Materiality and Social Life

Theodore Schatzki

ABSTRACT
An important issue in contemporary social theory is how social thought can
systematically take materiality into account. This article suggests that one
way social theory can do so is by working with an ontology that treats ma-
teriality as part of society. The article presents one such ontology, according
to which social phenomena consist in nexuses of human practices and ma-
terial arrangements. This ontology (1) recognizes three ways materiality is
part of social phenomena, (2) holds that most social phenomena are inter-
calated constellations of practices, technology, and materiality, and (3)
opens up consideration of relations between practices and material arrange-
ments. A brief practice-material history of the Kentucky Bluegrass region
where the author resides illustrates the idea that social phenomena evince
changing material configurations over time.

KEYWORDS
social ontology, social practices, society/materiality, society/nature


An important question in contemporary social thought is: How can

social theory systematically take materiality into account? The answer
that this article explores is that social theory can do this by working
with an ontology that construes materiality as part of society, that is
treats materiality as an ingredient of social phenomena. The article dis-
cusses one such ontology. This ontology (1) analyzes social phenomena
as slices or aspects of nexuses of practices and material arrangements,
(2) recognizes three ways materiality is part of social phenomena, (3)
holds that most social phenomena are intercalated constellations of
practices, technology, and materiality, and (4) opens up consideration
of relations between practices and material arrangements. These ideas
are substantialized through a practice-material history of the Bluegrass
Region surrounding Lexington, Kentucky where the author resides.
Because this essay presents a social ontology, it might be helpful
to explain what this is. By “social ontology” I mean ideas about,
including the self-conscious study of, the nature or basic features,
structures, or elements-constituents of social life. A social ontology,
accordingly, is a statement or understanding of the nature or basic
features, structures, or constituents of social phenomena. It is an ex-

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THEODORE SCHATZKI

plication or understanding of what, ultimately, there is to social life.

Formulated ontologies can range from a few sentences to entire chap-
ters and longer (e.g., Durkheim 1938: chs. 1 and 6; Giddens 1979). It
is my belief that all theories of social life either explicitly contain and
maybe also discuss, or constitutively presuppose ontological under-
standings.
Diverse trends in contemporary theory challenge the integrity of
prominent social theoretical conceptions and theories of the social.
One might wonder, consequently, why I am interested in spelling out
a social ontology, all the more so because the particular ontology I
present erases one of the boundary lines that theorists have tradition-
ally relied on in demarcating the social: that between society and ma-
teriality. I delineate a social ontology because the issue this article
addresses is how social thought can systematically take materiality
into account. I take it that social thought is thought about things so-
cial, however such things are defined or delimited. I also presume
that an answer to the question “How can social thought, i.e., thought
about social things, take materiality into account?” can unproblemat-
ically draw on an account of basic aspects of such things.
Still, one might press, given the aforementioned theoretical devel-
opments, what is the point of defining one’s issue by reference to so-
cial thought? I emphasize that I do this not out of a belief that social
things can be clearly and cleanly separated from nonsocial things.
There is no well-defined realm, domain, or level of reality that can be
labeled “society,” “social entities,” or “the objects studied by social
science,” and cleanly demarcated from other alleged large-scale realms
or levels (e.g., materiality, biology, physicality, nature). Defining my
issue as one about social thought signals merely an interest in a par-
ticular topic, a particular overall subject matter, namely, social things.
In signaling an interest in this subject matter, I make no presumptions
about how this subject matter should be understood or analyzed: no
presumptions about whether, for instance, social phenomena should
or should not be analyzed as related, inherently related, separate from,
or autonomous from other phenomena such as material things. It is
not an interest in social things, but specific analyses of them, that pro-
nounce on such matters.
One might still wonder, Why be interested in this subject matter,
that is, in social phenomena? I can only reply that, as a human being,
I am interested in how things stand with human beings; in particular,
I am interested in how things stand with human social affairs. Many
others share this interest. As suggested, moreover, having this interest

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and defining my topic by reference to social life do not have any of
the baleful effects that ecologists and post-humanists have attributed
to many conceptions and theories of society: for the interest and sub-
ject matter do not themselves determine how the subject matter should
be analyzed.
Theorists who pen or think about social ontologies are also some-
times asked, What is the point of such ontologies? Social ontologies
play three roles in social research. These roles are ones played by the-
ories generally in social investigation, and they devolve to ontologies
because ontologies are a type of theory. One of the roles that theories,
including ontologies, play in social research is to provide understand-
ings of key concepts with which investigators conceptualize topics
and subject matters and formulate descriptions, explanations, and in-
terpretations. Examples of ontological concepts used in this article are
social practice, arrangement, practice-arrangement nexus, materiality,
physicality, and nature. A second role that theories, including ontolo-
gies, play in social research is to suggest important topics and issues
for study. Theoretical conceptions of space, for example, have sug-
gested important questions about such matters as the organization of
cities, the history of capitalism, local and global, the production of
identities, and relations between nature and society. Indeed relations
between nature and society constitute a theoretical topic that ontolo-
gies have contributed to and coinstigated, and vice versa. A third way
that social ontologies inform empirical work is by suggesting connec-
tions among research findings.

Materiality

Materiality is an ambiguous term in contemporary social thought. For

many thinkers, it connotes physicality: the materiality of the world is
its physical constituents and properties. This understanding appears to
animate the self-understanding of a workshop recently held in Basel
on the topic of materiality and social theory, titled “Matter in Social
Theory.” Matter is a less ambiguous term than is material and more
clearly picks out a physical feature of the world.
Materiality can be understood more broadly than as physicality.
One broader construal, closely allied to an equation of materiality with
matter, is that materiality is stuff, that is, composition: the materiality
of social life is its stuff. This construal can bleed into materiality qua
physicality because examining something’s composition often bottoms

