Material Matters: The Duality of Persons and Objects in Everyday Life of an Artistic Community

The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of materiality in dual ordering of the social and the cultural. Within Bourdieusian theoretical tradition, we argue that throughout trivial everyday material activities, often unnoticed but concrete, culture continuously intertwines with interpersonal ties, ordering the micro structure of physically collocated individuals and objects with regard to social macro structure. To enable a search of the principles of socio-material micro structuring, the paper proposes a mixed method network-analytical approach that combines ethnographic and statistical (multilevel exponential random graph models) components. We study a collective of artists based in Barcelona, Spain and find that in the everyday life of small groups material culture not only facilitates the reproduction of social fields, but also mediates between them, invisibly securing cohesion in the collective that ‘large’ social forces are taking apart.