Material Culture is the personal statement of Henry Glassie, a distinguished folklorist who has devoted his career to studying technology in cultural context. Actually, the term "technology" rarely appears, but the book's subject matter--the multifaceted relationships of objects to the lives of their makers and users--is what studies of technology should be about. Glassie seeks to reorient studies of history and art by furnishing an antidote to the End Page 791 postmodern pall that has settled over humanistic research. Rejecting postmodern dichotomies, he suggests that upon studies of material culture we can build new intellectual practice that transcends disciplines and is "at once humanistic and scientific" (p. 1) and attentive to both objective reality (artifacts and behavior) and subjective experience. I agree.
Michael Brian Schiffer (Sun,) studied this question.