Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture ... - UBC Blogs

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Mind in Matter1. Art (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture,photography)2. Diversions (books, toys, games, meals, theatricalperformances)3. Adornment (jewelry, clothing, hairstyles,cosmetics, tattooing, other alterations of thebody)4. Modifications of the landscape (architecture,town planning, agriculture, mining)5. Applied arts (furniture, furnishings, receptacles)6. Devices (machines, vehicles, scientific instruments,musical instruments, implements)These categories are broad; they undoubtedlyrequire modification and refining; the list is intendedsimply to define the terrain and suggestthe outlines of a system. Many objects straddle categories,but taxonomic shortcomings do not causeanalytical problems. Classification for purposes ofmanageability and discussion does not affect theactual process of material culture analysis describedbelow which applies to all artifacts. Although therange of categories suggests the potential applicabilityof a variety of specialized techniques andmethodologies, no systematic attempt is made inthis general essay to correlate categories of objectswith particular analytical methods or with the productionof particular kinds of cultural data. However,further consideration is given to these categoriesin the final section.Why Material Culture?Why should one bother to investigate material objectsin the quest for culture, for a society's systemsof belief? Surely people in all societies express andhave expressed their beliefs more explicitly andopenly in their words and deeds than in the thingsthey have made. Are there aspects of mind to bediscovered in objects that differ from, complement,supplement, or contradict what can be learnedfrom more traditional literary and behavioralsources?Inherent and Attached ValueThe most obvious cultural belief associated withmaterial objects has to do with value. There aredifferent kinds of value. One, intrinsic in the fabricof an object itself, is established by the rarity of thematerials used. Such value will inhere in the objectfor as long as the material continues to be valuable.With gold or silver or precious stones, this kind ofvalue is quite persistent. More transient or variableare those values that have been attached by thepeople who originally made or used the object, byus today, or by people at any intervening moment.A value that accrues from utility will inhere as longas an object continues to be useful and can returnwhen an obsolete object again becomes useful(wood stoves in an oil shortage). In addition tomaterial and utilitarian values, certain objects haveaesthetic value (art), some possess spiritual value(icons, cult objects), and some express attitudes towardother human beings (a fortress, a love seat)or toward the world (using materials in their naturalcondition as opposed to reshaping them).Obviously, then, objects do embody and reflectcultural beliefs. But, although such embodimentsof value differ in form from verbal and behavioralmodes of cultural expression, they do not necessarilydiffer in character or content. In the followingregards, however, objects do constitute distinctivecultural expressions.Surviving Historical EventsObjects created in the past are the only historicaloccurrences that continue to exist in the present.They provide an opportunity by which "we encounterthe past at first hand; we have direct sensoryexperience of surviving historical events."4Artifacts may not be important historical events,but they are, to the extent that they can be experiencedand interpreted as evidence, significant.More RepresentativeHenry Glassie has observed that only a small percentageof the world's population is and has beenliterate, and that the people who write literatureor keep diaries are atypical. Objects are used by amuch broader cross section of the population andare therefore potentially a more wide-ranging,more representative source of information thanwords.5 They offer the possibility of a way to understandthe mind of the great majority of nonliteratepeople, past and present, who remain otherwiseinaccessible except through impersonalrecords and the distorting view of a contemporary4Jules David Prown, "Style as Evidence," Winterthur Portfolio15, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 208. Peter Gay has observed that "themost undramatic work of art presents precisely the same causalpuzzles as the eruption of a war, the making of a treaty, or therise of a class" (Art and Act: On Causes in History-Manet, Gropius,Mondrian [New York: Harper & Row, 1976], p. 3).5 Henry Glassie, "Meaningful Things and AppropriateMyths: The Artifact's Place in American Studies," in Prospects:An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, vol. 3(New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), pp. 29-30.3
