Material Culture = People

Kate asked a very interesting question about what academics study vs what the public will accept as worthy... 

I've always thought that the study of material culture should appeal to everyone because it is the study of things, and everyone has a relationship with things.  Of course there are many different kinds of things (and people), and often atypical things are more interesting to study... Also, many everyday things are difficult to study because they were so ordinary that no one thought to write about them...  Either way, the public is not predisposed to like academic scholarship, so we have to entice them, draw them in.

My approach has been to try and study things that are familiar, like objects used for travel, in an effort to unravel the relationships between people and their stuff and the historical moment that they live in.  Although I don't often think directly about the method underpinning this approach, there are many scholars from whom I have modeled my approach after.  The first thing that comes to mind is historicism, defined in the OED as an attempt by 19th c. German historians "to view all social and cultural phenomena, all categories, truths, and values, as relative and historically determined, and in consequence to be understood only by examining their historical context, in complete detachment from present-day attitudes."  I'm not sure if it's possible to detach ourselves or our histories from the present day, but I see my job largely as an effort to understand people on their own terms and in their own time.

Many scholars of "material culture" talk about using theory to understand and interrogate objects.  They can list dozens of theorists, and apply all kinds of theoretical "tools" to looking at objects like artists books.  Maybe it's an intellectual deficiency on my part, but I've never been comfortable using theories as "tools," largely because I find that focusing on theory widens the distance between me, the object, and the people I'm trying to learn about.  My eyes tend to glaze over when scholars talk about theory.  But I am also a scholar, so I'm just as likely to use complicated approaches to make sense of complicated things.  Historicism doesn't sound like theory to me... but is it?  

I wonder if public engagement requires a kind of magician's approach, where the mechanism is not visible.  As academics, we always want to be upfront about our scholarly apparatus, so that everyone can see that we've done our homework.  But there must be a way to do that without alienating the public.  When I try to imagine "the public," and consider what they might be interested in, I fall back on the idea that people are naturally interested in other people's lives.  And since everyday lives are literally filled with material culture (I'm thinking of the clothes I'm wearing, the chair I'm sitting in, the desk I'm leaning on, the computer I'm typing on and looking at, the fan that's blowing cool air around, the house I'm in, etc.) - why shouldn't our histories be filled with material culture too?

I, too, remember the first time I was introduced to the study of material culture in an academic setting.  I was in Laurie Sterling's undergrad literature class in nineteenth-century American literature and we were reading A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave and Dr. Sterling brought some images of Douglas that were printed in this book and his later work My Bondage and My Freedom.  We were asked to determine what information or attitudes we thought the images were supposed to communicate to readers of both texts and how the differences of these images indicated a difference in Douglas's messages in the texts or some other change.  I can remember thinking at the time, "why are we looking at pictures?  This isn't what we do" (we, of course, meaning English majors).  Now, ironically, here I am years later doing something very similar with Wilde.  But I am continually amazed by the types of objects that literature scholars use to investigate texts, audiences, authors, reading practices, etc.  While I once felt that my discipline limited me to printed materials, I now see, with the help of scholars such as Julian Yates and his oranges, that the study of many types of objects can and do help inform our understanding of the study of literary texts or the people who encountered them.  In response to Josh's question, then, I see more similarities rather than differences between disciplines studying material culture, because the types of objects we use and the questions we ask of these objects share many commonalities.  Over the last two weeks, whether we interrogated trunks, maps, or artists books, we all brought a set of foundational questions to these objects like "how was this object used?" even though many of our questions were informed by our disciplinary training.

As an aside, I also googled "material culture" to see what hits came up and the first was a website for a store in Philly called Material Culture.  It appears to be an antique store, but I was intrigued by both their use of the term material culture instead of so-and-so's antique store and the way their website seems to align historical value and monetary value: "It's ironic that many of the antique and vintage furnishing and arts sold at Material Culture are priced at a fraction of the sterile, industrial knockoffs that fill the profusion of online catalog sellers and chain stores that pay lip service to art, tradition and sustainability.  Between the high and low there is a middle path; it is there, slightly ahead of the curve, that Material Culture welcomes the public" (www.materialculture.com/aboutus).  They seem to promote the idea that age=authenticity=value and it seems to me that a general public would probably buy this notion.  Is there a difference between a yard sale where someone sells a 1960s egg beater that was handed down from Aunt Martha in order to de-clutter their home and an antique store that sells the same 1960s egg beater as a piece of history?  I'm wondering if there is a disconnect between what scholars study as "material culture" and what the public will accept as worthy for study as "material culture."

