Reading Response: When Things are More than Things

In Cultural Revolutions, Leora Auslander argues that the English, American, and French revolutions were cultural revolutions that brought about many characteristics associated with modern, western society. The insightful, provocative portions of the book were where Auslander displayed how the democratizing effects of these revolutions were not just political and rhetorical, but brought about changes in the way everyday people associate with, and are able to politicize everyday things.

In his review of the book in American Studies (Vol. 50, ½) Andrew Cayton voiced skepticism about Auslander’s decision to organize her thesis by comparing political revolutions. I agree with this sentiment entirely. Narrowly truncating a cultural revolution within the bounds of political events oversimplifies the process of cultural change.  More often than not, the objects Auslander used to make her points were not everyday objects, but novelties. Knowing that upper class American women wore homespun in public and that the French Jacobins changed street names does not say very much about a cultural revolution. As I think of it, a revolution involves lasting change: a worldview shift from which there is no return. Most Americans, especially the poor, did not wear homespun and most of the Jacobin measures (with the exception of their measurement system) were quickly reverted back to pre-revolutionary status.

I see two excellent books itching to get out of Cultural Revolutions. The first is an analysis of the symbiotic relationship between political events and mass culture. Stallybrass’ “Marx’s Coat” did an excellent job of portraying this type of close relationship between the simple action of pawning a coat and the larger social implications of selling one’s status in industrial cultures. The second is a more theoretical groundwork of Auslander’s conceptualization of cultural revolutions and emotional history. Personally, I do not like the comparative model for writing history. As an alternative to comparative history, framing the book around a specific idea allows the telling of histories at different times and places, while eliminating the need to constantly qualify similarities and differences.

Igor Kopytoff’s “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,” successfully played with ideas in this way. Kopytoff does not tell a historical narrative. Instead, he analyses and theorizes how and why things become commodities, and the implications of this commoditization for different cultures. From this cultural, anthropological perspective, commodities are things that have value. But how different people interpret that value determine the commodity’s status. Kopytoff’s analysis of the singularization of commodities, particularly in Western cultures, is particularly useful thinking about my object.

The powder horn, illustrated and engraved with a succession of names, is definitely a singular object. Rather than selling it, giving it a monetary value, its last owner donated it to a public institution. After reading Kopytoff I wonder how the horn’s commoditization evolved. At some point in the horn’s history it was a tool, part of a standard military uniform. The engraving may mark a transition point in the life of the object from military gear to a singular commemorative object.

Readings

Auslander, Leora. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx’s Coat,” in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Archives: Photographs in the Archives

In their article “Fields of Vision” Paul Conway and Ricardo Punzalan developed a theory of visual literacy specifically concerning digitized photographs. The authors categorized the ways that people approach archival photographs as landscaping, storytelling, and discovering by surveying a diverse user group. Having more of a background in art than history, I was excited to read about archivists grappling with the issue of visual literacy. I believe that Conway and Punzalan’s methods provide a more useful theory of visual literacy for historic pictures than an art historian could. Nevertheless the article also brought to light key differences between history and art.

Opposed to photography collections in art museums, the photographs in archives are predominately there because of subject matter rather than the photographer. This difference leads to differences in the ways that people interpret photographs that can lead to divergent results. Opposed to looking at content first, if the researcher thinks about the person behind the camera they begin to see the deliberate decisions that a person makes to construct a photograph. Likewise, attention to the print can divulge darkroom manipulations that were, and still are, common despite photography’s reputation for being a direct window into another era. Thinking about the photography process also forces the realization that most photographers, whether art, survey, or commercial, work in series.

Conway and Punzalan do not look at these aspects of photography, likely because they were not important to the users surveyed. Archivists emphasis original order and provenance for most of their collections, yet the individualized, content-oriented uses of photographs sometimes obscures original order and provenance. Many digitized photographs are displayed via subject, like the National Archives exhibits (for example Photographs of the American West: 1861-1912), or via place, like Philly History. Few archival photography collections (at least that I have found – still searching) emphasize the work of the photographer, or the commercial studio, in the same way that manuscripts or institutional archives emphasize an individual or institution. Visual literacy is a great stepping stone to make digitized, archived photographs accessible to users, but I believe the next step is for archivists to think about the people who produce photographs and the photographs themselves with the same critical awareness that they give documents.

