The hundreds of thousands of fragmentary documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza have made it possible to reconstruct daily life and material culture in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds between 950 and 1250. S. D. Goitein opened up this field in his five-volume A Mediterranean Society (1967–93), devoting a volume to what he called “daily life” — which we would now call material culture. In this volume, published in 1983, he discusses the home and its furnishings, clothing and jewelry, crafts and the bazaar, shipping and mounts, take-out food and wine recipes, the street and the port.

But the volume is, characteristically, virtually silent on its own theoretical presuppositions. Goitein explained what he was doing in a single page devoted to what he called Sachkultur, a term that appears to have a solid German academic pedigree.

In decoding the documents’ rich technical vocabulary for objects, materials, and techniques, Goitein relied on one of the founders of the field of Islamic art history, Richard Ettinghausen. But his relationship to art history and archeology remains either casual or opaque or both. The four intervening decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarship on material culture in art history, archaeology, history and anthropology. All this water under the bridge persuaded us to ask what a fresh look at the world of material culture in the Geniza documents could look like given what we know not only about material culture, but also about the medieval Middle East and Indian Ocean, whose history has been transformed by precisely the documents Goitein opened up.

The four panelists will approach this question from different angles. Peter Miller will evaluate Goitein’s Sachkultur in its own intellectual context — especially that of early twentieth-century German thought — and in light of today’s richly theorized field of material culture. Elizabeth Lambourn will make real objects speak to Geniza texts, putting the last several decades of archaeological findings and theory into the picture for the first time. Lorenzo Bondioli will explore what Goitein called the “semipublic spaces” of the ports, the Houses — caravanserais coupled with bourses and toll-stations, and above all, mechanisms for ensuring that objects of exchange passed the scrutiny of state functionaries — with an eye to the social production of space and the political economy of medieval Egypt. Marina Rustow will reconstruct the object-biography — from raw material to millennium-old artifact — of the most pervasive object in Goitein’s research apparatus, but one he never discussed: documents on paper.