A Visual Method to Compare the Quality and Complexity of Archaeological Textiles: The Cotton Mantas of Pre-Hispanic Colombia

People live amidst objects, things, articles, items, artefacts, materials, substances, and stuff – described in social sciences and humanities as material culture, which denotes both natural and human-made entities, which form our physical environment. We, humans, relate to this environment by using, depicting, interacting with or thinking about various material objects or their representations. In other words, material culture is never just about things in themselves, it is also about various ideas, representations, experiences, practices and relations. In contemporary theorising about material culture, the watershed between the tangible and intangible has started to disappear as all the objects have multiple meanings. This paper theorises objects mostly in terms of contemporary socio-cultural anthropology and ethnology by first giving an overview of the development of the material culture studies and then focusing upon consumption studies, material agency, practice theory and the methods for studying material culture.
 Both anthropology and ethnology in the beginning of the 20th century were dealing mostly with ‘saving’; that is, collecting the ethnographical objects from various cultures for future preservation as societies modernised. The collecting of the everyday items of rural Estonians, which had begun in the 19th century during the period of national awakening, gained its full momentum after the establishment of the Estonian National Museum in 1909. During the museum’s first ten years, 20,000 objects were collected (Õunapuu 2007). First, the focus was on the identification of the historical-geographical typologies of the collected artefacts. In 1919, the first Estonian with a degree in ethnology, Helmi Reiman-Neggo (2013) stressed the need for ethnographical descriptions of the collected items and the theoretical planning of the museum collections. The resulting vast ethnographical collection of the Estonian National Museum (currently about 140,000 items) has also largely influenced ethnology and anthropology as academic disciplines in Estonia (Pärdi 1993).
 Even though in the first half of the 20th century the focus lay in the systematic collection and comparative analysis of everyday items and folk art, there were studies that centred on meaning already at the end of 19th century. Austrianethnologist Rudolf Meringer suggested in 1891 that a house should be studied as a cultural individual and analysed within the context of its functions and in relation to its inhabitants. Similarly, the 1920s and 1930s saw studies on the roles of artefacts that were not influenced by Anglo-American functionalism: Mathilde Hain (1936) studied how folk costumes contribute to the harmonious functioning of a ‘small community’, and Petr Bogatyrev (1971) published his study on Moravian costumes in 1937. This study, determining the three main functions – instrumental, aesthetic and symbolic – of the folk costume, and translated into English 30 years after first publication, had a substantial influence on the development of material culture studies.
 The 1970s saw the focus of material culture studies in Western and Northern Europe shifting mainly from the examination of (historical) rural artefacts to the topics surrounding contemporary culture, such as consumption. In Soviet Estonian ethnology, however, the focus on the 19th century ethnographic items was prevalent until the 1980s as the topic was also partially perceived as a protest against the direction of Soviet academia (see Annist and Kaaristo 2013 for a thorough overview). There were, of course, exceptions, as for instance Arved Luts’s (1962) studies on everyday life on collective farms. Meanwhile, however, the communicative and semiotic turn of the 1970s turned European ethnology’s focus to the idea of representation and objects as markers of identity as well as means of materialising the otherwise intangible and immaterial relationships and relations. The theory of cultural communication was established in Scandinavian ethnology and numerous studies on clothing, housing and everyday items as material expressions of social structures, hierarchies, values and ideologies emerged (Lönnqvist 1979, Gustavsson 1991). The Scandinavian influences on Estonia are also reflected in Ants Viires’s (1990) suggestion that ethnologists should study clothing (including contemporary clothing) in general and not just folk costumes, by using a semiotic approach.