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out in physical entities and properties. A second broader understand-

ing of materiality treats materiality, not as physicality alone, but as
biophysicality. It is hard to avoid the inference that what motivates this
conjoining of physical reality and the biosphere is the intuition that
these are the chief components of nature. The concept of nature is, of
course, a difficult one. All I will presently write about this arcane,
though very important concept is that it licenses the introduction of
the term “environment.” Materiality qua nature points toward the en-
vironment, meaning circumjacent nature.
Thus, the issue of how systematically to acknowledge materiality
in social theory can be taken as at least three distinct but related issues:
how to recognize the role of physical entities and their properties in
social life and theory; how to take the stuff, or basic composition, of
social phenomena, into account; and how to consider the role of na-
ture, meaning biological and physical phenomena, in social life and
thought. Many discussions suggest construing the issue, first, as how
social theory can systematically take physical entities and their prop-
erties into account. To take physicality into account, however, is at
once to take the physical composition of things into account. The first
rendering of the leading issue thus leads to the second, even though
social phenomena are composed of more than physical things alone.
What’s more, much of people’s interest in the topic of materiality in
social life and thought is tied to the question of the presence and role
of nature in them, thus the third version of the central issue. This third
version also overlaps with the first two. In short, all three versions of
the issue before this essay are pertinent and related. As a result, I will
try to hold them together as I proceed. In my interpretation, the issue
is how social theory can systematically take physicality, material com-
position, and nature into account.
Why does this issue arise? The dominant practice for decades in
social thought, above all in sociology, was to theorize society as if
materiality did not matter (Murphy 1995). According to this attitude,
physicality and nature are mostly irrelevant to the character and
progress of social phenomena, instead forming background condi-
tions against which social affairs proceed. Durkheim’s dictum that so-
cial facts are explained by social facts is often cited as the source of
this attitude. After World War II, a slew of prominent theorists upheld
it, including structural Marxists (e.g., Althusser and Poulantzas), sym-
bolic interactionists (e.g., Blumer), ethnomethodologists (e.g., Gar-
finkel), phenomenologists (e.g., Berger and Luckmann), critical realists
(e.g., Bhaskar), and the practice theorist Giddens. Some of these the-

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orists also argued that social phenomena “construct” material ones—
even environmental dangers and resources extracted from the earth.
Ontologically, these theorists (like empiricist social thinkers) con-
strued social affairs as composed of people and their relations, most
prominent, their interactions. Some of these theorists supplemented
the realm of interacting people with structural domains of one sort or
another. These ontologies neglect the objects amid, with, and through
which people relate. Of course, theoretical economics and anthropol-
ogy, and more recently science studies, have consistently attended to
materiality in the forms of land, resources, commodities, life func-
tions, food, building materials, or the objects of scientific investigation.
This is not to mention the long tradition of human ecology or the more
recent slew of human-animal studies whose interest has never strayed
from physicality, organisms, and nature, though it begs questions and
possibly shifts priorities to label these accounts social theories. De-
spite countervailing streams, however, the most prominent social on-
tologies have ignored materiality.
The neglect of physicality-nature was abetted by the historical
separation between, on the one hand, society, history, or human prac-
tice, and, on the other hand, nature or environment. The basic sepa-
ration goes back to the pre-Socratic distinction between convention
and nature and has been a fixture of modern Western thought, even
today (despite the efforts of those contemporary thinkers who seek to
break down the distinctions involved). The indomitable sense that
something about humanity marks a fundamental division in reality,
segregating entities, properties, or events into two mutually exclusive
classes, is a powerful humanistic impulse running through modern
Western history.
In the past few decades, a chorus of protest has arisen against the
social theoretical neglect of materiality. One prominent collection of
oppositional voices can be labeled “interactionism.” Focusing on the
relationship between society and nature, interactionism contends,
first, that society and nature are distinct realms and, second, that the
two realms of society and nature interact. The vast range of contem-
porary theories that describe themselves as contesting the “dualism”
or “opposition” between society and nature fall into this category. Es-
pying pervasive intertwinings, interminglings, amalgamations, and in-
teractions between natural and social phenomena, these theories call
for and sometimes supply fresh conceptualizations of the society-
nature interface. They thereby uphold the pertinence of materiality to
social life and thought. Key interactionists include Fischer-Kowalski

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and Weisz (1999) in human ecology, Dickens (1992) in sociology, Rap-

paport (1971) in anthropology, and Worster (1990) in history. In addi-
tion, some proponents of above-mentioned materiality-neglecting
schools of thought, for instance symbolic interactionism, have sought
to update these schools by embracing interactionism as I define it (e.g.,
Weigert 1991).1 Today, the claim that society interacts with nature is
a common way of systematically recognizing materiality in social
thought, although, as noted, classifying human ecology as social the-
ory begs important issues.
Alongside interactionism there has arisen another family of theo-
ries that treat human activity as constitutively and causally tied to ma-
terial objects. Related theories tie identity and the self to material
objects. Because human activity and identity are central to society on
most understandings of the latter, these accounts point toward or even
affirm my thesis that material phenomena are part of society. Exam-
ples of the theories I have in mind are socio-cultural theories of me-
diated action (e.g., Wertsch 1998), actor-network theory (e.g., Latour
1986), object-centered socialities (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1997; Preda
1999), and certain ontologies of science (e.g., Pickering 1995; Rhein-
berger 1997; Rouse 2003). An example of the sort of account of the
self I have in mind is Čapek (2006). The fact that some actor network
theorists and students of science would both deny offering social on-
tologies and, due to their recognition of materiality, challenge the in-
tegrity of the concept of society, does not weaken the parallel. My
point is that many of the above theorists, in so far as they acknowl-
edge social phenomena, treat material entities as components of such
phenomena. In the next section I will mention key differences be-
tween my ontology and theories belonging to these two families.

Sites of the Social

“Social,” as I use the term, means pertaining to human coexistence.

