The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture 9780199341764, 0199341761

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of HISTORY AND MATERIAL CULTURE
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why History and Material Culture?
Material Culture, Material Pluralism
Five Fields of History and Material Culture
Notes
Part I: HISTORY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND COGNITION
Chapter 1: Words or Things in American History?
Material Culture and How to Categorize the Past
Material Culture, Historical Narrative, and the Problem of Scale
Twists and Turns: Whither Material Culture?
Material Culture, the Past, and Nostalgia
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Artifacts and Their Functions*
What Is Artifact Function and Why Should We Care?
Two Theories of Artifact Function: Intentionalism and Conventionalism
An Etiological Account of Function
Conclusion: Some Hard Cases
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order: A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry
Natural Wonders: Pearls as Collectibles
The Art of Mastering Nature
Captured Treasures, Treasured Captives
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Food and Cognition: Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia
A Banquet in Transit
Dining with the Werowance
A Virginia Planter’s “Well Order’d” Table
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: On Pins and Needles: Straight Pins, Safety Pins, and Spectacularity
Introduction
A Tale of Two Exhibits
The Underpinnings of Spectacularity
Spectacular Gaps/Epistemological Folds
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Mind, Time, and Material Engagement
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Problems with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis
Mind, Time, and Material Agency
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Part II: HISTORY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY
Chapter 7: Material Time*
Materiality and Temporality
The Materiality of Time
Temporal Strategies: Managing Time
Conclusions and Implications: Timing Is All
Notes
Chapter 8: Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850
George and Mary Read’s Kitchen
Samuel and Olive Stearns’ House
Joseph and Betsey Maybury’s House
Charity and George Stearns’ House
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Boston Electric: Science by “Mail Order” and Bricolage at Colonial Harvard
Early Lessons in Cambridge: Playing with Exhalations
The Leyden Jar Comes to Town
Repurposed Glass Jars
Home Built versus “Mail Order”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Making Knowledge Claims in the Eighteenth-Century British Museum*
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11: The Ever-Changing Technology and Significance of Silk on the Silk Road
The Ancient System during the Han Period in China (200 bce–200 ce)
Central Asia, or the Sogdian System (First–Seventh Centuries ce)
The New System of Tang Silk Production (Eighth–Twelfth Centuries)
The European System of Silk Production (Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Science, Play, and the Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood
The Freedom of Interwar Boyhood Experimentation
The Dangers of Postwar Material Culture: Everybody’s a Child Here
Conclusion: Science, Gender, and Protection
Notes
Bibliography
Part III: HISTORY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND THE SYMBOLIC
Chapter 13: The Sensory Webof Vision Enchantment and Agency in Religious Material Culture
Defining Enchantment
A Network Approach to Material Culture
Between Relic and Image: Materializing Vision
Veronica Since the Middle Ages
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 14: Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond
Seeing
Sensing
Sensiotics Elaborated
Sensiotics and a Yorùbá Sensorium
Conclusion—Sensiotics beyond Africa
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 15: The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains
The Numinous
Religion and the Body in the Study of American Material Culture
An Engraved Portrait of Ann Wilkins
George Whitefield’s Rib
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 16: Symbolic Things and Social Performance: Christmas Nativity Scenes in Late Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile
Theoretical Framework
Description of the Objects
Votive Practices around the Nativity Scene
Viewing the Nativity Scene
The Relationship between the Crèche and Its Spectators
Celebration and Ritual as Sources of Social Cohesion
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 17: Heritage Religion and the Mormons
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 18: From Confiscation to Collection: The Objects of China’s Cultural Revolution
Material Culture, Class Categories, and China
The House Search and the Attack on the “Four Olds”
Old Society in New Society
Collecting after the Cultural Revolution
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Part IV: HISTORY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND SOCIAL DISTINCTION
Chapter 19: Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 20: Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida: Weaving and Unraveling the Code
Nettles and Velvet: The Language of Clothing Prior to Contact
Painted Deerskins and Linen: Florida Natives Meet the Spanish
Fleur de Lys and Spanish Wool: The French Encounters in La Florida
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 21: Street “Luxuries”: Food Hawking in Early Modern Rome*
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 22: Ebony and Ivory: Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861–1870*
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 23: The Material Culture of Furniture Production in the British Colonies
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 24: Material Culture, Museums, and the Creation of Multiple Meanings
The Biography of Museum Objects
Entwining Texts and Objects
Numinous Objects
The Culture of Museums
Museums as Sacred Places
Collecting and Exhibiting Scottish Identities
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Part V: HISTORY, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND MEMORY
Chapter 25: Chronology and Time: Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500–1050
Material Culture, Memory, and Identity Construction in Coastal Zones, c. 450–600
Coastal Societies and Cycles of Maritime Orientation through Time around the Southern North Sea and Kattegat, c. 650–1000
Material Culture, Representation, and Memory in Port Towns, c. 900–1050
Concluding Remarks
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 26: Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific
Flexible Palm Leaves
Resonant Genealogies
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 27: Mapping History in Clay and Skin: Strategies for Remembrance among Ga’anda of Northeastern Nigeria
Spirit Vessels
Ga’anda Historical Narratives
Mapping Memory in Skin
Modeling Memory and History in Clay
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 28: Remember Me: Sensibility and the Sacred in Early Mormonism
Mormons, Memory, and the Tangible
Mormons, Sentimental Friendship, and Plurality
Mormons, Patriarchy, and the Sacred
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 29: Housing History: The Colonial Revival as Consumer Culture*
The Literary Industrial Complex
Consumed by the Past
A Landscape of the (Historical) Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 30: Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object
Figural and Textual Representation: Materializing Nathan Hale
The Hale Homestead: Space, Place, and Performance
Biography and Autobiography: Nathan Hale and Henry Solon Graves
Antiquarian or Dilettante? Autobiography, Posterity, and the Infidelities of Portraiture
Space, Place, and Performance (Again): Putting Nathan Hale on the National Map
Material Texts: Inscribing the Ideal Friendship of Hale and Wyllys
Final Words, Persistent Things
Conclusion: Future Antiquaries
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion: The Meaning of Things*
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

H ISTORY A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E

The Oxford Handbook of

HISTORY AND MATERIAL CULTURE Edited by

IVAN GASKELL and

SARAH ANNE CARTER

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933538 ISBN 978–0–19–934176–4 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by LSC Communications, United States of America

For Peter Burke and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, contributors in so many senses

Contents

List of Contributorsxi Acknowledgmentsxiii

Introduction: Why History and Material Culture?

1

Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter

PA RT I   H I STORY, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E , A N D C O G N I T ION 1. Words or Things in American History?

17

Steven Conn

2. Artifacts and Their Functions

35

A. W. Eaton

3. Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order: A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry

54

Mónica Domínguez Torres

4. Food and Cognition: Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia 73 Bernard L. Herman

5. On Pins and Needles: Straight Pins, Safety Pins, and Spectacularity

90

Amber Jamilla Musser

6. Mind, Time, and Material Engagement

105

Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden

PA RT I I   H I STORY, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E , A N D T E C H N OL O G Y 7 . Material Time John Robb

123

viii   contents

8. Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850

140

J. Ritchie Garrison

9. Boston Electric: Science by “Mail Order” and Bricolage at Colonial Harvard

170

Sara J. Schechner

10. Making Knowledge Claims in the Eighteenth-Century British Museum

200

Ivan Gaskell

11. The Ever-Changing Technology and Significance of Silk on the Silk Road

222

Zhao Feng

12. Science, Play, and the Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood

236

Rebecca Onion

PA RT I I I   H I STORY, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E , A N D T H E SYM B OL IC 13. The Sensory Web of Vision: Enchantment and Agency in Religious Material Culture

255

David Morgan

14. Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond

275

Henry John Drewal

15. The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains

295

Christopher Allison

16. Symbolic Things and Social Performance: Christmas Nativity Scenes in Late Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile

317

Olaya Sanfuentes

17. Heritage Religion and the Mormons

337

Colleen McDannell

18. From Confiscation to Collection: The Objects of China’s Cultural Revolution Denise Y. Ho

355

contents   ix

PA RT I V   H I STORY, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E , A N D S O C IA L DI S T I N C T ION 19. Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450

379

Daniel Lord Smail

20. Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida: Weaving and Unraveling the Code

397

Laura Johnson

21. Street “Luxuries”: Food Hawking in Early Modern Rome

414

Melissa Calaresu

22. Ebony and Ivory: Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861–1870

434

Dana E. Byrd

23. The Material Culture of Furniture Production in the British Colonies 451 Edward S. Cooke Jr.

2 4. Material Culture, Museums, and the Creation of Multiple Meanings

474

Neil G. W. Curtis

PA RT V   H I STORY, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E , A N D M E M ORY 25. Chronology and Time: Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500–1050

493

Christopher Loveluck

26. Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific

513

Sujit Sivasundaram

27. Mapping History in Clay and Skin: Strategies for Remembrance among Ga’anda of Northeastern Nigeria

535

Marla C. Berns

28. Remember Me: Sensibility and the Sacred in Early Mormonism Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

558

x   contents

29. Housing History: The Colonial Revival as Consumer Culture

578

Thomas Denenberg

30. Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object

593

Catherine L. Whalen

Conclusion: The Meaning of Things

619

Peter Burke

Index

635

List of Contributors

Christopher Allison is Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities Core: Reading Cultures at the University of Chicago. Marla C. Berns is Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles. Peter Burke is Professor of Cultural History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Dana E. Byrd is Assistant Professor of Art History at Bowdoin College. Melissa Calaresu is Affiliated Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge, and Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History, Director of Studies in History, and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Sarah Anne Carter is Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture, and Visiting Assistant Professor in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Steven Conn is W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Edward S. Cooke Jr. is Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Center for the Study of American Decorative Arts and Material Culture at Yale University. Neil  G.  W.  Curtis  is Head of Museums and Special Collections at the University of Aberdeen. Thomas Denenberg is Director of the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont. Henry John Drewal is Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A. W. Eaton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. J. Ritchie Garrison is Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at Bard Graduate Center, New York City. Chris Gosden  is Chair and Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford.

xii   list of contributors Bernard L. Herman is Chair of American Studies, and George B. Tindall Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Denise Y. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Laura Johnson is Associate Curator at Historic New England. Christopher Loveluck is Associate Professor and Reader in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. Lambros Malafouris is Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture, Keble College, University of Oxford. Colleen McDannell  is Sterling  M.  McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah. David Morgan is Chair and Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University. Amber Jamilla Musser  is Associate Professor of American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Rebecca Onion is the History correspondent for Slate.com and Visiting Scholar in the Department of History, Ohio University. John Robb is Professor of European Prehistory at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. Olaya Sanfuentes  is Professor of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago. Sara J. Schechner is David P. Wheatland Curator of the Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University. Mónica Domínguez Torres is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. Catherine L. Whalen is Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center, New York City. Zhao Feng is Executive Director of the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the collaborative enthusiasm with which all the contributors to this volume have sustained this project. Thirty-one of the thirty-three authors traveled in many cases considerable distances to participate in the workshop we convened at Bard Graduate Center, New York City, in May 2014 to discuss early versions of their chapters. We are grateful to both Bard Graduate Center and to the Chipstone Foundation for the funding and institutional support that made this workshop possible. We are also grateful for the long-term support of Susan Weber and Peter Miller, respectively director and dean of Bard Graduate Center, and Jonathan Prown, executive director and chief curator of the Chipstone Foundation. The contributors were generous enough to make their draft chapters available for critique by graduate students Anne Hilker, Cynthia Kok, and Carlin Soos in Ivan Gaskell’s spring 2015 seminar at Bard Graduate Center, “History and Material Culture: New Directions.” Most were also able to join the seminar by video link from locations as far apart as Hong Kong and Cambridge, England, to discuss their drafts with the seminar members. Sarah Anne Carter joined regularly by video link from Milwaukee. We wish to thank both the contributors and the students. Our commissioning editor, Nancy Toff, has been a source of intellectual and organizational sustenance throughout, without whom we could never have dared to attempt such an undertaking. Nancy’s assistants, Elda Granata, Elizabeth Vaziri, and Lena Rubin, have provided conscientious assistance throughout the editorial process. Saranya Purushothaman and Lakshmanan Sethuraman diligently led the production team, and Leslie Anglin elegantly copyedited the text. As we developed the themes, grappled with the case studies, and corresponded with the contributors, we incurred debts to many other scholars, in addition to the contributors themselves. We wish to express our thanks to them all—too many to name—and also to members of our respective families for their patience and support. This volume is dedicated to Peter Burke and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, both of whom are contributors. We offer this book to them in happy recognition of the many years they have been such valued colleagues and friends, setting standards of stringency and generosity in historical practice that we can only hope to emulate. As a permanent fellow resident each summer, Ivan Gaskell wishes to acknowledge the invaluable support provided by the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) of the Georg-August University, Göttingen, and to thank its entire staff led by its director, Martin van Gelderen, managing director, Kora Baumbach, and former managing director, Dominik Hünniger (now of the University

xiv   acknowledgments of Hamburg). At Göttingen, he also wishes to acknowledge the aid and friendship of Marie Luisa Allemeyer, director of the Zentrale Kustodie (University Collections, Museums, and Gardens), and Ulrike Beisiegel, former president of the university. Sarah Anne Carter is grateful to the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she has served as the curator and director of research for six years. Her Chipstone colleagues, Jonathan Prown, W. David Knox, Natalie Wright, Jackie Sarich, Elizabeth Dunn, Tina Schinabeck, and Claudia Arzeno, understood the value of this project from the start and helped to create time for it. She wishes to acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of Ann Glasscock, who recently earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as an exceptionally thorough and creative research assistant on this volume.

I n troduction Why History and Material Culture? Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter

Since the nineteenth century, following a revolution initiated by German scholars, most historians have relied principally on written sources, placing special emphasis on documents. Written sources—whether manuscript, printed, or digital—are many and various. Their historical interpretation presents a considerable range of methodological challenges, and the rewards they offer the diligent historian are huge. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians in addition to documents, printed materials, and digital files. These are the many other material things that people have selected or made and used. The principle of employing nonwritten material things for historical purposes is of  long standing in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In Europe, this practice—called ­antiquarianism—was prominent from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the interpretation of the past from buried and subsequently excavated physical remains emerged as the distinct discipline of archaeology. Also in the nineteenth century, some scholars developed modes of methodical attention to certain kinds of material things that many imbued with aesthetic qualities, bringing about the emergence of the discipline of art history. At much the same time, Europeans and their diaspora began to treat peoples they viewed as primitive as existing beyond human history in relatively unchanging circumstances that they thought of as part of the natural world, thereby giving rise to the discipline of anthropology. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, academic approaches to things have changed again. If antiquarianism has been revived and radically modified as material culture studies; if archaeology, art history, and anthropology have developed their own sets of specialist assumptions and practices; and if history remains preponderantly dependent on the interpretation of writings, the barriers that grew up to separate these individually broad fields of inquiry have become increasingly porous. The result is an unprecedented amount of interdisciplinary discussion.

2   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter In this increasingly interdisciplinary context, how might a concept of material culture influence historians’ understanding of the past? Does the study of material culture have anything particular to offer historians that appeals to written sources, archaeological finds, artworks, or anthropological materials treated from their individual disciplinary points of view are unable to provide? If so, does an appeal to material culture work for historians only locally and in certain circumstances, or worldwide and across time? At the outset, though, we should attempt to define material culture. We take material culture to be physical entities that resonate with communities of humans. These may be physical things that humans have found and selected, adapted, or fashioned for their use, whether physically, cognitively, or both. Material culture items may be things that humans fashion, transforming one or more physical ingredients into artifacts. Or they may be things, including living things, that humans adapt from nature, modifying them, as in the selective breeding of crops and animals. Or they may be things that humans select and adopt from nature in a physically unmodified form, incorporating them into cultural practices constituted by a consistent set of assumptions and behaviors shared by a viable human community. Material culture items are not limited by size. A mountain imbued with communally shared associations in terms of human explanations, whether geological or mythological, is no less an item of material culture than an individual atom similarly imbued. Material culture, then, covers a huge range of things. The common thread that binds them is communal—as opposed to idiosyncratic—human engagement to the extent of transformation, whether physical or cognitive. This may be termed a maximalist definition of material culture. Most historians and others who concentrate on material culture in practice focus on those things that humans have made for their use by the physical transformation of materials. Are material culture items necessarily exclusively physical? Given the role of human purpose in their constitution, and their place in human thought and action, all material culture items must have immaterial as well as material components. However, just as not every material thing has a place in human thought and action, so not all immaterial manifestations of human thought and action have material components in the sense in which we are using the term material. Although any distinction between material and immaterial properties remains to some extent fluid, our employment of the term material culture necessarily implies human uses of physical things, apprehended through the senses. To work with this definition is not to imply an unreflecting adherence to a simplified Lockean notion that all knowledge is derived from human sensory ­experience. Indeed, the Western distinction between the material and the immaterial— that which is apprehensible via the senses and that which is not—is a culturally bound concept that may not be relevant to all cultures, including various Indigenous cultures. Material culture, then, is a category of things with extremely fuzzy boundaries. It may be best understood in terms of the Wittgensteinian principle of family resemblance rather than necessary and sufficient conditions. In focusing on material culture, we are not claiming a privileged position for material culture in the pursuit of historical scholarship; but we are proposing that material culture—however hedged by caveats—is well worth

Introduction   3 historians’ attention, and it poses particular challenges to historians that documents treated as texts alone do not. Our mention here of “documents treated as texts alone” is a reminder that any document, beyond conveying a text, is also a material thing, and those of its properties that invite inspection in material terms, and that themselves can have immaterial aspects, can provide evidence to historians in addition to its textual component. This was clearly acknowledged by the historian Arlette Farge in a meditation on the character and conditions of documentary archives that is surely second to none, in which she chooses to cite not only documents in the narrow sense but other things preserved in French archives since the eighteenth century: a fragment of a shirt that a prisoner in the Bastille failed to smuggle out to his wife, and a pouch of seeds sent to the Royal Society of Medicine allegedly discharged from a woman’s breasts each month.1 The historian drawn to written documents values the archives in part because those documents do not account for the entirety of their contents, and nondocumentary materials can be especially illuminating—they can “communicate the feeling of reality better than anything else can,” in Farge’s words—out of all proportion to their numbers in the context of the archive. How can historians make not merely adequate but the best use of material culture? Everything that survives from the past, however remote or recent, is a trace of that past. Often a given thing is a trace of more than one moment in that past. This is the source of its usefulness to historians who seek to make something of that past for their contemporaries in the present. That is, a material culture item can be a primary source—an admittedly problematic concept—no less than a manuscript, in printed or digital form, can. Farge is right to note that perhaps a material culture item can “communicate the feeling of reality better than anything else can,” but it can do so much more when treated as evidence of past lived experiences. One of the major inhibitions to treating material culture items as primary sources is a propensity on the part of historians familiar with relying on written materials sorted in archives and elsewhere to appeal to such things as no more than mere illustrations. To treat a material culture item as a subsidiary illustration can evoke an event or enliven a text but fails to employ it as a source of unique information. However, properly interpreted, any material culture item can be a source of information about the past. Often that information is unobtainable by other means. Indeed, the successful use of material culture in history depends on treating such sources—material things of many kinds— not as illustrations to picture already developed arguments about the past, but as key evidence. Historians who use material things as illustrations alone limit their potential as primary evidence. This practice can also suggest a familiarity with the past in this medium that is all too often shallow or even false. Although the varied things that constitute material culture are no less rich as primary sources than are written documents, each kind—and there may be an infinite variety of things to consider—requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying

4   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. When historians use material culture as primary evidence convincingly and successfully, they illuminate fruitful relationships between the practice of history and these other disciplines. They can even think through familiar historical problems in new ways. What kinds of history do those historians who turn to material culture produce? Although they have certainly turned their attention to social elites, as have archaeologists and art historians, material culture also gives scholars access to the past of subaltern groups. By “subaltern groups” we mean groups at a disadvantage to those exercising power within a society.2 This access has meant that Western historians of material ­culture often identified or allied with the emergence in the 1970s of nonelite social and cultural history. This history aimed to bring to light the lives of those excluded from or marginal to the dominant written record. These include, in particular, working people of all kinds (including the enslaved), ethnic minorities, women, sexual orientation minorities, children, and nonhuman animals. Initially, some historians who practiced well-established elite history in the political, economic, and intellectual realms were suspicious of the historical value of subaltern history, while some who practiced what was sometimes referred to as the “new history” in turn denigrated attention to elites and their political, economic, military, and intellectual concerns. More recently, mutual jealousy and envy have receded considerably. Many now see attention to “high” and “low” as necessarily complementary for a rounded understanding of the past. Material culture can play a transformative role in both areas. Attention to material culture can help to bring historical attention to the many considerations that link elite and subaltern concerns, whether these are matters of shared interest or of conflict. Material culture can be open to all who interpret the past, regardless of whether their principal concerns are with subalterns or elites. Certainly, political, economic, military, and intellectual historians can make fruitful use of material culture. Indeed, historians of all kinds can acquire the capacity to be adaptable in respect of the materials they press into service and the various ways in which they are studied, while keeping distinctively historical questions ever in the forefront of their concerns. For example, in 1792, Thomas Jefferson decided to commission a great clock for his home at Monticello. In surviving letters and manuscripts, Jefferson described his plan for this object. The Janus-faced, seven-day clock would keep time both inside and outside this founding father’s home. Just over a decade later, when president of the United States, Jefferson finally had the clock installed. The interior clock kept time with both hour and minute hands; a smaller clock face even ticked the passing seconds. The larger exterior face in the portico could be seen from the fields where his enslaved workers could keep track of each hour of labor. For them, no minute or second hand was deemed necessary. Those who could not see the exterior clock could hear the Chinese gong that marked the hourly passage of time on the plantation and defined the sonic limits of Jefferson’s authority. As the creation of a president and statesman known for his mechanical ingenuity, this clock has an impressive paper trail in the Library of Congress. Yet, if the manuscripts and letters in the Library of Congress were to disappear and only the clock remained, it would still offer strong evidence about a specific historical world, particularly about power relations and the history of race-based slavery in the early United States. The enslaved workers in

Introduction   5 the fields lacked the control over their time to worry over passing seconds or minutes, a concern for family and guests whose refined, structured time was punctuated by individual appointments and commitments. The hourly gong offered enslaved individuals— even those up to six miles away—a steady reminder of their position within a hierarchical structure of the plantation. Study of the physical clock makes these conclusions possible.3 Just as a careful historian would view any document of the past, she must study the clock within the context and conventions of its world, a world—early nineteenth-century Virginia—in which clocks conveyed information in specific ways and enslaved laborers comprised the primary workforce. This is how material things can aid historians: in the absence of written documents or, often most fruitfully, in conjunction with them, material things represent the experiences, choices, and creations of individuals whose lives may be unrecorded, or offer additional insights about prominent people that may not make it into the written historical record. Jefferson’s clock provides additional evidence about the experience of enslaved individuals who were not permitted to leave many written traces, even though they lived in a literate society. If they appear at all, those who do not write appear solely from the viewpoint of those who do. Material culture can help to redress the balance, even at times providing evidence that unmasks the assumptions and prejudices of those who rely on writing. Although each specific case has unique characteristics, historians can press material culture into such service anywhere in the world. Material culture has not only opened vistas of the past in respect of subaltern groups at a disadvantage to those exercising power within a society, but also of communities that have been in any given place longer than those who consequently came to dominate them as wielders of imperial power or as colonizing settlers. The subaltern can include the Indigenous.4 Indigenous communities frequently have not used writing, or they may even have deliberately relinquished its use.5 In these cases, an appeal to material culture can offer historians a much richer and more balanced source base. This can be especially informative whenever and wherever a society has extended its geographical reach. Instances include, among many others, Arab expansion in West Asia and North and East Africa, Han Chinese expansion in East Asia, and European seaborne expansion in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The study of material things allows historians to address the ongoing consequences of the textual imbalance between those who write and those who do not. If history is to be concerned with more than a minority of societies and communities throughout the existence of humankind, historians must look beyond writing. Material culture can allow access to aspects of the lives of those many human groups that have not used or relied on writing, whether existing in literate societies or in societies dominated by oral traditions. Thankfully, the three-tier system of human distribution familiar from classical antiquity and its Western revivals—savagery, barbarism, and civilization— no longer accounts for the sophistication and dignity of all humans, regardless of their perceived social organization and culture. If there has been no appreciable evolution in human intellectual capacity since early Paleolithic times, historians should be prepared to regard all humans ever as essentially equal rather than ranked according to their adoption of certain forms of social organization and particular technological achievements.

6   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter By accepting this understanding, “pre-history” becomes a thing of the past. All peoples can have histories, their own or those produced by outsiders. They include all those who have never used writing or who have purposefully relinquished its use. The material ­culture of such peoples—when accessible—gives historians, who are often outsiders, entry to aspects of their pasts. This reality raises a serious puzzle. To what extent should outsiders have entry to the concerns of subaltern and Indigenous groups in order to produce history in a manner that might be quite foreign to those groups? Many Westerners (and some others, for instance, some Japanese) have believed that there are no legitimate limits to what they might properly learn about other peoples they encounter. Yet many subaltern, especially Indigenous, communities wish to enforce strict limitations on access to knowledge about them.6 The exploitation by historians, as well as by anthropologists and art historians, of some types of material culture such as grave goods and other sacred things, as well human remains, can cause what the philosopher James O. Young terms profound offence.7 Historians who encounter prohibitions on access to material culture items, or limitations on their permitted uses, would do well to ponder the consequences, both moral and practical, of transgression. In these instances, communication, collaboration with, and respect for the keepers and scholars of these objects are of vital importance. There is yet another category of material culture from which historians can learn: not those things that have survived from the past, but that are the newly created results of experiment and diligent replication. Material culture for historians is not confined to actual traces of the past, but also to understandings of the processes and craft skills that may survive into the present. This is so, in part, because historians are not concerned with trying to understand the character of particular material things for ontological or aesthetic reasons, but for their role as mediators of human behavior. There is a role for what is termed “experimental archaeology” and “re-enactment” in making history. Much can be learned from choosing, making, and using newly made material things that replicate material culture items from the past. Fashioning a hand axe by napping flint can promote at least some understanding of materials and skills, while wearing stays or corsetry recently made from old patterns with appropriate materials can aid in the acquisition of an appreciation of the contingency of bodily deportment. Many such replications and re-enactments, whether individually or communally, can cast light on human behavior in the past, in particular on the patterns of behavior they suggest. Such studies are therefore properly within the purview of history and material culture.

Material Culture, Material Pluralism Any human community from any time and from anywhere on Earth can be the subject of history through material culture. Humans at all times and in all places have certain

Introduction   7 identical fundamental concerns, such as procuring shelter, whether long term or ­temporary; food; water; and the physical security to allow life to continue and be perpetuated through reproduction and child-rearing. Clearly, humans have particular ways of addressing these concerns at different times and in different places. That they exhibit a huge variety of adaptive ways of addressing these and other challenges in a wide range of circumstances characterizes humans. Although many thinkers past and present and in various societies have evaluated and ranked these adaptive ways, often relating the supposedly primitive to the allegedly sophisticated by notions of progress, humans are all equally capable in a fundamental cognitive sense. Therefore, rankings of the kind that ascribe savagery, barbarism, or civilization (or similar values in accordance with other such schema) to human groups are invalid. It may not be possible to consider material culture that addresses all parts of the Earth at all times. But it is possible to aim to be even-handed in respect of humanity in all its diversity and to endeavor to take a worldwide view of the possibilities of employing material culture sources for historical research. This is not to acquiesce to a notion of globalization. The close study of material things defies such an homogenizing approach. Even though they are frequently adopted and adapted across cultures, material things resist easy translation. They are often rooted in the choices and material realities of specific regions, cultures, and groups. While glob­al­i­za­tion offers a standardized and homogenizing view of various cultures, material culture gives historians access to a diverse range of practices, beliefs, and choices made in dissimilar societies. Globalization packages the nuances and complexities of societies all over the world in a Westernizing shell that denies the material realities and needs of diverse people, places, and historical moments. Though material culture certainly has an impact on the history of capitalism, it is far from confined to the study of currently dominant markets and systems. Material pluralism rather than globalization captures the potential of material things to shape the writing of history. Material pluralism imbues the history of a variety of world cultures with equal weight. If historians could treat all humans of all times equally, certain parts of the world and certain eras would not predominate. However, such a truly acentric viewpoint is not reliably available. Although all humans are capable of imaginative leaps that—with the right prompts and information—can take them imaginatively beyond the bounds of their particular contexts, all humans principally see the world from their own particular viewpoints that are in part defined by time and place. We must acknowledge that we see things through a North American lens. Both to recognize and critically address this challenge, we consciously approach the subject as initially a North American puzzle to be defined and compared with puzzles regarding the historical use of material culture elsewhere in the world. The North American circumstances that inevitably color our approach to material pluralism are marked by colonialism, in the present as well as in the past. The growth of  history based on the study of material culture in North America derives in part from a consciousness on the part of white Americans, exacerbated by the establishment of the political independence of the United States, of cultural divergence from Europe. If,  in the white American and European scheme of things, age lends authority,

8   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter white Americans once saw themselves at a disadvantage to Europeans. Even while ­continuing to defer to European cultural values by importing European markers of cultural sophistication—from household crockery to paintings by Rembrandt—Americans set out to define their separate development. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural arbiters preserved, popularized, and reproduced aspects of white colonial life focusing on houses and their contents. Early American furniture, in particular, became the touchstone of a peculiarly American cultural identity, owing to an emphasis on its divergence from English models. Silver was treated similarly. Preservation bled into recreation, with such ambitious statements of cultural pride as the town of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, created from 1927 onward. If a growth of interest in early American material culture in the later nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century was stimulated by nostalgia, a sense of republican virtue expressed by modesty, and cultural anxiety in comparison with Europe, it also arose from an emerging realization that certain sectors of American society could only be illumined historically by these means. The preservation and restoration of ­colonial houses encouraged the development of historical archaeology to ensure as comprehensive an investigation of the material components of any given place as possible. Historical archaeologists, whose data complement written records, developed their own disciplinary procedures that relate to archaeology more generally. Historians who use material culture can take these findings into account, but also make use of a far wider range of physical traces of the past than those investigated by archaeologists. These, in turn, often also require appropriate forms of specialist disciplinary attention—such as those proper to the history of art or the history of technology—if they are to yield reliable information to the historian. The turn to material culture among historians in North America—whether archaeological or not—arose from voluntary settlers and their descendants not only attempting to include accounts of their relationships with their primarily European source communities, but also with the descendants of both involuntary immigrants—predominantly enslaved Africans—and Native peoples whose continuing presence was, and is, often overlooked. The other half of the story is that members of those communities are themselves increasingly adopting and adapting these means in conjunction with their own traditions to create histories of their own. These are some of the peculiar circumstances that contribute to a distinctively North American articulation of history and material culture. Although we certainly do not offer them as a template for a common global vision, they share at least some characteristics with circumstances elsewhere in the world, not the least being continuing cultural encounters between and among competing social groups. Yet differences matter. In this light, how are historians to accommodate and acknowledge the value of diverse cultural lenses, beyond those of North Americans, without reducing everything to a common— and false—global vision? Appeals to material specificity can be a way to hone awareness of this dilemma and to address it. Different groups come up with different solutions to shared challenges and to solve the simplest human problems. For example, all humans need to sleep. A Japanese futon, a Mexican hammock, a South African sleeping mat, a North American straw mattress, and a gilt state bed in an English country house are all

Introduction   9 different solutions to this problem, though we acknowledge that each of these things can address a human need or desire beyond sleep alone. Even so, the material specificity of a Japanese futon reveals information about connections among environment, family, and culture that is fundamentally different from the evidence that may be gleaned from a light hammock, a woven mat, or a state bed. By examining the diverse ways individuals and communities have chosen, created, or made material things, historians can document and interpret a range of human behavior without eliding distinctions among cultures. This discussion of history and material culture assumes a distinctively Western understanding of time, the past, and history. Not to focus on practices dependent on this concept would be disingenuous. Nonetheless, the concept of history promulgated in classical antiquity and elaborated in the Enlightenment European world is but one way of considering the passage of time and the place of humankind within it. Accounts of the human past from non-Western points of view may afford insights open to all. In this way, notions of material pluralism seek to encompass not only subject matter, but also forms of understanding. Some of the modes of historical explanation and expression used by historians from societies outside North America and Europe may differ, in small or large ways, from those that historians in the latter societies use as a matter of course and treat as standard. These approaches serve not only to expand the range of habitual reference within these societies, but also to demonstrate that familiar Western historiographical approaches are not the only way of addressing the past. We have already touched on certain ways in which the historical use of material ­culture necessarily intersects with its study from the viewpoints of archaeology, anthropology, and art history. However, in offering a study in material pluralism, we stress that this use of material culture is specifically historical, though it encompasses topics and materials also studied within those other disciplines. The subjects of history are not bounded by chronological limits but concern human action—with its implication of change—in any period, from human origins to a past so recent that it still seems present.

Five Fields of History and Material Culture It may be impossible to treat all human communities as of potentially equal historical interest regardless of time or place, yet there are thematic concerns that open the material world of all human communities to the study of historians. We have identified five kinds of human behavior likely shared by peoples in all geographical circumstances throughout human existence. Through time and across the world, a variety of peoples have used things to achieve practical goals, to meet spiritual needs, to think with, to mark and create social distinction, and to memorialize and shape conceptions of the past. This approach, while far from exhaustive, is at least representative of challenges

10   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter humans have faced over time and in many parts of the world insofar as they are amenable to historical interpretation by appeal to material things. “Material Culture and Cognition,” the first thematic category, deals with how humans choose, make, and use material things to be parts of the machinery of human thought, including emotions and know-how. How do people think with things? Human categorization of things is the first topic to mention within this thematic section. Fundamental, though not necessarily in every circumstance, are the categories of nature and artifice: that which occurs without human contrivance, and that which is formed by human acts of choosing and making. The coevolution of things and people, or how humans and the things with which they interact affect each other in dynamic ways, changing physical forms, modes of thinking, and behaviors, is relevant here, as is what is often described as the agency of things. Can things act in senses that are other than purely metaphorical? The second thematic category is “Material Culture and Technology.” This addresses choosing, making, and using material things to achieve everyday goals. This encompasses several issues, including the functions of things, that is, their purpose and design; the relative stability or instability of things as humans adapt existing things in new ­circumstances; and how things can outlive even adaptive uses yet remain part of the human domain as obsolete, forgotten, or discarded things. The third thematic category is “Material Culture and the Symbolic.” This concerns how humans choose, make, and use material things to access or harness the immaterial realm, including the sacred. Among the topics at issue are the varying character of relationships between the material and the immaterial realms; distinctions between those things any given community regards and treats as sacred, and those things (if any) it treats as in some sense devoid of numinous characteristics; and the application of these considerations to human bodies or parts thereof, whether living or dead. “Material Culture and Social Distinction” is the fourth thematic category. This deals with distinction in the sense of how humans choose, make, and use material things as means of marking social differentiations within and among groups, thereby establishing boundaries and hierarchies. This includes consideration of rights in material things, including access and use, and various concepts of property. Place, in the sense of environment, the categorization of people through things in their possession and control, affecting notions of gender, ethnicity, age, and class and the distinction between shared and individual rights in things as a generator of social distinctions are all relevant to notions of social distinction. Fifth and last is “Material Culture and Memory.” This directly addresses aspects of what in Western academic, though not popular, thought and practice history has come to dominate in terms of prestige. It concerns choosing, making, and using material things to preserve and regulate knowledge of the past in order to shape the historical present. Material things may shape understandings of chronology and time, transform a wide range of historical practices and, crucially, complicate distinctions between memory and history. These five fields are not mutually exclusive. For instance, it would be possible to describe various aspects of writing (inscription in a broad sense that includes pictograms) as

Introduction   11 material culture under all five. First, an historian could describe writing as functioning as a cognitive tool, opening areas of thought that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Second, that historian could approach writing as a technology geared to practical goals, such as recording exchange transactions and taxation. Third, that historian could regard writing as a means of harnessing the immaterial and sacred realms through such things as written spells and records of divine revelation. Fourth, she could regard writing as a method of establishing social differentiation between literate (elite) and nonliterate (enslaved, female, juvenile) subjects in literate societies; between colonizing and colonized populations; and furthermore as a technology deliberately eschewed or even abandoned by some oral societies. Fifth, the same historian could describe writing as a means of preserving and regulating knowledge of the past in order to shape the historical present. We cannot overemphasize that these five thematic divisions do not serve to organize material things into entirely separate groups. Rather, they serve to organize ways of interacting with the material world in terms of analytical categories for convenient individual consideration pertinent to historians. Together these fields address a range of ways human engagement with material culture has been—or could be—vitally important to the work of historians. As historians, our approach foregrounds the “choosing, making, and use” of material things rather than any attempt to ascertain their meaning. The thematic considerations outlined earlier attend principally to human decisions and actions expressed in choosing, making, and using material things. Why avoid the term meaning? Material things are not necessarily primarily or even secondarily items of communication, though they can embody values and beliefs that a given community shares, and can convey them, or changes to them, whether deliberately or incidentally, within and, on occasion, beyond that community. Any given thing can have a purposeful or an incidental meaning, or both; but meaning in this sense is liable to change with circumstances. An approach that invites attention to human relationships with material things in terms not of meaning but of choosing, making, and use shifts the focus from the meaning of things to the behavior of people. While not necessarily denying the utility of treating things as signs, this approach furthermore avoids the semiotic reductionism that has long characterized much attention to many kinds of material things. While things can indeed function as signs, they can function in human affairs in various other ways, too. A pin, for instance, can convey social status or aspiration as a matter of communication, yet it can simultaneously, and equally importantly, hold two pieces of fabric together. We readily acknowledge, though, that the procedures and relationships suggested by choosing, making, and use far from account for humans’ often highly complex, often conflicted, relationships with the things they choose, make, and use. We are well aware that those relationships cannot be accounted for in what is initially conveyed by these terms alone. Some uses—if the term still serves in the following circumstances—may be neither volitional nor intentional. Any material thing can be an object of aesthetic fascination— St. Augustine cites an earthworm8—or of irrational desire. Objects of desire can include a wide range of things that serve a huge variety of needs. These include fetishes, discussed by Sigmund Freud as displaced foci of the libido, and artworks.9 The historian

12   Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter Raphael Samuel, discussing photographs as traces of the past, characteristically touched on the role of desire with great delicacy in considering what he termed historians’ “need to engage with the irrecoverability of the past.” This, he points out, is “the central pathos of retrieval projects, as of any kind of historical enterprise which also—by one of those mysterious alchemies of taste which it is beyond the reach of history to explain, even though we are among its prime beneficiaries—transforms subjects of study into objects of desire.”10 Not to take aspects of the range of human desire for material things into account in various ways, pertinent to any material and topic in hand, would be culpably to ignore dimensions of human engagement with things with consequences deleterious to any historical account. However, to focus exclusively or even predominantly on the aesthetic or fetishistic (or other) potentialities of a material thing when seeking to put it to historical use would also be an error. A key aspect of the art and science of history is to choose those forms of attention to particular traces of the past that best serve to address the questions regarding relations between past and present raised by the needs of one’s specific inquiry. Historians may fruitfully choose, make, and use material things in their efforts to write histories that account for diverse understandings of human experiences through time and around the world. Opening the study of material culture to historians through these five thematic approaches—to think with, to achieve practical goals, to meet spiritual needs, to mark and create social distinction, and to memorialize and shape ideas about the past— means consciously choosing to use material things as key historical evidence not merely as illustrations. The material pluralism reflected by those choices reveals richer, fuller, and more nuanced understandings of the human condition through time and around the world.

Notes 1. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 9–11. 2. A. W. Eaton and Ivan Gaskell, “Do Subaltern Artifacts belong in Art Museums?” The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, ed. James O. Young and Conrad Brunk (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 235. 3. Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–4; “Great Clock,” designed by Thomas Jefferson, created in 1792–1793, installed at Monticello in 1804–1805, accession number 1923–6, Monticello, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. 4. Eaton and Gaskell, “Do Subaltern Artifacts belong in Art Museums?” 235–236. 5. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009): 226–234. 6. See, for instance, Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), especially 205–228; and James O. Young and Conrad Brunk, eds., The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 7. James O. Young, “Profound Offence and Cultural Appropriation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 135–146.

Introduction   13 8. St. Augustine, De vera religione, 41, 7 (Library of Latin Texts, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), http://clt.brepolis.net.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/llta/pages/Toc.aspx?ctx=525165 (accessed August 28, 2015). We owe this reference to Oleg Bychkov following an inquiry concerning Arthur Danto’s claim that we can choose to regard anything from an aesthetic viewpoint, citing the teeth of a dead dog, an example he attributes—erroneously—to St. Augustine (Arthur C. Danto, “Art and Artifact in Africa,” in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992], 94). 9. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press: 1953–1974), 21: 149. 10. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 376.

Pa rt I

H ISTORY, M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , A N D C O GN I T ION

chapter 1

Wor ds or Thi ngs i n A m er ica n History? Steven Conn

In 1963, John Kouwenhoven published his now classic article “American Studies: Words or Things.” It was a manifesto, really, more than a scholarly work, polemical in tone and ringing with a certain defiance. That essay is often credited with helping to move the  study of material culture—objects of all kinds and broadly defined—into the ­mainstream of the American Studies enterprise and by extension into the study of American history. Kouwenhoven set words and things at odds with each other in a never-the-twainshall-meet dichotomy. Challenging the very reliability of words altogether, he wrote: Verbal symbols “are inherently ‘defective.’ They are at best a sort of generalized, ­averaged-out substitute for a complex reality comprising an infinite number of individual particularities.”1 He pitted language and material culture against each other, because where language was slippery and unreliable, objects were fixed and unchanging. There is an almost moralizing tone in the essay—objects are true and honest and retain their fidelity over time, whereas words dissemble. Looking back now, we can see that “American Studies: Words or Things” was entirely of its scholarly moment. In order to more fully “discover America,” Kouwenhoven continued, especially the “nonscribbling” America which had largely been left out of the standard histories until that point, it was necessary to engage with a whole world of “vernacular objects.” Written on the cusp of what would be hailed as the “new social history,” “American Studies: Words or Things” really attempted to move American studies scholarship in two related ways: first, Kouwenhoven wanted us to pay attention to those who did not, or could not, scribble. Not only were words inherently unreliable, as records of the past they misrepresented it because they were only produced by “elites,” those with the education, the leisure, and the wherewithal to write in the first place. If we hoped to

18   Steven Conn recover history “from the bottom up,” as the phrase went, then the second proposition Kouwenhoven made was that “things” were the only way we could re-create the ­experiences of the vast majority of Americans. Kouwenhoven hinted that using things to recover the history of those nonscribbling Americans whom we had otherwise ignored meant engaging with a different kind of historical cognition altogether. He challenged historians and others to develop what he called “sensory thinking.” “To discover America,” he wrote, hammering home his main theme, “to become aware of American culture as a community of experienced particulars about which we can effectively communicate our perceptions to one another, we must first be aware of the limitations of verbal translations of reality. Then we can set about the job of training our young people and ourselves to think with our senses as well as with words.”2 Capturing the spirit of an expansive age, Kouwenhoven’s essay pointed the way to the future, or so he hoped. Material culture, he believed, opened the door to vast ­historical possibilities, veritable undiscovered countries of the past. He felt that by engaging with the material world we could get closer to the mental worlds—the ­cognition—of those people who made Navajo sand paintings or Pennsylvania Dutch fraktur, to take two examples that he offered. If nothing else, material culture in all its forms constituted a large and as yet untapped archive of primary source material with which to recover the past. His bold assertions, however, were built on several assumptions that deserve some closer inspection, and he raised a handful of questions that have still not been definitively answered. For starters: Whose cognition, exactly, does material culture illuminate—the Navajo person who made the object, those who used it subsequently, or Kouwenhoven when he showed up to study it, or some combination of all three? In other words, does material culture provide a transparent window onto the cognition of those who made whatever it is we hold in our hands, or into the machinery of thought of those of us doing the holding? Likewise, when Kouwenhoven insisted that “direct sensory awareness of such vernacular objects provides an important kind of knowledge about American culture,”3 we need to ask: is all sensory thinking the same? Are there different methodological approaches to material culture that yield different (contradictory?) results? Has “sensory thinking” changed over time, and if so, what does that mean for the use of material things to reckon with the past? And was Kouwenhoven’s clarion call really that new in the first place? I am not simply stealing Kouwenhoven’s title here. Rather, his essay serves as a touchstone for consideration of the relationship between material culture and how we understand history, and it can be used to sketch a history of how we have seen that relationship today. “American Studies: Words or Things” stands at roughly the halfway point in a century of material culture scholars insisting that things matter just as much as words in conceiving the past, and of historians trying to figure out just what that might mean.

Words or Things in American History?   19

Material Culture and How to Categorize the Past It’s worth remembering what Henry Ford really said. Yes, he did declare that “history is bunk,” thus making him a hero to countless American high school students. But that wasn’t the whole of it. He later clarified what he came to see as perhaps an unfortunate gaffe: “History as sometimes written is mostly bunk. But history that you can see is of great value.”4 Meet Henry Ford, material culture enthusiast. Most of us are familiar with what Ford did with that enthusiasm. Between 1919 and 1929, when Ford’s own involvement with his company was waning and when that company probably commanded its greatest market share, Ford began to collect pieces of the American past. He started close to home—his own home as a matter of fact—when he bought the old Ford family homestead and moved it to Dearborn, Michigan. The house was about to be demolished—fittingly enough, for a road-widening project. And off he went after that through the 1920s. When The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village—formally known as The Edison Institute—was dedicated on October 21, 1929, President Herbert Hoover traveled from Washington to attend the ceremony. (This turned out to be just about the last happy moment of his presidency since the stock market collapsed a week later.) Broadly speaking, The Henry Ford was conceived in two parts. One was a museum of objects and artifacts, millions of them in fact. The other was an ersatz village of buildings Ford bought and moved to the site. There are eighty-three of them today, and many have some important historical association even if they don’t really bear any relationship to each other: the Wright Brothers cycle shop from Dayton, Ohio; Noah Webster’s home from Connecticut; Thomas Edison’s workshop from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Put the coherence of the results to one side. For our purposes Ford’s rationale for the project remains fascinating. He contrasted what he was doing with the work of conventional historians: “The historian,” he told an interviewer, “tries to put together a true story of the past,” and he went on, anticipating John Kouwenhoven, “but he is working with words and ideas that do not include the whole of history.” The whole history of the American people, he continued, “was not expressed in wars, but in the way they lived and worked . . .” The objects of ordinary life, Ford insisted, told that story. He didn’t use a fancy term like “sensory thinking,” but Ford believed in the power of objects to tell a story: “You can read in every one of them what the man who made them was thinking— what he was aiming at. A piece of machinery or anything that is made is like a book, if you can read it. It is part of the record of man’s spirit.” Ford may not have used the verb “read” in a deliberately provocative way, but he certainly meant to contrast seeing and reading, objects and words. “For by looking at the things that people used and the way

20   Steven Conn they lived,” he told a New York Times interviewer, “a better and truer impression can be gained in an hour than could be had from a month of reading.” And in a delicious irony, anti-union, anti-Semitic Henry Ford—with his right-leaning politics and his even more conservative social values—got to the “new social history” four decades before left-leaning graduate students in the 1960s did. “The history of America wasn’t written in Washington,” Ford announced, “it was written in the grass roots.”5 Ford housed the objects of people’s ordinary and working lives in a replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (bigger, actually, than the original). He might have intended to pay homage to the founding of the nation with that building, but it also proved a wonderful way to subordinate the old-fashioned political history to his brand of social history. Ford’s goal was to create nothing less than the biggest, most comprehensive museum of American history in the country. In that, however, he didn’t really have much competition. During what I have elsewhere called the golden age of American museum building, roughly 1876 to 1929, Americans did not attempt to build any grand, comprehensive, encyclopedic museums of American history, in the way that they did for art and for natural history. Even at the Smithsonian, which surely collected virtually everything else, “history had become a residual category,” according to Gary Kulik, “the repository for collections that did not fit the elaborate natural-science model . . .”6 In that sense, the public saw something of a hybrid institution when The Henry Ford opened in 1931. Greenfield Village was an example of the immersive, experiential model of a history museum, allowing visitors to walk into history, as it were. That model had nineteenth-century roots in “living history” museums started in Scandinavia and elsewhere. It would reach a kind of apotheosis in Williamsburg, Virginia, another grand history project that began in the 1920s. (In fact, officials from Williamsburg gave Ford the chance to buy that town in 1924 for $5 million if he promised to restore the place. He declined.) The museum proper, however, housed in that re-created Independence Hall, looked very much like a conventional museum. To judge from the old photos and gallery plans, the museum was lined with glass cases, each filled with objects. If you don’t look too carefully, you might confuse the galleries with a natural history museum or an anthropology collection from the late nineteenth century. In this way, Ford built his collections of material culture and the museum in which he displayed them around the concept I have described as an “object-based epistemology.” Briefly stated, in the nineteenth century, objects, and the museums which collected, classified, and displayed them, played an important role in knowledge production. That function was predicated on a way of knowing whereby the careful visual inspection of objects would yield information about the category of knowledge in which that object resided. Ford, child of the nineteenth century as he was, certainly adhered to this faith in the ability of objects to be read by viewers, and for those viewers to understand the ­stories objects had to tell. Ford found a specific, object-based inspiration in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. In 1923, in the midst of his collecting binge, Ford traveled there to

Words or Things in American History?   21 tour the museum of the Bucks County Historical Society, more colloquially called the Mercer Museum. Conceived and built by Henry Mercer, an archaeologist turned collector, the museum opened in 1916 in a wonderfully bizarre building that looks vaguely like a Rhine castle made entirely of poured concrete. Inside, the museum is stuffed to the (concrete) rafters with exactly the sort of objects Ford wanted to collect: cast iron stove plates; cobblers’ tools; more candle molds than you can count; a whaling boat. Ford loved it, and he ran an enthusiastic review of it in his own personal mouthpiece The Dearborn Independent. “This is the only museum I’ve ever been sufficiently interested in to visit,” Ford said. “Some day I expect to have a museum which will rival it.”7 Mercer and Ford shared the idea that work, and the people who did it, formed the principal theme of American history. Labor, then, was how they categorized their objects, and they tried to create a taxonomy of it. The results in Doylestown are jaw-dropping and overwhelming. Display after display, floor after floor, thousands upon thousands of objects. And if you look carefully, you’ll notice that each one has an identifying number on it, painted in white as if on an archaeological artifact. As befits a product of nineteenth-century museum building, the “sensory thinking” that goes on at the Mercer Museum is purely visual. You are invited—commanded—to look at the objects. Mercer included no other explanatory material. Nor are the objects exhibited in any sort of contextualizing display: he did not put his cobblers’ tools in the hands of mannequins to make it clearer how the tools were once used. That was for you to figure out. Did it work? That’s hard to know. But if imitation is a measure of success, then the answer is probably “no.” Very few museums attempted to use objects to create something akin to a natural history museum of American history. None that I can think of tried to embody a grand narrative of American history either. The vast bulk of history museums tell specific stories about a single topic, often with plenty of artifacts (the Kansas Barbed Wire museum, say, in LaCrosse, Kansas, which displays a comprehensive history of the wire that won the West), or about local places or individual people and the material culture specific to that place or person (the Warren Harding Home, for example, in Marion, Ohio). This certainly was Ford’s ambition. The fact that he built two different kinds of museums to satisfy it, however, probably reflects an uneasiness that the old, object-centered museum no longer communicated effectively with audiences. Despite Ford’s insistence on the novelty of his project, Greenfield Village was an example of exhibitionary ideas current in the 1920s. Art museums began to install their pieces in contextualizing period rooms, for example, and natural history museums had begun to replace their rows of  glass cases with dioramas, creating “natural” displays for their stuffed specimens. Several other outdoor or “living history” museums also got their start in the 1920s. What Ford built, then, wrestled with the problem of material culture and the categorization of American history on two levels. First, he borrowed from Henry Mercer to conceptualize the narrative of the nation’s history as the story of work and to categorize his collection accordingly. At another level, however, he chose to tell that story using two different types of history museum: one, a version of the nineteenth-century, object-based

22   Steven Conn museum which relied on visitors’ careful observation in order to extract meaning from objects; the other, an immersive, more experiential museum which allowed people to engage with objects in a wider context and which created the illusion of traveling back in time to walk through a real American village. At the same time, if Ford’s museum idea wasn’t quite as new as he insisted it was, then his idea of using material culture as a window onto the past wasn’t entirely novel either. Ford found history as it was written to be “mostly bunk” because he wasn’t keeping up with some of the leading academic historians of the early twentieth century. In 1912, James Harvey Robinson called on historians to examine “the real sources of historical knowledge”—among which he included architecture, tools, and clothing—in his book The New History. In fact, Robinson sounded a great deal like Mercer and Ford when he wrote “the history of man begins with his industries.” Robinson shared the history department at the University of Pennsylvania briefly with James McMaster at the turn of the twentieth century. McMaster, too, was committed to broadening the study of history beyond the political and the military to include the daily lives of regular people using the things they left behind. Indeed, Mercer saw his own museum project at least in part as Turnerian. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner articulated his now famous thesis, identifying the frontier process as the motive force in American history. The frontier made the nation, Turner argued, creating Americans out of European immigrants and instilling in us all of our democratic virtues. The tools Mercer collected remained as the evidence of how the work of settling the frontier got done. Fittingly, when Mercer organized his first public exhibit of his collections in 1897, he titled it “Tools of the Nation Maker.” As Ellen Fitzpatrick has noted, the “new social history” of the 1960s was not really all that new.8 In the early years of the twentieth century, therefore, several high-profile historians and museum builders saw material culture as central to how we could and should comprehend the past. Why then, fifty years later, did John Kouwenhoven believe he was onto something big and new?

Material Culture, Historical Narrative, and the Problem of Scale If museums serve as the primary institutions in which a general public encounters material culture, then it is surely true that in the mid-twentieth century, objects of all kinds— natural and human-made, art and artifact—lost the pride of place that they had enjoyed at the turn of the century in those museum galleries. The endless cases of stuffed birds and fossil trilobites in natural history museums wound up in storage, and the exhibits that replaced them relied much more heavily on the written (wall text of various kinds) and on the experiential (hands-on, especially in museums of science and technology)

Words or Things in American History?   23 than on a pure visual engagement. Even in art museums, where the primacy of the ­individual object and visual experience remained, visitors encountered far fewer of them. Spare “modernist” hangs supplanted cluttered “salon” style displays. Indeed, as the job of being an art museum curator became increasingly professionalized across the mid-twentieth century, one consequence was that curators changed from managers of collections to exhibit auteurs. As a consequence, curators assumed an increasing importance in instructing viewers what to look at and how, and explanatory and didactic material proliferated.9 Comprehensive, object-centered museums of American history did not become common, despite the example Henry Ford and Henry Mercer set. Even in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian built a National Museum of Natural History (1910) and a National Gallery of Art (1941) but did not get around to creating a museum of American history until 1980. Its creation, of course, was really a rechristening. The National Museum of American History was the new name given to the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology (1964). The name is doubly telling: it equates American history only with the history of technology to the implicit exclusion of any number of other major currents in American history—immigration, electoral politics, expansion, to name just three. Likewise, while Mercer, and even Ford to some extent, wanted to use technology to highlight the concepts and experiences of work and labor, on the Mall technology itself became the focus. Museums of history have struggled with the problem of how to relate objects to narrative, and at two levels. First, what narrative to tell? For art museums and for natural history museums, the answer seemed self-evident. Most natural history museums arranged their specimens to reflect the way the natural world was organized and how evolution had produced the world we see today.10 Similarly, encyclopedic art museums told “the story of art” as an approximately evolutionary march through time: beginning with the Greeks (or the Egyptians or the Sumerians) and ending with the Post Impressionists (or the Cubists or the Abstract Expressionists). What overarching narrative would organize American history in a museum setting, what story to tell? That problem sits at the center of Henry Adams’s mordant autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1918). The best he could come up with was that history amounted to the accumulation of power without purpose, the marshalling of forces without direction, and thus did he find himself “lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” Long before postmodernism forced us to examine such assumptions, Adams realized that history offered no lessons, nor did it present any coherent meaning. Assuming for a moment that the problem of narrating could be solved, the question then remained: how do we tell that narrative using material culture? Can historical objects be categorized, classified, arranged, and displayed to convey a historical narrative? Individual objects might have intrinsic interest or some kind of historical resonance, but ultimately could they tell a larger tale?

24   Steven Conn The diminished role of objects in mid-twentieth-century museums of all kinds c­ orresponds to another institutional shift as well. Museums, which in the late nineteenth century were conceived of as places of original research as well as public education, lost the first role to some extent to dynamic, growing research universities. Certainly in the hard sciences, but even in the biological sciences, in engineering and other technologies, in anthropology, and in art history, universities (and related kinds of academic institutions) have come to dominate the production of new knowledge. And nowhere more so than in the world of academic, professionalized history. Peter Novick has charted the way in which the practice of history came to be dominated by academics, trained by other academics, credentialed with PhDs, and working in turn to perpetuate themselves. As a result, the practice of history moved away from the world of amateurs, secondary school teachers, historical societies, and museums. The National Council on Public History was founded in 1979 precisely because practitioners in archives, museums, government agencies, and elsewhere wanted to be seen as professionally legitimate. Kouwenhoven could write his manifesto in 1964, after all, because objects did not, or didn’t any longer, figure much into the work of studying the past. They had been left to local historical societies, and in academia, words prevailed. Academic historians, who had come to dominate the production of historical knowledge, were not much interested in objects anymore. In fact, although he probably does not deserve all the credit, Kouwenhoven’s essay came in the midst of what we might see now as a golden age of material culture studies. Crude though it is, a Google ngram for “material culture” reveals a rapid growth in publications after World War II and peaking in 1970. In fact, the year after Kouwenhoven published his piece, the Smithsonian Institution created a material culture studies program in partnership with George Washington University. By 1980, “material culture” was in the titles of two scholarly journals. Much of this scholarly work on material culture, however, was done by academics perched elsewhere around campus than in history departments: archaeology, anthropology, folklore, and art and architectural history. It is worth remembering that Kouwenhoven wrote about the nation’s material culture from the English Department at Barnard College. Between 1964, when Kouwenhoven issued his call, and 1980, only two articles that deal in some way with material culture were published in the Journal of American History. Writing nearly twenty years after Kouwenhoven, Thomas Schlereth complained that “a sample survey of the major texts used to survey the current interpretive trends and methodological perspectives in the writing of American history reveals a complete ignorance of [material culture studies].”11 On campus, then, the problem of how to access material culture to understand the  past became a problem of disciplinary location, of academic real estate. Kouwenhoven wrote his essay for two reasons. The first was to plead the case for the study of material culture; the second was to advance the field of American Studies as  a house of many mansions, where scholars with varied disciplinary training could gather.

Words or Things in American History?   25 This too was entirely of its moment. The American Studies Association, and its ­journal American Quarterly, were both founded shortly after World War II.12 In those postwar salad days of American higher education, colleges and universities around the country established American Studies programs and, on rare occasions, even freestanding departments. American Studies scholars shared a subject matter—“American culture in all its diversity and complexity,” according to the Association’s founding statement. Putting material culture at the center of American Studies might be the way for it  to carve out a more distinctive academic and disciplinary identity. In 1977, Yale University established the Center for the Study of American Arts and Material Culture— in conjunction with its American Studies program. Yet even rallying under the banner of American Studies did not entirely solve the problem of narrative that museumbuilders had also faced. During the mid-century, high-water mark of material culture scholarship, much of that work appeared in the form of essays, rather than monographs. Sometimes these essays have appeared alongside others in edited collections, and individual scholars have published collections of their own essays as books. Kouwenhoven did just that, for example, with his 1982 title Half a Truth Is Better Than None. Each chapter of James Deetz’s 1977 book In Small Things Forgotten is a tour de force, but it is fair to ask whether the whole of the book is greater than the sum of those chapters, each of which can be read as a stand-alone essay. Kouwenhoven’s subtitle hints at this same problem: “Some Unsystematic Conjectures about Art, Disorder, and American Experience.” Material culture scholarship has been more successful at producing vignettes than it has been at producing bigger narrative wholes of the sort the study of history is built upon. Let’s call this the problem of scale. “History” has been good at producing what Kouwenhoven derided as “ingenious verbal generalizations that are sometimes laughably and sometimes tragically unrelated to actualities.” Those generalizations, laughable or otherwise, create an understanding of the past from a high altitude. Studying material culture held the promise of getting down to ground level to explore particularities. But how those two vantages can be negotiated has proved tricky. Does history necessarily have to concern itself with the larger, the collective, the common denominator, while material culture only offers a window onto the individual, the very particular, and the personal? In this sense, material culture might best be seen as part of the phenomenon of “microhistory,” described by Charles Joyner as the task of asking “large questions in small places,” though as such it would be subject to the ebbing and flowing of that historical project.13 Kouwenhoven presented his readers with a choice—words or things—and threw the gauntlet down. How to change the “or” to an “and” has not proved obvious or easy. So when Perry Duis wrote in 1979: “For years a gap of misunderstanding has divided history as an academic discipline from the world of material culture and museums,” his was probably a fair assessment. A decade later, the American Historical Association published a “state of the field” collection of essays assembled and edited by Eric Foner. Material culture did not figure in The New American History.14

26   Steven Conn

Twists and Turns: Whither Material Culture? Disciplinary questions were much on the minds of those who gathered for a symposium in 1985 to assess whither material culture. Organizer Simon Bronner assembled an allstar team of scholars and asked them to consider: “What should material culture studies do?” now that, as Bronner put it, “the validity of material culture studies has been well established.” By all the professional measures, Bronner was certainly right. The case for material culture had been made in all the disciplines where it originated, and the definition of the term had broadened to include landscape and the “built environment.” Even historians who might not themselves use material culture in their own work no longer resisted the idea that someone else might. Bibliographies burgeoned by the year. This success, however, underscored that material culture studies still occupied an ambiguous place in the disciplinary and institutional landscape. Was it primarily a method, which could be applied across other disciplines? Did it need to be rooted in a specific time and place: the material culture of medieval France or seventeenth-century New England? Did material culture studies belong with the social sciences and should it thus be “data driven,” as some archeologists might prefer? Or did it reside in the humanities and thus reckon primarily with questions of aesthetics and related issues? In the end, did all these questions merely complicate matters unnecessarily? After all, as John Michael Vlatch put it: “it must be remembered that material culture is not a discipline, it is just stuff.”15 As the participants put their thoughts together for the symposium, however, disciplinary and institutional plates had begun to shift. On campus, support for American Studies programs flattened and in some cases even declined. Most programs remained just that: constellations of affiliated faculty who had their faculty homes elsewhere, rather than free-standing departments. Tenure lines are the most valuable commodity on college campuses, and dedicated faculty positions in American Studies have become rare. Most spectacularly, for example, the American Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania—among the most venerable and arguably the one that emphasized the study of material culture most prominently—blew up and was dissolved by the university’s administration in the late 1980s. In the wake of the 1960s, American Studies itself began to drift in directions different from those that it pursued originally. Rejecting notions of a broadly shared “American Culture” or a unitary “American Mind,” the new American Studies increasingly focused on questions of ethnoracial identity, parsing the pluribus further and further and denying the unum altogether. Tellingly, the American Studies Association website lists a  number of African American Studies programs among its collation of graduate ­programs in American Studies.16 At the same time, other American Studies scholars defined the “culture” of America as largely the consumer world of the present and searched, however quixotically, for

Words or Things in American History?   27 political “agency” at the shopping mall and in lifestyle choices. In this, they borrowed from certain trends in British “cultural studies,” a baggy concatenation of critical ­postures and scholarly methods that shared mostly the project to critique the present without being informed too much by the past. The new American Studies, some of its critics charged, saves you the hard work of doing actual research. Material culture studies emerged as part of the (not so) New Social History of the 1960s, and the two shared some of the same political motivations and concern for questions of labor and class. But in Ronald Reagan’s America, class questions faded from view even while identity politics blossomed. Whether material culture studies could contribute to this new focus on identity remained to be seen. And as if that were not enough turmoil, just as Bronner’s symposium came together, historians themselves—or some of them at any rate—were in the midst of taking their linguistic turn. I have no intention of rehearsing here the arrival of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and related postmodern ideas in American history departments and the impact that they have, or have not, had. But I do want to return to a recurring verb: to read. This was how Henry Ford described the way people should interact with objects, and it became the common, almost irresistible metaphor used by material culturists to explain how they did what they did. Individual objects could be read, as E. McClung Fleming asserted when describing the nature of material culture: “Artifacts are not only natural facts in themselves, but the evidence they contain can be read to establish historical facts…” Whole landscapes too could be read, and Peirce Lewis, to take one example, extended the metaphor still further. He codified a set of rules for reading landscape “just as the rules of grammar help guide us through some particularly convoluted bit of syntax.”17 One consequence of the linguistic turn—though in fairness many historians resisted it—was to throw the whole enterprise of reading itself into flux. In a deconstructed world, authors were dead, meanings were hopelessly contingent, and all that remained among the smoldering literary ruins, apparently, were literary critics. The linguistic turn created conundrums for material culture studies as well. On one hand, it ostensibly caught up with John Kouwenhoven’s attack on the deception of words by giving that attack a dense (often unreadable) critical underpinning (and Gallic imprimatur!). And in so doing, it opened up the possibility of “reading” material culture with a new sophistication. Parades and prisons, clothing and gender were all now cultural “texts” waiting to be read. At another level, if one could no longer read words with any reliability, could one still read objects with the same innocence and transparency? “Things,” as Kouwenhoven had argued, connected us with those who could not or did not write, but could “things” now be inherently more trustworthy than “words” if both had to be “read” to yield meaning? Objects might, in some Foucauldian “reading,” be yet another product of a discursive formation, but what, exactly, is a discursive object? Dell Upton, another participant in Simon Bronner’s  1985 symposium, recognized the  problem, though only partially. “The linguistic analogy,” he offered, “has serious ­problems as a theoretical model and it needn’t be the only true path in any case…” Upton

28   Steven Conn was quick to insist that he didn’t want a raft of “theoretical treatises,” but he did suggest that material culturists might “develop more specific ideas about how to ‘read’ objects clearly in ways that are accessible to a variety of scholars.” Without that, Upton fretted, material culture would continue to be seen as “derivative” by those scholars because “artifacts do not reveal anything that documents cannot tell us more succinctly.”18 Upton perhaps did not anticipate another consequence of the linguistic turn: that those who had once spent their time reading documents, however problematically, might turn their attention to reading other things as well. Reading itself might be fraught, but with the linguistic turn came the assertion that all the world was a text and thus ­literary ­theory could be applied to anything, anywhere. Call it the Anschluss by the English department. Certainly, scholarship about museums came to be dominated by those who saw exhibits, galleries, and the material culture that filled them as just one more kind of literary text. This posture became so pervasive that in the late 1990s Sharon Macdonald had to remind people of the need to examine the “ways in which museums are unlike texts” and Alan Wallach complained that “a successful exhibition is not a book on the wall, a narrative with objects as illustrations…” In trying to repel the invasion of the literary theorists, Macdonald insisted that when we look at museums, we need to consider “the centrality of material culture, the durability and solidity of objects, the non-verbal nature of so many of their messages.”19 In fact, though—and here again another irony—poststructuralism mostly sent scholars back to words, not to things, to texts in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Even Phillip Fisher, a champion of the new, poststructurally inflected American Studies, admitted that the most “enduring outcome” of all of this literary theory “has been its powerful analytic techniques in the face of brief crux passages.” Fisher edited a 1991 collection of essays titled The New American Studies. Material culture is absent entirely from it.20 Whatever else might be said of poststructuralism and its cousins, they did not develop “sensory thinking.”

Material Culture, the Past, and Nostalgia As far as I can determine, the term “material culture” itself originated with the anthropologists, as, for example, in Clark Wissler’s 1910 book Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indians. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that definitions of what material culture is— though they vary only in their desire to encompass the broadest possible scope—all spring, I think, from anthropological origins. Thomas Schlereth, for example, relied on Melville Herskovits’s definition of the idea and saw material culture as “the totality of artifacts in a culture, the vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the physical world, to facilitate social intercourse, to delight our fancy, and to create symbols

Words or Things in American History?   29 of meaning.” He went on to elaborate on that latter by saying that material culture study uses artifacts as windows onto “the belief systems—the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society.”21 All well and good, but Schlereth tacked on a phrase at the end of that definition, and in so doing performed a small sleight of hand: the assumptions “of a particular community or society, usually across time” (emphasis mine). And therein lay a conceptual and methodological problem: the discipline of anthropology from its very origins in the nineteenth century had a hard time thinking of its subjects in historical terms. Well into the twentieth century, cultural anthropology continued to study “timeless” people or “people without history.” For anthropologists, the societies they studied resided in that hazy and ill-defined chronology called “the ethnographic present.” At its crudest, the ethnographic present served as a way to collapse the process of historical change over time for the groups anthropologists endeavored to study. What is true now was true then, because these people exist outside time. Indeed, as Johannes Fabian has argued, much of anthropology’s discourse was “made for the purpose of distancing those who are observed from the time of the observer.”22 We might see the development of American folklore studies as the domestic analog to anthropology, built on many of the same assumptions and applied to groups closer to home than Samoans or Trobriand Islanders. The “discovery” of the American folk—in the Mississippi delta and off the coast of Georgia and in the Southern Appalachians and in Amish communities in Pennsylvania—allowed folklorists to look the past in the face and to access it almost seamlessly through material as well as oral and musical culture. Or so many of them thought. The assumption for material culturists interested in using objects to recover history was that this essentially ahistorical anthropological notion of culture could be applied to the historical past—that we could, through an easy correspondence, access the “values” and “belief systems” of people long gone. And complicating matters further, cultural anthropology, especially of the Geertzian, thickly described variety, became most influential for American historians in the 1970s and early 1980s, just at the moment when cultural anthropologists themselves began a withering self-critique from which, forty years on, the field has arguably not recovered.23 Schlereth might have borrowed his conception of culture from anthropologists, but by 1982 many anthropologists weren’t at all sure what the term meant anymore. Cultural anthropologists, and by extension material culturalists who have ­borrowed their conceptual frameworks, have had to confront in their own work the relationship between historical change and historical loss, and have had to negotiate the tricky boundary between the faith in progress and pangs of nostalgia. Kouwenhoven slipped into some of this in his essay when he sounded a wonderfully dated lament that “fewer and fewer of us know the taste of tobacco on the tongue, or the taste and feel of tobacco smoke, now that cigarettes have filter tips, some with the filters recessed a quarter inch away so you can’t even touch your tongue to them.”24 (And yes, Kouwenhoven’s essay appeared in the same year as the Surgeon General’s epochal report on smoking and health.)

30   Steven Conn This too, has been a dilemma from the beginning. Without saying so specifically, John Crowe Ransom rooted nostalgia in the idea of place, writing in 1930: “Memories of the past are attended with a certain pain called nostalgia. . . . Nostalgia is a kind of growing-pain, psychically speaking. It occurs to our sorrow when we have decided that it is time for us, marching to some magnificent destiny, to abandon an old home, an old provincial setting, or an old way of living to which we had become habituated.”25 That describes as perfectly as any three sentences Henry Ford’s motivation in creating his museum of the American past. The first “piece” he collected for Greenfield Village, after all, was precisely his own “old home,” and Ford raced to save as many bits of that “old way of living” as he could before the unrelenting march of the modern world—a vector which Ford himself had done so much to initiate. Other early-twentieth-century collectors of “Americana,” who helped define material culture study in its incipient phase, raced to save bits of the past against what Adams called the “acceleration” of history. “Nostalgia,” philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes, “belongs on the side of the irreversible. It is regret over what is no longer, which one would like to retain, relive.”26 That would certainly seem to describe Ford’s Greenfield Village, and the experiences created at Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation, Connor Prairie, and elsewhere. We walk through those recreations to measure the distance between then and now, and while we do so we sigh a bit at the pleasures of the simple life, a life lived in the midst of the hand-made, the home-spun, and the home-grown. The appeal is obvious because the contrast can be so acute, and maybe it is even presented deliberately as such: communities were close-knit, cultures were coherent, and labor was not yet alienated. Scholars, of course, are not supposed to be susceptible to those kinds of emotions. When Warren Roberts proposed that material culturists confine themselves to preindustrial production, he insisted that they simply did not have the expertise to deal with the world of industrial and consumer goods. “I submit to you,” he wrote, “that ‘most of us’ do not have the interest, the training, or the tools to study contemporary American popular culture.”27 In this, he sounded a bit like Henry Mercer, who did not collect objects made after 1820, he claimed, because after that date the US Patent Office maintained good records. Collecting post-1820 pieces, therefore, was not necessary. Perhaps. Yet I can’t help but think that it is some version of nostalgia that has worked to confine the study of material culture largely to the preindustrial age. There is, I suspect, an assumption that those “values” and “belief systems” to which material culture give us access are infused only in the hand-made and the home-spun, not in the massproduced and industrially designed. There is something a little wistful about the title of James Deetz’s classic In Small Things Forgotten, which resonates with the sense of loss that permeates, say, the work of artist and Americana collector Eric Sloane and his books A Reverence for Wood and Our Vanishing Landscape. How many material culturists still largely agree with Raymond Williams when he wrote that “the traditional popular culture of England was, if not annihilated, at least fragmented and weakened by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution”? He continued, “what is left, with what in the new conditions has been newly made, is small in quantity and narrow in range. It exacts respect, but it is in no sense an alternative culture.”28

Words or Things in American History?   31 Back in 1985, Upton acknowledged that most material culturists “work intuitively in ways that at best seem elusive and at worst sloppy to people outside our field.”29 At one level, Upton simply reiterated an ongoing desire to develop a method and methodology for the study of material culture, something that had analytic rigor, a scientific objectivity (pardon), and which could be used consistently by different scholars working with differing material. Intuition would hardly suffice. Yet Upton may inadvertently have been on to something. There is clearly something before or beyond the analytic that allows us to connect with the past, something that resonates at the level of feeling, emotion, or even intuition. Indeed, as Emily Robinson noted a few years ago, even old-fashioned historians whose writings are based on conventional archival—written—sources have an affective relationship with the materiality of the archive. Even if we are only interested in the words on those pieces of paper, the “archival encounter” is still a “physical experience of holding a piece of the past.”30 Words, it turns out, are things. And vice versa. Perhaps the dichotomy Kouenhowen drew in his essay was a proverbially false one. Holding a piece of the past, of course, is that most basic, almost primal, connection that material culture has always provided. But before those physical pieces of the past can exert their sensory magic on us, we bring categories of meaning, built from words, to the act of holding. Those categories shape our affective responses to whatever it is that we are encountering—object, building, letter—in the first place. Years ago I began my dissertation research in the archives of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. I poured over thousands of documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I made a special point of requesting one. The Academy was the first American scientific institution to offer Darwin membership after the publication of On the Origin of Species, and on a shelf deep in the archive resides Darwin’s short, grateful letter of acceptance. The letter had no connection to my own research, and besides the text of it has been widely published. I simply wanted to hold a letter that Charles Darwin had written in my hand. But the yellowed piece of paper only had a resonance because I brought an understanding of its significance to the experience. Perhaps the way to answer Kouwenhoven’s challenge, then, is to find the words not only that describe and analyze the things but that also convey the intuitions and emotions, both the sense of distance and loss but also the immediacy and thrill, that come when we hold the past in our hands. If Joseph Conrad was right when he wrote that “there is a rebellious soul in things,” then maybe this is the way we can find it.

Notes 1. John Kouwenhoven, “American Studies: Words or Things?,” in Thomas Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 83. 2. Kouwenhoven, “American Studies: Words or Things?,” 90. 3. Kouwenhoven, “American Studies: Words or Things?,” 88. 4. Henry Ford quoted in “The Ford Museum,” American Historical Review 36 (July 1931), 773.

32   Steven Conn 5. Henry Ford quoted in William Greenleaf, From These Beginnings: The Early Philanthropies of Henry and Edsel Ford, 1911–1936 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 97–100; Henry Ford quoted in New York Times Magazine, April 5, 1931, p. 1. 6. Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 10–12. 7. Doylestown Daily News, September 10, 1923. 8. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 9. The beginnings of this professionalization can be traced to the seminars run by Paul J. Sachs at the Fogg Museum, which he started teaching in the 1920s. See Sally Anne Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs and the Institutionalization of Museum Culture between the Wars,” PhD dissertation, Tufts University, 2001. For a quick gloss on some of this history see Jason Farago, “Curation as Creation,” New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019, 17–19. 10. Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology was established in 1859 by Louis Agassiz, Darwin’s chief American antagonist in the mid-nineteenth century, and he used it to display anti-Darwinian ideas. The Museum remained that way for some years after Agassiz’s death in 1873 but eventually was reorganized along similar lines to other natural history collections. 11. Thomas Schlereth, “Material Culture Studies in America, 1876–1976,” in Thomas Schlereth ed., Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 73–74. 12. Folklore arrived on campus at exactly the same moment. The establishment of Indiana University’s PhD program in folklore in 1948 is generally seen as the starting point for academic folklore, though initially folklore centered on music, dance, mythologies, and folktales rather than material culture. 13. Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 1. 14. Perry Duis review in Journal of American History 65 (1979): 1079–1080. See Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1990). 15. John Michael Vlatch, in Bronner, Material Culture, 83. 16. ASA website: http://www.theasa.net/publications/grad_programs/letter/accessed Aug. 20. 17. E.  McClung Fleming, “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model,” Winterthur Portfolio (1974): 153–173; Peirce Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene,” in Thomas Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 177. 18. Dell Upton, in Bronner, Material Culture, 86. 19. Sharon Macdonald, “Introduction,” in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 5; Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 121. 20. Phillip Fisher, “Introduction,” in Fisher, ed., The New American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), vii–xxii. 21. Thomas Schlereth, “Material Culture Studies in America, 1876–1976,” in Thomas Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 2–3.

Words or Things in American History?   33 22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 25. 23. Dell Hymes’s 1972 edited collection Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Pantheon Books) is a good starting point for this re-evaluation of anthropology’s foundational methods and assumptions. 24. Kouwenhoven, “Words or Things,” 89–90. 25. John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1930, 6. 26. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 602, n. 35. In this note, Ricoeur is discussing the ideas of Vladimir Jankelevitch. 27. Warren E. Roberts, in Bronner, Material Culture, 89. 28. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 320. 29. Upton, in Bronner, Material Culture, 86. 30. Emily Robinson, “Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible,” Rethinking History 14 (2010): 503–520. This essay is part of what some have called the “affective turn” in historical study.

Bibliography Bronner, Simon, ed. Material Culture vol. 17, 2/3 (1985). Special issue: Material Culture Studies: A Symposium, 77–114. Conn, Steven. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010. Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. Duncan, Sally Anne. “Paul J. Sachs and the Institutionalization of Museum Culture between the Wars.” PhD dissertation, Tufts University, 2001. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Fitzpatrick, Ellen. History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Foner, Eric, ed., The New American History. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1990. Hymes, Dell, ed. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1930. Joyner, Charles. Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Kouwenhoven, John. “American Studies: Words or Things?” Reprinted in Thomas Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982. 79–92. Macdonald, Sharon, and Gordon Fyfe. Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

34   Steven Conn Robinson, Emily. “Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible.” Rethinking History 14 (2010): 503–520. Robinson, James Harvey. The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912. Schlereth, Thomas, ed. Material Culture Studies in America. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982. Wallach, Alan. Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

chapter 2

A rtifacts a n d Th eir Fu nctions* A. W. Eaton

A particular problem arises with artifacts, meaning extended things shaped at least in part by human action. At the most general level, the problem is that artifacts are mute: they cannot by themselves tell us anything about where they came from, or about how or by whom they were used, or even whether they are intact or unfinished or damaged or mere parts of a larger whole. Muteness may not a problem if one has only a purely aesthetic interest in the formal and material dimension of an artifact; for instance, one can in most cases appreciate the shimmering texture of an artifact’s surface without knowing anything about its history. But if one wants to learn about the past from artifacts, then their stubborn silence is a considerable obstacle. The most fundamental step in overcoming this obstacle is arguably figuring out what an artifact is for. Armed with this bit of knowledge, we can determine whether a particular specimen is a part or a whole, complete or damaged, exemplary or inferior, a prototype or a flawed copy, and so on. But—and here is the more refined version of the problem animating this chapter—how does one figure out what an artifact is for, especially in advance of being able to answer these other questions (about parts and wholes and such) which could easily seem conceptually prior? Far be it for a philosopher to have any practical advice about this matter! My aim, rather, is to elucidate the relevant conceptual terrain and shed light on this notion of “for-ness”; that is, I hope to elucidate the very idea that an artifact is for some particular activity yet not for other activities. I carefully and methodically distinguish between ­various ways of understanding “for-ness” or, as I prefer to call it, function. I argue that an adequate account of function cannot reduce to an artifact’s uses or capacities, nor to its maker’s intentions, and argue that instead we ought to conceive of artifact function on a model that is quite similar to that used to explain the functions of living things. To help make the case for this way of thinking about artifact function, I suggest that we look to living artifacts that have been shaped by artificial selection to help us bridge the gap between functions of artifacts and the function of natural things (including living things).

36   A. W. Eaton

What Is Artifact Function and Why Should We Care? Imagine that a huge explosion has killed all life on Earth and destroyed much of human material culture, and that buildings, roads, books, computers, and so forth have been incinerated or reduced to rubble. Very few artifacts remain. Now imagine that an archaeologist from Mars, who knows almost nothing about human civilization, has come to Earth to retrieve and analyze the few remains of this strange culture. As she travels the planet, she uncovers and collects a few samples. Of particular interest to her are two virtually physically identical objects that she found in locations quite remote from one another. Imagine that these objects are so similar as to be indistinguishable at even a very detailed level of analysis (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1.  Two found objects. Photo credit: Cameron and Logan Eaton-Strong.

The first thing our archaeologist wants to know is: Are these artifacts or mere freak accidents of nature? If artifacts, her next task is to classify them: What kind of thing are they? Once she’s answered these questions, she will be able turn her attention to more complex

Artifacts and Their Functions   37 questions regarding the structure of the concrete particular before her. Is it a single item—an individual unit in its entirety—or merely a part of one item, or one item fused to another? What are the artifact’s component parts, and how do they relate to the whole they compose? Which of these parts are essential to its being the kind of thing it is and which are incidental? There are also normative questions to ask even at this basic fact-gathering stage: Is this particular item a good example of its kind? Or is it broken, malformed or otherwise defective, or worn down from years of use? Before our archaeologist can even begin to interpret these objects in their broader historical context, she must answer these very basic questions that are the province of what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls artifact hermeneutics, the enterprise of interpreting the human-made world.1 To begin to answer these basic questions, our archaeologist performs extensive postexcavation analysis of the objects’ physical properties: she analyzes their formal attributes (e.g., dimension, shape, size, and looks for supervening aspects such as breakage patterns and cut marks) and surface attributes (e.g., color), identifies their chemical components, and dates them. We might expect that if all goes aright, such an analysis would yield everything required to answer our archaeologist’s questions. But this expectation is mistaken. An analysis of mere physical properties alone cannot answer even the basic typological question, namely, What is it? While the object’s physical properties often yield negative constraints on typology—the objects pictured here could not be, for instance, trousers, tires, drinking vessels, or antifreeze—this tells us only what these objects are not; negative constraints reveal little about what they are. (Similar things could be said about dating these objects.) Although examination and analysis of an object’s physical properties may be necessary for typology, no matter how powerful the microscope or extensive the chemical analysis, such examination will not by itself yield an answer to the most basic question, What is it? This is because, when it comes to artifacts, an object’s identity, if you will, and its function are inextricably intertwined. Archaeologist Ian Hodder puts the point thus: “So how I define an entity depends on its use as a thing,”2 though by “use” Hodder means, or should mean, function. Hodder’s point is evident in, for instance, our names for common artifacts—shoelace, nutcracker, hairbrush, windshield wiper, and so on, where the name of the artifact is the artifact’s function. When dealing with artifacts, the best answer—that is, the answer with the most explanatory power—to the question “What is it?” points to the artifact’s function. Appeal to function is also how we pick out an artifact’s component parts; indeed, function is what determines what counts as a part in the first place.3 The tires, seat, break cables, and chain are all are separable from each other and from the frame of my bicycle, yet they nevertheless count as proper parts of the bicycle; other connected-but-separable parts such as the basket and horn, however, do not. These determinations are based on our understanding of a bicycle’s function: tires are essential to a bicycle’s doing what it is supposed to do, whereas the basket and horn—useful as they may be—are not. The central role of function in interpreting the human-made world probably strikes you as unexceptionable; after all, people do this all the time. However, there is a serious difficulty that any function-based account of artifact hermeneutics must overcome, namely to explain on what basis one properly ascribes a particular function to a given

38   A. W. Eaton artifact. I emphasize “properly” here because when we ascribe a function to an artifact we can get it right or wrong. The central question here is, What makes an ascription of function correct or incorrect? On what basis do we say that someone has correctly described, or misdescribed, an artifact’s function? These questions quickly lead us to a very basic question, namely: What, exactly, is a function and where is it located (both spatially and temporally) and what is our epistemic access to it? These questions, which are the focus of this chapter, are not merely of abstract philosophical interest; they must be answered, at least implicitly, before one can make claims about artifacts’ functions in the first place. In this way, they should be of interest to anyone who hopes to use artifacts to learn about the past. An examination of an object’s physical properties alone, while perhaps necessary for ascribing a particular function to a given artifact, is insufficient for this purpose. Philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argues that artifact functions, like intentions, are to be found in a wider context.4 However, since artifacts, unlike intentions, often endure diachronically and synchronically through a variety of contexts, the trick is to identify and demarcate the relevant context(s). Is every context in which an artifact finds itself relevant to its function? Or only certain contexts? If the latter, what makes some contexts especially relevant yet others irrelevant? We begin in this section with criteria that an adequate account of artifact function should meet. First, such an account should be explanatory. It should tell us why the thing in question exists and why it has the shape and consistency that it does. As art historian Michael Baxandall puts it, Why at all and why thus?5 Second, it should be empirically adequate and historically accurate, reflecting current and past practices of making and using artifacts in particular contexts. Third and related, an adequate account of artifact function should allow for and be able to explain shifts in function over time (so that function is not conceived as an immutable or even stable feature of an artifact). Fourth, an account of artifact function should be broadly naturalistic in the sense that it should be consonant with and draw from our best science, including archaeology. Fifth and finally, an account of artifact function should be normative. Since the concept of normativity has a bad reputation in some fields outside of philosophy, explanation is in order. I do not mean “normative” in a strong evaluative sense of the sort invoked in discussions of morality and aesthetics. As Ruth Millikan reminds us, “normative terms are not always evaluative, but can indicate any kind of measure from which actual departures are possible.”6 It is this naturalistic and nonmoralizing sense of normativity that I mean to introduce as one criterion of an adequate conception of artifact function: that there is a performance of some activity (or activities) that is proper to the artifact in question—something that the artifact is supposed to do, even if it never performs this activity (perhaps because unable) or is occasionally co-opted for some other activity.7 This performance that is proper to the artifact provides a standard against which to evaluate the artifact’s actual performances or its actual capacity to perform; it is what many philosophers refer to as a proper function.8 Such a standard—that is, a normative standard—is necessary in order for us to do the sorts of things that are common in the study of material culture, such as:

Artifacts and Their Functions   39 •  attribute a function to unused or rarely used artifacts, •  distinguish an artifact’s accidental effects from its proper function, •  distinguish idiosyncratic and transient uses of an artifact from its function, •  account for malfunction and distinguish it from simply failing to have a function at all, and •  assess and explain defect and breakage in artifacts (essential to fixing or improving artifacts). A normative account of artifact function conceives of functions in terms of performances that an artifact is supposed to achieve, even if it never achieves them. It means conceiving of functions in terms of purposes or, if you prefer, ends—that is, performance(s) for the sake of which the artifact exists, even though it may never realize, and may be chronically unable to realize, this performance(s). It may strike you that the normativity requirement undercuts the naturalism requirement. After all, conceiving of artifact function in terms of purposes can easily appear vitalistic and anthropomorphizing, particularly given that our paradigmatic case of purposiveness is intentional action. Since artifacts are not intentional agents, attributing purposes to them could seem to posit a mind where there is none. Further, a normative understanding of function could seem to invoke backward causation (which is decidedly not naturalistic) in the sense that future outcomes—that is, the realization of some future performance—appear to explain present traits. Finally, this understanding of artifact function might seem empirically untestable precisely for the previous two reasons. These are the kinds of worries that lead some, like the architect and industrial designer David Pye, to deny that functions of the sort proposed here (i.e., proper functions) really exist for artifacts. Pye writes: “Surely if there were activities proper to things, and if things acted, and if they had purposes, Newton might have been relied on to take note of these facts? ‘Function’ will not square with physics.”9 In the third section, I offer an account of artifact function that answers these worries by reconciling normative demands with naturalistic ones. But before we can get there, we need to understand the problems with competing accounts of artifact function. These we explore in the next section.

Two Theories of Artifact Function: Intentionalism and Conventionalism What does our Martian archaeologist need to know in order (a) to determine whether her specimens have functions at all and, if so, (b) to ascribe functions properly? Before turning to what I think is the right answer in the third section, we first consider two popular but, I argue, misguided ways of construing artifact function: the first bases artifact function on the intentions of makers, and the second on the uses to which artifacts are put.

40   A. W. Eaton Philosophers who talk about function tend to focus exclusively on biological function. Where artifact function is discussed at all in this literature, intentionalism is the dominant view. Intentionalism holds that an artifact’s function is determined by its maker’s intentions; in particular, on the purpose(s) the maker intended the artifact to serve (and when the production process is divided between designers and fabricators, by “maker” one typically means the designer of the artifact). The attendant epistemological thesis holds that where an artifact’s function is ambiguous, discerning the maker’s intentions is the only surefire way to uncover the artifact’s function. Valerie Hardcastle sums up the view: “The function of human artifacts depends on human intentions. We explicitly designed the microwave oven to heat food; all we have to do is talk to the microwave engineers to know what the microwave oven’s function is.”10 Intentionalism is a common-sense view that is motivated by what we might consider to be the typical process of making artifacts. The creation of an artifact often begins with a person’s felt need or desire to achieve some end that, she hopes, can be fulfilled by means of some thing. With this end in mind (likely along with considerations of economy and aesthetics), she develops a plan according to which she modifies materials until she reaches the desired result, namely an object that fulfills her ends. While it is true that the design of artifacts often centrally involves rational planning and intentional activity leading toward a goal, and also true that artifacts often function according to the goals that their makers set for them, this should not seduce us into accepting intentionalism. Shaping materials in a way that reflects the maker’s goals may be an important part of the causal process that brings many, even most, artifacts into existence, but it would take magic or something like it for those goals to be transferred to, impressed upon, or deposited within an inanimate object. Understood as an ontological thesis, intentionalism is anti-naturalist. Nor are artifacts always the result of rational planning in the way just described. Accident—in the sense of unintended and unforeseen occurrences—plays a decisive role in the designing of many common artifacts. In some cases, an accident occurs during the attempt to develop a kind of artifact that furthers the development of that very kind of artifact; for example, in the process of trying to develop vulcanized rubber, Charles Goodyear accidentally spilled a mixture onto a hot stove that resulted in the very thing he was hoping to produce. In other cases, an accident occurs in the attempt to develop one kind of artifact that results in the production of an entirely different artifact (that is, one with an entirely different function); for example, Teflon was the fortuitous result of a botched attempt to produce a new kind of refrigerant, and synthetic dye was the result of a failed attempt to produce a new treatment for malaria. In still other cases, an accident occurs and someone notices its potential; popsicles, for instance, were “discovered” when Frank Epperson accidentally left a container with a stick in fruit-flavored drink out all night in subfreezing temperature. In all such cases, an unintended and unforeseen incident plays a pivotal causal role in producing a trait that performs in a way deemed desirable, and this trait is then identified and selected to be reproduced in future artifacts on the basis of this desirable performance. I argue in the third section that this is

Artifacts and Their Functions   41 a key to understanding how all artifacts acquire proper functions, regardless of accident’s role (or lack thereof) in their production. I have just said that, understood as an ontological thesis, intentionalism is antinaturalist, but what of its attendant epistemological thesis? One could accept that intentions are not, strictly speaking, embedded in inanimate objects but still maintain that makers are often reliable guides to the functions of the artifacts that they produce. This is because, on my view, makers typically do the selecting and so they know which of an artifact’s potential performances or uses serve as the basis for reproduction of the type (more on this in the third section). But we should also note that makers are not infallible guides to the functions of artifacts they themselves have made. As I discuss in the following section, functions can and often do change over time, where artifacts acquire new functions that their makers had not anticipated. Consider, for instance, the so-called cigarette lighter receptacle in automobiles, which has come to serve primarily as an electric outlet for portable accessories (and only secondarily for cigarette lighters which are now typically offered as an optional extra-cost accessory). Sometimes artifacts’ first functions are not even anticipated or endorsed by their makers; for example, Edison saw the phonograph (1877) as a tool for dictation, making “talking books” for the blind, teaching public speaking, preserving family sayings and the last words of the dying, creating new sounds for music boxes, making clocks that announce the time, recording telephone calls, and, almost as an afterthought, reproducing music (although he resisted the last of these as he entered the phonograph business a decade later). Finally, in the case of hermeneutically complex artifacts—like artworks—the maker may not even be the best interpreter of the artifact; in some cases, she may not even understand it. Indeed, artists are notoriously poor interpreters of their own work. The fact that the maker’s intention is often a reliable indicator to an artifact’s function—as with Hardcastle’s microwave example—does not mean that intentions are constitutive of function. Like speaker meaning and utterance meaning, intended function and actual function can come apart. Turning to conventionalism, it should be noted that many anti-intentionalists favor a Wittgensteinian construal of function, namely that an artifact’s function is simply its actual performances or the uses to which it is put. While this construal of function avoids the problems with intentionalism mentioned earlier, it cannot meet three of the criteria for an adequate conception of artifact function laid out in the previous section. Let me briefly remind you of these criteria and explain them in a bit more detail. First, we want to retain a meaningful distinction between genuine function and merely using as. The fact that I use a particular fork exclusively as an implement to scrape burned food from pots and pans does not suffice to make pot scrubbing the proper function of my fork; the object remains a utensil for conveying solid food to the mouth, although it is one that I sometimes, or perhaps always, use as a pot scrubber. Second, we want our understanding of function to be able to distinguish between function and merely accidental effects. A steel belt buckle, for instance, might serve to save a person from a bullet, but this propitious performance would be fortuitous and not

42   A. W. Eaton the buckle’s function.11 If our archaeologist were in possession of such an object and knew only that it had once saved a person from a bullet, she would be profoundly mistaken to interpret the object as a bullet stopper rather than a belt buckle. Third, we want our formulation of function to be able to acknowledge cases of malfunction—in particular cases of defect and damage—and to be able to distinguish these cases from the case of simply not having a function at all. A broken artifact has been damaged and so can no longer perform its function (or perform it as well as it should), although it still may be able to do lots of other things; for example, a spoon with a hole in it will make a lousy spoon, but this will not diminish its use as a pot scrubber. But to say that it is a broken spoon is to say that it cannot do something that it should be able to do; that is, it has a function that it can no longer perform. Can a conventionalist construal of function meet these demands? To start with, the conventionalist view should be formulated so as to preclude isolated or idiosyncratic uses. So the conventionalist might say that an artifact has the function of a particular kind of performance just in case the artifact regularly actually performs in that way. There will be some trouble in specifying what one means by “regularly,” but let us imagine that this can be handled. The real problem for this formulation is that many artifacts are regularly used in ways that are not their functions. For instance, one survey reveals that three of every ten paper clips are lost, and that only one of every ten is actually used for holding papers together.12 Even though they are rarely used in this capacity, it is still the proper function of the kind of thing that we call “paper clips” to hold sheets of paper together. Further, if saying that “this paper clip has the function of this holding sheets of paper together” means merely that “this paper clip actually regularly holds sheets of paper together,” then this leaves no room for the concept of malfunction since, on such an account, lack of capacity to hold sheets together would be to have no function at all. Some are willing to bite this bullet: philosopher Christopher Boorse, for instance, insists that a broken artifact has no function until it is repaired.13 But what can “repair” mean, on this account, if not restoring the artifact to a state in which it can function properly? This understanding of “repair” requires attributing to the artifact a function despite the fact that the artifact currently cannot—and in the case of deformation perhaps never could—perform in the requisite way. Pointing to the regularity of past performances or uses still does not help to deal with artifacts that were broken before they were ever used—say, for instance, something broken in the factory—nor with cases of artifacts that are deformed from the start. To complicate matters further, many artifacts are regularly unused for a variety of reasons. Warehouses are full of artifacts whose uses expire before they ever make it out. There is furniture in the decorative arts sections of most museums that has never been used as furniture. The fire extinguisher in my kitchen has never, thank goodness, put out a fire, nor has the bumper on my automobile ever absorbed impact in a collision. About such examples you might be tempted to say that although they never get used in their lifetimes, they all have a capacity to perform in particular ways that constitute their functions. One doesn’t have to be sitting in a chair most of the time, or ever, for the chair to have the capacity to support humans in the sitting position. But as already

Artifacts and Their Functions   43 noted, most artifacts offer a wide spectrum of capacities that are not their functions: the fork has the capacity to be a pot scrubber just as the clothespin has the capacity to serve as an excellent bag closure. And once again, the malfunction requirement poses problems since broken and deformed artifacts lack the requisite capacities. Perhaps we can tighten up the notion of “capacity” to mean “potential to be used in a certain way under normal conditions” and reformulate our conventionalist construal of artifact function accordingly: an artifact has the function of a particular kind of performance just in case the artifact has the capacity to perform in that way under normal conditions. The difficulty here is how to interpret “normal conditions.” “Normal” cannot be understood in a statistical sense since, as we saw in the case of paper clips, a large majority of uses may be other than the artifact’s proper function. Nor can we use a purely statistical construal of “normal” in the case of typically unused artifacts like car bumpers and fire extinguishers, since their functions are realized only under conditions that are extraordinary. Further, some artifacts—like shotgun pellets, most of which fly off into the air without hitting anything14—regularly fail to perform their function. To construe “normal” as something like “under appropriate conditions” does not help, for what we want to know is how to distinguish the many adventitious uses of an artifact from those that constitute the artifact’s function. To say that the artifact’s function is just those uses that are appropriate begs the question. (“To beg the question” in philosophical parlance is to assume the very conclusion that one is trying to prove. In this case, it is precisely the question “Which uses count as appropriate?” that we are trying to explain here.) It is this kind of worry that pushed philosopher Robert Cummins to insist that one must specify a system to which the artifact belongs.15 Mutatis mutandis, Cummins’s view can be formulated this way: An artifact has the function of a particular kind of performance just in case the artifact actually performs in that way in the system of which it is a part. Let us for the moment set aside the thorny question of what makes an artifact part of one system rather than another. Even assuming this, merely being part of a system does not suffice to distinguish between proper function and adventitious effects. Consider this example from Larry Wright: imagine that a small nut in an engine comes loose and falls into just the right position under the valve-adjustment screw so as to properly adjust the poorly adjusted valve. Despite the fact that an internal combustion engine is a paradigmatic example of a complex system, and that the loosened nut is part of that system and affords proper valve adjustment that is necessary for the system’s correct operation, we nevertheless should not say that valve adjustment is the proper function of the loosened nut.16 One might respond that these worries confuse tokens (particular instances of a thing) with types (general classes of things). While token artifacts may get used in all sorts of idiosyncratic ways, or not used at all, artifacts do not get their functions from individual uses; rather, so this line of thought goes, token artifacts get their function from their membership in a more general category of artifact type. So although the token clothespins in my house are used as bag closures, these idiosyncratic uses do not alter the clothespins’ proper function, which derives from the general class “clothespin.” We might

44   A. W. Eaton formulate the view thus: A token artifact has the function of a certain performance just in case the artifact belongs to a type whose function is to perform in that way. While I think it is right that function statements, whether in the natural or the artifactual realm, are primarily about types and only derivatively about tokens,17 this formulation of artifact function simply displaces to types of the very same worries discussed earlier. How does a type of artifact get its function? Saying that it is typical of, for instance, the kind “clothespin” that it fastens clothes to a line inherits all the problems of paper clips, fire extinguishers, and malfunctioning artifacts. My point is not that type membership is irrelevant but, rather, that appeal to it will not solve the serious difficulties that beset a conventionalist construal of artifact function.

An Etiological Account of Function Intentionalism’s strength is conventionalism’s weakness, and vice versa. According to intentionalism, the maker’s idea of the artifact’s purpose sets the standard against which to measure its actual performances, thereby allowing one to identify and explain de­form­ity, breakage, misuse, and idiosyncratic uses/performances. The problem is that intentionalism locates this standard in the maker’s psychology without any plausible account of how the standard gets inscribed in or otherwise transferred to the object. While conventionalism gets function out of the maker’s head and into the public realm of actual practices, it does so at the cost of normativity. As we have seen, conventionalism cannot distinguish between what an artifact is supposed to do and what it merely happens to do. What we need is an account of artifact function that offers the benefits of each view without the attendant disadvantages. This is just what an etiological account of artifact function does. An etiological account of function focuses on the natural history of the thing in question (usually a trait), and in particular on how it got there.18 Such an account is appealing in that it provides a normative conception of function, but it does so naturalistically—and, without appeal to its maker’s intentions—by employing our best scientific theories, in particular, natural selection. Here are the bare bones of an etiological account (noting that accounts of biological function tend to focus on traits of an organism). A trait’s performance counts as the trait’s function just in case this type of trait was selected for this kind of performance. Not just any performance counts as a trait’s function: only that performance that enabled the ancestors (of the organism bearing the trait) to survive and reproduce is the function that is biologically “proper” to that trait. To say that a trait’s performance is its proper function is to say that the trait has a history where it was selected for that performance. We might formulate the general idea thus: A trait has the (proper) function of a particular kind of performance in an organism just in case the trait has been selected for because that kind of trait has successfully performed in this way in the past. (Talk of “selection” in the biological realm, it should be noted, is shorthand for a process of elimination:

Artifacts and Their Functions   45 organisms bearing the trait survive because the trait makes them especially suited to survive in the prevailing environment. To say that the trait in question was “selected for,” on this account, simply means that the trait is [a] heritable and [b] contributed to the fitness of the organism’s ancestors in virtue of performing in that way.) What Ruth Millikan and philosophers following her call proper function is the performance that the trait in question ought to effect, even though the trait may not in fact live up to this; an item need not serve its function in order to have that function.19 It does not matter that a token heart, for instance, does not for whatever reason pump blood, because hearts were selected for this performance and this makes pumping blood their proper function. Selection history sets the norms that determine this purposive sense of function. It is because something has the right kind of history that it can be said to have a certain purpose. In Millikan’s words, “items have functions when their being there depends on reproduction from ancestors having similar traits, these traits having been causally efficacious in helping to produce these items, and these traits having been selected at some point in this history for their capacity to make this kind of contribution.”20 This kind of account of function may appear ill-suited to artifacts since they, at least at first blush, would seem to lack selection history. This impression, however, is mistaken. We shall see that artificial selection bridges the apparent gap between natural selection and the development of artifacts. Let us call bio-artifact any living thing at least part of whose material configuration is due to intentional shaping by humans through artificial selection. Artificial selection— that is, the modification of a species by encouraging certain traits over others—happens through selective breeding, which works in roughly the following way. We begin with variation within a given population. From this population, breeders select desired traits and then isolate organisms bearing these traits so as to prevent random mating and hence prevent entrance into the population of new genetic material. Breeders then limit mating to those organisms that exhibit the desired characteristics, thereby weeding out the undesired traits while fixing the desired ones. Through this process, domesticated plants and animals change over time to become better adapted to human needs and desires. An etiological account works nicely for bio-artifacts. Recall: A trait has the (proper) function of a particular kind of performance in an organism just in case the trait has been selected for because that kind of trait has successfully performed in this way in the past. As evolutionary biologists routinely point out, since “select” means to pick a thing out from a group, properly speaking there is no selection taking place in natural selection. Artificial selection, on the other hand, is aptly named because the animal or plant breeder chooses desired traits and selects the desired individuals from a group in order to serve as breeding stock for the next generation. There is no breeder making choices in natural selection; instead, as noted earlier, there is just a process of elimination where certain organisms do not survive long enough to reproduce because they cannot compete for scarce resources with other organisms bearing survival-favoring attributes.21 Natural selection is called “natural selection” because the struggle for survival in nature has effects that are similar to the actions of breeders in artificial selection. Of course, with natural selection the production of variation is random, whereas with artificial

46   A. W. Eaton selection the production of variation is often the result of rational planning—although not always—but this does not make any decisive difference to the process. It just means that in the case of artificial selection the modifications have a greater likelihood of success, which speeds up the process of change. The difference between the two kinds of selection, then, is one of degree rather than of kind.22 We shall see shortly how this pertains to artifacts and material culture, but first we must consider how the etiological understanding of function works for bio-artifacts. Let us take the example of the Basset Hound. One obvious question to ask about these dogs is why they have such large pendant ears, especially since their considerable length diminishes air circulation, which makes them prone to infection. What is the function of these unusually elongated flaps? On the etiological account, what we need to know is the selection history of the hound’s ears: for what performance was this trait selected? The abbreviated answer is that the Basset Hound was bread for tracking small game, which explains its short legs and also its long ears that, along with its dewlap, trap and hold scent. So, whereas the human outer ear was selected to collect sound, the Basset’s elongated flap was selected to collect smells. Though this may have been the ear flaps’ original function, we have not used these dogs for hunting, at least not in the United States, for a very long time. What, then, explains the continued presence of this trait?23 There is still selection pressure on the breed to maintain the long ears—that is, breeders still isolate populations and limit mating to those hounds with the desired characteristics— but the motives for selection have changed. Nowadays Bassets are bread primarily for their mild temperament and cuteness, where long ears contribute significantly to the latter. This is to say that although the trait of long ears was initially selected for one purpose, namely trapping scent, it is now actively maintained for another purpose, namely cuteness or some variant of this aesthetic function. The important thing about the Bassett Hound is that while there has been no morphological modification of the trait (long floppy ears), the proper function of the trait has shifted. The long ears have been “exapted,” to take a term from Stephen J. Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: they were selected for one performance but have been co-opted for another.24 But because there is selection pressure for this new role, it still counts as a proper function in Millikan’s sense. As historian George Basalla argued, artifact development occurs in a manner that is similar in important respects to artificial selection.25 Although it is common to portray progress in the artifactual realm—whether art or technology—as propagated by genius inventors or artists making great leaps forward, Basalla and others argue that this is not in fact how artifacts develop.26 Most quotidian artifacts—like wheels, hammers, forks, and pencils—have arisen slowly through the cumulative effects of small improvements—where adaption to human needs and desires is the standard against which improvement is measured. Even the seemingly most novel inventions and original artistic creations always centrally involve modification of some existing artifact. Indeed, inventors and artists work by perceiving inadequacies and failures in existing artifacts and then making modifications so that they will better suit our needs.27 The proposal, then, is that artifacts acquire functions in the same manner as bioartifacts, namely through artificial selection. As with bio-artifacts, we begin with variation

Artifacts and Their Functions   47 in the population of artifacts. Just consider the diversity of our artifactual world, some of which arises through invention, some through deliberate modification, and some by chance. From this manifold, desired traits are selected by inventors, users, and manufacturers. As with bio-artifacts, the criterion for selection is the artifact’s “success,” where this means not that the artifact performs as its maker intended but, rather, that its performances are deemed valuable by some members of the society.28 In this way “fitness” is determined by how well the artifact fulfills human needs and desires, where these may be medical, economic, political, aesthetic, and so forth. When a given artifact meets these needs and desires better than its competitors, it is selected over competitors for replication and distribution. As the artifact is used, its users may find it wanting improvement or their needs may change, and so modifications are introduced and passed on to subsequent generations. In this way, artifacts evolve, although it should always be remembered that what we call “progress” is relative to human needs and desires, which can also change radically over time; just as with biology, it is not “progress” in any absolute sense. This evolutionary model accurately reflects the actual development of ordinary tools and utensils such as, for instance, the table fork.29 The table fork was not invented by a particular individual at a precise moment in human history but, rather, developed slowly out of modifications to other utensils, especially the knife. Some think that the fork was born out of frustrations with the knife’s inadequacy in steadying food while carving and in lifting food from a boiling pot. The first forks had only two prongs that were widely spaced in order to facilitate carving and serving. From these serving forks developed forks with three and eventually four tines that are better suited to conveying certain kinds of food to the mouth. There was not some moment in history when the table fork was contrived ex nihilo by an ingenious inventor; rather, like so many artifacts, it developed slowly through the accretion of very small changes to already extant artifacts. Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin famously wrote, “Not all things are possible at all times.”30 Although the remark was restricted to one rarified kind of artifact—namely artworks—Wölfflin’s point holds for any kind of artifact whatsoever, including forks (it also holds, noncoincidentally, for organisms). All artifacts are inextricably imbricated in a specific historical and cultural context which, borrowing another concept from biology, we might refer to as a niche: a specific set of environmental properties that are necessary—but not sufficient—for an artifact’s survival (that is, for its being selected for reproduction). Just as organisms are remarkably adapted to animate and inanimate dimensions of their environments, so artifacts are adapted to specific properties of theirs: in particular, to available material and intellectual resources (including available technologies); to customs, practices, and social relations; and to existing material culture, that is, to other artifacts. However, we ought not to think of the interaction between artifact and environment as merely one-way; rather, artifacts also shape the very environments to which they adapt.31 The concept of niche, which is borrowed from ecology, can be understood in two importantly different senses. In the classical sense introduced by Charles Elton in 1927, a niche exists independently of its occupants and has specific requirements to which the

48   A. W. Eaton occupants adapt.32 Biologist Richard Lewontin argues that the relationship between organism and its environment should be conceived differently; instead, as a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between organism and environment, where organisms and environment are co-constructive.33 According to this constructivist view of evolution, organisms shape their environment at the same time that the environment shapes them. This is understood as an ongoing process in which multiple species are in a constant process of shaping their environment in complex interactions that in turn produce changes in the species, where these changes introduce further complex and interactive changes in the environment, and so on.34 The upshot for an evolutionary account of function is that we should conceive of functions not as performances or activities that once-and-for-all meet pre-existent environmental demands but, rather, as a dynamic feedback loop where continually shifting performances shape the demands that these performances meet.35 This interactive picture of the relationship between artifact and environment provides an accurate and subtle understanding of the evolution of the human-made material world and so, I suggest, of artifact function.36 To begin with, a given artifact’s development depends on both existing artifacts and practices, and also begets significant changes in other kinds of artifacts and in practices. Consider, again, the table fork. The fact that the fork speared food more efficiently than knives relieved the latter of the need for a pointed tip, which was also undesirable owing to its resemblance to weapons, hence the appearance of the blunt-tipped table knife in Europe.37 Further, people tend to prepare foods that are appropriate to the utensils that they have, and so cuisine adapts to artifacts for eating, as do table manners.38 The introduction of new foods may require changes in utensils, which can in turn motivate changes in table manners and also the development of new skills for using the utensils (and with new skills come changes in musculature and brain, as Lambros Malafouris shows in his compelling study).39 A table fork is not useful tout court but useful only in certain contexts at certain times, and only for certain foods, and only to those who have developed the skills to wield one. A table fork would not have been useful to, for instance, Homo habilis, nor is it useful to, for instance, most Indians, much to Oprah Winfrey’s chagrin.40 The table fork continues to be reproduced in certain parts of the world—that is, is selected for replication—because the things it can do are valued by people in these areas, people whose cuisine and material culture call for a table fork and who have cultivated the skills required to manipulate it properly. Like most artifacts, table forks have many capacities for which they are often used: whisking eggs, mashing soft fruit, crimping pie crusts before baking, lowering food into or fishing it from hot liquids, pulling pickles out of a jar, testing meats and vegetables for tenderness, back scratching, weeding, and so on (Disney’s Ariel, a.k.a. the “Little Mermaid,” famously uses a fork as a hair comb). None of these alternate uses, however, is a table fork’s proper function. A fork has a proper function that was not bestowed upon it either by its maker (inventor, designer, or manufacturer) or by individual users. Rather, the fork’s selection history, which should always be understood as niche relative, sets the norms that determine its proper function: viz., the activity of spearing food

Artifacts and Their Functions   49 and conveying it to the mouth, an activity for which its ancestors bearing this capacity were selected and reproduced.

Conclusion: Some Hard Cases The problem remains that talk about artifacts in teleological terms can easily appear to ascribe human characteristics to mere objects. This raises the troublesome question of justification. Can these useful and enlightening ways of speaking be acquitted of the charge of anthropomorphism? They can so long as they are understood aright; that is, where function is construed on the etiological and ecological model proposed in this chapter. While one might accept this etiological account in the case of ordinary artifacts, one might nevertheless resist applying it to the kinds of artifacts that are thought to be sui generis; for example, inventions, artworks, and other things that seem to be, as Millikan puts it, “very new under the sun.” To lump artworks and inventions in with forks, chairs, and other quotidian artifacts could seem to flagrantly disregard these artifacts’ uniqueness and originality. Famous inventions afford a slightly neater case. Consider the phonograph, as pure a case of invention as any. We credit Thomas Edison with its invention in 1877, although some twenty years earlier Leon Scott de Martinville of France had come up with a “phonoautograph” that recorded sounds but could not reproduce them. And a few months before Edison’s patent another Frenchman—Charles Cros—had created a machine that both recorded and reproduced sounds, although sadly for his legacy he had no patent. These were all prototypes upon which Edison built. Although Edison did not intend his “invention” for this purpose, the function of the phonograph quickly became playing music for personal entertainment. Between 1900 and the present, a series of radical modifications were introduced and either reproduced or eventually eliminated, depending on how well they served the purpose of personal musical entertainment. The phonograph then went through a variety of modifications that were better adapted to this purpose: • It went from playing a cylinder in the 1910s to playing discs of varying shapes, sizes, and materials (hard rubber, shellac, and celluloid were all tried before it was determined that vinyl was best suited to our purposes). • A variety of drive systems were tried for turntables (wheel drives, belt drives, and direct drives). • Many pickup systems were tried: crystal, ceramic, and magnetic cartridges. • A variety of arms were tried. Modifications to the phonograph were introduced, and some of these were selected over others based on their fitness—that is, based on how well they fulfilled human needs

50   A. W. Eaton and desires. These modifications were then reproduced—that is, introduced into the next generation of phonograph, and in this way the phonograph adapted to people’s needs. However, keeping in mind Lewontin’s point about constructivism, we should note that people’s needs are constantly changing, in part in response to changes in the phonograph and related artifacts. With the introduction of digital media in the 1980s, and especially as these became better adapted for personal use (cheaper, less cumbersome, easier to use), the phonograph’s function changed. Nowadays the biggest consumers of “phonographs” and vinyl records are audiophiles who prefer the analog format for aesthetic reasons, and disc jockeys who prefer this medium because it allows for direct manipulation: with a record one can move the stylus, accelerate or decelerate the turntable, or reverse its direction, thereby allowing for cueing, phrasing, beat juggling, scratching, needle drops, phase shifting, and other DJ techniques. So, as with the Basset Hound’s ears and the table knife, we can say that the phonograph has been exapted for this new function; that is, this type of artifact is now actively maintained because of these new performances. The phonograph has a new function, one that its inventor never would have—to Wölfflin’s point, never could have—dreamed of. Every element of artificial selection does not extend to the artifactual realm. There are, of course, important differences that must be considered: for instance, artifacts are not capable of reproducing themselves; there is no genetic basis for inheritance; and there is no speciation in this realm. Any evolutionary of artifacts must acknowledge and accommodate these differences. However, thinking that the basic features of artificial selection apply to the artifactual realm, we do select artifacts that are best suited to certain tasks, reject those that are less well-suited, and modify surviving artifacts so that they perform their tasks better. Artifact types are modified and passed down over generations, and their replication is contingent upon their success in satisfying human needs, and those needs in turn respond to, and in some cases are generated by, changes in the human-made material world.

Notes * I would like to thank Ivan Gaskell for exchanging ideas about this topic long before he and Sarah Anne Carter invited me to contribute to this volume; and Allison Wylie, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Barbara Montero, and John Kulvicki for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I presented partial drafts of this chapter at CUNY Graduate Center, Mt. Holyoke, and the Bard Graduate Center, and I am grateful for the many helpful comments I received there. 1. Daniel C. Dennett, “The Interpretation of Texts, People and Other Artifacts,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (October 1, 1990): 177–194. 2. Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things, 1st ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 11. 3. Ibid. 4. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Reprint edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 25 ff.

Artifacts and Their Functions   51 6. Ruth Garrett Millikan, “Wings, Spoons, Pills, and Quills: A Pluralist Theory of Function,” The Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 4 (April 1999): 192–193. 7. Valerie Hardcastle, “On the Normativity of Functions,” in Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, ed. Mark Perlman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 8. Paul E. Griffiths, “Functional Analysis and Proper Functions,” in Function, Selection, and Design, ed. David J. Buller (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). 9. David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (London: A&C Black, 2000), 12. 10. Hardcastle, “On the Normativity of Functions,” 144. 11. Larry Wright, “Functions,” The Philosophical Review 82, no. 2 (April 1973): 139. 12. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts—From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be as They Are, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1994), 51. 13. Christopher Boorse, “A Rebuttal on Functions,” in Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, ed. André Ariew, Robert Cummins, and Mark Perlman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63–112. 14. Thanks to Walter Sinott-Armstrong for making this point. 15. Robert Cummins, “Functional Analysis,” The Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 20 (November 20, 1975): 741. 16. Wright, “Functions.” 17. Karen Neander, “The Teleological Notion of ‘Function,’ ” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 4 (1991): 454–468. 18. The idea that one must know a thing’s history in order to properly ascribe a function to it begins with Wright, “Functions,” although etiology is only half of Wright’s conception of function. The etiological account is more fully developed by Ruth Millikan: Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Ruth Garrett Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Millikan, “Wings, Spoons, Pills, and Quills.” For helpful review and analysis of the terrain, see Beth Preston, “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon? A Pluralist Theory of Function,” Journal of Philosophy 95, no. 5 (1998): 215–254. 19. Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, 29. 20. Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, 41. 21. Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, Reprint edition (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 115ff. 22. Preston, “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon?”; Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Reprint edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 317–318. 23. See Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, 47ff. on the distinction between being selected for and being actively maintained for. 24. Stephen Jay Gould, “Exaptation: A Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology,” Journal of Social Issues 47, no. 3 (1991): 43–65; Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth  S.  Vrba, “Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology, 1982, 4–15. 25. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). While there are proponents of an etiological account of artifact function—for example, Preston, “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon?” and to some extent Elder—most prefer to use natural selection as their model for how artifacts acquire proper functions. In the end it does not matter much which model one chooses since the processes are analogous in the relevant respects. Artifact evolution is simply closer to artificial selection in the

52   A. W. Eaton sense that it is humans, rather than nature, doing the selecting (where, as noted earlier, the claim that nature “selects” should be understood as a process of elimination). 26. Basalla, The Evolution of Technology; Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things. 27. On the central role of failure in invention and the evolution of artifacts, see Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design; Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, chap.  2; Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 28. Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, chap. 1 and 2. 29. Sarah  D.  Coffin et al., Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005 (New York: Assouline, 2006); Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things; Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 30. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover, 1950). 31. Thanks to Lambros Malafouris and John Robb for pressing me to develop this point. 32. Charles  S.  Elton, Animal Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Kim Sterelny, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 11. 33. Richard Lewontin, “Sociobiology as an Adaptationist Program,” Behavioral Science 24, no. 1 (January 1, 1979): 5–14; Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 2. 34. Lewontin, The Triple Helix, chap. 2. 35. My understanding here has been greatly influenced by Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 11. 36. Hodder, Entangled; Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 37. Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, chap. 1. 38. As Bee Wilson discusses, the invention of pottery worked in tandem with the science of agriculture to change diets—allowing for the preparation of mushy grains—and also  cooking methods, since pottery allowed for boiling. Wilson, Consider the Fork, chap. 1. 39. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind. 40. At the start of a meal on her recent visit to India, Oprah asked, “I heard that some Indian people eat with their hands still.” It was the “still” that, I think, gave many offense because it was taken, to my mind reasonably, to imply that Western cutlery is more advanced in some absolute sense. But table forks are not an advance over eating with hands or chopsticks; table forks simply are not useful to most Indians, in part because Indian cuisine has developed in a way that does not call for forks, and also because most Indians have not cultivated the skills required to manipulate table forks properly. Inserted into a foreign context (i.e., a context that is not its niche), a table fork is quite useless.

Bibliography Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Basalla, George. The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Artifacts and Their Functions   53 Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. Reprint edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Coffin, Sarah  D., Ellen Lupton, Darra Goldstein, and Barbara Bloemink. Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005. New York: Assouline, 2006. Dennett, Daniel C. “The Interpretation of Texts, People and Other Artifacts.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990): 177–194. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Elisabeth  S.  Vrba. “Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form.” Paleobiology, 1982, 4–15. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Lewontin, Richard. “Sociobiology as an Adaptationist Program.” Behavioral Science 24, no. 1 (1979): 5–14. Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. “Wings, Spoons, Pills, and Quills: A Pluralist Theory of Function.” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 4 (1999): 191. Neander, Karen. “The Teleological Notion of Function.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 4 (1991): 454–468. Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts—From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be as They Are. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. Preston, Beth. “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon? A Pluralist Theory of Function.” Journal of Philosophy 95, no. 5 (1998): 215–254. Pye, David. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. London: A&C Black, 2000. Wilson, Bee. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

chapter 3

M astery, A rtifice , a n d the Nat u r a l Or der A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry Mónica Domínguez Torres

At the Chamber of Wonders of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a cabinet titled “Wonders of Human Ingenuity” displays a true embarrassment of riches: cups made of gold, coconut shells, and nautilus shells; figurines in crystal, ivory, and coral; ingenious automatons; scientific instruments; and so on. Among so many treasures, an intriguing jewel tucked away on the bottom right of the case may pass unnoticed—a pearl pendant in the form of a captive black boy with his hands manacled behind his back, the whole piece measuring just over two inches. Museum records indicate the piece was created by an anonymous artist probably in Dresden or Frankfurt, Germany, around 1680–1720, using silver, lacquer, a ruby, red glass, and crystal to transform a large, oddly shaped pearl into a recognizable motif.1 Thus, behind the splendor of precious materials ­paradoxically lies a rather dark story of human oppression (Figures 3.1). Transformations of natural materials into intricate objects were common occurrences in early modern Europe—a number of artists used the intriguing forms of exotic organic materials such as deer antlers, nautilus shells, and ostrich eggs, among others, to create fanciful chandeliers, cups, and other luxurious commodities. Through these types of objects, known at the time as artificialia, artists showed off their ingenuity and creative power by transforming the rich natural resources gathered from faraway ­locations into meaningful figures and symbols. As Joy Kenseth observed: While for Europeans God’s ingenuity was apparent in all the natural wonders, the ingenuity of man was revealed in artificial wonders. Just as God, through his divine

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   55

Figure 3.1.  Anonymous (probably from Frankfurt or Dresden), Pendant in the Form of a Captive Black Boy, ca. 1680–1720, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

handiwork, had the power to create the most extraordinary things, so the a­ rtist . . . had the capacity, by means of his technical skills and his imaginative powers, to rival God’s work on earth in the fashioning of exceptional, unusual, and surprising objects.2

As opposed to other gems or precious stones that can be cut, faceted, carved, or engraved, pearls are especially challenging materials because there is not much that can be done to them but polishing them and showcasing their natural beauty. Jewelers were limited to piercing and stringing those of similar roundness and size to make necklaces, bracelets, and all sorts of accessories; or to set the larger and most impressive ones in rich and intricate mounts to highlight their natural shape, color, and shine. In the particular case of large, irregular specimens, the so-called baroque pearls, artists could take advantage of their curious shapes to create familiar figures: a lion, a dragon, or a sea monster, whose heads, legs, and tails were recreated with gold, enamel, and other precious materials. Rather than having a practical purpose, though, such jewels were conceived as objets de vertu (objects of virtue), that is, ­artifacts whose rich materials and high levels of craftsmanship placed them in the realm of the collectible. Among such objects, the lavish pendant at the Walters is particularly intriguing because its motif looks back at one of the darkest episodes of Western history, one closely

56   Mónica Domínguez Torres related to the very industry that supplied these gems to artists and collectors. During the early modern period, pearl fishing operations in places as distant as the Caribbean and the Persian Gulf relied on intense human exploitation of divers, many of them black slaves shipped from Africa. Far from a peaceful enterprise as many contemporary sources portrayed it, the early modern pearl industry was demanding and exploitative. This chapter explores how notions of artifice and mastery over nature in vogue during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played an important role in the production of jewels and objects of virtue for European aristocratic patrons, and how certain pieces such as the Walters’ pendant, usually overlooked as innocuous decorative items, can be understood as self-reflexive pieces that bring to light early modern ideas about race and sociopolitical order. Unlike a number of early modern objects of virtue that have been preserved as a group or in their original settings, the pearl jewel at The Walters poses the challenge of lacking specific records about its creation or provenance. Our analysis needs to be made, thus, in relation to similar objects in well-documented collections, along with general information about the early modern pearl industry. By focusing on one particular material and the industry behind it, this chapter not only addresses how these impressive jewels articulated specific claims of authority and power, but also unveils the cognitive and aesthetic values that early modern collectors placed on such objects.

Natural Wonders: Pearls as Collectibles Traded and prized as luxurious commodities since ancient times, pearls have been put to a wide range of uses—from decorative functions garnishing religious and secular objects, to medicinal applications for the cure of several maladies.3 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular, European scholars and aristocrats avidly studied and collected diverse specimens that became available thanks to new trade routes and markets. The most impressive pearls were usually reserved for aristocratic patrons, who had them mounted in elaborate frames to display over their bodies or within their collections, and to be treasured over generations. As Marina Belozerskaya has pointed out, in the Renaissance “objects rendered in gold and precious stones were among the most admired and valued effects of the elites because they communicated the status and refinement of their owners, radiated spiritual authority, and possessed medicinal and magical powers.”4 Pearls in particular had been associated with a wide range of properties since ancient times, as for centuries they were thought to possess both aquatic and aerial qualities. An old legend passed down by first-century Roman author Pliny the Elder in his Natural History asserted that pearls originated from dewdrops that were trapped into the oysters when they surfaced to breath and reproduce. Much like Venus, pearls were thought to

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   57 descend from heaven and reach their perfect forms in the sea, and they were therefore emblematic of maidenly purity and love. Unlike bezoar stones and “unicorn” horns, which were coveted because of their ­supposed alexipharmic virtues, in Western Europe pearls were believed to have specific therapeutic qualities. In the Middle Ages, pearls were reputed to have medicinal properties against afflictions of the heart, hemorrhages, dysentery, and even mental diseases. For example, the only surviving volume of King Alfonso X of Castile’s Lapidary (a treatise on precious stones compiling a variety of Islamic sources) recorded that pearls were “most excellent” for those who are sad or timid, and “in every sickness which is caused by melancholia, because it purifies the blood, clears it and removes all its impurities.”5 According to this source, physicians made several types of medicines with pulverized pearls—some were swallowed, and others were applied as ointments to the ailing body part. Renaissance Neoplatonic scholars, such as the Florentine Marsilio Ficino and the German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, echoed similar ideas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In keeping with the Aristotelian tradition that gems were mixtures of the four elements in different proportions, they believed that the powers of gems resided in their shape, composition, and the particular influences conveyed to them by the stars—in the particular case of pearls, they were thought to receive astral influences from the moon. They were therefore effective against maladies affecting organs and parts of the body influenced by the moon phases: limbs, brain, lungs, spinal marrow, and stomach, among others.6 Pearls’ alleged virtues could be transmitted to a person just by wearing them, or through medicinal drinks made with pulverized samples. Among the illustrious patients treated with such medicinal concoctions was Lorenzo de’ Medici “The Magnificent,” when dying of fever at Careggi.7 It is no wonder, then, that pearls were among the first items in the list of goods that the Spanish Catholic Monarchs expected Christopher Columbus to search for in his travel to the “Indies.” And indeed, during his third trip in 1498, Columbus found a plentiful supply of pearls on the coast of what is today Venezuela, which gave rise to organized ventures to harvest the pearling beds in diverse locations in the Americas. By the ­mid-sixteenth century, pearls from the New World were among the many commodities that filled the cargoes of the Spanish galleons that reached Seville, the main trade center from where they were shipped to other parts of Europe and even Asia. Around the same years, Portuguese explorers had also obtained control of some of the most important pearl fisheries of the Old World, including those in the Persian Gulf.8 This “pearl rush” not only made diverse pearl specimens more available to European audiences, but also gradually changed Western perceptions of this commodity. For example, the dew-engendered theory of the origin of pearls began to be challenged during the early sixteenth century, thanks in part to information offered by several exploration chronicles. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, in particular, believed that the matrix of pearl-producing oysters could be compared to the organ in which hens form their numerous eggs. He wrote in the Third Decade of his book De Orbe Novo (first published in 1517) that experienced American Indian pearl divers knew nothing about Pliny’s

58   Mónica Domínguez Torres t­ heories on the formation of pearls, but believed instead that the so-called blister pearls (those cemented to the oyster shell) were some sort of wart formed from the same material as the interior of the oyster shell. The Italian chronicler, however, fell short of discounting Pliny’s theory and instead hoped to gather more information from other explorers.9 More definitive was the position of the Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira, who published an account of his travel to the Island of Hormuz (in the Persian Gulf) in 1610, openly refuting the dew-engendering theory, and claiming instead that pearls were made of the same substance as the shell, observing that there is often a sort of inflammation in the oyster flesh surrounding the pearl.10 Teixeira’s ideas were likely based on recent scientific studies. The French physician Guillaume Rondelet, for instance, established that pearls were some sort of organic concretions or calculi, similar to those that appeared in the skin of swine. A professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, Rondelet was the first to advance the theory that pearls formed from an internal secretion of the oyster may be a surplus of food or excrement. His comprehensive study of marine animals, published between 1554 and 1555, cast doubt on statements advanced in authoritative classical sources and relied instead on direct observation of living and harvested marine specimens, and on information gathered from experienced fishermen. He observed that many pearls were made of the same substance that covered the interior of the oyster shell, and sometimes they were so firmly attached to the shell that they could only be separated with a file.11 Rondelet’s theories found positive reception in the work of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, whose volume studying aquatic creatures was published posthumously in 1606.12 Expanding on the French professor’s observations, Aldrovandi was the first to refer to the genus of the pearl-producing oyster, a discussion that he illustrated with images of blister pearl oysters that belonged to his own collection (Figure 3.2). Aldrovandi also illustrated the different shapes that baroque pearls could take, as these types of gems were more difficult to find than round pearls, and therefore were particularly intriguing for European scholars and patrons.13 A few years later, the Flemish scholar Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt, in his treatise Gemmarum et lapidum historia first published in 1609, consolidated the theory that pearls gradually increased in size and thickness around a nucleus. Building on Rondelet’s theory, Boëtius thought this “humour” was internally produced by the oyster in response to the presence of an external agent. He believed that pearls were some sort of animal stones or concretions produced by disease, as the outer shells of oysters that actually yield pearls were usually rough and uneven. Yet Boëtius’s study was not limited to scientific considerations. His chapter on pearls also discusses their effectiveness for pharmacological applications as well as their uses in jewelry, including an evaluation method, and an illustration of the proper means of drilling them.14 It comes as no surprise, thus, that pearl and mother-of-pearl specimens made their way to several early modern collections as both natural curiosities worthy of study and analysis, and also as beautiful objects to be contemplated and admired. For instance, in 1635 an inventory of the Uffizi Tribuna, where the most important antiquities and artworks of the Medici collection were on display, records in the second row to the right a

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   59

Figure 3.2.  Ulisse Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus exanguibus libri quatuor, post mortem eius editi: nempe de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis (Bologna: J. B. Bellagamba, 1606), p. 418.

“Madre Perla grandetta” (large mother of pearl) hanging side by the side with a painting by the renowned Florentine artist Antonio Tempesta (today at the Louvre). The lavish piece, painted on lapis lazuli, iconographically relates to the natural collectible to its side for it features a pearl fishing scene in the West Indies, as indicated by the feather headdresses worn by the pearl divers and two turkeys featured in the background.15

The Art of Mastering Nature Baroque pearls not only aroused the interests of scholars and scientists but also of famous artists and aristocratic patrons, who often transformed the impressive specimens coming from faraway lands into complex, figurative jewels. In particular, many pearl pendants featuring baroque pearls were not created as decorative items to be worn on their owners’ bodies, but as collectibles to be displayed and treasured in Wunderkammern, or chambers of wonders, as the piece in the Walters’ cabinet illustrates. Such pieces mainly served to showcase the craftsmanship of an artist—they became palpable examples of an artist’s capacity to master the natural world by creating recognizable motifs and objects from the intriguing forms provided by mother nature, exercising thus the intellectual capacity that he shared with God.16

60   Mónica Domínguez Torres Although today jewelry is mostly relegated to the category of “minor” or decorative arts, in the early modern period, goldsmithing enjoyed a privileged status. Even the Italian artist and theorist Giorgio Vasari, who strove to establish painting, sculpture, and architecture as the three arti del disegno, in his first edition of the Lives of the Artists recognized that artists such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Botticelli began as goldsmiths, a craft that provided them with a necessary training ground for learning disegno.17 In fact, some of the most prominent Renaissance artists designed pearl jewelry for their aristocratic patrons. Albrecht Dürer is not only known to have produced a number of pendant designs, but also to have hunted for “pearls and precious stones” for his humanist patron Willibald Pirkheimer during his trip to Venice in 1506.18 French goldsmith Etienne Delaunne, who had important links to the Valois court, designed and engraved a good quantity of jewelry models, including pendants meant to showcase baroque pearls.19 In 1581, the Flemish engraver Hans Collaert published in Antwerp his Monilium bul­ larum inauriumque icones (Designs for necklaces, pendants, earrings), which contained a wide range of models that could be recreated by other artists. After Collaert’s death, two more sets of his jewelry engravings were published by his son Adriaen and their publisher Philip Galle, which included a variety of sea-monster pendants featuring a baroque pearl as the main part of the creature’s body. Pendants similar to those designed by Collaert are commonly found in early modern collections.20 The sixteenth century was doubtless a turning point in the artistic status of goldsmiths and silversmiths. Their ingenuity and virtuosity were highly regarded by most European rulers, who maintained at their courts the services of renowned masters, ­furnishing them not only with the precious materials they needed but also with a high degree of creative freedom.21 It is not surprising, then, that most scholarship in the field has focused on aesthetic and technical considerations regarding the pieces themselves, as well as on the role of princely patrons in assembling their impressive collections. Art historian Martin Kemp, for example, has observed that Renaissance collectors must have perceived in such objects a series of interconnected resonances, ranging from the scientific to the religious. In his words: We would probably be wrong to impute just one driving motivation to the assemblers of cabinets. Even if we may regard the princely cabinets of [Holy Roman emperors] Rudolph II and Ferdinand as expressions of their personas as rulers, we should not doubt that other motifs, such as curiosity, delight, scientific wonder, and magic, were necessary accompaniments and corollaries to the more political impulses.22

Kemp offers as an example the statements advanced by Anselm Boëtius de Boodt, who in the preface to his treatise about gems and stones, asserts that his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, was not merely attracted to precious stones to magnify with their luster “his own importance and majesty,” but to understand through them “the grandeur and infinite power of God, who was able to combine in such minute

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   61 particles the beauty and the force of all other things on earth, and in this way to have before his eyes a permanent reflection of the brilliance of the Deity.”23 That is, princely collectors were not only interested in pearls as economic or political capital, but also because of their cognitive value. And indeed, as we have seen, scholars like Boëtius were not only concerned with aesthetic and financial considerations, but also with the mysteries involved in the origins and nature of gems. He was, moreover, an active collaborator at the Holy Roman Emperor’s court, and in such a role his ideas must have reached the ears of artists producing works for the imperial collections.24 In a different context, Benvenuto Cellini, in his Treatise on Goldsmithing (Dell’oreiceria) partially published in 1568, provides clear evidence that scholarly discussions on the nature of pearls did enter the scope of knowledge of court artists. There, Cellini complains about the ignorance and presumptuousness of fellow jewelers who, according to him, knew nothing of precious stones and were so stupid as to ignore that pearls were “fish bones.”25 Modern-day scholars have often interpreted this particular passage as an example of Cellini’s own ignorance and arrogance, disregarding the fact that by the late sixteenth century most individuals still subscribed to the classical dewengendered theory about the origin of pearls. Guillaume Rondelet’s new understanding of pearl formation was by no means immediately accepted or disseminated, and, even if a century later, his revisionary theory was widely available in print, it was not seen as a new scientific dogma but instead as one of the possible modes of understanding the matter.26 For example, the Italian physician Camillo Leonardi, the first scholar to study baroque pearls by observing them against the light, explained in his popular treatise Speculum Lapidum (first published in 1502 but  reprinted in 1516 and 1565) that these strange formations were produced by a ­conglomeration of several individual pearls, which were generated by an abundance of air taken in by the oyster, accommodating in this way his empirical observations to the theories advanced by classical authors and sanctioned by tradition.27 Even if pearls are not exactly fish bones, Cellini’s statement highlights the organic ­origin of the gem, thus demonstrating his awareness of alternative theories on pearl ­formation as the one recently advanced by Rondelet. In fact, Cellini considered that there were only four true gems, one for every element: ruby made of fire; sapphire of air; emerald of earth; and diamond of water. Cellini, who actually made his reputation by casting and chiseling small objects such as medals and jewels in which gemstones were conspicuous, deeply distrusted the knowledge provided by some contemporary gemologists and the place they held in courtly circles. In his own words: Great princes are mainly to blame for encouraging them, since they quite put themselves in the hands of such men, and so not only do injury to themselves, but undervalue men that walk in the right way and do excellent work.28

Cellini, thus, vouched for goldsmiths to be knowledgeable about their craft, being ­conversant not only with technical matters, but also with the nature of the materials they had at hand. In this light, it does not seem to be a coincidence that a large number of the

62   Mónica Domínguez Torres pendants created with baroque pearls during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alluded to the marine origins of pearls, featuring motifs related to the seas. Early modern artists often used their “artifice” to transform baroque pearls into sea-bound mythological creatures, such as marine monsters, mermaids, or tritons; or they could even create boats such as caravels, the main type of vessel used within the commercial networks that made such sea treasures from the “Indies” available to European patrons.29 Considerations about the industries and trade networks that provided European artists and collectors with the raw materials for their luxurious objects, however, have been mostly overlooked in art historical interpretations. Even if aesthetic and cognitive values were key elements in the production and reception of luxurious collectibles, consideration of the sources and circulation of such precious materials also informed particular iconographic choices. In this regard, art historians like Kemp overlooked the fact that the interconnected resonances that early modern collectibles possessed often involved political ones, as early modern ideas of power and authority often overrode aesthetic and scientific interests. In numerous instances, virtuoso pearl jewels became ideal sites to articulate discourses on the reach of imperial power. For example, an elaborate Renaissance pendant at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles establishes connections between pearls and the power of rulers (Figures  3.3). A sixteenth-century goldsmith encased a baroque pearl within a gold medallion, using the irregular surface of the gem to represent the muscular torso of Hercules. On the verso, Hercules is drawn carrying the pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar, which were a common metaphor in early modern times to indicate European expansion beyond the limits of the Mediterranean. Some scholars believe this

Figure 3.3.  Unidentified artist (probably French), Hercules Raising the Pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar, about 1540, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   63 particular piece may have been commissioned by King Francis I, since he considered himself a “Gallic Hercules,” in competition with his archrival Charles V, the Habsburg Hercules, and pursued an expansionist agenda that emulated that of the Holy Roman emperor.30 In the early modern period, indeed, the extension of imperial power toward distant territories went hand in hand with the need to access exotic materials and commodities coveted by European rulers.31

Captured Treasures, Treasured Captives Fascination with pearl collectibles endured well into the eighteenth century, especially in the Germanic lands. In Düsseldorf, during her time as Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, the last member of the house of Medici, amassed an impressive quantity of baroque pearl jewels. This collection, referred to as the “galanterie ingioiellate” in a 1743 inventory, and today on display at the Museo degli Argenti in Florence, contains a variety of motifs based on baroque pearls, including exotic animals, such as an ostrich and an elephant, and everyday characters, such as soldiers and shoemakers.32 In Dresden, Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, added to the rich collections he had inherited from his predecessors a considerable number of luxurious baroque pearl pieces, which brought the total number of such objects of virtue in his collection to about two hundred (today around a fourth of them survive).33 Most of them were purchased from the Huguenot jeweler Guillaume Verbecq, who was based in Frankfurt by the year 1700. They were destined to enter Augustus the Strong’s Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), one of the richest treasure chambers of Europe, which became accessible to the public in 1729. Several of these pieces show the prevalent presence of blacks within Augustus’s collection—some of them riding a camel or attired in carnivalesque costumes—a particular element that supports the Walters’ curators’ conjecture that the piece today in Baltimore may come from the same milieu. The reconstruction of the Green Vault also provides clear indications of how jewels such as the Walters’ pendant were displayed and viewed. Augustus the Strong’s large collection of pearl figurines was located at a small and intimate cabinet at the corner of the so-called Precious Hall, the larger room of the treasure chamber where the most precious objects in the collection were displayed on splendidly carved consoles against mirrored walls. Thanks to the surrounding reflective surfaces, the selected individuals who visited the princely chamber could admire every piece from various angles. Some of the figurines were placed on their own tiny pedestals; others inserted into larger, intricate pieces, such as in a splendid jasper vessel created by Johann Melchior Dinglinger between 1708 and 1731. The piece was outfitted with a small mirror that allows for the full contemplation of the central figure of Hercules fighting against the Nemean lion.34 As objects of contemplation rather than of personal adornment, these pieces were true

64   Mónica Domínguez Torres objects of virtue—that is, pieces that not only featured virtuoso artistry but that, as Luke Syson and Dora Thornton assert, also showed off the specified virtues of their owners.35 Very much like the Getty’s pendant, Dinglinger’s vessel references ideas of expansion and political control by incorporating an idealized portrait of the Elector-King on the verso of the mirror, in clear counterpoint to the mythical hero. Such claims are even more urgent in the case of pieces featuring black characters. As it is well known, since the sixteenth century, images of blacks often appeared in artistic programs as metaphors of European supremacy. It was common to find them in allegorical renditions showing the superiority of Europe over the other continents, such as in the frontispiece of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), where female allegories of Africa and Asia occupied a lower level than Europe. Blacks were also often depicted in portraits of wealthy European patrons as their loyal servants, or even in stilllife paintings as pages carrying plates loaded with their masters’ collectibles.36 In Robin Blackburn’s words, “As the baroque epoch dawned, representations of African slaves or servants increasingly came to adorn precious objects, and black pages act as a foil in portraits of aristocratic ladies or gentlemen: the black has become an object of value, an adornment and an exotic pet.”37 It was a common belief during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that do­min­ ium was conferred directly by God through his vicars on earth, the kings, and therefore they were in charge to secure political and religious hegemony. Within the early modern worldview, which did not question the inferiority of Africans, slavery was understood as a European right to “long-term tutelage” of such inferior creatures, and the master–slave relationship as an extension of God’s command to “rule” nature and administer its bounties.38 According to this viewpoint, it was reasonable to use enslaved labor to retrieve the natural treasures God had placed under the care of Christian rulers. For the case of the pearl industry, it was well established by the seventeenth century that black slaves were the labor force of choice. In the Atlantic trade, for example, the intensive exploitation of pearls that followed Columbus’s discovery annihilated not only most of the pearl-bearing oyster beds of the Caribbean, but also numerous local and foreign enslaved divers.39 The miserable conditions in which pearl divers worked did not escape the attention of eyewitnesses. For instance, since the early sixteenth century, the outspoken friar Bartolomé de las Casas sent several reports to Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V, denouncing the abuses committed by the Spaniards in the Pearl Coast and providing gruesome details of the exploitation that indigenous divers suffered: One of the cruellest and most damnable things in the whole of Creation is the way in which the Spanish use natives to fish for pearls. . . . They are in the water from dawn to dusk, often operating at depths of four and five fathoms. Seldom are they permitted to surface for air but must spend their time swimming under water and tearing at the oysters in which pearls grow. . . . If they spend more than a few seconds at the surface to get their breath back, [the Spanish taskmaster] will punch them or grab them by the hair and push them back under, making them dive once

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   65 more. . . . They are kept perpetually hungry. At night, they are shackled to prevent them from escaping and have to sleep on the hard ground. Often, when out fishing or searching for pearls, a man will dive never to resurface, for the poor wretches are easy prey to all manner of sharks. . . . The nature of the work is such that they perish in any case within a few days, for no man can spend long under water without coming up for air, and the water is so cold that it chills them to the marrow. Most choke on their own blood as the length of time they must stay under water without breathing and the attendant pressure upon their lungs makes them haemorrhage from the mouth; others are carried off by dysentery caused by the extreme cold to which they are subjected.40

In response to Las Casas’s complaints, Charles V issued regulations to limit the number of hours and depth of diving per day and to oblige diving bosses to provide food and lodging to the enslaved divers. These measures, however, were mostly ignored, forcing the Spanish monarch to impose the death penalty in 1546 on anyone who forced free American Indians to become pearl divers. Gradually, the original contingents of local swimmers who initially dived for pearls were replaced by large numbers of African slaves brought to the Americas by Portuguese traders. A Spanish royal decree issued in 1585 stated that only African slaves could be used for pearl fishing.41 By the early seventeenth century, most New World chroniclers testified about the prevalent presence of black pearl divers. For example, Samuel de Champlain—a French explorer who traveled to the West Indies toward the end of the sixteenth ­century to make a comprehensive report for the king of France—explained that fishing for pearls at Margarita Island, off the coast of today’s Venezuela, was “done by negroes, slaves of the king of Spain.”42 Moreover, the Dutch chronicler Pieter de Marees asserted in 1602 that Gold Coast Africans were favored for this activity: Because they are so good at swimming and diving, they are specially kept for that purpose in many Countries and employed in this capacity where there is a need for them, such as on the Island of St. Margaret in the West Indies, where Pearls are found and brought up from the bottom [sea-bed].43

Such associations of black slaves with the pearl industry pervaded European courtly art for decades. A late sixteenth-century painting by the Florentine Jacopo Zucchi, today at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, shows black divers as part of an allegorical scene of pearl fishing in the New World.44 The presence of a monkey and a parrot—animals that at the time were associated with the newly discovered lands to the West—anchors this scene of abundance and wealth in the Americas. More important, the accouterments and methods used by the divers to gather pearls and other sea treasures echo textual details provided by some New World eyewitness accounts—in particular, the canoes, string net bags, and the heavy stones that Zucchi’s divers carry on either side of their necks are mentioned by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in his Historia General de las Indias, published in 1524.45

66   Mónica Domínguez Torres About a century later, a pair of ebony statuettes created by the sculptor Balthasar Permoser and the goldsmith Johann Melchior Dinglinger for Augustus the Strong’s Green Vault features black servants in relation to pearls (Figures 3.4). Much as black pages in contemporaneous still-life paintings, the two figurines carved by Permoser carry plates that offer to the viewers curious examples of seed pearls. Usually called at the time “blackamoors,” these images of black servants were created in several sizes and shapes to showcase the jewels collected by the Saxon electors. The gems themselves very likely counted among the many diplomatic gifts that Augustus’s ancestors received from several European rulers from the late sixteenth century onward.46 This was so in the case of a similar but much larger piece he commissioned for the Jewelry Room: a blackamoor over two feet high, carrying an emerald cluster that was given in 1581 by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II to the Elector Augustus of Saxony, third great-grandfather of Augustus the Strong. According to a 1587 inventory, the emerald cluster was originally from a mine in the New Kingdom of New Granada (today Colombia) and was housed in a black box lined with crimson velvet; the Elector treasured it so highly that he declared it to be an inalienable possession of the House of Wettin.47 To be sure, despite their usual designations as Moors or Africans, the blacks that Permoser carved to showcase Augustus’s gems should not be understood as individuals coming from Asia or Africa—their attires taken from Theodore de Bry’s New World accounts (specifically from his portrayals of kings Satouriona and Olata Outina in La Florida) place them within the particular context of the Americas.48 These servants, therefore, were intentionally conceived as part of the contingent of black slaves that since the sixteenth century had been a crucial part of the exploitation of natural resources in the Americas to the point of becoming naturalized within their new environment. Very likely created at much the same time, the Walters’ pendant seems to reference cognate ideas of expansion and imperial control. As opposed to Permoser’s ebony figurines, though, the garments of the young black captive in the pendant does not seem to refer to European possessions in the West, but instead looks toward the East. The turban, in particular, relates this captive boy to the Ottoman Empire, the main external force opposing European rulers by that time. Despite this elaborate garb, however, his position of servitude cannot be ignored—his kneeling position and, above all, his hands manacled behind his back create a posture of subordination, emphasizing the captive’s inferior position before a higher authority: the European collector for whom the jewel was produced. In fact, many black servants depicted in European portraits of the time were usually dressed in sumptuous garments, including turbans and light-colored silks, which gave a heightened level of exoticism to them as human props. Pearls, moreover, were among the typical bright elements that were displayed against the dark skin of the servant, creating thus a striking visual contrast. Such images may have been particularly appealing in northern Europe by the turn of the seventeenth century, when Augustus the Strong and other important leaders hoped to obliterate Ottoman political supremacy in the region.49 Even if in military, political, and economic terms Ottoman rulers were on a par with European monarchs, their ­different religious confession made them inferior in the eyes of Christian princes, and

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   67

Figure 3.4.  Balthasar Permoser and Johann Melchior Dinglinger, Blacks Carrying Platters with Pearls, ca. 1720, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden.

therefore objects to be subjugated. Thus, some early modern pearl jewels indicate that artifice and mastery over nature was a lingering notion in early modern times, not only referring to the task of scholars who sought to understand nature’s mysteries and of artists who transformed natural treasures into ingenious artifices, but also to the rulers and aristocrats who collected such wonders. The Walters’ pendant, in particular, brings together two compatible messages in early modern Europe: mastery understood as dominion over nature, and over individuals in the lower ranks of the social and religious hierarchy. Their subjugation not only helped secure political hegemony, but also access to precious natural resources around the globe. Examples like this, therefore, contradict Martin Kemp’s skepticism about art historical studies that tend to see early modern courtly collections “in terms . . . of historical ‘meta-realities’—such as power, colonialism, possession, oppression, patriarchy, Eurocentrism and otherness.”50 The Walters’ captive black boy clearly and paradoxically articulates some of the ideological premises that ruled both the sociopolitical order as  well as scientific and artistic practices. Over time, such pieces have lost their ­original implications and have been celebrated instead for their artistic virtuosity and

68   Mónica Domínguez Torres craftsmanship. In fact, they have persisted until our days as high-priced and sought-after jewels, such as the turbaned blackamoors or moretti produced by the exclusive Gioielleria Nardi in Venice. Acquired by present-day royalty and celebrities, Nardi’s moretti echo early modern aristocratic trends, showcasing baroque pearls and a wide variety of ­precious stones under a veil of luxury and exoticism.51

Notes 1. This piece has been published and discussed in Jewelry, Ancient to Modern (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 193–194; and Objects of Adornment: Five Thousand Years of Jewelry from the Walters Art Gallery (New York: The Federation, 1984), 138. The piece’s museum record is available online at http://art.thewalters.org/detail/31558/brooch-of-an-african/. I thank the Walters’ curatorial and library staff for providing me with the complete conservation report. 2. Joy Kenseth, “The Age of the Marvelous: An Introduction,” in The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991), 38. 3. There exists an extensive bibliography on pearls and their uses throughout history, among others: George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: Its History, Art, Science, and Industry (New York: The Century, 1908); Kristin Joyce and Shellei Addison, Pearls: Ornament & Obsession (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); R.  A.  Donkin, Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl-Fishing: Origins to the Age of Discoveries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998); Neil  H.  Landman et al., Pearls: A Natural History (New York: H.N. Abrams, American Museum of Natural History, Field Museum, 2001); Silvia Malaguzzi, The Pearl (New York: Rizzoli, 2001); Hubert Bari and David Lam, Pearls (Milan: Skira, 2009); and Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, Pearls (New York: Abrams, 2013). 4. Marina Belozerskaya, Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 49. 5. Cited in Kunz and Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl, 311. 6. See Malaguzzi, The Pearl, 53–55. 7. See Kunz and Stevenson, 313. 8. On the pearl trade in the early modern period, see Donkin, Beyond Price, 275–346; and Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 9. Cf. Petrus Martyr d’Anghiera, Fuentes históricas sobre Colón y América (Madrid: Impr. de la S. E. de San Francisco de Sales, 1892), vol. 2, 464–466. 10. Cf. Teixeira, Pedro. The Travels of Pedro Teixeira; with His “Kings of Harmuz” and Extracts from His “Kings of Persia” (London: Hakluyt Society, 1902), 179–181. See also B. J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 35–37. 11. Cf. Guillaume Rondelet, Uniuersae aquatilium historiæ pars altera, cum veris ipsorum imaginibus (Lyon: Matthiam Bonhomme, 1555), 55–61. 12. Ulisse Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus exanguibus libri quatuor, post mortem eius editi: nempe de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis (Bologna: J.  B.  Bellagamba, 1606), 417–445.

