To
define Material Culture and its boundaries is a daunting task. Either the
category is too broad or too narrow: everything is material and so everything
could be inserted in to a Material Culture study, at the same time what is the
point of a taxonomic organization if the group that we utilize encompasses everything?
This
week’s readings stretch the limits of Material Culture considering the
environment itself as an object that deserves attention like a hand-crafted pot
or a mass-produced stereo system. Surely the environment is a collection of
objects and nobody with any rationality would negate the fact that the
environment materiality is a fact, but to reduce the complex system of any
environment could seem a reductive perspective. Yet to analyze the environment
in its materiality offers powerful instruments to decode numerous aspects of the
interaction between human beings and the landscape they live in. Indeed too often
the environment is reduced to a too-theoretical and distant scenery that is
disjointed from the decisions and lives of the people that inhabit it, while on
the contrary the environment influences and is influenced strongly by human
choices.
Kenneth
Ames[1]
and Angel Kwolek-Folland[2]
show clearly how strong the link is between the environment and society: the
house and the workplace reflect not only the practical adaptations of the
places where human beings live and work, but also the social expectations and
etiquette rules that constitute the web of social interactions of modern and
complex societies. Both the scholars describe situations of a very structured
society such as the late Victorian one. The implications of their work however
cast an interesting light even on contemporary times, and it is easy to ask
ourselves questions such as the meaning in our lives of the homogenous Ikea furniture
in houses or the new structures of office furniture and spatial separations in offices.
Regarding another era, more distant from us, is the work of
Dell Upton[3],
who explains the spatial dynamics in the life of slaves in Virginia during the eighteenth
century. Social hierarchy and slave-owner interaction defined the space,
creating shared areas and exclusive ones. The freedom and privacy of the woods
for example allowed the slaves to set themselves temporarily free from the
controlling eye of the owners.
John
Brinckerhoff Jackson[4]
in one of the multiple and variegated chapters of his book analyses the woods
as environment and its history. The perspective is totally focused on the
interactions between men and the forest and this viewpoint can help us to
understand the relationship between landscape and Material Culture. The forest
itself is not the center of the study: the dendrochronology and the biological
aspect of the life of trees could be part of it, but it is not the focus.
Material Culture, inserting the landscape in to the list of tools with which
men interact with, defines the environment as a medium that influences humans
and is strongly influenced by them. Our eyes love the sweet slopes of Tuscany,
their natural pleasantness attracts thousands of tourists from around the
globe, but few of them know that every slope is the result of thousands of
years of agriculture. Human hands made them.
[1] Kenneth Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in
Victorian America,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 19-46.
[2] Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace,
1880-1930,” in
Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds. The
Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of
Material Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 1997), 157-79.
[3] Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in
Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Robert Blair St. George,
ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988).
[4] John
Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1994).
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