is a temporal dimension as well. The child who has to be stopped from turning its dial at nineteen months may one day set its timer, bleed its radiators, or repair it. The material arrangement stays much the same while the living capacities through which it is encountered are transformed.
Some care is needed even here. The diary records that Benjamin sucks the end of the chicken leg. Whether this soothed him after being stopped, explored a new texture, or relieved a teething gum, the diary does not say. The act is observed and its function is inferred, and any account that starts from living has to keep that difference in view. The issue is less that Tilley chose the wrong function than that his framework directs attention away from what was happening for these two children’s continued living altogether, and towards the values that their household’s things supposedly objectify.
This article argues that the gap between Tilley’s diary and Tilley’s interpretation is a small model of what is wrong with material culture studies. The field sets off on the wrong foot. It first severs material things from the living coordination in which they are encountered, and then spends its theoretical energy trying to reconnect them, to meanings, to persons, and to the world. The severance should never have been made, and it rests on a failure to see that things appear in fundamentally different ways at different levels of recursive coordination.
II. The Wrong Foot: Severance and Reconnection
The editors of the 2006 Handbook of Material Culture described their field as “a diffuse and relatively uncharted interdisciplinary field of study in which a concept of materiality provides both the starting point and the justification” (Tilley et al. 2006: 1). Four years later, Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry opened The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies with “what is perhaps a reactionary view” of the same field, one that would involve “unpicking the culturalist uses of materials that developed during the 1980s and 1990s” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010: 2). In 2021, the final volume of A Cultural History of Objects, edited by Laurie Wilkie and John Chenoweth, brought the history of things up to the present. Read together, the three volumes give a fifteen-year cross-section of a mature and inventive body of scholarship, and they show a single founding move that has survived each of the field’s theoretical reorientations.
The move has two steps. First, material things are cut out of the coordination of living and constituted as a domain of objects. Second, the field sets out to reconnect what it has cut: to establish what the objects mean, how they relate to persons, and what they do in the world. The Handbook editors state the programme with complete clarity. Material culture studies, they write, “inevitably have to emphasize the dialectical and recursive relationship between persons and things: that persons make and use things and that the things make persons. Subjects and objects are indelibly linked. Through considering one, we find the other” (Tilley et al. 2006: 4). The passage presupposes what it sets out to overcome. A dialectic needs two terms, a link needs two things to be linked, and one finds the other only by starting from one. Persons and things are posited as separate, and the work of theory is to join them. Even “recursive” here names a loop between two pre-given entities rather than the recursivity of living itself.
The vocabularies of reconnection have changed across four decades while the operation has stayed the same. Semiotics reconnected things to persons through signification, objectification through dialectic, object biography through life histories, actor-network theory through networks, and the new materialisms through entanglement. Wilkie and Chenoweth open their volume by declaring that the old binaries “are no longer acceptable taxonomies for organizing a world where humans, nonhumans, and matter are entangled in complex situated histories and geographies” (Wilkie and Chenoweth 2021: 2). Entanglement is the most telling of these words, because only what has first been laid out as separate strands can become entangled. Hicks and Beaudry see the resulting oscillation clearly. Unless researchers change their footing, “we will simply continue to play back and forth across the categories of the cultural and the material: critiquing, collapsing, relating” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010: 21).
The reconnection cannot succeed, because the severance is built into the starting point. Every account of how persons and things “make” each other inherits the gap it is meant to close, and each new vocabulary of relation produces a new version of the question it was supposed to answer. A cut that is never made needs no suture.
It might be objected that every discipline must isolate something for study, and that investigating things commits no one to believing that things exist apart from life. Material culture scholars have spent decades insisting that objects cannot be understood apart from their relations. The objection misplaces the problem. Focusing attention on material arrangements is legitimate and necessary. The error lies in what is selected. To select “objects” is already to select things in the form in which they appear once they have been lifted out of coordination: bounded, named, classified, and set before an observer. That form is real, but it is a particular and late mode of appearance, and making it the starting point builds severance into the definition of the field. The insistence on relationality that follows is sincere and endless, because relations are being sought from the far side of the cut.