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   69 13. Ibid., 423. 14. Anselmus de Boodt, Gemmarvm et Lapidvm Historia (Hanoviæ: Typis Wechelianis apud Claudium Marnium & heredes Ioannis Aubrii, 1609), 83–92. 15. AGF, ms. 76, c. 1v. Quoted by Alessandro Cecchi, “La pêche des perles aux Indes: une ­peinture d’Antonio Tempesta,” La revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 36 (1986): 46. To the other side of Tempesta’s painting hung a small religious painting on wood. 16. Cf. Malaguzzi, The Pearl, 122, 126. See also Elizabeth Rodini, “Baroque Pearls” in Renaissance Jewelry in the Alsdorf Collection, special issue of Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 25 (2000): 68–71. 17. Cf. Malaguzzi, The Pearl, 21. 18. Thomas Sturge Moore, Albert Dürer (London: Duckworth, 1905), 80. 19. Joan Evans, A History of Jewelry, 1100–1879 (Boston: Boston Book and Art, 1970), 89–91. 20. Evans, A History of Jewelry, 1100–1879, 112–114. 21. See J.  F.  Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620 (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), 31–50. 22. Martin Kemp, “ ‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, edited by Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 193. 23. Cited in ibid., 193. For the original Latin version, see de Boodt, Gemmarvm et Lapidvm Historia, preface. 24. See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “From Mastery of the World to Mastery of Nature: The Kunstkammer, Politics, and Science,” in The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 174–194. 25. Benvenuto Cellini, The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture (New York: Dover, 1967), 23. 26. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge, 33. 27. See Camillo Leonardi, The Mirror of Stones (London: J. Freeman, 1750), 200. 28. Cellini, The Treatises, 23. 29. See, for instance, the Anonymous Pendant of a Caravel, from the late sixteenth century at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. 30. Cf. Belozerskaya, Luxury Arts of the Renaissance, 83. 31. See Geoffrey V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion 1500–1715 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 43–59. 32. See Maria Sframeli, “The Gems of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, Electress Palatine,” in Treasures of Florence: The Medici Collection 1400–1700, edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 199–220. 33. Dirk Syndram, Gems of the Green Vault in Dresden (Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 2013), 133. 34. Ibid., 124–125. 35. Cf. Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001). 36. See a comprehensive survey of such images in David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, and Karen C. C. Dalton (eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), vol. 3, part 2, 213–260. 37. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 79.

70   Mónica Domínguez Torres 38. Cf. Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 110. 39. Early pearl fishing activities in the Caribbean are discussed in Enrique Otte, Las Perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton, 1977); Donkin, Beyond Price, 318–329; and Landman, Pearls, 12–21. The particular case of Cubagua’s ecological and human overexploitation has been discussed by A. Romero, S. Chilbert, and M.  G.  Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First European-Caused Natural Resource Depletion in the American Continent,” Journal of Political Ecology 6 (1999): 57–78; and Michael Perri, “ ‘Ruined and Lost’: Spanish Destruction of the Pearl Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Environment and History 15 (May 2009): 129–161. 40. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin, 1992), 93–94. 41. For studies on the use of African divers in the New World pearl industry, see Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” The Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1327–1355; Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Perlas y piel azabache: El negro en las pesquerías de las Indias Occidentales,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 65 (2008): 91–124; and Molly Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 31 (2010): 345–362. 42. Samuel de Champlain, Narrative of a Voyage to the West Indies and Mexico in the Years 1599–1602, edited by A. Wilmere and N. Shaw (London: Hakluyt Society, 1859), 7. 43. Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 186. Cited by Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers,” 1348. 44. Different aspects of Zucchi’s painting have been discussed by art historians, among them: Philippe Morel, “Jacopo Zucchi al servizio di Ferdinando de’ Medici,” in Villa Medici: Il sogno di un cardinal. Collezioni e artisti di Ferdinando de’ Medici, edited by Michel Hochmann (Rome: De Luca, 1999), 125–134; Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 22–24; and Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), chapter 6. 45. See my essay “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas,” in African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, edited by Persephone Braham (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 73–82. 46. Cf. Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts ca. 1710–1763 (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 2007), 47–51. 47. Helmut Nickel, “The Graphic Sources for the ‘Moor with the Emerald Cluster,’ ” Metropolitan Museum Journal 15 (1980): 203. 48. Ibid., 207–210. 49. On the political fortune of Augustus the Strong against the Ottomans, see Tony Sharp, Pleasure and Ambition: The Life, Loves and Wars of Augustus the Strong, 1670–1707 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 119–126. 50. Kemp, “Wrought by No Artist’s Hand,” 181. 51. Cf. Nicholas Foulkes, Nardi Venezia (New York: Assouline, 2012). I thank Felicia M. Else, Professor of Art History at Gettysburg College, for kindly bringing these jewels to my attention.

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order   71

Bibliography Bari, Hubert, and David Lam. Pearls. Milan, Qatar: Skira, Museum of Islamic Art, 2009. Belozerskaya, Marina. Luxury Arts of the Renaissance. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. Bindman, David, Henry Louis Gates, and Karen C. C. Dalton, eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas. The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Dawson, Kevin. “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World.” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1327–1355. Domínguez Torres, Mónica. “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas.” In African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, edited by Persephone Braham, 73–82. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Donkin, R.  A. Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl-Fishing: Origins to the Age of Discoveries. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998. Hayward, J.  F. Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620. New York: Rizzoli, 1976. Kemp, Martin. “ ‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance.” In Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, edited by Claire Farago, 176–196. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Kenseth, Joy, ed. The Age of the Marvelous. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991. Kunz, George Frederick, and Charles Hugh Stevenson. The Book of the Pearl: Its History, Art, Science, and Industry. New York: Century, 1908. Landman, Neil  H., Rüdiger Bieler, Bennet Bronson, and Paula Mikkelsen. Pearls: A Natural History. New York: H. N. Abrams, American Museum of Natural History, Field Museum, 2001. Malaguzzi, Silvia. The Pearl. New York: Rizzoli, 2001. Syson, Luke, and Dora Thornton. Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001. Warsh, Molly A. American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Warsh, Molly A. “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 31, no. 3 (2010): 345–362.

chapter 4

Food a n d Cogn ition Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia Bernard L. Herman

When it comes to material culture and cognition, we confront a straightforward ­question: How do people know themselves and the world through objects? The answer is equally to the point. Given the English language idiom, “events take place,” we are compelled to recognize that place (broadly understood as material circumstance) ­matters. Simplicity invariably masks complexity and so it is with this truism. If place or materiality matters, then what is place and how do we measure its presence, its reach, its consequence? These questions extend beyond the illustrative or evidential roles objects play in anchoring the past to a more fundamental proposition that all history is embodied, and that embodiment occupies a fluid position between subjective knowledge and collective sense. Thus, the coevolution of people and things is so interwoven that we cannot think of one without the other. The coevolution of things and people, however, is not just about “how” we know and develop with and through things but also about aesthetics and affect or structured feeling. Too often, we are left with a sense of objects as instrumental—made things wielded as tools for work that ranges from the blandly utilitarian to the construction of social and political relationships. But what we tend to forget through an analysis of how things work in the expression and cultivation of social relations is how they operate on and through the senses, how they feel as embodied and understood experience. Because objects texture as well as furnish experience, the ways in which people and things act within the affective fields of sensibility and sense of self are crucial. Affect offers a slippery theoretical slope, but key to its critical nuances is the formulation offered by Lawrence Grossberg: “Everyday life is not simply the material relationships; it is a structure of feeling, and that is where I want to locate affect. . . . It is about how you can move across those relationships, where you can and cannot invest, where you can stop/rest and where you can move and make new connections, what matters and in what ways.”1 Feeling for all its subjectivity is, in fact, structured as something that can be known, communicated, recovered, shared, and understood. We might think of

74   Bernard L. Herman this dimension of affect as an affective field where feeling is enacted and communicated. Affect offers a means to think about the ineffable emotional impacts (feeling) on substantive experiences in terms of influence and action. The consequences of feeling are tangible enough and their structured qualities coherent enough. What we realize, though, is the space between affective intent (the purposes to which feeling can be put) and affective consequence (the unforeseen outcomes feeling might yield). Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart begins her discussion of affect by defining the ordinary as “a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges” and elaborates that “the ordinary throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found. . . . Or, it falters, fails.”2 Stewart explains: “Ordinary affects are the capacities to affect and be affected that gives [sic] everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies. . . . Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of.”3 The human dimension of things binds ordinary affects to aesthetics defined, not as a philosophy of the beautiful mapped through the application of canonical tastes and privileged acts of discernment, but rather as the balance and proportion of being in the world discovered in the relationships between people and things. The example of a mid-seventeenth-century travel account of a fraught voyage from Europe to British America reifies these abstractions. Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia owns it all: a royalist’s exile from Cromwell’s England, drunken sailors and lost boats, a harrowing sea voyage and marooning, starvation, desperation, cannibalism, castaways, more starvation, more desperation, rescue by friendly Indians, a suggestively implied night of passion with the Indian “king’s” “daughter,” reluctant leave taking, the trek to civil society, and the denouement of our narrator’s restoration to civil society. A compact fifty pages in print, Norwood’s account is notable for its matter-of-fact vividness and for the manner in which the author parsed his narrative with recollections of affecting situations and encounters framed by food and its conspicuous absences and presences.4 Norwood, an unequivocal royalist who traveled in exile to Virginia in 1649, penned his account of his adventures in the years following his return to England and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.5 Although Norwood is not explicit on his intended audience, and the publication of the work did not occur until the mid-eighteenth century, long after the events it describes and the author’s death in the 1680s, his opening lines make his sensibilities vividly clear, suggesting that Norwood had like-minded English readers in mind when he put quill to paper.6 He describes the arrest and subsequent execution of Charles I as acts of savagery and butchery: “For if our spirits were somewhat depress’d in contemplation of the barbarous restraint upon our king in the Isle of Wight; to what horrors and despairs must our minds be reduc’d at the bloody and bitter stroke of his assassination, at his palace of Whitehall.”7 Flight emerged as the safest option for many royalists, especially those of family and rank: “the sad prospect of affairs in this juncture, gave such a damp to all the royal party who had resolved to persevere in the principle which engaged them in the war, that a very considerable number nobility,

Food and Cognition   75 clergy, and gentry, so circumstanc’d, did fly from their native country, as from a place infected with the plague, and did betake themselves to travel any where to shun so hot a contagion, there being no point on the compass that would not suit with some of our  tempers and circumstances, for transportation into foreign lands.”8 Norwood chose Virginia. Norwood positioned his decision to seek refuge in Virginia as part of a larger royalist diaspora in terms that spoke to a fundamental upheaval in what he and his compatriots viewed as the perversion of a natural and civil order. Simply, Norwood wrote in an idiom that relied on a particular form of literacy. His was a linguistic code that privileged subtext. He described an England brought low by a diseased and savage body politic. Doing so, he cast his narrative as a restorative pilgrimage. When he wrote of one starving shipmate denying a rat to a woman in their company, he alluded to a larger collapse in the world of well-born manners and the raw behavior of the mob. When he praised the nobility of his Indian host and benefactor, the werowance of the Keckotanks, he subtly excoriated the barbarity, savagery, and lack of nobility in Cromwell and the regicides. Thus, Norwood used the broadly understood code of a world turned upside down to make his rhetorical points. Significantly, Norwood turned repeatedly to food and how ingredients, preparations, consumption, and etiquette communicated a larger critique about civil society. In a conversation about the culinary topographies of the early modern Eurocentric domestic world, Norwood’s recitation offers extraordinary insights into mid ­seventeenth-century foodways not only in its descriptions of certain meals and preparations but also in its silences about others. Even where Norwood dwells on particular foods (peaches, rats, hominy, and oysters) and preparations (roast venison; hickory and hominy porridge; and oyster, mussel, and turkey stew), he says only enough to whet (maybe dampen) the appetite. For the most part, he elides the details, relying for the substance of his content on the readers’ culinary imaginary. In essence, Henry Norwood wrote through food silences—and he did so within an affective field that cultivated social affinity through the demonstration of higher sensibilities and emotions. Food silences superintend the typically unarticulated systems of values and beliefs that serve as the cement and sense of everyday relations around ordinary gastronomical culture. Although the idea of silence extends to the entirety of material culture, we encounter their work in Norwood through a narrative arc of food. Because Norwood’s food silences are so deeply naturalized, we encounter them largely through “food noise,” those remarked-upon moments of the exceptional, the exotic, the grotesque. The critical position that defines the limits of historical knowledge is well established in readings of power and its applications. In whiteness studies, for example, “white” reveals itself by describing its “other” and only rarely by describing itself. David Batchelor, in Chromophobia, lays it on the line in his description of the interior of a starkly minimalist residence: “There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that is not ­created by bleach but itself is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was aggressively

76   Bernard L. Herman white. It did its work on everything around it, and nothing escaped.” That is the work of silences within their generative contexts—to consolidate forms of cultural authority and convention. As historian Michel-Rolph Troulliot succinctly writes, “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”9 Norwood’s affecting food silences are as rich and suggestive as are his descriptions of what he ate and how it was prepared and consumed. Together they sketch something of the larger coevolution of people and things—and they raise the vexing question of how do we make this world heard, visible, and savored in the present. Before delving into Norwood’s food silences, though, we need to consider the nature of silences. First, silence and noise go beyond the sense of hearing and quality of audibility. Silence and noise comprehend an entirety of historical evidence and how it enters our awareness. Because we are so accustomed to the distractions of things said, we too often miss the fact of silence as a particular kind of presence that we encounter in the interstices of noise. Noise is arguably of the moment, a bounded and finite instantiation; silence is enduring, always with us but masked and often an indeterminate object of longing. Silence also operates as something of a screen onto which noise is projected and perceived. Silence offers a background against which noise clamors for attention. Silence is not to be confused with absence, although as a presence it serves as a medium through which we recognize and feel absence. Finally, neither silence nor absence is absolute. They are substantive negative spaces that communicate through coded suggestion and unstated convention in ways that bind readerships and communities into living social imaginaries. Silence possesses form, and its form is contingent on circumstance and occasion. Although silence may be positioned and perceived as inchoate or as a void, its presence structures and parses noise. Silence unsettles us, creating a dislocative affective field that frames the “said.” The form of silence is ambient, always redounding to underlying notions of materiality. Jean Baudrillard, for example, viewed ambience as synonymous with a specifically formulated quality of cultural environment “where all activities are summarized, systematically combined and centered around the fundamental concept of ‘ambiance.’ ”10 Thus, ambience, like silence, is critically atmospheric and environmental. Silence made audible (that is, open to the senses and embodied understanding) sacrifices its ambient qualities in ways that range from the affective to the didactic. Silence is prejudiced in the sense that it isolates noise without revealing itself but nonetheless making itself felt. It depends on noise for presence, shape, and content. And yet it is open-ended. Noise, however we construct it, is bounded by its place in the senses. Silence, on the other hand, is without end, marked by its interruptions. When it comes to conversations about foodways in the early modern world, we ultimately encounter presence, form, substance, and prejudice of food silences in the coevolution of people and objects. Norwood’s narrative of his fraught voyage from Europe to an emergent British America coaxes a sibilant encounter with food silences that reveals the work of affect through objects known through how they aesthetically enter an ­embodied universe.

Food and Cognition   77 Norwood’s voyage begins in Holland in the early autumn of 1649 where he unites with fellow royalists in exile and resolves to seek his fortune in the Virginia colony. Norwood’s story concludes with his reception by Virginia Governor William Berkeley at his Greenspring estate near Jamestown.11 In its exposition of a journey from a state of expulsion to one of restoration, Norwood’s tale possesses formulaic elements that would have been widely understood by his English audience: the world turned upside down, the quest, the prodigal son. Every incident described within his saga carries metaphorical weight, serving the double purpose of advancing a voyage of personal and civil redemption. Encounters with food marked by demonstrations of manners, acts of discernment, and assertions of identity provide the milestones in that journey. All of this redounds to Norwood’s construction of reputation made tangible through his ability to act and react with higher feeling or nobility. In effect, Norwood’s chronicle relies on the author’s rendition of his interactions with people and things in the evolution and projection of self-worth. These are strategically enacted affective and aesthetic gestures. In his tale of misadventure and deliverance, Norwood offered a number of observations about what he ate (and what he didn’t), but the benchmarks for his progress hinge on what we might characterize as “official” meals.12 Three of these episodes offer insight into how Norwood’s reputation evolved in concert with the meals he ate and how those meals evolved within Norwood’s affective social imaginary: on shipboard in the Canary Islands, in the werowance’s lodge, and at a planter’s table. In all three instances, however incisive, Norwood implicitly contextualizes significant meals in the context of familiar social hierarchies of state and society. With the exception of his commentary on meals with the Keckotank people, Norwood’s account initially appears incisive and unrevealing. Food silences, however, would have it otherwise.

A Banquet in Transit Anchored at Tenerife in October 1649, Norwood and his party attend a dinner party hosted by the English captain of the ship John en route from Brazil to Lisbon. Norwood noted the condition of the The Virginia Merchant’s drunken crew, “who had all tasted so liberally of new wine, by the commodiousness of the vintage.”13 The aftermath of the crew’s frolic compelled their host to provide the transport between the two ships. Convened on board the John, the host “gave us excellent wines to drink before dinner, and at our meat as good as other sorts for concoction.” “There was a handsome plenty of fish and fowl, several ways cooked,” Norwood continued, “to relish the Portuguese’s and the English palates.”14 Joined at their table by “a great lady, with her pretty son” en route to Lisbon, the ship’s company praised the young boy, the “lineaments of his face, full of sweetness,” resembling the deposed King Charles. Honored, the unnamed noblewoman “ordered the table to be covered anew and a handsome banquet placed upon it.” The ­banquet, an elaborate repast marked by toasts and ceremony, concluded with her

78   Bernard L. Herman toasting “the health of our king in a sort of rich wine that they make in Brasil, and drank the proportion she would take, without the allay of water, which till then she drank with little or no wine.”15 The significance of her gesture, of drinking wine without water, was important enough for Norwood to record the act. The meaning of the gesture, however, went unremarked, leaving us to imagine its implications. That is the work of silences as coded communication located in the enlivened practices that define the lives of things. The food silences discovered in Norwood’s description of events in the course of his brief sojourn at Tenerife index ideas of excess, order, and identity. The crew’s drunken revels, resulting in a dereliction of duty that leads to the loss of a boat, stand in contrast to the consumption of distinctive wines and the delivery of toasts at the stateroom supper and ensuing banquet. The excess of the low brings the excess (disguised as restraint) of the high into sharp relief and in that moment links excess to order. The crew, swilling new wine, embraces disorder—they guzzle without thought or reflection; the ships’ officers and dignitaries sip wines deemed “excellent” and “rich”—they exercise discernment and demonstrate social knowledge. Thus, discernment speaks to restraint and restraint addresses civil society. The subtext, of course, refers to the events unfolding in England, where, at least for Norwood and like-minded fellow travelers, Cromwellian excess ­disorders the realm and ultimately upends a “natural” hierarchy of hereditary power. The two wines (one new, raw, and potent; the other aged, nuanced, and refined) and how they are imbibed juxtapose affective fields of pleasure around the experience of low/high sensibilities. The performance of discernment maps identity in two planes. First, there is a sense of unity discovered in the polite, civil sensibility of toasts delivered in English and Portuguese (for the noble lady and Norwood both require a translator) that resonates in the author’s comment on meats “several ways cooked to relish the Portuguese’s and the English palates.” Here, in the mid-1600s anchored in a distant port, Norwood discovers unity within distinction; a unity that emanates from shared affects and the aesthetics discovered within their material expression. The particulars of national elite palates may diverge, but the values that inform them are linked. Thus, it’s not that Norwood speaks to specific foods, but that he establishes their role in a ­particular social imaginary—one where wine serves as a communion around the ­fineness of feeling. Second, if food silences possess the form, presence, and expressions of power, then how does the nature of drink shape Norwood’s account? He reprises three iterations of wine: the local vintage marked for its abundance and potency, the captain’s cellar notable for its excellence and invocation of connoisseurial knowledge, and the lady’s offering remarkable for its richness, rarity, and exoticness. The wine consumed by the crew could have been one of three popular in the 1600s, “the highly popular Malmsey produced from Malvasia [native to Cyprus], a greenish dry wine, and a purplish sweet wine produced from late harvested grapes.”16 Malmsey, a sweet fermentation, was surely the culprit—and it has its own history in the ignominious death of English nobility, namely the brother of Edward IV who reportedly drowned (read “was assassinated”) in a barrel of the stuff. The noblewoman’s “rich” Brazilian wine, for its part, was the product of ­colonization and exchange. Portuguese settlers and subsequently Jesuit missionaries

Food and Cognition   79 established Brazilian vineyards in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with cuttings imported from Portugal and Spain.17 The captain’s cellar offered the gauge by which the rough quaff of sailors and the elegant cordial of noble largesse found its measure. Norwood never describes the flavors of these wines—he engages in no winespeak on notes of earth, tobacco, or the lingering music of a summer’s lost romance on the tongue. What he does offer, however, are the silences that in their presence contour an understanding of nascent ideologies of taste, identity, and place. The sensibilities of an early modern Atlantic world and its peoples coevolve with the world they ingest, the manners they summon forth in that act, and the artifacts central to those performances. Food silences surrounding the acknowledged distinctions to be tasted between English, Portuguese, and Brazilian cuisines were a commonplace in the mid-1600s, and Norwood would encounter them a second time, albeit tangentially, at a dinner after his deliverance into the “settled” lands of the Virginia colony.

Dining with the Werowance Unexpectedly marooned by his shipmates on an uninhabited island off the northern reach of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Colonel Henry Norwood and a small band of his fellow unfortunates struggled to survive winter’s bitter chill subsisting on foraged oysters, the occasional duck or shorebird that came into range of their guns, and a boiled green— most likely “sea beans” (Salicornia virginica) or “sea rocket” (Cakile lacustris) foraged from the dunes. Still, even as some of their number perished from exposure and starvation and the survivors resorted to cannibalism, their situation in Norwood’s opinion was slightly less despairing than just a few weeks earlier at sea. Then, while at the mercy of wind and tide in their storm-dismasted ship, they hoarded biscuits, auctioned rats, and thirsted for sweet water. Still, shipboard rank held its privileges even in the wretchedness of direst want, and so the officers’ mess celebrated “the blessed feast of Christmas.” Their “Christmas pudding” began with “the scrapings of the meal-tubs . . . all amassed together” along with “Malaga sack, sea water, with fruit [likely dried] and spice [likely nutmeg], all well fryed in oyl.”18 The concoction, Norwood concluded with apparent irony, was a “regale, which raised some envy in the spectators,” who were starving. Festivity, however, was short lived. The crippled boat and its increasingly desperate crew struggled on against wind and tide until a coastline was sighted and a shore party with Norwood landed and was promptly marooned. One food silence replaced another. Norwood arrived on the uninhabited island near present-day Assateague with a fowling piece, powder and shot, and a secret stash of thirty ship’s biscuits. One of his stranded companions added to this meager larder with a pound of black pepper. With his companions, Norwood killed wildfowl ranging from geese to shorebirds, roasting them on sticks. They dined on a “booty of oysters” and “a sort of weed some four inches long, as thick as [a] houseleek and the only green (except pines) that the island afforded.” “Being boiled with a little pepper,” Norwood continued, “and helped with five or six oysters . . . it

80   Bernard L. Herman was very insipid on the palate.”19 Like the shipboard Christmas pudding, this dish appears to be a one-pot concoction. As time passed, the birds appeared and disappeared with shifting winter winds. The oysters, however, remained the marooned mariner’s constant. Still, an oyster diet could, at best, only slow starvation’s progress and so the unfortunates’ bodies “decayed so sensibly, that we could hardly pull them [the oysters] out of their muddy beds.”20 In time, though, the local Keckotank people discovered, reconnoitered, rescued, fed, and housed the languishing cohort, conveying them ultimately to the lodge of the werowance, who Norwood, adhering to the conventions of the time, terms the “king.”21 Norwood’s sojourn with his rescuers marks the second “chapter” in his memoir. Significantly, the episode reverses the narrative trajectory from the civility and plenty on display at the shipboard banquet to loss of society and want that framed the course of Norwood’s miserable voyage to his marooning. Thus, the first stop for the rescued was “an honest fisherman’s house” where their Indian host welcomed the strangers and “di­vers earthen pipkins were put to boil with the such varieties as the season would afford,” including “boiled swan for supper.”22 The next stop was the dwelling of the “queen” of the Keckotanks, where “a mat was spread without the house, upon the ground, furnish’d with Pone, Homini, oysters, and other things.”23 The escalation of delicacies continued when the “poor starved weather-beaten creatures” arrived at the werowance’s compound. Here, in the “King’s mansion,” Norwood received “a great wooden bowl full of homini (which is the corn of that country, beat and boiled to mash,” noting “instead of a spoon there was a well-shaped muscle shell that accompanied the bowl.”24 The preparation of the hominy for the king’s guests required the “hard servile labour of beating corn,” a task relegated to the “queens of that country [who] do esteem it a privilege to serve their husbands in all kinds of cookery.”25 The passage from meal to meal is a journey of rising stature with each station along the way marked by gratitude, trust, humility, and respect. Still, Norwood’s frame of reference for ascertaining the organization of Keckotank society was prejudiced by inscription of his affective ­yearnings on the Keckotanks. The mussel shell spoon that Norwood wielded epitomizes a silence of its own that is as much about environmental change as it is about early modern rituals of sociability and dining. On first reading, we might picture the shell spoon as smooth with a lustrously pearl-colored, almost translucent interior and deep blue to black exterior. This is the mussel (Mytilus edulis) we know in present-day markets, but this is not the common ribbed mussel (Geukensia demissa) of the Chesapeake and coastal Atlantic where the marsh or “horse” mussel, with its equally brilliant shimmering interior but with a ridged, brown-and-tan outer surface, prevails. Both occur in the Atlantic waters where Norwood and his party found themselves marooned, but the black species tends to flourish in colder waters, whereas the ribbed mussels thrive as the base for the vast marshlands, anchoring the miles of grass and thriving in the intense heat of summer. Thus, we would do well to consider the marsh mussel as spoon—except that the winter of 1650 unfolded in a spike in the “Little Ice Age” that progressed in waves from the later sixteenth into the early nineteenth century. Colder water makes the black mussel spoon

Food and Cognition   81 a greater possibility. Because Norwood never describes the spoon, we are left to ­wonder—and it is precisely that silence that opens the context of the shell from an encounter with the “foreign” to a consideration of global climate change and affective wonder. Similarly, we flatten the consideration of the oysters Norwood pulled from the mud and ate. The oysters consumed by Norwood and his companions were Crassostrea virginica—the species that extends from the Canadian Maritimes to the Gulf of Mexico. But oysters are liquid animals, and they assume the contours and taste of where they live, leading to notable variations, sometimes in a space of less than a hundred yards. Norwood’s oysters grew in clumps and were “snipey” (that is elongated) with the high salinity of ocean water. The more you eat, the harder it is to slake your thirst. Oysters culled from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay on the opposite side of the peninsula contained far less salt and matured with a more rounded, flatter shell. These just as easily may have been the oysters proffered by the Keckotanks. The food silences we encounter in these passages of Norwood’s chronicle draw our attention to lost ecologies of the ­larder—and to the ways things tasted on the tongue and in the imagination. Norwood, in varying detail, recalled the specifics of three meals prepared in the werowance’s “kitchen” and served at his “table.” The first of the “new regales” was “a sort of spoon-meat in colour and taste not unlike to almond-milk temper’d and mix’d with boiled rice.”26 The dish fascinated Norwood, inspiring a description sufficiently detailed to serve as a recipe: The ground still was Indian corn boiled to a pap, which they call Homini, but the ingredient which performed the milky part, was nothing but dry pokickery nuts, beaten shells and all to powder, and they are like our walnuts, but thicker shell’d, and the kernel sweeter, but being beaten with a mortar, and put into a tray, hollow’d in the middle to make place for fair water, no sooner is the water poured into the powder, but it rises again white and creamish; and after a little ferment it does partake so much of the delicate taste of the kernel of that nut, that it becomes a rarity to a miracle.27

The second meal transpired as a “midnight venison feast” at the werowance’s fire where Norwood was shown the “quarters of a lean doe, new brought in.” The “king,” Norwood told his readers, [G]ave me a knife to cut what part of it I pleased, and then pointing to fire, I inferr’d, I was left to my own discretion for the dressing of it. I could not readily tell how to shew my skill in the cookery of it, with nor better ingredients then appear’d in sight; and so did no more but cut a collop and cast it on the coals. His majesty laugh’d at my ignorance, and to instruct me better, he broach’d the collop on a long skewer, thrust the sharp end into the ground (for there was no hearth but what nature made) and turning sometimes one side, sometimes the other, to the fire, it became fit in short time to be served up, had there been a dining-room of state such as that excellent king deserved.28

82   Bernard L. Herman With his roasted venison collop cooked, Norwood concluded: “I made tender of it first to the king, and then to his nobles, but all refused, and left all to me, who gave God and the king thanks for that great meal. The rest of the doe was cut in pieces, stewed in a ­pipkin, and then put into my hands to dispose of amongst my company.”29 The third meal occurred toward the conclusion of Norwood’s residency with the Keckotanks. Approached by the werowance, Norwood was directed, again by gesture, to follow his host’s “daughter” to the “house” of the child’s mother. The day “was excessive cold, with frost, and the winds blowing very fresh” and Norwood arrived at his destination chilled. His hostess seated him before a “lusty rousing fire” where “a wild turkey boiled with oysters, was preparing for my supper, which when it was ready, was served up in the same pot that boiled it. It was a savoury mess [in the shipboard sense], stew’d with muscles, and I believe would have passed for a delicacy at any great table in England, by palates more competent to make a judgment than mine, which was now more gratify’d with the quantity than the quality of what was before me.”30 Norwood’s meals mapped a succession of affects: amazement, delight, nobility, gratitude, modesty, curiosity, pleasure. In the first description, Norwood emphasizes the exotic quality of unfamiliar foods and preparations, presenting the hickory nut milk as something of a culinary wonder. In the second, Norwood presents himself as something of a buffoon in the lodge of the Keckotank werowance. To the amusement of his hosts, he demonstrates a profound ignorance of how to dress and roast meat. The result is laughter, instruction, and ultimately an acknowledgment of hierarchy where the guest offers the cooked venison to his host as tribute. The gift, however, is Norwood’s, and his manners are rewarded with stewed venison for his fellow travelers. It is also important to recognize that the late-night moment at the werowance’s “table” is explicitly masculine. Norwood’s third recounted meal unfolds in feminine company where the “queen” presents a “delicacy” suitable for the English table and the discernment of educated tastes. Again, Norwood positions himself within a sphere of culinary ignorance, where he would defer in the determination of quality to the taste of more educated European gastronomes. Norwood’s narrative of his culinary adventures among the Keckotanks seems his most voluble, but silence and affect structure it in key ways. First, each description of his Keckotank meals unfolds in deferential contexts of unarticulated custom and convention. In the first, Norwood plays the adventurer discovering alien marvels; in the second, he positions himself as the courtier whose actions aggrandize the authority and cultivate the largesse of his Indian host; in the third, he positions himself subordinate to the judgment of cultivated English palates. The greater silence, though, emerges when we remember that Norwood is twice exiled—from Cromwellian England and his crippled transport. Norwood inscribes the civility, generosity, and plenty of the Keckotanks from that “humble fisherman” to the werowance’s “court” on implied shortcomings of English civil society manifest in the operations of kitchen and table. The richness of his description deepens the silence of his critique. Developing his layered story, Norwood taps into networks of relationships between objects and people revealed through strategic behaviors and narrative purpose. His larger veiled

Food and Cognition   83 a­ rguments about the course of civil society, nobility, and reputation could not unfold without their enacted grounding in materiality and feeling.

A Virginia Planter’s “Well Order’d” Table Where Colonel Norwood was incisive in his account of his mariner’s diet and, by comparison, loquacious concerning his meals among the Keckotanks, he was positively terse upon his deliverance into the settlements of Accomack “called by the English, Northampton county.” Northampton County comprised the lower extent of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, a narrow, sandy-soiled, roughly seventy-mile-long peninsula bordered to the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Chesapeake Bay. First peoples occupied these lands for centuries prior to European and African colonization in the second decade of the 1600s and continued to interact with their neighbors well into the nineteenth century.31 As immigration swelled the population in the early seventeenth century, new residents and old pushed northward, developing and establishing the infrastructure of a plantation society. At the time of Norwood’s arrival, the plantation landscape extended to Occohannock Neck. “As we advanced into the plantations that lay thicker together,” Norwood wrote, relating his southerly trek from the lands of the Keckotanks, “we had our choice of hosts for our entertainment. . . . When I came to the house of one Stephen Charlton, he did not only outdo all that I had visited before him, in a variety of dishes at his table, which was very well order’d in the kitchen.”32 That is the sum of detail describing his first English meal upon his deliverance to “English” plantation society. But, in these few words, three queries emerge: how English were these plantations, what was the nature of variety, and what constituted well ordered? Stephen Charlton’s kitchen and table, as best as we can recover them, provides a framework for addressing these questions. Stephen Charlton occupied a large plantation of roughly a thousand acres bordered by Westerhouse Creek, Nassawadox Creek, and the Chesapeake. A court justice and wealthy landholder, Charlton stood out as one of the county elite and as a peer to Norwood, who was related by blood and marriage to other Virginia colony elites. To penetrate the silence of Norwood’s reference to Charlton’s table and kitchen, we need to turn to the county records—the oldest unbroken chain of British American court proceedings, extending from 1632 to the present. Within these records, we encounter probate records, a genre familiar to students of early American material life, and depositions on cases ranging across complaints concerning buggery, defamation, hog rustling, death by misadventure, theft, adultery, and much more. Significantly, Charlton surfaces frequently. He engages in various land and commercial transactions, his heirs file his will in the 1650s, and he hears and adjudicates the legal business of his neighbors.

84   Bernard L. Herman Just as significantly, we know virtually nothing of the tangible materiality of Charlton’s world beyond the written record. The earliest extant houses to survive into the era of photography date no earlier than 1700, and the oldest standing relic dwellings were built in the 1720s. In essence, there is no architectural record for Charlton’s world. Modest archaeological work in the area provides additional information, but again scant evidence from the time when Norwood dined with Charlton in that bitterly cold winter of 1650. True, the landscape survives, but it is much changed by forces that range from natural causes to human actions, both deliberate and unintended. Thus, the silences of things that physically shaped and furnished Charlton’s and Norwood’s experiences are, for the moment, virtually complete. Only the words of the court, standing as object proxies, rescue (as Clifford Geertz remarked) “the said from its perishing occasions” and only the imaginative enlivening of text, through what Rhys Isaacs terms “action statements,” restores its vividness. The evocation of Charlton’s plantation frames Norwood’s reference to a “well order’d” kitchen and our first thoughts bend toward envisioning an architectural space notable for its arrangement and amenities. But “well order’d” also describes a working social space where assigned tasks and demonstrated expertise organize cooking as process, affirming a larger universe of domestic relations. And beyond that, the notion of “well order’d” superintends the social imaginary violated by Cromwell’s rule and Norwood’s marooning. Pointedly, Norwood deploys the notion of “well order’d in the kitchen” as the measure of larger political economies. But what objects furnished and sustained that “well order’d” social imaginary? And how did those objects constitute an affective field mapped by structured feelings of civility and relief? No inventory describes the objects in Charlton’s estate, but others provide some suggestion of what Norwood encountered on his visit. First, though, it is useful to have a general sense of how Charlton and his neighbors cooked. The core cooking utensils listed in probate inventories were first and foremost a pot followed by a frying pan or skillet and augmented by spits. The problem here is that we may easily assume too much—silence has that effect, and affective habit masks it. Spits listed in estate records were most likely metal—and, not unlike the Keckotanks—the majority of settler households employed wooden skewers of no monetary value. Pots held stews, porridges, and gruels, but again the inventories are heavily biased toward iron vessels, often eliding cheap “earthen pots” and “Indian Bowles.” Frying pans were invariably of metal and the mode of cookery least akin to the practices of Norwood’s Keckotank hosts. Thus, Colonel William Andrews’s well-furnished kitchen of 1654 contained: “One ould Cppr Kettle; 1 great Iron pott; 2 Iron Kettles; 3 ould brasse Kettles; 2 spitts; 2 ould Racks; one Iron pott Haaker; 1 Iron pott; one drippin pan; & tonges and Iron to keepe upp the fire. . . . One ould Table; & forme & ould cubboard.”33 A minimally functional cooking hearth held only a single pot that could be shoved into the coals, and some sticks for skewering and roasting meat and fish. An elaborate kitchen contained specialized cooking ware, including chaffers or chafing dishes, dripping pans, grills, mortars and pestles, and more.

Food and Cognition   85 Settler households breakfasted and dined on hominy dishes concocted from native maize. Even as they consumed native fish, shellfish, wildfowl, and occasionally venison, they introduced their own livestock, crops, and foodways. Milkmaids and servants tended dairy cows and made cheese and churned butter. Plantation households pressed apples for cider and planted plums and peaches in orchards. Hogs, their ears cropped with proprietorial markings, ran in the woods until periodic round-ups corralled them. Slaughtered, hogs became pork, rendered as lard, salted down in powdering tubs, and stored in milkhouses and butteries (smokehouses do not appear by name until later). One of Charlton’s neighbors kept domesticated geese and turkeys along with hens; others herded goats and sheep. Distilling apparatuses appeared in estate listings along with mention of “strong waters” and “acquavit.” Some folks brewed beer. Norwood, Charlton, and the dinner company likely sat at what was locally referred to as a “long table” that was roughly three feet in breadth and as much as ten to twelve feet in length. These were ceremonial tables favored for their flexibility in use. Period accounts indicate their service not just for dining but also as tables that could seat justices convened for neighborhood hearings, cooling boards for laying out the dead, and even as the sites of adulterous congress. The multiplicity of uses suggests the affective array a single object might sustain from respect for authority to delight of conviviality to the revulsion of transgressive actions. Other objects introduced into the mix might narrow those possibilities. Wealthy planters set their tables with individual dishes, but in the 1640s cutlery was limited to spoons (English and Dutch), knives, and bowls and trenchers. Forks appeared later. Salts, caudle cups, beakers, and wine cups graced the best well-laid tables. For those who knew the rituals of polite dining, these objects provided reassurance and comfort; confusion, awkwardness, and intimidation for those without that knowledge. Thus, the coevolution of people and things is mapped by inconstancy and conversation. And so we come full circle to Norwood’s journey with all its performances and silences anchored in the tangible culinary world of the table. Remembering Charlton as both plantation host and county justice, we can imagine a conversation where he recounted for his guest the mystery and inquest of the death of the Dutch boy Sneere just a year and half earlier.34 It sounds like a bad joke. The neighbor enters the quartering house wherein dwelt the Spaniard, the Englishman, the African, and the Dutch boy Sneere (recently deceased). Sneere’s body had been discovered in a field where, in the early morning hours of a stormy August day in 1647, he had been assigned as a “Crow Keepes” to preserve his master John Nuthall’s corn from marauding birds. The task as described by witnesses involved a good deal of hallooing at the crows and the occasional firing of a gun. But now Sneere was dead and a coroner’s jury gathered on the plantation to determine cause. Several schools of thought competed: Sneere’s abusive master had struck him in the head with a six-foot mulberry rod; the Negro Peter beat Sneere to death; a bolt of lightning struck Sneere as he stood vigilant among the corn hills. We will never know. The witnesses entered their evidence; the jury listened; the clerk recorded Sneere’s last chapter. Robert Berry concluded the proceedings, “Ye Servantes sate very mellanchollye in ye Quart’inge howse.” He asked them,

86   Bernard L. Herman “what they ayled to bee soe mellanchollye?” In turn, the servants responded: “The Spanyard made answr & sd Lord have m’yce upon us this Boye hath been killed by lowes[?] (his Conscience told him) Tom Clarke sd Lord have mrcye upon us that evr it was my hard fortune to come to this Countrye for (if this be suffered) it maye bee my turne to morrow or next daye, the Negro sd Jesus Christ my maystr is not good; and they all wept bittelye.” And here we discover the role that things and settings assume in affectively parsing and communicating the humanity of things. Dinner is in the details. Depositions taken in the early years of European settlement on this long finger of sandy-soiled land off the coast of Virginia’s mainland include information that gives the speakers’ words a particular kind of substantive weight. Recounting seemingly inconsequential actions typically grounded in a larger world of things and feeling, the witnesses asserted the veracity of their testimony. Simply, ordinary objects and actions laid claims to truthfulness—and many of those claims related to food procurement, preparation, and eating. The evidence given on the occasion of Sneere’s posthumous court date began with James Barnaby, who swore that he had just returned from fishing. Elizabeth Ffoskutt testified that she was coming from the “Cowe peen Haveinge been a milkeinge.” Robert Berry recounted that the first inkling of something amiss occurred when “wee went in all of us to breakfast” and Sneere, at task as a “Crowes Keepes,” did not join them. John Nutthall dismissed Sneere’s absence, claiming that the boy was sleeping off the after effects of too much watermelon, “for yondr lyeth a great heape of watrmillion Ryndes, att ye tobaco howse for to be seene.” And Sneere lay dead in a cornfield raucously mocked by crows. The scene of the three servants sitting in their quarters, disclosing their fears to Robert Berry, haunts the affective imagination. In the 1640s, their dwelling likely followed local practice: small and built of posts set directly into the ground, roughly clad and roofed with mauled clapboards, unfinished on the interior and open to the rafters, and if there was a hearth, it was surely not made of brick. Owning little more than the clothes they wore, the Spaniard, the African, and the Englishman, like the dead Dutch boy, were likely serving out their indentures and hoping for the opportunity to survive long enough to make their fortunes. Two questions come to mind. In the modest compass of their quarters, what language did they speak, what foods did they eat? As wretched as their condition may have been, the occupants of the quartering house huddled at an international crossroads where fragments of European, African, and American (settler and indigenous) cultures took shared sustenance. Factoring in the trade and colonizing networks that enmeshed the early colonial Chesapeake, including goods and cultural practices from south Asia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific, the quartering house truly stood at a global crossroads. This was the “well order’d” world to which Norwood was restored. Fish, milk, watermelons, hominy, oysters, mussels, hickory meal, venison, wild leeks, sea salt, and black pepper constitute a few of the ingredients that fed the inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay country. Thinking through the lens of objects and the occasions they furnished, we return to the questions implicit in the accounts of Sneere’s demise and Norwood’s salvation: the ecology of the larder (what they ate), the

Food and Cognition   87 “well order’d” kitchen (how they cooked), and the conversational landscape of the table (where, at least sometimes, they broke bread—or more likely pone). The difficulty in parsing these categories resides in the food silences where they coevolve in the most literal aspects of affective embodiment and the aesthetics of Norwood’s, the werowance’s, the Dutch boy’s, the Brazilian noble lady’s social imaginaries. The things they ate were the worlds they knew, and they evolved together.

Notes 1. Lawrence Grossberg, “Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual,” interview by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 2. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 29. 3. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 1–2. 4. Norwood’s division of his story with accounts of significant meals prefigures Daniel Defoe’s similar strategy in A Journal of the Plague Year, in which the narrative is divided not by chapter but by quoting the bills of mortality. 5. Biographical sketches of Norwood appear in a number of sources, including Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1915), 299. An article in Maryland’s Salisbury Times newspaper’s “Delmarva Heritage Series” printed an abbreviated version of Norwood’s account, prefacing the text with the note that Norwood wrote his tale “some 20 years later,” nabbhistory.salisbury. edu/new_website/new_wroten_hnorwood.asp. 6. Henry Norwood, A Voyage to Virginia by Colonel Norwood, in Awnsham Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now Printed Original Manuscripts, Others Now First Published in English, vol. 6 (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, c. 1745, 3rd ed., 1744), 161–186. The first edition appeared in 1704, but the third was apparently the first to include Norwood’s account. 7. Norwood, Voyage, 161. 8. Norwood, Voyage, 161. 9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xix. 10. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 36. 11. Cary Carson, “Banqueting Houses and the ‘Need of Society’ among Slave-Owning Planters in the Chesapeake Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2013): 725–780. 12. For an overview of food and cultural negotiation, see Michael  A.  LaCombe, Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 13. Norwood, Voyage, 162. 14. Norwood, Voyage, 162. 15. Norwood, Voyage, 163. 16. http://hogsheadwine.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/a-brief-history-of-wine-fromthe-canary-islands/

88   Bernard L. Herman 17. http://wineeconomist.com/2010/12/17/the-brics-misunderstanding-brazilian-wine/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvasia http://www.xing.com/net/winesfrombrazil/aboutbrazilian-wine-533123/the-history-of-wine-production-in-brazil-31287234 18. Norwood, Voyage, 169. 19. Norwood, Voyage, 172. 2 0. Norwood, Voyage, 172. 21. Norwood, Voyage, 176. 2 2. Norwood, Voyage, 177. 23. Norwood, Voyage, 178. 2 4. Norwood, Voyage, 179. 25. Norwood, Voyage, 179. 2 6. Norwood, Voyage, 179. 27. Norwood, Voyage, 180. 2 8. Norwood, Voyage, 180. 2 9. Norwood, Voyage, 180. 3 0. Norwood, Voyage, 182. 31. James R. Perry recovers the history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Euro-American civil society and governance in The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990). 32. Norwood, Voyage, 186. 33. “A true Inventory of ye Estate of Lt. Coll. Wm Andrewes (1654),” in Northampton County, Virginia, Record Book: Orders, Deeds, Wills, &c., Volume 5, 1654–1655, edited by Howard Mackey and Marlene Alma Hinkley Groves (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 1999), 194–197. 34. The testimony and proceedings around the death of the Dutch boy John Sneere run through Northampton County court proceedings. The depositions regarding the case are found in Howard Mackey and Marlene Alma Hinkley Groves, eds., Northampton County, Virginia, Record Book: Orders, Deeds, Wills, &c., Volume 3, 1645–1651 (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 2000).

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Attfield, Judy. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings, 2nd ed. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Carson, Cary. “Banqueting Houses and the ‘Need of Society’ among Slave-Owning Planters in the Chesapeake Colonies.” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (2013): 725–780. Glassie, Henry. Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2011. Hymes, Dell  H. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.

Food and Cognition   89 Isaac, Rhys. “Discourse on the Method.” In The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, 323–357. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982. LaCombe, Michael A. Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Meskell, Lynn. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. New York: Berg, 2004. Norwood, Henry. A Voyage to Virginia by Colonel Norwood. In A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now Printed Original Manuscripts, Others Now First Published in English, 3rd ed., vol. 6, edited by Awnsham Churchill, 161–186. London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1744. Perry, James  R. The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Upton, Dell. “Architecture in Everyday Life.” New Literary History 33 (2002): 707–723.

chapter 5

On Pi ns a n d N eedl e s Straight Pins, Safety Pins, and Spectacularity Amber Jamilla Musser

Introduction Designed to make viewers feel the energy before they actually encounter objects, the exhibit at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (hereafter MMA) on punk, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (hereafter RISD) exhibit on the dandy offer case studies in spectacularity—conscious self-fashioning. A re-creation of the famous lower Manhattan cradle of punk, CBGB’s bathroom replete with indecipherable scrawl and broken, dirty toilet greets visitors at the entrance to the MMA’s exhibit while a wall of Scottish tweeds invites patrons at RISD to touch, smell, and imbibe the sensorium of the dandy. By engaging with the punk and the dandy in tactile terms, these exhibits highlight the punk and dandy as aesthetic forms that inhabit a world beyond the individual who might wear these outfits. This foregrounding of the aesthetic offers us a way into theorizing the relationship between spectacularity and materiality and the particular role that sewing tools play within this economy of aesthetics. Spectacularity functions, here, as a heuristic device to understand a particularly conscious mode of performing the self, but not all forms of spectacularity are equivalent. In these exhibits, the safety pin and straight pin conjure up different modes of spectacularity with regard to the punk and dandy. They produce divergent epistemologies, thereby playing roles as cognitive objects. When tailors, designers, and wearers use them, they are indicating participation in and adherence to a particular milieu of spectacularity. By presenting an encapsulation of the punk and dandy aesthetically, the MMA and RISD exhibits help us to unpack the politics of spectacularity and materiality that underlie these performances of gender and self.

On Pins and Needles   91

A Tale of Two Exhibits RISD’s exhibit, Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion, which ran from April 28 to August 18, 2013, produces a simultaneously capacious and specific view of the dandy. The curators build on and complicate Charles Baudelaire’s canonical 1863 description, which notes that dandyism requires both leisure and healthy finances for a man who “has no profession other than elegance.”1 Baudelaire’s dandy is timeless; he can be found in Caesar, Alcibiades, and “in the forests and on the lake-sides of the New World.”2 What links these men is “a burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.”3 These dandies are cool, blasé, and melancholic. They emerge from the waning moments of aristocracy against the tide of democracy, attached, above all, to their own egos. The RISD exhibit, however, is specific about an origin point for the dandy—Regency England’s Beau Brummell, who eschewed ornate style in favor of simple, tailored fashion. He is credited with introducing the modern men’s suit made of broadcloth and worn with a necktie. His fashion acuity was also famously accompanied by a sly wit, which famously left him struggling for income after he insulted his friend, the future King George IV of England at a ball.4 In the RISD exhibit, tailoring and outsized personality go hand in hand. The exhibit has several goals. It aims to have us see the dandy not as historical artifact, but something that is embodied in the present. It wants us to understand the dandy in terms of personality and tailoring, and it wants us to imagine that the dandy is something that any number of people (though the exhibit focuses more on male dandies) can embody, regardless of their connection to aristocracy. In fact, John W. Smith, director of the museum, writes that the impetus for the show emerged from looking around. In the introduction to the exhibit catalogue, he writes, “Artist/Rebel/ Dandy reflects the tableau that we see every day on RISD’s campus, as the freedom of youth enables experimental self-fashioning that fuses the creative output of the artist, the constructive urge to challenge the status quo, and the power of clothing to allow one to transcend the quotidian. We are surrounded by individuals who are at once artists, rebels, and dandies.”5 Further, he writes, “Artist/Rebel/Dandy is not a definitive survey; it is a proposal, a series of provocative, subjective renderings of a paradigmatic form that has characterized the avant-garde from the early nineteenth century to today.”6 The exhibit, then, is not committed to preserving the ideal of the dandy, who is often invoked in Charles Baudelaire’s work as a melancholic relic of the past, but to understand how this spirit might continue onward. Baudelaire’s dandies were iconoclasts, but dandyism was “a setting sun,” futile resistance to the oncoming threat of “democracy” or normalization. In contrast, the RISD exhibit understands dandyism to be a vibrant rebuke against the norm. By arguing that dandyism is about spirit, the RISD exhibit produces dandyism as artistry (in a suit or sneakers) and rebellion; personality and individualism are put on display.

92   Amber Jamilla Musser This version of the dandy is premised on a particular relationship to fashion; specifically it argues that the dandy’s fashion choices are an outgrowth of the personality of the wearer. Smith writes that the exhibit “emphasiz[es] the personalities of well-known fashionable men, focusing on the enduring bond between identity, creativity, and selfpresentation. It crafts a narrative about clothing that extends well beyond the expected surface treatment of the dandy’s fashion, mining his material world to reposition him as a forward-thinking, conscientious, and thoroughly artistic character.”7 The exhibit cautions against thinking that the dandy operates as a synonym for a fashionable man. Though aesthetically appealing, a dandy’s tastes are the mark of a unique attachment to artistry and self-presentation. His clothes are tools that he uses to make himself spectacular and to showcase his inner self. While this investment in the self is usually coded as a form of narcissism, the exhibit curators are insistent that we see the dandy as interested in society, so as to flout its norms.8 In the material world of the exhibit, which displays rows of elegant suits, a tailored suit is often shorthand for the dandy’s artistry. This relationship between the material (often the aforementioned suits) and the aesthetic underscores the dandy as a participant in a delicate dance of individuality and consumption. Maintaining this individuality also, however, often requires the use of the straight pin. The type of spectacularity presented by the dandy is legible as a particular permutation of liberal subjectivity in which self-fashioning (here in its most literal terms) is the marker of individuality and agency. Though presented as a disruption to modern society, this ideal is actually coterminous with prevailing norms surrounding masculinity. What this means in terms of spectacularity is that the investment in objectification does not come at a cost to agency and, in fact, bolsters that agency by making it the object of spectacle. By showcasing reflections on individual dandies and their contribution to fashion, the museum’s catalogue reinforces the relationship between individuality, agency, and self-fashioning. Though the MMA and RISD exhibits were not necessarily planned to overlap, the RISD exhibit ends where the punk exhibit begins—with Malcolm McLaren, fashion designer and former Sex Pistols manager. Neither exhibit dwells on McLaren’s connection to music; instead, they focus on his collaboration with Vivienne Westwood on the London SEX boutique. This moment in 1974 is, apparently, where the punk meets the dandy. Or, to put it another way, when the well-dressed man coincides with the antiestablishment (or at least assumes this posture). In the RISD catalogue, Andrew Wilson writes, “McLaren was attracted to the renegade and the revolutionary—the beautiful and enigmatic failures, the scavenger here (the savage, the pirate, the witch, the teddy boy, the punk, the agent of sedition) . . . Looking at the image of McLaren in the Appalachians, you see a dandy who understood not only the distinction between the authentic and the karaoke world that now defines us, but also the true value of failure.”9 Through these words we see that as a dandy, McLaren cultivates a particular aesthetics of agential failure, where spectacularity has to do with individuality and rebellion. From the perspective of punk, Wilson’s analysis of McLaren’s interest in spectacular failure suggests an investment in counterculture and a conscious mixing of commercialism

On Pins and Needles   93 with poverty. Later in the essay, Wilson cites McLaren’s response to criticisms that his clothing makes people look poor: “Well, have you heard of Robin Hood? He’s a very big, famous character in English literature. I’m trying to make the rich look poor, so the poor can look rich! That’s the idea.”10 Indeed, the MMA exhibit on punk is deeply invested in the aesthetic of the antiestablishment. Near the CBGB toilets, the exhibit re-creates Westwood and McLaren’s London shop alongside mannequins wearing T-shirts, trousers, and kilts from that era. The video monitors play short interview clips, and the walls are dark and moody. This is the exhibit’s nod to the chaotic. Punk, it seems, is atmospheric, an adjective that helps to explain the transition from 1970s counterculture to contemporary couture. After setting the scene, the curators divide the rest of the exhibit—the couture—into different DIY aesthetics: hardware, bricolage, graffiti, and deconstruction, where faceless mannequins represent these sartorial techniques. In this exhibit, couture captures symbols of punk and uses them to connote edginess without transgressing norms that actually surround that couture and how it operates in the world. This method of adding punk to an established mix is captured by the director of the MMA’s foreword: “as the exhibit and this catalogue reveal, haute couture has readily appropriated the visual and symbolic language of punk, replacing beads with studs, paillettes with safety pins, and feathers with razor blades to capture the style’s rebellious impetuosity.”11 If the RISD exhibit highlights the personality of the wearer, the MMA exhibit presents punk as a property that the maker possesses. McLaren, in particular, is credited with bringing punk aesthetics from New York to London. Andrew Bolton’s introduction to the exhibit reads: “More than anyone associated with punk, Malcolm McLaren, whom the journalist, artist, and political activist Caroline Coon has described in the ‘Diaghilev of punk,’ and his then-partner Vivienne Westwood were instrumental in crystallizing and commercializing what became known as the classic punk style through their boutique at 430 King’s Road.”12 A quote from Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, drives this idea even further: “I don’t think punk would have happened without Malcolm and Vivienne to be honest. Something would have happened, and it might even have been called punk but it wouldn’t have looked the way it did. And the look of it was so important.”13 Unlike the dandy, whose clothing in an outgrowth of his self-fashioning, the MMA exhibit emphasizes the design of the punk aesthetic. Emblematic of this is the description of Elizabeth Hurley’s famous Versace safety pin dress. While the dress has become famous for launching Hurley’s career, amplifying the importance of fashion at film premieres, and generally heralding an era when one’s spectacularity can bring both fame and fortune, the catalogue focuses on Versace’s manipulation of the punk aesthetic. The catalogue reads: “In this dress, Versace opened up the side from bust to waist and again at the upper leg, revealing almost as much flesh as it concealed. Punk safety pins were transformed into majestic gold-and-silver toned metal safety pin ornaments resplendent with diamantes, offering a dialogue between chaos and couture.”14 This attention to designers is partially due to the fact that the Costume Institute, whose exhibits often focus on single designers, including Alexander McQueen and Charles James, organized the exhibit. This fact is displayed

94   Amber Jamilla Musser most flagrantly by their annual costume galas where designers invite celebrities as their guests—signaling the fact that the wearers, though attention getting, are not the focus of the Institute. This is in marked contrast to the opening of the RISD exhibit, which featured Andre Talley Leon, also at Vogue, as a representative dandy. Punk, then, provides the occasion for this gathering of designers, but what the viewer sees is the ways that punk can be made abstract and distorted from its social (and musical) context. Like the RISD exhibit’s compulsion to bring the dandy forward into time, the MMA exhibit is less interested in punk’s histories (though it does offer nods to both its American and British roots) and more invested in what it allows people to create. It showcases the spectacularity of punk through the lens of couture. Instead of reveling in the personality of those in the garments—the mannequins have blank faces, after all—the virtuosity of designers is on display. The exhibit shows how aesthetics can be maintained despite different materials. In explaining his choices, the director of the MMA writes, “PUNK: Chaos to Couture examines the impact of punk’s subversive yet innovative aesthetic on high fashion, focusing on its do-it-yourself impulse—the antithesis of couture’s made-to-measure precision. . . . Focusing on high fashion’s embrace of punk’s aesthetic vocabulary, this outstanding catalogue illustrates how designers have looked to the quintessential anti-establishment style to originate new ideals of beauty and fashionability.”15 While focusing on expensive, high-end designers might seem anathema to the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist tendencies of punk, the MMA’s decision to focus on the making of clothing produces a commonality with punk’s DIY (do it yourself) aesthetic, which attaches importance to the wearer’s self-manipulations of clothing, often through the safety pin. Yet, for Richard Hell, the musician whose style inspired McLaren, “clothes are empty”; “they remain decoration, unless they’re actually worn, vivified into soul plumage, by an artiste of personal appearance.”16 Though Hell hews closer to the mode of agency and self-fashioning that underlies the RISD exhibit, he is also resolutely anti-consumerist in arguing that one cannot purchase expensive clothing and acquire personality. In the middle ground that Hell straddles in locating agency and individuality between the wearer and the designer, we find the material. Though Hell argues that clothes are “empty,” they warrant attention, specifically the tools that have enabled their transformation from fabric into recognizable emblems of the punk and dandy in order to suture spectacularity to the material.

The Underpinnings of Spectacularity The MMA and RISD exhibits work to produce the punk and dandy as aesthetic forms. This deserves emphasis not to underscore the evacuation of the historically specific conditions that allowed for their emergence, but rather to think through the material traces of this focus on form. When to-be-looked-at-ness is privileged in and of itself, this formalization of aesthetics is boiled down to a matter of fashion technology, thereby

On Pins and Needles   95 enhancing and reorienting our understanding of spectacularity. Rather than a nebulous concept of anti-normativity, spectacularity is reduced to its nuts and bolts or rather its pins and needles. The particular technologies that allow this formalization of the dandy and the punk are the straight pin and safety pin, respectively. These fashion technologies produce their own epistemological regimes of agency, gender, and rebellion, which undergird these exhibits’ emphasis on aesthetics. When we examine what the exhibits prioritize, it becomes evident that the straight and safety pins produce entire worlds, including different forms of spectacularity. The dandy’s cult of personality is symbolized by the bespoke suit, which in turn is reliant on the straight pin. By contrast, the idea of the punk as designer resonates with the DIY tool par excellence, the safety pin. Both objects suggest different economies of labor and affect. The straight pin assumes expertise and a certain amount of secrecy. It is necessary to the process of producing these ­garments—suit, shirt, tie—but is not present in their final incarnation. The safety pin, on the other hand, invites all—experts and novices alike—to participate, makes visible the work of production, and extends the temporality of the quick fix. It connotes edginess despite (or indeed because of) its attachment to the concept of safety. In the catalogue to the RISD exhibit, Thom Brown, menswear designer, writes that the dandy ought to be known less for his flamboyance and more for his simple elegance: “the dandy is often interpreted incorrectly as a fussy and flamboyant fellow. But when we look back at the original dandy—the early nineteenth century figure of Beau Brummell—we find a silhouette that is paired down, fitted, and uniform-like.”17 In answer to that, the curators of the show strip the dandy down to his wardrobe. While there are photographs of various dandy personalities, in these moments, what conspires to label all of these people (mostly men, but some women) dandies is the attention paid to tailoring. To this effect, the curators of the show have decided to focus on the garments themselves. Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer write, “all ensembles on display are distinguished by their quality and often by the deft workmanship and particular style of a tailor or designer, but they are also tied to the personalities of the particular dandy who wore them through portraits, caricatures, and fashion plates.”18 This is, after all, an exhibit about fashion. How does one visualize the link to rebellion through tailoring? In addition to featuring photographs/images of each of their particular dandies as a way to explain why they had been lumped into that category, the RISD exhibit also makes a claim about the material world of the dandy. They show clothing on hangers, so as to preserve the original folds and creases. Then, they focus on the fabrics used with videos of tailors, all men, from Scotland. Underlying this focus on personality is the relationship between the tailor and the dandy and, more precisely, the way that this man works his way around a straight pin. The tailors help to enact the vision that their patrons proffer, and they do so with a particular set of tools at their disposal—their ability to drape, to pin, to cut. The secret of the dandy, then, is his relationship to the pin and how well another man can make the pin speak to and for him. The straight pin speaks to the dandy’s relationship to the world. In the world of bespoke suits, these pins allow the fabric to hug the body; they are a technology of body consciousness. Spectacularity, here, is about fit and highlighting the ability to make fabric

96   Amber Jamilla Musser conform to corporeality. Owing to the difficulty of attempting to pin fabric to one’s own body for fit, however, these pins also conjure up another—a tailor or a mannequin. Through the help of this ghostly other, fabric envelops the body in dazzling ways, highlighting each body’s uniqueness and endowing the wearer with spectacularity. This exhibit foregrounds the effect of the work of tailoring, but conspicuously absents much of its work in favor of promoting the dandies’ external personas. In this set of relationships we see how the straight pin works as a technology of gender. The type of masculinity that the dandy is presumed to have and the masculinity that the straight pin produces are the same; they are about cloaking agency through spectacularity—fabulousness distracts from power and power hides the tailor. The power is also codified financially. The dandy has enough money not only to have his suits tailored, but also to allow the modifications to be sewn into permanence. This is a commitment to a particular fashion and moment where any modification is not worried about—it would simply require a new suit. The relationship between punk and the safety pin requires less unpacking since the safety pin is a visible component of many of the garments selected by the MMA. The safety pin functions to denote a particular mode of punk style—it marks a space where functionality becomes a central part of the aesthetic. It valorizes what was once ugly, rendering “chaos” from established aesthetic systems, making visible what used to be hidden—the work of creation. Here we see, however, that the safety pin is inextricable from the system. If the straight pin demonstrates a particular mode of expertise and intimacy between tailor and subject, the safety pin speaks to economies of modernity that involve large-scale production and rescripting of intimacy and subversion. It offers a glimpse at making on a different scale from that of the dandy. In offering a link between the safety pin and modernity and subversion, we must look closely at both the histories of punk and histories of the safety pin. The introduction to the MMA catalogue provides a concise history of punk, locating its origins as a music subculture in New York in the 1974 and moving transatlantically to the United Kingdom in 1975. In New York, music venues such as the East Village’s CBGB provided a central node for punk happenings. In London, punk revolved around McLaren and Westwood’s boutique. However, the catalogue sidesteps the reasons for punk’s popularity and its place beyond commercial culture. Tricia Henry, an historian of punk and the avant-garde, describes punk as a movement that is explicit about its rejection of normativity and bourgeois values. In her discussion of punk’s history, Henry is foregrounds the context of poverty and social upheaval into which punk emerged in both countries. The general pessimism of North American punk gave way to a critique of unemployment and poverty in the United Kingdom: The punk scene first crystallized in England in the late 1970s but its roots are undeniably North American. In the late 1960s and early 1970s New York bands such as the “Velvet Underground” (whose lead singer Lou Reed later became known as the “Godfather of Punk”), “The New York Dolls” and “The Ramones” began producing a new kind of rock which was self-consciously street-wise and pessimistic about the future. . . . The English adapted the form to its own domestic situation and developed what became known as punk rock. With one of the highest unemployment rates

On Pins and Needles   97 since World War II and a steadily rising cost of living, the irony, pessimism and amateur style of the new underground took on overt social and political implications, and the English punk scene became as self-consciously proletariat.19

As a response to particular social traumas, Henry argues that punk appeared to offer a way to opt out of various regimes of modernity, which had become oppressive. Instead of artistry, we see critique and the importance of making difference, ugliness, and incoherence visible. Punk aims to reveal the fraying at the seams that hold society together. Seen from this angle, the safety pin is a stunningly appropriate appendage for the punk. Though versions of the safety pin have been in use since antiquity, the modern safety pin was patented by Walter Hunt in April 1849. The device, which was “made from one piece of wire or metal combining a spring, and clasp or catch, in which catch, the point of said pin is forced and by its own spring securely retained,” offered “perfect convenience of inserting these into the dress, without danger of bending the pin, or wounding the fingers, which renders them equally adapted to either ornamental, common dress, or nursery uses.”20 The patent was immediately sold to a factory where the pin was manufactured and sold into wide usage. As Hunt made clear in his patent application, the safety pin had a wide number of uses—chief among them was allowing for easy modification of clothing. Before the advent of the safety pin, decorative pins were used to hold clothing that was not sewn together in place. This allowed for clothing to be put on more easily in the absence of other fasteners, and it allowed clothing to be easily modified for different bodies. It was a tool for those without access to tailoring and without need of ornamentation.21 The safety pin became especially useful for securing bandages and for use on modern cloth diapers, which went into mass production in 1887. In addition to ease and affordability, this sutured the safety pin to infancy and medicalization. These associations were not lost on those who later used the safety pin as a fashion accessory. In his reflections on the meaning of the safety pin, John Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, writes that the safety pin evokes a very particular memory from childhood: “basically, the safety pin goes back to being two years old. It’s a very personal thing. My mother, when she put on my nappy . . . she stuck the safety pin into my penis! So the safety pin means something to me!”22 Though one cannot generalize from Lydon’s experience, the invocation of infantilism is illustrative of the world that the safety pin inhabits. In many ways the safety pin’s visibility and malleability are a tribute to its relationship to mass production, particularly when one connects this to the deliberate amateurism of the DIY movement with which punk is also associated. Lydon makes brief mention of this ideology as necessity: “I joined the Sex Pistols, the safety pin was a necessity because I couldn’t sew,” but DIY is an important component of punk.23 Ian Moran credits the DIY aspect of punk as one of the key components of its survival. As a subculture on the fringes of society, punk, Moran argues, relies on informal networks of people to form bands, produce albums, promote albums, and run venues: “Independent record labels, the D.I.Y. press, and the D.I.Y. venues are what have kept the punk subculture alive since the late 1970s. The creation of the punk subculture has

98   Amber Jamilla Musser allowed individuals who seek an alternative lifestyle to thrive.”24 This independence keeps punk relatively separate from the currents of the mainstream, where it can thrive as a space of critique and be responsive to its own politics. Ryan Moore and Michael Roberts elaborate on this political freedom, “The D.I.Y. ethic has enabled punk subculture to build a substantial infrastructure of underground media [. . .] this media has played an active role in generating and coordinating social protest among people who identify as punks.”25 In these analyses, the DIY aspect of punk is what holds the movement together. It enables social connectivity, critique, and an alternative mode of self-fashioning. It is also highly gendered with these acts of individual ingenuity getting coded as masculine, and gender discrimination being as prevalent within the punk scene as in the outside world.26 The most visible way that this attachment to the DIY scene filters into the punk aesthetic is through the safety pin. It speaks most clearly to the political landscape that punk evokes by illuminating the disruptions within society and showing an alternative (pins over stitches) as a mode of critique. It also makes visible the way that DIY technologies appropriate what is already extant for new purposes. A closure for diapers becomes an earring; a triumph of mass production becomes a rallying cry for the failures of capitalism. Most important, however, this aesthetic requires that we use the individual to see the whole of the social. Instead of attempting to stick out in order to appeal to artistry, artistry is used to illuminate social pain. This invocation of the safety pin’s relationship to the political means explicitly engaging with the desire to rupture these extant systems while also showing the imbrication of capitalism and individuality. The safety pin, in many regards, was developed as a technology to enable comfort—better adhering bandages and diapers means fewer leaks and a closing off of danger. No longer is another person needed to ward off danger. One can safely cocoon oneself inside a world of cloth. In that way, one can also easily escape. This produces the effect of altering the temporality of the safety pin. Unlike the straight pin, the safety pin isn’t just a step in the process, but a potentially integral part of things. One does not quite know what will happen next—a doing or an undoing. The straight pin and the safety pin inhabit different epistemological worlds even as they both offer insight into spectacularity. In RISD and the MMA’s push to identify the punk and the dandy as particular emblems of individuality in 2013, they show us how this individuality is constructed materially through particular garments and the objects that produce them. The punk and dandy emerge as figures of rebellion—the dandy through the sedimentation of expertise and the intricate folds that the straight pin can provide; the punk through the unexpected (and temporary) use of commodity culture. Interestingly, these seemingly divergent aesthetics mirror recent trends in queer studies, which has turned to punk and dandyism to theorize alternative ways of being (and dressing).27 Making the aesthetic political is not new, but queer theory’s investment in the punk and the dandy has to do with the contemporary framing of both as nonnormative. Though both are spectacular and different in their nonnormativity, a historically embedded excavation of the dandy and the punk will allow a thinking through of the folds that historic specificity adds, and the impossibility of thinking of rebellion as a form.

On Pins and Needles   99

Spectacular Gaps/ Epistemological Folds In the RISD and MMA exhibits’ production of spectacularity as a consumable space of to-be-looked-at-ness, what becomes available and malleable are the materials used to construct these identities. The consistency of the form relies on the lowest common denominator. In this case that means the straight pin and the safety pin. In these scenarios the identities of the wearers do not seem to really matter. The pins convey various essences to their wearers. In this way, we can have Waris Ahluwalia, Sikh jewelry designer, alongside Patty Smith, alongside the Sapeurs (La Societé des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes) from the Congo. On the punk side, the evacuation of wearers to focus on designers already creates a sense that it is about form rather than personality. Further, given the fact that the exhibit focuses on couture, and some of the exhibits feature an array of models in these garments, identity is not the thing. Producing spectacularity requires more than making folds in cloth, so we must consider the historical specificity of these figures. While both the straight pin and the safety pin are key components of the aesthetic universes of the dandy and punk, they also show us the ways that the dandy and punk emerge from the prevailing culture, even if they attitudinally separate from it. These objects have longer histories than these figures, and, further, these figures are not entirely reducible to these objects. In this way, it may be useful to remember that pins provide an incomplete suture. These gaps are the basis for their utility as well as a place where we can look to see the particular contours of spectacularity. History illuminates other versions of spectacularity, which is where queer theory and its investment in sexuality, race, and signification come in. The straight pin produces the bespoke suit as untimely (in that the folds are permanent and the techniques are from an earlier moment), but the suit and the labor of its production, the self-objectification that it entails, have also become associated with male femininity and homosexuality. Here, we need not look further than the fact that Oscar Wilde is frequently invoked as the ster­e­o­typ­i­cal dandy. Wilde’s interest in style (both in clothing and in writing) and his flamboyant public persona fit in with prevailing nineteenth-century views that male femininity correlated with homosexuality. Karli Cerankowski writes, “it is not simply that all forms of dandyism have become associated with homosexuality but, rather, that a specific performance of the effeminate male dandy has come to signify gay male sexuality. This association may be attributed to the fact that Wilde’s performance of a transgressive masculinity was seen as a failure to measure up to certain standards of modern masculine presentation, a failure that later came to be correlated with his perceived failures at heterosexuality.”28 In Cerankowski’s analysis, we see that it is not only important that Wilde wore tailored suits as an expression of his personality, but that Wilde’s behavior—his acid tongue and propensity toward indiscreet sexual liaisons— flew counter to norms of Victorian-era masculinity. In the prevailing descriptions of Wilde as a gender outlaw, his clothes and mannerisms became marked as spectacular,

100   Amber Jamilla Musser and the dandy became queer. In this brief narrative, we see not only the rebellious charge of spectacularity, but the importance of context—since earlier dandies might have been figured as anachronistic (recall Baudelaire’s description of the dandy as melancholic), but not necessarily transgressive in terms of gender or sexuality. In contemporary analyses, however, these links between gender transgression, queerness, and dandyism are an important aspect of the dandy’s significance as an emblem of individuality and spectacularity. While the story of the dandy’s racialization does not have as precise a point of origin, the relationship between spectacularity and race is just as important for thinking about the context for dandies. In Slaves to Fashion, her book on black dandies, Monica Miller argues that looking specifically at what happens when black bodies are at the center of these discussions of subversion and spectacularity causes things to change dramatically. She writes, “Because the dandy is a figure who exists in the space between masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual, seeming and being, even when not specifically racialized, an investigation of the black dandy’s emergence and perpetuation as a cultural sign of this indeterminacy says much about the politics and aesthetics of racialization and identity formation.”29 Through the prism of race, the dandy’s performance of subversion is no longer about the spectacularity of the individual, but about the racialized quality of spectacularity. In sharp contrast to my analysis of the way that the form of the dandy brings together spectacularity and individuality, Miller describes the ways that the black dandy is made to speak not only for himself, but also for blackness. He is not regarded as expressing individual style, but of making others aware of social critique: “When racialized as black, the dandy’s extravagant or tastefully reserved bodily display signifies well beyond obsessive self-fashioning and play with social hierarchies. The black dandy’s style is, from the beginning, always simultaneously personal, cultural, representative of ‘the race,’ and about representation even as it evacuates norms of racialization, class privileges, gender assignments, and the rules of sexuality in ways similar to that of his European dandy brothers.”30 While spectacularity matters, so does thinking about the politics of reception and the conditions of production. The black dandy makes evident the difference in these conditions. In one instance he may be wearing a bespoke suit, but it may be at the behest of his master, as in the case of Mungo Macaroni, or he may be using the suit to produce a narrative of racial uplift, as in the case of W. E. B. DuBois. In thinking about the dandy as pure aesthetic, these undercurrents of spectacularity are lost to the folds of history. The RISD exhibit asks us to imagine that the dandy’s vanity and drive toward individuality are the only elements at work. Even as we may be able to read the possibility of homosociality and intimate knowledge of the male body into the process of tailoring, the types of spectacularity that thinking about race and sexuality produce are evasive. The forms of spectacularity that race and sexuality bring forth have to do with identity politics and representation—all of which is beyond the purview of the straight pin’s epistemology. To see this failure, one must look no further than the Sapeurs, who are hailed in the dandy exhibit by name and via several beautiful photographs by Baudouin Mouanda.

On Pins and Needles   101 One of the photographs shows two African young men in bright suits weaving their way through a crowd. One of the men wears a neon-green, three-piece suit with y­ ellow lining and a yellow handkerchief and carries a cane. The other gentleman dons a ­yellow double-breasted suit, blue shirt, and black tie. The people in the crowd are in T-shirts. These Sapeurs, then, do not blend in, but importantly, they are not described here as individuals, but as members of a Congolese subculture. The subculture developed as a political mode of dissent against a regime invested in the ideology of African authenticity. James Brooke describes the Sapeurs as “a cultural affront to people of the older generation, who speak of ‘authenticity,’ anti-colonialism, and Marxism. For the sapeur, the only ‘ism’ to follow is narcissism.”31 Brooke breathlessly describes the sartorial circuit as beginning on the pages of Africa Elite and Jeune Afrique, through immigrants returning from Paris with bulging suitcases, to the young Sapeurs who covet these wares; if men cannot afford them, they borrow items from friends or rent particular articles. In addition to the RISD exhibit, the Sapeurs have been featured in music videos, photography books, and a 2014 worldwide Guinness beer campaign. Even among a wide array of spectacles, they are a spectacle. There is a certain amount of exoticization in this North American and European interest in the Sapeurs—their investment (financial and sartorial in European modes of dress), the African influence on Western clothing, and the contrast between the poverty in the Congo and their suits. Being a dandy is more than having a suit or a rebellious attitude; much also depends on cultural contributions. While the original dandy was all about elegance and personality, here sharp dressing serves to create affiliation and community. To-be-looked-at is not just about stopping the narrative, but about enabling a pattern of recognition, subverting expectations of decadence (or catering to them), and paying homage to earlier eras of well-dressed gentlemen. This aspect of affiliation is directly counter to the prevailing ethos of individuality and spectacularity that the RISD exhibit highlights. Thinking about a coterie of gentlemen highlights the normalizing structures that the dandy disrupts, rather than his or her individual personality. The collectivity of Sapeurs also emphasizes the cultural production that the dandy is capable of producing. “Quirk” becomes message and the idea that elegance can truly be simple is dashed. In these moments, the dandy looks more like the punk. While punk is about destabilizing hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality, it must also be historicized. In a reading of punk that seeks to enlarge its origins beyond 1974, Tavia Nyong’o describes the history of punk’s association with sodomy and blackness, discussing the fact that punk is slang for an African American gay man and Richard Hell’s offhand comment to New Musical Express that “Punks are niggers.”32 This formulation of punk positions the aesthetic explicitly against the aspirations of the dandy. Nyong’o describes this position thus: “the punk-as-nigger identifies against the glamorous homosexual.”33 However, by using McLaren as the origin point, the MMA exhibit effectively whites out the colorful racialized histories of punks. Though Nyong’o’s article explains the forms of identification and distancing that work in the solidification of one particular narrative of punk, he also asks us to think more critically about the concept

102   Amber Jamilla Musser and what it could mean as it works across various vernaculars. In restaging punk as an attitude that is translated across different situations, we see even more clearly that it is the act that is important, rather than any particular identity. Punk focuses on doing and making: a continuity of terms. In this context, punk’s spectacularity cannot be crystallized into an identity in the same way as the dandy. While punk culture and punk communities exist, these can easily slide toward the arena of commercialization, thereby highlighting the spectacularity of novelty and finding evermore objects to repurpose and deconstruct. In this context the safety pin is an intriguing object. The epistemic world that it creates is surprisingly robust, even as it writes itself out the picture. Since it is so strongly identified with punk, its logic dictates that new objects must be sought and consumed. In this way, the MMA exhibit is actually historically specific in unexpected ways. It shows us the lifecycle of one of punk’s objects, but it cannot show us which way punk will lean. In this way, perhaps a true punk aesthetic cannot be linked to material history; perhaps it is always about the future and objects-yet-to-come. As José Esteban Muñoz writes, “At the heart of the punk rock commons one locates the desire, indeed the demand, for ‘something else’ that is not the holding pattern of a devastated present, with its limits and impasses.”34 Material history, then, shows us the difference between these two modes of spectacularity and the epistemologies of cognitive objects. While both are about embodied performances of individuality and agency, the straight pin leads us into the world of the bespoke suit and the form of the dandy. It also creates the dandy as inhabiting a temporality of pastness. On the other hand, the safety pin marks a particular moment within punk: a moment when rebellion was made visible through the repurposing of a commercial object. It also shows us the ways in which that moment has gone, and that punk’s spectacularity is an out-of-timeness that has to do with the not-yet-here. For queer theory, adding materiality into the mix means nuancing these visions of spectacularity, allowing us to parse the line between rebellion and neoliberal normativity more closely. It may come down to attitude, but the ability to express that depends on the material.

Notes 1. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,” trans. Jonathan Mayne in Frances Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Westview Press, 1982), 1–35; 26. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 27. 4. Glenn O’Brien, “Beau Brummell” in Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, eds., Artist, Rebel, Dandy: Men of Fashion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013), 16. 5. John W Smith, director’s foreword to Irvin and Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy, ix–xiii; ix. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

On Pins and Needles   103 8. The exhibit’s curators, Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, who are costume and textile curators, write: “we hope to shift the focus from the prevailing image of the dandy as superficial, flamboyant, self-indulgent, and mindless to reveal him instead as an artistic, rebellious figure who employs profound thought and imagination in his sartorial and personal presentation, forging a unique path to self-discovery and self-expression.” Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, introduction to Irvin and Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy, 1–13. 9. Andrew Wilson, “Malcolm McLaren,” in Irvin and Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy, 102. 10. Ibid. 11. Thomas  P.  Campbell, director’s foreword to Andrew Bolton, with Richard Hell, John Lydon, and Jon Savage, Punk: Chaos to Couture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 10. 12. Andrew Bolton, introduction to Bolton, Punk: Chaos to Couture, 12–17; 13. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. Thomas P. Campbell, director’s foreword to Bolton, Punk: Chaos to Couture, 10. 16. Richard Hell, “Punk Couture: Insides Out” in Bolton, Punk: Chaos to Couture, 19–20. 17. Thom Brown, “Preface,” in Irvin and Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy, xv. 18. Kate Ivins and Laurie Anne Brewer, introduction, in Irvin and Brewer, Artist, Rebel, Dandy, 1. 19. Tricia Henry, “Punk and Avant-Garde Art,” Journal of Popular Culture 17 (1984): 30–36, 30. 20. William Hunt, “Dress-Pin,” William Richardson and John Richardson, assignee. Patent 6281. April 10, 1849. Print. 21. Christopher Morley, Safety Pins and Other Essays (London: J. Cape, 1925). 22. John Lydon, “A Beautiful Ugliness Inside,” in Bolton, Punk: Chaos to Couture, 20–22. 23. Ibid. 24. Ian P. Moran, “Punk: The Do-It-Yourself Subculture,” Social Sciences Journal 10 (2010): 58–65; 58. 25. Ryan Moore and Michael Roberts, “Do-It-Yourself Mobilization: Punk and Social Movements,” Mobilization 14 (2009): 273–291; 276. 26. Tom Buechele, “DIY Masculinity: Masculine Identity in DIY Punk Subculture,” Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society (2006): 20. 27. Social Text published an issue on the relationship between punk and theory: Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013), which used punk as a site to think about different anti-normative modes of coming together. Monica Miller’s work on the black dandy has also resurrected conversations about fashion and politics. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 28. Karli June Cerankowski, “Queer Dandy Style: The Cultural Politics of Tim Gunn’s Asexuality,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 41 (2013): 226–244; 230–231. 29. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 5. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. James Brooke, “In Congo, Fashion from a Suitcase,” The New York Times, March 17, 1988: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/garden/in-congo-fashion-from-a-suitcase.html 32. Tavia Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (2005): 19–34, 24. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. José Esteban Muñoz, “Gimme Gimme This . . . Gimme Gimme That: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons,” Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013): 95–110; 96.

104   Amber Jamilla Musser

Bibliography Adams, Nathaniel. I Am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman. Berlin: Gestalten, 2013. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays.” Translated by Jonathan Mayne. In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Frances Frascina and Charles Harrison, with the assistance of Deirdre Paul, 1–35. London: Harper & Row in association with the Open University, 1982. Buechele, Tom. “DIY Masculinity: Masculine Identity in DIY Punk Subculture.” Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society (2006): 20. Bolton, Andrew, with Richard Hell, John Lydon, and Jon Savage. Punk: Chaos to Couture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. Brooke, James. “In Congo, Fashion from a Suitcase.” The New York Times, March 17, 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/garden/in-congo-fashion-from-a-suitcase.html Brown, Jayna, Patrick Deer, and Tavia Nyong’o, eds. “Punk and Its Afterlives.” Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013). Cerankowski, Karli June. “Queer Dandy Style: The Cultural Politics of Tim Gunn's Asexuality.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 41 (2013): 226–244. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1991. First published 1979 by Methuen. Henry, Tricia. “Punk and Avant-Garde Art.” Journal of Popular Culture 17 (1984): 30–36. Hunt, William. “Dress-Pin.” William Richardson and John Richardson, assignee. Patent 6281. April 10, 1849. Print. Irvin, Kate, and Laurie Anne Brewe, eds. Artist, Rebel, Dandy: Men of Fashion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013. Kaye, Jeremy. “Twenty-First-Century Victorian Dandy: What Metrosexuality and the Heterosexual Matrix Reveal about Victorian Men.” Journal of Popular Culture 42 (2009): 103–125. Kugelberg, Johan, and Jon Savage, eds. Punk: An Aesthetic. New York: Rizzoli, 2012. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Moore, Ryan, and Michael Roberts. “Do-It-Yourself Mobilization: Punk and Social Movements.” Mobilization 14 (2009): 273–279. Moran, Ian P. “Punk: The Do-It-Yourself Subculture.” Social Sciences Journal 10 (2010): 58–65. Morley, Christopher. Safety Pins and Other Essays. London: J. Cape, 1925. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Gimme Gimme This . . . Gimme Gimme That: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013): 95–110. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Punk’d Theory” Social Text 23: 3–4 (2005): 19–34. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s.” Radical History Review 100 (2008): 103–119. Yazan, Senem. “The Black Princess of Elegance: The Emergence of the Female Dandy.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 3 (2012): 101–115.

chapter 6

Mi n d, Ti m e , a n d M ater i a l Engagem en t Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden

In recent years, it has become almost commonplace in archaeology to declare that our social and cognitive life is not just mediated by the material things we make and use but is entangled with and very often constituted by them.1 How exactly is this changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming? More important, how is this new emphasis on materiality, and the recognition it brings with it that human life cannot be understood apart from its material entailments, affecting historians’ understanding of material culture? As archaeologists, we are especially interested in the phenomenon of material engagement2 and the various social ontologies3 and material agencies4 that this engagement enacts and substantiates in different cultural contexts. The implications of the view that humans and things coconstitute each other specifically are important for understanding the developmental and evolutionary processes by which human cognitive abilities develop and change in different cultural and historical contexts. In particular, the argument for the constitutive intertwining of mind with the material world brings with it a new conception of human cognitive evolution that is grounded in situated learning, development, and thus historical and cultural specificity.5 It is thus valuable to incorporate a material engagement perspective in the historical study of change over time.

Material Engagement and the Extended Mind Traditionally, and for various historical and other reasons, the received view of the human mind has been that of an internal brain-bound device operating primarily by

106   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden constructing and manipulating internal representations of the outside world. This ­so-called computational, cognitivist, or representational view of mind6 has largely defined the field of contemporary cognitive sciences and has influenced how other ­disciplines such as history, archaeology, and anthropology have come to perceive the place of mind, and the value of incorporating a cognitive dimension, in the way they try to make sense of human beings and becomings. As one can imagine, the predominantly internalist logic of traditional cognitive science left limited space for productive dialogue, and it raised suspicion in the majority of scholars in the humanities and social sciences who, rightly, remain unwilling to follow any universally reductionist strategy that attempts to capture the human mind in purely neural and representational terms. This type of cognitive science had very little to offer toward an understanding of historical and culture-specific processes of change and human becoming. The term human becoming signifies that humanity is not a genetic set-up or an evolutionary stage, but an accomplishment, a dynamic coevolutionary entanglement of people, materials, and things. Human becoming is never finished; it is always ongoing.7 This has all been radically changing with the emergence of various new approaches recognizing the embodied, extended, distributed, enacted, and interactive character of human cognition.8 These new conceptual frameworks are not just offering viable alternatives to classical computational models but open the way for true interaction among fields of research that were traditionally thought of as being incompatible. These new perspectives on the life of mind have significant differences in their approach and theoretical commitments relevant to the hard problems of mental location and representation.9 Nonetheless, they are all more or less united in their attempts to understand the human mind as a relational embodied entity, and their opposition to cognitivism and methodological individualism. To put it in brief, the ontological foundation that unites the aforementioned frameworks is one that recognizes that the old categorical divisions between a mental “internal” realm where mind resides and a material “external” realm where action takes place gives way to a hybrid space of dynamical interaction. Instead of two fundamentally different kinds of action, internal or cognitive and external or behavioral, we now have a continuity of mind as action that draws on a variety of heterogeneous resources. Some of those resources might be biologically related to the human body or more specifically to the brain; ­others might be material or artificial and thus part of the outside material world. Nonetheless, all these different kinds of resources, biological and nonbiological, are recognized as cognitive since they may contribute equally, although not in the same way, in the making of the mind. In archaeology, new theoretical perspectives such as material engagement theory (MET)10 and neuroarchaeology11 have been building on this new theoretical foundation from their distinctive object-oriented perspective, and from the vantage point of long-term change. In brief, the main idea behind MET is precisely to redraw, and where necessary altogether dissolve, the boundaries among brains, bodies, and things. This new understanding about the extended, enacted, and distributed character of thinking12 and the cognitive life of things13 also raises serious doubts about the

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   107 ­ eo-Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution.14 It also stands in opposition to the n basic premises of evolutionary psychology that continue to view the human mind as a collection of functionally specialized (i.e., domain-specific) computational modules inside the head.15 The unification between the study of mind and the study of material culture we advocate here is very different from the one at the heart of neo-evolutionary theory.16

Problems with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis We begin with evolutionary psychology. Here we find two main problems. The first ­concerns the computational character of psychological adaptations and the related arguments about their domain-specific internal structure. The second concerns the false dichotomy between evolved and learned behaviors.17 There are two fundamental assumptions in evolutionary psychology: First we have the so-called massive modularity hypothesis, which states, in brief, that the functional architecture of the human mind comprises a number of different, evolved, specialized mechanisms, or “modules.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby used the analogy of a Swiss Army knife to describe their vision of the domain-specific architecture of the human mind. The second fundamental premise states that these modules are the products of natural selection, adapted to ­perform specific problem-solving tasks as originally encountered by our Stone Age ancestors in past environments that no longer exist.18 Against the basic theoretical commitments of evolutionary psychology for a “modular” and “maladaptationist”19 view of human cognitive evolution (that is, the view of mind as an innately driven process adapted to past environments that no longer exist), the integrative perspective of material engagement that we propose brings with it a new emphasis on materiality and the long-term developmental mechanisms by which the bidirectionally mutual constitution of brain and culture occurs. We want to resist any tendency to reduce the nature of change in human beings to a series of underlying domain-specific adaptations and shift the focus, instead, on processes of deep en­cul­tu­ ra­tion, dynamical enskillment, and “profound embodiment.”20 If there is anything truly distinctive and universal about human mind, it must be its openness to cultural influence and variation. This is not to deny that a fair amount of genetically guided structure exists, but to recognize, instead, that this genetic endowment and/or neurobiological underpinning becomes important only in relation to the human ability to alter and manipulate the nature and flexibility of the developmental pathways that allow or inhibit environmentally and culturally derived plastic changes in real ontogenetic time. How, then, can we make better sense of the ongoing tension between the way human beings appear to be constrained by, on the one hand, their biology and their evolutionary history, and on the other, historical-specific cultural factors? One negative implication

108   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden that evolutionary psychology has had on our thinking about human cognitive b ­ ecoming is that it reiterates a false dichotomy between evolved or innate and learned or acquired capacities. This misrepresentation has been a source of great confusion. Are we free to  learn anything we want, and if we are not free, what exactly is the nature of the ­constraints on the learning process? Does the human mind resembles a “blank slate,” or does learning presuppose some innate “acquisition device” or “instinct” like the one Chomsky21 and Pinker22 have famously argued in the case of language? It may seem that a simple way to frame these questions would be to say that “innate” is whatever is not “acquired.” What, then, about the process or capacity for learning itself? When evolutionary psychologists argue that humans possess an evolved capacity for X or Y, what they essentially mean is that these capacities are not learned in the way we learn how to read or tie a knot. But how can you separate reading, as something you learn, from those “innate” processes that enable you to learn how to read? The important question for us, then, is not how you separate innate capacities from those that are acquired. Rather, the question is, whether there is anything about human life that is truly and solely innate or acquired, and if there is, how does it matter for human cognitive life? We suspect that this opposition of a universal evolved human nature versus our culture-specific ways of learning is a false opposition. We also think that one of the main reasons for the per­sist­ ence of this false opposition can be found in the influence that computational thinking still has on the way psychology traditionally understands the basic structure of human mental architecture. Another reason, as Louise Barrett points out, is probably “because the argument is framed in terms of adaptation, when the real issue . . . [is] the degree of plasticity or flexibility shown by our learning mechanisms.”23 This brings us to the neo-Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution we mentioned previously. Traditional culture-gene coevolution theory24 is based on the fundamental premise that there are two distinguishable, yet complementary and interacting, evolutionary processes: that is, genetic evolution and cultural evolution. In other words, the main claim is that cultural evolution exhibits the Darwinian properties of variation, inheritance, and the accumulation of successive cultural modifications over time. An immediate implication of seeing culture as an evolutionary system in its own right is that cultural evolution could then be studied using similar methods and concepts to those already in use to study biological evolution (e.g., population-dynamic concepts and evolutionary models). Such a unified approach to the study of cultural change might look appealing from a methodological or empirical perspective, but it embodies various shortcomings, especially from a material culture perspective. Important to point out, in this connection, is that for dual-inheritance theory, as is also the case for the majority of the proponents of Darwinian models of cultural evolution, culture is more or less defined as acquired information (knowledge, beliefs, and values) that is inherited through social learning, stored in human brains, and expressed in behavior and artifacts.25 We suggest that this view of culture as a collection of internal representations inside the head, and the epiphenomenal conception of material culture that it implies, are deeply flawed. For one thing, they misrepresent materiality as a passive means of adaptation

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   109 and offer an erroneous view of the relationship between cognition and material culture. For another, they reiterate the nature/culture dichotomy. We believe that neither the active nature of material culture nor the nature of change in material culture can be accounted for solely in Darwinian terms. We are not denying, of course, that cultural change, so long as it involves human beings, may well resemble or comprise elements that resemble Darwinian evolution in the basic sense of the term. However, even if one could borrow a Darwinian expression like “descent with modification” and use it as a metaphor to describe how, let’s say, a given “style” is changing over time, it would be a mistake to think that this metaphor reflects anything other than a superficial similarity between ways of speaking about change. The historical continuity of material forms and skills we often describe using the term “style” in archaeology is doing much more than offering a passive collection of object types in the service of cultural transmission. Instead, different styles set up sensory and “cognitive ecologies”26 of their own, into which people need to fit and adapt by way of skillful coping and learning. They also place obligations on the way we interact with other people and educate our senses, and they shape the ways we act and think. Moreover, object traditions or styles are able, in ways that escape the narrow logic of adaptation, to “use human muscles and skills to bring about their own reproduction.”27 This is why we are skeptical about the value of applying biological metaphors and phylogenetic analyses to infer and reconstruct historical patterns of cultural artifacts and their transformation.28 To be fair, some of the problems we have pointed out are now beginning to be recognized. To give one example, a 2007 paper by Ilya Tëmkin and Niles Eldredge focusing on the case of two musical instruments (the cornet and the Baltic psaltery) provides a detailed exposition of the differences between biological and material cultural evolution and the implications they entail for the application of traditional phylogenetics.29 But overcoming these problems demands a more radical approach than the mere recognition that there are fundamental differences in the modes of information transfer in biological and material cultural realms, as well as in the nature of evolving entities themselves. Such a critique would implicitly reiterate the problem. Although it attacks the basic underlying assumption for homologous similarity, it retains the dichotomy between a biological versus a cultural domain. As a consequence, it continues to maintain the standard distinction between cognition and material culture. But in doing so, it leaves unaddressed precisely what matters the most, that is, the hybrid realm of the intersection of biology and culture—the realm of material engagement. In other words, the main issue here pertains rather to the nature of the connection and interaction (and potential information flow or exchange) between cognition and material culture. Specifically, it relates to the implications of the claim for a constitutive intertwining of mind with the material world in human evolution. The neo-Darwinian approach, in all its different manifestations, has had little success in bringing out the relationships between people and their object worlds. Although the “population thinking” approach to cultural evolution30 manages to avoid the fallacy of classical sociobiology and memetics by recognizing that cultural change is not a mere extension of biological evolution, it nonetheless fails to incorporate a strongly

110   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden i­nteractionist and dynamical view that would enable overcoming this problem. The kind of “interaction” that one can find at the heart of the gene-culture coevolution approach is far too soft to provide an adequate description of the relation between cognition and material culture. We are not denying that for gene-culture coevolution theory, “culture” is indeed recognized as an important influence, but as long as the cognitive system and its development remain confined to the organism alone, environmental and cultural resources might influence the process of development and evolution, but they remain fundamentally distinct and secondary when compared with genetic influences. To a large extent, the conceptual barriers currently confronting neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology have long been pointed out, especially from the niche-construction perspective.31 Niche-construction theory, since Richard Lewontin first introduced it to evolutionary biology in the 1980s,32 has consistently and explicitly emphasized “the capacity of organisms to modify natural selection in their environment and thereby act as co-directors of their own and other species’ evolution.”33 The recognition that the relationship between an organism and its relative niche can be modified, and that those alterations (conscious, in the case of humans) matter to the evolutionary process, also demonstrates the evolutionary significance of the huge variability we see archaeologically in material culture and the built environment. From the perspective of material engagement theory, the recognition of the material world as a constitutive and efficacious part of the human cognitive system means that interaction elicited by our surroundings (human or nonhuman) not only influences our cognitive abilities and affective responses from the very beginning but also shapes the form and the constitutive mechanisms of interaction. Different forms of material culture demand and dictate different kinds of engagement and forms of relatedness. New materialities (objects, materials, or assemblages) bring about new modes of acting and thinking. Those changes are not simply epiphenomenal, adding layers of complexity and variation on a stable, evolved core of natural cognitive capacities. Instead, they penetrate and alter the historical constitution of that core. Evolutionary psychology and neo-Darwinianism misrepresent human nature because their account of material culture lacks this recognition. How can we understand these processes better? A notion of metaplasticity, able to accommodate the hypothesis that the plasticity of the mind is continuous and inseparably constituted with the plasticity of culture, offers a promising avenue for building some analytical bridges between the short- and long-term aspects of human cognitive becoming.34 Moving away from the dichotomous account of development and evolution toward an account incorporating elements from developmental systems theory (DST),35 “niche-construction theory,”36 and neuroconstructivism37 and probabilistic epigenesis38 will put us in a better position to recognize the multiplicity and dynamical character of resources contributing to the developmental process. What this means, essentially, is that there is no predetermined central driver (genetic or cultural) but instead a temporally emergent coalition of situated developmental forces. Karola Stotz phrased the issue in this especially insightful way:

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   111 The focus on the human-being-in-its-developmental-niche dispenses with the need of a definition of humankind based on universal and genetically specified abstractions. It should help us to embrace plasticity, human self-engineering, and an openness to the world. The “nature” of the organism becomes the natural outcome nurtured through the open-ended process of development that is not genetically predetermined but reliably and flexibly guided by the process of developmental niche construction.39

The proposed shift of focus on the plastic and changing nature of the human mind through an examination of the dynamic relationships or linkages among brains, bodies, and things changes, no doubt, our ways of looking at the past. But how exactly can all this aid historians and archaeologists?

Mind, Time, and Material Agency Archaeologists, working primarily with material assemblages and artifacts of the past, are very aware and interested in the plasticity of the object world and the different forms it takes—although they use different terms (e.g., style and cultural change) to describe these phenomena. Archaeologists are far less familiar with or interested in the plasticity of the mind and brain, and as a consequence, they are unaware of the important consequences that the latter might have on the former and vice versa. The same applies to history. With some noteworthy recent exceptions, such as Daniel Smail’s book On Deep History and the Brain, the call for rethinking “humanity’s deep history as history, not just biology or anthropology”40 has yet to receive the attention it deserves. There are many reasons for this, but Smail suggests that those that relate especially to historical writing essentially come down to simple academic “inertia” and the various “ghost” theories and ideas that structure the way we think about the mind in the past without our even being aware of their presence.41 For instance, a traditional obstacle to a deep history of mind is the common belief that archaeology in general and prehistory in particular study material culture because they lack other forms of historical (i.e., written) sources of evidence. But this assumption about the superiority or directedness of written evidence has been falsified and should be abandoned. We are not saying this because we think material culture can be seen as a kind of text that the archaeologist could potentially decipher. This is not what we mean when we say that objects are active. Rather, it is because material culture, unlike any historical document, enacts the history that a text can only describe. Objects can be viewed as historical agents because history would be different if they were not there. It is in the latter sense, namely, in its capacity as an enactive sign able to “bring forth” and constitute rather than simply “represent” or narrate, that the agency and materiality of the historical document as a “thing” should be understood. The study of history and the making of history are inseparably connected with the tangibility of everyday things.42 The written document

112   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden is just such another “tangible thing” with its own special properties and affordances. Another good example of “ghost” ideas are the cognitivist theories found at the heart of evolutionary psychology and old-fashioned computational cognitive science. The controlling presence and influence of cognitivism on how we think about the mind is responsible for making most historians, archaeologists, and social anthropologists skeptical about incorporating a cognitive dimension in their study. As mentioned this is changing now. A number of alternative, influential frameworks that open up new analytical paths to human becoming, and deal more seriously with the nature of the links between brains, bodies, and things, demonstrate that we no longer need to be bound by representational logic. The renewed interest, on the one hand, in the engagement of mind with the material world, and on the other, in the agency and vitality of things, has been especially useful for overcoming the problems with the cognitivist paradigm, and doing away with some deeply misconceived “internalist” assumptions about the function, ontology, and location of human cognitive operations.43 Still, the question of what we mean when we speak about the agency of things remains open. There are at present various theoretical trends (ranging along a continuum of radicalness), both within and outside of archaeology, that explore these issues.44 It suffices to point out here some of the underlying threads and potential pitfalls that could help us better understand the need for taking material culture seriously. One very popular, but we believe unhelpful, way to think about the agency of things is to ascribe to them, as the anthropologist Alfred Gell45 appears to have suggested, a kind of “secondary agency”—that is, to think of objects as agents with derived intentionality. But this conception renders material culture a passive instrument of human intentions and probably “distracts attention from Gell’s main point, which is that we should concentrate on the effects of objects and the formal qualities of objects which were aimed at creating effects.”46 It is important to clarify, then, that the notion of material agency we advocate here does not aim to animate things in some way that will make them look more like people, but with certain deficiencies of intention.47 Such an isomorphic conception will not help us overcome the distinction between animate people and inanimate objects. As Ian Hodder points out, one characteristic of the entanglement of people and things is that “our relations with things are often asymmetrical, leading to entrapments in particular pathways from which it is difficult to escape.”48 The whole purpose of recognizing that the objects we make and use can be seen as prosthetic extensions of ourselves is to acknowledge material culture as a creative and constitutive part of social and cognitive life, rather than as a passive instrument of externalization. In other words: “Objects can be seen to be active, but they are active in the manner of objects not in the manner of people. . . . the active nature of objects lies in their ability to elicit and channel particular sensory responses on the part of people.”49 Ultimately, what we are after in emphasizing notions of material agency is not to establish a symmetry or isomorphy between people and things; it is instead to establish an isonomy in the way people and  things are treated when it comes to explaining human becoming. People and

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   113 things have an equal right to participate, from their own distinctive perspective, in the process of becoming, and thus we should not privilege the one over the other when it comes to studying that process. How, then, can an ecological approach to agency,50 incorporating notions of material agency51 and vital materiality,52 change the way we conceptualize the role of material culture in human cognitive life and history? A possible answer to this question can be found by concentrating on the effects of objects on the sets of social relations attached to various forms of sensory activity associated with their use and life history. A good starting point would be, for instance, to examine things as agents of tradition and change through the social relations they help create and maintain or renegotiate. Just by looking at the different forms and networks of production, exchange, and consumption, and by exploring their social and political consequences in different historical contexts, one could get an immediate, straightforward sense of the ways in which human and object histories inform and constitute each other through the creation and maintenance of social, emotional, and aesthetic links. The central idea that objects are capable of accumulating histories through their ex­ist­ ence has been expressed in archaeology through the notions of “life history”53 and “biography.”54 The basic premise behind what has become known as the biographical approach is that “as people and objects gather time, movement and change, they are constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with each other.”55 In this connection, a theory of material engagement incorporating notions of “metaplasticity,”56 “cognitive ecology,”57 and “social ontology”58 can be used to exemplify the recursive relationship between brains, bodies, and things by providing new relational ways of thinking about the flows and interactions among brain-body-world, in which each of these three terms acts as cause and effect, without attributing a causally determinant position to any one. A historical biography of material engagement is thus needed, one that will allow us to think comparatively about the changing effects the variety of relationships between people and things have in different cultural and historical contexts. This brings us to the second major way that material engagement can aid history, which is temporality. Very much like archaeology, history is particularly concerned with the study of longterm change and distinguishing what came “before” and “after.” The latter is essential for making sense of causality and understanding the temporality of different events. Especially in archaeology, time and material culture are two themes that define, more than anything else, what differentiates the archaeological perspective on the human condition. Moreover, as many archaeologists have pointed out, the two notions of time and material culture are linked.59 Geoff Bailey uses the term “palimpsest” to describe the process of superimposing successive activities over variable periods of time and the ways their material traces are partially destroyed, reworked, and transformed to create “complex layered and multi-temporal entities that disrupt conventional views of temporal sequence.”60 This intimate link between time and material culture can easily be extended to incorporate various aspects of human mind and consciousness.

114   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden For instance, conceptualizations of selfhood and memory are inseparable from the ­temporal awareness of past peoples. Obviously then, time is of the essence. Paradoxically, the study of human evolution has always been ahistorical and atemporal, as if the process of evolution exists out of time. The sense of time that one finds in classical evolutionary theory is predicated (explicitly or implicitly) as strictly separated from the lived time of human experience. The reason for this is quite simple: Evolution was seen as something that happens outside history (and development). On this construal, history begins when evolution stops. Against that claim, we argue that archaeologists and historians alike need to reconsider the problem of time through a rethinking of the nature of mind and evolution. The quest for establishing culturally sensitive and historically valid links between the brain’s functional structure and the plasticity of the object world calls for a methodology that, among other things, is able to integrate different temporalities and allow that connections can be made between microscale cognitive and neuroscientific theories and the macroscale material realities of the archaeological record. In this sense, material engagement provides a point of intersection for three interconnected time scales: evolution, development, and situated action. How is this possible? The role of material things is crucial for “binding” the temporality of daily life and action to that of the “longue durée” of history and evolution. We should keep in mind that time is one of the defining features of human phenomenal experience and thinking. Moreover, “human time flows on a number of levels”61 and operates at different speeds. One important question that unites history, archaeology, and anthropology concerns the nature of the relation connecting the varieties of phenomenal consciousness, and the varieties of historical consciousness operating over different scales, durations, and rhythms. We propose that the phenomenon of material engagement help humans solve the problem of how to live and think between often widely differing experiential levels (e.g., neural, bodily, cultural, and evolutionary). It also brings within our reach and conscious awareness the possible range of different time scales of activity available to us. Specifically, the engagement of the mind with the material world provides temporal anchoring and binding that helps us move and think across the scales of time.62 In particular, when humans engage the material world by using a simple artifact, they establish a bridge with the larger-scale processes at work beyond their awareness or control that are embodied in the objects at hand. With things, the past becomes present. Through their physical persistence and durable properties, as Geoff Bailey writes, [Things] give to human awareness a sense of time extending beyond individual lives and perceptions, and to archaeologists the opportunity for empirical exploration of human activities beyond the reach of personal observation, oral testimony or written records.63

The latter process must be of special interest to the historian.

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   115

Epilogue We started this chapter with a critique of current neo-evolutionary models of thinking about cultural change and their view of culture as a separate evolutionary system that operates in parallel to biological or genetic evolution. We proposed that the only way one could speak meaningfully of cultural and biological evolution is as forming a single inseparable and situated process of human becoming. Thus, we argued that a more holistic and relational conceptualization of human cognition as profoundly embodied, enacted, extended, and distributed opens the way to reanimate the importance of history and development in the study of human cognitive evolution. On this we also argued, with Smail, that although archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists alike need to be concerned with the workings of the mind, evolutionary psychology, at least as it is currently defined, “with its inexorable presentism is not . . . the way to go.”64 Instead, we argued that a focus on the phenomenon of material engagement provides a most productive and empirically accessible means to situate and integrate those processes (evolutionary, historical, and developmental). In particular, drawing on the principles of material engagement theory,65 and building on notions of “social ontology” and “object plasticity,”66 we sketched a different approach to the study of human becoming that recognizes the impact of material culture on the making and evolution of human intelligence from its earliest beginnings to the present day. The new focus on material culture that the material engagement approach brings with it will enable historians not only to rethink old questions and problems in new ways but to also construct a new approach to historical analysis, one in which minds and things play a more central role.

Notes 1. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons,  2012); Andrew Jones and Benjamin Alberti, “Archaeology after Interpretation,” in Archaeology after Interpretation: Returning Materials to Archaeological Theory, ed. Benjamin Alberti, Andrew Jones, and Joshua Pollard (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013); Carl Knappett, An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2011); Carl Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  2013); Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, “The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material Engagement and the Extended Mind,” in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, ed. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010); Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Bjørnar Olsen,

116   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Plymouth, UK: Altamira, 2010); Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007); Michael B. Schiffer and Andrea R. Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behaviour and Communication (London: Routledge, 1999); Timothy Webmoor and Christopher  L.  Witmore, “Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/ Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 41 (2008). 2. Malafouris, “The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement”; Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind; Malafouris and Renfrew, “The Cognitive Life of Things”; Colin Renfrew, “Towards a Theory of Material Engagement,” in Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World, ed. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004); Renfrew, Prehistory. 3. Chris Gosden, “Social Ontologies,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 363 (2008). 4. Chris Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12  (2005); Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach (New York: Springer, 2008). 5. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind. 6. E.g., Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975); Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2003). 7. We refer to this phenomenon as process ontology: see Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris, “Process Archaeology (p-arch),” World Archaeology 47 (2015): 701–717. 8. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Edwin Hutchins, “Cognitive Ecology,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010); Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Richard Menary, ed., The Extended Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010); Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); John Sutton, “Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory,” in Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Perspective, ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer, 2008); Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 9. For a recent review of the similarities and differences among the various theoretical ­models, see Sven Walter, “Situated Cognition: A Field Guide to Some Open Conceptual and Ontological Issues,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2014). 10. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind; Malafouris and Renfrew, “The Cognitive Life of Things.” 11. Lambros Malafouris, “Beads for a Plastic Mind: The ‘Blind Man’s Stick’ (BMS) Hypothesis and the Active Nature of Material Culture,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (2008b); Lambros Malafouris, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarchaeology,” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 88 (2010); Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, “Steps to a ‘Neuroarchaeology’ of Mind: An Introduction,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (2008); Colin Renfrew, Christopher  D.  Frith, and Lambros Malafouris, eds., The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   117 12. Clark, Being There; Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild; Noë, Action in Perception. 13. Malafouris and Renfrew, “The Cognitive Life of Things.” 14. Robert Boyd and Peter  J.  Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland, “Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006). 15. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “From Evolution to Behavior: Evolutionary Psychology as the Missing Link,” in The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality, ed. John Dupré (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 16. For different perspectives on the same problem, also see Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Louise Barrett, Thomas V. Pollet, and Gert Stulp, “From Computers to Cultivation: Reconceptualizing Evolutionary Psychology,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014); John Dupré, “Against Maladaptationism: Or What’s Wrong with Evolutionary Psychology?” in Knowledge as Social Order: Rethinking the Sociology of Barry Barnes, ed. Massimo Mazzotti (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008); Tim Ingold, “Beyond Biology and Culture: The Meaning of Evolution in a Relational World,” Social Anthropology 12 (2004); Tim Ingold and Gisli Pálsson, eds., Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Annette Kamiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2011). 17. For a recent discussion of these problems, see Barrett, Pollet, and Stulp, “From Computers to Cultivation.” 18. E.g., Cosmides and Tooby, “From Evolution to Behavior.” 19. Dupré, “Against Maladaptationism.” 20. Clark, Supersizing the Mind; Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark, “Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (2008). 21. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Vol. 11 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 22. Pinker, The Blank Slate. 23. Barrett, Pollet, and Stulp, “From Computers to Cultivation,” 5. 24. E.g., Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 25. E.g., ibid., 5; Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland, “Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution”; Peter  J.  Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 26. Hutchins, “Cognitive Ecology.” 27. Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?” 194. 28. E.g., Michael  J.  O’Brien, John Darwent, and R.  Lee Lyman, “Cladistics Is Useful for Reconstructing Archaeological Phylogenies: Paleoindian Points from the Southeastern United States,” Journal of Archaeological Science 28 (2001); Jamshid Tehrani and Mark Collard, “Investigating Cultural Evolution through Biological Phylogenetic Analyses of Turkmen Textiles,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21 (2002). 29. Ilya Tëmkin and Niles Eldredge, “Phylogenetics and Material Cultural Evolution,” Current Anthropology 48 (2007).

118   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden 3 0. Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 31. Kevin  N.  Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Marcus  W.  Feldman, “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000); Tim Lewens, “Prospects for Evolutionary Policy,” Philosophy 78 (2003); F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell  D.  Gray, eds., Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Kim Sterelny, “Niche Construction, Developmental Systems, and the Extended Replicator,” in Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, ed. Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 32. Richard C. Lewontin, “Gene, Organism and Environment,” in Evolution from Molecules to Men, ed. D. S. Bendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Richard C. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 33. Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together,” Nature Reviews Genetics 11 (2010): 139. 34. Also see Malafouris, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming.” 35. Paul  E.  Griffiths and Russell  D.  Gray, “Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation,” Journal of Philosophy XCI (1994); Paul  E.  Griffiths and Russell  D.  Gray, “Darwinism and Developmental Systems,” in Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, ed. Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  2001); Paul  E.  Griffiths and Karola Stotz, “How the Mind Grows: A Developmental Perspective on the Biology of Cognition,” Synthese 122 (2000); Eva Jablonka, Marion J. Lamb, and Anna Zeligowski, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray, eds., Cycles of Contingency. 36. Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction; Karola Stotz, “Extended Evolutionary Psychology: The Importance of Transgenerational Developmental Plasticity,” Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience 5 (2014); Sterelny, “Niche Construction.” 37. Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, “The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997). 38. Gilbert Gottlieb, “On Making Behavioral Genetics Truly Developmental,” Human Development 46 (2003); Gilbert Gottlieb, “Probabilistic Epigenesis,” Developmental Science 10 (2007). 39. Karola Stotz, “Human Nature and Cognitive–Developmental Niche Construction,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (2010): 498–499; Paul  E.  Griffiths and Karola Stotz, Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 40. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3. 41. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 3–4. 42. Laurel T. Ulrich et al., Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 43. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind. 44. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement   119 Press, 1998); Gosden, “Social Ontologies”; Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?”; Hodder, Entangled; Tim Ingold, “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012); Tim Ingold, “Prospect,” in Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold and Gisli Pálsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Niels Johannsen, “Archaeology and the Inanimate Agency Proposition: A Critique and a Suggestion,” in Excavating the Mind: Cross-sections through Culture, Cognition and Materiality, ed. Niels Johannsen, Mads D. Jessen, and Helle Juel Jensen (Denmark: Aarhus, 2012); Jones and Alberti, “Archaeology after Interpretation”; Andrew Jones and Nicole Boivin, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture; Knappett and Malafouris, eds., Material Agency; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lambros Malafouris, “At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency,” in Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Perspective, ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer, 2008); Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind; Olsen, In Defense of Things. 45. Gell, Art and Agency. 46. Chris Gosden, “Making Sense: Archaeology and Aesthetics,” World Archaeology 33 (2001), 164. 47. Also see Gosden, “Making Sense”; Malafouris, “At the Potter’s Wheel”; Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, chapter 6. 48. Ian Hodder, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-term View,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 19; Hodder, Entangled. 49. Gosden, “Making Sense,” 164–165. 50. Gell, Art and Agency; Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?” 51. Knappett and Malafouris, eds., Material Agency; Malafouris, “At the Potter’s Wheel”. 52. Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind; Michael Wheeler, “Minds, Things, and Materiality,” in The Cognitive Life of Things, ed. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010). 53. Ruth Tringham, “Archaeological Houses, Households, Housework and the Home,” in The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings, and Environments, ed. David N. Benjamin, David Stea, and Eje Arén (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1995). 54. Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People’s Lives (London: Routledge, 1998); Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 55. Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31 (1999), 169. 56. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind; Malafouris, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming.” 57. Hutchins, “Cognitive Ecology.” 58. Gosden, “Social Ontologies.” 59. E.g., Geoff Bailey, “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007); John L. Bintliff, ed., The Annales of School and Archaeology (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991); Chris Gosden, Social Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Arthur Bernard Knapp, “Archaeology and Annales: Time, Space, and Change,” in Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory, ed. Arthur Bernard Knapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Gavin Lucas, The Archaeology of Time

120   Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden (London: Routledge, 2004); Karenleigh  A.  Overmann, “Material Scaffolds in Numbers and Time,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23 (2012); also see Robb, this volume. 60. Bailey, “Time Perspectives,” 203. 61. Gosden, Social Being and Time, 17. 62. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, 246–247. 63. Bailey, “Time Perspectives,” 198. 64. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 8. 65. Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind. 66. Gosden, “Social Ontologies.”

Bibliography Bailey, Geoff. “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 198–223. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gosden, Chris. “Social Ontologies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 363 (2008): 2003–2010. Gosden, Chris. “What Do Objects Want?” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12 (2005): 193–211. Gosden, Chris, and Lambros Malafouris. “Process Archaeology (p-arch).” World Archaeology 47 (2015): 701–717. Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology 31 (1999): 169–178. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Oxford: John Wiley, 2012. Ingold, Tim. “Beyond Biology and Culture: The Meaning of Evolution in a Relational World.” Social Anthropology 12 (2004): 209–221. Knappett, Carl. An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Knappett, Carl, and Lambros Malafouris, eds. Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, 2008. Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Malafouris, Lambros, and Colin Renfrew. “The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material Engagement and the Extended Mind.” In The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, edited by Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, 1–12. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010. Oyama, Susan, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, eds. Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Renfrew, Colin. Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007. Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Varela, Francisco  J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

pa rt I I

H ISTORY, M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , A N D T E C H NOL O GY

chapter 7

M ater i a l Ti m e* John Robb

In the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures outside Paris, there is a platinum alloy bar that was, for almost a century, the meter—the permanent international reference standard for how long a meter really is. What would be the equivalent for time? Can one imagine an official metal bar recording how long a minute is? The obvious, commonsense reply is that this is silly: you cannot represent time materially because time is not material. It is invisible, intangible, fleeting. By definition, time is transient and material things have duration. But precisely the opposite is true. For humans, time is inherently a material process. Material things have inherent temporalities and it is through materials’ processes that we know time. Moreover, this is not a trivial fact. Materiality theorists have argued persuasively that the material qualities of objects are central to how human interaction with things unfolds, but they have typically discussed qualities such as color and hardness. A material’s temporality is at least as important as its visual qualities and texture, and it lies at the heart of both the experiential rhythms of social life and some of the most fundamental strategies people develop for dealing with things—scheduling and storage, for example. To understand human technologies, thus, we need to understand basic issues of materiality of which temporal qualities are a key example.

Materiality and Temporality Since the turn of the millennium, a wide range of theorists have rediscovered material culture, in fields ranging across literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. One of the major problems is that of materiality. The point of material culture, of course, is that it is material: there must be a fundamental connection between the material substance which things are made of and their social and historical being. Yet understanding this connection has proved remarkably recalcitrant. Virtually all material culture theorists agree that matter is not simply a blank parchment to be written by sociality, a pure, generic substance to be imprinted with form by social need; the

124   John Robb specific material qualities of things are essential. But operationalizing this analytically is more difficult. The great bulk of work on material culture in history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology is concerned principally with the social construction and ­discourse of objects; it has very little to say about their actual material qualities and what difference they make. Within archaeology and anthropology, the question is often posed through the term “materiality.”1 However, anthropologist Tim Ingold has charged that the term provides simply a vague placeholder for conceptualizing the implications of the qualities of matter,2 and it is true that materiality theorists often either focus exclusively on social construction of the object or reduce the material qualities exclusively to the level of stating that stone is hard or ocher is red, rendering them trivial and obvious. Objects thus become hollow or superficial: they are convenient surfaces merely to be inscribed with social meaning, like three-dimensional printed replicas of themselves made from generic plastic substance. The most useful approach to materiality is via seeing material qualities as affordances, following Ingold and building upon James Gibson’s work in environmental psychology.3 In this model, an external, material world certainly exists independent of human perception, but in order for people to act in it, they have to perceive and understand it. Thus, the specific material qualities of things—weight, hardness, color, texture, workability, taste, smell, and many others—exist as potentialities until people experience and cognize them. Material qualities are thus not physical properties which dictate how people perceive or use substances, in an unmediated way. Instead, they provide affordances for humans’ perception and use; they emerge from a process of negotiation between the material world and humans’ abilities to understand it and work with it. This is obvious: iron-bearing minerals afford a raw material which can be transformed into metal only once you understand that they do and have the technology to extract iron; through most of human history, they afforded a source of color. A forest affords the possibility of leisure and an encounter with nature only for people to whom “leisure” and “nature” are concepts through which they orient themselves in the world; to other people, it may afford other possibilities, from a foraged dinner to primal terror. Affordances do not dictate how people understand and work with materials, but we have to negotiate with them. We do not have to comment on the solidity of a stone, but people are ethno-realists whose action is grounded in encounter with the world; given stone’s contrast with other materials we commonly interact with, if we choose to do so, it is much more likely that we will say that it is hard than that we will say it is soft. This approach has two further implications for understanding materiality. One is that material qualities do not merely provide convenient signifiers in the construction of meaning (e.g., stone provides a convenient signifier of durability); instead, they are emergent properties which are interwoven with all the processes of interacting experientially with materials. For instance, basic production techniques and strategies will integrate and even produce specific material qualities. Temporality provides a good example of this. Secondly, although our intellectual instinct is to draw a hard and fast line between the qualities which the world has regardless of the observer and those which human observers impute to it, the properties which happen independently and

Material Time   125 those which are caused by human intervention—between “nature” and “culture” in other words—such a distinction is more misleading than useful here; for understanding ­materiality, the real action is in the indivisible mediating zone in which humans ­perceive and act.

The Materiality of Time Does time exist, and if so, in what sense? The nature of time is a matter for philosophers, cosmologists, or perhaps deities, so it is not addressed directly here. Rather, this chapter proceeds on the assumption that time exists and that it allows events to happen sequentially in some way. The concern here is in how humans know time and integrate it into their experiential understanding of the world. This issue has been addressed extensively by anthropologists and archaeologists, who have principally discussed the experience of the flow of time and how different cultures understand time through models such as cyclicity and linearity.4 Another body of literature by historians and archaeologists explores scales of time within a distinctly historical analytical framework.5 Neither literature, however, really considers how material things intervene in the experience of time. This is fundamentally the same epistemological question whether we are asking how people in general make sense of their daily lives, or how professional historians and archaeologists define events, date them, and put them in order when creating historical interpretations. To start in the obvious place, how do humans understand the passage of time? The answer is straightforward: we measure time entirely by the material processes which unfold in it. Most basic frameworks of chronometry rests upon dates, which are a notational way of reckoning time based upon the earth’s physical processes of rotation (days) and orbit around the sun (years and seasons). Within a day, clocks measure time through any of several usefully regular physical processes: the tension of a metal spring mediated by a geared mechanism, the swing of a pendulum, and the vibrations of quartz crystals or even atomic particles. Indeed, the history of both chronometry in general and absolute dating methods in archaeology is all about the search for observable physical processes regular enough to measure the passing of time by: in archaeology this includes not only radioactive decay (as in radiocarbon and uranium/thorium dating) but the accumulation of subatomic particles (optically stimulated luminescence dating, or thermoluminescence), and even the seasonal growth of trees (dendrochronology). We equally depend upon material processes to know time in daily experience. Clock time is our conventional framework, but if one is deprived of it, one judges the time by various clues which are either material in themselves or represent material processes: events which have or have not occurred (the mail being delivered, the morning train passing by), the quality of light and darkness, rhythms of noise (the traffic in the streets, the birds in the hedges). As experiments of people living in isolation chambers or deep caves show, when other clues are taken away, humans understand time through the yardstick of their own bodily rhythms.

126   John Robb From here, it is a simple step to argue that among a material’s relevant qualities is how it behaves temporally. The possibility that material things have inherent temporalities has rarely been discussed, creating the impression that things are temporally neutral, that they are fitted into time entirely by social use and convention. Temporality as a material quality has been discussed only by Ingold.6 Ingold argues that materials are always in flux, never free from time and change. While Ingold is interested philosophically in matter as an almost animate substance, this Heraclitean formulation misses the point. In a philosophical sense, it is true that a rock is embedded in time as much as a soap bubble is: a boulder may be always eroding fluidly. But from the point of view of a human sitting on the boulder, it is a static fixture. Similarly, a human’s body is always in flux, but it forms a static, planetary world to the bacteria living on his teeth or in her gut. And, indeed, the human may change the temporality of the stone by eroding it more quickly, just as the bacteria may change the temporality of the body they inhabit by maintaining its health or by infecting it. The point is that it is not the absolute fact of temporal change which is important, but the temporality which emerges from an object’s material qualities as they afford possibilities of use, inhabitation, and understanding to the subject. The temporality of an object derives from the nature of the relational processes it can be involved in. These processes are not uniform; different processes happen to, and with, different materials and objects. Clearly, except for those rare processes so linear and regular that we can use them for chronometry, this temporality will only be an approximation, a generalization, a center of gravity for a material’s possibilities: most processes involving stone may unfold slowly, but it can be transformed in an instant through a catastrophic earthquake or through dynamite. But this contingency is true for all material qualities; the redness of a stone vanishes in the dark, water can undergo a phase change into ice or steam, without undermining their general affordances of redness or liquidity. As a generalization, the temporality of a material is defined by the speed and pattern with which its most salient and characteristic processes unfold. For the student of material culture, this is enormously encouraging. As with the grain in wood, the signs of melting and crystallization in metal, or the remodeling of bone, it means that all things have their past locked up in their physical structure, whether we can read it readily or not. The time of words illustrates this point. Although spoken words may seem immaterial, they consist of vibrations in air; you cannot transmit speech in a vacuum. To the extent that they have an inherent temporality, words are proverbially fleeting. This is a material quality of their vehicle of transmission; sound vibrations can be produced rapidly in almost infinite variety, spread almost instantaneously, and dissipate rapidly. These material features are so fundamental that speech evolved around them, and they condition how sound is used socially. We usually acknowledge the fluidity of words in disparaging terms (for instance, by saying that spoken promises have little value because they vanish, unlike written words or deeds). But the temporality of words runs much deeper than that. Communication, in fact, presupposes the temporality of words. Communicating with sound requires the speed, flexibility, and nuance with which we can speak; holding a conversation in written rather than spoken form (for instance, via a

Material Time   127 typed Internet chat) requires linguistic adaptation to compensate for the reduced speed and narrower band of communication. Beyond this, acting socially often requires change and situationality, losing the past and acting spontaneously, the fungibility of words, the ability to communicate in a given moment without being straitjacketed by all the fossilized wordage one has ever uttered. And imagine a world in which any sound did not dissipate quickly but remained floating in the air indefinitely; in the dense sonic clutter, any kind of detailed utterance would rapidly become incomprehensible. In some ways, the temporality of words becomes most apparent when we transpose them into media other than sound waves; this not only changes how long they last but also makes them into different speech acts. For example, until the invention of recording media allowed sounds to be reproduced and heard in a place and at a time other than when and where they were first made, all music was live music; all speech was live speech. Until the invention of writing systems about five thousand years ago, the only way to ensure faithful reproduction and transmission of spoken words would have been by liturgical means, such as ritual practices stressing the verbatim reproduction of a fixed wordage.7 Writing itself is a transformative act which gives fixity and authority to speech, a distinction replicated in further distinctions between ephemeral or erasable writings and ones given the authority of permanence by inscription in media such as stone. Just as earth time is almost always originally rooted in the materiality of astronomical cycles, human time is originally rooted in the materiality of the body. The temporality of humans as material objects is their biography, an elastic story with a tough core extending from conception and birth through growth and maturation, reproduction, degeneration, death, and, frequently, transformation into postmortal social beings. As historical changes in the ages of menarche, puberty, parenthood, and death illustrate, the temporality of the body is not a fixed biological temporality overlaid by sociality, but a temporality of something which is always simultaneously biological and social. For instance, dividing the human biography into stages such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age may be a cultural interpretation of the biological processes of growth, maturity, and degeneration, but once someone is assigned to such a category, the decision may have biological consequences which shape how her body changes physically (for instance, through patterns of work, nourishment, sexuality, and exposure to risk and harm).8 We intervene in the temporality of the body both in life, around the time of death—both to retard death and to speed it up (withdrawing life support from the terminally ill, for instance), and after death in processes such as embalming, cremation, mummification, and memorialization. The biography creates a scale of narrative time mediating between day-to-day social interaction and the cosmological or ritual time.9 Birth, growth, aging, and death provide metaphors for understanding change in other things, and generalized biographies provide units of time such as the generation, the unit of time marking the maximum change in an individual’s social capacity. The human body provides a yardstick of time in other ways, for instance, in our capacity to cope with change. We learn our basic framework of perception, categorization, and language in early childhood, along with many motor skills, and these things thenceforth are deeply embedded psychologically: if these things

128   John Robb change slowly, we can cope with change, even if we are keenly aware of it. But if change happens with a rapidity that outstrips our capacity to relearn, the result may be psychological dislocation and trauma. At the other extreme of temporality is stone, a proverbially enduring substance. Stone’s hardness makes it durable and resistant to change, as well as slower and more costly to work than rival substances such as earth and wood, particularly by hand. These qualities make it difficult to use for short-term or expedient purposes, but they make it ideal for something which is made to endure, or which is intended to be seen as enduring. The best-discussed case of the temporality of a specific material concerns how stone was used throughout much of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe in ritual structures such as megalithic tombs, menhirs, and henges. As archaeologist Richard Bradley originally argued, such structures, with their massive permanence, generated a sense of ritual time distinct from quotidian time.10 More recently, stone’s hardness and durability has been associated with the permanence of the supernatural; it has been suggested, for instance, that the stones at Stonehenge represent human beings after a process of “hardening” into ancestral figures, and there is general consensus that the stone statue-stelae portraying anthropomorphic beings in Western Europe between 3000 and 2000 bce represent or present ancestral figures.11 These examples give some important and common illustrations of how material things are enmeshed in processes which have characteristic temporalities. Moreover, they show how people are usually keenly aware of the temporal characteristics of things, not merely in order to be able to manage things practically, but often as the basis for cultural senses of time of different natures. Indeed, we often play with temporality by transposing things to a different temporal key. For example, beyond shaping our ability to communicate, the temporality of sounds shapes how we think about communication. The transience of speech forms part of our sense of what speech as a social genre means (as opposed to writing). And when permanence is needed, we transfer speech to more enduring material forms: writing on paper, inscription in stone. Thus, the ability to shift communication through media with different temporalities like a set of gears provides a social resource for responding to social need. Similarly, transferring a social being from a medium which endures in biographical time to a medium embedded in longer time effects a transformation in their nature. The temporality of stone is thus used creatively in the paradox of stone people such as the human statues found across Europe in the third millennium bce, a form of abstraction which transforms something mobile, responsive, and living within biographical time to something massive, stationary, and (from the perspective of human time) permanent.

Temporal Strategies: Managing Time The inherent temporality of material things is one of their most salient characteristics in structuring how people interact with them. In the parlance of actor network theory,

Material Time   129 action originates in heterogeneous networks of actants which include both people and things, and temporality forms one of the key characteristics of actants which condition how actions unfold.12 Things have processes unfolding at different paces. This means that humans need constantly to coordinate and manage the pace of things. Such time management is built into the basic fabric of how people interact with material culture. Examples are legion, and they range from simple to subtle and complex. On a superficial level, such interactions are often a way of adapting the rhythms of things to the needs of human schedules. But things are not infinitely malleable; each material offers a limited envelope for how far its processes may be rescheduled, and every such intervention imposes its own technological subroutines and space-time demands on people. They are therefore anything but the simple imposition of human structure upon passive material. Four examples of types of material change involving material things and people in dynamic relationships follow. The first is what can be termed accelerating processes. Material processes can be catalyzed in many ways; many interventions which fragment or heat materials speed up processes. Plowing speeds up water absorption, air uptake, and root penetration of the earth, just as manuring speeds growth and sheltering seedlings allows growth earlier in the growing season. Processing foods in specific ways—for instance, grinding grain—and cooking change the speed with which we can eat and break down food. Drying lumber in heated environments shortens the time before it can be used for carpentry. Careful composting converts waste to useful material more quickly; indeed, cremation accomplishes rapidly a bodily transformation which otherwise could take a much longer period. The second example is retarding processes. Conversely, we often retard material processes to coordinate their times with our scheduling needs. This is usually done either by altering the environmental conditions to render them more stable—storing food in cold, frozen, oxygen-deprived, salty, or acidic conditions—or by transforming them material into a more stable object. Pottery is fired to render it stone-like; leather is tanned to make it less perishable; grain is dried to prevent bacterial and fungal growth so that it can be consumed when people need it rather than when it is about to spoil. Maintenance schedules form the third example. Human projects often involve stability or stasis; nobody wants a castle built upon sand, or even one which requires constant painting and repair. Things, conversely, often want to change. Many objects, particularly large and complex ones such as bodies, houses, cars, and roads, form ongoing projects of constant maintenance whose schedule is set by the nature of the material and its inherent tendencies to change. This is an argument which will ring true to those who have to get their hair cut, mow lawns, repaint houses, and change the oil in their car. But such needs typify the past as well—for instance, the constant need to rethatch and replaster houses, to coppice woodland, prune fruit trees and maintain herds, and to maintain agricultural terraces and irrigation canals in working order. Buying a house or building up a family herd may take years from planning to fruition and involve constant attention and maintenance once accomplished. In this sense, our important possessions are not merely things; they are projects, often ones which involve intricate scheduling and commitment over long time spans, and they possess as well as are possessed by people.

130   John Robb Fourth is storage and scheduling. Scheduling coordinates need with the availability of resources; storage coordinates availability with need. Humans originated as highly mobile foragers mapping their movements onto plant and game resources, and it is likely that storage was one of humans’ earliest and most important adaptations. Carrying containers such as fiber or skin bags and nets allow mobile people to use resources over longer windows of time, not merely when present at the resources’ source, and though organic materials are poorly attested in archaeology, carrying containers were likely one of the earliest technologies. Storage probably originated as caches of food to be revisited. Sedentary agricultural lifestyles were a major development, with people centering their settlement around an annual hoard of carefully stored food; some form of silo or granary is evident at most early agricultural villages. Such stored resources were not neutral technologies, but restructured patterns of movement and sedentism, tethering people to places. Larger-scale storage for industrial reasons (such as the stockpiling of raw materials), for commercial reasons (such as the collection of products for trade), and for political reasons (such as taxation for redistribution) really becomes evident with complex polities. Inter generational transmission of wealth is a particular form of storage. We now take storage of all kinds as a natural and self-evident mechanism in many chains of social action, without recognizing its historical specificity as a tactic in managing the temporal flow of materials. These examples illustrate the general directions of how people manage the temporality of things, but the effects of material temporality can be much more subtle when worked out in detail. For instance, things that are available in limited temporal windows impose particular demands and conditions on human use. They often have a higher cost, or the cost can vary wildly through seasons of abundance and scarcity, as with highly perishable produce. Similarly, hearing singers and actors in time-restricted live performance is differently valued, and priced than hearing their performance stored reproducibly and transferrably. Another example is furnished by speed in capitalist production. In a world in which time and money are interconvertible via the cost of labor or the opportunity cost of land and materials, inherently slow things also have different costs and social careers. Slow food costs more than fast food, and if a factory manager can cut a few minutes off the cost of producing something the result is more profit. Wood is a fascinating example of how material temporality affects both economics and design. It takes a long time to grow a tree with a thick trunk. Moreover, the slower trees grow, the tougher their wood is; but hardwood forests tie up capital longer and deliver profits more slowly than fast-growing conifer plantations; hence, oak and other hardwoods are much more expensive than softwoods such as pine and fir. Thus, commercially planted forests grow fast-growing softwoods almost exclusively. Moreover, trees in many commercial forests are harvested at a standard diameter of about 40 centimeters. This produces a large yield of narrow softwood timbers. Hence, pieces of wood larger than about 20 centimeters across are relatively costly, and many uses (such as floorboards, paneling, and furniture) which once used wide or solid timbers have been redesigned to use either narrow strips of wood or composite wood-based materials such as plywood, chipboard, or boards made from thin strips bonded together. In this example, material

Material Time   131 culture design has shifted directly in response to how the temporality of wood meshes with the needs of the economic system. To understand how the time of materials helps generate the rhythms of social life, it is useful to turn from disparate illustrations to a single historical scenario. Here let’s make a foray into the Central Mediterranean Neolithic. This is Italy and adjacent areas such as Dalmatia, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta between about 6000 and 4000 bce (as this example has already been described in detail, it can be summarized briefly here13). This is a low-tech, slow-tech world, a world of small hamlets and villages, settlements of a few dozen people farming wheat, barley, and pulses, and keeping sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. They did a little hunting and gathering, and a fair amount of low-key ritualism. It is not a world of hierarchy; nor is it a world of elaborate ritualism like the Neolithic of Stonehenge. It is a world of everyday social projects such as building villages, exchanging animals, and journeying to visit neighbors, the pursuit of which generated the relations and preoccupations of social life. Managing the time built into the basic materials of life was integral to these projects. Aside from the basic ecological seasonality of farming—which meant an ongoing rhythm of sowing and harvests, and a commitment to storage and sedentism—other projects had their own rhythms. Houses were small wattle-and-daub huts, rarely longer than 5 meters, sheltering a few people. As a technology, such structures had a lifespan of perhaps twenty or thirty years, and they required regular maintenance of daub and thatch to remain in condition. They also required embedded routines with their own temporal structure; for instance, house building would have required a long preparation period during which one quarried heaps of clay, gathered stacks of straw and sticks (perhaps from woods coppiced a year or two in advance), and twisted huge lengths of twine to tie the frame together. Then there was the temporality of animals. The vegetable staples—grains and pulses—once dried could be stored indefinitely and prepared in any quantities at any time. In contrast, meat came in large, perishable packages; when cattle were slaughtered, a small household was faced with the problem of consuming large quantities of soon-to-decay meat within a short window of time. The solution was to hold a feast, converting quantities of perishable meat far too large for a household to consume into social obligation and reciprocity—a form of the “social storage” strategy common in Neolithic Europe.14 On a larger scale, livestock were important social valuables, and building up and managing a family herd would have been a multiyear, careful undertaking whose pace was set not only by household needs and ambitions, but also by parameters such as animal reproduction and demography. Among made objects, making pottery was an art of expert timing, with a highly structured chaîne opératoire, each stage of which required careful understanding of the changes clay underwent. Weathering gathered clay would have taken weeks or months. Molding a vessel, adding features such as handles and lugs, impressing decoration, drying vessels, burnishing surfaces, and firing all had to be carried out within specific windows of time, on the order of hours, as the clay being worked dried, heated, or cooled. Firing rendered vessels permanent, placing them into another scale of time. On a larger scale, the lifespan of finished pots affected the historic career of pottery types. Large, thick,

132   John Robb durable, and rarely moved storage vessels provided long-lasting prototypes for potters making new pots and thus reproducing this “distributed object” (in Alfred Gell’s sense of the term15). Consequently, such vessels changed little throughout the 1,500 years of the Early and Middle Neolithic. In contrast, much as it is the coffee cups and cereal bowls which break most commonly in today’s household pottery, it was the small, relatively fragile, frequently handled ornate bowls which broke most often in the Neolithic. Hence, these had a much more rapid turnover, and the assemblage at any given point which provided prototypes for potters making new vessels had a much shallower time depth. The result was that these styles underwent much more rapid stylistic drift. Stone axes provide another example of how an object’s lifespan was conditioned by its material temporality. Axes were an important Neolithic valuable, often made from metamorphic stone such as amphibolite imported over long distances and worked with great labor to take aesthetically attractive forms and a shining, high-gloss surface. While stone changes and weathers in geological time, in a human time scale it is stable, virtually static; the management of stasis or change in axes depended entirely upon how humans chose to shape their biographies. In making an axe, by far the greatest amount of time would have been the final polishing to obtain its lucid surface. This lucid surface was not functionally needed, but it was important for axes’ social roles as valuables and perhaps magical objects, and its perfection was immediately visible to the eye; axes thus stored and displayed the time put into making them. An unused axe could last in pristine condition forever (at least in terms of human time), as many in museums still demonstrate. But axes were also working tools, for woodcutting, carpentry, and other tasks, and they may have served as weapons as well. When they were used as working tools, axes were liable to break or dull, after which they needed reshaping or resharpening. Reshaping axes after wear or breakage rapidly made them smaller. Use, breakage, and reworking were thus reductive one-way processes, and after a certain point an axe would become too small to use further. Axes thus had bifurcated biographies depending upon how humans chose to use them. Axes found on living sites are usually worn and broken fragments, while axes found in caches or ritual depositions are usually intact and ready to resume their lives as social valuables. The biographies of axes, thus, were managed; some were rapidly consumed as working tools, while others put them in a kind of temporal stasis and preserved them as social capital. We could review the temporality of other Neolithic Mediterranean projects—the fast and unidirectional reduction of flint and obsidian, the strategies of storage and scheduling of all kinds of material, the seasonality of sea travel, the cultural demography shaping the growth and abandonment of little communities—but these instances illustrate four important points that have implications for historical analysis. First, the temporality of materials acts as an affordance in Ingold’s sense. It does not determine what one does with a material; there are often alternative ways of dealing with it. For instance, our Neolithic villagers could decide whether to consume an axe quickly or reserve it for future use; they could have developed ways of storing meat rather than holding feasts to consume it rapidly. But it establishes one of the parameters of the situation one has to think about, one of the claims the material as an actant makes upon the unfolding chain of events.

Material Time   133 The second concerns André Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of the chaîne opératoire, or operational sequence, with which anthropologists of technology are familiar. This specifies the sequence of steps which must be carried out to make something, or in a wider sense to effect a social operation.16 In an immediate, analytical sense, the chaîne opératoire is where the temporality of materials enters the equation. Productive acts have not only a sequence but a duration. Some, such as weathering a heap of clay for potting or leaving an animal in its pasture, can be extended or compressed elastically, allowing a project to be hurried up or shelved until it suits a social need. Others, such as dealing with a freshly killed cow or molding and finishing a complex vessel, require specific kinds of actions within quite narrow windows of time. A key step in socializing the temporality of materials, therefore, is managing each step—aligning a step which requires intense activity with a lull in other rhythms or with an event which will bring together lots of helpers, or figuring out how to convert a highly structured moment into an elastic one (such as processing a volatile object to make it storable). Third, the temporality of materials often acts at several scales of time. There is the sequence of actions needed to deal with transforming or using materials in an immediate sense—whether you have to strike while the iron is hot or can leave a pot to simmer unattended. But in a larger scale, these rhythms are also built into larger institutions, which are mediated and shaped by other needs. Killing an animal may trigger a feast, but one does not kill an animal haphazardly; it is part of a calculated decision to convert social capital on the hoof into action. The decision of which temporal track to channel an axe into is a social decision integrated into micro politics of other kinds. Material temporality will be most obviously seen in social worlds dependent upon a few resources with tightly defined temporalities—the staple harvest, the annual salmon run, and so on. But it remains a pervasive if often quite subtle conditioning factor in many situations. In the earlier example of modern wood production, basic schedules of growth percolate through the economics of the industry as far as the design of furniture which consumers can buy. As another instance, in the Central Mediterranean Neolithic, the normative burial rites made use of the gradual dissolution of the body to allow the remembered individual to merge gradually with the history of the group. This is a typical role of funerary rites and ideologies, which mediate the visible material changes triggered by dying, death, and a shift from metabolism to decomposition and map them onto a larger narrative of individual biography and a larger scale of group history. Fourth, as one expands the scope of analysis, material temporalities become crosslinked. The master narrative which coordinates many schedules in most societies is that of seasonal cycles, which are always both ecological and economic and social. But other cross-linkings also are often established. For example, in the Italian Neolithic, houses were often intentionally burnt down, probably to mark the death of the people living in them or the dissolution of the social unit they represented. In effect, the history of the group is written in a generational time made from the merged biographies of the people composing the local group, and this forms a temporal framework into which the lifespans of houses were fitted by rituals of intentional destruction. The composite effect of such cross-linkings among the many projects people undertake is to place material temporalities at the heart of the compelling rhythms of social life. In this sense,

134   John Robb people live in “taskscapes” (in Ingold’s term), the accumulated rhythms and commitments of all their activities; this is the key point that Ingold draws our attention to in his wonderfully insightful phrase “the temporality of the landscape.”17 Finally, the temporality of materials not only conditions how people interact with them; it can also form a symbolic resource as well. One example is the symbolism of stone, noted earlier, used to transform both words into lasting statements and people into beings existing on another plane of time. Temporal structure also provides drama via the contrast between times of fast and slow activity, free or coordinated activity, low-risk and hazardous activity; for instance, in pottery production on most scales from craft to early industry, the highly structured, irreversible moment of firing is often the dramatic climax of the operation. And when time is understood as a proxy for labor, objects which store and display time visibly can form special kinds of valuables; polished stone axes took on this role in the Neolithic, much as high-end textiles which condensed huge amounts of labor did in the Iron Age and Classical periods.

