Writing Material Culture History

Anne Gerritsen, Giorgio Riello, Anne Gerritsen, Giorgio Riello

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350105249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Writing Material Culture History 2e examines the methodologies used in the historical study of material culture. Looking at archaeology, anthropology, art history and literary studies, the book provides students with a fundamental understanding of the relationship between artefacts and historical narratives. The book addresses the role of museums, the impact of the digital age and the representations of objects in public history, bringing together students and specialists from around the world. This new edition includes:
A new substantive introduction from the editors, providing a useful roadmap for students and specialists.
A more balanced and easy-to-use structure, including methodological chapters and 'object in focus' chapters consisting of case studies for classroom discussion.
New chapters showing greater engagement with 20th-century material culture, non-European artefacts and the definitions and limits of material culture as a discipline.
Offers global coverage and discussion of both the early modern and modern periods. Writing Material Culture History 2e is an essential tool for students seeking to understand the potential of objects to re-cast established historical narratives in new and exciting ways.

Object in focus 1

Broken saints, house cats, other historical matter

Dana Leibsohn

Stacked bundles and broken statues, pieces of lumber, chairs in need of mending, a dusty floor – all of this, along with damaged doors and candlesticks and an unwanted painting, clutter a storage space in the church of San Agustín, in Lima, Peru. Figure F1.1 shows a maw of rooms strewn with things that have little (if any) use in the present. Affectively, the photograph strikes a note of abjection. Yet the image displays more than the wrecked shards and discards of Catholic worship. It calls up uneasy relationships between material objects and history-writing. This unease, I suggest, is tied to the status of bodies – in this case, the seemingly inanimate bodies of fragmented statues, but also bodies of humans and divinities, which are absent though implied. While a church storeroom in Latin America may seem an unobvious place to begin an essay on historical interpretive practice, I did not choose this photo casually. Rather, I see here opportunities to assess how materiality inflects the work that history-writing might do. A question therefore centres this chapter: in the first decades of the twenty-first century, what are the cultural politics and ethical implications of writing history about, and through material objects?

Figure F1.1 Storage space in the church of San Agustín, Lima, Peru.

On the surface, the scene from San Agustín does not seem especially complicated, politically or ethically. However, I am reluctant to be hasty and dismiss these possibilities.¹ The most common images of churches and other religious settings – especially published in books or posted online – feature the places where people gather and pray; they accentuate architectural details or the play of light through stained-glass windows and, often, offer views of landscape or cities from elevated spires. Quite a few churches have rooms where unneeded objects have been stashed, but ‘back stage’ views are rare. In subtly resisting familiar pictorial conventions, this photo catches us a bit off guard. Once it has our attention, it asks us to consider a culturally fraught issue: what habits of knowing the world do pictorial conventions sustain (or obscure); and, relatedly, whose interests are served by such conventions?

It is impossible to say whether anything in the San Agustín storeroom will ever be rescued and repaired, whether anything will again find its way upstairs. Also unclear are the identities of those who decided that this furniture and these emblems of sainthood were no longer worthy of reverence, but neither were they ready to be dispensed with as trash. Both dust and the state of disrepair tell us these objects are not new arrivals. These broken things have been waiting a long time. This is a photo, then, of and about objects held in abeyance. It reminds us of the distress that objects live with (if not also through) and the hopelessness of waiting for conditions to change. Since the setting is Latin America, this scene also references the ways that Catholicism itself produced – and often still produces – bodies marked by very particular kinds of hope, decadence and decay. Read in this light, the photo calls to mind Ann Stoler’s writing on ‘imperial debris’ and how haphazard material traces hint at the scarring ambitions of global projects from the past.²

As an art historian who studies the Americas’ colonial histories, I find the photograph of San Agustín unsettling. I am used to viewing statues of saints in gilded niches or set upon pedestals, their bodies covered by clothing or adorned with paint. The most jarring part of the storeroom scene is not this, however. The plaster and wood body parts heaped on the floor point to multiple temporalities and the contingencies of worldly life. For instance, this scene evokes Surrealist sculptures and photographs of the early twentieth century, and so, uncannily, warps time and muddles genres of representation. It also calls to mind hospitals of the early modern period, where broken and damaged bodies prayed for cures amidst images of saints, the Virgin, and Jesus. With temporal dislocation come ideas of transcendence, something not unexpected for a church setting. Yet this photo leads in another direction, inviting us to contemplate how divinity becomes embodied, how it makes itself present in daily life. This scene might also make us wonder what it means to break the body of a holy thing and, perhaps more provocatively, what it means to hold onto holy, broken remnants.

