Role Of Material Culture Research Articles

Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica (review)

Julia Hendon, Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 312 pp. Julia Hendon's Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica is a book about and the social processes of remembering, and about the role of material culture in these processes. Hendon sets about inspecting the connections between social identity and social memory, using historically- and geographically-related examples from three late Classic/Post Classic Mayan communities: the Maya kingdom in the Copan valley, its neighbors in the Cuyumapa valley and the site of Cerro Palenque in the lower Ulua river valley, all in what today is Honduras. In working through her examples, she will shed light on the how and why of itself (2), which is more directly her intent in this volume than a discussion of Mesoamerican houses or landscape or domestic life per se. In fact in Hendon's scheme, memory-making and its related practices touch and inform virtually all contexts and objects and sequences of activities involved in social life. From the start, she recognizes the close relationship between remembering, learning, knowing, making meaning, and identity formation as linked social practices. Thus groups who share memories (communities of memory) also share social practices (communities of practice) and, significantly, identities, as central aspects of performing life that Hendon returns to again and again. Hendon's treatment of is elegant, nuanced, and scholarly as she takes us through contrastive scholarly traditions and alternative views that define and analyze memory: as the faculty of the individual mind vs. the property of social groups (the dichotomy ultimately dismissed in favor of an active practice-centered approach); seeing artifacts as visual archives vs. seeing objects as fossil memories (both positions dismissed to insist that it is people's interactions with things that produce memories); recall of something absent vs. the recovery of something forgotten. As she refines her perspective, she asserts larger questions: How does everyday life become the locus of memory? How do domestic spaces become places of memory? And How does the presence of multiple built around and practice lead to a historical consciousness made manifest in material culture, practice and landscape? Somehow the answer will lie in the fact that, It is through an intensive and ongoing engagement with materiality that people do the work of across time and space (28). Ultimately, it is the analysis of how the social process of is accomplished that forms the backbone of the book, and the data fall into place around it-chosen selectively to illustrate the theoretical points Hendon is making about memory. (And if you expect, as I did, to find a traditional data set describing archaeological houses excavated by the author and then used to speak to theory, you will be surprised. In this volume, incidents of data-figurines, metates, spinning whorls, ballcourts, royal residences-may be taken up and compared within and between the three under consideration, but systematic treatment of houses is hardly the point, nor is it offered.) In Chapter 1, Hendon introduces her three Mesoamerican communities of memory (or communities of practice), setting them up to examine in each the shared project of living and to compare in the three the means through which day-to-day reality is produced (61). Known empirical facts about Copan, Cerro Palenque and the sites in the Cuyumapa valley are fitted around Hendon's theoretical arguments about how different exist together as landscape and how issues of identity, lineage, and household may be better addressed as of practice. Chapter 2 uses Alfred Gell's notions of the enchantment and the humility of objects to begin to discuss how objects become the shared focus of remembering and forgetting; examples here look to the extravagantly carved stelae of Copan and Quirigua (enchanting objects) and differences in everyday metates (humble objects) to compare and contrast. …

Disciplining Memory: Heritage Tourism and the Temporalisation of the Built Environment in Rural France

This article presents an ethnographic case study of the relationship between the development of heritage tourism, and the role of material culture in memory practices in rural Southern France. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the village of Monadières, it provides an analysis of how artefacts in the locality's built environment have been renovated and revalued in a climate of historical change. This was the consequence of varied acts of commemoration by both independent individuals and the local council in which heritage tourism development was not necessarily the end‐goal. Nevertheless, these acts were implicated in the council's ‘disciplinary programme’ to produce a local infrastructure for heritage tourism. The article therefore explores how this industry co‐habits with and colonises modern memory practices at a micro‐level. To this end it adapts analytical tools from the anthropology of time, which enable an integrative analysis of these differing ‘temporalisations’ of the past.