4literary elite. This promise perhaps explains whymany of the leading early proponents, indeed pioneers,of material culture have come from thefield of folklore and folk life and have studied vernacularobjects. Such study has required a consid-erable amount of scholarly innovation. Vernacularobjects pose interpretive difficulties because ourscholarly traditions and experience, especially inregard to art, architecture, and the decorative arts,have focused on high style objects.The theoretical democratic advantage of artifactsin general, and vernacular material in particular,is partially offset by the skewed nature of whatin fact survives from an earlier culture. A primaryfactor in this is the destructive, or the preservative,effect of particular environments on particularmaterials. Materials from the deeper recesses oftime are often buried, and recovered archaeologically.Of the material heritage of such cultures,glass and ceramics survive in relatively good con-dition, metal in poor to fair condition, wood in theform of voids (postholes), and clothing not at all(except for metallic threads, buttons, and an oddclasp or hook).Inherent and attached value, discussed above,is another major element in what survives. A significantaspect of this is taste, or, more specifically,changes in taste over the years. A "degree-of-sophistication"scale, ranging from rude vernacularat one end to high style at the other, comes intoplay. The calibrations on this scale have obviousimplications of social class. High style objects, some-times of precious materials and fabricated withtechnical skill that elicits admiration, tend to bepreserved; ruder objects, which for economic reasonssometimes have much less invested in themin terms of the quality of the material or the craftsmanship,simply may not last as long or, if they do,tend eventually to be discarded as junk. Objectswith iconic or associational value are preserved, butwhen they lose that association (religious paintingsin a secular society, photographs of unknown ancestors),they become disposable.Even allowing for the distortions of survival, itremains true that objects can make accessible aspects,especially nonelite aspects, of a culture thatare not always present or detectable in other modesof cultural expression.isVeracityCertain fundamental beliefs in any society are sogenerally accepted that they never need to be articulated(see Cultural Perspective below). Thesebasic cultural assumptions, the detection of whichWinterthur Portfolioessential for cultural understanding, are consequentlynot perceivable in what a society expresses.They can, however, be detected in the way in whicha society expresses itself, in the configuration orform of things, in style.6 Stylistic evidence can befound in all modes of cultural expression, whetherverbal, behavioral, or material. But a society putsa considerable amount of cultural spin on what itconsciously says and does. Cultural expression isless self-conscious, and therefore potentially moretruthful, in what a society produces, especially suchmundane, utilitarian objects as domestic buildings,furniture, or pots.Cultural PerspectivePerhaps the most difficult problem to recognizeand surmount in cultural studies is that of culturalstance or cultural perspective. The evidence westudy is the product of a particular cultural environment.We, the interpreters, are products of adifferent cultural environment. We are pervadedby the beliefs of our own social groups-nation,locality, class, religion, politics, occupation, gender,age, race, ethnicity-beliefs in the form of assumptionsthat we make unconsciously. These are biasesthat we take for granted; we accept them as mindlesslyas we accept the tug of gravity. Is it possibleto step outside of one's own cultural givens andinterpret evidence objectively in terms of the beliefsof the individuals and the society that producedthat evidence? If not, if we are irredeemably biasedby our own unconscious beliefs, if we are hopelesslyculture bound, then the entire enterprise of culturalinterpretation should be avoided since ourinterpretations will inevitably be distorted. It is possibleto argue, as Arnold Hauser does in responseto the contention of Karl Marx that we see all thingsfrom the perspective of our social interest and ourview is therefore inevitably distorted, that once webecome aware of the problem we can struggleagainst subjectivity, against individual and class interests,and can move toward greater objectivity.7Awareness of the problem of one's own culturalbias is a large step in the direction of neutralizingthe problem, but material culture offers a scholarlyapproach that is more specific and trustworthy thansimple awareness. The study of systems of beliefthrough an analysis of artifacts offers opportunitiesto circumvent the investigator's own cultural per-6 For an extended discussion of this issue, see Prown, "Styleas Evidence," esp. pp. 197-200.7 Arnold Hauser, "Sociology of Art," in Marxism and Art:Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism, ed. Berel Lang and ForrestWilliams (New York: David McKay Co., 1972), p. 272.
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