Conclusions and Implications: Timing Is All Material culture theorists have had limited s­ uccess in integrating the material qualities of objects into social and historical interpretations. Sometimes this is simply because they have been interested principally in social discourses about objects rather than in the objects themselves, but it is also probably because discussion of material qualities has remained at a somewhat superficial level—for instance, focusing upon colors and what they can be used to symbolize, rather than going into the details of how people interact with objects and materials. I have tried to argue that one of the most salient material qualities of an object is its temporality—how the processes it forms unfold in time. The temporal qualities of materials demonstrably structure how people understand and use them in both obvious and subtle ways. Much of what people do when they work with materials is to cope with their temporality. Humans develop complex strategies for speeding up and slowing down material processes to align them with their needs and the rhythms of social life. Scheduling and storage regimes superimpose multiple fields of activity to create an overall time map of human life. Moreover, many of these strategies of temporal management are not trivial matters of putting an object on a shelf until you are ready to use it; they involve major transformative efforts such as plowing fields, converting milk into cheese and butter, and tanning leather, which themselves structure other things. Beyond this, the inherent temporality of things is apparent in the chaînes opératoires and maintenance schedules they impose on humans in order to simply remain usable. Managing the temporality of objects is thus not really a matter of imposing a human social logic on

Material Time   135 a receptive material world; it creates a world of negotiation where the social and the material reciprocally and inextricably structure each other. There are four sets of theoretical implications for historical analysis—ideas which really require further exploration. The first concerns object biographies and materiality. How does this discussion help the historian or archaeologist trying to interpret a specific case of material culture? Returning to the question of materiality, it is clearly not enough simply to reinsert the object in its historical context and read it semiotically as a social text. Without coming to grips with the material qualities of the object and how they structure its social life, we can at best only partially understand why objects were important to ancient people, how they gave form to ancient lives, and why they were the way they were. Using temporal qualities as an example, we see that materials never determine the uses people make of them, nor do people impose their projects randomly upon materials, sculpting the Colosseum out of ice or writing emails carved in stone. Rather, making and using things is a prolonged negotiation in which humans recognize, respond to, use, or redefine the material qualities of an object, often with remarkable attention, knowledge, and skill—not only technical skill but often conceptual and organizational acuity as well. In analyzing the temporality of objects, this leads us methodologically toward the familiar concepts of the chaîne opératoire and the object biography18—both ways of conceptualizing the sequence of operations involved in making and using a thing. These are usually established by a combination of close analysis of the actual substance of a thing (often with scientific techniques to characterize its sources and working methods), analyses of its use contexts, traces of wear, signs of repurposing, and depositional context, often with experimental work as an adjunct. But the difference is that these sequences are not interpreted merely as necessary or functional technological pathways; rather, the temporal trajectory of an object is in itself an achievement, a reworking of the temporal possibilities of the material which is frequently both technically accomplished and conceptually astute. The second implication concerns reflexivity in the practices of both history and archaeology, and the character of objects as “time travelers.” It is obvious that there is a link between the material qualities of objects and their long-term historical careers. From words upward, evanescent or even moderately ephemeral materials vanish from our historical and archaeological consciousness. The freak preservation of “Ötzi,” the Tyrolean Ice Man, and his organic finds, has taught us almost all we know about what clothing Europeans wore at 3000 bce;19 learning a single Neolithic song would transform our knowledge of the period entirely. But the material qualities of things also condition their historical careers in subtler ways. To take an example, Neolithic pottery design typically required detailed local social knowledge to interpret its stylistic cues. This defines a temporal bracketing, even if it is one not apparent at first sight: local social knowledge decays rapidly, and even within the thousand-year span of the Earlier and Middle Neolithic, earlier pottery styles probably meant little to people encountering fragments of old pottery. In contrast, Neolithic axes had (literally and figuratively) more superficial designs; their aesthetic emphasized readily cognized features such as the

136   John Robb color of stone and surface gloss, which require much less context. This conceptual portability, which allowed them to travel across widely separated Neolithic societies, has also helped them to slide down through the ages. They were thus repeatedly collected and reinterpreted by later peoples, from Classical Greeks and Romans to modern farmers, antiquarians, and archaeologists. There are important studies yet to be done about the other means by which objects make their way through time via strategies of translation which make them less ephemeral or localized, freer from restrictions of medium or knowledge base (for instance, by replication into drawings, photographs, imitations, free-floating designs, or generic styles). The third implication emerges from what we might term the political logic of temporality regarding, in particular, storage and control. Ways of dealing with temporal challenges have political implications. For example, when key resources are available for short, perhaps unpredictable intervals, humans have developed three basic options: mobility to access a range of resources as they become available, reciprocity to even out local shortfalls, and storage to make good shortfalls. But these have very different political effects; for instance, the first two tend to inhibit the development of inequality, while the third creates a resource which can be used as political capital. The shift over human history from scheduling to storage goes hand in hand with a historical increase in inequality. Property and wealth provide another example. What is the intergenerational transmission of wealth if not a way of having specific people–thing relations outlast the materiality of the body? The development of property rights allows the individual body to be substituted by a collective kin or corporate body which, ideally, lasts as long as the thing worth possessing. Such arrangements act as check-dams in the historical flow of material value, making it pool temporarily before flowing on. Looking at the same relationship from the other side, the needs of things, the relationship of accumulation rather than production or use poses new needs for nonperishable, infinitely convertible, and hence increasingly immaterial forms of value. The point is that coordinating different material temporalities creates a host of issues for social and economic engineering, as well as lying at the heart of religious and ethical considerations of familial reproduction and social relations. Finally, material temporality has implications for understanding the shape of human history. Is there a relationship between the kinds of materials humans engage with and the overall shape of history? The pace of change has been speeding up throughout human history; on the scale of grand narrative, is plastic or silicon a faster material than stone, bone, or metal? It seems unlikely that any one material alone can determine the characteristics of a technological system. We can leave aside here the fact that the “Stone Age” is so called because its stone objects have survived to be found by archaeologists, not because people then particularly used stone more than other materials such as wood, skins, basketry, or bone. More to the point, somewhat counterintuitively for any simple evolutionary story, the Paleolithic use of stone—flaking it to make sharp cutting edges—is a distinctly fast technology in which an entire chaîne opératoire may be accomplished in a few minutes and many artifacts were made and discarded expediently; it is only from the Neolithic onward that the use of stone in polished axes, monuments, and statuary began to exploit its qualities of slow working and durability.

Material Time   137 Instead, if there is a relationship between temporality and the shape of history, it probably lies in the technological style of overall systems through which materials are used—systems which provide the lenses through which people see the affordances of material qualities. For example, systems encompassing varied technologies are likely to be more dynamic than those with fewer technologies, as each new component or technique will enable more recombinations and pathways, opening up new possibility spaces. Such systemic factors may underlie the repeated pattern of alternating rises and plateaus in the long-term history of material complexity.20 Moreover, systems which maximize productivity are likely to be more unstable than systems which maximize security, as the development of capitalism since medieval times may demonstrate. Moving to a yet more abstract level, innovations in human–thing relations such as the concept of enduring, exclusive rights over things may themselves change the dynamic of a material culture system over the longue durée. But in the present state of the discussion, these are questions and hypotheses, not answers.

Notes * I am grateful to Sarah Chapman and Anne Hilker for their comments, which have helped improve this chapter. 1. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 2. Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16. 3. Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000); James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Cf. Christopher Y. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 4. Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (Oxford: Berg, 1996); Chris Gosden, Social Being and Time (London: Blackwell, 1994); Jan Harding, “Rethinking the Great Divide: Long-Term Structural History and the Temporality of the Event,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 38 (2005): 88–101; Gavin Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London: Routledge, 2005). 5. Geoff Bailey, “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 198–223; Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973); R. I. Moore, “World History,” in Routledge Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997): 918–936; John Robb and Timothy  R.  Pauketat, Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2012); Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 6. Ingold, “Materials against Materiality.” 7. Fredrik Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” Current Anthropology 43 (2002): 1–18. 8. John Robb and Oliver Harris, The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2003); Joanna Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

138   John Robb 9. John Robb, “Time and Biography,” in Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, ed. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow (London: Kluwer/ Academic, 2002), 145–163. 10. Richard Bradley, “Ritual, Time and History,” World Archaeology 23 (1991): 209–219. 11. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone; M. Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina, “Stonehenge for the Ancestors: The Stones Pass on the Message,” Antiquity 72 (1998): 308–326; Stefania Casini and Angelo Fossati, Le Pietre Degli Dei: Statue-Stele Dell’età Del Rame in Europa—Lo Stato Della Ricerca (Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi 12) (Bergamo: Civico Museo Archeologico, 2004); Francesco Fedele, “Statue-Menhirs, Human Remains and Mana at the Ossimo ‘Anvòia’ Ceremonial Site, Val Camonica,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 21 (2008): 57–79; John Robb, “People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Society in Prehistoric Europe,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 162–183. 12. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13. John Robb, “Beyond Agency,” World Archaeology 42 (2010), 493–520; John Robb, The Early Mediterranean Village: Agency, Material Culture and Social Change in Neolithic Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 14. Paul Halstead and John O’Shea, “A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed: Social Storage and the Origins of Ranking,” in Ranking, Resource and Exchange, ed. Colin Renfrew and Stephen Shennan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 92–99. 15. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 16. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993). 17. Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 189 ff. 18. Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31 (1999): 169–178. 19. Konrad Spindler and Ewald Osers, The Man in the Ice: The Preserved Body of a Neolithic Man Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age (London: Phoenix, 2001). 20. Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Bibliography Bailey, Geoff. “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 198–223. Barth, Fredrik. “An Anthropology of Knowledge.” Current Anthropology 43 (2002): 1–18. Bradley, Richard. “Ritual, Time and History.” World Archaeology 23 (1991): 209–219. Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg, 1996. Gosden, Chris. Social Being and Time. London: Blackwell, 1994. Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology 31 (1999): 169–178. Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16. Ingold, Tim. Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. Lucas, Gavin. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge, 2005.

Material Time   139 Robb, John. The Early Mediterranean Village: Agency, Material Culture and Social Change in Neolithic Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Robb, John. “Time and Biography.” In Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, edited by Y. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik, & S. Tarlow, 145–163. London: Kluwer/Academic, 2002. Robb, John, and Timothy R. Pauketat. Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2012. Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel Lord Smail. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Tilley, C. The Materiality of Stone. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

chapter 8

R em a k i ng th e K itchen, 1800 –1850 J. Ritchie Garrison

A small watercolor sketch by John Lewis Krimmel, painted on July 4, 1819, captures an important moment of historical change (Figure 8.1). A young woman stoops before the kitchen fire to cook the midday meal; off to her side stands a Pennsylvania tenplate stove with a small child sitting next to it dangling his shoes. The woman and her work organize the room—cooking, cleaning, and childcare—yet in many ways, things organize her in the endless responsibility to feed the body and keep it healthy. Krimmel implies so much and reveals so little in this small image. Viewers cannot see the fuel she is using or what she is cooking. The stove is disconnected, its pipe out of sight. The child’s shoes dangle as if to beg the question: where are they going on this Independence Day when the young woman at the hearth has so many responsibilities to keep her there? The fireplace reflects a past that stretches back to the origins of cooking; the ten-plate stove is a modern appliance in an industrializing age. The kitchen contains both. Despite fine studies of foodways, women’s work, domestic technology, and architecture, we still know too little about the important changes that took place in American and Western European kitchens between 1800 and 1850— about why a kitchen in 1819 would have a cooking hearth still in use when a stove was at hand.1 Solving that problem from a material-culture perspective builds on existing scholarship that has focused on the relationship of food to architectural spaces and domestic design, on the relationships of gender and domestic technology, and on the ideologies of domesticity and memory. The core argument is that in many sections of the United States the majority of early modern kitchen technologies—stoves, sinks, refrigerators, and piped water—emerged before most domestic advice literature and reform surveys began to record their presence. The changes are visible in surviving buildings if one knows what to look for, but later systems often replaced or covered up the earlier iterations, making it hard to understand what was done, when, and why.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   141

Figure 8.1.  John Lewis Krimmel, View into Kitchen of a House, Sunday, July 4, 1819. Watercolor over pencil, pencil inscription. Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.

Many Western European elites, artisans, and philosophers, as well as Americans, experimented with new technology; indeed, many of the progressive technologies Americans adopted were first developed and imported from Europe. While the majority of American and European households did not have the technologies explored here by 1850, owner-occupied dwellings of the middling and wealthier sort often had at least some of them. What is startling about these changes is how fast they occurred and how much human behavior was local and contingent.2 Educated women were critical to these changes even when men were responsible for implementing and paying for them. Catherine Beecher pointedly reminded readers of a married woman’s duties in 1841: She has a husband, to whose particular tastes and habits she must accommodate herself; she has children, whose health she must guard, whose physical constitutions she must study and develop, whose temper and habits she must regulate, whose principles she must form, whose pursuits she must direct. She has constantly changing domestics, with all varieties of temper and habits, whom she must govern, instruct, and direct; she is required to regulate the finances of the domestic state, and constantly to adapt expenditures to the means and to the relative claims of each department. She has the direction of the kitchen, where ignorance, forgetfulness, and awkwardness, are to be so regulated, that the various operations shall each start at the right time, and all be in completeness at the same given hour. She has the

142   J. Ritchie Garrison claims of society to meet, calls to receive and return, and the duties of hospitality to sustain. She has the poor to relieve; benevolent societies to aid; the schools of her children to inquire and decide about; the care of the sick; the nursing of infancy; and the endless miscellany of odd items, constantly recurring in a large family.3

In the references to domestics and social calling, the language is firmly tied to middleclass respectability, but it captures the dimensions of adult obligations. What the observations did not state because they were implicitly understood was how much time and physical labor these responsibilities entailed. Managed mostly by women of varying ages and conditions, kitchen technologies and the spaces that supported them in the early nineteenth century were still experimental hybrids in which people negotiated competing priorities of convenience, nourishment, health, and order through objects. Implementation was strategic and messy, and near-universal adoption of the things pioneered in this era was incomplete until the mid-twentieth century in the United States and Western Europe.4 Early nineteenth-century American architecture and kitchen technology entangled people and their things in webs of codependence at a time of rapid population growth in all areas of the country. It was a period of sharp contrasts. People moving to the South and West had to build new communities; residents in established areas experienced increased population density, epidemiological challenges, and great social and economic change. Regardless of location, rank, or social condition, period reformers such as Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Beecher encouraged women to take charge of their households for the safety and happiness of their families. They reminded their readers that the kitchen, not the parlor, was the critical nexus of embodied family security. Domestic well-being depended on knowledge of childcare, nutrition, and hygiene, but there was no universal prescription for family security. Strategies that worked well in the countryside were often irrelevant in urban neighborhoods of renters who moved frequently and who had peddlers, markets, bakeries, coffeehouses, taverns, service workers, or pubs nearby. Recognizing that many women had to make do with the already-built dwellings and kitchens they moved into, the reformers advised them on coping strategies and moral priorities. Their prescriptions set a horizon line for expectations. The challenge for scholars is to test the prescriptions against actions.5 Theory and texts attract because of their interpretive richness and the delights of scholarly exchange. But they tempt researchers to treat objects as illustrations of what mostly privileged and literate people wrote down, what advertisers wished to sell, what critics wanted to reform, and what scholars are currently thinking about. Understanding things requires patience because objects often communicate quietly; they confront researchers with context, pattern, ambiguity, and circumstance. Things are also disruptive. Life flows around them because it is often easier to tolerate inconveniences than to find the ambition, time, and treasure to change them or to endure the messes changes make. Four dwellings explored here—the George and Mary Read II house in New Castle Delaware, 1797–1804; the Samuel and Olive Stearns house in Northfield, Massachusetts, 1819–1826; the Joseph and Betsey Maybury house in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1847–1848;

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   143 and the George and Charity Stearns house in Northfield, Massachusetts, 1843–1846— offer detailed analysis and description to surface the differing temporalities of objects and culture and to advance the argument that when possible material culture scholarship should take advantage of close object study as they work through the challenges of interpreting texts or advancing theory. They are noteworthy for their state of preservation and for the survival of layers of technological innovations. Together, they form a kind of archaeological assemblage with unusual degrees of integrity. To study material culture through these buildings requires scholars to consider the complementary ontologies of language and objects, to witness surprises and mistakes, and, in generalizing, to welcome the mitigating persistence of difference as humans work through things. Technology and cultural change shaped kitchen design in this era. As Krimmel’s sketch reminds us, the body and nutrition were elemental and people always built upon and judged outcomes against the past. In the span of less than fifty years, these four families progressed from a world of cooking hearths to stand-alone features that included cook stoves, sinks with running water, specialized laundries, and (ice) refrigerators that were linked to new sources of supply and distribution. Scholars have effectively recorded the general trends; the fine-grained fieldwork reminds readers that remaking the kitchen was a bumpy process as men and women experimented in the places where they were powerful.6

George and Mary Read’s Kitchen The Reads’ kitchen provides an opening benchmark for the diffusion of advanced cooking technology from Europe to the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century. Much of the experimental science that was then accessible in the English-speaking world was written up by Benjamin, Count Rumford (otherwise known as Benjamin Thompson), an American Loyalist and polymath whose personal biography included experience in England, Germany, and eventually France. His Essays, Political, Economical, and Scientific appeared in various editions and volumes starting in 1796, but the third volume with extensive reports on his institutional kitchen experiments in Munich and London appeared in 1802—about the time the Reads’ prodigy house (the term architectural historians have often used to identify luxury dwellings of ambitious design, scale, and workmanship) was closed in and the finish work was underway. Rumford’s experiments clearly shaped the Reads’ thinking about their kitchen, but the implementation was a hybrid in which well-understood traditions of open-hearth cooking merged with new knowledge.7 The Reads had not planned the house with advanced cooking technology in mind. A Philadelphia master builder, Peter Crowding, superintended the construction of the Reads’ house between 1797 and 1804, although the structure was far enough along by 1803 that the family could live in it (Figure 8.2). At the time of its construction it was probably the largest house in Delaware and incorporated the taut neoclassicism that

144   J. Ritchie Garrison prevailed in polite architecture throughout much of the Delaware Valley and parts of the Atlantic World. Like other wealthy progressive families of the era, the Reads situated the service wing of the dwelling in an ell that opened to a yard on the south and an alley to the north; the yard sheltered outdoor activities, and the alley facilitated deliveries away from the polite world of the front door, where the clients for Read’s law practice entered.8

Figure 8.2.  George and Mary Read II house, built 1798–1804. New Castle, Delaware. Photograph by the author.

Although many urban townhouses built on narrow lots stretching back from expensive street frontage had service ells, they were still uncommon in most parts of the United States when the Reads began designing their house. In some respects the house was a family project. Although Crowding probably controlled the highly ornamented designs that made the house’s interior so extraordinary, sketches in George Read’s letters suggest that kinship and social ties bound the project to a much larger network of urban suppliers and design ideas. George Read’s brother John, and on occasion his son William, lived in Philadelphia, where they served as George’s agents. The city also contained the specialist subcontractors who were critical to the process of fabricating Rumford kitchens.9 Rumford’s practical experiments with kitchen equipment resonated widely because they were accessible. He illustrated his ideas with simple woodcuts and explained experiments and philosophical principles in relatively plain English. He explored technology as a system in which the sensible priority of a kitchen was to produce palatable nutritious food efficiently. He included recipes that he and his assistants had tried and refined while feeding the poor in Bavaria and the rich in England, and he talked (some) about

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   145 his failures and lessons learned (Figure 8.3). The Reads incorporated three of Rumford’s experiments into their kitchen: they used one fire to do many kinds of cooking, they added a steam kitchen, and they acquired a Rumford Roaster. These features are still visible because it was easier to cover them up or leave them in place after better technology arrived.10

Figure 8.3.  First-floor plan adapted by the author from Benardon Haber Holloway Architects. Diagram of the Read house kitchen apparatus adapted and redrawn by the author from the originals prepared by Alvin Holm and Robert Levy. Courtesy Delaware Historical Society.

146   J. Ritchie Garrison Reading about the new science was simpler than converting texts into objects that few people had made previously, installing them in a space not designed for them, or training staff to use the technology. The contractors must have had their doubts. The family initially planned the kitchen with a large open hearth that sported double cranes and probably a bake oven to one side—features that local masons understood. Rumford’s Essays with the information on cooking with steam appeared in 1802 when the Reads’ walls and chimneys were already completed. The new innovations represented a change order, likely one that George Read made because he paid the bills. Mary Read managed the family’s domestic affairs, but she was also a mother with several small children to superintend and another on the way; like many other women of her rank, place, and time, she had a hired African American cook and may not have used the new apparatus. In any case, what Mary Read or the cook thought was never recorded.11 The kitchen documents the struggle to adopt cutting-edge kitchen technology. By the time of publication, Rumford had developed his roaster to an advanced state, and he provided detailed specifications, drawings, and instructions. Although he had experimented with and illustrated a cylinder design, he acknowledged that these roasters could be rectangular with a domed top—the form visible at the Read house. Average cooks found the finicky roaster hard to manage with so many other things going on in the kitchen, and their training in hearth cooking was not helpful. Rumford warned his readers frequently that small, masonry-enclosed fireboxes set just below the roaster generated ample amounts of heat with very little fuel; he had observed that beginners tended to use far too much fuel based on their experience with hearth cooking in open fireplaces where the coals were surrounded by cool air. The result was that they would burn dinner and overheat the apparatus, damaging it.12 Explaining these philosophical subtleties to staff must have been challenging. What precisely was a small amount of fuel and how did the type of fuel (wood species, charcoal, or coal) matter? Rumford’s words abstracted reality and transmitted ideas across space and time, but they left out the kinds of localized knowledge that all humans learn primarily from experience. The Reads’ design did not have a small firebox beneath the roaster as Rumford had specified; it got its heat from the firebox under a boiler at the very back of the kitchen fireplace. The cook could partly control the heat reaching the roaster by opening the hinged door in the very back of the kitchen fireplace located directly over the boiler and kitchen fire and by managing a damper in the exit flue above the roaster, but it was a dangerous and inconvenient design. One suspects that men who had never done much actual cooking thought it up based on some reading, experience with brick masonry, and an eye toward the budget and Mary’s “confinement.” Predictably, the roaster seems to have overheated, and the subsequent repairer abandoned the roaster idea and converted the mess into a bake oven. The steam kitchen the Reads’ installed was part of an integrated system that merged heating and plumbing. The original kitchen boilers where food was prepared were located to the left of the fireplace. The supply line that fed water to the boiler once ran

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   147 through the kitchen wall to the pump area behind the kitchen. Unlike the roaster, the operation of the steam boiler would have been fairly simple. When the cook pushed hot coals under the boiler, the water would eventually boil, forcing steam up the ­conductor pipe. This pipe had a safety valve located in a niche to the upper left of the firebox to prevent explosions. The niche also contained a second pipe with a low water indicator. If all worked as designed, steam would pass through the conductor pipe, exit the chimney mass, and enter the steam boilers to the left of the fireplace. Parts of the system must have worked well enough that Read continued to think about improvements. By 1811, he wanted a tap for hot water, conceptually a simple change. But his system was built in and hard to get at without demolishing portions of the chimney or modifying his steam kitchen. “I have made inquiry for a person acquainted with the construction of steam kitchen apparatus without much success,” George’s son, William, wrote: I am however advised by a Tin-man who is best acquainted with its machinery to procure from you the length and dimensions of the pipe for the conveyance of warm water from the boiler and that he will procure a casting of the same size—as it appears from your letter that this is the only part deficient, and that you will want some soldering done, to make it complete, and as you will also want some leaden pipes for your Bath House, a Plumber would be the proper person to employ for both ­purposes—if you are of the same opinion I will endeavor to send one to you—you should inform him of the length of Pipe as near as may be and the number of cocks wanted, so that he may be prepared with everything necessary when he does go down.13

The letter captures concisely the problems of working on the cutting edge of kitchen and bathing technology in the early nineteenth century; the technology was still experimental bespoke work and expensive. Building things into a structure made them hard to modify. And the more complicated the system, the more dependent one became on specialists who were nonlocal, charged travel costs, and required parts no one carried in stock.14 Read did not bring down the plumber from Philadelphia; having learned his lessons, he upgraded his entire system to a cook stove in 1813, paying Christian Johns $48 “for a double oven and Cooking stove with a boiler of from 4 to 5 gallons—9 feet of Pipe & brass ornaments.” It must have been a top-of-the-line item as it was still in use at the time of his death in 1836. He also got a good deal on it, probably because there was a war on and Johns wanted to unload it rather than keep it in inventory. The closest match for what this expensive piece of equipment must have looked like at that time was probably the stove that Englishman John Slater had developed (Figure 8.4). A trade catalog of his wares came out in 1810 for a patent steam kitchen, and a second version, nearly identical to the first, appeared in 1812. Slater sold several models at various price points (all of them significantly higher than what Read paid) and indicated that his stoves were in use in America. Some were designed for masonry installations, but others were free

148   J. Ritchie Garrison standing. Since the Reads bought pipe with the stove, theirs must have been free standing and probably sat in front of or to one side of his kitchen chimney on the wide brick hearth. Other manufacturers also patented and made cook stoves after the War of 1812 ended, beginning a decades-long evolution of stove design that would use fuel more efficiently and that approached standards of taste set by traditions of open-hearth cooking.15

Figure 8.4.  John Slater, Steam Kitchen [trade catalog], ca. 1807–1817. Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Rare Book Collection.

The Reads’ fascination with advanced kitchen equipment was shared by other Americans whether inventors or adopters. Examples of Rumford’s European innovations have survived in other elite homes and for many of the same reasons that they survived in New Castle: they were built into masonry structures that were hard to alter without a great deal of inconvenience or structural damage. But if one tabulates the innovations that Rumford proposed, the key ideas were apparent in the Reads’ first kitchen: designers reduced fuel consumption by applying energy in small amounts to where it was needed for the best effect; they developed more convenient approaches to hot and cold water supplies; they raised work and cooking levels to avoid stooping; and they used science and engineering principles in domestic contexts that had long operated by tradition. These developments increased the costs of kitchens and related work areas, but when properly designed, they also made them more convenient for the women who used them.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   149

Samuel and Olive Stearns’ House It is easy enough to explain the Reads’ extraordinary kitchen equipment as the prerogative of class, connections, and education in an urban setting, but interest in convenience was broadly shared. When Samuel Stearns, thirty-three, and his brother Calvin, forty, both carpenters, began building Sam and Olive’s new house in 1819, on the Street (as it was called) in Northfield, Massachusetts, they deliberately included modern workspaces. Both men had worked as young journeymen in Boston and like their neighbors had kin in various parts of New England. Their perspectives were larger than the rural community of Northfield and, as builders, they rather than patrons were the principal agents for transmitting design ideas. Both men used Sam’s house to segment the local market for homes. They did this by including features that modeled new possibilities for anyone who came into the center of town to conduct business. The building’s workspaces resonated with the middling sort, not the top 1 percent. It generated gossip and some forms of emulation.16 While the house was one of the earliest gable ends to the street dwellings in town, it was in many ways a conservative expression of vernacular forms. The new dwelling was on a lot that sloped away from the street elevation, a feature that Sam incorporated into the plan (Figure 8.5). The brothers took a two-story, center chimney dwelling, turned it

Figure 8.5. Samuel and Olive Stearns house, Northfield, Massachusetts, built 1819–1824. Photograph by the author.

150   J. Ritchie Garrison Samuel and Olive Stearns house 1819–1824

Wood storage

Basement kitchen

Kitchen

Dining room

Office

Dairy

Storage

Storage

Sitting room

Parlor Entry

Basement plan

First floor plan

Figure 8.6.  First-floor and basement plans, Samuel and Olive Stearns house, built 1819–1824. Measured and drawn by the author.

sideways so that the gable faced the street, and inserted a side entry into the bay that in similar dwellings was usually a bedroom or a pantry. They also added an ell, a feature that by the 1820s was becoming common on middling houses in the Northeast (Figure 8.6). The structure’s most unusual feature was a finished basement that included storage and workspaces—a cobble-floored storage room nearest the street where the thermal

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   151 insulation of the earthen bank was greatest, a match-boarded buttery to seal off the ­storage of dairy products from hungry mice, and a full cooking hearth with bake oven and set kettle for laundry and preservation activities. A woodshed under the ell and a masonry ash pit completed this service area. Upstairs, where most family life took place, the kitchen ell also had a cooking hearth and bake oven. Ashes shoveled out of the oven or from the fireplace could be pitched into the ash pit, where they would safely cool before being sold to the local potash factory just down the street.17 The extra basement kitchen was exceptional and prompts questions about use and intent. Urban houses often had basement kitchens because land values were high and lots small, but in rural towns, second or summer kitchens were exceptional. The Stearns’ basement kitchen was apparently the first in Northfield. It must have seemed a dubious advantage to local women who typically did the cooking and laundry while superintending small children, often without much extra help. They and their husbands probably also questioned the cost of a second kitchen. As Beecher later observed, “Nothing is more injurious, to a feeble woman, than going up and down stairs; . . . If it is possible, the nursery, sitting parlor, and kitchen, ought always to be on the same floor.” Still, the planning that went into the Stearns’ basement storage and workspaces must have interested passersby as they watched foundations going up.18 It is likely that the basement kitchen supplemented the main kitchen upstairs, segregating messy wet jobs such as laundry and butchering. The below-grade storage spaces kept food supplies cool without the risk of freezing in winter. Above, in the main kitchen, the principal working space had ample room filled with light and ventilation; a pantry to one side of the cooking hearth provided convenient storage, and a door and exterior stairway led to the backyard. It was a modern house. It was also more than the small family of a skilled artisan needed in the tough economy after the Panic of 1819 when work was scarce and Sam had to compete with his brother who also lived in town. He and Olive moved away for a couple of years while brother Calvin did much of the finish work between other jobs. Upon their return in 1824, they sold it.19 The house is a reminder that the Stearnses were building in a market in which more was at stake than kitchens or storage. Innovative kitchens were as much a product of forward-thinking design as a reflection of cultural categories such as work, class, or gender. A variety of people, including men, were interested in kitchens and domestic economy because they were selling ideas about how a modern house should function. Many of them also cared about the conditions in which their wives and children lived. When popular advice books such as Lydia Maria Child’s American Frugal Housewife (in the enlarged edition) was published in 1832, and Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy, in 1841, they addressed women readers, but many of their prescriptions also appealed to men. Child dedicated her book to “Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy” on the title page and most of the contents emphasized economical ways to preserve, prepare, and manage food. The book also included her thoughts on health and economy.20 Efficiency, sound management, and economy were terms that resonated in business and domestic reform literature. Among her general maxims for health were old

152   J. Ritchie Garrison ­ romides: “Rise early. Eat simple food. Take plenty of exercise . . . . Eat what best agrees b with your system, and resolutely abstain from what hurts you, however well you may like it.”21 Child was impatient with invalidism and folly among elite women and pointedly stated: “The prevailing evil of the present day is extravagance.” She also advocated a strong education for females in domestic economy as opposed to training at the piano.22 Excluding the comments about pianos, many of these attitudes were also conventions in advice to young men. Moral priorities aside, the extravagances visible in the house Sam and Olive sold covered all bases whether their house was originally intended as a speculative venture or their home. Design shaped markets.23 Ten years later, Beecher’s book addressed some of the same themes but with important differences as material and ideological contexts had changed. Although she accepted the era’s attitudes toward the political subordination of women to men, she had little patience with notions of intellectual inferiority and was active in educational reforms, many of them focused on “Domestic Economy as a Branch of Study,” the title of one of her chapters. Push and pull factors were at work by the time she wrote. The economic dislocations of the Panic of 1837, the public health problems caused by recurring epidemics that had ravaged many cities, and a dearth of domestic help outside of enslaved people or young single women (who usually disliked domestic work) had affected most Americans. Simultaneously, scientific advances in anatomy and medicine provided a much clearer understanding of how the body functioned and how environment and nutrition shaped health. Diet, exercise, fresh air, and hygiene had become accepted parts of preventative medicine in ways that drove conversations about architecture, water cures, summer holidays away from city diseases, and proper attire. Women and men could take practical steps that would reduce their own and their children’s risks for disease. Building a well-organized kitchen was not just a matter of easing labor; it was important for health.24

Joseph and Betsey Maybury’s House Samuel Stearns was not the only artisan who designed a modern kitchen. Joseph Maybury immigrated from Britain to work in America’s iron industry. By 1835, he was in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he married Betsey Cleveland Read. In 1847, when Joseph was thirty-nine and Betsey was forty-seven, the couple acquired land on the banks of Plymouth’s Alms House pond within sight of the factory where Joseph worked. Their one-and-a-half-story, center-passage house remained in the same family through three generations and retains its original fireplaces, hearths, bake oven, laundry set kettle, and the ghosts of the original masonry refrigerator, sinks, pumps, and waste pipe (Figure 8.7). The Mayburys’ house provides a perspective on what happened to kitchens as the Northeast rapidly industrialized.25 Unlike the Stearnses, who had done much of their own building, the Mayburys were consumers of other’s work. They lacked the freedom the Stearnses had to innovate as the

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   153

Figure 8.7.  Artist unknown, Joseph and Betsey Maybury House, Plymouth, Massachusetts, ca. 1845. Oil on canvas. Author’s collection.

work went up, but Betsey Maybury was an experienced middle-aged woman; judging from the architectural evidence, she imposed some of that experience on the house’s work zones. Their property was also near Plymouth harbor’s wharves, where suppliers stored coal, cordwood, ice, and provisions. Northfield was rural with many local sources of food and fuel. Plymouth was not, and the differences showed up in the Mayburys’ kitchen and work areas. Joseph Maybury received wages and did not have to negotiate the complicated cash and barter economy characteristic of most rural communities. Consequently, the Mayburys did not need as much storage as the Stearns’ house had in a farming community where things arrived in season and had to be put up for the long haul. Although the Maybury’s eventually had a “barn” and a substantial orchard, they were not farmers and many of their groceries probably came from suppliers in town on an as-needed basis. Like the Stearnses, the Mayburys built their house into the side of a hill with a walkout basement (Figure 8.8). The basement had two rooms: a well-lighted outer room that served as a laundry and a more dimly lit inner room for storage. Thus, the work area of the Mayburys’ basement was organized for efficiency, but it was zoned for different work than the kitchen above.26

154   J. Ritchie Garrison

Figure 8.8.  First-floor and basement plans, Joseph and Betsey Maybury house, built ca. 1847–1848. Measured by Bill Fornaciari and drawn by the author.

The location of the main kitchen emphasized the central importance of domestic control. It bridged the space between the main house and the ell and woodshed stretching out to the rear. From it, Betsey Maybury commanded the house while her husband was at the ironworks during ten- to twelve-hour days. The kitchen mediated internal access to most rooms in the house and was filled with doorways that facilitated how she managed air, sounds, and human circulation. The polite entrance was via the front door that faced the drive out front, but the central passage led to the kitchen that controlled the back of the building. To the rear of the kitchen was a pantry with a sink, counters, and open shelving; a passage and storage room led to the woodshed that had exterior loading doors to the east and west and a privy in the southeast corner with a small window and a door for ventilation and privacy. West of the kitchen was a tiny lobby that led to the back door and the back stairs. Boarders or children could go up to their rooms without going through the kitchen, and the door between the lobby and the kitchen had a lock as did other bedrooms in the house, including a two-room suite on the ground floor behind the parlor. Clearly, the Mayburys planned on controlled privacy from the beginning and apparently had thought about the possibilities of taking in boarders when construction occurred in 1847–1848. The touches of luxury—Egyptian marble chimneypieces in the parlor and dining room and carpeted floors—reflected refined aspirations of a family on a management track, but the scale was restrained. The dining

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   155 room overlooked the steeples of the churches on Leyden Street where the Pilgrims first settled; the town’s large almshouse stood on the opposite side of the pond. The view surely reminded family or lodgers how rapidly things could turn around if discipline faltered or ill health struck. Although cook-stove technology was maturing rapidly in the 1840s when the house was built, the kitchen did not originally have a cook stove. The bake oven built into the masonry flush with the front jambs of the firebox was typical for the era and initially seems similar to colonial antecedents, but it was equipped with a slide damper for controlling the exhaust draft when the oven was heating or baking and a circular damper in the iron fire door to regulate oxygen reaching the fuel. As Rumford had discovered forty years before, these controls made the oven more efficient, saving time and fuel. By contrast, the open hearth used fuel much less efficiently, but many cooks in the 1830s and 1840s continued to prefer cooking over a fire to stove cooking because it yielded different results. Nevertheless, stoves were becoming more common. A study of probate inventories in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, showed that six of sixty-three probated inventories between 1830 and 1835 had cook stoves. The inventories probably underestimate the true numbers; account books like the one Samuel Pierce kept in Greenfield, Massachusetts, suggest that about 18.9 percent of the stoves sold between 1821 and 1826 were cook stoves. By 1834–1835 the percentage in the accounts had increased to 40 percent; they were no longer novelties. The decade of the 1840s was a tipping point in which prices declined, reliability improved, and designs began to stabilize. The Mayburys’ use of the hearth cooking was likely an aesthetic choice because the cost of the kitchen’s chimney with a cooking hearth and multiple flues in 1847–1848 was probably higher than buying and installing a $30–$35 cook stove in a much less complicated flue. In any case, the Mayburys had no objections on principle to stoves because they had already installed them in the parlor and two of their bedchambers.27 Seen as a set of relationships, then, the kitchen and its support spaces sorted domestic priorities and behaviors in direct but efficient ways. As in the Stearns’ house, the family organized work and storage by frequency of use, convenience, light, and temperature. The Mayburys remanded laundry to the basement, where there was an internal water supply, a large copper set kettle for efficient boiling, direct access to the yard for drying and sun-bleaching in good weather, and a closet for storing tubs and supplies. Water for washing and cleaning was close at hand and under the window, where workers could see what they were doing. If Joseph came in filthy from the ironworks, he may well have started in the basement to clean up before rising to the level of polite society. Upstairs, the kitchen workspaces were also segmented, hierarchic, and orderly. The cooking hearth’s brick face was painted black to mask soot, a common feature in period kitchens. The family set a whale oil lamp on the mantelshelf to the right of the firebox where it would have provided light to right-handed workers in the dark hours of winter. Because the kitchen floor was replaced in the 1910s, it is now impossible to recover the wear marks that would reveal where the Mayburys might have located kitchen furniture, but the absence of hooks, nail holes, or hardware on or near the kitchen mantel suggests that most cooking tools were put away when not in use, possibly in a table with

156   J. Ritchie Garrison drawer that went between the original east-facing windows. These windows provided large amounts of light in the morning when Betsey would have prepared breakfast and a midday dinner. Evening suppers were cold and appreciably dimmer even in summers as sunlight went over to the west side of the house. The pantry exhibited a similar attention to order. Although too small for more than one or two people at a time, it was an active workspace with everything located within a step or two, long before designers had worked out concepts of kitchen triangles. It had another sink for cleanup (a practice seen in some other Plymouth houses of this era), a wide counter with a pine top that still shows knife marks where food was cut up in the light from the pantry window, and numerous shelves for storage. If anyone at the time had thought to put doors on the shelves instead of leaving them open, the pantry would have looked much like a twentieth-century kitchen with counters and cabinets. Betsey Maybury might have had girls as live-in help, but one suspects that she did much of the work herself. Just as Beecher advised, the sink was immediately adjacent to where plates and provisions were stored. When Betsey cleaned up, she simply put the dishes back on the shelves where they belonged.28 What the archaeology of these spaces demonstrated as layers of paint were removed during restoration was that the Mayburys and their builders were deliberate in their planning and construction: food preparation, cleanup, and storage were segregated in the pantry; cooking, baking, and probably light meals were located in the kitchen, where there was space to move around; dining in varying degrees of formality probably took place in the dining room; fuel storage and the privy with the attending mess and smells was segregated in the woodshed; laundry and bathing occurred downstairs in the outer basement, where there was access to water and efficient means of heating it; and refrigeration and bulk storage was located in the inner basement, where ambient temperatures were cooler. All of these zones make sense, but their survival from this era is exceptionally rare. The most unusual feature in the Maybury house was the masonry refrigerator in the northwest corner of the inner basement—the coldest corner (Figure  8.9). Beecher urged that basements be equipped with “a safe or moveable closet, with sides of wire of perforated tin, in which cold meats, cream, and other articles should be kept; . . . a refrigerator, or large wooden box, on feet, with a lining of tin or zinc, and a space between the tin and wood filled with powdered charcoal, having at the bottom, a place for ice, a drain to carry off the water, and also moveable shelves and partitions.” The Mayburys’ refrigerator was actually built of bricks on the two sides that projected into the inner basement. It was five feet long, eighteen inches high, and about twenty inches deep. The Mayburys’ contractors apparently followed the advice of Thomas Moore, who published the instructions for making a refrigerator in 1803. The masonry walls apparently enclosed two wooden boxes of unequal size (one containing the ice; the other the food), probably lined with zinc to separate the wood from condensate or meltwater. The boxes were set inside the brick wall, and the workers backfilled the interstices with powdered charcoal. Charcoal residue still remains on the refrigerator walls to document this form of insulation. The entire refrigerator was covered with a hinged lid. Kept covered, and maintained with blocks of ice as needed, this refrigerator

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   157 probably worked about as well as the ice boxes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although it is hard to know without reconstructing it and measuring its ability to maintain cold temperatures.29

Figure 8.9. Reconstructed cut-away perspective of the refrigerator, Joseph and Betsey Maybury house. Measured and drawn by the author.

There were also stand-alone refrigerators in the 1820s and probably earlier. Made of woods as inexpensive as pine and as luxurious as mahogany, their owners could place them where wanted. Furniture warehouses advertised them in the 1820s as stand-alone objects, and they sometimes appear in auction notices. Francis Amory placed an auction notice in the Boston Daily Advertiser on May 2, 1817, listing a “variety of articles in the cellar, iron bound casks, &c.—a Refrigerator for keeping butter, fruit, etc.” Another notice that appeared in the Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot in 1823 suggested that Daniel Richardson’s improvements would permit “the refrigerator to be deposited in the cellar, in the garret, in any part of the house, or even in the open sun, without any perceptible injury to the contents; it does not require to be replenished with ice, more than once in three days, during the hottest season; and it is attended with another advantage—complete security against every species of vermin, . . . .” Both types of refrigerators, wooden or masonry, depended upon access to commercially harvested ice kept in specialized warehouses. In effect, the technology and costs of ice harvesting and storage matured after the Stearnses built their house and before the Mayburys built theirs. Cost factors and stabilizing technology undoubtedly affected the Mayburys’

158   J. Ritchie Garrison decision to build a refrigerator, but so did the fact that Plymouth had ice ponds and warehouses for commercial harvesting.30 What surfaces in this case study is the importance of timing, context, and location. The Mayburys adopted refrigeration and chose open-hearth cooking when deciding how to organize their kitchen and workspaces. Their choices preceded yet cohered to Beecher’s advice that “A full supply of all conveniences in the kitchen and cellar, and a place appointed for each article, very much facilitates domestic labor. . . . It would be far better, for a lady to give up some expensive article, in the parlor, and apply the money, thus saved, for kitchen conveniences, than to have stinted supply, where most labor is to be performed.” In Plymouth, where seasonal provisions were readily available, and in an economy based on factory pay and factory time, it made sense to allocate resources for cooling with ice and also store batches of salted, dried, and pickled foods in crocks and barrels placed in the basement. What becomes increasingly visible in the 1830s and 1840s is a selective adoption of new ideas as technologies stabilized. Betsey apparently preferred cooking at a fireplace when she moved into the house, probably because she and her family maintained expectations about what food should taste like based on their life experience with hearth cooking and brick bake ovens. What really made her working facilities exceptional was their careful organization by zones and by access to piped water on two floors. These were logical choices for someone who was getting older and who likely did her own work because the plumbing reduced hard physical labor. Like her husband, she was a manager of time and resources, and she seems to have imposed her sense of orderliness on her dwelling.31

Charity and George Stearns’ House Charity and George Stearns’ house shares many characteristics with the Mayburys’ house but completed the shift to modern cook stoves (Figure 8.10). Begun in 1843, it was mostly finished by 1845 when the couple married. In a sense Charity moved into George’s house, but she furnished it. While he probably consulted her about the organization of kitchen and storage spaces, the plan of the kitchen so closely followed those of other family-built houses that it seems unlikely that Charity had many suggestions for change, perhaps because she was still in her teens and far away when planning and construction began. “There is no one thing, more necessary to a housekeeper, in performing her varied duties,” Beecher admonished, “than a habit of system and order; and yet, the peculiarly desultory nature of women’s pursuits, and the embarrassments resulting from the state of domestic service in this Country, render it very difficult to form such a habit.” Whatever Charity’s prior domestic experiences may have been, her husband and his family had built a number of local houses and had a clear understanding what worked, or at least sold, in the community. Indeed, there was far more consistency to the family’s design for service ells than for the fronts of houses that addressed varying tastes for elegance, social deportment, and individual expression.32

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   159

Figure 8.10.  George and Charity Stearns house, built 1843–1845, Northfield, Massachusetts. Photograph taken about 1858. Author’s collection.

Like the majority of women who moved into houses they did not help design, Charity would have to impose order on what others had already decided and in a rural community rather than on the seacoast, where she had grown up in refined circumstances. Her piano came out to Northfield, where it was situated in one of the double parlors close to the street. Her skill at the piano complemented her husband’s fondness for singing, but she would have to learn married housekeeping in a model kitchen that was different from what she had grown up with in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The house helped teach her how to manage.33 The circumstances must have been challenging. Although it was new and designed to be comfortable, the house was also large and it merged domestic life with George’s business (Figure 8.11). Aware that this was a very big change for her in a community with little available domestic help other than young girls, George seems to have altered portions of the family’s standard ell design to make her work easier; he segmented the plan by function and integrated his and Charity’s work horizontally and vertically with the rest of the house. His business office was between the parlor and the dining room. His shop was beneath the main kitchen. Much of the ell consisted of a long shed that provided George with lumber storage above and a shop in the walkout basement. So long as his work kept

160   J. Ritchie Garrison George and Charity Stearns house 1843–1846

Privy

Shed

Storage

Workbench

Shop

Store room

Pantry

Sink Well Ash pit Set kettle

Kitchen Cookstove

Smoke oven

China closet

Dining room

Basement kitchen

Office and library

Entry

Cellar storage S. Parlor

Basement plan

N. Parlor

First floor plan

Figure 8.11.  Reconstructed first-floor and basement plans, George and Charity Stearns house, 1843–1845, Northfield, Massachusetts. Measured and drawn by the author.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   161 him at home, he could assist Charity, but the nature of construction meant that he often worked at the job site. At least some of the time she had to manage on her own. The house was as much a design showcase as a domicile; in 1845, it had two kitchens for its two occupants. Adjacent to the shop in the basement level was a kitchen hearth (but no bake oven), a cabinet for smoking meats, an exterior set kettle for boiling laundry in nice weather just outside a door to the south-facing yard, and a clean-out for the ashes from the bake oven that was located in the main kitchen above. Like his uncle’s basement kitchen, George seems to have designed the basement kitchen for laundry and butchering, but it was not as conveniently arranged as the laundry at the Mayburys’ house, which was fully indoors. The primary kitchen on the first (main) floor of the shed was small but minimized steps. He clustered her activities around a cook stove, a brick bake oven, and a sink opposite the stove that drew water via a pump from the well in George’s shop below. The kitchen had three doors: one led into a large pantry, one to a piazza with a set of stairs down to the yard, and one to the dining room. The northeast corner of the kitchen was partitioned for a china closet entered from the dining room, but it had a pass-through that enabled workers to put the plates onto a shelf in the closet without having to go through the dining room. The only modern feature that was missing was a refrigerator, most likely because ice supplies were then less common in rural than coastal communities. George had anticipated change. By the mid-1840s, cook stoves were evolving rapidly in a rising tide of patented variations and differing price points. In many ways these stoves were simply appliances attached to chimney flues; consumers could swap them out for newer and better models if they had the means or inclination. They could even arrange to rent them in Greenfield, the county seat. While there was general consensus that stoves were efficient, brought cooking to a more convenient height, and were good for a wide variety of cooking tasks, such as boiling, stewing, sautéing, and frying, there were doubts, based on experience, about their ability to bake well or roast meats. Knowing this, George designed the new kitchen with a brick bake oven that mitigated flaws then common. Years later, when Catherine Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, prepared the copy for American Woman’s Home, they captured the reasons why he and others made this decision, remembering with regret “for the sake of bread, that our old steady brick ovens have been almost universally superseded by those of ranges and cooking-stoves, which are infinite in their caprices and forbid all general rules.” The Stearns’ brick bake oven compensated for the inadequacies of the new technology, but as time passed, most Americans adapted their tastes to the baked “roasts” and breads cook stoves produced.34 The continuities and changes visible in George’s and Charity’s house reflected the perspective of a new generation and the difficulties of generalizing too freely about the process of remaking kitchens. The Stearnses had parlors that both Child and Beecher would have characterized as extravagant, but they also had a modern kitchen that met most of their criteria for domestic organization and efficiency. The resources invested in the work and social components of the house occurred at the same time that family size (best studied at present in Massachusetts and the Middle Atlantic) among the native

162   J. Ritchie Garrison born declined to two to three children—a trend that correlated most closely with increased female education. In thirteen-and-a-half years of marriage, Charity had only one child; many other members of her generation also had much smaller families than their mothers and grandmothers who had experienced recurring cycles of pregnancy, birth, lactation, and childcare. This decrease in fertility obviously varied by family and by ethnicity, religion, and region, but it suggests that reformers’ insistence on healthy behaviors such as better ventilation, hygiene, exercise, and nutrition also reflected new patterns in emotional and physical intimacy. These smaller families raised the stakes for each child as parents aged and health declined. In an increasing number of households, including all of Charity’s female in-laws, large families with the attending workload were apparently becoming another choice rather that a woman’s lot. Charity’s and George’s parlors and kitchens were in part allegories for decisions with large human and material consequences.35

Conclusions What emerges from the details in these cases and the commentaries by domestic advisors are the challenges of making selections under conditions of rapid change, analogous in many ways to the arrival of the personal computer and the Internet. The texts remind scholars that a range of conversations and empirical knowledge affected most Americans; the buildings and the things in them situate households in specific locations. The interpretive model is not one of top-down or bottom-up, but of a broadly networked dialectic between the outside-in and the inside-out, operating over time. Ideas, politics, and human behavior can change rapidly; once they are fabricated, however, objects often are durable enough to entangle cultural change in alternate temporalities. The architectural evidence suggests that women’s workspaces were increasingly integrated into dwelling plans by the mid-nineteenth century and that builders paid attention to making women’s work less onerous and more productive. Addressing these issues was not only important to a builder’s profits, but also reflected the fact that men and women were coupled in family relationships. Gendered ideologies shaped expectations, but the physicality of most work was hard on everyone, especially in an era of precarious health. Increased domestic efficiency, therefore, made sense to many men, not just to the women who were their partners. The expanding role of some women in the era’s reform, religious, educational, and cultural efforts was partially shaped by growing efficiencies that predated the arrival of cheaper domestic help as immigration surged in the 1840s—indeed, these efficiencies may have emerged when they did because there was insufficient help.36 The basic design ideas of the modern kitchen in the northeastern United States were mostly worked out before the Civil War based on the three themes that were salient in these case studies: a rise in domestic productivity; an effort to improve health; and a cautious engagement with large-scale systems. The first theme was visible in the

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   163 increased segmentation of workspaces to reduce fatigue and achieve organizational efficiencies in an era when reliable domestic labor supplies were expensive, scarce, or nonexistent. The second theme, the importance of establishing better domestic conditions for health, emphasized a holistic approach—lower stress levels, better light, ventilation, warmth, simple nutrition, vigorous exercise, bathing, and clean linens. And the third appeared as new industries and distribution networks began to bring ice to refrigerators, cook stoves to modern kitchens, and water to sinks. It is easy in critical hindsight to emphasize the importance of the systems that increasingly tied households to capitalist distribution networks, energy supplies, and more intensive forms of labor. But in many ways the systems were the handmaidens of modern Western families that selectively adapted technologies that made sense to them in the particular places they lived. That people did so based on the aesthetics of food, their affections for loved ones, and the management of resources at the local level testifies to their priorities and their desire for flexibility. Technological developments shaped but did not determine the principal innovations in modern American kitchens and service areas: cook-stove designs stabilized as manufacturers and consumers learned to treat them as an appliance subject to deterioration and constant small improvements that would require periodic replacement; interior plumbing with on-demand running water became available in heated work areas; ice refrigeration improved the preservation of fruits, vegetables, and dairy products; laundry facilities generally became more convenient (although the number of clothes increased as the price of textiles and clothing declined); and efficient storage helped housekeepers improve organization and reduce steps and clutter. Did these changes reflect Americans’ or Europeans’ wealth and education or help to produce it? The houses studied here imply it was a little of both. The past, of our biological bodies and cultural habits, remains powerful. The features of modern kitchens that we have written into law via building codes and social welfare policy as a normative form of “decency” spread incrementally (and still incompletely in countries with modern economies), but they did. We are all now entangled in a world that became visible in the early 1800s as fairly ordinary people selectively and creatively introduced new kitchen technologies and systems in their households. As we debate their meanings, inequalities, and aesthetic pleasures—just as Krimmel depicted for a different era—the past and the emerging present remain stubbornly in tension during the endless search for our daily bread. We seem to prefer it that way.37

Notes 1. The original sketch is in the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden, Winterthur, Delaware; for a biographical study of Krimmel, see Anneliese Harding, John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic (Winterthur, DE: A Winterthur Book, 1994), 158–162. 2. There is a fairly large literature on various topics related to kitchens, although much of it is either very general, treats the kitchen primarily as part of an architectural whole, or

164   J. Ritchie Garrison analyzes the ways in which economic, social, and technological changes shaped kitchens, often without much detailed understanding of the objects involved. The Bibliography includes works on kitchens and architecture that shaped this essay, as well as on the social aspects of kitchens and cooking. 3. Catherine Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy for Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, rev. ed. (Boston: T. H. Webb, 1842), 157. 4. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 157; Strasser, Never Done, 32–37. 5. For general background on this period of study, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, Vintage Books, 1993); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); the theoretical insights in this essay are largely grounded in the work of Ian Hodder, John Law, and Bruno Latour. See Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and John Law, After Method: Mess as Social Science Research (London: Routledge, 2004). In essence, look closely at the objects themselves, think carefully about how humans and things are linked to other agents of cultural change, and recognize that change frequently takes place in differing temporalities and in ways that people cannot or do not talk about directly via words. 6. Hodder, Entanglement, 208: “The determinative component in entanglements that pushes them in certain directions is not the economic base, the ecology nor the infrastructure; but neither is it ideology, systems of meaning nor the superstructure. Rather the entangling itself has a tautness that channels and directs humans and things as they go about their daily business of dependence and co-dependence.” 7. Benjamin, Count of Rumford, Essays, Political, Economical and Philosophical, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by Luke Hansard for T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1802). 8. See, for example: Matthew Pearce to George Read II, February 10, 1798; Matthew Pearce to George Read II, July 18, 1799; Peter Crowding to George Read II, January 14, 1800; Peter Crowding to George Read II, January 17, 1801; Thomas Spikerman and George Read II, March 1801; Peter Crowding to George Read II, March 27, 1801; John Read to George Read, II, February 11, 1802; John Read to George Read II, May 13, 1802; John Read to George Read II, August 15, 1803; John Read to George Read II, October 11, 1803; John Read to George Read II, November 7, 1803; John Read to Georger Read II, November 25, 1803; R. Rodney Collection, Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, Delaware. 9. The house is now owned and maintained by the Delaware Historical Society; restoration in the 1980s peeled back layers of kitchen alterations to return to the Read’s original intentions. As restoration masons removed the adjustments made for later iterations of kitchen ranges in the old kitchen, they discovered that the Reads themselves had made a number of changes, some of them during the earliest phases of construction; surviving examples of Rumford kitchens are almost always in the homes of wealthy families in northeastern cities, where access to materials and suppliers, both local and imported, enabled patrons and their master builders to translate Rumford’s published ideas into real kitchens; also see Herman, Townhouse, 1–32. 10. Rumford, Essays, Political, Economical and Philosophical. 11. Very few of Mary Read’s letters have survived; what we know of the domestics she had is based on George Read’s accounts.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   165 12. Rumford, Essays, III, 134–154. 13. William Read to George Read II, June 30, 1811, R. Rodney Collection, Delaware Historical Society. 14. William Read to George Read II, June 30, 1811, R. Rodney Collection, Delaware Historical Society. 15. Inventory of George Read II, copy on file at the George Read II House, New Castle, Delaware; “Dist. of sales, goods and Chattels late of G. Read Esq. Decd. Sold December 13th 1836 by William  T.  Read Esp. Administrator,” typescript on file at George Read II House, New Castle, Delaware; George Read, II, Account Book; personal accounts, 1806–1813; John Slater, [Catalog], 1807–1817, Collection of Printed Books and Periodicals, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. 16. Garrison, Two Carpenters, 29–47, 75; for the genealogy of Samuel Stearns, see Avis Stearns Van Wagenen, Genealogy and Memoirs of Isaac Stearns and His Descendants (Syracuse, NY: Courier Printing Company, 1901), I: 113. 17. William Pomeroy’s potash business offered an opportunity for local residents to profit from the sale of their ashes. There are at least two ash houses (stone structures used to collect ashes) standing in the town, and dwellings in the county frequently contained ash pits directly beneath their bake ovens. While many homeowners collected ashes to make soap for the household or to improve the soil of their gardens, the artifacts document the importance of the potash factory to the local economy. See  J.  H.  Temple and George Sheldon, History of the Town of Northfield, Massachusetts (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1875). 18. Beecher, Treatise, 259; the book has an entire chapter “On the Care of the Kitchen, Cellar, and Storeroom,” 317–324. 19. Calvin Stearns, Day Book, Northfield, Historical Society, Northfield, Massachusetts, December 11, 1819; December 15, 1819; April 16, 1820; August 6, 1820; August 13, 1820; August 20, 1820; August 25, 1820; September 3, 1820; September 17, 1820; September 24, 1820; October 9, 1820; October 16, 1820; November 4, 1820; November 25, 1820; December 2, 1820; December 9, 1820; December 25, 1820; April 5, 1821; April 7, 1821; April 14, 1821; May 1, 1821; May 5, 1821; May 6, 1821; May 18, 1821; June 16, 1821; June 23, 1821; July 30, 1821; August 18, 1821; August 25, 1821; September 1, 1821; September 8, 1821; September 27, 1821; October 8, 1821; October 17, 1821; October 25, 1821; December 15, 1821; December 23, 1821; April 20, 1822; April 28, 1822; May 26, 1822; June 1, 1822; June 8, 1822; June 9, 1822; June 15, 1822; June 29, 1822; July 10, 1822; July 15, 1822; July 27, 1822; October 5, 1822; November 23, 1822; November 30, 1822; December 7, 1822; December 14, 1822; December 21, 1822; December 26, 1822; February 8, 1823; March 7, 1823; March 15, 1823; March 22, 1823; March 29, 1823; April 5, 1823; April 12, 1823; April 19, 1823; April 26, 1823; May 3, 1823; May 10, 1823; May 17, 1823; July 5, 1823; August 9, 1823; August 16, 1823; August 25, 1823; September 20, 1823; September 28, 1823; October 7, 1823; October 18, 1823; October 25, 1823; November 1, 1823; November 7, 1823; February 21, 1824; April 3, 1824; April 10, 1824; April 17, 1824; April 25, 1824; May 2, 1824; June 1, 1824; June 26, 1824; July 18, 1824; August 21, 1824; November 20, 1824; December 11, 1824; December 28, 1824; March 1, 1825; March 5, 1825; March 12, 1825; March 19, 1825; March 26, 1825. 20. Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy (New York: Samuel S. and William Wood, 1838, orig. ed. 1832). 21. Child, Frugal Housewife, 87–88. 22. Child, Frugal Housewife, 91. 23. Child, Frugal Housewife, 87–88.

166   J. Ritchie Garrison 24. In general, the relationship of health and buildings to the scholarship on domestic ­vernacular architecture is understudied. See John  S.  Haller, Jr. American Medicine in Transition, 1840–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); the classic biography on Beecher is Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W.  W.  Norton and Company, 1976); Beecher, Treatise, “Chapter IV On Domestic Economy as a Branch of Study,” 64–68; Beecher spent five chapters on various aspects of health and hygiene—“On the Care of Health”; “On Healthful Food”; “On Healthful Drinks”; “On Clothing”; and “On Cleanliness,” 69–122; there were frequent references to the unhealthy aspect of women’s lives in Frances Trollop’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) during the time she spent in Cincinnati in 1828–1830; on water cures, see Susan E. Caleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 173–185. The latter has a fine chapter on how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s treatment at the Wesselhoeft Water Cure, Brattleboro, Vermont, helped her recover her health by getting away from the era’s medicines. Many of the recommendations Catherine Beecher made in her Treatise on Domestic Economy prefigured the lifestyle changes and physical regimens her sister would undergo at great expense in Brattleboro. Both the advice of the reformers like Child and Beecher and the design choices in kitchens were ahead of the literature on hydropathy in this country; on the Panic of 1837, see Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); on epidemics and their consequences, see Billy G. Smith, Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); on the emotional experience of illness and loss, see Alan Swedlund, Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840–1916 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 25. Research on the Maybury genealogy indicates Joseph was born in 1808. Mary Cleveland Read Maybury was born in 1800 and gave birth to her last child when she was forty-three. Mary died in 1868. Joseph Maybury lived on in the house with two of his married children and an unmarried son until his death in 1878. 26. In the manuscript census records of 1850, 1860, and 1870, Joseph is listed as an ironworker. The house value in 1860 was $2,500 and in 1870, $3,000; it was a substantial house, better than most, but not the largest or most expensive in town, and it was located in Plymouth’s industrial zone. 27. Brewer, Fireplace to Cookstove, 63–94, esp. 83, 125–126; Samuel Pierce & Son, Account books 1821–1826; 1834–1835; George Pierce, Account book 1852–1855, Memorial Libraries, Deerfield, Massachusetts. The larger point here is that cooking with fire worked well and continues to do so. See Paula Marcoux, Cooking with Fire: From Roasting on a Spit to Baking in a Tannur: Rediscovering Techniques and Recipes That Capture the Flavors of Wood-Fired Cooking (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2014); Nancy Carter Crump, Hearthside Cooking, Early Southern Cuisine Updated for Today’s Hearth and Cookstove, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   167 28. The manuscript Census of 1850 lists a fourteen-year-old girl, Mary Martin, as a member of the household, but it is impossible to know from this vantage point whether she was a domestic or a boarder working in one of the nearby mills; she is not listed as a domestic servant as some individuals living in Plymouth households were. 29. There is a surviving masonry refrigerator in the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, in the Center Dwelling House. This unit gives some idea of what the Mayburys’ refrigerator might have looked like. The earliest publication on refrigerators is Thomas Moore, An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice Houses (Baltimore: Bonsal & Niles, 1803); Strasser, Never Done, 19–21. 30. Boston Daily Advertiser, May 2, 1817; Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, May 24, 1823 (infoweb.newsbank.com: America’s Historical Newspapers, accessed September 13, 2014); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965): 10–16; Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 36–39; and Richard Osborn Cummings, The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology, 1800–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949). 31. Beecher, Treatise, 163. 32. Garrison, Two Carpenters, 109–119; Beecher, Treatise, 157; for references to the construction of George’s house, see Calvin Stearns, Day Book, January 8, 1841; January 15, 1842; January 20, 1842; May 15, 1842; May 29, 1842; May 23, 1843; June 9, 1843; August 8, 1843; August 12, 1843; August 23, 1843 (“raised George’s house in the street”); August 26, 1843; February 26, 1844; June 8, 1844; June 15, 1844; June 29, 1844; August 30, 1845; September 1, 1845; September 8, 1845, Northfield Historical Society, Northfield, Massachusetts. 33. The couple’s property was inventoried after George’s death in 1859, at which time Charity petitioned the court for a widow’s portion stating that “she is nevertheless entitled to her wearing apparel, and such other of the personal estate of the said deceased (especially as she furnished almost all of it with her own means) as your Honor’s sense of Justice and equity shall dictate.” See Probate Records of George Stearns, Registry of Probate and Family Court, Franklin County Courthouse, Greenfield, Massachusetts; while the notion of separateness is now out of fashion, Nancy Cott’s, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997): 64–74, 90–100, has much that is still useful; Ann Douglas talks about the idealized domestic world in The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); more recently, Catherine E. Kelly has emphasized the heterosocial worlds that kept women and men engaged in each other’s lives, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002): 157–160, 220–221. 34. Brewer, Fireplace to Cookstove, 118–143; Beecher, Treatise, 175. 35. For information on the period’s birthrates in Massachusetts, see Maris  A.  Vinovskis, Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 11–22; for a perspective on infertility, see Margaret  S.  Marsh, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); for a comparison with the Middle Atlantic region, see Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 21–55.

168   J. Ritchie Garrison 36. This point was well made by Mary  P.  Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 37. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Bibliography Beecher, Catherine. Treatise on Domestic Economy for Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School. Rev. ed. Boston: T. H. Webb, 1842. Belluscio, Lynne  J. “Brick Ovens in the Gennessee Country, 1789–1860: Architectural and Documentary Evidence.” In Foodways in the Northeast: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1982, edited by Peter Benes, 64–79. Boston: Boston University, 1984. Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brewer, Priscilla J. From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Caleff, Susan  E. Wash and Be Healed: The Water Cure Movement and Women’s Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Carlisle, Nancy, and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov with Jennifer Pustz. America’s Kitchens. Boston: Historic New England, 2008. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Cromley, Elizabeth Collins. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating and the Architecture of American Houses. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Garrison, J. Ritchie. Two Carpenters: Architecture and Building in Early New England, 1799–1859. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969. Herman, Bernard L. Townhouse: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hubka, Thomas C. Big House, Little House, Back House Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984. Klepp, Susan  E. Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Lanier, Gabrielle M. The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McMurry, Sally. Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Olmert, Michael. Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Rumford, Benjamin Thompson Reichgraf von (Count). Essays, Political, Economical and Philosophical. 2nd ed. London: Printed by Luke Hansard for T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1802.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850   169 Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Worrell, John, Myron O. Stachiw, and David Simmons. “Archaeology from the Ground Up.” In Lu Ann De Cunzo and Bernard  L.  Herman, Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Material Culture, 35–69. Winterthur, DE: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc., Dist. by University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Yamin, Rebecca. Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

chapter 9

Boston El ectr ic Science by “Mail Order” and Bricolage at Colonial Harvard Sara J. Schechner

In April 1758, Benjamin Franklin sent a “most curiously printed” edition of Virgil to Harvard College as a gift.1 It was packed in a chest containing glassware requisite for electrical experiments at the college. These tangible things—a book and bottles—did not travel alone. The crate that arrived in Cambridge also contained affection, news, and ideas: all incorporeal things that were reified by Franklin’s gift. Electricity in Franklin’s day was another intangible. Natural philosophers debated whether it was an exhalation, a weightless spirit, a virtue, or an imponderable fluid, but they could not see or touch it directly. It could be studied only through its puzzling and marvelous effects—for example, the attraction or repulsion of small bits of paper to a rubbed glass rod, or the spark and snap of electricity when it jumped through the air between a charged conductor and a person’s fingertips. Electricity could be generated, transferred, and bottled, but it remained invisible. During the course of the eighteenth century, electrical science was in its infancy, but like a developing child, it was coached along with toys and apparatus devised by philosophers. When this equipment survives— like electrical machines, Leyden jars, and thunder houses—we can inspect them to discover things that words alone would not disclose. This is not to discount texts, news stories, lectures, and letters, which are interdependent with objects and can provide context for material things that have survived and evidence of breakable objects that have not endured. But the story would be impoverished and incomplete without the physical objects of study. The examination of objects illuminates the practice of colonial American science in four significant ways. The tools of experiment and teaching show that Harvard scholars were just as interested as their European counterparts in making electricity manifest and trying to understand it. Colonial experimenters were handicapped. They found the lag time in scientific news reaching them to be inconvenient, but they suffered more

Boston Electric   171 from a lack of easy access to equipment and individuals who could repair it. This was particularly true with glass and brass scientific instruments and their components, which had to be imported. The expense and time of sending items to London encouraged experimenters to incorporate recycled, traded, and ready-to-hand materials into their apparatus more extensively than their counterparts in England.2 The paucity of local scientific instruments also encouraged the sociability of American science. This took the form of letter writing between individuals in order to exchange instructions for homemade apparatus and reports of observations, and the gathering together of polite society in private homes and public venues to enjoy experiments.

Early Lessons in Cambridge: Playing with Exhalations When Edward Holyoke (A.B. 1705),3 Harvard’s ninth president, was a Harvard student, electrical science was in its infancy and taught at the college according to a seventeenthcentury Cartesian textbook circulated in manuscript, the Compendium Physicae, of Charles Morton.4 From 1687 until 1728, generations of Harvard students dutifully learned from Morton that electricity was the property of particular materials called “electricks” to attract to themselves small light bodies. Electricity got its name from the Greek word for amber—elektron—which was the first material known to have this property. Jet and red wax were other known electrics. Morton explained electrical attraction in terms of the interactions of electrical effluvia and the elasticity and pressure of the air. When electrics were rubbed, they released effluvia from their pores. What the stuff was, no one knew. Many thought it could be a rarefied form of the rubbed body— an exhalation—that was distinct from a penetrating cosmic ether, which philosophers held to be responsible for the movements of the planets and phenomena such as gravitation. Small bodies, such as threads or bits of paper, became entangled with the volatile streams and were drawn back toward the excited electric when the pressure of the atmosphere forced the effluvia back into the rubbed material. As one student copied into his notebook: [Electricity is] that power which Jett, Amber, Red-wax, etc: have of being rub[b]ed, to draw small motes to themselves. But this (they say) is not by Coelestiall matter moved through the pores of these bodyes but by Volatile streames from themselves which stirred, and put in motion by the action (or rub[b]ing) fly out every way in straight lines: and are presently in like straight lines prest back again to their fountain by the Atmosphere.5

If Holyoke or his eleven classmates wanted to explore electrical attraction in a hands-on way, they would not need much in the way of equipment aside from a rod of sealing wax

172   Sara J. Schechner or lump of amber, plus some cat fur or woolen cloth with which to rub them. It was not widely known, then, that glass was a good electric, even though Isaac Newton had reported this to the Royal Society by letter thirty years earlier.6 This was too bad, since there were plenty of glass pieces to be had from the college windows that the rambunctious Holyoke broke!7 A year after Holyoke graduated, Francis Hauksbee, the curator of experiments for the Royal Society in London, rediscovered the electrical qualities of glass tubes and solid cylinders that were rubbed briskly with paper. He demonstrated the effects in November and December 1706. To make the rubbing more efficient, Hauksbee mounted a hollow glass globe on a horizontal axis, which could be spun by means of a belt drive operated by a hand-crank attached to a large wheel.8 The rotating globe was rubbed by the experimenter’s hands (Figure 9.1). Hauksbee’s new electrical machine was the prototype for many later electrical generators.9 (Today we call these machines “electrostatic generators,” but this label is anachronistic and confusing if applied to the period of this essay. Eighteenth-century experimenters had no current electricity to distinguish from static electricity. Those who used Hauksbee’s machine thought that electricity was an exhalation from the glass released by friction.) In the months that followed, Hauksbee performed many new experiments showing how the electrical exhalations produced sparks or luminescence, and how they attracted bits of leaf-brass and chaff. In one series of experiments, he placed a wooden hoop around the whirling, rubbed globe and showed how threads suspended from the hoop were attracted radially toward the globe’s axis. When the threads were placed inside the globe, they stood out like spokes on a wheel. Even more astonishing was the fact that the electrified threads—whether inside or outside the globe—shrank away from an approaching finger.10 Electricity, so named after the power of amber to attract bodies, was now observed also to repel bodies (although Hauksbee himself did not interpret it this way). One experimenter who embraced the actuality of electrical repulsion was Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande, a Dutch natural philosopher at the University of Leiden. His ­lectures, which incorporated experiments to demonstrate Newtonian physics, were collected and published in 1720–1721 in a remarkable textbook that went through numerous editions and translations in his lifetime. Willem ’s Gravesande took a strong stand on the nature of electricity: “Electricity is that Property of Bodies by which (when they are heated by Attrition) they attract, and repel lighter Bodies at a sensible distance.”11 This definition appeared in a section on “Fire,” because ’s Gravesande thought fire and light were connected to electricity in Hauksbee’s experiments. Word of these novel and puzzling experiments might have reached Harvard via the scientific correspondence of local Fellows of the Royal Society (such as Thomas Brattle or Cotton Mather), or perhaps through published reports in the society’s journal, the Philosophical Transactions, or even through a compilation that Hauksbee published as Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects (1709; second edition, 1719).12 News may also have come in the form of a book printed in 1712 to accompany the public lecture demonstrations performed by Hauksbee’s nephew (also named Francis

Boston Electric   173

Figure 9.1.  To study electricity in the 1730s, Harvard students rubbed their hands against a rotating glass globe and charged threads hung from hoops (like those shown here). Francis Hauksbee, Physico-Mechanical Experiments (London, 1709).

174   Sara J. Schechner Hauksbee) and William Whiston.13 A copy of this book survives in the Harvard College Library and was checked out by a student in 1729.14 That student would have been a pupil of Isaac Greenwood (A.B.  1721), the first incumbent of the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, a chair endowed in 1727 by Thomas Hollis, a London merchant.15 Hollis was much taken by the new experimental philosophy, and it influenced the terms of his professorship, his choice of Greenwood, and the contents of “5 chests of Mathematical instruments and glasses for Experiments” that he shipped to Cambridge for use by his professor and Harvard students.16 In London, Hollis had met Greenwood who was lodging and training with Jean T. Desaguliers, one of the most accomplished lecture demonstrators of the day.17 Desaguliers had succeeded the elder Hauksbee as curator of experiments at the Royal Society in 1714, and he delivered public lectures as well. He also had translated ’s Gravesande’s Newtonian textbook into English.18 Greenwood could not have had a better master, and Hollis handpicked him for the post. Alas, Greenwood was a drunkard and rake who skipped out on his bills in London (even the room and board he owed Desaguliers) on his way to Boston via Lisbon. Waiting for evidence that Greenwood was reformed, the Harvard Corporation held up his election for more than a year. But the attraction of the new course of experimental lectures and a room full of apparatus—both extraordinary provisions for a college of the time—proved too enticing. In the end, Harvard hired Greenwood under some duress after Hollis announced his plan to send a “Baptist Professor” if Mr. Greenwood disappointed them.19 While Greenwood awaited his official appointment, he offered an Experimental Course of Mechanical Philosophy in Boston from January through April 1727; it was the first public course of its kind in New England.20 The course prospectus, published in December 1726, shows his debt to Desaguliers and ’s Gravesande, whose book became standard reading for Harvard students during Greenwood’s tenure.21 After his election to the Hollis professorship,22 the inventories that Greenwood prepared in 1730 and 1738 of the apparatus make it clear that he intended to follow the order of the HauksbeeWhiston course of experiments in his Harvard lectures.23 These talks were of two sorts. The weekly public lectures were open to the entire college community by a subscription of forty shillings (two-thirds of the fee he had asked for his Boston series). The two private lectures each week were mandatory for juniors and seniors, and open to graduate students. Those in attendance would have been treated to demonstrations on mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, and electricity, as well as topics in mathematics, astronomy, and geography.24 We cannot emphasize enough how new this teaching method was. Morton’s lessons had been taught by lecture and recitation; experiments were not part of the regular program. After Greenwood arrived, demonstrations were standard, and the kit for the electrical experiments included glass tubes, solid glass cylinders, and a Hauksbee-style globe electrical machine, valued at eight pounds sterling.25 Hoops with threads were employed as well, for there is an expense on the college accounts for replacing four in 1740.26 Unfortunately none of this early apparatus has survived, but we know of its import, use, and fragile nature from archival records.

Boston Electric   175 At the time that Professor Greenwood was demonstrating electrical phenomena in Harvard Yard, Benjamin Franklin and Edward Holyoke were preoccupied with other matters. For much of the 1720s and 1730s, Franklin was busy with the printing business in Boston, London, and Philadelphia. He helped to establish the Junto, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Union Fire Company, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1737 he became postmaster of Philadelphia. During a trip to Boston in 1743, Franklin met a fellow Freemason, Dr. Archibald Spencer, an itinerant lecturer lately arrived from Scotland, at the Saint John’s Grand Lodge.27 In June, Spencer delivered a course of lectures on experimental philosophy to ladies and gentlemen in Boston willing to subscribe at six pounds old tenor per head.28 Derived largely from the elder and younger Hauksbees’ lecture demonstrations in London thirty years before, the experiments were not much different from those being presented to Harvard undergraduates, but they grabbed the attention of Boston society unfamiliar with experimental natural philosophy. By popular demand, Spencer began another series of lectures in August 1743.29 Spencer’s most memorable electrical demonstration was the classic of Stephen Gray, a English experimenter who had studied how the “electric virtue” could be communicated and received by many materials, including a dangling charity boy.30 Spencer’s trick was to suspend a boy horizontally by silk threads and make “sparks of Fire” fly from his face and hands by rubbing a glass tube at his feet (Figure 9.2). Although the spectacle was electrical, Spencer employed it to illustrate that “Fire” was diffused through all space and could be emitted from any body.31 Franklin witnessed the experiments, most likely in June, and later gave credit to Spencer for introducing him to the subject of electricity. In his Autobiography, Franklin recalled that the “electric Experiments . . . were imperfectly perform’d, as he [Spencer] was not very expert, but being on a Subject quite new to me, they equally surpris’d and pleas’d me.”32 Franklin, however, did not become an enthusiast until after 1745 when Peter Collinson, a London Quaker, sent the Library Company of Philadelphia a glass tube with instructions for its electrical use along with the April 1745 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine containing a description of the latest German electrical experiments.33 Soon after, Franklin learned of the invention of the Leyden jar, a device that stored and condensed electricity, thereby enabling more powerful (and dangerous!) experiments to be tried. The Leyden jar, moreover, exposed critical problems with contemporary theories of electrical matter—problems that Franklin’s own theory of electricity would resolve with great success. We will come back to Franklin shortly. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1705 and a master’s in 1708, Edward Holyoke remained in Cambridge until 1716 observing the stars, computing eclipses, and preparing almanacs for the meridian of Boston and Barbados.34 He employed astronomical instruments of the College and those that he imported.35 Holyoke became Harvard’s library keeper in 1709, a tutor in 1712, and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation in 1713. His duties as tutor (1712–1716) made him responsible for taking the sophomores through all their subjects, but in an unusual administrative move, he was also charged

176   Sara J. Schechner

Figure 9.2.  In this crowd-pleasing lecture demonstration, a dangling boy gave off sparks when touched by a glass rod or finger and attracted bits of paper. Abbé Nollet, Essai sur l’electricité des corps (Paris, 1746).

Boston Electric   177 with the instruction of the seniors in mathematics. In 1716, Holyoke left Cambridge to take up a living as pastor of the Second Congregationalist Church of Marblehead. He returned in 1737, after being elected the ninth president of Harvard College, a post he held for thirty-two years. One of President Holyoke’s first acts was the dismissal of Professor Greenwood for his many “Acts of gross Intemperance, by excessive drinking, to the dishonour of God & the great hurt & Reproach of this Society.”36 In 1738, John Winthrop (A.B. 1732) was elected the next Hollis Professor and inaugurated on January 2, 1739. Winthrop developed his own “Course of Experimental Philosophical Lectures,” which he kept current throughout his tenure.37 In his notes for his twenty-sixth lecture, dated May 10, 1746, he opened with this pronouncement: Electricity is a property of some Bodies wh: allternatly Attracts & Repels all Light Bodies at a Sensible Distance. & is so Call’d from Electric amber which is a property peculiar to that Body. Some Sorts of Bodies, as all Glass, all precious Stones, & Sulphurs & all Dry Animall Substances, have this property, & are Call’d Electricks, & all Bodies that have not this Quality are Call’d Non=Electrics, such as water, wood, metals &c. Electrisity is Excited in Bodies by Attr[i]tion: A [glass] Tube of ¾ of an Inch Diameter & 2 or 3 foot Long being Rub[b]ed, will Attract or Repel Light Bodies such as Leaf Gold, Soot, paper &c, But non Electricks may Become Electrical, by resting on an Electrical & [by] touching a non-Electrical wh: Touches the excited Electrick. If a flaxen String (wh: is not Electrick) be Extended & Supported & at one end [and] an Excited Tube be Apply’d Light bodies will be attracted & That at the Distance of 1200 feet at the Other End.38

Winthrop’s apparatus was simple—a long glass tube, leaf gold, soot, and packthread. He made no mention of a globe electrical machine, so the one provided by Hollis may have been out of order. Indeed, he had wished to give this lecture six weeks earlier on March 28, “but the Instruments not being Ready: it was Reffered to this place.” The experiments show Winthrop’s familiarity with the work of Stephen Gray on conduction and induction of electricity. Gray had inferred that electricity was an independent substance, not just an exhalation released from bodies by friction. On the other hand, Winthrop’s lecture notes suggest that he either did not yet know of Charles François de Cisternay Dufay’s research findings, which had been summarized in the same issues of the Philosophical Transactions that included Gray’s reports, or that he disagreed with them and so kept silent. Dufay had reasoned from experiments that all substances could be electrified, that there were two kinds of electricity, and that sparks, snaps, and shocks accompanied the transfer of electricity.39 As for news of the latest astonishing experiments, Winthrop tantalized his students: This Electricity since the Year 1743 has made a Considerable noise in the World; upon wh: it’s Suppose’d Several of the (at present hidden) Phænomina of Nature Depend; it has been Carry’d to So Great perfection that an Electriz’d man by touching heated Spirits of wine, he has Set them on flame: If a man Stand[ing] on pitch or

178   Sara J. Schechner Glass & hold[ing] a non Electrick in his hand, wh: touches a Glass Globe that is whirl’d with prodigious Velocity, be touch’d in any part of his Body, There immediately Succeeds a Considerable flame, with a Sensible pain & a Crackling Noise—Men have been so Electriz’d; as to have a Considerable Light Round their heads, & Bodies, not unlike The Light Represented Round the heads of Saints by the painters.40

What Winthrop had in mind when he referred to 1743 was not the local interest in Dr. Spencer’s lectures that year, which he must have realized were about fifteen years behind the times. What Winthrop shared with his students was a report that had only come into his hands some months earlier. This was the same report that would astonish Franklin and turn him into an electrician. It was the account of discoveries made in Germany that was published in Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1745 and reprinted in the American Magazine in December.41 According to this article, these were “flourishing times” for electricity. No one had a clue what electricity really was, but “from the year 1743, they [had] discover’d phenomena, so surprising as to awaken the indolent curiosity of the public, the ladies and people of quality, who never regard natural philosophy but when it works miracles.” Public lectures had become all the rage: They were “brilliant assemblies . . . and electricity took place of quadrille.”42 If spectacular European experiments could turn the heads of high society toward natural philosophy, they could wake up Harvard students. This was cutting-edge research, and Winthrop, a good Newtonian, held out hope that “electric fire” would prove to be an all-pervasive, fundamental spirit or subtle fluid on which the operations of Nature depended.43 In 1746, Winthrop still did not know about the Leyden jar, and his lack of detailed instructions and better equipment prevented him from trying out some of the more impressive experiments done in Europe. He was still working with glass tubes and thinking in terms of electrical effluvia and atmospheres. This would change in the 1750s.

The Leyden Jar Comes to Town Back in Philadelphia, Franklin carried out experiments with the glass tube Peter Collinson had sent in 1745, as well as with electrical machines and Leyden jars. There were different forms of Leyden jars. An early form consisted of a glass flask filled with water and held in the hand of an assistant who was grounded. It was electrified by a wire with one end dipped into the water and the other connected to the prime conductor of an electrical machine. If the person holding the jar also touched the wire leading into it, he received a strong shock. The water in the glass jar was soon replaced by metal in the form of lead shot, crumpled gold foil, or an interior coating of lead or tin foil. The assistant’s hand was replaced by a foil coating on the jar’s exterior. The early jars were made from ready-to-hand, narrow-necked, glass bottles like those used for medicines. In the 1760s, however, many European experimenters began to use a common design. It was a purpose-made, wide-mouthed glass jar with tin foil coating the lower two-thirds of its

Boston Electric   179 exterior and interior. The jar had a tight-fitting, mahogany lid through which a brass conducting rod extended. The lower end of the rod was connected to the tin foil inside the jar by means of a hanging brass chain (or sometimes by water).44 The Leyden jar was a turning point. Its invention in 1745, coupled to that of the electrical machine, was similar in importance to that of the telescope in the preceding century: Each was essential for research and amplified the observer’s experience of nature in ways that raised many new questions. The Leyden jar condensed and stored “electric fluid,” creating a more potent source. Arrays of Leyden jars, called batteries, enabled experiments with greater electrical force. The puzzle was that the type of electricity inside the jar was opposite to that on the jar’s outer foil. It seemed as if there were two kinds of electric fluid. But then, if the experimenter removed the coatings or water from a charged Leyden jar, the electrical charge somehow remained in the glass. How could this be? Franklin developed a theory to explain all the known phenomena in terms of the flow of a single electrical fluid, which some called “fire.” At the theory’s core was the concept that electrical charge was conserved. Every object had a natural amount of this fluid or fire. When two bodies were rubbed together, one received fluid from the other and became positively charged, while the deficient body became negatively charged. No fluid was created or destroyed, but simply transferred from one body to another. Nature wanted to restore the balance, so charge always flowed from the positive to the negative body. This led to Franklin’s lightning experiments and his study of atmospheric electricity, which not only proved that electricity was as much a part of the physical world as gravity, light, and heat, but also led to the useful invention of the lightning rod.45 A friend and collaborator in Franklin’s experiments was Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist minister without a pulpit. By all accounts, he was a master of words and experiments. Franklin helped to compose a pair of lectures on electricity, amply illustrated by dramatic experiments, and encouraged Kinnersley to spread the word. In 1749, Kinnersley embarked on a twenty-five-year career as an itinerant lecturer. In 1751, Ebenezer Kinnersley took his traveling electrical show to Boston.46 In advance of Kinnersley’s visit, Franklin sent word to James Bowdoin (A.B. 1745), a wealthy merchant and recent acquaintance.47 Bowdoin was most impressed with Kinnersley’s lectures and brought others to witness them. Soon new experiments were being tried with Kinnersley’s apparatus at Faneuil Hall. A lengthy and detailed correspondence ensued between Bowdoin and Franklin, beginning with electrical matters but ranging over astronomy, meteorology, microscopy, and oceanography. Bowdoin’s professors, John Winthrop and Edward Holyoke, may have been among the participants in these experiments. The trials were spectacular and playful. They demonstrated that the “Electric Fire” was an elemental and subtle fluid that permeated all bodies and space. Our bodies contained sufficient quantities to set a house on fire, and yet the “Fire will live in water, a River not being sufficient to quench the smallest Spark of it.” The electric fire activated a machine that played tunes on eight musical bells. There were demonstrations of “Fire darting from a Lady’s Lips, so that she may defy any Person to salute [kiss] her” and of “Electrified Money, which scarce any Body will take when offer’d to them.” Other experiments suggested danger. There were “Spirits kindled

180   Sara J. Schechner by Fire darting from a Lady’s Eyes (without a Metaphor).” “Metal [was] melted by it (tho’ without any Heat) in less than the thousandth Part of a Minute,” and single sparks drilled a fair-sized hole in a quire of paper, killed an animal instantly, and discharged a battery of eleven guns after passing through ten feet of water. Franklin’s new hypothesis that lightning was electrical was illustrated as were experiments showing that metal points attracted the electric fire more strongly than any blunt form. Model lightning rods were demonstrated and instructions offered on “How to secure Houses, Ships, &c. from being hurt by its [lightning’s] destructive Violence.”48 The latest experiments required more than glass tubes rubbed by cat fur or the old broken-down Hauksbee globe machine. For starters, one needed Leyden jars. But where could Bowdoin, Holyoke, and Winthrop turn to update their philosophical cabinets? There were no philosophical instrument makers in Boston. One solution was to import ready-made electrical apparatus from London instrument makers, such as George Adams, Sr., Edward Nairne, Benjamin Martin, and Peter Dollond, who by the 1750s were devising and selling new forms of machines and accessories.49 Another solution for Harvard’s would-be experimenters was to make their own equipment from imported or locally sourced parts. Both strategies were adopted in mid-century Boston.

Repurposed Glass Jars Let’s look at glass components first. Without glass there was no easy way to generate a charge, and no way to condense that charge in order to have enough power to perform the latest experiments. Boston did not have any glass manufactories. British law required the colonies to ship raw materials to the mother country and buy back the finished goods. This forced dependency stifled the emergence of many industries in colonial America, and glassmaking was one of them. Attracting little notice, the Wistar Glassworks in New Jersey was the only glasshouse operating in the colonies between 1739 and 1780. The primary source for Boston’s electrical glass was Benjamin Franklin. In 1753, Franklin wrote to Bowdoin from Philadelphia, “I have shipt 18 Glass Jarrs in Casks well pack’d, on board Capt. Branscombe for Boston. 6 of them are for you, the rest I understand are for the College.” He then apologized for sending a do-it-yourself project. The jars needed to be lined with tin foil that was glued down with a flour-and-water paste. Franklin gave instructions. He also specified how to make a battery by arranging jars in a crate partitioned by the thin wooden strips that printers used to justify type.50 Franklin then cautioned: “If you charge more than one or two [jars] together, pray take care how you expose your Head to an accidental Stroke; for I can assure you from Experience, one is sufficient to knock a stout Man down; and I believe a Stroke from two or three in the Head, would kill him.”51 Indeed! And there was a postscript: “The Glassmaker being from home, I cannot now get the Account.” Franklin expected to be reimbursed, but kindly sent the materials on ahead. Professor Winthrop must have been pleased to have a new set of Leyden jars, even if he had to coat them himself, for he put them to heavy use. The glass jars were likely made

Boston Electric   181 by the Wistar Glassworks, and the quality was not very good. Winthrop lamented that “the pint & quart phials, which were sent us . . . , are rather too thick; so that they don’t admit of a very high Charge; and our large Jars are exceeding[ly] apt to crack, so that we lose them frequently.”52 This led Winthrop to request Franklin’s help again in 1758 in the procurement of more electrical glassware. In a memo to Harvard’s London agent or treasurer, Winthrop explained that after “the electric globes which were sent us some years ago from Pennsylvania [had broken] almost as soon as we fitted them on their wooden caps, Mr. Franklin was so kind as to give us encouragement that he would send the College some others from London . . . to fit our machine.” Please also ask Mr. Franklin to send more Leyden jars, Winthrop continued, and ask him if it would not be better to have “square bottles, of a moderate size, fitted in a wooden box, like what they call case bottles for spirits; and to make them without Necks & open at the top, so that they might be lined with tin foil on the inside, as well as coated on the outside (as the Jars are), & of a sufficient thickness round the mouth to strengthen them.” Winthrop thought such Leyden jars would not only charge more efficiently but also “would stand more secure from accidents; & might be safely moved from place to place, upon occasion.”53 Franklin responded from London and shipped the fittings to make a large battery, including “a Mahogany Case lined with lead containing 35 Square Glass Bottles [with necks], in 5 Rows, 7 in a Row.”54 He also sent tin foil, wooden stoppers, and wires, which he personally prepped for Winthrop’s use, and a long set of instructions. This battery was not an off-the-shelf product purchased from one of London’s instrument makers, but a state-of-the-art research apparatus in which Franklin and Winthrop collaborated on the design and construction. At Winthrop’s request, Franklin also shipped replacement parts for Harvard’s electrical machine, namely: A Glass Globe of the same Size and kind with that I used at Philadelphia and Mounted in the same Manner [cemented to wooden cheeks without an axis]. A large Glass Cylinder mounted on an Iron Axis with brass Caps, this form being most used here and thought better than the Globe as the long narrow Cushion will Electrify a greater surface at the same time.55

The apparatus cost £10 3s. 7d. and was shipped in May 1758.56 It was not cheap, and assembly was required. The electrical machine that used this globe and cylinder does not survive, but the letter gives us clues about its form (it resembled Franklin’s machine) and the fact that broken glass apparatus could not be replaced locally. The correspondence also confirms what an examination of the earliest Leyden jars suggests: that the jars were common, cylindrical quart and pint bottles, or square case gin bottles, which had been repurposed. To be honest, Franklin’s style of electrical machine was not much of an improvement over Hauksbee’s. The main difference was the inclusion of a cushion as a friction pad in place of the experimenter’s hand, an element introduced by a German experimenter in 1743. But what if a Harvard scholar wanted a machine with all the latest improvements up to 1750? His dream machine would have a rotating glass sphere rubbed by a cushion and a prime conductor with collecting threads, chains, or a wire comb. These collectors

182   Sara J. Schechner would draw the electric matter from the excited glass to a Leyden jar, a person, or other apparatus, which in turn could be grounded or set upon an insulated stand.57 If money were not plentiful, this scholar would have to borrow or build his own.

Home Built versus “Mail Order” It may have been during the period that Harvard’s electrical machine was out of order that President Holyoke decided to make his own. Holyoke’s electrical machine was a tabletop instrument fashioned from rough lumber painted red (Figures 9.3A and B).58 The principal parts include a small glass globe turned by means of a belt drive of spliced rope. The globe is rubbed by a small cushion attached to a wooden spring that rises out of the instrument’s platform. The prime conductor is made of a tin tube with flat ends, which looks like a cookie press. Protruding from one end is a metal comb (to draw off the charge from the rubbed globe). At the other end, there is a wire terminating in a ball. The prime conductor is mounted on an insulating pedestal, formed from the thick stem of a broken glass goblet that is held by wire wrapped around what appears to be a wooden egg cup. Holyoke’s creation was a bricolage of obsolete and discarded parts. This was not simply an adaptation of secondhand instrument components or the repurposing of a household kettle to investigate steam like English natural philosophers were wont to do.59 This was a much cruder product assembled partly from trash! Nonetheless, it had all the latest improvements, which had been introduced to electrical machines in Europe between 1740 and 1750.60 Thus, it must date no earlier than the first years of the 1750s after Kinnersley’s Boston lectures. Perhaps those lectures inspired Holyoke to undertake the project. A ready companion for his investigations with the “new” machine would have been John Winthrop. Both men welcomed the opportunity to purchase state-of-the-art electrical apparatus after a devastating fire in 1764 destroyed Harvard’s instrument cabinet. Benjamin Franklin offered his expertise and by the end of the year was making the rounds of his favorite instrument makers in London to select items for Harvard to buy. The first shipment after the fire included thirteen crates of apparatus sent August 17, 1765 on board the Devonshire. The electrical items included the following:61 £ a Portable Electrical Machine double center & its Apparatus all in a brass Box

8.

a spare Glass Globe for Elect. Machine

s.

d

8.

0.

3.

6.

a Magazine Case of Bottles

8.

18.

6.

2 large Electr[ica]l Globes mounted with Axis thro’ each Brass work & Mahogany Pulleys

4.

4.

0.

17.

0.

6 square spare bottles for the Magazine Case

Boston Electric   183

Figure 9.3A and B. Harvard President Edward Holyoke fashioned this globe electrical machine from kitchen implements and recycled broken glass (shown in detail) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1750s. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 0565.

184   Sara J. Schechner The portable electrical machine may have been one of Edward Nairne’s machines with a vertical rotating globe. It was operated by gearing in a brass box that clamped to the edge of a table.62 More was to come. By the end of September 1766 Franklin had a pair of very fine electrical machines from the London workshop of Benjamin Martin, complete with all the accessories, ready to go on board the John & Sukey:63

£ 2 very large Electrical Machines, the frames Mahogany & Wheels 4 feet diam[ete]r: d[itt]o: 2 Glass Globes wth: axes thro: them, the handles to d[itt]o: brass & Conductors sollid d[itt]o: at £20 [each] 2 Cushions for the Electrical Machines 2 spare Glass Globes to d[itt]o—12 Inches diam[ete]r [not mounted] 12 Cylendric Jars coated wth: Leaf tin inside & Out 4 large Tubes (2 Rough’d) for Electricity & seald at one End 6 Smaller d[itt]o:—about 12 Inches long open 1 lb 7 oz Leaf Tin A Large Cylendric Stick of Sealing Wax for Electricity Spare silk, Gut, &c. for the Machines not charged.

s.

d

40.

0.

0.

1. 1. 2.

5. 4. 12. 12. 3. 10.

0. 0. 6. 0. 0. 6.

More apparatus for electrical experiments was also in the shipment, including two spare glass globes, a dozen Leyden jars, ten glass tubes, silk, gut, leaf tin, sealing wax, and “all the Glass that was broke in the former order sent (Gratis).”64 The great electrical machines from London had the same principal parts as that of Holyoke, but they were much larger and more elegant65 (Figure  9.4). Each London machine had a mahogany frame constructed like a fine bedstead, complete with a footboard and headboard fastened by brass bolts. Its mahogany multiplying wheel was four feet in diameter; its glass globe, twelve inches in diameter. Revolutions of the wheel caused the glass globe to rotate and rub against a leather cushion attached to the frame by a brass spring. The electricity generated by the rubbing was collected from the globe by means of a brass chain that draped from two brass prime conductors suspended by silk cords from wooden arms extended from the headboard. Different artisans probably had a hand in making these two electrical machines sold by Benjamin Martin. It appears that a cabinetmaker, a wheelwright, a glass-blower, a brass smith, and a rope maker had their goods repurposed for scientific use by Martin. However, the polished finished product throws into relief the makeshift nature of Holyoke’s homemade machine and the difference between metropolitan and provincial reuse and recycling. With all the new equipment—judging by the material culture that has survived66— Professor Winthrop’s lectures on electricity became filled with motion, light, and sound. Benjamin Wadsworth (A.B. 1769) recorded that Winthrop told the class of forty students that what was chiefly known about electricity had been discovered in the last fifty years, and “most of yt by Accident.”67 The students took part in entertaining demonstrations: “Mr. Winthrop set Spirits of wine on fire by Electricity, & I with a Considerable

Boston Electric   185

Figure 9.4.  Complete with headboard and footboard, this elegant mahogany electrical machine was fashioned like a bed. Made by Benjamin Martin, London, 1766, it was one of a pair selected for Harvard by Benjamin Franklin. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 0012.

Number of my Class & others were electrized; I felt ye Shock very Sensibly in both my Elbows.”68 Timothy Foster, who took notes at Winthrop’s public lectures in 1772–1774, described metal conductors hung by silk ropes and having small chains that collected “electric fluid” from the whirling glass globe of the college machine. Electricity was emitted from the insulated conductor whenever another conductor “came nigh, with a prodigious snap and appearance of a Flash like Lightning.” When the conductor rested on the table and was not insulated, the electricity would “run off into ye Earth imperceptibly.”69 Experiments Winthrop had formerly done with merely a glass tube were now performed with panache with the new globe electrical machines and their accessories. Wadsworth’s class had been present when Hollis Hall, a dormitory, was struck by lightning on July 2, 1768. Afterward, the students no doubt took to heart Winthrop’s warning that it “was very dangerous to Stand nigh any Collection of Metals in a Thunderstorm, they being very apt to receive ye electrical Power from ye Clouds.”70 They had witnessed the “prodigious explosion,” which had split door posts and cornices, thrown off bricks, and cracked a chimney. The lightning had burst into window frames, thereby breaking glass, tearing off casings and shutters, and hurling iron sash weights across a room. The woodwork became scorched in many places throughout the building. In a tutor’s chamber, the lightning had stripped the gilding off a mirror frame and dulled the

186   Sara J. Schechner glass. Students had “felt a blow, which they compare[d] to an electric shock, some on their head, and some on their feet; and one of the Students, in the north-west upper chamber, sitting on a chair, was thrown down with his chair perceiving neither the flash nor the report.”71 After this, it was Winthrop’s duty to install lightning rods on Harvard buildings.72 He also used his moral authority to recommend lightning rods in the Boston papers after every fatal accident that resulted from lightning striking a steeple or tree beneath which people had sheltered in a thunderstorm.73 Winthrop also carried out research on electric fluid in the atmosphere. By means of wires, he connected metal points on his roof to bells, which would ring when thunder clouds were in the vicinity. The electric bells had been Franklin’s idea, and Winthrop corresponded with him about his findings.74 His lectures explained that thunder and lightning proceeded from natural causes and not an angry God. Indeed, divine providence had seen fit to give us Dr. Franklin, the inventor of the remedy to lightning’s dangerous power.75 To reinforce this message and elucidate the physics of lightning rods, Winthrop blew up model buildings in class! A variety of these charming devices survive (Figures 9.5).76 Winthrop also had at his disposal other electrical demonstration apparatus. These included an electric air thermometer to determine the heat associated with an electric spark; an electric sparker to demonstrate how sparks could be transmitted through paper, cloth, and other materials; insulated mahogany stools with glass feet, jointed dischargers, and more. The unsigned instruments survive, although their invoices do not. Close inspection and comparison with London trade catalogues tell us that most were made by George Adams, Senior, and they arrived in the 1760s and 1770s.77 Winthrop’s successor to the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, Samuel Williams (A.B. 1761), also took the showman’s approach in two lectures on electricity that he delivered annually to Harvard students from 1782 to 1787 and at least once to the Boston public.78 Starting from Franklin’s premise, that all bodies without exception contained a natural quantity of electricity, Williams demonstrated the remarkable effects of the “exceeding elastic & subtle Fluid” when the natural state was disturbed. His lectures contained no fewer than fifty-five experiments on collecting electrical matter; conducting it through various media (including students holding hands) and over great distances; demonstrating plus and minus, repulsion, and attraction; comparing electricity with “fire” and light by setting spirits on fire and lighting a candle just blown out; exploring electricity’s heat; electrifying water jets and vegetables; and demonstrating the electrical nature of thunderstorms with artificial clouds, electrical bells, and thunder houses.79 John Quincy Adams attended Professor Williams’s course of demonstration lectures twice and recorded in his diary this memorable moment on June 3, 1786: “We had a Lecture this morning upon Electricity: we received two small shocks, which however gave me such a stroke in the joints at my elbows that I could not work after it.”80 The overall quantity of electrical apparatus at Harvard in the second half of the eighteenth century—evidenced by material culture that survives along with lecture notes, invoices, and inventories—demonstrates the determination of Harvard scholars to explore the active field. Also providing evidence was the need continually to repair the electrical apparatus damaged by heavy use. Take, for instance, the constant need to

Boston Electric   187

Figure 9.5.  Model steeples and houses, sometimes filled with gunpowder, demonstrated the safety to be had from lightning rods. These examples were made in London by George Adams in the 1760s and in Salem, Massachusetts, by the Rev. John Prince in 1789. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 0017, 0018, 0019.

replace broken globes on the electrical machines. One of the large Martin electrical machines, in particular, required alteration after the glass globe broke and no spares were to be had.81 For this job, the college turned to the Reverend John Prince of Salem in 1788. John Prince (A.B. 1776) was the most able instrument maker in Massachusetts at this time and the man to whom numerous colleges and academies turned when they

188   Sara J. Schechner did not want to deal directly with the London firms.82 But Prince faced the same old complications of relative isolation from London, and some of his own constructions were amateurish compared to craftsmanship there. At the close of the eighteenth century, glass still needed to be procured from London, as there was yet no suitable supplier in America at the time.83 Transatlantic orders remained fraught with problems. What was sent was not to Prince’s specifications, it was poorly packed, and an accident on this side of the Atlantic nearly derailed the entire project. Prince explained the situation to Harvard’s treasurer: In some cases [glass] tubes which I had did better than those sent for: they not being exactly according to orders. . . . One large tube . . . was broken into a number of pieces, by not being well packed in London, ye heavy solid glass sticks getting loose among them destroyed one. One of ye [glass] cylinders also broke soon after they arrived, I believed from not being properly aknealed, as new glass frequently does. I had been rubbing a little dirt off of ye corner of ye neck and had left it: It snapped with ye report of a small pistol, so as to be heard thro’ ye whole house. ye neck was compleatly taken off tho’ 4 inches diam: & 2 inch thick. It gave me much uneasiness, as it reduced me to one chance, and I did not know but ye other might do ye same. I did not mention it till ye other was safely mounted lest you should be anxious for ye event.84

The glass cylinder mentioned was an upgrade to the machine, being preferable to a globe because it had more surface area to rub. But the cylinder that London shipped was too long for the old Harvard frame. Prince had to fashion a new supporting structure from a piece of discarded furniture. The solid glass rods arrived mostly ­broken, and those that were intact were too narrow to support the weight of the cylinder and serve as insulating pillars. Prince fattened them up by slathering on a mixture of pitch and red pigment to make up the shortfall. He chose pitch, most likely, because it was considered to be an insulator like glass, and because it was in plentiful supply along the Salem waterfront, being used to make boats watertight. He mixed in red pigment, because it was the English style to paint glass stands red.85 In the long run, however, pitch was not the best choice. Sparks have scorched and melted the pitch on the pillars (Figures 9.6). When Harvard complained about the cost, Prince compared his restored electrical machine to an example made by Edward Nairne in London for Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and subsequently the Holy Roman Emperor. The Grand Duke’s machine was well known through its illustration in Chamber’s Dictionary.86 That machine had cost £40 sterling. Its cylinder was twelve inches in diameter and nineteen inches long— the same diameter as the one Prince had mounted on Harvard’s machine, but five inches longer. Prince asserted that he had made up for the difference in length by mounting Harvard’s shorter cylinder on insulating pillars. Prince had charged only 12 pounds lawful money (the equivalent of £9 sterling) and after taking into account the value of the old frame, he claimed that Harvard had come out ahead.87 This was true in terms of functionality relative to cost. Craftsmanship was another matter. Although the Grand Duke’s machine was not ornamentally fancy, it was certainly more refined in its construction than the parts that Prince had added to Harvard’s great electrical machine. This is something

Boston Electric   189

Figure 9.6.  John Prince’s replacement of the broken glass globe with an ill-fitting cylinder on this English electrical machine shows how Americans had to make do with repurposed furniture and boatyard supplies. As seen in the detail below, Prince used pitch to thicken glass insulating pillars, and electrical sparks have scorched them (rotated in view). Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 0013.

that would not be known without close inspection of the surviving instrument at Harvard. From the vantage point of London, Prince’s comparison was laughable, but seen from Boston, it was aspirational. At the time of this repair, Prince had also been tasked by Harvard College “to make ye [electrical] apparatus compleat with ye latest improvements.”88 To accomplish this, Prince provided Harvard with the following between 1789 and 1799:89

190   Sara J. Schechner

an electrical universal discharger & press a thunder house Luminous word a Quadrant Electrometer a spotted bottle fixing a double bottle a large brass pin & ball an apparatus for analizing ye Leyden phial making additions to an electrophorus making horns for ye exhausted conductor fitting up 3 single bottles with caps wires & balls an elastic wire and 3 brass chains great Tin conductor 6 feet long & 9 inches diam[ete]r making 2 stands to support ye conductor a small tin conductor 2 ½ feet long, 4 inches diam[ete]r making a stand to support ye conductor making another stand for holding ye jointed rod & balls 2 large balls 3 & 4 inches diam[ete]r with tubes & point a small battery of 9 jars 5 square feet coated surf[ace] fitting up a large battery of 18 jars coated 18 sq feet fitting up one d[itt]o of 15 jars, 15 square feet repairing ye old battery a large Glass tube 3 feet long 1 ½ in diam[ete]r fitted up for exhaustion mounting ye great cylinder & altering ye old frame for it [on the electrical machine] Coating 2 spare jars An apparatus for making experiments on elect[rica]l attraction a small phial to hang on ye conductor & in vacuo a discharging rod with a Glass handle a Brooks electrometer for shewing ye charge of a battery in grain weights, a double instrument Bennetts gold-leaf electrometer repairing ye luminous discharger repairing a double bottle & a single one a large electrical plate 16 inches by 14 framed & glassed for drawing figures on with electricity a set of spiral tubes altering ye cushion of ye other great [electrical] machine an electrical jointed discharger (large) an Electrical flask for shewing the Auro[ra] Bo[realis]: brass mounted & fitted to ye syringe with a ball electrical pistol delivered Mr. Storer 2 large electrical jars for battery and repairing bottle with coating &c. An elect[rica]l picture 13/4 and swan 3/7 A luminous conductor insulated on frame and mounted with wires and balls An elect[rica]l head with hair

£

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Boston Electric   191 The list is instructive because it shows research-quality apparatus intended for the “necessary experiments in this branch of science” as well as apparatus “for instruction and entertainment.” The latter included luminous pictures and words, a doll whose electrified hair would stand on end, a spangled bottle with sparks jumping between tin foil spots, and model houses to be blown up by gunpowder when their lightning rods  were not grounded. These playful instruments were important, and a few ­survive today.90 Prince understood that “to catch ye attention of youth [was] the only way to instruct them.”91 Notable among the research instruments were those to which Prince made ­significant improvements or modifications—for example, a delicate electrometer of his own invention to measure minute amounts of charge without the need for internal gearing, or powerful yet space-saving batteries. The latter were labors of love: The batteries in my account being heavy articles to satisfy you (as I am myself) . . . are not highly charged [i.e., they are not costing you much money] & I would mention that they take a great deal of time to fit them up to answer their purpose in ye best manner. All ye wooden tops of these bottles being baked, boiled in linseed oil & baked again on which account they can be coated nearer ye top then when they are not thus prepared, and glass and room are saved. Look at ye old battery and you will see that it takes up nearly half as much again room in ye apparatus as mine, tho’ that is but 15 and mine 18 square feet [of tin foil coating]. I wrote to Lon[don]: to get some information of ye cost of batteries. The batteries mentioned in Mr. Adams essays on Electricity has nine jars, and coats about 7 squ[a]re feet and costs 6: 5: 0 in Lon[don]: one of 18 jars at this rate would be 12:10. And have but 14 feet coated surface: but yours of 18 jars, (taking in ye cost of ye glass) is but 9:17:0, and you have 4 more square feet than that would have. I have not considered ye freight which would be common to both.92

Prince could have purchased the batteries and other electrical apparatus from George Adams Jr., W. & S. Jones, or another London instrument maker, but he decided instead to fabricate his own from scrap materials, to resell apparatus he had gotten in trade, and to fuse new and old apparatus together in order to give the college more value for its money. It was thrifty American household recycling at its best.93

Conclusion So what has the material culture told us? Starting from a lump of amber plus a cat and progressing to electrical machines, Leyden jars, and thunder houses, the range of apparatus grew more varied and complex as lectures and recitations gave way to experimental philosophy and electrical theories developed during the eighteenth ­century. The electrical instruments bear witness to the provincial setting in which colonial experimenters had to work. Colonial Massachusetts lacked makers of glass and brass scientific instruments. Instruments and their replacement parts had to be

192   Sara J. Schechner imported from London through a mail-order system. This was costly both in time and money, and it was hard to know what one was ordering sight unseen. Consequently, Greenwood, Holyoke, Winthrop, and Bowdoin were very happy to have someone as congenial and generous as Thomas Hollis or Benjamin Franklin to hand-pick instruments in London on their behalf. At the end of the century, it was the Reverend John Prince who did the sorting, picking, trading, and buying that was needed for Harvard faculty to keep research equipment up to date or to provide demonstrations for the students. Even so, there were a lot of do-it-yourself projects, particularly in the assembly of Leyden jars and batteries or in making repairs with repurposed local goods. Here again, Franklin was an essential link between the Boston-based scholars, the suppliers of glass jars and tin foil, the expertise, and the news of current scientific work. Making do and know-how were part of a social system. When equipment could not be bought overseas for whatever reason, American scholars improvised with a bricolage of repurposed jars, old furniture, kitchen implements, and shipyard caulking in the pursuit of science.

Notes 1. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Hubbard, Harvard’s treasurer, London, April 28, 1758, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 8: 51–53. The book was John Baskerville’s edition of Virgil, Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis (Birmingham, 1757), which is still in Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *AC7.F8545.Zz757v. 2. Bricolage, recycling, and repurposing materials were central to natural philosophy, as shown by Simon Werrett, “Recycling in Early Modern Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013): 627–646. 3. The dates of bachelor’s degrees are only given in this essay for those received at Harvard College. They are useful in tracing the educational arcs and social interconnections of Harvard-trained individuals in this story. 4. Student copies of the manuscript in the Harvard University Archives include HUC 8707.370, HUC 8720.370, HUC 8721.370.1 mf, and others. Many are now digitized and online. See I. Bernard Cohen, “The Compendium Physicae of Charles Morton (1627–1698),” Isis 33 (1942): 657–671. 5. Theodore Hornberger, ed., Charles Morton’s Compendium Physicae, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 33 (Boston, 1940), 76. To see a student manuscript copy of this passage, see Obadiah Ayer, Philosophia naturalis ex authoribus extracta per dominum Carolum Mortonum, Cambridge, 1707–1708, 65–66, Harvard University Archives, HUC 8707.370; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:10919373?n=77. 6. Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, December 7, 1675, December 21, 1675, and January 10, 1675/6, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–1977), 1: 364–365, 404, 408; Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (London, 1756), 3: 250, 260–261, 270–271. 7. Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1701–1712, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 5 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1937), s.v. “Edward Holyoke,” 265–278. [Hereafter referred to as Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 5: 265–278.]

Boston Electric   193 8. “Papin, Hauksbee, Desaguliers,” Classified Papers 1660–1740, vol. 18, Royal Society Archives, London; see p. 107 of the Hauksbee section. Francis Hauksbee, “An Account of an Experiment . . . Touching the Extraordinary Elistricity of Glass, Produceab[l]e on a Smart Attrition of It; with a Continuation of Experiments on the Same Subject, and Other Phenomena,” Philosophical Transactions 25 (1706–1707): 2327–2335. 9. Willem  D.  Hackmann, Electricity from Glass: The History of the Frictional Electrical Machine, 1600–1850 (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhiff, 1978); Sara J. Schechner, “The Influence of Theory on Instrument Design: The Case of Hauksbee’s Friction Electric Machine” (MPhil thesis, Cambridge University, 1980). 10. Hauksbee’s experiments were described in the Philosophical Transactions 25 (1706–1707): 2372–2377, 2413–2415; Philosophical Transactions 26 (1708–1709): 82–86, 87–92, 219–221, 391–392, 439–443. See also Francis Hauksbee, Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects. Containing an Account of Several Surprizing Phenomena Touching Light and Electricity, Producible on the Attrition of Bodies (London, 1709; 2nd ed., 1719). 11. W. J. ’s Gravesande, Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata, sive Introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam, 2 vols. (Leyden, 1720–1721); and Mathematical Elements of  Natural Philosophy Confirmed by Experiments, or an Introduction to Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, trans. J. T. Desagulier, 2 vols. (London, 1721, and 4th edition, 1731), 2: 3. 12. Raymond Phineas Stearns, “Colonial Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 1661–1788,” Osiris 8 (1948): 73–121. 13. Francis Hauksbee, A Course of Mechanical, Optical, Hydrostatical, and Pneumatical Experiments. To Be Perform’d by Francis Hauksbee; and the Explanatory Lectures Read by William Whiston (London: 1712). 14. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *90W‑117. 15. Harvard University, Corporation, “Rules and Orders Relating to a Professor of the Mathematicks, of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, in Harvard College, 18 January 1726,” Harvard University Archives, UAI 15.1067 [hereafter cited as “Rules and Orders Relating to a Professor of the Mathematics”]; and David  C.  Leonard, “Harvard’s First Science Professor: A Sketch of Isaac Greenwood’s Life and Work,” Harvard Library Bulletin 29, no. 2 (1981): 135–168. 16. Thomas Hollis to Benjamin Colman, February 10, 1725/6, July 27, 1726, and March 5, 1726/7; quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 31–33. 17. On these public lectures, see Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983): 1–43. 18. J.  T.  Desagulier, A Catalogue of the Experiments in Mr. Desaguliers’s Course (London, 1713?); J. T. Desaguliers, Physico-Mechanical Lectures. Or, an Account of What Is Explain’d and Demonstrated in the Course of Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy (London, 1717); and many later works. 19. Thomas Hollis to Benjamin Colman, July 27, 1726 and January 12, 1726/7; quoted in Cohen, Some Early Tools, 31–32. 20. Isaac Greenwood, An Experimental Course of Mechanical Philosophy. Whereby Such a Competent Skill in Natural Knowledge May Be Attained to (by Means of Various Instruments, and Machines, with Which There Are Above Three Hundred Curious, and Useful Experiments Performed) That Such Persons as are Desirous Thereof, Nay, in a Few Weeks Time, Make Themselves Better Acquainted with the Principles of Nature, and the Wonderful Discoveries of the Incomparable Sir Isaac Newton, Than by a Year’s Application to Books, and Schemes

194   Sara J. Schechner (Boston, 1726). Original in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Advertisements of a recapitulation of the course and the start of a new series appeared in the New England Weekly Journal, February 5, 12, and 19, 1728, all p. 2. 2.1. Cohen, Some Early Tools, 182; Sara J. Schechner, “John Prince and Early American Scientific Instrument Making,” 431–503 in Sibley’s Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 59 (Boston, 1982), 438. 22. Isaac Greenwood was installed on February 13, 1728. See reports of the event in the Boston News-Letter, February 15–22, 1728, p. 2; and New-England Weekly Journal, February 26, 1728, p. 2. 23. Isaac Greenwood, “A Catalogue of the Mathematical & Phylosophical Instruments, belonging to ye Apparatus given to Harvard College by mr Thomas Hollis of London, Merchant with price sterl.,” 6 September 1730, and a similar one signed by Greenwood on  19 April 1738, are entered on pp. 20–22, 35–39 in College Book 6 (“Hollis Book”), 1726–1779, Harvard University Archives, UAI 5.5 Box 4. The 1738 inventory is printed and annotated in Cohen, Some Early Tools, appendix 1, where he cross-references the experiments in the Hauksbee-Whiston Course to which Greenwood refers. 24. College Book 6 (“Hollis Book”), 6–8, 12–14; “Rules and Orders Relating to a Professor of the Mathematics.” 25. The inventory of 1730 lists “Apparatus for Experiments of Light & Electricity with Solid Glass Cylinders,” and that of 1738 refers in addition to a plate showing Hauksbee’s electrical machine, which appeared in the works of both the elder and younger Hauksbee. See College Book 6 (“Hollis Book”), 20, 36. 26. “Expenses for the Apparatus from April 1740 to April 1741 . . . Sign’d by the Mathematical Professor,” include a charge of four shillings on September 15, 1740 “To 4 Hoops for Electrical Experiments.” See College Book 6 (“Hollis Book”), 47. 27. J.  A.  Leo Lemay, “Spencer, Archibald,” American National Biography Online (February 2000), http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-01171.html. J.  A.  Leo Lemay, “Franklin’s Dr. Spence,” Maryland Historical Magazine 59 (1964): 199–216; I.  Bernard Cohen, ‘The Mysterious ‘Dr. Spence,’ ” in Cohen’s Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 40–60. 28. Archibald Spencer advertised a “Course of Experimental Philosophy” in the Boston PostBoy, May 30, 1743, 3; Boston Gazette, May 31, 1743, 3; and Boston Evening-Post, June 6, 1743, 2. 29. “Dr. SPENCER . . . begins THIS AFTERNOON . . . another Course of Experimental Philosophy,” Boston News-Letter, August 4, 1743, 1. 30. On Stephen Gray’s experiments 1729–1731, published in the Philosophical Transactions 37 (1731–1732): 18–44, 227–230, 285–291, 397–407, see J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 242–249. 31. On the content of Archibald Spencer’s lectures, see the surviving notes taken by two spectators in 1744, which are transcribed in Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science, 44–47. 32. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Joyce E. Chaplin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), chap. 18. 33. Albrecht von Haller, “An Historical Account of the Wonderful Discoveries, Made in Germany, &c. Concerning Electricity,” Gentleman’s Magazine 15 (April 1745): 193–197 [hereafter cited as Gentleman’s Magazine (1745)]. I.  B.  Cohen, “Collinson’s Gift and the New German Experiments,” in Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science, 61–65; Heilbron, Electricity, 325. 34. On Holyoke’s astronomical work, see Sibley’s Harvard Graduates 5: 265–267; Samuel Sewell, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973),

Boston Electric   195 1: 599, 2: 734; Edward Holyoke, An Ephemeris of the Cœlestial Motions, Aspects and Eclipses, &c. for the Year of the Christian Æra, 1709 . . . . Fitted to the Meridian of Boston, in N.E. being 71 deg. Westward of London, & Lat. of 42. 25 N. (Boston, 1708); Edward Holyoke, An Almanack of the Cœlestial Motions Aspects & Eclipses, for the Year of the Christian Æra, 1711 . . . . Fitted to the Meridian of Boston in N. England (Boston, 1710); Edward Holyoke, An Almanack of the Cœlestial Motions, Aspects & Eclipses, for the Year of the Christian Æra, 1712. . . . Fitted to the Meridian of the Island of Barbadoes, Being about 58 deg. 15 min. Westward of the Meridian of London, and in 13. 20. of North Latitude (Boston, 1711). 35. Some of Holyoke’s astronomical instruments survive in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University (CHSI). These include an early Gregorian telescope by John Hadley, London, ca. 1720, and an English, wooden sector in the shape of a triangle, 1712, with which he found latitude and computed ancient eclipse times, CHSI 5002 and 5450. The use of the sector is described in The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 2: 107. 36. Harvard Corporation, minutes, November 25, 1737, as quoted by Leonard, “Harvard’s First Science Professor,” 159; Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1840), 2: 11–13. 37. John Winthrop, “The Summary of a Course of Experimental Philosophical Lectures, 1746–1747,” Papers of John and Hannah Winthrop, 1728–1789, Harvard University Archives, HUM 9 Box 14, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:10355684. [Hereafter cited as Winthrop, “Summary of a Course” (1746).] 38. Winthrop, “Summary of a Course” (1746), pp. 73–74: “Lecture. 26th. – May. 10th. / Chap: 17th. of Electricity.” 39. See Gray’s essays in the Philosophical Transactions, 37 (1731–1732): 18–44, 227–230, 285–291, 397–407, and 39 (1735–1736): 16–24; Dufay in Philosophical Transactions, 38 (1733–1734): 258–266; Heilbron, Electricity, 242–260. 40. Winthrop, “Summary of a Course,” 74. 41. Gentleman’s Magazine (1745); reprinted in the American Magazine and Historical Chronicle 2 (December 1745): 530–537. 42. Gentleman’s Magazine (1745), 194. 43. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London, 1713), General Scholium. 44. Hackmann, Electricity from Glass, chap. 5. 45. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments; a New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, ed. I.  Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). 46. Ebenezer Kinnersley, “Notice is hereby given to the Curious, That at Faneuil-Hall in Boston, is now to be exhibited and continued from Day to Day, (the Weather being suitable) a Course of EXPERIMENTS on the newly-discovered Electrical Fire,” Boston Evening Post, October 7, 1751, 2; October 14, 1751, 2; and October 21, 1751, 3. 47. Benjamin Franklin to James Bowdoin, Philadelphia, September 5, 1751, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 4: 191–192 [hereafter cited as Franklin Papers]. 48. Kinnersley, “Notice Is Hereby Given to the Curious.” 49. Hackmann, Electricity from Glass, chap. 6. 50. Sara J. Schechner, “The Art of Making Leyden Jars and Batteries According to Benjamin Franklin,” eRittenhouse 26 (2015): 1–11; https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/saraschechner/

196   Sara J. Schechner files/schechner-leyden-jars_erittenhouse_26_2015.pdf. (The journal is defunct, and the original online link is dead; this is why I give my personal link.) 51. Benjamin Franklin to James Bowdoin, Philadelphia, April 12, 1753, in Franklin Papers, 4: 462–463. 52. John Winthrop’s proposal respecting electrical globes and jars, ca. 1758, Harvard University Archives, UAI 15.1068. 53. John Winthrop’s proposal respecting electrical globes and jars, ca. 1758, Harvard University Archives, UAI 15.1068. 54. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Hubbard, Harvard’s treasurer, London, April 28, 1758, Franklin Papers, 8: 51–53. 55. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Hubbard, Harvard’s treasurer, London, April 28, 1758, Franklin Papers, 8: 51–53. Words in square brackets are taken from the bill of lading: “Invoice of the following Goods Shipt on board the America Robt Smith Masr bound for Boston in New England on the proper Accot. of The President and Fellows of Harvard College, London, 13 May 1758.” College Papers 1: 95 (item 195), Harvard University Archives. 56. “Invoice of . . . Goods Shipt on board the America,” May 13, 1758. 57. Hackmann, Electricity from Glass, 11–13. 58. Globe electrical machine, Edward Holyoke, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ca. 1750, CHSI, 0565. 59. Werrett, “Recycling in Early Modern Science.” 60. Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 40–42. 61. Joseph Mico, “Invoice of the Following Goods Shipt on Board the Devonshire Hugh Hunter Masr: Bound for Boston in New England on the Proper Accot: of the President & Fellows of Harvard College, London, 17 August 1765,” College Papers 2: 1–5, Harvard University Archives, UAI.5.100; and in Corporation Papers 1765, 305–309; see p. 307, Harvard University Archives, UAI.5.120VT. 62. Table-clamping, vertical globe electrical machine with gearing, Edward Nairne London, ca. 1770, and a later example by Nairne and Blunt with accessories in a packing box, CHSI, DW0508 and DW0338. John R. Millburn assumed that the portable machine was supplied by Benjamin Martin, but I don’t think that it is an open-and-shut case. The machine is listed as packed among seven crates of sundry items bought from Martin, but another crate contained instruments made by Edward Nairne. It is true that Martin employed similar wording in his advertisement of an “Electrical Machine in Brass, with an Apparatus, Box, &c from 5l. 5s. to 13.13.0,” but here “brass” is describing parts of the machine rather than a box. See Benjamin Martin, A Catalogue of Philosophical, Optical, and Mathematical Instruments Made and Sold by Benjamin Martin (London, 1762), 1; John R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-Maker, and “Country Showman” (Leyden: Noordhoff, 1976), 130–131. 63. “Invoice of the Following Goods Shipt on Board the John & Sukey, James Bruce Master Bound for Boston in New England on the Proper Account of the President & Fellows of Harvard College & Consign’d to Thomas Hubbard Esqr: of Boston,” London, September 27, 1766, in College Papers, 2: 8 (item 16), Harvard University Archives, UAI.5.100. 64. “Invoice of . . . Goods Shipt on Board the John & Sukey,” September 27, 1766. 65. Two large electrical machines by Benjamin Martin, London, 1766, CHSI, 0012, 0013. 66. In addition to the great electrical machines by Benjamin Martin, London, 1766 (CHSI 0012, 0013), the following English instruments are known to have been (or plausibly were)

Boston Electric   197 at Harvard at this time: portable cylindrical electrical machine in a box (0014); insulated stool (0015); brass conductors (RS1482, 1997-1-0640, 1997-1-0486, 1997-1-0476, 1998-1-0911); pith ball support (1997-1-1419); electrometers (0034, 1997-1-1349, 2007-1-0143); glass rod (RS1484); discharge tree (0091); hinged electrical discharging spheres (1997-1-0667); dischargers (1997-1-1365, 1997-1-1369, 1997-1-1389, 2007-1-0145, 2007-1-0146); chain collectors (2007-1-0273 to 2007-1-0276) ; Leyden jar (1997-1-0467); electrostatic hemisphere (1998-1-1225); rabbit skin (1997-1-1293); and lightning rod demonstrations and thunder houses (0017, 0018). 67. Benjamin Wadsworth, “An Abridgment of What I Extracted While an Undergraduate at  Harvard College, 1766–1769,” Harvard University Archives, HUC 8766.314; http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:10876679?n=199; see p. 194. Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 193. 68. Wadsworth, “An Abridgment.” 69. Timothy Foster, “The Summary of a Course of Experimental Lectures in Natural Philosophy by Dr. John Winthrop,” manuscript copy, 1772–1774, fol. 16r, Harvard University Archives, HUC 8772.358; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:10965589, seq. 31. 70. Wadsworth, “An Abridgment,” 194. 71. John Winthrop, “To the Printers” on “The Identity of Lightening and Electricity” with a description of significant damage to Hollis Hall when struck by lightning on July 2, 1768, Boston Chronicle, July 4–11, 1768, vol. 1, 273–274; and in Boston Evening-Post, July 11, 1768, 1. 72. Vote of the Harvard Corporation, August 1768, quoted in David  P.  Wheatland, The Apparatus of Science at Harvard, 1765–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 1968), 147. 73. John Winthrop, “To the Printers” on “The Fatal Accidents, Which Have Very Frequently Followed upon Persons Taking Shelter under Trees in Thunder-storms,” Boston Gazette, July 4, 1757, [1]; John Winthrop, “To the Printer,” Cambridge, August 8, 1770, on “The Modern Discoveries in Electricity,” Boston Evening Post, August 13, 1770, [4] and Boston Post-Boy, August 13, 1770, 1. John Winthrop to Benjamin Franklin, Cambridge, October 26, 1770, Franklin Papers, 17: 263–265. 74. See observations on the electric bells in John Winthrop’s annotated almanacs for the years 1757–1759, Harvard University Archive, HUM 9 Box 5, Volume 2–4; John Winthrop to Benjamin Franklin, Cambridge, September 29, 1762, and Cambridge, March 4, 1773,  Franklin Papers, 10: 150, 20: 90–95; and Winthrop, Boston Chronicle, July 4–11, 1768, vol. 1, p. 273. 75. Foster, “Summary of a Course,” fols. 16v–17r [seq. 32–33]. 76. Profile of a house, and a pyramidal steeple with lightning rods, George Adams, London, c. 1765 (CHSI 0017, 0018). John Prince of Salem made a thunder house for Harvard in 1789 (CHSI 0019), which was used by Winthrop’s successors. 77. Electric air thermometer (0016), electric sparker (0020), insulated stool (0015), profile of a house (0017), and pyramid demonstrating lightning rods (0018). See also note 67 for other possible Adams items at CHSI. 78. Robert Rothschild, Two Brides for Apollo: The Life of Samuel Williams (1743–1817) (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009). 79. Samuel Williams, “Lectures on Electricity,” 1782, Papers of Samuel Williams, Harvard University Archives, HUM 8 Box 1, Folder 4, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL. ARCH:4692448. 80. John Quincy Adams, Diary 10, January 1, 1785–June 30, 1786, p. 357 (June 3, 1786 entry); see also Diary 11, July 1, 1786–October 31, 1787, p. 248 (May 23, 1787 entry). John Quincy

198   Sara J. Schechner Adams Diary: An Electronic Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2014), http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries. 81. Electrical machine, Benjamin Martin, London, 1766, repaired by John Prince, Salem, 1789, CHSI, 0013. 82. Schechner, “John Prince.” 83. See invoice for £16.6 of electrical glassware “Bo[ugh]t of William Parker & Son, Glass Manufacturers,” London, October 2, 1788, in “Records Relating to the Philosophical Apparatus of the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics, 1765–1835 and undated,” 7, Harvard University Archives, UAI 15.960 VT [hereafter cited as “Philosophical Apparatus”]. 84. John Prince to [Ebenezer Storer], treasurer of Harvard College, Salem, June 3, 1791, in “Philosophical Apparatus,” 8. 85. See, for example, the Nairne and Blunt portable electrical machine and accessories, London, 1774–1793, CHSI, DW0338. 86. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia, or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, with supplement by Abraham Rees, new edition, 5 vols. (Dublin, 1780–1787), vol. 2, sig. 55 3Q, s.v. “Electrical Machine,” and vol. 5, “Electricity,” pl. 3, fig. 19. 87. John Prince to [Ebenezer Storer], June 3, 1791; Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, Division of Statistics, “Historical Review of Wages and Prices, 1752–1860,” Part IV of Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston, 1885), 199. http:// books.google.com/books?id=wvNHAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA199#v=thumbnail&q=lawful% 20money&f=false. 88. John Prince to [Ebenezer Storer], June 3, 1791. 89. John Prince, invoices submitted May 29, 1793 and December 11, 1799 for work done 1789–1799, in “Philosophical Apparatus,” 9–12. 90. Most notable is the thunder house, CHSI, 0019. 91. John Prince to [Ebenezer Storer], June 3, 1791. 92. John Prince to [Ebenezer Storer], June 3, 1791. 93. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 22–23.

Bibliography Bedini, Silvio A. Thinkers and Tinkers: Early American Men of Science. New York: Scribner, 1975. Cohen, I. Bernard. Some Early Tools of American Science: An Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical and Biological Collections in Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity. Edited by I.  Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941. Hackmann, Willem D. Electricity from Glass: The History of the Frictional Electrical Machine, 1600–1850. Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhiff, 1978. Heilbron, J.  L. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Millburn, John  R. Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-Maker, and “Country Showman.” Leyden: Noordhoff, 1976. Rittenhouse: Journal of the American Scientific Enterprise. 1986–2012. Vols. 1–23, nos. 1–70.

Boston Electric   199 eRittenhouse: Journal of the Historic Scientific Instrument Enterprise in the Americas. 2013–. Vols. 24–, no.71–. http://www.erittenhouse.org/ Schechner, Sara  J. “The Art of Making Leyden Jars and Batteries According to Benjamin Franklin.” eRittenhouse 26 (2015): 1–11. Schechner, Sara J. “Benjamin Franklin and a Tale of Two Electrical Machines.” In Benjamin Franklin: A How-To Guide, special double issue of Harvard Library Bulletin 17, nos. 1–2 (2006): 33–40. Schechner, Sara  J. “Instrumentation.” In A Companion to the History of American Science, edited by Georgina M. Montgomery and Mark A. Largent, 408–419. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Schechner, Sara J. “John Prince and Early American Scientific Instrument Making.” In Sibley’s Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton, edited by Frederick S. Allis, Jr. and Philip C. F. Smith, 431–503. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 59. Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982. Schechner, Sara J. “Science in the United States during the Colonial Period (to 1789).” In The History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia, edited by Marc Rothenberg, 494–500. New York: Garland, 2001. Werrett, Simon. “Recycling in Early Modern Science.” British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013): 627–646. Wheatland, David  P. The Apparatus of Science at Harvard, 1765–1800. Cambridge, MA: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 1968.

chapter 10

M a k i ng K now l edge Cl a ims i n th e Eighteen th- Cen t u ry Br itish M useum* Ivan Gaskell

Historians make use of material things from a wide variety of places. One of those places is the museum. Most visitors expect to see things in museum collections exhibited in galleries, though few museums of any kind exhibit their entire collections. Much is usually kept in storage. Many people unfamiliar with the workings of museums, including considerable numbers of scholarly commentators, appear unaware that the heart of just about every museum is not its exhibition space but its storage areas. They are often under the misapprehension that things in storage are not in use. Of course, many museums have areas of storage that may be more or less neglected, but, in general, things in storage are carefully arranged with individual object locations recorded by collections managers or registrars, ready to be accessed by curators, conservators, scientists, and other scholars, whether in situ or transferred to a study room or a laboratory, smoothly and efficiently. This is how most museum scholars work with most museum objects. Other scholars can gain similar access, whether in study rooms or storage areas, usually by appointment. However, many non–museum scholars tend to rely on what they, like any other members of the public, can see exhibited at any given time. Although other factors encouraged and led to the practice of exhibiting, one that is usually overlooked is that exhibiting is far less labor intensive and much less expensive than the alternative, the use of study rooms or accessible storage. There was a time, though, when unaccompanied public access to exhibition galleries was the exception rather than the rule in some of the most important European museums, which, instead, relied on guided tours of object exhibits and study rooms. For instance, when the British Museum, London, first opened in January 1759, although much of the collection of natural specimens and artifacts was displayed, the museum was only open by application and by

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   201 guided tour, reportedly limited to groups of no more than fifteen for a maximum of two hours.1 One could also apply to study in the reading room, to which items in the collection would be brought on request. An examination of aspects of the British Museum in the eighteenth century as a representative museum reveals it as exemplifying a technology for the generation of knowledge claims. In particular, one manifestation of knowledge claims was that made by an artist and thinker Jan van Rymsdyk. Rymsdyk used his access to the reading room of the British Museum to produce an elaborately illustrated text, the Museum Britannicum, propounding a series of claims about relations among items in the museum that may appear “quirky in the extreme,” as print scholar and former British Museum curator Anthony Griffiths expressed it.2 Museum Britannicum is itself one manifestation of the technology of the museum, even though it expresses the author’s own views, not those of the British Museum’s curators or trustees. Access to museum collections allows anyone with the means to express ideas about them. These ideas may be at odds with those of the museum staff, but such expressions are rarely threats to the fundamental epistemological schema of the museum itself, which, in terms of basic procedures of observation, discrimination, and categorization, is the same in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth. The British Museum was initially created from three collections. The immediate occasion was the offer to the nation by bequest in 1753 of the “Museum or Collection” of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) on condition that a financial settlement be provided for his two daughters. It consisted in a great diversity of things that Sloane, a sometime president of both the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society, had gathered since the time of his sojourn in Jamaica between 1687 and 1689. To the collections of plant and animal specimens, insects, minerals, and fossils, he gradually added Roman, Etruscan, Egyptian, and Assyrian antiquities, as well as artists’ drawings, ancient and modern coins and medals, and books and manuscripts. The other two original principal constituents of the British Museum were the Cottonian Library, settled on the nation by Sir John Cotton in 1700, and the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts. This collection was part of the great library created by two successive earls of Oxford, Robert Harley and his son, Edward, which was acquired on behalf of the nation from the latter’s sole heir, Margaret, duchess of Portland, also in 1753. The British Museum was established by Act of Parliament in that same year. Officers were appointed in 1756, departments finally defined in 1758, and Montagu House, which housed the Museum, opened on January 15, 1759. Further collections were added swiftly and seemingly continually, beginning with the Royal Library of the Kings of England, offered by King George II, and transferred in 1757.3 One regular visitor to the reading room of the British Museum was Jan van Rymsdyk. He applied to study in the reading room, and the register of admission records “Mr. Van Rymsdyk to copy Birds, &c. 6 months” on July 16, 1772, permission that was subsequently renewed.4 Jan van Rymsdyk was a Dutch portraitist and medical illustrator long resident in England.5 He is best known for his remarkable illustrations to William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (London, 1774).6 He drew illustrations for Hunter over a period of some twenty years, and he also produced illustrations for Hunter’s

202   Ivan Gaskell younger brother, John, also a surgeon (Natural History of the Human Teeth, 1771), and the obstetrical innovator, William Smellie (Sett of Anatomical Tables, 1754). In most of his work, van Rymsdyk put his considerable skills of draftsmanship at the service of others. Some took advantage of his abilities in a patronizing manner. William Hunter did not even acknowledge van Rymsdyk’s contribution to his great publication, the Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, an omission that was a source of great resentment on van Rymsdyk’s part.7 Unlike his medical illustrations, and although he was assisted by his son, Andreas or Andrew, his publication project based on items in the British Museum was uniquely his own affair. At the time of van Rymsdyck’s first visit to the reading room of the British Museum in 1772, the collections were divided among three departments: Manuscripts, Printed Books, and Natural and Artificial Productions.8 Van Rymsdyk was concerned with the last of these. Over a period of as much as six years, Jan van Rymsdyk and his son made highly detailed drawings, their hands indistinguishable from one another’s. These extremely fine watercolor drawings, executed in a sure and deft technique that is anything but finicky, are bound together in an album preserved in the British Museum, having been acquired in 1947.9 What was van Rymsdyk’s purpose in executing these drawings? He clearly had ambitions to be a portrait or even history painter, but, as the art historian Harry Mount has argued, his truculent adherence to a highly detailed manner of picture making, respecting the minute particularity of all things he sought to represent, put him at odds with the ruling idealizing methods of the day championed by the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds.10 William Hunter, who, as professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy, had advocated attention to detail even in finished paintings, must have appreciated the qualities van Rymsdyk pursued since the surgeon chose to employ him as his illustrator, but Hunter’s authority in the sphere of art was no match for that of Reynolds, so van Rymsdyk had to confine his activities to those described as “servile” by contemporary art theorists, who denigrated the detailed copying of particular nature. Van Rymsdyk’s illustrative work for leading anatomists, most prominently, Hunter, fell precisely into this category.11 Using the drawings he made after things among the very varied holdings of the British Museum, Jan van Rymsdyk, assisted by his son, published a folio volume in 1778, illustrated with thirty plates, entitled Museum Britannicum, Being an Exhibition of a Great Variety of Antiquities and Natural Curiosities, Belonging to that Noble and Magnificent Cabinet, the British Museum.12 The plates were by engravers whom van Rymsdyk employed to reproduce his and his son’s drawings with the same meticulous attention to detail as their own. The Museum Brittanicum was van Rymsdyk’s initiative to turn his meticulous manner to a purpose entirely his own. Yet this project was far more ambitious than an assertion of the value of intricately detailed picture making. Van Rymsdyk was engaged in no less than the creation of his own taxonomy and systematics of tangible things. Things in organized collections have inevitably been grouped methodically since at least the sixteenth century, even if criteria of choice and arrangement have changed and

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   203 changed again over the decades. Historians who seek to use material things in museum collections as traces of the past must be aware that these things exist not singly, but as elements of systems. These systems affect the ways in which historians, and others, apprehend these things and their qualities. Those who devise these systems, some of which generate as well as reflect states of affairs in the world, create the conditions within which historians make knowledge claims that employ those things that comprise them. Museums play a role in articulating and shaping aspects not only of systems of things, but of human beings’ relationships with those things. Furthermore, tangible things mediate many of the relationships that human beings have with one another and with the world more generally. Museums contribute greatly to the definition of those relationships. They do so by selecting from among the things in the world and ordering them. By doing this, museums establish facts; those facts that, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s estimation, constitute the world, for “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”13 In deriving facts by means of collecting, studying, preserving, and, above all, ordering many kinds of tangible things, museums transform human conceptions of the things they work with. In short, museums constitute a technology for transforming things in the world into elements of human knowledge through collection, observation, description, and ordering. It is important to note that this process of transformation is not in any sense neutral or disinterested. In accordance with critiques of museums, and developing museum practice in the global North, James Delbourgo, who has studied Sloane’s project in depth, rightly points out that it is inseparable from Britain’s contemporaneous colonial endeavors. Many tangible things used in museums came from European colonies. Sloane began with tangible things from Jamaica, where, between 1687 and 1688, he spent fifteen months as personal physician to the colonial governor, the second duke of Albemarle. His interest in Jamaica was lifelong, not least because he married the widow and heiress of the owner of sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, the income from which remained the principal means by which he accrued his collections.14 A museum institutionalizes and prolongs beyond the lifespan of any single collector a prime means by which a colonizing society could make knowledge claims about its sites of settlement, in large part to maximize exploitation. Many former and remaining colonized communities now demand the repatriation from museums of tangible things that were taken when this could be done with impunity. The British Museum is no stranger to such claims. In order to make sense of the things that a museum acquires, from whatever source, its scholars sort them in accordance with ever-developing taxonomies. Tangible things must be ordered if they are to make sense. In the European tradition, one fundamental distinction underlies such ordering: the Aristotelian distinction between things in nature and things made by human beings. These two categories are usually termed the natural and the artificial. At its inception, the British Museum, while acknowledging that a distinction might be made between the natural and the artificial, nonetheless grouped things of both kinds in a single department, the Department of Natural and Artificial Productions, and continued to do so until 1807 when they were divided. Even then, the new Department of Natural History and Modern Curiosities contained not

204   Ivan Gaskell only things in nature, but what would later be described as ethnographic objects, such as those collected on their Pacific voyages by James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. It subsumed everything that would not fit cognitively within the other successor department, that of Antiquities and Coins.15 This division brings to light another distinction no less fundamental in museum practice than that between the natural and the artificial: that between things scholars attend to as representative of their kind, and things scholars attend to in respect of their unique qualities. It is the distinction between the specimen and the artwork, and between purely systematic and aesthetic attention. The “modern curiosities” that would become the stuff of cultural anthropology, gathered from peoples thought of as uncivilized, were treated as specimens valued for their amenability to be representative, rather than as unique items valued for their peculiar inherent characteristics. This distinction— between the representative and the unique, the specimen and the artwork—appears to admit of more obvious ambiguity at the outset than that between the natural and the artificial. It appears to concern museological use rather than a priori principles of description. A moment’s reflection, though, confirms that ambiguity is inevitable when considering objects in the light of both these forms of attention. The distinction between these forms of attention affects the status of both things from the natural world and representations of them, and hence their use as traces of the past by historians. For instance, a dragonfly may be represented in a museum’s collection, not because it is unique (though it may be rare and, when acquired, previously unrecorded), but because it helps to establish and thereafter to illustrate a set of relationships among similar, though not identical, dragonflies. It may also do the same thing for a local ecology involving plants and other animals. In these entomological and ecological contexts, this specific dragonfly is of limited interest in and of itself. This does not mean to say, however, that observers, including scientific observers, do not notice aesthetic factors. For instance, an individual specimen may exhibit unusually prominent qualities that evoke a purely aesthetic response in and of themselves: an exceptional iridescence of the wings, for example. It is therefore not inconceivable, though it would be unusual, for a dragonfly to be presented in a museum in such a way as to prompt attention to its aesthetic qualities rather than to its taxonomic, systematic, or other scientific significance. By contrast, the attention implicitly given to an artwork in a museum lends privilege to its unique, aesthetic qualities. One ideal is that the exhibition of an artwork allows viewers to respond to it individually, one-to-one, unmediated, in a manner that allows maximum aesthetic engagement. The inherently discursive character of museum display may make this ideal unrealizable, but the provision of opportunity for aesthetic attention to unique objects is the purpose of much art display in museums, even though the choice and grouping of exhibited artworks show individual objects serving equally as specimens in a systematics of art. The relationship between the informational and the aesthetic aspects of picture making, both of which can be characteristic of representations of things in nature, has changed repeatedly over time. In the seventeenth century, there may not yet invariably have been a tension between these two aspects.16 Only in retrospect have scholars

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   205 sought to impose one, as though attention for purposes of detailed observation that result in images for informational dissemination and exercises in aesthetic engagement that may initially have been idiosyncratic and private must be wholly mutually exclusive. This misapprehension is exemplified by recent treatment of a sheet of three studies in brown ink by Jacques de Gheyn II from 1600 depicting a dragonfly (Figure 10.1).17 These detailed front, rear, and side views from above conform to conventions of botanical and entomological illustration that de Gheyn practiced using Leiden University’s collection of specimens at the turn of the seventeenth century.18 Both the subject and the ultimate product—the dragonfly specimen and the drawing—can be associated with proto-museological collections early in the seventeenth century as part of the examination of the natural world. Yet the presentation of this sheet in the exhibition Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe in 2011 was confused and confusing. The author of the catalog entry, Ronah Sadan, argued that by conveying the precise peculiarity of a single dragonfly, albeit from three viewpoints, rather than presenting at least two specimens comparatively, de Gheyn was not engaging in zoological illustration, but was producing “private exercises of curiosity and wonder.”19 However, elsewhere in the same publication, Claudia Swan raised the likelihood that the single,

Figure 10.1.  Jacques de Gheyn, II, Three Studies of a Dragonfly, 1600. Brown ink over black chalk on paper, 152 × 189 mm. Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston.