Reading:

Conway, Paul and Ricardo Punzalan. "Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs." Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011).

Readings Response: The Material of Identities

This weeks readings got me thinking about how people construct identities, both for themselves and for others.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” takes a broad look at how people display people under the guise of ethnography. The article is a thoughtful contemplation on the history of ethnographic exhibits and on the ways that exhibition standards have changed. It would have helped the article if the author had clearly defined what she meant by ethnography and ethnographic objects. She used the terms as constants, even though their definitions and interpretations have varied greatly over the past century. I would not term the items she lists in the first paragraph, like moon rocks and pieces of the Berlin Wall, as ethnographic. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett uses these things to ask the reader why we would display non-aesthetic objects in order to challenge our notions of object autonomy. Her main thesis, in the last paragraph, gets around to making the connection, namely, that we should consider the context that an object is produced in and why we have an interest in it. This article is more an ethnography, in the current sense, of exhibition disguising as a history of ethnographic objects.

Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity uses the material culture of American Christians to argue that people express their religious identity through things. McDannell argues against the dualistic interpretations of religion as a separation between the sacred and the profane. Because of this division, scholars have disregarded material culture, commonly situated in the realm of profane. (McDannell, 5-7) Throughout the book McDannell shows how religion and religious objects permeate through culture and can indicate shifting beliefs within religious communities. I agree with breaking the sacred/profane division, but I wish that the author had done so more completely. Even though she emphasizes how arbitrary those labels are, she continued to use them throughout the book. One of the big historiographical assumptions that McDannell challenges is the idea that after the enlightenment period people suddenly attained the ability to isolate religion from other aspects of life. Behind the writing lay far more questions that the author had time to answer.

One aspect of Material Christianity that got me thinking was the hierarchy that historians assign certain labels. McDannell took her subjects identification as Christian, living in America, before anything else. She discusses issues of class, gender, and race within the label of Christianity. She also discusses the different Christian sects, tends to keep the discussion in terms of larger Christian theology. Together, all the potential identification makers can make for a complicated interpretation. I liked how McDannell looked at different historical eras and was able to tie together multiple markers to interpret objects. For my powder horn, this is a good method to keep in mind. The horn likely meant different things to the different owners in different time periods. The illustrations on the horn point to different identity markers, and I need to choose certain markers over others in my interpretation. Thinking about religion, national lines seem arbitrary, and a few times McDannell stepped out of the United States for evidence. From a colonial period, my object mat force me to consider the different ways its owners viewed their world which likely do not fit the nation maps in my head today.

Readings:

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Objects of Ethnography,” in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991): 17-78.

McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Archives: Education and the Archives

Today I spent some time looking at digital educational programs from archives. The topics included all fit into a national, twentieth century timeline of events. I landed on the Presidential Libraries and Museums page of the National Archives that lists different educational initiatives. 

I focused my looking on the Presidential Timeline, which includes historical sources, exhibits, and activities for presidents beginning with Hoover.I specifically looked at the educational activity “Visiting History - President Clinton and Little Rock Central High School.” It is a historical investigation into an event commemorating a historical event. “Visiting History” was particularly poignant because it asked student to look at primary source materials from Little Rock in 1957 and about President Clinton in 1999. Additionally, it involved an activity where the students research a historic site local to them and track down primary sources about the site. I appreciated the reflectivity of the assignment. Asking students to consider primary sources from two periods is a good way to get them to think about change and what it means for a source to be historical. Asking the students to find their own historic site engages them in the question of how society labels certain sites as historic.

