Material culture may be defined as the human significance of the totality of tangible artifacts that humans have produced. These artifacts range from the mundane and perishable to the monumental and enduring, and have been linked together in distinctive ways across place and time. Scholarly attention to material culture beyond technical analyses is divided among mainstream disciplines such as history and anthropology and specializations such as art history, archaeology, history of technology, cultural geography, and philosophy of technology. In all instances, questions of the ethical implications of material culture call for reflective consideration.

Basic Transformations

Despite the manifold plurality of material cultures across places and times, the Industrial Revolution of late-eighteenth-century England introduced a watershed into human history that began a radical transformation in the general character of material culture across all of its permutations. The steam engine for the first time in human history provided...