Examples Of Material Culture Research Articles

American Missionaries and the Harem: Cultural Exchanges behind the Scenes

This article examines the impact on American furniture and clothing styles by women missionaries traveling to Turkey in the Victorian era. Although there has been much discussion of the impact of Western missionaries on Turkey and other parts of Asia, the reciprocal impact on American culture has not been adequately assessed. Missionary work, which started in the 1820s in a modest manner, turned into a systematic and large-scale activity, reaching its climax during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Unlike Western diplomats, whose visits took place in the palaces of Istanbul, far from the realities of everyday life, missionary women had informal contact with ordinary Turkish women. Ottoman Turkish domestic space was highly gendered, so only these missionary women would have had access to authentic Ottoman Turkish interiors and been able to observe them as social spaces. The furniture style and the unique concept of comfort that they observed in Turkey presented an alternative point of view of home life and its organization. After spending years abroad, these women would return to the US to recruit and raise money for their missions by traveling from community to community, often creating interest for their work abroad by presenting examples of material culture. This article will put letters, diaries, travelogues and other contemporary material in the context of American culture of the Victorian era in order to chart the unusual way in which American and Turkish women interacted with each other at this historical moment.

"Remembrance is Not Enough": The Political Function of Tony Harrison’s Poetry

Tony Harrison’s dramatic works frequently engage with issues of cultural memory, both what is remembered and what is forgotten. In most instances, Harrison explores these issues by engaging with canonical texts, which, like certain examples of material culture—particularly monumental architecture—are marked by both their duration and by the accretion of a multiplicity of interpretations and symbolic functions. These works become, to use Pierre Nora’s term, lieux de mémoire , “sites of memory,” endowed by the collective cultural imagination with a symbolic aura. Nora noted “that lieux de mémoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications” (19). It is with the metamorphic nature of mythic characters, texts, and sites that Harrison engages as they provide him spaces endowed with significance by both the past and the present: these are spaces in which collective and cultural memory has been repeatedly constructed through the centuries. Numerous aspects of memory in Harrison’s work could be fruitfully explored, but this paper limits itself to a relatively brief discussion of Harrison’s examination of remembrance, or the lack thereof, in the mythic examples of Hecuba, Medea, and Hercules, and the historical figures such as Faustina and the anonymous victims of contemporary conflicts.