An ongoing outcome, a surrounding world:

materiality, agency and history*

Manuel A. Arroyo-Kalin

Introduction
The denial of peoples dignity and the social importance of controlling the means to
un-dignify have not historically existed independently of each other. They are, and have
been, mutually constitutive, much like social classes are reciprocally defined by access to
commodities in industrial societies. After all, the social groupings that are reproduced as
classes sort peoples through a hierarchical wedlock which is an outcome of the network of
social positions that produce, use, exchange and consume commodities. Yet, at the same
time, it is the very asymmetrical distribution of the latter that constitute through time the
social positions of peoples: when these positions are expressed as collectives, we talk of
social classes. In this essay, I will suggest that the insights of this classic formulation can help
us understand materiality as an ongoing historical outcome of agent-based relations that goes
well beyond the constitution of commodities.
Renfrew (2004, see also 1996; 1998; 2001) proposes that the increased productivity
and accumulation of discrete material objects that resulted from sedentism had the effect of
channelling human livelihood into a permanent engagement with materiality. This can be
contested not only on archaeological grounds (Gamble, this volume, see also Wobst 2000)
but also on the grounds that it understands materiality as a set of discrete material objects. In
this sense, one is reminded of the work of Alfred Gell (1998) and others (e.g. Appadurai
1986b; Miller 1987; Thomas 1991; Kingery 1996; Myers 2001) and the very important
insights their contribution make to our understanding of the world of things. However, if
materiality is understood to comprise all forms of matter that agents relate to - a continuum
that unites discrete goods (socially-contextualised objects, technically-modified or not),
substances (clay, water, earth, food, drink see also Boivin, this volume), animate entities
(plants, animals), built structures, places, enclosures, spaces, and, perhaps ultimately,
environs and/or landscapes, it becomes necessary to consider the issue of engagement in
broader terms.
In this contribution I will go on to explore what materiality can be said to be beyond
definitions such as the adjectival quality of matter or corporeity. These might very well
distil conceptually the shared sensorial stimuli through which individual bodies establish that
something is material, but also reproduce a problematic commitment to a form/substance
dichotomy that cannot be held to be universal1. Instead, I will adopt a position on materiality
based on the standpoint that human agency is social and historical (see also Dobres & Robb
2000; Barrett 2000; Clark 2000), i.e. that it is best understood as the dispositions to act in the
world that are enacted by time-transgressive subjectivities embodied in social collectives.
Whilst these social collectives are constituted by the birth, life and death of self-conscious
individuals, the constitution of individual social relations, indeed of the social relations of any
individual, always hinge on the ongoing outcome of prior, supra-individual relations. Such
that agency is, simply put, never an individual affair: both the past and the present of agents
are enmeshed with that of other agents (Gosden 1994; Moore 2000; Lawson 2003).
With this background, I will go on to suggest that materiality is best understood as an
ongoing outcome of the material objectification of agents relations. In putting the matter in
such terms I do not seek to restrict the scope of materiality to the material mediations of
*

To appear in Rethinking Materiality, DeMarrais, Renfrew and Gosden (eds.), in press. This is a near to final version draft.
Please do not cite without the authors permission.

McBurney Geoarchaeology Lab, Department of Archaeology, Downing St, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, England

relations between agents. Acknowledging that agents establish relations to a world suffused
with signification, a part of which is comprised by sentient beings that are understood to be
autonomous from, rather than coterminous with, materiality, in this essay I am concerned
with materially-mediated relations both among agents and between agents and materiality.
Or, more specifically, with the manner in which their history constitutes materiality.

