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.