As pointed out in the introduction, incidentalness is a challenge for the study of culture. This applies not only to anthropological and archaeological approaches, but to any discipline that produces descriptions of cultures. As I will explain in more detail, in the framework of more detailed empirical studies dealing with things, the challenge is not only one of ‘method’, but also in terms of ‘research artefacts’, such as the tendency to overestimate meaning. Basically, this is about the question of how cultures should be described and what role everyday things play in cultural change. In this comment, I shall develop the hypothesis that the place of the individual in a society and in his or her material environment as part of everyday culture is adequately described only when incidentalness has a prominent role. Furthermore, I argue that incidentalness is a condition that is unstable, if not transient and ephemeral in terms of temporality. Innovation and cultural change are often related to this specific form of instability in time. Things are eclipsed from incidentalness and, at a certain historical moment, may become central vehicles of meaning in a society, or vice versa: things are shifted to the status of casualness, and the collective awareness shifts to other fields.

I consider it as one of the greatest challenges for current Material Culture Studies to deal adequately with the side-by-side existence of objects with quite different relevance and to be sensitive to the co-presence of things that differ tremendously with regard to appreciation and awareness. Whenever someone proceeds to describe things with more precision, their importance changes. It is impossible to identify and document an object with painstaking care and simultaneously to keep its incidental character. Through description, the ‘unimportant’ achieves a considerable amount of importance; by thorough analysis, objects of minimal or rather opaque meaning are placed alongside others that are much more prominent.

In a rather specific sense, dealing with material culture has a long tradition in Western thought. As Jean-Baptiste Vico highlighted in his ‘New Science’ from 1725, the imagined language of things pre-exists the spoken language. No matter whether we refer in the first place to the so-called ‘language of the goods’ or the ‘language of heraldry’, both are based on ‘objects’ that are relevant beyond the purely linguistic level (Vico Reference Vico1948, 124ff). It is this object-sign-meaning which in Vico's perspective bears the characteristic of unambiguous communication (Trabant Reference Trabant2004). Jacob Böhme's major work De Signatura Rerum is quite similar. His much-quoted statement ‘Every object has its mouth’ reflects a paradoxical overestimation of the meaningfulness of the material (Böhme Reference Böhme2009).

If we embed these quite specific arguments from the intellectual history of Europe into a wider context, namely the idealistic ways of thinking since Greek philosophy, we are confronted with a fundamental dichotomy. On the one hand, there is a long tradition of the primacy of thoughts and marginalization of the material. On the other hand, there is the idea that some specific objects can rise from the field of the meaningless and marginalized into the sphere of the ideal, the thinking and the meaningful. Consequently, only these selected, special things can be acknowledged as equal elements in the production of meaning and the meaningful (Küchler Reference Küchler and Clarke2011; Lemonnier Reference Lemonnier2014). This mode of thinking the material is nicely visualized in Michelangelo's painting entitled The Creation of Adam. It shows how the mythical first man, Adam, a weak, mindless, and fleshy creature, is brought to life by the outstretched finger of God. Only when sparked by the ‘breath of the spiritual’ (i.e. the ‘ideal’) does ‘crude matter’ become a meaningful entity.

This historically dominant mode of thinking the material is close to some implicit assumptions of current material culture studies. This statement applies especially to the observation that, with the conceptual tools dominant throughout the last 30 years, it is hardly possible to describe an object without simultaneously changing its status. Every careful and nuanced description implicitly causes the object to become something different. Description and interpretation of the meaning brings the things closer to the mind of the investigator. Thus things neglected and incidental on an everyday basis become something special. The challenge of describing something without changing its status was also acknowledged by Immanuel Kant. He may have been the first to remark that a contextual (embedded) perspective stands in contrast to the idea of gaining a more detailed perception. As indicated by the opening quotation, for Kant estrangement (außer sich sein) is the appropriate mode for objectivity.

‘Bringing into the light’ the previously marginal and insignificant is the implicit but fundamental and also problematic agenda of material culture studies. Thus, as described by Ian Bogost and David Bloor, they create a dystopia of an awful human lifeworld (Bloor Reference Bloor1999; Bogost Reference Bogost2012). If anyone were able to create a complete and comprehensive analysis of all things in his lifeworld, the result would be a cosmos excessively charged with meanings. The individual would be nothing more than a marionette moving alongside important, luminous and essentially meaningful objects.