History, matter and materiality

The pathways of materiality, I argue, are so intimately enmeshed with human agency
that if one is conceived to be historical, the other should so too. But, what does it mean
exactly to say that something is historical? This is fairly straightforward to understand if we
focus our attention on things whose transformation through time still enables the retention of
a certain identity. A language is a prime exemplar: it is not that languages do not change but
rather that through time the emergent whole that we call a language exists as an
interconnected and existentially-contiguous entity in the world. Hence, to say Today English
is is really about dissecting this historical entity on the basis of a particular time
reckoning.
For the purpose of my argument, however, it is strategic to highlight a very different
example of something historical: matter. Broadly speaking, matter is the stuff of the cosmos.
It has a history of its own, i.e. matter actually unfolds as a history that cosmologists are busy
unravelling. Nonetheless, knowledge of this history is not coterminous with matter itself. Put
another way, the narrative that translates the history of the cosmos2 is not coterminous with
how the cosmos came to be. This is so even if the particular social activities that constitute
matter as an object-of-knowledge, i.e. as a narrative about the history of matter, have an
impact (e.g. Kuhn 1970; Lakatos et al. 1980; Latour 1999) on what we know about matter-asstuff-of-the-world. Now, even if there is a sense in which one drinks a portion of the cosmos
in every glass of water, materiality is categorically different from both matter as a whole and
from the knowledge about glasses, water and drinking that filter our experience of thirst3. As
I have suggested above, materiality instead comprises all forms of matter through which
agents constitute relations.
A realist distinction needs to be made between history and narrative in order to
take full stock of the historical aspect of materiality. As archaeologists and historians we are
familiar with this distinction because it maps onto the difference between the elusive history
that we aim to reconstruct and our intersubjectively-validated interpretations of
archaeological and historical evidence. The latter are indeed constructed, positional, and,
more importantly, constructive of what will occur there and hereafter (Shanks & Tilley
1987). However, lest we reduce the world to the limits of our own cognition, history has a
definitive trajectory that is not identical to our narratives about it. I have illustrated this above
by discussing matter as thing-in-the-world versus object-of-knowledge. I will add to this that
a dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony is not a property of the broader processes that
generate time through existential contiguity but is instead analytical (see Gell 1992; Gosden
1994). Hence, to say that materiality is historical cannot be equivalent to ordering individual
events as a diachronic sequence because the latter does not imply a generative linkage
between synchronicities (Whitehead 1998): as others have remarked (see Barrett 1999;
Murray 1999), we can date archaeological objects to a specific point in our time scale but this
only approximates a time of their specific biographies.
Now, if by history we mean that which actually did take place, calling something
historical is not about identifying a sequence of events but instead about focusing on the
generative existential contiguity or causal enchainment that constitutes that something. It is in
this sense that I suggest that materiality has a particular yet multithreaded history, one
marked by existential contiguity. Like matter, it is in itself an ongoing outcome, a trajectory

of constitutive occurrences that actually takes place as unbroken causality4. But, unlike
matter, the unfolding dispositions of materiality depend and have depended on human
agency: by establishing relations to matter, it is human agents that instantiate the subset of
it that we label materiality.

Engagement and materialization

Consider, for a moment, a percussionist playing her drums: through the rhythm of
bodily action the music we hear is instantiated precisely where her fingers hit the drum and
the drum is hit by her fingers. Yet, as it eventually ceases to be heard we learn that the
percussionist has stopped playing her drums. Is this engagement followed by disengagement?
Contrast this to people leading a nomadic lifestyle: their social identities and dwelling
practices cannot be fully understood without recourse to the places they have inhabited. Is
this a mobile engagement to place, a set of successive engagements and disengagements to
various locales, or simply a lack of engagement to place? Compare, lastly, the relations that
all of the above (and yourself) might have to the metal, paper, and plastic objects that today
serve as means of transaction. Does one disengage from the world of money if one runs out
of them? Does their relative uselessness outside the networks that value commodities
monetarily imply that agents have disengaged from them? Is an engagement maintained with
the money stored in a bank account? Do I engage with the coins that I have in my pocket or
with the value that they represent?
My point here is to underline that bringing the huge variety of materially-mediated
relations under the single umbrella of engagement with materiality is doomed to failure
unless we specify what we mean exactly by these terms. Therefore, whilst I will continue
characterising materiality throughout this essay, for heuristic purposes I will attempt to
distinguish material engagement from materialisation. On the one hand, I suggest that the
material engagement between bodies and materiality is fleeting, even if it is recursively
enacted. Hence, the repeated use of trousers does not signify that a body is permanently
engaged with a pair of Levis. Instead, it is the relationship between the trousers and the
body as a locus of social agency that spells out how these trousers activate a gendering form
of discipline structured by the sedimented dispositions of prior relations (Bourdieu 1989). It
is this historical aspect of social agency that highlights those trousers both as a status symbol
and as a condition and outcome of the productive network that establishes differential access
to trousers.
At the other extreme, the emergence and transformation of materiality is categorically
different from mere encounter or even recursive interaction. As I hinted above, I offer that it
is useful to think of this emergence as the material objectification of agents relations. By this
I mean that these relations are rendered material, such that objects are created and made to
stand in a relation to other, prior objects (see Deely 2000). Let us consider some examples: a
vessel used to store crops not only presupposes at minimum that a potter fleetingly engaged
with the objects she used to make pots (Malafouris, this volume), but also that symbiotic
relations between farmers and plant resources existed and were being reproduced. That is, in
addition to fire, water and clay, the emergence of a storage vessel as an object in the world is
predicated on relations between prior material objectifications, i.e. between pre-existing
potter-pots and farmer-plants. We can retrospectively behold the set of relations that was a
condition for the manufacture of our storage vessel just as we can learn that an actual set of
created times links back to both the non-farmer ascendants of the farmer and the
undomesticated progenitors of the cultivars.
From the above, it will be understood that I advocate using the notion of
materialisation as shorthand for material objectification. This usage contrasts with
Renfrews (this volume) notion of material engagement as some sort of stable relation

