I thought you guys might get a kick out of this:

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

(And, funnily enough, they have a recording of the song I was named after!)

They have a section for Hawaiian music if you look in Browse Collection, just in case anyone's interested in something like that.

Definitions of Material Culture

Debby Andrews is currently collecting definitions for Material Culture. Would you PEMCI-ites be willing to add your definitions? Here is what Debbie has so far:

Definitions of Material Culture

The things we make reflect our beliefs about the world; the things around us affect the way that we understand the world. There is an unending circularity to thisthat implies less a circle and more a kind of wheel moving. --Lance Winn, with respect to Foucault

Material culture is the history and philosophy of objects and the myriadrelationships between people and things. --Bernie Herman

Material Culture Studies opens the question of the “thingness” of things—what is matter? How does it produce meaning, yield uses, constitute worlds? Material culture studies attends to the situation of “things,” their accreted associations and meanings as they are successively performed. Working with “things” is so rooted in experience, so tuned to how we perceive the world, so inductive, that teacher and student become fellow observers / users, equally able to respond to the strangeness of this “thing,” before them, now. “Things” matter and the knowledge they offer us transforms our sense of the habit worlds we live and make. --Julian Yates

My idea of material culture studies is a quite literal one: I see us engaged in in-depth studies of the materials of human cultures--of anything (any/thing/) for how it reflects and constructs the culture of which it is a part.--Marcy Dinius

The American Institute for Conservation's definition for "cultural property" can loosely substitute for material culture. “The legacy of our collective cultural heritage enriches our lives. Each generation has a responsibility to maintain and to protect this heritage for the benefit of succeeding generations. Conservation is the field dedicated to preserving cultural property -objects, collections, specimens, structures, or sites identified as having artistic, historic, scientific, religious, or social significance - for future generations. -AIC website----Jae Gutierrez

The rise of mass consumption was accompanied by a proliferation in objects and the multiplication of meanings, practices, and “needs” associated with these things. Material Culture Studies helps us to think about the objects, and the cultural, political, and economic systems that created them.--William R. Scott

Material culture is the relationship between people and things.—Arwen Mohun
Further notes from Arwen: Material culture scholars ask questions like: how do historical actors and present day people make and use objects like houses, books, and paintings? What did those objects mean to specific historical actors at specific moments in time? How might these meanings change over time? How have authors and artists used material things as symbols in art and literature? How do the physical characteristics of artifacts—the paper a magazine or newspaper is printed on, the cloth a garment is fashioned from—affect interpretation?

Material Culture is the unpacking or mining of both historic and everyday objects to find the embedded ideas and concepts that define the surrounding society – Joyce Hill Stoner

We're in the news

Maybe you guys all already saw this, but in case you haven't, enjoy:

http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/jun/workshop060308.html

Edit:
Ok, for some reason when I posted this, the extension was cut off. It should end with a /workshop060308.html. You might have to add it yourself--I don't have the technical know-how to do this any better.