Besides linking to digitized sources, the website exists segregated from the archives. I wish that the primary sources had a link back to their place in the actual digital archives website, as that may be a way to make them consider the archives as the place where all of the information comes from. (See: here for an example of how the sources are formatted.)

Most of the educational initiatives that I looked at incorporated a combination of materials such as timelines, introductions to events and historical context, and activities where the students can look at primary sources and actively interpret them. I am curious if there are any studies about the use of these types of digital activities and feedback from the students and teachers that use them.

Readings Response: Stories and Things

Laurel Ulritch’s method of using provenance as a way to ask questions about an object’s place in social history could have direct correlations to my object. Ulritch, studying woman’s history, tried to see objects passed down through mothers and daughters. This method was particularly useful because it enabled Ulritch to look at an aspect of family life that is not in the records, which traditionally favor husbands and fathers.

In many ways, my object is an affront to the type of social history that is most common. The powder horn is traditionally associated with men and was often a symbol of dominance over nature. This particular powder horn may have belonged to, but is definitely commemorating, an aristocratic British general who fought in an international war over state power. The illustrations covering the horn include the most recognizable symbol of state power in the eighteenth century, the British coat of arms. It was passed down through men from one high-status Philadelphia family. That being said, Ulrich’s method could be useful for my object. Where Ulritch used the tenets of social history as a platform to view material culture, my object may force me to question traditional social history in favor of a more nuanced interpretation of culture where the lines between family, gender, and status on the one side, and politics, power, and national identity on the other are blurred.

Opposed to Ulritch, and possibly closer to what I think I can do with my object, Georgio Reillo’s “Things that Shape History” promotes the use of materials specifically because they can challenge historical concepts and narratives. The different ways that Reillo explains researchers can approach material culture study will be useful for my research, especially as I begin to think more about what the story of my object is. It will be a good mental exercise to come up with three, or five, or ten different ways to interpret my object before deciding on the final narrative. I had a similar reaction to Karen Dannehl’s “Object Biographies.” Some of the biography method could be useful, though assigning an object anthropomorphic life stages can get too metaphorical for my tastes. (That’s either my inner cynic or my tendency to take things more literally than they are meant).  

Ames’ “Meaning in Artifacts” was an enjoyable read. The author did a great job in making Victorian homes come alive through furniture. One of the things I took from this piece was the sense of the past as a foreign country. Ames stresses the now culturally defunct nature of hallstands and card receivers in a way that makes Victorian life more real. For a people commonly stereotyped as superficial this is a big deal. In terms of Ames interpretation, I would have liked him to talk more to how the Victorian social life represented in these items were a matter of what we would consider business instead of private life and the implications of this on things like assumed Victorian gender roles. If Victorian women spent much of their time handling business affairs, why do historians consistently label Victorian women as relegated to the domestic sphere? Do our own assumption about private and public life prevent us from imagining life as the Victorians did? I have strayed away from powder horns, though I do wonder where, in the home of the late-nineteenth century owner, was the powder horn on display? And what did that display say about the people who put it there?

Ames, Kenneth. “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 19-46.

Dannehl, Karin. “Object Biographies: From Production to Consumption,” in Karen Harvey, ed. History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Reillo, Georgio. “Things that Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives,” in Karen Harvey, ed. History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. “Furniture as Social History” in Luke Beckerdite and William N. Hosley, eds. American Furniture (Hanover:University Press of New England, 1995), 35-64. 

Archives: Historians and the Archives

Many of the archivists in this weeks reading asked themselves how the archives affect historians. As a historian-in-training, I admire the desire from one professional discipline to consider changing their methods in order to benefit another. I also wonder if historians would ever do the same. Do historians, who rely on archives for a great majority of their research, consider the big picture about the archives that they use? Should they?

When historians do research they want to make sure that their interpretations add to the existing historiography of a subject. Duff, Craig, and Cherry’s study asked historians how they became aware of and located primary sources, with archivists, finding aids, and footnotes being most popular. (Duff, Craig, and Cherry, 13-14) From my research experience, I have most often become aware of sources through footnotes and colleagues. While this allows me to read a primary source firsthand, it also means that I may be missing out on archives collections that may have value to my topic just because they were not used in past historians’ work.

