Chapter 2 - The logic(s) of material culture

Summary

To call an object a “bibelot” is to place it in a category, therefore to classify it. Categorizing and classifying are key steps in the processes of organizing and establishing order. And yet, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, the category “bibelot” is fraught with ambiguity, put to often contradictory uses as a result of the disparities among the items that the category includes. Complicating matters is the consideration that the category “bibelot” calls forth several networks of terms used to classify, describe, and evaluate the various objects included within it, terms from the lexicons of the fine arts, the decorative arts, interior decor, collecting, the souvenir, commerce, home economics, and more. If, as I have suggested, the creation of the category “bibelot” is part of a modern and modernizing reconfiguration, reorganization, and recodification of material culture necessitated by a multiplication of objects in daily life, then what kind of reorganization is this? What kind of logic can accommodate or even account for such a disorderly order?

Bourdieu's notion of the “logic of practice” can be usefully applied to the contradictions and ambiguities of the category “bibelot.” The “logic of practice” is to be understood in opposition to the logic of analysis used by modernist scholars such as anthropologists (in the structuralist tradition), sociologists (in the positivist tradition), or philosophers of art (in the Kantian tradition).