THE THINGS THAT MAKE US WHO WE ARE
Our cultural values get baked into the materials we create, changing humanity along the way
Humans spend a lot of time and effort making stuff. At last count, humanity has created more than 100,000 different materials from which we build our cities, our clothing, our smartphones, our world. Without our stuff, we would be naked, vulnerable, and, arguably, not very human. The question of how much of our humanity is due to this material wealth and how our cultural values are baked into the materials we create is the subject of Ainissa Ramirez’s fascinating new treatise, The Alchemy of Us.[…] The book’s central thesis is that we make materials and materials make us. […]
Ramirez’s meditation on the materials that have facilitated community (“share”) is particularly illuminating. Here, she writes about the phonograph’s impact on how music was enjoyed. The ability to record music meant that the experience of listening to it no longer had to be a communal one. […] – but it also opened up uncharted horizons. The recordings allowed a cross-fertilization of musical culture between jazz, blues, and rock and roll, even as the musicians themselves remained segregated by race politics.
On the subject of race and racial discrimination, Ramirez argues that a society that is racist will reflect racism in the substances that it makes. For example, photographic film, she writes, was largely developed by white people for white people. Because dark skin absorbs more light than white skin, early photographs of black people were often underexposed, rendering images that were barely recognizable. […]
Ramirez is particularly keen to debunk the idea that materials arise from flashes of insight experienced by extraordinary individuals, instead painting a picture of a diverse range of people from all walks of life driven by love, passion, and intellect. The culture of innovation, she maintains, does not belong only to privileged elites, it can be found in all those who care enough to reinvent the material world and, as a result, themselves.
Mark Miodownik, Science, 03 Apr 2020.
The word stuff in BOLD in the first paragraph of text is