Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis

What can actor-network theory’s approach to analyzing objects offer to cultural sociology? To answer this question we ask a more specific one: How does materiality affect people’s experience of art in a museum exhibition? Research at two museums suggests that non-human agents—object and words—interact with human bodies to choreograph the art encounter. This process works through interactions between two processes of emplacement: physical position and cognitive location. Position guides location in the process of meaning-making, a relationship mediated by three mechanisms: distance, legibility, and orientation.