This definition is straightforward, intuitive, and comports with much
common usage and diverse traditions of social thought. By human co-
existence, meanwhile, I mean the hanging together (Zusammenhang)
of human lives, the togetherness and withness of human beings. Some-
thing is social if it pertains to the hanging together of human lives.
I acknowledge that the term “social” is often used to characterize
members of nonhuman species and their lives. In focusing on human
sociality and using the word and its cognates to denote the human

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form of sociality, I do not mean to deny that fish, insects, and other
animals are social creatures, too. My focus and use simply reflect my
interest in humanity and its form of sociality. I make no claims, more-
over, about similarities and differences between human sociality and
nonhuman sorts, or about relations among conceptions and theories
of different species’ sociality. In addition, I affirm the claim—at least
vis-à-vis many social phenomena—that human sociality is constitu-
tionally intertwined with relations to domesticated, commensal, and
wild organisms. Nonetheless, I do not consider the specific entwine-
ment of human and interspecies sociality. Materiality, in my use of the
term, encompasses organisms. In arguing that materiality is part of
society, I am arguing, among other things, that nonhuman organisms
(and their socialities) are part of society. Which dimensions and types
of materiality are most pertinent in analyzing particular social phe-
nomena depends on the particular social phenomena involved. Or-
ganisms and our relations to them might or might not be prominent
in particular cases.
According to the social ontology I have elaborated elsewhere
(Schatzki 2002, 2003), social life, that is human coexistence, inher-
ently transpires as part of nexuses of practices and material arrange-
ments. By “practices” I mean organized spatial-temporal manifolds of
human activity. Examples are cooking practices, political practices,
manufacturing practices, football practices, dating practices, and horse
breeding practices. The varied activities that compose a practice are
organized by understandings, rules, and normative teleologies. These
activities also need not form regularities: a practice is not a set of reg-
ular actions, but an evolving domain of varied activities linked by
common and orchestrated items of the types just mentioned.
By “material arrangements” I mean a set of interconnected mate-
rial entities. The entities that make up arrangements can be segregated
into four types: humans, artifacts, organisms, and things of nature.
This is a useful, experience-based sorting of the entities significant to
humans through which their lives hang together. (For discussion of the
nature and presuppositions of this typology, see Schatzki 2002:
174–180). Entities of these sorts connect in various ways, most promi-
nently through causality, which in many cases is the causality exerted
on the world in human activity (e.g., setting things up).
Human coexistence inherently transpires as part of nexuses of
practices and material arrangements. Let me illustrate this claim. Peo-
ple’s lives hang together in many ways. One is through chains of ac-
tion. Because almost any action that a person performs is a moment

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of some practice(s) or other (see Schatzki 1996: ch. 3), each action
that helps make up a chain of action is a moment of this or that prac-
tice. The chains of action that link football players on the pitch, for in-
stance, are mostly made up of actions that are moments of football
practices. Similarly, the chains of action that link horse trainers, horse
owners, riders, and barn hands on the job are mostly made up of ac-
tions that are moments of the practice of horse training. It is as part of
football or horse training practices that the actions, through whose
causal linking these people’s lives hang together, are performed.
Another way people’s lives hang together is through material con-
figurations: in the case of football players, through the layouts of pitches
and stadiums and, say, the physical set-up and communication net-
work of the league’s central office and, in the case of horse trainers
and riders, through the layouts of paddocks, barns, horses, paths,
fences, and wooded copses on horse farms. Human coexistence is in-
herently tied, not just to practices, but also to material arrangements.
Indeed, social life, as indicated, always transpires as part of a mesh of
practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and deter-
minative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrange-
ments. I call the practice-arrangement nexuses, as inherently part of
which human coexistence transpires, sites of the social.
The practice-arrangement nexuses of football games link and
overlap with those of stadium maintenance, television broadcasting,
and the investment activity of the wealthy. Similarly, the practice-
arrangement nexus of horse training links and overlaps with those of
horse breeding, horse sales, horse farm maintenance, and leisure ac-
tivity. All these nexuses link, in turn, to the wider nets of nexuses that
compose governments, financial networks, race tracks, and farming.
These nets, together with the even wider confederations that they form,
make up one immense transmogrifying web of practices and arrange-
ments. The entirety of this web is coextensive with socio-historic time-
space.
All human coexistence transpires as part of this immense and
evolving web. It follows that all social phenomena are slices or aspects
of this web. As just suggested, governments, financial networks, race
tracks, and farming are all elaborate nets of practice-arrangement
nexuses. Spelling out a particular example further substantiates this idea.
The so-called Bluegrass Region around Lexington, Kentucky—a
city of about a quarter million people—comprises farms, small towns,
and hamlets.2 Different types of farms are found there, including com-
mercial stock farms, family farms, trailer farms, and horse farms. The

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Figure 1
A Bluegrass Horse Farm.

horse farms dominate the countryside because of their great size and
extensive shaping of the land.
A prominent feature of these horse farms is their park-like lands
divided into paddocks, pastures, and copses by miles of plank fences.
Other notable features are elaborate entrances opening onto stately
tree-lined driveways that lead to elegant main residences, efficiently
designed barns and residences dotting the property, and small networks
of private lanes. The overall impression that the Bluegrass Region pre-
sents is of a manicured, aesthetically pleasing tapestry of enclosures,
shady lands, hillsides, copses, and stately mansions, through which
weave undulating streams and meandering, sometimes tree-lined roads
that link farms, villages, and city. It is worth noting that horse farms
are thoroughbred breeding operations, that is big business. At the same
time, they are run for pleasure, in pursuit of a modern gentry lifestyle,
or out off love for horse racing.
A horse farm is an elaborate nexus of practices and arrangements.
The mansion, for instance, is an arrangement embracing walls, furni-
ture, foodstuffs, people, pets, viruses, and so on. Each of its rooms can
be treated as an arrangement, as can the mansion as a whole. Amid
these arrangements, people carry out such practices as cooking, eat-

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Figure 2
A Road through the Bluegrass.

ing, toiletry, child rearing, entertainment, and book-keeping. The barns

form further arrangements amid which different sets of practices take
place, some practices (e.g., eating and child rearing) being carried out
in multiple locales. The practices carried out at these different arrange-
ments connect, as do the arrangements involved. The copses, farm
race track, open pastures, paddocks, and workers’ hamlet (including
the organisms tied to them) are still further arrangements. Both amid
each of and across these further arrangements a variety of practices
are carried on.
The claims (1) that human coexistence inherently transpires as
part of practice-arrangement nexuses, and (2) that social phenomena
are slices or aspects of such nexuses, accord materiality composi-
tional significance in social life: materiality is among the items in
which coexistence and social phenomena consist. When, for instance,
farm employees clear a field, their lives hang together partly through
the trees, rocks, and canes towards which they act. Their coexistence
comprises states of affairs and events that involve or happen to mate-
rial objects. Horse farm operations more broadly embrace numerous
activities focused on or concerned with material phenomena such as
frosts, thunderstorms, viruses, horses, caterpillar worms, the dirt on race

