At Home with Material Culture

Abstract

KENNETH AMES HAS BEEN A CENTRAL FIGURE IN MATERIAL CULTURE studies of decorative arts for almost two decades. Few have been as influential in advancing the study of American culture and society through the study of household furnishings. Death in the Dining Room is a welcome assemblage of essays that brings together new work and updated, previously published work. Scholars and collectors have explored the dimensions of material culture at least since the 1870s, but it is only in the past few decades that the study has broadened its method and subjects of inquiry to spawn what Thomas Schlereth has called Age of Interpretation. Schlereth sees the decades from roughly the 1876 Centennial to World War II as dominated by the collecting and preserving of artifacts with study focused on highly specific aspects of those artifacts and their makers. The postwar period to the 1960s, he argues, was characterized by a growing professionalism, efforts to unite museum and academy in material culture research, an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, and essentially descriptive research. Since that time, he finds more interpretation and a quest for new methods, new subjects and new syntheses. By the late 1970s, scholars,