between agents and partible, transactable material objects. My usage of materialisation also
contrasts with Searles concept of institutionalisation, which both DeMarrais (this volume)
and Renfrew invoke to characterise the materially-mediated regularisation of a particular set
of social practices. My usage overlaps with the conditions for DeMarrais and colleagues
(1996) notion of materialisation: I understand their usage to describe a process in which the
power relations that are geared towards the production of material entities make the latter
indexical of the representations (or ideologies) that legitimise such power relations. Because
my intent is to explore the historical aspect of materiality, I am minded to instead focus on
the actual emergence in materiality that this production of material entities entails. I
understand this emergence as the material objectification of agents relations.
The main reason to offer these distinctions is that materiality, conceived historically,
has and continues to exist as a tension between, on the one hand, the material objectification
of relations into temporally-durable and spatially-predictable entities (Law 1992), and, on the
other, the fleeting but active aspect of interaction that specifies a relative autonomy between
bodies and materiality (see also Warnier 2001). Therefore, to say potter or pot / farmer or
crop, invokes relations that might or not be empirically irreducible but are certainly
historically decomposable. This entails that it is retrospectively possible to obtain a closure
both between the bodies of symbiotic human agents and domesticates, and between the body
of the agent in her potter capacity and the more stable cylinder of clay in its pot-in-themaking state. There remains the fact, however, that these specific material entities are the
objectification of existentially contiguous agents relations, i.e. of relations that came one
after the other.

Historical materialities
El ojo que ves no es
ojo porque t lo veas;
es ojo porque te ve5.

Compared to a language or even to matter, materiality appears as historically

disjointed. This is, however, a function of the fact that we and other agents have not been
privy to its continual existence. Instead, individuals emerge into a world that is populated by
pre-existing beings and objects such that, in a sense at least, there is much catching up to do.
And yet, the historical aspect of materiality follows from the causal enchainment of its
emergences, linked through time by the enactment of multiples agencies. One way to
problematise this is to rethink material objectifications as implications, in the sense of the
relations which go into the constitution of. For instance, a crime scene implicates a given
set of antecedents without which it might not have become instantiated. Implications need to
be distinguished from what the crime scene comes to symbolically embody for engaging
subjects: for the ethically-minded, it is the barbarity of a murder; for Sherlock Holmes, it is a
puzzle; for archaeologists, similarly enough, the scene is indexical of past agencies, etc. It
will be seen that if Ingold (1993) is correct, these embodiments are consubstantial to
particular forms of inhabitation.
The distinction between implication and embodiment suggests that we ought to
refrain from assuming that the material objectification of relations signifies particular
symbols. Implications cannot be immediately understood as the valued biography of objects
(Appadurai 1986a; Kopytoff 1986; Thomas 1991; Weiner 1994), their agency (Gell 1998, see
also Robb, this volume), or the social needs to which their construction are particularly
geared to (Byers 1992). It is perhaps more accurate to suggest that the relations that are
implicated as materiality are known indexically within a set of representational associations
(Rosenstein 2003; see also Keane 2003), such that they could render materialities into
particular embodied material symbols (Parmentier 1997; cf. Renfrew, this volume, Hodder