Mary Pugh urged archivists to be reflexive about the assumptions they make and suggested that subject fields could be a great way to make archives more accessible. (Pugh, 42) Pugh’s conclusions are relevant to digital archives today. The ability to connect collections by subject could urge historians to try new collections that they possibly would not have found otherwise. Like archivists thinking about access, I feel like historians should think about the way that digital tools can expand their audience. This type of access to historical research involves the historian stepping outside of familiar historiographical conversations and also acknowledging that history is a collaborative process despite how solitary the historian in the archives may seem. 

 

Object Description

(Note: My description is based on observing the horn on Tuesday, measurements and weights are all approximate and will be adjusted.)

Powder horn, mid-eighteenth century (better photos coming soon!)

Form and Formal Function:

This object is a powder horn. The horn is a lighter yellowish-brown color and appears to have yellowed with age. The horn has a curve to it, but has been polished (and possibly shaped). The length of the horn is around 12 inches. The diameter at the bottom of the horn is about 3 inches. The horn gets narrower from the bottom up. The top of the horn has a diameter of around 2 inches, while the tip’s diameter is .5 inch. The bottom of the horn has a flat, gold cap. The function of this cap is to create an enclosed form that holds powder. At the top of the horn there is a narrow silver rim that connects the horn to a larger gold cap that can open to pour powder into the gun. On the lower end of this cap there is a loop to attach the horn to its owner. (This could be done with a shoulder strap, on a belt, or attached to other gear, but I need to look into how powder horns were carried.) The upper gold cap has a series of simple, circular bands leading up to a ridge with a more pronounced band and a rounded notch that could be a mechanism to open the cap and let powder out. Beyond this notch, the cap is narrower (half the diameter or less) and extends with a similar series of bands for about 1.5 inches. The horn is surprisingly light, due to its hollow nature, and does not weight more than 2 pounds.

Decoration:

The horn is engraved with a variety of drawings, designs, and names of people who owned the horn and the person who gifted it to them. I have seen this type of engraving called scrimshaw, but am uncertain whether that is the proper term for engraving into all types of bone, or if that only refers to sea-faring peoples. The illustration that takes up the most space on the horn is the British Royal Coat of Arms, centrally situated on the horn. There is also a view of ships on the water with a waterfront view of a city in the background. Other illustrations include a tree, and two men in hunting clothing with two dogs hunting a stag.

“Gen. Edward Braddock” is engraved below a crest on the upper part of the horn. The crest looks as if it may have originally contained different engraving and then was blacked out to write “R. Tempest 1764 to 1809 to” this continues upward, “Robert R. Tempest 1834” continues upward, “Presented by Robert R. Tempest to James R. Tempest Dec. 25, 1874” continues below, “To Robert Tempest, Pianist and Composer, 1894.”

Materials and Their Significance:

Though I am not certain, I guess that the horn either a cattle or stag horn. On the horn there is an illustration of two men in hunting garments chasing a stag with large antlers. This illustration may commemorate the hunt, as may the transformation of the antler into a powder horn. This interpretation fits with readings that mention powder horns as trophies in addition to their utilitarian function. However, most other horns I have come across that are a similar size have been from cattle.

The metal caps on the horn look like they were made from a mold, but the materials appear expensive, especially as I peruse horns from other collections. The majority of horns I have come across have brass caps. Silver and gold signify the wealth and status of whoever had the horn assembled.

Who Made This:

The question of who made this horn is complicated and layered. The original owner (be it Braddock or someone else) may have hunted the animal that provided the horn, but I do not think they would have been the one who assembled it. The horn is beautifully shaped and the metal fixtures are perfectly symmetrical, leading me to believe that a professional artisan executed the cutting, shaping, and added fixtures.