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tracks, and poorly draining lowlands. Material phenomena such as
these are part of what there is in the world to social phenomena. In
writing this, I mean materiality in all the senses identified above: phys-
icality, composition, bio-physicality, nature, and environment.
The claim that social phenomena are slices or aspects of practice-
arrangement nexuses exemplifies one kind of answer to the question:
“How can social theory systematically take materiality into account?”
The claim articulates a social ontology according to which material-
ity helps compose sociality and social phenomena.
In the previous section, I mentioned two families of accounts that
have corrected social theory’s neglect of materiality. Now that I have
described my ontology, I want to identify two key differences between
it and these accounts. Interactionism treats society (history, human
practice) and materiality (nature, environment) as separate realms, be-
tween which interactions and relations exist. To treat society and ma-
teriality cum nature as separate is to treat them, not just as analytically
distinct, but as embracing substantially different sets of entities. In
construing them as separate realms, therefore, interactionism high-
lights interactions or mutual dependences and determinations between
entities of two substantially distinct sets. Interactionists proceed, ac-
cordingly, by presuming a division between social and natural things,
properties, and events and investigating either causal or energy trans-
actions between entities from the two realms or the issue or compo-
sition of “hybrid” phenomena such as pedigrees, barns, or landscapes
from things, properties, or events belonging to the two realms. In
treating hybrids as neither pure material nor pure social entities, inter-
actionism blurs the boundary between the social and the material. Its
analyses still uphold this boundary, however, by treating these hybrids
as outcomes or combinations of entities, properties, and events that
are either social or natural.
My ontology, by contrast, recognizes that any thing, property, or
event can be at once both social and material-natural. Something is
social if it is part of the nexus of practices and arrangements as part
of which human coexistence inherently transpires. Something is ma-
terial if it is physical, biological, or natural (by “natural” I mean that
it happens or changes on its own, perhaps subject to principles or
laws not of human making). The somethings involved can be objects,
things, properties, events, or processes. Any material entity that is an
element of the arrangements as part of which human coexistence trans-
pires is also at once a social entity. More expansively, any entity at all
can in theory be both social and material-natural. The analytic dis-

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tinction between social and material (or natural) does not mark a de-
marcation of things, properties, events, or anything else into two sub-
stantially distinct realms or categories. My account, consequently,
declines to talk of interactions, exchanges, or a dialectical relation-
ship between society and nature.
The second family of accounts mentioned in the previous section
treats human activity or identity as constitutively and causally tied to
material objects, thereby pointing toward or affirming my claim that
materiality helps compose social phenomena. Because members of
this family differ greatly among themselves, I will confine my comments
to one prominent instance: actor-network theory, most centrally, the
ideas of Latour.
Actor network theory analyzes any state of the world in which hu-
mans are involved as a network of actors and intermediaries. An ac-
tor is anything that does something (in a broad sense of “doing”), an
intermediary is an entity that an actor circulates (e.g., money), and for
entities to form a network is for them to be aligned, coordinated, en-
rolled, many of these latter relations being causal. What a given actor
can do depends on the particular network that it itself is (a human, for
instance, is a network of organs, bones, nerve fibers) and on its loca-
tion in wider networks, that is its place in the relations of alignment,
coordination, and enrollment that characterize wider networks. Ac-
tors, in turn, are often catalogued as humans and nonhumans. Any
state of the world involving humans, including any social state of af-
fairs in my sense of “social,” is such a network, thus a configuration
of related and interdependent human and nonhuman actors. In rec-
ognizing nonhumans as constitutive of social affairs, actor-network
theory affirms my claim that materiality is an ingredient of social phe-
nomena. I might add that Latour is a little schizophrenic about the
implications of this ontology for the notion of society. He sometimes
treats the fact, that nonhumans help constitute the reality through
which humans live, as gainsaying the integrity of the social. At other
times, he suggests that this fact implies that society is composed of
humans and nonhumans.
The networks of actor-network theory closely resemble what I call
“arrangements.” Both are composed of interrelated material entities.
Arrangements, however, are only one of the two principle sorts of
phenomena that make up social phenomena. The second is practices,
which have no pendent in actor-network theory. Practices, inciden-
tally, also have no pendent in the other theories mentioned in the pre-
vious section that join with actor-network theory in acknowledging

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the constitutive and causal relationship of objects to human activity.
There is no pendent of practices in actor-network theory because ac-
tions are the doings of particular actors (networks act only in so far as
they are treated as single actors), and because the nominalism of actor-
network theory bars recognition of any wider entity that actions make
up or of any constitutive context in which actions take place. Actor-
network theory thereby fails to capture a key feature of human social
life, namely, the practices that are tied to arrangements and help con-
stitute social phenomena. Actor-network theory is also, as a result, un-
able to study relations between practices and material arrangements
(see below). In short, the bearing of materiality on human activity and
social life lies not just in the constitutive and causal relations that hold
between individual actors and particular objects, but also in how ma-
terial entities are connected with temporally and spatially extended
manifolds of organized human actions.

The Roles of Materiality in Social Life

Material entities or phenomena enter social life in at least three ways.

The first has already been adumbrated: physical and biological enti-
ties number among the entities that compose the arrangements that,
together with practices, compose social sites. Notice that any entity
that helps make up these arrangements is material: it is a physical en-
tity and maybe also a biological one (people and organisms). Indeed,
arrangements, as configurations of interconnected material entities to
which material events occur, are kin to what Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) dub the material “stratum” of social life. Of course, entities
that compose arrangements are also social entities, by virtue of help-
ing constitute that as part of which human coexistence inherently
transpires; many of these entities are also artifactual, by virtue of be-
ing shaped by human activity. So the expression “material stratum” is
misleading in so far as it suggests that a layer of materiality underlies
or undergirds social affairs. Social life nonetheless evinces a pervasive
material dimension. And direct relations among material entities in
this dimension (e.g., viral infections of horses, the buckling of a barn
roof under a heavy snow pack) contribute to the shape and progress
of social life.
Land is part of many arrangements. In the case of horse farms, for
example, fields, the shaded floors of copses, stream beds, dirt paths,
and the earth on which mansion foundations sit, are all part of arrange-