 Löfgren’s (1997) clarion call to bring more ‘flesh and blood’ to the study of material culture was a certain reaction to the above focus. Researchers had for too long focused exclusively upon the meaning and, as Löfgren brought forth, they still did not have enough understanding of what exactly it was that people were actually and practically doing with their things. Ingold’s (2013) criticism on the studies focusing on symbolism, and the lack of studies on the tangible materiality of the materials and their properties, takes a similar position. In the 1990s, there was a turn toward the examination of material-cultural and those studies that were written within the framework of ‘new materialism’ (Hicks 2010, Coole and Frost 2010) started to pay attention to objects as embodied and agentive (Latour 1999, Tilley et al 2006). Nevertheless, as Olsen (2017) notes, all materialities are not created equal in contemporary academic research: while items like prostheses, Boyle’s air pumps or virtual realities enjoy increased attention, objects such as wooden houses, fireplaces, rakes and simple wooden chairs are still largely unexamined. The traditional material culture therefore needs new studying in the light of these post-humanist theories.
 Where does this leave Estonian ethnology? In the light of the theoretical developments discussed above, we could ask, whether and how has the material Making sense of the material culture turn affected research in Estonia? Here we must first note that for a significant part of the 20th century, Estonian ethnology (or ethnography as the discipline was called before 1990s) has mostly been centred on the material culture (see the overview of the main topics from vehicles to folk costumes in Viires and Vunder 2008). Partly because of this aspect of the discipline’s history, many researchers actually felt the need to somewhat distance themselves from these topics in the 1990s (Pärdi 1998). Compared to topics like religion, identity, memory, oral history and intangible heritage, study of material culture has largely stayed in the background. There are of course notable exceptions such as Vunder’s (1992) study on the history of style, which includes analysis of theirsymbolic aspects. It is also interesting to note that in the 1990s Estonian ethnology, the term ‘material culture’ (‘materiaalne kultuur’) – then seen as incorporating the dualism between material and immaterial – was actually replaced with the Estonian translation of German ‘Sachkultur’ (‘esemekultuur’, literally ‘artefact culture’). Nevertheless, it was soon realised that this was actually a too narrow term (with its exclusion of natural objects and phenomena as well as the intangible and social aspects of culture), slowly fell out of general usage, and was replaced with ‘material culture’ once again. Within the past three decades, studies dealing with material culture have discussed a wide variety of topics from the vernacular interior design (Kannike 2000, 2002, 2012), everyday commodities (Kõresaar 1999b) and spiritual objects (Teidearu 2019), traditional rural architecture (Pärdi 2012, Kask 2012, 2015), museum artefacts (Leete 1996), clothing, textiles and jewellery (Kõresaar 1999a; Järs 2004; Summatavet 2005; Jõeste 2012; Araste and Ventsel 2015), food culture (Piiri 2006; Bardone 2016; Kannike and Bardone 2017), to soviet consumer culture (Ruusmann 2006, Rattus 2013) and its implications in life histories (Kõresaar 1998, Jõesalu and Nugin 2017). All of these these studies deal with how people interpret, remember and use objects.
 The main keywords of the studies of European material culture have been home, identity and consumption (but also museology and tangible heritage, which have not been covered in this article). Material culture studies are an important part of the studies of everyday life and here social and cultural histories are still important (even though they have been criticised for focusing too much on symbols and representation). Therefore, those studies focusing on physical materials and materialites, sensory experiences, embodiment, and material agency have recently become more and more important. This article has given an overview of the three most prevalent thematic and theoretical strands of the study of material culture: objects as symbols especially in the consumer culture, material agency and practice theory as well as discussing some methodological suggestions for the material culture studies.
 To conclude, even though on the one hand we could argue that when it comes to the study of material culture there indeed exists a certain hierarchy of „old“ topics that relate to museums or traditional crafts and „new“ and modern materialities, such as smart phones or genetically modified organisms. However, dichotomies like this are often artificial and do not show the whole picture: contemporary children are often as proficient in playing cat’s cradle as they are with video games (Jackson 2016). Thus, studying various (everyday) material objects and entities is still topical and the various theories discussed in this article can help to build both theoretical and empirical bridge between different approaches. Therefore, there is still a lot to do in this regard and we invite researchers to study objects form all branches of material culture, be they 19th century beer mugs in the collections of the Estonian National Museum that can help us to better give meaning to our past

