True
to the past two week’s readings that the study of material culture lends itself
to an interdisciplinary approach, this week offers five different perspectives on
material culture and provide examples of how this can be
done.
What seems to run as the common
thread among these theoretical underpinnings is the cyclical process of
material culture studies. The process of understanding the past through the
study of objects, as evidenced by E. McClung Fleming and Jules David Prown’s works,
is an attempt to impose some kind of order on the chaos that is the past. Prown
defines material culture as “the study through artifacts of the beliefs –
values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions – of a particular community or
society of a given time.”[1]
Both Fleming and Prown identify specific steps to analyze objects to get at
these beliefs. Fleming shows how identification, evaluation, cultural analysis,
and interpretation serve as an order of operations to organize objects into
piecemeal windows into the past. Prown offers a similar process, but explicitly
states that material culture methodology should be followed in a specific
sequence.[2]
It doesn’t appear too dissimilar from a scientific method of looking at our
historical specimens.
To me, Fleming and Prown’s processes
positioned objects in a space of mediation between creator and/or perceiver and
the scholar. As a starting point, a historical subject may have expressed
implicit and explicit cultural beliefs to create or justify owning a particular
object with a specific visual and identifiable structure and elements. However,
a scholar starts backwards by looking at the structure, style, etc. to reach
the end point in the study that hopefully identifies those cultural values that created that
object in the first place.
This kind of fluid process and identification is also
discussed by Tim Ingold in his quest to champion understanding the building blocks
of objects: materials. Ingold argues that talking about an abstract materiality
obscures and creates a huge distance between the physical materials we should
really be discussing. What was most interesting to me about Ingold was that he
presented materials as part of a fluid process of exchange rather than a static
existence of objects. Materials are a part of a system that are transformed into an object,
just as all humans, animals, materials, and all matter participate in a
breathing life cycle.
Material is also key to English
potter Edmund de Waal, profiled by New
York Times contributor Sam Anderson. De Waal reminds us that it’s not
enough to just look at his finished products, but to take a step back to look
at the porcelain that makes his art possible. Porcelain and all other materials
are the foundation for the stuff we have. If we don’t look at it and try to
understand it in all of its parts, why does the object even matter?
Which brings me to the most puzzling
question I’ve been thinking about since last week’s class. When do objects matter? Carolyn Kitch addresses this in her look at
different media such as magazine covers, postcards, and her father’s possessions
from his military service during World War II. Kitch asks her students to think about
what stuff of theirs might be left behind one day for historians to find. Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich also looks at what’s been left behind of furniture to teach us
something about what these furnishing say about gender relations in colonial
New England. It comes back to the idea of cycle. Objects have a life cycle – they
are created, are used, and then they sometimes become obsolete, anachronistic,
irrelevant, etc. What I wonder is: when do they become relevant to the
historian for study? It is this dormant phase of the cycle between when the
object is out of use and when it becomes useful for study that interests me the
most. I hope to explore this more as I study my own object.