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ments that compose farms. They qualify as such by being entities through
which humans coexist. The stream bed qualifies, for instance, when a
dam needs to be built across it or when a group of riders lead their
mounts through its shallow end. Other examples are the knobs on
which barns are built to ensure good ventilation and drainage and the
central knobs on which mansions are constructed for this reason and
also for the purpose of surveyability. Further examples are the shallow
valleys between these knobs where the hamlets, originally built for
freed slaves and today occupied (if at all) by Hispanic farm help, usu-
ally lie—out of sight of farm owners, guests, travelers, and tourists.
A second way that materiality is part of social life is that the enti-
ties that compose arrangements have a physical-chemical composi-
tion. This is one of the senses in which they are physical(-chemical)
entities. This fact also lends fuller sense to the idea that society has a
“material stratum.” For it is often by virtue of their physical-chemical
composition that arrangement-composing entities are related. The
collapsing snow-covered roof provides an example. The physical com-
position of things also has significance for social affairs. Shoeing a
horse, for example, is intimately tied to the physical properties of the
horse, the horse’s hoofs, the horse shoes, and the nails with which it
is attached. Practical knowledge of the interface among these has
been a part of human history for some time now. The same is also true
of the physical properties of building materials such as stone and
wood, with which builders, maintenance people, and horse farm own-
ers cope. Attention to and knowledge of material properties are also
key to the production of artifacts. Artifacts are either physical objects
or realized in physical objects (as are informational and cyber enti-
ties). Because of this, care must be paid to material composition in
constructing or designing them.
Horse farms reveal another way that physical composition is rel-
evant both to relations among the components of arrangements and
to social affairs. The spatial distribution of horse farms in the Bluegrass
Region closely corresponds to the geographical extent of a stratum of
limestone rock that in geological time became exposed on the surface
of the earth and eroded into phosphate rich soil. Any suggestion that
the geological pattern simply determines the spatial distribution of
horse farms would be wrong (Wilson 1941). The fit is not perfect, and
land use patterns often diverge from geological formations. Still, the
close coincidence of horse farms with phosphate rich soil is striking.
Physical composition clearly bears on the existence of particular
arrangements and social phenomena.

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 
Beyond the physical composition of the implements, things, and
land with which they deal, people cope with the physical manifesta-
tions in their coexistence of such physical events and phenomena as
viruses, tornadoes, electrocution, disease, fatigue, centers of gravity,
wear and tear, deterioration and rotting, and pollution. Both how these
matters are manifested in people’s lives and how people react to them
are closely tied to the physical composition of things. Another way
physical composition affects the course of practices is by rendering
combinations and sequences of action physically impossible, physi-
cally easier or harder, physically painful or pleasing, and the like. The
physical compositions of humans, artifacts, organisms, and things of
nature likewise structure what actions can and might be carried out
when, where, how, and for what ends. The properties of wood, for in-
stance, determine how barns, fences, and carts can be built, how they
are best painted, how trees can be felled, and the dangers trees can
pose to horses roaming in their paddocks. Physicality likewise deter-
mines the locations of the elements of arrangements (and thus the
arrangements themselves) in objective space and time. Physical com-
position also contributes to the longevity of arrangements: the decades
that a house stands, the centuries that a rock fence perdures, and so
on. Indeed, the composition of human bodies and of entities such as
houses and fences are important determinants of continuity and lon-
gevity in human practices.
A third way materiality is part of society arises from the fact that
biological and physical flows pass through practice-arrangement nex-
uses. Two prominent flows are of matter-energy (e.g., Adams 1988; Dyke
1988) and of organisms and genes (e.g., de Landa 1997; McNeill 1976).
Material arrangements are in some sense crystallizations of matter-
energy flows. They also capture or embrace moments of biological
flows. Viruses, parasites, pests, itinerant workers, and broodmares are
examples of organisms that flow through horse farm practice-arrange-
ment nexuses. Flows of both sorts are also mediated by practices, for
example, by cooking, eating, heating, feeding, constructing, trans-
porting, fumigating, mowing, planting, and racing practices.
Some credit must be given to human labor and technology for draw-
ing materiality into social life. As just suggested, for instance, human
practices can mediate physical and biological flows, and technology
is essential to or intimately embedded in many of these practices. The
movements of workers and broodmares, for instance, depend on hu-
man labor and on such technological objects as carts and horse vans.
Technology itself, moreover, represents an incorporation of materiality-

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nature into human practice: technological objects are either altera-

tions of natural things, transformations of natural things into artifacts,
or reworkings of artifacts already derived from nature. Despite all this,
excessive highlighting by theorists of what Marx (1970) called the
“metabolism” of society with nature, in conjunction with attention to
the role technology plays in mediating society and nature, can occa-
sion an overemphasis of the role of labor and technology in this con-
text. Organisms and matter-energy flow through practice-arrangement
nexuses regardless of whether and how labor and technology chan-
nel, shape, or capture the flows involved. As discussed, furthermore,
because the entities that compose arrangements are physical in char-
acter, physicality is more or less automatically part of social life,
regardless of how much labor and technology shape, arrange, trans-
form, or bring physical entities into being. Materiality pervades social
life regardless of the extent and the ways—which can be quite con-
siderable—that labor and technology contribute to its presence.
Many social phenomena evince a complex mutual mediation and
dependence among human practices, technology, and materiality, in-
cluding nature. Some thinkers who have treated society (or history)
and nature as separate realms have conceptualized technology as
something that mediates between them (Marx 1970; Rothenberg
1992; White 1949). Technology certainly can mediate human prac-
tices and materiality. Horse farm mansion heating systems, for in-
stance, mediate between the physical-chemical composition of oil
and gas—a natural feature of them—and, not just the practice of
warming houses, but other practices carried on there such as cooking,
cleaning, reading, conversing, and bookkeeping. Roofs, meanwhile,
shelter families, workers, and horses from the weather, while farm
employees excavate depressions for ponds with shovels and back-
hoes. There is also a sense, however, in which technology, materiality-
nature, and relations between them depend on human practices.
Consider the heating systems and the physical-chemical composition
of oil and gas. The systems are products of human activity, as is the
presence of oil and gas in them. As a result, the fact that a particular
heating system heats a particular house at a particular moment be-
cause oil or gas combusts in it can be credited to human activity. Sim-
ilarly, backhoes are products of human industrial practices and are
there cutting into soil only because of human activity and as part of
construction practices. But not only does technology mediate prac-
tices and nature, and not only do practices orchestrate technology
and materiality-nature, but materiality-nature enables human prac-