Studies of material culture have the tendency to attribute a higher valuation to or undertake a wider exploration of the meanings of the things under study. Thus, ‘empathy for the meaningful’ leads researchers to omit the incidental character of many things (Coupaye & Douny Reference Coupaye and Douny2009, 33). The specificity of things as being culturally most relevant when they are disregarded or overlooked has also been described by Daniel Miller (Reference Miller and Miller2005, 5). He uses the term ‘humility’ in order to describe the efficiency of embedded material objects. This expression, which is in some regards similar to incidentalness, highlights the fact that regarding material objects in culturally defined contexts, efficiency and awareness are very often inversely correlated. The less one is aware of the object, the better this item fulfils its role in the given context.

Obviously, close and detailed description contrasts with such forms of embedding. When scholars from the humanities produce such descriptions, this may lead to a model of the world in which many things are singled out and upgraded in meaning and specificity. At this point, the parallels with Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty become obvious. At the very moment when a material thing is observed and thus defined in its position, it is also created as a piece of matter (Barad Reference Barad, Dolphijn and Tuin2012, 66). The observer never can be who she/he thinks to be. Instead, s/he is the creator of the findings s/he claims to observe.

How is it possible to escape from this problem? One possible strategy is to search for material culture studies that explicitly address meaningless or worthless things. This is a relevant topic in the field of consumer criticism. As early as 1900, consumer critics warned against cheap, tasteless and widely available consumer goods. They believed that mass-produced industrial goods could never have the same value or the same usability as comparable, crafted items. Consumer critics, then and now, have a solution to this problem at hand: they demand the renunciation of the superfluous and the reduction of material possessions. We are urged to own less and limit what we have to only the essential things (Hahn Reference Hahn2005, 66ff; Miller Reference Miller2001) Such scenarios develop a basic dichotomy between the essential, tasteful and meaningful on the one hand and the superfluous and worthless on the other.

However, the questionable character of such a distinction is regularly omitted. The uncertainty of assigning a particular object to the group of ‘worthless items’ or to the ‘meaningful objects’ is underestimated. Ethnographic observations of everyday things bring up quite different evaluations of seemingly valueless objects: at any given time, it may happen that an object, long since neglected or forgotten, becomes an important, meaningful and sometimes even extremely valuable item for its owner. No less common is the reverse dynamic: things that were acquired because they were highly esteemed, valuable and extraordinary consumer goods lose their attractiveness over time and end up, more or less forgotten, in a drawer. Good examples are old mobile phones and the broken watch that has been dropped somewhere.

The material environment is full of such things that perhaps might evoke events or habits of the past, but that have long since lost their meanings in everyday life. Modern households are regularly stuck with such things that their owners do not use any more and simultaneously are unable to get rid of (Arnold et al. Reference Arnold, Graesch, Ragazzini and Ochs2012). It is a typical feature of things that their meanings and relevance change. Part of the fundamental observations about such ongoing shifts in attention and valuation is the tendency not to shift away from the owner's consciousness. Appreciation and devaluation are processes that are quite often beyond the control of the owner. Only in a few isolated cases are they subject to the intentions of the possessor or user. This includes a quite important critique of Heidegger's notion of ‘Zeug’. Heidegger assumes that the incidental character and the embeddedness of ‘stuff’ is a permanent condition, whereas I intend to highlight the shifts in status of things (Thevenot Reference Thevenot1994). Something that had for long been considered as ‘stuff’ may become highly meaningful, semiotically speaking a dense object, and vice versa. Things that were once important are, at a later time, marginalized, if not absolutely forgotten. Scholarly approaches to material culture tend to stabilize the status of the item under examination and thereby suggest a quite problematic stability of the material environment.

When I carried out research concerning material possessions in Burkina Faso, covering 17 households with a total of 50 adults and 81 children, I found an average number of less than 100 objects per person (Hahn Reference Hahn, Burmeister and Müller-Scheeßel2006). My expectation was that these men and women would know their few things better and treat them more carefully than individuals in a consumer society. This has proven to be completely false. In the course of the ethnographic research, I found that contempt, forgetfulness and neglect of things is as widespread as in a consumer society where most individuals own between 3000 and 5000 objects. Limited property ownership does not correlate with greater care in dealing with things. After coming to this conclusion, I began to collect literature on this topic. There is a small number of references that confirm my finding about the negligence in dealing with things in the context of few material possessions (Dugast Reference Dugast1955; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2000).

One could distil a critique of consumer criticism from this finding. Accordingly, the dichotomy between low ownership and high esteem on the one hand and many possessions and low esteem on the other hand is unfounded. Maybe it is the other way round: Could it not be that people in high ownership, consumerist societies pay the most attention to the many things they have in their households? The modern, consumer-oriented individual, busy with keeping control of his plethoric possessions, might therefore be considered a slave to his consumerism, because he is fundamentally influenced by paying the highest possible attention to his things. Thus, I would argue that the basic dichotomy assumed by consumer critics does not exist. With regard to ‘incidentalness’, this has some important consequences. Incidentalness is by no means a result of abundantly available mass-produced everyday goods, and it is not a consequence of consumerism.