Technology Becomes the Object

The inaugural exhibits created for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC were met with emotive public debates as to their success or failure to change the ways in which Native American cultures are portrayed in the USA. These debates, however, overlooked the significance of the use of electronic media in the NMAI galleries, their effect on the role of material culture and the subsequent shifts in how the collections were not only displayed, but also experienced by visitors. This inquiry draws on these exhibits for a re-examination of the categories of art/artefact and original/duplicate, exploring how electronic media has transformed the interpretation of the museum `object'. It employs interviews with NMAI staff to discuss the history and philosophy underlying the introduction of electronic media, and with visitors to contextualize these changes in the interpretation of collections from a broader perspective. In conclusion, it considers the confluence of Native, postcolonial and mediated knowledges presented by NMAI, and the possibility that media technology itself has become the museum object.

A Monument’s Work is Never Done: The Watson Monument, Memory, and Forgetting in a Small Canadian City

Private Alexander Watson died a few days after being wounded during a decisive battle in the Northwest Rebellions of Canada in 1885. A year later, a monument to his memory was erected in front of city hall in his hometown of St. Catharines in the municipal region of Niagara. Our interest in Watson’s monument is in understanding the role of material culture in the fostering of popular memory. On one hand, the production side of this equation has been well considered. The mnemonic and didactic potential of monuments is used by elites in order to build a consensual understanding of the past and to legitimate claims to authority and privilege. On the other hand, the consumption side of public memory is less well understood. This paper seeks to identify how the people of St. Catharines have engaged the monument commemorating Watson’s service and his death. We use archival research and surveys in order to understand the monument’s relationship to residents of the city.

Travel and Material Culture: Commodity, Currency, and Destabilised Meaning in Women's Home Tour Writing

This study explores the influence of material culture on patterns of identity construction within eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century home tour travel writing by women. Considering the ways in which material goods were used to promote and maintain travellers' own identities, and to position the peoples encountered in the spaces of travel, it is nevertheless argued that they frequently complicate and challenge, rather than reinforce, definitive social and cultural hierarchies. The fact that travellers in Britain engage with material culture in much the same way as those abroad—as is evidenced in the discursive similarity between the home tour narratives considered here and the colonial travel texts produced in a later period—raises important questions for the way in which we consider the notion of ‘foreignness’ in relation to travel in this period. Likewise, the examples here challenge traditional views of eighteenth-century women's role in material culture as merely one of consumption, as opposed to the more positive and creative masculine act of production. The shifting meanings of objects in women's home tour travel narratives engender a positive critique of commonly held assumptions regarding the ways in which we read gender, class, national and regional difference through the material.

Philosophy as a cultural resource and medium of reflection for hermann weyl

Dans un discours prononcé à Zurich vers la fin des années 1940, Hermann Weyl a examiné l'épistémologie dialectique de Ferdinand Gonseth et l'a considérée comme trop strictement limitée aux aspects de changement historique. Son expérience de la philosophie diaclectique post-kantienne, en particulier la dérivation du concept de l'espace et de la matière chez Johann Gottlieb Fichte, avait constitué une base dialectique solide pour ses propres études de 1918 en une géométrie purement infinitésimale et la théorie antérieure d'un champ de matière géométriquement unifié (en prolongement du programme Mie-Hilbert). Bien que Weyl se fût alors éloigné des aspects spéculatifs de la philosophie de sa jeunesse et eût montré, en particulier, moins d'enthousiasme qu'auparavant pour Fichte, il nourrissait encore de nombreux doutes sur la base culturelle de la science mathématique moderne et sur son rôle dans la culture matérielle du modernisme de pointe. Pour Weyl, la « réflexion » philosophique était une nécessité culturelle ; il se tourna alors vers lexistentialisme de Karl Jaspers et de Martin Heidegger pour trouver des raisons plus profondes, dans un mouvement comparable à son orientation vers la philosophie de Fichte après la Première Guerre mondiale. Le débat de la fin des années 1940 peut être compris comme une sorte de supplément postérieur à la Seconde Guerre mondiale par rapport à ses commentaires plus connus sur les mathématiques et les sciences naturelles publiés au milieu des années 1920.