1992). Hence, to some a monument will be indexical of elites power; to others of the human
labour that went into it (see also DeMarrais, this volume). Whatever the case, for materialities
to instantiate symbols, they must first become semiotic objects (cf. Renfrew, this volume).
It might prove worthwhile to explore those situations in which the relations that are
implicated in material emergence could become the embodied dispositions of materialities,
i.e. to query under what conditions agents could sensorially apprehend the constitutive
relations of materiality. A brief excursus into the anthropological and archaeological
literature on landscapes provides some food for thought. Landscapes are composite historical
materialities (Ingold 1993) that have become, in recent years, an evocative catch-all notion to
problematise open-ended, anthropogenically-modified human environs (Crumley 1994b;
Hirsch & O'Hanlon 1995; Tilley 1996; Bale 1998b; Layton & Ucko 1999; Ashmore &
Knapp 1999; Barrett 1999; Anschuetz et al. 2001). Landscapes have been problematised as
an either/or affair: either as natural ecosystems or as culturally-constructed representations
that are draped onto the surrounding world (but see Ingold 2000; Tilley et al. 2000).
The social consequences of both the implantation of monumental structures and the
constitution of places have amply discussed over the last decade (e.g. Trigger 1990; Barrett et
al. 1991; Tilley 1994; Gosden & Lock 1998; Ashmore 2002). Less attention has been paid to
the anthropogenic modification of environs (Sauer 1969; Butzer 1982; Wandsnider 1992;
Crumley 1994a; Bale 1998a; McIntosh et al. 2000; Denevan 2001) and how the complex
socio-ecological interactions that shape particular landscapes have modified agents
livelihood (Bale 1998b). In this connection, it is worth highlighting that a number of studies
in the Amazon basin suggest that either through subtle change (Linares 1976; Bale 1992;
1994; Morcote et al. 1998; Politis 1999; Crdenas & Politis 2000) or planned management
(Posey 1984; Posey 1985; Bale 1989; Rival 1996), the distribution of edible plant species in
rainforests may have resulted from the effect of human groups on the landscape, such that the
social techniques of dwelling of subsequent inhabitants were lastingly transformed (see
Parker 1992; 1993; Meggers 2003 for sceptical views). Some past transformations of this
kind were, moreover, enduring, as evidenced by the presence of anthrosols locally known as
terras pretas. These soils cover vast expanses of the riparian bluffs of the main river network
of the basin and track important transformations in the agricultural productivity of the
landscape. Present knowledge suggests they resulted from a combination of farming and
dwelling that took place during the first millennium AD (Sombroek 1966; Smith 1980; Eden
et al. 1984; Kern & Kampf 1989; Mora 1991; Pabst 1991; Denevan 1996; Heckenberger et al.
1999; Woods et al. 2000; McCann et al. 2001; Glaser et al. 2001; Lehmann et al. 2003). At
these former settlements, the overall fertility of the land increased dramatically through the
retention of unusually high concentrations of soil organic matter, pyrogenic carbon, and
nutrients in the soils. Now, whilst terras pretas are today valued agricultural land for
peasants, some of the latter baulk at the idea that they can be considered anthropogenic
(German 2001; 2003); others mine them as compost and believe that they regenerate
naturally (Woods 2002); and still others recognise a relation between soil fertility and past
settlements (Arroyo-Kalin et al. 2004). Hence, even if we can state that these anthrosols were
associated with more intensive occupations and perhaps higher population densities in the
past (Petersen et al. 2001; Neves et al. 2003), we cannot as yet make claims about whether
past peoples acknowledged their formation or not.
However, landscapes, anthropogenic soils and cultivars remind us of the limitations of
conceiving materiality simply as a collection of objects and instead point towards the need to
understand it as an ongoing outcome of composite processes of materialisation that have
operated at a variety of scales. At one level, the duration of implicated relations through time
might be a key to understand their salience and potential for symbolic embodiment. However,
one is here reminded of domestication as a social and evolutionary process (cf. Rindos 1983;
Harris & Hillman 1989; Blumer 1996; Hastorf 1998; Rival 1998; Clement 1999): before we
5

can even discuss domestication as intentional we need to specify both the pace at which
symbiotic relations were established and the rate at which the decay of the latter can make a
domesticate feral.