Living Value Theory (LVT) does not make the first move, and therefore never needs the second. It begins with living as continuous recursive coordination across five co-constitutive mediations: multisensorial embodiment, multispecies being-with, multiversal dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization. These are five fundamental counterpart relations rather than five domains or substances. Multisensorial embodiment coordinates a living being’s own recursive continuation. Multispecies being-with coordinates another recursively responsive being, whether a person, a companion animal, livestock, a pest, or a microbe. Multiversal dwelling coordinates found nonrecursive ground. Multimateriality coordinates made nonrecursive material ground, and multisymbolization made nonrecursive symbolic ground. Material things thus enter the theory already as one side of a relation of coordination. A material difference becomes multimaterial mediation only through recursive uptake, when it enters a living being’s further coordination, and “found” and “made” describe relations to aspects of material configurations rather than classes of objects. Because the five mediations are co-constitutive, every multimaterial coordination is at once embodied, shared with others, situated in found conditions, and more or less symbolically organized. Located in this way, things never have to be reconnected to persons, meanings, or the world, because they were never disconnected from them. The question that material culture studies keeps trying to answer from outside, how things relate to life, gives way to a question asked from within: what do particular material arrangements make possible, or foreclose, for continued living?
III. How Things Appear: Recursivity and the Ontology of the Object
The severance has a precise source, and naming it shows why reconnection cannot work. Things do not appear in one way. How a material arrangement shows up depends on the recursivity level at which it is coordinated, and the shift between levels is ontological: it changes what the thing is for the living being coordinating with it, rather than merely how much attention is paid to an object that stays the same.
Heidegger saw the first part of this long ago. In the analysis of equipment in Being and Time, the hammer in use is ready-to-hand. It withdraws into the hammering, so that what is encountered is the work rather than the tool. Only when the hammer is missing, damaged, or in the way does it become conspicuous, obtrusive, or obstinate, and only when the work stops and one looks at it does it become present-at-hand, an object with properties (Heidegger 1962: 95–107). Material culture studies has known this analysis for a long time. In the 2006 Handbook, Julian Thomas sets out the distinction clearly: things “can show themselves to us in a variety of different ways, depending on the kind of involvement that we have with them”, and the hammer “recedes” from explicit concern as we use it (Thomas 2006: 46). A page later he concludes that “Heidegger’s early arguments about the position of things as tools in an equipmental totality may be flawed” and moves on to background and horizon (2006: 47). Bjørnar Olsen grants that the way scholars relate to their source material “of necessity implies making them present-at-hand”, and allows that “these practical dealings with things” may be “kept separate” from scholarly epistemology, while insisting that the difference still matters for interpretation (Olsen 2006: 97).
The concession is revealing. Treated as a binary between two attitudes, practical and theoretical, Heidegger’s distinction can be acknowledged and then shelved: things are ready-to-hand for the people we study and present-at-hand for us. Treated as one instance of a graded structure of recursive levels, it cannot be shelved, because it governs every item of evidence the field possesses.
LVT distinguishes five recursivity levels, and at each a material arrangement appears differently. At L1, in continuous and muted coordination, a thing does not appear as a separate thing at all. The floor that bears weight, the cup lifted while talking, the mattress during sleep, and the boiler running in the garage while the house stays warm are coordinated with rather than attended to. They are present as the smoothness of the activity, which is why their failure is so disruptive. Far from a deficit of perception, this is the normal and most extensive mode in which living beings coordinate with made things, and it is the mode in which most of the life of things is spent. At L2, coordination meets felt misalignment: the knife is blunt, the door sticks, the bed is cold, the jacket is too warm. Here the thing emerges as resistance, conspicuous before it is named. Bill Brown’s thing theory begins exactly here: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us” (Brown 2001: 4). At L3, the misalignment is articulated, and the thing becomes an object of questions and answers. It acquires a name, properties, and a place in explanation: this is a thermostat, it controls the temperature, it must not be touched. At L4, articulations are stabilized in categories and institutions: the domestic appliance, the safety regulation, the commodity, the museum specimen with its label, the archaeological find with its context number, and “material culture” itself. At L5, those stabilizations are themselves repositioned and theorized, as objecthood, agency, actants, or autonomous objects.
The boiler in Tilley’s diary passes through all of these in a single morning and a single text. For the household it is, most of the time, warmth, an L1 condition that no one attends to. For Benjamin it is briefly an explorable surface with a dial. For the adult who stops him it becomes, in an instant, an L2 hazard. In the diary it is articulated at L3 as “the thermostat on the boiler”. In the interpretation that follows, it becomes, at L4 and L5, one of the things that “objectify values”. The levels are stacked within Tilley’s own text, and the interpretation speaks from the top of the stack about activity conducted at its bottom.
