What is it about?
Modern people are often afraid of the material things that surround them taking over their lives. "Materialism" was from the outset a specter that haunted Protestants, not least because they were so closely involved with the rise of capitalist culture and its focus on producing, selling and consuming things. This essay outlines how such Protestant fears of matters were transmitted to science, largely by following secular scientists who descended from Dissenting (marginal Protestant) communities. Especially Thomas Henry Huxley is a good example of how such Dissenting fears of matter ended up in British anthropology and natural history in the 1870s and 1880s.
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Why is it important?
The study of material culture has generated much progress in social science theories and research programmes. However, even many material culture studies often hesitate to grant things the agency they have in people's everyday lives. They still proclaim that humans (ought to) have control over the materials things that surround them and determine their lives. This essay shows that these anti-materialist biases were introduced into secular science from Protestant Christian sources, and thereby allows us to criticize and correct them.
Perspectives
This essay formed a crucial chapter in a book I finished in 2018 entitled "The Spirit of Matter: Religion, Modernity and the Power of Objects". The book extends the argument to the theory of material culture studies in general, to museums and photographic collections and exhibitions, and to the problem of commodity fetishism today.
Peter Pels
Universiteit Leiden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The modern fear of matter: reflections on the protestantism of victorian science, Material Religion, November 2008, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.2752/175183408x376656.
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