The material world is often created by gendered power structures and used to express gendered identities. In this paper, I will offer an overview of the historiography of gender and material culture in the modern period. The first half of the paper will focus on studies of modern Britain. I will take a long view of the development of the history of gender, considering its relationship with cultural history, and why the study of material culture is useful to historians working in this area. I will then explore how historians of gender have recently used material culture, focusing on three main areas: gendered responsibility for purchasing goods; the use of material things to shape and create ideas of gender, and in particular new work that focuses on the construction of masculinity through everyday objects and practices; and the way in which historians of the family and emotional life have started to use the material world, especially in work on fatherhood. I will also reflect on recent criticisms of the study of gender and material culture, and how and where the field might usefully develop in the future. The second half of the paper will focus in on the material culture of the home. Narrowing the focus of discussion will allow me to open up the geographical remit of the paper to explore how we might use the study of gender and material culture in a transnational context.

The word “material” in material culture refers to a broad range of objects classified as “artifacts”—that is, those objects made or used by humans. The inclusion of the word “culture” is rather misleading, however, as material culture is not strictly culture itself but rather its product; as cultural constructs inform the production of artifacts, the study of material culture is a way of revealing beliefs, assumptions, and social fears within the society that produced and consumed any given artifact. Material culture therefore properly means the physical manifestations of culture, and covers those aspects of human behavior, learning, and knowledge that provide a person with the reasoning for producing and using artifacts. Until relatively recently, there was little serious interest in the study of the material cultures of children and childhood (children being biologically immature individuals, with the associated childhood referring to the social and cultural construction of the lives, development, and meaning of these children). Children’s experiences vary enormously over time, space, and culture, and the material environment of the child is an important part of their experience of the world. Conversely, the study of such material culture makes children visible, particularly in the archaeological record where such materials evidence children’s presence and activities. While the origins of material culture study can be traced back to the late 19th century, texts on childhood objects did not start appearing until much later on, and even then it was largely confined to collectors’ guides and histories (mostly concerning toys, dolls, and children’s costume; items that may be thought of as icons of childhood) rather than studies considering the relationship between children and their material world. Such material cultures may therefore be thought of (after Brookshaw 2009, cited under Material Culture of Children) as being either the material culture of children (items made, adapted, or repurposed by children themselves such as homemade—sometimes termed “makeshift” toys) or the material culture of childhood (items made by or bought for children by adults).

The study of material culture belongs to a relatively young discipline that examines artifacts as well as ideas about, and practices related to, artifacts, with artifacts defined as material objects created or modified by people. Aspects of research in material culture overlap with art history, archaeology, and anthropology, but studies in material culture approach the subject from a different perspective, focusing on areas not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines. Unlike traditional art history, material culture studies concentrate on the function of objects, devoting little attention to their aesthetic qualities, with more emphasis, for instance, on miracles associated with icons than on the style or iconography of icons; unlike traditional archaeology, material culture studies do not necessarily focus on extant artifacts, giving as much attention to references to objects in texts as to extant objects; and, unlike traditional anthropology, material culture studies often give great emphasis to historical development, often over vast expanses of time. While the field of material culture studies has flourished for decades, religious studies have been slow to recognize the importance of material things. Many areas of religion in which material culture plays a prominent role remain largely unexplored, including the place of objects in ritual, religious emotion, pilgrimage, and doctrine. Readers interested in the material culture of Buddhism will want to consult entries for Buddhist art, archaeology, and anthropology as well; in the entries below, the focus is on areas of material culture not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines as well as on studies within these disciplines that are especially relevant to the study of material culture. The term visual culture overlaps with much of what is considered material culture, but excludes objects associated with other senses, such as taste, smell, and touch, which are covered by the term material culture. The material culture approach is particularly well suited for exploring the qualities of particular classes of objects. What is it about relics as body parts that accounts for their appeal? Why are miracles so often associated with physical representations of holy figures and how do these differ from textual representations? How do clothing and food differ from language as a medium of communication? To highlight this aspect of research in Buddhist material culture, the scholarship listed below is divided according to type of object. At the same time, material culture studies also offer an opportunity to examine attitudes toward the material world as applied to a wide variety of objects normally separated by discipline. The doctrine of merit inspired the creation of a wide variety of different types of objects, and the monastic ideal of renunciation permeates many different areas of Buddhist material culture.

