Abstract

Studies of material culture have privileged conceptual abstraction rather than actual engagement in the understanding of the world of materials. Rather than looking at the properties of materials the emphasis has been on the essential attributes of objects as if they were fixed entities contained in themselves. The widely extended notion of materiality is the best example of this. Ingold (2007) has recently challenged this notion, inviting us to look at the everyday engagement with materials, not asking for their essence but as they occur in life. This phenomenological call to actually go back to the things in themselves, pushes us not to think of static and essential attributes but to conceive the properties of materials as processual and relational. It is in other words an invitation to follow and tell the story of materials. But how do we come to know those stories in the first place? There are still things that need to be explored from a non-essentialist approach about how we come to trace these stories. In other words, how do we come to follow their movements and trajectories? This paper draws on recent ethnographic research that looks at how archaeologists follow their materials and the conditions for this process to occur. In particular it pays attention to three neglected elements, namely, interactive movement, emotion and attention.