With this I come to the first point of my conclusion: the incidentalness of things is something universal, not limited to modern consumer culture and its new quantitative heights of material possessions. Things with a neglected or ambiguous status are much more widespread than the critics of modern society assume. Therefore, it is all the more important that the incidental character be acknowledged as a widespread and fundamental feature and be highlighted accordingly.

Since the emergence of semiotic approaches in studies of culture during the 1970s, semioticians have tried to describe the specificity of material items. While Roland Barthes was still rather sceptical in this regard at least in his ‘Fashion System’ (Barthes Reference Barthes1983), his French colleagues were much more positive about the meaningfulness of things. Jean Baudrillard and Abraham Moles proclaimed their vision of revealing the meanings of lifeworld, milieu and social structure through an analysis of everyday material things (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1968; Moles Reference Moles1972). In contrast, semiotician Jürgen Trabant was more sceptical. He characterized material culture only in such a way that objects are ‘permanent sign bearers’ (Trabant Reference Trabant1976). Although this statement appears rather blunt, it only reveals half of the truth. He simply did not consider that the significance of material objects is very often quite ambiguous. Although it might be true that material things are ‘permanent signifiers’, we have to take into account that objects are ‘weak signifiers’.

Some years later, still in the framework of semiotics, Winfried Nöth worked out a specific feature of the sign quality of things that is important for our topic. Nöth suggested the metaphor of a ‘threshold of conscious perception’ (Nöth Reference Nöth2000, 518f). If placed above this threshold, we consciously perceive objects and their meaning. This refers, for example, to such special things as branded clothing, jewellery, luxury goods, expensive liquors, etc. Below that threshold things might still mean something, but in everyday life people are unable to express such meanings explicitly; this is where we can place incidentalness. However, although this model of a threshold is appealing, Nöth did not tackle the question of the relative share of things on each side, above and below the threshold. How many things remain indeterminate or implicit in everyday perception?

This is the second point of my conclusion: we have still no indication how many mundane things are below the threshold and how many we can legitimately place above. How many things in the human environment are characterized by incidentalness? My concern is that material culture studies have a tendency to push whatever is under examination above that threshold and to assign it meaning where there would not be any in the absence of examination. The metaphor of the threshold reminds us that there are quite a lot of incidental objects.

The third point of the conclusion has to do with the repeated shifts between what is ‘incidental’ and what has explicit meaning. My argument is that people live quite well without knowing the actual status of their possessions. Things may be neglected, meaningless, lost from consciousness, but at a later moment re-emerge and become important. In contrast to Heidegger's ‘stuff’, incidentalness should be considered as an inherently unstable category. Incidentalness is a manifest feature of things at a particular moment, but lost at another one.

This is particularly well exemplified in a study by Tamas Hofer. He studied households in a Hungarian village as early as the 1950s, and he was particularly interested in the importance of objects related to livestock and agriculture. Many years later, he wrote an essay dealing with the juxtaposition of intensively used and already half-forgotten tools (Hofer Reference Hofer and Wiegelmann1979). In the households he studied, he found an average of around 1000 items per individual, with significant differences between poor families and wealthier ones. At an initial level, his interpretation highlights the variation in total numbers of objects per household. Even more important in that later publication, however, was the observation that some frequently used agricultural tools were present twice or three times in most households. The farmers said that the old, defective items would be repaired in the event that the new implement should suddenly become unusable. Thus, the old and damaged tools were of no importance except in the situation where there might be a need to replace those which were currently in regular use. Hofer uses this explanation to show how things are placed side-by-side without having the same meaning. The important and meaningful, i.e. the frequently used tools, are quite close to the marginalized, almost forgotten and incidental ones.

Hofer uses the metaphor of the ‘Universe of Things’ in order to draw attention to the unequal juxtaposition of material objects. In fact, the metaphor of the ‘universe’ covers a wide range of different entities at the researcher's fingertips. A ‘universe’ includes bright suns, planets and also those remote moons that are hard to detect. Furthermore, the universe includes comets and asteroids, whose status is often uncertain.

With regard to incidentalness, this enables me finally me to conclude that neglected and forgotten things are no less important than the meaningful and valued object. As the Hungarian farmers would say, the simultaneous and equilibrated presence of the ‘important’ with the ‘incidental’ is the right composition of the material world in order to be prepared for unpredictable eventualities. The frequency and the roles of incidental objects might be underestimated by material culture scholars, however, in the context of pragmatic dealing with the challenges of everyday life; the incidental things are as important as those other, valued items.