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 
tices, technology, and relations between them. Heating systems, for
instance, heat houses and make houses hospitable for human prac-
tices because of their physical properties, and it is the physical prop-
erties of the metal and other materials from which they are made that
enable them to be forged in human activity. Materiality also mediates
between construction practices and backhoes: it is because of the
physical properties of hands, arms, and eyes, on the one hand, and
handles, wheels, and windshields, on the other hand, that operators
can dig holes with these machines.
All social phenomena evince an entanglement of practices, tech-
nology, and materiality. A Sunday afternoon family ride encompasses
a complex nexus of practices (riding, picnicking, surveying), technol-
ogy (stirrups, thermoses, gates, binoculars, riding clothes), organisms
(horses, insects, trees), and other materialities (the physical properties
of these artifacts, humans, and organisms). The knobs, fields, and
copse floors that are traversed are also very much part of the outing.

Relations between Practices and Arrangements

Social phenomena are slices or features of practice-arrangement nex-

uses. At least four sorts of relation exist among practices and arrange-
ments: causality, prefiguration, constitution, and intelligibility. The
sort of relation that has cropped up most in the above discussion is
causality. Causal relations between practices and arrangements take
many forms. A prominent one is human activity and practices interven-
ing in the world and altering, creating, or rearranging material entities
there. Nonhuman material entities also exert causal effects. When-
ever people react to material properties of entities or to events that be-
fall material entities, the entities—more precisely, the properties or
events—cause their actions. The causality involved is not of the bring-
ing about sort, but instead of the leads to variety: both the properties
of material entities and the events that occur to them lead people to
perform actions and practices to take certain courses. Material enti-
ties also maintain causal relations among themselves: the warming of
heating systems and houses by combusting oil and gas is an example,
as is a virus bringing about disease in a horse and a flooded field re-
sulting from a collapse of the earthen dam that holds back a pond.
Causal relations among the elements of an arrangement (or among
the material events that befall them) clearly affect the practices car-
ried out amid them.

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THEODORE SCHATZKI

A second sort of relation between material arrangements and

practices is prefiguration. Prefiguration is the social present shaping/
influencing/affecting the social future, above all, the nascent social
future. It has become pervasive in recent decades to conceptualize
prefiguration through the notion of fields of possibility. According to
a widespread theoretical intuition, the social present shapes the social
future by laying down a field of possibilities, to which the nascent fu-
ture must hew. Without expanding on this idea or my problems with
it (see Schatzki 2002: ch. 4), I state that to analyze prefiguration as the
delimitation of possibility is to reduce its bearing on the actual course
of practice to a minimum. Prefiguration is better understood as a qual-
ification of possible paths of action on such registers as easy and hard,
obvious and obscure, tiresome and invigorating, short and long, and
so on. Material arrangements clearly prefigure practices in such var-
ied ways. The pond makes it easy to let thirsty horses get a drink, hard
to lead horses directly to the barn from the paddocks (i.e., through the
pond’s middle), and invigorating to gallop one’s mount through its
shallow end. Similarly, a heating system might make it sensible during
the winter to read the morning newspaper indoors, while the con-
ducting properties of outside metal furniture help make it uncomfort-
able to do so on the porch. The particulars of material arrangements
prefigure the course of practices in indefinitely complex ways.
A third relation between practices and arrangements is constitu-
tion. Arrangements constitute practices in two ways. One is by being
essential to them in the sense that the practices could not be carried
on in the absence of the arrangements. Horses, for instance, are es-
sential to the practices of horse riding and horse training. A second,
more common way entities constitute practices is by being perva-
sively involved in particular practices at particular times and places.
It is not essential, for instance, to horse training that ropes and stirrups
be used in the process. These implements, however, have been widely
used in horse training practices over a broad swath of geohistorical
space-time. In this sense, they help constitute these practices in that
portion of geohistory. Indeed almost all practices would not exist or
would take different forms were it not for the presence in them of par-
ticular material entities. The reverse also holds: most arrangements
through which human practices proceed would not exist or would as-
sume different shapes were it not for the particular practices that are
responsible for them and/or carried on amid them. Practices and
arrangements are co-constitutive.3

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 
A final relation between practices and arrangements is intelligibil-
ity: the material entities that make up arrangements are intelligible (in
some ways or other) to the humans who carry on practices amid
them. Elsewhere I (Schatzki 1996) have developed the thesis that how
material entities are intelligible to humans is tied to the practices the
latter carry on.4 Arrangements might also be meaningful to certain
nonhumans that are elements of them (e.g., horses); this controversial
issue cannot be presently addressed. The relevant points at present are
that the arrangements amid which humans proceed are intelligible to
humans and that this intelligibility is instituted in the practices they
carry on.

Illustrative Conclusion: Practice-Material Histories

This article has sought to illustrate one way that social theory can sys-
tematically take materiality into account. The social ontology I advocate
holds that social phenomena are slices or aspects of practice-arrange-
ment nexuses. Materiality is part of, a constituent of, social phenom-
ena: indeed it is inherent to these phenomena.
Various thinkers have conceptualized social and material-natural
states of affairs as conjoined elements of larger complexes. One ex-
ample is Levins and Haila’s (1992) concept of ecological historical
formations, which combine modes of production with the portions of
nature which they metabolize with or systematically alter (see also
Harris 1979). Another is Fischer-Kowalski’s concept of socio-ecologi-
cal regimes, which are structural couplings between social and natu-
ral systems. According to the analysis outlined here, materiality is not
interwoven with social life but, stronger, a dimension of it. Society is
not just inevitably and ubiquitously linked to materiality and nature:
the latter is a dimension of the former. More precisely, almost all so-
cial phenomena have a material dimension comprising the arrange-
ments of material entities in which these phenomena partly consist,
the physical-chemical composition of these entities, and captures or
moments of the matter-energy and biological flows that pass through
these arrangements. This material dimension is causally interdepend-
ent with the human practices that also compose social phenomena.
It, in addition, prefigures and mutually constitutes these practices and
is intelligible to the humans involved by virtue of their practices. So-
cial inquiry, consequently, always investigates phenomena that have

