Reading Response: The Future of Material Culture

Future material culture studies could go on many paths, as this week’s readings attest. Whether it’s integrating material culture into scholarly articles, bringing theory to material culture, or taking the study of material culture outside of history, these readings show some possible paths.

Cary Carson’s “Material Culture History: The Scholarship Nobody Knows” reflected on the state of material culture studies. Carson points out how material culture scholars tend to import the theoretical foundations of their ideas. Carson places scholars of material culture within the larger umbrella of scholars of American history. Material culture studies has been an isolated field and I appreciate the idea of inclusion. From our past readings, Ulrich is a good example of this type of history: using material culture to tell history and not worrying about crossing disciplinary boundaries.

“The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace, 1880-1930” Angel Kwolek-Folland provides an example of how traditional historical scholarship could integrate material culture studies. Kwolek-Folland concludes that the structures of office buildings reinforced domestic gender roles between male and female workers even when doing so went against the ideal work environment. The parallels between public work life and private family life shows how cultures operate in seemingly different spaces.

Devon Elliott et al.’s “New Old Things” questioned how historians could collaborate with other fields and find new, interdisciplinary ways to study material culture. This research utilized 3-d printers and model-making to replicate historic magic tricks. While I think that 3-d printing is a fad at the moment, I loved the way that this group approached a historical question about senses and communication. The idea that doing research can also be like playing, and might involve failure is powerful.

As much as I tried to give it a chance, Bill Brown’s “Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object” did not do anything for me. On one hand, I think its great that high-theory people are getting into looking at material culture. On the other hand, the public historian in me despises Brown’s writing style. Brown studies the novelty collectible items that proliferated after 9/11 and relates these items to the issues of nationalized commodities. Brown’s sources are almost entirely theoreticians, rarely are they people who produce or consume the material in question.

One thing this weeks readings did was highlight the divide between academic historians and public historians who work outside of the academe. Carson emphasized that material culture scholars need to be involved in telling a national story. I believe this task is one that public historians dealing with material culture are fit to try. Reading Brown’s article, I get a sense that the theory which grounds much social and cultural history is narrow when considering the whole of human culture. “New Old Things” offers a good lesson for new material culture studies, namely that it may involve collaborating and looking outside of the theoretical base that history offers.


Readings

Brown, Bill. “Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object,” in Hasselstein, et al., eds, The Pathos of Authenticity: American Passions of the Real, 33-52. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2010.

Carson, Cary. “Material Culture History: The Scholarship Nobody Knows” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field, 401-428. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press, 1997.

Elliott, Devon, Robert MacDougall, William J. Turkel, “New Old Things: Fabrication, Physical Computing, and Experiment in Historical Practice,” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no.1 (April 2012): 121-128.

Kwolek-Folland, Angel. “The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace, 1880-1930,” in Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds. The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture, 157-179. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997.