Conclusion: a surrounding world

My hope is that some of the ideas presented above are found useful to counter
understandings of materiality as the sum total of discrete material entities. In this sense, if we
can abandon a definition of agency as synchronic actions exerted volitionally by individual
sentient beings in favour of a social conception, we should be in a position to also expand our
definitions of materiality beyond a collection of partible and finite material entities. If we
understand the material objectification of relations as the convergence of unfolding
dispositions, moreover, we can also adopt a conception of materiality as a trajectory of
existential contiguity that is punctuated by material emergence. In this short essay, I have
attempted to set the grounds for this by, first, problematising historical existence as
existential contiguity; second, exploring how the subset of matter that agency instantiates as
materiality unfolds its dispositions through agency-mediated emergence and transformation;
and third, by discussing how the material objectification of relations can be seen as the
enchainment of causal implications. In this sense, implications are like the nodes of
materiality: to join them enables us to apprehend material history.
Like others in the volume, I am inspired by Ingolds (2000) remarks to suggest that
we understand materiality as ongoing and lived-in. A fourth and final step is therefore now in
order: that we specify materiality as a temporally-situated network in which things-in-theworld become enmeshed though objectification. The image of a surrounding world or
Umwelt (Sebeok 1996; 2001; Patten 2001), in which a categorical distinction inheres between
the world-as-sensed and the world-of-action (Deely 2000), is here extremely provocative. In
an Umwelt, sentient beings select stimuli from the world and effect outcomes of such stimuli,
such that the latter add themselves to the world of stimuli that can be sensed. If materiality is
understood as an Umwelt, two qualifications are important: first, for human agents a
surrounding world is modified dramatically by the existence of language, understood both as
a secondary modelling system that enables signification beyond the indexical level (Sebeok
1988) and as a means of communication that enables the externalisation (Renfrew & Scarre
1998) of embodied representations (Lakoff & Johnson 1997). Second, the effects of the livedin dispositions of materiality extend beyond synchronicity: they are the ongoing outcomes
established through the constitution of relations to and with prior objects, i.e. things-in-theworld that have become objectified historically.
As a surrounding world, materiality is peculiar: it is a subset of matter that is
instantiated through engagement, it is an ongoing outcome that is transformed through the
objectification of relations, and it exists not just in the present but also as a trajectory of
constitutive occurrences whose unbroken causality we are not immediately aware of.
Perhaps this is why the transgenerational material reproduction of power asymmetries has
gone so far; equally, however, it might be why the subversion of this reproduction remains
possible.
1

An ontology based on a dichotomy between form and substance is a heritage of ancient Greek philosophy.
Some of its limitations for archaeological discourses on materiality have been recently remarked by Thomas
(2004).
2
We can think of much scientific knowledge about the cosmos as streamlined models that ultimately need to fit
a particular narrative of origins. Of course this is not without problems (Hawking 1989; Greene 1999).
3
The historical aspect of materiality does not hinge on culturally-specific conceptions about the world. By
contrast, there are potentially infinite culturally-specific conceptions about the history of materiality.
4
Events can be said to be causal even if our retroduction of them at best approximates this causality as a
tendency in all but experimental conditions (see Bhaskar 1975; 1979).

The eye that you see is not / an eye because you see it / it is an eye because it sees you. My translation, from
Antonio Machados poem Proverbios y Cantares.

Acknowledgements
Many of the ideas presented here would never have been formulated without the opportunity to participate in the
Rethinking Materiality conference, organised by the editors of this volume at the McDonald Institute. I feel
indebted, moreover, to the many colleagues and friends whose encounters have led both to provocative
questions and insightful criticism of the thoughts presented. These include L. DeMarrais, O. Biner, C. Lawson,
S. AlOmari, R. Bartone, E. Neves, J. Petersen, E. Brumfiel, A. Herrera, and P. Miracle. In addition B. Patten
kindly sent me a draft version of a forthcoming publication whilst J. Deely and W. Keane graciously answered
my questions about their work over email. I hope to have drawn lessons from their insights that bear witness to
the importance of their contributions. Key to some of the points and examples has been my affiliation as
researcher at the Instituto SocioAmbiental, So Paulo, and my involvement as team member of the Central
Amazon Project, Brazil. Generous support for my research comes from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UK
Overseas Research Student Award Scheme, and the following institutions in Cambridge: Girton College,
Cambridge Overseas Trust, the H.M Chadwick Fund, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the
Centre for Latin American Studies, the Cambridge Historical Society, the Cambridge Political Economy
Society, and the Department of Archaeology.

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