Susan M. Pearce, "Objects as Meaning; or Narrating the Past," Interpreting Objects and Collections, Routledge, 1994

ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION IN MATERIAL CULTURE, USING SAUSSURE'S SYSTEM

The position of the jacket in all this seems quite clear. The langue of western European society in 1815 held a mass of material and human 'vocabulary', which included the production of coloured coths and brass fittings, gunpowder, horse wagons and so on. Its categories included a desire to define armies, and within these armies different ranks and different regiments. The jacket, with its special cut, its red colour, its regimental insignia and its elements indicating rank, shows material structuring at work in classic form.