This is the conceptual heart of the problem. The “object” with which material culture studies begins is the thing as it appears at L3 and above: bounded, named, classified, and set before an observer. The field’s methods ensure it. Excavation lifts things out of the ground and out of use and gives them numbers. Collecting moves them into cabinets. Interviews ask people to articulate what they ordinarily do not. Approached intellectually, as Olsen observes, “we encounter things as (pre)labelled, as enveloped by layers of linguistic meaning”, and his examples are catalogue labels and figure captions (Olsen 2006: 94). Hicks and Beaudry’s insistence that “the things that we study are the effects of our practice” (2010: 21) registers part of this, and LVT can specify it: scholarly practice raises things to recursivity levels at which they rarely appear for the living beings who coordinate with them. The field then treats this higher-level appearance as the mode of being of things as such, and sets out to reconnect it to an L1 life in which things never appeared like that. The reconnection fails conceptually rather than empirically, because a higher-level appearance is being asked to stand in for a lower-level coordination. No relational vocabulary can close the gap, since the gap lies between levels rather than between entities.
Two further consequences follow. First, movement between levels is constant and runs in both directions. A repaired boiler sinks back into L1. A new appliance passes through L2 and L3 while its use is learned and then disappears into habit. A thing that falls out of coordination altogether becomes waste, and may later be re-found. An adequate study of things must follow their trajectories across levels rather than fixing them at the level at which they reached the archive. Second, the level at which a thing is encountered governs what can be inferred from it. A teacup in a probate inventory, a toothbrush in a privy, and a bunk in a detention barracks are all evidence encountered at L3 or L4 about coordination conducted largely at L1 and L2. Material culture studies cannot succeed conceptually without an account of these levels, because without one it cannot tell which mode of appearance its evidence records, and therefore cannot tell what that evidence is evidence of.
IV. How Use Became Functionalism
The severance also explains why use dropped out of the field’s theoretical vocabulary. The Handbook editors offer a short history. After the fieldwork revolution of the 1920s, things were “conceived as dead inert matter” and “primarily conceived as having a utilitarian significance fulfilling the basic needs of human adaptation to different environments as tools, a technological substrate of life, or alternatively, as passive markers of social status and ethnic difference” (Tilley et al. 2006: 2). The recovery came with structuralism: “From a functionalist perspective things were only good to use, props for the social. Now they could become reconceptualized as ‘good to think’ in Lévi-Strauss’s felicitous phrase” (2006: 2).
This founding narrative bundles two things together and rejects them as one: the theoretical claim that things fulfil basic needs, and the fact that people use things to keep living. Functionalist anthropology had reduced use to need satisfaction, and the reduction was poor theory. Rejecting it was right, and rejecting the phenomenon along with it was a mistake whose effects outlasted the rejection. The choice of “good to think” over “good to use” was also a choice of level. Use is coordinated mostly at L1 and L2; thinking with things is an L3 and L4 activity. The field’s recovery of things was a recovery of things as they appear higher up.
The anxiety about use is visible across the three volumes. Kacy Hollenback and Michael Brian Schiffer defend behavioural archaeology’s concept of performance characteristics, “the specific behavioural capabilities of objects that come into play in particular interactions and activities” (Hollenback and Schiffer 2010: 319), against the charge that “behavioural archaeologists adopt overly utilitarian interpretations of technology” (2010: 320), and they do so by showing that the concept also covers “symbolic and even aesthetic performance” (2010: 320). Hicks and Beaudry describe researchers being pressed beyond meaning “and simultaneously beyond concerns with simply the use by people of objects in social relations” (2010: 19). The field did not forget use: it developed sophisticated accounts of what things afford, enable, constrain, and accomplish. What it did not develop was an account of the vital stakes of these accomplishments, of how material involvement enters the continuous maintenance, depletion, restoration, and transformation of living capacities. Such an account need not revive functionalism. Living coordination is no apparatus for satisfying needs, and it is not directed towards stability or survival as a goal. Using a toothbrush, rather than fulfilling a need for oral hygiene, is a habituated multisensorial embodiment coordinated with an implement, water, a routine learned from others, a symbolic knowledge of decay, and the arrangements of a bathroom, and that coordination has consequences for how living can continue.
