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.

Reading Response: Theory and Material Culture

This week’s readings tackled theory and material culture. While the writers use different aspects of material culture to link to theory, they all highlight the difficulty of theorizing things. Most theory focuses on abstract ideas whereas things are tangible. The benefit of these writings is that they can bring material culture studies to a wider academic audience.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” traces changes in art that resulted from technological innovations. As material culture studies, this piece is a great example of how different types of material culture affect one another and how society as a whole uses, reacts to, and develops alongside these changes. I admire Benjamin’s writing, in particular the way that he places his subject clearly within the present in which he wrote. Reproduction and questions of new technologies are as relevant today as they were in 1936. The themes of presenting and disseminating information and the blurry line between authorship and readership have particular importance for current cultural studies of the Internet.

Jean Baudrillard analyses the whole atmosphere of domestic spaces and interprets the symbolic meaning of the stuff within. This reading is more difficult to grasp than the others. Unlike Benjamin, who pinpointed the historic moment in which he wrote, Baudrillard is abstract and does not place himself in historical context. His theory of material culture ultimately highlights a constructivist perspective and looks for the ways people manipulate their surroundings to appear natural. This theory involves the scholar taking a more detached view a material than the other writings, which focus on material that is living.

Daniel Miller’s “Theories of Things” directly confronts the difficulties to theorizing about material culture and how humans relate to stuff. I am attracted to the framing theory. This theory acknowledges the stuff that humans interact with as being integral parts of daily life but also explains how these things become so normalized as to be invisible. This explanation of why stuff is sometimes invisible helps me understand why lots of theorists tend to disregard the material world. Miller’s idea that objects make people is also thought provoking and could relate to the Tempest Powder Horn because the horn’s owners (after the first) all grew up with the thing before it became theirs. In a sense, this approach gives agency to objects and takes it away from people.

Glenn Adamson’s “The Case of the Missing Footstool” focuses on how historians can use the gaps in the material record as ways to deepen historical interpretations. Adamson studied the footstool, common from the eighteenth century, but absent before. Adamson offers a few hypotheses, but the most effective is his nuanced interpretation of how the adoption of the footstool could represent a normalizing of exotic cultures.

I am not sure which approach best aides my interpretation of the Tempest Powder Horn. Despite its functional form, the horn is primarily decorative. I like Adamson’s method for looking at a classification of objects, but do not think it applies to the horn. Miller and Benjamin offer me the most. In terms of changing technologies, the horn’s meaning likely changed when guns were manufactured without the need for separate powder horns. This point in time may have helped determine why the horn was altered and revered in the later generations of the family.

Readings: 

Adamson, Glenn. “The Case of the Missing Footstool: Reading the Absent Object” in Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Functional System, or Object Discourse,” in The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005: 11-69.

Miller, Daniel. “Theories of Things,” in Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010: 54-78.