material culture

noun

Sociology.

1. the aggregate of physical objects or artifacts used by a society.

Word History and Origins

Origin of material culture¹

First recorded in 1925–30

Example Sentences

Vaill, a historian and former executive editor at Viking Penguin, has had a lifelong interest in stuff—material culture—that she dates back to her first glimpse as a child of a facsimile of a letter, complete with bloodstains, that the French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre was writing when he was shot in the jaw.

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The burials had scanty grave goods—a bead and a dog paw—so it’s hard to connect them to any particular material culture.

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Music becomes sacred partly through the material culture it inspires.

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That, quite by accident, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, in the process creating a totem of midcentury material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.

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“Even in that early moment, Americans kind of conflated consumerism with patriotic memory,” said Bruggeman, whose books include “Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument.”

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