It’s Hard to Say Elizabeth McKeown (bio) Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. By Colleen McDannell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. 312 pages. $35.00. Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis. By Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995. 202 pages. $29.95 (cloth). $14.95 (paper). It’s not easy to say what things mean. A good reading of the objects of popular culture requires an eye for objects and a taste for theory. It aims to locate things in a landscape that is simultaneously familiar and fresh. The study of material culture is especially challenging when the materials in question are religious things. In this case, interpreters must address the complex category of “religion” and acquaint themselves with a variety of particular and highly-defined traditions of doctrine and practice. Colleen McDannell and Charles Reagan Wilson engage in this demanding practice and demonstrate that the effort pays notable dividends. Things and their associated rituals anchor interpretations of American “popular religion.” From McDannell and Wilson we learn that ordinary people—Protestants, Catholics, Southerners, women, and men—routinely practice religion outside of church, in the privacy of their bedrooms and parlors, and in the public spaces of football stadiums and fraternal lodges. We also learn that the beliefs and rituals of popular religion are frequently borrowed from traditional sources and edited to express regional, class, ethnic and gender convictions. The gender, economic and racial imprints of the larger culture are expressed in popular religion just as they are in the [End Page 650] traditional churches. But popular religion is more heterodox than the Christian churches, and its mass appeal erodes doctrinal and ritual boundaries. McDannell and Wilson provide affectionate readings of the objects, architecture, and landscapes of popular religion and bring this complex and shape-shifting practice into vivid focus. A specialist in Southern religion and culture, Wilson’s first exploration of popular religion—which he also calls “Southern civil religion”—was an analysis of the apotheosis of the Confederacy after the Civil War. In Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, he argued that the myths, rituals, evangelists, and demons of Lost Cause religion provided white Southerners with a cohesive cultural identity in the wake of political defeat. 1 In subsequent essays, Wilson extended his analysis of Southern popular religion into the contemporary period and emphasized the study of material culture. His latest volume, Judgment and Grace in Dixie, is a collection of these essays. He concludes that the South is still “God’s Project.” The civil rights movement has desacralized the memory of the Confederacy and its foundational doctrine of white supremacy, and now black and white Southerners struggle to establish a biracial South. Wilson argues that this vision is rooted evangelical Christianity—under God’s judgment and with God’s grace—and nourished in the icons and landscapes of Southern popular religion. The recent wave of church-burnings in the South offer a graphic reminder of Wilson’s accompanying caution: this biracial project is “still in the making.” Popular and material culture studies is Colleen McDannell’s project. While Wilson promotes the South as a site for biracial renewal, McDannell advances the study of popular and material culture among scholars of religion. 2 In her earlier The Christian Home in Victorian America, McDannell entered Anglo-Protestant and Irish-Catholic middle-class parlors to examine hearth rituals and patterns of domesticity that borrowed from and transformed ecclesiastical practices of the institutional churches. She showed how objects (especially the family bible) and domestic architecture (most memorably the “Christian home” designs of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) infused everyday lives with religious structure and significance. In addition to her conclusions about religion, gender, class, and ethnicity, McDannell discovered an ecumenicity of religious goods among Northern Protestants and Catholics, of which Protestant use of Marian icons and devotions is a notable instance. Now, in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, McDannell extends her material cultural approach in several provocative [End Page 651] directions. In a lavishly-produced volume that will find space on contemporary coffee tables, she showcases the materials of...

Oldtidsforfattere under arkæologisk kontrol – Om skriftlige kilder og materiel kultur i Sydskandinavien

Lega Dress as Cultural Artifact

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 317 Most noteworthy in the New World series is Anna Roosevelt’s “Early Pottery in the Amazon.” The pottery represents the earliest so far discovered in the Americas, dating to about 7,500 b.c.—“more than 1,500years earlier than elsewhere in the hemisphere” (p. 115). Roosevelt notes that the early radiocarbon dates for these Amazo­ nian sites were not taken seriously by earlier investigators and, while available in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution (p. 116), re­ mained hidden and unpublished until now. She does not, however, claim Amazonia as the “hearth of pottery in the New World” (p. 129), recognizing from her experience with these hidden data that archaeologists in the past have too often let their theoretical models determine and override empirical research strategies and results. The final three chapters are not as conclusive as one would expect. I take particular exception to Hayden’s preoccupation with status and prestige as forces for technological innovation. While elites are often the first to acquire exotic, expensive, and new kinds of objects in order to display their wealth and status, they often do not invent these new objects but simply adopt them. The invention of those objects and technologies originates, instead, with individuals experi­ menting on the basis of knowledge and experience of other and earlier craft technologies, and very often within a ritualistic con­ text—which apparently was the case for ceramics at Dolni Vestonice in the Upper Palaeolithic. Joan M. Vastokas Dr. Vastokas is professor of anthropology at Trent University, Ontario, Canada. Her research and writing focus on material culture, art, architecture, and technology in various societies. Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies. Edited by W. David Kingery. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Insti­ tution Press, 1996. Pp. x+262; illustrations, maps, figures, notes. $39.00 (cloth). This collection of fifteen essays is based on a Smithsonian confer­ ence on material culture. W. David Kingery’s editor’s preface cites the conference theme: “the conviction that the things humankind makes and uses at any particular time and place are probably the truest representation we have ofvalues and meaning within a society. The study of things, material culture, is thus capable of piercing in­ terdisciplinary boundaries and bringing forward meaningful discus­ sions and interactions among scholars in many disparate fields” (p. ix). This anthology is to be “an introduction to the methods and theories common to material cultural studies in a variety of specialist fields’ ’ (p. ix). Kingery claims that Historyfrom Things: Essays on Mate­ rial Culture, which he coedited with Steven Lubar (Washington, D.C.: 318 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Smithsonian Institution, Press, 1993), is a predecessor volume, but he gives neither date nor title for the conference. Nor do we learn how this volume reflects the total conference agenda. Kingery asserts that “No one denies the importance of things, but learning from them requires rather more attention than reading texts. The grammar of things is related to, but more complex and difficult to decipher than, the grammar of words” (p. 1). These es­ says help practitioners of “a relatively new and distinct discipline,” the study of material culture, learn to work together and appreciate the contributions ofmany disciplines to material culture (p. 1). After one introductory chapter, the book is divided into four parts: “Para­ digms for Material Culture Studies,” “Material Culture in the His­ tory of Technology,” “Formation Processes,” and “Materials Sci­ ence in Material Culture Studies.” The strengths of this volume are the varied backgrounds of the contributors, the strong international perspective these experts bring to their work, and the section on materials science. The ten U.S. and three European authors include anthropologists (some­ times also materials science experts), archaeologists, historians, and an ethnologist. Jules D. Prown distinguished between “hard” and “soft” material culturists, between those who focus on “the reality of the object it­ self” and “the artifact as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind” (pp. 21-22). The essays can be similarly divided. Representing the “soft” approach, JosephJ. Corn and Ruth Oldenziel provide useful historiographical essays focused on articles in Technology and Culture and on the influence...