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THEODORE SCHATZKI

a material dimension. The relevance of that dimension to particular

topics of investigation obviously varies.
Over time, social phenomena embrace changing configurations
of materiality. These changing configurations are linked to changes in
practices, technology, and nature (e.g., weather, climate, geological
events). The histories of agriculture and of energy production provide
dramatic, important, and well-explored examples of such changes.
Because materiality, however, is a dimension of all social phenomena,
changing configurations of materiality characterize social life gener-
ally. The particular material arrangements, physical-chemical compo-
sitions, and moments of physical and biological flows that particular
or new social phenomena evince, change over time. Such change can
be seen in the history of the Bluegrass Region in central Kentucky. Re-
lating this history in outline also provides opportunity to describe im-
plications of my ontology for social research.
When the first European people arrived in this area in the mid-
eighteenth century, the landscape they found comprised rolling grass-
land meadows interspersed among relatively sparse copses, denser
stretches of mature hardwood woods, and thick brakes of cane, a
North American relative of bamboo that grows as high as thirty feet.
Scholars disagree about the use Native Americans made of the Blue-
grass Region prior to the settlers’ arrival. It was likely shared hunting
ground. If so, the social phenomena found there prior to the mid-eigh-
teenth century encompassed hunting and camping practices, hunted
bison and elk, and those pieces of the landscape—copses, brakes,
streams—pertinent to hunting and camping. Depending on the prac-
tices the natives carried on, the artifacts they employed, and the actions
of bison, elk, and other material entities, humans, animals, artifacts,
and features of the landscape formed metamorphosing arrangements.
Some of the white settlers who arrived in the Bluegrass stayed to
live there. They brought with them from eastern lands practices and
technology, as well as domestic, commensal, and microbial organ-
isms, and altered these practices and technology in response to the
materialities they encountered in their new home. Toward the end of
the eighteenth century, the Bluegrass contained social formations that
differed from those previously found there. These formations em-
braced materialities different from the ones that had characterized In-
dian social life. Coordinately with the importation of cattle, pigs, and
horses from Virginia, trees and brakes of cane were chopped or burnt
down and replaced by grass pastures, crop land, and clearings for
houses. The bison and elk that had figured prominently in Indian so-

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 
cial affairs were slowly eliminated. Crops such as corn, hemp, and to-
bacco were sewn and became part of social existence in the Blue-
grass, which now included a new form of materiality—tended-to crops.
Practices of husbandry and agriculture, as well as European versions
of hunting practices employing technologies different from those used
by Indians, laid down and depended on newly built arrangements
such as pens, barns, paths, roads, fields, and fences. Other imported
practices such as those of trading, cooking, child raising, and slave
holding likewise established and rested on further new built arrange-
ments encompassing houses, roads, porches, wash houses, shacks,
and the like. Social life in the Bluegrass thus evolved from hunting
and camping focused on particular game and keyed to landscape fea-
tures relatively unaffected by these practices to a mix of new eco-
nomic and domestic practices that were attuned as well as tied both
to features of a newly built and otherwise altered landscape and to an
evolving cast of organisms.
The American Civil War in the 1860s wreaked havoc on Bluegrass
farms. The practices of the Union and Confederate armies, in con-
junction with the fears of the local residents and the vulnerabilities of
the built and natural environment, resulted in damage to, neglect of,
and abandonment of farms. The abolition of slavery also contributed
to the decline of agriculture by depriving prior agricultural practices
of the humans that had been carrying them on. After the war, wealth-
ier northerners migrated to the area and bought farmsteads. Largely
for aesthetic considerations and reasons of class, these newcomers
were interested in breeding, rearing, and racing horses instead of in
husbandry and agriculture. New economic and domestic practices,
imported from northern states (and England), came to be carried out
in the Bluegrass, requiring and producing new technologies and re-
sulting in and depending on new arrangements on the land that ac-
commodated and shaped the practices involved. An impressive first
version of the sort of practice-arrangement complex that later came to
be known as a horse farm had been built in the region in the 1850s
(see Domer 2005). Over the second half of the nineteenth century,
many horse farms roughly modeled on this original came into being,
propagating largely the same practices, using the same artifacts, and
imposing similar built environments on the extant landscape. This
rapid dissemination of practices, artifacts, and arrangements also fos-
tered their diversification. These farms were set up on the best lands.
The practice-arrangement nexuses that were the combined crop and
stock farms of the antebellum period slowly disappeared or migrated

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THEODORE SCHATZKI

to poorer lands at the margins of the region. The Bluegrass horse farm
world thus took shape. By the end of the century, its beauty was ex-
tolled throughout the United States (e.g., in magazines), and tourists
began to visit the region, introducing new practices (e.g., sightseeing,
touring) and requiring and abetting new practice-arrangement nex-
uses (e.g., inns, tours, better roads).
Both the practice and the material dimensions of social affairs in
the Bluegrass had again evolved. Practices of horse breeding, horse
care, horse raising, as well as domestic, recreational, and aesthetic
practices tied to a gentry lifestyle, had come to dominate where camp-
ing and hunting pursued for utilitarian and spiritual ends had once
held sway. The land had become organized and manicured for the
raising of horses and in pursuit of particular aesthetic values and ideas,
and a previously unknown infrastructure of hospitality and tourist
practices carried out amid new arrangements had arisen. Meanwhile,
particular grasses and legumes were being grown to maintain equine
production, while trees were being strategically planted in the middle
of paddocks and along lanes. A few brakes of cane and wooded ar-
eas remained and continued to be hunting grounds (for now highly
stylized fox hunting practices decoupled from camping). Combined
with the departure of most stock and crops, a quite changed organis-
mic regime had evolved.
The artifactual component of Bluegrass arrangements had also
dramatically changed. The arrangements characterizing Indian hunt-
ing grounds were relatively free of human-made structures: paths and
trampled camping sites were the prominent artifactual features, though
Indians also sometimes set off fires that caused limited destruction (a
hybrid sort of phenomenon). Now the land contained elaborate, or-
ganized built environments. Far-flung farm arrangements included
and centered on the technology, buildings, and artifact-land-organism
configurations relevant to the breeding and training of horses. The
wider built environment comprised horse barns, breeding sheds,
copses, tree lined roadways, and miles of plank and stone fences that
enclosed paddocks, fields, and property. A park-like ambiance reigned.
These changes symbolically came together in the use of fences to en-
close wooded pastures as deer parks, a clairvoyant mix of aesthetics,
artifactuality, and nature utterly alien to Indian worlds.
The history of the material dimension of social life in the Blue-
grass is neither dramatic nor terribly significant for understanding the
specific histories of events at other geographical locations. It simply

