Goitein, Sachkultur, Civilisation Matérielle, Material Culture

On a single page of A Mediterranean Society. Volume IV: Daily Life (1983), after the final page of text, S. D. Goitein penned “A Note on Sachkultur." The statement, all of five paragraphs long, is presented as orientation for the Anglophone reader for whom the term would have been unfamiliar. Goitein implies that this knowledge was somehow essential for making sense of his text. He does not define the concept but, instead, provides a reading list focused exclusively on medieval scholarship. We are to assume that he found these works to be especially useful.

How are we to grasp Goitein's understanding of the term Sachkultur? Even more, why did Goitein, then living in Princeton, identify his work with a German term and cite contemporary German-language literature?

Goitein's seemingly casual presentation of Sachkultur is an invitation to explore the history and meaning of this term within the traditions of German scholarship on the study of things. As with his encounter with Fernand Braudel and the French tradition of material history, there is no certainty that Goitein actually read these books. Yet, intriguingly, in the two other places in Volume IV where he mentions Sachkultur, he calls it “material civilization,” a phrase in which we can hear a lingering echo of Braudel's civilisation matérielle.

In this paper I will compare Sachkultur with the contemporary Anglophone category of material culture and the French civilisation matérielle as they developed starting in the 1980s. Informed by this literature, we can begin the task of imagining a different Daily Life.