Pondering the relevance of New Materialism for agricultural history has been a bit like returning to a familiar childhood home only to find it newly remodeled. Is New Materialism simply wall-papering over existing grooves and contours of agricultural histories? Does it rewire and electrify our inquiries about the past? Does New Materialism simply add a new room onto an older structure? Or does it fundamentally alter the structures through which historians engage the subjects (and objects) of agricultural pasts?New materialists often launch their case by describing a scholarly world inattentive or ignorant of material forces. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost open their book New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics by discussing the impact of microorganisms and material artifacts on daily life with the comment: “For the most part we take such materiality for granted, or we assume there is little of interest to say about it.”1 Jane Bennett's widely acclaimed Vibrant Matter, similarly, describes a social and humanities scholarship about food that is inattentive to material forces.2Such assessments prompted me to think new materialists are describing a different old house than the one with which I am familiar. For agricultural history pulses with materiality! In its pages, Bermuda grass creeps, boll weevils chomp, tsetse flies infect, cattle walk, weeds choke irrigation ditches, peaches enchant, bulls stomp, and boars refuse to mount.3 Far from taking materiality for granted, or treating the material as mundane, among agricultural historians, even manure matters.4 A great deal.5If agricultural historians have already conceptualized animals and plants (and manure!) as consequential makers of history, what do they have to gain from the new materiality? New Materialism enlarges both the temporal frame and the scope of action, inviting scholars to imagine humans as objects of material manipulation, not simply as modifiers of the natural world. In his Matter of History, Tim LeCain presents the history of the longhorn cow as an evolutionary history, tracing ruminants' development of a four-chambered stomach to the domestication of cattle eight thousand years ago. LeCain argues that, ultimately, the story of cows' domestication is not only about something that humans did to cows, but also about what cows did to humans. Human proximity to a domesticated ruminant, combined with a genetic mutation to make it possible for adults to drink milk, compelled people to take advantage of the nearby food source. Over time, well-fed genetic mutants (milk drinkers) proved more likely to survive, and thus their cultural traits and genetic mutation thrived.6This neo-materialist approach offers novel insights to histories of milk and dairying. Most works about dairy farming center people enacting change on cows—feeding, housing, and breeding them, and protecting their health.7 To a point, cows pattern human lives in these works, structuring the days of those tasked with milking them. Historians rarely explore, however, the longer, more profound ways cows shaped humans' bodies and human history writ large. In a sense, such a perspective forces readers to wonder whether theirs is the only house on the lot—or whether the anthill, bird's nest, doghouse, and compost pile might hold greater leverage than previously understood.Another element of LeCain's New Materialism is that it puts commodities in context with other materials—correcting a shortcoming of focused commodity-centric works. In LeCain's analysis of the cattle of the Deer Lodge Valley, evolutionary biology meets chemistry and physical properties of copper. He describes how copper smelting lofted arsenic-laden ash, ruining cattle ranching's prospects by tainting milk, poisoning cows' capacity to reproduce, and undermining cows' ability to fend for themselves on the open range.8 Making these connections overt provides a more textured history of the unique features of the Deer Lodge Valley, and it also promises to help rescue the field from an ever-more complex set of commodity-focused monographs that largely offer different variations of a similar narrative.LeCain makes this leap to understand humans as objects of cows by mining scholarly secondary literature in biology, psychology, and history, building on scholars who have mined the archives. By so doing, LeCain intends to bring about an end to anthropocentrism. It was striking to me, then, that to make this move, he turns to scientific traditions—cognitive biology, epigenetics—that center humans more than the ecological studies on which environmental historians have generally relied. Human biases are not historians' alone. What impact might amplification of the findings of cognitive and human biology at the expense of field biologists have on science, as well as on history?Thinking more about neo-materialism got me thinking as much about the objects within the remodeled house as of its walls. In particular, neo-materialism offered new ideas about positioning the robust scholarship in material culture studies in agricultural history. At present, neo-materialist works draw more heavily from the fields of technological, environmental, and