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Jan Apel
It should be obvious to us that the difference between the inside and outside
examples of how certain technologies are protected from insight by restrict
ing the theoretical knowledge involved. I have collected several examples
these. I have a friend who worked at Arlanda airport, transporting baggage
a special computer. This procedure was effectively guarded by a few workers
all were supposed to make the registrations. The registration procedure in
itself was simple and demanded no sophisticated training and thus, control
had to be executed by exclusion. While it may be possible to make this kind
of study in our own contexts, it is easier to make them in a cultural context
of which you are not a part. This is the true advantage of working from a
material culture studies.
Once we avoid the temptation to only try to understand how the prehis
toric agents experienced their world, thus avoiding making “accounts of ac
categories that break with folk categories, the point may very well be reached
when the distance between “them” and “us”, cultural as well as chronologi
cal, disappears. The knowledge gained through studying material remains of
people in other contexts may then be used to study aspects of our own soci
ety because we are forced to see ourselves from the outside. We might even
realise that the symbolic economy in evidence in traditional technologies is
uncomfortably familiar. Perhaps it is now time for archaeologists, engaged in
material culture studies, to focus less on writing cultural historical interpre
tation of how it once was and instead develop a study of material culture that
may help us to understand ourselves through our relation to things.
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