206   Ivan Gaskell consolidated view found in prints of natural history specimens likely derive from studies such as this, thereby recognizing that de Gheyn’s drawing probably played a role in natural history investigation and illustration.20 These mutually exclusive opinions in the same publication present a false dichotomy. Only in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did a distinction emerge between artistic representation and scientific illustration, each practice acquiring its own set of variable conventions. However, depictions of all kinds have always been subject to reevaluation and taxonomic reassignment by later users. In a contemporary art market starved of excellent examples, dealers, auction houses, collectors, and museum curators increasingly promote the aesthetic qualities of drawings that they might once have consigned to the realm of mere illustration. Although made by a draftsman long accepted as a fine artist, the fate of de Gheyn’s Three Studies of a Dragonfly exemplifies this attitude.21 Discussing the drawing in the catalog of an exhibition in 2002 drawn from the private art collection of which it is a part, the curator, William W. Robinson, invites viewers to recognize that it “displays not only De Gheyn’s extraordinary mimetic skills, but a delicacy and subtlety that transcend mere illustration,” thereby claiming it for the realm of art.22 Those in the art world value the sheet primarily not because of its efficacy in illustrating entomological specimens, but because of its execution by de Gheyn. As such, the drawing is not only aesthetically valuable in itself but has a place in a schema of seventeenth-century Dutch draftsmanship related to works of other kinds by the same artist, and to a range of drawing practice in the Netherlands presented in terms of variety and development. De Gheyn’s sheet may certainly exemplify an aesthetic attention and a superb artistic capacity on the part of the draftsman, but the delicacy and subtlety of these drawings of dragonflies may also be said to allow them to function extremely well as illustrations that convey knowledge derived from the observation of a thing in nature. Such a mixture of factors and considerations as was common in the early seventeenth century was not entirely superseded by the development of purely dispassionate scientific illustration in the eighteenth. The work of the van Rymsdyks, father and son, is a clear example of a continuing ambivalence between depiction as science and as art, though in a new set of circumstances, different from that in which de Gheyn was working. By the Rymsdyks’ time, dispassionate scientific illustration, not considered to be art, had an established place. Van Rymsdyk may have sought praise on artistic grounds for the unerring accuracy of his drawings and the subsequent engravings in his book, but that praise paradoxically depended on both draftsman and engraver achieving maximum transparency and representational self-effacement. There was an inescapable tension between the claims of attention to artistry on the one hand, and to transparency on the other. Like all representation in the service of technologies of observation, discrimination, and categorization characteristic of museums, the van Rymsdyks’ drawings and the prints after them, while clearly artificial, ideally principally do not convey their own artifice. Instead, they show the character, whether natural or artificial, of those things they represent, as appropriate—or, as we shall see, the exceptions to an unequivocal distinction between the natural and the artificial that so intrigued van Rymsdyk.

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   207 The ruthless separation of the consideration of the natural and the artificial that proceeded in Europe from the seventeenth century onward, with an ever-increasing institutional entrenchment, brought about huge intellectual gains. The application of systematic distinction and taxonomy to collections is well-known. Concerning the study of nature, Carl von Linnée (Linnaeus) and Georges Cuvier, founder of the Galérie d’anatomie comparée, Paris, are but two such systematic practitioners. Less well-known to historians of science is that systematic principles were being applied to paintings simultaneously by grouping works by national school and chronology by, among others, Christian von Mechel in Vienna, and Dominique Vivant-Denon in Paris.23 Systematic organization has become so standard as to appear natural. Yet this form of systematization entailed losses as well as gains. The prospect of rapprochement between nature and artifice to be found in contemporary fields of enquiry such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology (the term itself unites notions once thought of as mutually irreconcilable) might prompt a reexamination of earlier integrative considerations of nature and artifice. Early museums, usually and appropriately discussed for their vital role in the taxonomic ordering of things both natural and artificial, could also prompt integrative thinking that cuts across boundaries among things that many now take for granted. Jan and Andreas van Rymsdyk’s Museum Britannicum is one expression of such a mode of thinking. Although in certain respects idiosyncratic, the Museum Britannicum presents readers with an opportunity to witness a mind (that of Jan van Rymsdyk) musing freely on a wide range of things both natural and artificial, often in conjunction, associated together by notions drawn in turn from classical sources and natural philosophy. Each of its thirty folio plates consists of a number of figures, often apparently unrelated, yet Jan van Rymsdyk’s commentary treats each group of figures as coherent; indeed, he stresses the criterion of coherence in his introduction: “As to some of the Plates not having so many Figures, the Reason was, because I could not find any more Subjects which were properly connected together.”24 Although perhaps “properly connected together” in van Rymsdyk’s estimation, the progression of the plates and van Rymsdyk’s text seems to suggest random associations rather than methodical thinking. The commentary has more the character of a shaggy dog story worthy of Tristram Shandy than a scholarly disquisition. For instance, Tab. III depicts “An Incrustated Scull and Sword, they were both found in the Tiber at Rome”25 (Figure 10.2). In a note on “Incrustations” the author distinguishes between “calcarious incrustation and penetrative petrifaction.” This reminds him that “A friend of mine had once an incrustation of a peruke” and “it was my intention to have added a Draught of the incrustated peruke; but after much enquiry, I find it is lost.” However, his mention of the absent object prompts van Rymsdyk to discuss wigs in general, followed by an account of the dressing of hair in antiquity derived from a variety of Greek and Roman sources.26 The connection between an encrusted Roman sword and skull and classical hairstyles appears idiosyncratic, depending solely, and eccentrically, on the chance existence of a friend’s lost petrified wig; yet for van Rymsdyk chance has nothing to do with the matter, for “Now as all things in Nature are linked together in a bewitching manner, our business is to go on gradually, i.e. step by step.”27

208   Ivan Gaskell

Figure 10.2.  Unidentified engraver after Jan or Andreas van Rymsdyk, “An Incrustated Scull and Sword, they were both found in the Tiber at Rome.” From John and Andrew van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum (1778), Tab III (plate 3). Special Collections of the Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Even if the notion that “all things in Nature are linked together” sanctions the most unlikely concatenations of objects and textual descriptions, van Rymsdyk’s associative system is not devoid of a coherence of its own. He distinguishes among “Tribes,” which include not only those of plants, quadrupeds, birds, and fish, but also of minerals, metals, and stones. From the observation he cites by Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek that “the whole plant was in the orange seed,” he infers the same to be true of other creatures, concluding that “From this we may see that universal Resemblance there is in all Species, and which some have more or less to each other: This is a Fact, and I could trace the Human Species even into an Oyster, Stone, &c.”28

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   209 This principle of resemblance presumably led van Rymsdyk to select for depiction and comment “A very curious Coral modled by Nature in the form of a Hand or Glove.”29 Even while pursuing resemblance, it is a vital and consistent feature of van Rymsdyk’s strangely systematic exposition that he regularly selects metamorphosed or otherwise ambiguous materials. Thus, he was uncertain of the status of coral. “The Nature of Coral is very difficult to determine: The Ancients took it for a Stone, the Moderns for a Vegetable, or Marine Plant; some partly Plant and partly Stone; certain curious and able Naturalists call it an Animal, or the Production of some Insect, like the Honey-Comb, &c.”30 He comes to no conclusion. “Universal Resemblance” is central to van Rymsdyk’s choice of natural and artificial objects and their arrangement among the plates of his book. He discusses this concept when considering the “Scythian Lamb” (Figure 10.3). He illustrates this alleged cross between a plant and an animal, supposedly found in Russia, as a rudimentary vimineous quadruped with a partial fleece-like covering.31 Stories of trees existing in Asia that produced animals like small lambs from within gourd-like pods had been disseminated in Europe since the early fourteenth century.32 However, van Rymsdyk is consistently skeptical about what

Figure 10.3.  Jan van Rymsdyk, “A Scythian lamb”; preparatory drawing for plate 15, figure 2, in Jan and Andreas van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum (1778), watercolor on paper, 473 × 295 mm. British Museum, London.

210   Ivan Gaskell he fears might be “impositions.” Among these he places the “Scythian Lamb.” He states that this creature “In fact is nothing but the root of a Plant much like Fern.” Sir Hans Sloane, from whose collection the “Scythian Lamb” came, had demonstrated at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1698 that it is a scale-covered rhizome and associated leaf bases from a large fern. It is, in fact, Cibotium barometz, naturally occurring in China. Sloane’s specimen had been sent from India.33 Van Rymsdyk continues, “I was glad as well for myself as for others, to meet the real Plant, to confute the Fallacy.”34 Yet a certain ambiguity remains. Although he describes any attempt to suggest that it might be anything other than a plant root (actually a rhizome) as an “imposition,” he nonetheless deliberately chose to draw attention to its ambiguous qualities, continuing in his text to term it a “Plant Animal.” He illustrates it below “The Sallad Earthen Vessel,” a porous earthenware vase inscribed with runnels on the exterior in which seeds can be lodged. These germinate when the vase is filled with water, and the shoots can be gathered for consumption.35 What might the connection be between these two seemingly utterly unrelated things? That connection would appear to be the doctrine that the whole creature is within the seed, derived by van Rymsdyk from van Leeuwenhoek’s observation about the orange seed, mentioned in the note that accompanies this plate. It is here that he sets out his beliefs about the principle of universal resemblance, concluding, “Thus we find the Analogical Track of the Human Species, through all these various Tribes, and likewise into Vegetables.”36 Rather than separate the natural from the artificial, and within the natural, the animal from the plant, and even when ostensibly exposing “impositions,” van Rymsdyk’s selection of objects is designed to bring out analogies among them, usually to the ostensible benefit of the relative status of the natural, though invariably in an anthropocentric manner that quite undermines any sense of human self-effacement before nature. Thus, the first plate in the book depicts a tailor bird nest from Bengal made from a single leaf, and an American wasp nest.37 “When I look with attention on the Taylor-bird and Wasp’s Nests,” he writes, “considering who made them, I think mankind need not boast of their architecture in building houses and fine palaces, when we behold the ingenuity of the first, and the various Stories, Concamerations, &c. of the last.”38 Writing of the Museum Britannicum, art historian Barbara Stafford described such commentaries as the conversion of objects “into abstract allegories wrested from their material contexts.”39 This was a mode of thought that ascribed meaning to each element of creation. It had found its apogee in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century genre of the emblem book. Van Rymsdyk did not rest content with such allegorical musings when considering natural objects. He also sought to describe how people had exploited the natural characteristics of objects in unlikely manners, thereby associating them with human ingenuity. For example, he illustrates a tubular Jamaican spider’s nest end-on and from the side, plus a card with the raw web wound on the broad end and the spun web wound on the narrow end. Completing the plate was a “Piece of a Garter of the Same Woven Silk.”40 The plate that follows immediately depicts the interior of a Mediterranean bivalve shellfish and a pair of men’s gloves from Andalusia made from the beard or byssus of this same shellfish.41 Similarly, the plate depicting the stages of cutting two celebrated

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   211 diamonds shows the application of human ingenuity to an unprepossessing natural material to produce estimable objects.42 Van Rymsdyk is at pains to demonstrate that the “Pencil of Nature” is capable of the highest artistry, so in contrast to the depictions of the diamonds, he illustrates on the same plate “another kind of diamond,” being “A Rough Egyptian Pebble, broke oblique . . . on which is a striking Likeness of Chaucer, father of the English Poets, and is entirely by the Pencil of Nature, without any assistance of Art.”43 Further, he depicts: A Derby or Florentine Stone, on which by the Hand of Nature is depicted a Beautiful Landscape, it’s supposed to be Iron, or a Mineral Substance that has marked the Landscape, and occasioned chiefly by Mineral Exhalations, staining the Original soft Matter. Nature has no where been assisted, except the Black Frame; there is another Landscape equally Beautiful, same size, in the British Museum. I never saw in my life any Stones of this kind, so well imitating the Composition, invention, &c. of the late Famous Landscape Painters. —There is a low Horizon, a large Sky, Trees on the fore Ground, and they are not done in that manner, or method of making Ornamental Trees, the general way of doing Landscapes now a Days: but Represents Nature, and in a Ruysdale-like manner, (so call’d by Painters when Trees, &c. are Natural, and not mannered).44 (See Figure 10.4.)

The “landscape in stone” was a consistent ingredient of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury natural history collections, and the phenomenon had long been discussed in print.45 In such objects, nature and art exhibit a capacity for mutually sustaining symmetry, nature’s productions in the manner of art guaranteeing the probity of artists’ faithful imitations of nature. Van Rymsdyk consistently selects objects that draw together nature and art, creating or reinforcing ambiguities, rather than making selections that clearly allow the discernment of distinctions between them. He is true to what Michel Foucault described as the “semantic web of resemblance” that preceded the emergence of taxonomic discrimination.46 Integral to van Rymsdyk’s particular pursuit of resemblance among natural and artificial objects in the collections of the British Museum is his means of depiction. Just as nature can produce depictions without human mediation, so human draftsmen ought in turn to depict objects without the appearance of mediation. He is utterly explicit about holding in contempt those who modify nature in their representations, and he has little use for those imitations of nature made at a distance so that they reveal but the “Effect of Nature.” “To represent Nature in its greatest Beauty” entails having the object depicted as though “near to the eye,” for only in this way can a true representation of nature be achieved in its minute details.47 Depiction in this manner in two dimensions is as perfect a simulacrum of the three-dimensional object as human beings could then achieve, and it could serve as its substitute accurately to convey all those relations of resemblance in the great scheme of things that the object itself reveals. Van Rymsdyk’s goal is total transparency of verisimilitude, total immediacy such that his paper “Exhibition” might function as effectively as any encounter in the British Museum with the objects themselves. This is picture making as pure description, and as such conforms

212   Ivan Gaskell

Figure 10.4.  Jan van Rymsdyk, A “graptolithos” of figured salte, with a landscape visible in a piece of marble, and an agate set into jewelry with the eclipse of the sun; preparatory drawings for plate 23 in Jan and Andreas van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum (1778), 1772, watercolor on paper, 473 × 295 mm. British Museum, London.

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   213 to a long-standing, though not unique, characteristic of Netherlandish art.48 Yet even the ostensibly transparent transcription of observed reality, however “near the eye,” is interpretive and bound by conventions. For instance, a comparison between van Rymsdyk’s drawing of black, carved, stone Egyptian scarab and the object itself reveals that the artist has rendered the linear inscriptions defining the wing cases as smoother and more regularly curvilinear than they actually are. By his own account, and as the plates themselves show, van Rymsdyk took enormous trouble to have the plates derived from his and his son’s painstaking (and indistinguishable) watercolors. For example, the drawing of “A Bohemian River Horse-muscle, with six Pearls” is very freely brushed in pinks, purples, and yellows, giving a lively sense of the iridescence of the interior of the shell (Figure 10.5). An inscription notes that Jan van Rymsdyk made this drawing on August 31, 1772. He took great pains to ensure that the liveliness of hue and the verisimilitude that he and his son had achieved in the drawings should be conveyed in the monochrome engravings for the book. This entailed the suppression of line and the creation of fine tonal gradation. The individual plates are not signed, but van Rymsdyk mentions that several engravers were responsible, including “some French frothy snakes” who might have been the engravers he used for many of the plates in William Hunter’s The Anatomy of the Gravid Human Uterus.49 The only three engravers whom van Rymsdyk names as having worked on the Museum Britannicum plates are Charles White and the Swedish brothers then resident in London, Elias Martin and Johan Frederik Martin.50 Van Rymsdyk insisted that the engravers he employed should modify their techniques so as to meet his demands. As Antony Griffiths has pointed out, the engravers used a great variety of tools and stippling devices to render the van Rymsdyks’ original watercolor drawings. Van Rymsdyk himself drew attention to the problem of translation between media, emphasizing the paradox of apparent immediacy, by pointing out that “My drawings were as intricate to them as Nature was to me.”51 The van Rymsdyks’ ostensibly self-effacing practice of pictorial representation, however highly developed, was neither wholly innovative nor unique. It participates in a convention of dispassionate depiction that developed for illustrative purposes from the late seventeenth century onward, such as is to be seen, for example, in Sir Hans Sloane’s Natural History, the published fruit of his sojourn in Jamaica and visits to other Caribbean islands and Madeira.52 The ideology that underlies this set of pictorial conventions remains largely unanalyzed. This form of representation has its roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attempts to describe Creation methodically and dispassionately, projects such as the Museo Cartaceo (Paper Museum) of Cassiano dal Pozzo: a seventeenth-century attempt to assemble drawings and prints of as many of the material remains of antiquity as were known, and of geological specimens, plants, and animals from all over the world.53 However, it is important to note that while the objects depicted in Sloane’s plates cast shadows, implying that they exist in relation to a perceptible fictive bounded pictorial space, none of the van Rymsdyk’s objects does. Their representation in what Barbara Stafford has termed “naked relief against a blank

214   Ivan Gaskell

Figure 10.5.  Jan van Rymsdyk, A view of the garden side of Montagu House (the British Museum) and six studies of pearls, two being of an “oculus mundi,” three of oriental, purple and rose-colored pearls, and the last a Bohemian horse-mussel with six pearls sticking to the shell; preparatory drawings for the title-page vignette and for plate 2 in Jan and Andreas van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum (1778), 1772, watercolor on paper, 473 × 295 mm. British Museum, London.

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   215 page”54 permits the peculiar grouping and sequencing of images that an implied fictive bounded pictorial space would inhibit or cancel. In seeking to produce an effect of illustrative transparency and infinite combinability, the Museum Britannicum was a pictorial simulacrum analogous to twenty-first-century World Wide Web sites in which the distinction between actual objects and their virtual derivatives is elided by means of a rhetoric of equivalence. The Museum Britannicum is an “Exhibition” (the term used in its title) in much the same sense as are “virtual exhibitions” on the Web. Encouragement of obliviousness to the medium serves the organizational and epistemological purposes of the authors in either case. For van Rymsdyk, obliviousness promotes a doctrine of “resemblance,” while for contemporary website producers, obliviousness fosters a doctrine of “information.” Both forms of reproduction—van Rymsdyk’s and websites—allow kinds of manipulation that would be impossible to achieve with the objects themselves. In the case of the Museum Britannicum, this involves their peculiar grouping and sequencing in, as we have seen, “naked relief against a blank page.” By this means, van Rymsdyk imposes his own interpretive order on the material he has selected, the most efficient use of the objects for his own ends requiring the appearance of transparency and the semblance of the total exclusion of pictorial context such as that literally adumbrated by a cast shadow. This form of “Exhibition,” which conveys an impression of naturalness and inevitability in what is actually contrived and contingent, is an analog of the taxonomy and systematics of the institution that contained the objects represented insofar as its technology of categorization and presentation also readily appears natural and inevitable. The effectiveness of museums as sites of systematic ordering depends on their accommodating variant elaborations within their schema, or even alternatives to it, that temporarily appear viable, but that never permanently supersede the museum’s master taxonomy. The British Museum could readily accommodate the Museum Britannicum because it long outlived the latter, in part because the museum is a technology that permits continual internal reordering, even though that reordering, which included the eventual splitting off of the Natural History Museum in 1963 as a separate entity, consistently conformed to an unchanging underlying schema the foundation of which was an unquestioned distinction between the natural and the artificial. Historical received ideas, whether of progress or of rupture and change, suggest that by 1778 such notions of resemblance as are propounded by van Rymsdyk should have had no place. This has led to the consensual description of the Museum Britannicum, insofar as it has been considered at all, as incoherent, or, in Antony Griffiths’s phrase, “quirky in the extreme.”55 Yet the work appears to have held some appeal, and it should not necessarily be dismissed as an anachronistic eccentricity. Peter Boyle, subsequently an editor of London guides, acquired the plates and text, and in 1791 published a second edition.56 This was furnished with an impressive list of subscribers headed by no lesser a figure than the prince of Wales, to whom the edition was ostentatiously dedicated. The acquisition of this property by Boyle, apparently a shrewd publisher and businessman, and his exploitation of it, would suggest that the van Rymsdyks’ book fulfilled a certain demand or at least expectation, among those who could afford such luxurious publications.

216   Ivan Gaskell Proponents of Internet technology advocate its infinite capacity for the manipulation of reproductions of objects (their images) in any number of combinations. Such a use of images can indeed be inspiring, but any inferences drawn from such manipulations concern those images, and not necessarily the things they represent. These images and the systems within which they function can indeed take on the appearance of an independent epistemological existence concerning, as they do, distinct artifacts; but any use that depends on an assumption of exact equivalence between image and prototype— which most do—risks introducing a flaw. One simply cannot extrapolate from the image to the thing it represents and assume that they behave identically. Tangible things allow and resist manipulation differently from images, and we should always be aware of, and allow for, the distinctions between them. This is not to imply that the relationship between a thing and its reproductions— whether produced manually, mechanically, photographically, or electronically—is simple. It would be wrong to think of that relationship as one of reliable original and treacherous simulacrum. A prototype and its various derivatives form a complex nexus, our perception of any one constituent affecting our perception of any or all of the others. Each may have its own peculiar characteristics, some of which mask and some of which enhance particular characteristics of the prototype and of other derivatives. Certain kinds of knowledge can only be derived from the prototype; some knowledge can be derived reliably from reproductions. However, human experience of tangible things and their various derivatives is such that it is often difficult for percipients to ascertain accurately from which source—the prototype or one or more among its derivatives—any given knowledge of it derives. A person’s assessment of her experience of a thing is modified by her experience of reproductions of it such that an object becomes, in that person’s practical experience, a complex nexus comprising object, material and electronic images, and mental images. It is not—and, in terms of human perception, probably never was—a single thing.57 One can acknowledge this state of affairs and readily exploit the opportunities it affords for creative manipulation, comparison, and the free play of virtual reality.58 On the other hand, there is much to be said for returning from such heady play to a consideration of the particularities of tangible things, if human subjects are further to develop a historical understanding of humankind’s relationships with things as well as with facts. Despite the ambiguities that result from human experience of any given tangible thing as a complex nexus, it remains nonetheless possible to identify aspects of that experience that pertain to the prototype alone. To do just this is a particular responsibility of museum scholars, and it is a responsibility the discharge of which is afforded by the peculiar technology of museums of all kinds. In addition, in the singular context of the museum, there is much to be said for opening to question the distinctions between the natural and the artificial, and between the specimen and the artwork. Those who exploited the consequences of distinguishing between the natural and the artificial created opportunities for the establishment of whole bodies of knowledge—facts. Entire fruitful systems of thought in such apparently disparate disciplines as biology and art history would have proved inconceivable

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   217 without the techniques of distinction, comparison, and relation that the fundamental division between the natural and the artificial, on the one hand, and between the ­representative specimen and the unique object valued as such, on the other, allowed. Yet when scholars reassess the potential relationships among all these types of things in their actuality—that is, not at the remove fostered by reproduction, whether on the printed page or on the computer screen—they will find that both the natural and the artificial, and the representative and the unique, are rather more interpenetrative and subject to profound ambiguity than they, relying on the technology of museums, might initially imagine. To refresh the technological viability of museums of all kinds, those responsible for them need to reestablish a sense of the profound multivalency of the tangible things of this world: their amenability to almost endless manipulation in relation to one another so as to prompt reflection upon the experience of juxtaposition. Resemblance, in a broad sense developed from the manner in which the van Rymsdyks used it, will be a key notion in the rehabilitation of constructive thinking about the tangible things of the world when information, as a system, and its propagation as an ideology, come to be found wanting. As Barbara Stafford has noted, “Today, however, we possess no language for talking about resemblance, only an exaggerated awareness of difference.”59 Historians and other scholars need to encourage the reflective good use of things, for relationships among people and objects, and among people as mediated by objects, are vital in human experience. Museums have a special responsibility in this respect, for it is in them that such relationships can be explored theoretically and experimentally by using tangible things themselves.

Notes * This chapter is in part derived from “Museums, Nature and Artifice,” in Nature and Nation: Vaster Than Empires, edited by Anne Eggebert and Polly Gould, exhibition catalogue (London: The London Institute; Hastings: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, 2003), 35–44. I thank Katherine Park and Justin Broackes for comments made at the Harvard University Department of History of Science seminar that led to revisions. I should also like to express my enduring gratitude for years of friendship to the wonderful artist Polly Gould who commissioned the original essay. 1. [Robert Dodsley], The General Contents of the British Museum: With Remarks. Serving as a Directory in Viewing That Noble Cabinet, 2nd ed. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762), pp. xxii–xxiii. 2. Antony Griffiths, “Notes: Museum Britannicum,” Print Quarterly 8 (1991): 438. 3. Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (London: Deutsch, 1973), 36–63. 4. John L. Thornton, Jan Van Rymsdyk: Medical Artist of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1982), 61. 5. Jan van Rymsdyk is the form of his name given by the British Museum, which notes variant spellings: Jan van Rymsdyck, Jan van Rijmsdijk, and John Rymsdyck: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=101853.

218   Ivan Gaskell 6. William Hunter, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabula illustrata (London, 1774); Griffiths, “Notes: Museum Britannicum,” 440. 7. Thornton, Jan Van Rymsdyk, 91. 8. Miller, That Noble Cabinet, 61. 9. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Case 200, no. C12. 10. Harry Mount, “Van Rymsdyk and the Nature-Menders: An Early Victim of the Two Cultures Divide,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (2006): 79–96. 11. Mount, “Van Rymsdyk,” 91. 12. John and Andrew Van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum: Being an Exhibition of a Great Variety of Antiquities and Natural Curiosities Belonging to That Noble and Magnificent Cabinet, The British Museum. Illustrated with Curious Prints, Engraved after the Original Designs, from Nature, Other Objects; and with Distinct Explanations of Each Figure (London: printed for the authors by J. Moore, 1778). 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922), 1.1. 14. James Delbourgo is the first student of Sloane to have pointed out in detail that colonial slavery largely financed his collecting: James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). 15. Miller, That Noble Cabinet, 100. In 1803, coins and medals had been transferred from the Department of Manuscripts to the Department of Natural and Artificial Productions. 16. See the various contributions by David Freedberg, especially The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 17. Brown ink over black chalk, 152 × 189 mm, Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston. 18. One of these studies appears to have informed De Gheyn’s watercolor drawing, dated 1600, of various insects, once a sheet in the album of plants, insects, and small animals acquired by the Emperor Rudolf II in 1604 to form part of his immense and varied collection of natural and artificial curiosities (Inv. no. 5655, fol. 11, watercolor, tempera, heightened with gouache over stylus, 201 × 163 mm, Fondation Custodia, Collection F. Lugt, Paris). 19. Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Dackerman, exhibit catalogue, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, and Hew Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 206, no. 44. 20. Claudia Swan, “Illustrated Natural History,” in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge, 190–191. Indeed, if the information shared with the author in person by the head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, Jane Shoaf Turner, in November, 2017, is correct, the dragonfly represented by Jacques de Gheyn in the Abrams drawing itself has colonial implications, for it appears to show an example of a species native to present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, where the Dutch developed commercial and colonial interests from the last years of the sixteenth century onward. 21. I. Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, Three Generations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), II, p. 140, no. 900a. 22. William W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exhibit catalogue, British Museum, London; Institut Néerlandais, Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 84, no. 29. This entry substantially repeats that for the same study in William W. Robinson, SeventeenthCentury Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   219 exhibit catalogue, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Albertina, Vienna; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1991), no. 8. 23. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79–80, 140–148. 24. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, ix. 25. Mineralogy Department, Natural History Museum, London; John Thackray, “Mineral and Fossil Collections,” in MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, p. 132, ill. fig. 33. 26. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 10, note *. 27. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 12. 28. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 38, note †. 29. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 50, ill. Tab. XX, fig. 1, opp. p. 50. 30. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 50, note *. 31. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, Tab. XV, fig. 2, opp. p. 37. 32. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 35, 37, fig. 1.4.2, citing Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his travels in Asia in 1314, and many versions of Mandeville’s Travels. 33. John  F.  M.  Cannon, “Botanical Collections” in MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, 146–147. Sloane’s specimen is in the Natural History Museum, permanently displayed in the Botany Students’ Room (and illustrated by Cannon, “Botanical Collections,” 146, fig. 47). See also Mark Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception, exhibit catalogue, British Museum (London: British Museum, 1990): 85, no. 71. 34. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 38, note †. 35. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, Tab. XV, fig. 1, opp. p. 37, and p. 37. The object is currently untraced (communication from Kim Sloan, July 15, 2002). 36. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 38, note †. 37. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, Tab. I, opp. p. 1. The original nests do not survive. 38. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 2, note *. 39. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 271. 40. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 29, ill. Tab. XI, opp. p. 29. None of the original objects has been traced. 41. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 31, ill. Tab. XII, opp. p. 31. One of the pair survives in the Natural History Museum: Kathie Way, “Invertebrate Collections,” in MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane, 110, ill. col. pl. 11. 42. The models of Pitt’s diamond are in the Mineralogy Department of the Natural History Museum, London. 43. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 71–72, ill. Tab. XXVIII, fig. 9, opp. p. 69. The stone is in the Mineralogy Department of the Natural History Museum. 44. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, 56–57, ill. Tab. XXXIII, fig. 1, opp. p. 56. 45. See The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, exhibit catalogue, British Museum, London (London: Olivetti, 1993), 215, no. 135, with further references to works by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Athanasius Kircher. 46. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970; 1st. ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 17–45. 47. Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, iv–vii.

220   Ivan Gaskell 48. See Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 49. Griffiths, “Notes: Museum Britannicum,” 440. 50. As Griffiths points out (“Notes: Museum Britannicum,” 440), the standard monograph on the Hans Frölich Martins, Bröderna Elias och Johan Frederik Martins Gravyrer (Stockholm, 1939), makes no mention of their work for van Rymsdyk. 51. Griffiths, “Notes: Museum Britannicum,” 439; Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, viii (original emphasis). 52. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S.  Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, &c. of the Last of Those Islands, 2 vols. (London, 1707–1725). 53. Francis Haskell and Henrietta McBurney, “General Introduction to the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo,” in The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings and Prints in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the British Museum, the Institut de France and Other Collections, Series A—Antiquities and Architecture, Part  2, John Osborne and Amanda Claridge, Early Christian and Medieval Antiquities, vol. 1, Mosaics and Wallpaintings in Roman Churches (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 9. See also Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 15–64. 54. Stafford, Artful Science, 271. 55. Griffiths, “Notes: Museum Britannicum,” 438. 56. John and Andrew Van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum; or a Display in Thirty-Two Plates, in Antiquities and Natural Curiosities, in That Noble and Magnificent Cabinet, The British Museum, 2nd ed., revised and corrected by P. Boyle (London: printed for the editor by J. Moore, 1791). 57. This point is derived from the discussion of the status and uses of reproductive photography in my Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 115. 58. Propounded by, for example, Alain Renaud, “Memory and the Digital World: A Few Philosophical Pointers for New Memory Practices in the Information Era,” Museum International 54, no. 3 (2002): 8–18. 59. Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 10.

Bibliography Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Griffiths, Antony. “Notes: Museum Britannicum.” Print Quarterly 8 (1991): 438–440. MacGregor, Arthur, ed. Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary: Founding Father of the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1994. Miller, Edward. That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum. London: Deutsch, 1973. Mount, Harry. “Van Rymsdyk and the Nature-Menders: An Early Victim of the Two Cultures Divide.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (2006): 79–96.

Knowledge Claims in the British Museum   221 Rymsdyk, John Van, and Andrew Van Rymsdyk. Museum Britannicum: Being an Exhibition of a Great Variety of Antiquities and Natural Curiosities Belonging to That Noble and Magnificent Cabinet, The British Museum. Illustrated with Curious Prints, Engraved after the Original Designs, from Nature, Other Objects; and with Distinct Explanations of Each Figure. London: printed for the authors by J. Moore, 1778. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Thornton, John  L. Jan Van Rymsdyk: Medical Artist of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1982. Tonkovich, Jennifer. “Rymsdyk’s Museum: Jan van Rymsdyk as a Collector of Old Master Drawings.” Journal of the History of Collections 17, no. 2 (2005): 155–171. Walker, Alison, Michael Hunter, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections. London: British Library and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

chapter 11

The Ev er- Ch a ngi ng Tech nol ogy a n d Sign ifica nce of Silk on the Silk Roa d Zhao Feng

There is no doubt that sericulture and silk production were invented in China around the fourth to the third millennium bce. Sericulture includes the cultivation of the ­mulberry tree and the domestication of the mulberry silkworm. Silk production is the use of silk from domesticated silkworm cocoons to form threads and fabrics. It took a very long time for the wild silkworm to become a domestic silkworm, as genetic research on both demonstrates a very big difference between them. Research data consisted of forty samples from twenty-nine phenotypically and geographically diverse domesticated silkworm lines, as well as eleven wild silkworms from various mulberry fields in China. Compared to its wild ancestor Bombyx mandarina, B. mori has gained some representative behavioral characteristics (such as tolerance to human proximity and handling, and extensive crowding) and has lost other traits (such as flight, predators, and disease avoidance).1 Scientists have identified 354 protein-coding genes that characterize good candidates among silkworms for domestication. No one can tell when the process of the domestication of the silkworm was finished, but archaeological evidence reveals the earliest possible date for the use of domestic silk to make fabric for humankind. The earliest known silk fabric was found at the Qingtai site near Zhengzhou, on the south bank of the Yellow River, Henan province. It dates to 3630 bce and belongs to the Yangshao culture during the Neolithic period.2 In another site, Xiyin village in Shanxi province, not far from Qingtai but on the other bank of the Yellow River, a half cocoon was found in an early excavation by Li Ji in 1926 and dated back to the same period as Yangshao culture.3 However, in the Yangtze Delta region of southern China, evidence of sericulture and silk production suggests a date slightly later

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   223 than the north. Some silk threads and plain weave fabric were found at the Qianshanyang site, near Huzhou, Zhejiang province, which were dated to the second millennium bce, based on carbon dating.4 All these show that Chinese sericulture and silk production probably originated in the lower Yellow River region during the fourth millennium bce and spread to the Yangtze Delta region, where the Qianshanyang site was located, around the second millennium bce. Although silk production was invented in China, the Chinese continued to develop silk technologies within a context of a global history of silk. However, those big developmental jumps always happened during the major periods of the spread of silk through a culture of exchange on the Silk Road.

The Ancient System during the Han Period in China (200 bce–200 ce) There is likely to have been a long period of development between the Shang and Zhou dynasties (1600–200 bce), but it is not clear exactly what technologies were used for the whole process of silk production until the Han dynasty (200 bc–200 ce) from which period relevant historical documents and specimens of silk fabric are available. Chinese silk is derived from the domestic or mulberry silkworm, which is dependent on the mulberry tree. The mulberry tree is indigenous to eastern China, though we do not know when and where it was first cultivated. The earliest example of wood derived from a mulberry tree, a mulberry bow, was excavated at the Kuahuqiao site, Hangzhou, a Neolithic site dated to 6000 bce.5 Other examples could be found in many places in China from the same period, showing the rich natural potential for mulberry c­ ultivation and sericulture. This is the place where sericulture and silk production were invented. There were two major kinds of mulberry tree in China, Lu and Jin mulberry, both Morus alba. Lu is the name of a place that is part of Shandong province in the east of China, while Jin is the name of part Hubei province, in the middle region of the Yangtze River. According to the historical documents, the Lu mulberry was of a very good quality for the silkworm and was used widely, whereas the Jin mulberry was limited to the middle Yangtze region. Two forms of mulberry tree are mentioned in documents, one tall and one low. Both were used to feed the silkworm, but it is much easier for people to harvest the leaves from the low-growing tree.6 There were also many different species of mulberry silkworm in different regions of China throughout history. Voltinism, meaning the annual times of incubation of the silkworm without any human interruption or control, is the most distinguishing characteristic of the various silkworm species. The normally univoltine silkworm, which incubated once a year, was confined to northern China, where the temperature is cooler than in the south, while the multivoltine silkworm was more popular in the southernmost

224   Zhao Feng regions of China. However, incubation twice a year—bivoltinism—is the most common behavior in most parts of China, especially in the Yellow and Yangtzi regions.7 An early Chinese character, jian, on a bronze yan, a cooking vessel and stand, shows the tool used to reel the silk filament from the cocoon. It has a frame with two small wheels, probably made of bamboo, which stands at the top of the vessel. The cocoons were put into hot water in the vessel, which was heated by a fire under the tripod.8 Filaments would be pulled out from the cocoons by hand and wound on a separate wheel. This is the simplest method of collecting the silk filament from each cocoon, and of combining them into a thicker raw silk with more filaments. The method is believed to have been used for the long period from the Shang dynasty until the Han dynasty, and it is still used even today in some parts of Southeast Asia. Silk is a good material for dyeing, so it could consistently hold rich colors that form a color palette, known as the “five colors,” because these five colors constituted the color system during the Han dynasty. This color selection is quite often to be seen on jin silk, the most outstanding polychrome silk with a compound weave.9 The analysis of dyes from jin silk found on the Silk Road from the late Han to early Jin dynasties (first to fourth centuries) allowed us to identify the source materials of these basic dyes: cinnabar and madder for red, fresh indigo for blue, and various dyes for yellow. Cinnabar is the most beautiful and long-lasting red color in early China; however, it was difficult to obtain and process for dyeing. So local madder, Rubia cordifolia, was widely used as a red dyestuff. The fresh leaves of indigo (Polygonum tinctorium) were used to produce blue dye. For a long period, the traditional Chinese dyeing method was linked to the seasons when the vegetable dyestuffs were harvested. This was recorded in many ancient agricultural books. It was impossible to preserve and transport fresh dyestuffs to other places, so they were used mostly in the local area where they were harvested. Besides red and blue, there were several dyes for the color yellow. Dihuang (Rehmannia glutinosa) was the imperial yellow dye, while amur cork (Phellodendron amurense), Cape jasmine (Gardenia jasminoides), and Jincao (Arthraxon hispidus) served as the dye sources for general application.10 One more kind of yellow dye could be noted as an example of a Chinese fresh dye: rehmannia root, from the plant rehmannia, whose Latin name is Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch. This plant has purple flowers and, beneath the ground, yellowish white tubers, which give it its Chinese name. Rehmannia grows in the northern provinces that include Liaoning, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Jiangsu. Its earliest known mention is in the third-century ce compilation of far earlier herbal medicine lore, Shennong Ben Cao Jing, as a traditional Chinese herb. Rehmannia can be processed for different uses in three ways: fresh rehmannia, dried rehmannia, and cooked rehmannia. The book says that imperial yellow is dyed in the eighth lunar month, suggesting that fresh rehmannia roots were used for dyeing. Unfortunately, the  only rehmannia roots we could obtain were cooked ones, which have already become black. The coloring agent they contain must be quite different from those of fresh rehmannia roots.11

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   225 Turning from dyeing to weaving, we should note that textile weaving in China began with the back-strap loom, which is found in many early archaeological sites.12 However, by the time of the Han dynasty, there were two major types of loom. One is the treadle loom for weaving the simple textile such as plain weave without pattern,13 and the other is a pattern-weaving loom. The basic structure of the pattern-weaving, or patterning, loom is a multishaft loom, with or without corresponding treadles. In  his annotations of San Guo Zhi (The records of the three kingdoms), the late fourth- and early fifth-century politician and historian Pei Songzhi recorded one kind of ­patterning loom, with fifty shafts for fifty treadles and sixty shafts for sixty treadles, probably widely used in Shaanxi province.14 Fortunately, four pattern loom models (small three-dimensional looms, with a ratio of 1:6 to real looms) dating back to the  early Han dynasty (second–first centuries bce) were recently excavated at Laoguanshan tomb 2, Chengdu, Sichuan province.15 According to our reconstruction and research, these models indicate that the patterning loom with one hook and ­multishafts was the preferred type for weaving Han-style jin silk and damask. Demonstrating that technological innovation does not necessarily entail the complete abandonment of earlier modes of production, we should note that the same type of patterning loom with corresponding treadles is still used in Shuangliu county near Chendu, Shichuan province.16 The silk textiles woven during this period include monochrome complex gauze, ­damask on plain weave, and polychrome jin silk in warp-faced compound tabby. All these three types are patterned textiles, so they would have to have been woven on a pattern weaving loom. The patterns woven on this multishaft loom will be always one repeat in the weft direction but more short repeats in the whole warp direction. This is because there could not have many shafts on one loom, so that only a very limited number of weft variations that produce patterns were obtainable. Normally they vary from a couple of shafts up to twenty or thirty shafts. The most complicated patterns require more than eighty shafts. The patterns of silks we found in many different tombs on the Silk Road show the same limitations. The most famous one is the jin silk with bird, animal, and dancer, found in Mashan, Hubei province.17 One more example of complex gauze with lozenge and deer pattern, dated to the same period as the third century bce, was excavated at Wufu, Anji of Zhejiang province. The pattern on this gauze, which could be only made on a multishaft patterning loom, has a zigzag element that reveals an error of a shaft lifting.18 There is a large quantity of jin silk with cloud and animal pattern, as well as Chinese characters, mostly from the first to the fourth centuries, found along the Silk Road, from the sites of Yuanquanzhi and Maquanwan, in the Gansu corridor, through the sites of Loulan, Niya, Yingpan, Zagunluk, and Shanpula in Xinjiang territory, to Palmyra in Syria near the Mediterranean Sea. Those jin silks are normally in warp-faced compound plain weave but in two to five colors. They were still in use until the fifth to the sixth centuries, such as the jin silk with a parade and dawang chuyou, meaning the great king in a parade, found at tomb 170, Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang.19

226   Zhao Feng

Central Asia, or the Sogdian System (First–Seventh Centuries ce) We do not know exactly when mulberry sericulture was introduced to the West from China. It is likely to have been over some considerable period of time. The earliest silk textiles found on the Silk Road are those in Xinjiang and Pazyrik, Russia, including plain silk, jin silk with geometric patterns, and silk embroidery, which were dated to between the fifth and third centuries bce. However, the earliest evidence of sericulture and silk production on the Silk Road is probably the cocoons found at the Niya site in the southern Taklamakan Desert, Xinjiang, dating from the third century ce. A corresponding story was recorded that a princess from the Eastern Kingdom brought silkworm eggs to the Buddhist Khotan Kingdom in the West, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert and the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang.20 This is believed to have occurred between the third and fourth centuries ce. This is the first known step in the introduction of sericulture to the West. The second story is that two Christian monks (likely Nestorians) stole silkworm eggs or young larvae and, having concealed them in their bamboo canes, brought them to Constantinople in the mid-sixth century.21 Sericulture and silk production were likely already quite common in both central and western Asia by this time. However, during the same period, the silk reeling technique did not follow the silkworm egg and arrive in the same area. Both the story of the princess, and analysis of the silk textiles attributed this region, suggest that all were woven from spun rather than from reeled threads. Probably owing to the predominance of Buddhism in the region of the former Kushan Empire, local people were unwilling to take the pupa from inside the cocoon. Only after the emergence of the moth from the cocoon was the broken case collected, cut into short fibers, and spun into thread. The silk reeling method, which entailed the death of the pupa, was probably not adopted in this area until the sixth century.22 We obtained a series of dye samples for a variety of colors from woolen textiles from the Iron Age in Xinjiang and silk textiles in weft-faced compound tabby and compound twill, which are the typical central Asian styles.23 The root of the madder plant (Rubia tinctorum) was quite commonly used as red vegetable dye in local Xinjiang textiles, but some insect dyes were in common use. These include kermes (Kermes vermilio) and lac (Laccifer lacca). Kermes is obtained from the dried bodies of the female of the insect Kermes vermilio (Planchon) (formerly Coccus ilicis) living on the kermes oak, while lac is the resinous secretion from the insect Kerria lacca.24 The former originated in and was transported from southern Europe, while the latter was from southern Asia. Indigo, including (Isatis indigotica) from central Asia and Xinjiang, and Indigofera tinctoria, from India, were mainly used for blue using the real indigo technique. This entailed soaking the plant leaves in water until they ferment, and then mixing the resulting precipitate (indigotin) with lye. Yellow color is easily made from various plants and

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   227 vegetables, so that yellows were normally derived from local resources. For instance, local species of poplar tree, Populus euphraticus and P.  pruinosa, widely seen in the Taklamakan Desert, were identified as yellow dyes on the central Asian silk textiles.25 There were many pattern-weaving methods in use in central Asia, but only weft-faced compound tabby and twill can reliably be recognized as distinctive central Asian weave structures. The former, now called taqueté, was an imitation Chinese jin silk, with the same structure but turned through 90 degrees in relation to jin silk. The first examples were found at sites near the Mediterranean Sea: Masada in Israel,26 and Dura-Europa in Syria.27 Masada is a precisely dated site from the 70s ce, so we can be confident that taqueté was created with wool fiber in the Near East, and then spread to the east. The latter, a weft-faced compound twill, called samite or samit, was a development from taqueté and was used first in Persia and elsewhere in central Asia. However, the earliest example was found in Monchek-tepe, at Pap in the Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan, and probably came from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, some two hundred miles to the southwest. From there, the style finally reached northwest China.28 Samite, weft-faced compound twill, was known as zandaniji in the middle of central Asia, especially in Bukhara, which was documented in the tenth-century book History of Bukhara by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Narshakhi.29 In this book, zandaniji was mentioned as a silk product from a place called Zandana. Al-Narshakhi states that Zandana has a great citadel, a large marketplace, and a grand mosque, and that every Friday the prayers are offered there, and there is trading (the same day). The specialty of the place is zandaniji, which is a kind of cloth made in Zandana. It is fine cloth and is made in large quantities. Much of that cloth is woven in other villages in the region of Bukhara, but it is called zandaniji because it first appeared in this village. That cloth is exported to all countries such as Iraq, Fars, Kirman, Hindustan, and elsewhere. All of the nobles and rulers make garments of it, and they buy it at the same price as brocade. However, for textile researchers now, zandaniji is a kind of central Asian silk textile woven in samite weave, that is, weft-faced compound twill.30 This has become standard usage, though what should properly be called zandaniji has been open to debate in recent years. Both taqueté and samite from this period have the same characteristics of pattern, which repeats in the weft direction but not in the warp direction. It indicates that the structure of the patterning loom used to weave taqueté and samite textiles is similar to that of the Zilu loom, a type of patterning loom employing the pick-up patterning method. The Zilu loom is still used in Zilu village in Iran to weave textiles with pattern repeats in the weft but not in the warp.31 As we have observed, the Zilu loom could also have been a prototype of the loom used to weave the central Asian textiles known as zandaniji. This loom has two key components. One is a vertical frame, which holds all the warps in two beams, a warp beam on top and a cloth beam on bottom. The weaver stands in front of the warp and weaves with a shuttle. The other part is a set of harnesses, among which the threads needed for the pattern are picked up and lifted by a standing boy. Between these two parts, a mechanical device I term a 1-N cord system must be used between the warp and the harness to repeat the single pattern unit on all the warps

228   Zhao Feng in the weft direction. In consequence, this patterning method renders repeats only the in the weft direction and not in the warp direction. This matches the pattern structures of the taqueté textiles and the samite textiles from Central Asia.32

The New System of Tang Silk Production (Eighth–Twelfth Centuries) More or less around the sixth to the seventh centuries, that is, during the Sui to early Tang dynasties in China, a new system of silk production seems gradually to have appeared. Afterwards, the center of the Chinese economy from the north to the south, and the mode of long-distance cultural exchange between the East and the West was also changed from the Oasis Silk Road to the Maritime Silk Road. After the civil war known as the An Lushan Rebellion in 755 ce, the Tang government was keen to ensure that its tax income should come mainly from southern China, because the economic center had already moved to the south, including the Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Sericulture in this area became more important, but the southern tradition was different from the northern since the humidity and temperature are so different. The most famous mulberry in this area was called Hu mulberry, concentrated in the Zhejiang area. Like the Jin mulberry, it has a short trunk and low shape but otherwise resembles other Morus alba species, such as the Lu mulberry. Silkworms in the south normally produced several broods each year—that is, they were multivoltine— but, after sufficient genetic exchange with the northern silkworm, became more frequently bivoltine. The silk thread from such bivoltine silkworms is finer that that from the north, but thicker than that from multivoltine silkworms in the south.33 The treadle silk reeling device came into being during the same time. Wang Jian, a late Tang poet, mentioned the silk reeling device in his poem about a local farmer’s family who raises silkworms and reels the silk from the cocoons. The same device could be found in a painting of agriculture and sericulture in the Southern Song dynasty, which is the earliest painting of sericulture in China (around the 1120s).34 This device made the silk process more efficient and more productive. The quality of silk was also very good and consistent, so that it met the expectations of consumers during the Song and Yuan dynasties, especially those that dominated the Maritime Silk Road. The dye system that developed in the south includes a large number of new types from all over the world. Neither cinnabar nor madder was in use anymore. Instead, the safflower was widely used for red in China, and sappanwood (Biancaea sappan) could yield a variety of colors from red to purple according to which mordents were used in conjunction with it. Indigo from various indigo plants gave blue. The safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) was supposed to have originated in central Asia and to have been

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   229 brought back to China by the General Zhang Qian following his expedition to central Asia in the second century bce.35 It was widely planted throughout China during the Tang dynasty, though mostly in Sichuan. People could make safflower cake and dry the safflower to preserve the dyestuff without loss of its dyeing properties. Sappanwood (Biancaea sappan), originally from southeastern Asia, was imported in large quantities during the same period, especially via the Maritime Silk Road.36 Probably inspired by the Western murex dye and the vegetable colorant derived from the purple gromwell plant (Lithospermum erythrorhizon), it was widely used to produce the color purple, which was the symbol of the highest official level from the Tang to Mongol period. However, a range of yellows was still mainly based on the local materials, including the fragrant cape jasmine, flowering Amur cork, and the flower buds of the pagoda tree (Sophora japonica).37 The patterning loom had a great development between the sixth and seventh centuries. A new type of patterning loom, which could control the pattern repeats not only from the weft but also from the warp directions, came into being no later than the mid-sixth century, as is suggested by our research on the textiles from tomb 170 at Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang.38 This type of patterning loom was completely formed by at least the beginning of the Tang era (early seventh century). Most of the silk textiles we found along the Silk Road were woven on this type of loom. The loom could be called a drawloom, for it is similar to the drawloom in the later periods. The earliest illustration of this drawloom can be found in a Song dynasty painting.39 It has a tower on the top where the pattern program made of vertical and horizontal threads was held and operated by a boy sitting on the top, and a frame where the warps were laid. A weaver sitting on a bench controlled the weaving process. The frame of the drawloom did not change much from the Tang to Qing dynasties, except for the size of the pattern. More varied silk textiles could be woven on this drawloom, with simpler structures but more realistic patterns. Real damask with twill and satin foundation weave was produced in both the south and the north. Weft-faced compound weave had a big family of variants, including the Tang-style samite (weft-faced compound twill), Liao-style samite (weft-faced on both sides), and Liao satin samite.40 Complex gauze also used the new pattern system and replaced the old system. On this loom, brocade was much easier to weave, and brocade became the most important decorating method from the Song to Qing dynasty (between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries). Patterning looms and patterning programs were the reasons for the big change in woven silk patterns during the Tang dynasty. More medallion patterns appeared in the Tang in different styles, sometimes only floral medallions, sometimes a floral roundel enclosing one or a pair of animals or birds, and sometimes the birds flying around and among the flowers.41 These could be achieved because the new patterning loom made the pattern repeats in both warp and weft direction possible. And after the late Tang period, a representational style became more popular, so flowers, birds, even dragons and clouds, often appeared on woven silk textiles, especially those associated with the imperial court.

230   Zhao Feng

The European System of Silk Production (Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries) Transportation along old Oasis Silk Road almost stopped after the rise of the Arabs during the seventh century. It was largely superseded by the Maritime Silk Road as the economic center of silk production moved to the southeast of China. However, in the thirteenth century the Mongols and Arabs revived the fortunes of the Oasis Silk Road through the Eurasian steppes after the Mongol Empire had assumed control of this area, even reaching eastern Europe. Silk materials were transported everywhere in Eurasia, and silk weavers moved around the world. This change brought about another development in silk technology and formed a new system of production and trade in West Asia and Europe. However, the Maritime Silk Road also saw a great advancement during the same period. Chinese silks, porcelain, lacquer, Indian cotton, and other local materials were frequently traded by sea. In Borobudur and other sites in Indonesia, we can find some Chinese silk patterns carved on the stones or sculptures from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Some travelers from the Song and Yuan dynasties left travel account, such as Zhufan zhi (Treatises on various foreign peoples) and Daoyi zhilue (A brief account of island barbarians) in which Zhao Rushi from the Song dynasty, and Wang Dayuan from the Yuan dynasty, mention that silk textiles from Hangzhou and Suzhou in southern China could be seen in the southeastern Asian islands, so we learn that the silk trade via the Maritime Silk Road was still considerable.42 As a result of silk trade via the Silk Road from the thirteenth to the eighteenth ­centuries, the whole sericulture system was brought to Europe and sericulture books were translated into European languages. Northern Italy and southern France became the sericulture and silk production centers in Europe. The mulberry tree has existed in Europe since ancient times, mostly around the Mediterranean Sea, though it is the species Morus nigra, rather than the Morus alba in the East. So the Europeans used the leaves from the Morus nigra to feed the silkworm for a long time. They did not understand that the silk quality was not as good as the Chinese because of the difference between the mulberry species until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Afterward they introduced the Morus alba from the East, probably from Persia, to increase the quality of their silk. This change is first documented in Piedmont and Tuscany between the 1410s and 1420s. However, the complete replacement of Morus nigra by Morus alba took about three centuries, not having been achieved until the eighteenth century.43 Europeans also used the silk reeling device from China. The illustration shows that the reeling device in Italy is exactly the same as the Chinese during the same period. Moreover, they started to use the silk twisting machine almost during the same time. We do not know exactly who invented and who copied, but research shows that the circular twisting machine was probably of Italian origin, and the straight one Chinese.44

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   231 Dyeing for European silk constituted its own system. Murex, cochineal, and madder were three main dyes for the color red, and they had been in use in Europe for centuries. Murex, sometimes called purple shell (purpura), is the source of the traditional dye for the royal or imperial purple color, which had been highly appreciated in Europe since at least Roman times and was still used into the Renaissance period. Cochineal came in three major qualities: Polish cochineal, in a smaller size, which arrived from Poland and Ukraine via the Black Sea, was the best and most expensive one; the larger Armenian cochineal, from Mount Ararat, Turkey, via Constantinople, was the second best; and the Mediterranean cochineal, also called grain, was the least expensive. Madder was excellent for dyeing wool but was rarely used for silk. To achieve the color blue, people used woad (Isatis tinctoria), a plant that grows everywhere in Europe, and indigo, which arrived from India or Persia in a dried form. Weld, or dyer’s rocket (Reseda luteola), was used to dye yellow or green when mixed with indigo blue.45 During this period, silk resulted in the best textile in comparison with any other fiber materials. Therefore, some important types of silk were produced in large quantities. Taffeta, or plain weave silk, was the most common and cheapest kind. Damask, with satin weave but reversed monochrome pattern, and plain satin were very fine silk fabrics, too. Brocade and lampas were always beautiful, and expensive, because they were woven with more colorful silk threads, metal threads, in complicated weaves. But the most precious and complex kind was velvet, which has a very large number of variations: plain velvet; cut or uncut velvet, called ciselé velvet; cut pile with two or three different heights, called pile-on-pile velvet; and the patterned velvet brocaded with gold filé or gold loops.46 Velvet was introduced to the East during the Mongol period, between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, and woven in China and Japan from mid-Ming, in the sixteenth century, onward. There is one piece of evidence, a velvet hat, dating back to the thirteenth century, in the collection of the China National Silk Museum, showing that velvet was transmitted to the East from the West.47 The drawloom came to western Asia probably during the tenth century and spread to Europe thereafter. Silk textiles found in European cathedrals show that the drawloom had not been used until the eleventh century in most of Europe. However, European textiles from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show the use of the drawloom, which definitely originated in China but changed gradually as it traveled along the Silk Road from the East to the West. In India and Persia, the loom has a lower position and the drawboy sits facing the weaver. In Europe, the drawboy stands to the side of the loom to operate the pattern program, which was moved from the top to the loom side in 1605. Finally, in 1804–1805 in Lyons, France, Joseph Marie Jacquard developed the loom named for him, which uses a deck of punched cards to control the actions of the loom, allowing the automatic weaving of complex patterns.48 Then the drawloom finally disappeared in Europe, and the whole weaving system moved into the industrial era. The Jacquard loom was adopted by many other places in the world after its emergence in France, especially where the major industry was silk production. As local silk weavers in Lyons boycotted the Jacquard loom, it was mass produced in England instead. After that, the Americans also embraced the loom, followed by Japan. After the Meiji Restoration,

232   Zhao Feng Japan started to take note of worldwide trends and followed the footsteps of the Americans and British, for instance, in weaving and reeling silk. Thomas Stevens, a British silk weaver, founded a silk factory in Coventry and started to produce silk pictures. By 1862, he had produced four designs, but his factories expanded and his designs proliferated, allowing him to exhibit and distribute these Stevengraphs internationally. An exhibition of his woven pictures in Nishijin, Kyoto, testifies how the Jacquard technique can be applied in the Eastern context. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Jacquard loom was also introduced to Asia, arriving first in Japan, and spreading to China in or soon after 1910. Xu Bingkun, the chancellor of the institute, purchased a Japanese loom and hired Japanese instructors for the Zhejiang Middle Industrial School. One of the institute instructors, Du Jinsheng, took an interest in the technology and gave up his job and returned to his home. Then he launched the Du Jinsheng Silk Weaving Factory in Hangzhou, producing the first woven picture, titled Nine Creeks and Eighteen Gullies. He also started to market the products throughout the country. At almost the same time, the powerful and strong Yuan Zhenhe Silk Store also produced woven pictures, which were exhibited in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Afterward, Jacquard woven pictures became synonymous with Hangzhou silk. This also spread to other places, such as Shanghai, which saw an increase in silk factories that produced woven picture products.49

Conclusion We have discussed four steps in the technological development of silk in Asia and Europe, at the two ends of the Silk Road. Each step involved an integrated system, including the mulberry, silkworm, silk reeling, weaving, weave structure, weaving loom, dye, and pattern. All the development during these four steps indicates that the technology of silk never stopped changing. The major factors are exchanges of technology and the challenge to make new fashions in textiles. This ever-changing technology shows the significance of the Silk Road, which brought trade, transportation, exchange, competition, and inspiration to people throughout its length, as well as progress and development to the world.

Notes 1. Xia Qingyou et al., “Complete Resequencing of 40 Genomes Reveals Domestication Events and Genes in Silkworm (Bombyx),” Science 326 (5951) (2009): 433–436. 2. 张松林、高汉玉：《荥阳青台遗址出土丝麻织品观察与研究》 ，《中原文物》 ，1999 年 3期 3. 李济： 《西阴村史前遗存》 ，清华研究院丛书，1927 年 4. 徐辉等， 《对钱山漾出土丝织品的验证》 《丝绸》1981 年 2 期 5. 浙江省文物考古研究所、萧山博物馆：《跨湖桥》 ，文物出版社 (Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing House, 2004).

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   233 6. 贾思勰：《齐民要求》卷 5，种桑、柘第四十五，有鲁桑、荆桑二桑。上海古籍出 版社，2009 年，271–288. 7. 蒋猷龙，《家蚕的起源与分化》 ，南京，江苏科技出版社，1982. 8. 赵丰：《中国丝绸通史》 ，商代缫丝工具 9. 赵丰、于志勇主编：《沙漠王子遗宝：丝绸之路尼雅遗址出土文物》 ，艺纱堂/服饰 出版，2000. 10. Liu Jian and Zhao Feng, “Dye Analysis of Two Polychrome Woven Textiles from the Han and Tang Dynasties,” in Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, ed. Mary M. Dusenbury (Lawrence: Spenser Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2015), 113–119. 11. Zhao Feng and Long Bo, “Imperial Yellow in the Sixth Century: A Preliminary Attempt to Reproduce Imperial Yellow Based on Instructions in the Qimin Yaoshu,” in Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, ed. Mary M. Dusenbury (Lawrence: Spenser Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2015), 103–112. 12. 宋兆麟、牟永抗：我国远古时期的踞织机：河姆渡文化的纺织技术，中国纺织科学 技术史资料，1983 年，总第 15 集 13. Zhao Feng, “Reproduction of Han Dynasty Oblique Treadle Loom,” Cultural Relics 5 (1996): 87–95. 14. Notes by Pei Songzhi for Wei Zhi (The records of Wei kingdom) of San Guo Zhi (The records of three kingdoms). 15. “Chengdu Institute of Archaeology, Jinzhou Conservation Center for Cultural Heritage: Archaeological Report of Han Tombs at Laoguanshan, Tianhuizhen, Chengdu, Sichuan,” Archaeology 7 (2014): 59–70. 16. Zhao Feng, Wang Yi, Luo Qun, Long Bo, and Zhang Baichun, et al., “The Earliest Evidence of Pattern Looms: Han Dynasty Tomb Models from Chengdu, China,” Antiquity 91 (2017), 360–374. Hu Yuduan et al., “The Development of Shu Silk Loom from a Point of View of Dingqiao Loom: A Field Research Report on the Multi-treadle and Multi-shaft Loom,” Newsletter of History of Textile Science and Technology in China 1 (1980): 50–62. 17. 湖北省荆州地区博物馆：《江陵马山一号楚墓》 ，文物出版社，1985 年 18. 赵丰主编，《丝路之绸：起源、传播与交流》 ，浙江大学出版社，2015. 19. Zhao Feng and Wang Le, “Reconciling Excavated Textiles with Contemporary Documentary Evidence: A Closer Look at the Finds from a Sixth-Century Tomb at Astana,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 3rd series 23 (2013): 197–221. 20. 玄奘、辩机原著，季羡林等校注 ：《大唐西域记》 ，中华书局，1985 年，1021–1022 页 21. Theophanes of Byzantium, as reported by Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople in his Myriobiblon, reprinted in Textes d’auteurs grecs et latins relatifs à l’Extrême-Orient depuis le IVe siècle av. J.-C.  jusqu’au XIVe siècle, ed. and trans. George Coedès (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910), 152. ，2005 年 1 期; Zhao Feng, “Domestic, 22. 赵丰：《新疆地产绵线织锦研究》 ，《西域研究》 Wild or Unraveled? A Study on Tabby, Taqueté and Jin with Spun Silk from Yingpan, Xinjiang, Third-Fourth Centuries,” in Silk: Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity, ed. Berit Hildebrandt with Carole Gillis (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017), 95–103. 23. In weft-faced weaves, the warp (the threads that are stationary during weaving) is entirely covered by the weft (the thread that the weaver passes progressively between the warp threads). Tabby is plain weave, in which the weft passes over and under each successive warp thread. In twill, each warp or weft thread crosses two or more weft or warp threads with a progression of interlacing by one to the right or to the left, forming a distinct diagonal line.

234   Zhao Feng 24. Judith H. Hofenk de Graaff, The Colourful Past: Origins, Chemistry and Identification of Natural Dyestuffs (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2004), 54 and 85. 25. Liu Jian, Chika Mouri, Richard Laursen, Zhao Feng, and Li Wenying, “Characterization of Dyes in Ancient Textiles from Yingpan, Xinjiang,” Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013): 4444–4449. 26. Masada: The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989). 27. Lisa R. Brody and Gail Hoffman, eds., Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, exhibit catalogue, McMullen Museum of Art (Boston: Boston College, 2011). 28. Bokijon Matbabaev and Zhao Feng, Textile Manufacture of Fergana in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Samarkand: Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of Republic of Uzbekistan, 2010) [上海古籍出版社]. 29. R. N. Frye, The History of Bukhara, Translated from a Persian Abridgement of the Arabic Original by Narshakhī (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007), Chapter 4: “Bhkhara and the Places Adjoining It.” 30. D. G. Shepherd and W. B. Henning, “Zandanījī Identified?” in Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel zum 75. Geburtstag am 26. 10. 1957 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1959), 15–40. 31. Jon Thompson and Hero Granger-Taylor, “The Persian Zilu Loom from Meybod,” Bulletin du Centre internationale d'études des textiles anciens 73 (1995-1996): 27–53. 32. Zhao Feng, “Weaving Methods for Western-Style Samit from the Silk Road in Northwestern China,” in Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Regula Schorta (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2006), 189–210. 33. 陈甫《农书》 34. 赵丰，《蚕织图的版本及所见南宋蚕织技术》 ，《农业考古》1986 年 1 期 35. 张华： 《博物志》 36. 赵丰，《海交史研究》1986 年 1 期 37. 赵丰，唐代丝绸染料及助剂初探《中国纺织科技史资料》1983 年第 15 辑 38. Zhao Feng and Wang Le, “Reconciling Excavated Textiles with Contemporary Documentary Evidence: A Closer Look at the Finds from a Sixth-Century Tomb at Astana,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 3rd series 23 (2013): 197–221. 39. Zhao Feng, “Hand Scroll of Sericulture and Weaving: The Edition and the Reflection of the Sericulture and Weaving in Southern Song Dynasty,” Agricultural History of China 5 (1986): 345–359 (Chinese). 4 0. Zhao Feng, Liao Textiles & Costumes (Hong Kong: Mu Wen Tang, 2004). 41. Zhao Feng, “Silk Roundels from the Sui to the Tang,” HALI: The International Journal of Oriental Carpets and Textiles 92 (May 1997): 81–85. 42. 赵汝适：《诸蕃志》 ，汪大渊，《岛夷志略》 43. R. Comba, “Produzioni tessili nel Piemonte tardo-medievale,” Bollettino Storico-bibliografico Subalpino 72 (1984), 344. 44. Domenica Digilie, “L’Arte della Seta a Lucca,” Sulla via del Catai: Rivista semestrale sulle relazioni culturali tra Europa e Cina 3 (2010): 195–202. 45. Domique Cardon, Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science (London: Archetype, 2007). 46. Chiara Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009). 47. Zhao Feng, Chinese Velvet (Suzhou: Soochow University Press, 2012).

The Significance of Silk on the Silk Road   235 48. Eric Broudy, The Book of Looms: A History of the Handloom from Ancient Times to the Present (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1979), 134–137; Zhao Feng, Sandra Sardjono, and Christopher Buckley, A World of Looms: Weaving Technology and Textile Arts (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2019). 49. Zhao Feng, “Beyond the Limit of Weaving: From Leashes and Punched Cards to Digital Jacquard,” in Methodologies of Digital Jacquard in Design and Arts, ed. Kinor Jiand and Tao Hua, exhibit catalogue, The Fashion Gallery, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2013), 154–163.

Bibliography Andrews, Fred H. “Ancient Chinese Figured Silks Excavated by Sir Aurel Stein.” Burlington Magazine 37 (1920): 2–10, 71–77, 147–152. Becker, John, and Donald B. Wagner. Pattern and Loom: A Practical Study of the Development of Weaving Techniques in China, Western Asia and Europe. Copenhagen: Rhodos International, 1987. Broudy, Eric. The Book of Looms: A History of the Handloom from Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979. Dusenbury, Mary M., ed. Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia. Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Kuhn, Dieter, ed. Chinese Silks. Translated by David Andrew Knight, Craig Shaw, and Nicholas Morrow Williams. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Chinese edition edited by Zhao Feng. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2012. Nosch, Marie-Louise, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan, eds. Global Textile Encounters. Oxford: Oxbow Press, 2014. Watt, James C. Y. China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 AD. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Watt, James  C.  Y., and Anne  E.  Wardwell. When Silk Was Gold: Central Asia and Chinese Textiles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1997. Zhao Feng, ed. The General History of Chinese Silk (Chinese with English abstracts and illustration captions). Suzhou: Suzhou University Press, 2005. Zhao Feng. Liao Textiles & Costumes. Hong Kong: Muwen Tang Fine Arts, 2004. Zhao Feng. Treasures in Silk. Hong Kong: ISAT/Costume Squad, 1999. Zhao Feng and Wang Le. “Reconciling Excavated Textiles with Contemporary Documentary Evidence: A Closer Look at the Finds from a Sixth-Century Tomb at Astana.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 3rd series 23 (2013): 197–221. Zhao Feng, Sandra Sardjono, and Christopher Buckley, A World of Looms: Weaving Technology and Textile Arts (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2019). Zhao Feng, Helen Wang, Helen Persson, Frances Wood, Wang Le, and Xu Zheng, eds. Textiles from Dunhuang in UK Collections (Chinese and English versions). Shanghai: Donghua University Press, 2007.

chapter 12

Science , Pl ay, a n d the M ater i a l Cu lt u r e of T w en tieth- Cen t u ry A m er ica n Boy hood Rebecca Onion

The opinion that America’s (white, middle-class) children are “overprotected” gathered great currency in mainstream thought, both liberal and conservative, in the 2000s and 2010s. A reform movement has spawned parental self-help books, such as Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods and Michael Thompson’s Homesick and Happy; cover stories in the Atlantic Monthly; and the website Free Range Kids, whose tagline is “Fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/ or the perils of a non-organic grape.”1 Regulation and separation of children’s environments—the twentieth-century “islanding” of childhood described by historian John R. Gillis—has brought some undeniable benefits with it, including the reduction of deaths of children who suffered accidents while sitting in moving vehicles without wearing seatbelts, or played in the street and were hit by streetcars.2 It seems far-fetched to believe that any adult would argue for the restoration of a material environment full of unlabeled household poisons and flammable sleepwear. Yet what some of this anger at “overprotection” supposes is that a dangerous, rough-edged material culture, full of germs, bugs, and nonorganic grapes, is good for moral fiber. This belief is often couched in a generous dose of conservative—or, at least, libertarian— ideology. In 2009, Daily Kos blogger dsteffen posted an email forward (a piece of prose that is designed to circulate socially through email) that sums up the American folk belief that children’s material worlds have gotten too safe. Titled “To all the kids who survived the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s!!”, the forward, which was passed around among older

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   237 people, reminisced about the little moments of physical danger they enjoyed in the “good old days.” The list included activities like drinking from a hose, starting a fire, or riding in the back of a pickup truck. “We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes,” the writers remembered. “After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.” The email forward ends with a flourish of defiant pride: “These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem-solvers and inventors ever. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.”3 The mental inferiority of the present, safer generation—if not explicitly described—is certainly implied. These memories are pressed into service as critical historical arguments, made by adults who remember the material landscapes of their own childhoods and extrapolate from this anecdotal evidence to construct an imagined—and shared—American past in which everyday life contained much more danger. These nostalgic invocations of pickup trucks and go-carts tap into a powerful inclination to transform strongly felt childhood memories into an authoritative perspective on the material past. What’s more, this imagined collective history serves as an implied prescription for how children’s material culture should be regulated (or left unregulated) today. As the email forward’s reference to the prized qualities of risk taking, problem solving, and inventiveness makes clear, the critique of overprotection sees the regulation of the material environment as ultimately dangerous to national brainpower. Perhaps the most nostalgic reminiscences about an unbounded material culture come from scientists and science promoters mourning the apparent loss to scientific experimentation through a more regulated environment. These arguments are, again, historical, pressing a common understanding of “childhoods past” into service to make an argument about the ­trajectory of society as a whole. As early as 1980, New York Times columnist Malcolm W.  Browne eulogized the “magic,” “malodorous and occasionally alarming” home chemistry lab. “The careers of many . . . leading scientists were shaped by home experimentation, in which there was always time to grope for understanding at one’s own pace and in one’s own way,” Browne wrote. “Mounting social and legal pressures to make life safe and supervised have incidentally robbed science of some of the magic with which it once lured young people.”4 More recently, Wired science writer Steve Silberman wrote in a 2006 report on new chemical regulations imposed in an age of counterterrorism, unconsciously echoing Browne’s language of seduction: “The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer.”5 The little tale of domestic destruction is a staple of the twentieth-century scientific autobiography. Physicist Richard Feynman recalls throwing a flaming wastebasket out of the window so that his mother wouldn’t find out that he had been playing around with a spark coil; neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts an incident in which he and a friend so thoroughly polluted a friend’s basement with chunks of fermented cuttlefish (products of an attempt at preservation, gone badly awry) that the house was rendered uninhabitable for weeks.6

238   Rebecca Onion In such stories, the gender dynamic—frustrated mother, who has to clean up this mess; incorrigible, yet brilliant, son—repeats itself again and again. The message is clear: scientific advancement relies upon boyish mischief. Nobel Prize–winning chemist Roald Hoffmann, interviewed by Silberman, made the gendered nature of this connection clear: “Stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids—particularly boys—to science. Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”7 Such anecdotes make powerful arguments for danger over safety. But a look at the historical record finds other anecdotes in which this kind of scientific experimentation caused children (always boys) significant harm. In La Plata, Maryland, in 1947, John H. Taylor Jr., who had been experimenting for two years with a chemistry set he had received as a Christmas present, mixed potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, hoping to make what he called “an atomic bomb.” The contraption exploded in his hands, and he lost the tips of two fingers.8 Daniel Nellis, fourteen, of Chicago, lost both hands and one eye in a chemistry set explosion in 1955: “doctors used skin from his thighs to cover some of the nearly 200 wounds inflicted by fragments of a glass bottle that pierced his cheek, neck, and face.”9 Terry James Burns of San Bernardino, California, lost the first joints of three fingers of his left hand in 1958, when he tamped hundreds of match heads from safety matches into a four-inch metal cartridge, looking to make the whole into a rocket.10 William Dushock, seven, of Yonkers, died in the hospital in 1960, after he and his thirteen-year-old brother tried the same trick.11 In perhaps the saddest such story, in 1960, an eighth-grade honors student in Kankakee, Illinois, stuffed a carbon dioxide cartridge and matchheads into a homemade rocket and was tightening it in a vise in his basement workshop when “the cartridge exploded, striking him in the abdomen.” John Tait’s younger brother, Terry, found him “slumped in a chair near the telephone,” where he had gone to call for help. Tait’s father, a chemist for a paint manufacturer in town, had forbidden him to experiment with that type of rocket fuel; the story’s headline read “Father’s Warning Ignored; Blast Kills Rocket Fan, 13.”12 In looking at these eruptions of danger within the material-cultural landscapes of past childhoods, we can see more clearly how much we have idealized the lost experimental material landscapes of boyhoods past. Brian Sutton-Smith calls for an understanding of “play’s dysfunctionality,” as a corrective to the twentieth century’s persistent sentimentalization of childhood. “There is plenty of evidence,” he writes, “to demonstrate that human or animal play is not necessarily an ideal phenomenon,” despite a cultural privileging of valorizing tropes like “Children’s play is work.”13 In his recent study of the meaning of medieval childhood, J. Allan Mitchell agrees: “All talk about ‘children’s culture’ is wrong-headed if it does not admit the abusive, refractory, materialistic excessive matter of children’s play and playthings.”14 In a moment, John Tait’s rocket shifted from an admirable token of effort to a lethal product of obsession. A closer look at the transition between the culture that idealized boyish experimentation, and today’s more protective regime, illuminates the way that changes in the material culture of twentieth-century childhood have reflected shifting understandings of the nature of childhood. Unlike parents of the interwar era, we no longer assume that all

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   239 boys are automatically good at manipulating the materials of a home chemistry lab, or that an injury will make a child stronger. How did this come to pass?

The Freedom of Interwar Boyhood Experimentation The cover of Winifred Esther Wise’s Thomas Edison biography, printed in 1933, sums up the image of the independent and entrepreneurial boy chemist. As a young teenager, Edison worked on the railroad, selling provisions and newspapers to passengers. He combined this small business with his hobby of experimentation, setting up a miniature laboratory in the car where he kept his supplies. The image depicts Edison as master of his domain: smiling, red-cheeked, and happy, with the tools of his present trade (newspapers, a basket of food) alongside the chemicals that foretell his future status as innovator. The cup into which he is pouring his chemicals is at the very center of the tableau, with lines (representing fumes, or perhaps the sound of a small reaction) emanating upward, toward his smiling face. This Edison, having transformed a semipublic corner of his workplace into an experimental space, experiences the ultimate in mastery of his environment. Americans’ approving vision of the freewheeling, mischievous boy chemist dates to the interwar years, when it was fueled by a social fascination with science and technology, and, in particular, chemistry; geopolitical circumstances that fed the American chemical and toy industries; and the increasingly protected and sentimentalized status of American children, who more and more often had time to mess around with financially unproductive, yet theoretically admirable, hobbies.15 For the first three decades of the century, the experimental culture of boy chemists and wireless-radio aficionados coexisted with the observational, collection-oriented, spiritually inflected teachings of the nature-study movement, a type of science education with roots in nineteenth-century natural history that reached into schools, museums, and youth organizations before being supplanted by more discipline-specific science classes in the 1930s and 1940s.16 This change closed many girls—who had been able to participate in nature study (a socially approved activity for young women)—out of the culture of children’s science play. These factors all contributed to the emergence of the mischievous “boy scientist” as a guiding national archetype. The early twentieth century also represents a turning point in the history of attitudes toward accidental injury. While children quite often died while exploring and playing in the dangerous home environments of the colonial and nineteenth-century United States, it was not until the twentieth century that these material-cultural tragedies looked solvable. Colonial ideas about household accidents tended to be fatalistic, with parents turning to religion in ascribing such tragedies to cruel destiny. (Cotton Mather, in mourning after one such accident, wrote in his diary: “The just God throwes my Child into the Fire!”17)

240   Rebecca Onion While many prescriptive authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century suggested health-promoting practices for childrearing, the prevention of accidental injury did not often enter the discussion; in their minds, diseases were preventable, but accidents were not.18 The frequency of infant and child deaths made a mark on the kinds of material culture intended for children. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parents saw infancy as incredibly dangerous, dosing babies with preventative tonics in the first months and adopting practices meant to help them “grow up” faster, that they might leave this perilous period behind. Material culture of the period reflected these aims, with furniture specially designed to hasten children’s growth.19 In the first half of the twentieth century, safety movements, mostly aimed at improving the health of workers and pedestrians in mechanized spaces of factories and city streets, made some inroads on questions of home safety. The National Safety Council began the first of many public awareness campaigns in 1912, addressing industrial safety, then public safety, in trying to reduce numbers of auto accidents. The NSC launched its first household safety campaign in the 1930s.20 Also during the 1930s, the Red Cross mounted a major campaign to heighten awareness of home safety, distributing more than 26 million home inspection forms to children, who would bring them home to their parents.21 These efforts emphasized the need for responsible action on the part of the consumer. In particular, during this period, advice on household safety increasingly emphasized the mother’s duty in keeping children, husbands, and visitors safe.22 The transition between the Victorian perception of the “home-as-haven” to “home-as-dangerousplace,” part of a new Progressive-era awareness of environmental risk, led to calls for women to become “home safety managers.” This role aligned with the era’s emphasis on efficiency and scientific practices in home economics. Women should know the house best, so that they should know how to avoid dangers like slips and falls on wet floors or fire hazards like poor electrical wiring or piled-up clothing.23 This expectation makes it all the more remarkable that scientific experimentation in the home in the interwar years was so emphatically unsupervised. The now-idealized “free” play that went on in basements and tree houses was allowed because the children enjoying that freedom were male, living in a time and place when the material culture of childhood allowed them access to adult-scaled technological and scientific hobbies. Such technological toys were highly gender segregated: chemistry sets, engineering kits, and model airplanes for boys; toys referencing the newly technologically equipped kitchens of the female realm for girls.24 The ascendancy of the chemistry set—just like its later demise—was tied up with the state of the market for children’s leisure. Child-specific marketing appeals proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s. While some parents found this unsettling, wondering how to align consumerism with older standards of morality, child-development experts suggested various ways for parents to parlay children’s desires to consume into lessons in responsibility. The educational toy—a particularly American specialty, or so the toy companies would argue—took advantage of all of these cultural shifts in creating a

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   241 robust new market.25 Boys, in particular, were seen as rational and admirable consumers, who sometimes knew even more than their parents did about such products as ­automobiles and bicycles. Boys, the formulation went, were citizens of the future, and they could be expected to best their parents when it came to assessing modern technology.26 The chemistry set—along with the multitude of equipment related to scientific and technical hobbies like wireless radio and carpentry27—was cast as one of these positive products of the new children’s market. Parents could expect that boys with science sets would have bright futures—no small consideration during the Depression, when advertisers used children’s well-being and future prospects as a trump card in persuading parents of the merits of their products.28 Children would enjoy these types of toys; child-development experts and toy companies alike argued that science toys were particularly apropos for school-age children, who had “workmanlike instincts” and liked to “know” and “understand” how things really were, rather than indulge in fantasies and imaginative play.29 The chemistry sets marketed in the interwar years, by such companies as the A. C. Gilbert Company, the Lionel Company, and Porter Chemical Company, used boyish independence and mastery of the physical world as an integral part of their marketing plan. A.  C.  Gilbert, in particular, exuded Progressive-era manliness that privileged physical toughness and adventuresome spirit (The Gilbert motto: “Hello Boys!”). A ­former Olympian pole vaulter, an MD, and a proponent of the athletic “strenuous life,” Gilbert sold science as the next frontier: To our forefathers, adventure meant blazing a trail through the wilderness, fighting off Indians and wild animals, and conquering the forces of nature. . . . Today the world’s most thrilling adventures lie in the field of science—engineering, chemistry, electricity, microscopy, and other forms of scientific activity. . . . There is as much romance in discovering the secrets of strange chemicals as the secrets of strange lands . . . there is as much glory in conquering the wild forces of electricity as in conquering wild tribes.30

The chemistry sets of the interwar period were specifically marketed as aids to in­de­ pend­ent experimentation. Neither teachers nor parents, the imagery and language told children, should have anything to do with the chemistry lab. A. C. Gilbert disdained to associate his products with formal schooling, telling his official biographer: “When schools became interested in our construction and educational toys, we discouraged them as much as we could. . . . We were afraid that if kids saw our things in school, they’d think they were just as deadly dull as the rest of school and would have nothing to do with them.”31 The marketing materials distributed with science sets—box tops, manual covers—depicted boys working with each other, in small groups, or alone, shadowed only by an imaginary industrial scientist (meant to stand in for the boy’s possible future) (Figure 12.3). Changes in the spatial arrangements of the middle-class American family home made dedicated spaces for science possible. “Children’s rooms” became a common feature of

242   Rebecca Onion

Figure 12.1.  “Chemcraft, the Chemical Outfit,” n.d. Chemical Heritage Foundation, Object Collections, 2005.001.

American family homes only in the period 1890 to 1930.32 By the 1920s and 1930s, it was the fashion to decorate boys’ rooms with military motifs and to outfit these spaces with accoutrements intended to develop future careers. Girls’ rooms were not themed in the same way.33 Less historical work has been done on the nonbedroom spaces that boys were given to practice their hobbies.34 The home space known as the laboratory, and the scientific “research” that a boy carried out in this space, became a part of the house that was both physical and symbolic. The lab, and the absorption in science that it signified, was where a young man could establish his difference from the rest of his family: older and more responsible than younger siblings, while at the same time more forwardthinking and informed than his parents. Toy companies gave advice in the form of recommended procedures for marking the boundaries of this space. A 1937 Lionel-Porter glass blowing manual advised that chemists pick a well-lighted place, close to running water and a sink, and added “Gas and electrical connections will add to the usefulness and convenience of your ‘lab.’ ” This manual also advised readers on proper procedures for making eight different kinds of lab benches, the shelves that might go above them, a water reservoir, and lampshades to cast the right kind of light for “night experimenting.”35 Some evidence regarding the actual locations of home labs can be found in the letters that Chemcraft’s in-house

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   243 magazine received from “Chief Scientists” leading Chemcraft Clubs across the country. Chemcraft Scientists wrote in that they had “a clubhouse laboratory” (James Rodgers, Grove City, PA); had been given “a fifteen square foot space in our basement” (Louis Schlitz, St. Paul, MN)36; had “partly partitioned off the basement with [a] bulletin board, case for apparatus, a regular desk and a table large enough to accommodate three or four members” (Alois Dettlaff, Cudahy, WI); were “making plans for a larger and better equipped lab on the roof of our house” (William Hudson, New York, NY)37; and had “received permission from our country [sic] commissioners to use the voting house in our district as our club headquarters” (Joe R. Mahr Jr., McKees Rocks, PA).38 In order to dissuade boys from dangerous activities in these semiprivate spaces, manuals tried to link “carefulness” with science as it was done professionally, furthering the perceived connection between the home experience and a career in science, and seizing the opportunity to teach the values of restraint, precision, and forethought. A  1940s-era Chemcraft manual advertised prominently that the set contained “No Dangerous Poisons or Explosive Chemicals.”39 In its introduction, the manual said: “Chemistry is sometimes looked upon as a dangerous profession, but this is not the case. Contrary to an old popular idea, a chemical reaction does not necessarily result in an explosion.” Having put such fears aside in the category of aged superstition, the manual went on, “Chemicals, as a class, are not intended for use as a food and should not be eaten, but very few of them are violent poisons. CHEMCRAFT in particular, does not contain any dangerous poisons.”40 An undated Chemcraft manual reasoned with its readers: “If you should eat a cake of laundry soap it would make you very sick, and the same is true of some of the chemicals in this outfit, even though none of them is dangerous to life in small quantities.” The manual then juxtaposed the foolish child who would eat that laundry soap with the careful scientist: “Chemistry is a science of systematic procedure and control. Everything is done for a definite reason. Do not combine any other reagents, substances or materials with the chemicals contained in this Chemcraft Outfit. Do not find fault with Chemcraft because of incorrect results that will follow chemical combinations other than those specifically stated in this Book.” Finally, the manual made clear its own common-sense differentiation between the rational reader and the younger sibling or friend who might wish to play with this set: “Chemcraft is not recommended for children who are unable to read and understand this statement.”41 Here, potential danger was turned into a chance for the child to distinguish himself as capable of handling responsibility. Knowledge and control, the chemistry-set manufacturers told their market, was power. In an advertisement for his early 1920s science sets, Gilbert wrote, “The boy who knows about different types of engineering—electrical, chemical, structural, etc.—the kinds that are covered by Gilbert Toys, is the type of boy who will be a leader among his fellow boy friends. He is the boy whom the rest of the boys look up to, and they only do it because they appreciate that he has a knowledge of different things which they don’t understand.”42 Chemical magic shows, suggested and scripted by the manuals produced by toy companies, served as training grounds for boys who wanted to learn how to command a crowd. A. C. Gilbert credited his boyhood magic hobby with teaching him

244   Rebecca Onion habits of perfectionism and persistence; he often pointed to a boyhood incident, in which he had attended a magic show and been allowed on stage to perform some of his own illusions, as the genesis of his own seemingly boundless self-confidence.43 Toy companies took the cultural phenomenon of the magic show and recast it with young people as showmen rather than spectators, offering the boy customer a chance to be the fooler, instead of the fooled. In their performances, the boy chemists would show their friends and family how great the differential between their knowledge and the knowledge of those who remained outside the laboratory had grown. Between 1918, when the first chemistry set was sold in the United States, and the postwar era, science toys enjoyed unimpeachably good press, as they were allied with an admirable national project: creating “wide-awake” boys with entrepreneurial, in­de­ pend­ent spirits. Child consumers were charged with complete knowledge of the sets, even as their parents were presumed to know little or nothing about their operation. The cultural approval of this state of affairs confirmed a complete confidence in the potential of boyhood and in the magic word: Science.

The Dangers of Postwar Material Culture: Everybody’s a Child Here In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a consumer movement that had been largely dormant since the Depression moved to pass a raft of consumer protection and environmental legislation.44 But levels of concern over the material culture of childhood began to rise earlier in the postwar period. The Flammable Fabrics Act (1953), the Refrigerator Safety Act (1956), and the Hazardous Substances Act (1960) all had child victims in mind. By considering the special relationship of children to their material environments, these consumer protection laws broke ground in requiring responsibility of manufacturers. The new statutes responded to child-specific product dangers that had generated newspaper horror stories: children killed or maimed by flammable cowboy suits; kids trapped in abandoned refrigerators, unable to open the door from the inside; babies poisoned by new and confusing household chemicals.45 These laws asked manufacturers to take actions (test fabrics; fit refrigerator doors with locks that worked from the inside; label dangerous solvents and cleaners) that would forestall future tragedies. In a capstone to this era of regulation of children’s material environments, the passage of the Child Protection and Toy Safety Act in 1969 extended government regulation from toys that might present a chemical hazard to those that posed mechanical, thermal, or electrical threats to children. While the legislation was underfunded, and the government found it difficult to regulate the hundreds of toys that hit the market every year, the new attention to the potential dangers of toys affected the market for chemistry and other science sets.46 In changing ideas about legal liability for accidents, these regulations incited a new awareness of children’s sometimes irrational interactions with toys

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   245 and household items, as well as an expectation that the marketplace had a custodial obligation to shape children’s material culture into a safer landscape. Postwar fears about children’s material culture shared similarities with other worries about the influence of mass culture on family life. If prewar parents had confidence in young (male) consumers’ powers of discernment, this confidence seemed to vanish in the postwar landscape of household abundance and commercial novelty. In the mid1950s, comic books came under fire in Congress, with psychologist Frederic Wertham as star witness claiming that such books made children (again, often boys) into dangerous, sex-crazed criminals. Commentators saw television as a child-specific problem as early as 1949.47 Television eliminated parents’ authority to mediate between the child and the world, addressing children directly.48 This sense of alienation between parent and child, which disturbed contemporary commentators, increased as television advertisers used a trick previously perfected in print and leveraged children’s commercial desires against parental defenses. Both comic books and television promoted the acquisition of cheaply produced novelty toys, which parents experienced as an uncontrollable flood of new material objects in their homes. Meanwhile, new ideals of permissive parenting held that children should be indulged in their inclinations. Children, the new paradigm held, were creative, expressive, and precious, and they should not be made to fear parental discipline, lest their individuality be crushed.49 This new approach asked more from mothers, who were now more often expected to happily participate in children’s play and hobbies, often cited as a way to counteract the negative influence of mass culture.50 Science hobbies were no exception. In her 1960 book Growing Up with Science, journalist Marianne Besser gave recommendations to parents whose children showed interest in scientific topics, telling mothers to act as de facto enrichment tutors, procuring equipment, suggesting experiments, and helping to carry them out.51 As the atomic bomb, Sputnik, and the National Defense Education Act put science education at the center of the national conversation, parents’ and consumer magazines began to test and rate chemistry sets, and to offer parents advice on how to keep their science-minded children safe. Parenting magazines stressed the importance of supervision, co-play, and regulation. In 1963, Good Housekeeping warned, “A chemistry set cannot simply be given to a child and forgotten.” Children should read and follow directions, and they should not be allowed to buy chemicals from other sources besides the chemistry set manufacturers. Chemicals and equipment should be kept in a locked closet.52 Parents should not allow open-ended experimentation. “Under no circumstances should [a child] be encouraged to mix substances just to see what will happen,” E. Maxwell scolded in Today’s Health in December 1964.53 “Free-style experimentation of any sort must be ruled out,” Consumer Reports wrote in a roundup review of a group of chemistry sets in its December 1965 issue. “The Big Bang image of childhood chemistry may be more common in the funny papers than in real life . . . but as anyone with laboratory experience knows, the dangers run less frequently to full-scale explosions than to noxious fumes, staining or corrosive damage to clothing and furnishings, chemical burns and irritations, and the accidental ingestion of toxicants.”54

246   Rebecca Onion The danger to children using science sets wasn’t just from explosions; the kits were no longer immune from criticism of the quality of science that they taught. Consumer Reports critiqued several for flimsy equipment and unclear instructions. The old trick of selling chemistry sets as “magic” rubbed the science educators that Consumer Reports consulted the wrong way. The box-cover copy for a “Mad Mad Mad Scientist Laboratory,” with chemicals labeled as “leech’s love dust” or “ghoul’s globule,” suggested “This is a very sneaky way for kids to have fun while learning about chemistry.” The magazine noted that its pedagogical experts disliked the idea of being “sneaky” in  teaching science, but added that the set was technically safe.55 Expensive sets, Consumer Reports wrote, bragged about the number of experiments that one could carry out using their equipment, but many of these were repetitions on a theme: “A basic procedure in determining how much of a given chemical will dissolve in hot or cold water is repeated 22 times with various chemicals in the lowest-priced Skil-Craft set; the most expensive set of this line, with its greater selection of chemicals, repeats this exercise 64 times.”56 These new critiques of science sets reflected a growing awareness of the dangers of household material culture to children’s health. As baby-boom children were increasingly safe from childhood diseases, attention turned toward accidental deaths. Success in eradicating or controlling childhood diseases like measles, polio, diphtheria, and whooping cough emboldened doctors, suggesting to them that other causes of early mortality could also be curtailed.57 By the late 1940s, actors including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children’s Bureau, the National Safety Council, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company collaborated in attempting to reduce home accidents.58 Injury epidemiology became a new field in the 1950s, with governmental funding available for public health agencies to track the pattern of accidents. Arwen Mohun notes that those involved in such efforts began to focus on the “objects and forces” that caused accidental injury—a change that enabled a transition away from blaming parent or child, and toward blaming the company or distributor of flawed products.59 The push to end accidental poisoning in the home in the 1950s and 1960s exemplified the new focus on prevention at the level of production, rather than consumption. John Burnham writes: “For most Americans [before World War II], poisoning was a specific act about which they did not normally have to worry,” since it was associated with malicious intent. After the war, as the range of chemicals used in the household expanded, Americans began to recognize the existence of “indirect and unexpected” poisonings.60 New kinds of household products and medicines accounted for many such poisonings, and terrified onlookers in their variety and unfamiliarity. Children’s aspirin and vitamins posed special dangers.61 Children got mercury poisoning by absorbing the chemical through such unusual suspects as felt hats, sealing wax, and wood treated for protection against termites.62 The unexpectedness and seeming unknowability of these chemicals put the lie to the old argument that parents should be responsible researchers of their children’s home environments. Because of the growing sense that such poisonings could be nobody’s “fault,” or that children should not pay for their parents’ ignorance, activists found it easier to shift responsibility onto the manufacturers, asking them to devise childproof bottles or to label hazards accordingly.63

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   247 The Child Protection and Toy Safety Act of 1969 was passed amid a nationwide panic over treacherous and shoddy toys: play ovens that burned small hands; dolls whose heads and limbs came off, revealing sharp pins; “rocket ships” with cutting metal fins. Although the rhetoric of consumer safety was often heated, the emotions associated with this panic were particularly acute. Barbara Welke writes of the particular emotional cargo present in the postwar market for toys: The purchase of a child’s toy was hardly the stuff that would make the economy go, and yet in its very economic inconsequentiality, its equal emotive consequentiality repeated thousands of times over by families across the country, it represented the way the consumer market, by the mid-twentieth century, had come to provide not just the necessities of daily living but also satisfaction of the most elemental of expressive human needs.64

When toys—the flammable cowboy suits that Welke writes about; the chemistry sets or model rockets that landed boys in the hospital—delivered pain instead of satisfaction, the result, critics argued, was an especially potent betrayal of the natural order of things. Ralph Nader wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal: “For millions of children, a toy helps to express their sense of movement, beauty, mimicry, curiosity and fun. But every year, hundreds of thousands of children find their cries of joy suddenly stilled by bursts of pain.”65 Lawyer Edward Swartz, the so-called Nader of the Nursery who prosecuted toy companies and issued a yearly watchlist of dangerous toys, published a book in 1971 called Toys That Don’t Care—a neat turn of phrase that summed up onlookers’ aggressively negative feelings toward the toy industry, and pointed out the extra emotional freight attached to toys among household objects. Toys, of course, cannot “care,” but in this polemic, Swartz leveraged the special status of toys and of childhood to argue that we should expect more from an object that a child loves. “We bring to our toys an innocence and an openness and a fidelity that—in the best of us—anticipate and foreshadow more important and more lasting loyalties,” he argued. “Over and above the physical and psychological injury wrought by dangerous toys, there is a special wrong they do—a betrayal of the child by a toy that doesn’t care.”66 Swartz argued that the use of the words “educational” or “creative,” “words we associate most with intellectual pursuits,” soothed parents into self-satisfaction about giving a supposedly precocious child unsuitable toys. Toys that promised magically to turn a child into an adult, with adult ability to take on responsibility, were the most dangerous of all. The junior Von Braun or Fermi with his rocket fuels or chemistry set, the young Davy Crockett with his air rifle, and the little Miss Homemaker with her “make-believe” but functioning electrical appliances are dangerous people. No sane parent would send his son to play in a university chemistry laboratory, nor would a thinking mother let her little girl run loose in the kitchen to play with the electric stove. . . . My study has convinced me that most children are definitely too young for many of their playthings. . . . The unlimited ingenuity and natural contrariness of children is a combination that frequently leads them to try out the forbidden just because it is forbidden.67

248   Rebecca Onion Here, Swartz inverted an argument that had been used to laud children’s natural scientific abilities a few decades before. Childhood curiosity, in his view, was a detriment and not an asset. While Swartz, Nader, and other consumer-protection advocates were not averse to the use of chemistry sets fitted with well-labeled chemicals in households with teenaged children, and the sets received an educational exemption from the general prohibition against toxic toys, the end result of the new set of critiques was that companies manufacturing chemistry sets self-regulated, removing alcohol lamps and acids from their kits. The era of free play with chemistry sets was over.

Conclusion: Science, Gender, and Protection As this look back at the interwar and postwar attitudes toward children’s science play should show, the nostalgic impulse to mourn a time when children were free to be injured in the course of experimentation is, in fact, somewhat ahistorical. In truth, the early popularity of chemistry sets and science toys, and their unfettered use, coincided with a few short decades of time during which an expanding market for toys served a few generations of boys, who were seen as capable agents of modernizing material worlds. This period was soon over, as parents of the postwar era seemed to see schoolage boys as children, subject to regulation in the same way that their sisters and younger brothers would be. Today’s critics idealize the “science play” of yesteryear as productive and healthy, provocative of a desirable cathexis that connects children to science careers. But—to fight anecdote with anecdote—the historical record shows that some children were, indeed, hurt by their free access to chemicals and rocket-building materials. As later examinations of the chemistry sets of the pre-1970 era show, the science toy was not always welldesigned, “honest,” or smart, even in its early incarnations. Science toys were subject to market pressures, just like their less exalted toy cousins. The unspoken implication of today’s protests against “overprotection” is a gendered critique of excessive management of the material world. The oft-repeated memory of destructive exploration (“I almost blew up my parents’ house!”) implies a sense of privilege and freedom, most often felt by boys who disturbed their mothers’ domestic arrangements, while experiencing the transgression as a moment of personal freedom. Resistance to the regulation of boyhood scientific play is a rebellion against an authority perceived as irrationally fearful, grasping, and confused about the nature of science: in other words, female. Perhaps a paradigm of experimental play that privileges nondestructive aspects of scientific practice—looking, collecting, cultivating—has some social benefits to recommend it.

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   249

Notes 1. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, updated and expanded (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008); Homesick & Happy—How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow, n.d.; Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2014, http://www.theatlantic. com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/; “Free Range Kids,” http://www.freerangekids.com/. 2. John  R.  Gillis, “The Islanding of Children—Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Childhood, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 316–330. 3. dsteffen, “How Regulation Came to Be: Toy Safety,” Daily Kos, December 27, 2009, http:// www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/27/819494/-How-regulation-came-to-be-Toy-safety. 4. Malcolm W. Browne, “A Goodbye to Adventures Gone By,” New York Times, January 29, 1980, sec. Science Times, http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2095/docview/121385028/abstrac t/13D6BCEC0DA45EEA105/40?accountid=14707. 5. Steve Silberman, “Don’t Try This at Home,” Wired, 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/ archive/14.06/chemistry_pr.html. 6. Richard Phillips Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 16–17; Oliver W. Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 273–274. 7. Silberman, “Don’t Try This at Home.” 8. “Md. Boy, 12, Loses 2 Fingers in Homemade ‘A-Bomb’ Blast,” The Washington Post (­1923–1954), March 6, 1947. 9. “Fund Will Aid Boy Victim of Chemical Toy,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1923–1963), March 17, 1955, sec. PART 6; “Skin Grafted on Boy Injured by Explosion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1923–1963), April 7, 1955, sec. Part 3. 10. “Homemade Rocket Blast Injures Boy,” Los Angeles Times (1923–Current File), February 10, 1958. 11. Special to The New York Times, “ ‘ROCKET’ FATAL TO BOY, 7: Brother, 13, in Hospital after Explosion in Their Home,” New York Times, April 4, 1960. 12. “Father’s Warning Ignored; Blast Kills Rocket Fan, 13,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1923–1963), March 21, 1960, sec. Part 1. 13. Brian Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: Gardner Press, 1986), 234. 14. J.  Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 91. 15. David Rhees, “The Chemists’ Crusade: The Rise of an Industrial Science in Modern America, 1907–1922” (Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1987); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 16. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 17. John C. Burnham, “Why Did the Infants and Toddlers Die? Shifts in Americans’ Ideas of Responsibility for Accidents: From Blaming Mom to Engineering,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 818, doi:10.2307/3788667. 18. Ibid., 819.

250   Rebecca Onion 19. Karin Lee Fishbeck Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 150. 20. John C. Burnham, “How the Discovery of Accidental Childhood Poisoning Contributed to the Development of Environmentalism in the United States,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 3 (October 1, 1995): 60, doi:10.2307/3984912. 21. Joel Tarr and Mark Tebeau, “Housewives as Home Safety Managers: The Changing Perception of the Home as a Place of Hazard and Risk, 1870–1940,” in Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations, ed. Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1997), 220. 22. Burnham, “Why Did the Infants and Toddlers Die?,” 819. 23. Joel A. Tarr and Mark Tebeau, “Managing Danger in the Home Environment, 1900–1940,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 797, doi:10.2307/3788666. 24. Carroll W. Pursell, “Toys, Technology, and Sex Roles in America, 1920–1940,” in Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History, ed. Martha Moore Trescott (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1979), 252. 25. Gary S. Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 60; Thomas  K.  Black, “The Romance of Toys,” Playthings Magazine, June 1917. 26. Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2–12. This is a mindset still evident in the twenty-first century, when children in the United States are often credited with being better at working with electronics and computers than their parents. 27. Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Kristen Haring, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Ruth Oldenziel, “Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930–1968, and the Making of a Male Technical Domain,” in Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, ed. Roger Horowitz (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131–168; Carroll W. Pursell, “Toys, Technology, and Sex Roles in America, 1920–1940,” in Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History, ed. Martha Moore Trescott (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1979), 252–267. 28. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 298–299. 29. Ethel Kawin, The Wise Choice of Toys (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1938), 49–50; “Teaching Children,” Playthings Magazine, January 1919, Strong National Museum of Play. 30. It’s Fun to Be a Boy Engineer . . . A Boy Chemist . . . A Boy Scientist . . . A Boy Magician (The A. C. Gilbert Company, 1940), 2. 31. A. C. Gilbert, The Man Who Lives in Paradise: The Autobiography of A. C. Gilbert (Forest Park, IL: Heimburger House, 1990), 136. 32. Jessica  H.  Foy and Thomas  J.  Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1992), 75. 33. Ibid., 88. 34. Kristen Haring’s study of ham radio culture does attend to the way that families allocated spaces within the home for radio hobbyists both young and old, though she focuses on the midcentury period; I have been unable to find work on the history of the in-home chemistry lab in the United States. Haring, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture.

Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood   251 35. “Lionel-Porter Glass Blowing Manual” (The Lionel Corporation, Hagerstown, MD, 1937), 15, 28, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Object Collections, 2005.079. 36. Home Experiments in Science and Magic, 1937, 16. 37. “Club News,” The Chemcraft Science Magazine, July 1939, 4–5, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Object Collections, GB98:09.054, Chemistry Set Paper Ephemera. 38. “Club News,” The Chemcraft Science Magazine, December 1939, 20, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Object Collections, GB98:09.054, Chemistry Set Paper Ephemera. 39. “Chemcraft Experiment Book No. 2” (The Porter Chemical Company, Hagerstown, MD, n.d.), 1, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Object Collections, GB98:09.003. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 2. 42. Bruce Watson, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made (New York: Viking, 2002), 129. 43. Gorton Adams, “Magic and More Magic,” 4-H Horizons, April 1939, A. C. Gilbert Papers (MS 1618), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 44. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2003), 357–358. 45. B. Y. Welke, “The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Spreading Risk, Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Economy,” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 97–121, doi:10.1093/jahist/jau336; Arwen Mohun, Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 240. 46. Robert  S.  Adler, “Redesigning People Versus Redesigning Products: The Consumer Product Safety Commission Addresses Misuse,” Journal of Law & Politics 11 (1995): 84. 47. Peter  N.  Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 175–184. 48. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 191. 49. Amy Fumiko Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 50. Henry Jenkins, “Dennis the Menace: ‘All-American Handful’, ” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 120. 51. Marianne Besser, Growing Up with Science, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). 52. “Chemistry Sets Are Fun, Keep Them Safe!,” Good Housekeeping 157 (December 1963): 175. 53. E. Maxwell, “Tips for Your Home and Family,” Today’s Health, December 1964, 62. 54. “Chemistry Sets,” Consumer Reports, November 1965, 549. 55. Ibid., 548. 56. Ibid., 549. 57. Burnham, “How the Discovery of Accidental Childhood Poisoning Contributed to the Development of Environmentalism in the United States,” 60. 58. Ibid., 62. 59. Mohun, Risk, 241. 60. Burnham, “How the Discovery of Accidental Childhood Poisoning Contributed to the Development of Environmentalism in the United States,” 59. 61. Ibid., 66. 62. Ibid., 70.

252   Rebecca Onion 63. Ibid., 72. 64. Welke, “The Cowboy Suit Tragedy,” 103. 65. Ralph Nader, “Danger in Toyland,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1969, 81. 66. Edward  M.  Swartz, Toys That Don’t Care (Boston: Gambit, 1971); Emma Brown, “Edward M. Swartz, 76, Dies; Lawyer Was a Pioneer on Toy Safety,” The Washington Post, September 9, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/08/ AR2010090807114.html. 67. Swartz, Toys That Don’t Care, 16–29.

Bibliography Burnham, John C. “How the Discovery of Accidental Childhood Poisoning Contributed to the Development of Environmentalism in the United States.” Environmental History Review 19, no. 3 (October 1, 1995): 57–81. doi:10.2307/3984912. Burnham, John  C. “Why Did the Infants and Toddlers Die? Shifts in Americans’ Ideas of Responsibility for Accidents: From Blaming Mom to Engineering.” Journal of Social History 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 817–837. doi:10.2307/3788667. Calvert, Karin Lee Fishbeck. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2003. Cross, Gary S. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Foy, Jessica H., and Thomas J Schlereth, eds. American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1992. Gillis, John R. “The Islanding of Children—Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood.” In Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Childhood, edited by Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 316–330. Jacobson, Lisa. Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Mohun, Arwen. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Ogata, Amy Fumiko. Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Tarr, Joel, and Mark Tebeau. “Housewives as Home Safety Managers: The Changing Perception of the Home as a Place of Hazard and Risk, 1870–1940.” In Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations, edited by Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin, 196–233. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1997. Tarr, Joel A., and Mark Tebeau. “Managing Danger in the Home Environment, 1900–1940.” Journal of Social History 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 797–816. doi:10.2307/3788666. Welke, B.  Y. “The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Spreading Risk, Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Economy.” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (2014): 97–121. Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

pa rt I I I

H ISTORY, M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , A N D T H E SY M BOL IC

chapter 13

The Sensory W eb of V ision Enchantment and Agency in Religious Material Culture David Morgan

How are a ritual libation, the act of pronouncing “I do” in a wedding ceremony, and using a remote control to change television channels both alike and different? One way of distinguishing them is to say that the first two actions are forms of ritual behavior and the last one is not. The first two are actions that invite auspicious circumstances or the sanction of a higher power, whereas pressing a remote’s button sends a pulse of energy that activates a corresponding mechanism. Yet, different as they are, in every case these actions form a system or pattern of linkages to accomplish work. Words, actions, objects, occasion, forces, gods, and people combine to produce a result. In the first instance, the action of acknowledging a deity or ancestor is inserted into an extended chain of events designed to connect a desire to the forces that can fulfill it, not simply by material causation, but by additional forms of invocation, pledge, influence, and action. With the utterance of “I do,” the marriage ceremony produces a legal bond, recognized by the state, such that one’s social and legal status and identity change. In the case of the remote control, my partner may ask me to change the channel, which I do by activating a signal that consists of infrared radio waves emitted from a chain of transmitters, receivers or sensors, modulators, amplifiers, and code generators. The code includes what is called a “header” in order to privatize the signal lest my neighbor’s remote control operate my television set. In each of the operations, human actors join with one another, with objects, with a series of mechanical acts, and with sets of symbolic codes that enable the transmission of information. But message making is not all that produces the desired end. The meaning of each act is not simply the delivery of a message. We do better to speak of the salience of an action in terms of the circuit or network of relations that it achieves.

256   David Morgan In each instance, an assemblage of factors enables an outcome. The networks all involve conventions of one sort or another, but what really sets them apart are their respective components and how they work together to achieve particular ends. The ritual gestures of one offering a libation signals to the immaterial realm of unseen deities or departed ancestors, and the words of the nuptial rite ascend to the attentive ear of God. The machinery for understanding these acts is not immaterial. By the same token, we may imagine that the remote control is a purely material device, but when it fails to operate, I am tempted to suspect it is obstinately intent on spoiling my pleasure while seated before the screen. My partner impatiently blames me for the delay, and I insist that it is not my fault, but the remote’s. I desperately shake the device, mutter frustration, threaten to pitch it across the room, but settle for pelting it with salty language. In that moment I confirm its enchantment because something I might have considered inanimate is capable of hearing me: my scolding is intended to coerce it into operating properly. In this moment, the remote is redeployed in a network of forces that cause it to act in entirely different ways—it may now refuse me, obey gremlins, and feel my wrath, or, bowing to my will, at the last moment it may submit and act as I desire. In a 1992 essay, Bruno Latour happily confessed similar behavior: “I constantly talk with my computer, who answers back; I am sure you swear at your old car; we are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance, not to mention cracks in the concrete belt of our nuclear plants.”1 Latour refused to allow this sort of practice to be dismissed as anthropomorphic projection since the effect of things on us is as powerful as our effect on the world around us. Anthropomorphism, he insisted, works both ways: on humans no less than on things.

Defining Enchantment The distinction of these three acts gets only less clear the more we consider the nature of enchantment. We might say that enchantment is the process of animating an object by ascribing to it a will or capacity to choose to work or not. This occurs by inserting an object into an ecology of forces or relations that allow it to operate to a certain effect. I animate the remote control when I blame it for not working. But this judgment focuses only on the frustration of my desire. Something more intricate is at work among those, for instance, who describe the power of crystals to heal. One writer explains their power as a natural process of radiating “pure patterns” of energy, which he compares to the action of a tuning fork: Anything can heal us if we are open to suggestion by external tuning fork of another’s harmony. Receptivity is a necessity. Being open to it is the key. . . . Healing is often a matter of recovering our bodies’ inherent harmony by letting go of what we are holding onto—our own ideas about how, where, when, what and why—mental frameworks that have us behaving in inorganic ways.2

The Sensory Web of Vision   257 It is receptivity, the preparation to accept an explanatory framework by eliminating what resists it, that allows crystals to exert healing. In this and other contexts, receptivity may mean prayer, attitude, meditation, introspection, study, diet, dress, exercise, pious actions such as confession or charity, pilgrimage, consecration, a proper spirit of questing, cooperation with an adept, or a community of belief. It is useful, therefore, to distinguish two primary forms of the appearance of enchantment. One anthropomorphizes or animates a single object, as in the case of the remote control; the other consists of the ritual use of an object, as with the crystal. Animation attributes to something the power to act; ritual enchantment invests something within an enabling matrix of forces. But both operations are examples of the single species of phenomena defined here as enchantment.3 The libation and the couch potato’s remote control both rely on an assemblage of many elements in order to work. Both of these networks consist of broadly heterogeneous elements. Actor network theory, according to sociologist John Law, treats “everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located,” and therefore takes as its task the description of “the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors, including objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature’, ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements.”4 The heterogeneity that Law foregrounds in this definition is important to note because it stresses the range of different kinds of actors that are configured in networks—human and animal, as well as inanimate things and forces such as machines, tools, objects, ocean currents, geography, and natural forces. To this list we might also add intangible phenomena such as dreams, visions, apparitions, and events of collective effervescence as well as the many forms of discourse that structure human relations. And we need to add amulets, talismans, ghosts, demons, ancestors, saints, spirits, and gods, for it is these actors that distinguish the sacred network from others. It is important, though perhaps quite obvious, to point out that enchantment often has nothing to do with religion of any kind. The sacred is a network that includes forces and actors that are invisible, immaterial, and otherwise inaccessible except by the interface of practices that invoke or address them. Enchantment and sacrality are not therefore the same thing, though they readily operate together in the same network of actors. Enchantment can operate without being sacred, but the sacred is never produced without the presence of enchantment. Thus, one is not engaging in a religious practice when it seems necessary to curse one’s remote control. I animate the device in order to compel it to work for me. But invoking the help of a saint or an ancestor by prayer before a cult image or by pouring a libation are sacred acts involving enchanted objects. We might be inclined to think of enchantment as a singularly irrational act of animation, but that misses the calculated nature of its purpose and actual operation. The libation, for example, offers an insight. The fellow pouring out a mixture of wine and water in a libation cup, depicted by the Macron vase painter on a fifth-century bce Greek red-figured cup (Figure 13.1) is conducting what the Greeks called spendo, or to pour a libation. The verb, which also signifies sealing or concluding an agreement, is related to the Latin,

258   David Morgan

Figure 13.1.  Macron vase painter, “Young man pouring a libation on an altar.” Center medallion of a red-figured cup, ca. 480 bce. Louvre, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

expendo, the origin of the modern English verb, to spend. The Latin libatio referred to a “sacrificial offering of a drink” in the ancient world.5 The Indo-European root of spendo is likewise the source of the Latin verb, spondeo, to promise or pledge. In other words, the act of libation inserted the pourer into an economy of relations that turned on promise or offering with the expectation of return for the solemn act. Gratitude or respect for the gods was part of a system of exchange that solicited their favor. To make an offering was to enter into a relationship. As a gift offering, the act of libation was part of something more. It is not surprising therefore that libation cups were costly items, beautifully adorned, and valued for the special work of ritual use. Libation accompanied invocation and petition and was the necessary act for civic ceremonies, meals, and daily acts of piety, but also for auspicious occasions such as battles and journeys. Thucydides described the ritual offering of the Athenian army before it departed for the Sicilian expedition: The whole army had wine poured out into bowls, and officers and men made their libations from cups of gold and of silver. The crowds on the shore also, the citizens and others who wished well to the expedition, joined together in the prayers. Then, when the hymn had been sung and the libations finished, they put out to sea.6

The Sensory Web of Vision   259 Offering wine to the gods invited them to share in good relations, forming a network whose nodal point was ritual use of the cup, which survives in examples such as the cup decorated by the Macron Painter, and in scenes decorating countless other ceramic vessels, stone reliefs, and bronze figures from ancient Greece and Rome.

A Network Approach to Material Culture Rather than explain enchantment as a psychological projection, which tends to install a dualism that pits an enclosed ego against an external world, a ghost afloat in a very large machine, we get a richer account of causation or agency when we integrate the viewer into an extended network of human and nonhuman actors. Human beings are part of much larger habitats, economies, or ecologies, and require assistance to thrive in them— the aid of knowledge, science, lore, communities, partners, rituals, kinships, gods, or chance. The world does not always go our way. A little help is indispensable. At issue is the way that human beings collectively construct material webs of relatedness that consist of themselves, but also all manner of agencies around them, and how enchantment ensues from the networks to which they belong. Enchantment is not simply the projection of one actor, but a collaboration of people and the things that comprise their worlds, whether they discern the manifold or not. Enchantment is what happens when a world accommodates one’s desires. A fit unfolds between humans and the worlds they inhabit. Disenchantment, by contrast, is a world shorn of such proactive cooperation, a world in which one experiences alienation, in which one is no longer favored by a sympathetic operation. One way of describing this is in Weber’s terms of life without spirit or heart, enslavement to “the technical and economic conditions of machine production.”7 Yet mechanization can also distribute agency, extending human value, and providing for possibilities of human empowerment no less than subjugation. Thus, Latour could describe a door as a “miracle of technology” for the simple reason that its design incorporates a host of devices that ease human traffic and perform for people the tasks they easily neglect—such as automatically shutting the door.8 Re-enchantment is no less possible than disenchantment. Latour has urged social analysts to recognize that human morality is more than human will. Things act on us and shape our conduct—like seatbelt alarms, subway gates, traffic signs, construction site walkways, and fences—anything to which human makers delegate responsibility to ensure that people do what they ought to do, but otherwise may be inclined not to do. This urges us to recognize that material culture is more than objects alone. It is the fit between objects and the body, which serves as the means of engagement between body and network. The feel of the libation cup, the remote control, the fit and weight of the marriage dress materially integrate the body into an enabling matrix of powers. The ensuing interactions put objects to work, weaving them into

260   David Morgan configurations that produce a compelling sense of the world as enchanted. This means that the materiality of things pertains not only to their singularity as objects, but also to their connectedness to other things and forces. People experience the result of a web of relations in the objects they engage in patterns of religious practice. The effects of webs of relations become clear when we consider a very common object in modern life such as the automobile, which has received attention from sociologists and anthropologists for its power as an object of enchantment and webbed connections.9 Rather than being experienced as the confluence of the sprawling sociotechnical, industrial, and commercial network that produces and sustains it, the automobile acts as what I have elsewhere called a focal object, that is, an interfacial node or material form of interface with an entire network that the focal object appears to replace in order to make negotiation with it possible and corporeal.10 Ian Hodder has summarized a good deal of discussion about the automobile as part of a network, in effect, as a focal object arrayed within a vast and enabling network of very different kinds of agencies: A car appears to us as a car. We are taken in by the fact that the car has a perceptual boundary we can see or feel. It appears isolated, an object that is stable. But in fact the car is connected to the tarmac—indeed to a whole network of roads and road management systems that make the car possible.11

But when owners or would-be owners look at a car, they do not see this network, but rather a focal object, that is, any one of several embodied experiences: the solution to a midlife crisis, “my dream car,” the enviable expression of the owner’s coolness, individuality, machismo, or social status. As focal objects, automobiles allow their owners to feel themselves into the worlds they want to inhabit, materialized in the fit and feel of the automobile about their bodies. The focal object acts as an extension of the human body, which we are inclined to substitute for the network since doing so confers agency upon us, rather than the network of interacting features. We might define enchantment as the subordination of a network to a focal object. Michel Callon points out that when the driver takes the wheel of the car, “in a sense the driver then merges with the network that defines what he or she is (a driver-choosing-adestination-and-an-itinerary).”12 But it looks that way only to those of us who watch from the outside. We see a host of moving parts come together in a vast social assembly. The same holds for religion. Only to the outsider does the icon or focal object take its place within an interactive reticulation of actors. To insiders, who themselves intermingle with the network, who are themselves part of what they experience, there is no rival to the centrality of the sacred object of devotion. Callon argues that the entire sociotechnical network that moves with the automobile as a collective action is “black-boxed” in the car.13 Black-boxing of the network of production is at work in the visual experience of enchantment when a network is subsumed under a focal object such as an image or object, a place or a person.

The Sensory Web of Vision   261

The Veil of Veronica: Image as Object A fascinating instance of the focal object in the history of Christian imagery is the Veil of Veronica. A mid-nineteenth-century Italian engraving is one of countless examples of the subject that present themselves to viewers as a visual trace of an original event (Figure 13.2). In this representation, the face of Jesus floats before a veil fastened to the upper corners of a frame. The veil forms a matrix, a cavity that is clearly distinguished from the face itself, which it appears to occupy more as a niche than as a surface. We might regard the image as a towel or cloth hung before us. But the floating face demands attention. There is a story there—indeed, it turns out, more than one. Upon examination, a complex and layered set of accounts, visual forms, and histories become visible behind and within the motif, and they serve to reveal the network of actors at work in the image. The enchantment of this focal object proceeded from a series of conditions that the history of the Veronica image produced. These included the object’s power as icon circulating widely for cult purposes and its association with the Roman Church

Figure 13.2.  True Image of the Sacred Countenance of our Lord Jesus Christ, Rome, 1854, engraving with wax seal. Photo by author.

262   David Morgan and the papacy in particular in contrast to the Eastern Church. East and West had split in 1054, in part over the issue of the authority of the Roman pontiff. The Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204 only reinforced the break. Finally, the Veronica image became firmly associated during the late Middle Ages with liturgical settings of the Passion of Jesus and the Eucharist and with the practice of indulgenced pilgrimage, infusing it with a visual impact that contributed greatly to the power of the image. This history helps explain the conditions that allow the image of Jesus to operate as an enchanted object. The legend of the Veronica image had established itself in Latin Christendom by the twelfth century in Petrus Mallus’s history of St. Peter’s basilica, published around 1160.14 Petrus Mallus mentioned the “sudarium of Christ” as “the cloth into which he pressed his most holy face before his Passion, when his sweat ran in drops of blood to the earth.”15 The reference seems to be to Jesus’s intense prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44), on the eve of the Passion. It was not until about 1300 that the Veronica was linked to the way of the cross.16 Before then, stories vary, sometimes situating the origin of the cloth’s image in some detail of the Gospel account, or in an extra-biblical narrative such as the life of Veronica.17 Petrus Mallus looked for a Gospel account of secretion of sweat and blood, or sweat metamorphosed by tradition into blood, to act as the fluid medium for the creation of the image. The blood or sweat was important because it made the cloth a special kind of relic, which is how the object, or rather, the many objects considered the genuine article, were treated. Perhaps the most definitive moment in the Latin history of Veronica occurred at the end of the life of Innocent III, when the Veronica dramatically demonstrated its capacity to act as an agent, and acquired thereby a more explicit web of connections to human actors. Innocent III, pope from 1198 to 1216, established the devotion to the Veronica in the early years of the thirteenth century by creating a procession of the image from St. Peter’s to the hospital of Santo Spirito, where people gathered to venerate it.18 A long association of the true image of Christ with healing clearly informed Innocent’s choice to venerate the image in this way.19 But there was another element in the tradition that was particularly important to Innocent. Two eighth-century texts, the “Healing of Tiberius” and the “Vindication of the Savior,” effectively retell the old Syrian story of Abgar and his mandylion (cloth or towel). Beginning with these stories, the understanding of the Veil of Veronica in the West was often likened to the older accounts of Abgar, of which there were many. The story of Abgar developed over many centuries. Said to be ruler in Edessa during the time of Jesus, Abgar suffered from a disease and sought healing from the miracle worker in Palestine of whom he had heard much. In the earliest account recorded Eusebius, Abgar writes to Jesus, who replies with a letter of his own. No image was involved. In different, later versions of the story Abgar is healed by the countenance of a disciple sent to him; Abgar sends an artist to sketch Jesus; an angel completes the artist’s work; or Jesus himself touches the cloth to his face, which is sent to Abgar.20 In another version an image of Jesus miraculously replicates itself on a tile, which is housed at Edessa. The story that is endorsed by John of Damascus during the Iconoclastic controversy (ca. 726 ce) is closest to the Veronica tradition: Jesus “took a strip of cloth and lifted it to his face, marking it

The Sensory Web of Vision   263 with his own form. The cloth survives to this day.”21 The resulting icon is taken to the ruler, heals him, and he converts. With the eighth-century accounts of Veronica, the scene shifts to Rome, where the pagan emperor Tiberius, in the first instance, and a French king, Titus, in the second, suffer from leprosy and seek the medicinal power of the cloth for their healing. The Eastern story is westernized. In the thirteenth century, the story fixes on a sweat cloth or sudarium, but from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, the accounts have Jesus create the image himself, as he did for Abgar, making a gift of it to Veronica. One twelfthcentury story even has Veronica herself perform as a portrait painter of Jesus.22 Later, when the cult had become associated with the Passion of Christ, the term “sudarium” was used to refer to the sweat cloth that Veronica was said to have offered Jesus on his path to Calvary. In every case, the stories offer narratives that link Veronica and her image to Western Europe. In the two eighth-century stories, for instance, Veronica herself travels to the imperial capital and brings her cloth with her. And each time the narratives pit Jews as adversaries of Jesus and the cause of his execution against the interests of the French and Roman rulers. Indeed, in the case of Titus, this even inspires a crusade to Jerusalem to purge it of recalcitrant Jews.23 For Innocent III, who had launched the Fourth Crusade and who resented the Byzantine Church’s refusal to recognize the primacy of the bishop of Rome, this narrative properly eclipsed the Eastern account of Abgar and made it quite fitting for the Roman pontiff to have in St. Peter’s church the very cloth on which the likeness of Jesus was imprinted. When, on the day of the annual procession in 1216 (the first Sunday following the Octave of Epiphany, or mid-January), the Veronica suddenly leapt into the air and stood on its head, Innocent became very disturbed. Some might have regarded the event to have been caused by a bearer who stumbled. But Innocent did not. He interpreted the act as a bad omen and determined that amends must be made to the Savior. He created a prayer and established an indulgence attached to the image of the Veronica.24 Those who recited the prayer while gazing upon the image would receive ten days of relief from Purgatory. The quantity sounds very small in comparison to the far larger amounts of time that would eventually be attained via indulgences, but even this modest amount established a very consequential precedent in late medieval piety.25 The prayer that Innocent composed is striking for its understanding of the visual nature of the devotion to the Veil of Veronica: Lord, you have left behind as your memento for us, who are marked by the light of your countenance, the image imprinted at the urging of Veronica on a handkerchief. We beseech you, for the sake of your Passion and Cross, that we might adore and venerate it on earth as in a mirror and dimly, just as we will one day surely see you face to face when you come as judge, who lives and reigns with God the Father.26

The devotee of the image asks to see Jesus “face to face.” Although the image is clearly not its referent, but stipulated to be a “memento,” the two acts of seeing are paralleled such that the act of faith is tantamount to its eschatological fulfillment.

264   David Morgan The crux of Innocent’s prayer is the plea that seeing dimly would lead to seeing fully. But followers of Jesus, those who seek to see his face, are not gazing on mere signs for they are “marked” by countenance, the light of Jesus’s face in the Veronica. Innocent clearly invokes Paul’s language: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully . . . ” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Innocent’s use of the Pauline text suggests that he regarded the Veronica as participating in what it portrayed, but not fully being it. In other words, to see the face of Jesus in the image of the Veronica was imperfectly, that is, incompletely to gaze upon the image’s referent, and therefore to look ahead to the day at the end of time when the act of seeing would be full or complete. Seeing dimly and fully were not disparate acts of seeing, but distinguished in time. But the difference signaled the instrumentality of the image as a technology of appeasement. Innocent wanted the new devotion to placate an angry God, a Judge, who had conveyed his displeasure in the acrobatic gesture of his image, the image that he had created of himself with his own hands. Innocent’s reference to the veil as a “memento” and his invocation of Paul’s metaphor describing the image of Jesus as a dim reflection of an eschatological reality urges that the image on the cloth was not to be confused with Christ himself. This was likely a view inherited from Byzantine Orthodoxy. Art historian Herbert L. Kessler has argued that the image of Edessa, the mandylion, made a problematic icon because it failed to conform to Orthodox icon theory, which strongly distinguished between the image and the physical substance on which it appeared.27 The image participated in its prototype’s heavenly reality; the cloth support did not. Instead, the image was regarded as an anticipation. One might say that the image was the front end of a rising assemblage culminating in Christ himself. The image was an interface, an entrance into a network of actors or nodes ranging from the cloth itself, the occasion of its ritual display, the devotees who gathered before it, the pope, Veronica, and Jesus.

Between Relic and Image: Materializing Vision The history of the Veronica in the West continued to develop after Innocent’s lifetime. Uses for the Veronica proliferated. The image was taken up in a very popular visual motif in the late Middle Ages, the Mass of St. Gregory (Figure 13.3), where the Veronica appeared among the arma Christi, where it hung above the altar, beside the true cross and the many implements of Jesus’s abuse and death. As such, the Veronica was a historical relic of the Passion, attesting to Jesus’s redemptive work and portrayed in an image that played a key role in late medieval visual piety, stressing the importance of seeing Christ’s suffering and receiving in the act the merits of his salvific work.28 It is not surprising, then, to find the Veronica established as one of the Stations of the Cross in the fourteenth century. The image was included in illustrated devotional booklets in Germany, which

The Sensory Web of Vision   265

Figure 13.3.  Mass of Saint Gregory, panel from the Altar of the Holy Kinship, 1473, Germany. Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.

266   David Morgan served to direct meditation on the Passion.29 The Veronica found a place on the way to Calvary, where Jesus paused to receive the cloth from the young Veronica. In addition to the devotional books that circulated in the domain of private devotion, the Veronica also was hung in the home when it was paired with the Letter of Publius Lentulus, an eyewitness account of the appearance of Jesus.30 Word and image corroborated one another in a way that assured the viewer that this image really was Jesus’s portrait. This was a significant development since it added to the Veronica as enshrined relic and indulgenced image the status of something like devotional portraiture. We find this taking shape powerfully in late medieval devotional piety in the form of singular images of the Veronica and in the portrayal of Jesus on the way to Calvary. Images of the Veronica attracted prayers addressed to the image, such as Pope John XXII’s greeting of 1319, which carried an indulgence of 10,000 days: “Hail, holy face/of our redeemer,/in which shines the image of divine splendor/imprinted on cloth/of snowy brilliance/and given to Veronica/as a sign of love!”31 The distinction noted by Kessler remains, though it has become somewhat confused: there is the face, the shining image of splendor, and the image imprinted on cloth. These three—face, image, and imprint—appear to be different, but coincident as the gift from Jesus to Veronica. But what is clearly new is the singular focus on the Veronica itself. The omnivoyant gaze of the face struck the fifteenth-century theologian and bishop, Nicholas of Cusa, as a powerful way to understand the all-seeing power of God himself. Yet Nicholas continued to recognize the figural nature of the comparison. Contemplating God was like contemplating the Veronica: “I presently contemplate eternal life in a mirror, an icon, a symbolism.”32 The shift evident in the production and display of the Veronica in the later medieval period corresponds to the historic rise of images as a principal feature of the sacred economy of intercessions that shaped Roman Catholicism in Europe beginning in the thirteenth century and extending to the modern era. The rise of the image as a primary actor in the network of relations linking devotee with saint rivaled the place the relic had come to enjoy since the dawn of the Carolingian Empire in Western Europe. In an eloquent account of the history of relics in the Middle Ages, Patrick Geary argued that the Frankish church needed relics for its abbeys and pilgrimage churches and imperial chapels to suit its image of itself and to secure the traffic of pilgrims and the allegiance of its bishops. Before the eighth century, relics in Europe had been strictly controlled by Roman pontiffs, who were loathe to allow the remains of martyrs to leave the catacombs and altars of Rome. But as successive popes needed to engage Carolingian rulers for security and political purposes, the flow of relics northward began, by gift and commerce, but also by theft.33 The trade in relics continued until the era of the Crusades, when new sources of relics, but also icons, became available to plundering European forces. The infamous fourth Crusade of Innocent III, for example, settled on Constantinople as a site of conquest, resulting in a rich bounty of icons that were brought back to France and Germany. Innocent’s embrace of the Veronica marks the introduction of a new visual cult that began with the recognition of a venerated image as the very trace of Jesus’s presence. The

The Sensory Web of Vision   267 display of the artifact as a relic, however, became a transition to a reproducible image. Relics had long been partible even to the minutest size without losing their efficacy. Likewise, images could be reproduced and disseminated without losing the efficacy of the original. The “true image,” which also came to be known as a “true copy” (wahres Abbild), could become indulgenced and serve in the same way that the exotic original in Rome did. This was a new idea of the image in the West. It was image as brandia, the objects that pilgrims touched to shrines or relics. Charisma or aura was a quality transmitted in the copy. Geary notes that by the fourteenth century images “began to compete successfully with relics as sources of personal religious power.”34 It seems likely that the contemporary rise of the Stations of the Cross, bolstered by the Mass of St. Gregory, contributed to this change, especially in regard to the Veronica. The practice of issuing indulgences for prayers said before a certain image encouraged pilgrimage to churches and shrines where the image was displayed. Pledges vowed before cult images or votive imagery displayed in thanks for graces received were both part of a growing visual economy of the sacred in the late Middle Ages.35 This economy or material system of exchange was a fundamental part of the network that structured the relationship of the image to the viewer, to other viewers, to the space in which the image was displayed, to the extended circulation of pilgrims, and to the saint. Seeing was not an immaterial process, but a very embodied one. To gaze upon an image was to enter into a relation with the saint and to do so in the medium of the extended material practices of pilgrimage and devotion, pledge, effort, and thanks. Thus, in the second half of the fifteenth century, another prayer to the countenance of Jesus in a German devotional book conveyed the visually transmitted network of intercession: “O thou adorned countenance, I beg you that you will not turn away from me, but that you will regard me constantly as a gentle father with your merciful eyes.”36 And the relationship did not end with petition or thanks. If images were commodities in a sacred economy, their use was not purely transactional, but part of ongoing relationships. They were not fluid forms of currency, but gifts. As mediums of devotion, they were enduring forms of interface. The devotee returned to the cult image again and again, treasured the ex-voto that was deposited and displayed at a shrine. Images were sometimes carried about on one’s person or enshrined on domestic altars. They were “purchased” with the sweat and labor of pilgrimage and kept as sacred artifacts for memory as well as for ongoing devotional practice. An excellent example of the Veronica image or sudarium as a transitional artifact, one that bears the indices of relic qua image but also as an image that is on the way to becoming an object, is a mass-printed memento issued to pilgrims in 1854 and officially endorsed by the Vatican with a red wax seal that bears the familiar image (Figure 13.2). Bearing the legend, “True image of the Sacred Countenance of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is seen and revered in the holy basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican,” the image is printed on cloth, evoking the original medium on which Jesus imprinted his likeness for Veronica. At the same time, the image refers to a long pictorial history of depicting the Veronica as a face floating before the cloth. It is in fact an engraving made from a copy (now in Il Gesu, Rome) of a Veronica that remains in St. Peter’s and was there as early

268   David Morgan as 1533.37 So a copy of a copy of what was surely itself a copy. But each iteration posits a direct registration of the face of Jesus. Indeed, each copy presents not only the original imprint, but the face itself, or more accurately, the imprinted face becoming a trompe l’oeil image of the very countenance of Jesus. The metamorphosis is evident in the 1854 engraving, where we can see the frame of a painting to which the cloth is affixed—note the shadow cast on the frame at the ­bottom of the image. And the face of Jesus itself is in the process of separating from the support. It is not just an image, synonymous with the cloth of Veronica. This is made clear by the peak of his head, which eclipses the fold of cloth behind it. Fresh blood drips from wounds on his forehead, tears fall from his eyes, and blood or spittle dribbles from his lips. The viewer does not behold only an imprint, a telltale trace, but the face itself. The Veronica is evidently a relic and an image. The viewer sees it denying its two-dimensional character to become the three-dimensional face, and we see the image literally imprinted on a cloth as an engraving. We witness the cloth relic and the image coming to life. The image of Jesus in the case of Innocent’s Veronica was enchanted because it belonged to Jesus and he moved in it. Whether it was a relic or an icon, its likeness participated in him and therefore the image acted. But that is the logic of the focal object, which operates in tandem with or as part of a network that it tends to occlude. What makes the image move and reveal a divine agency? Enchantment is the cultural work of an encompassing network of interrelated agents and the conditions that empower agents. In the case of the Veronica that Innocent III witnessed to leap into the air, the conditions include the following four factors. The first is the shift from relic to image, which imbued images with presence and power. The emergent sacred economy of exchange that enabled devotees to enter into negotiation with a cult image is second. Third is the desire to centralize power in the papacy and place Rome at the center of Christendom—a message to be sent to Constantinople as well as to the monarchy of European states. The fourth factor is the eventual association of the Veronica with the Stations of the Cross and with the Mass of Saint Gregory, which inserted the image into a devotional relationship in which Christ’s suffering was the visceral point of connection between himself and the faithful. The assumption was that Jesus responds to the devotee because the two of them share suffering that was caused by the devotee’s sin, which Jesus offers to forgive. The first three conditions enabled Innocent III to regard the tumble of the Veronica as evidence of Jesus’s discontent. The fourth, which took place after his lifetime, imbued the image with further power. As a result, the image became an agent, an actor to which Innocent reacted by producing a prayer and an indulgence for ritual expiation in a sacred economy of exchange that might be used by devotees to persuade Jesus to have mercy on those who honor him and seek his aid. By revering the image, the devotee revered Jesus. A visible network composed of Jesus, the Veronica, the Vatican, the pope, and devotees was nested in a larger network of historical, political, national, and international forces.

The Sensory Web of Vision   269

Veronica Since the Middle Ages The oldest surviving image of Abgar’s cloth, a tenth-century icon in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai, shows the face, in Kessler’s words, as “independent of its physical matrix.”38 The practice continued in Western depictions. From the late Middle Ages to the present, artists crafted images of the Veronica that captured a miracle in the making. They did so in many ways, all of which sought to portray a key distinction between the image and its cloth ground. Trompe l’oeil is at work in the object. The metamorphosis of the cloth-bound image into the very face of Jesus echoes a long tradition. Image makers from the fifteenth century onward seized on the ambivalent relationship of the face to its medium in order to convey a transformation that enacts a moment of revelation. The fabric turns into the face of Jesus. At least, it appears that way to modern eyes. But originally it may have been an attempt to distinguish the face of Jesus from the materiality of its support. Following Kessler’s point about the mandylion in the East, the sudarium in the West made a better relic than icon, and for this reason early versions considered authentic were sometimes enclosed in metal cases— to protect the precious object, but also in some cases to protect viewers from the power of the relic. Traditionally, the sudarium portrayed a placid Christ, a solemn, unmoved visage, which likely comports with the icon tradition and with its source, Egyptian mummy portraits.39 But the fifteenth century saw the expression of Jesus change in some instances from stately and calm to bloody and anguished. In the seventeenth century the practice became more common. The 1854 Roman engraving is a latter-day example, where blood, wounds, and sweat are apparent. But Francisco de Zurbarán’s image, dated 1631, is even more striking (Figure 13.4). Jesus cries out, his brow furrowed in pain, his eyes seeking out the viewer’s gaze in order to establish an emotional tie that is unforgettable. For the most part, the Orthodox icon theory did not prevail for Roman Catholics. Rather than preserving inviolate the divine archetype by icons that denied their materiality, the point was to display the actual countenance of Jesus since Catholic visual piety turned on empathetic response to his suffering, which was simultaneously an indictment of human sin, the engine of repentance, and the source of grace. The pairing of the face of Jesus with its literary description in the letter of Publius Lentulus underscored the power of his likeness as the desideratum of Catholic devotion. Seeing Jesus in the sudarium meant access to the merits of his passion. The trompe l’oeil was intended to recreate the relic, allowing a virtual presence before it, which took the place of pilgrimage and made the relic into a devotional image. Baroque-era artists made special use of the enchanting effects of the medium of oil paint and its support. Philippe de Champagne, for example, was so taken by the trompe l’oeil effect that he placed a thick curtain between the viewer and the face in order to enhance the sense of space into which the face of Jesus morphed from the canvas support

270   David Morgan

Figure 13.4.  Francisco de Zurbarán, Veil of Veronica, 1631, oil on canvas. Art Stockholm, Nationalmuseum.

(Figure 13.5). Not satisfied by the theatrics of metamorphosis, Zurbarán portrayed the face as congealing in the very fabric of the cloth like an image on a lens, and he did so repeatedly, in as many as ten versions.40 Modern viewers are perhaps reminded of the uncanny feature of the daguerreotype, the polished metal surface in which the photographic image seems to inhere. In Zurbarán’s painting, the face appears from a misty distance, uttering silent anguish as the image takes shape before the viewer. Glimpsed at an angle, the face bears a completely different relation to the cloth than in the traditional motif, where Jesus gazes directly outward, situated parallel to the plane of the cloth and the canvas on which the image is painted. In Zurbarán’s image, however, the cloth (and canvas, by extension) becomes a translucent surface that slowly reveals the face behind it. The three-quarters view of the face suggests that Jesus is in the midst of turning toward the viewer, captured in a moment of revelation. The result is a ghostly, yet strangely material sense of the image. It occupies another world, one that is not fully coincident with the fabric. The image is like a haunting memory, a moving shadow coming into focus. Philippe de Champagne, by contrast, shows the head of Jesus fully morphed into material presence, discontinuous with the cloth behind it, yet separated from the viewer by the curtain. Both images want to re-enact the creation of the image as something one observes. The intention does not seem to be merely to fashion an illusion of the relic (as the art historical term “trompe l’oeil” might suggest) as much as to place the viewer

The Sensory Web of Vision   271

Figure 13.5.  Philippe de Champagne, Veil of Veronica, ca. 1650, oil on canvas. Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove.

before a conjuration, a dramatic moment of presence that shows something extraordinary happening. In Champagne’s picture, the curtain is being drawn aside and the viewer is treated to revelation, an unveiling of the very face of Jesus. The point is not merely to fool the eye, but to enthrall it.

272   David Morgan As focal objects, these and many other versions of the sudarium motif submerge an entire ecology of relations beneath the single event of a face coming to life. The image puts them in touch with the event portrayed and the history that conditions their apprehension of the event. The image is not a set of visual codes to be deciphered, but a series of triggers and presences to be viscerally experienced. Enchantment, as defined early in this essay, is the process of animating an object by ascribing to it a will or capacity to work. This relies on situating it within an ecology or assemblage of actors that distribute agency across a network of relations. Images like Zurbarán’s and Champagne’s operate as they do in tandem with the entire history of stories, objects, installations, pilgrimages, indulgences, devotional practices, liturgies, and miracles that make the Veil of Veronica what it is among pious viewers—a living presence.

Notes 1. Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 235. 2. Benjamin Dean, “How Do Healing Crystals Work? Healing with Gemstones, How It Works” at https://crystal-cure.com/article-how-healing-crystals-work.html. 3. For further discussion of images and enchantment and several of the ideas discussed in this essay, see David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 4. John Law, “Actor Network John Theory and Material Semiotics,” 2007, p. 1, www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf 5. Hans-Dieter Betz, “Libation,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 5433; D. Q. Adams and J. P. Mallory, “Libation,” in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 351. 6. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1954), 429 (book 6, 32). 7. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001), 123. 8. Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses?” 228. 9. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 16–23; Michel Callon, “Actor Network Theory,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), 62–66. 10. David Morgan, “The Ecology of Images: Seeing and the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 5 (2014): 85–103. 11. Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 6. 12. Callon, “Actor Network Theory,” 63. 13. Callon, “Actor Network Theory,” 64. 14. Narrative, poetic, and liturgical references to versions of the Veronica story have been traced from the middle of the eighth century in the Latin West by Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende (Leipzig: J.  C.  Hinrisch’sche Buchhandlung, 1899), 273–285.

The Sensory Web of Vision   273 15. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 541. 16. Ibid., 219–220. 17. Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 122; Gerhard Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West.” In The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Herbert  L.  Kessler and Gerhard Wolf. Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 6 (Rome: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), 153–179. 18. Reprinted in Belting, Likeness and Presence, 542. 19. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 114–124; Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 209–224; Christoph Egger, “Papst Innocenz III. und die Veronica. Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Seelsorge,” in Kessler and Wolf, eds., The Holy Face, 181–203. 20. For discussion of the many accounts of Abgar and the image of Edessa, see Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 38–64; Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 102–196; and Karl Pearson, Die Fronica: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christusbildes im Mittelalter (Strassburg: Verlag von Karl J. Trübner, 1887; reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–22. 21. St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 41. 22. See Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 122–123. 23. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 120–121; Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 209–217. The account of Veronica in the “Healing of Tiberius” was used by the late medieval compiler, Jacobus de Voragine, 1993. The Golden Legend, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 211–212. 24. Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery, 2000), 76. 25. Pearson, Die Fronica, 69–72, traced the steep arc of increasing time afforded by indulgenced prayers to the Veronica, beginning with Innocent III’s prayer of 1216 at ten days to 30,000 years by 1491 (71). 26. Latin in Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 294, supplementary texts. 27. Herbert  L.  Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 77; see also Victor  I.  Stoichita, “Zurbaráns Veronika,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54, no. 2 (1991), 199. 28. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing-Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2006), 209–240; R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 4. 29. Finaldi, The Image of Christ, 140–159. Pearson, Die Fronica, 14, noted that in the course of the last years of the fourteenth centuries and beginning of the fifteenth, the image of the Veronica changed to register the suffering of Jesus, introducing a second major version of the legend of Veronica in which she hands a cloth to Jesus on the way to Golgatha. 30. Ibid., 94–96, includes examples and discussion of the letter. 31. Latin in Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 307; length of indulgence, 224. Pearson, Die Fronica, 22–5, did not realize that the text was by Pope John XXII, which Dobschütz correctly identified. 32. Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study of De Visione Dei, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985), 685.

274   David Morgan 33. Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 182–183. 34. Geary, “Sacred Commodities,” 188. 35. David Morgan, The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), chapter three. 36. Quoted in Thomas Noll, “Zu Begriff, Gestalt und Funktion des Andachtsbildes im späten Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 67, no. 3 (2004): 310. 37. Finaldi, Image of Christ, 76. 38. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, 79. 39. Ibid., 71; Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds (London: Reaktion, 1997), 65–76. 40. Stoichita, “Zurbaráns Veronika,” 190–206.

Bibliography Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Callon, Michel. “Actor Network Theory.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes, 62–66. Oxford: Pergamon, 2001. Dobschütz, Ernst von. Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrisch’sche Buchhandlung, 1899. Geary, Patrick. “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 169–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1998. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Kessler, Herbert L. Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Kessler, Herbert L., and Gerhard Wolf, eds. The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation. Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 6. Rome: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998. Kuryluk, Ewa. Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Morgan, David. “The Ecology of Images: Seeing and the Study of Religion.” Religion and Society 5 (2014): 85–103. Morgan, David. The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Morgan, David. Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pearson, Karl. Die Fronica: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christusbildes im Mittelalter. Strassburg: Verlag von Karl J. Trübner, 1887; reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2010.

chapter 14

Sensiotics, or th e Stu dy of the Sense s i n M ater i a l Cu lt u r e a n d History i n A fr ica a n d Beyon d Henry John Drewal

The senses are crucial to understandings of material culture, history, and more. Body and mind do not function by means of a Cartesian dualism. The body and its sensing abilities is the source of cognition, not the brain/mind. This proposition underlies the approach I call sensiotics. Sensiotics is the study of the crucial role of the senses in the formation of material forms, persons, cultures, and histories, with a focus on bodily knowledge in the creative process as well as in reception by body-minds. Since the 1980s, there has been a transdisciplinary turn away from texts to bodies and the senses, owing in part to recent research on body-mind unities and interactions. Here I outline sensiotics and, from my work among Yorùbá-speaking peoples of West Africa, give examples of various multisensory experiences that constitute elements of a Yorùbá sensorium. I close with an example from beyond Africa, for this approach has important implications universally. The term sensiotics “playfully pokes” those engaged in linguistically based semiotics. Despite the fact that semiotics claims to be the study and interpretation of signs and symbols in all forms and media, it is in practice shaped by linguistics and the study of texts and then adapted to other media such as the visual arts, where it has had a major impact on art history, and visual and material culture studies. Art historians often speak about “reading” a painting or sculpture or photograph. Such a phrase is symptomatic of the logo-centric bias of semiotics. It betrays a perspective shaped by language, afterthoughts of an initial sensory experience. We do not “read” a painting; we look at and see it using

276   Henry John Drewal our sense of sight, which is quite different from reading a “text.” Not only is our sense of sight engaged, but all our senses and sense memories that we bring to the perception of that work, whether we are conscious of them or not—of hearing, touch, taste, smell, and perhaps others as well, depending upon our cultural background and life experiences. We think with our multisensory body-minds. The transdisciplinary turn away from texts to bodies and the senses is due in part to recent philosophical, historical, anthropological, and neurological research.1 Here I outline sensiotics and give examples from my work among Yorùbá-speaking peoples, their culture, thought, and material culture. Yorùbá artists (working in all forms/ media—song, sculpture, painting, tattooing, dance, cooking, etc.) and audiences use the senses to create and respond to lived experience and art, what Yorùbá people call ọnà, which I translate as “evocative form.” The senses are defined, classified, and understood differently in different cultures and in different eras. They tell us much about what are often sensory experiences that are beyond words. Sensiotics considers how these senses, constituted genetically (nature) and shaped by culture (nurture), shape individuals, cultures, histories, and material culture. Language-based approaches, such as semiotics, are not sense based. Such linguistic or logo-centric approaches to the arts have tended to distort or blur understandings of material culture and art on their own terms.2 When we consider art, it becomes form webbed by words. Granted, we cannot avoid using words—the discipline of art history/ material culture is basically “words about images.” But we need to go beyond this. As W. J. T. Mitchell has observed, “ ‘visual experience’ or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable in the model of textuality.”3 Malcolm Gladwell, using the work of Jonathan H. Schooler, notes that visual perception is clouded and overshadowed by the verbal: that visual cognition is “immediate, holistic, and instinctive,” whereas verbal cognition is “linear and consciously constructed.”4 It seems clear, then, that we need to explore how material forms communicate and evoke by means of their own unique sensorial modes.5 Sensiotics can also give us certain insights about the past, not just narratives of what happened or why, or how, but what people experienced viscerally, and how these sensory experiences may have shaped their histories. For example, the work of Constance Classen on the Worlds of Sense has shown how a society’s sensorium in a particular era changed in response to specific lived circumstances and experiences, and how these in turn shaped history.6 And Mark M. Smith, regarded as America’s leading practitioner of  the growing field of “sensory history,” demonstrated how understanding sensory experiences can evocatively illuminate the past.7

Seeing Historians of art have also critiqued Saussurean semiotics. David Freedberg argues that an image is not a sign—it does not signify a displaced signified. Rather, the power of the image resides in a fusion between sign and signified, and the sign becomes

Sensiotics   277 the living embodiment of what it signifies. “The time has come,” insists Freedberg, “to see the ­picture and the sculpture as more continuous with whatever we call reality than we have been accustomed to, and to reintegrate figuration and imitation into reality . . . that is to say, the time has come to acknowledge the possibility that our responses to images may be of the same order as our responses to reality.”8 He concludes that the relationship that  results between viewer and image is somatic and ­psychological, not semiotic. Additionally, our knowledge of how we see has been changing as a result of insights from neuroscience. The science of vision has changed with the discovery of a third photoreceptor in addition to rods and cones and the process by which the eyes and brain first distinguish center and surround, that is, difference, contrast, and discontinuities. Luminescence is the sensory reality. Color and value are symbolic—creations of cultural systems of meaning and significance (see Yorùbá chromatics discussed later). Contrast creates the illusion of movement, and color resolution is slow. Yet sight is just one of the senses, and one that has been privileged by what Guy Debord calls the “tyranny of the visual” in which he argues that social life or being has become merely representation mediated by images.9 Rather, we need an approach that recognizes and examines all the senses involved in thinking and acting.

