Constructing Meaningful Ecologies of Material Culture

Written by Sharanya DG 

Enculturation: Meaning-making, Materialism, Dissemination, and Reception

“Culture,” notes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). Its etymological root in cultivation—the tending and propagation of life—signals a resistance to being contained. Classroom pedagogy encompasses various elements into it—mythology, rituals, religion, tradition; movies, songs, literature; fashion, food, art—classifying it as ‘a whole way of life.’ Yet, culture surpasses being merely a way of life; it represents a way of understanding life and saturating existence with meaning. In the 19th Century, Matthew Arnold viewed culture as a framework supporting liberal humanist ideology, which aimed to prescribe a universal definition of excellence. The emergence of Cultural Studies as a discipline in the 1960s England advocated for a pluralized understanding under the purview of cultural discourse and prioritized the need to study ‘cultures’ in the plural.

The CFP of LLIDS’s Volume 8 invites interdisciplinary contributions on cultural studies, focusing on the shaping and reshaping of social relations, spaces, practices, identities, and politics. This CFP focuses on how meanings within these plural ‘cultures’ are generated, materialised, disseminated, received, and negotiated. The rhetoric surrounding cultural studies as a self-reflexive domain in dialogue with itself, includes: the production of cultural meaning, the tangible materiality of cultural elements, the forms of their dissemination in society, and eventually their reception. These are not sequential components of cultural studies but are integral to their analytic architecture. Being not rooted in a particular methodology, Cultural studies draw from a range of theoretical frameworks, making its enterprise interdisciplinary. Building upon the eclectic moorings of the field, each part of the CFP seeks to generate meaningful insight into the formation of culture, interrelations of cultural practices, and historical forces. Submissions to this Volume are encouraged to explore the rich complexity of culture in its various dimensions.

PART II: Constructing Meaningful Ecologies of Material Culture

The second part of this four-part CFP explores material culture and the world of objects. While this Volume understands culture as an exercise in meaning-making, this section of the CFP questions what creates this meaning. Are objects passive recipients or are they active agents in shaping the world of meaning? The strands of discourse within material culture blur the boundaries of human/non-human, living/non-living, subject/object in order to examine the place, and even the very ontology, of objects and materiality in trying to answer these questions.

While scholarship has considered the role of objects in culture as symbols and icons, and the role of culture in the interplay of meanings around objects, Material Culture Studies centres objects and considers them co-creators in the meaning-making process. Objects can have multi-dimensional social lives and cultural biographies, and perhaps even their own agency. This CFP calls for investigations into the embodiment of meaning within our physical environs, technologies, and artefacts, drawing on their interrelations with history, power, and change.  Objects, things, stuff—whether human-made or not—are integral to how cultural communities experience and make sense of their own existence. The materiality of our geographical landscape constructs both our physical and semiotic worlds, probing interconnections between our subjectivities, identities, and culture. Images, objects, and bodies foreground relations, knowledge, and emotions within, say, religious practices. Knowledge and emotions around religious artefacts make occasions sacred or profane.

Objects are not physically or symbolically static, and keep shaping and reshaping as per their placement and circumstances in a co-constitutive relationship. The circulation of objects is also the circulation and navigation of values and meanings across time and space. For instance, colonial history has been a history of struggle over objects—precious metals, spices, and textiles—determining taste and aesthetics. Distanced from their context, these objects take on lives and meanings of their own, while still calling attention to the routes of power they travelled. In a postcolonial (and neocolonial) landscape, this movement of objects has accelerated, breeding global homogeneity while emphasising local diversity. Objects are active agents in these encounters, altering the very trajectories of histories and affecting the circumstances and values they apprehend. Arjun Appadurai points to this when he talks about how it is not just human meanings that animate things but things in movement that animate human meanings.

Material culture takes seriously the heft of this world of objects, paying attention to our bodily engagement with objects, like food and cooking, textiles and sewing, manual technologies and craftsmanship. What an object is made of, how it looks, and how it feels, all have consequences for the cultural ecology in which these objects operate. Matter matters for signification, and also for what it does to our internal processes of thinking and feeling. They determine human relations and actions, as these material forms are variously produced, used, discarded, or remembered. Considered from the epistemological and representational dimensions, material culture tells us that the medium is the message. This materiality can have different forms: physical, digital, textual, pictorial, or performative (to name some). For instance, the same narrative read across different formats—newspapers, physical books, e-readers, or digital screens—can evoke different understandings or feelings, depending on the materiality of its medium.

This CFP probes the materiality of the world objects inhabit and co-produce. What does a consideration of objects and materiality do to our understanding of the world and our place in it? This CFP reconsiders the relevance of seeing ourselves as separate from this world of things. What lines do we draw between ourselves and the world, between the atoms of our body and the atoms of our environment? As Daniel Miller insists, “We too are stuff.”

  • Agency of objects
  • Object-Oriented Ontology, Thing theory
  • New Materialism
  • Material politics
  • Ethnographic study of objects
  • Intangible objects and materiality
  • Anthropology and Archaeology
  • Design and architecture
  • Material culture and Visual culture
  • Role of objects in historiography
  • Material objects and memory
  • Museums and curation
  • Materiality of technology
  • Politics of food and foodways
  • Textile history and fast fashion
  • Consumption practices and commodity culture
  • Mass Production and meaning-making
  • Waste studies

Submission Process:

Submission Criteria Checklist:

    • Only complete papers along with a 150 words abstract, list of keywords, and Works Cited will be considered for publication.
    • Word limit for submissions (excluding Title, Abstract, Keywords, Footnotes, and Works Cited list): 3,500–10,000 words
    • The papers need to be formatted as per MLA guidelines.
    • LLIDS has Zero plagiarism and AI policies. The Similarity Index of the submissions (Quote percentage) needs to be under 20%, unless absolutely required by the research. The similarity index is a calculation of the percentage of quotes from the word count (excluding title, abstract, keywords, footnote, works cited list)

Submission deadline: 30th November, 2026

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