Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches (Intersections in Communications and Culture)

Focusing on the technoculture of everyday life, this book attempts to zero in on the simplicity and the habitual character of the interaction between humans and material objects, which is often assumed or taken for granted. Because objects are always meaningful in the pragmatic use to which they are directed, the material world of everyday life can be seen as a technoculture of its own one made of behaviors as simple, and yet as significant, as using a lawnmower, or decorating ones body. In discussing the unique methodological components of the ethnography of the technoculture of everyday life, this book begins a dialogue on how we can examine from the participants perspective the interconnections between social agents, their technological/material practices, their material objects or technics, and their social and material environment.