Sensing While language, for example, is one of the ways we re-present the world, before language we began by perceiving, reasoning, theorizing, and understanding through all our senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, motion, and suprasensory perception continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world. Seeing (hearing, tasting, moving, etc.) is thinking. In the beginning, there was no word, only sensations. Often such sensory experiences are beyond words. They are so deeply moving and transformative that we cannot find words to describe, much less analyze them. That is why we employ metaphors as one way to put into words experiences that are beyond words—moments of joy, fear or dread, loathing or astonishment.10 They are, as a Yorùbá person would say, moments that “make my jaw drop [make me speechless]” (O yá mi l’ẹnu!). Where would we be if we had no sense of humor, regret, shame, pride, or forgiveness? These emotional moments are essential to our humanness, our being in the world, our social existence in culture. The field of affect theory, which addresses emotions, has also taken a sensory turn. A number of human and social science scholars have begun to explore affect theory as a way of understanding bodily experiences which fall outside of the dominant paradigm of representation.11 Many verbally inexpressible feelings result from what we call expressive culture—material culture and the arts, the “evocative forms” (ọnà) of Yorùbá people. Sensiotics offers a way to feel, think about, and understand such cultural and artistic experiences.

278   Henry John Drewal Our sensing bodies are an integral part of the body-brain-mind continuum that, in our capacity as social beings, helps to shape culture. Culture may be defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and social interactions, and affective cognition and understandings learned in the process of socialization. Culture is an aesthetic system writ large. That is, culture is what we talk about when we say “ways of living” or “ways of being in the world,” and these ways constitute cultural style, a set of preferences in ways of being and acting. That cultural style is being shaped (even before we come into this world at birth) by the sensory experiences we have, and continue to have, throughout our lives. If we are to understand cultural or historical formations of individuals, societies, and material culture (where artists/artisans/makers are often those creators of culture most closely attuned to bodily, sensory knowledge), then the sensory world of such persons should be a rewarding and revealing site of investigation.

Sensiotics Elaborated Sensiotics is a shift from products to process, from ends to means. It is a move to an active, embodied subjectivist perspective that incorporates elements of phenomenology— intersubjectivities, dialectics, and reciprocities. Seminal texts in the expanding field of sensory studies are the works of Constance Classen and David Howes. They outline some of the cultural domains which seem to be the most productive in eliciting a ­culture’s “sensory profile” or sensorium. They describe a “Paradigm for Sensing” that includes language, artifacts, body decoration, child-rearing practices, alternative ­sensory modes, media of communication (orality), the natural and built environment, rituals, mythology, and cos­mology. Classen and Howes offer some of the questions to be considered in any analysis of a culture’s sensorium. They ask what the relationship might be between the various senses in a culture’s sensorium. Which are stressed, and which are suppressed, and by what means, and to what ends? They ask what is the symbolic importance of specific senses? How has sensorium changed over time? How are sensory orders different for different groups in culture (including women, men, children, elders, initiates, and rulers)? Lastly, they propose a research method that entails the researcher becoming aware of his or her personal sensory biases, and becoming sensitive to those of another community. The aim is to develop the ability to operate within two perceptual systems or sensory orders simultaneously (the sensory order of one’s own culture and that of the culture studied) so as to be able to make comparisons continually. These methods are rounded out with archival research into such areas as ethnographies, histories, novels, films, music, performances, and sayings.12 Howes and Classen’s description of research methods resonates with my own writing about being an “in-betweener.” Both this approach and sensiotics are similar to what Paul Stoller calls “sensuous scholarship.”13 Sensiotics requires a revised way of doing research. One no longer aspires to “distanced objectivity” of a so-called participant-observer.

Sensiotics   279 Rather, one works as a sensorially engaged participant, using all one’s senses in order to open multiple, sensory paths to knowledge and understanding. The engagement of the senses, processed by our body-brain-mind, is crucial to such understanding. To be “neutral” or completely “objective” is impossible. Humans are rationalizing creatures, not rational ones. We argue a position or point of view. This is our subjectivity, which is very different from the notion of objectivity. Granted, the differences between cultural insiders and outsiders will always remain, yet within those two groups significant differences exist in cultural knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, perspectives that provide different insights. Most of us are not strictly “insiders” or “outsiders,” but cultural “in-betweeners.” We may all be “in-betweeners,” whether in our own societies, or cross-culturally, for we are social animals. No human is an island. We are hard-wired to be social, to be part of a group, and this derives from our very human sense of empathy, evidenced in recent neuroscience research on mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been defined as those neurons that cause or make our bodies do what we see being done. For example, when we watch a violent movie, our bodies respond with various sensory “fight or flight” reactions to the actions viewed—sweaty palms, heart palpitations, adrenalin rush, and so on. But perhaps mirror neurons should be renamed and defined more broadly as “sensory or somatic neurons.” To call them “mirror” neurons privileges the sense of sight, yet these types of neurons, found throughout the brain, are processing all kinds of bodily sensory data (sounds, tastes, touches, etc.), not just sight. They are part of a cybernetic feedback system that makes us flexible, adaptable, and capable of learning from experience.

Sensiotics and a Yorùbá Sensorium Apprenticeships with two Yorùbá artists, Sanusi in Abẹ́okuta in 1965 and Ogúndipẹ̀ of Iláro in 1978, were vital research experiences. I learned that “the actions of artists teach us as much about style and aesthetics as their words.”14 In other words, I gained insights into Yorùbá artistic concepts, not only in discussing them with artists and observing them during the creative process, but more important, in attempting to achieve them in my own carving under the tutelage of Yorùbá masters. My own bodily, multisensorial experience was crucial to a more profound understanding (òye) of Yorùbá arts, material culture, and the history that shape them. This process of watching, listening, carving, making mistakes, being corrected by example, and trying again was a transformative sensorial experience for me. Slowly my body-mind learned to carve as my adze-strokes became more precise and effective and the image in my mind took shape through the actions of my body. Yorùbá people explain this experience with a sensory metaphor: “the outsider or uninitiated usually sees through the nose” (imú ni àlejò fi í ríran).15 This saying has two different yet complementary connotations: that an outsider understands little because he or she confuses sensing organs; and, at the same time, that understanding

280   Henry John Drewal requires multiple senses.16 With knowledge (ìmọ̀) together with wisdom (ọgbọ́n), we struggle to achieve understanding (òye). And such understanding comes from the unity of body and mind as they process sensory experiences. In the early 1970s, I researched Ẹ̀fẹ̀/Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ masquerades that honor the mystical powers of women termed “Our Mothers” (Àwọn Ìyá wa) because they epitomize for Yorùbá people a deeply moving, multimedia and multisensorial spectacle of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and movements captured in the statement “The eyes that have seen Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ have seen the ultimate spectacle” (ojú tó bá rí Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ ti dé òpin ìran)17 (Figure 14.1). While this saying seems to privilege the sense of sight (“eyes” and “spectacle”), ìran or “spectacle” implies an experience that comes from more than just sight: Ẹ̀fẹ ̀/Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ is about the dance movements of masqueraders, the sounds of complex drum rhythms and leg rattles, and the songs of Ọ̀rọ Ẹ̀fẹ̀ at night when sounds dominate sights, not to mention the tastes and smells of fried beancakes (àkàrà) and other dishes. All occurs in the marketplace, a space commanded by powerful women who are the very ones honored in Ẹ̀fẹ̀/Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́. For Yorùbá, ìran (“spectacle”) is a multisensorial, evocative body-mind experience. There is no single “Yorùbá sensorium”; rather, there are multiple, dynamic sensoria among Yorùbá-speaking peoples in Africa and the diaspora. Sensoria vary depending on location (rural vs. urban, Africa or diaspora) and social position (female/male,

Figure 14.1. Ẹ̀fẹ ̀/Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ masquerades epitomize for Yorùbá people a deeply moving, multimedia and multisensorial spectacle of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and movements. Photograph by Henry John Drewal, 1971.

Sensiotics   281 young/old, initiated/uninitiated, full-sensory bodied vs. partially sensing, that is, blind, deaf, etc.). This is also a sensorium that is continually changing over time. Seven senses are distinct and equally important for Yorùbá people. They are the usual five plus motion and extra or suprasensory perception. Motion has to do with our relation to gravitational forces and our sense of balance and movement through space. Among the Anglo-Ewe (a culture related to Yorùbá), a sense of balance (agbagbadodo), when a child first learns to rise up on two feet and not fall over, is “an essential part of what it means to be human.”18 A similar idea may be present in the Yorùbá term dọ́gba, “to balance.” Balancing and artful motion are important concerns for Yorùbá as expressed in the saying: àìdúró, ijó ni (“not-standing-still is dancing”). The notion of balance/spatial orientation extends to encompass all motion, whether gestures, body postures, or dance, with the body’s sensing organ, the labyrinth of the inner ear. The seventh sense, what some call “the sixth sense,” has to do with extrasensory or suprasensory perception. Trance, or altered states of consciousness, when one’s head “swells” (orí wú) as the Yorùbá say, concerns issues of suprasensory perception, the supplement, the indeterminate. The trance experiences of followers of the Thundergodwarrior Ṣàngó, as evidenced in the swelled heads of his followers depicted in dance wands, is an example of the seventh sense (Figure 14.2).19 This seventh sense is perhaps related to synaesthesia—the simultaneous body-mind interplay of multiple senses that has a profound effect on how we experience things in this world, and what we imagine might be beyond—as expressed by the African musicologist A. M. Opoku urging us to “see the music, hear the dance.”20 This notion of indeterminacy is fundamental to Yorùbá thinking. It is expressed in the notion of “400 plus one òrìṣà”—a pantheon of divinities that is without limit, forever in flux. As Ọ̀lábíyì Yáì has remarked, this indeterminacy is expressed in the concept of ọ̀kànlénírinwó òrìṣà, which translates as “something that is ever-unpredictable and does not admit of limitation or ceiling.”21 And as Wole Soyinka reminds us, “Ifá [Yorùbá divination] emphasizes for us the perpetual elasticity of knowledge,”22 a statement that resonates with recent findings in neuroscience that confirm the elasticity of our brains, that is, the constant creation of brain cells and our ability to continually learn from sensory experience. Frequently in discussions of objects and events we attempt to separate discussions of “form” from “content” or “meaning.” While the former generally considers how a particular work has been created (sounds, rhythms, tastes, colors, shapes, volumes, lines, textures, and composition, which constitute its “style”), and the latter attempts to discuss what is represented (or isn’t), a work’s evocative qualities embody both—they create a somatic experience. Form is content, and content, form. Sounds, rhythms, smells, tastes, colors, shapes, textures, and so on have their histories and symbolic associations that, if explored from a multisensorial perspective, can help deepen, complicate, and enrich our understandings of creative processes and audience responses. A Yorùbá sensorium is the culturally and historically shaped world of the senses experienced and understood by Yorùbá people in interaction with various arts, whether visual or performed. Such a sensorium has two important dimensions. The first is the importance of orality—hearing, listening, and speaking—the voicing and naming of

282   Henry John Drewal Figure 14.2.  A Ṣàngó entranced devotee (adoṣù) with “swollen” head depicted in a dancewand (oṣe). Photograph by Henry John Drewal, 1975.

things and persons with form-words, which are sounds that possess sensory resonances and some with sacred affect. The second comprises examples of multisensorial aspects of Yorùbá material culture and history. The arts (ọnà) are for Yorùbá-speaking people evocative form—objects, actions, sounds/words, tastes, touches, smells, and more—meant to engage the senses of ­body-minds. The ideas that surround art and its creators are complex and include such concepts as sensitivity and good perception (ìmọjú-mọra), insight (ojú-inú), design consciousness and originality (ojú-ọnà), and endurance/lastingness (titọ́).23 Art is meant to inspire, stimulate, and enhance experiences during a person’s journey through life in this world (ayé), passage to the otherworld (ọ̀run), and potential return (túndé) to the world in the spirit-body-minds of their descendants. Such “returnees” are those with names like “Father-has-returned” (Babatúndé) or “Mother-has-come-back” (Yétúndé). The arts and material culture are essential to such journeys for they shape and transform life, departure, and return. Artists create using their senses and sensibilities, and audiences respond in kind. Hearing, a sense that has great importance, especially on a continent where oral traditions are essential to the production and reproduction of social, cultural, and artistic practices, is an extremely important sensorial mode of understanding in Yorùbá society. As Rowland Abiodun notes, in Yorùbá society, a multisensorial mode of understanding

Sensiotics   283 is embedded in the concept of ìlutí: the ability to hear, communicate, and remember; in other words, the capacity to learn, to be educated. Significantly, ìlutí determines whether or not a work of art is alive and responding, in other words, effectively evocative.24 When a Yorùbá person understands something, she or he will say “I hear” (mo gbọ́), not “I see.” Sounds are often ignored or devalued in discussions of material forms. For example, when scholars discuss the complex composition and imagery of a divination tray (Figure 14.3), they neglect to mention that the hollow area carved into the underside of the tray is a sound chamber. The tray is a sculpted wooden drum. When an Ifa priest (babaláwo) strikes the center of the front surface with the pointed end of a divination tapper (irọ́kẹ), the sound reverberates in order to “communicate between this world and the next” as the diviner Kolawole Oshitola explained to me.25 This initial sound is followed by another: the sound of the diviner striking or “beating” together (pa’kin) the sixteen palmnuts (ikin Ifá) before marking the numbered signatures of an Ifá verse (odù Ifá) in the camwood powder (ìyẹ̀rósùn) on the tray. The sound of the tapper on the drum tray, followed by the sharp clack of the ikin, alerts cosmic forces. Sacred sounds—cosmic vibrations—not just images, create a transcendent, evocative experience. For many Yorùbá persons, spoken words are vibrations that have the “power to bring things to pass,” to accomplish things, a power termed àṣẹ. The nature and scope of the àṣẹ of words depend, of course, on how, where, when, and by whom they are voiced.26

Figure 14.3.  Diviner Kolawole Oshitola beginning the divination session by striking the drum tray with a d ­ ivination ­tapper (irọ́kẹ) to create the evocative sound that  communicates “between this world and  the next.” Photograph by Margaret Thompson Drewal and Henry John Drewal, 1982.

284   Henry John Drewal In conversations with the diviner (babaláwo) Kolawole Oshitola, he elaborated on these ideas.27 He explained, The mouth (ẹnu) is understood as the organ for eating and tasting, but more importantly for speaking. As the person’s “speaker,” it is the way to voice out or deliver a message. The Yorùbá saying, “mind your mouth” reminds one to be careful with what one says. We say “may my mouth/words not kill me!” or “may my inner head not ruin my outer/physical one” (Kí orí inú mi, kó má ba orí òde mi jẹ́). “Words are like eggs, once they leave the mouth, fall and break, they cannot be repaired [taken back]” (ẹyin l’ọ̀rọ̀—bi o ba balẹ, koo ṣe ko).

Oshitola’s mouth is a powerful one (ẹnu àṣẹ)—one that has been “well prepared” as a result of his living and learning from àwọn àgbàlágbà (wise elders) and his continual practice in divining or what he calls “traditional work” that involves many incantations (ọ̀rọ̀, ọfọ̀, afọ̀sẹ̣ ) that give his words power and effect to bless or curse. As he said, “I eat and dine with the gods and ancestors all the time. . . . I am in the midst of àṣẹ all the time.”28 From the very start of a Yorùbá individual’s journey through life, names define that person’s uniqueness, connectedness, and potential.29 Thus, when persons come into the world, they receive special names (revealed through divination) expressing their spiritual nature as revealed by the ways in which they arrived and their origins. Such names, called orúkọ àmútọ̀runwá (“names brought from the otherworld”), reveal the special qualities and potentials of persons. For example, children born inside the caul (that is, masked) are called amúṣàn (male) and ato (female). They are thought to have special affinities with their ancestors and should become active members in the Egúngún or ancestral masquerade society. Other names, given by a diviner after birth, are called orúkọ abisọ and provide other clues to the nature of the person. Orúkọ àbíkú are names given to those who are reincarnations of themselves, that is, “children born to die” and to be reborn frequently. Twins (ìbejì) are often thought to be closely related to àbíkú and other troublesome children, and this is one of the reasons they are so carefully honored in twin memorial figures (ère ìbejì). Orúkọ ẹ̀yà are names that refer to the partial reincarnation of ancestors, generally a grandmother (Yétúndé) or grandfather (Babatúndé). All such names indicate persons’ spiritual qualities and propensities, stressing their uniqueness and connectedness with the past, the ancestors, and other spiritual forces in the universe. Finally, and most revealingly, are the very private names given to a person that are kept highly restricted for safety, for the belief is that a person’s enemy could utter such an intimate name in a curse that would do harm to the person. (At the same time, a Yorùbá sense of justice and moral behavior warns that “a curse reflects before it is uttered”—èpè ń rò kó tó jà.) Names become a focus in the verbal arts of appellations (oríkì) and songs (orin).30 These arts embellish the imagery associated with names, names that serve to integrate persons in a lineage, an unbroken chain of relations from departed ancestors to living relatives. They celebrate the distinctive qualities and uniqueness of the individual, invoke the spiritual essence of the person, and elevate the person by encouraging perfection

Sensiotics   285 and “faultless performance.”31 When such praises are voiced, the head becomes “inspired” or “energized” (wú) with the spirit of one’s noble ancestry, which is calculated to encourage high achievement. And that same verb (wú) is used to describe the “swelling” of a devotee’s head during possession trance. Voicing a name is important because as Yorùbá say, “a person’s name directs actions and behavior” (orúkọ ní ń ro ni).32 It encapsulates the person’s and the family’s history, activating the past in order to guide present and future actions. If naming or voicing is of such importance among Yorùbá, then spoken words that refer to object types or performances should contain associative ideas, evocative resonances related to various senses (touch, smell, etc.), allusions to the past, and glimpses of potentiality that can provide insights into the import, the evocative, affective qualities of a form as experienced by its audiences. Sound, as such, can have considerable affective potency. A night masquerade’s affective power is not a word, but an awesome sound, in the absence of sight. Orò is the fearsome society of elders responsible for enforcing the rule of law and meting out punishment for crimes committed, including those for the most serious offense—murder—that usually demands the death penalty. In the dead of night, when Orò is abroad, all nonmembers must remain indoors with shutters closed. Imagine this scene then—close your eyes— and listen to the otherworldly “voice” of Orò . . . WHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR . . . as it seeks its target and carries out its mission. Its invisibility and fearsome sound are the source of its evocative, performative power or àṣẹ. If Orò operates largely in darkness, relying on the perception of sound, a Yorùbá Ifá divination session involves the perception of color to which symbolic significance attaches. The experience of color involves three senses simultaneously: sight, motion, and touch. Yorùbá Ifá is an etútù, a “cooling,” soothing, placating act. And as its name implies, it evokes a change in temperature, and by extension, temperament, a particular state of body-mind. Those present, humans and spirits, must feel the cooling, calming moment. Divination sessions take place in the shade of a tree or house, or within a house—any cool open space. In this way, the sense of touch is part of the perception of color. But more than this, color cognition among Yorùbá (and all of us) is not solely a matter of sight and touch, but also of motion. Yorùbá distinguish three chromatic groupings: pupa, funfun, and dúdú, inadequately translated as “reds, whites, and blacks/dark” hues, respectively.33 Colors provoke the sensation of temperature, experienced through the sense of touch. Pupa (reds, oranges) are hot (gbigbóna), whites (funfun) are cool (tútù), and dark colors (dúdú)—black, blue, green, brown—mediate between these two extremes. Such colors evoke temperature and by extension temperament—the essence or character (ìwà) of the gods. Thus, the cool of white invites the presence of wise Ọ̀bàtálá, and the heat of red evokes the Thundergod-warrior Ṣàngó (Figure 14.4).34 Colors also evoke a sense of motion. Reds and other warm/hot hues seem to advance toward the viewer, owing to the length of their light waves hitting the retina. Blues, purples, and greens tend to recede or move away from us. Thus, perception of color engages three senses simultaneously: sight, touch, and motion.

286   Henry John Drewal Figure 14.4. The red in the dress and beaded dancewand of a devotee of the Thundergod-warrior Ṣàngó evokes the heat and violence of battle. Photograph by Henry John Drewal, 1975.

Now in much of the world of Ifá, the colors yellow and green tend to dominate, especially in the beadwork of diviners (Figure 14.5). According to Yorùbá chromatics, yellow and green are mediating colors. They are neither hot (gbigbóna) hues nor cool ones (tútù). They fall between these two extremes, moderating and mediating them. And this is symbolic of the position of Ifá (and the diviner) in the Yorùbá cosmos: to serve as a cosmic bridge between the tangible world (ayé) and the spiritual otherworld (ọ̀run), between humans and divine forces. These mediating beads are known as otútùopon. As the diviner Kolawole Oshitola explained to me: “they are either green and yellow or green and brown . . . [they say] . . . “when we perform a ceremony for someone, it will be alright [it will succeed],” suggesting that the affect of sacred/symbolic colors brings the desired effect. And the full range of colors in the beaded necklace of diviners (odigba) signals the fact that Ifá must work with all forces in ayé and ọ̀run.35 Colors are somatic, not semiotic. Black and/or dark hues (dúdú) are other important colors in Ifá—related to the ikin Ifá, the sixteen oil-palm nuts, the most important objects in a diviner’s possession. They are vehicles of illumination. Very dark, black, and shiny from age and handling, they evoke the aesthetic beauty of Ifá (and Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the founder of Ifá), whose blackness is praised in names given to ebony children, Adúbiifá, “Black-as-the-ikin-Ifá.”36 Blackness, as Abiodun reminds us, is symbolic of the infinite knowledge and wisdom of Ifá and its diviners in penetrating the vast unknown, the forces operating in the cosmos, and

Sensiotics   287 Figure 14.5. In the world of Ifá, the mediating colors of yellow and green (see as dúdú) tend  to dominate in the beadwork of diviners like the Araba of Eko, Chief Fagbemi Ajanku. Photograph by Margaret Thompson Drewal and Henry John Drewal, 1977.

providing illumination. Blackness also references the unfathomable depths of the ocean, the realm of the goddess of the sea Olókun to which diviners travel when they leave the world for the otherworld.37 Touch has a particular role in the Yorùbá sensorium. Kóló, or body tattoo scarifications, are as much about touch as sight (Figure 14.6).38 While the sense of sight is certainly used to perceive them initially, it is the sense of touch (whether actual or virtual) that provokes a deeper sensual pleasure and appreciation. As one Yorùbá man confided to me, “when we see a young woman with kóló, and try to touch the kóló with our hands, the weather changes to another thing [we become sexually aroused]!”39 Smell has a wide cognitive role to play. Yorùbá believe that with the nose (imú) one can smell and detect an evil, cruel, or dangerous person (ènìan burúkú, kika) or a good, positive person (ènìan to da). As the diviner Oshitola said, “Smell helps us to notice good (òórùn to da, didun: sweet, delicious); and bad/bitter (òórùn kika, burúkú)” and the smell of death.40 The powerful impact of smell, together with other senses, was abundantly evident during the performance of an Egúngún masquerader that honored the spirit of departed warrior ancestors (Figure 14.7). Its aura or performative power (àṣẹ) resided not only in its striking colors and assemblage of power packets attached to its costume, but other multisensorial elements as well. These include the powerful chorus of praise songs that energized it; the kinetic energy of its dance amplified by the aggressive and threatening

288   Henry John Drewal Figure 14.6.  Woman with tattoo scarifications (kóló), Ohori-Yorùbá. Photograph by Henry John Drewal, 1973.

demeanor of its attendants; the pain of whips striking flesh; the rushing, boisterous crowd; the gritty taste of dust kicked up in the chaos; the pulsing beat of drums; and the heavy thud of the masker’s combat boots. But what dominated the experience was the pervasive, overpowering stench that emanated from the animal sacrificial offerings on its blood-soaked tunic. The crowd, sensing and smelling the presence of danger, death, and violence in that place and moment, responded accordingly by running desperately in all directions to avoid injury. Yorùbá have a particular sensitivity to motion. They assess and evaluate aspects of a person’s character (ìwà) with a keen awareness of how the person moves through life. The sense of motion reveals elements of one’s personality. For example, one who gets up quickly in the morning is a person who is called ajítẹní (the one who rises quickly and rolls up his sleeping mat). Another is the description of one who expresses confidence with a swagger or “strut” called alapanṣapa (one who swings his arms widely while walking). According to Gabriel Ayoola, some Yorùbá watch a child when he is about to walk to see which leg the child uses first. For example, if a child “carries the left leg first, parents belief that his motion or mechanical ability may be impaired.” That is, such a child may not be able to walk as fast as he should. So the parents train and help the baby learn how to walk and which leg should be carried first. Sometimes they even make a wooden stroller for the baby to practice walking. The “learned ability to walk” is called lílé kọ́ ìrìn.41

Sensiotics   289 Figure 14.7. The sight, actions, and especially the stench of this Egúngún masquerade honoring the spirit of warrior ancestors created a powerful sensory experience. Photograph by Henry John Drewal, 1978.

Dance is a form of motion with its own associations. Yorùbá dance practice embodies “cool” (itútù), which is also a manifestation of a deeper Yorùbá philosophy of body-mind: self-control, collectedness of mind and emotion.42 The sensual power of movement and dance is conveyed in the Yorùbá saying “Stretch out your leg and let dance catch it!” (ko ma jó, l’ẹsẹ soke!). This exhortation urges the dancer to move appropriately, that is, with a properly enculturated style that follows the music. The dancer must hear (gbọ́) the music for it “controls” the dancer as it “heats up” (ijó wóra) the body (ijó lo wóra, o wóra mi, ijó wóra). Motion is understood as active and an activating sense. Yorùbá also say that “Not standing still is dancing” (àìdúró, ijó ni) as a way to encourage a person to do something—to work, dance, wake up, perform—to carry on.43 Yorùbá have an enduring, fundamental metaphor: that life in the world is a journey (ayé l’àjò), that is, movement through space and time. They are also concerned with the “crossroads” of life (oríta mẹ́ta): those moments of decision, direction, and action, ­presided over by the divine principle of indeterminacy, Èṣù/Ẹlẹ́gbà, who is asked to “open the way” (àgò l’ònà). Such metaphors about journeying, crossroads, paths— movement—help us understand the importance of motion as a separate and distinctive sense in a Yorùbá sensorium. And finally, Ọ̀lábíyì Yáì states that for the Yorùbá, successful artists must be àrè—itinerant persons forever on the move, strangers everywhere, at home nowhere—engaged in “constant departures” of creativity.44 Such an insight

290   Henry John Drewal recognizes that the never-ending accumulation of sensory experiences is essential for artistic excellence. Trance or altered state of consciousness is another important aspect of a Yorùbá sensorium that is central to òrìṣà belief and practice. When such a state occurs, Yorùbá say orí mi wú (“My head swelled”). In religious contexts it refers to the spirit power of an òrìṣà, for example, a Ṣàngó devotee with an oṣù (empowering inoculations on the top/ ociput of the head). As Oshitola explained, “It is the òrìṣà that controls the person and her/his dance, the spirit incited in your inner head (orí inú) comes from the spiritual realm of ọ̀run—and it is this that overpowers your ayé [worldly] senses.”45 This is represented in Ṣàngó dance wand sculptures where the head is dramatically enlarged or “swollen.” Understanding changes in a culture’s sensorium can reveal important historical processes. One example from Yorùbá is the sensory impact of a growing British presence in the early nineteenth century, and formal colonial rule from about 1900 to 1960. The British traveler Hugh Clapperton and his assistant Richard Landers witnessed and described a multisensorial Egungun idán (“miracles/wonders”) masquerade performance on February 22, 1826, in the capital city of the Ọ̀yọ́-Yorùbá (Eyeo or Katunga) that included a humorous (for Yorùbá) satirical presentation highlighting the strangeness of the “white man” (òyìbó):46 The third act consisted of the white devil. The actors having retired to some ­distance in the back ground, one of them was left in the center, whose sack falling gradually down, exposed a white head, at which all the crowd gave a shout, that rent the air; they appeared indeed to enjoy this sight, as the perfection of the actor’s art. The whole body was at last cleared of the incumbrance [sic] of the sack, when it exhibited the appearance of a human figure cast in white wax, of the middle size, miserably thin, and starved with cold. It frequently went through the motion of taking snuff, and rubbing its hands; when it walked, it was with the most awkward gait, treading as the most tender-footed white man would do in walking bare-footed, for the first time, over new frozen ground. The spectators often appealed to us, as to the excellence of the performance, and entreated I would look and be attentive to what was going on. I pretended to be fully as much pleased with this caricature of a white man as they could be, and certainly the actor burlesqued the part to admiration.

That 1826 satirical skit of the “white man,” which showed a Yorùbá attention to movement and gesture that reveal personality, continues today in Egúngún, revealing the impact on the changing importance of hearing as the basis for learning (ìlutí ). In the late twentieth century, after sixty years of colonial rule, the òyìbó performance involved a white couple who hold hands, kiss, and then, instead of talking, write and exchange notes in order to communicate. Yorùbá consider this scene hilarious, not just because of the public display of affections (which should be done in private), but because the sight of the written word has taken precedence over hearing the spoken word.

Sensiotics   291

Conclusion—Sensiotics beyond Africa An exposition of aspects of a Yorùbá sensorium illustrates how sensiotics may enrich cultural and historical understanding of the Yorùbá, but sensiotics can inform understandings of material culture and history everywhere. For example, Hindu images of the divine in the form of stones will be given human form with merely a pair of eyes (sense organs) and a pair of hands (action organs). This, together with the concept of darshan (blessing that comes from seeing a deity), informs us that the senses of sight and touch (action) are privileged in matters of belief and practice. Hindu religion, and perhaps many others globally, including Yorùbá òrìṣà faith, have always recognized the importance and effect of the aura of an object—that is, its embodied impact that affects us sensorially (and understood as spiritually). For Hindus, seeing the deity (darshan) is to be blessed—for the deity responds by looking back. Seeing is reciprocal. And anything that has come in contact, that is, anything that has touched the deity is prasad—a sacred gift that “contains divine aura” and can thus help the devotee.47 Human experiences are body-mind ones, whether in Africa or beyond, that are shaping us as we respond to wider worlds—a spinning globe of complex, competing images, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, movements, and suprasensory moments—sensations that constantly bombard and shape us. Out of these, culture makers create and audiences respond, using their senses and sense abilities. If we want to understand such matters, then we must understand how the senses shape and guide us from the womb to grave, and then find ways to communicate evocatively and poetically such sensory experiences.

Notes 1. Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993); Constance Classen, ed., A Cultural History of the Senses, six volumes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); David Howes, Sensual Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); D.  Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Tim Ingold argues that theorizing about “materiality” has taken us away from our practical experience with and nature of materials and is a reflection of the classical mind-body split: Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16. 2. Henry John Drewal, “African Art Studies Today,” African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 1990), 29–62. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. 4. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 119–120. 5. Henry John Drewal, “African Art Studies Today,” African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 1990), 35; Drewal, “Celebrating Water Spirits: Influence, Confluence, and Difference in Ijebu-Yorùbá and Delta Masquerades,” in Ways of the River: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta, ed.

292   Henry John Drewal Martha G. Anderson and Philip M. Peek (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2002), 200. 6. Classen, Worlds of Sense. 7. Mark, M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 437–438. 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. [1967] 1977). 10. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 11. See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 12. David Howes and Constance Classen, eds., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 13. Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 14. Henry John Drewal, African Artistry: Technique and Aesthetics in Yorùbá Sculpture (Atlanta: The High Museum of Art, 1980), 7. 15. Rowland Abiodun, “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,” in African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 1990), 75. 16. Rowland Abiodun and Abayomi Ola, personal communications, 2005. 17. Henry John Drewal and Margaret T. Drewal, Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yorùbá (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 18. Kathryn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowledge in an African Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 49–50. 19. See Henry John Drewal, “Image and Indeterminacy: The Significances of Elephants and Ivory among the Yorùbá,” in Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture, ed. Doran H. Ross (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1993), 186–207. 20. Fred Lamp, ed., See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art and Prestel Verlag, 2004). 21. Ọ̀lábíyì B. Yáì, personal communication, 2006. 22. Wole Ṣọyinka, “The Tolerant Gods,” in Orisa Devotion as World Religion, ed. Jacob Olupọna and Terry Rey (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 41. 23. Henry John Drewal et al., Yorùbá: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Museum for African Art, 1989), 42. 24. Rowland Abiodun, “Identity and the Artistic Process in the Yorùbá Aesthetic Concept of ìwà,” Journal of Cultures and Ideas 1 (1983): 13–30. 25. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communications, 1982. 26. See Drewal and Drewal, Gelede, chapters 1–3; Henry John Drewal and M.  T.  Drewal, “Composing Time and Space in Yorùbá Art,” Word and Image 3 (1987): 225–227; Rowland Abiodun, “Understanding Yorùbá Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase,” African Arts 27 (1994): 68–78, 102–103. 27. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communication, November 14, 2010. 28. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communication, November 14, 2010. 29. Henry John Drewal and John Pemberton III, with Rowland Abiodun, Yorùbá: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Museum for African Art, 1989), 26.

Sensiotics   293 30. See Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 31. F. N. Akinnaso, “Yorùbá Traditional Names and the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge,” Names: The Journal of the American Name Society 31 (1983): 139–158, 15. 32. F. N. Akinnaso, “Names and Naming Principles in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Names: The Journal of the American Name Society 29 (1981): 51. 33. Moyọ Okediji, “Yorùbá Chromacy,” in Principles of “Traditional” African Art (Ile-Ife: Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 1991); Bolaji Campbell, Painting for the Gods: Art and Aesthetics of Yoruba Religious Murals (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008). 34. These same color temperament connotations carry over to Yorùbá descendants in Cuba as well. John Mason (1989, personal communication) notes: “when a diviner warns of a ‘red’ enemy, a violent, unpredictable, explosive person is being described.” 35. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communications, 1982. 36. Wande Abimbola, ed., Yorùbá oral Tradition (Ile-Ife: University of Ife, 1975), 427 and Rowland Abiodun, personal communication, 2008. 37. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communications, 1982, 1986. 38. Henry John Drewal, “Beauty and Being: Aesthetics and Ontology in Yorùbá Body Art,” in Marks of Civilization, ed. A.  Rubin (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1988), 83–96. 39. While I have no comment from a woman, I imagine kóló are highly sensitive for them as well. 40. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communication, November 14, 2010. 41. Gabriel Ayoola, personal communication, June 12, 2012. 42. See Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7 (1973): 40–43, 64–67, 89–91, and Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 43. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communication, September 27, 2010. 44. Ọ̀lábíyì B. Yáì, “In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘Tradition’ and ‘Creativity’ in the Transmission of Yorùbá Artistry over Time and Space,” in The Yorùbá Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry  J.  Drewal, and John Pemberton III (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 112–113. 45. Kolawole Oshitola, personal communication, September 27, 2010. 46. Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo (London: John Murray [Frank Cass], [1829] 1966), 54–56. 47. Devdutt Pattaniak, Myth=Mithya: Decoding Hindu Mythology (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006), 6–10.

Bibliography Classen, Constance, ed. A Cultural History of the Senses. 6 volumes. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures. London: Routledge, 1993. Drewal, Henry John. “African Art Studies Today.” In African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline, 29–62. Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 1990. Drewal, Henry John. “Senses in Understandings of Art.” African Arts 38, no. 2 (2005): 1, 4, 6, 88, 96. Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. Gẹlẹdẹ: Art and Female Power among the Yorùbá. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

294   Henry John Drewal Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gallese, Vittorio, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Corrado Sinigaglia. Translated by Frances Anderson. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Geurts, Kathryn. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowledge in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. New York: Berg, 2005. Howes, David, and Constance Classen, eds. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lamp, Fred, ed. See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art and Prestel Verlag, 2004. Stoller, Paul. Sensual Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Thompson, Robert F. African Art in Motion: Icon and Act. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

chapter 15

The N um i nous Body a n d the Sym bolism of H um a n R em a i ns Christopher Allison

The intersection of the body and the sacred in American material culture presents a particular challenge. Sacred matter relating to, and consisting of, the body is widespread in collections, but they sit there awkwardly. Even in collections that have strong connections to religious traditions, there is a palpable confusion. The exception is anthropological collections of North American Indigenous peoples, which have been forced to reckon with (and sometimes have embraced) the sacred within their walls, on their shelves, and in their displays. Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, the presence of sacred matter and human remains in collections, among other categories of material, has led to a broad effort to inventory and publish summary descriptions of these objects and, in some instances, the demand for repatriation by representatives of federally recognized tribes. These consultations have led to many fruitful exchanges that have engaged questions of the sacred, the body, and material culture. Many museums, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, have gone a step further to engage the wider public with these complex issues. But what about the rest? What should we do with grave goods found in African American burial sites? How should we understand the ubiquity of portraiture of eminent divines from American colonial history? How should we interpret missionary artifacts from the American foreign missions boom of the nineteenth century? How should we approach the explosion of hair artifacts within the Victorian cult of the dead? How sacred are the unruly human remains that piled up in early American burial grounds, and later in the landscaped cemeteries of the nineteenth century? And how do we reckon with the enshrinement of the artifacts of twentieth-century rocks stars or the founding objects of the United States? The categories, variety of materials, and times of all these things are vast, but they all intersect around issues of the sacred, the body, and objects—and raise the category of

296   Christopher Allison the numinous. While there are many synonyms that describe sacred matter—holy, divine, aura, sanctified—the numinous has two particular meanings that make it a viable category of analysis. First of all, it suggests that the sacred has rubbed off, entered, possessed, or lingers in the material thing.1 Second, that the source of the sacred, the numen, is ontologically other from the person who is sensing the numinous. In other words, the numinous is not in the eye of the beholder, but rather outside the self, yet sensed by the self. Some of the issues that concern sacred bodily matter in American material culture study could benefit from a more robust understanding of the discourse of the sacred as applied to material culture. The concept of the numinous can be helpful in clarifying the experience of apprehending the sacred body by historical actors and their readiness to label material culture as sacred or holy. The case studies that follow concern the material culture of early American Protestantism: a printed portrait of the American missionary to Liberia, Ann Wilkins, and the rib of George Whitefield, famed eighteenth-century preacher, (mostly) buried in the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Although these two people comfortably sit within the category of religion, it is important to recognize that the sacred does not neatly remain within formal religious boundaries. Religion is not a normative category that scholars can successfully maintain to evaluate or describe a particular kind of human phenomenon; it is best understood as a scholarly tool for the description of a variety of cultural activity. As J. Z. Smith noted, map is not territory when it comes to matters of religion.2 How people have approached the bodies of Ann Wilkins and George Whitefield can be illuminating to the ways people seek to enshrine the objects of special people of all kinds in recognition of the numinous.

The Numinous The concept of the numinous was first thoroughly theorized by Rudolf Otto, an early twentieth-century German philosopher of religion, who was involved in the nascent history of religions movement, theology, and the psychology of religion. His Das Heilige (1917), translated in English as The Idea of the Holy (1923), was one of the most influential texts in the philosophy of religion in the early twentieth century—widely read by those with interests in religion, from popular authors such as C.  S.  Lewis to theorists like Mircea Eliade. Otto did not see himself as creating something new, but rather recognizing something old, timeless, even primordial. He wanted to identify and diagnose the phenomenon of the numinous across history, as a kind of “creature feeling”; he looked backward and forward in time to identify a certain anthropological sense in which human beings apprehended the divine, exceptional other, or, in his terminology, the numen (typically translated from the Latin as holy).3 It is also significant that Otto had a strong collecting interest in sacred matter across religious traditions; this led him to go on extensive collecting trips to India, China, Japan, and North Africa. For Otto, combining Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist objects in one place was essential to the

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   297 “affirmative” study of religion as a human phenomenon; from the outset, the collection, which became the extant Marburg Museum of Religions, was a research and teaching institution aimed at furthering this cause.4 Otto chose the terms numen or numinous in order to distance his readers from the commonplace cultural associations with the terms holy or sacred. He suggested that in spite of the prevalent use of commonplace terms it would be helpful to describe them as numinous. Much like religion, the numinous was a scholarly tool.5 In terms of the body, the apprehension of the numinous for Otto was a “creature feeling” that perceived something “wholly other” (ganz andere). Although Otto said his project was an inquiry into the “nonrational” aspects of religious experience, his critics, such as Heidegger, thought this distinction was “notorious indetermination” because, as Heidegger stated, this put religious experience beyond rational analysis.6 While the choice of “nonrational” was misguided on Otto’s part, he by no means suggested that it was noncognitive, or closed to rational inquiry. Otto was trying to make the distinction that people could not think themselves to the numinous; rather, the numinous intruded upon people, in modern material culture theoretical parlance, with an agency of its own, and its most distinctive attribute was that it was ontologically distinct from the self. Although he thought the apprehension of the numinous was a consistent aspect of human culture across time and space, he did not think it necessarily was universal to a person: much like many other senses, some people may be particularly gifted, some impaired, even to the point of disability. Mystics could be overwhelmed with their rapturous encounter with the divine, whereas others may be tone-deaf, so to speak, to spiritual feeling. And yet a sensate capacity for the numinous remained an aspect of human nature.7 Henning Nörenberg and others have pointed out that his concept of “creature feeling” accords with a modern scholarly emphasis on the role of affect, the senses, and, of course, the body.8 The “numinous” is “felt as objective and outside the self.”9 The response to the apprehension of this other presence was a range of feelings that Otto thought could all be present, or selectively so. He categorized the numinous as a feeling of awful dread (tremendum), being overpowered (maiestas), urgency (energicum), uncanny (mirum), mystery (mysterium), fascination (fascinans), respectful obligation and recognition (augustum), utter and total dependence, and a sense of ethical obligation. This categorization of the experience of the holy allows scholars to add dimension to their analysis of sacred material culture, which otherwise seems theoretically airy. While Otto himself didn’t believe all experiences of the numinous had all of these qualities—or all at the same time—he did open up a range of affective and cognitive responses consequent upon the apprehension of the sacred.10 This is helpful because it opens up a cabinet of interpretive possibilities when we study the material culture of the sacred. Nineteenthcentury Americans, for example, preferred the term sacred and applied it to a dizzying number of objects, most of which somehow referenced the human body, in particular for people for whom they felt special “sympathy” or devotion.11 Ultimately, the numinous is a concept that can lead to a complex realization and analysis of the experience of sacred material culture.

298   Christopher Allison

Religion and the Body in the Study of American Material Culture Many material culture scholars look at the things people make or shape as an index of their cultural, social, and political lives. And many new materialists have sought to give a kind of democratic agency to the nonhuman world in the age of the Anthropocene and to topple the human-centric approaches of the past.12 All of these are important conversations that should and will continue. However, for those who remain interested in the human experience, objects that reference or consist of the human body itself are a special class of things that seem to elicit a special response.13 Modern specialists in disciplines from psychiatry to theology have been on a mission to remind people reared in the Western tradition that human beings are an embodied species. The human experience of embodiment shapes epistemology. Human beings shape their material circumstances and are likewise shaped by them.14 In the philosophical shadow of Descartes, many in the West have often forgotten their own architecture, the blood that courses through their veins, the neurons that electrify their thoughts, the sensory feedback they receive. Trash, forests, glaciers, and so forth may have agendas, but I am skeptical if our embodied selves have the tools to know what they might be. But our embodiment allows us to be especially attuned and drawn to the embodiments of others, if they be human or not. Portraiture, sculpture, forms of photography, relics, specimens, mementoes, hair, and so forth have special places in American material culture—one in which the numinous, uncanny, or wonderful is never far away, and for which the mutual embodiment of subject and object are in play. For example, portraits require a real person as a reference point—thereby we sense presence—even coats of arms require bodies behind them to give the symbol meaning. Theorists of material things have long explored this phenomenon of the uncanny and the role of the body in the perception of presence.15 Furthermore, the presence of the human being has a kind of power that often is entangled with the divine. On the one hand, religion is the least material area of human experience, and yet it is an immensely productive area of material culture production. While humans set their own kind apart from the variety of matter that encircles them, there is a tendency not only to materialize religion but to embody religion within people and outside of them. Next time you are at an art museum consider the number of bodies in the objects that surround you that performed religious work in their original contexts: sculptures of the Buddha, icons of the saints, African ceremonial masks. If religion tends to embody itself in material things, it is also sensed by the body; there is a reflexive relationship. Robert Fuller has argued that attention to the body is essential: “religion emerges as an integral part of our body’s endlessly creative, yet imperfect, ways of inhabiting the world.”16 It is incumbent upon historians who work with to American material culture to attend to the perception of the sacred, felt in the body, directed at the bodies and objects of others.

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   299 Moreover, scholars should pay attention to the moments in which the numinous inheres in objects themselves, or, to use Marx’s term, “congeals” in objects.17 Most American material culture historians are confused in their encounters with the discourse of the sacred as it applies to material culture. There is a discursive upping of the ante that leaves many of us with little insight. We don’t precisely know what sacred terminology means, and that often means that the sacred is typically chalked up to overheated sentimentalism, lowbrow culture, or an index of something we understand better (or think is more real) such as race, gender, class, power, politics (civil religion), or economics. Furthermore, as Rachel Maines and James Glynn have observed, despite the historical attempts by collection managers and curators to discredit and often rid their collection of “relics” or “association objects,” “icons” or “memorabilia,” “denying numinosity does not make it go away.”18 They note that the “numen cannot be exorcized from an artifact as long as there is a single person who remembers the association of the object with the significant person, place, or event.”19 While this is true from the perspective of those who care for collections, it is not true from the perspective of people who sense the numinous: the numen inheres in objects independent of the memories of those devoted to them. Scholars have disagreed over the degree to which the term sacred is hyperbolic or serious in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The “sacred” was defined by EuroAmericans as “set apart” for divine purposes, following the discourse of the holy in the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. In Noah Webster’s 1828 definition, the sacred was “Holy, pertaining to God or to his worship, separated from common secular uses and consecrated to God and his service.”20 And yet tokens of affection, personal objects of deceased loved ones, portraiture of family members, and so forth were often described as “sacred relics.”21 This suggests that any body set apart, for reasons of love, divinity, or devotional reverence could comfortably sit within the category of the sacred. This was not confined to Euro-American material culture either. Indian “relics” were, of course, also collected in major early American antiquarian and historical societies— which were both correctly and falsely described as sacred objects. Many of these things were procured without the consent of the relevant communities, and often with the (false) understanding that this material needed to be saved because the Indian communities were disappearing.22 The sacrality here was mortuary. Theresa Barnett, in the first full study of relic objects in America, believes these kinds of objects were primarily a form of “historical representation,” implicated in various “historical processes,” thus “qualitatively different from earlier kinds of objects [they are] often grouped with, such as the religious relic and the curiosity.”23 Barnett seems to suggest that a tie to history precluded sacrality. Sally Promey, in her pioneering study of Shaker visual culture, was more willing to take the sacred seriously. She noticed a significant relic culture among Shakers in the shadow of Mother Ann Lee’s life and death. Images of nonextant objects, such as handkerchiefs, were gifted as relics of holy people from the spiritual realms, both “reliquaries of sacred history and heavenly gifts.”24 Promey suggests that relic culture among Shakers was implicated in intergenerational transfer of religious power. This seems a key distinction between Catholic and Protestant

300   Christopher Allison engagement with sacred matter: the former is about obtaining sacred material for the present and acquiring certain advantages in the transfer from death to life; the latter is more about marshaling religious power from one age and bringing it into another. In her broad history of American Christian materiality, Colleen McDannell made a distinction between the comparative sacrality of objects among American Catholics and Protestants. She tends to see Protestant “relics” as religious objects that seem to exude some kind of “power,” but an ambiguous one that is vaguely historical and confined within the category of the souvenir. But she does not afford these objects the level of religious power of relics or other holy matter, such as Lourdes water, among American Catholics.25 While it is true that Catholics have an established cultic tradition for their handling of relics—a clearer script, if you will—various forms of Protestantism and other religions in America have a perennial relationship with holy matter in which the numinous is sensed, collected, and responded to. Protestants are probably the surprise here, for they seem to defy most historians’ inherited understandings of their historic relationship to matter. Since Protestants have dominated the American religious landscape, attention to their approach to the numinous body is illuminating.26 In terms of the treatment of the body proper, there was a transition starting after the American Civil War, completed by the twentieth century, in which death and its attendant corpse became more hidden, pathologized, and increasingly devalued as a sacred thing. Sacrality was replaced with scientific value, a robust belief in the material resurrection of the dead was replaced with a more disembodied understanding of the afterlife (and a small, but growing questioning if there was an afterlife at all), and personal and intimate encounters with the material dead body were shielded, at least mediated, by a growing funeral industry, which displaced elaborate family mourning rituals from the home to the funeral parlor.27 Scientists were at the forefront of pushing desacralized attitudes toward the body because they wanted bodies to study. While this may seem innocent, the history is far from it. Scientists were the perpetrators of massive grave robbing in search of cadavers and human specimens, especially of Indian, African, and other precarious populations’ bodies. Their goal was often to bolster projects of racial science, while knowingly violating the religious norms of Americans of all kinds.28 When it comes to the reburial of the corpses of exceptional people, some scholars have seen these as primarily imbued with “political” meaning.29 Yet, even in the modern period, as Ellen Stroud and Thomas Laqueur have shown, the sacred clings to the dead body and makes claims on the living, stubbornly remaining “in culture.” This is true even in more secularized societies, even among those who may resist treating the body as a sacred thing.30 Moreover, there has been a recent compelling trend to invite the sacred into ostensibly “political” or “historical” treatments of the exceptional body.31 Thinkers of a previous generation had a tendency to treat the body as a discursive category, following Michele Foucault, in which the body was less a real thing than something that was constructed and disciplined along the lines of “bio-power.”32 Power had its way with bodies, and bodies were the sites of its discipline. For example, the bodily

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   301 convulsions that attended early American conversions during the awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were following scripts that were either disciplinary or subversive, either serving larger biopolitical ends or trying to upend them.33 These authors held that there was nothing inherently numinous about these bodily manifestations, but saw them in terms of worldly power. So why is there so much confusion about numinous or sacred matter? McDannell believes this was because material culture of religion scrambles inherited divisions (primarily from Durkheim, Weber, Eliade, and others) between the sacred and the profane, and among modern theorists, the sacred and the secular.34 Promey’s analysis of Shakers, and also of Puritan gravestones, succeeds, I believe, because she respects the tension between the fear of idolatry prevalent among Protestants (and disdain for the material religion of Catholic and non-Christians) alongside their persistent and consistently material expression of the sacred. While historians of early American historical consciousness have long pointed to its robust providentialism,35 there remains a stubborn reluctance to believe that a hegemonically Protestant culture’s ascription of the “sacred” to matter means sacred. One reason is the caricatural view of Protestantism that persists: namely, that when American Protestants claimed (in certain texts) that they did not care for material religion, were interested in spirit over substance, were aniconic, and rejected the Catholic cult of the saints and the “idols” of other religions, at home or abroad—we believed them. Of course, historians who work in this area know American Protestantisms have consistently engaged with matter and bodies, and have ascribed significant sacred value to both.36 While these belief systems may not have the same formal structure as, say, the Catholic cult of the saints, they don’t relinquish the idea that divinity could inhabit matter, that the body was the “temple of the holy spirit” (for the regenerated), nor that there were exceptional religious figures among the “sainthood of all believers,” nor the idea that these lives are worth mimetic emulation.37 I am not proposing that we become faithful disciples of Rudolf Otto, but that we take his point that to apprehend the numinous is phenomenologically complex, conceptually rich, makes demands of people, springs them into action, and palpably intervenes in their lives. These diverse responses pertain not only to the sensing of the numinous but in response to the felt presence of the numen, or sacred. The origin of that sacred ascription is not simply a labeling of the world from the viewpoint of the beholder but is often perceived to be prompted by the matter itself. It is a response to the apprehension of other “presences” or “actors” in matter.38 Here we have a lot to learn from medievalists, specialists in others parts of the world, and the study of other religious traditions.39 While American material culture study can benefit from a medievalization, so to speak, of the study of sacred objects, we must not neglect our knowledge of the history of American peoples interfacing with the material world.40 It should be noted that the material culture of the sacred has been understudied in American material culture studies.41 This contrasts with a robust catalogue of first-rate work on the visual culture of religion in America. More needs to be done in this area to reach the sophistication found in early modern and medieval studies of the Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist worlds.

302   Christopher Allison

An Engraved Portrait of Ann Wilkins An engraved portrait of Ann Wilkins is, at first glance, not very significant. Few know who Ann Wilkins was, nor will many take much notice of the composition. It has several intriguing features, however. There is a noticeable tropical landscape in the background, which seems at odds with the Western attire of the woman in the foreground. Trained eyes will also notice that that her body appears engraved after some kind of photograph. As for a label, all we have is a name: “Mrs. Ann Wilkins” (Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1. J. C. Butre, Mrs. Ann Wilkins, engraving, The Ladies’ Repository (November, 1859), plate preceding p. 641. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Wilkins was missionary to Liberia, moreover, a survivor. She had outlived almost every American missionary, Afro or Euro-American, who set foot on Liberian soil. But after twenty years working as a school teacher across Liberia, she succumbed to acute sickness, and, after a failed recovery in the United States, Wilkins was buried among her kin on the family land near White Plains, New York, in 1858. In this portrait, engraved after a daguerreotype and published in 1859, she sits rigidly before us in an oval format: a compositional choice that proposes a memorial aspect to the portrait and a visual

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   303 connection to the typical matting of a daguerreotype. Her hands are pressed delicately together, her dress modest, her expression rigid. In fact, her rigidity is one reason why this print is significant, for it copies a body captured in a singular daguerreotype and multiplies it for a wide devotional public. In the aftermath of her death, her portrait was printed alongside a narrative of her final days in 1858. The author of that narrative wrote that “None approached her without being illuminated by the depth and gleam of her piety: it literally shone upon and penetrated every one that came into communion with her . . . as oracles issuing out of the temple of God.” Those who cared for her in her transition from life to death refused compensation from the missionary society: “No, indeed, we have had reward enough; it was as if waiting upon an angel of God; we never saw such a person; such dying we never witnessed.”42 While the Victorian cult of the good death is clearly on display here, even by those standards Wilkins’s dying body seemed to exude a special numinousness. With the portrait on one side of the page, and the reportage of her saintly death on the other, the pair functioned as a second coming of a departed sainted woman in maximum bodily fidelity.43 As one admirer wrote pithily, “Has not God smiled upon it?”—her body, her life.”44 The story might end here, but to excavate the depth of the numinousness that surrounded her body, we must return to Wilkins decades later. In October of 1886, a group of women and an undertaker met on a farm on the border of New York and New Jersey. The women were there from the local Methodist church to exhume Ann Wilkins’s remains. After her burial in 1858, the farm had fallen into new hands. The new farmer wanted to plow over the Wilkins family burial ground, and the bones and stones of the people buried there. The local Methodist women of the local auxiliary of the Women’s Missionary Society caught wind of this plan and were appalled. They quickly raised money to move Ann Wilkins’s body from the farm to one of the most fashionable cemeteries in nineteenth-century America, Maple Grove Cemetery on Long Island, New York. By doing so they set apart Ann Wilkins’s body from the rest buried there (who were not saved). But they also clearly intended to create a devotional site for those devoted to Wilkins’s memory. Her tall grave stone, engraved with her name, a cross and crown (indicating her victorious sainthood), and the name of the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society was strategically placed on a crest of the highest point on Long Island. People could visit her grave on the crest of the hill that overlooked the “rolling Atlantic,” and by extension Liberia. Here they were invited to meditate on Wilkins’s life, pay their respects, and, the women hoped, walk away inspired to follow her example. Mrs. Kenneth Chandler (née Belle Glasier) led the charge, because, she wrote, Ann Wilkins was a “pioneer . . . [who] opened, as only a woman can do, a pathway in the wilderness of the human heart.”45 The women purchased a new casket and had the undertaker bring it to the field, but they were surprised to find the old casket was “perfect and entire.” Amazed, they thanked God for saving Wilkins’ body and her “resurrection seed,” a phrase that looked forward to the new body that would spring from her skeletal remains upon Christ’s return at the Last Judgement. The undertaker moved the body from the old casket to the new one. Chandler kept the plate from the old coffin, as a “memento,” and the coffin

304   Christopher Allison itself was supposedly broken up and disseminated among an unknown group of admirers, probably many of the women who attended her exhumation. The undertaker, as he moved the bones from the old coffin to the new, showed the remains to the women, saying, “Here is her right arm.” Mrs. Chandler immediately exclaimed, “Give it to me.” Chandler wrote, “I pressed it in my own . . . I gave this living hand in renewed consecration to the cause she loved so well.” Fleshy hand shaking dead bone, Mrs. Chandler committed herself to missions anew. This encounter was experienced as a gateway to heaven: . . . kneeling over that wide open-grave, filled with the pure, sweet air of heaven, baptized with glorious sunlight, across the more than a quarter of a century since that tired hand had rested across her breast, there came to me a quick vibration, almost as though the harp held by her angel hand had throbbed a double note of praise.46

Chandler not only felt a “quick vibration” from her first-hand encounter with Wilkins’s skeletal hand, but immediately envisioned the relics as a portal to heaven, animated from another realm. She spent the rest of her time at the graveside pouring, meditating over Wilkins’s body—her feet, “so many times weary with the march . . . of life,” “her head that ached and eyes that wept,” her forehead, “the crown rests now upon thine uplifted brow.”47 The numinousness of her material body was immediately and sensationally available: both here and there, holy and immanent, her relics a means of transcending the stubborn boundaries between life and death, heaven and earth, memory and embodiment. A second funeral was in order. The minister who presided meditated on the role of the body, with the skeleton of Wilkins displayed before him. He preached, “The body may not be the most important part of our being, but it may, nevertheless be a part.” “So much is said in the Bible of the body, that I cannot but feel it is, in some sense, an important part of ourselves. Our church still maintains the old-fashioned exegesis that understands God as promising, in his Word, that in the resurrection, the spirit shall be glorified in the same body in which it struggled and triumphed on earth.”48 Here in 1886, this minister both recognized the enduring value given to the corpse in the light of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, but also that this “old” interpretation justified devotion to the body. And in response he acted in an old way. He gifted as a “relic” the daguerreotype of Ann Wilkins to the Women’s Missionary Society, telling them, “A little while before her death this now sainted lady sent me an old daguerreotype of herself. I now hand it over as a sacred relic to this branch of the [Women’s Missionary Society].”49 When young women missionaries were consecrated for their missions abroad, they brought out the daguerreotype during the service and reminded the congregation that Ann Wilkins had frequented the space and that her bones had rested in the church during her second funeral service; thus, they said, “consecrating this place for the cause of missions.” The pastor instructed those who gazed at the daguerreotype, or the print made after it, on its religious meaning: “she whose memory awakens all these associations is the face of a diamond, large and lustrous, shining with the splendor of woman’s heroism

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   305 and faith, and the gloriously superlative love of Christ our adorable Redeemer.”50 From this body, this face, shone forth her personal splendor and Christ’s love alike—and it was not in the eye of the beholder but in the body of the beheld. Wilkins’s eulogist preached at a theological crossroads, between a past that invested immense spiritual meaning in the body and a future where ideas of the afterlife would become increasingly disembodied, thus divesting the relics of the faithful of their previous meaning. But during the sermon this preacher looked back, connecting the corpse of Ann Wilkins to another he had encountered, “a few weeks back” when he visited the “sepulcher of [George] Whitefield,” the famous evangelical preacher. Staring at Whitefield in his open casket in the basement of the church in Newburyport, his mind went to the . . . achievements of that body, when, long ago, it was clothed with muscles, and moved by a sanctified spirit. How often were those limbs wearied in the way of duty; how often were those arms outstretched as if to embrace a world; how often the eyes that filled those sockets flashed with holy fire, kindled by thoughts of immortality; and what a river of persuasive eloquence flowed from those lips! My pilgrimage to that crypt was not a folly. The sword of [Ulysses] Grant, the pen of [Abraham] Lincoln, the pew of [George] Washington, the Bible of [John] Wesley, and many such relics are beyond price in the estimate of those who hold them. These are our relics; yon [new] casket of Ann Wilkins is precious because of the uses to which feet, and hands, and head, and all of which these are the remains, were once put. We have brought them here, because these motionless, fleshless limbs once frequented this place. . . . and sanctified it in the holy purpose of world missions.51

This passage is shot through with the discourse of the sacred: “sanctified spirit,” “holy fire,” “immortality,” “pilgrimage,” “pew,” “Bible,” “relics,” “sanctified,” “holy.” The divine indwelling, or use by God, of both Ann Wilkins and George Whitefield made their bodies not only sacred to those who encountered their remains, but numinous.

George Whitefield’s Rib The rib of George Whitefield, now in the Warren Anatomical Museum of the Harvard Medical School, was no longer part of the body of George Whitefield when the minister visited his crypt before Ann Wilkins’s second funeral in 1886. The medical museum’s collection is, of course, full of human remains, in addition to plaster casts of abnormal growths, kidney stones in cases, organs in glass jars, early stethoscopes, bleeding bowls, medical instruments, and more. So the presence of a rib is not surprising. However, it is an anomaly (Figure 15.2). This rib stands out, for it diverges from the typical treatment of osteological specimens in the collection. Bones were treated for future study by being boiled or macerated to remove the remaining soft tissue from the specimen, rendering it white, and, as time went on, ivory. After they were cleaned, bone specimens were almost always labeled

306   Christopher Allison

Figure 15.2.  Right seventh rib of George Whitefield, Warren Anatomical Museum in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, specimen number 10107A. Label: “Rib of Rev. George Whitefield, a celebrated preacher.” Photograph by the author with the permission of Harvard Medical School.

directly on the specimen in paint; human remains get confusing otherwise, for if a paper label were to fall off, the scientific value, its provenance, would be lost. But this rib has not been preserved in these established ways. Unboiled, it remains in its yellowed state, with crevices darkened by the remaining decayed tissue. The labeling is also unique; instead of labeling the object directly on the bone, it is instead encompassed by a small piece of bookbinder’s leather stitched tightly, using a surgeon’s suture, onto the rib, thus forming a barrier between the inky label and the bone. The label reads: “Rib of George Whitefield, a celebrated preacher,” along with its specimen number, in another hand, “10107A.” What should we make of this object, a fragment of a religious body in a scientific collection, mindful that this was not just any religious body, but probably the most famous religious figure of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world? The rib originally came into the collection from the Boston Phrenological Society, via the personal collection of John Collins Warren, dean of Harvard Medical School for most of the nineteenth century. This only compounds the mystery, because ribs have no phrenological scientific value. But we do know that a young doctor by the name of Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, who would go on to become mayor of Boston from 1868 to 1871, was the original collector. Shurtleff collected the rib while he was dispatched to cast the skull of George Whitefield in the summer of 1833 in the crypt of the Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The crypt had been open to visitors since the Revolutionary

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   307 War, and when the nascent American phrenological movement was looking for accessible skulls of international renown, they soon were drawn to Whitefield’s crypt. Shurtleff ’s mission was to create a cast of the skull that could serve as a kind of type specimen for religious genius.52 With the permission of the local church to cast the skull, he removed the excess tissue and pushed the plaster tight around the skull. But while he waited for the plaster to set on Whitefield’s skull, he reached down and collected the rib; this was his relic.53 The rib did not satisfy his scientific mission for sure but seems to have satisfied a religious one. Did Shurtleff sense the numinous in the rib he plucked? Did it prompt him to restrain from boiling the bone or labeling it in rude paint? Did he carefully suture the leather around the rib, to maintain its associations, in veneration of the life that once animated the rib, and might animate it again? While we are unable to answer all of these questions with certainty, the evidence suggests that Shurtleff treated the Whitefield rib with a special respect, honoring the material in a way that differed from the conventional practices of medical specimen collecting. We know from other sources that the numinous was a common experience with encountering Whitefield’s body in the crypt, and Shurtleff was not alone in plucking relics from this evangelical saint.54 An arm bone circulated among English admirers for several decades, until it was repatriated in 1849, to great fanfare.55 A knucklebone is extant in the archives of the United Methodist Church. The troops of Benedict Arnold’s and Phillip Morgan’s expedition to Canada carried pieces of Whitefield’s bands and robes into battle in Quebec in 1775, effectively opening the crypt for countless visitors over the decades.56 And many more visited the body, much like the eulogist at Ann Wilkins’s second funeral, finding in the corpse a lingering numinousness. This was an experience of fear and wonder—both of which Otto suggested were constitutive of the numinous. In 1791, when itinerant preacher Jesse Lee was spreading the Methodist message across New England, he stopped in Newburyport to encounter the corpse of George Whitefield. For Methodists of this period, Whitefield was the great itinerant hero, who, along with John Wesley, established the iconic model of the Methodist preacher. But upon encountering Whitefield’s body, Lee was unsettled by “the fearful change . . . which the king of terrors makes upon the most perfect forms.”57 Although Lee noted that anyone who knew Whitefield in life could “discover some traces of his former likeness,” the body remained shockingly distorted: “ears, hair, and a part of his nose had fallen off,” though his face remained “nearly in the common shape, though much contracted, and appeared quite destitute of moisture, and very hard.” Even for a holy man such as Whitefield, death had its way, and fear and dread were Lee’s response. Despite this different emotional register, Whitefield was for Lee “one of the greatest missionaries that ever lived,” and so a similar devotional impulse that led Chandler to seize Wilkins’s hand prompted Lee to have “contented himself by bringing away a small relic of the gown in which he was buried; and prayed that he might be endued with the same zeal which once inspired the breast of its wearer.”58 Jesse Lee’s handling of George Whitefield’s body and taking away a relic of his gown became for Lee an object over which he prayed for similar zeal—but he also seemed to hope for a material transfer. Did he hope the zeal would transfer from the object to

308   Christopher Allison himself, or would the object serve as a devotional center in his pursuit to live up to Whitefield’s example? While all Protestant sects expunged relic practice from their confessions, they consistently revered certain individuals as especially saintly, and similarly believed that their bodies were the sites of divine presence. This is why they sought to capture the bodies of the sainted figures of their past, whether through portraiture, touch relics, personal objects, or their remains themselves. What is striking is not necessarily the departure from Protestant doctrinal positions, but the persistence of devotion to exceptional religious people and their bodies. As much as Whitefield’s corpse could be awful for Jesse Lee, it left one “J. Brown” flummoxed after visiting Whitefield’s corpse in the summer of 1784. While in town, he “heard of the unaccountable fact of Whitefield’s body being entire,” that is, intact. So one morning at “about ten o’clock,” Brown went with his wife and “other friends” to see for himself. Provided with a candle and a lantern, Brown “descended down into the tomb” and was lead to “dear Whitefield’s coffin,” which was opened “down to his breast.” The impact was immediate; “I never felt so over a corpse. His body was perfect.” Brown was drawn in by the body, entangling him in a flurry of feelings and questions. He touched the corpse. “I felt the cheeks, his breast, &c. the skin immediately rose after; even his lips were not consumed, nor his nose.” Furthermore, “He did not look frightful at all.” This was quite the opposite effect that Lee experienced seven years later. The “skin was considerably discoloured, blackish,” which Brown attributed to “dust and age.” To round out the senses, he commented on the smell: “It must be thought the corpse could not have any.” And then finally, the clothes, which he had been so famously laid out in: “his gown was not much impaired, neither was his wig: (it is well known he was in his coffin, as he was in his pulpit),” he reminded his readers. The encounter was enhanced by the possibility of an immediate comparison, which was done with Jonathan Parsons’s body, the minister who buried Whitefield and had died five years before: “I turned myself to look at Mr. Parsons, but there was only a promiscuous shew of bones, clean and dry.” He sensed his reader’s incredulity, for he stopped to note, “I do but give you matter of fact.” And “I am well assured the body of Mr. Whitefield was not embalmed; he particularly ordered it should not.”59 Brown was flummoxed with the encounter, and here we see his veneration of Whitefield and his enlightenment empiricism colliding.60 “I confess, to account for the above upon natural principles nonpluses me,” he wrote. Brown knew of other remarkable preservations in “snow, and in dry gravelly earth.” But the access to “air, or the least touch, had destroyed them.” But Whitefield’s body was exposed to copious amounts of air and touch, as his “body is opened to every curious visitor.” His final explanation for it was that there was something in the mortar of the freshly constructed crypt that worked on the body for the six years the tomb was sealed. But even this was “but a fancy of mine,” he wrote.61 Many others “have not been backward to say, ‘God miraculously preserves Whitefield’s body.’ I hardly know what to say to this—I will not say God does not preternaturally preserve it.”62 Of course, the Bible was instructive on framing what he saw, for Brown noted that Whitefield “was favored and distinguished in our day as Enoch was in his; and if God did not honour his body with a translation, he may with a preservation.” He finishes his

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   309 letter by asking for readers “thoughts concerning the above.”63 The letter, so honest and inquiring, never received a direct answer. But we can recognize here that for Brown the numinousness of Whitefield’s body was not simply a mental state, but was evident in his real, material corpse. It could be confounding, for it defied natural causes, but it also could be intelligible, because of Brown’s recognition of the supernatural animation of  Whitefield’s ministry. The numinous here was keeping Whitefield intact. Now, Whitefield’s crypt is sealed by panels of black slate, after the city ordered the crypt closed in the early twentieth century. Even with Whitefield’s body sealed off from visitors, modern pilgrims still flock to the grave to be near the great revivalist’s corpse and pray for revival. The art historian Hans Belting has made an intriguing anthropological point that bears directly on the future study of the numinous body and the objects that emanate from it. He notes that the human experience of absence, death, and invisibility is a precondition for the creation of the image—mental, material, textual, visual.64 To translate this insight into the concerns of this essay, the absence of the body or the invisibility of the divine, is the precondition for the materialization of presence. This explains, in part, why religious traditions are such generative loci for material culture: they deal with unseen presences sensed in living bodies. These bodies, more often than not, feel the need to materialize presence. When, as historians of material culture, we are encountering a moment of loss, death, or absence as it relates to the body in the context of religious feeling, we might observe the cultural texture of the numinous begin to appear.

Notes 1. Most readers will be familiar with concepts of the “fetish” or the “aura” when applied to things. See note 17. 2. Jonathan  Z.  Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 3. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 5–11. 4. Peter J. Bräunlein, “The Marburg Museum of Religions,” Material Religion 1 (2015): 284–287; Konstanze Runge, “Studying, Teaching, and Exhibiting Religion: The Marburg Museum of Religions (Religionskundliche Sammlung),” in Religion in Museums: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Gretchen Townsend Buggeln, Crispin Paine, and S. Brent Plate (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 155–162. 5. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 5–7. 6. Wayne Proudfoot has made a similar criticism of scholarly recourse to “religious experience,” and he had a similar, more modern, criticism of Otto. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 7. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 24. 8. Henning Nörenberg, “The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolph Otto’s ‘The Idea of the Holy’ Revisted,” Open Theology 3 (2017): 546–564. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  2002); Sally  M.  Promey, ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

310   Christopher Allison 9. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 11. 10. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 12–40. 11. See, for example, the wonderful summary of the role of sympathy and the sacred given by Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2015). 12. The most influential here is Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 13. My use of “special” here is informed by Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). While Bill Brown has offered a helpful theoretical distinction between object and thing, people rarely make such a distinction in practice, and therefore I use the term interchangeably. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22. The special attraction to the human form, recent research suggests, is innate, not exclusively one of postpartum conditioning. Vincent M. Reid et al., “The Human Fetus Preferentially Engages with Face-like Visual Stimuli,” Current Biology 27 (2017): 1825–1828. 14. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Bennett, Vibrant Matter; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 15. Some standout works on this include Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 175–207; Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 16. Robert C. Fuller, The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America, Chicago History of American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10. 17. This raises the issue of the “fetish,” which has had a vibrant life in Marxist thought and in anthropology, viz. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17. For Marx’s use of the Fetish in Capital, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert  C.  Tucker, 2nd revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 321. Benjamin’s concept of the aura is germane here as well, one in which a special presence inheres in the object; see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 23–24. 18. Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” The Public Historian 15 (1993): 9–10. 19. Maines and Glynn, “Numinous Objects.” 20. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), 687. 21. Charles Chaucer Goss, Methodism, Its Founders and Pioneers: Being an Explanatory Key to a Group of 255 Portraits, Entitled the Founders and Pioneers of Methodism: In All Parts of the World and in All of Its Branches (Mrs. C.C. Goss, 1873).

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   311 22. Christine DeLucia, “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture: Rethinking ‘Indian Relics’ and Tribal Histories,” Common-place, 17 (2017). 23. Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7. 24. Sally  M.  Promey, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism, Religion in North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  1993), 118–123. 25. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 39–46, 132–160. 26. Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin, American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, ed. W. Clark Gilpin and Catherine A. Brekus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 27. Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Vintage Books, 1982); Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 28. Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 29. Michael  G.  Kammen, Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 30. See Ellen Stroud’s forthcoming, Dead as Dirt: An Environmental History of the Dead Body, and Laqueur, The Work of the Dead. 31. Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,  2015); Martha Elizabeth Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 140. 33. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, eds., A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,  2001). Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 34. McDannell, Material Christianity, 4–8. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard  R.  Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). On the modern discussion of the co-constitutive nature of the sacred and the secular, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 35. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xvi. In the nineteenth century, see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” The American Historical Review 89 (1984): 909–928. More recent work on historicism and its connection to Protestant projects is found in Eileen  K.  Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism & Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Thomas  A.  Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.  M.  L.  de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2001); Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing

312   Christopher Allison Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 37. I have made this argument elsewhere; see Christopher Allison, “Holy Man, Holy Head: John Wesley’s Busts in the Atlantic World,” Common-Place 15 (2015), http://www.commonplace-archives.org/vol-15/no-03/lessons/#.V0M0A77SQ5w. 38. Gell’s focus is art, of course, “as a system of action,” not simply a conveyor of signs, but you could easily think of religious systems of action as well, in which objects find themselves implicated and participants therein. Gell, Art and Agency, 6. Orsi argues for the recognition of “presences” within history that create historical space—not above history, but within it. So, for our purposes, the “historical significance” of the “sacred relic” is not one of absence, but one in which presence is made tangibly real, the sacred becoming historically proximate. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 69. While not a commonly cited aspect of Bruno Latour, he suggested that scholars attend to the “nonhuman” and “human” actors, but also those connections to ostensibly nonmaterial actors, such as relationships with, to use Orsi’s phrases, “gods” and “presences,” that intervene in the collectivity of the network. Latour, Reassembling the Social. 39. Recent standouts are Cynthia J. Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion Books, 2017); Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books; distributed by MIT Press, 2011). Ironically, Miller uses Bill Brown’s Thing Theory, a mainstay of American material culture study, to approach late antiquity. An older, but still remarkably relevant, is the classic, Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Haskell Lectures on History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 40. Credit to Ann Little for informally dubbing this move in early American studies as “medievalization.” 41. Sally Promey and Shira Brisman, “Sensory Cultures: Material and Visual Religion Reconsidered,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, ed. Philip Goff, Blackwell Companions to Religion (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 177–205. 42. Rev  J.  P.  Durbin, “Mrs. Ann Wilkins,” The Ladies’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion 19 (1859): 641–642. 43. Kaya Silverman makes an argument for the centrality of the idea of “second coming” in the early history of photography, a moment in which the world is returned to the vision of nineteenth-century people. She finds this theme most prominent in the early religious subject matter of early photography that focuses on moments of return. Whitman’s description of early daguerreotypes is germane as well: “speechless and motionless, but yet realities . . . the soul of the face.” Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, 33. Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat (Brooklyn, New York) 5:160 (July 2, 1846), 1. 44. Mrs. O. W. Scott, Ann Wilkins: Missionary to Africa, Pioneer Series 17 (Boston: Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, n.d.), 7. 45. Mrs. Kennard Chandler, “Mrs. Ann Wilkins.: The Appeal.,” Zion’s Herald (1868–1910); Boston, July 28, 1886. Mrs. Kennard [Belle  N.  Glasier] Chandler, “Mrs. Ann Wilkins: Resolutions from the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   313 Society; The Appeal,” in The Gospel in All Lands: Representing the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Also Other Churches and Societies, ed. Eugene R Smith (New York: Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary Society, 1886), 373–374. 46. Chandler, “Mrs. Ann Wilkins: Resolutions from the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society; The Appeal”; Chandler, “MRS. ANN WILKINS.” 47. Chandler, “Mrs. Ann Wilkins; Chandler, “MRS. ANN WILKINS.” 48. J. M. Reid, “Address of Rev. Dr. J. M. Reid, at the Memorial Service on the Occasion of the Reinterment of Ann Wilkins, June 19, 1886,” Heathen Woman’s Friend 18 (1886): 31–33. 49. Reid, “Address of Rev. Dr. J. M. Reid.” 50. Ibid., 33. Cynthia  J.  Hahn et al., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ex. cat. Cleveland Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and the British Museum, London (New Haven, CT: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2010). 51. Reid, “Address of Rev. Dr. J. M. Reid,” 31. 52. Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, “Nathaniel B. Shurtleff to William B. Fowle, Friday, August 2, 1833,” in Scientific Tracts and Family Lyceum, Designed for Instruction and Entertainment, and Adapted to Schools, Lyceums and Families, ed. Jerome V. C. Smith, vol. 1 (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1834). William B. Fowle, “William B. Fowle to Moses Pettingill, Paul Stinsen & John Cushing Esq., Committee of the First Presbyterian Church, Newburyport,” January 5, 1834, Old South Presbyterian Church Newburyport Archive. 53. We know so much about Shurtleff ’s method because he wrote a casting manual: see Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, “Description of the Method of Moulding and Casting Heads, Masks, Medallions, &c. [Pamphlet],” in Annals of Phrenology, vol. 1 (Boston, 1833). 54. Ireneaus, “Religious: A Pilgrimage to Whitefield’s Bones. New England Letters,” New York Observer and Chronicle (1833–1912), July 12, 1845; Abel Stevens, Sketches & Incidents, or, a Budget from the Saddlebags of a Superannuated Itinerant, ed. George Peck (New York: G. Lane & C.B. Tippett for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1845); Jeremiah, “The Grave of Whitefield,” New York Observer and Chronicle (1833–1912), November 13, 1851. 55. J. B. (Joseph Beaumont) Wakeley, Anecdotes of the Rev. George Whitefield, M.A (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), 388–389. Jonathan F. Stearns, “The Remains of Whitefield,” Newburyport Herald September 28, 1849. “Whitefield’s Body,” British Standard, October 14, 1842. 56. Ibid. 57. Jesse Lee (1758–1816), Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee with Extracts from His Journals, ed. Minton Thrift (New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1823), 153. 58. Ibid. 59. J.  Brown, “ ‘To the Editor of the Christian’s Magazine.’ July 1790,” in The Christian’s Magazine, or Gospel Repository, ed. T. Priestly, vol. 1, 3 vols. (London, 1790), 273–275. 60. Brown, The Christian’s Magazine. 61. Brown, The Christian’s Magazine, 274. 62. On the long negotiation between divisions of the natural, preternatural, and miraculous, see Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold Ira Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 1998), 329–364.

314   Christopher Allison Unable to come up with a natural solution, but uncomfortable with a supernatural one, Brown settles for a preternatural preservation, that God had somehow worked in his body in life in such a way that he honors the moral material of Whitefield with preservation. The older definition of preternatural, most clearly articulated by Thomas Aquinas, was something that was exceptional to the patterns (not yet “laws”) of nature, of which the ultimate cause was created. The miraculous could also be exceptional to the patterns of nature, but the ultimate cause was divine, that is, uncreated. 63. Brown, The Christian’s Magazine. 6 4. Belting, An Anthropology of Images.

Bibliography Allison, Christopher M. B. “Jamestown’s Relics: Sacred Presence in the English New World.” Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2016). http://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/essays/jamestown-s-relics-sacredpresence-english-new-world. Barnett, Teresa. Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Bellion, Wendy. “Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America.” In New Media, 1740–1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey  B.  Pingree, 31–60. Media in Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Bellion, Wendy. “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies.” In Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America, edited by Maurie Dee McInnis and Louis P. Nelson, 15–46. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Buggeln, Gretchen Townsend. Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches, 1790–1840. Hanover, CT: University Press of New England, 2003. Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Burns, Sarah (Sarah Lea). Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in NineteenthCentury America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1992. Cayton, Mary Kupiec. “Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement.” In Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, edited by Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie Anne Shemo, 69–93. American Encounters/Global Interactions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo—American Frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Cray, Robert  E., Jr. “Memorialization and Enshrinement: George Whitefield and Popular Religious Culture, 1770–1850.” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 339–361. DeLucia, Christine. “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture: Rethinking ‘Indian Relics’ and Tribal Histories.” Commonplace: the journal of early American life (2017). http://common-place.org/book/antiquarian-collecting-and-the-transits-ofindigenous-material-culture-rethinking-indian-relics-and-tribal-histories/.

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains   315 Fabian, Ann. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008. Fox, Richard Wightman. Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History. New York: W.  W.  Norton & Company, 2015. Fuller, Robert  C. The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. Chicago History of American Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Garfinkel, Susan. “Discipline, Discourse and Deviation: The Material Life of Philadelphia Quakers, 1762–1781.” M.A. Thesis, University of Delaware, 1986. Greenhalgh, Adam. “‘Not a Man but a God’ The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington.” Winterthur Portfolio 41 (2007): 269–304. Hodes, Martha Elizabeth. Mourning Lincoln. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Hooper, Steven. “A Cross-Cultural Theory of Relics: On Understanding Religion, Bodies, Artefacts, Images and Art.” World Art 4 (2014): 175–207. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Laqueur, Thomas W. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Lindman, Janet Moore, and Michele Lise Tarter, eds. A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Lindsey, Rachel McBride. A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in NineteenthCentury America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. McDannell, Colleen. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900. Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Morgan, David. Protestants & Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Morgan, David. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. London: Routledge, 2010. Nörenberg, Henning. “The Numinous, the Ethical, and the Body. Rudolph Otto’s ‘The Idea of the Holy’ Revisited.” Open Theology 3 (2017): 546–564. O’Donnell, Patricia C. “This Side of the Grave: Navigating the Quaker Plainness Testimony in London and Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century.” Winterthur Portfolio 49 (2015): 29–54. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John  W.  Harvey. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. Promey, Sally, and Shira Brisman. “Sensory Cultures: Material and Visual Religion Reconsidered.” In The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, edited by Philip Goff, 177–205. Blackwell Companions to Religion. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Promey, Sally M. “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety.” Material Religion 1 (March 2005): 10–46. Promey, Sally M. Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism. Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Rivett, Sarah. The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

316   Christopher Allison Robert, Dana L. “The Influence of American Missionary Women on the World Back Home.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 12 (2002): 59–89. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, or, the History of Photography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Syman, Stefanie. The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870. New York: Knopf, 2017. Winiarski, Douglas Leo. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

chapter 16

Sym bolic Thi ngs a n d Soci a l Per for m a nce Christmas Nativity Scenes in Late Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile Olaya Sanfuentes

Verses published in 1898 offer a glimpse of social performances associated with a ­particular kind of symbolic artifact in Santiago, Chile: miniature figures arranged to form nativity scenes during the Christmas season. The nativity scenes have begun Now that the sun is setting I can see the children on my street Practicing, rehearsing Their concerts with chicharra, Cagapatos, and a hundred other Instruments invented, One imagines, by a deaf person.1

These nativity figures, used for, and evocative of, a series of activities, reveal the eloquence of material culture as a contemporaneous agent, as a medium for interrelating material and immaterial dimensions, and as a source for contemporary historians. Nativity scenes are objects that bear special significance for religious communities. The performative rituals they enhance provide access to an immaterial realm of sacred historical allusion or re-enactment. Various elements come together to constitute a symbolic whole: the crèches, the ritual’s participants, and the late nineteenth-century newspapers that serve as records of these practices. The term performative invokes the theory that those who appear merely to witness an event participate in it actively no less than do those who take a lead in initiating that event.

318   Olaya Sanfuentes Newspapers are among the sources of descriptions of many late nineteenth-century Santiago nativity scenes.2 While some nativity figures survive in museums or private collections, others may be appreciated in a precious few extant photographs, as well as some paintings in private and public collections. An evaluation of this heterogeneous corpus reveals that some of the crèches were comprised of simple materials and were crafted and used by poor people who employed all their wit to create beautiful scenarios befitting the worship of Jesus Christ. At the same time, other objects of higher quality were used in monasteries, churches, and private homes. These higher quality pieces came from Quito, Ecuador, a renowned center of sculpture production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the exception of convent activities, all religious practices were public. The entire society participated in Christmas rituals. Christmas was a very special case in point, since it took place in springtime and was taken to signify the flowering of nature. Such celebrations were also a perfect opportunity for the whole community to share the experience in the public space. Various sources, both textual and visual, allow the painting of a picture of what this human group looked like. In relation to visual sources, some photographs and canvases provide information on popular characters that comprised society during this period. Most of these characters also appear in the nativity scenes as members of a secular society that kneel at the feet of the young Jesus to present their offerings and gifts. The community as a whole is also described in its practices through late nineteenth-century newspaper accounts.

Theoretical Framework Building on insights by dramatist Antonin Artaud, philosopher Jacques Rancière proposed social situations in terms of a “theater without spectators,” in which the attendees become participants instead of passive voyeurs. They are filled with emotion and passion, and restore to the community the ceremonial quality of the theater.3 This approach characterizes the field of performance studies. Art history and more recent trends in the history of material culture have provided some very useful methodologies for deciphering various and sundry aspects of artworks and objects that, in other times, were used on an everyday basis. Even in anthropology and archeology, there has been a focus on the physical and cultural trajectories of certain objects, explaining that the object’s value ultimately resides in the subject or user.4 The way people and material things are to be understood in relation to one another depends on how people conceptualize those things.5 This gives rise to the notion of agency,6 which necessarily takes on meaning and relevance in different ways in different cultural contexts. That the objects have agency and can influence the thoughts and actions of others is a reflection of what David Morgan argued when claiming that “the value of an object derives from the relation to those who use it and rely on it, to those for

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   319 whom the object is part of a system of production, circulation and use.”7 Morgan continues his argument by quoting the legacy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who stressed embodiment as its focus. The body interacts with objects, and in this way it inhabits the world and creates culture. Key concepts gleaned from the field of performance studies can take understanding yet further by focusing on certain theatrical and performative dimensions of the practices that accompany certain objects. The objects discussed in this chapter reveal agency but were also actors within the staging of Christmas. These objects and the actions of those who used them constitute historiographic sources. New trends in performance studies propose both theatrical activities and performative actions as a visible manifestation that reveals ways of doing that originated in the past. A style of doing things lurks behind the activities described here. The ritual is slowly resignified and has the ability to give us information about history and identity.8 The ritual described is capable of containing memories of other times, through gestures inherited and inserted in a collective memory. Each description of a ritual action is a potential source of memory of past eras, and we should regard those performances in this manner. In theater theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte’s words, “History is not construed as an accumulation of pasts, but rather as a succession of present moments from which those pasts project themselves.”9 Concretely, the objects that prompted this reflection are the nativity scenes used for the celebration of Christmas in Santiago during the nineteenth century. In fact, it was the nativity scenes themselves that gave rise to the emergence of a series of actions related to them. By researching other period sources that give us complementary information to understand exactly how Christmas was celebrated, the performative universe comes into focus in a much more eloquent way.

Description of the Objects The crèche, also known as a nativity scene, is a three-dimensional representation, on a smaller scale, of the founding event of Christianity: the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem in a manger or cavern. The origins of this motif are associated with the representations of Christmas that began with St. Francis of Assisi, though a concrete theological elaboration does not exist. To this end, and despite the fact that other events are alluded to and regarded as foundational, legend has it that St. Francis was the person who chose to celebrate Christmas Eve in 1223 in Greccio, Umbria, by placing an image of baby Jesus between those of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, accompanied by a live mule and ox. “He summoned his friars and the people close by, held mass in front of this nativity scene and sung the Epistles.”10 St. Bernard and St. Francis helped to change the focus on Christ’s dual human-divine nature. Before these two saints, worshippers had frequently focused on the more majestic aspects of Christ; with Bernard and Francis the child Jesus became an ideal figure for underscoring other virtues. As a result, a new theology emerged, as did new votive practices

320   Olaya Sanfuentes such as re-enactments or stagings of Christ’s birth. This opened the door to representations in the visual arts, in which Jesus began to appear as a typical child, both in two-dimensional formats such as paintings and prints, as well as three-dimensional presentations such as nativity scenes. My inventory of some of the nativity scenes in use during the nineteenth century that have survived to the present day, along with descriptions of others that appeared in newspapers and magazines, memoirs or popular songs, suggests that in Chile there were a number of nativity scenes of Ecuadorian origin, specifically from Quito. These objects made their way to Chile as a consequence of the significant industrialization process undergone by the Quito school of three-dimensional images. By the mid-eighteenth century, a golden age was in full swing, with Quito producing and exporting religious images on a large scale all over the American continent. Chile also benefited from this phenomenon, which resulted in the arrival of high-quality wood sculptures that clearly featured the characteristics of the Quito school. Figures comprising nativity scenes were predominant in these imports (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1.  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the central characters of nativity scenes. Historical photograph of Ecuadorian figures. Taken from the Photographic Archive of Universidad de Chile.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Chile experienced an influx of a number of Quito artists who had been adversely affected by the commercialization of the sculpture business in their home country and could not compete with the low prices sculptures were commanding at the time. In contrast, the situation in Chile was very favorable for them, as the demand for religious objects was high and unsatisfied until these artisans arrived. The only craftsmen of this sort in Chile at the time were of a far inferior level of culture and craft. Once settled in Chile, the sculptors from Quito offered their services through the local newspapers in cities like Santiago, Valparaíso, and Concepción, satisfying a market that demanded, among other things, characters for their nativity scenes. This is the provenance of some of the figures that are still extant.

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   321 There were also nativity scenes made of bone or Huamanga stone, and several were made of ceramic or clay and are catalogued as Chilean in origin. Some were preserved in boxes, urns, or bell jars. Finally, mention must be made of the legendary ceramics of the Clarisa (St. Clare) nuns, figurines of popular characters crafted within the convent walls at first and, later on, outside the cloister. These pieces were traditionally purchased on the evenings leading up to Christmas on Santiago’s central boulevard, the Alameda, where families would come to stroll and buy new characters for their nativity scenes (Figures  16.2 and 16.3). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the nativity scene figures could also be purchased at the many toy stores in the nation’s capital, such as the  one at the portal Fernández Concha, number 12, as was advertised in the ­newspapers of the day.11

Figure 16.2.  Stand at the Alameda boulevard selling little figures for Nativity Scenes. Domínguez Collection at Patrimonio Fotográfico.

The descriptions of the characters that comprised the nativity scenes are quite detailed: some include the three basic figures of the biblical tale (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph), who appear in the canonical gospels of Mark and Luke; but there are also those

322   Olaya Sanfuentes

Figure 16.3.  Stand at the Alameda boulevard selling little figures for Nativity Scenes, Domínguez Collection at Patrimonio Fotográfico.

that include the cow, the donkey, the shepherds, and the three wise men. These characters appear in a variety of iterations and characterizations, as a consequence of information gleaned from the apocryphal gospels.12 Finally, we find much richer and more imaginative compositions that reveal how local communities appropriated the biblical story and made it their own by incorporating elements from their own customs, idiosyncrasies, and historical moments. In this vein we may admire nativity scenes with Chilean horseback riders or huasos (cowboys) on horseback, llamas, and lambs. There is a nativity scene that includes a figure of St. Barbara with a cannon, and others featuring a central scene surrounded by a collection of smaller scenes recounting the life of Jesus. In 1878, El Curicano reported on a lovely nativity scene that featured “devout Franciscans with their little baskets for receiving alms; Dominican friars hearing the confessions of sanctimonious women; a St. Anthony preaching to the trout; black African women

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   323 removing bread from the oven; blind men playing guitar; presbyters celebrating mass and liberals hearing it.”13 Another important aspect to emerge from an examination of these types of nativity scenes and other cultural artifacts such as photographs, paintings, and engravings, as well as the popular songs that accompanied them in the late nineteenth century, is that they reflect a traditional, agrarian society. In this context, Roger Chartier’s ideas regarding the confluence of reality and certain forms of representation are enlightening.14 Representations also contribute to the creation of reality, so they have a dialectic relationship with society. Objects can represent reality, but they are not passive because they can also stimulate practices and attitudes toward them. There is a continuous space of relationships between reception and production in which both the material and the immaterial are important.15 Rurality and traditionalism dominate, first, in the prominence of the huaso in all the crèches so far mentioned, as well as in other cultural representations of the period. Also present are other popular characters, such as the cantoras and the arpistas, the female singers and harp players who participated in popular religious activities through their songs. There are also representations of women baking bread and selling mote, husked wheat. In popular nativity scenes, there is a profusion of baskets with fruits and flowers, which suggests that there were also many fruit and flower sellers wandering the streets during days of festivity. Photographic documentation exists of other popular characters such as the chocolatero and the aguatero, the chocolate seller and the water seller, of whom figures were probably created for the crèches.

Votive Practices around the Nativity Scene Great efforts involved in preparing the nativity scene, which should be borne in mind in order to properly describe the places where these characters were arranged in houses, convents, and the public spaces of local churches. People worked on their nativity scenes in the middle of the general preparations for the Christmas holidays, which were always characterized by the enthusiasm and devotion of the faithful who anxiously awaited the arrival of their baby Jesus. The yearly staging of nativity scenes was a source of great expectation and anticipation. In 1865, for example, by December 21, people in the city of San Felipe were already whispering that the nativity scene prepared by the brothers of the Sacred Heart would put all the others to shame.16 In the capital, the newspapers told of how the local matrons all hoped their nativity scenes would be the toast of the Christmas season and be remembered for years thereafter.17 All throughout the year, Santiago’s families and congregations would amass objects and ornaments for their nativity scenes, saving them in boxes and trunks that they would

324   Olaya Sanfuentes open with delicacy and care in mid-December. Days before Christmas Eve, wheat was harvested in small pots, and the tender shoots would be placed in the nativity scenes to adorn the mountains built especially for the occasion.18 Flowers were often added for special effect as well. The mountain was generally set up in the largest room of a family’s home, usually the living room (Figure 16.4). Sometimes, however, families would choose the room closest to the street so that passersby might view the scene through the window. These mountainous nativity scenes were created with boxes draped in canvas that was painted and glued to suggest the presence of caves and ridges, the kind where scenes from the Bible might have taken place. Lights and touches of sparkling materials were added as well.19 We also know that in other homes, hills were crafted out of cork and cardboard. The infant Jesus would be placed front and center of these compositions, in a manger or on a box, or else he would be simply removed from the bell jar in which he lay throughout the rest of the year. Snow would be simulated with powder, and colored

Figure 16.4.  Popular nativity scene from the beginning of the twentieth century. Photograph taken from the Photographic Archive of Universidad de Chile.

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   325 candles, toys, lead soldiers, pieces of marzipan, and other adornments would be added to dazzle the children. To complete the picture, a star wrapped in tinfoil would dangle from the ceiling. One crèche set up in a church consisted of a framework of wood beams covered with a brown fabric with greenish stains to suggest a mountain. In the farthest depths of a cave at the foothills of the mountains was the figure of a child sleeping on a pile of hay venerated by the Virgin Mary, Joseph, a donkey, and an ox, all fashioned out of cardboard. Little shepherds dressed in sheepskin “look on with curiosity.” Atop the cave fluttered a chorus of porcelain angels holding Chilean flags in their hands. Three wise men stood close by, mounted atop the most monstrous animals that might have been intended to be camels. The scene also featured a locomotive with several cars containing travelers dressed as English tourists. On the other side of the scene, atop little stick horses, were three Chilean huasos in festively colored capes and broad-brimmed straw hats, their horses equipped with saddles, saddle blankets, lariats, and spurs. A bit further down, there was a young lady playing piano; a tiny oven for baking empanadas; a dozen rag dolls; three woolen dogs; an elephant that could move its head; sheep climbing the hill; perfumed ceramics in the form of women with their hands on their hips; an army of lead soldiers set up in formation along battle lines; windmills with rope; clowns playing cymbals; and a thousand other objects and toys of all shapes and sizes.20 One famous nativity scene was that of Doña Liberata, which little children in their Sunday best would stop to admire. In addition to sharing the structure of mountain, cave, and baby Jesus atop a pile of hay, Liberata’s nativity scene featured little roads with processions of soldiers, Jews, clerics, and nuns in “a merry jumble.”21 The children were endlessly fascinated by how the cow and the donkey were able to move their necks and gaze at the little boy; how the shepherds knelt; and how Joseph rested upon a long handsaw. Those who took the time to gaze at this amazing spectacle experienced a whole range of feelings and expressed them in a variety of ways: The children often just stand there mesmerized, their mouths half open as they stare, rapt, studying all the details of the colorful troupe of followers before them. How they burst out in peals of joy and admiration, as they remark on what they see! How they try to press against those precious objects, to caress them with their hands, not content to just see them with their eyes.22

All of this, of course, under the watchful eye of Doña Liberata. Churches, too, had their preparations to think about. In the days leading up to Christmas, priests invited the faithful to pray the novena, which was also announced in the Santiago newspapers. On Christmas Eve, prayers were said at eleven-thirty at night, with a procession accompanied by the sounds of Christmas carols being sung to the melody of a harp. This would be followed by an adoration, and then the midnight mass. There, in the very center of the church, would be the nativity scene with the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and the beautiful, newborn Jesus resting on a pile of hay.23 In other places, the crèche would be placed to the side of the main

326   Olaya Sanfuentes altar, alongside the gate of the presbytery. In some convents, the songs were sung by young boys, in others by pious women.

Convents, churches, and family homes invited people to pass by and take in their respective nativity scenes. This was a social, public event. When the nativity scene was particularly spectacular, it might even be announced in the local press. This, for example, was the case of the great nativity scene assembled in a public salon for Christmas 1897. The montage was the work of Pedro Carlucci and Angel Armezzani, who had a huge assortment of elements to exhibit. The semicircular structure was packed with representations of the Holy Land. The nativity itself had seventy figurines brought from Rome, acquired at the workshops of such sculptors as Silvio Sbricoli, Gustavo Galvani, Ferdinando Busetti, Marco Carducci, and Domenico Rasetti. The pieces were between thirty and forty centimeters high, and were grouped in scenes: the birth of Jesus, the shepherds in the manger, Mary and Joseph resting in the manger, the three wise men from the Orient with their offerings and their adoration.24 In this public display of nativity scenes, there is one essential quality that speaks to their theatrical nature: the gesture of exhibiting these scenes in public is in itself theatrical. These, then, are the descriptions of the Christmastime preparations of the crèche. They reveal a series of exteriorizing practices, in which the spatial arrangement and the corporeal gestures of people in the presence of the object place the subject in a special relationship to it.

Viewing the Nativity Scene Unlike what goes on in contemporary theater, in which the spectator does not usually participate in what occurs onstage, the nineteenth-century faithful carried out many acts in front of nativity scenes, which made them actors in both everyday life as well as in the annals of art. The crèches had the power to make things happen, to set a dynamic in motion.25 In this sense, the “scenes” that took place around and in front of the crèches allowed participants to combine real and symbolic actions.26 The shared idea of contemplating the sacred story and being part of it through actual participation is a notion we believe was part of the mental world around this practice since it appeared in the Gospels and was reinforced through homilies at churches. It took form through different practices: offering fruits, eggs, flowers; singing; dancing; and making noise. It was as if Jesus was right there, with the viewers helping to partake in this colossal celebration. All those invited would arrive with offerings. Of the performative acts that regularly took place in those days, the presentation of the offering was one of the most significant. As a form of giving the very best of oneself, and hoping for some kind of material or

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   327 spiritual gratification from the divine, young and old alike approached the nativity scene with humility and devotion. There, they would kneel and, with genuine faith in the possible consequences of their action, deposit their gifts at the feet of the child. There are plenty of chronicles filled with detailed descriptions of this sort, attesting to the presentation of gifts such as hens, honey, and fruit and flowers in season, along with toys and the famous ceramics crafted by nuns. Among these pieces were figurines of horses, dogs, and lambs, all of them animals that played the role of worshipping the baby Jesus. One chronicler of the day describes how the local children placed their offerings at the foot of the crèche, where the first fruits of the season had begun to pile up. Figs, peaches, and plums coexisted with tender wheat and hen and partridge eggs.27 Others speak of fresh cheese, colored candles, and an endless list of offerings (Figure 16.5). To one side of the mountain that cradled the crèche, chairs were set up for the chorus, the harp, and the guitars. On the other side, the table was laid out with drinks and sweets

Figure 16.5.  Detail of a popular nativity scene from the beginning of the twentieth century. Photograph taken from the Photographic Archive of Universidad de Chile.

328   Olaya Sanfuentes made by the nuns. The doors and windows of local homes would be left open so that people passing by might catch a glimpse of this musical and visual feast. The faithful who gathered would pray the novena, which would last around twenty minutes. With harps and guitars, they would sing Christmas carols or hymns, and make offerings to the baby Jesus (Figure 16.6). Songs were written especially for the occasion, and the devout songwriter would often include himself in the verses he wrote to venerate Christ. “Vengo de Pichidegua galopando” (“I’ve come all the way from Pichidegua galloping on horseback”), “Vengo con mi comadre para verlo” (“I’ve come with my best friend to see you”), “Yo soy pobre y nada tengo” (“I’m poor and have nothing”). Then they would applaud, shake their noisemakers, blow whistles, and ring bells. Children would set off firecrackers and toss bottle rockets and flares. Faraway dogs would bark. In all, a great deal of noise. Then treats would be served: popular drinks such as aloja de culén (a spiced and sweetened local herb infusion), horchata made from almonds grown in the local gardens, and mulled wine, cherry sherbet, and sweets made by the St. Clare nuns, other flavors of sherbet, and ice cream made from snow. People from the street

Figure 16.6.  Arturo Gordon, Celebrating Christmas, c. 1920s–1930s. Photograph taken by the author of the painting at the exhibition Puro Chile, at Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda, Santiago, 2014.

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   329 would also partake in this revelry, singing, praying, applauding, whistling, and blowing their noisemakers, throwing flares and firecrackers, and occasionally listening to the words of the priest delivering his homily.

The Relationship between the Crèche and Its Spectators In this active and contemplative participation with the Christmas scene, the faithful would seem like the characters in the crèche: in fact, many of the characters that comprise the crèche are the same characters that might be seen every day in the city; the songs that were recited in front of the nativity scene were verses in which the faithful would speak about themselves; and the group of spectators as a whole would tend to resemble that busy composition of profane and religious figures. Adapting the ideas of Consuelo Morel, we might say that these theatrical activities are both nourished by culture and create culture at the same time.28 Each of these figurines is an autonomous world in itself, in that each represents a craft, a genre, an era, or a place that is personified in the historical moment of the birth of Jesus to pay homage to him with their presence. In the arrangement of the nativity scene, each character takes his or her place to worship the baby. In the same way, devotees in the nineteenth century would gather around the crèche to participate in the mystery of the nativity from the vantage point of their own age and with their own instruments and resources. Through this commemoration, both the faithful in action and the figures in the crèche—collections cultivated over time in family homes and community spaces—transform the nativity scene into a lived experience with the capacity to generate practices of participation in the Christmas ritual and the festivities surrounding it. It is worth noting that both the figures within the nativity scene among themselves, as well as the worshippers and the nativity ­figures, do not bond in eternal or universal terms. They come together only in that space, and on that most important day, which allows them to take part in the same theatricality. The heterogeneity of it all, contributed by the very diverse figures that share the space of the crèche, and the amalgam of people who interact in the rite, effectively enables the staying power of the ritual and allows it to grow infinitely over time. Each person can approach this space and participate with his or her gifts, talents, and general nature. The idea is that everyone, without exception, can be part of the divine mystery. The image of the world in miniature that is offered up by the crèche is an historical image.29 The belief in the historicity of the related event (the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem) allows the practices that continue to lend historicity to the phenomenon to go on infinitely. On the other hand, as the iconographic sources of the crèche are centuries old, they can interact constantly, even to the point of incorporating blatant anachronisms.30 And so the spectator comes to feel that this tale could easily take place in his own time, and that he could absolutely take part in it if that were the case. Society put itself onstage.31

330   Olaya Sanfuentes Likewise, what the crèche aims to commemorate is the birth of a poor child who, in his innocence and humility, captivates the attention and the emotion of a community. In turn, this inspires people to feel a kind of closeness, a sense of intimacy and trust. In their songs, the faithful speak to the child Jesus and the Virgin with tremendous familiarity and affection. The lack of a fixed structure is, then, a characteristic of the performative that the nativity scene practices also possess. Erika Fischer-Lichte emphasizes this aspect and adds that the group actions are the result of close contacts and temporal synchronizations.32 She argues that the dynamics that emerge from this kind of practice are related to ­autopoiesis.33 The descriptions enumerated earlier, regarding the dynamics that emerge among people, and between people and the nativity scenes, jibe perfectly with this hypothesis. The dynamics emerge in the corporeal co-presence of the different groups in their confrontation and interaction, which tends to be accompanied by feelings of empathy, suspense, and emotional involvement. The crèche is there for the faithful to contemplate. In one news report from 1878, the crèche is described as a silent book that serves as a visual model for how the world ought to work, in keeping with the values of humility and joy.34 Yet the topic and the way it is represented allow the spectator to experience more feelings and carry out more practices than is possible in an initial observation of the spectacle. In the first place, the spectator feels invited by the staging and theatricality of the represented scenario. The Christmastime news articles focus especially on this, recounting how the crèche occupies a prime role in the home: from its privileged location it emits a kind of magnetic attraction, making the spectator want to eat the fruit and smell the flowers, and the ­colors of the cherry make the eyes feel somehow renewed. The senses of the faithful spectator grow dizzy from the stimulation. Seduced, the spectator stops for a moment to move on to a phase of contemplation, which is a superior form of comprehension.35 And then, at one with the scene, some devotees revel in the feeling of being emotionally touched, while others feel the urge to intervene, to sing, to dance. The singers, male and female, intone their popular songs as they gaze upon the nativity scenes: Tonight the child is born/amid straw and ice; Who could dress you, lovely boy, in velvet!/At the manger in Bethlehem there are stars, sun and moon /The Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, and the baby boy in his crib/ . . . 36

Some housewives could not resist the temptation to recount to passersby the story of the characters in the crèche. One such matron, for example, explained the meaning of the figures of Abel and Cain in a dramatic tone of voice, specifying that Cain had killed Abel by firing a revolver.37 Others, in the presence of a St. Peter with keys in hand, but with a beard and a bald head, sang: “St. Peter, since he was bald/asked Christ for a strand of hair/ and Christ responded/That’s how I love you, without a hair [sic].”38 Some women would place a rope around the crèche and hang the infant Jesus’s clothes there, creating a vision of tiny shirts and diapers, the creation of which required a great deal of care and time.

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   331 It was the children, however, who carried out the most actions around the nativity scenes, running through the streets visiting houses and convents, comparing one nativity scene to another, going back and forth from one to the other, animatedly comparing and shouting their glee and admiration.39 The crèche, as such, is not a mere mise en scène nor a pure theatrical structure, but rather the starting point for a rendering that everyone could take part in, feeling that they might be able to influence the form of the evening’s spectacle. These spectators, and all those who participate in festivities around the nativity scene, are in some way  ­re-enacting, or reperforming the original event of the birth of Christ and the ­representations of the event that St. Francis of Assisi would establish in the thirteenth century.40 In this sense, the performance commemorates a foundational event.41 Adding more theatricality to the Christmastime practices, sources tell us that at all churches one might witness performances of autos sacramentales, allegorical religious plays. I have not found mention of specific pieces, despite repeated reports of their evolution. One Valparaíso newspaper, for example, mentions a “respectable matron” who, for Christmas in 1855, apparently composed an auto sacramental that was “quite good for performing on Christmas Day.”42 The Swedish traveler Carl Bladh makes mention of a popular representation in which a child plays the baby Jesus: The religious ceremonies and festivals are strange and exotic, and on Christmas Eve particularly, the celebration is rather grotesque. The churches are lit from early on and fill up with a motley assortment of people, among them a substantial number of children and older people who bring hens and pigs that they hit in order to make them cluck and shriek. Others blew whistles or horns, or made a racket with noisemakers. This terrible din, a reminder of the stable where the Savior was born, continued until after midnight. Then, a real boy was presented and the priest celebrated Mass, announcing the birth of Christ. The Mass ended with a lovely choir but the noise of the bells of those awful horns and whistles and noisemakers continued throughout the night in every neighborhood, all over the city.43

One newspaper mentions a procession in which locals play the roles of the three kings, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, but are unwilling to play the ox or the mule unless they are paid double. “If there is no other choice, they will use real oxen and mules.”44 Though these pieces remain untraced, I believe that these theatrical attitudes confirm a knowledge of and a familiarity with performative practices on the part of the local ­population. This familiarity is also suggested by the existence, in addition to autos sacramentales, of Christmas-themed social dramas and comedies in which the public engaged in animated dialogues with the characters depicted. Laughter and challenging banter would ensue in earnest.45 The religious authorities viewed these attitudes as moral affronts, but people defended them by arguing that they involved no dishonesty whatsoever, and that the townspeople needed new, simple, honest entertainment. These dramatized liturgies, to a certain degree, might be considered ritual acts that reinforce the society’s basic beliefs.46

332   Olaya Sanfuentes

Celebration and Ritual as Sources of Social Cohesion In addition to visiting the nativity scenes in churches and houses that opened their doors to the faithful in the nineteenth century, the residents of Santiago would stroll down the Alameda during the days close to Christmas. With no distinctions made between class, gender, or age, Santiago denizens would enjoy themselves while participating in a number of different activities in this promenade: buying articles for their own crèches, drinking sweet almond horchata from the roving vendors, buying flowers to offer young ladies, or just gazing at the other passersby. As one journalist noted in a newspaper article, “joy was written on people’s faces, a widespread sense of admiration.”47 In the same newspaper, another writer waxed even more eloquent, noting that everyone mixed and mingled with ease: the humble man in his poncho with the dandy in his tuxedo; the well-heeled lady with the washerwoman; the man in priest’s vestments with the man in the sable coat; the pious with the pretentious.48 Through both written and visual sources, it is clear that Christmas was a celebration that brought the people of Santiago together, a moment when differences of age and class fell to the wayside. All these manifestations helped to maintain the stability of the groups that could see, year in and year out, that they had a familiar script upon which they could act and in which they might also introduce new, and even spontaneous modalities or practices. In this sense, these performative actions functioned as agents promoting social cohesion by means of the theatricalization of the culture.49 The ritual constitutes a structure of facts, languages, and actions capable of containing and tolerating the frustration, pain, and mysteries of life, performing a kind of essential metabolic function. In nineteenth-century Chilean society, social and cultural differences were softened and controlled through these festive rituals that offered a very welcome respite from the difficulties of everyday life. The fact that the ecclesiastical authorities felt forced to resort to special regulations to control what they believed to be disorder and waywardness in the celebration of these holy days proves that in fact the people, through their actions, had taken possession of the celebration of this very beloved holiday. The entire celebration was a tremendous parade of those popular traditions that inverted the normal, routine-driven order of things and allowed people to let loose their deepest sentiments and passions—at least to a certain point. Such disruption, however, had a dark side: on the one hand, these practices allowed everyday people to show how they could appropriate religious liturgy for a period of time and within a sanctioned scenario, but on the other hand, they made themselves noticed by the ecclesiastical authorities who would then try to reestablish order and control. Some nineteenth-century synods announced that the faithful could indeed carry out performances permitted by the church, which is clear proof that the people themselves had appropriated the practices associated with the adoration. What could be more eloquent than the songs, sung in booming voices, to the baby Jesus, accompanied by the vocal imitations of birds and other animals?50 Or the ceremony described by another astonished traveler of the day, fascinated by the cannon shots and

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   333 firecrackers that reverberated through the air as the midnight mass took place?51 Or British naval officer Basil Hall’s description of his Christmas experience in Valparaíso: During the Christmas season, the city takes on a brilliant and lively quality; a huge number of townspeople are drawn by the festivities and, most particularly, the bullfights. On the afternoon of Christmas Day, which is the equivalent of our midsummer day, in the moments at which the moon dapples the port with its serene clarity, everywhere you went you could hear a bustling, noisy gaiety: here you might find a group of dancers, just over there a group of singers from the countryside crooning old popular romance songs to the strumming of a guitar, and through the multitudes drinking and socializing, riders on horseback would elicit one’s admiration of their mastery and beauty of their steeds. From one end of the city to the other, and all along the Almendral harbor, it was all motion and gaiety.52

The celebration in general and the admiration of nativity scenes in particular generated positive feelings that helped to establish a sensation of cohesion and hope among the faithful. Newspaper articles spoke of this widespread feeling of joy and peace that was almost tangible whenever worshippers stood gazing at a crèche. “We cannot help but confess that we have never walked away from a nativity scene without feeling stirred by the most generous of sentiments.”53

Conclusions Christmas was clearly an important event for the inhabitants of Santiago during the nineteenth century. “The capital festival of the city” was how the contemporary press described it. Along with the September 18 independence holiday, this was the most popular celebration of the year. “If there is something that moves these people, that inspires their enthusiasm, distracts them from their work and the monotony of everyday life, it is Christmas. Of all the celebrations that the church recognizes and celebrates as feast days, none is so powerfully influential as Christmas.”54 Performative practices helped to maintain the stability of groups that had a familiar script upon which they could act every year. In this sense, rituals at Christmastime worked as agents of social cohesion and gave people a chance to form and reshape their identities. It was during religious holidays—particularly Christmas—in which popular sociability was most actively exercised, when subjects might define and deploy their subsistence strategies.55 Each person and each group had the chance to be represented in the nativity scene and could act in front of the objects playing their own character. This brought feelings of belonging and made people feel like real actors within the foundational, historical event. Humble along with wise men participated both with their presence and their gifts. The crèches of the Christmas holiday season in Santiago eloquently reveal how symbolic use may be made of material objects. Insofar as the crèche has the ability to represent an ideal world in which everyone may find his or her niche, and generate participatory

334   Olaya Sanfuentes practices around it, the object defies its merely material condition and proposes an encounter with all that is not material.

Notes 1. “Ya empiezan los nacimientos/Ya desde el anochecer/A los chicos de mi calle/ Ensayando se les ve/Sus conciertos de chicharra/Cagapatos y otros cien/ Instrumentos inventados/ Por algún sordo tal vez” (Poncio Pilatos, The Nativity Scenes, December 17, 1898, No. 348, Santiago). 2. Patricio Bernedo, “Prensa e Iglesia en el Chile del siglo XIX. Usando las armas del adversario,” Cuaderno de Información 19 (2006). The print sources we use are primarily newspapers from the mid- and late nineteenth century. During this period, newspapers were the main medium for disseminating and debating ideas, and for this study we include both Catholic and secular newspapers. “Newspapers became the material support for participation.” 3. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (Buenos Aires: Manantial, TK): 9–29. 4. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 5. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, eds., Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006). 6. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 7. David Morgan, “Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Culture,” in Religion: Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 1–20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), http://religion. oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378e-32?rskey=HZXHMo&result=1. 8. Diana Taylor, “Performance e Historia,” Revista Teatro Apuntes (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), No. 131 (Santiago, 2009), 105–124. 9. Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance,” Modern Austrian Literature 42, no. 3 (2009): 1. 10. Santiago Alcolea i Gil, Carmelo García de Castro Márquez, and Emilio García de Castro Márquez, El Belén como expresión de un arte colectivo (Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2001). 11. El Chileno, December 12, 1889, Santiago. “[The store] has received a massive selection of toys and animal figures of all sizes and types. One nativity scene with twelve figures; a wide selection of dolls may be had with costume or without, at all prices; lovely furniture pieces, porcelain services for tea, dining and cooking. Superb discounts at all prices.” 12. The Gospel of James, from the fourth century, is the gospel that likely contains the most information about the space of the cave and the light that surrounded the infant Jesus when he was born. 13. El Curicano, December 31, 1878, No. 95, Curicó. 14. Roger Chartier, “La Construcción estética de la realidad. Vagabundos y pícaros en la Edad Moderna,” Tiempos Modernos. Revista Electrónica de Historia Moderna 3, no. 7 (2002). 15. Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency,” The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture, September 2012, http://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218714.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199218714-e-14. 16. El Doce de Febrero, December 21, 1865, No. 135, San Felipe. 17. El Charivari, December 23, 1867, No. 26, Santiago. The Gospel of Pseudo Matthew abounded in details of the cave, the light, and the nativity itself. The Armenian infant gospel tells the tale of the voyage of the three kings and their arrival in Jerusalem.

Symbolic Things and Social Performance   335 18. Armando Moock, Mi viejo Santiago. Chile de ayer y de hoy (Buenos Aires: Macagno, Carrasco y Landa Editores, 1941), 30. 19. Oreste Plath, Baraja de Chile (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1946), 101. 20. El Chileno, December 25, 1897, Santiago. 21. El Pueblo, January 7, 1898, No. 332, Santiago. 22. El Pueblo, January 7, 1898, No. 332, Santiago. 23. El recreo. Periódico Infantil, December 15, 1891, No. 3. 24. El Pueblo, December 17, 1897, Santiago. 25. Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance,” Modern Austrian Literature 42, no. 3 (2009). According to John  L.  Austin, this would be the essence of the performative: John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 26. I owe these ideas to Sarah Carter: personal communication during the workshop for this Handbook at the Bard Gaduate Center, New York, May 2014. 27. El Chileno, December 25, 1897. 28. Consuelo Morel Montes, “Teatro, experiencia humana y religiosidad,” Apuntes 111 (1996). 29. Giorgio Agamben and Adriana Hidalgo, eds., Infancia e Historia. Destrucción de la experiencia y origen de la historia (Buenos Aires, 2007), 189. 30. El Estandarte Católico, December 24, 1877, Santiago. “The most blatant anachronisms only serve [to] allow the spirit the expansiveness it needs: critics retreat, disarmed, in the presence of that ardent faith and that simple virtue, so free of pretension.” 31. Oscar Cornago Bernal, “La teatralidad como paradigma de la Modernidad: Una perspectiva de análisis comparado de los sistemas estéticos en el siglo XX,” Hispanic Research Journal 6 (2005): 159. 32. Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance,” 1. 33. Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance,” 3. 34. El Mensajero del Pueblo (1870–1885) (December 21, 1878). 35. Arnaldo Pinto Cardoso, “Navidad lusitana,” Revista FMR 75 (December–January 2004): 20. 36. El Estandarte Católico, December 24, 1875, No. 439, Santiago: “Esta noche nace el niño/ entre la paja y el hielo; Quien pudiera niño hermoso, vestirte de terciopelo!/En el portal de Belén hay estrellas, sol y luna/La Virgen y san José y el niño que está en su cuna/ . . . ” 37. El Estandarte Católico, December 24, 1877, Santiago. 38. El Estandarte Católico, December 24, 1877, Santiago: “San Pedro como era calvo/a Cristo le pidió un pelo/y Cristo le respondió/Así pelao (sic) te quiero.” 39. El Pueblo, January 7, 1898, No. 332, Santiago. 40. The earliest popular representations of the birth of Christ may have taken place in the ninth century at certain French and Swiss monasteries. In the beginning they were brief texts that were inserted into the liturgical celebration; as time went by, people began composing dialogic texts, which are known as liturgical dramas. Slowly, sung dialogues were incorporated as well, taken from popular tradition and the apocryphal gospels. The theatrical representations coincided stylistically with the visual representations of the day. The author adds that people were crafting visual recreations of the birth of Christ before St. Francis’s day in certain parts of Italy. Nevertheless, the propagation of these scenarios set in Bethlehem is attributed to the Franciscans. 41. Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance,” 7. 42. El Diario, December 20, 1855, No. 1408, Valparaíso. 43. Carl Bladh, República de Chile, 1821–1828 (Santiago: Universitaria, 1951), 54–55.

336   Olaya Sanfuentes 44. Los Tiempos (1877–1882), January 3, 1879, No. 312, Santiago. 45. Vicente Grez, La Vida Santiaguina (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1968), 98. 46. Antonio Biedma Tordesillas, “La teatralidad como determinante cultural: ¿una constante histórica?” Boletín Militares Carlo, No. 16 (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Asociado UNED, 1998), 122. 47. El Ferrocarril (1855–1911), December 25, 1858, Santiago. 48. El Ferrocarril (1855–1911), December 27, 1859, Santiago. 49. Biedma Tordesillas, “La teatralidad,” 122. 50. Rafael Valentín Valdivieso, Boletín eclesiástico o sea colección de edictos, estatutos i decretos de los prelados del Arzobispado de Santiago de Chile (Santiago: Imprenta de la Opinión, 1861), Vol. I: 223–224. 51. Eduard Poepping, Un testigo de la alborada de Chile (1826–1829) (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1960): 276. 52. Basil Hall, Excerpt from Un diario de viaje a Chile, Perú y México en los años de 1820, 1821 y 1822 (Santiago: Universitaria, 1906), 7–8. 53. El Estandarte Católico (1874–1890), December 24, 1875. 54. El Diario, Valparaíso. “La Pascua, El Pueblo, La Noche Buena,” December 26, 1853. 55. Igor Goicovic Donoso, “Sociabilidad y mecanismos de control social en el espacio aldeano decimonónico: Illapel, 1840–1870,” in Historias Urbanas. Homenaje a Armando de Ramón, ed. Jaime Valenzuela (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile), 190.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, and Liz Heron. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso, 1993. Alcolea i Gil, Santiago, Carmelo García de Castro Márquez, and Emilio García de Castro Márquez. El Belén como expresión de un arte colectivo. Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Boxall, Ian. “Luke’s Nativity Story: A Narrative Reading.” In New Perspectives on the Nativity, edited by Jeremy Corley, 23–36. London: T. & T. Clark International, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “La Construcción estética de la realidad. Vagabundos y pícaros en la Edad Moderna.” Tiempos Modernos. Revista Electrónica de Historia Moderna 3, no. 7 (2002): 1–15. Cornago Bernal, Óscar. “La teatralidad como paradigma de la Modernidad: Una perspectiva de análisis comparado de los sistemas estéticos en el siglo XX.” Hispanic Research Journal 6 (2005): 155–170. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Culture as Performance.” Modern Austrian Literature 42 (2009): 1–10. Gertsman, Elina, ed. Visualizing Medieval Performance. Perspectives, Histories, Contexts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Morgan, David. “Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Culture.” In Religion: Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 1–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015). http://religion. oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378e-32?rskey=HZXHMo&result=1 Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2006. Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Press, 1986. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theater. New York: Performing Arts Journal Press, 1982.

chapter 17

Her itage R eligion a n d the Mor mons Colleen M c Dannell

In January 2010, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened a historic site in San Diego, California, to commemorate the achievements of the Mormon Battalion’s 1846 trek across the country. The site sits on the edge of “Old Town,” is staffed by church missionaries, and is open until 9:00 p.m. every day of the week.1 The Mormon Battalion Historic Site contains multiple rooms where videos depict the struggles of pioneer Latter-day Saints, and missionary docents dressed in nineteenth-century clothing interact with both visitors and the people in the films. A limited number of historic artifacts are displayed in a small museum-like area, and fidgety children can go outside to pan for “gold” in a “stream.” In addition to visits by tourists and Latter-day Saint church groups, thousands of fourth graders have also heard the story of how in the nineteenth century the Mormons marched to California. The site ranks high on TripAdvisor’s list of “Things to Do in San Diego.” Even considering the unusually large number of compliments on TripAdvisor from residents of Utah, families from around the world comment on the entertaining and informative character of the site. The site commemorates the activities of the Mormon Battalion, the only American military unit recruited exclusively from members of one religious community. In July of 1846, a year before the Latter-day Saints arrived in Utah, the United States Army assembled approximately five hundred Mormon men to fight against the Republic of Mexico. As a part of its westward expansion, the United States had provoked a war against its southern neighbor. Not having much of a standing Army and no draft, the military was scrambling to find soldiers to fight in the southwest. Consequently, the Army permitted the recruited Mormon men to take some family members, and so approximately thirty women and fifty children accompanied the soldiers, although most noncombatants would go only as far as Santa Fe, New Mexico.2 Although the Mexican-American War was at times brutal, during their 2,000-mile march from Iowa to California, the Mormons met no enemy and did no fighting. By the time they arrived in San Diego at the end of January of 1847, the battle for Alta California

338   Colleen McDannell was over. This disputed land of the southwest became the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. The Mormon soldiers stayed only in southern California for about six months and then most left the Army. A few men returned to their families in the Midwest, but most traveled up the coast working at odd jobs. They then moved on to Salt Lake City to join the newly arrived Latter-day Saint community. Wrestling the American West from Mexico and the subsequent Mexican-American War is an unfamiliar part of American history. While scholars have at various times seen it as a fortuitous expansion or an unfortunate example of US imperialism, no historian has understood the Mexican-American War as key in the development of American religious history. For Latter-day Saints, however, the recitation of the past exploits of their ancestors, such as their participation in the Mexican-American War, holds particular meaning. For over a hundred years, Mormons have used material culture to build physical reminders of their history in order to reinforce a continually changing Mormon identity. Reciting history, for Mormons, serves a religious function not unlike a ritual does.3 Critical to constructing Latter-day Saint history is the use and production of material culture. The success of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in San Diego is more than a physical statement of Mormon belief. Latter-day Saints also participate in a national and nonreligious cultural phenomenon: the heritage industry. Rather than simply articulating Mormon history, the Mormon Battalion Historic Site reinforces general notions of what constitutes acceptable heritage in contemporary America. Consequently, we should understand the Mormon Battalion Historic Site not as a glimpse into America’s past— something meant to teach a history lesson—but more as a key to unlocking what counts as fundamentally meaningful in the present. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site is an example of “heritage religion,” which may be defined as a set of generic religious beliefs, cast into the past, and translated into media and material culture. Secular “heritage” and traditional religion can merge because each shares a similar understanding of time, mutually reinforcing each other in modern society. Scholars struggle to understand the difference (if there is one) between heritage and history. However, what is less recognized is how faith communities use the material culture of the past to make sense out of their present and craft an agenda for the future. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site fully participates in the leisure wonder that is San Diego. Every year 31 million tourists spend more than $7.5 billion in this southern California county.4 Visitors outnumber residents ten to one. The site sits on the edge of Old Town, a state-supported historical park founded in 1968. As a tourist destination, Old Town actually began in the late nineteenth century, when San Diego boosters wanted to draw visitors away from San Francisco and Los Angeles and foster regional identity. Since San Diego had few buildings dating from the founding of the city, they decided to link the existing crumbling ruins to the romantic homes described in Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884). Ramona was a vastly popular tale that romanticized life in colonial Spanish California. In 1907, one entrepreneur remodeled one house in Old Town to resemble the home where the novel’s ill-fated couple were married.5 Tourists arrived and more homes were renovated. By 1971, developers added the collection

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   339 of restored buildings to the National Register of Historic Places. In a region filled with leisure activities, Old Town was the most visited state park in California in 2005 and 2006.6 According to its publicity materials, Old Town “presents the opportunity to experience the history of early San Diego by providing a connection to the past.”7 In addition to five renovated adobe buildings, the park includes reconstructed museums, retail shops, and restaurants. Just up the hill from the state historic park and immediately adjacent to the Mormon Battalion Historic Site sits Heritage Park Victorian Village. The success of the state park motivated a private company to purchase Victorian homes scheduled for demolition and reassemble them around a central green. At the top of the green they placed the first Jewish synagogue erected in San Diego, Temple Beth Israel. Built in 1889 by Reform Jews, the synagogue was originally located in downtown San Diego. Since its relocation, it no longer has a religious function. Tourists visit the interior, and the space is rented out for weddings and parties. Directly across the green from the former synagogue sits the Mormon Battalion Historic Site. The square mile of material culture that surrounds the Mormon Battalion Historic Site is a jumble of the real and the fake. Some buildings and objects are restored, others are replicas but hew to the historical, and others are fanciful fabrications of the past. At every point the area conflates categories: state-run public history museums sit next to privately owned restaurants; a transported Jewish synagogue directs attention across a New England green; historical re-enactors and sales clerks all dress like pioneers. And so it should come as no surprise that Mormon missionaries wear period clothes that have been made for them and provide tours through a building that looks vaguely like a colonial California mission. It is heritage, and not pristine history, that surrounds this site. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site is an example of how material culture is used to secure the “heritage industry,” a term coined in 1987 by Robert Hewison.8 Hewison elaborated on the ideas of social critic Theodor Adorno, who during the 1940s believed that a “cultural industry” was promoting “mass deception” among unsuspecting consumers in order to promote a set of goods and values.9 During the eighties, Hewison had observed both the decline of British manufacturing and the withdrawal of governmental support for museums and historical institutions. Under the privatizing impact of Margaret Thatcher, closed factories remade themselves as “living museums.” “Instead of manufacturing goods,” Hewison wrote, “we are manufacturing heritage.”10 Unlike Americans, who preferred the neutral term “public history,” British historians sought to stress the intimate connection between postmodern capitalism and what they understood to be history “processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, or local pride” into a commodity.11 In order to sell something, heritage producers selectively re-created and reinterpreted the past based on contemporary values that they believed should be passed on to the present generation.12 Heritage, however, is not simply “passed on.” Heritage must be consciously produced. The material culture of heritage is not merely “preserved”; it must be made. While in the 1980s there was a global uptick in the creation of private museums and historical

340   Colleen McDannell re-enactments, by the new millennium people were producing heritage through every form of staged entertainment, media, consumer object, and leisure pursuit. Indeed, by  1994 a whole television network, the History Channel, was inaugurated in the United States. Heritage itself does not have a particular political agenda. It can reflect a con­serv­a­tive orientation by stressing the importance of preserving tradition or a progressive perspective by underscoring a democratized history that pays particular attention to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Under the influence of democratic heritage production, we have learned about the lives of servants, slaves, the mothers of large households, and the fathers who labor with little recognition of their toil.13 The Mormon Battalion Historic Site participates in the heritage industry of Old Town San Diego, but this is only the latest expression of its commemoration. No one knows where the Mormon Battalion was stationed when it arrived in California, so there are no ruins of an existing building to renovate and only a very few material objects owned by members of the Battalion have been preserved. While the material culture is thin, the desire of Latter-day Saints to acknowledge this historical expedition has been strong. In Utah, an offshoot of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers (not unlike the Daughters of the American Revolution) formed the Daughters of the Mormon Battalion. In 1905, they started to raise funds for what they called a “patriotic shrine” commemorating the event to be located in Salt Lake City. It took ten years for them to obtain $1,000 from the Utah State legislature. Mormon farmers, not easily separated from their money, showed little interest in monuments and gave only sporadically. In 1919, B. H. Roberts published his history of the Battalion, which was then used as a fundraising tool. Finally a granite sculpture was dedicated in 1927 on the state capitol grounds. A newspaper reporter described the monument as representing the spirit of Columbia inspiring a Mormon Battalion soldier while “an Indian woman and her child [disappear] from the scene with sullen resentment at the prospects of development of the great and wealthy west.”14 The monument was to be a way for Mormons, often portrayed as disreputable polygamists, to assert their contribution in settling the American West. By the end of the nineteenth century, some people in the United States began to use history as a way of articulating what it meant to be a particular type of “American.” Progressive Era community boosters became increasingly worried about the multicultural, multireligious country that was being created through immigration. By honoring great white men and their deeds, patriotism could physically be erected, preserved, and protected through material culture.15 Monuments, parades, pageants, and heritage associations became popular. Women in particular took up the cause of preserving elements of the history of their ancestors. Latter-day Saint women were a part of this Progressive Era impulse. As Latter-day Saints made converts in other parts of the West, they wanted it known that California—in addition to Utah—held a special place in Mormon history. In the 1960s, San Diego Mormons purchased an old medical building and reconditioned it to serve as a site to commemorate the Mormon Battalion. Not unlike other local history museums, the Mormon Battalion site contained objects laid out in display cases and was staffed by volunteers. This first site received no Church funding and so its ability to

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   341 purchase or make appropriate material culture was limited. Such would be the case at most Mormon sites until history became a Church priority in the late 1990s. In 1995, a new Latter-day Saint president eased the tensions that had developed between professional historians and the more conservative members of the church hierarchy. President Gordon B. Hinckley was more open to how history could galvanize religious commitment, and he encouraged Latter-day Saints to explore a variety of ways to understand the past. Mormon leaders began to see how history could take on a variety of shapes and speak to many different audiences. A flurry of pioneer re-enactments took place to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1847 arrival of the Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake valley, and Church leaders saw how positively families responded to those celebrations. At the same time the Church also launched a long-term scholarly effort to meticulously edit the papers of Joseph Smith. Scholarship once considered a threat to belief became more acceptable. Church authorities were willing to invest money in both preserving material culture and in creating it. Consequently, at some point the corporation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints assumed full responsibility for the San Diego site and made the financial commitment to bring its material culture up to modern standards.16 They tore the old museum down to its foundation. What they built resembled a California Spanish fort or perhaps a colonial mission. Masonry was applied to make it look like the adobe was chipping to reveal bricks. A covered wagon sits outside, and families are invited to sit on it to have their pictures taken. Any visitor not looking carefully might think that she has simply wandered onto another renovated building in Old Town. The material culture made for the Mormon Battalion Historic Site is largely a contrivance located in the midst of other, very similar, contrivances of material culture. Shaped by the concerns of heritage, their relation to “real” history is complicated. Upon entering the site, visitors soon realize that this is a “museum” run by a religious organization. Older men and women, dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, sit at a front desk and cheerfully welcome the visitors as they enter. These senior missionaries ask the guests to assemble in a small orientation room. A pair of young, female, “sister” missionaries then begin a well-rehearsed, thirty-five-minute tour. Standing next to a picture of Jesus and in front of a series of vintage “photographs,” the women explain that we are going to “journey back in time to 1846.”17 “We are,” the missionaries tell us, “going to see how (by relying on faith in Jesus Christ) ordinary men, women, and children accomplished an extraordinary task.” As we visitors wonder why they would do that, suddenly, one of the pictures “sneezes.” Then another begins to sing. “Soldiers!” one of the animated portraits shouts, “pictures don’t talk.” The others respond: “Or sing, or shout, or sneeze!” Another character warns that if they all keep talking the visitors will not be able to concentrate on the story they are about to tell. Within a few minutes of sitting down, children and their parents are paying attention. This is not boring history; this is a story told with technological sophistication and wit. There is nothing cheesy or amateurish about the multimedia. The sister missionaries are not simply going to talk about Jesus; they are going to interact both with the audience and with the filmed actors. These actors play historical characters who, like the

342   Colleen McDannell visitors, are men and women; children and adults; funny and serious. This is a past world interacting with the present world; interacting with a virtual world. As with other producers of heritage, Mormons bring the past to life through multimedia installations—a particular form of material culture—that engage the senses and stress the importance of having a personal connection with the past. While non-Mormons might be struck by the sophisticated material culture made for the Mormon Battalion Historic Site, Latter-day Saints are familiar with such efforts to stimulate religious commitment among members. Just as the pioneer re-enactments of 1997 brought families together to “experience” their Mormon past, historic sites employ both sophisticated archeological methods and creative entertainment that actively engage Latter-day Saint families. The Mormon Battalion center is one of twenty-two such historic sites.18 The Church’s renovation of the city of Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi River, for instance, utilizes material culture—both original and produced— to create a seamless experience of the past.19 In “old Nauvoo,” visitors can explore more than forty historic sites, including homes, shops, and cultural halls built in the 1840s. Missionaries act as tour guides, and college-age volunteers put on musical presentations and puppet shows. During the Nauvoo Pageant, a cast and crew of 1,100 volunteers bring the history of early Mormonism to life through their costumes and stage settings. Each summer thousands of Latter-day Saint families wander through the historic buildings, visit the cemetery, and enjoy fast-paced pageants. The production, maintenance, and experiencing of historic sites are not the only ways that Latter-day Saints connect with their past. In addition to the Nauvoo Pageant, Church monies fund other pageants that are spectacles of song and dance, often of a historical nature.20 Unlike many Americans who know little about their ancestors, Mormons are sophisticated genealogists. They are expected to research their own family history in preparation for temple rituals. Latter-day Saints believe that by conducting ceremonies in the sacred spaces of the temple, they enable their dead to progress toward divinity. The Church History Department organizes archives, creates online history articles, funds documentary histories, and displays Latter-day Saint material culture in its library. The Department’s Global Support and Training Team is charged with acquiring, preserving, and making available church history records of Latter-day Saints around the world. If we widen our gaze from church-funded activities, we see faithful Latterday Saints penning historical novels and directing inspirational frontier films.21 Entrepreneurs start heritage tour companies and manage rental property in Nauvoo.22 Parents become intimately familiar with the material culture of the nineteenth century as they dress their children in pioneer garb and show teens how to pull handcarts.23 No other American religious community goes to such extremes to use material culture to represent its past to its members and to the public. To call Mormon engagement with history an “obsession” is not an overstatement. In most of the other Latter-day Saint historic sites, original material culture dating from the nineteenth century takes a prominent place. This is not the case in San Diego. Here, it is technology that must create a past. Once on the tour, “sister” missionaries direct the visitors into a room where everyone sits on fake logs and watches the story

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   343 unfold. On the sides of three tents, movies are projected simultaneously and seamlessly. Sound surrounds the visitors. The narrator is one of the characters from the talking photographs, handsome seventeen-year-old Zemira Palmer.24 He quickly tells the story of the Mormons of Nauvoo, Illinois, who built homes, mills, stores, and a temple but who had neighbors “who feared their growing economic and political power.” With their prophet dead, they are forced to leave their homes and eventually set up camps in southwestern Iowa where they could “live in peace and worship God.” The Mormons intend to keep heading west, but they lack the funds for the journey. “Despite the difficult circumstances,” Zemira tells the visitors, “we chose to be happy.” At this point, Zemira transitions from being a third-person narrator to a character in the drama. He races to finish washing the dinner dishes before going to play his fiddle at a dance. Visitors then watch as an army captain attempts to recruit Mormon men to form a battalion of soldiers to fight in the Mexican-American war. The men show no interest until their leader, Brigham Young, convinces them “the Lord’s hand is in this” and that “the Lord will afford you constant direction.” The soldiers’ families will be taken care of and their pay will help finance the migration west.25 The story ends with a celebratory party of music and dancing.26 The sister missionaries clap along, encouraging the visitors to do the same. Not surprisingly, the film provides little historical context for understanding why the Mormons are tormented by their neighbors, why the federal government would trust them as soldiers, or why Americans would be fighting Mexicans in the first place. Indeed, I heard visitors at the end of the tour comment that they never heard this story about the Civil War. There is no mention of Manifest Destiny or why the Latter-day Saints wanted to gather in the West. Visitors are presented only a scant history of the Mormons and nothing about the United States of the 1840s. The evasion of historical context is intentional. Geographer Michael Madsen has explained that since 1995 there has been a shift in the character of Mormon historic sites.27 Prior to that date, sites presented an array of nineteenth-century material culture and linked it to the specifics of Mormon history, especially the history of Joseph Smith. The intention was to explain to non-Mormons the story of the Mormons. It turned out, however, that most of the visitors to the historic sites were Mormons. Under the influence of President Gordon  B.  Hinckley, sites were increasingly transformed into “sacred spaces.”28 Hinckley, for instance, directed the renovation of the Nauvoo temple and the construction of a new temple near the Sacred Grove.29 Whereas architectural restorers were paying close attention to the historicity of the material culture, interpreters designed larger, spiritual themes for each site. Church historian Susan Easton Black explained to me that her goal in interpreting various buildings in Nauvoo was “not to leave visitors in the nineteenth century” where they might learn how a butter churn worked but not why the site was important religiously. “It’s not Williamsburg,” she explained, referring to the eighteenth-century Virginia historic site.30 Tours that once had been driven by historical objects or Mormon history were rewritten to stress eternal, religious principles. Heritage took precedence over history. A different, contemporary, material culture came to the fore displacing the earlier emphasis on material things from the past.

344   Colleen McDannell By the late 1990s, historic site handbooks made it quite clear that buildings could tell many “stories”—including ones that might take material culture, political history, or even theology more seriously. However, once Latter-day Saint leaders in Salt Lake City determined a set of key spiritual messages, all other stories were to be “sidelights.” Missionaries are warned to “Never pass along any information or story which you learn from visitors or a fellow missionary.”31 While fears still linger that missionaries will say something incorrect about history, what is more critical is that they stay on-point regarding the spiritual messages the site is supposed to convey. Consequently, the lack of material culture dating to the 1846 trek and the absence of a specific place relevant to the Battalion did not deter the Church from investing in this San Diego site. Likewise, the fact that many visitors are not Latter-day Saints and so are not looking to experience sacred space is not a problem.32 The key messages established for the Mormon Battalion Historic Site are values that both Saints and nonmembers would find uncontroversial: faith, sacrifice, and service.33 The goal of the historic site is to express these values through telling the story of the Battalion with multimedia and material culture—a material culture of the present, such as “talking photographs,” videos, and fake logs. Both missionaries and directors told me that this site was different from Nauvoo and Palmyra because it focused on history and not on proselytizing. By “history,” they meant a story of the past that contained eternal truths. Because the values of faith, sacrifice, and service are not unique to Mormonism, visitors would not perceive the site as being religious. “History” that contains “eternal truths” is better understood as heritage, rather than history. Professional historians see the past as “a foreign country,” which is fundamentally different from our own. They conceive history as the study of the process of how things change. On the other hand, the practitioners of heritage believe that “they’re a lot like us.”34 Those who prefer heritage assume that the past is transitive, flexible, and layered. The past echoes into the present and the future.35 Much of our engagement with the American Civil War may be understood as heritage. After studying Civil War re-enactors, performance scholar Rebecca Schneider concluded that her subjects understood the past as “a future direction in which one can travel.”36 Such Americans create intimate relationships with those long dead by linking contemporary identities with the past. Heritage rejects the museum model of history: that is, that history is a collection of dead things.37 Broadly speaking, the roles played by material culture in history and in heritage, respectively, are quite different. Heritage sanctions the use of material culture in less rigorous ways than would be acceptable to professional historians. In the material culture of heritage, the identity of any given thing is the same, in essence, in the present as it was in the past. The fact that an object or building actually existed long ago, is irrelevant. Authenticity comes from how people experience the object or space, not from its actual age. In the world of heritage, an interesting object conveys a message in a more intense way than an old one. Consequently, replicas and new media are employed to vividly connect people to an eternal present. Such presently produced things can freely substitute, replace, or even displace those things that have survived over time, serving as traces of the past.

