Concluding Discussion to Part II

The chapter draws together themes in the material studied in Part II; as well as summarizing some of the principal findings from the individual chapters, it examines in particular how the artefacts studied, and the activities associated with them, related to life course stages, and how they contributed to wider aspects of social practice and social experience. The consideration of objects in relation to the life course illustrates that everyday objects were important as a means to inhabit and perform particular roles, especially socialization into roles at the thresholds between different life course stages such as the transition between adolescence and adulthood. Domestic artefact evidence is also shown to illuminate wider aspects of social practice and experience, developing understanding of the social functions and values of the objects, their multiple roles including status display, and the experiences to which they contributed, and achieving insights through the comparison of the different activities under study. The sensory qualities of the objects, and how sensation was important to particular activities, are also explored briefly, as well as the amuletic properties of functional and other artefacts, which may have protected processes and products, as well as users. It is suggested that amuletic qualities included the sounds of objects, as well as their appearance. In this chapter, it is also considered how the dress objects examined in Part I, and the functional material considered in Part II, were integrated together into the wider social context.