Touching materiality: Presenting the past of everyday school life

Abstract

Dripping ink pens, colourful paint on skin, vegetables pots on a school roof. In interviews with three generations of former school pupils, memories of material objects bore a relation to everyday school life in the past. Interwoven, these objects entered the memorizing processes, taking the interviewer and interviewee beyond an exclusively linguistic understanding of memory. This article analyses how the shifting objects of materiality in personal and generational school memories connects to material as well as sensuous experiences of everyday school life and its complex processes of learning. Drawing on anthropological writings, the article argues that the objects of materiality are part of important but non-verbalized memories of schooling. The Dutch philosopher Eelco Runia’s notions of presence and metonymy are incorporated as tools for approaching objects of materiality in memory studies.