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   345 Thus, historians employed by universities see the past in ways different from those who do historic re-enactment, write historical novels, or even develop historic sites. The producers and consumers of heritage challenge the linear trajectory of a changing time articulated by academic historians. Such historians would insist that heritage is not ­history. “Time moves forward, not backward,” writes Harvard historian Jill Lepore. “Chronology is like gravity. Nothing falls up. We cannot go back to the eighteenth ­century, and the Founding Fathers are not, in fact, here with us today.”38 The practitioners of heritage challenge this assumption of the linear nature of history. By insisting that time is fluid, heritage shares many of the functions of a religious orientation. Many religious people believe they can return to powerful, even sacred, moments in time.39 Religious people believe that some values are eternal and exist in the past, present, and future. Like heritage, religion assumes the fluidity of time and place. For religious people, chronology actually can “fall up” and the founders are, in fact, here with us today. In heritage religion, quotidian human understanding, religious belief, and ritual practice all support the idea that the past reoccurs. When religious people use their past ritualistically to inculcate values and solidify beliefs, they make even fewer compromises than public historians do. For religious people, there is an intimate connection between heritage and religion. The past is full of meaning, and it behooves us to pay close attention to its messages. It should not surprise us that American religious history has entered the world of heritage production. The Latter-day Saints, however, have become masters in the contemporary making of the material culture of the past. Heritage material culture speaks to the religious sensibilities of the Latter-day Saints, but they also know that Americans in general are especially avid and appreciative consumers of heritage. When US historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen surveyed 1,500 adults on their feelings about the past, they found that people loved looking at old photographs, talking to their relatives about the bygone days, thinking about biblical history, and watching movies about past events. Americans liked historical material culture that sparked memory and sentiment. What Americans hated, it turned out, was studying history in school. Despite decades of curriculum reform, those polled felt that history classes were shaped by remote bureaucrats, covered irrelevant subjects, featured mindless memorization and regurgitation, and were—in a word—boring.40 Rosenzweig and Thelen concluded that Americans did care about the past.41 They just wanted the past to be approached in ways different from what they received from teachers and professors. Americans wanted heritage. The material culture made for the Mormon Battalion Historic Site helps transform history into heritage. In doing so, the beliefs and practices of a community are acknowledged but not elaborated on. The movies projected at the site show Zemira and his compatriots praying and singing hymns. They discuss how Brigham Young promised that if they were true and faithful they would not have to fight the Mexicans. “We follow the prophet’s council,” Zemira explains, “And I have to believe we’ll be blessed for it.” Throughout the film the characters refer to “the Lord,” a common Latter-day Saint term but one easily taken to be a generic reference to God. To follow “the Lord,” to listen to revered leaders, to be rewarded for faithfulness, these are religious practices but they are

346   Colleen McDannell vague enough to resonate with most visitors. The material culture is not explicitly Mormon but rather supports the general values of religious heritage. A set of general values—key messages of faith, sacrifice, and service—are laid out in the next room the visitors enter, the outfitting room at Fort Leavenworth. Here visitors interact not only with the sister missionaries and filmed characters that appear at a ­window but also with replicas of objects carried by the Battalion members. To illustrate the sacrifice the Mormons endured, visitors handle small backpacks and consider the hardtack they had to eat. A volunteer from the touring visitors is dressed by a Sister Missionary in a scabbard belt, scabbard, waist belt, waist belt plate, and hat. She then hands a musket to the visitor, who typically comments about how heavy it is. Family and friends often take pictures of the “soldier.” To counterbalance the focus on war, missionaries explain that a Bible, Book of Mormon, and a journal also had to be carried. The material culture of war engages the visitors, but the religious objects return the viewers’ attention to what makes the Battalion unique. By holding, touching, and wearing—and watching others hold, touch, and wear— visitors believe they are entering the world of a mid-nineteenth-century soldier. Material culture that engages the senses, rather than interpretation or elaborations on the historical context, entertains the visitors. Replicas evoke an eternal present, eliding the distinction between the present and the past, effacing all but superficial differences. Though educational research tells public historians that their audiences need to be sensually engaged, Latter-day Saints in particular value activity, keeping busy, and enlivening their faith through practice. Faith without action, they preach, is ultimately dead. The outfitting room is designed to shrink the distance between past and present by activating the visitor’s senses through engaging with realistic objects. Visitors imaginatively enter into a past world via holding the musket. No effort is made to explain whether or not the musket is a reproduction or an authentic piece of material culture that dates from the period. They trust that the missionaries are telling them the truth when they say, “This is what they carried.” Sophisticated computer-driven media that is professionally designed and then maintained remotely from Salt Lake City has already heightened the experience of realism. Media produces visual facts, and the division between something that is real and something that is realistic is blurred. What is critical is what the presentation does with the object, not what the object is. The outfitting room best captures the attention of those elementary school students who visit on field trips. As many as 11,000 fourth graders have participated in Old Town historic programs each year.42 At one point, approximately 20 percent of the visitors to the Mormon Battalion Historic Site were San Diego children spending time at Old Town.43 From its inception, the developers of the site realized that they had an opportunity to integrate their messages with those of the public schools. In California, local history is taught as a part of the fourth-grade social studies curriculum. Teachers scramble to find activities relevant to the areas they must cover: Spanish exploration and colonization, land and sea routes, the daily lives of natives and nonnatives, and how the gold rush transformed California.44 When the Mormon Battalion physical plant was rebuilt, it was specifically laid out to accommodate busloads of children. The site’s media was devised to keep the attention of ten-year-olds.45

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   347 Sister missionaries explain that they modify their description of the faith commitments of the Battalion when fourth graders are touring. However, since the key messages expressed through the material culture are not uniquely Mormon, it is easy to adapt the tour to the needs of the public schools. Teachers freely discuss the problems of being a minority and the importance of sacrificing for what you believe in. They remind children that we know about the Mormon Battalion because eighty of them kept journals. At the end of the tour, children pan for gold with the friendly missionaries. Heritage religion reinforces contemporary educational values, and so the tour needs only a few minor accommodations to engage public school children. Students proudly return with their parents in tow. Children feel comfortable at the Mormon Battalion Historic Site not only because the videos and presentations are geared to their age group. Public historians teach that museums make more sense to visitors when exhibits connect people to the past in ways that are relevant for their lives today. Rather than use material culture to present the past as something disembodied and dispassionately “objective,” experts in public history encourage organizations to articulate their own mission through explicit interpretive frameworks. At the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, for instance, the life and work of the author are employed to inspire “commitment to social justice and positive change.”46 Rather than being unique in public history, the Latter-day Saint historians who craft site interpretations see their work as paralleling groups like the US National Park Service. All exhibitions present basic value messages, but now museums are more upfront about exactly what those messages are.47 The other rooms the visitors experience continue the use of multimedia material culture to connect the present to the past. Visitors enter a room designed to look like a campsite complete with logs assembled around a fire. There they sit and watch another movie, again seeing Zemira interacting with the other members of the Battalion. In one scene, Zemira chats with a ten-year-old boy who ran away from his mother to join his father on the march. In a nurturing manner, Zemira talks to the boy about fear, sacrifice, and belief before the two fall asleep under the stars. Although there are women on the trek, it is the tender relationship between males that is pictured. As historian Raphael Samuel has observed, heritage eschews the sweeping national narrative and prefers the intimate space of heart and home.48 Even in the wide-open and threatening spaces of the great American West, a homey atmosphere can be created. The domestication of history as heritage also dovetails with the Latterday Saint attention to families. Fathers and brothers have a responsibility to be caring and must not disregard their home duties in pursuit of work (or, in this case, war). The inclusion of children and women in the story of soldiers reinforces both heritage and family values. In the final room, visitors sit in a reconstructed courthouse where more “talking pictures” describe what happened when the Mormon Battalion arrived in California. One of the women who made the full march recalls, “The local Californios have heard all kinds of rumors of an army of religious zealots on their way to destroy them.” Zemira then chimes in, “So you can imagine their surprise when we showed up and started helping them build their city.” At this point the services the Mormons performed for the

348   Colleen McDannell West are laid out in rapid succession: a wagon-passable trail from Santa Fe to the coast; Mormon-made bricks used in wells and a courthouse; whitewashed walls and fences. Money from Battalion wages, clothing allowance, and saved gold dust supported the Latter-day Saint migration to the Salt Lake Valley. Even those who ended up in Santa Fe learned new irrigation techniques that enabled the Utah desert to bloom. Unlike in films earlier in the tour, this film includes historic photographs. The division between the faces of contemporary actors playing characters and the real portraits of people and places is erased. Zemira not so modestly summarizes their service: “Some say our ragged little Battalion’s march changed history.” The tour concludes, however, with heritage, not history. After the recitation of accomplishments, the film returns to the story of Zemira and his friends. With their work done, they enjoy a multicultural fiesta of dancing, singing, and eating hot chili peppers in a space that could be any restaurant in Old Town San Diego. “We didn’t end up fighting a war,” Zemira concludes, “in fact we became friends: Americans, Mexicans, Mormons, soldiers, and volunteers.” As the music swells, and Zemira’s fiddle joins the mariachi band, we are shown the positive results of faith, sacrifice, and service. This multicultural celebration sharply departs from early twentieth-century Mormon Battalion commemorations that stressed Latter-day Saint patriotic participation in the American westward expansion. The turn-of-the century patriotic view of the Mormon Battalion reflected a general national attitude toward the Mexican-American War. In this view, the conquering of the West by the United States was positive and inevitable because of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization.49 Latter-day Saints insisted that they made a vital contribution to this national expansion. Like other minority communities, Mormons in the past have claimed citizenship based on their military sacrifices and their role in nation building. However, by the time of the opening of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in 2010, Mormons no longer had to prove they were loyal and useful Americans. Colonialism and imperialism are no longer values to be celebrated. The final fiesta instead underscores the international thrust of contemporary Mormonism that cultivates global ties and promotes multiethnic images. The “take away” point of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in the twenty-first century is their service, not their role is securing the West from Mexicans and Native Americans. The Mormon Battalion story ends in a multireligious, multicultural California rather than in theocratic Utah. Mormon multiculturalism overlaps with the heritage perspective of global tourists and San Diego schoolteachers. By using new technology and replicas, this multimedia material culture expresses what religions should cultivate: inclusiveness, joy, and optimism. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site reflects a tripartite Christian narrative that structures much of popular history: first there are struggles, hardships, and sacrifices; then a series of miracles (or just plain luck) occurs that accompanies hard work; and this finally results in success and triumph. The local history of one particular military battalion displayed in one specific historic site becomes the vehicle to display the universal and the true. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appeals to the California past to reveal and highlight values applicable to any global situation.

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   349 The Mormon Battalion Historic Site is only one example of a myriad of ­ hurch-supported historical expressions that utilize material culture. Latter-day Saints C point to an 1830 revelation by their prophet Joseph Smith in which God told him that “there shall be a record kept among you” as the source of their concern for history. It was in this same revelation that Smith was told to organize a church, “for by doing these things the gates of hell shall not prevail against you” (D&C: 21:1). History making—in a variety of forms—became a special concern of church leaders. Although Latter-day Saints have always felt a special connection to certain places, it is only during the first decades of the twentieth century that individual Mormons purchased historic properties, which they later sold to the Church. As death took the original Mormon pioneers, their children and grandchildren began to think of ways to keep their memories alive. Preserving the m ­ aterial culture of Mormonism increasingly became important. The church bought property or established historic sites at Temple Square (1902); Carthage Jail (1903); the Independence, Missouri, Temple Lot (1904); the Joseph Smith Birthplace (1905); Smith Farm and Sacred Grove (1907); and the Far West Temple Site (1909). Pageants and “pioneer days”—filled with ready-made material culture—became popular. Church leaders came to understand the function of physical, material culture as a way to actively promote spiritual experiences (rather than merely to preserve the past). As Americans have become more sophisticated in their consumption of media and material culture, Latter-day Saints have invested much time and money in producing religious heritage. If we are to understand how religions work in the contemporary world, we must pay careful attention to how they represent their own past. The use of sophisticated multimedia techniques and the number of non-Latter-day Saint visitors distinguish the San Diego site from other Mormon historical sites. However, the Mormon Battalion Historic Site’s reliance on heritage and generic religious values resonates with other Latter-day Saint sites across the country. The construction of a new stateof-the art archives, the recent purchase of historic sites from the Community of Christ, and the current push to collect global local histories all attest to the Latter-day Saints Church’s continued commitment to the religious functions of the interpretation of the past. The modern heritage industry, in which many American participate, serves as both a context and stimulus for Latter-day Saint historic sites. For Mormons, heritage tourism has become another means to find nourishment in the word of God and inspiration in their religious community.

Notes 1. The original research for this essay was conducted in 2012, and it does not take into account changes that have occurred in the site since then. 2. A classic early study of the Mormon battalion was written in 1919 by Latter-day Saints Church leader B. H. Roberts, The Mormon Battalion: Its History and Achievements. Recent scholarly accounts include Norma  B.  Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S.  Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996); Sherman L. Fleek, History May Be Searched in Vain: A Military History of the Mormon Battalion (Norman, OK: Arthur

350   Colleen McDannell C. Clark Company, 2006); and an edited collection of primary sources by David Bigler and Will Bagley, Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000). Histories written for a general readership include Kate B. Carter, The Mormon Battalion (Los Angeles: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1957); Carl V. Larson, Women of the Mormon Battalion (Providence, UT: Watkins Printing, 1995); and Michael N. Landon and Brandon  J.  Metcalf, History of the Saints: The Remarkable Journey of the Mormon Battalion (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2012). 3. Davis Bitton, “Ritualization of Mormon History” in The Ritualization of Mormon History and Other Essays (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994) originally published in the Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975): 67–85. 4. San Diego Tourism Industry Research statistics, which also cite a San Diego population of 3,118,876. See http://www.sandiego.org/press/resources/industry-research.aspx 5. Glen Gendzel, “Pioneers and Padres: Competing Mythologies in Northern and Southern California, 1850–1930,” The Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 2001): 55–79. See also Dydia Yvonne DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 6. According to its own publicity: http://www.oldtownsandiego.org/history-of-old-town.html 7. California State Parks website: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=663 8. Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen: London, 1987). This concept was developed by David Lowenthal in The Heritage Crusades and the Spoils of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the relationship between heritage and tourism, see Barbara  Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theorizing Heritage,” Ethnomusicology 39 (Autumn 1995): 367–380; also “Destination Museum” in her Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 131–176. 9. See Adorno’s chapter on that topic in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 10. Hewsion, The Heritage Industry, 9. 11. J. Tivers, “Performing Heritage: The Use of Life ‘Actors’ in Heritage Presentations,” Leisure Studies 21 (2002): 188. 12. Brian Graham, G.  J.  Ashworth, and J.  E.  Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture, Economy (London: Arnold Press, 2000). 13. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 146–165. 14. Newspaper clipping, “ “Monument Shows Spirit of Conqueror in West,” no bibliographic information. In Utah Mormon Battalion Monument Commission MS 5941, reel one. Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. 15. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991; New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 132–282. 16. Because materials that relate to the modern Church are not open to researchers, I do not know the details of this change. 17. All quotes from the sister missionaries and the film come from two week-long visits in March of 2011 and October of 2012. No one is allowed to tape the tour, although part of it has been posted on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03y4lakUSSs 18. Several of these officially designated historic sites include visitor centers, multiple buildings, and missionary docents. Others are only restored buildings. Joseph Smith Birthplace (Sharon, Vermont); Smith Farm and Sacred Grove (Palmyra, New York); Hill Cumorah (Palmyra, New York); Book of Mormon Publication Site (Palmyra, New York); Whitmer

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   351 Home (Fayette, New York); Historic Kirtland (Kirtland, Ohio); Historic Johnson Home (Hiram, Ohio); Liberty Jail (Liberty, Missouri); Historic Independence (Independence, Missouri); Historic Nauvoo (Nauvoo, Illinois); Carthage Jail (Carthage, Illinois); Kanesville Tabernacle (Council Bluffs, Iowa); Mormon Trail Center (Omaha, Nebraska); Mormon Handcart Centers (three sites in Wyoming); Beehive House (Salt Lake City, Utah); Temple Square (Salt Lake City, Utah); Cove Fort (Cove Fort, Utah); Brigham Young’s Winter Home (St. George, Utah); St. George Tabernacle (St. George, Utah); Jacob Hamblin Home (Santa Clara, Utah); Mormon Battalion Historic Site (San Diego, California); and Gadfield Elm Chapel (Pendock, England). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is continuing to expand the number of sites it maintains. Currently, it is developing a site near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, where the Book of Mormon was translated. See http://independentweekender.com/index.php/ 2012/10/17/lds-church-unveils-restoration-site-plan/#.UIGB9lE8B8E and https://www. lds.org/church/news/church-to-restore-site-of-book-of-mormon-translation?lang=eng 19. Benjamin  C.  Pykles, Excavating Nauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2010). 20. On pageants in general, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and for Latter-day Saints, Martha S. Lomonaco, “Mormon Pageants in American Historical Performance,” Theater Symposium 17 (2009): 69–83; Kent R. Bean, “Policing the Borders of Identity at the Mormon Miracle Pageant,” PhD diss. (Bowling Green State University, 2005); Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin, Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010). 21. See Lavinia Fielding Anderson, “Fictional Pasts: Mormon Historical Novels,” in Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Lavinia Fielding Anderson (Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 367–394. Historical fiction written by Mormons about their experiences begins with Susa Young Gates, John Stevens’ Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon War (1909) but does not flourish until the end of the twentieth century. See Samuel W. Taylor, Nightfall at Nauvoo (1971), Marilyn McMeen Brown, The Earthkeepers (1979), the multiple novels of Dean Hughes and the nine volume series by Gerald Lund, The Work and the Glory (1990–1998). Margaret  D.  Young and Darius Gray have told the stories of African American Mormons in three novels (2000, 2002, 2003). Two volumes of The Work and the Glory (2005, 2006) have been made into films. See also Saints and Soldiers (2004); Emma Smith: My Story (2008); and 17 Miracles (2011). For a discussion of Mormon movies that include historical portrayals, see Randy Astle and Gideon  O.  Burton, “A History of Mormon Cinema,” BYU Studies 46 (2007): 12–163. 22. Tour companies that provide travel to historical sites include Bountiful Travel, Book of Mormon Tours, Liahona Tours, and Legacy Tours and Travel. Nauvoo Property Services offers rental homes in Nauvoo. 23. For general instructions on handcart pulls, see http://www.handcarttreks.com/General/ generalindex.html On Mormon pioneer nostalgia, see Paul Anderson, “Heroic Nostalgia: Enshrining the Mormon Past,” Sunstone 5, no. 44: 47–55; Eric A. Eliason, “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression,” in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, edited by Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 175–214; and Megan Sanborn Jones, “(Re)living the Pioneer Past: Mormon Youth Handcart Trek Re-enactments,” Theatre Topics 16 (September 2006): 113–130.

352   Colleen McDannell 24. There are no credits given for the production of the film. Zemira Palmer, however, is played by Andrew Veenstra, who went on to an acting career in New York City and in 2012 starred in the lead role in the traveling production of the Tony Award–winning play War House. The film used at the Mormon Battalion Historic Site was produced by Latter-day Saints Motion Picture Studio in Provo, Utah. 25. One of the many places where history and heritage do not agree is in the interpretation of Brigham Young’s role in supporting the families of the Mormon Battalion. The implication from the film, both in dialogue and in the nonverbal attitude of Brigham Young, was that he was willing, able, and actually did take care of the families of the soldiers. However, biographer John G. Turner argues that the church simply did not have the ability to support these families, and he includes evidence that Brigham Young did not take kindly to those women who pointed out such problems: “I know that the lowest scraping of Hell were in that Bot [battalion],” Brigham Young reportedly joked dismissively, “All their [wives] council & wisdom (although there are many good women) don’t weigh as much with me as the weight of a Fly Tird.’ ” John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 180. Turner cites his source for the quote as Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks, eds., A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–1876 (San Mario, CA: Huntington Library, 1955), I:5. 26. The dance is an example of the insertion of historical evidence into the fictionalized film. A “Mormon Battalion Ball” was held on July 16, 1846, and a painting of it was made by C. C. C. Christiansen in the 1870s. Dancing and music were an important part of early Mormon culture that continued into the present. 27. Michael  H.  Madsen, “Mormon Meccas: The Spiritual Transformation of Mormon Historical Sites from Points of Interest to Sacred Space,” PhD diss. (Syracuse University, 2003), summarized in Michael H. Madsen, “The Sanctification of Mormonism’s Historical Geography,” Journal of Mormon History 34 (Spring 2008): 228–255. A more critical appraisal of the same trend is Barry Laga, “In Lieu of History: Mormon Monuments and the Shaping of Memory,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43 (Winter 2010): 131–154. 28. On the impact of Hinckley, see Hugo N. Olaiz, “Gordon B. Hinckley and the Ritualization of Mormon History,” Sunstone 149 (April 2008): 21–27. For examples of “sacred space,” see the six volumes of Lamar  C.  Berrett, Sacred Places: A Comprehensive Guide to LDS Historical Sites (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1999–2007). 29. “President Hinkley and the Nauvoo Temple,” Ensign, July 2002. “Palmyra New York Temple,” Church News, March 9, 2010. In 2001, a temple was dedicated near the “Winter Quarters” in Omaha, Nebraska. It sits on a hill adjacent to the cemetery and across the street from the Mormon trail center. 30. Interview with Susan Easton Black, professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, September 14, 2012. 31. Guide to Exhibits at the Book of Mormon Historic Publication Site (Corporation of the President, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1999). An example of this concern is contained in the text from the Cove Fort Historic Site (2000): “There are many other stories which might be told at this site, such as blacksmithing skills in the early West or details of the Utah Blackhawk War. Although these stories are interesting, and they may be valid interpretive focuses for many other institutions, they are only sidelights at Cove Fort Historic Site. At this site, it is not the buildings themselves or the frontier skills which are important, but the obedience of the inhabitants to prophetic counsel, the service extended to travelers and others settlers, the charity manifested to the poor, and the devotion to gospel principles displayed in the daily lives of these early pioneers” (3). All the handbooks I was permitted to review express similar statements.

Heritage Religion and the Mormons   353 32. The Latter-day Saints Missionary Department does not give out statistical information about the numbers or religious affiliation of the visitors. Interviews with two different site directors, and my own observations, indicate that perhaps 40 percent of visitors (not including school children) are non-Latter-day Saints. 33. The handbook on the Mormon Battalion, which is not available to the public, also lists “citizenship” along with service. I never heard missionaries refer to citizenship nor is it mentioned in the film. 34. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). “They’re a lot like us” is a phrase repeated in the short film The Story Lives Here (2010) produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to introduce the new Church History Library. 35. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 30. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 139. 38. Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 16. 39. Although his separation of people into “archaic man” and “historical man,” with an implied evolutionary trajectory is too simplistic, Mircea Eliade remains the most astute theorizer of the relationship between religion and time. See the final chapter in his The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949; New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), 142–162. 40. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 111. 41. Ibid., 177. 42. On number of students, see http://www.oldtownsandiegoguide.com/cincoimages/program. html. For several years, field trips were cancelled due to California’s budgetary problems. Then, in 2014, organizations in Old Town (including the Latter-day Saints Church) worked with school districts to fund buses to bring children to the sites. Whether the numbers have returned to this high is unknown. 43. Interview with Jennifer Lund, April 2, 2012. 44. “History-Social Science Content Standards in California Schools Grade Four: California a Changing State” (1998): http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf 45. Interview with Jennifer Lund, April 2, 2012. 46. https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/about/ 47. Email with Jennifer Lund, August 28, 2014. 48. Samuel, Theaters of Memory, 146. 49. Michael Scott Van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the Mexican-American War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 101–127.

Bibliography Bitton, Davis. The Ritualization of Mormon History and Other Essays. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Eliason, Eric A. “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression.” In Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, edited by Tad Tuleja, 175–214. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997. Fleek, Sherman  L. History May Be Searched in Vain: A Military History of the Mormon Battalion. Norman, OK: Arthur C. Clark Company, 2006.

354   Colleen McDannell Gendzel, Glen. “Pioneers and Padres: Competing Mythologies in Northern and Southern California, 1850–1930.” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 2001): 55–79. Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen, 1987. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1993. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology 39 (Autumn 1995): 367–380. Lepore, Jill. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusades and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Madsen, Michael H. “The Sanctification of Mormonism’s Historical Geography.” Journal of Mormon History 34 (Spring 2008): 228–255. Pykles, Benjamin C. Excavating Nauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Ricketts, Norma  B. The Mormon Battalion: U.S.  Army of the West, 1846–1848. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. Samuel, Raphael. Theaters of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011.

chapter 18

From Con fiscation to Collection The Objects of China’s Cultural Revolution Denise Y. Ho

A little boy, born in 1957, rolls his hoop-and-stick down one of the wide avenues of Shanghai’s former French Concession. He finds a green-and-white mahjong tile, winning praise from the policeman when he turns it in.1 A young girl from a worker’s family grieves over the suicide of her mother’s friend, a department store clerk. Her “auntie” had hidden the family’s gold in the kitchen stove, and when her son revealed its location, she could not bear the betrayal.2 In Shanghai’s Hongkou District, the Catholic Church is crammed so full of pianos that they overflow onto the street; it seems that no one is looking after them.3 A mahjong tile, bars of gold, pianos: at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), all three were deemed examples of the “four olds”: old ideology, old culture, old customs, and old habits. To establish a New China, according to the Cultural Revolution’s precepts, the new society had to sweep away all vestiges of the old. China’s Cultural Revolution has been called “Mao’s Last Revolution,” an attempt to eliminate enemies within the Communist Party allegedly “taking the capitalist road,” and concurrently a bottom-up call on China’s young people to become revolutionary by “making revolution.” These young people, known as Red Guards, took to the streets in the summer of 1966 to destroy the “four olds.” They smashed temples, tore down street signs and replaced them with new names, and attacked people on the street for signs of bourgeoisie desire: leather shoes, wide-legged pants, permed hair. The attack on the “four olds” legitimized the Red Guards’ search of private homes (chaojia), as personal possessions became evidence. The discovery of gold in the young girl’s auntie’s stove was thus doubly incriminating: not only did she dream of capitalist restoration, but she attempted to hide it from the revolutionary masses (Figure 18.1). The literature on material culture in Mao’s China (1949–1976) has focused primarily on the new rather than the old, such as Mao objects and their afterlives as Mao kitsch: the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao’s quotations, Chairman Mao badges, and Cultural

356   Denise Y. Ho

Figure 18.1. Artist unknown, “Scatter the Old World, Build a New World” (1967). IISH Collection BG D29/184.

From Confiscation to Collection   357 Revolution posters.4 In an era of extreme scarcity, many of these new things had to serve a political purpose, though recent research on fashion has demonstrated the persistence of individual style in a period of perceived conformity. Thus, while everyday consumer goods were emblazoned with political slogans, some people found ways to inscribe their possessions with alternate meanings.5 Beyond the meaning of objects of “new society” (xin shehui) in their own times, two other categories of material culture take precedence here: the place of objects from “old society” ( jiu shehui) in the midst of revolution, and then the post–Cultural Revolution collection of the objects from a once-new society. Tracing the material culture of “old society”—as objects were wrested from their owners to warehouses of confiscated possessions—reveals both a politicized relationship between object and class status, and a practical repurposing of private goods. Examining the material culture of “new society” in China today underscores how individuals and collectors grapple with a politically sensitive history. In both socialist and postsocialist China, confiscation and collection have been easier than coming to terms with the pasts that Cultural Revolution objects symbolize.

Material Culture, Class Categories, and China Cultural Revolution actors would have categorized almost anything from before 1949 as one of the “four olds”; asked to define these, informants replied by listing the four categories, giving various examples of each, or linking the “four olds” to the triumvirate feudal-capitalist-revisionist (fengzixiu).6 The history of such objects is far more complex. Scholars have studied the material culture of China from many vantage points. Its archaeological, art historical, and religious traditions, for example, have yielded rich understandings of life for several millennia. Examining the absorption of foreign cultures, as in the cosmopolitan age of Tang (618–907), demonstrates how culture in China assimilated a broad range of cultural practices, from Central Asian musical instruments to the latest hairstyles. At court, imperial collection was a way to wield cultural power. Writing of the Song emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125) and his collection and catalogues, Patricia Ebrey argues that the unprecedented scale of his collecting projected the “cultural leadership” of the throne vis-à-vis its men of letters.7 Among such educated elites, the art historian Craig Clunas points to the Ming (1368–1644) as the beginning of China’s early modern period, showing how the commercialization of the market and the attendant rise in wealth led to individuals distinguishing themselves through collecting; during this period connoisseur handbooks circulated, teaching individuals to have a proper relationship with their personal treasures.8 The material culture of the last Qing dynasty (1644–1912) is complex and

358   Denise Y. Ho richly documented, and the imperial collection—divided across the Taiwan strait—is still the object of nationalistic flurry whenever a contested piece hits the international auction block.9 In the twentieth century, material culture played an important role in the cultivation of nationalism and the promotion of modernity. In the case of the former, rituals helped shape the Republican citizen, and rituals were often defined by things, like wearing a Western suit as a modern official or bowing before the national flag in school.10 Chinese business associations and nationalists joined forces to promote commodities that were “China Made.”11 But such prescriptions were difficult to define and even harder to impose; ordinary Chinese were much less concerned with national origin, eagerly adopting foreign things as long as they were practical. Despite the Republican era’s (1912–1949) nationalism, inherited by the Communists (and sometimes pushed to xenophobia), Frank Dikötter suggests that “there is no exclusively Chinese material culture either; it was all but impossible to distinguish ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ by the time the communists seized power in 1949.”12 But whether or not it had been possible to distinguish between native and foreign, the categorization of things was a central feature of both the rhetoric and lived experience of New China. When the Communist Party came to power, one of its first acts was to seize, parade, and reallocate the property of landlords in the countryside, and the nationalization of property in the cities also took place through a series of political movements.13 With an economy focused on heavy rather than light industry, consumer goods were extremely scarce and ordinary people were required to use ration coupons for everything from a prized bicycle to a scrap of fabric for a sanitary napkin. In this context, poverty was a virtue and objects of the “old society” were shunned; as one informant (b. 1949) remembers, his father, an official under the former Nationalist regime, had a whole box full of silk neckties. “And then they were all made into mops, those neckties, mopping from Liberation until today! (laughs) These were all four olds.”14 Asked whether things had class, a former factory technician (b. 1944) answered, Yes, yes we did have this concept. If a thing was very ordinary, something that everybody else had, then it would be something that belonged to the working class. But if this thing, say, had some decoration on it, a dragon or a phoenix, then this was a capitalist thing. Because in ordinary life, what did you need? Why would you need such a nice thing? If you pursued nice things, if you pursued beautiful things, well, this was capitalist thinking. The most simple, the most inexpensive, the most con­ ven­ient, the most sturdy . . . and it was best if you could use it for your life. If you bought something, you were to use it your whole life.15

Yet despite the necessity and revolutionary virtue of plain living, even New China had its classes. To the consternation of Mao, the cadres of the new society often had access to special privileges, a phenomenon criticized during the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956) and in the early Cultural Revolution. Purchases of objects such as bicycles or wristwatches were important affairs, and the national brands established in this period provided new ways to stand out. For example, though heads of state like Premier Zhou

From Confiscation to Collection   359 Enlai might boast a Shanghai-brand wristwatch (instead of a foreign watch), such markers were inaccessible to all but a few urbanites. Instead, people turned to other methods of differentiation, even repurposing foreign burlap bags for clothing that indicated the high political status required to access imported goods.16 Indeed, the actual material conditions of the Mao era were so associated with one’s new status that a Cultural Revolution museum today replicates separate dioramas of household interiors: the family of a worker, a peasant, a soldier, and a cadre (Figure 18.2).17

Figure 18.2.  Jianchuan Museum Cluster Exhibition. Anren Township, Sichuan Province.

But if the objects of the new society had their own unspoken categories, the material remnants of the old society were far less assured of their place. What came to be known as the “four olds” were products and reflections of China’s feudal and capitalist past, and they had to be reinscribed or hidden. Thus, art objects were placed in museums, redefined as the handiwork of China’s historical working people.18 Temple statuary was culled during attacks on superstitious beliefs, and temple buildings were eventually boarded up or made inaccessible from main streets.19 In an atmosphere marked by frequent and unpredictable political campaigns, the objects of old society were thrown away or hidden. One retired hospital accountant (b. 1955) remembers that her maternal grandmother received packages from her sisters in Hong Kong and Germany, “qipao and real silk. But she was afraid to wear them, or even pick them up from the post office. If she wore them, people would say that she had overseas connections (haiwai guanxi).”20 Of the “four olds,” one former sent-down youth (b. 1950) relates, “At that time, we didn’t even dare look at things. If people said they should be burned, then we burned them.”21 In the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution, such material symbols of the old society had to be purged, their numinous power destroyed. The Red Guards thus searched the darkest and most private corners for their traces, armed with the material of their imaginations and breaking into the sanctity of the home.

The House Search and the Attack on the “Four Olds” As a ten-year-old boy, the cultural critic Fu Jin (b. 1956) remembers, he followed the grown-ups as they carried out a house search in the Zhejiang countryside. He explained

360   Denise Y. Ho that he did have an idea of what he might find in the landlord’s house, and that they were mostly looking for “restoration accounts” (biantianzhang), or land deeds and other documents saved in anticipation of a “change of sky.” Fu recalls, “At that age, we’d think that, well, landlords were always thinking of restoration, waiting for the Guomindang to return and annihilate the Communists, for Chiang Kai-shek to come. So we also thought there’d be weapons, and radio transmitters, because they were probably also spies.” In the midst of the house search, Fu found a bobbin for the sewing machine and seized it in triumph, thinking that it might have film or top-secret information on it. He presented it to the grown-ups, and they laughed (Figure 18.3).22

Figure 18.3. Preparatory Committee of the East China Branch of the Chinese People’s Committee to Preserve World Peace and Oppose American Oppression, “Special agent! Where are you running to?” (1951). Published by Shanghai Shengsheng Art Company. Private Collection, PC-195a-s-002.

The attack on the “four olds” and the house searches that followed are perhaps some of the most iconic scenes of the Cultural Revolution. Part of this is because the earliest émigré authors of Cultural Revolution memoirs were elites who were the first to be targeted. In Life and Death in Shanghai, for example, Nien Cheng relates a scene of wanton looting and destruction; Red Guards take her jewelry, burn her books, and crush her porcelain under their feet.23 Another reason is that these campaigns were at once the most public and most private of affairs. The attack on the “four olds” could be conducted

From Confiscation to Collection   361 on the street as well as in the home, and after the house search ransacked an individual household, the accusatory objects were then put on display. As Jie Li writes in her microhistory of the Shanghai alleyway, house searches “turned domestic artifacts into evidence that incriminated their owners.”24 In the initial chaos, some Red Guards burned “four olds” in bonfires, but later on they became object lessons. As a piano professor (b. 1959) describes, “They would put out tables and display the things they had found. Then everyone would see it, and see how corrupt that family was. What was put out? Vases, porcelain, carved things . . . really beautiful things. Also leather shoes and Western suits. In any case, they’d put it all outside, and then carts would come and take it all away.”25 A high school physical education teacher (b. 1942) remembers how his own leather shoes were hung at the school gate, with a sign identifying him as a capitalist, “And what were you going to do about it? I wasn’t the only one; they did this to everybody.”26 Directed by central authorities in Beijing, the Red Guards eventually organized elaborate exhibitions that displayed the fruit of their house searches. The exhibited pieces could also be mobilized for individual mass struggle sessions, the equivalent of a show trial. In one particularly memorable case, a professor at Fudan University was labeled a counterrevolutionary, and after the struggle session spectators were invited to look over evidence assembled on tables. The professor had previously been made to participate in labor, resulting in a layer of calluses on his feet. One informant explains, “He had pared the calluses off his feet, and wrapped them up—who knows why—but when they searched his house, they found the calluses. So the Red Guards tacked the calluses up on a bulletin board to show everyone, saying that Professor X had rejected this badge of labor. He was a counterrevolutionary.”27 Most of the house searches did not turn up anything so graphic, but they followed a pattern. Red Guards, sometimes supplied with name lists from the Public Security Bureau or from the work units to which individuals belonged, would appear at one’s door. Occupants of the house would be cordoned off in another room while the Red Guards carried out their search. One man (b. 1949) recounts a house search that he participated in: There was this rosewood chair, and we thought there might be something in it, so we pried it open. And there was a leather sofa, so we slashed it open. And the floorboards, we thought maybe they’d be guns or swords hidden underneath, so we broke them up. From when we were little, we’d be educated about capitalist things and landlord things . . . they were all bad. All of these things were extravagances; they were all gained from exploiting the sweat and blood of us working people. So if we saw them, they should be taken away; [capitalists and landlords] shouldn’t be allowed to live that kind of life. So that was the logic of Cultural Revolution house searches, to take those things away and make everyone equal.28

How had these young people come to associate objects with the “four olds,” with feudalismcapitalism-revisionism, and with class? The former Red Guard just quoted explains that it was part of their generation’s education. For all of these young people who had

362   Denise Y. Ho “grown up under the red flag,” everything from school lessons to movies portrayed new society in contrast to the old. In comic books and propaganda posters, the counterrevolutionary is usually portrayed with several items: a Guomindang flag, a gun, a radio transmitter. Exhibits and newspaper articles displayed and described objects allegedly found at the scene of the crime. In the denunciation of Shanghai’s Bishop Gong, for example (which was later replicated in a children’s exhibition), a cache of weapons was found in a well.29 Such objects were so typical that one wonders if the Public Security Bureau did not keep boxes full of counterrevolutionary sets handy. Beyond the specific type of the counterrevolutionary, objects were clearly linked to class. Some informants linked objects with their owners and their use; “for example, the things that you used for farming were workers’ things, and the things used by the landlord were those that served a life of luxury.”30 Along the same lines, proletarian objects were begotten with one’s own labor. Asked if a worker could have jewelry, the factory technician explained, “Yes, but this was totally different [from a capitalist having jewelry]. Because we could see their labor, every day they were working. And if they earned a ring with their own labor, well, this was two different things.”31 Others identified proletarian things for their simplicity and capitalist things for their extravagance; “capitalist furniture was all carved. In our house, all of the furniture was square and flat.”32 Sometimes collectively owned furniture was even stamped with the name of the work unit, as one retired cadre (b. 1954) remembers. His family had come to Shanghai with the PLA as part of the takeover; allocated a flat in Shanghai’s best district, they had only the Public Security Bureau–issued (and stamped) furniture to put in it. “We had a couple of iron-rail beds, a square table, not much at all. And it didn’t match the surroundings . . . so people would look at your furniture and immediately know that you didn’t belong there.”33 Many were shocked and dazzled by things they had not seen before, and gold was the most outstanding example. Describing a “four olds” exhibition, held in a temple on Zhenru County’s commune, one informant (b. 1952) says, “At that time the old-hundred-names, the ordinary people, they’d never have something like gold bars. So they’d think, ‘Whoa, there are gold bars! Or silver pieces!’ And if you had never seen this kind of thing, it would be really shocking . . . where did it come from? And you’d think, well, it came from exploitation.”34 Almost fifty years later a former factory worker (b. 1947) still remembers the heft of the bag of gold bars from her factory’s former boss’s manager, the gold bars as proof of a crime (zuizheng). After the attack on the “four olds,” what was to become of the Red Guards’ material achievements ( gongxun)? Red Guards actually put on exhibitions which legitimized their own movement, laying bare the fact that supposed counterrevolutionaries had four olds and that they had hidden them from view. Thus, a teapot with gold in its false bottom was a better exhibition object than gold itself, showing the capitalists’ treachery and the Red Guards’ acuity. But there may have been a far more practical reason behind the Red Guard exhibitions, which was to provide the state with an inventory and prevent—in the midst of chaos—wide-scale theft. As it turned out, the objects of old society would still have a place in the new.

From Confiscation to Collection   363

Old Society in New Society Much of what we know of the fate of the “four olds” is anecdotal and fragmentary. The same Cultural Revolution memoirists who wrote of their homes being searched sometimes include accounts of what they received back, if anything at all. Interviewees may also have a sense of what happened, remembering their own family’s return (or that of a relative) of confiscated items. One woman (b. 1956) recalls that her “house was filled with books, because that is what my father liked best . . . then after the Cultural Revolution, we were supposed to get things back, and my father saw the books, but realized they weren’t our family’s original books. All the good ones were gone. A receipt? No, we didn’t get anything like a receipt.”35 Others remember the availability of fine furniture and antiquities in second-hand shops. A semiretired professor (b. 1943) explains, “Later, I remember, these items would be sold to others. Maybe the best things, the paintings, or gold, maybe these would disappear. But other things, you couldn’t keep them forever in the storehouses, so they’d be auctioned off for really cheap. Or they’d give out tickets, and you could take your ticket and go inside and pick out one or two things. You had to pay for them, but it wasn’t very much.”36 The archival evidence, or what is known to be in the archive, is similarly fragmentary. What is listed in archives is clearly limited in scope and also off-limits for photocopying, the contents both cause for discomfort and potentially troublesome. But from what little is publicly available (at least for reading), we can reconstruct a complicated system of dealing with the material of the house search. Perhaps the best known was the institutionalized protection of cultural relics, many of which form the basis of significant state collections today. But at a time when nothing was wasted, and in a country with a long history of bureaucratic organization, a system for sorting confiscated objects (usually chaojia wuzi, for “house-search property” or chachao wuzi for “examine-confiscate property”) was set in motion by January of 1967. Thus, we can trace the fate of those pianos jamming the entrance to the Hongkou District Cathedral. In 1969, the Shanghai Bureau of Education took charge of the repair and redistribution of 597 confiscated pianos, allocating them to primary and secondary schools in Shanghai and surrounding counties. Calling their project a “political responsibility, an achievement established by the revolutionary Red Guards during this Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” the Bureau of Education called for propaganda on “cherishing public property” and for each piano to be tagged with a sign explaining its maintenance and care (Figure 18.4).37 In Shanghai, throughout the Red Guard movement, the Party Committee kept track of the numbers of houses searched and what was confiscated. According to a 1967 report by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee (which replaced the 1966 Shanghai Party Committee as the ruling power), the Red Guards had “smashed the four olds of the capitalist classes, confiscating from the homes of the old parasites and blood-sucking ­vampires. Their harvest was great, and they made an immortal contribution to the Great Cultural Revolution.” Following 1966 statistics, 150,000 homes in Shanghai were

364   Denise Y. Ho

Figure 18.4.  Piano painted with slogans: Front: “Art and culture serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers”; left: “Serve socialism”; right: “Serve proletarian politics,” Jianchuan Museum Cluster, Anren Township, Sichuan Province. Photograph by Denise Y. Ho (2014).

searched, among which 50,000 were those of capitalists and 57,000 homes belonged to what were known as the five black categories (heiwulei), or the difufanhuaiyou (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists).38 The materials from all of the households included the following: • Thirty tons of gold • 300,000 pieces of jewelry • 3,300,000 yuan in foreign currency • 370,000,000 yuan in deposits and bonds • 598 guns • 10,000 knives • 400 counterrevolutionary documents • 448 liang of opium • 900,000 pieces of gold and silver jewelry • 3,300,000 yuan in American currency • 2,400,000 silver dollars • 117,000 bullets • 5,700 transistor radios

From Confiscation to Collection   365 Directed by central authorities from Beijing, Shanghai established a team for processing confiscated materials (chaojia wuzi chuli lingdao xiaozu). Though the initial impetus for their organization appeared to be the protection of cultural relics, the team pointed out that work units were not paying sufficient attention to confiscated materials, allowing things to be damaged, lost, or stolen. Some work units had accounting systems, taking stock of Red Guard confiscations, while others had none at all. The Party’s Central Committee stressed that items should be returned according to policy, but the Shanghai team admitted that policies were not clear. For example, they asked, “What is an ‘unlawful person,’ how does one determine who is a capitalist element and who a petty bourgeoisie element, how should one differentiate between capitalists and their descendants, and how many daily use items are appropriate to return?”39 These bureaucratic activities were by no means limited to Shanghai, though Shanghai—historically a center of capitalism, wealth, and connoisseurship—was the biggest center for house searches and perhaps the most fruitful ground for Red Guard “achievements.” Documents from Beijing show that the processing of confiscated items was a nationwide movement. In March, prior to the establishment of the Shanghai team, the Central Committee issued regulations which allowed for “revolutionary masses or working people” to have wrongly confiscated items returned (and restitution paid). The property of the five black elements (with the exception of a few daily necessities) was to be turned over to higher authorities. Furthermore, reiterating an exemplary case from Guangxi Province, the Central Committee declared that gold, silver, foreign currency, or large amounts of renminbi, as well as “high-class daily use articles including fur, leather clothing, or watches,” be confiscated. Stealing and embezzlement were prohibited, but property or modest amounts of cash could be used in service of the Cultural Revolution.40 But as Shanghai’s response indicated, actually determining who should be allowed to have what, and what to do with all of old society’s objects was far less clear. The incomplete paper trail in the archive suggests that Shanghai officials struggled with this inventory from the day the Shanghai team was established until long after the Cultural Revolution was over in 1976. Just as objects were linked with the class of their owner during the house search, so the particular—and changing—class status of the owner determined the fate of his property. In the summer of 1967, for example, the Shanghai team issued a list of questions and answers meant to clarify the processing of confiscated property. Allowances were made, for example, for those of the five black categories and capitalists who were struggling to survive: they could be allotted daily living necessities (pending approval from the revolutionary masses), granted half a year’s basic living allowance, or withdraw from confiscated cash enough to “support the lowest limit of daily living.”41 A distinction was made between items begotten by labor and exploitation. For example, the children of capitalists could receive property that had been earned through their own work, as could a spouse of one of the Five Black Elements. Those revolutionary masses and working people who had turned in their own gold and silver (earned through labor) could also have their property back.42 The questions and answers also provided for those whose status had changed, although often the default answer was to postpone processing. Wrongly accused revolutionary cadres, for instance, could

366   Denise Y. Ho get their property back, but members of the Five Black Elements who had completed their sentence or who had their “political hats” removed would only have their property suspended.43 Other categories of things were permitted to be liquidated; the foreign securities of the capitalists were to be exchanged for foreign currency, usable commodities could be appropriated for production, and in one peculiarly specific answer, confiscated electric fans were to be turned over to the Commerce Bureau for service in Shanghai’s sweltering summers.44 For several more years, the management of confiscated property in Shanghai continued to be plagued with the problem of classifying their owners, occupying the attention of almost a hundred cadres as late as 1969. The number of houses searched rose to 270,000, but only 130,000 of these households belonged to the Five Black Elements, illegal elements, or capitalist class elements. The property of the remaining households had been put on hold, because their status was unclear. They neither fit the category of “antagonistic contradiction”(diwo maodun) nor were they an “exploiting element” (boxue jiejifenzi), including “educable” children of capitalists, those with histories of political problems, those with minor cases of exploitation, petty shop owners, private doctors, and religious personnel. These types, Shanghai authorities concluded, should have property gained through labor and daily necessities returned.45 Even with these provisions, vast quantities of stuff—including items of high value— remained in various warehouses. Also in 1969, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee received a report on the processing of “four olds commodities” (sijiu shangpin), which numbered over 370,000 items and included things like clothing, shoes and hats, appliances, cosmetics, porcelain, and other decorative objects. The Shanghai Number One Commerce Bureau (diyi shangyeju), an organization that had previously put on a large Red Guard exhibition, found itself with hundreds of thousands of items and was eager to get rid of them.46 The Commerce Bureau argued for selling them, explaining that many of the decorative objects were foreign antiquities from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a high international market value. Admitting that such art objects were the products of the foreign working class, the Commerce Bureau nonetheless suggested that they were best suited for a feudal-capitalist-revisionist lifestyle and were “needed by foreign capitalist society” ( guowai zibenzhuyi shehui suo xuyao). Thus, these commodities could be sold to foreigners, either at special sales counters or directly overseas. Items of low value, such as kitchenware and approved leather shoes, could be provided to secondhand shops in China, and items deemed unsuitable for ordinary people could be taken apart for their materials.47 Though this report suggests that only low-value daily necessities made it to secondhand shops, a piece of ephemera suggests the contrary. A price list for confiscated objects from the period shows that high-value things were sold, including watches, sewing machines, radios, bicycles, bedding, furniture, and furs. Watches, for example, were divided by brand; a Rolex cost 265 yuan and an Omega, 171. One could furnish an entire apartment with the furniture listed, and also fill one’s closet with down comforters, woolen clothing, and mink coats (48 yuan for long, 41 for short).48

From Confiscation to Collection   367 It is unclear who exactly profited from the liquidation of the “four olds” commodities, but as for gold and silver—which had been deposited in the People’s Bank and presumably more carefully managed—metals were also processed in 1969–1970. In response to Mao’s call for wartime readiness (at this point, with the Soviet Union), gold and silver were handed in for raw materials or conversion to foreign currency.49 Thereafter, much of the work of processing slowed down; the organization that managed antiquities and books, for example, stopped receiving materials by the end of 1974.50 Starting in 1971, national capitalists (minzu zichan jieji) began to receive confiscated items; a 1973 report suggests that everyday objects and about 56 percent of property were returned by that time.51 In 1979 and after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai Party Committee’s United Front Department issued regulations on the restitution of liquidated bank deposits, withheld salary, and confiscated housing. However, art, antiquities, and rare books that had belonged to capitalists were to be preserved (shouguan) by the state; former owners would receive material compensation or certificates of merit in exchange.52 In the following year, the Shanghai team for processing confiscated property was finally dissolved, four years after the Cultural Revolution’s end. At that moment the Party Committee agreed to return property not only to the national capitalists but also to those who had their “rightist” designation annulled and to those enemies who had returned to the fold of the people. But by this time, many of those who were still categorized as one of the bad elements were already dead.53 What is the point of reconstructing the bureaucratic system by which the detritus of the “old society” was processed? First, it tells us something about the revolutionary state. Although the ideology of revolution condemned the “four olds” as excrescences on building a new society, authorities were eminently practical, willing to repurpose electric fans and pianos, to sell foreign antiquities and even luxury goods. In the process of sorting, the revolutionary state did attempt to record and manage confiscated properties, returning them when political designations allowed. Second, the bureaucratic system tells us something about the way objects continued to be inflected with class, here the class status of their owners. If pre–Cultural Revolution culture and society had ascribed a sense of class to objects eventually deemed “four olds,” then the Cultural Revolution perpetuated this association by linking property rights to class and legitimate property to that begotten by labor. It could be argued that the trauma of the house search and the insecurity of one’s property continue to affect China today. Some people declined to have their property returned. As one informant (b. 1949) explained, “Many people were too afraid to take [their things] back. They thought, if there are more movements in the future, ‘I wouldn’t be able to bear it . . . I don’t want them back. If I can be a proletarian, then I could rest easy.’ Some people even denied that things were theirs.”54 Several people mentioned that those who had suffered the most were the most eager to go abroad or at least send their children abroad. One couple in their seventies, themselves from worker families, said that one still has no sense of security today; anyone who can will move their property abroad.55

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Collecting after the Cultural Revolution Those with good class backgrounds could buy items classified as the “four olds,” and many were very grateful to do so.56 Others received gifts from people who knew their homes were about to be searched; the piano professor, from a worker’s “red” family, went with his elder brother to cart away objects from the home of a capitalist who was also a family friend.57 Still others used the opportunity of the secondhand shops to start collections of their own. One informant (b. 1949), who as a Red Guard once saw the gilded teacups of a house search as “capitalist, as rotten ( fuxiu)” became a collector himself from 1977. He explained that he began his collection from confiscated property in secondhand shops, “At that time you could buy a Qing (1644–1912) dynasty cup for one renminbi, and even at one renminbi no one would buy it! Of course, at that time salaries weren’t that high either, maybe thirty-six renminbi a month. So each month I’d set aside a third of my salary to buy things, and slowly the shopkeepers got to know me.”58 Collecting antiquities as well as Cultural Revolution ephemera, this last informant is one of many private collectors in China today. Despite the post–Mao reform era’s obsession with acquiring the new and modern, and today’s Chinese consumer taking over international luxury markets, the material culture of the Cultural Revolution has taken on a second life. Indeed, both Chinese and foreign enthusiasm for collecting Cultural Revolution artifacts has created a huge industry.59 In China, most private collectors are like this Shanghai informant, with small collections built from local shops or perhaps on the used book market online. They collect for their own pleasure. As he explains, “It’s just a hobby . . . I like it . . . and anyway each thing has a story. I could buy something, and have a dialogue with it . . . there was so much to learn. How can you show that you are Chinese? The only thing you have left is culture (wenhua), represented by cultural relics (wenwu) . . . a family is like this, and a country is like this. Documents alone are not enough, archives are not enough. Cultural relics are witnesses of history (lishi de jianzheng).”60 Though this collector participates in periodic exhibitions in his neighborhood, others have gone further to open private museums even before they are permitted to by the state. Notable among these collectors is Yang Peiming (b. 1945), a former English professor who began collecting Mao-era propaganda posters in 1995. Yang exhibits his poster collection in the basement rooms of an apartment building, and his Propaganda Poster Art Center has become a popular stop for foreign tourists in Shanghai. On my visits over the years, the visitors have mostly been foreign tourists, but Chinese visitors now number among them, and study-abroad students often come as a group. In 2012, Yang Peiming’s museum was finally registered as a private museum, and parts of his collection are exhibited in China and overseas.61 But perhaps the most prominent collector of Cultural Revolution material culture is Fan Jianchuan (b. 1957). Fan was himself a child during the Cultural Revolution, and he

From Confiscation to Collection   369 traces the beginning of his collection to his childhood. The young Fan, with a cadre father under attack, went about collecting handbills and other materials to help his father understand the shifting revolutionary currents.62 More recently, as a local official turned real estate mogul, Fan has devoted the last decade to creating the eponymous Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a sprawling complex of museums in Anren township, an hour west of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. It has outdoor memorials, gathering spaces, and museums that cover folk and material culture, the Second World War including the Flying Tigers, the Mao era, and the recent Sichuan earthquake. The series of museums that cover the Mao era are labeled “Red Age,” and they include an exhibition hall devoted to “daily necessities,” the life of sent-down youth, Mao-era mirrors and badges, and porcelain. The Jianchuan Museum empire continues to expand; Fan consults on museum projects all over China, he is currently collecting for a museum of China’s reform era, and he has lists of exhibition halls planned. One of these proposed museums is even dedicated to the Cultural Revolution house search. While the future house search museum will undoubtedly display the “four olds” of “old society,” the “Red Age” museums display the material culture of New China. In addition to the dioramas of typical households described earlier, many of Fan Jianchuan’s exhibition halls are stunning because of the sheer volume of objects presented: an entire museum is devoted to different mirrors painted with revolutionary scenes and symbols, vast walls are inlaid with clocks, and rooms unfold with case after case filled with items from everyday life: washbasins and toothbrushes, school textbooks and children’s comics, Mao badges and I.D. cards (Figure 18.5).63 These collections of objects are the public face of an even larger collection: Fan Jianchuan has a nationwide network of buyers that even stretches overseas; he measures his collection in tens of thousands, in shipping containers, and in tons; and his warehouses (on and off-site) contain avalanches of family photo albums, diaries, and stacks of personal dossiers once destined for scrap. As Fan related in an interview, China’s economic takeoff has meant that “all of China was moving house,” and he was there to take in Maoist China’s detritus.64 Though Fan Jianchuan likened his Museum Complex to a “supermarket” from which visitors could pick and choose, his curatorial practice is actually far more complex. If the Museum Complex is part Smithsonian, it is also part theme park and part individual library. The logo for the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a Sichuan opera mask superimposed with the character for “chuan,” is everywhere in the complex, stamped on manhole covers and emblazoned on glass cases. Fan himself appears on billboards, his books are in the museum shops, and he even puts himself in the displays. Though Fan demurs from making judgments about history, the art installations within the museums clearly have a message. For example, within the museum for sent-down youth is a field of broken mirrors, symbolizing the shattered lives of the young people sent to the countryside. Similarly, the museum devoted to mirrors is a white metal labyrinth designed to confuse the visitor, but as a gesture to the mirror as a classic metaphor for examining and learning from the past, a side room displays original documents related to those labeled “enemies” (diwei dang’an) in the Cultural Revolution. The museum of clocks echoes with

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Figure 18.5.  A glass display case of enamelware cups from the Mao era covered with political slogans, including “Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts,” “The people’s communes are great,” “A single spark can light a prairie fire,” and “Long live the Great Leap Forward,” Jianchuan Museum Cluster, Anren Township, Sichuan Province. Photograph by Denise Y. Ho (2014).

their chiming, their ominous ticking the backdrop for the violent photographs displayed nearby. After an exhibition has passed the censors, Fan Jianchuan even slips subversive material into the cases: reports of counterrevolution, cases of accidental death, top-secret messages describing resistance.65 One such document is the price list for confiscated objects, its very existence evidence that someone profited by the sale of personal property, that New China had a market for Old China’s luxury goods. If the state was once the reluctant collector of the “old society” as a byproduct of Cultural Revolution, today Fan Jianchuan and other collectors like him are active connoisseurs of the “new society,” the everyday items of the socialist era. To most, these items are a small curiosity that might tell a story for their grandchildren, like the retired police officer (b. 1942) who rushed into his room to bring me an envelope of saved ration tickets.66 To a few, like Yang Peiming and Fan Jianchuan, it is a life’s work; the title of Fan Jianchuan’s recent autobiography is The Great Museum Slave (daguannu). But it is less clear what such a vast collection of the once-new society means. Since the writer Ba Jin called for a national Cultural Revolution Museum in 1986, Chinese intellectuals

From Confiscation to Collection   371 have debated what this would entail. Yang Peiming explained that few of his friends understand his Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, and he himself wonders if such a museum will memorialize the Cultural Revolution, or oppose it, and how?67 And although Fan Jianchuan’s curatorial practice suggests otherwise, he was adamant in interviews that it was his job to collect history. Future generations, he claimed, would be able to judge.68 Perhaps the difficulty with Cultural Revolution material culture is that the history of the period lies mostly unreckoned. To some, Fan Jianchuan’s museums offer a moment of nostalgia, or a vast repository of object lessons for children and grandchildren. For others, the objects of the Mao period, whether quotidian necessities or politicized objects, represent personal trauma or family tragedy. In a 2014 radio interview, a China historian based in San Francisco told a story of seeing old copies of the Little Red Book at a garage sale. An elderly Chinese man browsing the tables shook the Little Red Book in his face and stretched open his mouth, telling him that Red Guards holding just this book had kicked out all of his teeth.69 The objects of new society are thus still subject to interpretations diverse and painful. In Yang Peiming’s posters collection and Fan Jianchuan’s museum, objects are displayed with their titles, date, and provenance, but they are mostly left without further explanation, objects without a lesson.

Conclusion What might the socialist and postsocialist afterlives of objects of “old society” and “new society” tell us about China’s revolutionary experience? The initial attack on the “four olds” suggests a hard line between the remnants of the China’s pre-Liberation past and its revolutionary present. To sacralize the revolution, one needed to dispel the objects of the old; the language with which old society was described, with its ox-demons and snake-spirits, demonstrates the necessity of replacing one kind of idol with another. It is no surprise that one of the most popular tropes of describing a new home in Maoist China was that of an elderly grandmother, taking down paper gods and pasting up a Chairman Mao portrait. Yet the real afterlives of such old objects, the archival record shows, were far more flexible. Objects of the old society could be returned, repurposed, and resold. Two factors stand out: first, whether the object was earned through labor or exploitation, giving an object alternately a proletarian or capitalist valance, and second, that property ownership was linked to class, despite the fact that such labels continued to change over time. Decades after the Cultural Revolution, the collection of objects from the once-“new society” brings up new questions of memory and interpretation. In today’s consumer culture, the once-sacred seems now profane. But the difficulty in building a Cultural Revolution museum, and the persistence of assembling rather than interpreting its artifacts, suggests that the objects of Mao’s “new society” have yet to be disarmed.

372   Denise Y. Ho

Notes 1. Interview in Shanghai, July 24, 2013. 2. Interview in Shanghai, July 9, 2013. 3. Interview in Shanghai, July 9, 2013. 4. See, for example, Melissa Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 5. Sun Peidong, Shishang yu zhengzhi: Guangdong minzhong richang zhuozhuang shishang, 1966–1976 (Fashion and politics: everyday popular clothing and fashion in Guangdong, 1966–1976) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2013). 6. Exceptions of things from “old society” that were not “four olds” would include revolutionary relics (geming wenwu) and objects associated with those of good class status, such as workers and peasants. 7. Patricia Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 17, 343, and 348–349. 8. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 9. On the material culture of the Qing court, see Evelyn  S.  Rawski, The Last Emperors: A  Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For a survey of the imperial collection, see Jeanette Shambaugh Elliott, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). Ebrey compares Emperor Huizong to Qing emperor Qianlong; see especially 341–347. 10. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 12. Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London: Hurst, 2006), 9. 13. Property included both land and moveable possessions. As per the Basic Program on Chinese Agrarian Law (1947) Article 8, “Village peasants’ associations shall take over the landlords’ animals, agricultural implements, houses, grain and other properties.” See Appendix A in William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Random House, 1966), 616. 14. Interview in Shanghai, July 9, 2013. 15. Interview in Shanghai, July 20, 2013. 16. Sun Peidong, Shishang yu zhengzhi, 184–185. This chapter includes other examples of what Sun describes as “resistance” to received notions of revolutionary fashion. 17. See Fan Jianchuan, Jianchuan bowuguan jiangjieci (Narratives of the Jianchuan Museum) (Independently printed book, 2007), 93–94. 18. Denise  Y.  Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity: The Shanghai Cultural Bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968,” China Quarterly 207 (2011): 687–705. 19. Campaigns against superstition took place well before the Cultural Revolution. See Shanghai Municipal Archive (henceforth SMA) B3-2–139, 27–29. 20. Interview in Shanghai, July 20, 2013. Qipao or cheongsam is a “traditional,” long, tight-fitting dress made popular in the 1920s. As Tina Mai Chen points out, though the qipao was seen as bourgeoisie in Mao’s China, it could be reinscribed on the proletarian body; model woman worker Liang Jun was ordered to have a qipao made before her visit to the

From Confiscation to Collection   373 Soviet Union. Tina Mai Chen, “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao’s China,” Fashion Theory 5 (2001): 151–153. But this meaning could also be unstable; Wang Guangmei as China’s first lady wore qipao on a 1963 trip to Indonesia, but she was publicly humiliated in qipao and ping-pong ball “pearls” in a 1966 Cultural Revolution struggle session. See Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 149–157 and 227–228. 21. Interview in Shanghai, July 2, 2013. 22. Interview of Fu Jin in Shanghai, July 1, 2013. 23. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (London: Grafton Books, 1986), 69–95. 24. Jie Li, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 111. 25. Interview in Shanghai, July 3, 2013. 26. Interview in Shanghai, July 20, 2013. 27. Interview in Shanghai, July 2, 2013. 28. Interview in Shanghai, July 15, 2013. Though “capitalist” and “landlord” were separate class categories in Mao’s China (and, indeed, included subcategories), in this case the in­form­ant is referring to them together, and likely to the same kinds of luxury goods. 29. Paul  P.  Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 192 and 196. On the exhibition of Bishop Gong, see SMA C27-1–51, 100. 30. Interview in Shanghai, July 1, 2013. 31. Interview in Shanghai, July 20, 2013. 32. Interview in Shanghai, July 3, 2013. 33. Interview in Shanghai, July 20, 2013. 34. Interview in Shanghai, July 15, 2013. 35. Interview in Shanghai, July 21, 2013. 36. Interview in Shanghai, July 7, 2013. 37. SMA B105-4-325-4, 6–7. 38. See “Hei wu lei,” in A Glossary of Political Terms of The People’s Republic of China, compiled by Kwok-sing Li (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995), 150. 39. I located and copied this document from a glass case in the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, Anren, Sichuan. It was dated April 15, 1967, and its contents include a report from the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee’s Small Group for Processing Confiscated Materials, sent to the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. In 1980, a report gave the final tally of houses searched at over 250,000, with a confiscated property valued at over six hundred million yuan, with an additional 3,220,000 cultural relics and 5,450,000 books. SMA B1-9-228-74, 74. 40. “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu wenhua dageming yundong zhong chuli hongweibing chaojia wuzi de jixiang guiding” (Central Committee Regulations on Processing Confiscated Property by Red Guards from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Movement), March 20, 1967. In Zhongguo wenhua da geming wenku (Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, henceforth WDGW). Here it is implied that a unit could retain a portion to fund its activities. 41. SMA B22-3-10-13, 14–16. 42. SMA B22-3-10-13, 14b, 16. See also Jie Li, Shanghai Homes, 119. 43. SMA B22-3-10-13, 16. The document goes further to explain other classes of criminals, to be treated as “bad elements.”

374   Denise Y. Ho 44. SMA B226-3-10-13, 14b. Foreign securities were to be exchanged for foreign currency, something that China desperately needed. But it appears that their renmibi amount was held in the bank for the capitalists. 45. SMA B134-3–198, 2–13b. This document puts the total number of households at 200,000, but a later document estimates 270,000 (SMA B248-1–11, 11). In addition, cadres who had participated in Liberation and intellectuals, found only with contradictions among the people (neibu maodun), could withdraw from their bank accounts. 46. SMA B248-2-148-13, 14–15. 47. SMA B248-2-148-13, 15. As for confiscated properties that were sold to foreign dignitaries and marines, there were so many that the Friendship Store could not contain them all. In 1971, the municipal trade bureau established three additional stores, even relocating twenty families who lived near the Bund Friendship store so that there would be an adjacent space. It was noted that the foreigners should be kept separate from residents, in order to prevent incidents (shigu) and maintain safety. SMA B248-2-374-20, 22–23. 48. I located and copied this document from a glass case in the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, Anren, Sichuan. It is undated and labeled only “Chuli chachao wuzi jiage cankaobiao” (Reference price list for processing confiscated property). 49. SMA B112-5-355-4, 4–5, SMA B112-355–3, 3. 50. SMA B172-3-132-44, 45–46. At this point, the best antiquities had already been taken in, and those being collected were of low value. Work units were instructed to take any remaining objects and (a) sell handicrafts and books to the requisite purchasing stations, and (b) transfer cultural relics to the Cultural Relics Commission and records to the Shanghai Library. 51. SMA B104-3–135, 2. Special thanks to Christopher Leighton for sharing this document. 52. SMA B112-6–205, 2. Special thanks to Christopher Leighton for sharing this document. 53. SMA B1-9-228-74, 73–76. The issue of the property of the deceased seems to have differed over time. For example, in 1973, if the spouse of a deceased national capitalist was also no longer living, property was not returned unless there was family financial difficulty. In 1980, confiscated property was to be returned to the legal heir (hefa jichengren). 54. Interview in Shanghai, July 15, 2013. 55. Interview in Shanghai, July 21, 2013. 56. Interview in Shanghai, July 7, 2013. 57. Interview in Shanghai, July 3, 2013. This capitalist was called Li Jiawen, the grandchild of Li Hongzhang. Among the cartload of objects was a spoon with engravings on the back and a tray. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family sold all of the objects. 58. Interview in Shanghai, July 15, 2013. See also Jie Li, Shanghai Homes, 121. 59. Jennifer Hubbert, “(Re)collecting Mao: Memory and Fetish in Contemporary China,” American Ethnologist 33 (2006): 145–161. 60. Interview in Shanghai, July 15, 2013. 61. Interview of Yang Peiming in Shanghai, July 8, 2013. 62. Joshua Frank, Collecting Insanity (China File Video, September 18, 2014), http://www. chinafile.com/multimedia/video/collecting-insanity. 63. Fan Jianchuan, Jianchuan bowuguan jiangjieci (Narratives of the Jianchuan Museum) (independently printed book, 2007). 64. Interview of Fan Jianchuan in Anren, Sichuan Province, August 26, 2013. 65. Denise Y. Ho and Jie Li, “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town,” Modern China 42 (2015): 3–37.

From Confiscation to Collection   375 6 6. Interview in Shanghai, July 21, 2013. 67. Interview of Yang Peiming in Shanghai, July 8, 2013. 68. Interview of Fan Jianchuan in Anren, Sichuan Province, August 26, 2013. See also Joshua Frank, Collecting Insanity. 69. Alina Simone, “A History of the Modern World as Told by Everyday Throwaway Ephemera,” Public Radio International, February 4, 2014, http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-04/historymodern-world-told-everyday-throwaway-ephemera.

Bibliography Clark, Paul. The Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Denton, Kirk  A. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Dikötter, Frank. Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China. London: Hurst, 2006. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. Ho, Dahpon David. “To Protect and Preserve: Resisting the ‘Destroy the Four Olds; Campaign, 1966–1967.” In The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, 64–95. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Ho, Denise Y. “Revolutionizing Antiquity: The Shanghai Cultural Bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968.” China Quarterly 207 (2011): 687–705. Hubbert, Jennifer. “(Re)collecting Mao: Memory and Fetish in Contemporary China.” American Ethnologist 33, no. 2 (May 2006): 145–161. Hung, Chang-tai. Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Li, Jie. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Mittler, Barbara. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Murck, Alfreda. “Golden Mangoes: The Life Cycle of a Cultural Revolution Symbol.” Archives of Asian Art 57 (2007): 1–21. Schrift, Melissa. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Sun, Peidong. Shishang yu zhengzhi: Guangdong minzhong richang zhuozhuang shishang, 1966–1976 (Fashion and politics: everyday popular clothing and fashion in Guangdong, 1966–1976). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2013. Zhang, Everett. “Grieving at Chongqing’s Red Guard Graveyard: In the Name of Life Itself.” China Journal 70 (2014): 24–47.

pa rt I V

H ISTORY, M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , AND SOCIAL DIST I NC T ION

chapter 19

Persons a n d Thi ngs i n M a rseille a n d Lucca, 1300 –1 450 Daniel Lord Smail

Over the course of the high Middle Ages, at some indeterminate point between the decline of Carolingian civilization and the rise of the great kingdoms of the thirteenth century, Europe began to grow rich again. A symbolic date is 1252, the year in which the city-states of Genoa and Florence returned to the custom of minting gold, a practice forgotten in Christian Europe since the days of the Romans.1 But money itself is not wealth; it is only a convenient way to represent value as it circulates from one coffer to the next.2 Value itself is something quite different, a quality defined in some ineffable way by the operations of desire. If we choose to trace value back to its source, we will find that value is rooted in energy, for everything of value, at its core, is labor or energy that has congealed in some form.3 Whenever the circulation of value slows down and begins to pool, whether in homes or temples or businesses, value itself freezes. In freezing, value is embodied, transmuted into materiality in the form of things or elements of the built environment. The return to gold in 1252, therefore, may provide a convenient date for marking the slow turning of the tide in medieval Europe, but for all practical purposes the wealth that became increasingly manifest in the thirteenth century consisted of the stuff that money bought, rendered in material forms ranging from the fabric of Gothic cathedrals to the fashionable clothes featured in French romances. Whenever value solidifies in material form, the resulting stuff serves some kind of role or function. One of the most interesting features of things, however, is that they are always capable of acquiring new functions, ranging from the aesthetic and the symbolic to the mechanical.4 These new roles arise from the affordances of things, that is to say, certain qualities that suggest possible uses. Affordances are not present a priori; they emerge instead from the properties of things and from the networks in which they are embedded. For this reason, we can never predict all the potential affordances of things in advance. This is why the study of the entanglement of persons and things is best

380   Daniel Lord Smail understood through the lens of sciences such as history or evolutionary biology that look backward rather than the predictive or experimental natural sciences. Here, we are interested in the manner in which later medieval things were swept up into a system of signs that communicated social distinction. But it is important to bear in mind that an object that signals prestige does not cease to be an aesthetic or mechanical object. Nor does it cease to be a store of value, as long as there are mechanisms for releasing that store of value.5 By the early fourteenth century, the rising tide of wealth, which began in the south of Europe, had caught the eye and the fancy of Italian chroniclers and commentators. Many of them were divided in their minds about whether to gloat over the newfound wealth of their lands and cities or, following the example of ancient Roman commentators, to bemoan the shallowness and softness that would inevitably attend any exaltation of the material.6 Either way, they understood that the newfound wealth was doing something to the social worlds in which they moved. Those skeptical of the benefits of the newfound wealth were joined by the preachers who condemned vanity and by the city fathers or kings and parliaments who passed sumptuary laws in the hopes of restraining excessive and untoward consumption. But the tide itself was indifferent to the outrage generated among its critics. As it turned inexorably northward across Europe, the tide of wealth flowed into great courts and peasant homes alike. As it did so, it reshaped or transformed everything from rooms and the arts with which they were decorated to clothing and beds.7 By the sixteenth century, the kinds of things regularly found in the Mediterranean household of the fourteenth century, including fancy coverlets, feather pillows, and bright colors made from expensive dyes, begin to show up in inventories of English households.8 When it surrounds us, matter such as this forms part of our extended phenotype, in much the same way that the beaver’s dam is part of the beaver or the bower a part of the bower bird.9 Humanity without a self-fashioned materiality, like a honeybee without a hive, is very nearly unimaginable.10 This point has been made to great effect by the world’s ascetics, who are arguably more powerfully defined by materiality than the rest of us.11 What is especially interesting about all self-fashioned niches are the feedback loops that bind the organism to its environment. Humans systematically create and recreate the material habitat in which human culture and human bodies continue to evolve.12 Collectively, humans and things are entangled in a network in which all the nodes, whether human or material, can be theorized as actors.13 The existence of connections that bind us to our habitat and vice versa has important consequences for our understanding of why things change in history. Whenever there are changes in the material regime, we should expect to see changes reverberating in the system of signs that people use to communicate status, identity, and belonging. And we do. The anthropology and archaeology of European expansion and colonialism provide innumerable examples of new objects that are caught up in new systems of signs or are repurposed in dramatic ways when they are translated from one culture to another.14 One among many is a spool from a Kodak film packet that makes a cameo appearance in an ethnography from the area around Mt. Kilimanjaro, where it was observed serving as a plug in the earlobe of a Maasai man.15

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   381 Here, it is important to note that the meaning of materiality is not constrained by its use within semiotic systems. Of all the platitudes inscribed on the chat labels found in museums of ethnography, one of the most ubiquitous and least informative is the one that says “prestige good, used for display purposes” (or whatever). Objects can and do signal all kinds of things, including prestige, but even so it is reasonable for us to ask whether the display of status represents the sum total of the meaning inherent in an object.16 In addition, we may reasonably doubt the attribution itself; after all, a museum’s prestige is parasitic on that of its display goods, so we are dealing with a system of mutually self-fashioning prestige. The relationship between humans and things is surely more complex than a purely semiotic approach would indicate, although we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the nonsemiotic approaches to materiality. The penchant for destroying things provides a case in point, for although some things are broken for reasons that include a desire to communicate, other things—think of television screens in moments of stress or lovers’ gifts following moments of betrayal—are broken for reasons that seem to go beyond a desire to signal. In some cultures, the healing process can involve the transmigration of the disease into a pot, which is then broken in a ceremony of healing so as to enact the destruction of the disease.17 An accumulation of stuff, moreover, can happen for reasons that have nothing to do with conspicuous consumption or conspicuous display. Studies in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, to take a vivid recent example, have shown how the compulsive hoarders of the present day accumulate for reasons that have nothing to do with communicating. Although hoarding behavior is not well understood, it is clear that the materiality that overwhelms the compulsive hoarder has somehow gotten entangled in deep cognitive processes involving anxiety, stress, contentment, and belonging. In the psyche of some hoarders, objects are more like body fat than anything external to the body—not wanted, maybe, but not easy to get rid of for all that.18 We should expect to find that the rising tide of wealth in Europe after 1252, as it materialized in the form of buildings and things, created new affordances that altered, in some significant and interesting way, the complex and perpetually changing matrix or network constituted by medieval Europeans and their material environment. If we want to understand the people of this world not through their writings but instead through their things, we need to have some things at hand. But here is where we run up against the most severe of the methodological challenges associated with studying past materiality. Here is the problem: no assemblage of material remains available today is even remotely representative of the original environment. It is not just a question of there being little left to study. The most intractable problem lies in the fact that the taphonomic process, whereby a once-extant thing disappears from the stream of history, to resurface later as a fossil consisting of altered traces of the original, is systematically biased against whole classes of objects, such as those made of organic materials, notably cloth and wood. Colors are preserved on ceramics, but they are hard to find elsewhere. Anything that is habitually recycled, ranging from household linens to metal wares, is typically consumed before it gets into the ground, and because metal is so easily recycled, large things such as iron coffers are preserved at a much lower rate than small things such

382   Daniel Lord Smail as coins, which fall out of pockets into fields and latrines.19 The taphonomic process, moreover, is systematically biased in favor of material forms that are preserved from the cycles of decay and rebirth by enduring institutions. Museum holdings of medieval European objects, for this reason, are wildly biased toward items that once filled ecclesiastical treasuries. Much the same is true for medieval Europe’s extraordinary manuscripts, not to mention cathedrals and churches. By the later Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical imbalance in our collections is righted somewhat by the astonishing array of visual arts that have survived from the period. Many of the arguments concerning the fashion revolution of later medieval Europe, to take an example, rely to a significant degree on the images of dress and dress accessories available in paintings and illuminations.20 But one can also find humbler things in the visual arts, such as images of the curved barrels used by the wine porters of northern Italy.21 Alongside visual art, there is much to learn from literature, which can convey extraordinary details about the material horizons of the characters.22 Finally, another of Europe’s great medieval treasures consists of its archives, which preserve a truly monumental quantity of records left by state and local governments, private families, and businesses.23 We are nowhere near to grasping the sheer bulk of the surviving mass of archival documentation, but there are tens or even hundreds of millions of extant pages of material. The medieval archives of Marseille and Lucca, the cities from which some of the examples used later are drawn, preserve page counts in the hundreds of thousands, or, in the case of Lucca, probably the low millions. These archives, by definition, consist of tangible things—that is to say, the registers or parchments themselves. It is quite feasible to study documents insofar as they are also things, focusing on the paper, parchment, ink, and binding from which they were made so as to draw conclusions about the trade in paper, the culture of documentation, the changing composition of sealing wax, and so on. But like the visual arts, the archives also preserve ghostly remnants of the tangible things that were present in the world in which those documents were made. We can see this most vividly in the postmortem or probate inventories that have survived from the period. Before 1500, such inventories are relatively uncommon, but even so there are enough to go around. If we hazard a guess that there are 5,000 inventories to be found in all Europe’s archives, each listing, on average, fifty line-items, we could without much difficulty assemble a database of some 250,000 late medieval household goods. Unless we choose to adopt a radical poststructural stance, where all is text and the external reality of medieval Europe is forever beyond our grasp, we can assume that the items found in this database are linked by an exceedingly thin and tenuous thread to actual things that, once upon a time, entered the eye and impinged upon the consciousness of the family members or officials who took the inventory. This is not in the least to suggest that inventories capture belongings in some photographic way. Among other things, the uniqueness of each and every object is cruelly homogenized by the necessity of converting the thing into a descriptive phrase. The challenges associated with describing androgynous or in-between things perplexed the makers of inventories themselves, a fact attested in the inventories by the ubiquity of

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   383 the Latin words vel or sive, meaning “or,” as in “a houppelande or a cloak (unam chopam sive unum mantellum).” The absence of photographic realism is also revealed, in a photonegative way, by the silences or blind spots that characterize all inventories. By way of example, a sample of one hundred inventories from later medieval Marseille, between 1328 and 1451, records not a single pet, and indeed none of the paraphernalia of petdom, apart from a parrot’s cage that makes a rather improbable appearance in an inventory from 1405. But it is hard to believe that the houses of the deceased or the indebted were actually devoid of dogs and cats. Absent things abound in these documents; they range from charms and amulets to fireplaces. The blind spots that obliterated the fireplaces arose, perhaps, from an intuition that elements of the house’s fabric belong to the house, and not to its people. Likewise, we know that some residents of Marseille had painted walls, for we have notarial contracts that specify the commissions of such paintings, but those responsible for making inventories evidently did not feel that wall paintings constituted a thing capable of being inventoried. Surveying the totality of objects, comprising some 5,000 line entries in these hundred inventories, there are other bizarre silences, including surprising shortfalls in things that should be ubiquitous, such as slippers, sandals, hose, clogs, and boots. But even if inventories offer a distorted or warped image of the stuff that was really there, it is no more distorted than the skewed impression of the material world of later medieval Europe we would derive from visiting museums or flipping through facsimile editions of illuminated manuscripts, or, for that matter, from walking the aisles of a rescuearchaeology warehouse where shelf after shelf is filled largely with broken crockery. The textual things found in archival documents, moreover, contain information about tangible things that is not inferior to the facts we can glean from a chemical analysis of elemental ratios, even if textual information constitutes a different species of evidence. The presence of fish in the human diet, for example, leaves behind a legacy of stable isotopes found in the bone long after the fish itself is gone. In the case of an inventory, where an ephemeral object leaves a faint and ghostly trace of its passing in the form of words on a page, the signal we find today is distorted by virtue of having passed through the visual cortex of an observer, to reemerge as a faint linguistic echo or avatar of the original. The fact that we have to use history rather than chemistry to trace that signal back to its origin might seem to diminish the aura of authority that we might like to bring to the process of reconstituting the thing that emitted the signal. But chemistry is not everything. Given this philosophical stance regarding the nature of things and their residual traces, the distinction we conventionally draw between tangible things and word things diminishes just a little bit. Proceeding in this hopeful way, we can approach the written archives of later medieval Europe in search of the tangible things that have long since vanished but have left behind a faint whiff of their passing. The purpose of a documentary archaeology of things from medieval Europe is to provide insights that can complement the archaeology of tangible things. A documentary archaeology would have been unimaginable a generation ago, and even now is little better than a research prospect.24 But the immense and growing power of digital technology, coupled with the emerging

384   Daniel Lord Smail possibilities of scholarly collaboration and crowdsourcing, has made the prospect thinkable. If we could assemble 250,000 line-items from 5,000 inventories, the faintness of each and every signal would be compensated by the sheer richness and volume of their collective voice. With this methodological point in hand, the question before us is the question of how the matrix of people and things underwent one of its many transformations as the rising tide of materiality flowed into the houses and onto and around the bodies of the Europeans of the later Middle Ages. Using the archaeological and art historical sources, we can reach durable and reliable conclusions that have formed the staple elements of the narrative of the history of material culture. All the indices, after all, point to a world in which habits of emulative consumption and competitive display were becoming more common, more costly, and increasingly accessible to a growing range of people. Since the 1980s, historians and scholars of many different eras, or at least those who believe that consumption is driven by demand, have sought to identify the moment marking the birth of desire in the Western world, and medievalists have not been slow to claim priority for their own period.25 So what happens when we test this conclusion against the record of the material past provided by a documentary archaeology? Cities such as Marseille and Lucca in the later Middle Ages offer excellent case studies for measuring the findings of material and ­visual archaeology against the archival record. Although no city can be considered representative of a world in which the bulk of the population consisted of peasants and sharecroppers, cities do have the enormous virtue of generating far more surviving documents per capita. These two cities provide important counterweights to studies that focus on Florence, Venice, Paris, or London. Neither Marseille nor Lucca was in a flourishing condition across the period from 1250 to 1500; Marseille’s economy, in particular, was positively depressed. In neither city do we find anything like a royal court or a university. In the case of Lucca, the city’s political domination over a hinterland means that records pertaining to the small communes and villages that dotted the countryside were preserved in the city itself, meaning that the possibilities for studying patterns of rural consumption are quite substantial. Surveying the records, it would certainly be possible to write a history about the emergence of desire or the birth of a system of competitive consumption. By way of example, let us look at the inventory of a citizen and resident of Marseille who died on June 5, 1348, toward the tail end of the Black Death (Figure 19.1).26 The deceased was a Jew named Bonafos Bonet, who had lived, with his late wife Doneta, in a house located in Marseille’s Jewish quarter. The two appear to have immigrated several decades previously from the town of Lunel in Languedoc, across the Rhone River, and it is almost certain that they had fled to Marseille following the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306.27 An inventory of a Jew, admittedly, is not typical, but once we start to screen inventories in search of typical individuals, we soon find that there is no one left at all. Like most postmortem inventories in this world, the document was not made by a government official. It was compiled instead by a member of the extended family—in this case, by a Jew named Bonet Vital, an immigrant from the town of Uzès in Languedoc who was acting

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   385

Figure 19.1.  Inventory of Bonafos Bonet, Marseille, 1348. Archives municipales de la Ville de Marseille, 1 II 44, fol. 55 verso. Reproduced with permission.

as the guardian of Bonafos’s heir, a child named Benet Bensegnori. The inventory records everything the guardian found as he moved from room to room in the couple’s house, keeping notes either in Provençal or Hebrew. The inventory itself was translated into Latin when it was entered into the record, although many of the words are Provençal in origin and have been given Latin endings. One or two words may be Hebrew.

386   Daniel Lord Smail Unlike virtually every other inventory of a well-to-do house in Marseille at this period, the document lists no kitchen and, for that matter, no trenchers, bowls, kettles, spits, or utensils of any kind. The text ends abruptly, and it is possible that some elements of the inventory were lost. Leaving aside this major lacuna, the couple’s known possessions were distributed in three rooms. First, we find a storeroom full of equipment for making and storing wine. Next comes a dining hall, furnished with a table, benches, and several chests containing linens and other things. Finally, there is a bedroom, with three beds and several more chests, in which the clothing was kept. The guardian who made the inventory, Bonet Vital, had an eye for fabrics and colors, and he went to some lengths to describe the linens and clothing in all their glorious detail. One of the many things that strike us is the not insignificant quantity of silk. Opening one of the chests in the dining hall, for example, Bonet d ­ iscovered a large pile of thirty-two bed sheets and fifteen tablecloths, including the following items: • One silk tablecloth • One bed sheet worked with silk • One silk purse • One purse and a belt made of silk • A certain silk rasali28 In the chests in the bedroom, similarly, he found several articles of clothing in a whole rainbow of colors, several of which were dressed with sendal, a fabric made of silk. It is worth lingering over some of the highlights: • An overtunic, a tunic, and a cloak with red sendal and squirrel fur and tassels, which are called “rapra,” colored lead blue or “pes” • A scarlet cloak with yellow sendal and silver tassels • A green cloak with red sendal • A ruby-red overtunic with yellow sendal • A ruby-red tunic • A coverlet for a crib or a cradle made of sendal • A child’s overtunic, ruby red • A lead-blue hood • A lead-blue scapular • A silk hood faced with ruby-red linen • A bright green tunic • One bright green overtunic, old, with a pelisse Silks and fabrics dyed in spectacular colors can be found in other inventories from mid-fourteenth-century Marseille. What is remarkable here is the density of such items. We can construct several theories that might help explain the concentrated luxury in this house. It is possible, for example, that the deceased man and his wife were engaged in some form of pawnbroking, and if so, perhaps these items came from their Christian debtors. But this seems unlikely, and not just because Bonafos and Doneta were clearly

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   387 in the wine business. At least two of the items were fringed with tassels, presumably the tzitzits worn by male Jews, and the uncertainty with several other readings suggests that the notary who translated the text was dealing with Hebrew words for which the corresponding Latin words were unclear. The most likely explanation for the concentrated luxury in this house arises from the cosmopolitan nature of Marseille’s Jews.29 It is easy to imagine the pathways that could have bound an immigrant Jewish household tightly into networks of communication in the Western Mediterranean. In fact, we do not have to merely imagine it—we can see it in the inventory itself, in the form of two glass lamps from Damascus and a ceramic bowl from the city of Bougie in the Maghreb. These exotic items are nearly unprecedented in the sample collection of inventories. The networks of communication that bound together the world of Mediterranean Jewry facilitated the transmission not only of letters and rabbinic commentaries but also lamps, Islamic lusterware, and the latest fabrics and fashions from Italy and Valencia. If so, did the fashions paraded about by immigrant Jews in cities such as Marseille generate acquisitive envy among Christians? It is certainly possible. Jews, of course, were not the only Massiliotes with connections afar. Like any port city at this time, Marseille possessed a small community of expatriate Italians. There were many pathways whereby the colors and fabrics pioneered elsewhere in the Mediterranean could have found their way into the city. This understanding of luxury consumption is modeled on an epidemiological approach wherein the desire for luxury is a contagious disease that started somewhere else, leapt from one port to the next, caught hold in a few households, and then gradually swept across the whole city, leaving unscathed only those whose poverty served to inoculate them. We could certainly write the history of luxury consumption in Marseille in this way and highlight how the silken fabrics and colors found in the house of Bonafos and Doneta eventually found their way into the houses of Christian fishmongers and bakers. But to write the history in this way would be to generate some enormous blind spots of our own. The fact of the matter is that any survey which tried very hard not to cherry-pick the results would reveal no more than tiny ripples of change in certain domains, such as silken fabrics, colors, coats of arms, books, and the decorative artistry dedicated to chests and coffers, and these ripples would scarcely blemish the surface of an otherwise unmoving sea of materiality. There are no meaningful changes to be found in wine-making equipment, utensils, lighting fixtures, rugs and carpets, bed furnishings and coverlets, tables, stools, and benches. We cannot find any signs of a takeoff in children’s goods, pet accessories, or devotional objects. There are few meaningful changes in the ratio of tin or pewter to ceramic and no indication that the ceramics became so noticeably more beautiful as to impinge upon the awareness of the makers of inventories. From an epidemiological point of view, of course, this is not even remotely a problem. One can simply scratch cities like Marseille off the list of trendsetters and explain it away as a result of the city’s poverty. This is, after all, how diffusionist models of cultural change always work. They proceed by identifying a hot spot, such as Sumeria at the outset of the agricultural transition or Western Europe on the eve of the colonial enterprise. They then isolate the reasons for the putative change and assign the causal arrow of all

388   Daniel Lord Smail future change to the vector identified in this way, as if urbanity or consumer desire will unfold in some predictable and uncomplicated way wherever its vector should land. But to return to the Kodak film spool used to ornament the ear, we know that that is  not how it happens. The actor networks of cities like Marseille and Lucca are not organisms that can catch a disease. They are complex networks with multiple feedback mechanisms that are, in turn, entangled in systems of communication and meaning making that go far beyond the simple desire to display prestige. If we are trying to understand people through their things and possessions, if we are seeking to understand the phenotypes in which things and self-fashioned materials were so deeply embedded, let us return to the documentary archaeology of these cities and find out what else the things are trying to tell us. One of the first and most important things is the presence of shabby things in and among the luxurious. Today, many of us inhabit a world where the social homogeneity of our neighborhoods is matched by a similar homogeneity in the profile of the goods we choose to surround ourselves with. It was quite the opposite in the later Middle Ages. The point is emblematized by the inventory of goods of Bonafos Bonet and his wife Doneta, for although the couple owned stacks of expensive linens, at least some of those linens were tucked away in these rather disreputable objects: • One box with a broken lid • Another box, old Old and shabby things abound in the inventories. To the extent that inventories recorded things more or less in the order seen, moreover, it is clear that the luxury goods were often juxtaposed with the shabby things. In some cases, this is because people indiscriminately stacked the shabby things alongside the nice ones, as in these items belonging to another victim of the Black Death which were found along with some other things in a great painted chest:30 • Thirty hand towels, some good, some shabby • Eight facecloths • Three shabby cloths31 which are worked with silk Of course, it could be said that these things were squirreled away in a chest and therefore the juxtaposition of the fine and the shabby was not one that made a public statement. But we find such juxtapositions even in display goods. The house of a candler who died in 1395, for example, included a bed of planks furnished with a bottom mattress, a top mattress, and sheets and coverlets to match, including a flocked coverlet in an Alexandrian style, but along with these we find a type of coverlet or blanket described as both shabby and torn. However much people were motivated by the desire for nice things, in other words, and however much they created hierarchies of objects, they did not seek to spatially isolate the fine from the shabby. The human world worked in much the same way, of course, with the poor living in the homes of the wealthy, as their servants

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   389 or slaves, or, just as often, in houses or rented rooms right next door. In this way, we can see how the network of persons and the network of things were defined by the same social aesthetic. The fact that Bonafos and Doneta tucked their fine linens away in old or shabby chests points to another finding revealed by documentary archaeology, namely, that the rising tide of wealth did not lift all areas of the household equally. Instead, the taste for luxury was confined to certain kinds of things, notably outer clothing, fine metal wares, dress accessories such as belts and crowns, and bed accessories such as coverlets and quilts. Left far behind were furniture items of all types, including tables, bed frames, chairs, benches, and stools. The reason for the asymmetry in investment probably lies in the fact that people were indeed using such articles to engage in prestige competition. The biological parallel can be found in sexual selection, a pattern that leads to spiraling takeoffs isolated in just one part of the (male) phenotype—the peacock’s tail, for example, or the sea lion’s bulk. The presence of isolated luxury articles in the homes of the modest also points to the pattern of emulative, trickle-down consumption that we have come to expect to find, following the theories of Thorstein Veblen and Werner Sombart. But there is an important proviso, namely, the fact that the robust nature of the resale market and the system for guaranteeing credit that was based upon pawn goods means that the value found in luxury goods was far more fungible than we might otherwise imagine.32 One of the astonishing findings of a documentary archaeology is that the value of luxury goods and garments, at least at the upper end, belongs to the same order of magnitude as the value of houses and plots of land. This fact is displayed with great clarity in a collection of inventories of insolvent estates from the years 1421 to 1422, where the estimated values of real estate holdings are listed alongside the estimated values of things. To take just one example, the inventory of a woman whose late husband, a notary, was insolvent at the time of his death lists seven units of property averaging 85 florins in value. The inventory also lists two outer garments valued at 25 florins and 28 florins, a woman’s belt of silver and enamel valued at 20 florins, and a crown of silver and pearls at 18 florins. Surveys of other inventories indicate that the ratio of the total investment in movable goods compared to the total investment in real estate was typically around 3:2, though there is much variation from one person to the next. What this means, in effect, is that luxury goods were simultaneously stores of value. Like subcutaneous fat, which in animals can serve both as a signaling device and as a store of calories, luxury goods serviced at least two functions. In point of fact, small, portable things had a very special kind of value, since they could be readily pawned, or, if the going got tough, hidden or spirited away from exigent creditors. In other words, their weight and size afforded a more rapid and efficient liquidation of their value in those moments when liquidity was needed. For this reason, wealth congealed much more readily in certain small objects than in other kinds of objects. Furniture, for example, was spectacularly cheap and often very shabby, something we know, counterintuitively, from the curious fact that furniture was not commonly described as being shabby. The point is that things were called shabby only if they were capable of not being shabby. The drabness of the furniture, in turn, derives from furniture’s

390   Daniel Lord Smail being cumbersome. In addition, the materials themselves had different temporalities. Wool and especially silk were very durable fabrics; the latter could last hundreds of years. Linen, by contrast, wore out more quickly, revealed in the inventories by the fact that linens acquired the word “shabby” much more often than other fabrics. One of the consequences is that the system of dressing homes and bodies favored wealth that congealed as woolens with silk trims or as coverlets with embroidered designs. Some kinds of clothing were composites of fabrics of very different temporalities. This was possible because articles of dress were often modular. The durable parts, such as fur trims, silken linings, or decorative buttons could be removed from worn clothing and attached to new designs. In this vein, we sometimes find sheets made of linen but decorated with a silken fringe. Comparing the two cities, we find some striking similarities. The entanglement of prestige and value, for example, is just as marked in the things found in the Lucchesia, as are the striking asymmetries constituted by the juxtaposition of fine and shabby things. But the contrasts between the two cities are equally vivid. Lucca’s fancy clothing, for example, relied on contrasting color schemes and striped or checkered patterns that are present in Marseille but distinctly less frequent. These include parti-colored clothing, where one-half of the costume was made up in one color or a type of weave that contrasted, sometimes violently, with the color or weave of the other half: • A woman’s parti-colored surcoat colored tawny on one side and peach blossom on the other side • A woman’s parti-colored jacket in vermilion or blood red and bluish medley cloth, piped with narrow gold fringes at the hands and neck and lined with rabbit skin • A woman’s parti-colored tunic, colored green and colored vermilion • A man’s parti-colored woolen cloak colored blood red and peach blossom • A man’s parti-colored woolen jacket in vermilion [on one side] and yellow stripes [on the other] with a lining of white skin Little of this can be found in Marseille, though there are one or two examples of clothing that was nearly similar: • A woman’s parti-colored tunic in good condition [colored] ruby red [on one side] and deep blue [on the other] The Lucchese clothing, moreover, was much more prone to be described using a gendered terminology of male and female. The entrenched habit of gendering in the Lucchesia seeped sideways into other linguistic domains. Double beds and double-bed sheets, for example, were often gendered male simply because they were bigger. Can we explain Lucca’s distinctive color schemes in terms of the desire for social distinction? Possibly, but we should do so with care. We need to remind ourselves that the modern world is the child of Enlightenment philosophy, and of Thomas Malthus, and is therefore prone to imagine that the world operates by virtue of the competition that

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   391 exists between atomistic individuals within societies. The very sameness of the clothing styles found in the Lucchesia, for example, may point to something other than prestige competition: namely, a regional costume that came into existence not because the individual pieces allowed Lucchese men and women to distance themselves from one another, but instead because the collective fashion allowed Lucchese men and women to demonstrate, publicly, that they were not to be confused with those god-damned Pisans or Florentines.33 That the argument of distinction is so readily available does not mean that we should spurn it, of course, so let us look more closely at the patterns of prestige. The records of Lucca are distinguished by the vast quantity of sources pertaining to the seizure of goods for the purposes of debt collection. Creditors in pursuit of a debt brought their complaints to the court, prompting a sergeant of the court to travel to the houses of debtors, seizing anywhere between one and one hundred objects with which to reimburse the creditor. Returning to the court, the sergeants handed to the notary a list of the plunder he had taken—the plunder itself was left with a bailee or handed over directly to the creditor—and the notary duly transcribed a translation of the list of objects and their descriptive phrases into his register. Thousands of these little inventories of seized objects exist from the early to middle decades of the fourteenth century. Simple calculations based on survival rates indicate that more than 2,000 seizures were made annually during the 1330s, in a city and district comprising around 20,000 households. The sergeants took everything they could get their hands on, including wine casks both empty and full, wicker baskets, nets for catching thrushes and doves, swords, raw flax, and even manure. But they showed a distinct preference for fine clothing. In the rare cases where an individual was plundered in successive weeks, we can occasionally witness the process whereby the sergeants began with the fancy stuff, and gradually worked their way down to the ordinary stuff. This process bears more than a passing resemblance to the enforcement of a sumptuary law, for when an individual had proven himself or herself to be unworthy through falling into debt, the first things to be taken away were the fancy clothes. What is remarkable about the system is that the status of being unworthy was not given a priori, in the form of a status such as “peasant” or “tradesman.” Instead, unworthiness was proven a posteriori by indebtedness. In this way, we can see how materiality, in this case the materiality of a clothing regime enforced by the process of debt collection, was swept up into systems of social marking or social control. What did the impoverished peasants, laborers, and artisans of the Lucchesia feel about the seizure of their things? All people have a map of the body laid out somewhere in the cortex. As literature in cognitive neuroscience has shown, the brain uses that map to know where to find heads and toes and everything in between.34 But the brain is not fussy about what it chooses to consider the edges of the body, and it is quite willing to include hats and boots in the body map, not to mention tools and tennis rackets, as long as they are in contact with the body for a sufficient amount of time. Objects that are further away cannot be necessarily absorbed into the body map, but they are readily caught up in affective relationships with their owners, as most of us know already without being

392   Daniel Lord Smail told by neuroscientists. The compulsive hoarder is one whose emotional relationships with objects and pets have supplanted relationships with family and friends. It is not clear that people always acquire emotional relationships with things—the ubiquity of trash in the modern world suggests otherwise. But one of the most distinctive things to emerge from the records of debt collection from Lucca is the fact that people could and did develop emotional ties to their things. The evidence is necessarily indirect, but the signal is suggestive. To begin with, we find a small but revealing number of cases where individual debtors chose to hide certain special things away from the sergeants. The archetypal case is from the year 1334, when a sergeant of the court, plundering a farm for repayment of a debt reported that he had found and carried off a fancy coverlet that had been hidden away in a haystack. This rather extraordinary tale tells us that at least some debtors were distressed at the thought of losing precious coverlets. It also suggests that sergeants perceived the hiding away of coverlets as an affront to their office and their own dignity. This was not, as it happens, the only instance where a coverlet was hidden away in the Lucchesia, although the second coverlet, seized the previous day by the same sergeant, had been hidden in a shed. The world of debt collection was predicated on an overt system of monetary value, but as these examples indicate, it was shot through with a second economy, an economy of humiliation. Cases such as these two illustrate the emotional bonds that could connect people with their things. These connections are also revealed by the violence with which the sergeants were sometimes confronted. Many features of the process, including the home invasions that were necessarily part of the process, would have been sufficient to anger even the most stoic of debtors. But as the practice of iconoclasm indicates so well, objects are especially good at channeling emotion, which is why the object itself often takes center stage among the violent responses. Here we find a debtor hastening to seize back a piglet squealing in the arms of a predatory sergeant. There, a debtor cuts the cords that tie a sack of plundered goods to a donkey. The point is that if we take seriously our own intuition that goods form part of our bodies and are embedded in our emotions and psyches, then the objects seized in the Lucchesia were not just objects. They were proxies for the body. Michel de Montaigne, who understood humanity as well as anyone, makes much the same point in his essay on cruelty, where he praises the Persian king, Artaxerxes, who chose to whip the clothing rather than the backs of errant noblemen.35 As long as we understand objects as proxies for the body, we can draw an equivalence between debt collection and the body-based humiliations that were rapidly emerging in the criminal justice system at this time, including whipping, maiming, and the stocks. Debt collection, as argued earlier, afforded a mechanism for enforcing sumptuary distinctions, but it also afforded a mechanism for inflicting stress and humiliation, which are key elements in a system of domination. Surveying the records produced by a documentary archaeology of both Marseille and Lucca, we can, if we choose, pick out the luxury goods and thereby claim that the roots of modernity are somehow located in the later Middle Ages. As noted above, this is a

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   393 stance necessarily informed by a diffusionist or epidemiological model of doubtful reliability. But even if we allow ourselves this dubious luxury, imagining thereby to enhance the standing of later medieval Europe and make of it a happening place, what do we do with all the evidence for the late-medieval patterns that are distinctly not modern?36 We have already seen some of these not-modern patterns, such as the fact that their prestige goods, especially their clothing, were arguably far more fungible or liquid than ours, and far more likely to hold their value over the years. If we yield to the temptation to attach date-stamps to patterns or processes, then we commit ourselves to a historical vision where the modern elements of any world, like Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture of the dying slave, are somehow trapped in the stony matrix of premodernity, just waiting to be chipped free. This is not how the world works, and if we really want to understand the people and things of the later Middle Ages, we need to understand them on their own terms. So let us, in closing, return to one of the most interesting observations to be gleaned from a survey of the archives of the two cities featured here. Once again, this is an absence, not a presence, and in this case it is the absence of anything that we can creditably call a collection. By the sixteenth century, the habit of forming collections was beginning to manifest itself in the behavior of antiquarians, naturalists, scientists, and humanists of all stripes and conditions. We find vast assemblages of diverse objects, such as wondrous things gathered from the four corners of the earth, or collections of nearly identical objects, such as books and beetles.37 The streams and rivulets of this practice come down to the present day and constitute a fascinating realm of historical inquiry. But in all the documents from Marseille and Lucca, among the thousands upon thousands of individuals and objects to be found there, you will never find anything that even remotely suggests the existence of a collection. Absence of evidence can hardly be assumed to mean evidence of absence, especially in the Lucchese records, where many of the victims of predation were far too poor to collect anything other than grain and beans. For this reason, research in other archives is quite capable of falsifying the claim. But if it should hold up, this noteworthy absence gestures to the fundamental alterity of this world and points to a number of possible conclusions. Of these, the most interesting is the possibility that what really defines the last two hundred years, and even more the last two decades, is not the sheer volume of stuff so much as its sameness. Our desire to believe in our own individuality, so cherished a feature of modern identity constructs, is inversely proportional to the individuality of the very objects we assemble in the frantic pursuit of distinction. The results can be desperate indeed, for if you are a compulsive hoarder, and if you choose to treasure only one thing, such as a newspaper or a Tetra Brik container, then you will have a nearinfinitude of things to treasure. The existence of compulsive hoards in modern Western societies, together with the fact that junk clings to most of us without our really having a say in the matter, stands in sharp contrast to the medieval world. In the Middle Ages, movable things really were movable, largely because the value they contained caused them to be sucked up into circulation. Observations such as these remind us that the relationship between persons

394   Daniel Lord Smail and things is contingent on the societies of which they are a part, and they highlight the futility of any exercise that seeks to find any of the trappings of our society in the societies of the past.

Notes 1. Robert Sabatino Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” The Economic History Review 9 (1956): 219–240. 2. See Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 3. This perspective is in keeping with arguments made in Marshall David Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Routledge, 2004). 4. James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. Robert Shaw and John Bransford (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum; distributed by the Halsted Press Division, Wiley, 1977), 67–82. 5. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. These themes are discussed in David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967); Carlo  M.  Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1994). 7. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996); Evelyn S. Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg, eds., Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 8. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England, Early Modern History (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998). 9. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. 11. A point made by Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 12. The theoretical premises of this claim are outlined in Kevin  N.  Laland and Michael J.  O’Brien, “Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Method & Theory 17, no. 4 (December 2010): 303–322. 13. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 14. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Michael Dietler, Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 15. Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4. 16. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450   395 17. James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition, Clarendon Lectures in English 2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska, Parts and Wholes: Fragmentation in Prehistoric Context (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007). 18. I have reviewed some of the literature in Daniel Lord Smail, “Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past,” Isis; an International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 105, no. 1 (March 2014): 110–122. 19. Whence the enormous number of small metal objects that can be found; see the Portable Antiquities database at http://finds.org.uk/. Christopher Dyer has commented on the prevalence of coin finds in fields, implying that the coins fell out of the pockets of peasants working the fields; see Christopher Dyer, “Peasants and Coins: The Uses of Money in the Middle Ages,” British Numismatic Journal 67 (1997): 31–47. 20. Much of the literature on the fashion revolution in later medieval Europe, for example, has included evidence drawn from visual sources; see Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years, 1340–1365 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1999); Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Also valuable from a theoretical point of view are Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 21. See Lester Little, Indispensable Immigrants: The Wine Porters of Northern Italy and Their Saint (1200–1800) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 22. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). 23. A fascinating introduction to this material, featuring private business records, can be found in Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, Francesco Di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1957). 24. Mary Carolyn Beaudry, ed., Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 25. This perspective on the meaning of consumption can be traced back to Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2007), and especially to Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, trans. W. R. Dittmar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967). Scholars who emphasize the later medieval contribution to the consumer revolution include Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Cochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Maryanne Kowaleski, “A Consumer Economy,” in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W.  M.  Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238–259. 26. Archives municipales de la Ville de Marseille 1 II 44, fols. 55v–56v. 27. Marseille, at the time, belonged to the Kingdom of Naples. 28. Scilicet rançal, Spanish for a fine woven textile; my thanks to Luis Girón-Negrón. 29. Juliette Sibon, Les juifs de Marseille au XIVe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2011). 30. Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône 355E 1, fols. 25r–29v. 31. Ms: tralhole.

396   Daniel Lord Smail 32. See, inter alia, Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, ch. 9. 33. A major point made by Mary Douglas, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption: With a New Introduction, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1996). 34. Sandra Blakeslee, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better (New York: Random House, 2007). 35. Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), book 2, 101. 36. This is the question that motivates Martha  C.  Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 37. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Bibliography Beaudry, Mary Carolyn, ed. Documentary Archaeology in the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Cochan. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Cipolla, Carlo M. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994. Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Heller, Sarah-Grace. Fashion in Medieval France. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Herlihy, David. Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. Howell, Martha C. Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996. Kowaleski, Maryanne, and P. J. P. Goldberg, eds. Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Early Modern History. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998. Newton, Stella Mary. Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years, 1340–1365. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1999. Origo, Iris. The Merchant of Prato, Francesco Di Marco Datini, 1335–1410. 1st American ed. New York: Knopf, 1957. Piponnier, Françoise, and Perrine Mane. Dress in the Middle Ages. Translated by Caroline Beamish. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Stuard, Susan Mosher. Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Welch, Evelyn S. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

chapter 20

Cl oth a n d th e R itua l s of Encou n ter i n L a Fl or ida Weaving and Unraveling the Code Laura Johnson

Translations are transmutations, renderings, representations formed from alchemical mixtures that can relate but never duplicate the original material. Where there are signs, there is translation. Such is the nature of culture contact when two individuals meet and attempt to make sense of one another. Such linguistic bridging is a crucial step when encountering the new.1 A specific type of linguistic construct, metaphor, helps humans connect this symbolic realm with the physical world of objects. Metaphors, according to recent linguistic and philosophical interpretations, are structural, subjective elements of language that go far beyond mere description to actually define and help create cultural realities. Linguistic metaphors reflect cultural structures. Metaphors are an important physical part of how humans make sense of the world; they are reflections and agents of deep structure in a society.2 Understanding and interacting with the world demands a metaphorical conceptual system. This material translation is an active process. Jonathan Dickinson, an English colonist shipwrecked off the coast of southeastern Florida and captured for the Spanish by the Hobe Indians in 1697, experienced firsthand the powerful, intimate nature of material translation. Dickinson and his men were quickly stripped of their garments by the Hobe, who exchanged their native breechclouts of plaited grass for English woolens and linens. Woolen breeches and doublets quickly became thin strips, perfect for breechclout wrapping. On the other side of this exchange, switching breeches for breechclouts transformed Dickinson and the other Englishmen. Hobe straw breechclouts superficially translated Englishmen into Indians just as the Hobe translated English garments into versions they appreciated. Translation in sixteenthcentury England had a nearly identical physical expression in its counterpart among the Hobe. The word could refer to either linguistic metamorphosis or the act of reclothing.

398   Laura Johnson To clothe someone in livery and incorporate them in the company was to translate them. For tailors, “translating” was deconstructing a garment to reuse the materials. To dress someone was to translate the person physically and metaphorically. Both Indians and Europeans created and used metaphors. The very concept of metaphorical thinking helped create the initial bridges and misunderstandings between peoples. Scholars of Native/European contact have long noted the metaphorical language used in diplomatic negotiations.3 More recent work concludes that metaphor played a vital role in creating both a shared cultural language and discord between Natives and Europeans.4 Examination of the many roles metaphors play in association with textiles in contact situations will elucidate the mental and physical realities of the individuals involved. Creating special spaces for diplomatic meetings with deerskins and carpets might open the next stage of fictive kinship ties recognized with gifts of clothing. Mutual knowledge of textiles and their translative power could be used to turn European into Native captive or Native leader into brother. In the discursive and physical worlds of the early American southeast, textiles were tangible, material metaphors for connection and recognition, for power and control. Native peoples from Alaska to Mexico, Canada to Florida wove, twined, and knotted textiles in various forms long before they saw European woven goods.5 The traditional argument for Native adoption and eventual “dependence” on European cloth posits that it was an exciting foreign substance that was vastly superior to tanned animal skins for winter warmth and durability. Work on adoption and adaptation of European goods indicates that Natives worked these new materials into their lives because they paralleled Native items imbued with power and status, rich with symbolism and ritual. Native Americans cut copper kettles and engraved Spanish silver into ornaments that duplicated precontact forms or decorated them with Indigenous designs. Glass beads and broken wine glass knops often took the place of crystal decorations.6 The translation of those objects is metaphorical—understanding one item/concept in terms of another. Metaphorical translation does not deny the utility of an object. It provides additional layers of resonance for its choice as a tool, a garment, a decoration. Utility reinforces beauty in most Native versions of the cosmos.7 Work by anthropologists and ethnographers traces the symbolic and representational parameters of textiles as a mode of connection and interaction, specifically the applications of classical gift theory through the metaphor of fabric.8 Textiles functioned concretely and metaphorically in a wide range of contact situations to create and reinforce cultural and physical relationships. Elaborate rituals, from how one approached the cleared space of encounter to physical gestures and gift offerings, developed over the course of the sixteenth century in La Florida as Native met European. Working out how to read one another could result in violent reprisals as easily as it could peaceful exchange. Theories on nonlinguistic cultural contact abound, yet most seem to agree on a common trajectory from signs to objects to verbal exchanges.9 Searching for a common symbolism between cultures is often limited to those items that both groups recognize and use in a similar fashion. Those are frequently reduced to food, shelter, and clothes. Almost all early encounter rituals involved the body: touch, perception, and presentation of physical form.10 As symbolic interaction

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   399 developed through the sixteenth century, clothing became one of the most common methods of achieving connection. Individuals chose items of dress to do some of the work of cultural interpretation, one that resonated with their own experiences and parent cultures. It is difficult to understand how textiles could work as a cross-cultural gesture of diplomacy without first examining how they functioned in precontact societies in Europe and in the southeastern region of North America. Initial movements by the Spanish into La Florida in the 1520s set the stage for clothing as a way for men and women to communicate when spoken language was not an option. Europeans and Natives spent the subsequent decades developing textile metaphors, encoding and decoding cloth and clothing. By the time linguistic interpreters regularly accompanied European missions of exploration and conquest, textiles were already firmly established tools. By the end of the sixteenth century, many Native groups up and down the Eastern Seaboard had a working knowledge of European textiles and their metaphorical role in the rituals of encounter. Textiles’ ubiquity determined their place in those ceremonies.

Nettles and Velvet: The Language of Clothing Prior to Contact Beginning in the twelfth century, various societies throughout the southeastern portion of North America developed sets of locally differentiated but regionally related complex plaza and mound architecture and rich material culture assemblages.11 Paramount chiefs of major Mississippian sites such as Etowah in present-day Georgia achieved much of their power through access to trading networks that moved textiles, turquoise, feathers, mica, copper, and other luxury items to the region from areas as distant as the Southwest, Midwest, and Mexico.12 Producing twined mantles, lace kilts, feather cloaks, and painted hides took a significant amount of time and resources.13 There are strong correlations between the quality of materials, decorative complexity, and the relative social status of those who wore them.14 Collecting and occasionally redistributing such resources, and using them in interments, confirmed Mississippian elite social, political, and economic power. Displaying them publicly and privately reinforced hierarchies and ritual power.15 From early Spanish accounts, textiles continued to play important economic, political, and ritual roles in what is currently referred to as the “Mississippian shatter zone” of continual upheaval and social reorganization throughout the southeast.16 Within elite tombs from the protohistoric period a few textile fragments survived, some sandwiched by copper plates placed over the body, all markers of elite status and control of trade networks.17 Woolens and linens, like other European-made materials, moved through proto-contact exchange networks and into the hinterlands smoothly, affecting social and political power beyond the immediate zone of contact.18 A sixteenth-century Spanish noble’s dress, much like an Etowah chief ’s, signified his power, wealth, and social connections to all who saw him. By the beginning of the

400   Laura Johnson sixteenth century, textiles and dress styles were becoming increasingly codified across Europe. According to law, social status largely dictated whether someone wore fine velvet and silk, Spanish merino wool and Holland linen, or hemp and rough jergueta (a lower-end woolen). Unlike more commonly studied sumptuary laws, sayings—such as “Por la facha y por el traje se conoce al personaje” (“By sight and suit [of clothes] you will know the person”)19—echo popular perception and use of clothing with a greater degree of application across social boundaries. Proverbs and sayings functioned as “operational laws of daily life” that accurately reflected life in an oral community.20 This view was not uniquely Spanish. Similar opinions on the role of clothing in construction of status and identity occurred throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.21 Clothes and fashion were metaphors for everything from political commentary to the very essence of thought. The term “fashion” meant both dress and form, clothing and making.22 As Peter Stallybrass stated, clothing is “a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body.”23 Clothes had a life of their own, encoding identity and memory, from liveried servants in a household marked by and paid with the clothes on their backs to the suit of clothes that transmuted sister into brother in Twelfth Night.24 How people referenced clothing in their daily lives offers keen insight into how those textiles were perceived and used across society. In phrases such as “por la facha y el traje,” the connection between dress, bearing, and status is clear. Such proverbs provide us with the rationale behind sumptuary lawbreaking. Dressing above your station effectively put you there. “Apparells great excess/For though the laws against yt are express/ Each Lady like a Queen herself doth dress/A merchants wife like to be a baroness.”25 Clothes announced one’s presence, vouched for one’s honor and word when it was given. Clothes acted as servants and offspring for their wearers, public representation of their bearer’s perceived worth. “Vestidos dan honores, que no hijos de emperador” (“Clothes give honors, as sons to the emperor”). Dress was such an effective method of persuasion and conversion that in mid-sixteenth-century Ireland the English sent key individuals rich suits of clothing such as crimson velvet coats, silks, and feathered hats to encourage a consideration of English direct rule.26 The transgressive potential of clothing and fears associated with it crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. Dress, and its perception, blurred social, racial, and class boundaries as people relied increasingly on exterior signifiers to communicate status.27 When European met Floridano, each was primed to understand dress codes to recognize authority and social standing.

Painted Deerskins and Linen: Florida Natives Meet the Spanish The early Spanish saga of La Florida was a tale of false starts, lessons more often left unlearned, and the power of miscommunication rather than clear recognition of mutual

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   401 sartorial codes. But through it all, Indian and Spanish presentations of cloth and clothing emerge as first choices to offer up and open conversation. As Spaniards appeared on their shores and in their homes, local Natives consistently attempted to open negotiations using gifts of clothing. Sometimes this was only a feint in order to better plan an ambush, but their offers of deerskins, mantles, and cloaks indicate that groups from South Carolina to Florida attempted to use adornment to open the path between two peoples. Spanish officials, while they recognized the value and power of the goods offered and had the cultural capital to understand how dress functioned in society, failed to view Natives as capable partners in such a dialog. Viewed as a whole, the initial rituals of encounter appear to have been both a Native seminar for Spanish and French diplomats in deploying the language of clothing and a European attempt to conquer the bodies and the resources of Floridanos. The legend of Chicora, that fabled Spanish “new Andalusia,” began with linen shirts and red woolen caps.28 Pedro de Quexo and Francisco Gordillo, sent north from Santo Domingo to collect slaves for their employers, met enthusiastic, if wary, Chicora Natives on the coast of what would become known as La Florida (near present-day Winyah Bay, South Carolina) in 1521.29 The Spanish captured two Indians, dragged them on board, dressed them in linen and wool, and released them. From their actions, it appears they hoped Native interest in the strange men and their exotic gifts would stimulate others to investigate the source of those novel goods and trade with them. It worked. Shirts, caps, and other clothes proved the perfect lure. When de Quexo, Gordillo, and their men came ashore the next day, locals had seen their friends’ new clothes and apparently wanted some of their own. In a society that measured wealth and status through textile acquisition and display, such a decision makes some sense. A larger group of Indians who met the sailors on the shore received “four red gorras [caps], shirts of precilla and ruan [linen], cañamazo [hemp], and six kerchiefs.” Impressed by Spanish generosity, the Native leader sent fifty of his servants with food for the Spanish. Peter Martyr took the story one step further, saying the Natives, “full of admiration, advanced to meet them with many presents, as though they were divinities to be worshipped.”30 Martyr, while not a direct observer, understood the language of clothing and the power of perception. His interpretation serves as an effective précis for sixteenth-century European attitudes and assumptions about Native behavior. “Innocent” Natives could be duped into viewing Europeans as gods with the right costumes and props, making it all too easy to enslave them. After trading for several days, de Quexo and Gordillo invited a group of Chicora Indians onto their ships for additional gifts and trading. They immediately set sail, taking their erstwhile trading partners as slaves. Left behind in Winyah Bay were the remaining Chicoras, possibly wearing the caps and shirts that led to their family members’ translations from free to slave. Wave after wave of Spanish entradas continued to crash on southeastern shores. After failed attempts by Allyón and Narvaez, Hernando de Soto pressed for a license to claim land in La Florida using the wealth and the reputation he won in Peru.31 In 1539, he gathered a sizeable group of colonists and entered La Florida near present-day Tampa Bay.

402   Laura Johnson Moving quickly into the interior in search of food and wealth, de Soto encountered a wide range of Mississippian social structures that rivaled the hierarchies of Peru and Mexico. De Soto accompanied Pizarro into Peru and saw the mounds of textiles among the Inca treasure stores, where wovens functioned as a primary exchange medium, closely regulated and restricted to particular classes and positions.32 De Soto offered luxury goods as gifts appealing to Native sensibilities that were also carefully tailored to the recipient’s status, recognizing the hierarchical social systems and presence of textiles among groups like the Coosa, Calusa, and Apalachee.33 As de Soto moved through the region, his encounters took on a formulaic pattern with apparel at the center. Messengers met him on the road, bearing presents of mantas [blankets or shawls], skins, and food, or simply left the goods themselves stacked on the verge.34 Once the adelantado entered a town, its cacique would await him in a designated location decorated with deerskins and cushions placed there to mark the area as separate and elite. Only caciques and micos traveled in litters or on the backs of others, wore painted hides and fine clothing, and lived in spaces with luxurious things. Paramount chiefs often kept their homes on platforms, which were the primary indicators of hierarchy and elite status throughout the southeast. At least two paramount chiefs, the lady of Cofitachequi and the cacique of Coosa, met de Soto in a litter covered with white “mantles of the land.”35 The day before he arrived at Ichisi, the governor and his party had been met along the path by messengers who simultaneously interrogated de Soto and brought him “presents of skins, mantas of the land,” which Ranjel described as “the first gifts in sign of peace.” The cacique of Tascaluza met them on “a sort of balcony” on a platform mound, wearing a full-length cape of feathers, seated on some cushions and surrounded by his “men.”36 On at least one occasion Natives offered feather mantles to the Spanish horses.37 Ritual display by paramount chiefs was intimately connected to these public spaces, power plays that utilized copper-covered feather headdresses, copper gorgets, and elaborately worked, fringed, or feather garments. These events cemented the cacique’s authority, as they demonstrated his or her ability to acquire rare items through maintenance of extensive trade networks. If the cacique did not merit, or could not build a platform, they received the Spanish on deerskins spread on the ground, like a carpet. The emphasis in each of these rituals of encounter was on creating a physical space appropriate to the status of the individuals involved. Giving mantas created the diplomatic space for further material translation. De Soto, unlike previous Spanish adelantados, recognized the crucial, metaphorical role textiles played in these encounters, marking those leaders as kin with clothing gifts of his own. One of the best-documented encounters was de Soto’s meeting with Zamumo, the cacique of Altamaha, when de Soto offered him a silver-decorated feather. De Soto’s offer prompted Zamumo’s enthusiastic thanks, saying he “would wear it in his hair, eat with it and make love to his wife in it.”38 But that silver feather was not the only gift de Soto handed out in Altamaha. Upon hearing that Ocute, the paramount chief of the region, received Zamumo’s tribute (was his superior), de Soto informed Zamumo that he regarded Ocute “as a brother” and all of Ocute’s tribute should come to de Soto. Upon his first encounter with that paramount leader, used to receiving textile tribute,

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   403 de  Soto offered Ocute a “yellow satin cap and a shirt and a feather,” calling him “my  brother.”39 In de Soto’s calculus of social status, Zamumo was only worthy of a feather, but his tributary lord deserved more. De Soto and Ocute’s exchange demonstrates that dress items could act as tribute as well as metaphors for kinship, entangling multiple codes within a single garment. De Soto was a quick study in Native politics and economics. He played offers of tribute into his due as a noble, placing himself within regional hierarchies, using clothes more often than other goods to confirm these relationships. De Soto learned the power of adoptive kinship terms he displayed so ably in his encounter with Ocute as he performed additional rituals of encounter along his route. Each time he met with regional tributary lords, as textiles changed hands, de Soto often called the men “brother.” When meeting the cacique of Tascaluza, a far more important cacique than Ocute or Zamumo, de Soto offered him a horse and a scarlet cape, by far the richest gift yet offered to a Native leader.40 Only Spanish gentlemen rode horses and wore scarlet. As de Soto worked his way up the hierarchy, he increased the value and scale of his gifts, which matched Native tributary systems and sartorial status markers. De Soto accepted Native gifts and used the language of fictive kinship, but he did not hesitate to attack, torture, and demand obedience as he saw fit. His well-known penchant for violence to Natives often negated the carefully structured rituals of encounter. As he moved into the paramount chiefdom of Tascaluza, de Soto’s imperious manner with Native leaders resulted in disastrous battles, most notably at the town of Mabila. Despite staggering losses of men and supplies, de Soto and much of his army survived. After the initial attack that pushed the Spanish out of the town, Tascaluzas seized all of the Spaniards’ clothing for their own, dragging it to the palisade and waving at the Spanish tauntingly. When the Spanish retaliated by setting fire to the town, they destroyed their own possessions.41 A second fire at Chicasa burned the remainder of their clothes, leaving them “naked.” After Chicasa, the Spanish began entering towns and ransacking them for clothing.42 In a reversal of his initial entry, De Soto and his men were now naked. They covered themselves with mats and raw leather while their Native adversaries wore the (confiscated) breeches. Within a few years of de Soto’s violent expedition of conquest, items of dress appeared prominently in Fray Luis Cancer’s effort to capture souls for the Spanish Crown. A Dominican and student of Bartolome de las Casas, Cancer firmly believed in Native self-determination and governance within the larger Royal colonial structure. His attempt was, by all the usual measures, a complete failure. A pair of shirts set the tone for the initial meeting between Fray Cancer, Fray Gregorio, and the first Tocobagas who approached them.43 Cancer and his companion each held a shirt in their arms as they drew near to the shore, where they were met waist-deep in water by a pair of Natives. One of the Indians carried a wand topped with a bunch of white feathers. Cancer, knowing that he was engaged in a ritual greeting, took the “sign of peace” as he and Gregorio handed each of its bearers a shirt. As the ritual began, thirty more Indians emerged on the beach. Completely altering the nature and tone of the interaction, this group began calling out in Spanish, relying on spoken words rather

404   Laura Johnson than material metaphors. Crying “buen amigo, buen amigo,” they called for the priests to approach but they were not to bring swords, “espada no, espada no.” The priests, duped into coming ashore, were captured and slaughtered before those who remained in the boat. The typical tale of Cancer’s failure, which excludes the ritual exchange of clothing for the wand of peace, usually ends there. Those few historians who mention the short story of Fray Cancer do so for the evidence that Natives residing in this region clearly knew enough of Spanish language and custom to use it against the Dominicans. This was a tale of far more than apparent Native duplicity and Spanish failure, however, for the Indians calling to the Spanish priests let them know exactly what they desired. The remaining men on the beach had seen the shirts offered to the messengers and understood the signs. Among the cries of “buen amigo” were the phrases “ven aca da camisas ven aca da camisas, come here, give shirts, come here, give shirts”44 After additional ransom demands were met by stripping the sailors who accompanied Fray Cancer of their hats, doublets, and shirts, they executed the Dominican on the beach in front of his companions. The failure of the mission should not overshadow the mutual recognition by both Indians and Spaniards of the power of cloth. Floridanos knew what they wanted, and they knew Spaniards would have it. Stripping and confiscation of Spanish clothes translated not only the men who wore them but also the items themselves from European to Native. Native desires for textiles were such an expected part of the rituals of encounter that the Tocobaga used them to lay a trap for the friar and his fellow Dominicans. Fray Cancer’s death reveals that cloth’s power had come full circle in early Florida, an inversion of the lure de Quexo used on the Chicora a generation before.

Fleur de Lys and Spanish Wool: The French Encounters in La Florida When rumors of French explorers appearing in Florida began to circulate in the early 1560s, Phillip II knew he would have to assert his claim to the region more aggressively. He did not send someone to deal with the French presence until 1564, when word reached him of Jean Ribaut’s presence at Santa Elena.45 The two European contenders arrived in lands subdivided into small Native paramount chiefdoms, all vying with one another for power. Timucuan and other area caciques immediately saw the potential for competition between the French and Spanish. Ribaut seems to have landed north of present-day St. Augustine and most likely encountered a group of Timucuans before heading inland.46 Ribaut notes that they gave to the “kinge and his brethren . . . gownes of blewe clothe garnished with yellowe flowers de luce.” René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s description of this meeting omits the textiles but does note that the “king” offered Ribaut an egret feather, a small basket, and a deerskin “painted with pictures of various wild beasts.” Ribaut’s exchange with the Timucuan chief parallels that between de Soto and Zamumo a generation earlier. Exchanging

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   405 Timucuan painted deerskin for French embroidered gown affirmed the place of clothing in southeastern rituals of encounter, one established by more than forty years of Spanish and Native exchanges. After the French party had crossed the modern-day St. John’s River, they met with another group and were entertained by that “king” as well. Ribaut claimed he clothed the leader and his “brethren with like robes we had geven to them on the other side.”47 Ribaut’s textile gift marked the Timucua who received it as both a person of worth and French by association. Flowers “de luce” was an alternate, older, spelling of fleur de lys, a symbol long associated with French royalty. The gowns served the added purpose of visibility in a region the French knew was claimed and held by the Spanish. The ideogram for the French king was a signifier of possession meant for other Europeans to see. In the map “The Promonotory of Florida at Which the French Touched,” Theodor de Bry (likely using Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues sketches as his source) placed a pair of Natives displaying deerskins on the shore to welcome the arriving Laudonnière’s party48 (Figure 20.1). Not only are they holding deerskins aloft, but they have created a separate area for meeting with a carpet of skins and a screen of flowers and brush, at the righthand edge of the land. The men, clothed in breechclouts, each hold aloft a tanned hide. Le Moyne notes, “As they approached the shore they saw a number of Indians who had gathered to greet them in a spirit of what appeared to be friendship and trust.”49 Laudonnière mentions that the first gift offered Ribaut upon landing at the mouth of the

Figure 20.1.  Theodor de Bry, purportedly after Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Arrival of the French in Florida, 1564 (detail), from Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americai provincia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt, 1591). Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

406   Laura Johnson “May River” (St. John’s River) was a gift of “chamois skins.” The image on de Bry’s map, whether based on Le Moyne’s watercolors or the written accounts, depicts the ritual of encounter that offered mantles and skins in an area set aside for peaceful discussion, just as de Soto experienced. Ribaut and his men claimed the area for France with clothes, stone, and wood. None proved permanent. They built the small Charlesfort on the coast and garrisoned it with a few men while Ribaut returned to France for additional supplies.50 After Ribaut returned to France, shortly followed by his miserable and starving colonists, Laudonnière picked up the tale with his journey to Florida in 1564. His experiences provide firm evidence of the connection between finely worked textiles, diplomatic meetings, and authority for southeastern Natives. The lord of “Ovadé” invited the party to his home, which was “hung with feathered tapestry of various colours, as high as a pike. Moreover, the place where the king took his rest was covered with white coverings woven in squares of ingenious workmanship and edged all around with a fringe dyed scarlet.”51 Making his duties as host and diplomat plain, the chief “had six pieces of his tapestries brought, which were made like little coverlets, and he presented them to the Frenchmen with such a generous impulse that they immediately understood his desire to be their friend.”52 The seat of the king was covered with a textile that was nearly identical to pieces recovered from Etowah that would have been made centuries earlier than those of Ovadé. Items dyed combinations of red and black, with fringed edges, were consistently associated with individuals of high status in the Mississippian burials.53 White textiles with red fringe would parallel color associations of peace and war. As cacique, Ovadé might have overseen both. Ovadé’s gift to Laudonnière of individual textile squares “like a coverlet” sounds similar to the square, fringed garments worn over one shoulder and fastened at the opposite hip by Native men.54 These gifts were tribute items of elite status. Ovadé’s gift was most likely meant to translate Laudonnière and his men as fictive kin to secure their power and goods for Ovadé and his people. Laudonnière was on the same learning curve that the Spanish had traveled nearly fifty years earlier. Textiles functioned as metaphorical translators in this encounter as they had in so many others, but this time with greater success. Regional caciques vying for friendly alliance with the French continued to offer them material metaphors of alliance and kinship, just as they did with de Soto. As with Ribaut and the Timucuan chief, when Laudonnière’s lieutenant met with Satouria, the cacique gave him the elaborately painted deerskin cloak he wore as “a pledge of deeper friendship.” Laudonnière later received a similar skin from Satouria, for which the cacique received a piece of French “merchandise.” Laudonnière slowly learned both the Timucua language and the diplomatic lesson of clothing exchange the longer he remained in Florida. By November 1564, he was trading with surrounding Native groups for alliance and supplies, most of whom were apparently vassals of Outina, a regional paramount chief and a rival of Satouria. One of the vassals sent Laudonnière a lynx-skin quiver, painted deerskins, and a silver chain, which must have been Spanish. In return, Laudonnière sent the cacique two complete suits of clothes and some tools. He sent an identical present to another cacique, “in order to insinuate myself more easily into his friendship.”55

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   407 With France a new player in the region, competition for empire in Florida escalated in the 1560s, setting the tone for negotiations and violent action that peaked in 1564 when the Spanish crown sent Pedro Menendez de Áviles to deal with the French incursion. After his massacre of the French at Ft. Caroline in 1565, de Áviles decided to take his new vessels and travel around the Cape to the Gulf Coast of Florida, where he discovered that his captain had met a Calusa messenger. Dressed and painted as a Native, the man addressed de Áviles in Spanish as a “brother and a Christian” and gave his name as Hernando Escalante Foneda. As with de Soto, de Áviles encountered a Spaniard from a previous entrada, in this case de Luna’s, held captive by the Calusa. These men were ready-made, if not always ideal, go-betweens but were no substitute for the material translations of clothing in these encounters. After hearing of the treatment of Spanish captives held by the cacique, de Áviles sent Foneda back to Carlos, the paramount chief of the Calusa, with the message that he brought “many things for him and his wives, and that he should come to see him.”56 Carlos agreed to meet de Áviles on the shore near the bay, surrounded by three hundred of his warriors and retinue. De Áviles had set the stage well, with a fine carpet rolled out on the sand for his visitor, a fitting parallel to the deerskin mantles laid out earlier for de Soto to mark the ritual space of encounter. As Carlos waited, de Áviles came ashore and then stepped onto the beach through the smoke and hissing fuses of his men’s arquebuses. The theatricality of this moment was probably not lost on either man, as performance of power and authority was critical to each. After the initial greeting, de Áviles offered Carlos “a shirt, a pair of silk breeches, a doublet and a hat, and other things for his wives; he looked very well, because he was very much of a gentleman.”57 The overwhelming similarity between this exchange and that of de Soto and Ocute is far from coincidental. To reciprocate the gift and cement kinship ties with the Spanish, the cacique proffered de Áviles his sister for a wife. De Áviles quickly tendered gifts of clothing to the women, who were “naked” except for collars of pearls and gold and thin “aprons” that barely covered their loins. His gifts were not to accept kinship but to recognize status. He clothed the women in chemises, bestowing “green gowns on them, one for each . . . he gave them beads, scissors, knives, bells and mirrors.”58 A later encounter between de Áviles and Hotina, a young cacique from a different group, makes Native perceptions of clothing and kinship bonds plain. De Áviles clothed Hotina “in a shirt, for he was naked, with only a belt around his loins, and so were all his Indians; and he clothed him in a pair of breeches and a doublet of green silk, and put a hat on his head . . . Hotina told [de Áviles] that he took him for his elder brother, to do what he might command him.”59 Hotina was a powerful young man, the cacique of a large paramount chiefdom called Outina that covered most of southeast Georgia and northern Florida.60 Clearly his treatment by the French made Hotina all too eager to acquire a new ally.61 Having the two most powerful regional lords as fictive kin potentially would have given de Áviles significant connections and authority, but only for as long as he maintained and honored those relationships. The language of nakedness, deployed so frequently in English encounters to demark a racialized “otherness,” had quite a different meaning for the Spanish in these early meetings.

408   Laura Johnson De Áviles’s language in these descriptions does not equate an absence of clothing with ­inferiority of class or race. It was their noble bearing, their demeanor, posture, and a clearly dominant body language that convinced de Áviles that Hotina and others deserved such recognition and could be treated as leaders. They lacked only the proper dress to recognize them as such for the Spanish. De Áviles’s gifts acted in the spirit of “como te veo te juzgo” (“as I see you, I judge you”). Getting European cloth into the hands of Natives did more than open paths to communication or attract potential slaves. It introduced a good at once familiar and enticingly new. Trying garments on the body, seeing similarities and differences between European and Native physical forms, was only one part of a visceral and powerful connection. Native bodies and, occasionally Native self-perception, changed when they donned European hats, doublets, and shirts. For Europeans, it translated Native leaders into gentlemen, “brothers,” and diplomats. No Native registered an opinion about how the clothing felt on their bodies. We have only European comments that certain items such as breeches were less desirable as they restricted movement and the evidence that most such coat switches were temporary and determined as occasion demanded. Yet it is tempting to imagine enclosing sweaty skin in a tightly stitched, reinforced, padded doublet for the first time. Velvet, probably lined in linen, padded with wool, and stiffened with buckram would have weighed at least a pound or two. It would have forced the shoulders down and back with the weight and the cut of the armscyes, pushed arms away from the body and into a bit of an angle at the elbow. Clothing such as that restricted movement, clung to the skin, itched. It probably smelled of stale sweat and unwashed bodies, of seawater, gunpowder, and the peculiar tang of metal. It might have been brightly colored and shiny. Satins reflect light, as do gilded trim and silk ribbon. Velvets and brushed wools are lush and pleasantly soft to touch. Despite the discomfort and possible stench of gifted clothing, Natives not only accepted it, they pursued it; demanded it. Once the initial decoding ceremonies established the importance of cloth in ritual encounter and negotiation, both Europeans and Natives continued to rely on it in many ways, adding layers of meaning and metaphor with each exchange. When cloth changed hands, it did far more than represent monetary value for service or alliance, although most Europeans regarded it in that manner. Beneath the barter or gift lay a deeper understanding of what those clothes and pieces of linen represented. When they requested clothing from a priest or government official, almost all Native Americans involved in that exchange regarded proffered textiles as a physical manifestation of that relationship. Working within the parameters of their own cultures and a burgeoning, sometimes problematic understanding of European social forms, Natives regarded cloth and clothing as material metaphors.

Notes 1. The translation of nonverbal to verbal methods of signification is called “intersemiotic” or “intralinguistic” translation or transmutation. Augusto Ponzio, “Preface,” in Translation, Translation, vol. 21, Approaches to Translation Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 13–17.

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   409 2. See, for example, Christopher Y. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 1999). 3. An early example is Wilbur R. Jacobs, Wilderness Politics and Indian Gifts; the Northern Colonial Frontier, 1748–1763 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 13. 4. Jane T. Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew Cayton and Fredrika  J.  Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 60–87. 5. See, for example, Penelope B. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power: Textiles in Mississippian Politics and Ritual,” Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, ed. Gregory  A.  Waslekov and Marvin T. Smith (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 16–40. 6. See Victor D. Thompson, Amanda D. Roberts Thompson, and John E. Worth, “Political Ecology and the Event: Calusa Social Action in Early Colonial Entanglements,” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 29, no. 1, Special Issue: Uneven Terrain: Archaeologies of Political Economy (2018): 68–82, and Laurier Turgeon, “French Beads in France and Northeastern North America During the Sixteenth Century,” Historical Archaeology 35 no. 4 (2001): 58–82. 7. Philip Joseph Deloria and Neal Salisbury, A Companion to American Indian History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 216–220; Richard  L.  Anderson, American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 195–197. 8. See, for example, Jane Schneider, “The Anthropology of Cloth,” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 409–448. 9. See, for example, The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays, European Expansion and Global Interaction, vol. 1 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). 10. Nancy Shoemaker, “Body Language: The Body as a Source and Difference in EighteenthCentury American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, ed. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,  2001), 211–222; Nash, “Antic Deportments,” in Lindman, A Centre of Wonders. 11. See, for example, Adam King, Southeastern Ceremonial Complex Chronology, Content, Context (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 12. See, for example, Drooker, “The Fabric of Power.” 13. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power,” 22–23; Penelope B. Drooker, Mississippian Village Textiles at Wickliffe (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992) 231–234. 14. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power”; Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff, “Mississippian Period Status Differentiation through Textile Analysis: A Caddoan Example,” American Antiquity 58, no. 1 (1993): 125–145. 15. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power,” 27–30; “Mississippian Lace: A Complex Textile Impressed on Pottery from the Stone Site, Tennessee,” Southeastern Archaeology 10, no. 2 (1991): 79–97; Beyond Cloth and Cordage: Archaeological Textile Research in the Americas (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000). 16. Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

410   Laura Johnson 17. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power”; Jerald  T.  Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 53–54, citing B. Calvin Jones. 18. See, for example, Joseph  M.  Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 19. Herón Pérez Martínez, “La Indumentaria en el refranero mexicano,” in Coloquio de Antropología e Historia Regionales, Herencia Española En La Cultura Material De Las Regiones De México: Casa, Vestido Y Sustento (México: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1993), 477–502. 20. Introduction, Coloquio de Antropología e Historia Regionales, Herencia Española En La Cultura Material De Las Regiones De México. Herón Pérez Martínez, “La Indumentaria en el refranero mexicano,” 477–502. 21. See, for example, Adam Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996). 22. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. 23. Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 291. 24. Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds,” 312–313; Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 5; Maria Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 89, 113. 25. John Harington, cited in Hayward, Rich Apparel, 22. 26. Hayward, Rich Apparel, 27. 27. Rebecca Earle, “ ‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’ Race, Clothing and Identity in the Americas (17th–19th Centuries),” History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 175–195; Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 28. Juan Ortiz de Matienzo and Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, Archivo General de las Indias, Justicia 3: 3, 1526, fol. 40v–41). Peter Martyr, who heard the story from Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, tells it a bit differently. Martyr’s tale includes additional detail and is corroborated by the second half of the story told by Matienzo in the AGI Justicia documents. 29. Paul E Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast during the Sixteenth Century, 1st ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 11. 30. Decade 7, Book 2 of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, De orbe novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d’Anghera (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 256. 31. Paul E. Hoffman, “The Chicora Legend and Franco-Spanish Rivalry in La Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4 (1984): 419–438; Hoffman, A New Andalucia; Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 32. Knight of Elvas, Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida (New York: Allerton Book Co., 1922), vol. 2; John V. Murra, “Cloth and Its Functions in the Inca State,” American Anthropologist, New Series 64, no. 4 (1962): 710–728. 33. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power;” cites some of the examples of Native textiles recognized by Soto and other early Spanish expeditions analyzed here, specifically noting type, color, and complexity of textiles displayed correlated with social and political status. 34. Luis Hernandez de Biedma, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Rodrigo Ranjel, Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida: As Told by a Knight

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   411 of Elvas, and in a Relation by Luys Hernández de Biedma, Factor of the Expedition (New York: Allerton, 1904), 86–88; Elvas, Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida, 53–54. 35. Hernandez de Biedma, Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Ranjel, Hernando de Soto, 89, 112; B. Calvin Jones, “Southern Cult Manifestations at the Lake Jackson Site, Leon County, Florida: Salvage Excavation of Mound 3,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 7 (1982): 3–44. 36. Hernandez de Biedma, Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Ranjel, Hernando de Soto, 120. 37. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power;” 28 citing Cañete in Clayton et al., 1993, 308. 38. See Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts, 2008. 39. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes narrative based on Ranjel diary, in Charles Robin Ewen and John H. Hann, Hernando de Soto among the Apalachee: The Archaeology of the First Winter Encampment (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 157. 40. Ranjel states that de Soto offered these to Tazcalusa before they left for Mabila so that the cacique might travel in style. Elvas notes that the cacique took the cloak and other items of clothing that “seemed best to him.” Elvas, Narratives, 95. 41. Jerald T. Milanich and Charles M. Hudson, Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida and Florida Museum of Natural History, 1993), 232–233. 42. Elvas, Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida, 122. 43. John  H.  Hann, Indians of Central and South Florida, 1513–1763 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 104–138; Milanich and Hudson, Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida, 121–131. 44. Gregorio de Betota, “Fray Cancer: Jornada a la Florida” 1549, 3v, Patronato 19 R 4, Archivo General de las Indias. 45. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 44–46. 46. John T. McGrath, The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 80–81. 47. Jean Ribault et al., The Whole & True Discouerye of Terra Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1964), 70–72. 48. There is some controversy about the source used by de Bry for this print. The authorship of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues has been doubted but has been reaffirmed by Jerald T. Milanich, “Devil in the Details,” Archaeology 58, no. 3 (2005): 26–31. 49. René Goulaine de Laudonnière, Sarah Lawson, and W. John Faupel, Foothold in Florida? (Truro: Antique Atlas Publications, 1992), 16. The older translation of this reads slightly differently but the overall perception is identical, that they were met by a group of Natives who gave their own “skin-garments to the commander.” Their leader remained seated on the “boughs of laurel and palm which had been spread for him. . . . He offered the commander a large skin decorated with pictures of various kinds of wild animals drawn after life.” Narrative of Le Moyne: An Artist Who Accompanied the French Expedition/Brevis Narratio (Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1875), 3. 50. McGrath, The French in Early Florida, 84. 51. Ovade might have been a cacique of Orista, given his location near the Savannah estuary: Goulaine de Laudonnière, Lawson, and Faupel, Foothold in Florida?, 38. 52. French coverlets of the seventeenth century were often fringed on three or four sides; see Kathryn Berenson, Quilts of Provence: The Art and Craft of French Quiltmaking (New York: H. Holt, 1996).

412   Laura Johnson 53. Drooker, “The Fabric of Power”; Jenna Kuttruff, “Mississippian Period Status Differentiation through Textile Analysis: A Caddoan Example,” American Antiquity 58 (1993): 125–145; Lucy  R.  Sibley and Kathryn  A.  Jakes, “Etowah Textile Remains and Cultural Context: A Model for Inference,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 7, no. 2 (1989): 37–45. 54. Elvas, Narratives; Drooker, Wickliffe. 55. Goulaine de Laudonnière, Lawson, and Faupel, Foothold in Florida?, 52–54, 79, 92. Audaste was Orista in Spanish, also called Cusabo; this group lived just south of the area where Charlesfort was located. 56. John  E.  Worth, “Fontaneda Revisited: Five Descriptions of Sixteenth-Century Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 73, no. 3 (1995): 342. 57. N.  10 in Gonzalo Solís de Merás, Pedro Menéndez De Avilés; Memorial (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1964); Bartolomé Barrientos, Pedro Menendez de Avilés Founder of Florida, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965), 88. 58. Solís de Merás, Pedro Menéndez De Avilés, 141–142, 148–149. 59. Solís de Merás, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, 208. 60. Outina was a Timucuca word for “chief,” so as with Carlos/Calusa and many other Native leaders, Europeans conflated their titles and location names, making them into personal names. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers, 50–51. 61. John E. Worth, The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), vol. 2, 25.