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 
illustrates the continual evolution of both the material dimension of
and the practice-arrangement nexuses that constitute the social phe-
nomena in a given geographical location. A similar tale can be told
about innumerable other locations.
The history does, however, substantialize implications of my on-
tology for social research. In particular, it illustrates two of the three
ways in which social ontologies bear on social research: providing con-
cepts and suggesting research topics. The theoretical concepts through
whose lens the above history was told were practices, arrangements
(thus technology and materiality), and practice-arrangement nexuses.
To tell the history through these concepts is to be directed to these
phenomena in telling it. This involves, among other things, identifying
the practices, and not just the actions, that are carried out at particu-
lar geographical locations. It also involves describing social affairs as
encompassing arrangements of humans, organisms, artifacts, and things
that are tied in various ways to these practices. Now, the concept of
practices diverges from the notions of action and activity with which
social researchers usually work, whereas the concept of arrangements
denotes configurations of entities of often counterposed types. A his-
tory told in terms of practices and practice-arrangement nexuses reads
differently from one told through the concepts of other theoretical
schemes. How differently depends on the specifics of these other
schemes. To take just two examples, whereas accounts inspired by my
ontology will resemble actor-network inspired accounts insofar as the
concept of arrangements resembles that of networks, they will diverge
from these accounts, among other things, in their constant attention
to practices and to relations between practices and arrangements. Ac-
counts inspired by my ontology diverge even more dramatically from
those based on the systems approach of Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz
(1999), which highlights systems such as those of material world, hu-
man society, nature, and culture, studies exchanges between these
systems, and ties intelligibility and meaning to abstract cultural sys-
tems instead of to practices. Because my ontology gainsays the sepa-
ration of society and nature, accounts inspired by it will also not search
for or speak of interactions, exchanges, or dialectical relations between
society and nature or between very many social and natural things.
More detailed histories and analyses than the one provided here
will identify further practices, arrangements, and nexuses. They might
also examine such matters as the organizations of practices, above all,
the teleologies and general understandings that animate them. My

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THEODORE SCHATZKI

history touches on this topic but does not begin to plumb it. More de-
tailed accounts might also describe particular significant arrange-
ments, for instance, those that decisively contributed to the evolution
of practice-arrangement nexuses or were particularly noteworthy sym-
bolically or to the people involved.
Mention of these further objects of investigation commences con-
sideration of the new issues that my ontology suggests. One promi-
nent such issue is how practices and arrangements are tied together
as nexuses. Investigating social phenomena through my ontology di-
rects attention to how practices and arrangements causally relate,
how arrangements prefigure practices, how practices and arrangements
constitute one another, and how the world is made intelligible through
practices. Another new task is investigating how practice-arrangement
nexuses are connected and, as connected, form still wider formations.
Two final implications. The first is that, as a general principle, my
ontology suggests that explanations of social phenomena should be
sought in the specifics of pertinent practice-arrangement nexuses and
the events that happen to them. All happenings and changes in social
life result or arise from the events, processes, and actions occurring in
and to these nexuses. My history gives some feel for this implication,
but it does not systematically display it. Second, the fact that the his-
tory I told is informed by theoretical concepts might be partly hidden
by what I would call the phenomenological, or better experiential,
valence of my conceptual scheme. In addition to enhancing the veri-
similitude of the theory (over against alternative such as Fischer-
Kowalski’s social-ecological regimes or Latour’s actor-network theory),
this experiential purchase might veil the theoretical character and
provenance of the scheme. I believe that one noteworthy outcome of
writing histories and analyzing contemporary phenomena with these
experientially resonant concepts is that history and the contemporary
world seem less systematic or ordered and more labyrinthine and
contingent than they do when described and analyzed through the
conceptual armature of many other theories.

Acknowledgments

I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal
for extraordinarily insightful and constructive comments, suggestions,
and criticisms on an earlier version of this article.

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 MATERIALITY AND SOCIAL LIFE 


Theodore Schatzki is Arts and Sciences Dean of Faculty and Professor of Phi-
losophy at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Social Practices:
A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (1996), The
Site of the Social: A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social
Life and Change (2002), Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (2007), and
The Timespace of Human Activity: Performance, Society, and History as
Teleological Events (2010).


Notes
1. Weigert (1991) argues that the basic form of interactions between human so-
cial actors and environmental others parallels the basic form of interactions between
human actors and human others (though there are also important differences). Each,
for example, has symbolic and causal dimensions and symbolic and causal outcomes
His account portrays the human social world as in symbolic and causal interaction
with the natural world from which it evolves and of which it is in some sense a mode.
2. Information in this article about the Bluegrass Region comes from personal ex-
perience and research as well as Domer (2005), Raitz (1975), Raitz and Van Domme-
len (1990), and Wilson (1941).
3. Freudenburg et al. make a complementary point: “What is needed is a greater
awareness of the extent to which the physical … is influenced by the social … and
vice versa. [What] have commonly been taken to be ‘physical facts’ are likely in many
cases to have been shaped strongly by social construction processes, while at the
same time, even what appear to be ‘strictly social’ phenomena are likely to have been
shaped in important if overlooked ways by the fact that social behaviors often respond
to stimuli and constraints from the biophysical world” (1995: 366).
4. Carl Knappett (2005) makes networks of material objects and accompanying
networks of human practices central to the conception of the social that he recom-
mends to archaeologists. Because Knappett is an archaeologist, perhaps it is not sur-
prising that he writes almost nothing about the second sort of network, focuses entirely
on material networks, and draws on the ideas of Charles Pierce to argue that the
meanings of objects arise from the object networks of which they are part. By contrast,
on Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian accounts such as my own, intelligibility arises
from practices, a vanishing archaeological quantity.

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