The engraving is another layer. The drawings could have been commissioned while the horn was being assembled and done by a different artisan. It is also possible that drawing were added after the horn had been in use to commemorate events that the horn witnessed. The engravings with names are slightly easier to locate. These still would have been done by different artisans, likely who specialized in engraving, at the different times when the horn changed ownership.

Provenance:

Provenance is a huge question with this object. A Philadelphia Inquirer article from August 5, 1899, tells of Robert Tempest’s recent gift of the horn to the Museum in Independence Hall. This article states that the horn had previously belonged to General Edward Braddock, whose name is inscribed on the horn. Braddock died on July 13, 1755 after sustaining wounds at the Battle of the Monongahela at the beginning of the French and Indian War. The first R. Tempest appears on the horn with the date 1764 and the ownership of the horn from this date is clear. Until I do more research I can only speculate about the period during the war.

Questions:

• Did this powder horn really belong to Edward Braddock? If so, was it brought from England?
• How did the Tempest family acquire the horn?
• Why did this horn mean so much to this family? What type of story would each successive generation hear about the horn’s past?
• What is the relationship between the myth of Edward Braddock, commonly treated as a fool who disregarded the sound advice of his colonist compatriots, and this family’s treasuring of this object? What does this say about how people remember historical figures?
• Who did the illustrations and at what point in time? Was it one individual or many? Do the illustrations represent Braddock or the Tempest Family?
• What do the illustrations mean? Is the waterfront scene depicting Philadelphia or somewhere else? 
• What is the relationship between scrimshaw engravings and this type of powder horn decoration? What does that relationship tell about trade, economies, and Atlantic culture of the eighteenth century?
• What does it mean for an object in a format commonly accepted as American folk art to have the British Royal Coat of Arms engraved in it and belong to an aristocratic British general? What does this say about American identity in the eighteenth (and through the nineteenth) century?

Coming up:

This object analysis is still missing key bits of information. I have not yet seen the object file, which could very well answer some of my questions. I would also like to inventory the drawings on the horn and draw the horn from different angles. I will be able to do these things next time I visit Independence Hall. I have begun collecting a variety of sources ranging from histories of General Braddock and the French and Indian War, particularly the war in Pennsylvania, and writings about powder horns and folk traditions. 

Some Sources:

A decent overview of Powder Horns from a collector/connoisseur perspective: LeFevre, Gregory. "Engraved Powder Horns." Early American Life. October, 2011. 

A fun History Detectives episode about a powder horn: here!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a huge collection of powder horns, many from the same time period as the one I am studying. 

Reading Response: The Importance of Material Culture

Henry Glassie’s “Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths,” Cary Carson’s “Doing History with Material Culture,” and James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten all defend the importance of material culture to understanding past peoples.

Henry Glassie studies untraditional sources, including material culture, art, literature, and the landscape, as necessary for understanding the meaning behind human activity. Most of Glassie’s examples are literary, highlighting the artist’s integration into the culture they come from. For Glassie, the crucial aspect of art is that art is representative of the myths that a culture believes. The point that Glassie makes is that the landscape people interact with and the things they make are just as much a cultural products as art.

Initially, I was taken aback that Glassie used highbrow literary and artistic examples to validate the study of material culture and how people interact with their environment. However, it makes sense that Glassie would make a literary analogy about material culture for an American studies audience.

Cary Carson confronts why historians rarely use things to formulate ideas. Speaking to historians directly, Carson concludes that trends in social history make material culture more important and relevant for historians than it had been before. For Carson material culture can most affect American history topics that deal within the home and the immediate community around households. (Carson, 57) This conclusion leaves the relative importance of domestic studies compared with other aspects of history up to the historian.

Though the materials discussed in Deetz’s book are primarily domestic, the interpretations that Deetz puts forth reflect larger cultures, economies, and worldviews. Deetz, a historical archaeologist, writes both about archaeological methodology and makes an argument about shifting worldviews leading into the modern era that historical archaeologists study. The array of artifacts that archaeologists deal with seem more mundane than pristine museum collections, but taken in context, Deetz shows how these little things can be a window into the culture that produced and used them.