Bibliography Drooker, Penelope B. “The Fabric of Power: Textiles in Mississippian Politics and Ritual.” In Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, edited by Gregory A. Waslekov and Marvin T. Smith, 16–40. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Ethridge, Robbie. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Hall, Joseph  M. Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Hoffman, Paul E. Florida’s Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lindman, Janet Moore, and Michele Lise Tarter, eds. A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Mancall, Peter C., and James H. Merrell, eds. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2007. Petrilli, Susan, ed. Translation, Translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Sabo, George III. “Rituals of Encounter: Interpreting Native American Views of European Explorers.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1992): 54–68. Schneider, Jane. Cloth and Human Experience. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida   413 Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage.” In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 289–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Tilley, Christopher Y. Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Usner, Daniel  H.  Jr. Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Waslekov, Gregory  A., and Marvin  T.  Smith, eds. Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Weiner, Annettes B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. White, Sophie. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Worth, John E. The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

chapter 21

Str eet “Lu xu r ies” Food Hawking in Early Modern Rome* Melissa Calaresu

With a few exceptions, food historians of the early modern period have focused on eating at a table sitting down. What remains of the material culture of the preparation and service of food has, in part, determined this focus. Plates, pots, pastry cutters, and platters—most of them from elite contexts—are the kinds of objects which have survived in museum collections. In turn, written and print records focus on food that was prepared in institutional or domestic contexts—from papal courts to a curate’s kitchen. Yet, most people living in cities in early modern period bought their food on the streets. Travel accounts and ethnographic images, in particular, represent the variety of cooked food sold on the streets, such as fried pastries, baked pears, boiled crabs, and meat pies, as one late sixteenth-century image from Rome shows. Increased travel to Italy in the early modern period brought a particular richness in the visual evidence and, for this reason, images of the street sellers of Rome, the main destination for most travelers to the Italian peninsula, are particularly resonant. While “eating out” has been explored by historians and museum curators, this has primarily meant eating in restaurants or as picnics in the modern period. Historians studying the informal economy have now begun to consider street sellers and their goods, with a specific focus on food.1 This chapter will begin to explore not only the variety of food sold on the streets of Rome but also consider some of the methodological problems that face all food historians, in particular, the question of ephemerality. The history of ordinary eating in early modern Europe, and in particular, the history of eating on the street, presents particular challenges for a topic for which the extant material culture is especially limited. In turn, this new research turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early modern economy as images of food hawkers on the streets of Rome show the variety of a range of goods which cannot be simply understood as daily necessities to meet the basic nutritional needs of the city’s inhabitants, such as raw cooking materials or hot fast food. Instead,

Street “Luxuries”   415 evidence from early modern images of street sellers suggests that labor-saving products such as hulled rice or even products such as sweetmeats, which were normally associated with the work of the steward of an aristocratic house and the elite “dressing” of the table, were being sold on the streets. Therefore, despite the inherent ephemerality of the act of selling and eating food and the lack of surviving material culture, these images reveal the complexity of determining social distinction through food choices in early modern Rome. The English naturalist John Ray recorded that the city of Rome was “well-served with all provisions for the belly.”2 His notebook dates from his journey there in 1664–1665 and includes, after a description of his visit to the museum of Athanasius Kircher, a long and detailed account of the food available in the city—from wild game and fish to the types of wine and apples to the preparation of soups and seasonal breads.3 Although Ray’s close attention to food is unusual, his observations reflected a growing ethnographic interest by seventeenth-century writers and readers of travel literature and costume books. This interest, in turn, produced a large number of images of Italian street scenes to meet this new demand.4 Thirty-five years after Ray’s visit, the nephew of Samuel Pepys found some series and single sheets of images of street vendors in Roman print shops for his uncle’s library, including the 1612 version of Ambrogio Brambilla’s Ritrato de quelli che vano vendendo et lavorando per Roma [Portrait of those who go selling and working in Rome], first published in 1582.5 The original Brambilla image of street vendors formed part of a series of prints, known broadly as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, which were produced from the late sixteenth century in Rome and included reconstructions of ancient Roman sites and representations of contemporary papal ceremonies as well as grids of Roman Emperors’ wives, French kings, Turkish sultans, and Roman street vendors.6 The images of street vendors vary from Ambrogio Brambilla’s 1582 grid of 189 vendors to a number of variants from the early seventeenth century with only twelve vendors but in more detail.7 The prints portray the sellers walking in the same direction in rows holding their wares or tools and most often with their cry inscribed below their feet. In the earliest example of 1579, published by Lorenzo della Vaccaria (or Vaccari) and entitled Ritratto chi vanno per Roma [Portrait of those who go around Rome], the variety of the goods sold by the forty-one vendors in four rows ranges from household goods such as brooms, fire bellows, baskets, cooking pans, and keys, more personal items related to hygiene, health, and dress such as soap, combs made out of horn, chamomile for infusions, clogs, and hats, and, finally, food products such as chicory, figs, artichokes, cooked dishes such as pears in pastry and vermicelli with grated cheese (vermicelli con cascio grattato), smoked meats, fresh fish and mollusks, and a fresh cheese called ravigiola.8 Another print of grids of vendors, by the same publisher but dated after 1579, is entitled Vero ritratto de quelli que vanno vindendo per Roma agionta fatta novament[e] (“True portrait of those who go selling around Rome with newly made additions”), emphasizing the addition of a further fifteen figures, including vendors of crinolines, gloves, musk (musco di zibetta), cucumbers, and medlar fruit, and suggesting that the two images were sold as part of a set.9 Vendors are also portrayed selling printed material

416   Melissa Calaresu such as lunar calendars and pamphlets of belle istorie e orationi. This and later grids also include images of vendors of products for the decoration of the house and table such as birdcages, majolica salt cellars, paintings on canvas and wood, and flower arrangements made out of wax or coral. What can we do with this extraordinary amount of information, and how does it relate to what was being sold and eaten on the streets of early modern Rome? Print and art historians have disentangled the complicated history of the production of the prints for the Speculum series, a knotted web of French printers and their heirs at the end of the sixteenth century in Rome.10 The neatness of the term “series” disguises the messiness of their production and later attribution over several generations of printers.11 From 1573, visitors to Rome could buy a Speculum frontispiece from the French printer Antonio Lafreri and then choose which prints to include in their unique album. Although this process suggests that buyers might have made radically different choices about what to include, buyers usually followed an established order that began with a map of Rome and included ancient and modern Roman sites.12 Ambrogio Brambilla, who was active in Rome for twenty years from 1579 to 1599, engraved a range of prints from images of saints to ancient Roman sites, and these images were offered for sale by the Roman shops for inclusion in Speculum albums.13 In 1614, the Vaccari brothers were still selling a number of Brambilla engravings in their print shop and a version of his Ritrato de quelli che vano vendendo et lavorando per Roma, highlighting the continuing demand for these images.14 Although the images of the street vendors do not seem to have been included in the final arrangement of the late sixteenth-century Speculum albums which have survived intact, they do survive as single prints in other collections like Pepys’s or bound in manuscripts, such as the hand-colored one, interleaved within an account of Roma Española, now in the Prado Museum.15 Nonetheless, the surviving Speculum albums do include images of current events such as papal audiences, processions, and triumphal entries in which crowds are depicted. Their inclusion reflects as much an interest in the modern city, Roma moderna, as in the ancient city, Roma antica, as the 1573 frontispiece printed for the Speculum proclaims (and as the sections of the print shop stock lists were titled). In fact, Brambilla’s depiction of an annual fireworks display at the Castel Sant’Angelo reflects the manifold appeal of Rome as a site of ancient and Christian pilgrimage as well as papal power and popular festivity.16 Flames and fireworks shoot out of barrels and the turrets of the papal fortress, which was first built as a mausoleum for Hadrian and his family, while, in the right-hand corner of the print, fishermen sell their wares at kiosks in the pescaria.17 The engravers of the Speculum prints emphasized their exactness (exactissima) and vividness or derivation from direct observation (ad vivum) on the prints themselves; these were qualities which were valued by collectors. As new archaeological evidence emerged from the ground, printers understood that antiquarian interest demanded more accurate depictions of ancient monuments and artifacts.18 In one of the Speculum prints, jagged cracks crisscross an ancient tablet and on either side is depicted an architect’s compass, visual cues of authenticity and exactness.19 And, while the star-filled night in

Street “Luxuries”   417 Brambilla’s image of the Castel Sant’ Angelo is visually more naïve, the breathless text at the bottom of the print evokes the smell of gunpowder, the sound of explosions, and the illumination created by a fireworks display. Similarly, the street-seller prints evoke the sounds, smells, and textures of early modern Rome. Some of the prints present quite detailed figures with very specific and different details of dress—men in clogs, boots, tunics, waistcoats, and breeches, wearing purses, chains, aprons, and a variety of hats. They carry baskets with their wares spilling out or piled high, with straps holding them in front, and sacks or more wares on their back. The wares are often identifiable—white oval disks of cheese, illustrated prints flapping out of the edges of a basket, and snow piled in mounds on straw beds—and under each figure is a cry in Italian inflected sometimes by the language of the streets: Sal bianco cascio ricotta e boturro/Vendo Carn salata e sapon duro (“White salt, ricotta and boturro cheese/I sell salted meat and hard soap”).20 Figures in the printed grids with almost two hundred street sellers, however, are much cruder and the cries are simpler or even descriptive; for example, in the 1612 print in the Pepys collection, Neve, neve (“Snow, snow”), cries one vendor, and Merangoli dolci (“Sweet oranges”), cries another, while under other figures appear the simple description of the seller such as Mondezaro (“Garbage collector”) or Cavadenti (“Tooth surgeon”). The visual detail is much less in these printed grids; comprehensiveness is privileged instead. Like other Speculum prints, these grids were attempts to document and evoke modern Rome, in this case, the variety of goods sold and people working on its streets. The expansion of travel in the late sixteenth century created new markets for the representation, description, and categorization of cities and the peoples of the world in words and images, and these prints, like costume books from this period, met the demands of travelers and readers of travel literature.21 In his manuscript describing the wonders of Spanish Rome for his cardinal patron, Juan de Valcalcarel finishes off his extensive description of what was sold in Rome, including specific numbers of street sellers for each product, with this statement: So nothing is missing concerning this subject, I have put here a print so that one may verify what they say about Rome, Omnia venalia sunt Romae [“In Rome, everything is for sale.”], because this truth can be verified in its streets and squares, which is very convenient for its inhabitants.22

The premium on the authenticity of the hand-colored print is clear in the Prado manuscript, but this emphasis on truthfulness could also be turned on its head by printers and be used satirically. The companion print to Vero ritratto de quelli que vanno vindendo per Roma includes three characters with masks from the commedia dell’arte.23 In fact, Brambilla produced another print in this period which depicted similar figures in humorous situations, suggesting that not only did engravers (and publishers) cross the boundaries of visual genres but that there might have been different publics for the street-seller images.24 These images were certainly part of a popular visual tradition, as suggested by the

418   Melissa Calaresu printed game boards which were placed or glued on to a hard surface for playing; in a board game engraved by Brambilla, players marked their progress on grids occupied by, for example, a wine porter (brentatdor) and a vegetable seller (ortolana) alongside more humorous figures such as a fool (il matto) and a woman identified as a cagarola.25 Street sellers were also part of popular literary culture, the subjects of songs and popular tales.26 Nonetheless, Brambilla and other engravers’ images of street sellers emerged out of the context of the print production for the Speculum albums and, as we have seen, their ethnographic qualities would have been appreciated by collectors. Although some of these images might have been produced for a difference audience, often by the same engravers and publishers of the Speculum series, I would argue that their value as a way to study the material world of consumption on the street remains. Renata Ago’s extensive analysis of seventeenth-century Roman inventories has extended the geography of the history of modern consumption as well as the chronology of the Italian story after the Renaissance.27 Her study has shown the variety of goods which were available in Rome at a variety of prices for a range of social groups; she demonstrates that there was a market for parasols, paintings, and clocks, for instance, which was not dissimilar to the markets of northern Europe. In turn, Tessa Storey’s study of Roman prostitutes and her jointly written book with Sandra Cavallo on health regimes in late Renaissance Italy also reveal the richness of the material culture of the city made evident through the study of inventories.28 What can the study of the Roman prints add to this story? Do they reveal “things unseen” as Giorgio Riello has expressed it?29 In their chapter on hygiene of the body, Cavallo and Storey note that, despite the widespread prescriptive literature on the need for daily combing and scraping of the scalp, very few combs appear in the inventories. They surmise that combs were of too little value to include in inventories and that used combs (after so much scraping) were thrown away as they could not easily be resold.30 Do the images of the comb sellers in the Roman prints give us better insight into their ubiquity in Italian hygiene regimes? The figure in the 1579 print cries: Di pettini di corna e calciatori/Servendo io a poveri e signori (“Combs of horn and shoehorns/I serve both rich and poor”).31 One wonders whether those made out of horn were cheaper emulative versions (perhaps made out of water buffalo horn as Valcarcel suggests) of the more expensive carved ivory ones which survive in museum collections.32 For another example, there is no mention of pumice stones in Cavallo and Storey’s history of the early modern health regime, but they appear as being sold on the street in the Brambilla prints.33 These prints from Rome open up a new dimension to the history of material culture of early modern Italy, a material culture which cannot be gleaned solely from inventories, from prescriptive literature, or from what survives in museum collections. We can begin to think about some of the goods depicted in these prints as everyday objects which were sold on the streets but which were of so little value that they do not appear in inventories or survive in museums and perhaps also so ubiquitous that they are not mentioned in contemporary prescriptive literature. As Sara Pennell in her article on the “mundane materiality” of the kitchen suggests, historians should

Street “Luxuries”   419 not forget “small things,” which, in the case of her small kitchen utensils, were often undifferentiated in early modern inventories and disregarded in later historical analyses of domestic interiors.34 In the bigger picture, historical study of the provisioning of food for cities has primarily been driven by the study of tax records, and Rome is no exception. Studies of the municipal system of taxation, the anona, have focused on the provision and price protection of necessary foodstuffs such as grain, wine, and oil.35 However, if one looks at the evidence related to guilds, we see the regulation of a greater variety of the foods being sold. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century saw the growth and specialization of guilds, including those related to food. Many of the guilds had existed as associations or confraternities in the centuries before, but this period saw their formalization as guilds and the establishment of statutes.36 In response to the growth of the market, guilds established formed, reformed, and divided with the specialization of work and the emergence of new products. There were guilds for those who grew fresh fruit and vegetables, the orto­ lani, who, in turn, could only sell their produce to guilds such as the fruttaioli, or fruit sellers. There were also restrictions in relation to urban space; for example, vegetables could only be sold in the Piazza del Paradiso and fruit in Piazza Navona.37 Among the guilds which drew up or redrew their statutes in this period were the bakers (fornari), founded in 1552 and who revised their statutes in 1648, and the vermicelli makers (vermicellari), founded in 1642 and who revised their statutes in 1728.38 One of the most expansionist guilds in this period was the grocers’ guild, the pizzicaroli, founded in 1568 with statute revisions in 1613 and 1781. They had traditionally sold salted meat and cheese but by 1624 were also allowed to sell salted and marinated fish, vermicelli, dry fruit, oil, soap, honey, and garlic. Later in the century, they managed to acquire special papal permission to prohibit the tripe sellers from selling cured meat, the right to sell eggs away from another guild, and, at one point, the right to sell fresh fish.39 However, there is little of this information in the statutes, as the guilds were more concerned with their internal management—the payment of fees and the provision for dowries, for example— than their relations with the public, although food guilds were, more than most, concerned with questions of hygiene and the quality of the goods being sold.40 This fine net of restrictions was pulled tighter by papal regulations, which confirmed the rights of guilds to sell certain goods at certain prices at certain times of the year and sometimes in certain places. A papal notification of pizzicaroli of March 1676 confirmed the price of one kind of cheese, Butiro di vaca, sold from the Feast Day of Sant’Angelo, May 5, to September and another price during Carnival (reminding of us of the way that the government responded to market demands, which were in turn linked to seasonality and the liturgical calendar). It also confirmed their right to sell soap made in Rome but not soap made in Genoa, which was bound by another set of regulations. Candles sold by the pizzicaroli could only be sold if they had the candle makers’ guild mark on them.41 In a 1693 notification by the papal government, the fishmongers (pescivendoli) are reminded of the requirement that all of their produce is clearly displayed with a sign and that none of it is hidden from the customer.42

420   Melissa Calaresu Despite this extraordinary detail of regulation found in this evidence, there is very little discussion about selling of food, or any products, on the street.43 We know that guild members sold their products from shops, and sometimes shared shop and storage premises. In turn, if we look to those municipal officials responsible for the care of the streets in Rome, the maestri di strada, their concern lay in keeping the streets clear so, for example, there are statutes against the pescivendolo leaving fish heads and innards on the street but none against selling on the street.44 In fact, historians of early modern Rome have made much of the fact that the number of printed bandi, avvisi, editti, or notificationi increased exponentially in this period.45 Rome’s walls were plastered with printed edicts and notifications—not only to regulate the buying and selling of goods but also to prohibit, for example, the removal of marble statues from the city or the throwing of snowballs.46 Despite this rich source of printed evidence, historians have increasingly been reluctant to take the bandi or avvisi at face value. Jean Delumeau in his extraordinary study of the social and economic life of Rome in this period used the bandi extensively if sometimes warily.47 Rose Marie San Juan, on the other hand, believes that their communicative power in regulating everyday life and in creating citizen identities was more significant than what they tell us about what was happening on the streets of Rome.48 For our purposes, the printed bandi and guild regulations provided the regulatory framework within which street sellers sold their wares. The images of street sellers by Brambilla and others capture not only the extraordinary variety of what was sold on the streets of Rome but also the economic vitality of the streets that the papal government was trying to regulate. Wild mushrooms, fresh walnuts, and blackberries, depicted in the grid from 1612 in the Pepys Library, might have been gathered wild from outside of the city walls and only during certain seasons.49 The gathering and selling of this kind of “wild food” might have been outside of the jurisdiction of the highly regulated guilds. In his account of Rome, John Ray observes that a variety of small wild birds was available in Rome, remarking that “They spare not the least and most innocent birds, which we account scarce worth the dressing, much less powder and shot.”50 Can we presume that these wild birds, like fat starlings (Storni grassi) drooping lifelessly from hooks in the two hands of a vendor in Figure 21.1, were poached?51 The same grid shows a vendor crying, Tartaru tartarughe (“t-t-turtles”), snails being sold by the weight or number, Lumache a cento, and the legs or bodies of frogs hanging from the hands of a man selling ranochie (Figure 21.2). Were the snails harvested along garden walls or the frogs captured in the wild and then sold on the market?52 Seasonal products are also depicted, such as ciambelle and fritelle, fried pastries served during Carnival, or pan de ramarino, rosemary buns sold on just one day of the year, Maundy Thursday.53 Because the Carnival pastries were fried and not baked, the right to sell them could have been outside the jurisdiction of the bakers’ guild. Cialdoni, on the other hand, were wafers rolled up—their particular form is depicted in the basket of a vendor who is selling two for four quatrini (Figure 21.7).54 Wafers could be made with an iron over a small fire and so perhaps again were outside of the bakers’ jurisdictional territory. There are also depictions of the selling of meat

Street “Luxuries”   421 Figure 21.1. Seller of “fat storks,” from [Ambrogio Brambilla], Ritrato de quelli che vano vendendo et lavorando per Roma con la nova agionta de tutti quelli che nelle altre mancavano sin al presente, Rome, 1612. Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, PL 2964, f. 53. Figure 21.2.  Seller of frogs, from [Brambilla], Ritrato, 1612.

Figure 21.3. Seller of blood sausages, from [Brambilla], Ritrato, 1612. Figure 21.4.  A seller cries cotto in forno, from [Brambilla], Ritrato, 1612.

Figure 21.5.  Seller of sweetmeats, from [Brambilla], Ritrato, 1612. Figure 21.6. Seller of ceci molli, from [Brambilla], Ritrato, 1612.

422   Melissa Calaresu Figure 21.7. Seller of cialdoni, from [Ambrogio Brambilla?], Vero ritratto de quelli que vanno vindendo per Roma agionta fatta novament[e] [probably after 1579]. Engraving with etching, 41.0 × 51.8 cm, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. http://speculum.lib.uchicago.edu/search.php?list= number&result=172

Figure 21.8. Seller of chicken and capon heads, from A172, cited earlier.

Figure 21.9. Cockles seller from [Ambrogio Brambilla?], Ritratto di quelli che vanno per Roma, Rome, [1579]. Engraving with etching, 38.0 × 39.4 cm, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A171. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. http://speculum.lib.uchicago.edu/search.php?list= number&result=171

Figure 21.10. Rice for minestra seller, from Speculum Romanae Magnif­ icentiae, A171, cited earlier.

Figure 21.11.  Seller of mosto costo, from Speculum Romanae Magnif­ icentiae, A171, cited earlier. Figure 21.12. Seller of eels, from Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier.

Street “Luxuries”   423 ­ y-products such as fresh and salted pork heads, blood sausages (sanguinacci) “for those b who always want to have a full stomach,” or chicken feet and heads “to make stews (guazetti),” the selling of which might not have been the business of the butchers’ and poultry guilds (Figures 21.3 and 21.8).55 It is possible that by studying these prints of street sellers, together with other sources, we can see the full variety of what you could buy on the streets of early modern Rome— poached or gathered outside of the city walls, fried as you waited on the street, or prepared at home. Their absence in other kinds of sources suggests this variety included food products which were not controlled by the guilds or regulated effectively by the papal government. Some of the products might have been alternative sources of protein for Romans during Lent or who could not afford certain kinds of meat, as this cry of a cockles vendor suggests: Aguzza l’apetitto le Telline, Ma per mangier son meglio le galline (“Cockles whet the appetite but chickens are better to eat.”) (Figure 21.9).56 Other products might have been affordable luxuries, eaten occasionally as a sweet respite; the seasonality of such products is clear in this cry: Fraole vi porto rosse son colorite, Delicate ma presto son finite (“Colored red are the strawberries I carry/Delicate but they will soon be finished.”).57 The question of what might have been consumed on the streets and what was prepared at home is made difficult by the lack of surviving material culture for the early modern period. The history of food has been dominated by the study of recipe manuscripts and books, although Sara Pennell’s work has done most to incorporate pots and pans into the history of food and food preparation in early modern England.58 The evidence necessarily pushes the historian toward the social elites. For the same period in Italy, even less material evidence survives, although Ago’s work has retrieved a good amount of detail on the kinds of kitchen equipment which ended up in inventories.59 Ago, however, makes the point that very few households had the space or equipment to cook in their homes; one-fourth of her sample of inventories had no kitchenware at all. And, while a very small number of houses would have had a spit to roast meat, it is likely that most cooking at home would have been very basic.60 For comparison, a Roman woman, known as “Maddalena the weaver,” who sold face waters and oils to earn some extra money, was able to do so only because, according to her court testimony in 1613, she had the space and equipment to store and prepare them.61 The kind of distillation equipment necessary was entirely absent from most households, and it is not surprising to see ointments and face waters being sold in the Roman prints. As one vendor carrying an array of small jars on his front exclaims, in the 1579 print: Ecco signore qui specchi pomata/E impiastri per le grinze acquarosata (“Here we have, ladies, mirrors, ointments, plasters for wrinkles, rose water”).62 While some research has uncovered the relationship between licensed apothecaries and sellers of remedies on Italian streets, we also know that many products were sold on the street precisely because they were not covered by the jurisdiction of any guild.63 No doubt Maddalena hoped to evade the authorities by making and selling skin remedies from her home, remedies which must have been in particular demand, judging by their

424   Melissa Calaresu ­ redominance in medical literature of the period.64 In this way, Romans might have also p bought a whole range of food products, which they could not make or prepare in their homes, but could have bought on the street, as is suggested by a seller of food “cooked in the oven” (cotto a forno) (Figure 21.4). We know, for instance, that very few urban inhabitants had their own ovens to bake bread, so the fornaro with his basket heavy with bread would have sold it around the city.65 The bakers’ guild was highly regulated, and it is likely that street sellers were working from fixed bakeries, just as other sellers worked from fixed shops or warehouses, as Valcarcel’s manuscript suggests.66 There was other ready-to-eat food on the street, such as the ciambelle for Carnival but also cooked pears and confortini fini (sweetmeats) (Figure 21.5) depicted on the trays of street sellers.67 Sweetmeats, described as “a kind of little biskets” in John Florio’s English-Italian dictionary of 1611, made with “apple and musk” could easily have graced the credenza of many elite families.68 Another kind of dry biscuit flavored with musk, mostaccioli, appears in these prints; it was also used, ground up, as an ingredient in savory dishes to give taste and to thicken stews.69 Valcarcel mentions that there were five sellers of mustachones “and other pastries made of sugar” in Rome and eighteen sellers of them on the street.70 There were other prepared ingredients for cooking at home—ground chickpeas (ceci molli) (Figure 21.6), hulled rice (riso bianco), shelled chestnuts (maroni a scorzo), and cooked grape must (mosto cotto). One vendor cries: Io gridando sol per darvi haviso, Che vender voglio per minestra riso (“I alone am letting you know, that I want to sell rice for your soup”) (Figure 21.10). Many households, as suggested earlier, might not have had the space or equipment to prepare these cooking ingredients—a seller of mosto cotto carries a large vat (mastello) in front of him (Figure 21.11). For those preparing food at home, there were also a whole range of kitchen implements for sale—sieves (i bei setacci) and wooden cutting boards (taglieri) and spoons (cochiari)—objects which do not end up in inventories or museum collections, as well as braziers and cauldrons which appear more often in inventories.71 Because Ago’s inventories are so sparse when it comes to kitchen equipment, these ready-to-use ingredients must have been bought by a socially broad range of households, all of which would have been keen to save the time and labor of preparing these ready-to-use ingredients. This brings us finally to the question of social distinction in relation to food. Dietary advice and recipe books in this period list most of the foodstuffs which appear in the printed images of street sellers; some of the foodstuffs were understood to be exclusively for aristocratic eaters and others lower down the social scale. Early modern writers on food, who were drawing from the Roman classical tradition, associated animals from as far from the ground as possible, all kinds of birds, for instance, with aristocratic taste, and those animals (and plants) closer to the ground were meant to be suitable for the lower orders. What Ken Albala’s work has shown, however, is that by the early seventeenth century, the rigidity of this vertical hierarchy of foods was giving way to other “food ideologies” which emerged from medical literature and which continued to carry even greater social meaning.72 Foods such as frogs, snails, melons, and mushrooms, which had been condemned by earlier writers

Street “Luxuries”   425 and their consumption deemed unhealthy, were associated with gluttony, but later they came to be considered dangerous delicacies.73 It is clear that the social meaning of these kinds of foodstuffs, which were often associated with unhealthy living, could change in this period, but they might have been eaten by social groups not aware of these food prejudices.74 The condemnation or absence of certain foodstuffs in recipe books and dietary literature obscures the possibility of their consumption by the broader population. In turn, archaeological evidence for earlier periods has shown that foods which are associated with the poor or marginal forms of agriculture had once been considered luxuries.75 In other cases, we know that new and exotic foodstuffs were sold on the street before they came under the authority of guilds and sold in shops.76 This study of the visualization and “auralization” of street selling in the printed images provides one way into recovering social meaning of different foodstuffs, but the printed images also complicate the picture given to us by contemporary printed sources on health and cooking.77 For example, the printed grid from 1612 includes a seller of confor­ tini fini right beside a man selling frogs, both delicacies of sorts, in one row, and, in other rows, there are men selling garlic bulbs and salted meat and fish, foods associated with humbler eaters. In turn, the satirical resonances of the printed images cannot be ignored, and the relationship between the generic and what is being represented, especially in relation to the “everyday,” needs to be explored further.78 The lack of surviving material culture concerning more ordinary consumption of food has meant, therefore, that we have had to find ways to fill the gap between the representation of street selling in words and images and the fiscal and guild records which survive. Further study using archaeological evidence or archival sources looked over in the pursuit of a different story will no doubt tell us more about the vibrant street economy of early modern Rome. The printed images also open up new questions about the harvesting, processing, and preparation of food before being sold on the street, the existence or details of which do not appear in recipe books or guild records. They could also reveal popular ideas about food and the body not found in advice books and medical literature from the period. Do the containers in which the lamprey eels are being sold indicate that they were transported and sold alive (Figure 21.12)?79 Were dates eaten in the belief that they would help with muscle pain?80 How far in the hinterland was fresh ricotta made before being brought into the city?81 How did street sellers establish trust with their customers and ensure that their produce was good if they were moving around?82 These are questions which we can continue to study.83 Rome’s population tripled in the sixteenth century from 30,000 to 100,000 by 1600, and there were food shortages at the end of the century, when these prints of street vendors first appeared.84 It was also the period of the greatest formalization and specialization of guilds in the city. To guarantee a regular supply and fixed prices, separate Anona for wheat, meat, and oil were established in 1620.85 More research needs to be done to place the production and publics for these printed images of street sellers within the history of the provisioning of Rome. The prints might have been expressions of defiance against the guilds, or depictions of a city of abundance in a period of want. There was

426   Melissa Calaresu also an important influx of tourists in the Jubilee years of 1575, 1590, and 1600, and publishers responded to the emerging market for ethnographic information in an expanding world. So much of what we rely on to reconstruct the cultural and social history of the early modern period is based on sources which prescribe and prohibit or on the objects which have survived as part of museum collections. The prints of street vendors examined here, despite their satirical resonances and generic qualities, could take us closer to the material culture of the street and homes of early modern Rome. They also show the complexity of determining social distinction in relation to the consumption of certain foods in this period. They not only reveal a whole range of objects which do not show up in inventories, but they also suggest practices such as the poaching and the processing of foodstuffs beyond the city walls and dietary customs now lost. Selling food on the streets in early modern Europe was ubiquitous but also ephemeral, as ambulant vendors moved from square to square, their cries lost in a cacophonous soundscape. These practices do not need to be lost to the historian if we explore further these printed images which travelers brought back from Rome.

Notes * For bibliographical references, help with translations, and further comments on earlier ­versions of this chapter, I would like to thank Ivan Day, Simon Ditchfield, Janine Maegraith, José Ramon Marcaida, Helen Pfeifer, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Richard Serjeantson, and Rebecca Zorach. 1. See the introduction to Melissa Calaresu and Danielle van den Heuvel, eds., Food Hawkers: Selling on the Street from Antiquity to the Present Day (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). See also Sara Pennell, “Getting down from the Table: Early modern foodways and material culture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2017), 185–195. 2. Hampshire Record Office, 19M59/5, f. 22. The notebook contains information from Ray’s visit to Italy, which was not published in his Observations . . . Made in a Journey through . . . the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy and France (London, 1673); see Michael Hunter, “John Ray in Italy: Lost Manuscripts Rediscovered,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 68 (2014): 93–109. My thanks to Richard Serjeantson for bringing this to my attention. 3. He also notes that “it is the custome heer to cry things about the streets as at London: as fruit, fish, & other edibles” (Hampshire Record Office, 19M59/5, f. 25); also cited in Hunter, “John Ray in Italy,” 98. 4. Melissa Calaresu, “Costumes and Customs in Print: Travel, Ethnography and the Representation of Street-sellers in Early Modern Italy,” in “Not Dead Things”: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1900, ed. Joad Raymond, Jeroen Salman, and Roeland Harms (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 181–209. 5. [Ambrogio Brambilla], Ritrato de quelli che vano vendendo et lavorando per Roma con la nova agionta de tutti quelli che nelle altre mancavano sin al presente (Rome, 1612), PL 2964 f. 53, Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. For a translation of the 1612 grid, see https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/treasuredpossessions/discover/streetcries. html

Street “Luxuries”   427 6. On the Speculum, see Rebecca Zorach, ed., The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 7. The University of Chicago holds ten of these images, the British Library has two, and the Bertarelli collection in Milan holds another four. 8. [Ambrogio Brambilla?], Ritratto di quelli che vanno per Roma (Rome, [1579]), engraving with etching, 42.1 × 51.8 cm, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A171, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 9. Vero ritratto de quelli che vanno vindendo per Roma agionta fatta novament[e], [probably after 1579], engraving with etching, 41 × 51.8 cm, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 10. This history was reconstructed in the introduction of Francesco Ehrle, ed., Roma prima di Sisto V: La pianta di Roma Du Pe ŕ ac-Lafre ŕ y del 1577 (Rome: Danesi, 1908). 11. For an excellent and up-to-date summary of their history, see Rebecca Zorach, “The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome—and Beyond,” in Zorach, ed., The Virtual Tourist, 11–23. See also Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (London: Harvey Miller, 2008). 12. For a list of print subjects, see Lawrence R. McGinniss, Catalogue of the Earl of Crawford’s “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae” (New York: Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University, 1976). Study of the albums has been made more complex by the later history of their collection, as they were often rebound with later additions and then disbound by later collectors or libraries. Their provenance and the order of the prints were often lost in the process. For example, the album now in the Founder’s Library of the Fitzwilliam Museum was disbound and has a number of pagination systems at work in, at least, three hands: Speculum Romanae magnificentiae: Omnia fere quaecunque in vrbe monumenta extant . . . University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Founder’s Library, Drawer 217.23. On the early history of their collection, see Peter Parshall, “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae,” The Print Quarterly 23 (2006): 3–28. 13. Clelia Alberici, “Ambrogio Brambilla,” Dizionario biografico italiano (Rome, 1971), 13: 729–730. There are twenty-five prints attributed to Brambilla at the University of Chicago and sixty-six in the British Museum. 14. The print is listed among other Brambilla prints in a 1614 inventory, as “Il foglio di tutti quelli, che vanno vendendo per Roma, intagliato di Gio. Maggio” (Ehrle, ed., Roma prima di Sisto V, 59–66, especially 62). 15. This is a third version of the 1582 Brambilla print which is dated 1600 and inserted in Don Juan de Valcarcel y Carrillo, Roma española y discursos modernos de heroicas grandezas del Alma ciudad de Roma, Museo del Prado, Sign. Ms/16. 1616, between two folio pages both labeled 48. The print has been cut so there are only six rows across showing. My thanks to José Ramon Marcaida for bringing this to my attention. 16. Simon Ditchfield, “Reading Rome as a Sacred Landscape, ca. 1586–1635,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds. W. Coster and A. Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–170. Brambilla’s maps of ancient and modern Rome had a variety of audiences, local and international, antiquarian and pilgrim (Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 159). 17. Ambrogio Brambilla, Castel Sant’Angelo [Rome, 1581–1586], etching with engraving, 49.7  × 37.8 cm, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A40, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

428   Melissa Calaresu 18. Zorach, “The Visual Tourist,” 12; Parshall, “Lafreri’s Speculum,” 10–11. 19. Anonymous, Roman Calendar, Known as Calendarium Maffeianum, engraving, 26.5 × 42.4 cm (Rome, 1580–1585), British Museum 1947, 0319.26.162. 20. This figure appears in the far-right-hand corner at the bottom of Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A171, cited earlier. 21. This argument is developed in Calaresu, “Costumes and Customs.” See also Joan Pau Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fictions and the Invention of a Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and  Travel Literature 1 (2000): 5–35; reprinted in Joan Pau Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 22. Valcarcel y Carrillo, Roma Española, f.48r. He begins his account of products sold on the street with oil (azeite) (f. 45r). The Latin quotation comes from Sallust (Bellum Jugurthinum, 8.i) and was a criticism of Roman venality. 23. Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A173, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. The figures are on the third row from the top on the right-hand side. On the same row, at the other end, is a “Turk” selling aghi damaschini, playing on the word origin of “damask.” The print has no title but, according to the Chicago website, is the companion print to A172.There is another copy of this print in the British Museum with a date of 1585 (British Museum 1863,0509.576). 24. Brambilla engraved another image, with similar figures in nine humorous vignettes, which was published by Lorenzo Vaccari, British Museum 1871,0812.812. 25. Ambrogio Brambilla, Il piacevole e nuovo giuoco novamente trovato detto pela il chiù, engraving 39.8 × 51.9 cm (Rome, 1589), British Museum 1893, 0331.32. On the board-game print, see Bury, The Print in Italy, Cat. No. 103, 152–153. 26. See the satirical poem by Giulio Cesare Croce: Chiacciaramenti sopra tutti li traffichi e negoccii, che si fanno ogni giorno su la Piazza di Bologna (Bologna, 1625). I have not been able to consult Andrea Spetiale’s comic verse itinerary of Rome: Andrea Spetiale, Historia nuova, et piacevole dove si racconta tutte le cose, che si vanno vendendo ogni giorno da gli artigiani per Roma (Rome, 1629), cited by Paula Findlen, “Early Modern Romans and Their Things,” in Ago, Gusto for Things, xxiii. 27. Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, trans. Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For the earlier period, see Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 28. Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 29. On the qualitative possibilities of inventories, see Giorgio Riello, “ ‘Things Seen and Unseen’: The Material Culture of Early Modern Inventories and Their Representation of Domestic Interiors,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen (Basingstoke, UK: Routledge, 2013), 125–150. 30. Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, 244–246. 31. See the fourth figure on the left in the second row from the bottom of Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A171, cited earlier. 32. See Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, Figure 8.1, 244. Valcarcel mentions both “those who work with buffalo horn” and combs of horn, in Valcarcel y Carrillo, Roma Española,

Street “Luxuries”   429 f.48r. There is also a figure selling pettinelle, with spiky objects resembling combs coming out of a wooden board in Brambilla’s board game, Il piacevole e nuovo giuoco, cited earlier. 33. The figure selling pietre pomice is in the right-hand corner of the 1582 print in the British Museum (1947, 0319.26.173) and in the far left-hand corner of the bottom row of the 1612 in the Pepys Library. 34. See Sara Pennell, “Mundane Materiality, or Should Small Things Still Be Forgotten? Material Culture, Microhistories, and the Problem of Scale,” in History and Material Culture, ed. Karen Harvey (London: Routledge, 2009), 173–191. 35. See Jacques Revel, “A Capital City’s Privileges: Food Supplies in Early Modern Rome,” in Food and Drink in History, eds. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979), 37–49. 36. On the growth of guilds in this period, see the introduction of Emanuel Rodocanachi’s extraordinary Les corporations ouvrières a Rome depuis la chute de l’empire Roman (2 vols., Paris: Picard, 1894), which includes an account and statutes for all of the Roman guilds. See also Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (2 vols., Paris: De Boccard, 1957–1958), I, 365–402. 37. Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières, I, 45–53. 38. Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières, I, 85 and 102. 39. Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières, I, 175–179. 40. Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières, I, xcvi. 41. Bando di Pizzicaroli, in Documenta ecclesiae romanae 1626–86, British Library, 74/1896.d.5, vol. 5, 60. 42. Bando di pescivendoli, in Raccolta di bandi, Cambridge University Library, Acton.a.Sel.4/1. 43. Rodocanacchi of the pizzicaroli, “Un certain nombre entre’eux exercaient leur industrie dans la rue.” (Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières, I, 178). On the professional trajectories of food vendors, see Eleonora Canepari, “Le commerce de détail dans les parcours de mobilité professionnelle (Rome, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in Il commercio al minuto: Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale. Sec. XIII–XVIII (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2015), 451–466. 44. For an early history of the maestri di strada and their statutes up until the sixteenth century, see Emilio Re, “Maestri di strada,” in Archivio della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria 43 (1920): 1–102. On the regulation of the marketplace in Rome, see also Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 118–127. 45. The British Library has ten volumes of various bandi, pasted in chronological order from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, from which an example is cited earlier. The Cambridge University Library has one volume, which is part of the Acton collection, also cited earlier. There is a chronological register of all bandi in Roman libraries, published in seven volumes, as Registi dei Bandi editti notificazioni e provvedimenti diversi relative alla città di Roma ed allo Stato Pontificio (7 vols., Rome, 1920–1958). 46. Prohibitione di poter estrarne statue di marmo . . . (1701) and Bando che non si tiri la Neve (January 18, 1704), in Raccolta di bandi, Cambridge University Library, Acton.a.Sel.4/21a and Acton.a.Sel.4/27. 47. Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome, I, 22–34. 48. Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), introduction and chapter 1.

430   Melissa Calaresu 49. The figures selling more celse, noci freschi piccoli, and funghi freschi appear in the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library. There is also a seller of more celse in one of the Bertarelli prints (Costumi m.2–1, Bertarelli collection, Milan). 50. Ray, Observations, 362; this also appears in his notebook in the Hampshire Record Office (19M59/5, f.23). 51. The seller cries, Ecco gli storni grassi e giovanetti/Per fa arosto o metter in guazetti (“Here are fat and young starlings/To roast or put in a stew.”), in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier. On the eating of starlings and other small wild birds, see Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 70. 52. Vendors are depicted selling turtles (Tarterughe di bosco e dacqua porto) and snails (Lumache, lumachoni, lumachette) in two prints in the Bertarelli Collection (respectively, Costumi m.2–1 and Costumi m.2–4, Bertarelli Collection, Milan). 53. Ciambelle fresch and fritelle calde are in, respectively, the top and bottom rows of the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library. You can see ciambelle, fried round doughnuts, stacked on sticks on Brambilla’s board-game print. In another Bertarelli print, a seller of fritelle cries: “Frittelle calde in questo piatto porto/Mangiate calde danno conforto” (Costumi m.2–3, Bertarelli collection, Milan). Similar to a hot cross bun, pan di ramerino are still sold on the Thursday before Easter in Florence. One of the vendors indicates the bun’s origins, identifying himself as di patron fiorentino, Primo inventor di pan ramerino, in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A173, cited earlier. 54. In his dictionary, John Florio correctly identified cialdoni as “long wafers rowled up,” but he was more confused about ciambelle and fritella: he defined the former as “simnels, buns, or cakes,” at least making the connection with Easter, and the latter as “fritters. Also wafers”: Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues, Collected and Newly Augmented by John Florio (London, 1611), 100 and 198: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/. 55. There are identifiable chicken heads in Figure 21.8, with the vendor crying, Regagli de gal­ line e de capone/Per far guazetti porto fresce e bone. Vendors of teste di porco and sangui­ nacci freschi (Figure  21.3) appear in the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library. In one of the Bertarelli prints, the vendor cries: “Chi sempre vuol haver sempre piena la panza/Mangiar de’ sanguinacci habbi in usanza” (Costumi.2–3, Bertarelli collection, Milan). The sale of these by-products is not mentioned in the statutes of the poultry and butcher guilds. In Amsterdam, for instance, the selling of offal could only be sold by wives and widows of the butchers (Danielle van den Heuvel, “Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe,” in Working on Labour: Essays in Honour of Jan Lucassen, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 125–151). 56. Although Revel argues that Romans were consuming almost double the beef per capita in 1600 than they were at the end of the eighteenth century (Revel, “A Capital City’s Privileges,” 43). 57. Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier. 58. Sara Pennell, “ ‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,” Journal of Design History 11(1998): 201–216. 59. Ago, Gusto for Things, 95–102. On Bartolomeo Scappi’s illustrations as sources for kitchenware, see Deborah L. Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens (Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 60. Ago, Gusto for Things, 95. She writes that the inventories suggest that most people boiled or stewed their food in a variety of copper and clay pots (Ago, Gusto for Things, 98). For

Street “Luxuries”   431 an extension of this argument into the eighteenth century, see Melissa Calaresu, “Thomas Jones’ Neapolitan Kitchen: The Material Cultures of Food on the Grand Tour,” Journal of Early Modern History 24, no.1 (2020), 84–102. 61. Tessa Storey, “Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, eds. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 158–160. 62. This figure appears three rows down, third on the right, in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A171, cited earlier. A vendor, in the third row in the middle of A172, cries: Per far la facia lustra bianca e bella/S’adopra lacqua di la frasinella (“To make your face shiny, lustrous, and beautiful/ Use water of oak-fern”). 63. David Gentilcore, “ ‘For the Protection of Those Who Have Both Shop and Home in This City’: Relations between Italian Charlatans and Apothecaries,” Pharmacy in History 45, no. 3 (2003): 95–107. 64. On the predominance of skin remedies in contemporary medical literature, see Storey, “Face Waters,” 154. 65. Ago, Gusto for Things, 95–98. There is a fornaro depicted in Brambilla’s board game. 66. Valcarcel distinguishes between warehouses (almazenes), shops (tiendas), and those who sell in the street (otros q[ue] la venden por las calles), in Valcarcel y Carrillo, Roma Española, f.46r. 67. On “extra-domestic” consumption of food in London, see Sara Pennell, “ ‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pie and Baked Clod of Beef ’: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London,” in Londinopolis, eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 228–249. 68. Queen Anna’s New World of Words . . . by John Florio, 117. The confortini seller in one of the Bertarelli print cries: Di pasta, mele e muschio, i confortini/Faccio che per lo stomacho son fini (Costumi m.2–4). 69. My thanks to Ivan Day for this suggestion. They appear in Florio’s dictionary as “Mostacciuóli, a kind of sugar or ginger bread” (Queen Anna’s New World of Words . . . by John Florio, 324). 70. Valcarcel y Carrillo, Roma Española, f.46r. 7 1. These objects are depicted in the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library and reproduced in Melissa Calaresu, “ ‘Everyday’ Objects and the Glaisher Collection,” in Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu, and Mary Laven, eds., Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (London: Philip Wilson, 2014), 182. 72. See his chapter on “Food and Class,” in Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 184–216. 73. Albala writes that frogs were considered a “dainty” dish in southern Europe (Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, 76). 74. Albala, Eating Right, 192–193. 75. On chestnut cultivation, see Paolo Squatriti, “Trees, Nuts, and Woods at the End of the First Millennium: A Case from the Amalfi Coast,” in Scott  G.  Bruce, Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Boston: Brill, 2010), 25–44. 76. See Danielle van den Heuvel, “Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe,” in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen, eds., Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 125–151. 77. I have not dealt with the aural qualities of street selling expressed in these images; see Deborah L. Krohn, “Quodlibets and Fricassées: Food in Musical Settings of Street Cries in

432   Melissa Calaresu Early Modern England,” in Calaresu and van den Heuvel, Food Hawkers, 141–142, and Katie Scott’s brilliant article, “Edme Bouchardon’s ‘Cris de Paris’: Crying Food in Early Modern Paris,” in Word and Image 29, no. 1 (2013): 59–91. 78. See the introduction to Sheila McTighe, The Imaginary Everyday: Genre Painting and Prints in Italy and France, 1580–1670 (2008). 79. Eels were one of the foods which garnered disgust but also fascination in the dietary literature in this period. Lamprede vive appear in the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library, and Figure 21.12 shows an eel seller who cries: Lamprede vive e daltre pisciarelli, Porto in questa caraffa allegre belli (“Live lamprey eels and others kinds of ‘fishies’/I’m carrying them in this carafe, contented and beautiful.”). The entry for “eels” (aal) in Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyklopädie includes a discussion of how live eels were transported “far and wide” in containers with soil, water, and reeds: http://www.kruenitz1.uni-trier.de/. My thanks to Janine Maegraith for this reference. 80. According to Albala, dates were quite rare and expensive (Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, 53). A vendor sells Datteri in the 1612 grid in the Pepys Library, and there is a date seller who cries: Datteri datteri chi a dolori di fianchi/Mangian de queste non manchi (“Dates, dates, for those with side pains/Eat some of these and they will go away”) in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier. 81. O ricotte ecco ricotte fresche in the Brambilla grid of 1612 in the Pepys Library and the seller with the cry: Ho calvacato tutto questa notti/Per portar a roma fresci ricotta (“I traveled through the night/To bring to Rome fresh ricotta”) in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier. 82. One seller cries, Nespole a scorzo ne porto un bon sacco, Ne vendo poco ci ormai son stracco (“Peeled medlar-fruit, I have in my sack/I sell so few and now I am fed up.”), in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, A172, cited earlier. 83. See the comparative possibilities for the study of street selling with disciplines such as anthropology, development economics, and musicology in Calaresu and Van Den Heuvel, Food Hawkers. 84. Revel, “A Capital City’s Privileges,” 37. 85. See Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières a Rome, and Revel, “A Capital City’s Privileges,” discussed earlier.

Bibliography Ago, Renata. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Translated by Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Albala, Ken. Eating right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California, 2002. Bury, Michael. The Print in Italy: 1550–1620. London: British Museum Press, 2001. Calaresu, Melissa. “Costumes and Customs in Print: Travel, Ethnography and the Representation of Street-sellers in Early Modern Italy.” In “Not Dead Things”: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1900, edited by Joad Raymond, Jeroen Salman, and Roeland Harms, 181–209. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Calaresu, Melissa. “Thomas Jones’ Neapolitan Kitchen: The Material Cultures of Food on the Grand Tour.” Journal of Early Modern History 24 (2020): 84–102. Calaresu, Melissa, and Danielle van den Heuvel. Food Hawkers: Selling on the Street from Antiquity to the Present Day. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015.

Street “Luxuries”   433 Canepari, Eleonora, “Le commerce de détail dans les parcours de mobilité professionnelle (Rome, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle).” In Il commercio al minuto: Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale. Sec. XIII–XVIII, 451–466. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2015. Cavallo, Sandra, and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Delumeau, Jean. Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle. 2 vols. Paris: De Boccard, 1957–1958. Krohn, Deborah  L. Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens. Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Parshall, Peter. “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae.” The Print Quarterly 23 (2006): 3–28. Pennell, Sara. “Getting down from the Table: Early modern foodways and material culture.” In The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster, 185-195. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. Pennell, Sara. “Mundane Materiality, or Should Small Things Still Be Forgotten? Material Culture, Microhistories, and the Problem of Scale.” In History and Material Culture, edited by Karen Harvey, 173–191. London: Routledge, 2009. Pennell, Sara. “ ‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England.” Journal of Design History 11 (1998): 201–216. Revel, Jacques. “A Capital City’s Privileges: Food Supplies in Early Modern Rome.” In Food and Drink in History, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, and translated by Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum, 37–49. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Riello, Giorgio. “ ‘Things Seen and Unseen’: The Material Culture of Early Modern Inventories and Their Representation of Domestic Interiors.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, edited by Paula Findlen, 125–150. Basingstoke, UK: Routledge, 2013. Rodocanachi, Emanuel. Les corporations ouvrières a Rome depuis la chute de l’empire Roman. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1894. San Juan, Rose Marie. Rome: A City out of Print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Storey, Tessa. “Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome.” In Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, edited by Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, 143–164. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Van den Heuvel, Danielle. “Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe.” In Working on Labour: Essays in Honour of Jan Lucassen, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen, 125–151. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Zorach, Rebecca, ed. The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

chapter 22

Ebon y a n d I vory Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861–1870* Dana E. Byrd

The American Civil War sent people and objects into motion. Union soldiers, some of whom had never traveled more than twenty miles from home, were sent into battle as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida, and many occupied the South for more than fifteen years after the war began in 1861. Confederate soldiers also went on the move, fighting across the South and the Mid-Atlantic states, while plantation owners abandoned their human and material property and sought refuge with their families away from the front lines. Formerly enslaved people wrested freedom from their absentee owners and then, having secured a nominal freedom as early as 1861 through the arrival and occupation of the federal military or claiming it under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation after January 1, 1863, joined the cash economy and sought to become citizens. From states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, missionaries streamed into the occupied territories and appointed themselves guardians and educators of the freedpeople. On the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina’s Sea Islands were one of the wealthiest regions of the United States, with an economy tightly organized around a system of cotton plantations supported by enslaved labor and dominated by an elite planter class. The arrival of federal troops there in November 1861 marked the end of slavery for nearly twenty thousand enslaved people on the islands, and the plantation system was immediately transformed.1 Planters fled to the mainland and remained away during the course of the war; and, in their wake, soldiers and missionaries sought to remake the South into a more productive region free from the taint of slavery. The strong views held by those who would reconstruct the South were often at odds with South Carolina freedpeople, who were eager to take control of their own lives. These diverse populations, with their dueling cultures, forged an uneasy alliance as they lived and worked together in the deslaved environment.

Ebony and Ivory   435 The tensions in the interactions among these groups newly entrenched in the South portended tremendous social and economic change, and were manifested materially. After white Sea Island planters packed up their most cherished possessions and took them inland, formerly enslaved people enacted freedom by abandoning the tasks that had supported their masters in such luxury. Northern sailors, soldiers, and missionaries left their homes and went south in order to preserve the Union and, afterward, many of them stayed to rehabilitate those affected by the war. Military policies on both sides supported the practice of removing goods from plantations and selling them to support the war effort. Some individual members of the military went beyond this legal provisioning and stole goods from Southern homes or destroyed them. Everyday artifacts—some of which may seem mundane to us today—loom large in the historical record. These artifacts survive as extant objects or textual references within the archive, all trailing some vapor of the past. One such artifact that is massive in size and cultural import, the piano, has served in popular culture worldwide as a symbol of wealth and status. By the mid-nineteenth century, the piano was increasingly within reach for most middling classes and served as an aspirational goal for would-be purchasers. As the centerpiece of most parlors, it was the source of domestic entertainment for the family, while signaling its owner’s claims to good taste and refinement.2 For this reason, during the Civil War it was an object of envy, singled out for praise and protection, and also became a trophy of war or a target of destruction. Tales of piano abuse were considered common enough to record, as is evident from the contemporaneous accounts of Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Philadelphia woman of color named Charlotte Forten, and others.3 Some scholars have focused on the movement of domestic art and artifacts in their studies of life during the Civil War. Art historian Jennifer Van Horn explores an enslaved worker’s repurposing of his former master’s painting from a family heirloom into a protective firescreen. Her exploration of this single act of “iconoclasm” enriches conventional conceptions of wartime looting and destruction.4 Historian Joan Cashin has investigated “trophies of war” in the hopes of using material culture to shed light on the war: “The war generated a massive traffic in objects, and it transformed the material culture of the entire country, prompting the redistribution of millions of objects. Many actors were involved—soldiers, civilians, men, women, northerners, southerners—in getting, giving, relinquishing, buying, selling, and keeping these objects, and they acted with a multitude of motives.”5 Cashin succeeds in developing an inventory of the sorts of everyday objects that were put into circulation during the war by theft, looting, and appropriation; and she addresses the myriad reasons for military involvement in these depredations. However, she does not address differences between classes of objects, or even their value, as markers of culture. For her, the plunder of objects on both sides influenced collective memory of the conflict and stoked white Southerners’ postwar animosity toward the North. Environmental historian Megan Kate Nelson similarly plumbs the archives to seek intersections between objects and ideas during the Civil War and emerges with a persuasive account of the place of the ruin in the American psyche during that period.6

436   Dana E. Byrd Nelson uses these accounts of devastated individual houses, urban areas, despoiled landscapes, and even mangled soldiers’ bodies to demonstrate that ruin affected all aspects of life between 1861 and 1865. In Nelson’s account, Americans’ initial experience and subsequent acceptance of ruin was necessary for the rebirth of the nation. In The Civil War and American Art, Eleanor Jones Harvey, a curator and art historian, describes the difficulty of depicting the events and emotions of the Civil War. She argues that genre and landscape painters often struggled unsuccessfully to represent the moods, moments, and meanings of the modern war, rendering the conflict as all but “unpaintable.”7 Because of the locations of various battles and the limitations of technology at that time, much of the imagery of the war was produced in the North for Northerners. Despite the worthy contributions of these important studies, each focuses on only one part of the whole and thus neglects to account for all segments of American wartime society. Indeed, most scholars who have written accounts of this period have tended to focus on one or two of the four most significant constituencies active in the South during and after the Civil War—white Southerners (mostly elite planters), black Southerners (newly freed slaves), Northern missionaries (mostly white former abolitionists), and soldiers (white and black Union troops and white Confederate troops).8 By extending the scope of Harvey’s study to domestic objects, we can redirect the inquiry about the relationship of art and the Civil War to objects used by Northerners and Southerners alike, civilian and military; and, navigating a middle path between Cashin’s and Nelson’s methods, focus on a single object, the piano, which held great importance in antebellum culture, and chart its use in a single place, the plantation, during the war. The piano was a widespread symbol of feminine culture and domesticity in nineteenthcentury America, and it was put in peril by the Civil War. At the dawn of the war, the piano was available in a striking array of styles at various prices;9 in 1860, 20,000 pianos were manufactured by 110 companies in the United States, evidence of the thriving domestic market for the instrument, which increased throughout the century.10 Middleclass Southerners were just as likely as their upper-class counterparts to own pianos in the 1860s; the diary of a widow living in a small town east of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863 (whose parents owned a nearby plantation) includes the information that the home where she was staying, that of a Mrs. Batchelor, “was a comfortable two-story frame house, and she paid luxury taxes on a piano, a clock, and a carriage. Nearby were the usual farm buildings, such as gin house, blacksmith shop, barns, sheds, and the slave quarters.”11 By the 1880s, American Art Journal declared, “Today the piano is an indispensable part of a well-regulated household; its social position is unquestionable and impregnable . . . how would society go on without it?”12 For middle-class and elite whites during the antebellum era, the piano was a luxury good, signaling its owner’s refinement while gesturing toward the household’s participation in genteel musical pursuits. “Possession of a piano was evidence of gentility, ability to play it . . . recognized everywhere as ‘one of the primary ornaments in the education of women.’ ”13 A homeowner’s intellectual prowess was demonstrated by bookshelves

Ebony and Ivory   437 filled to overflowing and a display of piano music on a piano. The very size of standard antebellum pianos made it the dominant article of furniture in most parlors. The parlor room was, of course, not essential to the survival of the family and existed in a home only because a family could afford the space and the appropriate goods to fill it. The piano served as a home-entertainment center in the household and had an elevating influence on nearly all who came into contact with it: children were taught to play, families and guests gathered to make music, courtship rituals were enacted around it. Servants and other workers cleaned and serviced the instrument. My investigation of the plantation during the Civil War, using the piano as the center of a constellation of the plantation’s inhabitants, is archaeological in intent and theoretical in strategy. Objects function as actors, and those artifacts exert agency in the performance of everyday life. Implicit in my approach is the notion that place is fundamentally material. To scrutinize the piano is to illuminate the relationships, etiquette, and behaviors it demanded from people and their changing plantation world. These episodes in the life of Civil War–era pianos are indicative of the ways that Southern spaces and, by extension, white Southerners were made vulnerable by war. The plantations on Hilton Head Island and the other Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina were vital to the cotton trade and the Southern economy, and were the sites of especially radical transformations during the war. After the Union Navy gained control over much of the North Carolina coast in August 1861,14 it needed a port with a deep enough harbor to provide a coaling and resupply port for its fleet and chose Port Royal harbor, the body of water linking several Sea Islands off the southernmost part of the South Carolina coast. On November 7, 1861, twelve thousand Union troops attacked and occupied Port Royal, and within two days occupied the nearby town of Beaufort and Hilton Head Island, establishing bases of operations there for the Union blockade of the Southern ports, especially Savannah and Charleston, which were less than 100 miles away in either direction. The Battle of Port Royal was the beginning of the end of the Old South, with the victory of the Union forces there giving them control over all the Sea  Islands.15 Beaufort was the first southern city captured by Union troops and remained under their control throughout the war. White inhabitants of Beaufort had evacuated the city immediately before that attack. In the two days between the white flight and the arrival of the Union troops, the slaves from Beaufort and the surrounding plantations ransacked many of its homes and began living in some of the mansions until General Isaac Stevens ordered his troops to clear the town of looters and secure the perimeter.16 Captain Samuel Francis Du Pont, a career naval officer who commanded the fleet that captured the forts guarding Port Royal Sound on November 7, 1861, wrote to his wife one week later about Beaufort and its recently abandoned plantations: [T]he houses are two and three stories, with verandas, large, and have a beautiful effect; . . . the gardens and shrubbery in the yard show the refinements of educated people but without the order of Northern towns of this description. And now comes,

438   Dana E. Byrd my dear, the saddest picture that you can well conceive of, an inside view of this nefarious secession. We landed, three gunboats covering . . . Before our gunboats got up, the Negroes had commenced plundering—the stores were all rifled and looked like a sacked town; by this time our officers stopped the robbery of the private houses, though much had been carried off, in hopes the whites would return. On my asking an old blacky of Mr. Nat Heyward’s as he is called, a millionaire gentleman, why the remainder of the furniture in his handsome mansion was not carried off, he replied, “Massa, because Yankee tell ’em they shoot ’em.” A sadder picture of desolation from the desertion of the population cannot be imagined; and the inhabitants fled not from fear of us but from the dread of their own Negroes; a few household servants followed their masters, but the field hands they dare not attempt to control, and the overseers had run with the masters. There are fifteen slaves to one white in this part; the latter threatened to shoot if they did not follow them into the interior, but I believe dare not attempt to execute this threat. The Negroes . . . said . . .  “Massa, they more afraid us, than you”—this was often repeated. Yet these are people whose very slaves were to drive us into the sea, fleeing from the institution with terror in their hearts, not taking a thing with them . . . Outside the beautiful oleanders and chrysanthemums smiled on this scene of robbery and confusion. . . . We took all the public property, a fine Fresnel lens [used in lighthouses], and buoys for the channels . . . I regret to leave the place to the Negroes, but why should I expose my people to save the property of those who are planning their destruction and who disregard the ordinary rules of war?17

Du Pont would have been well aware of official Federal and Confederate military policy that forbade “plunder and pillage.”18 And his description of taking “the public property” fits within the permissible boundaries of foraging, which allowed the military to take goods in direct support of the war effort. In the same 1861 letter to his wife, the officer takes great care to attest that the men under his command protected property and ­committed no looting. Du Pont related that, while walking with several of his officers through a live-oak grove near the ruins of an old Huguenot fort, they came across an area “covered with sea-island cotton, ungathered and dropping from the pods” where some of the slaves were living, and he bought “a basket of eggs from them . . . ; others got turkeys. All was paid for, and during the visit of the gunboats and their five days at Beaufort not an article was taken by our men, though things were laying about in all directions”—except for a family Bible that they rescued “from some rubbish and furniture going into a boat . . . to return it to its owner at some future day.”19 On the Sea Islands, the federal government systematically seized goods there to fund the war and to defray the cost of educating newly freed slaves, although planters were rarely present in the homes looted by soldiers. During the first few years of the war, Treasury Department agents collected a total of two million pounds of cotton from plantations and shipped it to New York for sale. Agricultural products were not the only sanctioned source of war funds; agents also removed furniture, books, paintings, vases, rugs, and botanical collections for auction in New York.20 The Confederate government similarly appropriated some goods and ordered the destruction of others. Confederate troops rounded up some two thousand head of beef

Ebony and Ivory   439 and dairy cattle from South Carolina’s Sea Island plantations, drove the animals to the Dawhoo River, and ferried them to the mainland to be consumed as rations.21 Sea Island planters were told by the rebel government to burn their cotton crop, lest it be seized by the Union Army and sold for profit. Laura Towne, a Pennsylvania woman who traveled to South Carolina to educate the freedmen, recorded the following episode in her wartime diary: “After the flight of the rebels at the taking of Hilton Head, which the negroes always call the ‘Gun Shoot at Bay Point’ “Ma’ Dan’ or Master Daniel, returned several times to take away clothing, corn, and poultry,—indeed, all the provisions he could carry, and to burn Eustis’ bridge—an intention frustrated, after it was actually fired, by the energy of our people, and those on the Eustis place. He also threatened to burn the cotton in the cotton-house.”22 As white Sea Island families began to abandon their plantations in the face of the arrival of troops, some—such as Elizabeth Allston Pringle, who lived on Chicora Wood plantation near Georgetown in the Low Country of South Carolina, one of the largest in the state—tried to ship her precious possessions upland to a safe place in the Confederate interior. Pringle, a daughter of Robert Francis Withers Allston, a South Carolina planter and politician who owned Chicora Wood and six other plantations along the Pee Dee River, was born into privilege on Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, in 1845. Her father served in the state legislature for several years before becoming governor in 1856. Like most Southerners, her life was transformed by the Civil War and its aftermath; it follows a pattern of gains and losses familiar to many knowledgeable about the war. At the war’s inception, she moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and stayed there until 1863; then, after a brief stint in Charleston, she settled in Crowley Hill, Georgetown County, where she endured a raid by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops in 1864. Her father died shortly after that, and all of his property was lost to creditors. Before marrying John Julius Pringle in 1870, she was thrust into wage-earning labor, including teaching at her mother’s boarding school, and her genteel lifestyle became a distant memory. Her husband’s death in 1876 precipitated another financial crisis, and she was forced to find another source of income. Under the pseudonym Patience Pennington, Pringle began writing weekly letters for the New York Sun, which described her life on a Southern plantation.23 These letters were influential in shaping Southern memories of losses incurred during the war, as well as the indignities wrought upon the Confederacy by the Union. They were later collected into a single volume and published in A Woman Rice Planter in 1914. Pringle also wrote a memoir, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, documenting her memories of the South, including the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Chronicles of Chicora Wood, Pringle recalled the importance of her family’s piano and the considerable efforts that her family made to ensure that it was secure: “The dear little piano was moved during the war to the interior where we refugeed, and it is still in the family—very tired, but still sweet in tone . . . it seems to me it was quite as beautiful as any of the machines I have heard since, and the collection of music was so fine.”24 Pringle’s account also captures the delightful times that her family had around the instrument, in addition to acknowledging the importance of the piano as a register of emotion. Like most wealthy Americans who owned a piano in the nineteenth century,

440   Dana E. Byrd the Allstons, who lived on their large rice plantation in swampy South Carolina, probably preferred the square piano (Figure 22.1), which was built to withstand the climate’s fluctuating temperatures and high humidity.25 Even though the Allstons’ piano was one of the more fashionable space-saving designs, it would have taken a great deal of labor and expense to move. With the intrusion of federal troops into South Carolina, it seems natural that the Allston family would have wanted to flee to a safer location further inland, but the fact that they took the piano along was remarkable. The instrument’s durability was not the only factor in deciding to move it: Pringle describes the piano in tender terms, verging on the human, with words such as “very tired” and

Figure 22.1.  Americans preferred the square piano like this 1850 model by Chickering & Sons of Boston for their homes until the 1870s, when the upright came into fashion. In 1850, the firm made about 10 percent of all American pianos and would dominate US manufacturing for some time to come. Square piano, Chickering and Sons, Boston, serial no. 10683, 1850. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Richard  P.  Butrick, catalog no. 68.5. Edwin Brown patented action. Frame: one-piece iron frame, gilded and decorative. Case: rosewood veneer.

Ebony and Ivory   441 “sweet” implying a state of being and suggesting that her piano could not only inspire emotions through music but was capable of embodying emotions as well. By endowing the piano with feminine humanity, she locates it among the important cultural artifacts of the period. Pringle’s identification of the piano’s importance in the home is in accord with the ideas of domestic theorist Catharine Beecher. Beecher devoted most of her life to the cause of women’s education, believing that women were responsible for the education and moral development of the next generation. The piano was regarded as a vital part of this development. In the popular book The American Women’s Home (1869), which she cowrote with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, the floor plan for an optimal Christian house included a space in the drawing room for the piano. Music, the sisters Beecher wrote, is an “elevating, and delightful recreation.” It follows that piano playing was “uplifting and sustained family life.” Talented piano playing demanded toil, sacrifice, and perseverance.26 The piano and the activities around it were associated with home and family life, and even served as a buffer from the frightening changes taking place in the world outside. The piano became glorified as both an emblem of prosperity and a symbol of moral improvement. Pringle’s choice of words—“sweet,” “fine,” and “beautiful”—are all terms associated with the feminine. Indeed, music in American homes, as sources of entertainment or edification, was the domain of women throughout the nineteenth century. Playing the piano was seen as a necessary female accomplishment for middle- and upper-class women, in the North and the South.27 Period images of piano playing in homes typically feature a woman who is seated at the instrument: she is either alone (and subject to the viewer’s gaze) or surrounded by children. Women were an important force in passing on musical interest and participation to children. For women, to be trained to play the piano properly was among the practical skills required to live a spiritually healthy and successful life. At the same time, not just any form of female piano playing would do, and it was obligatory to conform to established standards—codes of behavior that had a lasting influence on the American home. Ladies played the piano in a gentle, sweet, and correct manner. Neither stage performers nor laborers, they avoided playing fortissimo because too much bravado connoted an inappropriate level of effort, suggesting sexual availability, hard work, or paid performance. Moreover, a lady could play in mixed company of men and women, but only during the day. A preponderance of sheet music that has survived from that period indicates that polkas, waltzes, and adaptations of popular songs were the kinds of music appropriate to play for a gathering of family or friends. For anyone to play the piano well, it took many hours of practice every day; a girl or woman who had the freedom to practice for so long suggested that she was from the upper classes and did not have to concern herself with more physically demanding labor in the home. However, the rules that dictated ladylike piano playing created a code for genteel women to adhere to while stifling their ability to be free creatures. Gentlewomanly piano playing was thus a calculated and strategic form of leisure, which could be interpreted as constraining elite women’s freedom.

442   Dana E. Byrd Masters and mistresses of plantations acquired pianos—along with other genteel attributes and practices, such as beautiful manners, processional landscapes, and courtly balls—in order to make a world built on the proceeds of slavery more beautiful. Pringle’s attempts to control and protect the piano were thus about shielding from harm the instrument with which women demonstrated their impeccable breeding and refinement. Diaries and journals kept by individuals during the Civil War trace the destruction of goods that occurred when the military brought the battlefield to the home front. Pringle described the fervor with which the Union soldiers who arrived at her plantation searched for valuables: “All this time there were parties going all over the yard, running ramrods into the ground to find buried things . . . They even went under the big piazza at the back of the house and rammed every foot of the earth. It was a marvel that they never thought of coming to the front, having come up at the back of the house from the public road. They never even opened the gate, which separated the front yard from the back, and so the great piano box was never found.”28 Pringle, while expressing her pleasure that the measures she took to secure the piano kept it unscathed, lets us know that soldiers were familiar with the hiding places used by civilians to conceal their most precious goods. As Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted, soldiers found the hidden goods anyway, and, rather improbably, pianos were targeted for theft and looting in a blatant violation of military policy. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, prolific author, and leader of the first regiment of black troops, the South Carolina First Volunteers. He joked about Federal troops taking “piano rations” from homes in South Carolina. Some troops poached the instruments with the intention of selling them. One Union officer said his comrades took pianos (along with artwork, carriages, and other furniture) from private residences and sent them to the North—for private sale or enjoyment in their homes. Although the written historical record is frustratingly mute on the logistics of transporting pianos, or other large objects from sites of looting to the homes of their new owners, Sea Island oral tradition suggests one such scenario. The organ in the First Presbyterian Church, Edisto Island, South Carolina, was reportedly removed during the island’s occupation by Union troops but did not reach its intended destination, because the steamboat transporting it sank in the harbor.29 This account of one unsuccessful shipment suggests the most likely method that looters chose to (illicitly) transport the large and bulky instruments from the Sea Islands to the North. The piano is frequently associated with these war tales of lost, defaced, and defiled property. The historical record is replete with accounts of smaller incursions against pianos. South Carolinian soldier Augustine Smythe wrote to his sister, Jane, that during a tour of Johns Island outside Charleston in early October 1862, he had seen “in one house where were two or three fine pianos the soldiers have cut the strings and in other ways rendered them unfit for use.”30 Other soldiers, perhaps seeking entertainment, played music on the pianos of others, whether it was inside or outside an abandoned house.31 For a Union soldier in the lower ranks, stealing or destroying luxury goods might have been a way to rebel against those

Ebony and Ivory   443 who waged war to preserve the institution of slavery; and for Confederate soldiers in the lower ranks, it may have been an opportunity to exact a toll from those at whose behest they were fighting. Their interactions with pianos were more than performances: they represented an attack on elites. Planters’ homes, and their parlors specifically, were places of elaborate social ­intercourse where conduct was stage managed. With its myriad rules of etiquette governing which visitors had access to what spaces of the home, the parlor served as a means of establishing an “us” and “them.” With the piano at its nexus, this room was ­frequently used for musical and dramatic theatrical performances, through which the play of society unfolded. Thus, the infiltration by troops into this charged space, from the lowly infantryman to the commissioned officers, was often an assault on the foundation of the Southern gentry class. On June 3, 1863, Emilie Riley McKinley wrote about “two crowds of Yanks” at the house of one of her neighbors, a Mrs. Downs: one crowd of Yankee soldiers was “a foraging party, half-starved they must have been, for they rushed into the smoke house and ate the raw meat, drank vinegar, rushed around seeking whom and what they might devour”; in contrast to them, “[s]ome of the best behaved came into the parlor with the request that we would play for them. Vic sang the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’; they all admired that very much.” About three weeks later, McKinley wrote: When we reached home, we found Mrs. Booth, Mrs. Downs and Miss Rebecca here. . . . Captain Young . . . had some Yankee officers on a visit to him who were splendid musicians. They were singing at that time. He sent to [Mrs. Downs] to hurry home and bring us with her. . . . we went, found the Yanks in full possession of both the piano and the melodeon. They sang all the evening, as much for their own amusement as ours. They sang the “[T]e Deum,” “Gloria in Excelcis,” and “Benedicti” besides numerous hymns—beautifully. Julia said, “Just listen to those Yankees singing our hymns.” She was indignant. . . . They sang some other ballads. All had fine voices.32

For Northerners opposed to the evils of slavery who had come to the South as teachers, missionaries, and aid workers, it was difficult to even comprehend that Southerners managed to lead lives of refinement. Charlotte Forten, a Philadelphia woman of color who traveled to South Carolina to teach the freedmen, reported on the condition of the plantation house at Coffin Point during the War: “Drove to Coffin Point . . . we did not find Miss W. But the house [,] a large old-fashioned one, is beautifully situated on the seashore . . . the sitting room was the pleasantest I [have] seen down here, with its books and pictures. And an excellent piano was there—Gilbert’s of Boston—which was most refreshing to listen to after the tuneless instruments one hears generally down here.”33 Gilbert’s of Boston was one of the preeminent piano makers of the antebellum era. By 1850, there were nearly a hundred piano factories in the United States, most of which were located in the Northeast and distributed their pianos throughout the country. Forten’s comments express wonder at the ability of Southerners to own and maintain refined goods, a skepticism probably founded in the belief that to profit from slavery, as most elite white Southerners had, was to be devoid of refinement. In other words, a white Southerner could own objects traditionally linked to refinement, such as the

444   Dana E. Byrd piano, but their association with slavery rendered them incapable of benefiting from the object’s civilizing effects. Indeed, some Northerners saw a connection between the Southerners who perpetrated the evils of slavery and the ruinous combat that decimated the instigators’ homes. Austa French, who traveled to Beaufort, South Carolina, with her husband, remarked of a southern parlor, a few blocks away from the Bay Street residence of Confederate Robert Barnwell: “The ghosts of cruelty seem sliding about the room, and perching upon the book-shelves, sofas, piano, wardrobe, cradle.”34 These comments are also typical of the attitude of Northerners who traveled into the South during the Civil War. More than a decade of sectional strife between North and South ensured that each side viewed the other with loathing and contempt. To Northerners the South was plagued by plantation owners whose wealth was tainted as it was acquired from forcibly extracting labor from enslaved people.35 The pervasive accounts of Northerners’ looting of the South may have been an outgrowth of this moral assessment, but Southerners outside the planter class also threatened the piano and the veneer of refinement that came with it. Pringle’s concern about the fate of her piano, and by extension other cultural transmitters of refinement, was justified. Similarly, soldiers forcing Southern ladies to play piano struck at the heart of proper Southern domestic life.36 For example, Union soldier Horace Hooker reported to his wife in July 1863 that after setting out to “burn every Secesh house within five miles,” he and his fellow soldiers moved all the furniture out of one house, being “very careful not to injure” a “very fine piano.” The soldiers stood by as the lady played Yankee Doodle, bringing the gathered soldiers to tears “as the flames drowned out the sound of the music.”37 This dramatic moment of forced playing is an interesting deviation from the exceedingly correct performances of the parlor, and it can be viewed two ways. For those soldiers who had experienced so much death, devastation, and sorrow, it was experienced as a touching moment of beauty. However, as we know from the histories of piano playing in the United States, it was indecorous for a woman to play piano for a group of men who did not constitute proper and invited company, and doubly so to do so in a space other than her parlor. Indeed, forcing a woman to play the piano in the street was regarded as an assault on her virtue. Such barbaric behavior threatened white Southern female virtue and, by extension, the dominant Southern antebellum way of life. The loss of a piano may have been a material hardship, but the forced playing of the instrument tarnished the idea of an unadulterated white Southern womanhood. White Southern elites were also horrified by African American use of formerly elite domestic spaces. Wartime circumstances meant that many Confederates had abandoned their homes, leaving them open to looting and vandalism. After the battle left about 10,000 workers in Union hands, this apparently gave them ample opportunity to interact with pianos that had been left behind by their fleeing masters. When Confederate Thomas Eliot sneaked into Beaufort on November 8, 1861, he found his home occupied and his wife’s piano engaged by slaves. “Chloe, Steven’s wife seated at Phoebe’s piano playing away like the very Devil and two damsels upstairs dancing away famously.”38 This intrusion would have been unimaginable under the condition

Ebony and Ivory   445 of slavery. Freedmen, who had so recently been considered property in the rebel states, took pleasure in availing themselves of the comfort to be found in using the property their labor had earned their masters. Remarkably, one such instance was recorded in a Harper’s Weekly sketch (Figure 22.2).39 It imagines the revelry of freedmen who have ensconced themselves in the parlor of their former master, Mr. Barnwell. Coupled with the image of the battle of Port Royal Ferry that crowns it, the pair of images suggests a causal relationship between Union victories and unlimited freedom for slaves. The Union’ incursion into the South resulted in conditional freedom for slaves and the exorcism of Sea Island rebel gentry from their town homes and plantations.

Figure 22.2.  Sketched by “Special Artist,” Scene in the Parlor of Mr. Barnwell’s House at Beaufort, South Carolina, Harper’s Weekly, January 18, 1862, vol. 6, no. 264, p. 33 [Library of Congress, woodcut engraving, 9 3/4 × 6 3/8].

Through a series of visual malapropisms, the artist caricatures nine African Americans as they occupy the parlor while enjoying the music: the leftmost figure perches on the mantel; another thrusts his legs over the side of a bergère chair to get comfortable while listening; a third smokes a pipe while lounging on a chair; a fiddler accompanies the piano player from his seat on top of the piano; two singers manage to harmonize from pieces of sheet music that are upside down. Freedom for enslaved workers, coupled with their unrestrained access to their former master’s parlor, demonstrates that “Dixie Land” has been turned upside down.

446   Dana E. Byrd

Figure 22.3.  A dutiful mother brings music into the lives of her children by singing with them at the piano in this 1863 lithograph, Star Spangled Banner, by Thomas Sinclair of Philadelphia. Courtesy of Peters Print Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Black and white print of a parlor scene. Thomas Sinclair and Inger Christian, Star Spangled Banner, 17 × 13 in (NMAH—DL*60. 2570, negative number 2003-32004) 1863.

Ebony and Ivory   447 The War may have turned “Dixie Land” upside down, but an illustration featuring the lyrics and music of The Star Spangled Banner in a pamphlet of patriotic sheet music (Figure 22.3) indicates that the North remained unified and properly ordered. In the illustration, a white woman is shown sitting at a piano with her three children, who sing the anthem while she accompanies them. The sheet music rests on the piano, but it does not seem to induce much physical exertion from them in the expression of patriotic fervor apparent in the anthem. Everything is correct and in its place: the woman sits on a piano stool and wears an ornate, fringed dress of the period; one child is holding a doll; the boy is wearing a powder horn and a sword. Above them is a framed print of John Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill. Drawn to the music, another woman and child crouch on the stairs in the background at the left, with an American flag attached to the banister. The Star Spangled Banner features a scene of familial harmony and a celebration of Union, in contrast to the raucous and rambunctious playing of music in the Harper’s scene; the latter, rather than being sanctified by the Founding Fathers, shows a painted portrait of the plantation mistress looking away in disgust. Although the title of the Harper’s illustration suggests that the freedmen have coopted Mr. Barnwell’s parlor, the portrait of the mistress of the house floating above the piano and looking away in dismay indicates that her domain has been arrogated. Indeed, recent scholarship, including Judith’s Tick’s work on the “piano girl” and her role in society, has done much to describe the social phenomenon at the intersection of white women, pianos, and parlors in the antebellum era.40 Together, these accounts convey that the refined, piano-appointed parlor is not the proper place for freedmen; they use the room inappropriately, and thus their very presence constitutes a desecration of refinement. Elite white Southerners regarded this kind of betrayal by their trusted “servants” as doubly inappropriate because they expected that slaves, as their property, should have protected the goods, art, and artifacts that they had left behind. Here, the piano is used once again to register Southerners’ complex feelings about their possessions and to demonstrate the radical social upheaval wrought by the war and the consequent freeing of the slaves. The piano is one of the few objects that facilitated interactions between and among all the diverse groups present on the plantation and taps into all of their complicated and messy layers of history. Whether subject to actual theft, or simply a measure of metaphorical loss, it functions as a prism for tracking changes on the plantation resulting from the movement of Northerners to the South; the freedom of formerly enslaved people; and, finally Southerners of the lower ranks who were worn down by class resentment. Examining these moments in the Civil War history of the piano sheds light on the enormous socioeconomic changes that occurred on the plantation during the Civil War and early Reconstruction period.

Notes * This chapter has benefited from the advice and counsel provided by my colleagues, Tess Chakkalakal, Patrick Rael, and Peggy Wang. 1. Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 24.

448   Dana E. Byrd 2. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 3. Charlotte L. Forten and Ray Allen Billington, The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era (New York: Collier Books, 1961) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1869). 4. Jennifer Van Horn “The Dark Iconoclast”: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South, The Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–167. 5. Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (September 2011): 339–367. 6. Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 7. Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 15. 8. For example, the figure of the Southerner is a recurring trope in the work of Civil War scholars; for these scholars, this Southerner is white only. Often in these texts, the author notes in the introduction that there are black Southerners and white Southerners, but that for clarity’s sake, the word “Southerner” in the text refers only to whites. This is a pernicious practice that perpetuates the notion of the South, and the idea of Southern identity, as belonging only to whites. 9. James Parakilas, Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 131–133. 10. Ehrlich, The Piano, 129. 11. Gordon A. Cotton, ed., From the Pen of a She-rebel: The Civil War Diary of Emilie Riley McKinley, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 4. 12. American Art Journal (New York), December 25, 1886, quoted in Ehrlich, The Piano, 130. 13. Ibid., 17. Ehrlich cites Diderot’s Encyclopédie as the source of the quoted phrase here. 14. From late 1861 until the end of the war in 1865, the Union army controlled a swath of land from Hilton Head Island in the south to the Edisto River on the north in a wide arc to the interior, following the rough line formed by the creeks that had carved the islands from the mainland. 15. The Sea Islands are a series of tidal and barrier islands that extend along the Atlantic Coast of the United States from North Carolina to Northern Florida. 16. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 3–31. 17. Samuel Francis Du Pont to Sophie Du Pont, November 13, 1861, in The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and SheehanDean Aaron (New York: Library of America, 2011), 596–597; Robert Carse, Hilton Head Island in the Civil War, 3–5. 18. Robert Carse, Hilton Head Island in the Civil War, 3–5. 19. Samuel Francis Du Pont to Sophie Du Pont, November 13, 1861, in The Civil War, 598. 20. John Archibald Johnson, “Beaufort and the Sea Islands: Their History and Traditions,” published serially in the Beaufort Republican (Beaufort, SC), January 16–July 3, 1873. 21. “Losses Claimed by Sea Island Landowners, 1861–62,” entry for James Legare, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina. 22. Rupert Sargent Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1912), 85. 23. Patience Pennington (Elizabeth Allston Pringle), A Woman Rice Planter (New York: The  Macmillan Company, 1914); Elizabeth Allston Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood

Ebony and Ivory   449 (New York, Scribner & Sons, 1922), 143. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31–32; William Kauffman Scarborough, The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in the South Carolina Lowcountry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 32–33. 24. Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 143. 25. Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, 51; and Ehrlich, The Piano, 49. 26. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Women’s Home (1869), 12. 27. Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and  Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 28. Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 232. 29. As told in Charles Spencer, Edisto Island: A History (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2005), 44. See also Townsend Mikell Papers, University of South Carolina, Columbia (LS, April 23, 1897), William Elliott, Washington, to Townsend Mikell, Edisto Island (replying to Mikell’s letter re: compensation for an organ removed from the Presbyterian Church during the war, and providing information that he would need to file a claim, and stating that the length of time that had elapsed would adversely affect their claim). 30. Augustine Smythe to Jane Smythe from Camp Stono, October 12, 1862, Folder 11 AdgerSmyth[e]-Flynn Family Papers, South Carolinian Library. 31. Cashin, Trophies of War, 346. 32. Cotton, From the Pen of a She-rebel, 34. 33. Charlotte L. Forten and Ray Allen Billington, The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era (New York, Collier Books, 1961), 193. 34. Austa M. French, Slavery in South Carolina and the Ex-Slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission (New York: W.M. French, 1862): 32, 54–55. 35. Nash, “Northern Imperial Attitudes in the Civil War South,” iii. 36. Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover Press), 459–460. 37. As quoted in Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 82, no. 89. Horace Hooker to his wife from Pocahantas, July 21, 1863. Box 6a, Folder 82, Horace  B.  Hooker Civil War Letters, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, New York. 38. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 106–107. 39. January 18, 1862, Harpers Weekly. 40. Judith Tick, “Passed Away Is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870–1900,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987), 325.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Cashin, Joan E. “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (2011): 339–367.

450   Dana E. Byrd Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Repr. New York: Harper, 2002. Harvey, Eleanor Jones. The Civil War and American Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Herman, Bernard L. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 2005. Nelson, Megan Kate. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Parakilas, James. Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” In Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George, 17–37. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1974). Repr. Athens: University of Georgia Press & Brown Thrasher Books, 1999. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in NineteenthCentury America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Wineapple, Brenda. White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 2008.

chapter 23

The M ater i a l Cu ltu r e of Fu r n it u r e Production i n th e Br itish Col on ie s Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Artifacts have long been markers of wealth, status, self-identity, or taste. As a result, most studies of social distinction in British and American material culture have tended to focus upon the consumption/possession perspective: gross number of objects, value of materials, level of workmanship, and ensembles of specialized forms. Or, to use modern terms, there is a decided emphasis on the standard of living as expressed through possessions listed and described in inventories and wills, detailed in household accounts, illustrated in period photographs, or revered through family history.1 In the consumerist approach, objects are evidence of ownership, a new purchase signaling aspirations or restrictions, or an inherited item manifesting social legacy. Scant attention is paid to the social distinctions embedded within shop floor production that might have affected the look of these works; communicated certain values to those purchasing, viewing, or using those objects; or implied a certain hierarchical choice. To explore the production side of material culture distinction, furniture history is a useful lens, examining the structures of furniture making as a means to shed light on cultural values and social differentiation. A thematic approach, which draws upon a comparative model, provides the means to test assumptions, explore nuance, and develop a better sense of syntactical and dialectical variation in preference to an analysis of one specific region or current nation in isolation, with a goal of proving uniqueness. Many objectcentered studies might examine furniture making in the British colonies from the formalist colonial model of center and periphery, to track print and physical design sources in a linear fashion. In contradistinction, object-driven case studies can concentrate upon shop-floor history, the organization of work, its impact on the objects, and the implications for histories of collection and display. Opening up the inquiry to look at

452   Edward S. Cooke Jr. the organization of shops in a colonial British society reveals diverse strategies and attitudes within a common cultural core. Comparative exploration of America in the eight­eenth century, India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Australia in the early nineteenth century can provide us with a sense of how the social structure of production operated, how it affected the look of the objects, and how it has continued to influence contemporary understanding of these objects.2 In essence, the social distinctions rooted in the shops of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have contributed to a second iteration of social distinction, in which the collecting and scholarly communities of the past century have undervalued, misunderstood, or ignored the work of nonwhite craftspeople in America and India, and convicts in Australia. Ultimately our way of knowing about and understanding historical objects has been shaped by the distinctions of production as much as the distinctions of consumption. In an era of low-technology production, where the basic kit of tools was fairly similar in the various British colonies, and elaborate, specialized machines and task-specific jigs rare, there was a basic technological system shared by all woodworkers.3 For example, many of the tools illustrated in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises of the late seventeenth century can also be found in the so-called Company paintings of early nineteenthcentury India or the newspaper notices of colonial Australian shops in the 1810s and 1820s.4 While the craftsmen made intensive use of these tools, adapting them to a wide variety of tasks, what was different was who used which tools, which tools were used more frequently, and how specifically these tools might be used, for example whether at the bench or on the ground or for mortise-and-tenon joinery or dovetailing. Also ­distinctive were the raw materials, received habits of workmanship, exposure to different types of workmanship, organization of work, and clientele. It is these categories that form the context of production. In much of the literature on colonial American furniture, there is an assumption that craftsmen enjoyed an upward mobility from apprentice to journeyman to master; that anyone, if he worked hard and had good fortune, would eventually head his own shop. This sort of graduated evolutionary development, tied so closely to the myth of American exceptionalism, social progress, and opportunity, often remains unquestioned.5 In fact, several different models of craft organization existed in America. Each depended upon regional labor structures and resulted in different sorts of work. The most familiar model might be referred to as familial dynasties, in which master craftsmen passed skills and shops on through the family to sons, sons-in-laws, or nephews as a form of capital formation and transmission. This was a natural life cycle progression in which a young child naturally internalized the craft, provided needed human power and extra hands to optimize the shop’s output during the master’s prime years, and then assumed more responsibility as the master aged.6 In an urban area, such an organization was an effective means to control labor and maintain rigid control of the product as seen in the strict patriarchal authority and consistent workmanship of the Frothingham or Perkins shops of eighteenth-century Boston or the Goddard and Townsend shops in Newport.7 The Frothingham family counted sixteen furniture makers over four generations, while the Goddards and Townsends boasted nineteen over four generations.

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   453 These shops produced for local and external markets and needed a dependable and elastic sort of organization. The impact of these family-based structures can be seen directly in the details of the work produced in these shops: the Frothinghams’ production of matching pairs of high chests and dressing tables over fifty years in spite of their awareness of new forms such as chest-on-chests and bureaus, the Perkinses’ retention of unnecessary stretchers in their chairs right through the eighteenth century, and the Townsend shops’ continued reliance on the early eighteenth-century practice of dovetailing together the lower section of a high chest or dressing table and then setting the tenons of legs up within the corners of the dovetailed carcass. While aware of new techniques in which the sides of a high chest base were tenoned into the extensions of the legs, the Townsends followed a family tradition because it permitted a consistent economical approach across a number of individuals or shops (Figure 23.1). Problem solving, construction, and tool use remained consistent and shared across generations, suggesting that it was patriarchal control of the workmanship of habit more than simply client taste that contributed to the stability of form and construction. It also implies that the craftsmen in these shops found it difficult to exercise their own individual creativity.

Figure 23.1.  High chest of drawers, made in the shop of John Townsend, Newport, Rhode Island, 1759; mahogany, chestnut, eastern white pine, cottonwood, southern yellow pine. ­ Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery; bequest of Doris M. Brixey.

454   Edward S. Cooke Jr. In a rural context, this familial strategy comprised a sustainable response to the pressure to balance physical and human resources in a mixed agricultural economy. Especially in New England, colonists intensified their craftwork, either devoting more time to it or even specializing in certain tasks, to grapple with demographic growth, social inequalities, and land shortages. Craftwork like furniture making offered insurance against unpredictable harvests and allowed artisanal families like the Booths of Newtown, Connecticut, the Dominys of Long Island, or the Dunlaps of Bedford, New Hampshire, to remain in their town of origin or to retain identities within an ethnic subculture.8 Often lasting two or three generations, these dynasties provided continuity, consistency, and timelessness in the products they produced for familiar neighbors. While aware of new fashion and technically capable of following it, these dynasties embraced selective conservatism, but this tradition was dynamic rather than static (Figure 23.2). The goal of their work was well-wrought furniture of well-prepared quality materials that would continue to satisfy their neighbors and relatives, who applied hard-won assets to such an investment and wanted the products to endure.

Figure 23.2.  Dressing table, Newtown, Connecticut, 1780–1800; cherry, white oak, eastern white pine. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery; Mabel Brady Garvan Collection.

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   455 A second American practice might be called the merchant producer model, in which a master acted more like a capitalist who employed journeymen, pieceworkers, and specialists in order to stay flexible with an eye toward shifting markets and fashions.9 Such a wage-based rather than a social-based structure characterized the high-end urban setting or dynamic regional center where there was a flow of journeymen and skilled immigrants coming through town, the possibility of outsourcing to craftsmen in surrounding towns, and a constantly changing, eager customer base. Oftentimes such shops had a lifespan that lasted less than a generation and produced work characterized by a greater variation of forms and with more labor-intensive decorative details such as carving, seen in the work made in Portsmouth, New York, Philadelphia, or Colchester, Connecticut.10 Merchant producers often sought out recently immigrated specialists who could provide new skills, or they drew on a flexible network of small shops, some located in town but others located outside. For example, of the ten cabinetmakers employed by Nathaniel Holmes of Boston in the 1730s, only four were working in the urban center; the remainder lived and worked in towns surrounding Boston. The fluctuating numbers of craftsmen and decentralized nature of production resulted in variation within the urban shop’s line of goods but ironically could also contribute to the development of a regional style. Whether trained in Boston or working part-time for Boston shops while living in Marblehead or Concord, cabinetmakers in those outlying villages made chestson-chests with fluted pilasters in the upper section and serpentine front bureaus with ball-and-claw or bracket feet in the 1780s and 1790s. But these outlying shops often used cherry rather than mahogany and drew on different construction conventions in constructing case interiors or laying out drawers.11 Oftentimes work in these shops revealed certain shortcuts, such as the substitution of low-quality boards with knots or twists or a limited attention to the preparation of stock in areas that were not visible; use of inadequately seasoned wood on drawer bottoms and backboards, resulting in splitting; reliance on shallow drawer dividers rather than full-depth dustboards that would stiffen a case; reduction in the number of dovetail pins on drawer construction; emphasis on expedient workmanship such as nailing rather than glue blocks; and use of adzes to remove quickly vast quantities of wood when making case furniture with blockfronts, serpentine fronts, or bombé sides.12 Speed, the exterior emphasis on imported mahogany rather than local woods used on the interior, and the lowering of labor costs seem to have outweighed the cost of materials or preparatory workmanship. The physical evidence suggests a different connection to clientele in the competitive, impersonal environment of these dynamic centers. The products of these shops emphasized the façade more than the construction, and they were more susceptible to shorter fashion cycles driven by aspirant clients, immigrant craftsmen, imported objects, or printed images (Figure 23.3). In the interpretive model about the eighteenth century proposed by the historical archaeologist James Deetz, they embody more of a transatlantic horizon than a local tradition.13 A third and less acknowledged model of furniture production in colonial America relied upon unfree labor. In the Chesapeake and Low Country regional centers such as Charleston, local furniture production relied upon indentured craftsmen, often trained

456   Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Figure 23.3.  Pier table, made in the shop of Benjamin Randolph, carving by John Pollard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1765–1769; mahogany, southern yellow pine; marble. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; John Stewart Kennedy Fund.

in England and then recruited by local gentry or merchant producer masters. For example, the main cabinetmaking shop in Williamsburg, Virginia, was headed by a succession of recently immigrated cabinetmakers, and the Virginia planter George Mason sponsored the immigration of London-trained joiner William Buckland, who worked on a series of interiors and furnishings for Mason and his circle of friends before gaining his freedom and serving as an architect in Annapolis.14 Many of these indentured craftsmen finished out their terms and then moved on to seek their livelihood outside of the shop, turning over the shop to a recent immigrant, and pursuing life as a landowner or shopkeeper. Whereas in the North the turnover in craftsmen and the interest in regional or export markets resulted in a cheapening of construction, in the South the constant infusion of new British-trained cabinetmakers working for a sophisticated regional elite contributed to high-quality construction, seen in laminated glue blocks and paneled backboards. However, the short span of shop lives also promoted rapid turnover of new styles and vocabularies, some of which were intentionally “plain,” but others of which appealed to the ambitious planter class eager to furnish their plantation houses with the latest elaborate fashions such as china tables and console tables that would be admired during the cycle of visits among the plantation owners (Figure 23.4). In the Chesapeake and the Low Country, a locale clientele with sophisticated taste seemed to demand high-quality fashionable work.15 The indentured cabinetmaker and the aspiring planter who relied on unfree labor to work the fields thus forged a symbiotic relationship in which artisanal turnover, high

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   457

Figure 23.4.  Card table, made in the shop of Anthony Hay, Benjamin Bucktrout, or Edward Dickinson, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1755–1770; mahogany, southern yellow pine. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

standards of workmanship, and fashion were interconnected. A more long-term effect of this shop volatility has been a limited visible surviving record that has made it difficult to assemble an object pool of furniture with shared diagnostic features. It has been hard to find or document examples of these short-lived shops in contrast to some of the more long-lived, family-run shops in the North. In not understanding the impact of the constant flow of craftsmen, most scholars until the 1990s had mistaken Southern furniture as English, Scottish, or Irish. Another form of unfree labor was skilled slaves, both on plantations such as Monticello and in urban areas like Charleston.16 Contrary to the opinions of Carol Bridenbaugh and others, who stated that African and African American slaves were capable only of rough carpentry and basic repair, some slaves on plantations or in urban areas were prized for their skills.17 In Charleston, which served as the economic center for the entire region, many slaves possessed extensive experience in fine woodworking and were assigned high valuation in the inventories of shops like that of Thomas Elfe. A London-trained immigrant who entered into short-term partnerships with several other London-trained craftsmen, in January 1768, he employed nine slaves, four as sawyers and five as cabinetmakers. Using less skilled slaves as sawyers who ripped logs and resawed boards made sense with the surplus of unfree labor and a paucity of

458   Edward S. Cooke Jr. water-powered sawmills, but the reliance on skilled slaves was a distinguishing feature of Charleston.18 These slaves appear to have been trained in the Charleston shops, worked under Anglo masters, and were hired out to other cabinetmaking shops as needed. Their mobility, along with the constant flow of immigrant craftsmen, helped to create shop traditions that were in constant flux, making it hard to attribute surviving examples to specific shops.

Figure 23.5.  Cabinet on chest, made in the shop of Robert Dean, carving by Henry Burnett, Charleston, South Carolina, 1750–1760; mahogany, cypress. Courtesy of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George Kaufman in memory of Polly and Frank Meyers.

Unfortunately, the urban slave cabinetmakers apparently left little visible evidence of their work other than in the documentary record. The furniture in Charleston is characterized by British forms (for example, chests-on-chests and clothes presses rather than high chests and single-drawer dressing tables), refined British drawer construction with six dovetail pins in the front corner and a center muntin to support a two-panel drawer bottom for large drawers, and an emphasis placed on “neat” furniture, which meant quality construction (Figure 23.5). Research to date has revealed no diagnostic traits of workmanship that point to an African or African American way of working wood within an

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   459 Anglo-based shop, but it might be worthwhile to examine ways in which tools were handled rather than the actual joints they cut.19 Absorbed totally within the Anglo woodworking practice, the influence of slave cabinetmakers was taken for granted in the eighteenth-century Low Country, and it has remained invisible to scholars of eighteenth-century Southern furniture. In the British Indian presidencies, British cabinetmaking styles were incorporated within an existing woodworking structure of subcastes of woodworkers (sutar or mistri in the north and asari or vadrangi in the south). Much like the family shop dynasties of New England, castes acted as family-based guilds that preserved skill sets acquired throughout youth, passed along tools and tool knowledge, and regulated the supply of makers within a region. This deep-rooted foundation of technical accomplishment then found new uses when the British East India Company began to establish trading posts in the late seventeenth century. Some of the early soldiers of the commercial company had experience as woodworkers but applied those skills predominantly to repair work; indigenous woodworkers provided much of the furniture. The Indian woodworkers brought more than a century of experience to the situation since they had previously interacted with, and made objects for, the Portuguese and Dutch who had established trading posts along the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts and in Bengal. By the end of the seventeenth century, these Indian woodworkers had gained a reputation as artisans who intensively and deftly used a limited number of tools, relied on familiar techniques, achieved efficiency not through mechanization or speed but rather through a surplus of labor that permitted decentralized work among many skilled hands engaged in time-consuming work such as inlay, and could successfully copy or imitate any piece of furniture a client showed them. For example, Edward Harrison, an East India Company merchant and governor of Madras from 1711 to 1717, purchased in India an elaborate suite of caned seating furniture consisting of two daybeds, two armchairs, and twelve side chairs. Based on a type of London cane chair produced around 1700, seen in the scrolled front legs, symmetrical tapered-column side stretchers, attenuated stacked baluster vocabulary on the turned rear legs, and C-scrolled crest rail set between the legs, the suite documents the skill of the Indian craftsmen who likely had access to a ­contemporary carved walnut London model which they then translated into ebony with elaborate ivory inlay and pinned-on ivory stringing (Figure 23.6).20 The skill of Indian woodworkers at the turn of that century was recognized by the Joiners Company of London, who in 1701 petitioned the House of Commons to prevent the importation of cabinets, scrutoires, tables, and other furniture made in India. They complained that some London traders were sending patterns or models to India, and that the resulting Indian work shipped back to London undercut local production and adversely affected the thousands of people whose livelihoods depended on the furniture trade. This sort of protectionist mentality and fear of skilled South Asian artisans flooding the British market paralleled the woolen and silk lobby in London, who complained about competition from Indian painted cottons or chintz.21 It was not until the outbreak of the mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-French wars that British-trained joiners and cabinetmakers who arrived in South Asia as soldiers sought

460   Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Figure 23.6.  Side chair, Vizagapatam, India, 1690–1710; ebony, inlaid with ivory, caned seat. Courtesy, Raynham Hall, Norfolk, England.

to better their economic positions and then return to Britain. Between 1740 and 1763, thirteen cabinetmakers, four joiners, two chairmakers, and a carver all arrived in Madras as soldiers. By 1794, there were twenty-five British-trained cabinetmakers in Calcutta, ten in Madras, and one in Bombay. Many advertised that they came from leading London shops, trying to capitalize on that fashionable association.22 Most of these British craftsmen offered diverse services, importing work from Britain, hiring native woodworkers to assemble or build furniture, and diversifying into the building of palanquins and carriages. In the structure of their business and their reference to London fashion, the British-trained cabinetmakers resembled the merchant producers of the American colonies. But instead of relying upon a constant flow of skilled immigrants, specialized pieceworkers, and apprentices, the British in India turned primarily to the indigenous makers and developed “composite shops” with British masters and Indian craftsmen working collaboratively.23 With the influx of East India Company officials and employees over the course of the eighteenth century, the caste system ensured the ability to undertake the increased demand for furniture, but it did not necessarily result in stasis or slavish copies. Rather, the makers once again responded to new market opportunities presented by these British traders and officials, who continued to supply objects to copy, print images, or even patterns. Local Indian elites seeking the favor of the East India Company also eagerly sought British forms to furnish their large English style homes.24 The indigenous

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   461 makers responded to these opportunities by developing distinctive Anglo-Indian furniture. They offered a full line of familiar Anglo forms such as desks and bookcases, cane-seated chairs in the styles made popular by Thomas Chippendale, tea caddies, and candlestands with three legs (erroneously referred to as teapoys). In making these British forms in South Asia, the local makers continued to rely on local woods such as ebony, teak, and rosewood, and continued such habits of workmanship as rounded tenons and lap joints for joinery, butted boards fastened together with wooden pins, or ivory veneer panels secured with ivory pins rather than with unstable glue. They used floral ivory inlay to echo the painted cotton designs of textiles, also produced along the Coromandel Coast, and substituted solid ivory or ivory veneer for the rich figure of Caribbean mahogany used in British mid-century cabinetwork. For carving, the Indian craftsmen relied more on straight chisels rather than carving gouges with large radius sweeps or gooseneck gouges that contributed to highly rounded or deeply undercut carving. Five- or six-legged round-seated chairs of solid ivory or ivory veneer over a wood core, both local techniques that stretched back centuries, often blended local preferences for round seats with the form of the French fauteuil de bureau, the outward and downward flaring of the arms on Chinese folding chairs, and English decorative features like ball-and-claw feet, acanthus knees, or pierced splats. Exercising their own agency, the local makers made European-looking furniture their own way.25 In Vizagapatam, a port town on the east coast between Calcutta and Madras that was also the center of the painted cotton chintz trade, networks of design, production, and export paralleled the organizational structure of the textile industry. Factors provided European prototypes, prints for decorative design, patterns for specific details, and even lacquered objects from East Asia; woodworkers built carcasses and frames; ivory workers (kamsali) either engraved and blackened panels with lac which were then applied as veneers or sawed out, engraved, and blackened pieces of ivory with floral designs that were inlaid into the wood carcass; and then shops assembled the final product for local and export markets (Figure 23.7). A ready supply of ebony, rosewood, sandalwood, and ivory, and a regional network of shops, permitted this sort of work and left the European officials and traders dependent on the local system. It is this sort of work, rather than the familiar solid hardwood examples, that became the Indian trophies for the nabobs, such as Warren Hastings or Lord Clive, to take back to Britain when they finished their serv­ice. The identifiable Indianness of the ivory furniture drew attention to those successful adventurers who returned from India having made their profits. Just as much as Caribbean sugar and mahogany, Indian ivory inlaid or veneered furniture bespoke what James Bunn has referred to as “the aesthetics of British mercantilism.”26 While marveling at the high quality of the work, the British in India viewed the craftsmen through a racialized lens. They expressed frustration with the pace of work, were perplexed by the manner in which the craftsmen worked on the ground rather than at the bench and used their feet like benchdogs or holdfasts, and perceived the makers’ attentiveness to the European demands as a lack of inventive creativity. Such cultural attitudes prevented the British from recognizing the tacit knowledge and high levels of workmanship achieved by the local artisans. Only those pieces made with ivory seem to

462   Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Figure 23.7.  Desk and bookcase, Vizagapatam, India, ca. 1780; sandalwood with lac-filled incised ivory veneer. Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund.

have escaped this prejudice, but in those examples it was the material that was celebrated rather than the workmanship. In the early nineteenth century, shops in Calcutta and Bombay continued to gain prominence in the production of very British-looking furniture in the solid-wood Regency styles. In the former city, the structure consisted more of Anglo masters with Anglo capital running shops staffed by Bengali woodworkers, while in the latter, Parsee shopkeepers and craftsmen provided high-quality furniture in the European taste. The shops of both centers made furniture for the burgeoning British imperial staff as well as for other parts of the British Empire in that part of the world. For example, one unidentified Indian shop provided a set of chairs for Government House in Hobart in Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856), Australia, even though there were local cabinetmakers and chairmakers in Hobart capable of making the chairs (Figure 23.8).27 Calcutta and Madras acted like the local surrogate metropoles for that part of the empire. The circulation of Indian-made objects through the Australasia sector of the British Empire, often accompanying the East India officials and British military men as they circulated on the other side of the world, needs to be pursued more fully.

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   463

Figure 23.8. Armchair, Calcutta, ca. 1815; Australian red cedar, cane. Courtesy of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

In Australia, British imperial officials and soldiers and transported felons, who were predominantly the urban poor, rural laborers, or other sorts of socially dislocated inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland, first arrived in 1788 and established a penal colony. The furniture trade was initially staffed by convicts, many of whom had worked as cabinetmakers in England or Ireland. Under the Assignment System, artisanal convicts were often spared menial labor and found a ready demand for their skills. Some of these convict cabinetmakers worked in the government’s Lumber Yard (called the King’s Yard in Hobart), the operation that provided a wide variety of necessities, but others were quickly tapped by officials and wealthier citizens to produce high-end furniture that would differentiate these civil and commercial leaders from other colonists. Such connected patrons pulled convicts such as Lawrence Butler, a trained cabinetmaker from Wexford, Ireland, who arrived in 1802, or Thomas Shaughnessy, who arrived in 1806 from Dublin, from general work groups and helped to set them up as independent but unfree cabinetmakers to produce custom work (Figure 23.9).28 Like the indentured servants of the Chesapeake, these convict cabinetmakers possessed certain valued skills that provided a way to ameliorate their economic conditions and earn their freedom more quickly than the original sentence might have allowed.

464   Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Figure 23.9.  Secretaire bookcase by Lawrence Butler, Sydney, New South Wales, ca. 1805; Australian rosewood sides; red cedar carcass and drawer linings, Australian beefwood veneer on front, and baleen stringing along drawer sides. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Euphemia Grant Lipp Bequest Fund.

In the period before the Assignment System gave way to the Probationary System in the early 1840s, it was the convict’s skill, rather than his crime or sentence, that determined how he served his sentence. Convicts were assigned to existing shops, worked in government shops, or earned a ticket of leave to work on their own.29 Unlike the Chesapeake craftsmen, those in Australia seemed to have remained in the cabinetmaking trade, likely the result of limited alternative economic opportunities in the early decades of the colony, and their inability to amass sufficient capital to do something else. They began their time in Australia on the margins and seemed unable to break through that stigma, forming partnerships with each other and facing a certain amount of instability. These early cabinetmakers continued to make familiar forms in a preindustrial vernacular version of Hepplewhite and Sheraton styles, following British construction practice, but quickly adapted to local woods, favoring red cedar, rose mahogany, and beefwood over mahogany in New South Wales, and red cedar and huon pine over mahogany and satinwood in Tasmania.30 Only after the Australian colonists had crossed the threshold of settlement during the 1820s, when Sydney and Hobart expanded as commercial ports and the region transitioned

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   465 from penal colony to settler colony, did free skilled craftsmen from London, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany seek opportunity and land in distant Australia. In 1828, Sydney boasted sixty-four cabinetmakers in eight shops serving a population of 11,000. More than half of the cabinetmakers were either free or born in the colony; most of the ­apprentices were native born. In 1832, John McLaughlin from County Mayo, Ireland; William Hamilton from Sligo, Ireland; and James Whitesides, also from Sligo, all arrived in Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, on the same ship. Andrew Lenehan from Sligo arrived in Sydney in 1835, and Joseph Sly emigrated from London in 1834. Many of the Australian craftsmen continued working within the British traditions in which they had been trained, encouraged further by the Anglo tastes of their clients anxious to re-create a polite British environment in the Antipodes and supported by the circulation of such books as George Smith’s various publications, especially Collection of Designs for Household Furniture (1808) and later J. C. Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833). They made British forms with British techniques, but the paucity of specialist carvers and marquetry craftsmen resulted in a slightly restrained “neat and plain” version of Regency styles, one characterized by the figures of the local woods, an emphasis on profile, and the size of case furniture. Graham Cornall has described this work as “settlement furniture,” distinct from “colonial furniture” imported from Britain or directly copying British furniture, or in the colonial Gothic style embraced by prominent Australian politicians and elite beginning around 1840.31 Nevertheless, when given the opportunity in the late 1810s, these early convict cabinetmakers produced extraordinarily stylish work such as the pair of rose mahogany and beefwood chairs in the Gothic style made by the convicts William Temple and John Webster in 1820–1821, and a collector’s chest made in 1818 (Figure 23.10), both examples associated with Governor Lachlan Macquarie. The chairs were the first example of Gothic design in Australia while the cabinet, commissioned to hold an extensive collection of Australian natural history specimens, featured painted scenes by the convict artist Joseph Lycett, an elaborate hinged folding top with mitred dovetail corners, an ingenious system of specimen trays and drawers, and drawer construction of the highest quality.32 This brief comparative mapping of furniture-making systems in several parts of the early British Empire reveals a surprising complexity about the social status of furniture craftsmen and their products. Colonizing was not an overarching homogenization bent on extracting a consistent product or an establishment of certain production units enforced by the center. Rather, the patterns suggest a distinct difference between imperial colonialism, in which centralized authority is stressed and craftwork not considered appropriate for British gentlemen, and settler colonialism, in which an artisanal skill was considered part of a productive emerging new society.33 In India, the American South, and early Australia, cabinetmakers labored rather anonymously, restricted in their mobility, resourceful in their deft use of new materials with limited tools, and reliant upon an elite Anglo population. In essence, they appeared under the control of the imperial center through masters, fashions, or clientele. They may have been able to control the work on the shop floor and use their ingenuity, but this control was limited. In settlement colonialism, seen in the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies, and

466   Edward S. Cooke Jr.

Figure 23.10. Collector’s Cabinet, New South Wales, ca. 1818; red cedar, rose mahogany. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.

in Australia beginning in the 1820s, many master craftsmen achieved respectability, both economically and socially, and contributed a valuable product and service to the exchange economies of those regions. In a period before industrial capitalism provided a ready supply of goods and wage earnings linked together broader geographies, craftsmen such as cabinetmakers provided integral links within a social economy.34 Comparative histories also permit insights into the acquisition and retention of knowledge. Patriarchal authority, indenture, and castes were all means to preserve skill and identity, but we tend to distinguish among them according to shifting lenses. In the colonial period, familial dynasties were valued because craft work provided a livelihood in both a mixed agricultural economy, wherein craftwork provided a balance to crops and animal husbandry that ensured a family’s ability to retain their homestead, and a more urbanized economy, in which concentrated demand allowed a family to specialize within or over generations. Colonial American furniture-making families could be yeomen or entrepreneurs and thus fit within acceptable and desirable social types. In South Asia, family organization fell under the rubric of a caste. A family of furniture makers belonged to the caste of woodworkers and a subcaste of their family. Yet in this different context, British commentators portrayed familial authority as an inflexible retention of traditional techniques and an aversion to any new technology. In their eyes, familial dynasties resulted in moribund shops, a conclusion that belies a racial prejudice that denies the native artisan expertise or agency, even though surviving objects prove otherwise.

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   467 The distinction between an indentured servant in America and a convict in Australia is also instructive. The former seemed able to parlay his skill into the acquisition of land on the frontier or a career as an architect builder or a backcountry merchant. The backcountry of Virginia and North Carolina was filled with indentured servants who earned their release; William Buckland, sponsored as an indentured servant by George Mason, became a celebrated architect in Annapolis.35 Their past as an indentured servant faded away as they gained economic freedom and social mobility. Convict cabinetmakers in Australia, often drawn from the same social strata as indentured servants, did not enjoy the same opportunities. Instead, they struggled with their status as emancipated artisans, valued for their skill but restricted in their social mobility. Their perceived depravity followed them through their lives. Only the recent interest in convict genealogy and research in the early records of Australia have resuscitated the names of these early craftsmen. The social stigmas and racial attitudes seen in the different labels applied to the different groups of furniture makers under discussion also have affected subsequent reception and understanding of the work of these craftsmen. Furniture produced in the colonial shops of New England and the Middle Colonies have been prized, collected, and fetishized for the past century. The theme of American exceptionalism was even embraced by the Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes, who claimed that the Townsends and Goddards of Newport, Rhode Island, were the premier furniture shop in the entire Western world.36 Only in the past twenty-five years has the furniture of the Chesapeake and the South become studied and appreciated; prior to 1990 most people assumed the majority of the furniture from those regions had been imported from Britain. And few people thought that slaves were capable of producing anything but basic ­carpenter furniture.37 Ivory and luxury furniture made in India has been displayed and collected in London since the mid-nineteenth century, but the actual process of making it and the role of the makers have been completely pushed to the side. The commentary of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British visitors on the slavish copying of the Indian woodworkers and their primitive techniques passed along through the caste system has not been critically assessed, and few scholars have looked closely at the material evidence, such as joints and tool marks, to understand shop practices. Makers and process take a backseat to style and aesthetics: museums and the public focus upon the Anglo-Indian forms, the use of what the British deem luxurious materials—rosewood and teak, ivory inlay or veneer, mother-of-pearl veneers, and micro-mosaic veneers—and the associations of this furniture with the East India Company leaders, the Raj courts, or the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the other international exhibitions that have followed. It is the spectacle of Mughal or Maharajah furniture that seems to captivate most people today. In many ways it underscores a certain recolonization, through objects rather than people. The contemporary status of historic Australian furniture is even more problematic. While collected, displayed, and admired in Australia, it lacks a presence anywhere else in the world. While some examples were exhibited at the international expositions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, none were accessioned by the South Kensington

468   Edward S. Cooke Jr. Museum or purchased by the other leading collectors who eagerly sought East and South Asian examples from the same venues. Perhaps the Australian work seemed too familiar, too British, but it is more likely that the stain of its convict past continued to color British views of the colony’s material culture.38 A British sense of superiority precluded them from considering the work of felons as acceptable exemplars of culture. The study of Australian makers, processes, and products has thus remained the work of a few dedicated Australians. But a comparative history brings that work in line with works from other parts of the British Empire. Beautiful collected objects often distract us from the analysis of the systems of their production or an ethical critique; they are appreciated with little sense of the prejudices or hierarchies enacted in their making. Such a perspective would seem to tarnish the aesthetic merit of the precious object. However, this chapter has begun to articulate the importance of recovering the imperial perspective embedded in the furniture of the British colonies. In fact, there are two clear ways in which understanding the systems of production sheds light upon social distinction. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the backgrounds of cabinetmakers had a direct impact on the possibilities of their work and prospects. Moreover, these period distinctions have exerted an impact on a different sort of distinction today. Within collecting and scholarly communities, the skills and legacy of nonwhite and convict cabinetmakers, the artisanal “other” in the British Empire, continue to be undervalued or ignored. Drawing attention to the assumptions we make regarding the status of makers, using other examples from the British Empire to cast these assumptions into a revealing raking light, and charting how attitudes toward makers continue to impact our views of these historic works demonstrate the value a supply-side approach can bring to issues of social differentiation.

Notes 1. The standard text on consumer distinction is Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: The Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), but see also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, ­1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 483–697; and Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn, 1993): 141–157. 2. For a discussion of shop-floor oriented interpretive studies, see Edward S. Cooke, Jr. “The Study of American Furniture from the Perspective of the Maker,” in Gerald W. R. Ward, ed., Perspectives on the Study of American Furniture (New York: W.  W.  Norton, 1988), ­113–126. An example of a study that links production and consumption is Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Making Furniture in Pre-Industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 3. On low technology, its reliance on skilled flexibility, and its contextual practice, see John Worrell, “Ceramic Production in the Exchange Network of an Agricultural Neighborhood,” paper presented to the Society for Historical Archaeology, Philadelphia, 1982; and Douglas

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   469 Harper, Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-Works (3rd ed., London: Dan. Midwinter and Thos. Leigh, 1703); Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1992); Mehr Afshan Farooqi, ed., Craftting Traditions: Documenting Trades & Crafts in Early nineteenth Century North India (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2004); and David Kelly, Convict and Free: The Master Furniture-makers of Early New South Wales, 1788–1851 (Lew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014). 5. A seminal example of this Whiggish perspective is Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York: New York University Press, 1950). On American exceptionalism, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955) and Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 6. Edward Fix, “A Long Island Carpenter at Work: A Quantitative Inquiry into the Account Book of Jedediah Williamson,” parts 1 and 2, Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 32, no. 4 (1979): 61–63; 33, no. 1 (1980): 4–8. 7. Morrison Heckscher, John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005); Margaretta Lovell, “’Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable’: The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth-Century Newport,” Winterthur Portfolio 26 (Spring 1991): 27–62; Brock Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry 1720–1740,” in Walter Muir Whitehill, Jonathan L. Fairbanks, and Brock Jobe, eds., Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century: A Conference Held by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 11 and 12 May 1972, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 48 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974), 11; Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 18–19 and 139–142; and Nancy Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1997), 44–45, 262–263, and 313–318. 8. Cooke, Making Furniture in Pre-Industrial America; Charles Hummel, With Hammer in Hand (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968); and Philip Zea and Donald Dunlap, The Dunlap Cabinetmakers: A Tradition in Craftsmanship (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994). 9. In using the term “merchant producer,” I am drawing from Barbara Ward’s work on early eighteenth-century Boston silversmiths: Barbara McLean Ward, “The Craftsman in a Changing Society: Boston Goldsmiths, 1690–1730” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1983). A good example of a merchant producer in Boston during the 1730s is Nathaniel Holmes: Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture, 14–15. 10. Brock Jobe, with contributions by Diane Carlberg Ehrenpreis, James  L.  Garvin, Anne Rogers Haley, Myrna Kaye, Johanna McBrien, Kevin Nicholson, Richard  C.  Nylander, Elizabeth Redmond, Kevin Shupe, Robert Trent, Gerald  W.  R.  Ward, and Philip Zea, Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1993); Luke Beckerdite, “Origins of the Rococo Style in New York Furniture and Interior Architecture,” American Furniture 1993 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 1993), 15–38; Leroy Graqves and Luke Beckerdite, “New Insights on John Cadwalader’s Commode-Seat Side Chairs,” American Furniture 2000 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2000), 152–168; Luke Beckerdite and Alan

470   Edward S. Cooke Jr. Miller, “A Table’s Tale: Craft, Art, and Opportunity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Furniture 2004 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2004), 2–45; and Robert Trent, “The Colchester School of Cabinetmaking,” in Francis Puig and Michael Conforti, eds., The American Craftsman and the European Tradition 1620–1820 (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1989), 112–118. 11. Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture, 14–15 and 30–33; Margaretta Lovell, “Boston Blockfront Furniture,” in Whitehill, Fairbanks, and Jobe, eds., Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, 108–112; and David Wood, ed., The Concord Museum: Decorative Arts from a New England Collection (Concord, MA: Concord Museum, 1996), 21–33. 12. Observations on the general tendencies in this type of production are drawn from years of examination, but see also Wallace Gusler, “Variations in Eighteenth-Century Casework,” Fine Woodworking 23 (July 1980): 50–53. Bill Cotton focused my attention on dovetail keys, indicating that on large drawers most English makers used six pins along the front corner and five along the rear corner, whereas most American shops run by merchant producers had three to four pins on the front corner and two or three pins along the back corner (e-mail from Bill Cotton, furniture historian, to the author, July 25, 2015). 13. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden, City, NY: Doubleday, 1977). 14. Wallace Gusler, Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, 1710–1790 (Richmond: Virginia Museum, 1979); Luke Beckerdite, “Architect-Designed Furniture in EighteenthCentury Virginia: The Work of William Buckland and William Bernard Sears,” American Furniture 1994 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 1994), 29–48; and Robert Leath, “Robert and William Walker and the ‘Ne Plus Ultra’: Scottish Design and Colonial Virginia Furniture, 1730–1775,” American Furniture 2006 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2006), 54–95. 15. On the potential fit of fashionable furniture in the latest London styles within the planter class’s social milieu, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 16. There might have been slaves working in some of the shops in the Middle Atlantic and New England regions since there were small slave populations there, but there is no specific evidence. See William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) and Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 17. Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman, esp. 15. For a more positive assessment of slave expertise, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), esp. 56. 18. Robert Self and Susan Stein, “The Collaboration of Thomas Jefferson and John Hennings: The Furniture Attributed to the Monticello Joinery,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 231–248; Bradford Rauschenberg and John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture of Charleston, 1680–1820 (Winston-Salem, NC: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2003), vol. 3, 995. 19. Ibid., vol. 1, 52–55. 20. On the Harrison suite, see The Exceptional Sale (Christie’s, London, July 7, 2011), 72–79. On the London caned chair prototypes, see Adam Bowett, English Furniture, 1660–1714:

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   471 From Charles II to Queen Anne (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002), 230–236 and 260–263. 21. On the Joiners Company petition, see Minutes of the Joiners and Ceilers Company, vol. 3, April 7, 1701 (Guildhall Library, London). For the protest against Indian chintz, see Daniel Defoe, “Reflections on the Prohibition Act” (London, 1708). 22. On furniture making in India, see Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum (London: V & A Publications, 2001), 76–105; and Amin Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinet-maker (London: V & A Publications, 2002), esp. 9–12. On the dynamic aspects of caste skill, see Tryna Lyons, The Artists of Nathadwara: The Practice of Painting in Rajasthan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), esp. 247–292. Tamara Sears kindly referred this text to me. 23. On the “composite” nature of woodworking shops in South Asia, see the discussion of shipbuilding in Abhay Kumar Singh, Modern World System and Indian Protoindustrialization: Bengal, 1650–1800 (Calcutta: Northern Book Centre, 2006), vol. 1, 220–285. Mughal leaders and merchants hired European master shipwrights to work with Indian artisans, and European shipwrights hired local woodworkers to ensure proper use of local materials. Indian shipyards thus built a wide variety of ships, which often incorporated the speed and appearance of European vessels with the strength and ease of maintenance. Sylvia Houghteling kindly brought my attention to this volume. 24. On the taste for English houses and furnishings among the local Bengali elite, see the 1819–1820 recollections of Thomas Lumsden in his Journey from Merut in India to London (Edinburgh: Black Kingsbury, 1822), 36. Fanny Parkes, who lived in India in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, described how in Calcutta “Very excellent furniture was also to be had at the Europe shops, made by native workman under the superintendence of European cabinet and furniture makers; and furniture of an inferior description in the native bazaars.” See William Dalrymple, ed., Begums, Thugs & Englishmen: The Journals of Fanny Parkes (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), 14. 25. Jaffer addresses the hybrid round-seat chair form in Furniture from British India and Ceylon, 195–197 and 240–246. However, there has been little published that closely analyzes woodworking techniques in South Asian furniture of the eighteenth century. One of the few articles on traditional Indian woodworking is Eberhard Fischer, “Wood Working,” in Eberhard Fischer and Haku Shah, Rural Craftsmen and Their Work: Equipment and Techniques in the Mer Village of Ratadi in Saurashtra, India (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 1970), 65–107 and plates 94–168. 26. On the trade in Vizagapatam, see Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, 172–208; Kathy Gillis and David Park Curry, “Conservation of an Ivory-Clad Drop-Front Secretary from Vizagapatam, India” (Sixth International Symposium on Wood and Furniture Conservation, 2002), 10–17; and The Exceptional Sale (Christie’s, London, July 7, 2011), 60–71. The sophisticated production system for chintz, as well as the agency of the different specialist craftsmen and even the cloth itself, is articulated by Sylvia Houghteling, “Politics, Poetry and the Figural Language of South Asian Cloth, 1600–1730” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2015), chapter 2. On British mercantilism, see James Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism” New Literary History 11, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 303–321. 27. Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, 230–234, 330–335, and 386–389; and John Hawkins, “The Creation and Furnishing of Government House, Hobart by Lieutenant

472   Edward S. Cooke Jr. Governors Sorell, Arthur, and Franklin between 1817–1843: Part I: Sorell (1817–1824),” Australiana 30, no. 4 (November 2008): 32–41. 28. For good overviews of early Australian furniture and its makers, see Kevin Fahy, Christina Simpson, and Andrew Simpson, Nineteenth Century Australian Furniture (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1985), 33–55, 101–105, 119–136, and 145–156; and Graham Cornall, Memories: A Survey of Early Australian Furniture in the Collection of the Lord McAlpine of West Green (Perth: Australian City Properties, 1990). 29. E-mail from Robyn Lake, researcher in Tasmania, to the author, October 12, 2014. 30. For example, see John McPhee, ed., Red Cedar in Australia (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2004). 31. Cornall, Memories, 46–50 and 176–208. On the rise of colonial Gothic, see Joan Kerr and James Broadbent, Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980). 32. Julian Bickersteth, “The Three Macquarie Chairs,” Australiana 14, no. 2 (February 1992): 11–14; and Elizabeth Ellis, Rare and Curious: The Secret Life of Governor Macquarie’s Collector’s Chest (Sydney, New South Wales: State Library of New South Wales, 2010). 33. On the notion of settler colonialism and its relationship to the British Empire, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 34. On craft in a social economy, see Cooke, Making Furniture in Pre-Industrial America. 35. See John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina, 1700–1820 (Winston-Salem, NC: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1988); Ronald Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture 1680–1830 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997); and Luke Beckerdite, “Architect-Designed Furniture in EighteenthCentury Virginia.” 36. Robert Hughes, “Claw Daddy,” New York Times, May 29, 2005. 37. On the myths of Southern furniture, see Jonathan Prown, “A ‘Preponderance of Pineapples’: The Problem of Southern Furniture,” American Furniture 1997 (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 1997), 1–20. 38. For the persistence of the shame about the Australian penal system, see Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (New York: Knopf, 1987).

Bibliography Cooke, Edward  S., Jr. Making Furniture in Pre-Industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cooke, Edward S., Jr. “The Study of American Furniture from the Perspective of the Maker.” In Perspectives on the Study of American Furniture, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward, 113–126. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Cornall, Graham. Memories: A Survey of Early Australian Furniture in the Collection of the Lord McAlpine of West Green. Perth: Australian City Properties, 1990. Ellis, Elizabeth. Rare and Curious: The Secret Life of Governor Macquarie’s Collector’s Chest. Sydney, New South Wales: State Library of New South Wales, 2010.

The Material Culture of Furniture Production   473 The Exceptional Sale. Christie’s, London (July 7, 2011): 60–79. Gusler, Wallace. Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, 1710–1790. Richmond: Virginia Museum, 1979. Jaffer, Amin. Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum. London: V & A Publications, 2001. Jaffer, Amin, Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinet-maker. London: V & A Publications, 2002. Kelly, David. Convict and Free: The Master Furniture-makers of Early New South Wales, 1788–1851. Lew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014. Rauschenberg, Bradford, and John Bivins, Jr. The Furniture of Charleston, 1680–1820. WinstonSalem, NC: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2003. Whitehill, Walter Muir, Jonathan L. Fairbanks, and Brock Jobe, eds. Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century: A Conference Held by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 11 and 12 May 1972. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 48. Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974.

chapter 24

M ater i a l Cu lt u r e , M useums, a n d th e Cr eation of M u ltipl e M e a n i ngs Neil G. W. Curtis

No consideration of material culture can avoid discussing the role of museums. The last generation has seen not only an exponential growth in the number of museums and their visitors, and their social prominence across the world, but also the development of a large and rich academic literature—the “New Museology” of Peter Vergo,1 in which the writing of postmodern critics, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has been introduced to the literature2 and the social role of museums more thoroughly critiqued.3 The result has been a much greater emphasis on the present instead of posterity, people instead of collections, and access instead of scholarship. Nonetheless, a coherent intellectual framework for museums has not formed, with much uncertainty continuing as museums try to justify the continued care of vast collections created in different ages by claiming to be academically necessary, socially useful, and economically productive. Although the popular view of museums still sees them as authoritative institutions that are a rational part of the modern world, this was one of the shibboleths dismissed by the postmodern critique. As museum studies scholar Eilean Hooper-Greenhill says, “What counts as a rational act at one time will not so count at another time, and this is dependent on the context of reason that prevails” and that “what we now know to be reasonable was not so in the past, and will not so appear in the future.”4 While museums are found in many societies, this does not mean that they are relevant to everyone or that their collections adequately represent the full variety of cultural experiences. Instead, their collections are used to foster social distinctions, while their worldwide prevalence reflects the hegemony of Western culture. At the same time as dismissing rational explanations, it is also worth reflecting on the often unstated, but powerful, irrational

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   475 social functions of museums. This includes the role of museums as temples, storehouses of memories, memorials to the past, and markers for the future.5 Ideas of the sacred, the numinous, and the contested, rather than of the rational, are most important in understanding how the meanings of material culture are formed and the role that museums play in this. Rights in museum objects are contested and are used to foster distinctions among different groups of people and their aspirations. Among these are the differences between the meanings of an object to its maker, collector, and the museum into whose collection it is incorporated; the different approaches taken to numinous objects by “universal” museums and indigenous communities; and the uses of objects and exhibitions to promote specific attitudes toward identity. How can the sometimes conflicting rights in these objects be revealed and addressed? A set of case studies from Scotland will also emphasize that understanding is possible only through a detailed appreciation of the history and cultural contexts of museums, giving examples of how some meanings have been selected and privileged as they distinguish and give status to specific social groups. These examples include studies of objects that were seen as offering a link between the Classical past and Scottish history, the creation of a national museum and an exhibition of Scottish history, and a consideration of two repatriation cases.

The Biography of Museum Objects Many museums, notably the British Museum in its exhibition gallery “Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century,” now consider the history of their collections in exhibitions.6 Likewise, much academic writing focuses on the history of collecting, while the “biographical” approach to the “social life of things” has become very significant.7 The importance of objects is now seen as lying not just at the time of their creation, but also in their subsequent entanglements in people’s lives. Ancient Greek art is often seen as marking one of the highest points of human cultural achievement and considered to be of significance to “mankind as a whole.”8 The history by which it came to have this high value accorded it is rich, complex, and specific, with its origins in the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For educated men living in Scotland, far from the Mediterranean, the links between the Classical world and their own landscape and family history were weak. Despite this, it was claimed that “the source whence we are to draw authentic information concerning the early ages of British history, is from the Greek and Roman writers.”9 For Scottish antiquarians, the most important source was the Agricola of Tacitus, which culminates in the battle of Mons Graupius and the defeat of the Caledonians. One attempt to find a local connection with Agricola lies in the donation of a rusty piece of iron to Aberdeen’s Marischal College Museum in 181210 and described as being “an Iron Hoop supposed to belonging [sic] to the axle of Agricola’s Chariot. Found near the place where Agricola fought a desperate battle near Dunnottar (very much rusted no Wonder).”11

476   Neil G. W. Curtis A fine red figure kylix (wine drinking cup) has a more complex set of meanings linking someone from Scotland with the Classical world. Its underside depicts a group of men drinking at a symposion. The collection clearly reflects the donor, Alexander Henderson’s,12 interest in wine: his visits to the wine-growing areas of Italy would have given him access to finds of pottery as well as inspiring him to write a well-regarded history of wine.13 This particular object may, however, have had greater personal meaning. The red-figure depiction of men drinking also shows their property in black; alongside shoes and pots is an African slave. This is particularly striking when it is realized that Henderson derived his wealth from a plantation in Jamaica and would have known his father’s Black “servant” in his Aberdeenshire home.

Entwining Texts and Objects The changing relationship of written texts and the meanings of objects is also seen in a group of bronze leaf-shaped swords. Now dispersed among museums in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, and Copenhagen, they are the largest known group of nineteenthcentury replica prehistoric metalwork objects from the British Isles, based on a Bronze Age sword found south of Aberdeen.14 At the time of its discovery, it was described as “A Roman Gladius, and sheath. Found in 1809 under deep moss on the estate of Balnagubs, in the line between the Roman camps of Rae-dykes and Drumoak.” This supposed association gave a provenance that was to last for over a century: long after the swords were recognized as being prehistoric, the original and one of the copies were catalogued as “Romano-British” in an 1887 catalogue. Indeed, the power of text is such that that catalogue listed four swords: the two prehistoric ones, and the two Roman ones that only existed in textual form. Subsequently, aiming to escape from repeating inaccurate antiquarian descriptions, archaeological discussion turned to a study of the swords themselves. As a result, some of these very convincing copies entered the archaeological literature as Bronze Age swords, until a combination of metal analysis and archival study revealed their complex biography.15 While object “biographies” can show how objects inspire meanings, “the changes which (a work of art) may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership” (in Walter Benjamin’s words)16 have more rarely been a focus of investigation, despite Kopytoff ’s example, which showed that “the physical state of the [Suku] hut at each given age corresponds to a particular use.”17 The biography of the leaf-shaped swords offers is again revealing. Despite the replica swords being created as identical copies, each has had a different subsequent story. While some have seen their attribution change from Roman to prehistoric, others have retained the memory of being copies. For example, one had a wooden handle added in the early 1980s and was not included in a 1988 catalogue of Bronze Age metalwork.18 It was then handled by school classes and other groups, with the haft helping them to imagine it as a replica weapon, rather than thinking of it as a museum object. The most significant differences are, however, the words that have been written on them.

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   477 That most were written by museums, whose supposed aim is the unchanging preservation of objects, shows the importance of such writing. Sometimes, as with the words “Agricola” and “Rome” on one, or text on another saying, “This sword is probably a reproduction of a genuine one and has been acquired as such. The original may yet be discovered,” this writing directly relates the object to a wider narrative. The catalogue numbers are different, in which the writing relates them to the cataloguing system of a specific collection. Rather than existing as individual objects with biographies, they thus became “specimens” in which their principal meaning was to represent a classification system,19 highlighting Susan Stewart’s contention that the collection’s existence “is dependent upon principles of organization and categorization.”20 Rather than simply being a means by which objects and information can be linked, these numbers symbolize their transfer from being “souvenirs” to being “specimens” within a “collection” in which their principal meaning is to represent a classification system rather than as objects with individual stories.21 Describing something as a “museum object” is therefore only an indication of one stage in its biography, rather than there being an essential category of “museum objects.” Though other meanings may continue to be possible, the role of an item as a museum object can become its dominant meaning. Not only do individual objects combine to give status and authority to a museum, so too does belonging to a museum contribute to the significance of an individual object. In this way, the opening of the Neues Museum in Berlin was described as “Nefertiti gets a new palace,”22 and the Louvre is inseparable from the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa—both achieving their fame after becoming part of that museum’s collection.

Numinous Objects Although these examples show the meanings of objects changing as they move between different contexts, some personal meanings seem to be lost when the object becomes part of a collection. As one metal detectorist has said, “I spend a lot of hours searching to discover these items and would far rather have them on display in my own display cabinet than to be hidden in a locked cabinet somewhere at the back of a museum.”23 Some objects can have an association with an event or person such that their significance is “psychological rather than material; it is as if they are, to borrow a term from Roman paganism, inhabited by a numen or spirit that calls forth in many of us a reaction of awe and reverence”24 and in which “the ‘numinosity’ of an artifact or place, the intangible and invisible quality of its significance, consists in its presumed association with something, either in the past or in the imagination or both, that carries emotional weight with the viewer.”25 Whereas Stewart’s idea of the “souvenir” emphasizes personal memories associated with objects, the idea of the “numinous object” highlights powerful communal memories and meanings. A bass drum in the collections of the Stó:lō Research and Resource Management Centre is such an object. It was played by Stó:lō children in the brass band

478   Neil G. W. Curtis of the St. Mary’s Indian Residential School, British Columbia, between 1962 and 1984. The Canadian government established residential schools to teach First Nations ­children to adopt Christianity and White Canadian customs, and to “to kill the Indian in the child.”26 Attendance at school was compulsory, children’s contact with their families was restricted, and speaking their first language or practicing Native traditions was punished. The Canadian government has now acknowledged the individual and ­collective trauma caused by residential schools. While investigating the drum, Carolyn Bartlett “met seven of the women who, in various stages of the drum’s past, gave the brass band life.”27 In her analysis, the drum was “eternally attached to ­memories of the residential school system” and that “the numinosity of the drum was obvious. With its beat marks exposing twenty-four years of wear . . . [it] has undeniable historical and cultural importance to the Stó:lō people. It is eternally attached to memories of the residential school system.”28 Tangible and intangible heritage cannot be separated. The true “numinosity” of such objects therefore lies in the survival of those ­meanings, whether in memory or documentation. Once lost, the meaning is irretrievable, such as our ignorance of what the Palaeolithic human figure known as the Willendorf Venus meant to those who made it and used it. However, something of a numinous aura as a powerful object can survive in its classification as “art” or as “heritage.” Hirini Moko Mead and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku29 have discussed the Māori concept of taonga (roughly translated as “treasure”), a term that has largely replaced the ­museum practice of labeling Māori material as “primitive art.” As well as having some parallels with Western art, such as the beauty of an object, the quality of creativity it embodies, its size and material, its history and its iconography, taonga can also be seen as ­having some ­parallels with “heritage” in the way that they are passed down like heirlooms from one generation to the next. More than mere antiquity, this is important because it demonstrates a link between the founding ancestors of the tribe and people alive today. Close association with human remains is also important, such as carved chests used to contain human bones, but the spiritual essence of taonga is, however, the most telling attribute and one that has much greater force than do “art” and “heritage.” This brings with it social distinctions, including obligations for those responsible for the care of taonga, such as keeping close to their taonga, bringing an elder to clear away the tapu so they could interact with it safely, holding a church service to control the awesome powers of the ancestors, talking to the taonga as though it were an ancestor, bringing green leaves to lay at the feet or generally behaving in a very affectionate manner to their taonga.30

The levels of sanctity vary from object to object and may change over time, just as Hirini Moko Mead noted that “in a sense all Māori art has increased mana since [the exhibition] Te Maori opened in New York in September 1984,” giving international prestige to Māori art.31

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   479 The recognition of the sanctity of objects and other ways of valuing them has come with demands for the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects. Though some museum scholars have seen repatriation as a threat to the integrity and authority of museums, to indigenous people, it has had a more significant impact on how museum collections are conceptualized. This has a particular potential impact on museums in Scotland that have large collections given by the Scots living in colonies as part of the British Empire, though to date there have been relatively few repatriation requests.32 The headdress repatriated from the University of Aberdeen to the Kainai Sacred Horn Society (Iitskinaiksi) in Canada in 2003 has implications for the wider understanding of museum collections. It is no longer a museum object available for conservation, study, display, and interpretation; instead, it has returned to its traditional role in a sacred bundle with its own ritual roles.33 Even the museum’s treatment of its archive has been affected, as the decision to repatriate included an agreement not to publish photographs of the Iitskinaiksi headdress. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has even more fundamentally altered the power of publicly funded museums in the United States, with the right to make decisions about the repatriation of human remains, grave goods, and sacred items now in the hands of indigenous communities.34 In such cases, repatriation has not merely removed items from a particular museum collection and placed them in another museum; it has ensured that such items are no longer museum objects at all, even if they continue to be in the care of a museum. The decision to return the headdress was based on a comparison of the importance of the bundle to the Kainai people with its importance to the museum, rather than deciding that one set of meanings was invalid. Donated in 1934, it was probably purchased by an Aberdeen woman visiting the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in the 1920s. This tallies with it having been an Iitskinaiksi headdress, as the Kainai are one of the Blackfoot-speaking tribes now divided between the United States and Canada. Shortly after its return to the Kainai in 2003, the museum showed an exhibition “Going Home: Museums and Repatriation,” which explored the story of this and other repatriation requests. One visitor commented that they were “so glad to see this as a discussion—I knew very little about procedures and cases of repatriation,” and another said that the exhibition showed that “all of humanity is connected to each other.” This repatriation also highlights how the numinous quality of an object can transcend its physical existence. Despite having left the museum more than a decade ago, its presence is still felt: its display mount still stands in the store as witness to its absence, while a fossil ammonite gifted by a Kainai man “as a gift for being a capable caretaker of the Blue Paint Headdress,” bulging archival files, academic publications, and museum teaching mark its continuing presence, just as the other items collected at the same time as the headdress that continue to be held in the museum have an increased significance and additional stories to tell. In Canada, the keeper of the bundle subsequently bought a kilt jacket to commemorate the connections created by the headdress’s sojourn in Aberdeen—the decision to repatriate did not invalidate previous meanings and stories, but added further aspects to its numinosity.

480   Neil G. W. Curtis Though repatriation can build rich meanings and understandings,35 the risk is that arguments for repatriation and the rights of “source communities” are normally phrased in the terms of Western culture, resulting in distinctions between cultures being minimized as they are homogenized into an “other” with which museums can develop professional approaches. As anthropologist Tim Ingold has shown, the ways in which Western notions of what it is to be “indigenous” are rooted in a model that emphasizes linear descent from an ancestral population in a particular place.36 This is quite unlike the way that many indigenous people have traditionally considered their relationship to a place being a result of their lived experiences of their environment. In the process of articulating their land claims, indigenous groups can be compelled to use definitions at odds with their traditional ways of understanding the relationships between people and the material world. A similar analysis can be applied to some of the demands for restitution from museums. Indigenous people have been forced to follow Western legal and administrative ­processes, including demonstrating that a request meets criteria such as “continuity between the community that created the object and the community on whose behalf the request is being made.”37 Likewise, the provisions of NAGPRA in the United States are restricted to federally recognized Indian tribes, and lineal descendants of people on nineteenth-century listings of tribal members, despite the many errors and misconceptions in the creation of such lists by outsiders. For museums, such definitions can help create categories of collections, such as “human remains” or “sacred items,” which can be treated differently from the rest of the collection. However, are such categories merely the latest form of museum classification rather than a substantial challenge to the right of museums to classify material?

The Culture of Museums The idea that museums have a neutral, objective viewpoint, free from ideology, is common to much museum practice. This commonly held assumption applies, for example, to classification schemes for documenting collections, the frequent separation of displays of “Art” from “Natural History” and “Human History,” and the “subject-based networks” of museum experts in various subjects to “improve the care and interpretation of ­collections.”38 These approaches emphasize the importance of Western academic subject classifications in discussions about museums, which have also included proposals for “planned collection” and “rationalizing collections.”39 Such ideas also appeared in the “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” issued by a group of major museums in Europe and the United States in November 2002.40 One of the striking features of the Declaration is its claim that museums with geographically diverse collections could offer a more insightful perspective on objects than would be possible if objects were displayed only with material from a museum’s locality, and that museums are “a universal resource for the citizens of the world.”

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   481 However, who is the “international public” for whom these museum collections are available? If they are those who claim to be the intellectual descendants of the members of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters for whom the British Museum was established, they may indeed now be worldwide.41 They are, however, still a distinct community whose shared values include an interest in the products of classical Greece and other ancient civilizations. As museum studies scholar Suzanne Keene has argued, “Museums are deeply implicated in the Modern, as instruments for cataloguing and characterising first, the natural world, and later the world of invention, design and technology.”42 The language of much professional museum thinking therefore reflects the dominance of a particular way of looking at the world that is a product of eighteenthand nineteenth-century academic thought with its origins in essentialism, which “views the established beliefs and institutions of our modern heritage as not only real but true, and not only true but good.”43

Museums as Sacred Places Aspects of the current discussion about the treatment of human remains by museums exemplify the attempt to categorize museum objects.44 Defining what this ­category includes is always problematic: should hair, prostheses, blood-stained clothes, or grave goods be included? At the same time, things thought to have personhood by some people, such as sacred objects, pets, or children’s soft toys, are usually excluded. Despite originating in a desire to accord respect to indigenous people, the determination of museums to establish a definition of “human remains” shows a dominance of Western thinking that is remarkably similar to the approach taken by the 2002 Declaration.45 Many museum and museum studies scholars have come to recognize that museums are perhaps best not considered as rational, representative, or objective institutions, but might be better understood as sacred places.46 Charles Hunt has suggested that museum collections belong to a category of taboo material, sharing this category “with corpses, household refuse, bodily excretions, etc. which have in common the property of being regarded as polluting, i.e. as being dangerous to touch, smell, see or mention. As such, materials are kept within explicitly defined locations whose boundaries are signified and protected by more or less complex rites of passage.”47 In the late 1980s, Nick Merriman showed that 44 percent of people identified museums with churches, t­ emples, or monuments to the dead, and archetypal museums often resemble classical temples or gothic cathedrals within which visitors speak in hushed tones in front of barely visible iconic treasures.48 Likewise, the attempts of conservators to prevent decay, and the invocation of posterity by museums, speak of a timelessness that is a common at­trib­ute of the sacred, while the unwillingness of museums to offer monetary valuations of objects brought in for identification further emphasizes that they aim to act outside the commercial world of everyday life.

482   Neil G. W. Curtis

Collecting and Exhibiting Scottish Identities One of the most important ways in which museums have promoted a particular interpretation is in the development of national museums to demonstrate “the past glories and talents of those who were claimed (usually spuriously) to be ‘our ancestors’ ” and so contributed to the formation of apparently distinctive nationalities.49 Since the Middle Ages, a wide variety of national stories have been told about Scotland, resulting in a rich set of images of a variety of political hues,50 which “provided historic legitimacy for claims that Scotland was indubitably a distinctive country.”51 Rather than searching for a historical “truth,” it is more helpful to see these stories as myths with their popularity revealing different conceptions of what is Scotland. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, where the establishment of national museums was often the result of a national political revival and desire for independence, the Scottish intellectual tradition of the mid-nineteenth century has been described as the “blending of openly demonstrative patriotism to unquestioned, unconditional unionism.”52 This combination was exemplified by Sir Walter Scott, who described the Union of 1707 as “an event which had I lived in that day I would have resigned my life to have prevented but which being done before my day I am sensible was a wise turn.”53 The ways in which material culture was used as part of the telling of these stories can be shown in three ­episodes: the development of a national museum, the use of the ancient law of Treasure Trove to enrich its collections, and the creation of a temporary exhibition of Scottish History in 1911. Despite the transfer of the collections of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland to the state in 1851, in the following year Daniel Wilson, the secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, wrote of the failure of “an object I had much at heart, the establishing of a Museum of National Antiquities here. In Copenhagen a genuine nationality has been awakened on this; and it is wonderful what has been effected in Dublin. But Scotsmen seem to me beginning to be ashamed of Scotland—surely a woeful symptom.”54 Indeed, it was not until 1859 that the museum opened as part of what is now the Royal Scottish Academy building in central Edinburgh, by which time Wilson had left Scotland to become professor of History and English Literature in Toronto, and had introduced the word “prehistory” to the English language.55 Wilson’s comment about Denmark probably refers to the links established through the visit to Scotland by the Danish antiquarian J. J. A. Worsaae in 1846–1847. During that visit, Worsaae had seen the leaf-shaped swords discussed earlier and was given one for display in the museum in Copenhagen, believing it to be of Danish origin. He stated, “to sail across the ocean and to wield the sword in sanguinary conflict, for the sake of winning glory and booty, formed from the earliest times the occupation and the delight of the inhabitants of the North,”56 and that “We hold in our hands the swords, with which they made the Danish name respected and feared. . . . The remains of antiquity

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   483 thus binds us more firmly to our native Land.”57 His emphasis of a specifically Danish/ Nordic origin for leaf-shaped swords and the importance of antiquities to national identity was clearly political,58 and it must be seen in the context of the build-up to the 1848–1850 Danish-Prussian war during which “from the point of view of an archaeologist, [Worsaae] fought foreign encroachments, by publishing a series of part-political, part-scientific brochures.”59 Worsaae’s explanation of the Danish approach in which the state, not private bodies like the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, took responsibility for the care of antiquities, led to the promotion of a similar approach in Scotland. Since the early years of the nineteenth century, the existing Scots feudal law of bona vacantia, under which all objects with no traceable owner could be claimed as Crown property, had led to the allocation of antiquities to museums, particularly that of the Society of Antiquaries. With the transfer of the Society’s collections to state ownership, it is not surprising that the mid-nineteenth century saw particular efforts by archaeologists to use the ancient rights of the Crown to ensure that as many finds as possible were taken into the National Museum. By 1888, it was possible for the keeper of the National Museum to state that “the Archaeological collections existing in local Museums in Scotland are poor and fragmentary. There is no exception to this.”60 As well as improving the care of archaeological finds, the use of the Crown’s right to Treasure Trove to underpin archaeological collecting therefore had the additional benefits of placing archaeologists close to the legal establishment and giving the discipline a heightened status with a distinctive Scottish institutional heritage without threatening the integrity of the United Kingdom. The 1911 Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry in Glasgow was a successful example of a World’s Fair or Great Exhibition attracting over nine million visits.61 Alongside a Palace of Industry and a popular entertainment section, unusually it also included inhabited reconstructions of a Scottish burgh and a Highland village, and a Palace of History, which housed thousands of objects borrowed for the year. With this focus on Scottish history, a Scots baronial architectural style for the exhibition buildings, and the aim of raising funds to endow a chair of Scottish History and Literature in the University of Glasgow, the exhibition has been seen as relating to a resurgence of Scottish national identity and moves toward home rule at the turn of the twentieth century. However, most of the exhibition’s leaders were active members of the Conservative Party and hoped that visitors would leave with a view of Scottish history that promoted Scotland as being an equal partner with England at the heart of the British Empire rather than supporting the re-establishment of a Scottish parliament. As the exhibition’s president, the marquis of Tullibardine, claimed in a 1912 debate in the UK parliament, “I am quite certain the result would be to drift back on the whole stream of progress which has been flowing ever since the time of the Union, and to put us back into the small backwater of Scotland, if you put us back into the position of separation in which we were before the Union.”62 Being “acutely aware of the sensitivities surrounding issues of nationalism and national identity, and of the depth of Scottish feeling and the potential resentments

484   Neil G. W. Curtis which might be aroused by attempts to absorb or marginalise it,”63 the Conservatives at the turn of the twentieth century followed Sir Walter Scott’s view of Scottish history that “the ‘old’ consists of north and Highland Scotland, the clans, Jacobitism and the Scoto-Latinist intellectual tradition; the ‘new’ is Britain, settled prosperity and empirical common sense. . . . Scotland is childhood, Britain adulthood: this is Scott’s essential and repeated equation.”64 The main structuring principle of the displays was the didactic one of juxtaposing portraits of illustrious people with objects associated with them. As the socialist politician Tom Johnston noted at the time, “The history you’re going to get is the history Lord Tullibardine thinks will suit your present state in culture development; it’s the history the Duke of Connaught likes and the story of Kingly heroes and Queenly Saints, who gave their lives for their subjects; the Reformation history you’ll get is the history that won’t raise questions.”65 The portrayal of Scotland in the exhibition therefore managed to “paper over the geographic, class and religious divisions in Scotland,”66 to demonstrate a Scottish identity explicitly allied to the Union, Protestantism, trade, self-improvement, and the importance of the aristocracy. Despite having an avowedly political intent, the exhibition portrayed Scottish history as something that did not deserve political debate, instead offering an apparently authoritative and uncontentious story. Those studying Scottish history in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have interests that differ dramatically from those of the exhibition organizers. For instance, whereas the history and experiences of working-class people and those with an Irish or Catholic background had been excluded from the 1911 exhibition, they have subsequently become the topics of significant work.67 Scottish history has not, however, played a significant role in recent political debate, with the seven-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bannockburn seeing little public or political interest.68 Indeed, it is striking that while Lord Tullibardine’s fears of separation resonate with those parties wishing to maintain the Union, it is unlikely that they would promote an exhibition about Scottish history in the way that happened a century ago. Perhaps the exhibition can best be seen as a dramatically successful event in 1911, but one that both displayed Scottish history as having come to an end, and that almost resulted in the end of historical discussion in twentieth-century Scottish political life.

Conclusion Museums have offered rich contexts in which the changing meanings of material culture have developed. Scottish national identity, contested and unsettled, has therefore resulted in museum collections and interpretations that reveal the interests of different social groups, such as a focus on the Classical past by those who replicated some bronze swords, and on a protestant and unionist history displayed in the 1911 exhibition. Meanwhile, the growing support for repatriation from a number of museums may, in the words of a Glasgow City Council memorandum, “be based on Scottish people’s

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   485 self-perception as a just people, and their awareness that they had been beneficiaries as well as victims of imperial conquest.”69 While simplistic ideas of victimhood and empathy with indigenous people may have encouraged support for repatriation, the importance of quasi-legal processes and a public hearing could also be seen as demonstrating a Scottish tradition. Since the nineteenth century, museums have become increasingly professionalized, with formal policies and trained staff. Just as the development of archaeology in Scotland saw the belief grow that antiquities could only be properly understood by a national museum, more recently museums have developed professional networks and planned collecting so that they are now seen as part of a “sector” rather than each working in isolation. The “Collections for the Future” inquiry discussed this issue, though the final report acknowledges that “what gives the UK’s museum collections much of their richness and depth is precisely the fact that they have not been centrally planned, but are, in large part, the result of visionary and often idiosyncratic collecting by highly motivated individuals.”70 The idea of planned collecting works only when museums recognize a single set of meanings, such as collecting to “fill a gap” or “complete a collection.” As Hooper-Greenhill has argued, “the presentation of material things as they relate to only one space in a limited classificatory table leads . . . to the constitution of a unilinear meaning in relation to only one of the many contexts in which any material things may be made meaningful.”71 If all museums operated to the same classification scheme, they would avoid duplication, but at the cost of collections with vastly limited potential for use in ways unexpected by their creators. By accepting that the museum-generated meanings are not the only ones, museums such as the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, the National Museum of Australia, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa have been at the forefront of controlling access to sensitive material and recognizing different treatments, and Museums Australia has highlighted the importance of “­custodianship and care taking rather than ownership” and a “recognition of the value of stories and other intangibles associated with objects.”72 As a result of this shift in understanding, in the National Museum of Australia, for example, “any research undertaken on ancestral remains held on behalf of communities must have the prior consent of traditional custodians or those authorized by them” as well as from the museum.73 An approach that draws on the rights of groups other than those of the museum can also result in very effective exhibitions that give an “insider’s” view of culture, such as the exhibition Nitsitapiisini: The Story of the Blackfoot People in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta.74 At the same time, we also need to acknowledge the different local communities that have a claim on material. For example, the family of a collector who collected in Vanuatu at the turn of the twentieth century continues to have close links with the University of Aberdeen’s museums. These have included the collector’s nephew celebrating his eightieth birthday in the museum and other family members making contact with each other through the museum and donating family mementos to the museum.