Bolts of Cloth and Sherds of Pottery: Impressions of Caste in the Material Culture of the Seventeenth Century Audiencia of Quito

People use domestic material culture to create an image of themselves that they project to others who live in, or visit, their homes. This was as true in the Spanish colonial city as it is in any city today. If, therefore, we wish to investigate status and ethnicity in the Spanish colonies, domestic material culture is an excellent source of information on how people imagined their own place, and that of others, in society. The first step toward this is the reconstruction of the material culture of urban colonial houses. There are two main bodies of evidence available to accomplish this. The first is descriptions of household goods in the notarial archives of the colonies, and the second is the physical remains of household refuse found in archaeological contexts in cities. Each body of evidence can make unique contributions to our understanding of social relations in the colonial city, but each also has unique limitations. I use the interplay between colonial notarial documents and archaeological remains to help define the role of material culture in the study of caste relations in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Spanish colonial régimen de castas was a system that categorized people by caste, using a complex mixture of legal status, ethnicity, racial (or physical) categorization, and economic roles.

Becoming American: The archaeology of an Italian Immigrant

Excavations at the Queens Family Court and Families Court Agencies Facility site in Jamaica, Queens County, New York, uncovered three turn-of-the-20th-century features associated with Michael Pette, an Italian immigrant, and his family. Pette arrived in New York nearly penniless in 1885. After holding a number of unskilled jobs, he became a successful real estate developer, newspaper publisher, and community leader. Combined data from archaeological excavation, an autobiography, newspaper accounts, and interviews with descendants reveal how this Italian immigrant assimilated into the American middle class and the role of material culture in the process.

Constituting the past - forming the present: The role of material culture in the Augustan period

How did citizens of Augustan Rome perceive their material surroundings? To what extent did architecture, Republican and Greek statues, coins, gems, and even Greek vases constitute the ‘past’ for them, and to what extent were these part of the ‘present’ experienced in their current environment? Such questions have a special relevance in a context marked both politically by a conceptual culture of remembrance (renovatio) and culturally by a significant Greek influence. The treatment of material culture permits one view of the complex relationship between a society and its past. At the same time, this perception of the ‘Dingwelt’ is closely connected to the present: the context of reception, the content, the form and style of objects, their value and age, as well as the viewer's individual interpretation are superimposed on the ‘value of remembrance’ of material culture and are simultaneously permeated by it. Cultural goods therefore acquire a special importance from the fact that they are present within many different chronological horizons: they form the culture of the present. Their persistence not only allows the reconstruction of the past, but also constitutes contents and values for the future.

‘Closing’ and the Later Middle Ages

THE RELEVANCE of ‘closure theory’ to archaeology is discussed, and it is argued that the role of material culture in shaping medieval group identities was enhanced by taxation on movable property during the 13th century. Emphasis on monetary value led to concepts of ranking expressed in sumptuary laws and the use of symbols in late medieval contractual society.

Identity and Material Culture in the Later Prehistory of Central Europe

Examination of the archaeological evidence for the expression of identity in later European prehistory provides a new and promising approach to understanding change in this period. New views of the role of material culture in the communication of meanings, of the nature of identity, and of agency in the past provide a useful framework for approaching the evidence. Analysis of patterns of sameness and difference in style and decoration of manufactured objects indicates how people used their material culture to structure and to communicate their identities—on the level of the individual, of groups such as families and residential communities, and of larger entities commonly referred to as ethnic groups. This approach offers insights that complement social and economic models of change in later prehistory.

Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life.

Part I: Theoretical Considerations: 1. Semiotics, Socio-Semiotics and Postmodernism: From Idealist to Materialist Theories of the Sign. 2. The System of Objects and the Commodification of Everyday Life: The Early Baudrillard. 3. The Substance of the Expression: The Role of Material Culture in Symbolic Interaction. Part II: The Substance of the Expression: Case Studies: 4. Recapturing the Center: A Socio-Semiotic Analysis of Shopping Malls5. Disneyland: A Utopian Urban Space. 6. Postmodern Architecture and the City. 7. The Political Economy of Postmodernism: The Signs of Growth - A Case Study. Part III: Cultural Studies and Socio-Semiotics: 8. Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Socio-Semiotic Approach. 9. Group Differentiation in a Metropolitan High School: The Influence of Race, Class, Gender and Culture. 10. Unisex Fashions and Gender Role-Change. 11. Recovering Lost Signifieds: Cultural Criticism in a Postmodern World.