V. A Domain That Theorizes Itself
Having begun with the object, the field has had to define itself by an object without edges. The Handbook editors list ten main conceptualizations of things, report an initial outline of “around forty chapter topics” to which reviewers added “some twenty more”, and describe “an enormous field of potential studies which has no real limit or boundary” (Tilley et al. 2006: 4). The series preface to A Cultural History of Objects gives every volume the same internal order, with chapters “tracing developments in technology, economic objects, everyday objects, art objects, architecture, and bodily objects” (Hicks and Whyte 2021: xii), and Christopher Witmore notes that he begins his chapter as he does “because the series editors asked me to fit this discussion into these parameters” (Witmore 2021: 39). These parameters divide scholarly labour reasonably and correspond to nothing in the processes of living. Is a toothbrush an everyday or a bodily object? Is a bed architecture, furnishing, or part of the coordination of sleep? Someone brushing their teeth engages with no everyday object to which bodily, technological, and economic aspects are later added, because the activity is coordinated across all of these at once.
“Material culture” is an L4 classification, fixed by disciplines, museums, curricula, journals, and editorial schemes. So, too, are the categories through which the field has explained its object: meaning, identity, agency, objecthood. Each is a recursive stabilization drawn from moments in which living became articulated and institutionalized, and each is then offered back as an explanation of the living from which it was drawn. An L4 classification thus became the basis for increasingly elaborate L4 and L5 debates about objects, meanings, agency, and autonomy, while the coordinations from which the classification emerged continued largely at L1 and L2. The debates could become highly sophisticated without achieving a correspondingly better account of what things are doing in people’s lives. A theory can grow ever more elaborate at its own level of recursivity without expanding its grasp of the phenomenon it set out to explain. Hicks comes close to this diagnosis. Material culture studies, he writes, “emerged from particular efforts to solve a series of quite specific disciplinary problems in anthropology and archaeology. It came to be an effect of those problems” (Hicks 2010: 96–7). By understanding itself as theory rather than effect, it “has simply made the transition, as Edwin Ardener (1985) explained all modernist theories must do, from ‘life’ to ‘genre’” (2010: 97). The scholarship became recursively organized around the consequences of its own initial cut.
VI. Objectification and the Stake of Identity
The most influential reconnection in British material culture studies has been objectification, which Tilley calls “in a profound sense, at the heart of all studies of material culture” (Tilley 2006: 60). His summary of Daniel Miller’s theory is precise: “Through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things people make themselves in the process.” Without things, “we could neither be ourselves nor know ourselves”, and things “are the very medium through which we make and know ourselves” (2006: 61).
Objectification was a real advance over the idea that things passively reflect prior ideas. Its limitation lies in what it nominates as the outcome of reconnection: selves, identities, social relations, and self-knowledge. Being and knowing oneself are L3 and L4 achievements, and a theory that makes them the stake of things will read L1 and L2 coordination as their preparation. Eating, sleeping, keeping warm, and recovering are interpreted primarily through their contributions to personhood and social formation rather than investigated in their own metabolic specificity. The twins’ Sunday morning shows the result.
Miller’s own work shows why this criticism must be framed carefully. His empirical writing on shopping, domestic life, and provisioning has long attended to everyday practical life and to care for others, and it cannot be reduced to identity performance (Miller 1998; 2008). In the 2006 Handbook he observes that “we live in a time when most human suffering is still the direct result of the lack of goods”, in places where people “desperately need more consumption, more pharmaceuticals, more housing, more transport” (Miller 2006: 343). The difficulty is a mismatch between the range of phenomena that Miller recognizes empirically and the conceptual priorities of objectification theory. Good ethnographers regularly encounter what LVT names, even where their framework leaves it undifferentiated. Wilkie and Chenoweth, surveying their volume, list Miller’s remark on “vastly improved healthcare” among the “exceptions” to its predominantly critical tone (Wilkie and Chenoweth 2021: 33–4).
The broader pattern follows. Once identity has become the primary stake of things, the people who appear in material culture studies spend a remarkable proportion of their lives communicating who they are. They eat to perform class, dress to perform gender, and furnish homes to express identity. Most people, most of the time, are making breakfast, getting dressed, finding somewhere to sit, managing tiredness, and trying to continue what they were doing, largely at L1. A framework that registers such activity mainly when it becomes a statement about the self will overrepresent the moments of living that are already articulated.
