Seite - 24 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

24 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation Thing Theory, a theory of objects as described in literary texts.5 This state of affairs has created an exciting interdisciplinarity, but no discipline has contributed more to the current frameworks in material culture studies than has anthropology.6 Anthro- pologists have long relied on objects as a primary source for analyzing human behav- ior, social structures, and cultural perceptions of the world. This tendency emerged purely out of necessity, since from many eras of human history, especially distant history, objects are all that survive. In this manner, anthropology abuts archaeology and art history in being disciplines that attempt to understand human experience at specific moments in our shared history as well as in different cultural settings through objects. Yet anthropology has recently developed new dimensions to object studies, which focus less on past cultures or on anthropology’s other traditional focus, the experi- ences of pre-technological cultures, ones which modernity has affected in only minor ways. A movement has occurred that seeks to apply anthropological frameworks to modern cultures and to contemporary, often mass-produced objects. The leader of this shift has been the community of anthropologists at University College Lon- don, and its most visible spokesperson has been Daniel Miller.7 Beginning in the 1980s, Miller advocated understanding material culture – the study of objects – as a major project within anthropology, and likewise proposed it as a useful framework for understanding the ways that modern individuals in advanced, industrialized, late capitalistic societies coexist with their things. The way in which a person relates to an iPhone is complex and filters through a series of physical, personal, societal, economic, and emotional constructs. It is not simply a tool used to communicate with others. It is an object that is carried, interacted with, fetishized, decorated, and psychologized during the course of a typical day. Contemporary anthropology has enabled frameworks for studying objects like these, as well as other mass-produced commodities such as clothing, Coca-Cola, magazines, paper money, and household furnishings of all types.8 It has also been extended into the museological sphere to address the histories of collecting and display.9 This has proven to be an enormously successful scholarly project, one formulated to a great degree outside of art history. Intriguingly, American art history once at- tempted to go down a similar scholarly path. In 1982, a historian of American art at Yale University, Jules David Prown, recognized the beginnings of a shift in art his- tory, one which turned away from the study of images – then largely the discipline’s privileged subject – to one of objects. Here we should recognize that national trad- ition plays a significant role in how one understands these trends. Austrian academic art history has a long tradition of close collaboration with the nation’s numerous museums, as well as with the material legacy of its past accessible virtually every-