‘Villas as a Key to Social Structure’? Some Comments on Recent Approaches to the Romano–British Villa and Some Suggestions Towards and Alternative

The paper makes a critical examination of one of the more influential pieces of ‘social archaeology’ to have come out of Romano-British studies - J. T. Smith’s ‘Villas as a key to social structure ’. Smith’s suggestions that many villas were occupied by ‘extended families’ is found wanting under a more detailed examination of the evidence. Instead, while there may sometimes be more than one domestic structure on a site, or even indications that individual buildings were occupied by more than a single nuclear family, it is suggested that it is the nature of the relationships involved that should be under scrutiny. To this end, a brief outline is given of an alternative approach to the material. This takes up Bordieu’s notion of <em>habitus</em> with its emphasis on the role of material culture, and some examples are given to illustrate how it might expand our perceptions of the material from Romano-British sites.

Colonising With Style: Reviewing The Nexus Between Rock Art, Territoriality And The Colonisation And Occupation Of Sahul

The role of material culture in the visual communication of information has been a focus of much recent debate in the international anthropological and archaeological literature (eg Conkey 1990; Davis 1990; Hodder 1985; Wiessner 1988; Wobst 1977). Central to this concern has been assessment of the role of information exchange in the occupation of particular environments (eg Brandt and Carder 1987; Gamble 1982; Jochim 1983). Recent analyses of Australian rock art (eg David and Cole 1990; David 1991; Franklin 1989; Lewis 1988; Morwood 1984, 1988; TaA§on 1987, 1989a) have also approached this question, with varying degrees of success. In this paper I consider these issues in terms of the role rock art may have played in the colonisation and subsequent occupation of Sahul. I argue that colonisation was facilitated by visual communication systems which emphasised bonding between groups of people. The designs in these systems were primarily geometric in character and exhibited regional variation even within the Pleistocene (Rosenfeld 1991). I also argue that a greater regionalisation of Australian rock art styles through time can be interpreted as a closure of social networks which can itself be related to increases in population densities, or changes in human dispersal patterns, and greater territorial bounding by groups of people. Such bounding was visually articulated by relatively heterogeneous art styles that facilitated social differentiation between people. Â

Sourdoughs and cheechakos: The formation of identity-signaling social groups

A contextual framework is developed to account for the processes by which identity-signaling social groups might form among dispersed human populations. The model is constructed with reference to two early twentieth century gold rush camps in the southwest Yukon. Contextual differences between these sites lead to the consideration of (1) the conditions under which group identities and social boundaries are elicited, and (2) the role of material culture in strengthening within-group solidarity and regulating social interaction between groups. The utility of these theoretical constructs is revealed in examinations of stylistic data from contemporary Kalahari San villages in central Africa and Upper Paleolithic campsites in northern Spain. Understanding how and why ingroup/outgroup distinctions might initially form under conditions of residential mobility complements other rudimentary theories of social group differentiation and interactions.

Reply to Davis

Davis's comments have evoked a clarification of earlier work, and a discussion of more recent insights into the complexities of boundary signalling and the role of material culture in such behavior.

Private, public and historical sphere – in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the museum

The role of material culture in fiction has been given relatively little attention within the field of literary studies. This is surprising, since fiction provides interesting and at times revealing clues with regard to the way people experience the world and make sense of it. From this point of view, contemporary ’postmodern’ fiction especially seems worth exploring. Kate Atkinson’s novel is ’popular’ in the sense that it deals with themes that are common and close to ’ordinary’ British (English) people: it explores family ties, the encounters of generations and the over-all relations to the past, the present and the future. But at the same time it is also a highly complex and self-reflective ’postmodern’ novel, which is likely to reveal something in relation to the academic discourses that it has been influenced by. Although fictive worlds are undeniably fictive and personal constructions by the authors, they nevertheless mirror something of the contexts of their production, the contemporary social realities in which the texts are born. The following is a case study of a fictional process, in which the protagonist Ruby is attempting to make sense of her life, and in so doing, weaving ’words and things’ into a personal ’heritage narrative’ that combines both private and public elements.