Material. Culture. Now.

Josh's post got me thinking: Where did I first encounter "material culture?" Maybe we could share our individual introductions to material culture and from there we might move toward a common understanding of the concept (and possibly a definition?). My first experience with material culture came before I had heard of the term. I took a course entitled "The Automobile in America" as an undergraduate. The entire premise of the course was to take an object, the car, and use it as a lens through which to examine American history. It was wonderful (and I'm not really that into cars). I was one of the only non-engineering students in the class (and the rest of the university, for that matter). I learned a lot in that course, but most of all I learned that objects connect people. Things have the ability speak to people across disciplines, regions, class, time, etc. I later had a meeting with the professor from the "Automobile" class and I told him I was really interested in "stuff" and how it affected/reflected the people who used and/or made it. Then he said, "Yeah, material culture" and the cartoon light bulb over my head lit up. And here I am.
Also, in thinking about defining material culture, it seems that what it is now might differ from how material culture was understood in the past. As Josh indicated, scholars still seem to be defining it. I was in the Winterthur student lounge today, and someone had placed the program graphics for the Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars as the background on one of the computers. The symposium was titled: "Material. Culture. Now." This title seems to indicate that there is a difference between the field now and the field "then." But has material ever truly been defined? Has its appeal come from its ability to defy a singular definition? One publication that outlines a history of the concept's use is the introduction to "American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field" edited by Ann Smart Martin and Ritchie Garrison in 1997. I don't know if everyone is familiar with this work, but it might help to understand where the field of material culture has been.
But where is it going?

Material Culture is...?

Thoughts from the road:

1) Thanks to Bess and Janneken et al for this idea. This seems like an excellent forum to complement the social networking we're all fretting over now that casual friends from the past know they can "poke" us on Facebook.

2) I wonder if we might collaborate here to define Material Culture as a method of inquiry based on our multi-disciplinary experience of "Material Culture" training. It seems many of us (faculty included) are still defining exactly what we mean when we use the term. Supposing we can stitch together a working definition and some citations, links, etc., we might then move the info over to Wikipedia, which, as Paul Hyde noted, has no entry for MC. 

To get the ball rolling: According to the Laramie in Layers page for What is Material Culture, "Material culture is a method used by many different disciplines and as such the definitions of it can vary." Agree or disagree? Does the definition really vary across disciplines, or just the application of it?

Facebookin'

Thanks, Bess, for setting this up.

This morning I'm experiencing the challenge I anticipated that made me resistant to joining Facebook. I'm having trouble keeping up with answering all the friend requests (yes, I'm very popular!) and cannot resist the urge to sculpt my page into the perfect representation of myself. These Web 2.0 tools take time. Is this another instance of "more work for mother," the argument that new technologies of industrialization (think the Cuisinart and all its precursors) aimed to make life easier for housewives, but in fact gave them more they were 'obligated' to do? These new tools, aimed at making it easier to communicate and network, clearly make keeping up socially and professionally much more complicated and time-consuming than the old-fashioned way of simply emailing. Prior to PEMCI, I kept such things at arm's length, not willing to commit my time and energy. I now see the great potential of social networking and all its cousins, but am I really willing to throw myself in completely? Do they still work to their full potential if I am just half-assed about it? As you can see from my ever more fancy page, I am currently about three-quarters-assed about it, adding my flickr link and an addictive geography game. Can I keep up? Should I?

inaugural post

Well, we have successfully completed the Public Engagement/Material Culture Institute at the University of Delaware. This blog will allow us to track progress and note links, events, sites, etc that seem relevant to the issues of public engagement in the humanities.

Many thanks to Joyce Hill Stoner and Matt Kinservik, along with all the UD faculty and staff that made this workshop happen.

Fellows, please post a bit about your project and plans to start us off. To do this, go to the "dashboard" (click the orange B in the top left corner of this page) and start a new post. I have also set up sidebars for links-- please add ones you think are relevant (especially if they link to your own project in some way). To add to these, click "layout" and then select the sidebar you want to edit.