Reading "Artefacts and the Meaning of Things" by Daniel Miller, I appreciate how the text frames ‘culture’ more as a process than as a fixed term. For me, it is difficult to define culture or assign it a fixed structure, since humans are constantly constructing meaning by layering experiences. There is so much potential in the stories we create and share. In this sense, it makes sense to understand ‘culture’ as the ongoing process through which humans build meaning in their existence. Material artifacts, because of their physical form, concretize these abstract notions, meanings, and ideologies. They turn the intangible into tangible, shared objects that exist in the world, allowing us to observe and engage with the process of cultural meaning-making.

Building on this idea of culture as an active process, Miller’s discussion of how humans create meaning through the ordering of things. What I found most interesting was the logic of structuralism, particularly the idea that meaning can be produced through inversion. This reminds me of the formation of Christian cuisine, which I learned about in my food history class last semester. To distinguish themselves from Jews, early Christians intentionally inverted dietary practices by reducing pork consumption and emphasizing bread and wine. This inversion was not only about food but about marking identity outwardly through symbolic contrast. As structuralism suggests, the logic of culture emerges through such systems of opposition and transformation: foods, like masks, gain meaning when placed in relation to what they are not. In this sense, Christian cuisine can be seen as a cultural ordering in which inversion itself became a way of producing coherence and identity.

This focus on systems and meaning also intersects with the way objects influence human perception. Another idea that captured my attention is how certain objects, through humble sensations, influence human perception. Miller draws on Foucault’s point that sight is the most dominant of our senses, which implies that our attention is easily drawn to the appearance of an object — even from a distance. This primacy of vision can become a kind of distraction: sight determines our first impression of an object, artefact, or event, and we quickly form judgments because humans rely so heavily on vision. Conversely, if an object’s meaning or purpose depends on a relatively humble sense — such as touch or sound — we might overlook its deeper intention when we are distracted by its visual appeal. The clothing, for example, may be chosen or judged primarily for its appearance, yet its material texture and the sensation it creates against the skin often matter more for lived experience.