The dejection captured in this picture should give us pause. At the very least, this photo prompts us to ask why certain kinds of subjects and objects so frequently figure in history-writing of the last thirty years, whereas others seem so unwelcome. Historical studies have become more inclusive across the last few decades. Even so, historians of material culture tend to prefer their objects whole rather than fractured. Alongside this preference runs another: scholars and curators tend to privilege objects and settings far better cared for than those we see in this storeroom. It would be reasonable (and probably quite useful) to ask why these predilections remain so strong, but I find a different issue more pressing. When it comes to historical biases, one corrective many consider tenable lies casting a wider net, in expanding that which ‘counts’ as worthy of attention. I am not convinced such gestures are sufficient. When more things, or more kinds of things, enter and shape the histories written about, and with material culture, what actually changes?

One answer to this query comes from scanning the chapters in this book. Juxtaposing the histories of people and places, of technologies and creations, forged under disparate conditions opens opportunities to decentre Euro-American, elite belongings and their owners. In this, this collection stakes a far-ranging claim. Reminding us how varied human experiences can be, this book argues the value of interpreting the labour, works and aspirations of people who toiled – often in conditions not of their own choosing – alongside the desires and collecting gestures of those who could afford to purchase and delight in luxurious things. By acknowledging that Unangax̂ garments can (and should) be thought about in conjunction with Chinese porcelain and French bureaus, this book affirms the importance of understanding and appreciating both the diversity of material cultures and the work such diversity performs in the world (not only in our history-writing).

There are virtues in all of this, to be sure. Nevertheless, taking a cue from the scholarship on new materialism and its critique,³ I suggest it is time to think beyond additive and inclusive gestures in the writing of history. I believe we miss a crucial point when material culture is understood primarily as a topic or theme of historical enquiry. No matter how diverse the creations, settings or cultures involved, histories of objects and their cultural implications (if not also histories of ownership) take us only so far. In what follows, then, I wish to explore my conviction that material culture – if not materiality writ large – matters most when it productively challenges the implicit norms of history-writing. For such challenges invite new kinds of thinking about the epistemological (if not also ontological) status of objects, and, as well, the relationships habitually constructed between subjects and objects.

So what might it look like to recalibrate the relations between subjects and objects in the writing of history? This question hits directly at traditional hierarchies – among animate and inanimate beings, but also within interpretive communities. We sense something of this from another photograph (one that I took) whose affect could hardly be more different than that of San Agustín. Figure F1.2 presents a rather handsome cat perched in the crook of an apple tree. It is a mundane image, one that hardly seems worth serious attention. In spite of this first impression, both the cat and the craggy tree draw us onto tangled interpretive ground. To begin, the cat pictured here has a name, Bob. And Bob is a kind of creature that breathes and purrs. Cats also howl. They get hungry. A tree, under the weight of ice or whipped by wind, can groan. Recent scholarship on the vibrancy and agency of matter has taught us that we ought not undervalue such things.⁴ Historians, though, rarely write about the movement of air through lungs or the crack of a limb, not to mention the sticky ooze of sap from a broken branch or the hunger a cat can feel. At the crux of all this is not simply indifference (although there is some of that). Rather, at issue are the kinds of bodies, and which aspects of those bodies belong in, and to, contemporary history-writing.⁵

Figure F1.2 Bob the cat.

Compared to, say, twenty years ago, scholars and curators now weigh the senses and their affective work more often and with greater seriousness. Yet histories of material culture have long privileged (and still tend to privilege) the visual and the haptic. That which can be seen and touched – the colour and hardness of steel, the weave of woven fabric, the suppleness of leather – have been measured and valued as historical evidence in far more diverse ways than have the scent of wax, the salty taste of sweat or sounds of pleasure. In part, historians inherit these predilections from the Enlightenment. Our claims seem more verifiable when we study the appearance and tactility of material things rather than their taste or smell. The thread-count of cloth and the grain in wood tend to persist across time in ways that the warmth thrown by candlelight or the tang of a bloody battlefield does not.

