The ‘social’ within our walls: stamped bricks as hidden socio-material entanglements

Abstract

As a result of the materialist (re-)turn in cultural geography and beyond, an exceptionally broad variety of matters and things has been taken into scholarly consideration. In spite of this rich and still rapidly expanding work, however, almost no attention has been paid to one of our most mundane, most everyday material objects – brick. Therefore, on the example of Hungarian ‘stamped bricks’, this paper shows how the whole spectrum of the ‘social’ might be represented in an utterly material form, on bricks – including ideology, politics, class relations, religion and spirituality, naturecultures, even sexuality. Connected to these, as the main theoretical contributions of the paper, I develop two arguments. First, I posit that in contrast to most representations, the ones on stamped bricks are ‘normally’ hidden. Second, I also argue that as thick and solid as bricks are, at the same time they may also be as highly sensitive litmus papers of changing societal conditions and relations. Hence, based on the examples of the paper, stamped bricks are presented as hidden socio-material entanglements.