VII. Toothbrushes, Teacups, and the Making of Markers
Stacey Camp’s chapter on everyday objects in A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age is a fine piece of historical archaeology, and it shows the reconnecting logic at work in a careful scholar. It opens with James Deetz’s remark that “simple people doing simple things” were not thought worthy of noting (Camp 2021: 107).
The toothbrush section begins with Booker T. Washington’s “gospel of the toothbrush” and with the observation that, on the auction block, enslaved people were subjected to invasive inspections, “with healthy teeth being a factor influencing their value as a commodity to be sold and traded” (Camp 2021: 113). The vital stakes of the mouth are right there. The analysis moves elsewhere. The toothbrush’s rise “has been read as an extension of race, class, and gender politics that found expression in material culture” (2021: 113), and the object “conveyed an air of wealth and prestige” (2021: 114). Howson found toothbrushes so strongly associated with wealthier New York households that “oral hygiene may be a more sensitive marker” of class standing than other artefacts (2021: 115). The toothbrush, lifted from the privy to the L4 category of class marker, is reconnected to people through what it indicates about them. What it did for their mouths remains background.
Camp does not leave it there. Drawing on Horton and Baker’s work on “sanitary citizenship”, she shows that the children of Mexican farmworkers in California suffer poor oral health because their parents’ low wages deny them dental care, and that officials then treat this as a moral failing (Camp 2021: 115–16). In early twentieth-century Hawai’i, native Hawaiian schoolchildren were required to undergo “daily ‘toothbrush drills’” (2021: 116). These critiques depend on keeping apart the bodily consequences of dental disease, which are real, and the coercive programmes that seize on them. If oral hygiene is principally a marker, hygiene programmes become ideology all the way down. If the bodily stakes are real, the critique can be directed at who is denied the means of oral health and who is blamed for the result. The second critique is stronger, and it requires a concept of what toothbrushing accomplishes for living.
The teacup section has the same structure. Tea drinking is read, following Diana diZerega Wall, as a ritual that reified the “separation of the sexes” (Camp 2021: 117), and, following Mary Beaudry, as an instrument of “prestige negotiation” (2021: 118). Then, in Cabak and Loring’s study of Labrador Inuit ceramics, the analysis touches ground. Inuit assemblages were overwhelmingly hollowwares because people ate “liquid or oil-based foods such as stews”, and tea “complemented their frigid environment, combated the cold temperatures, and offered ‘structured social interaction’” (2021: 120). For once a vessel is explained by what it made possible for continued living in a particular place, and the chapter moves on.
The most revealing sentence concerns method. Comparing probate inventories with excavated assemblages from eighteenth-century Delaware, John Bedell found that teacups and other ceramics were commonplace in the ground but often absent from the inventories: “as soon as objects became quotidian, probate inventory-takers neglected to mention their presence in a household” (Camp 2021: 118). Things that had sunk into everyday coordination stopped appearing as items worth listing, even to clerks whose task was to list. The archive records things at the level at which they become articulable, and the field inherits its selection.
VIII. Agency, Autonomy, and Recursive Counterparts
The material turn set out to correct the reduction of things to meanings. Olsen complained that “much recent work in material culture studies” preferred “contemplating the readerly veil that envelops” things to “the repugnant task of digging into the substance of things” (Olsen 2006: 97). Hicks and Beaudry rejected “purely culturalist studies of material culture, which served simply to reduce things to meanings, or else to social relations” (2010: 2). Witmore, after Graham Harman, defines objects as “autonomous entities that cannot be broken down into their parts or reduced to their effects” (Witmore 2021: 38). Much of the material turn contests the subject-object division while retaining the object as its point of departure, and so offers a new reconnection rather than a new start.
Object-oriented ontology makes the point vividly, because it grew directly out of Heidegger’s tool analysis. Harman read the withdrawal of the hammer as a property of objects as such, which on his account withdraw from all relations (Harman 2002). What Heidegger described as a feature of smooth coordination, the receding of equipment into use, becomes a metaphysical attribute of things in isolation. The level structure is flattened into the object, and the object is declared autonomous. LVT reads the same phenomenon the other way round: withdrawal belongs to L1 coordination, and what withdraws is the thing’s separate appearance rather than the thing from its relations.