For Deetz material culture “Holds the promise of being more democratic and less self-conscious in its creation than any other body of historical material.” (Deetz, 212) Glassie also makes the democratic point, yet whether material is less self-conscious than writing may depend on the type of material and the interpreter’s definition of culture. From anthropology, Deetz has a specific definition of culture based on systems of beliefs and learned traditions. For people studying the arts, culture is not as broad. A drawing is very self-conscious. This is something I am keeping in mind with my object, an engraved powder horn, whose functions easily fall under all of Binford’s labels. In thinking about what the horn meant to the people that interacted with it, I need to carefully consider the context and function of the horn at a given time.

Together, these three pieces underline the interdisciplinary nature of material culture studies. History, archaeology, and American studies each have their own disciplinary standards. When different disciplines are dealing with similar subjects, can any afford to defend their standards to the exclusion of the others? For a historian, studying material culture involves learning a set of skills absent from the traditional repertoire. If I were to write a defense of material culture studies at this moment, it would likely have less to do with the interpretive importance of material culture, but with the way that materials force the people studying them to think in a variety of ways.

Readings:

James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (New York: Anchor, 1996).

Henry Glassie, “Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths: The Artifact’s Place in American Studies,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 63-92.

Cary Carson, “Doing History with Material Culture,” in Ian Quimby, ed., Material Culture and the Study of American Life (New York: Norton, 1978), 41-64. 

Archives: Perspectives

The past two weeks have exposed me to some of the internal logic that archivists use to create and maintain archives. This internal perspective is different than my typical user perspective. Two articles, Cory Nimer and J. Gordon Daines III’s "What Do You Mean It Doesn't Make Sense?" and Jennifer Schaffner’s "The Metadata Is the Interface” tackled questions about how the archives can manageably make their collections more accessible.

Nimer and Daines advocated for social navigation tools integrated in online finding aides while Schaffner concluded that collection descriptions should be revised to meet user needs. Both of these articles highlighted that people often interact with archives in a way that bypasses interacting with the archivist.

Over the summer I conducted research in the archives of The Print Center at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. With a finding aide containing little, occasionally misleading, description I was able to navigate the not-yet-completely processed collection. Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner advocated that archivists should strive to make as many collection available as possible and that the archivists work be adequate, minimum, and sufficient. The Print Center’s archives meet these requirements, yet after these readings, I wondered how the collection could benefit from Schaffner, Nimer, and Daines suggestions.

An online finding aide with searchable keyword headings would help to prioritize series or boxes. A personalized way to keep track of this prioritization would also benefit the research. Thinking about what it would take to actually accomplish either of those things, I realized that archivists play an active role facilitating the access of their archives on the web, even if their presence is hidden.

 Readings:

Greene, Mark A., and Dennis Meissner. "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing." American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 208-263.

Nimer, Cory, and J. Gordon Daines III. "What Do You Mean It Doesn't Make Sense? Redesigning Finding Aids from the User's Perspective." Journal of Archival Organization 6, no. 4 (2008): 216-232.

Schaffner, Jennifer. "The Metadata Is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies." Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 2009. 

Object Analysis

Historians who study the things that people make are in agreement that material culture is a vital part of human society. However, how historians should analyze material culture is a topic that elicits a variety of responses. Some older sources such as E. McClung Fleming’s 1974 article “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model” are rigorous in their emphasis on more technical identification and information gathering from professional curators and connoisseurs. Other sources such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton’s The Meaning of Things focuses on what people feel about things and less on the physical aspects of the things themselves. In developing a method for approaching material culture study I have drawn from different aspects of past studies in combination with my own background and way of working.

One of the main difficulties in creating a system like this is that there are many overlaps in terms of the steps that analyzing material culture takes. For example, if the object is a decorated chair, I might notice signs of wear and immediately begin thinking about how someone used that chair before I even think about when someone made the chair. Regardless, for whatever my object is I will try to keep the analysis organized even if my imagination wanders.