There is, still, a larger point about boundaries and material culture that the cat photo implicitly raises. The air a cat breathes may seem insignificant as the stuff of history; beyond the question of sensory perception and its role in history-writing, however, we might consider just how different feline breath is from that of a human. Cats (and dogs) are among the most common companion animals in twenty-first-century bourgeois society. They have filled this role for a very long time. Donna Haraway, among others, contends that this companionship blurs the hierarchy between humans and other living creatures.⁶ Not only are people and cats both animals, the bonds forged through rituals of daily care and dependency extend the life one into the life of the other. Tracing another set of vectors, critiques of anthropogenic environmental damage reaffirm that human bodies are not strictly biomatter. Plastic micro-particles, for instance, have taken up residence in human and other animate bodies. It may push the point too far to say that people are becoming plastic (although in a certain sense they are). Yet the boundaries between humans and other culturally charged matter have become – and perhaps always have been – more porous than much history-writing presumes. This is of no small consequence, and it is why the photo of Bob and the tree beckons to us. For histories that reckon with animals and breath, if not also the transgressive migration of toxins, decentre and destabilize normative thinking about the distinctiveness of human beings and their possessions. Whose history is worth knowing and on what terms become, therefore, very different propositions.

This theme is worth pressuring a bit. The cat in the photo seems neither pleased nor annoyed that the picture was taken. And while it is difficult to know for certain, I suspect that Bob does not really care that his image appears before you. Whether animals can grant consent to being photographed or having their portraits circulate in public is a tricky question. So, too, is the issue of whether they should be paid for their appearance (as many people are). I do not raise these queries facetiously. For the same might be asked of babies or sleeping people. And, as the case of Henrietta Lacks has made painfully clear, these questions are no less appropriate for the deceased. Indeed, consent – which has traditionally been taken more often than it has been granted – opens onto troubling ethical landscapes.⁷ For scholars and curators who write about material culture, well-honed rituals centre on consent. These rituals derive from, and reinforce, notions of property ownership, including intellectual property. To publish a photo of an object held in a museum or a document housed in an archive, or even to see such works up close, often requires institutional (but no other) permission. When working with living people or animals, other academic practices exist. In the United States, for example, permission tends to be granted by review boards, formed of academically trained scientists and social scientists responsible for adjudicating the ethical treatment of ‘research subjects’. This, though, is not quite what I mean by the ethics of consent.

Having the power to grant consent – to be studied, written about, photographed, published upon – implies that someone else has the power to ask. And adjudicating that power differential, especially in the present world, can be intractable. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have recently argued that there exist certain kinds of knowledge that academia does not deserve.⁸ Moreover, they suggest that any gesture of asking permission presumes a shared recognition (and valuing) of Western modes of knowledge acquisition. For Tuck and Yang, the point is not ‘which archive’ or ‘which museum’ might grant access for study or permission to publish documents and images, but rather which individuals might be affected by the interpretive projects of researchers. From their decolonizing perspective, just as one’s genetic history overlaps with, and is shared – at least in part – with kin, so too are one’s memories, belongings and lived experiences. History, in other words, is always embodied and generationally so. Indeed, one of the most potent lessons proffered by recent scholarship in Indigenous studies is that the desires of living beings – to know or remember, to dream or forget, to speak or remain silent – are not, and should not always be, available upon request.

All of this turns interpretive practice ‘as usual’, be it in the form of history writing or museum collecting and display, into a very difficult (if not impossible) proposition. No doubt some will find this sobering, whilst others will sigh with relief. Either way, hard work lies on the horizon. For beings and objects – animate and otherwise – have not lost their hold on our imagination. The labour of unwinding the conditions of knowledge production stabilized by settler colonialism and, in its wake, the nation-state, is daunting. So much so that some will prefer to turn away, choosing not to study or exhibit certain histories, bodies, materialities. In contrast, some see opportunities here, not strictly prohibitions. And open-source software, critical cataloguing practices, and art-making have begun to recast and enliven the temporal and spatial horizon of what Tuck and Yang call the ‘not yet’, wherein resistance and reclamation, recovery, reciprocity, and regeneration become ever more viable.⁹ In this landscape of shifting possibilities, a few museums and archives are seeking a middle ground: recognizing inclusiveness as too meagre an ambition, they are embracing collaborative projects of repatriation (if not also restitution). And most certainly, there exist other institutions and historians who continue exhibiting, curating and writing as if human exceptionalism and im...