Material Culture: the object

Abstract

Objects, artefacts, things. They are three-dimensional, visual, tactile and sometimes odorous and auditory manifestations of the past, yet for the historian this category of evidence possesses some challenging problems. According to Thomas Schlereth ‘objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patterns of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part’.1 While the validity of material evidence is no longer suspect, how to unlock its secrets in a meaningful way remains a challenge. Historians learn effective ways to interpret written evidence, but what about its material counterpart? How can we extract meaning from things such as clothing, furniture, utensils, tools and machines and transparently present it to support and shape the arguments we make? Many academic disciplines have objects at the core of their research but historydoes not. With access to rich documentary sources, historians have left the study of things to scholars who are largely denied access to text or for whom artefacts are paramount: archaeologists, who rely on material evidence excavated from (often) prehistoric sites; anthropologists, who until recently concentrated their research on non-literate cultures, devising theoretical constructs with which to make sense of them; and art historians, whose focus on works of art necessitated the development of formal and stylistic modes of analysis. Historians have not entirely overlooked material culture, but tend to use it to illustrate arguments derived from documents or to examine textual evidence such as household inventories, diaries, letters or novels, for example, that contain information about things. Rarely do we begin our research with objects or use them as an integral form of evidence. Moreover, some argue that the absence of objects makes little difference to our ability to study the past since we can more comfortably learn most of what we need from written material. But this is mistaken. By dismissing or ignoring ‘stuff’ we overlook a major category of evidence. Perhaps even more important, we neglect a source that can lead to unique, often inspired, questions about the past. My experience as a museum curator working closely with artefacts (textiles),followed by over a decade teaching a graduate course in material culture method and theory, has demonstrated beyond doubt the power of objects to open up new avenues of historical thinking and to provide insights into the past not possible withdocuments alone.What my students find so daunting when confronted with the task of beginning a research project with objects rather than questions, however, or trying to extract information from material evidence to support their documentary research, is, first, how to unlock the layers of meaning embedded in the items and, second, how to integrate that into their written work.2A chronological overview of the evolution of material culture studies over the past half century indicates they are not alone. Simply put, unlike archaeologists or anthropologists, most historians are not equipped to do object-centred research. Moreover, even after learning some of the skills needed to analyse objects, their reliance on traditional written evidence still tends to take over. One of the problems, as my colleague Sarah Amato recently observed of her undergraduate class in material culture, is that ‘the research into the history of the objects sometimes overwhelmed the process. Students didn’t use information derived from the methodology [a systematic analysis of the objects] to illuminate or complicate this history. Sometimes it is as if they never examined the object at all.’3 In an attempt to overcome this chronic difficulty, and directly confront history students with objects, I have chosen to begin with a discussion of the evidence, laying out and demonstrating some of the methodologies that can help obtain information from objects. The historiographical discussion that follows illuminates various reasons why historians have been slow to embrace physical evidence, the increasingly sophisticated approaches with which to tackle it, and some of the complex historical issues it can elucidate. I tend to agree with material culture scholar and advocate Thomas Schlereth,who argues that material culture cannot be considered a discipline in its own right nor is it a field of study. Rather, he says, it isa mode of inquiry primarily (but not exclusively) focused upon a type of evidence. Material culture thus becomes an investigation that uses artifacts (along with relevant documentary, statistical, and oral data) to explore cultural questions both in certain established disciplines (such as history or anthropology) and in certain research fields (such as the history of technology or the applied arts).4