Witmore’s list shows the cost. Stripped of Cartesian baggage, “microbes, the Tasmanian tiger, hypoxic zones in the ocean, plastic bottles, or gigantic container ships” are “all equally objects” (Witmore 2021: 38). The charge of anthropocentrism that motivates this flattening is serious, and LVT has no wish to restore a crude contrast between active subjects and passive objects. It does need a more precise distinction than the flattening allows. A plastic bottle is a nonrecursive counterpart, and nonrecursive does not mean inert, stable, or predictable. A bottle deforms under pressure, becomes brittle in sunlight, and fragments, and each change depends on its previous material state. What it lacks is any process in which its own ongoing state is taken up in sustaining its own continuation: its degradation happens to it, and no regulation of its own condition enters the causal loop. A microbe is a living selfrecursive counterpart, altering in relation to its own ongoing state as it takes up nutrients, repairs damage, and divides, and whether a given encounter involves interrecursive coordination is a further question. The tiger likewise sustains its living selfrecursively, and in hunting, mating, or rearing young it may enter interrecursive encounters in which each party responds to the other’s responses. LVT therefore differentiates kinds of efficacy rather than denying efficacy to the bottle. Plastic in the ocean matters because a nonrecursive arrangement, highly efficacious in its own right, enters the coordination of living beings.
Wilkie and Chenoweth themselves hesitate over agency when they ask whether “we are justified in outsourcing the moral failing of unexploded bombs to the bombs themselves, rather than holding the makers and users accountable” (Wilkie and Chenoweth 2021: 5). The bomb’s consequences arise from the encounter between a durable nonrecursive deposit and lives coordinated with ground that people reasonably take to be safe, and describing them this way keeps makers and users in view. Hicks proposes a subtler alternative. Noting that material culture studies conventionally focuses “only on those moments when things ... become important for humans: involved in social relationships, or charged with meaning”, he turns to “the humility of change”, the “silting-up of a ditch” (Hicks 2010: 82). The diagnosis is exactly right, and the remedy moves away from the moment of meaning in a direction that still bypasses living. Between the moment a pot is charged with meaning and the moment its sherds silt into a ditch lie thousands of meals cooked in it, liquids carried, mouths fed, and evenings in which the pot never appeared as a thing at all. That L1 middle ground is where most of the life of things takes place.
IX. Affordance, Skill, and Engagement
The strongest objection to this argument comes from approaches that already begin with practical activity. James Gibson defined affordances as what the environment “offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 1979: 127). Tim Ingold has argued that skilled practice and the movement of materials precede any division between the cultural and the material, and has urged attention to materials rather than an abstract materiality (Ingold 2000; 2007). Lambros Malafouris treats things as constitutive participants in cognition (Malafouris 2013), and his study of Bronze Age vessels with Carl Knappett and Peter Tomkins attends to “what these objects do, rather than what they mean”, as “action possibilities” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010: 18). These approaches do not sever things from activity in the way the mainstream does, and Ingold’s begins with life. They are the proper test for LVT.
Each answers a particular question well. Affordance theory explains what an arrangement permits a living being to do, skill theory how a practitioner becomes competent, and material engagement theory how people and things jointly constitute cognition and action. Gibson’s “for good or ill” points towards vital stakes, but the concept specifies what an environment offers relative to an animal’s capacities rather than what taking up those offers does to the capacities over time. LVT adds four differentiations. The five mediations distinguish whether a decisive change lay in the body, in others, in found conditions, in made arrangements, or in symbols, where Ingold’s dwelling perspective gathers all of these into one continuous field. The recursivity levels show that skill is overwhelmingly an L1 phenomenon, and supply what practice theories lack: an account of how and when things rise to L2, L3, and L4, which is where most evidence comes from. The counterpart types distinguish affording stones from responsive companions. The metabolic question asks what activity does over time to the capacities of those engaged in it. These approaches are allies more than rivals, and what they lack is a common account of living coordination, across levels, as the phenomenon to be explained.
X. Metabolic Remediation
LVT calls one decisive dimension of that phenomenon metabolic remediation: the continuous processes through which living capacities are sustained, replenished, redistributed, and transformed, and through which they are also exhausted or undermined. It names a dimension of every living coordination rather than a special class of activities. Watching a film, working, playing music, arguing, eating, and sleeping can all be investigated in terms of how living capacities are maintained, depleted, or transformed, without any of them being reduced to recuperation and without metabolic remediation explaining what is specific to them. Remediation is continuously at stake and never guaranteed. Activities exhaust, sleep may fail to restore, care can deplete those who give it, and technologies can shift labour rather than reduce it. Time enters the definition, because immediate depletion is not always failure: hard work, vigorous exercise, and demanding artistic experience can transform capacities over months and years. The metabolic problem is universal, while the outcomes of attempts to resolve it vary and frequently conflict.
