Commodities and Consumption

              This week’s readings ask us, once again (and perhaps more explicitly this time), to reconsider how we view the relationship between ourselves and things. British anthropologist Daniel Miller cautions at the end of his aptly titled book Stuff that “denigrating material things, and pushing them down, is one of the main ways we raise ourselves up onto apparent pedestals. From this height we make claims to a spirituality entirely divorced from our own materiality and the materiality of the world we live within” (156). We are challenged to discard the notion that objects are superficial and reinsert ourselves into a world filled with objects that we make and that make us.

                Miller starts off this conversation in Stuff and walks us through his unconventional approach to material culture. His aim is not to define or create convention for material culture studies, but to show us that variations exist in how we interact with the things around us. My favorite chapter in Stuff that drives this point home is his case studies on clothes in Trinidad, India, and London. Miller shows us that clothes don’t just say something about who we are, but sometimes they become a part of us. For example, Miller discusses the sari in India and how it almost serves as an extension of the women who wear them. By examining this, “we can see that there are a multitude of different expectations and experiences that are a direct result of wearing a particular item of clothing” (31).         

                Miller also challenges us to think about universalism and particularity as not in opposition, but that we should think about how and where these ideas might exist in one another. Igor Kopytoff eschews the polarization of another dichotomy, people and things, in “The cultural biography of things.” Kopytoff argues that objects, like people, also have biographies that are informed by various contexts – economic and cultural, and I might even add racial, gender, social, etc. Seth Bruggeman employs this perspective in his cultural economic biography of the Shenandoah River gundalow and how it helped drive Shenandoah Valley’s economy during the nineteenth century. This biography is intriguing because it looks not just into the gundalow’s original use, but also looks at its reuse later on. I was interested to read this because it made it clear that stuff has a life that extends past its original intent. It adapts and is adapted to new cultural constructs all the time.

                Kopytoff’s perspective isn’t just useful in Bruggeman’s study, but it’s also helpful for my project, as so far as his idea that conflicting identities are inherent in objects. He writes that the “drama here lies in the uncertainties of valuation and of identity.” For example, the prison in which my bicentennial license plate was made has a long history that stands in direct opposition to the symbolism of freedom that my plate intends to portray. Koptyoff helps me to articulate some of the struggles I’ve had characterizing its conflicting meanings.

                Finally, Peter Stallybrass' essay “Marx’s Coat” looks at how Karl Marx used his coat to help make his argument that capitalism is driven by the exploitation of labor. By giving some sort of agency to the coat, says Stallybrass, we see that the coat serves as Marx’s access point to a privileged setting like the British Museum. The coat as the driving force of this narrative reminds me of our first readings for this class in Turkle’s book. Placing objects as the center of our narratives, rather than peripheral to them, shows just how much we need our stuff. We can’t take our stuff, just like we can’t take ourselves, out of the culture we were born into or have chosen to occupy. 

Place and Cultural Landscapes/Built Environments

          This week’s readings challenge us to think about space, time, the built environment, and cultural landscapes.  J.B. Jackson’s A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time is one of the most intriguing works we’ve read in this class thus far. Jackson looks at many different kinds of landscapes – New Mexico, mobile homes, parks, gardens, etc., where he makes his point that space helps determine how humans interact with surrounding environments. In turn, it engages with how humans shape those spaces. His study in particular is fascinating because of how it looks at what his contemporaries may have considered mundane. His extensive conversations of roads, for example, is illustrative of Jackson’s point that roads are places, too and not just means of getting to other places. Jackson helped me to think about the in-between spaces that often get overlooked.

            These liminal spaces, an anthropological term to denote the “not quite” spaces during rituals, are important themes for this week as well. One of my favorite readings in this class was Sue Bridwell Beckham’s discussion of Southern porches as liminal spaces occupied by women. In it, Bridwell looks at the porch as a place where social mores broke down in courtship, black-white relationships, and gendered interactions. This offers an insight into how historically marginalized groups exercised their agency, often in opposition to the status quo. This is certainly relevant in Robert W. Weyeneth’s study of the built environment of Jim Crow South, in which he categorizes “the spatial strategies of white supremacy” to construct environments that isolated and partitioned whites and blacks from one another. These constructed spaces shaped how blacks and whites interacted within their racial own groups and outside of them. Most interesting is Weyeneth’s conversation about how African-American communities in South Carolina counteracted these constructions by creating alternative spaces to meet their needs previously denied to them in a segregated world.

            Most interesting of all is this week’s thematic structure in which these scholars highlight the silences of in-between spaces. It has made me think a lot about some of the silent spaces I’m not thinking about in regards to my license plate. Thanks to Jackson, the road is another excellent entry point into thinking about my object. What other spaces did it occupy, and how? How, if at all, did the meanings of the license plate change as it moved across various landscapes? It certainly helped to change visual landscapes when present, but I’m hoping to explore how its surrounding environments effected it. 

The Image as Object

          This week’s readings are particularly pertinent as I work through my project because they offered some tools to think about the text and images on my license plate. While intellectual Roland Barthes explains how semiotics (the study of signs and symbols in language) helps us to understand the multiple layers of meanings in text and images, the art historian Wendy Bullion offers her understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Philadelphia through her study of visual illusions (trompe l’oeil) in various contemporary artworks. In both cases, they produce rich cultural analyses through their focus on the image as object.

            French scholar Roland Barthes, significant contributor to the study of semiotics, gives us some tools to talk about images in his “Rhetoric of the Image.” Using an advertisement, Barthes classifies its images as having three different messages: linguistic, coded, and non-coded. Linguistic messages come in the form of text and often support the messages of the images it accompanies. They serve to “fix” or anchor various meanings into place to “counter the terror of uncertain signs” (197). Coded messages are found in the images themselves, but a very specific cultural understanding needs to be in place in order for someone to derive information from the images. In the case of my license plate, this makes sense. Someone from another country might look at the bell in the center as just a cracked bell, but almost any American would immediately identify it as the Liberty Bell. Finally, Barthes identifies non-coded messages that serve as literal rather than implied representations of something.

            Wendy Bullion in Citizen Spectator adds to this conversation in her study of art and the larger cultural trends in Philadelphia during the early federal period. She argues that trompe l’oeil techniques served to emphasize the importance of seeing and awareness as a means to avoid deception. How people saw these images and interacted with them in various spaces throughout Philadelphia, explains Bullion, played an important role in shaping citizenship in early America. She shows in paintings by the likes of Charles Willson Peale that images of illusion had their own multiple, material perspectives within the image themselves that were further compounded by the perspectives viewers brought to it. This is really important because while Barthes explains that several elements are used to anchor and fix meanings in images, Bullion deconstructs and uncovers the overt and hidden perspectives within these trompe l’oeil pieces. Objects have perspectives, too. 

            Barthes and Bullion have given me a lot to think about as I continue on with my project. I need to unravel some of the imbued cultural precepts of my license plate and understand how these are created. For example, I know just by looking at the plate that it’s a license tag. But why do I know that? Surely someone else would view it differently, or maybe even as a foreign object. Bullion helped me to step outside my ideas about the license plate as a measure of state control and look at citizenship a bit more. And how are people engaging with this particular license plate? Her extensive conversation about people’s interactions in various exhibition spaces to images helps me to think about license plates as another kind of social viewing. The bicentennial plates were meant to be seen and displayed, which raises questions about what its images communicated not only to the state but to the countless people who drove past it at some point or another. So much to discover!