General Material Culture Flashcards
Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 1992
Ames examines household/ordinary goods from the American Victorian era to 1. Highlight the varied tasks and roles of these objects and 2. Show how the ambiguities and contradictions of Victorian culture were expressed in these objects. He is trying to broaden our understanding of Victorian society, while maintaining that culture is “insistent and muddled.” (how objects reflect culture and values)
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 1986
This multidisciplinary volume seeks to show links between politics in the form of relations and assumptions surrounding power, and the value and exchange of commodities; to look at economic life through the lens of things. a new perspective on “circulation of commodities in social life” (move beyond looking at exchange relations
Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” 2009
Examining a photograph of a woman posing with a racist watermelon cutout, Bernstein argues that things (not objects- thing theory) can script people’s actions. Bernstein is not arguing that people do not have agency, but that “agency, intention, and racial subjectivation co-emerge through everyday physical encounters in the material world.”
Difference between things and objects (p. 69): objects are something we look through to understand something human, a thing asserts itself; situational and subjective whether an item is an object or a thing; Things demand people come to its own terms; thing refers to a specific subject-object relation
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 2001
Brown argues for an approach to the study of subject-object relations; it blends Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology (structures of consciousness). He argues that objects have their own agency and become subjects themselves (how do objects script our behavior)
Sara Ann Carter and Ivan Gaskell, “Why History and Material?” 2020
Gaskell and Carter argue that historians can utilize material culture as important pieces of historical evidence to understand human behavior, and that there are five ways of looking at human behavior and material culture: cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory
Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture, 2008
Carter and Cromley provide a succinct overview of the field of vernacular architecture and a guide on how to do research and make interpretations about everyday buildings/landscapes
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, 1996
Deetz argues that small objects have a large impact in people’s lives and should be considered in historical archaeological investigation. Focusing largely on New England, he advocates for historical archaeology and an anglicization theory of culture with 3 eras: replication, divergence/regionalization, and rejoining the English cultural sphere. Material culture, like ceramics, mortuary art, and architecture, reflected these three periods and the cultural change
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
Geertz defines culture as public/interpretive. Once must write down what one sees to be able to interpret/analyze and he argues this must be done through thick description- being able to deeply explain something to outsiders and have them fully understand it. One example of this is the Balinese cockfight (which sets up binary oppositions). (Thick description, deep play)
Henry Glassie, “Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths: The Artifact’s Place in American Studies,” 1977
Glassie argues that we can learn about people/the past if we look at material culture and can make history a more ethical, noble, and fuller endeavor. He sees historical research as part of human’s search for meaningful existence
Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, American Material Culture: The Shape of Field, 1997
Following the 1993 Winterthur conference on material culture studies (15 years after Schlereth’s piece), they argue that material culture studies is interdisciplinary (as it always was, no one path) but all agree artifacts serve as key pieces to text/evidence and provide context of human behavior. The field has moved from description to a focus on context
Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, eds, History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, 1993
Lubar and Kingery’s volume argues for reading objects as texts and for scholars of different disciplines to communicate in their pursuit of material culture studies. Material culture offers a meeting point for different fields; trying to push boundaries and increase communication
Cary Carson, “Material Culture History: The Scholarship Nobody Knows.” 1997
Providing an overview of the field of material culture (since Schlereth’s time), Carson argues that material culture studies needs to be public facing and that connecting to American consumerism is essential
Bernard L. Herman, “The Bricoleur Revisited, “ 1997
Analyzing an 1817 inventory to reconstruct the 18th century material world, Herman argues that we can use what is available to analyze the past and gain new understandings ; he argues for using many different creative sources, although they have their limitations, to hypothesize their past context; Looks at 1. the relationship between material culture studies and history, 2. The application of a material culture approach to history in the absence of tangible objects, 3. Levels of meaning that can be read from truly ordinary artifacts
Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework,” 1993
Martin argues that consumer behavior can only be understood through material culture and that by examining goods consumed, we can learn about people. She argues that objects made and confirmed social values/beliefs, especially household goods
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, 2021
Examining an embroidered sack, Miles explores Black women’s memory of slavery and genealogy through material culture, and argues that Ruth attempted to restore matrilineal line by stitching a list of strong, resilient women and a story of love on the sack. This sack also reveals the lived experience of slavery