animal histories than the robust scholarship in material culture and museum studies. Agricultural historians have thought deeply about the material world and the way it comes to life through objects.9 They have used objects to trace trade across rural spaces and considered how objects helped foster the development of social or cultural or regional identity.10 Agricultural historians have also turned to objects to glean hints of the meaning making and resistance of peoples otherwise sparsely documented in the written record. Lu Ann Jones's evaluation of embroidered and hand-dyed curtains made from chicken-feed sacks, for instance, reveals southern farm families' engagement with market-driven poultry production and demonstrates women's knowledge of the local ecology of natural dye sources.11 A set of canning jars in the possession of a southern African American rural household signals how determinedly the family sought self-sufficiency and community resilience.12How might neo-materialist scholarship mesh with material culture scholars to invigorate agricultural history? First, new materialists and material culture scholars might work together to probe the sensory elements of agricultural knowledge production. In the past two decades, sensory historians have helped reconstruct how the past smelled, sounded, tasted, and felt.13 Environmental history, similarly, has paid greater attention to the way that knowledge was embodied through work.14 In The Matter of History, LeCain emphasizes the significance of the material world in sparking cognition and knowledge. Drawing on anthropologist Tim Ingold, LeCain explains that a beginning cellist “would be unable to begin learning to truly play the cello until she picked one up, pressed her fingers to the board, and felt the inimitable deep vibrations as she pulled the bow across the strings.”15The sensory engagement afforded by object study is something long understood by agricultural historians. As John T. Schlebecker urged in his 1977 essay “The Use of Objects in Agricultural History,” “if at all possible the object should be touched, handled, and lifted . . . to know that a grain cradle weighs eleven pounds is not really as useful as lifting and walking with it.”16 The practice of farming—and its attendant pursuits—have many of the same embodied qualities as playing a cello. Whether evaluating friability of soil or gauging the pliability of a tobacco leaf or feeling the heat of an infected udder, to farm is to know by feeling, sniffing, listening, and watching.Might greater engagement with objects lend clues about the bodily experiences of these encounters? Might considering knowledge production from the perspective of cognitive science offer new angles on lay understandings of agriculture, and the pathways by which human bodies interact with the natural world? Thanks to living history farms and museums, it's possible for many scholars not to simply read about past work but to enact it; neo-materialist scholarship helps legitimize the significance of such institutions as not only historical repositories but also laboratories for understanding cognitive experiences.But objects of work are not the only kinds of artifacts that agricultural and rural historians have unearthed. In an arresting article in the 2018 Agricultural History special issue “Artifacts in Agraria,” museum curator Roland Sawatzky provided the “biography” of a violin that traveled from a London workshop to the Manitoban frontier—becoming a prized possession of Pierre Bruce, a Metis middle man for the North West Company. The violin, Sawatzky concludes, “was formative not only for the owners who played it, but for the communities that experienced its playing, followed its rhythms, danced its tunes, shared its sound, and were affected and transformed by its cultural mediations.”17Sawatzky's masterful biography of the object, viewed from the perspective of materialist approaches that attend to the organismal qualities of human behavior, prompted me to wonder whether material-culture scholars might add to the methodology of artifact analysis: How did it move them? What physical actions did the object invoke? What kinds of bodily behavior did it incite? But also—what emotional responses did the object elicit? How? From whom?Ultimately, my assessment is that much of the old house of agricultural history stands, even with the perspectives presented by New Materialism. Despite new materialists' bluster, agricultural history has a long tradition of acknowledging and being interested in the role of material forces—from animal bodies to climate, seed plasma to soil residue—as they interact with the human past. Rather than realign or replace existing fields of inquiry, New Materialism builds on and extends existing approaches.But New Materialism—like a new piece of art or a just-installed mirror—does prompt different kinds of questions and reflections, offering fresh perspectives and evocative questions on familiar terrain. Much like the fiddle's call on the Canadian frontier, the tune of New Materialism offers an invitation to dance with new steps in a familiar space. May the call-and-response of historical inquiry be harmonious.