The term differs from the “remediation” of Paul Graves-Brown’s chapter on economic objects, which follows McLuhan, Bolter, and Grusin: “following McLuhan, I treat all objects as media” (Graves-Brown 2021: 86). In the media sense one object remediates another; in the metabolic sense material arrangements remediate living capacities. Graves-Brown’s discussion of the Bendix Home Laundry of 1937 shows how close the field comes to the metabolic question. He doubts that the washing machine was “a thrilling announcement to every woman”, noting that the saving of labour “may have been more in the imagination of advertisers than in actuality” (2021: 90–1), and that appliances “raise the expectation of the level of domestic hygiene” (2021: 92). The metabolic questions lie one step further. Did the machine reduce the bodily strain of wringing, lifting, and scrubbing? Did it open intervals of rest, or fill them? How did it redistribute exhaustion within and between households? The washing machine also shows why metabolic remediation is not simply care. A machine can contribute to remediation without anyone acting as a caregiver and without the activity being recognized as care, and care is itself one organization of living coordination whose consequences are open to metabolic analysis.
Paul Mullins’s chapter on architecture shows the gap between building and living. When London’s Old Nichol was razed in the 1890s for the Boundary Estate, the new buildings offered “water closets, garbage chutes, improved ventilation, ground-floor shops, and a central laundry with twelve shared baths”, “marked improvements on the former tenements”. Yet “many of the poorest working-class residents displaced by the demolition of the previous tenements could not afford the rents in the new buildings” (Mullins 2021: 159). The architecture improved while, for some of those it was meant to serve, the possibilities of continued living deteriorated.
Elsewhere in the Oxford Handbook, nobody finds it reductive to relate tools to metabolic stakes. Tatyana Humle reports that “when fruits are scarce, the wild chimpanzees of Bossou (Guinea) effectively increase their tool use activities, in order to gain access to otherwise inaccessible food resources” (Humle 2010: 411). For chimpanzees the vital stakes of material forming are obvious; for humans they are often the first thing bracketed. Material forming arose, and continues, within the metabolic stakes of living beings, and whatever humans have added through multisymbolization and the durability of their deposits has been added to those stakes and never in their place.
XI. Ontologically Grounded Theory and the Problem of Silence
Anthropology works as a difference machine, drawn to what is distinctive, contested, unequal, or strange, which are the features of life most likely to have reached L3 and L4. When coordination works, people often have little reason to discuss it; when it fails, it becomes felt, articulated, and classified. Articulated problems are therefore likely to be overrepresented in the evidence, although routine practices and positive events also generate discourse.
Ontologically Grounded Theory (OGT) begins with an ontologically specified phenomenon, such as sleep or metabolic remediation, rather than with the categories that texts, interviews, and museum classifications supply, and asks what the evidence can reveal about it. In practice this changes research design. A household assemblage would be studied in relation to the sequences of cooking, washing, eating, sleeping, cleaning, and repairing through which the household continued. The capacities of appliances would be compared with records of domestic labour, housing plans, injury, working schedules, and medical complaints. Researchers would ask what became difficult when particular arrangements failed, since breakdown is where a thing rises to L2 and its contribution becomes legible. Every piece of evidence would be assigned the recursivity level at which it records its thing, and the five mediations would serve as a check against premature closure: for any material change, what happened to bodies, to the people and animals coordinated with them, to ambient conditions, to the arrangements themselves, and to the symbolic order?
OGT must also be evidentially disciplined. A bed does not prove that its occupants slept well, and a washing machine does not establish that domestic work became less exhausting. Objects establish possibilities and constraints, and their consequences require further evidence. Silence needs the same discipline. A practice may be unrecorded because it was habituated at L1, but also because those concerned lacked access to the archive, because their actions were concealed, or because the evidence was destroyed. Silence does not by itself establish L1 coordination, and OGT must make the competing explanations explicit. Bedell’s teacups are a plausible case of habituation, since the clerks recorded other household goods in detail, but the inference has to be argued.
