Deadline: August 15, 2021
“The political struggle is also a cultural struggle, a struggle for the reappropriation and
transformation of symbols of the dominant” wrote Christine Bard in her work Une histoire
politique du pantalon revisiting the methodology of history of fashion and highlighting the
symbolic function of clothes (Bard 2010). Since the 1980s, the material culture studies have developed into a solid forum of interdisciplinary research in which anthropologists,
archeologists, geographers, sociologists, literary scholars, and more recently historians, play a central role. Scholars have theorized the role of things in power relations (Bourdieu 1979), agency of material things (Gell 1998), and the ability of objects to construct, maintain, reinforce and transform social identities (Miller and Tilley 1996). Objects are important notably because we do not “see” them, the less we notice them, the more important they are in the way they determine our expectations by setting the scene and defining and ensuring normative behavior (Miller 2005 5). Thus, objects that constitute the material culture have the capacity to determine our behavior and identity by remaining at the same time peripheral to our vision.
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