Abstract: This article, based on the 2021 WMQ -EMSI workshop, “Material Culture Studies and Early American History,” offers a state-of-the-field report. It considers the scholarly popularity of the “material turn” among historians of early America in the twenty-first century and asks what scholars miss by engaging with material culture primarily as tangible evidence without dwelling on the methodological or theoretical foundations of material culture studies as a field. Understanding material culture studies as a field sheds greater light on why material culture evidence is critically important for studying early American history, especially a field that many of us now conceive of as “vast early America.” Interdisciplinary in its origins and practice, material culture studies, like early America, has a vastness—a vastness that gives us tools to decolonize our study of the past. The vastness of material culture studies equips us to do better justice to the rich history of an early America that is similarly vast. This article uses the work of workshop participants as the basis for a discussion of what material culture studies has done in the past, and can do in the future, for fully inclusive, interdisciplinary history.

Does Material Culture Matter? Bolin, P. E., & Blandy, D. (Eds.). (201 1). Matter Matters: Art Education and Material Culture Studies. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. 170 pages; ISBN 978-1-890160-51-7Matter Matters: Art Education and Material Culture Studies offers scholars, teachers, museum educators, and community-arts facilitators ways to theorize and apply understandings and practices about in art education. The editors, Paul Bolin and Doug Blandy, assert that isa description of any and humanconstructed or human-mediated objects, forms, or expressions, manifest consciously or unconsciously through human-mediated behaviors (p. ix). The book is divided into two sections consisting of eight theoretical chapters and nine chapters whose contributors apply theories to practices in art education.Authors in this book discuss ways to investigate how a wide range of human-made objects, places, and expressions might reflect experiences, values, desires, and cultures of their makers, people who purchased or used them, as well as societies to which they belonged. These authors propose interesting ways to examine by offering students tactics to interpret meanings invested by their makers in relational contexts, imposed by their marketers, associated by viewers, or situated within discourses of power/knowledge.The editors note that art educators have advocated studying common objects and spaces since 1 930s. Although art educators commonly study museum-based objects, scholars have studied commonplace objects, forms, and expressions similar to scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, folklore, and gender studies. Researchers in most fields have investigated objects as primary source cultural texts, yet few scholars offer insights into educational value of exploring meanings of objects, a shortcoming editors aim to address in this book. They assert that the current body of literature within does not address same range of topics, ideas, objects, and research methodologies examined and utilized with purview of studies. For these reasons. Matter Matters holds a distinctive place within collection of literature both inside and outside field of art education (p. x).Many authors in Matter Ma iters cite work of Bolin and Blandy (2003) as influential. In that piece Bolin and Blandy claim that Material Culture Studies moves beyond Visual Culture Studies for following reasons. They assert that Material Culture Studies includes a broader range of forms, objects, and cultural expressions. Material Studies scholars investigate truly common objects such as gardens or children's toys, and provide not necessarily best examples. They also study activities including ways people participate in events such as parades or dance performances. In other words, all human-mediated sights, sounds, smells, tastes, objects, forms, and expressions are culture (p. 250).According to Bolin and Blandy (2011), scholars of Material Cultures Studies have derived their methodologies from a vast number of academic disciplines. The primary reason scholars investigate has been to learn why people make, use, respond to, and preserve objects or experiences from a contextuallybased viewpoint rather than a descriptive or formalistic examination. They encourage scholars to engage multi-sensorial beyond such as sound, music, film and voices as layered texts (p. 255). They contend that term material culture should replace term visual art,with which field has struggled for 40 years.With exception of word visual, most of these statements could be made about scholarly works in Visual Culture Art Education in which authors study objects as varied as website images, teddy bears, and teenagers' bedrooms using multidisciplinary approaches (Barrett, 2003; Duncum, 2004; Pauly, 2003). …