My first step in analyzing an object is to get as accurate a physical description as possible and to learn about the object in terms of the materials used in making it and how it was made. Doing this takes many of the methods used in Fleming’s article as well as Charles Montgomery’s “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts.” This step may be more technical than what most historians are accustomed to, but I believe that proper identification is integral for a meaningful and reliable interpretation. This would involve looking at the objects dimensions, color, materials, and possibly photographing or drawing it. This first step would hopefully lead to a simple identification of the object in question.

Research into the object is the next step. This would involve learning about similar objects of the same period, possibly using typologies and art history resources if they exist to learn about any decoration on the object. Ideally I would be able to establish the provenience and provenance of the object and juxtapose the origins and ownership of the object against the typological information. I may be dependant on what type of information already exists in the objects file for the first two steps, but will hopefully gather enough to be able to move outside of the specific object to place it in some type of context.

Most of the reading borrowed methods primarily art historians and connoisseurs to describe and identify objects. Unfortunately these methods often leave me wanting more. I believe part of this is the emphasis on authenticity rather than use through time. An important aspect of my methodology is that I do not view any material culture as inauthentic. Where Fleming looks at the replacement parts of a cupboard as taking away from its original condition, I am interested in the story of the cupboard being used daily and through generations of the family that owned it. This may be the archaeologist in me, but I prefer objects that show some use and damage over pristine objects. For me, telling the use of an object leads to a more dynamic historical interpretation than telling how the culture produced the object in one place and point in time.

Because I am interested in the story of how people use objects after the objects creation I had tumultuous mental arguments with Jules Prown’s article “Mind in Matter.” Prown views culture as abstract beliefs and states that more art-oriented, decorative objects lead to better cultural understanding, while the interpretive promise of utilitarian objects is limited. My disagreement with Prown’s perspective may be another result of my archaeology background pitted against his more art history oriented perspective. Prown only looks at the meaning of objects at their creation. Csikszentmihalyi provided a good alternative by studying meaning during the life of the object. Csikszentmihalyi shows that a painting which an art historian would talk about in one way may be important to people for entirely different reasons. In the same light, utilitarian objects can attain cultural significance even though they seem mundane.

Describing and researching the object as fully as possible will allow me to ask meaningful questions about this particular object that may revolved around the objects creation, use, meaning to different people, or meaning in relation to other objects or events. For my methodology, the technical aspects of the description are important, but they are only a way to fully understand the context of the object in order to begin the process of interpretation. Karal Marlings’s article “Writing History with Artifacts” was successful in using material culture in a way that still focused on historical interpretation. This article described objects and relayed technical information when necessary, but not in an overwhelming way. Marling’s conclusions about objects being vehicles through which the masses understood history at the Colombian Exposition of 1893 displayed the cultural importance of things without getting too theoretical or caught up in the details.

Once I have research questions, I will have to do more research, this time possibly secondary and primary sources indirectly related to the object in order to come up with an interpretation. The interpretation is the last step that will hopefully tell a story about the object that adds to current historiography both in terms of material culture and history more generally. The interpretation would involve extracting from the technical descriptions and research into the period and people who interacted with the object through its existence. Ideally I would like most of the resulting research paper to focus on the interpretation and footnote the majority of the technical research.

This post has veered off topic at some point so here is a summary of my method:

1. Describe 

2. Identify

3. Research

4. Ask historical questions

5. More research

6. Interpretation

I’m sure that I will revise this method at times, but hopefully it will operate as a framework to begin my material culture studies.

Readings:

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Chapters 1-4. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Fleming, E. McClung. "Artifact Study: A Proposed Model." Winterthur Portfolio (1974): 153-173.

Marling, Karal Ann. "Writing History with Artifacts: Columbus at the 1893 Chicago Fair." The Public Historian (1992): 13-30.

Montgomery, Charles F. “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts.” In Schlereth, Thomas J., ed. Material culture studies in America. Rowman Altamira, 1982.

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