The same precision applies to the mediations themselves. Multiversal dwelling concerns conditions of living that are not formed as arrangements, such as terrain, climate, gravity, light, and ecological rhythm, even where human activity has altered them. Houses, roads, and cities belong to multimateriality. The two are distinguishable without being separable. A house is a durable multimaterial configuration that mediates its inhabitants’ coordination with ambient conditions, buffering cold, rain, and darkness only for as long as it is maintained, heated, and afforded, and once occupied it sinks into L1 as the taken-for-granted surroundings of habitual living.
XII. Inequality and the Tone of Harm
None of this diminishes class, gender, race, or power, and starting from living makes their importance more concrete. Class structures access to food, housing, medical care, rest, heating, and domestic help, and decides who can stop working when exhausted. Gender organizes caregiving and domestic labour, the interruption of rest, and the entitlement to recover. These arrangements need not involve continuous performance. A household can reproduce gendered inequality through the habitual, L1 distribution of who wakes for the child and who does the washing, without anyone communicating a gender identity, and the absence of reflection may be what keeps the arrangement stable. The finding about tea and the separation of the sexes is better understood first as a finding about how the material reorganization of work and home redistributed who prepared, served, cleaned up, and rested.
Wilkie and Chenoweth note that “the unplanned emphasis in this volume has been on the negative” and that “overwhelmingly, these scholars seem to have voted that modern objects are not good” (Wilkie and Chenoweth 2021: 34). Three claims need to be kept apart here. Material culture research frequently makes objects visible when they are involved in inequality, conflict, or controversy, which is to say when they have risen to L3 and L4. This can leave arrangements that work at L1 analytically underdeveloped. And an approach that starts from living can investigate both the sustaining and the destructive consequences of things. The third claim matters most, because a study of metabolic remediation need not be more celebratory and might be harsher. Domestic appliances may have let some people recover while others worked more intensively. Modern infrastructures support vast populations while generating conditions that undermine future living. The strength of LVT lies in a differentiated account of the often contradictory consequences of things for living.
XIII. Conclusion: The Bunks at Angel Island
The closing pages of Wilkie and Chenoweth’s introduction show where the field’s starting point leaves living. To avoid reducing humanity to objects, the editors insist that “within even the worst events and historical circumstances of the twentieth century, there is life”, and they name “the forming of families, the creation of art, the building of community and social progress”. At the Angel Island Immigration Station, Chinese men detained for years, “living in stacked bunks”, “carved poems and pictures of windows into the walls by their beds” (Wilkie and Chenoweth 2021: 34). Life enters the volume at its close as an edifying exception, in the forms most legible to a tradition that reconnects things through meaning.
The poems are L3 articulations, cut into the walls. The bunks were coordinated, night after night, largely at L1, which is why the scholarship sees the one and passes over the other. Yet the bunks are where the detained men slept, or tried to, for months and years. Stacked bunks in a crowded barracks permit sleep and, through crowding, noise, surveillance, and the absence of any control over one’s hours, can make restful sleep difficult. What those nights were like is a question for the testimonies and for the poems themselves, read as evidence about living as well as expressions of meaning. A history that began with living would start with the bunks, and it would neither celebrate them nor reduce them to instruments of domination. It would ask what this arrangement made possible and what it wore down, for whom, and over what span of time.
The three volumes show one pattern from three angles. In 2006, things are the medium through which we “make and know ourselves”, and two toddlers falling, howling, and being kept from a boiler are read as learning values. In 2010, the field’s critics see clearly that things enter scholarship only when charged with meaning, and look instead to the silting of ditches and the researcher’s own practice. In 2021, toothbrushes become markers of class, teacups instruments of prestige, and washing machines media, while life appears at the end as poetry carved beside the bunks in which detained men tried to sleep. In each case things are first severed from living and then reconnected through whatever vocabulary the moment supplies, and in each case the reconnection is conducted at a higher recursivity level than the coordination it describes.
Material culture studies will not repair this with a better vocabulary of relation. It needs a different first step. Located as multimateriality, one of five co-constitutive mediations of living, things never have to be reconnected, because they were never severed. Understood across recursivity levels, they no longer have to be taken in the form in which they reach the museum, the archive, and the theorist, since that form is one late mode of their appearance among several. The ontological subject of investigation changes, from objects and their relations to the continuously changing living coordination within which things, their meanings, their effects, and their histories become consequential, a coordination whose most vital accomplishments go unremarked because, at L1, the things that make them possible do not appear as things at all.
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