Material culture is a broad and interdisciplinary field that explores the cultural meanings objects acquire in context. It does not impose a hierarchy on what is included; anything that is made from a particular material can be seen as material culture. The implication, however, is that raw materials and natural commodities are, on the whole, excluded, and that there is a certain emphasis on the ways in which things have been made. In the case of tea, for example, the plant itself is perhaps not seen as part of material culture, but its methods of cultivation, the ways in which tea is brewed, the various attributes required in the preparation and consumption of the beverage, and all practices surrounding tea are all part of the material culture. There are fruitful overlaps with numerous other fields: with art history, where that discipline explores the so-called decorative arts; with history, where objects form a supplement and/or alternative to written documentation; with anthropology, where objects are part of social practice; and with (prehistoric) archaeology, where objects often are the only available source in the absence of written materials. The emphasis on objects has been useful in a number of areas, especially where written sources are difficult to access. In the field of women and gender, for example, the study of material culture has allowed a different kind of access to the experiences that shaped the lives of men and women who did not leave documentation in writing. In global history, material culture and the use of objects provide ways of overcoming the challenges of materials written in different languages. While material culture has become an important part of numerous academic fields in Europe and North America, in Asia the transition has been slower. The main developments in this area have come from Taiwan, where a number of scholars have made important contributions in this field. This bibliography includes not only materials conceived specifically from within a material culture context, but also work produced within disciplines such as archaeology and art history. Methodologically, they may differ from the study of material culture, but in terms of the source materials they present for the scholar interested in material culture, they are indispensable.

The study of material culture centers upon objects, their properties, and the materials that they are made of, and the ways in which these material facets are central to an understanding of culture and social relations. It challenges the historical division between the natural sciences as being the place for the study of the material world and the social sciences as being where society and social relations can be understood. Instead, culture and society are seen as being created and reproduced by the ways in which people make, design, and interact with objects. It also challenges the assumption, perpetuated by disciplinary divisions and also philosophical trajectories, that the object and subject are separate, wherein the latter is assumed to be immaterial, and the former is assumed to be inert and passive. In seeing the material properties of things as central to the meanings an object might have, much work within material culture studies is critical of the idea that objects merely symbolize or represent aspects of a pre-existing culture or identity. A key area of contestation in the literature on material culture is the question of agency and the ways in which objects can produce particular effects or allow and permit certain behaviors or cultural practices. This is developed through the concept of objectification, which is central to many studies of material culture—albeit differently conceived dependent upon the disciplinary and theoretical stance taken—which explores the intertwined, and often dialectic, relationships between people and things. Those who study material culture are situated in a wide range of disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, design, and sociology. Although material culture studies cross many disciplines, there are still theories, methods, and perspectives that are firmly located within particular disciplines. Understandings of material culture have been central to anthropology since its inception; during the late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists primarily collected material culture (Kroeber, Boas) that was displayed in museums in Europe and North America. It was only with the start of ethnographic fieldwork that the study of the material culture became less important. This bibliography of material culture will not focus primarily upon the study of ethnographic museums (with the exception of the section on Display) but more on the so-called new material culture studies that have developed since the 1980s and that are characterized by combining ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological debate. Within this field, empirical research explores specific genres of material culture, such as food or clothing, and empirical and theoretical work extends this to consider categories of objects, such as gifts and commodities, as situated within wider systems of exchange. There is also a concern with how objects “move” between domains and different value systems as the practices and meanings surrounding physically changing objects themselves change.

This article surveys the state of the field of material culture within the discipline of history. The study of material culture – the myriad layers of cultural meaning embedded within objects – has been adopted by historians from colleagues in anthropology, archaeology and museum studies, and continues to thrive as an interdisciplinary field in tandem with art history and literary studies. As inventive digital and embodied methodologies within material culture begin to shape the future of the field, this article takes the opportunity to reflect upon the opportunities and impediments presented to scholars of material culture. It elucidates the diverse and often unfamiliar vernaculars of material objects, and reflects upon future directions in the study of material culture.

Any new publication by the senior Japanese art scholar Christine Guth is on my must-read list as she is such an original thinker and fine writer. This deceptively small book does not disappoint. It focuses on ‘craft culture’ (the author’s term) in Japan between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Guth draws upon recent scholarship in material culture studies and craft production of early modern Europe to bring new understanding not only to early modern Japanese art studies but also to the fields of material culture and early modern studies globally. She takes as a starting point for thinking about the topic the premisses that Japanese crafts are exceptional, highly regarded worldwide; that early modern society developed in Japan differently than elsewhere in the world; and that crafts production in Japan is distinguished and best understood by discussing the inter-related and co-operative networks of creators, distributors and consumers which enabled it to flourish.