486   Neil G. W. Curtis It is worth reiterating that the collecting practices of museums have not been c­omprehensive, rational, or unchanging: many objects have not been collected because they have been seen as unpleasant, worthless, or too valuable, while others have been collected for reasons that now appear irrelevant or inappropriate. Many of the challenges to major museums today—from metal detectorists resisting the claiming of their finds to community museums and indigenous people—come from an opposition to the model that sees museums and their staff as the final arbiters of meaning and value. However, for many people museums do have a special role and are accorded a very high level of social trust. Perhaps museums should build on this trust by moving toward a model in which visitors join the curators in a “priesthood of all believers” in exploring the challenging nature of collections. That this process can benefit the visitor was seen in the display in Glasgow about the return of the Lakota Ghost Dance shirt or the explanation of the removal from display of a Māori tattooed head in the University of Aberdeen. Both resulted in much more engaging and thought-provoking exhibitions than did the previous display of the items ­themselves. That way, people would be offered both a clearer view of other cultures and a clearer reflection of their own. With an increasing emphasis on visitor services and social inclusion, it is ever more important that the wide variety of overlapping rights and interests of people in objects is understood. The meanings that objects generate and embody are shared, entangled, and co-constitutive. Instead of attempting to identify the “correct” meaning, it is therefore the responsibility of museums to explore the range of personal and shared rights that objects engender.

Notes 1. Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion, 1989). 2. For example, Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992). 3. For example, Samuel  J.  M.  M.  Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (Manchester University Press, 2009); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995). 4. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 9–10. 5. For example, Neil G. W. Curtis, “Human Remains: Archaeology, Museums and the Sacred,” Public Archaeology 3, no. 1 (2003): 21–32. 6. J. Pes, “The King’s Bounty,” Museums Journal 104, no. 1 (January 2004): 32–33. 7. For example, Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63; Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (London: Routledge, 1998). 8. Quoted in Neil G. W. Curtis, “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things,” Museum Management and Curatorship 21, no. 2 (2006): 117–127.

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   487 9. Rev. Grant, “Memoir Concerning the Roman Progress in Scotland to the North of the Grampian Hills,” Archaeologia Scotica: Transactions of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland 2, no. 1 (1818): 31–42, 31. 10. Inventory of the Principal Curiosities Natural and Artificial Preserved in the Museum and Library of Marischal College and University of Aberdeen [University of Aberdeen MS M106]. 11. List of Some of the Curiosities in the Museum of Marischal College [Aberdeen University Library MS 704]. 12. Caroline Pennington, “Henderson, Alexander Farquharson (1779/80–1863),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/12901. 13. Alexander Henderson, The History of Ancient and Modern Wines (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1824). 14. Neil  G.  W.  Curtis, “ ‘The Original May Yet Be Discovered’: Seven Bronze Age Swords Supposedly from Netherley, Kincardineshire,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 137 (2007): 487–500. 15. John  M.  Coles, “Scottish Late Bronze Age Metalwork: Typology, Distributions and Chronology,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 93 (1959–1960): 16–134. 16. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, [1936] 1999), 211–244. 17. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91, 67. 18. James Inglis, “Catalogue of Bronze Age Material Held by the Anthropological Museum, University of Aberdeen,” in Trevor  G.  Cowie, Magic Metal: Early Metalworkers in the North-east (Aberdeen: Anthropological Museum, University of Aberdeen, 1988), 45–52. 19. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). 20. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 153. 21. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections. 22. Der Speigel, “Nefertiti Gets a New Palace: Revamped Neues Museum Finally Opens in Berlin” (Hamburg: Der Speigel, 2009), http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ nefertiti-gets-a-new-palace-revamped-neues-museum-finally-opens-in-berlin-a-655577. html. 23. Gordon Innes, quoted in Neil G. W. Curtis, “’Like Stray Words or Letters’: The Development and Workings of the Treasure Trove System,” in West over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement before 1300, ed. Beverley Ballin Smith, Simon Taylor, and Gareth Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 341–361, 351. 24. Rachel P. Maines and James T. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” The Public Historian 15 (1993): 9–25, 9. 25. Maines and Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” 10. 26. Stephen Harper, Statement of Apology—To Former Students of Indian Residential Schools (Government of Canada, June 11, 2008), https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/11001000156 44/1100100015649. 27. Carolyn Bartlett, Numinous Objects: The Ethnohistorical Complexities of a Residential School Bass Drum (Victoria bc: Ethnohistory Field School with the Stó:lō, 2009), 2, http:// web.uvic.ca/vv/stolo/pdf/Bartlett%20Drum.pdf.

488   Neil G. W. Curtis 28. Bartlett, Numinous Objects, 1. 29. Hirini Moko Mead, “The Nature of Taonga,” Taonga Maori Conference: New Zealand 18–27 November 1990 (New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs 1991), 164–169; Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, “Maori: People and Culture,” in Maori Art and Culture, ed. Dorota C. Starzecka (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 26–49. 30. Mead, “The Nature of Taonga,” 167. 31. Mead, “The Nature of Taonga,” 166. 32. Neil  G.  W.  Curtis, “Repatriation from Scottish Museums; Learning from NAGPRA,” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2010): 234–248. 33. Neil  G.  W.  Curtis, “ ‘A Continuous Process of Reinterpretation’: The Challenge of the Universal and Rational Museum,” Public Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2005): 50–56. 34. C. Timothy McKeown, “Considering Repatriation Legislation as an Option: The National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA) & the Native American Graves Protection Act (NAGPRA),” in Utimut: Past Heritage—Future Partnerships—Discussions on Repatriation in the 21st Century, ed. Mille Gabriel and Jens Dahl (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Nuuk: Greenland National Museum and Archives, 2008), 134–147. 35. Louise Tythacott and Kostas Arvantis, Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 36. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000). 37. Glasgow City Council, Memorandum Submitted by Glasgow City Council to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee (2000), http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmcumeds/371/0051808.htm. 38. Museums Association, Collections for the Future (London: Museums Association, 2005), 9, http://www.museumsassociation.org/collections/9839. 39. Museums Association, Collections for the Future, 9. 40. Neil G. W. Curtis, “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things,” Museum Management and Curatorship 21, no. 2 (2006): 117–127. 41. Neil Macgregor and Jonathan Williams, “The Encyclopaedic Museum: Enlightenment Ideals, Contemporary Realities,” Public Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2005): 57–59. 42. Suzanne Keene, “All That Is Solid?—Museums and the Postmodern,” Public Archaeology 5, no. 3 (2006): 185–198, 185. 4 3. Theodore Brameld, Patterns of Educational Philosophy: Divergence and Convergence in Culturological Perspective (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 211. 44. Curtis, “Human Remains.” 45. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2005), 9. 46. For example, Curtis, “Human Remains”; Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). 47. Charles Hunt, “The Museum: A Sacred Arena,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 118, no. 1 (1993): 115–123, 122. 48. Nick Merriman, “Museum Visiting as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), 149–171. 49. Neal Ascherson, “Foreword,” in Nationalism and Archaeology, ed. John A. Atkinson, Iain Banks, and Jerry O’Sullivan (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996), v–ix, vi. 50. William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

Material Culture, Museums, and Creation of Multiple Meanings   489 51. David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992), 20. 52. John Morrison, Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting, 1800–1920 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 227. 53. Quoted in Cyrus Vakil, “Scott and Scottish Enlightenment Philosophical History,” in Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh 1991, ed. John H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1993), 404–418, 409. 54. Marinelle Ash, “ ‘A Fine, Genial, Hearty Band’: David Laing, Daniel Wilson and Scottish Archaeology,” in The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition, ed. A.  S.  Bell (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1981), 86–113, 111. 55. Ash, “ ‘A Fine, Genial, Hearty Band.’ ” 56. Jens J. A. Worsaae, The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark: Translated from the Danish and Applied to the Illustration of Similar Remains in England by William J. Thoms (London: John Henry Parker, 1849), 25. 57. Worsaae, The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark, 149–150. 58. Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 30. 59. S. O. Müller, A la Mémoire du Vice-President de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 1865–1885, JJA Worsaae; discourse sur l’importance de son œuvre archéologique (Copenhagen: Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 1886), 178. 60. James Anderson and G. F. Black, “Reports on Local Museums in Scotland,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 22 (1887–1888): 331–421, 421. 61. Perilla Kinchin and Juliette Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988 (Bicester: White Cockade Publishing, 1988); Neil  G.  W.  Curtis, “The Place of History, Literature and Politics in the 1911 Scottish Exhibition,” Scottish Literary Review 7, no. 1 (2015): 43–74. 62. Marquess of Tullibardine, House of Commons Debates 28 February 1912 vol. 34 cc144691, 1471, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/feb/28/scotland-federalgovernment#column_1471. 63. Graham S. Walker and David Officer, “Scottish Unionism and the Ulster Question,” in Unionist Scotland 1800–1997, ed. Catriona  M.M.  Macdonald (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1998), 13–26, 19. 64. Murray G. H. Pittock, “Scott as Historiographer: The Case of Waverly,” in Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh 1991, ed. J. H. Alexander and D. Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 145–153, 147. 65. Thomas Johnston (1911), Forward (April 22, 1911): 4. 66. Richard  J.  Finlay, A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union since 1880 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997), 13. 67. For example, Tom M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 68. Jamie Merrill, “Bannockburn Anniversary: Scottish Freedom . . . and Not a Hint of Mel Gibson,” The Independent on Sunday (June 22, 2014), http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/home-news/bannockburn-anniversary-scottish-freedom%97and-not-a-hintof-mel-gibson-9554354.html. 69. Glasgow City Council, Memorandum Submitted by Glasgow City Council to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee (2000), http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmcumeds/371/0051808.htm .

490   Neil G. W. Curtis 70. Museums Association, Collections for the Future, 17. 7 1. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 165–166. 72. Museums Australia, Continuous Cultures, Ongoing Responsibilities (Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005), 7. 73. National Museum of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Human Remains Policy (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2005), 4. 74. Gerald  T.  Conaty, “Glenbow’s Blackfoot Gallery: Working Towards Co-Existence,” in  Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, ed. Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown (London: Routledge, 2003), 227–241; Gerald. T. Conaty (ed.), “We Are Coming Home!”: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015).

Bibliography Alberti, Samuel J. M. M. Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Ames, Michael. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge, 1995. Curtis, Neil  G.  W. “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things.” Museum Management and Curatorship 21, no. 2 (2006): 117–127. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Gabriel, Mille, and Jens Dahl, eds. Utimut: Past Heritage—Future Partnerships—Discussions on repatriation in the 21st Century. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Nuuk: Greenland National Museum and Archives, 2008. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992. Hoskins, Janet. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge, 1998. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. Pearce, Susan  M., Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Peers, Laura, and Alison  K.  Brown, eds. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Tythacott, Louise, and Kostas Arvantis. Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Vergo, Peter, ed. The New Museology. London: Reaktion, 1989.

pa rt V

H ISTORY, M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , A N D M E MORY

chapter 25

Chronol ogy a n d Ti m e Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500–1050 Christopher Loveluck

Time, the strategic use of memory (both remembering and forgetting), and varying patterns of material engagement via land and sea influenced the development of coastal societies and their expressions of identity in northwest Europe, between c. 500 and 1050. The people inhabiting the coasts and estuarine zones of major rivers in this region lived in some of the most connected and liminal locales of the early Middle Ages. Waterborne connectivity and the fact that many of the low-lying coasts were difficult to police, owing to the presence of numerous sand and clay islands among tidal creeks and treacherous marsh-fenland belts, made these regions landscapes of opportunity. Specialist activities for exchange were the norm to support subsistence needs. Direct contact with local and foreign mariners also made the coasts porous contact zones where ideas, objects, and people could interact, often away from the eyes of ruling authorities. These coastal and delta regions and rivers reaching inland constituted what anthropologist Christer Westerdahl terms “maritime cultural landscapes” and “transport corridors,” where waterborne connections of the inhabitants of these landscape niches could give their societies some exceptional characteristics.1 However, analysis of anthropogenic material culture in the broadest sense (objects, texts, buildings, and human-altered landscapes) from these areas shows that the physical circumstances of the living environment did not result in uniform practices of engagement with people, the sea, and its networks through time. Indeed, in certain periods very little evidence of use of maritime networks and resources is evident in material culture. Yet, for those same periods, textual sources demonstrate seasonal exploitation of the sea and its resources, showing how links were maintained and recorded for posterity when archaeological evidence alone would suggest a very different conclusion. This allows some exploration of the complexity of the dynamics between human actions and the recording, significance, and manipulation of memory and time in material culture and text for specific purposes.

494   Christopher Loveluck Within the context of the changing patterns of material engagement with the sea and maritime and river networks through time, memories of past connections were selected, manipulated, and reflected in social practices, objects, and buildings, or were forgotten or remembered in seasonal actions or textual records, depending on the needs of the different presents, between c. 450 and 1050.2 Case study evidence primarily from Britain, Flanders, and Denmark illuminates three themes. The first explores how memories of earlier political and cultural affinities were used to create new social practices and material expressions of identity in eastern and western maritime Britain, between the later fifth and seventh centuries. The second examines changing cycles of maritime orientation and engagement on the part of coastal societies in eastern England and east Jutland, Denmark, between c. 650 and 1000, to illustrate how being situated next to the sea and major waterways did not always ensure use of maritime resources and communications in a uniform manner through time. The final theme explores the use of social practices, self-representation, and memory in major port towns, between c. 700 and 1050, to analyze the changing relationships from emulation to competition, between emerging seafarer-merchant-patricians and older, established landed elites. It is hoped that the conclusions drawn and questions generated from the exploration of these limited and specific themes can contribute some insights to place alongside and interrogate those drawn from the growing corpus of grand-narrative works analyzing maritime-oriented societies on a global and diachronic basis.3

Material Culture, Memory, and Identity Construction in Coastal Zones, c. 450–600 Between the later fifth and the seventh centuries, new societies were created in both eastern and western Britain through the adoption of influences from abroad, whether they were transferred via population movement and conquest or more peaceful acculturation and exchange. The use of old traditions and memories, native or foreign, was a key element in the creation of the material representation of new group identities. The melding of inherited traditions or the deliberate adoption of old traditions to create new markers of social expression can be seen especially in maritime eastern and western Britain, between the later fifth and seventh centuries. They provide an excellent window on to the use of “the past,” as fifth- and sixth-century northern Europeans perceived it, and on to the role of coastal regions as porous contact and entry zones for objects, commodities, ideologies, and people. In southeast Britain, the maritime-oriented kingdom of Kent provides excellent examples of how old, remembered traditions were used and retained alongside the new between c. 450 and 550, in order to create the “Early Anglo-Saxon” society of Kent. Old and contemporary artifact styles and decorative traditions were used in a new furnished

Chronology and Time   495 inhumation burial practice to signal the new “Kentish” identity. These artifacts and ­traditions were derived from both British and varying Continental European sources, reflecting the maritime connectivity and social networks that influenced what was “Kentish.” This identity had an especial bias in its gendered representation of women and their affiliations within furnished inhumation tableaux, although men would probably have been as active in the representation of the women of their families within the grave as female relatives.4 Hence, preferential use of the female burial practice to signal group affiliations and ethnic identity in their dress and other furnished accessories should be read as an act of both genders within family groups. In contrast, memory and affiliation in male graves tended to be marked in the richest of graves, especially in relation to certain swords, rather than in the furnished majority. Writing at the end of the seventh century, the Venerable Bede recorded the myths of his time in relation to the “Anglo-Saxon” kingdoms of his day, and he noted that Kent had been settled by Jutes from Jutland, in Denmark, and this also accorded with the foundation myth of the Kentish royal house.5 There is some material either from Jutland or with Jutish affiliations in later fifth- and sixth-century graves in Kent, especially in the female graves, but influences from the material culture of fifth-century Britain are also evident, and those from northern France and the Rhineland are even more demonstrable. Quoit brooches and the “Quoit-Brooch-style” of metalwork, found in richer female graves, were undoubtedly inherited from the provincial Roman metalworking traditions of fifth-century southern Britain, and the items were old when buried, in the late fifth and sixth centuries.6 They may have been heirlooms or were markers of legitimacy for new leaders who adopted what had been the principal clothing signs of elite status of the preceding generation together with other signs of status. It is possible that like other forms of fifth-century British artifacts found in sixth-century “Anglo-Saxon” graves, such as certain type-G penannular brooches (open-ring-shaped brooches, with two decorated terminals; usually copper-alloy), there was also an intergenerational gender change in the wearing of Quoit brooches in life or a gender change in their ­display for the purposes of the grave.7 They may have been worn by both wealthy men  and women in Kent in the early to mid-fifth century, but three generations later they were displayed only in the graves of women, some of whom may have been their descendants. The objects used in grave tableaux with an origin or inspiration from Jutland are significant in number but far from common. They consisted principally of gold bracteates (small, gold, coin-shaped pendants, with intertwined animal ornament) and squareheaded brooches, during the later fifth century. However, bracteates were not interred in graves in Jutland. Instead, they tended to be votive deposits at pagan religious cult sites, often in wetland bogs; for example, in the marshy wetland edge of the fjord-harbor settlement at Stavnsager, in east Jutland. There were also more limited similarities in stylistic and decorative traits among cruciform brooches and pottery vessels, between Jutland and Kent. By the sixth century, gold bracteates and square-headed brooches with Jutland-inspired zoomorphic artwork were only interred in the most richly furnished

496   Christopher Loveluck female graves, probably reflecting a Kentish elite. Most, if not all, of the sixth-century square-headed brooches indicating affiliations to southern Scandinavia were probably made in Kent.8 Their reduced use in the sixth century to the richest female graves seems to reflect a memory of Jutish affiliation, and perhaps ancestry. However, the rich female graves with the bracteates and square-headed brooches were also those which contained the small number of Quoit brooches of native derivation; and perhaps even more significantly, they were also the female graves with the majority of dress accessories and artifacts derived from northern France, Belgium, and the Rhineland. Multiple brooch types of northern French and Rhineland origin were placed in the female graves, reflecting a much more composite maritime-created elite identity in Kent, with affiliations as close to the “Frankish” societies of northern France and the middle Rhineland as to southern Scandinavia. Indeed, there is also a concentration of Jutland-inspired gold bracteates and square-headed brooches in the middle Rhine region. Hence, one cannot claim that Kentish “Anglo-Saxon” society had the monopoly on “Jutish” affiliation in the later fifth and sixth centuries. What can be said is that the connectivity provided by the North Sea and the Rhine-valley river corridor provided the means for the movement of people, ideas, and craftsmen who used new and old intergenerational markers to create new material expressions of identity at that time. The furnishing of richer male graves tells a similar story. This is seen most emphatically in the distribution of swords of the Bifrons-Gilton type, with distinctive ring attachments to decorate their pommels. They were made predominantly in Kent during the sixth century, and discoveries concentrate in Kent, the region of Pas-de-Calais on the opposite side of the Channel from Kent, and in the Marne and Meuse river valley systems, in northern France, a political heartland of the Merovingian Frankish kings. Their diffusion again reflects maritime and river-corridor connections, and probably the maintenance of cross-Channel social alliances between the Kentish elites and the rulers of Francia, witnessed textually later in the sixth century in the marriage between the Frankish princess, Bertha, to King Æthelbert of Kent. In maritime western Britain, we see a different use of the past and memory in the creation or consolidation of new sociopolitical groupings during the later fifth and sixth centuries. Western Britain had been the least “Romanized” part of the Roman provinces of Britannia. Yet, during the course of the fifth century, the leading social stratum (at least) of western Britain (Wales, Scotland) and Ireland adopted an ideological and material culture “package” based on the Late Antique fifth-century idea of what it was to be Roman. That is, they adopted Christianity, the religion of the Roman Empire from the fourth century but only found in southeastern Britain prior to AD 400. They also adopted existing traditions of monumental epigraphic and incised pictographic memorials, for which they used the distinctive Roman uncial script, and other scripts deriving from it as used in Britain and Ireland, plus the Irish ogham script. They also began to import fine pottery tableware, glass vessels, amphorae, and foodstuffs from the eastern Mediterranean, north Africa, Spain, and western Gaul/France, between the fifth and seventh centuries.

Chronology and Time   497 The distribution clusters of Mediterranean Phocaean and African red slipware pottery and amphorae, which transported wine, olive oil, and possibly garum (fish paste), on the southern and western coasts of Iberia, southwest Britain, and southern Ireland suggest a trade route traveling out of the Straits of Gibraltar and up the Atlantic coast in the sixth century. The discovery of a glass flagon from the elite center at Tintagel (Cornwall), paralleled in sixth- to seventh-century cemetery finds at Malaga and Cadiz, further reinforces the operation of such a trade route along the Atlantic coast.9 Ewan Campbell has convincingly argued that this reflects a sixth-century trade led by Byzantine merchants, in search of tin from southwest Britain, and perhaps gold and copper from southern Ireland.10 Hence, adoption of “Roman” identities and social practices was undertaken initially in an environment of intermittent direct contact with mariners from the eastern Roman, Byzantine world. Archaeological evidence also shows direct contacts between western Britain and the Atlantic coast of France during the sixth and seventh centuries, which is seen in a number of archaeological media: namely, stone epigraphic monuments and ecclesiastical raw materials, pottery, and glass vessels. For example, Jeremy Knight drew attention to the similarities between incised, Christian cross memorials of the sixth to seventh centuries from Nantes (Loire Atlantique) and Pouillé (Vienne), with Irish-Sea examples at Inismurray (Co. Sligo) and Ardwall Isle (Dumfries and Galloway).11 The maritime dispersion and exchange of religious commemorative practices and materials for ecclesiastical purposes is also reflected by the presence of the mineral, orpiment (arsenic sulfide), from Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples, at the fortified center at Dunadd (Argyll) in western Scotland. This volcanic mineral was used to produce a yellow dye for manuscript illumination.12 It may have been acquired by the secular rulers of Dunadd, as a gift for the nearby island-monastic community of Iona. It had probably traveled on the trade route from the Mediterranean via the Rivers Garonne or the Loire to the Atlantic coast of France, and then to western Scotland. Significant quantities of white/cream-colored pottery tableware, produced in western France and known in Britain and Ireland as “E-ware,” are also present along the western coast of Britain, in Cornwall, south Wales, and western Scotland. The source area of this western French pottery is currently uncertain, as kilns that produced it have never been found, but the character of the clay would suggest a production area in the lower Charente-Saintonge region. Glass drinking vessels, probably produced in the Bordeaux region of southwest France, are also dispersed around the Irish Sea, mirroring the distribution of E-ware pottery.13 In western Britain, therefore, we see the deliberate choice to adopt the contemporary fifth- and sixth-century memories of what it was to be “Roman” by elites who had never wanted to express themselves as Roman when incorporated within, or situated just beyond, the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The use and adoption of these Roman memories, belief systems, and social practices, in terms of Christian ideology and its material manifestations, elite foods and luxury tableware, can be seen as a strategy to mark western, Christian “Roman” Atlantic societies from their eastern “Anglo-Saxon,” pagan neighbors, within early post-Roman Britain.

498   Christopher Loveluck

Coastal Societies and Cycles of Maritime Orientation through Time around the Southern North Sea and Kattegat, c. 650–1000 Time, remembering in different ways, and forgetting also played key roles in the cycles or rhythms of maritime orientation and its loss among the coastal and estuarine societies of northern Europe, between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Put at its simplest, living next to the sea or a major waterway did not always result in use of maritime or river resources, communications, or exchange networks. Instead, we see interesting cycles and scales of connectivity and relative isolation through time. In some cases, earlier social practices were remembered, whereas in others they were forgotten, intentionally or otherwise. Around the North Sea and the Kattegat (the entrance waterway to the Baltic Sea), the societies of the low-lying coasts of eastern England, Flanders, Frisia, and Jutland show very similar cycles of connection, between c. 600 and 800. For example, in eastern England between the Humber estuary and the Fens (Figure 25.1), the full spectrum of the social and settlement hierarchy had access to imported goods (pottery, quernstones, and often glass vessels and coinage) from northern France, Frisia (a region that in the Early Middle Ages extended along the North Sea coast of the Netherlands from the Rhine mouth eastward to include parts of northern Germany), Rhineland Germany, and, sometimes, western Denmark. There was differential consumption based on social rank on both sides of the North Sea, here illustrated by comparative trends on estate centers in eastern England and Jutland at Flixborough (Lincolnshire) and Stavnsager (East Jutland). The former center enjoyed consumption of sixty-five Continental glass vessels and over thirty silver coins (sceattas), eighteen of them from Frisia and northern France, and Continental pottery vessels during the eighth century. This was accompanied by prestigious consumption of wild, documented “feast species” from coastal margins and the sea (cranes, large wildfowl, and dolphins—see Figure 25.2), although fishing was estuarine and in-shore alone.14 A similar consumption and connection pattern is seen in the artifact remains at the chieftain’s center and harbor settlement at Stavnsager on the Kattegat strait, in East Jutland (Figure 25.3). The presence of an elite is marked by fine dress accessories, both male and female, and also by weapons and riding gear from settlement contexts. Farflung connections are also reflected, between the sixth and eighth centuries, marked by dress accessories and weapon fittings from Frisia, the Frankish kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon England, Wales and Irish-Sea territories, and the Baltic region (Figure 25.4).15 In contrast, settlements of free proprietors or tied peasants tend to yield small quantities of imported glass vessel fragments, coins, and pots along the North Sea coastal marshlands of eastern England, Flanders, and Frisia.16 The situation is less clear in Jutland due to

De rw en

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Chronology and Time   499

Sewerby Wharram Percy

Bridlington

North Sea

York Beverley

East Garton

Ou

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e

Air

ber Hum

Don

Barrow Flixborough

Riby

au Gre

at E

Lu

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Holton-le-Clay

in

Ba

Lincoln

pin g

Wi

tha

m

Ste e

N

Fishtoft

ella

nd

Gosberton

0

5

25 km

Fens and Marshes Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds

West Walton Nene

Great Ouse

W

Bawsey

Figure 25.1.  Location of sites discussed along the low-lying coast of eastern England from the Humber estuary to the Fens. Drawn by Lacey Wallace.

500   Christopher Loveluck

Figure 25.2.  Jawbones and teeth of dolphins consumed at Flixborough in its later seventh- to eighth century and tenth-century phases of occupation. Photograph by Humber Archaeology.

more limited excavation of smaller coastal settlements, but preliminary indications may suggest a similar picture.17 Nevertheless, the full spectrum of coastal populations had access to objects and commodities that would have been regarded as luxuries and would have been beyond the reach of free and tied peasants further inland, beyond major river corridors. In the ninth century, long-distance international exchange was much diminished on both sides of the southern North Sea (the early Viking Age was as bad for western Scandinavia as it was for eastern England, Flanders, and northern Francia). Instead, there was a focus on more intensive production and regional maritime exchange. So, for example, the estate center at Flixborough (Lincolnshire) was transformed into a center for producing fine cloth, linked to specialist sheep husbandry and into a center for metalworking (it may have been a monastic estate center at this time). There was very limited exploitation of local maritime or marshland wild resources. Regional maritime exchange along the North Sea coast is reflected in imported pottery made at the port of Ipswich in Suffolk, and by coinage minted by the Mercian and West Saxon kings in London and Kent, during the ninth century.18 A similar fall in long-distance contacts was also seen at the chieftain’s settlement and harbor at Stavnsager, in Jutland, with maritime links refocused on southern Norway and the western Baltic alone. However, despite the decline in the geographical scope of

Chronology and Time   501

Figure 25.3. Location of Stavnsager and other key coastal and fjord-edge settlements in ­eastern Jutland and the Kattegat waterway. Drawn by Ragna Stidsing.

Figure 25.4.  A Frisian “Domburg-type” brooch (left) and a pelta-scroll-decorated piece of enameled metalwork from the Irish-Sea region (right), both dating from the seventh century and found at Stavnsager. Photographs by Reno Fiedel.

502   Christopher Loveluck contacts, a major waterfront and slipway, made of heat-shattered granite rubble, was constructed over a distance of c. 700 meters along the fjord edge at Stavnsager at this time. Therefore, any social and economic impact caused by the diminished scope of contacts was replaced by greater intensity and scale of regional maritime exchange, probably of agricultural products, textiles, and possibly iron.19 Accompanying the picture of increasingly specialist production and regional maritime exchange at rural central places, the smaller settlements of the wider coastal populations also reflect greater specialization over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, which must have been accompanied by greater levels of movement by water and by land for purposes of the exchange of these products, or their payment as taxation-in-kind to linked estate centers. Both this specialization and the nature of some of the products have a specific relationship to the impact of time and its management. One of the products that became more significant as a commodity during the course of the eighth and ninth centuries around the North Sea was salt—a key product for preservation of foods, whether through salting and smoking of meat and fish or through conversion of dairy products to cheese. The time for the production and movement of salt would also have been governed by seasonality. Archaeological evidence, for example from Fishtoft (Lincolnshire), near Boston in the Lincolnshire fens of eastern England (Figure 25.1), indicates that salt production was one of a range of activities conducted alongside animal husbandry and some cereal cultivation, often of salt-tolerant barley.20 Movement of a bulk commodity like salt was better achieved by boat or pack animal in the summer; and the likelihood of seasonal activities, especially those involving regional transport and exchange, would also have left coastal peasant households with gender and age imbalances when, presumably, adult men were away from their home settlements. Increased specialization by some peasant proprietors and also larger estate owners, in regard to salt production and other coastal commodities, and also their transport and exchange by river or sea, would have resulted in the development of regional merchants. Those merchant households can be expected to have had very significant gender and age imbalances for extended periods, with large numbers of women, older men, and children. The vulnerability of these households when significant numbers of the adult male population were absent could have provided an incentive for increasingly specialist artisans and merchants to locate their families and principal dwellings in the growing ports of the later seventh to ninth centuries, where close royal protection could be obtained at the price of taxation. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rural centers at Flixborough and Stavnsager were no longer integrated within any regional or long-distance maritime exchange links. They were merely estate centers relying on local resources, and for specialist services their owners had to travel to major ports or regional administrative towns. They seem to have lost their direct contact with mariners and maritime networks entirely, and their populations had become focused totally on agricultural production and consumption of the resources of their estate territories.21 At Flixborough (called Conesby—King’s Settlement in Old Danish—by the tenth century), there was a return to consumption of

Chronology and Time   503 the local wild resources of the marshland landscape and Humber estuary (wildfowl and dolphins), with continued limited levels of river, estuarine, and in-shore fishing, though all evidence of maritime exchange had been lost. It is difficult to know whether the return of the patterns of exploitation of wild ­species of the eighth century has any relationship, in terms of remembered practices, with those of the tenth to eleventh centuries. They may, instead, reflect the reappearance of the expected social practices of secular rural lords, in terms of hunting and falconry. A limited level of regional exchange is evident with towns and the Humber region, suggested through wheel-made pottery manufactured at the regional center at Lincoln among others. The extent and nature of connections seem no different to smaller settlements of free and tied peasant proprietors, despite the dramatically increased production and exchange of salt within this region during the tenth and eleventh centuries.22 At Stavnsager, in Jutland, on the opposite side of the North Sea, there is currently even less archaeological evidence of continued links with the sea through trade or fishing from the later tenth and eleventh centuries, even though it was a fjord-edge settlement and the waterway would still have been navigable to the shallow draught seagoing ships and riverboats of the period (despite some silting). Even though archaeological evidence for a continued maritime focus is lacking on behalf of the occupants of Stavnsager, textual and archaeological evidence from the wider region of Jutland and the Danish islands indicates that farmers still maintained a link with the sea through involvement in seasonal inshore sea fishing for herring from their harbors or landing places into the central and later Middle Ages. Sometimes local lords also tried to break the monopolies of the larger trading ports by encouraging the growth of local harbors again from the twelfth century.23 Fish remains have not yet been found at Stavnsager, probably due to the acid leaching of the sandy soils, but there remains the possibility that the tradition of linkage with the sea through marine fishing was maintained into the later Middle Ages. However, any cooperative fishing expeditions conducted by the inhabitants from the early to mid-twelfth century onward would probably have been launched from harbors other than Stavnsager, as the remains of a raised track-way running across part of the silted fjord (made from wood felled in 1106, on the basis of dendrochronology) suggest that it had become unnavigable for seagoing ships by that time.24

Material Culture, Representation, and Memory in Port Towns, c. 900–1050 Increased specialization and longer duration of waterborne journeys for exchange, trade, and the transport of goods by sea and river may have been a catalyst to the foundation of larger communities of artisans and traders in estuarine or river locations during the

504   Christopher Loveluck course of the seventh century. Such forces for the cooperative foundation of larger ­settlements for mutual protection and access to water-based communications could have been some of the most important in the development of the “emporia” ports of ­seventh- to ninth-century northern Europe. The influence of the time spent away from these larger “home” settlements by itinerant artisans and seafaring merchants would also have resulted in a very significant incentive to cooperate with the emerging royal dynasties and kingdom structures of the time, in terms of requesting armed royal protection for the nascent ports, with their seasonally larger proportions of women, older men, children, and foreign traders than other nodes within the settlement hierarchy. The quid pro quo of this alliance of protection with ruling authorities was taxation. However, the abundant access to silver coinage and consumption of glass vessels and other imports in mercantile households at ports such as Hamwic-Southampton and Fishergate-York shows that taxed merchant-artisans were still profiting materially from their trading activities. It is certainly the case, however, that the impact of time spent by merchants and itinerant specialist artisans away from their family groups has been underplayed when considering possible merchant agency in the creation of ports, in the face of models stressing elite initiative in their foundation.25 The manipulation of representation, time, and deliberate acts of forgetting is an even more demonstrable feature of the relationships between the emerging merchant-elites of port towns and the landed aristocracies of northwest Europe, between the tenth and mid-eleventh centuries. During the course of the tenth century, and especially from c. 950, there is clear evidence of the upward social mobility of merchant-artisans, especially in major port towns or cities around the North Sea, the Channel, and the Irish Sea. For example, the families of goldsmiths, metalworkers, moneyers (who mint money), and other artisans of Coppergate, in York, used imported materials and objects such as Byzantine or central Asian silk, in the form of a bonnet and offcuts, and also silver dirhem coins, minted in Islamic central Asia. They also possessed weapons and riding gear (horse bits, harness, and a silver-inlaid wooden saddle).26 The bones of two hunting birds, a goshawk and a smaller sparrowhawk, were also recovered from the Coppergate tenements, including the documented prey species, such cranes and other wildfowl, previously seen in quantity on wealthy rural estate centers, such as Flixborough.27 This suggests that the merchant-artisans of Coppergate could indulge in pastimes previously the preserve of rural elites. Charters from the 960s onward indicate that some artisans, especially moneyers, goldsmiths and other metalworkers (artificers), and stone masons/engineers, were granted or purchased substantial rural estates, on which they were entitled to hunt, in the vicinity of London in particular, but also Worcester and other towns. In their ownership of riding gear, weapons, and hunting animals, they were probably becoming indistinguishable from many rural aristocrats, especially the thegns—local and regional lords. Indeed, the funneling of long-distance international exchange through major port-town markets, such as London and York, may well have resulted in leading merchant-artisans having access to more exotic portable wealth and clothing than many rural lords.

Chronology and Time   505 By 1000, if a freeborn merchant financed and undertook a voyage across the sea twice, he was automatically given the rank of thegn/aristocrat—reflecting the value attributed to the time away from the home settlement on voyages, and increasing merchant-seafarer wealth to finance them. It is no accident, therefore, that from the mid-tenth century, we also witness rural aristocrats being given or buying urban townhouses and estates to generate income and gain access to exotica in major port cities.28 From the late tenth century, we see leading merchants, such as the Deorman family of moneyers and spice traders in the port city of London, becoming rich by combining commerce and royal office; and by the mid eleventh century the family had estates both within London and its rural hinterland.29 By the 1050s, when Edward the Confessor ordered the building of his Romanesque Westminster Abbey, he did not put a secular or ecclesiastical aristocrat in charge of its  direction. Instead, he placed the direction of the abbey’s construction under his church-wright (stone mason), Teinfrith, who possessed a large rural estate at Shepperton (Middlesex) of “eight hides” (i.e., its produce could support at least eight extended families). Teinfrith was supported in his task by the London merchant “burgesses,” Leofsi and Alwine, who were also urban and rural landowners and held the rank of thegn, the lowest level of aristocracy.30 Within the context of the complex social worlds of these port cities, where the world of “portable wealth” and commerce faced the world of “landed wealth” and political authority, there are some key markers shedding light on the use and possession of old objects and art styles, and the use of memory (or not) for strategies of competition, legitimacy, and the marking of group identity. For example, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it is quite clear that brooch styles with Scandinavian-inspired “Borre,” “Jelling,” and “Ringerike” styles were used in towns by the same people who also used West Saxon dress accessories decorated in “Winchester” style. They also used brooch forms from Continental Europe—ansate and disk brooches. Sometimes the owners of mercantile and artisan properties in York (Coppergate) and at different sites in London seem to have used dress accessories from England, Germany, and Scandinavia at the same time—and this phenomenon is mirrored to a certain extent in the rural world, especially in eastern England.31 This suggests that within the urban milieu of port-towns aspects of dress style and jewelry signaled ethnic affiliation far less during the tenth century than they had done in previous early-medieval centuries. The origins and associations of their decorative styles had been forgotten or had certainly become insignificant within the multiethnic worlds of major ports. In contrast, memory entangled with certain types of old objects may have constrained their use by their later owners, owing to what Igor Kopytoff termed their singularization or restricted access to particular social groups, when first made and circulated.32 The biography of manufacture, use, and deposition of the “Coppergate helmet” may illustrate such constraints. The Coppergate helmet was manufactured during the mid-eighth century on the basis of the decorative schemes upon it and the inscription on its crest. Yet it was carefully placed or even hidden in an in-filled well at the back of the rich merchant-artisan tenement properties on Coppergate, in York, during the tenth century

506   Christopher Loveluck (probably the middle of the tenth century).33 It may be a votive deposit, but these are rare in this period, and especially rare in towns, and perhaps a more plausible explanation may be that a rich metalworker or merchant had come into possession of this old helmet by purchase, or potentially as a battle trophy—the merchant-artisans of York had certainly provided armed contingents for the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon kings from the mid eighth century at latest.34 It is possible that the helmet was an heirloom, but this is perhaps unlikely owing to the evidence of the new material wealth created at Coppergate, dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries. The fact that someone, probably the owner, carefully hid the helmet in the well in the mid-tenth century may be a reflection of what was deemed appropriate weaponry and armor for merchant-artisans to wear within the confines of the wider urban community of the port at York, at a time when the city had only recently come under West Saxon royal control. For West Saxon royal officers and aristocrats, the possession and wearing of such a fine and old helmet by a merchant may have been beyond the bounds of acceptability for more politically powerful aristocrats and state officials of the newly created kingdom of England. Once merchant-seafarers were beyond port confines, however, and safely out to sea, such “singular” social constraints may have disappeared. The final “power play” involving time and status contests in the port towns of early medieval northwest Europe relates to buildings in townscapes and the seemingly intentional maintenance of old architectural styles to convey legitimacy of social position as “old money.” This involved the construction of monumental stone townhouses in the Romanesque style from the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries and their retention through the later Middle Ages by merchant families in Flanders, England, and other regions. For example, by the mid- to late eleventh century, the river-port city of Ghent in East Flanders was probably the largest in northwest Europe in terms of population. The merchants of Ghent had grown in wealth to become a self-governing collective by the 1040s to 1050s, when men termed viri illustrii or viri probii (illustrious and just men) were elected from among the leading merchants to govern the town’s interests in the face of the power of the count of Flanders, focused in the townscape on the count’s hall or embryonic castle in the north of the town, and the power of the two major abbeys— St. Peter’s and St. Bavo’s on its outskirts. As an exercise of displaying power in the townscape, the leading merchant-patricians of Ghent built up to one hundred fine Romanesque townhouses, some with towers, between the late eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries.35 During subsequent fashions in architectural development, such as the adoption of the Gothic style in the early thirteenth century, the existing Romanesque townhouses were not altered and very few new Gothic-style townhouses were built (Figure 25.5). One might assume that the merchant families no longer had the money to remodel or build fine townhouses, but this is clearly not the case. Merchant wealth increased in the thirteenth century generally. A more plausible explanation is that the Romanesque townhouses of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries were deliberately retained by merchants in major port cities like Ghent and other towns, as a form of

Chronology and Time   507

Figure 25.5.  One of the twelfth-century Romanesque townhouses of Ghent (center), next to the Church of St. Nicholas. The Romanesque house was retained until the addition of an early modern façade. Photograph by Christopher Loveluck.

displaying wealth and urban power of long standing by continuing the memory of the Romanesque style. The same phenomenon is also seen in major English port cities such as London and Southampton, and in the latter port especially it has often been commented that merchants did not seem to build many new palatial townhouses in the thirteenth century—they too were using the curation of the architectural styles of the past to make a statement of the longevity of their importance.36

Concluding Remarks The populations of coastal, estuarine, and river delta regions of early medieval northern Europe interacted with their material and social worlds between the later fifth and ­eleventh centuries in a variety of ways. Their living environments, situated next to large bodies of water that could be used for communication and exchange seasonally or throughout the year, gave them opportunities that were exploited in different ways at different times. The actions of these societies very much encapsulate Tim Ingold’s recent characterization of the “two faces of materiality”: the physicality of the land-, sea- and

508   Christopher Loveluck riverscapes provided opportunities and constraints at all times, but it was not environment that determined actions through time. Instead, it was the social driver of how the material world was comprehended, used, and involved in human activities that influenced different aspects of social expression.37 The impact of time, remembering and forgetting, and the changing social dynamics of different early medieval centuries produced very different patterns of material engagement and disengagement. For the immediate post-Roman period, the communications provided by the seaways of North Sea and Atlantic Europe were used to create new material expressions of social identity through the adoption and reworking of imported material memories of Rome and Scandinavia (and other regions). Through the seventh to mid-ninth centuries, coastal societies saw changing cycles of connection and use of coastal land- and seascapes for production, movement, and exchange, from long-distance connections for the majority in the North Sea coastal regions, to regional and larger scale specialist production and connection by land and water. This would have resulted in greater gender and age imbalances among coastal populations for ­longer periods, as more specialist seafaring and river traders emerged. Vulnerability of these coastal specialist households with adult men absent for extended periods probably resulted in location of their families in larger settlements by choice, and in cooperation with ruling elites who provided protection for taxation. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, many of the connected rural centers and communities of earlier times demonstrated only very limited use of the sea or maritime and river communications, even though they were located next to them. Material engagement with the wider world of products from beyond their regions and their purchase had to be undertaken increasingly in towns, especially major port cities. By the eleventh century, some of the coastal specialists and seafarers of the eighth and ninth centuries had emerged as urban patricians indulging in complex “tournaments of value,” in the sense of periodic contests for status38 with the established landed aristocracy, using objects, port townscapes and time as tools of competition and the demonstration of the antiquity of their power in those urban collectives.

Notes 1. As defined by Christer Westerdahl, “The Maritime Cultural Landscape,” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 21, no. 1 (1992): 5–14; and Christer Westerdahl, “From Land to Sea, from Sea to Land: On Transport, Borders and Human Space,” in Down the River to the Sea: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Gdansk 1997, ed. Jerzy Litwin (Gdansk: Polish Maritime Museum, 2000), 11–20. 2. Here, I borrow the term and concept defined in the works of Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett. See Lambros Malafouris, “At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency,” in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, ed. Carl Knapett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer, 2010), 19–36, especially 22 and 34–35; and Carl Knappett, An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture & Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Chronology and Time   509 3. For example, among others: Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2011); Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013); Peter N. Miller, ed., The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, Bard Graduate Center Cultural Studies of the  Material World series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4. See Birte Brugmann, “The Role of Continental Artefact-Types in Sixth-Century Kentish Chronology,” in The Pace of Change: Studies in Early Medieval Chronology, ed. John Hines, Karen Høilund Nielsen, and Frank Siegmund (Oxford: Oxbow, 1999), 37–64, especially 38–40. 5. Barbara Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London: Seaby, 1990), 26–27. 6. See Seiichi Suzuki, The Quoit Brooch Style and Anglo-Saxon Settlement: A Casting and Recasting of Cultural Identity Symbols (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2000). 7. Christopher Loveluck and Lloyd Laing, “Britons and Anglo-Saxons,” in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 534–555, see 541. On intergenerational biographies and roles of material culture, see Knappett, An Archaeology of Interaction, 192–195; and Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2012), 217–218. 8. See Karen Høilund Nielsen, “The Real Thing or Just Wannabes? Scandinavian-Style Brooches in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” in Foreigners in Early Medieval Europe: Thirteen International Studies on Early Medieval Mobility, ed. Dieter Quast (Mainz, Germany: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2009), 51–111, see 99–101. 9. See Ewan Campbell, “The Archaeological Evidence for External Contacts: Imports, Trade and Economy in Celtic Britain, AD 400–800,” in External Contacts and the Economy of  Late and Post-Roman Britain, ed. Ken  R.  Dark (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996), 86–88;  and Ewan Campbell, “Glass,” in Rachel  C.  Barrowman, Coleen  E.  Batey, and Christopher  D.  Morris, Excavations at Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, 1990–1999 (London: Society of Antiquaries, 2007), 222–228. 10. See Campbell, “The Archaeological Evidence,” 88–89; and Ewan Campbell, Continental and Maritime Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800 (York: CBA Research Report 157, 2007). 11. Jeremy Knight, “Seasoned with Salt: Insular-Gallic Contacts in the Early Memorial Stones and Cross Slabs,” in External Contacts and the Economy of Late and Post-Roman Britain, ed. Ken R. Dark (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996), 109–120. 12. See Alan Lane and Ewan Campbell, Dunadd: An Early Dalriadic Capital (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000). 13. See Campbell, Continental and Maritime Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, 65. 14. For trends from Flixborough through time, see Christopher Loveluck, Rural Settlement, Lifestyles and Social Change in the Later First Millennium AD: Anglo-Saxon Flixborough in Its Wider Context. Excavations at Flixborough, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007). 15. Reno Fiedel, Karen Høilund Nielsen, and Christopher Loveluck, “From Hamlet, to Central Place, to Manor: Social Transformation of the Settlement at Stavnsager, Eastern Jutland,

510   Christopher Loveluck and Its Networks, AD 400–1100 ” in Transformations in North-Western Europe, AD 300–1000, ed. Titus A. S. M. Panhuysen, Neue Studien zur Sachsen Forschung 3 (Hannover, Germany: Theiss, 2011), 161–176. 16. Andrew Crowson, Tom Lane, Ken Penn, and Dale Trimble, Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Siltland of Eastern England (Sleaford, UK: Lincolnshire Archaeology and Heritage Reports 7, 2005); Deckers Pieterjan, Between Land and Sea: Landscape, Power and Identity in the Coastal Plain of Flanders, Zeeland and northern France in the Early Middle Ages (AD 500–1000), vol. 1 (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2014); Menno Dijkstra and Henk van der Velde, House Plots, Pots and Pins: Transformations in the Rhine Estuary during the Early Middle Ages, in Transformations in North-Western Europe (AD 300–1000), ed. Titus A. S. M. Panhuysen, Neue Studien zur Sachsenforschung 3 (Hannover, Germany: Theiss, 2011), 15–21. 17. Martin Segschneider, Centrality and Trade on the North Frisian Islands during the Migration Period, in Wealth and Complexity: Economically Specialised Sites in Late Iron Age Denmark, ed. Ernst Stidsing, Karen Høilund Nielsen, and Reno Fiedel (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press and Østjylland Museum, 2014), 65–71. 18. Loveluck, Rural Settlement, Lifestyles and Social Change. 19. Fiedel et al., “From Hamlet, to Central Place, to Manor.” 20. See Paul Cope-Faulkner, Clampgate Road, Fishtoft: Archaeology of a Middle Saxon Island Settlement in the Lincolnshire Fens (Sleaford, UK: Lincolnshire Archaeology and Heritage Reports 10, 2012). 21. This is part of a wider trend of the focusing of exchange networks on town “hubs,” and especially on major ports, through the tenth and eleventh centuries. See Christopher Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150. A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 312–313. 22. Helen Fenwick, “Medieval Salt Production and Landscape Development in the Lincolnshire Marsh,” in Wetland Heritage of the Lincolnshire Marsh: An Archaeological Survey, ed. Stephen Ellis, Helen Fenwick, Malcolm Lillie, and Robert Van de Noort (Kingston-upon-Hull: English Heritage and the University of Hull, 2001), 231–241. 23. See Jens Ulriksen, “Danish Sites and Settlements with a Maritime Context, AD 200–1200,” Antiquity 68 (1994): 797–811, especially 798–801. 24. See Fiedel et al., “From Hamlet, to Central Place, to Manor,” 161. 25. For some earlier consideration of the impact of time and vulnerability of mercantile families on port foundation, see Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, 211–212. 26. See Ailsa Mainman and Nichola S. H. Rogers, “Craft and Economy in Anglo-Scandinavian York,” in Richard A. Hall, David W. Rollason, Mark Blackburn, David N. Parsons, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Allan R. Hall, Harry K. Kenward, Terry P. O’Connor, Dominic Tweddle, Ailsa  J.  Mainman, and Nichola  S.  H.  Rogers, Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York: The Archaeology of York, vol. 8, fascicule 4 (York: Council for British Archaeology and York Archaeological Trust, 2004), 459–487, see 482; Penelope Walton Rogers, Textile Production at 16–22 Coppergate. The Archaeology of York, vol. 17, fascicule 11 (York: Council for British Archaeology and York Archaeological Trust, 1997), see 1779; Patrick Ottaway, AngloScandinavian Ironwork from Coppergate: The Archaeology of York, vol. 17, fascicule 6 (York: Council for British Archaeology and York Archaeological Trust, 1992), 698–718. 27. See Terry  P.  O’Connor, “Animal Bones from Anglo-Scandinavian York,” in Hall et al., Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York, 427–445, see 436–438.

Chronology and Time   511 28. See Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, 314–318 and 325–327; and Robin Fleming, “Rural Elites and Urban Communities in Late Saxon England,” Past & Present 141 (1993): 3–37. 29. See Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 24–37. 30. See Richard Gem, “Craftsmen and Administrators in the Building of the Confessor”s Abbey,” in Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2009), 168–172. 31. See Dominic Tweddle, “Art in Pre-Conquest York,” in Hall et al., Aspects of AngloScandinavian York, 446–458; also Gabor Thomas, “Carolingian Culture in the North Sea World: Rethinking the Cultural Dynamics of Personal Adornment in Viking-Age England,” European Journal of Archaeology 15, no. 3 (2012): 486–518, see 505–507 and 510. 32. See Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64–91, especially 73–83. 33. For a discussion of the helmet and the circumstances of its deposition, see Dominic Tweddle, The Anglian Helmet from Coppergate: The Archaeology of York, vol. 17, fascicule 8 (London: Council for British Archaeology and York Archaeological Trust, 1992). 34. See Altfrid, Vita Liudgeri, chapters 11–12, Wilhelm Diekamp, trans., Die Vitae sancti Liudgeri, Geschichtsquellen des Bistums Münster 4 (Münster: Theissing, 1881). 35. See Marie-Christine Laleman, “Témoins des basses-cours seigneuriales dans le tissue urbain d’une ville: l’exemple de Gent (Gand, Flandre Orientale, Belgique),” Château Gaillard 21 (2004): 179–189; and Marie-Christine Laleman and Patrick Raveschot, “Maisons patriciennes médiévales à Gand (Gent), Belgique,” in Archéologie des Villes dans le Nord-Ouest de l’Europe (VIIe—XIIIe siècle), ed. Pierre Demolon, Henri Galinié, and Frans Verhaeghe (Douai: Société d’archéologie médiévale, 1994), 201–206. 36. See John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Colin Platt and Richard Coleman-Smith, Excavations in Medieval Southampton 1953–1969, Vol. 1, The Excavation Reports (London: Leicester University Press, 1975). 37. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 27–28. 38. See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3–63, especially 21–25.

Bibliography Campbell, Ewan. Continental and Maritime Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800. York, UK: CBA Research Report 157, 2007. Cope-Faulkner, Paul. Clampgate Road, Fishtoft: Archaeology of a Middle Saxon Island Settlement in the Lincolnshire Fens. Sleaford, UK: Lincolnshire Archaeology and Heritage Reports 10, 2012. Dijkstra, Menno, and Henk van der Velde. House Plots, Pots and Pins: Transformations in the Rhine Estuary during the Early Middle Ages. In Transformations in North-Western Europe

512   Christopher Loveluck (AD 300–1000), edited by Titus A. S. M. Panhuysen, Neue Studien zur Sachsenforschung 3, 15–21. Hannover, Germany: Theiss, 2011. Fiedel, Reno, Karen Høilund Nielsen, and Christopher Loveluck. “From Hamlet, to Central Place, to Manor: Social Transformation of the Settlement at Stavnsager, Eastern Jutland, and Its Networks, AD 400–1100.” In Transformations in North-Western Europe, AD 300–1000, edited by Titus  A.  S.  M.  Panhuysen, Neue Studien zur Sachsen Forschung 3, 161–176 (Hannover, Germany: Theiss, 2011). Fleming, Robin. “Rural Elites and Urban Communities in Late Saxon England.” Past & Present 141 (1993): 3–37. Gilchrist, Roberta. Medieval Life. Archaeology and the Life Course. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2012. Hall, Richard, David W. Rollason, Mark Blackburn, David N. Parsons, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Allan R. Hall, Harry K. Kenward, Terry P. O’Connor, Dominic Tweddle, Ailsa J. Mainman, and Nichola S. H. Rogers. Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York: The Archaeology of York. Vol. 8, fascicule 4. York: Council for British Archaeology and York Archaeological Trust, 2004. Høilund Nielsen, Karen. “The Real Thing or Just Wannabes? Scandinavian-Style Brooches in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries.” In Foreigners in Early Medieval Europe: Thirteen International Studies on Early Medieval Mobility, ed. Dieter Quast, 51–111. Mainz, Germany: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2009. Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013. Knappett, Carl. An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture & Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Laleman, Marie-Christine. “Témoins des basses-cours seigneuriales dans le tissue urbain d’une ville: l’exemple de Gent (Gand, Flandre Orientale, Belgique).” Château Gaillard 21 (2004): 179–189. Laleman, Marie-Christine, and Patrick Raveschot. “Maisons patriciennes médiévales à Gand (Gent), Belgique.” In Archéologie des Villes dans le Nord-Ouest de l’Europe (VIIe—XIIIe siècle), ed. Pierre Demolon, Henri Galinié, and Frans Verhaeghe, 201–206. Douai: Société d’archéologie médiévale, 1994. Loveluck, Christopher. Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Nightingale, Pamela. A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Thomas, Gabor. “Carolingian Culture in the North Sea World: Rethinking the Cultural Dynamics of Personal Adornment in Viking-Age England.” European Journal of Archaeology 15 (2012): 486–518.

chapter 26

M ater i a litie s i n th e M a k i ng of Wor ld Histor ies South Asia and the South Pacific Sujit Sivasundaram

The difference between history and memory is a vexed one for scholars working on the wider world. For the history of the discipline of History is often said to lie with the West and its empires, and in a postcolonial era, the weight of books, periodicals, libraries, and their electronic successors still rests very much in old imperial centers.1 History defined as such contrasts with memory—a field that too easily encompasses the rest of the world’s “myths,” “superstitions,” and oral forms of storytelling about the past. Yet a dichotomous view of History and memory, along these lines, deserves rounded criticism. For the origins of History lie in global processes; globalization was critical to the emergence of History’s language of universality. History’s aim of explaining the human condition everywhere came as colonizing print intersected with and absorbed other objects and forms of history. Orality had its own forms of materiality, and these materialities impinged on and left a shadow in the printed histories that spread across the world in the mid-nineteenth century. The dangerous ideas that underpinned the ever-increasing remit of empires as the twentieth century opened came through the entanglement of materialities of all kinds and the compilation of objects into printed form, making them accessible to wider audiences spread over distant locales. Destabilizing the origins of this imperial and global History requires a commitment to unwrapping the relations between different material forms of history; it requires an insistence that the terms of history and memory should not be aligned with the dividing lines of cross-cultural politics and empire. Scholars should not assume that print histories achieved an easy material hegemony over the ephemeral traditions of the wider world’s memories, treating those traditions as if they were immaterial.

514   Sujit Sivasundaram Among those places which arguably shared a similar moment of encounter and contestation with British and Euro-American colonialism in the long nineteenth century are South Asia and the South Pacific. In both locales it is common to consider the practice of History as connected to the arrival of the printing press and missionary teachers.2 It is about the diffusion of texts, the setting up of libraries, and the launching of newspapers, which in turn are embraced by the rising middle classes, such as Christianized Pacific islanders or the bhadralok, the rising middle classes of Bengal. By the end of the nineteenth century, historicism becomes tied up with nationalism, for instance on the part of Indian nationalists who write histories about the economic exploitation and ruination of the subcontinent by the British, or Hawai’ians who crafted their history in the face of the annexation of their islands by the Americans. In this account, the public sphere of these colonies lags behind and imitates that of the colonizer. History is sometimes a benefaction of colonialism, or more recently, a profoundly colonizing discipline that creates an epistemological rupture by dominating the colonized mind.3 Despite the difference in politics in these two renditions, they share an uncomfortable similarity; in both arguments, history is a recent arrival, an Enlightenment legacy, where the Enlightenment is European or at times Anglo-American. Yet it is possible to approach the materiality of history (or indeed histories, more appropriately), if history is not cast as an arrival “across the beach.” Rather South Asia and the South Pacific already had material historical traditions which responded robustly and creatively to the sūddhā (white man in Sri Lanka) or papālagi (foreigner in  Samoa). Palm-leaf texts and genealogies were among such objects of histories.4 They straddle the problematic divides of the oral and the textual, the material and the immaterial, the ephemeral and the durable. In this way, they problematize an intuitive Western sense of history as text and even standard ways of thinking about the materiality of history. They interweave a narration of a whole range of natural kinds, in what can be called evolutionary style, with a recounting of the descent of generations of humans, kings, and chiefs. In this sense, they are not only the material elements of history, but rather narrations which chart the interrelation of human pasts and their material contexts. They also unmoor a Judeo-Christian notion of space and time, by actively reorganizing both of these in the service of their communities, publics and the present. History for these artifacts is not simply about chronology; it is about an engagement with the past to serve a present political and material need, especially in the context of colonialism. The agenda here is not to use palm-leaf texts and genealogies to create an alternative order of historical practice which is “nativized” and tied to the domain of custom and tradition. Rather, it is argued that the arrival of print and Christianity intersected with palm-leaf texts and genealogies. These histories showed resilience while facing the advance of the press and made their presence felt within the materiality of print. The ability of palm-leaf texts and genealogies to take different forms served as a strength in debating European and Judeo-Christian accounts of human history. From this perspective, the reminder they issue is of the power and danger of histories in how they emerge from and move between divergent instantiations. Colonialism was not singularly

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   515 generative of history in the wider world, nor did it immediately monopolize the material forms of future histories. The potency and violence of historicist renditions of colonialism as well as nationalism lie in the complex they created by combining colonial artifacts with material cultures of asserted indigeneity. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, with the greater mobility of high imperialism, there arose the disciplinary category of “world history” as a singular and universal account.5 By studying palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka in the politics of colonial annexation, it is possible to see how they defy an easy classification of indigenous versus colonial, textual versus oral, or material versus immaterial. Instead, the flexible materiality of an oral tradition is in view, and how this flexibility set the context for the mobilization of print. In symmetry, by studying the materiality of British print histories of the Māori, the material forms of the genealogy are still discernible. This is presented as a resonant materiality, interweaving the oral and the textual.6

Flexible Palm Leaves The diffusion of palm-leaf writing in Sri Lanka is usually linked with the spread of Buddhism into the island from India in the third century. Given that monks dominated reading and writing on palm leaf, its dispersal, allowing some very early Sri Lankan manuscripts to be found in Southeast Asia, gestures to what may usefully be seen as a Buddhist ecumene across the Bay of Bengal. There is perhaps no better example of the contemporary status of palm-leaf narrations than Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s announcement a few years ago that the Mahāvaṃ sa will be updated by a panel of experts, bringing it up to 2010.7 This is the Pali chronicle, which went from leaf to print in the 1830s when British orientalists translated it into English, and which ranges over twenty-five centuries of Sri Lanka’s history. 2010 is the year following the Sri Lankan government’s victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam. While Rajapaksa proposed that he would have three chapters, each of his predecessors was allocated two. The Mahāvaṃ sa is the key text of contemporary Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. It was put together in the sixth century, with additions in the thirteenth and eighteenth century.8 The eighteenth-century version was updated soon after the British taking of the island. The extant version of the Mahāvaṃ sa thus ends in 1815, when the last independent kingdom on the island, Kandy, fell to the British. At the turn of a page, Rajapaksa’s idea was to jump between the early modern Sinhala polity and the postcolonial state, leaving the period of the British Empire from 1815 to 1978 unnarrated. Traditionally, the task of making a palm-leaf manuscript was a skill prized by specialists, often Buddhist monks.9 The Talipot or Palmyra palm leaves were rolled and boiled and oiled so as to prepare them for writing. As one early twentieth-century commentator writes, “The material aimed at is one that is light in weight, even in colour, strong in texture and durable in quality.”10 The writing was undertaken with a metal stylus. No ink

516   Sujit Sivasundaram was involved in the process; rather, the sharp tip of the stylus incised the surface of the leaf to create the script. This required strength and care on the part of the writer, who could place the leaf on a piece of wood or in the hand to write on it. Once this was done, the writing was blackened by a resin to which charcoal had been added. The leaf was cut into thin, long strips, and once the writing was complete, the leaves were punched with a hot iron rod and strung together by a cord, protected by covers which were often of decorated wood, where the decoration was commonly faunal or floral. The covers rarely included precious materials, such as ivory, silver, or gold, to indicate elite ownership and use. Collections of palm leaves were kept at court and in Buddhist temples, which acted as centers of learning for monks. Manuscripts were also kept in rural peripheries by village elders and brought out on special occasions. It is important to underline the flexible materiality of these objects in understanding the class of historical narratives on palm leaf connected to the advent of British colonialism. This flexibility is evident in terms of content, politics, language, and form. It is suggestive to consider these types of flexibility as interdependent. The political flexibility of these texts is apparent in how palm-leaf manuscripts could cast the last king of Kandy as a righteous ruler who took up the mantle of historic Sinhala kingship or as an alien Tamil intruder. They could also critique British violence or laud British benefaction. As  for flexible format, palm-leaf manuscripts were copied and recopied, and it was not uncommon to extract leaves from manuscripts. Later writers made additions, and new translations were undertaken into Sinhala. The language of the palm-leaf manuscripts of Sri Lanka is also heterodox; Pali combines with Sanskrit, while Sinhala texts also include Tamil, and sometimes Arabic Tamil or Southeast Asian languages. The flexibility of the palm-leaf texts also encompasses its various uses: ritual functions, medication, and the consolidation of kingly piety. The act of compiling or making manuscripts, especially those which related to Buddhist teaching, was an end in itself: an act which had the power to transform the next life.11 These texts are the remnants of a profoundly oral and associational culture, tied to court and temple. Those connected to warfare and historic events used below could have been used to inspire troops prior to battle with Europeans, but they were primarily for glorifying the king.12 Palm-leaf narrations are extant from the events of Kandy’s victory in battle over the colonizers in 1803 and the later fall of the kingdom to these invaders in 1815. In the first Anglo-Kandyan War of 1803, the British thought they had occupied the capital of the kingdom of Kandy, only to find themselves surrounded by the troops of the king. The British were sickened from the lack of food and the onset of the monsoon, and perhaps malaria, and were ambushed; many were slaughtered. The Ingrīsi Hatana, literally “English War,” is a palm-leaf manuscript of which there are several copies and which comprises a poem of about 310 verses in honor of the victory of Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha, the last king of Kandy, and his troops13 (Figure 26.1). It is part of a genre of epic poems—hatan kavi—written in honor of victory in battle. One view is that it was composed by Väligala Kavisūndara, a poet attached to the court.14 This palm-leaf poem propagandizes the status of the king. The king is linked with the dynasty of the sun, to indicate his solar caste and the credibility of his rule: “His Majesty

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   517

Figure 26.1.  A copy of the Ingrīsi Hatana at the Colombo Museum, Sri Lanka. Author’s photograph.

King Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha is like the sun that shines in the sky of Sri Lanka, which has removed the darkness of enemies and caused the lotus-like faces of the people to bloom.” In addition to his caste status, his credibility as a king arises from his identification with the gods: “Is it inappropriate if we say that His Majesty King Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha is like God Śakra [the chief of the gods of heaven] on this earth?” According to the origin myth of the Sinhala people, they were descended from a lion, and this sense of natural lineage was becoming increasingly ethnicized and is here linked with the king. The manuscript notes: “He appears as a lion that splits the heads of elephant-like enemies with his sword, which is like the lion’s claws.” There are numerous natural images in the poem: the king is compared with a swan swimming in the lake of Sri Lanka that sucks the pollen of taxes paid by other kings; his glory illuminates the earth like the moon shining over the milky ocean; troops of hostile soldiers are like waves stopping upon the beach of his feet; and the people of the kingdom have their views changed by swarms of bees that strike their ears. In addition to the king’s status being forged in relation to caste, divinity, ethnicity, and nature, it is also a sexualized depiction. The last section of the poem includes a passage in the words of young woman waiting in bed for the king, who has gone out to battle. “His Majesty King Śri Vickrama, you have kindled desire for love in my heart. When you do not

518   Sujit Sivasundaram care for my pure, undecorated but trembling breasts, will the god of love keep company with me while I lay alone in bed?” In the years following 1803, the British knew that they had to infiltrate this material culture of information if they were to succeed in conquering Kandy. There were a couple of Britons who secretly sought to master the art of writing on palm leaf. Chief among these was John D’Oyly, who had learned Sinhala by the time he was appointed Chief Translator in 1805. He later became the first British Resident of conquered Kandy.15 He was certainly a master spy.16 Throughout the years leading up to the second AngloKandyan war of 1815, palm leaves in Sinhala went back and forth between the British and the kingdom of Kandy under D’Oyly’s superintendence. D’Oyly’s diary, running with some gaps from 1805 to 1815, is a curious document.17 The diary presents a record of the receipt and dispatch of numerous secret palm leaves from a wide network of spies. In addition, D’Oyly successfully bought the friendship of the leading ministers in the court of the king of Kandy. One of them, Ähälēpola, fled to British protection and provided critical information which allowed the British to conquer Kandy.18 The only image we have of D’Oyly in adulthood shows him deep in conversation with the ministers of the court, after the taking of Kandy, his top hat put to one side, with a secretary in the background, dressed only from the waist down, taking notes (Figure 26.2). D’Oyly’s secretary is seen writing with a stylus on palm leaf. The last kings of Kandy came from South India and had a Hindu background. The British called them “Malabar,” the category that later became Tamil. This background

Figure 26.2. “John D’Oyly in conversation with the chiefs of Kandy, March 1815,” from Paul  E.  Pieris, Tri Sinhala: The Last Phase, 1796–1815 (Colombo, 1950), frontispiece. Author’s photograph.

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   519 was central to texts which took the opposite ideological position to that of the Ingrīsi Hatana, critiquing the king by playing up his foreignness. Three palm-leaf poems of this nature were the Vadiga Hatana, the Ähälēpola Hatana, and the Kirala Sandēśa.19 The first of these was written by the same poet as some scholars cast as the author of Ingrīsi Hatana, and the second was named after the minister who fled to the British. The Kirala Sandēśa was written by the monk Kitalagama Dēvamitta. To quote from the Vadiga Hatana, the last king was a “Demala [Tamil] eunuch, a heretic wicked and vile” or alternatively, “a large earth-worm that came to dig the ground day and night.” “He started killing men in Lanka like a robber, and took away their wealth and property as a tax for their deaths.” The growing number of this king’s relatives in the city were described as “crazed devils” who ignored “Sinhala men and caused distress to them.” His rule is a direct threat to Buddhism: the king demolished stūpa, and close to the shrine room of the tooth relic of the Buddha he built an octagon which rose above it, and he enjoyed the pleasure of women in it. Throughout this poem, the king’s cruelty lies in how he elevates the status of the Tamils with respect to the Sinhalese, while not according due respect to Buddhism. Whereas in the Ingrīsi Hatana, the monarch, by winning the war of 1803, restored the political, spiritual, and natural stability of the united Sinhala polity, in these rival poems all has gone awry. This is evident in natural pollution, for instance linked with the king’s renovation of his capital: “The great heap of soil was as high as the sacred Bōdhi [sacred Bo tree where Buddha attained enlightenment]/At night jackals and dogs came to it and defecated on it/And the heaps of earth by the shrine of Vishnu/Became a land of excrement, as passers-by relieved themselves there.” Meanwhile, the poet of the Vadiga Hatana describes the fall of the kingdom of Kandy to the British in 1815 as a natural calamity. The invading forces are “like the waters of the great ocean at the end of the world.” The defeat is heralded by a red sun, falling stars, comets, and earthquakes. However, the tale which is played upon to denote the fall from kingly righteousness is the slaying of the wife and children of Ähälēpola, who had been left in the kingdom after the chief fled to British protection. An illustrated and unverified manuscript entitled Ähälēpola Darūwan Märīma provides detailed pictures of this tale, and in particular shows the anguish of Ähälēpola’s wife as she was asked to pound the severed heads of her children in a mortar; probably a colonial embellishment of the tale (Figure 26.3).20 These events evidently had a wider visual life connected to colonial propaganda. In addition to taking up divergent ideologies in relation to kingship, palm-leaf sources of this period were also contradictory in their views of the British. Moving forward from 1815, the poet of the Ähälēpola Hatana details the events of a major rebellion against British rule in 1817–1818. The British are described “setting houses on fire and looting” and orchestrating a massacre. “During this year, when there was war in the country. Numerous people, living in jungles underwent hardship. They did not consume sweet soft food, but lived on roots and leaves. They suffered severe pain and difficulties.” However, there were also a good number of texts that presented the British as the inheritors of the ideal of Sinhalese and Buddhist kingship, and as meritorious rulers. One category of such texts was ceremonial verses written in honor of the British, which utilized the

520   Sujit Sivasundaram

Figure 26.3. The Ähälēpola Darūwan Märīma manuscript at the Colombo Museum, Sri Lanka. Author’s photograph.

same forms of description as were common in palm-leaf texts written in honor of kings. For instance, in Jōrgī Aśtaka, written in honor of King George III, the British monarch is “Bearer of all wealth, born in the solar clan, glorious like the sun with a chest which is the dwelling place of Goddess Lakshmī, who is like a beauty spot of other kings, like unto a house for Goddess Saraśwatī and, like a lion to the elephant like enemy kings. . . .” Other verses honor British officers in Ceylon, such as Alexander Johnston, a judge, John D’Oyly, or the governor who oversaw the fall of Kandy, Robert Brownrigg. These individuals are lauded for being of the “solar caste,” like a “lion,” linked to a “divine clan,” all signs of kingly blood.21 They are also sexualized in keeping with how the king was represented in the Ingrīsi Hatana. The impact of print on this tradition of literacy was not a full rupture. The first publication of the Mahāvaṃ sa in English came out in 1833.22 This was undertaken from a commentary on the text and was published in Britain under the name of Edward Upham, an orientalist, retired bookseller, and mayor of Exeter, who had not traveled to South Asia. The confusion over identification of commentaries and primary texts evident at this time indicates the difficulties that print histories encountered in deciphering the culture of oral recitation and reading of palm leaves. Another version soon followed, published by George Turnour (1779–1843), a civil servant in Ceylon who had learned Pali, and this text appeared in both English and Pali rendered into Roman script. This was hailed as the first publication in the Pali language and consisted of the first twenty chapters of the Mahāvaṃ sa and an extended introduction; more chapters followed the next year. The challenges of translating for print were also evident in the paper war that

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   521 erupted in reviews of these first two versions of the Mahāvaṃ sa, in relation to accuracy and the reliability of the informants. Historians assert that these works popularized the search for the origins of the Sinhalese race, and the idea of the island as a sacred home for Buddhism.23 This was clear by the time of the appearance of James Emerson Tennent’s monumental two-volume Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical and Topographical (1859), which arguably led the phalanx of printed texts on Sri Lanka. However, the curiosity is that the monks who supplied the British orientalists with the texts that fed into the translation of the Buddhist chronicles came directly out of an eighteenth-century reformulation of Buddhism patronized by the last kings of Kandy.24 D’Oyly and his compatriots also learned from monks who traced their descent from religious reformers of the eighteenth century. Engaging in orientalism in Sri Lanka was akin to engaging in kingly benefaction. Printing texts was akin to retranslating palm-leaf narratives, as the kings had done in the past. The ascent of a notion of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism as witnessed in its first printed histories was entangled with the flexible and mutable world of Buddhist kingship, its associated learning, and its materials. British colonialism could not ignore the culture of the palm leaf; Britons had to engage in palm-leaf writing, and also had to patronize and translate them, like the kings of the past, even inserting themselves into the palm-leaf narratives. This was a key to their political legitimacy in a place where ritual good works were seen as a sign of good rule. The making of British historicism on the island did not see a smooth passage from leaf to print; rather, there were slippages of materiality. The palm-leaf texts themselves were part of a wider culture of orality, which is still alive and well in Sri Lanka, where tellings of history play an important role in the public sphere and in postwar politics. The way in which palm leaves slid between Kandy and the British makes it impossible to cast them as inherently indigenous. This flexibility comes partly from their materiality. This was a form of record keeping that could be added to with ease, and which could pass through multiple hands. Accordingly, shifts and inversions of politics could be easily accomplished, even by related poets or perhaps the same poet.

Resonant Genealogies Genealogical narratives might have an even longer history in Polynesian cultures than palm-leaf narratives in South Asia. Like many palm leaves, they take a poetic form, linked to an oral tradition. If palm-leaf histories had the agenda of authorizing or critiquing rule, by placing the king in a line going back to the arrival of Buddhism on the island of Sri Lanka, this was also a key function of genealogies. Genealogies sought to generate credibility for the claims of the chiefly and priestly families, who traced descent from the cosmological past through the present without adopting a linear or evenly measured sense of Western timekeeping. Migration plays a role here, as it does in the

522   Sujit Sivasundaram story of the arrival of the Sinhala race in a vessel from India in the Mahāvaṃ sa. For Polynesian genealogies were also island stories of arrival, across the sea, and, at times, from the sky, linking humans to the deities.25 The commonality of the form across the vastly separated islands of Polynesia indicates transfers linked to epic voyages across the water from Southeast Asia to Latin America prior to the arrival of Europeans. Polynesian genealogies often begin with a point of creation or origin, marking the separation of male from female or light from darkness. In taking up the agenda of political legitimacy, genealogies like palm leaves could embrace the range of politics which were opened by the advent of British and Euro-American imperialism in the nineteenth century, venturing into anti-colonialism or picking up the echoes of Christian traditions and culture, which played a much greater role in the story of the colonization of Polynesia than in Sri Lanka. Polynesian genealogies were, in sum, as mutable and changeable as Sri Lankan palm-leaf narratives and did not give up their powers in the face of the press. Yet their claim to material status in historiographical terms is perhaps less obvious than in the case of palm leaves, as these are oral traditions that went from mouth to mouth, prior to print. Yet in contradiction to a classification of genealogies as immaterial, they were understood and engaged with in material form; they are still referred to as a narrative layering where things are laid one upon the other, and in particular where generations are laid one on the other.26 Trained genealogists performed genealogies by adopting a range of techniques and mnemonic devices to perfect their skill at memorizing the genealogy. The genealogy was embodied in the recitation, so much so that, according to one Hawai’ian, “[a] listener knew what the speaker meant by perhaps the rise of an eyebrow, an expression of the face, a tilt of the head, or a description molded with fingers.”27 A Hawai’ian saying was: “Tie a kanaka’s [native Hawai’ian’s] hands and you will have him tongue-tied.” The body was thus central to this mode of orality, as its material conduit. The informant carried on: “The same word pronounced one way meant one thing, yet pronounced differently it meant something else.” In Aotearoa New Zealand, a recent commentator writes, “[t]here is some evidence that genealogies were learned in metric patterns involving changes of pitch for each generation, similar to the intonation of waiata [songs], in formalized patterns, designed to aid the memory. . . . Genealogies were often rendered at a speed and in a tone of voice designed to protect both the tapu [taboo] information and the status of the tohunga [Māori priests or healers].”28 The performance of genealogies could also occur in the company of objects. In Aotearoa New Zealand, younger men were trained in whakapapa (genealogies) by older men in the family or tribe. This training occurred in a meeting house or whare, and it could take place together with the carving of wood to create a pole marked according to the lineage. Whare take different forms and uses: whare whakairo denotes a carved house, and whare tipuna is a particular ancestor, and the various parts of the house are the ancestor’s body. Other ancestors could be present in the house, in the carving or on the ridge pole (poutokomawa).29 The ridge pole, according to one Māori commentator, “indicates the inseparable connection between the language, the people, and their history.”30 The whare whakairo was accordingly a bridge between the oral and the written,

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   523 allowing knowledge, history, and culture to be memorized. When Māori assembled in a whare whakairo, they assembled with the ancestors and gods and returned to the “source of their being.”31 According to the editors of Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1896: On the arrival of each of the famous canoes of the migration from Hawaiki in about 1350, a whare-maire or whare-kura was built in which was taught the religion, history, poetry, and genealogies of the tribe, by the priests, whose special function it was to preserve this lore, and ensure that it was correctly handed down to ­succeeding generations.32

Though the concept of the whare, as in this rendition, is taken as timeless, their design was evolving rapidly in the nineteenth century. Larger and more elaborately carved meeting houses emerged, as carvers of war canoes transferred their skills to making houses with the arrival of Europeans ships. The need for the meeting houses to contend with European styles and meanings, especially with the spread of church buildings, meant that inscriptions became more literal: printed name labels were sometimes incised or painted onto figures, and by the later nineteenth century, photographs of ancestors were also put on display.33 Teachers and experts in Māori genealogy also possessed genealogical staffs that were notched with references to their ancestors, providing another means of keeping up the memory of the genealogy (Figure 26.4). A relationship between genealogies and carved sticks, sometimes including figures to indicate divine origin, and at times the binding or  winding of fibers which also indicated descent, is evident across much of the Polynesian world.34

Figure 26.4.  Staff, Nga Te Rangi, New Zealand, from the collections of the British Museum, Object ref: Oc1854, 1229.22.

Aperahama (or Abraham) Taonui is a Māori who wrote down a genealogy in 1849.35 He was the son of a high-ranking chief Te Taonui, who was baptized in 1833 by William White, a Wesleyan missionary. He was also one of the signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, which the British controversially interpreted as a deed of cession. He wrote his name as “Abrahama tautoro” on the parchment of the treaty, unlike his father, who simply marked it. His genealogy of the tribe of Ngāpuhi was written for

524   Sujit Sivasundaram White’s nephew, John. John worked for the colonial state and was embroiled in various Māori issues as a translator and land purchaser. Taonui conceived of the imparting of this knowledge in terms of an exchange: he was learning to read and write in English and was a student at the time at a Wesleyan Native Institution in Auckland. He eventually made clear that this exchange was on condition that the book would only be read by Pākehā (white men). This manuscript holds 350 names spanning about forty generations. While some of it consists of lists of names, it begins in the distant past with an account of the arrival of Kupe from the ancestral home of Hawaiki and turns quickly to the building of houses set in the context of the seas and land.36 Among a series of histories of the Māori that appeared in the later nineteenth century was John White’s six-volume Ancient History of the Maori (1887–1890), which was sponsored by the colonial state in New Zealand, and which followed White’s editing of a Māori newspaper.37 White asked Māori to fill books that he provided with information about Māori knowledge; he paid five pounds for a full book and three pounds for one which was partly full.38 Taonui wrote his genealogy in such a notebook, which had fortythree pages.39 In corresponding with White, Taonui showed an eagerness for the stuff of writing, asking for ink on a couple of occasions: “As I have no ink to write Genealogy books with this is why there has been nothing for you.”40 The lack of materials was placed directly in the context of why access to Māori cultural traditions was confined to the initiated: “It is impossible to write the explanations and meanings of the many waiata and the whakatauki and the other things which you have requested.” The letter, dated September 8, 1856, is composed of shreds of torn paper with uneven edges. Taonui’s coming to terms with the materiality of writing was thus occurring side by side with his coming to terms with how to integrate Māori cosmology and genealogy alongside and within Judeo-Christian history. He wrote to White, disputing an alternative history for his tribe, by turning to Christian teaching: Do not listen to the rumors from further south which say that the Ngapuhi people came from a certain young woman of very high rank and that this woman is from the canoe of Ngatoro-i-rangi. No. . . . if the Pakeha there believe that Ngapuhi came from a woman, of the canoe of Ngatoro-i-rangi, however high ranking, so, they too must believe that Ngatoro-i-rangi created the volcanic activity. It means then, that they do not believe that God created all things.41

It is pertinent that genealogies were also recorded at the front of Bibles in this period.42 This means that as genealogies went to paper, there was not an erasure of the tradition, but rather a creative transformation of it. In this transformation, there were undoubtedly some radical changes, in ownership, intent, access, and reproduction.43 With the spread of the newspaper, in turn, Māori came to see public print as a space for the exertion of traditional customs of speech-making, kinship, and orality, treating them as a “larger alternative marae [meeting house].”44 White brought together and compared oral traditions which he had acquired from various chiefs, using a rational empiricist method. He had the world of scholarship in

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   525 view, and at first the volumes were well received. He began his monumental printed work with a simple statement of the differences between the Māori and their others, in relation to the materiality of history, writing that the histories of “other peoples are based upon monuments, inscriptions in wood or stone, or upon other records: the Maori had not reached this state of advancement, and, though he valued knowledge in the very highest degree, it was entirely preserved in memory and transmitted orally.”45 Despite this dismissal, White’s published volumes arose from a reliance on the performance of genealogies. He had spent parts of “the last half-century . . . sitting under a shady tree, on the outskirts of a forest” rehearsing “the sacred lore of their race.” White’s volumes may be interpreted not as the simple domination of print but as spaces of collection, where people and things, including tattooed Māori and their objects, were assembled. The illustrations in the six volumes were sold separately as Illustrations Prepared for John White’s Ancient History of the Maori (1897). The volumes each have two halves: one in English, followed by the Māori translation. The arrival of the British and wars between the Māori and the British are recounted here in the words of the informants, interspersed and compared with extracts from the colonial Blue Books and other European sources. While the interweaving of these materials—or what has been called “cutting up of manuscripts” evident in White’s volumes—has the agenda of allowing a post-European Enlightenment method of historical interpretation to dominate, in fact the plural format of the book could have been open to multiple readings.46 It is interesting to note that Māori used the term kōrero pukapuka for reading, which translates literally as “to talk books.”47 White’s work is in keeping with the style of other volumes in the genre of ethnographic histories of the Pacific, which were printed by missionaries and travelers in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the initiator of this tradition in relation to Māori pasts was Governor George Grey, for whom White served as a secretary at one stage. Grey’s Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (1855) accompanied others of his writings on politics, the sciences, and the arts, and by the time of its appearance he had previously published works on  Māori material both in New Zealand and London.48 Its first section was titled “The Children of Heaven and Earth” and subtitled in Māori “Ko Nga Tama A Rangi— Tradition Relating to the Origin of the Human Race,” and it began: Men had but one pair of primate ancestors; they sprang from the vast heaven that exists above us, and from the earth which lies beneath us. According to the traditions of our race, Rangi and Papa, or Heaven and Earth, were the sources from which, in the beginning all things originated.49

After arriving for the first time as governor in New Zealand in 1845, Grey wrote of how he accumulated notes on traditional poems and legends at every possible opportunity, and while participating in Māori gatherings.50 Yet when Government House was burned by fire, a great deal of his collection was destroyed. Yet again Grey “collected a large mass of materials,” which he put together in “a scattered state . . . for different portions of the

526   Sujit Sivasundaram same poem or legend were often collected from different natives, in very distant parts of the country.”51 The way in which this research was done—where several versions of poems were collected at different times and compared—is borne out in the finished product. Yet such an interpretation should not only indicate the impossibility of British historicism’s triumph over Māori genealogy. Rather, it suggests the afterlife of genealogical materiality in the printed book format of British histories of the Māori. In fact, on Grey’s departure from New Zealand in 1853, Taonui was a signatory to a letter that had as its second line: “We who are here are also loving you, because we claim you as our father.”52 Grey’s interest in Māori culture, tied to an acquisition of the Māori language and genealogical materials, together with Taonui’s embrace of English and Christian history, had created a notion of kinship, consistent with Grey’s own political program of “racial amalgamation.” Grey took his collection of Māori materials with him to Cape Town, where he deposited them in the public library when he took up the governorship of Cape Colony in 1854. Grey also published a book on Māori language materials in Cape Town in 1857.53 In the long run, this was to be the critical pattern of imperial dominance over Māori pasts. It involved the fixing of the Māori place on a global map, thus finally overtaking the role of resonance, the term I use here for the afterlife of the oral, across genealogical and printed histories.54 Taonui’s own career across the nineteenth century is indicative of the impossibility of giving up genealogies and embracing print when the Christianity with which print arrived was itself tied up with genealogical and cosmological visions such as those in both Testaments of the Bible. In 1834, he claimed to be the Son of God.55 Later in the century, Taonui became a prophet and visionary who critiqued the lack of representation for Māori in the apparatus of the British state. He was involved in the Kotahitanga movements, which sought to curtail and replace the Native Land Court, and which formed its own parallel committees and parliament in a bid to strengthen unity across tribes. His prophecies increasingly focused on the Treaty of Waitangi and its fulfilment. One concerned why it was an error for it to be signed on the Union Jack, and how it should have been signed on a Māori cloak, and how the treaty needed now to be draped anew in a Māori cloak: “The day will come when you will see a man bearing in his hands two books, the Bible and the Treaty of Waitangi. Listen to him.” He was also involved in opening a meeting house in honor of the treaty in 1881, to denote the unity of Pākehā and Māori, physically demonstrated in how the Māori text of the treaty was covered with a Māori cloak and also a Union Jack. He wrote some books of scriptural exegesis while teaching in a whare. In this way, his biography denoted the interweaving and simultaneous trajectories of print histories and genealogies and registers of cosmology and origin that encompass both Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand. He cannot be classed either as indigenous or colonial or simply as a genealogist or writer. In the wider Polynesian world, there was an attempt to make genealogies engage with other types of knowledge, and there was resonance between genealogies and Western science in Hawai’i, especially around the materiality of coral and the evolutionary history of coral reef islands.56 Recent work has also highlighted the permeability of the genealogy

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   527 in being able to encompass Christian motifs, and how the genealogical tradition served as a context for anti-colonial millenarian movements in Polynesia.57 It was not dominated by the cultural imperialism of missionaries together with their attachment to print. Yet genealogies, when combined with Christianity, gave rise to the dominance of complexes of historicism, combining cultural traditions on all sides. For instance, the account of the peopling of Aotearoa New Zealand around 1350 by a “Great Fleet” from Hawaiki, which may denote Ra’iatea or Tahiti, and the role of a supreme being called Io in preEuropean Māori religious custom continue to play a role in Māori senses of the past to the present. The power of these histories comes from their reliance on dual bases: asserted indigeneity as well as scholarly anthropology and history.58 Across both Sri Lanka and Aotearoa New Zealand, Aryanism was in evidence. In the Sri Lankan case, later nationalism was linked to how Sinhalese people claimed an Aryan ancestry to set themselves apart from the Tamils. In Aotearoa New Zealand the mutability of genealogies and the publication of print histories came together in an idea of Aryanism that was applied to the migration history of the Māori.59 Accordingly, within the span of decades from Grey to White’s publications, there appeared the controversial The Aryan Maori (1885), authored by Edward Tregear, a surveyor and civil engineer in New Zealand. The thesis at the heart of this work was comparative at a different level: it was world historical in scope.60 Brought out by the Government Printer, aimed at a wide audience, and with scholars in Europe in view, it received a mixed response.61 It built on a longer history of orientalist and theological works linking New Zealand and Asia around notions of Aryanism from the middle of the nineteenth century.62 Tregear wrote of how “many nations, separated by distance, by ages of strife and bloodshed . . . yet had a common source of birth.” The agenda was to trace this shared origin in obsessively philological terms: “Comparative Philology and Comparative Mythology are the two youngest and fairest daughters of Knowledge.”63 Tregear provided a set of families of nations: those that spoke monosyllabic languages, those that used “nomadic forms of speech (agglutinated),” and those that spoke “inflected languages of the Semitic and Aryan races.” Aryans were posited to have originated north of the Himalayas and from this “fountainhead” came the Māori. In making this argument, Tregear picked up a notion of the Māori as a lost tribe of Jews, which went back to the early nineteenth century.64 For him, the Māori language was said to be comparable with Greek and Latin. Tregear postulated that the Māori left India about four thousand years before the appearance of his book. This book is full of dense analysis of words, and also the alleged contents of Māori myths. Tregear also provided his readers with an account of how he formed an idea of his research. He came to it when he saw a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi: I have seen many signatures, both of Maoris and Europeans, represented by “his mark,” but they were mostly the poor and shaky attempts of fingers untrained to guide the pen. This was not the case with many of the Waitangi signatures. They were the “tohu” (marks) of chiefs who each made a fearless sign, full of individuality. One signed with the “zigzag” (the “lightning-flash”) of symbolism. . . .65

528   Sujit Sivasundaram

Figure 26.5.  “Some of the signatures to the Treaty of Waitangi,” and “The Mystic Cross on the thousand heads of the King of Nagas,” from Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington: George Didsbury, 1885), facing p. 97.

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   529 Facing this description, Tregear provided a reproduction of these signatures, and for comparison the “swastika,” as reproduced from “The Mystic Cross on the thousand heads of the King of the Nagas” in India (Figure 26.5). While Aryanism—and Tregear’s work—was contested in New Zealand, it is worth bringing it into this discussion because of the way it stretched across to South Asia. Tregear’s book is an analysis of language, and yet in the instance of the signatures just cited it was more than this. It encompassed the materiality of marks on paper, and how in turn the format of these traces also spoke of an ancient and lost language. A printed book was here entangled with the oral; it imaginatively crossed and linked locales, even as scholars and administrators moved between the locations of their theories, too. If the “global reach of Aryanism reflected the centrality of knowledge production and dissemination within the imperial project,”66 its global reach arose from the resonance between the oral and the textual, and how circulating print molded this relation in ideologically powerful ways.

Conclusion There are many asymmetries in the making of histories in South Asia and the South Pacific, and Sri Lanka and Aotearoa New Zealand in particular. For example, the resilience of palm-leaf narratives and genealogies came as a result of slightly different structures of colonialism in each case. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the presence of genealogies into the late nineteenth century resulted from the culture of settlement and agriculture, tied up with the acquisition of land, and also disputes in the courts and in wars with the Māori. Though this may be the case, it is worth noting that the first translation of the Mahāvaṃ sa was undertaken with the patronage of a liberal reformist judge and orientalist, Alexander Johnston, who paralleled George Grey in forming a collection of palm-leaf materials through close relations with Buddhist monks. Another perceived asymmetry lies in how palm-leaf narrations stretched over a wide sphere of Buddhist culture and could also narrate specific episodes and periods of time connected to warfare with the British. Yet the recording of genealogies also occurred in the midst of sustained war between the British and the Māori, and they could incorporate references to specific historical events. In a rather striking parallel, in early colonial New Zealand, letters were sometimes written on the leaves of the flax plant. The artist G. F. Angas wrote on one occasion of a “letter,” written “with a sharp style upon a leaf of the New Zealand flax”: “it was about two feet long, and covered with writing on both sides, the characters showing out clearly upon the dark and glossy surface of the leaf.”67 Despite the real but perhaps not impassable asymmetries, by the nineteenth century there was not only resonance or entanglements between different material cultures of history, so as to give rise to complexes of print and palm leaf or print and genealogy. Rather, there were interrelations across these worlds of the dominant British Empire. The circulation of histories between Fiji and Sri Lanka or between New Zealand and Cape Town came as manuscripts, objects, and print itself traveled. As greater possibilities

530   Sujit Sivasundaram of mobility opened up for the work of writing world histories, the local resonance across oral and textual forms, or between the material and the immaterial, started to disappear. Indeed, the category of “World History” itself was consolidated by the end of the nineteenth century, and with it a new notion of the durability of the scholarly enterprise in its attempt to serve as repository of the past.68 In tracing the making of singular or universal History out of these other histories, it is possible to see how History has come to take shape as a global discipline by straddling domains of generation, preservation, and dissemination. History has sought to encompass different materialities, and, as the nineteenth century progressed, that act of compiling materials became more successful. Yet the intersections of different materialities—oral and textual—were evident until quite late in the day. It was in the layering of materialities that some dangerous and powerful ideas such as nationalism, racism, and imperial supremacy were forged. This was the context for a theory like the Aryan Māori, or an account of the racially superior Sinhalese, imaginatively linking the South Pacific to South Asia and so authorizing British imperialism in both territories. What would it mean for us to destabilize such History? It is in understanding the material sources of historical writing in their widest terms that such a project can begin. Then it may be possible to redirect the creative potential of histories, made out of diverse materials, in a more scholarly and politically dissident way. Meanwhile, treating history simply as text or print, or as a discipline which should be dominated by publication, will not take us far with world-oriented concerns.

Notes 1. I use “History” here for the discipline of history. 2. Indicative accounts of the role of the press, paper, and print in South Asia and the South Pacific include Chris Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008); Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. For critiques of the role of European historicism, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4. There are very few accounts of palm-leaf texts as material culture. One exception is Stephen  C.  Berkwitz, “Materiality and Merit in Sri Lankan Buddhist manuscripts” in Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual and Art, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober, and Claudia Brown (London: Routledge, 2009), 35–50. For an introduction to genealogies with some attention to their materiality, see Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   531 Bashford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 31–52; and Margaret Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 19 (2007): 508–545. 5. Understandings of global and world history were long-standing. One sees the quest to narrate the history of the world in the European Enlightenment, for instance. Yet my point here is that the term “World History” itself appeared in colonial sources in the nineteenth century. 6. There has been important recent work on the materiality of print in Aotearoa New Zealand; see Tony Ballantyne, “Paper, Pen and Print,” in Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams, 2012), 205–227. 7. For a news report on Rajapaksa’s announcement, see The Sunday Leader, December 25, 2011, http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2011/12/25/fonseka-omitted-from-mahawamsa/. 8. For the classic account of the origins of Sinhala nationalism in relation to vamsa, see R.  A.  L.  H.  Gunawardana, “The People of the Lion: Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography,” in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. J. Spencer (New York: Routledge, 1990). For further information on the translation of the Māhavam  sa and its printing under British patronage, see Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), Chapter 3. 9. Commentary on the making and form of palm leaves is taken primarily from Berkwitz, “Materiality and Merit”; W. A. De Silva, Catalogue of Palm Leaf Manuscripts in the Library of the Colombo Museum (Colombo: Colombo Museum, 1938); and Sirancee Gunawardana, Palm Leaf Manuscripts of Sri Lanka (Ratmalana, Sri Lanka: S.N. Publishing Co., 1997). 10. W. A. De Silva, Catalogue of Palm Leaf Manuscripts, xiii. 11. Berkwitz, “Materiality and Merit,” 47. 12. For oral and associational culture in the kingdom of Kandy and early modern Lanka, see Michael Roberts, Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period, 1590s to 1815 (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2004). 13. All quotations that follow from the Ingrīsi Hatana arise from a full translation from Sinhala into English completed in collaboration with Prof. Udaya Meddegama of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Copies of the Ingrīsi Hatana are available to view in the Museum Library, Colombo; see, for instance, K.11. 14. For discussion of authorship and for a general account of palm-leaf texts as debates and polemics, see this work, which was published after this chapter was written: Gananath Obeyesekere, The Doomed King: A Requiem for Śri Vikrama Rājasinha (Colombo: Sailfish, 2017), Appendix 1 for the Ingrīsi Hatana. 15. For the biography of John D’Oyly: Brendon and Yasmine Gooneratne, This Inscrutable Englishman, Sir John D’Oyly (1774–1824) (London: Cassell, 1999). See also Sivasundaram, Islanded, Chapter 3. 16. This follows my sense of him in Sivasundaram, Islanded, though I argue that his subject position is changeable over time; see also Obeyesekere, The Doomed King. 17. H. W. Codrington, ed., Diary of Mr. John D’Oyly, with Introduction and Notes (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries Co., 1917). 18. For more information on Ahälēpola and the British, see Sivasundaram, Islanded, 45–46, 123–127. 19. All quotations from these three texts come from translations of M.  E.  Fernando, ed., Vadiga Hatana (Colombo: Luxman Press, n.d.); K.  F.  Perera. Ehalepola Hatanaya

532   Sujit Sivasundaram [Ahälēpola] (Colombo: Subhadraloka Press, 1911); and C. E. Godakumbura, ed., Kirala Sandeshaya [Kirala Sandesa] (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1961). 20. Ahälēpola Daruwan Marima, SN 69N5, Colombo Museum Library, Sri Lanka. 21. The quotation and this description are based on Jōrgi Aśtaka, Jonston Aśtaka and also John Armour Aśtaka, Deanwood Aśtaka, and Sir Robert Brownrigg Aśtaka. Or 6601 (11) British Library. 22. The material here is summarized from Sivasundaram, Islanded, Chapter 3. 23. See, for instance, John Rogers, “Colonial Perceptions of Ethnicity and Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka,” in Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 97–109. 24. Sivasundaram, Islanded, Chapter 3. 25. See Niel Gunson, “Understanding Polynesian Traditional History,” Journal of Pacific History 28 (1993): 139–158. 26. In Māori culture, whakapapa, a genealogical table, is literally “to place in layers.” 27. Quotation from Gunson, “Understanding,” 149. 28. Cited in Joseph Selwyn Te Rito, “Whakapapa: A Framework for Understanding Identity” in MAI Review (2007): 550–551. 29. I thank Lachy Paterson of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for explaining the details to me. 30. Hirini Melbourne, “Whare Whakairo: Māori ‘Literary’ Traditions,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Graham McGregor and Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991), 129–142, 134. 31. For more on whare and genealogy, see “Whakapapa as a Whare,” Te Ara, Enclyclopaedia of New Zealand, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy/page-5. Also see Roger Neich, Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), 128–132; and Anne Salmond, Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings (Auckland: Reed, 1975), 39–43. The citation here is from Cleve Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991), 179. 32. H. W. Williams, “The Maori Whare: Notes on the Construction of a Maori House,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 5 (1896): 145–154. 33. Neich, Painted Histories, 99, 105. 34. H.  C.  March, “Polynesian Ornament a Mythography; or, a Symbolism of Origin and Descent,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1893): 307–333. 35. The biographical information here is taken from Ruth Miriam Ross, “Taonui, Aperahama (c. 1815–1882),” in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A. H. McLintock (Wellington, New Zealand, 1966), vol. 3, 347–348; and also Judith Binney, “Aperahama Taonui,” in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 2 (1993), republished http://www.teara.govt.nz/ en/biographies/2t7/taonui-aperahama. On one telling, which is unreferenced, Taonui was the first to write a genealogy down in 1843; see Rāwiri Taonui, “Whakapapa—Genealogy— What Is Whakapapa?,” Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.teara.govt. nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy/page-5. 36. D. R. Simmons, “The Taonui Manuscript,” Record of the Auckland Institute and Museum 12 (1975), 57–82, esp. 59. 37. John White, The Ancient History of the Maori: His Mythology and Traditions (Wellington, New Zealand: George Didsbury, 1887–1890), 6 vols. 38. Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth, 113.

Materialities in the Making of World Histories   533 3 9. Simmons, “The Taonui Manuscript,” 57. 40. Letter dated Waima, September 8, 1856, from Taonui to White, “Letters in Maori from Aperahama Taonui,” MS-Papers-0075-008A, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Translation as in the archive. 41. Letter dated Utakura, April 19, 1851, from Taonui to White, “Letters in Maori from Aperahama Taonui,” MS-Papers-0075-008A, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Translation as in the archive. 42. Ballantyne, “Paper, Pen and Print,” 219. 43. See also, Judith Binney, “Maori Oral Narratives, Pakeha Written Texts,” in Stories without End (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books, 2010), 71–85. 44. This is the argument of Lachy Paterson, Colonial Discourse: Niupepa Maori, 1855–1863 (Otago: Otago University Press, 2006), 200. 45. John White, Ancient History of the Maori (Wellington, New Zealand: G.  Didsbury, 1887–1890), Preface, Vol, 1, 1887; all quotations that follow are also from the Preface. 46. For the idea of cutting up of manuscripts and for the general claim that White’s books are heterogeneous amalgams of various sources, see David  R.  Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth: A Study of the Discovery and Origin Traditions of the Maori (Wellington, New Zealand: AH & AW Reed, 1976), 113. 47. This point is taken from Paterson, Colonial Discourses, 38. 48. For Grey as collector, see Donald Jackson Kerr, Amassing Treasure for All Times: Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector (Otago: Otago University Press, 2006). For Grey’s publication of Māori materials, see 88–89. 49. George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race (London: J Murray, 1855), 1. 50. For more on his collection practices, see Kerr, Amassing Treasure, 82–83. 51. Grey, Polynesian Mythology, ix. 52. “A Farewell Letter to Governor Sir George Grey, from the Chiefs Makoare Te Taonui, Apera Hama and Wiremu Hopihana Tahua of Hokianga,” in Charles O. B. Davis, Maori Momentos; Being a Series of Addresses Presented by the Native People (Auckland: Williamson & Wilson, 1855), 45. 53. Kerr, Amassing Treasure, 90. 54. Grey adopted a similar course of racial amalgamation with the Xhosa of Southern Africa: James O. Gump, “The Imperialism of Cultural Assimilation: Sir George Grey’s Encounter with the Maori and the Xhosa, 1845–1868,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 89–106. 55. See biographies of Taonui mentioned earlier. 56. Sujit Sivasundaram, “Science,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 237–260. 57. T.  D.  Smith, “Protestant Missionaries, Islanders and the Cosmology of Time in Nineteenth-Century Polynesia” (MPhil diss., University of Cambridge, 2013). 58. Allan Hanson, “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 4 (1989): 890–902. 59. For more on Aryanism between South Asia and the Pacific, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 60. Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington, New Zealand: G. Didsbury, 1885). 61. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 75. 62. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 68.

534   Sujit Sivasundaram 63. Tregear, The Aryan Maori, 1. 64. Hanson, “The Making of the Maori,” 892. 65. Tregear, The Aryan Maori, 97. 66. This citation is from Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 8. 67. G.  F.  Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, Being an Artist’s Impressions of Countries and People at the Antipodes (London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1847), vol. 2, 56, and also 133. For another letter writer on flax, see G. F. Angas, The New Zealanders Illustrated (London: Thomas M’Lean, 1847), Plate VII. I thank Lachy Paterson for these references. 68. I develop this point in Sujit Sivasundaram, “Towards a Critical History of Connection: The Port of Colombo, the Geographical ‘Circuit’ and the Visual Politics of New Imperialism, c. 1880–1914” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2017): 345–384.

Bibliography Ballantyne, Tony. Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 2012. Bayly, Chris. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Binney, Judith. Stories without End: Essays 1975–2010. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 2010. Chatterjee, Kumkum. The Cultures of History in Early Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ogborn, Miles. Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Paterson, Lachy. Colonial Discourse: Niupepa Maori, 1855–1863. Otago: Otago University Press, 2006. Raman, Bhavani. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Sivasundaram, Sujit. Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Smith, Vanessa. Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Strathern, Alan. Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

chapter 27

M a ppi ng History i n Cl ay a n d Sk i n Strategies for Remembrance among Ga’ anda of Northeastern Nigeria Marla C. Berns

Ga’anda people live in the remote eastern Gongola River Valley of northeastern Nigeria. Dramatic, steep-sided granite massifs dominate the terrain, and these once offered defensible locations for small-scale settlements. They also isolated their inhabitants until outsiders—initially Fulani jihadists in the late nineteenth century, followed by the British in the twentieth—imposed changes. Within this rugged landscape, naturally formed rock shelters and caves also provided protection for ritual sites and sacred objects, and they continue to do so today. For Ga’ anda these impressive rock outcroppings remain sites of memory, places where important annual rituals recalling history take place and where the most sacred objects encoding this history and empowering collective remembrance are preserved in secrecy. Before I conducted my field research among Ga’ anda in the early 1980s, few studies of the region had been made by outsiders, and these were largely confined to reports published by British colonial officers.1 Of note are the investigations of government anthropologist C. K. Meek, beginning in the mid-1920s,2 and descriptions recorded by Danish members of the Sudan United Mission, who settled in the area starting in 1940.3 As Ga’ anda and their immediate neighbors, all of whom live in thinly populated and dispersed village communities—quite unlike the extremely dense and urbanized regions of Nigeria’s south—exhibit a high degree of ethnolinguistic diversity for peoples living in close proximity, they offered me an opportunity to study how material culture could help reconstruct the dynamics of intergroup interaction and exchange.4 Ga’ anda themselves, who form the focus of the present chapter, number approximately ninety thousand and are spread among four key settlement areas of Ga’ anda Town, Boga, Gabun, and Dingai. This separation has led over time to each area speaking its own dialect of the Ga’ anda language.5

536   Marla C. Berns Ga’ anda historical narratives are traditionally oral, passed from generation to g­ eneration, and maintained by male ritual leaders and elders charged with their preservation. Although Christianity and Islam began to affect Ga’ anda and their traditional religious practices by the early twentieth century,6 in the early 1980s, social, political, and religious practices persisted in ways that had been documented for at least one hundred years—even if the gradual adoption of the world religions had instigated dual or even triple systems of belief, and local government prohibitions had begun to undermine certain traditional practices. I was, therefore, fortunate to be able to collect oral histories from many ritual leaders representing particular Ga’ anda lineages, especially the Gudban, from among whom the paramount chief/rain priest is still selected, along with his four assistants. From the interviews I recorded, I was able to learn those historical events that they considered to be the most important, as well as the strategies Ga’ anda priests used to remember them, especially those involving material objects. I also benefitted from other accounts codified in books by Ga’ anda historian Musa Wawu na Hammandikko, which was originally written in the Hausa language in 1970 (a lingua franca in the region) and by Polycarp Ayuba Chifartawa, another Ga’ anda historian, published nearly forty years later.7 This chapter relies on the input of these Ga’ anda colleagues as well as several others mentioned later in this chapter, whose feedback was and remains essential.

Spirit Vessels Among Ga’ anda, low-fired ceramic vessels are containers for spirits, whether the souls of ancestors or the culture heroes and tutelary forces who protect and guarantee Ga’ anda survival. The distinct identities of these spirits are made visible in the details of the vessel forms and their decoration.8 They are more than just representations, however. The vessels themselves serve as key actors in origin stories and as their most powerful material aide-mémoire. Sacred ceramics constitute the most elaborate and distinctive category of Ga’ anda material production. Pottery making is typically the work of women among Ga’ anda, yet the gender of the makers of spirit pots remains a matter of debate. Some Ga’ anda elders attributed these most sacred of objects to men, who are also their exclusive ritual custodians. I found no field evidence, however, to support this claim, and in Chifartawa’s Ga’ anda history, he writes “only women of postmenopausal ages made the sacred ceramics.”9 Complex programs of surface embellishment are the most notable physical characteristic of these sacred ceramics (Figure 27.1). They display humanizing elements such as hands, heads, mouths, navels, and genitalia, as well as representations of various tools and weapons largely associated with the work of men. Their most prominent surface features, patterns of raised markings on the “body” of the vessels, were, however, identified by Ga’ anda elders who showed them to me as representations of Thleta, the

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   537

Figure 27.1.  Mbir’thleng’nda, Ga’ anda-Dingai, Chohita village, Hurwire hamlet, Finguela family, made before 1970, Barbier Mueller Museum, Geneva.

name for the program of scarifications inscribed on the bodies of Ga’ anda girls to mark their transition to adulthood and eligibility for marriage and childbearing. The exterior “skin” of spirit vessels is scarified in much the same way that the skin of women is—in each case marking “Ga’ andaness.” There is a growing literature devoted to the meanings of body arts by anthropologists and art historians,10 as well as the work of archaeologists and ethnohistorians who have examined “Why Pots Are Decorated,” the title of a seminal article written in 1988 by Nicholas David, Judy Sterner, and Kodzo Gavua. The Ga’ anda example substantiates one of the main arguments made by these authors: “pots ‘are’ persons and . . . concepts of the body are closely related to and partly determinative of decorative expression on pots.”11 The parallels between the ways in which surface decoration activates vessels as containers of meaning and power, and the ways in which scarification “civilizes” and  irreversibly transforms the human body—also a container—are used here to support the proposition that visual systems transmit and help preserve history and memory. The critical question is how the act of inscribing memory in skin imbricates arenas of material production with significance, potency, and enduring collective remembrance.

538   Marla C. Berns

Ga’ a nda Historical Narratives Ga’ anda origin stories and founding myths describe them as having traveled to the Ga’ anda Hills from the east. Indeed, Hammandikko claims that the name Ga’ anda, or, more accurately, Kaa’nda, means “those who came from the east.”12 Whether the notion of eastern origins also derives from the pervasive impact of Islam and the eastward direction of Mecca is difficult to ascertain. Linguistic data do, nonetheless, point to eastern origins.13 Historical source materials on Ga’ anda from the precolonial period are minimal. Most accounts begin by describing the resistance of Ga’ anda and neighboring groups to the late nineteenth-century invasions of the Fulani, a militant Muslim group that waged jihad in the area and sought to capture slaves under the banner of Modibbo Adama.14 Ga’ anda defiance of the Fulani cavalry remains a point of honor up to the present day. Many of the Ga’ anda elders I interviewed recounted how their forefathers valiantly vanquished the Fulani during a particularly vigorous assault launched in 1899 by Adama’s successor, Zubeiru. In his history, Hammandikko presents the Ga’ anda version of the defeat of Zubeiru.15 In part he credits the success to Timshani, the paramount religious chief at the time, and his four assistants, all of whom lived in present-day Ga’ anda Town, close to Makwar Mountain, the primary Ga’ anda lieu de mémoire. Timshani called upon one of Ga’ anda peoples’ primary spirit protectors, Mbir’thleng’nda, enshrined at Makwar, who responded to “every misfortune that occurred in the Ga’ anda region.”16 On the day in question, Mbir’thleng’nda split into three parts, each of which “magically” became a person and served as decoys, allowing Timshani to warn his people, organize his assault, rout the Fulani cavalry, and seriously wound Zubeiru’s son Sa’ adu.17 At the heart of the defeat was the mythic Mbir’thleng’nda, who provided protection for all, and whose presence assured Timshani’s successful defensive strategy. The historical and ongoing spiritual roles of Mbir’thleng’nda are inseparable from the spirit guardian’s objectification in the form of a ceramic vessel identified by a very specific profile and program of raised and impressed decorative details (see Figure 27.1). I use the gender-neutral pronoun “it” to describe the spirit because this decoration marks it as both male and female. The female aspect of Mbir’thleng’nda resides in its “torso” decoration, which emulates the aforementioned Thleta scarification markings found on the bodies of Ga’ anda women. The bow and arrow the spirit “holds” in its left hand and the tiny penis rendered just below the herniated umbilicus, not easily visible in this photo, are additional signs of its maleness and association with brave Ga’ anda warriors (Figures 27.2 and 27.2a). In addition to this particular Mbir’thleng’nda vessel enshrined at Makwar Mountain, I mapped over fifty-two additional examples in shrines across the region. No two are exactly alike despite the inclusion of a prescribed iconography of motifs. The large number of examples supports the power of the objectified presence of Mbir’thleng’nda to confer protection, and it explains the necessity of situating shrines where spirit vessels are kept proximate to the dispersed hamlets and villages dotting the Ga’ anda Hills. Each

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   539 Figure 27.2.  Mbir’thleng’nda, Ga’ andaMakwar, Hurdefta precinct, made before 1950. Photograph by Marla C. Berns, 1980.

Figure 27.2a.  Mbir’thleng’nda (detail of Figure 27.2).

540   Marla C. Berns spirit vessel had a local ritual custodian who was selected from those lineages charged with regularly supplicating the spirit and calling upon its powers as needed. Custodians also recalled the histories of these spirit vessels and their roles in Ga’ anda origin and migrations stories. One such story, written down for me by educated youths from the Ga’ anda-Gabun hamlet of Thlanga, described how this Gabun subgroup determined where to settle in  their migration from the east. In it, Mbir’thleng’nda spoke to the community’s founder, Kata’ an: “Look at me! I am Mbir’thleng’nda. Take me out of this river called Yemchireng so that we can travel together to Thlanga . . . where we will live together and build our houses.”18 This account supports the repeated Ga’ anda narrative trope that invests ceramic spirit vessels as “first ancestors” with authority to decide where their peoples should live. That Mbir’thleng’nda chose the location for Thlanga—a place that promised them food and shelter—signifies the role of this guardian spirit in ensuring the conditions for survival. The power of Mbir’thleng’nda also resides in its supernatural capacity to change form and to manifest human behavior: speaking, moving, requiring food and shelter, and so forth. Mbir’thleng’nda vessels are kept in keten bucha (houses for pots), which take their form and materials from the houses in which people reside—round in shape and made of timbers and woven-grass walls with a conical thatched roof. Until the late twentieth century, Ga’ anda lived in compounds of three round grass rooms surrounded by a wall of woven mats even though sometime before 1970 most Ga’ anda households moved from remote hillside locations to larger villages in the plains below that had access to a network of dirt roads and local markets. Because the shrines that housed Ga’ anda spirit pots remained behind in hillside locations where they “stopped,” most have fallen into a state of disrepair or have disappeared entirely, leaving their contents exposed to the elements as well as to theft (Figure 27.3). Some individual Mbir’thleng’nda vessels have been removed from vulnerable situations to protected rock clefts or rock shelters, where they are less likely to be trampled by cattle or stolen. Despite such attempts to safeguard them, many of these vessels have been sold to traders, taken out of Nigeria, and then purchased for Western collections under circumstances nearly impossible to reconstruct. Even the primary shrine on Makwar Mountain, maintained to this day by the Gudban high priest and his assistants, suffered the loss of its Mbir’thleng’nda sometime after 1980 when I photographed it in situ (see Figure 27.2). I asked local historian Felix Theman to interview Ga’ anda leaders at Makwar in 2010 about the impact of such losses, and the response is illuminating: Theft is becoming a worrisome issue. But there is little you can do about a thief who is determined to take away your property, especially if the item is isolated. . . . These pots are containers. The spirit in them never dies, so when a new pot is provided the spirit occupies it. . . . It was only the pot that was stolen, leaving the spirit behind. The performance of the spirit does not change because it is in a new pot.19

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   541

Figure 27.3. Pottery shrine (keten bucha), Bәna, Ga’ anda-Dingai, Pitel hamlet, Pumta family. This shrine, which lacks its enclosure, includes one Ngum-Ngumi (Yinifarihi), the largest pot located at the center back of the photograph. One open-mouthed Mbir’thleng’nda stands in front of Ngum-Ngumi, facing forward, and yet another appears in the center at the very front of the image. At the right of the photograph is a cluster of four thlef ’ncha. Photograph by Marla C. Berns, 1981.

After Mbir’thleng’nda, the most commonly told Ga’ anda origin story involves another spirit presence, the culture hero named Ngum-Ngumi, also conceived as a large vessel, which moved on its own volition and led Ga’ anda from the “east” to the impressive granite inselberg of Makwar. Hammandikko describes this historical event: They had a large, spirit-charged pot called Ngum-Ngumi travelling in front of them. If it stopped, they stopped; if it went on, they followed. . . . When they arrived at Baagira, somewhere east of Mubi town, they settled with their pot Ngum-Ngumi for quite awhile. Then the pot moved off again, and again the Ga’ anda followed it . . . to Makwar, where they remain to the present day because Ngum-Ngumi never again moved. It is to Makwar that the people of Ga’ anda send tribute each year.20

When Ngum-Ngumi stopped, a house was built to contain it and other Ga’ anda spirit vessels, including Mbir’thleng’nda, and the enclosure was located in a clearing within the sacred grove (hurdefta) on Makwar. An imposing rock shelter in the same locale holds a group of large ceramic vessels used to prepare the beer made from fermented sorghum and consumed by the paramount Ga’ anda priest and his assistants at Ho’mbata,

542   Marla C. Berns the annual festival following the harvest. At festival time, the enshrined ceramic vessels are removed from their enclosure to be ritually “washed” and then “fed” the same special beer, with the exception of Ngum-Ngumi, which is never moved because it cannot be exposed to the sun, or farta, which is also the name Ga’ anda use to refer to their supreme creator deity, which is not objectified in material form. Gudban priests informed me that offerings made to Ngum-Ngumi reach it through a coterie of ceramic spirit surrogates or intermediaries, which are modeled with the same physical features as the culture hero itself. Though I never saw the Makwar Ngum-Ngumi, I did see its intermediaries, which were brought out of the shrine in 1980 to be washed and fed for Ho’mbata along with Mbir’thleng’nda, who takes a prominent central position within the shrine facing its entrance. Like the paramount Ga’ anda priest, who is responsible for the well-being of Ga’ anda people and has four assistants from each of the Makwar Gudban family lineages, Ngum-Ngumi has its own “helpers.” This parallel structure suggests that Ngum-Ngumi may have provided an ancestral model for the organization of Ga’ anda religious authority. I documented twenty-two other ceramic containers identified as Ngum-Ngumi by their custodians in locations across the Ga’ anda Hills. In each instance I assumed that as Ga’ anda families dispersed and resettled, following their culture hero, they produced new vessels to contain the spirit and establish a focus for annual offerings and other supplications. My assumptions were challenged in 2009, however, when I sent photographs of a Ngum-Ngumi pot I had documented in the hamlet of Tumbar within Ga’ anda Town to Benson Ali, a Ga’ anda man who worked in the nearby city of Yola yet returned regularly to Ga’ anda. I wanted to confirm the meanings ascribed to the iconographic ­features of Ngum-Ngumi explained to me in 1980–1981. Although the ritual leaders of Makwar supported my documentation, a surprising aspect of their response was disbelief that a Ngum-Ngumi other than the one at Makwar existed. They asserted that the vessel “was not supposed to move.”21 It seemed remarkable to me that these high-level priests were unaware of the many other representations of Ngum-Ngumi. In fact, the idea that history can be invested in a large ceramic vessel is one that spread beyond Ga’ anda-speaking communities to those of neighboring ethnic groups (especially ‘Bәna people with whom Ga’ anda share land, customs, ritual objects, and historical narratives). At the most westerly edge of Ga’ anda occupation, in an area called Dingai, Ga’ anda and ‘Bәna communities produced identical vessels with the same historical importance though called by different names.22

Mapping Memory in Skin Since the early twentieth century, Ga’ anda elders have consistently described their most important culture bearers and spirit protectors as pots. The pot-person metaphor is emphatically expressed in the forms these vessels take and in their ability to “contain” spirit forces and not simply represent them. Like people, pots have an inside and an

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   543 outside. Just as women’s bodies are containers of new life, vessels contain forces that promote human survival and continuity. It is not surprising, therefore, that the “skins” of pots and of people are treated similarly. By virtue of being modified and adorned, both are capable of communicating essential social messages and meanings. In the case of the spirits Ngum-Ngumi and Mbir’thleng’nda, their containment in pots minimizes the risk to people interacting with these powerful cosmic forces.23 The marked outsides of spirit pots are at once insulating barriers and connectors between people and the forces the pots contain. Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi vessels display consistent, though not slavishly identical, iconographic features that make them easily recognizable in shrines. Most prominently, their surfaces bear unequivocal references to the elaborately inscribed bodies of Ga’ anda women. Scarification, or more precisely, cicatrization, as the permanent and irreversible modification and transformation of the human skin, serves as a potent medium for expressing identity and belonging. Indeed, examples of Ga’ anda material culture representing virtually every category—from architecture to domestic tools and containers to other objects that activate ritual and embody spiritual forces—can be found that reference the same designs that appear on the decorated bodies of Ga’ anda women (Figure 27.4). Even though local government regulations imposed in 1978 prohibited girls from undergoing the scarification process, all Ga’ anda women of childbearing years that I saw during the nine months in the early 1980s when I lived in Ga’ anda Town evidenced the elaborate scars of their initiation. As most Ga’ anda women have worn printed cloth wrappers and wrap skirts and blouses at least since British colonial rule, and certainly following Nigerian independence, the most visible patterns were the subtly raised bumps on the face and areas of the body not normally covered by clothing. At the postharvest Ho’mbata festival in December 1980, several newly eligible Ga’ anda brides who had completed all but the last of the six stages of the scarification process “came out” to the community. They wore the prescribed ornamentation associated with this key social transition and displayed their scarified torsos. They also wore bikini briefs under the traditional bunches of leaves that in the past would alone have covered their genitalia (Figure 27.5). Elderly Ga’ anda women effected the scarification using a small iron hook to lift the skin and a small iron blade to make short shallow, regular cuts in it. In the process of healing, the cuts scarred, forming tiny raised bumps, which, being slightly lighter in color than the unmarked skin around them, created texture and pattern. These raised cicatrices eventually fade and become nearly imperceptible as a woman ages. It is not by chance that young women complete this elaborate transformation just as they are poised to start their own households and families. The newly formed scars lend an erotic and tactile dimension to sexual encounters; the fresh scars are highly sensitive and are also said by the young husbands to be pleasing to the touch. Due to the prohibition against scarification imposed by the Gombi Local Government authority in the Ga’ anda Hill area, I found Ga’ anda women anxious about discussing the practice. Understandably, they were also uncomfortable about being photographed.

544   Marla C. Berns

Figure 27.4. Thleta scarifications (close-up of torso). Photograph by Marla Berns, 1981.

I was therefore unable to do the kind of full photographic documentation I would have liked as part of my research process. I was, however, able to make drawings to reconstruct the complete program of Thleta (Figure 27.6). Talking directly to women about the experience was made even more difficult due to the fact that few women spoke Hausa, the language I used to conduct my field research. Given this, I used male interpreters who spoke both Ga’ anda and Hausa (such as Hammandikko). I am fully aware that my insights were hampered by a situation where women were reluctant to speak about this subject on a personal level, especially to an outsider (albeit a woman), and that my work among Ga’ anda coincided with the recent proscription. What I did learn through interviews with a few Ga’ anda women I had come to know better, as well as male elders and ritual leaders, was that Thleta scarification was considered integral to upholding the social order. To refuse it would have been unthinkable. Until its legal prohibition, it was not a process young girls questioned or sought to resist. This should be kept in mind before judging the obvious pain inflicted via scarification as a kind of ritual violence to women.24 Young Ga’ anda boys, though not scarified, were also subjected to tests of endurance as part of their own initiation into adulthood, called Sabta. The price of social belonging, even if paid for in pain, can also be read as a kind of personal empowerment, even if participation is not a matter of individual choice. It is critical to remember that in the eyes of Ga’ anda the body was perfected and civilized,25 making women critical actors in preserving Ga’ anda history and identity. If postindependence modernity in Nigeria led to such programs of scarification being outlawed

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   545 Figure 27.5. New brides (perra) at Ho’mbata Festival, Ga’ anda Town, Makwar. Photograph by Marla C. Berns, 1980.

and marked as “barbaric” or primitivizing, the objects that more permanently recall them, having long borrowed their most iconic motifs, have come to assume an even more crucial mnemonic purpose. The program of Thleta scarifications was accomplished over a number of years, starting when a girl was prepubescent, and the first cuts were made above or surrounding the navel—significant as the former place of attachment to the womb and in itself a mark of ancestral connection and continuity into the future.26 The six serial stages of the process were progressively more complex and elaborate. Figure 27.6 depicts the completed program of Thleta designs. Compositions are carefully conceived, and there are several repeated elements of design that are isolated temporarily until the next stage is accomplished, emphasizing their individuality as units of meaning in addition to their eventual role in the aggregate. From what I could observe, every Ga’ anda woman across the main subgroups I visited—Ga’ anda Town, Boga, Gabun, and Dingai—had virtually identical patterns of body design. Each stage of the execution of Thleta was also part of a system of economic exchange between the families of a bride and a groom. The individual stages punctuated the betrothal process and linked the two families in a network of obligations. No marriage was complete until the boy’s family paid a significant bridewealth, which included essential household objects (iron hoe blades, decorated gourd containers, and ceramic

546   Marla C. Berns

Figure 27.6. Thleta scarifications, Ga’ anda. Drawing by Christian Jacobs.

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   547 pots), substantial quantities of beer made of locally grown sorghum, and agricultural labor of the groom on the farm of the family of the bride. A young man was effectively indentured to the parents of his prospective bride for up to eight or ten years before the final stage of scarification was completed. The prescribed regimen of Thleta, where each stage required socially mandated transactions, made women primary agents of social solidarity in their transformation from girls into wives and in their immutable physical transformation signaling their “embodiment of a Ga’ anda way of life, of conformity to its order.”27

Modeling Memory and History in Clay The prohibition of body scarification coupled with late twentieth-century social changes that sent girls away to school, and even to universities, likely led to a vigorous refusal on the part of Ga’ anda youth to continue a practice that marked them as “unmodern.” This has no doubt meant that the preservation of Thleta designs on other categories of material culture—especially the spirit containers still used as a focus for ritual veneration today—offered more enduring local strategies for maintaining Ga’ anda identity and history. The presence of Thleta designs, even if they cannot literally be “read,” signals an essential link between the living and the spirit beings charged with their protection, as well as their mythic legitimization. It is not incidental that the designs most often represented on Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi are those worked down the center of the torso from the neck to the navel, emulating the penultimate stage of Thleta, njoxtimeta (“cutting in places”; see Figures 27.1, 27.2, and 27.5). Ngum-Ngumi’s torso is modeled with a broader and more dominant “bib” of scarified texture.28 These inscriptions stand in sharp contrast to the otherwise smooth expanses of skin or clay that surround them. As the next-to-last stage, njoxtimeta announced to the family of the groom that the most significant exchange of goods was due. It also signaled to the entire community that a new socioeconomic bond was imminent. The family of the bride could postpone the final stage of Thleta for years in order to extend the agricultural service of the prospective groom and the largest exchange of household goods. The final stage (thle’ngup, or “cutting all over”) was also the most complex and taxing, where areas of the body not yet marked were filled in on the stomach, chest, and back. Its prolongation may have prepared a girl for the physical and emotional endurance required to undergo this final stage. The program of decoration on Mbir’thleng’nda is the most complex of all the Ga’ anda ceramic deities, and there were more than twice as many of these spirit vessels in shrines across the Ga’ anda Hill area than there were of Ngum-Ngumi. It appears that there was greater freedom to produce a Mbir’thleng’nda when it was considered necessary to protect a particular place or settlement. The vessels range widely in size, from 20 to 75 cm

548   Marla C. Berns in height, and no two are identical. As the examples illustrated here show, Mbir’thleng’nda is anthropomorphized with a round head surmounting the neck and a cantilevered tubular mouth with a beard-like flange that supports it, as well as a bow and arrow in the left hand and an axe in the right (see Figures 27.2, 27.2A, and 27.3). The head has eyes, a nose, and ears in addition to the open mouth, often kept plugged with a bundle of grasses to contain its own power and to ensure any uninvited and potentially dangerous forces from entering unbidden. This action supports the important functions of ­containment and protection the vessel provides the spirit. Highly diagnostic of Mbir’thleng’nda (even in its more rudimentary configurations) are the bumps that cover its head and its shoulder, often defined by a “necklace” of large triangles that encircle the vessel. These appliqué pellets may be more literal evocations of the regular raised scars of Thleta. Despite their clear textural verisimilitude, however, their concentrated application over the head and neck may also communicate something else. Mbir’thleng’nda is, for example, known for inflicting certain skin diseases as punishment for disobeying codes of social behavior,29 and some Ga’ anda informants told me that changes in the skin meant a person was “touched” by the deity. Epidemics of  smallpox were known to have swept through the region, and the raised round ­pustules symptomatic of the disease marked its occurrence (and left depressed depigmented scars on the skin of survivors).30 The Mafa, a related Chadic-language-speaking group who live in the region from which the Ga’ anda were said to have migrated, produce “god-pots” called Zhikile, and one of the key diagnostic features of this vessel is “hair” rendered in the form of pellets on its head.31 The Mafa described such raised decorative pellets in clay as daw, the Mafa word for millet grain. David et al. express some uncertainty about whether informants would also describe Zhikile’s “hair” as daw.32 With millet as the staple of the local diet, and in its threshed form fundamental to survival, this seems, nonetheless, to be an apt apotropaic reference for a Mafa spirit pot charged with protective responsibilities. It is tempting to speculate that the same may be true for Mbir’thleng’nda, where the pellets over its head may refer to the round seeds of the sorghum plant, the staple of the Ga’ anda diet. The row of large knobs modeled along the sagittal plane of Mbir’thleng’nda’s head were described to me as topro, the name for a comb of large hair tufts stretching from the top of the spine to the forehead. These are worn by young Ga’ anda men when they complete Sabta initiation and are presented to the community in a public festivity called Yohiiwa. This iconic feature of the spirit’s identity helps mark it as a fully socialized male. There is no reason to assume that the distinctive decoration of Mbir’thleng’nda would have only one set of meanings. It is possible that the recurring iconographic motifs have accumulated multiple meanings over time just as the deity is credited with an essential protean capacity. Specific elements of the decorative vocabulary may reference the deity’s various avatars: a young marriageable woman (with scarifications), a young marriageable man (with the topro hairstyle), a male elder (with a beard), and a brave warrior (with weapons). Even if these conceptual interpretations of Mbir’thleng’nda’s materiality are somewhat fluid and conjectural, the consistency with which the Ga’ anda regard the

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   549 alteration of “skin” as a powerful mode of communication—and as an “inscribed surface of events”33—supports the proposition that such purposeful manipulations of surface texture function as maps of meaning and memory. Like Mbir’thleng’nda, Ngum-Ngumi’s identity also depends on visual features linking it to male and female Ga’ anda descendants. Though one can read Mbir’thleng’nda’s vessel form as more person-like, Ngum-Ngumi’s shape is decidedly pot-like, though its large spherical “body” is modeled with a segmented neck and a wide funnel-shaped mouth (Figure 27.7). The frequency with which cultures in Africa and elsewhere in the world name the parts of vessels in human terms (pots have bodies, shoulders, necks, mouths, lips, and sometimes arms and feet) makes the pot-person linkage uncontroversial.34 Pots also share with people “the characteristic of owing their ­existence to having been irreversibly transformed—by fire and by enculturation respectively—from a state of nature into cultural entities.”35 In the case of Ga’ anda ceramic deities, their most striking physical aspect is the reproduction in clay of “marks of civilization” rendered on the bodies of Ga’ anda girls. The bodies of both link the social to the spiritual, the past to the present. The torsos of Ngum-Ngumi vessels have a wide “bib” of carefully executed narrow ridges that have been “cut” across using a chip of gourd shell. Shrine custodians identified

Figure 27.7.  Ngum-Ngumi, Ga’ anda-Boga, Wetu family. Photograph by Marla C. Berns, 1981.

550   Marla C. Berns this highly regular torso texture with Thleta scarification, especially njoxtimeta, emulating the raised bumps achieved by lifting the skin and making small closely placed cuts (see Figure 27.4). Still enigmatic, however, are the other blocks and strips of this raised and impressed texture at the sides of the torso, which may emulate elements of the Thleta design program more specifically (see Figure 27.6) or may signify something lost to us with the passage of time. The same is true of the row of nodes flanking one side of the textured bib, about which I have only been able to speculate.36 Other features worked over the vessel’s torso further distinguish and anthropomorphize it—the right hand holding an axe, small breasts, and a herniated navel with small male genitals underneath it. The repetition of this quite distinctive formula of prescribed motifs, even if it cannot be decoded like language, still serves as a memoryscape of Ngum-Ngumi’s importance to the history of Ga’ anda people. In the course of my efforts to understand what the distinctive textures of Ga’ anda spirit pots evoke in their memory-making role, I have proposed that the laboriously rendered texture of Ngum-Ngumi’s bib may also be a reference to the ridge-riveted chain mail that was used for hauberks of original Mameluke manufacture, which were traded across the Sahara, making their way to northern Nigeria where they likely were worn by Fulani cavalry as armor.37 Does this chain mail refer to Ga’ anda having famously conquered their Fulani assailants and possibly robbed them of their armor? Transferring this protective wear to Ngum-Ngumi enhances the deity’s power and likewise protects it via the “chain mail” worked on its surface. The shape of the bib, as well as the way it is cut away to allow for the vessel’s umbilicus, strikingly resembles the lower edge of a chain mail hauberk, designed with a lower notch to accommodate the pommel of a saddle. Other applied motifs on Ngum-Ngumi vessels likewise refer to male weapons, including daggers and bows and arrows. The circle with pellets may describe a round hide shield embossed with bumps to help deflect arrows. Together this suite of decorative elements associates the deity’s protective role with that of a fully caparisoned Ga’ anda warrior. One subset of Ngum-Ngumi vessels stands out because of its especially crisp surface corrugations. These were made by the Wetu family of the Boga-Ga’ anda subgroup (see Figure 27.7). Their distinction suggests to me that there may have been a potter or perhaps a family of potters who produced all of these “Wetu-style” examples.38 In fact, I  documented more Ngum-Ngumi vessels in Boga-Wetu than in any other Ga’ anda location. Linguistic evidence suggests that Boga separated from their brethren at Makwar longer ago than did Gabun, as the Boga-Ga’ anda dialect displays more differences from the Ga’ anda spoken around Makwar than does the Gabun dialect. Chifartawa posits this hypothesis,39 and he also indicates that Boga oral histories state that Ga’ anda who moved to Boga “became impatient with Ngum-Ngumi’s unwillingness to leave Makwar Mountain” and taunted the custodians of the pot to set it on its way. He goes on to note that overpopulation and crowding led the Boga people to lose patience and to demand that the Ngum-Ngumi priest kick the sacred pot in order to “jolt [it] into action.” The sacred vessel, however, could not be commanded, and so in protest Boga left. The protesters earned the nickname “Pokam’ndi,” later shortened to “Poka” or Boga.40

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   551 It is worth questioning whether this conflicted separation may bear some relationship to the proliferation of Ngum-Ngumi vessels in Boga spirit shrines. Does their presence legitimize the right to have moved away from Makwar? The number of Boga Wetu-style vessels found among Ga’ anda families living in Dingai may also have functioned to justify their migration. Dingai is just to the northwest of the area occupied by the Boga-Ga’ anda. Although I cannot claim to have documented all of the Ngum-Ngumi vessels across the Ga’ anda Hills, it is notable that their highest concentration is outside the vicinity of Ga’ anda Town and Makwar Mountain, instead marking the destinations of their westerly migrations. By contrast, in the Gabun-Ga’ anda area (the most northerly of Ga’ anda settlement areas), none of the families I interviewed showed me a single Ngum-Ngumi vessel. They did have Mbir’thleng’nda vessels, and the oral history of the Thlanga Gabun family having followed the pot Mbir’thleng’nda to their place of settlement supports this distinction. Moreover, elders of the leading Hur’gabun family in Gabun told me that they followed their sacred granary, Tekeisha, to their original hilltop settlement.41 The granary—a clay pot encased in rope with a conical lid—was said to have introduced the secret for cultivating sorghum to Hur’gabun. Regular libations offered to Tekeisha helped secure a favorable harvest for all Ga’ anda people.

Conclusion The relationship between people and their spirits as defined by their shared surface decoration is nowhere more dramatic in Ga’ anda material culture than in the Thleta designs executed on the “torsos” of the ceramic vessels known as thlef ’ncha (singular, thlef ’nda) that are made to hold the spirits of the dead. As the example featured here shows (Figure 27.8), the “torso” of the pot features several key elements of Thleta, including njoxtimeta lines down the center, rows of lozenges at the sides (kwardata), and lines encircling the torso and framing the umbilicus (kun’kanwan’njnda). The designs are “scarified” with meticulously raised and impressed decoration on the surface of the vessel. The profile of the pot resembles those used to carry water and beer, characterized by long and elegant necks and flared mouths. Other humanizing features on these “soul” pots include a herniated umbilicus and small breasts. When Ga’ anda people die, their spirits do not immediately leave the world of the living but are said to reside in the thlef ’ncha made for them, which are kept in the sleeping room of the deceased for a year. There, these ancestral spirits can, like other spirit pots, be washed and fed by their families.42 It is no accident that these receptacles—further strengthening the pot-person linkage—bear the permanent and easily recognizable marks of Ga’ anda enculturation. A year later, the relationship between the living Ga’ anda and their immediate ancestors is typically severed, when the thlef ’nda container is ritually smashed to release the spirit to the afterlife, the place in which the supreme creator deity, Farta, is said to dwell.43 Not all thlef ’ncha are broken, however, and in the cases of

552   Marla C. Berns

Figure 27.8. Ancestor vessel (thlef ’nda), Ga’ anda, late twentieth century. Barbier Mueller Museum, Geneva, 1015–1162.

individuals who were considered troublesome during their lifetimes—with energies still potentially dangerous to the living—thlef ’ncha were moved to community-based pottery shrines where they could be kept under the watch of Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi (see Figure 27.3). They were also propitiated during annual Ho’mbata rituals. Even in death, Ga’ anda people and their guardian spirits are linked by a shared memoryscape drawn from the visual language of women’s skin and its capacity to proclaim adherence to the social order. Ga’ anda strategies for remembering the past seem to be inextricably linked to the production of material objects whose “skins” are unequivocally and purposefully scarified. It is clear that “Ga’ andaness” is identified through the motifs shared with those imposed on the bodies of Ga’ anda women. Ngum-Ngumi as “founding culture hero” and Mbir’thleng’nda as “community protector” are thereby civilized and made vulnerable to human interactions and controls at the same time they have the power to influence Ga’ anda destiny. The practice of inscribing the female body with irreversible designs references what anthropologists claim to be one of the most striking of human capacities: the ability to modify and transform the skin’s surface as a fundamental strategy for communication. The anthropologist Dominique Zahan described scarification and

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   553 other forms of body alteration as the tegumentary language of non-Western peoples.44 He also noted, as have others, that skin is likely to have been the first “canvas” of humanity, a threshold between self and others that implies interaction and exchange.45 The use of the body as a surface for encoding symbols relating to womanhood dates to at least 8000–6000 bce, as evidenced by cave art in Tassili n’ ajjer in Algeria.46 Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas posits in his recently published compendium on global body arts that this form of artistic activity may be the “most intimately associated with the human experience. It links the self, the senses and the social and the political.”47 And, using the elegant turn of phrase I quoted earlier, Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts write that the Tabwa and Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo sought to “perfect the person”48 by inscribing the body with systems of signs ready to be “read.”49 So, too, does the act of scarifying clay among the Ga’ anda perfect vessels as suitable repositories for the most powerful and influential tutelary deities. Transforming the body into “an inscribed surface of events” has provided a template for the creation of a total design field. Whether or not this is due to some deep structure that is inaccessible to us in the present, it is clear that the permanent alteration of a woman’s skin has created a language of history, identity, and collective remembrance. As Thomas observes, the tendency of nineteenth-century anthropologists to see body art as a social marker “overlooked the work that scars do to bear memories, and to express values and relationships that may not be verbally articulated.”50 In his work on the Tiwi people of northern Australia, Thomas documented the same herringbone designs on the scarified body as were evident on paintings and textiles. Likewise I recorded Ga’ anda scarification designs on domestic pottery, decorated gourds, and painted architecture, as well as spirit vessels. This “crossing over,” as Thomas calls it, likely carries potent messages and transfers power from the ancestors to the living, or as Ga’ anda examples underscore, from the living to the ancestors. Seen every day, the marked bodies of women “kept the community in visual touch with their history.”51 The repetition of designs, which move from the body’s surface to the outsides of other inanimate objects, builds a shared vocabulary of memory and history. My research supports the claim that skin is a highly mutable and expressive medium, the visible and often irreversible transformation of which is an event of profound cultural significance. Much has been written about body arts and the ways their constitutive design systems, as documented across the globe and over time, communicate messages about identity relating to ethnicity, kinship, social status, gender, and physiological change. The skin’s canvas carries graphic signs that once may have been read as historical texts even if, as my research on Ga’ anda shows, we do not know now what they literally mean (nor does this seem to be the point). Archaeologists argue that artifacts have a kind of textual mnemonic dimension embodied in their “propagation and continuation of ideological systems.”52 It may be that the process of inscribing the body with highly visible signs gives scarification, as well as its transference to the surfaces of other objects, dramatic cultural resonance. Just as bodily adornment renders “otherwise barren, uncivilized expanses of territory a landscape of meaning and memory,”53 so too does the permanent alteration of a vessel’s smooth outer skin invest it with meaning. For Ga’ anda,

554   Marla C. Berns the act of doing—as repeated from generation to generation—may have been as much a part of memory making as are the ways material symbols embodied knowledge of the past in order to secure the stability of the present and the promise of the future.

Notes 1. This fieldwork culminated in my dissertation, “Art and History in the Lower Gongola Valley, Northeastern Nigeria” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1986). 2. C.  K.  Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, 2 vols. (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931). 3. Margaret Nissen, An African Church Is Born: A Story of a Lutheran Church in Nigeria [The story of the Adamawa and Central Sardauna Provinces in Nigeria] (Viby, Denmark: Purups Grafiske Hus., 1968). 4. For my publications on Ga’ anda, see the Bibliography. 5. Polycarp Ayuba Chifartawa, Topics in History of Ga’ anda (Yola, Nigeria: Paraclete, 2009), 1: 11–12. 6. See http://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/11788/NI. 7. Musa Wawu na Hammandikko and Marla Berns, History of Ga’ anda/Tarihin Ga’ anda (Los Angeles: African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980). Text was translated from Hausa into English by the author. Polycarp Ayuba Chifartawa, Topics in History of Ga’ anda, vol. 1 (Yola, Nigeria: Paraclete, 2009). 8. Marla  C.  Berns, “Ceramic Clues: Art History in the Gongola Valley,” African Arts 22 (1989): 48–59, 102–103. 9. Polycarp Ayuba Chifartawa, Topics in History of Ga’ anda, vol. 1 (Yola, Nigeria: Paraclete, 2009), 124. Benson Ali also agrees that women are the most likely artists of Ga’ anda ceramic vessels (email communication, July 29, 2015). 10. One of the most important and influential anthologies of essays about global body art was edited by art historian Arnold Rubin, Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988). 11. Nicholas David, Judy Sterner, and Kodzo Gavua, “Why Pots Are Decorated,” Current Anthropology 29, no. 3 (1988): 365–389. See also Nigel Barley, Nigerian Arts Revisited (Geneva: Musée Barbier-Mueller, 2015), xxv. 12. Hammandikko and Berns, History of Ga’ anda, 2. 13. The Ga’ anda language belongs to a subset of the Chadic language group (Afro-Asiatic family) called Biu-Mandara or Central Chadic. Keir Hansford, John Bendor-Samuel, and Ronald Stanford, An Index of Nigerian Languages, Studies in Nigerian Languages 5 (Accra North, Ghana: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1976), 188. For a summary of the distribution of languages in this area and their historical implications, see Marla C. Berns, “Art and History in the Lower Gongola Valley, Northeastern Nigeria” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1986), 406–414; and Marla C. Berns, “Introduction to Upper Benue Arts,” in Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, ed. Marla C. Berns et al. (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011), 467–470. 14. For accounts of Ga’ anda resisting the Fulani, see A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Adamawa Past and Present: An Historical Approach to the Development of a Northern Cameroons Province, reprint (London: Dawsons, 1969), 63; Margaret Nissen, An African Church Is Born: A Story

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   555 of a Lutheran Church in Nigeria [The story of the Adamawa and Central Sardauna Provinces in Nigeria] (Viby, Denmark: Purups Grafiske Hus, 1968), 216; and C. K. Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931), 2, 437. 15. Musa Wawu na Hammandikko and Marla Berns, History of Ga’ anda/Tarihin Ga’ anda (Los Angeles: African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980), 5–6. 16. Hammandikko and Berns, History of Ga’ anda, 5. 17. Hammandikko and Berns, History of Ga’ anda, 5–6; Marla C. Berns, “Containing Power: Identities in Clay in the Eastern Gongola Valley, the Ga’ anda,” in Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, edited by Marla C. Berns, Richard Fardon, and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011), 511–512. 18. Original text written in Hausa translated by the author. The name Kata’ an may be an alternate spelling or alternate phoneticization of the word Te’kanan or Kanra’ an, referring to the people who migrated together from the east, now identified as Ga’ anda, Boga, and Gabun; see Chiftartawa, Topics in History, 13. 19. Marla C. Berns and Richard Fardon, “Introduction,” in Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, ed. Marla C. Berns et al. (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011), 31–32. 20. Hammandikko and Berns, History of Ga’ anda, 1. Baagira is the name of a village occupied today by a group called the Fali, who, like Ga’ anda, speak a Biu-Mandara/Central Chadic language. Fali vessels were also “scarified” with designs taken from the rows of small cicatrices made on the bodies of both boys and girls in the process of their initiation to adulthood. 21. Benson Ali (personal communication) in Berns, “Containing Power: Identities in Clay in the Eastern Gongola Valley, the Ga’ anda,” 515. 22. For example, among ‘Bәna (Adamawa speakers/Niger Congo family vs. Ga’ anda as Chadic speakers/Afro-Asiatic family), vessels identical to Ngum-Ngumi are named Komalamne and among Ga’ anda of Dingai are named Yinifarihi or Yinifartafa. Likewise, ‘Bәna spirit pots identical to Mbir’thleng’nda are named Kwarkandangra. Their uses and meanings are the same. 23. Berns, “Introduction to Upper Benue Arts,” 475. 24. It is problematic to judge from a Western hegemonic position that a girl’s body so transformed by scarification was thereby “mutilated” or “deformed.” See also Nicholas Thomas, Body Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 95. 25. Allen F. Roberts, “Tabwa Tegumentary Inscription,” in Marks of Civilization, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1988), 41. Susan Vogel, “Baule Scarification: The Mark of Civilization,” in Marks of Civilization, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1988), 97–100. 26. Berns, “Art and History.” 27. Thomas, Body Art, 74. 28. Sometimes other key Thleta motifs are worked on Ngum-Ngumi’s torso, such as the kwardata lozenge shape that appears on the sides of the torso, thighs, back, upper arms, and back of the neck; see Marla C. Berns, “Ga’ anda Scarification: A Model for Art and Identity,” in Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformation of the Human Body, edited by  Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), 61. 29. Berns, “Containing Power,” 510–511. 30. Berns, “Containing Power,” 510.

556   Marla C. Berns 31. Nicholas David, Judy Sterner, and Kodzo Gavua, “Why Pots Are Decorated,” Current Anthropology 29 (1988): 373–374, fig. 7. 32. David, Sterner, and Gavua, “Why Pots Are Decorated,” 374. 33. Quoted from Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen  F.  Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: The Museum for African Art, 1996), 85. 34. Olivier  P.  Gosselain, “In Pots We Trust: The Processing of Clay and Symbols in SubSaharan Africa,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 2 (1999), 212. 35. David, Sterner, and Gavua, “Why Pots Are Decorated,” 366. 36. Berns, “Containing Power,” 515–517. These design elements are consistently present in Ngum-Ngumi, although informants, including the elders recently interviewed, could not explain them. 37. Berns, “Containing Power,” 516–517. 38. Berns, “Art and History,” 236–242; Berns, “Containing Power,” 532–533. 39. Chifartawa, Topics in History, 21–22. 40. Chifartawa, Topics in History, 28. 41. Berns, “Art and History,” 196–198. 42. Berns, “Containing Power,” 519–521. 43. Felix Ndukwadan Theman, “Belief Systems on Life and Death among the Ga’ anda,” in Chifartawa, Topics in History, 94, writes that only the souls of those who have conformed to the codes of good behavior leave their bodies and go back to Farta. Ga’ anda also believe that old age is only attained by “good people.” 44. Dominique Zahan, “Colors and Body Painting in Black Africa: The Problem of the ‘Half-Man,’ ” Diogenes 23 (1975): 101. 45. See also Barley, Nigerian Arts Revisited, xxiv. 46. Barbara Thompson, Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 45. 47. Thomas, Body Art, 7. 48. Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: The Museum for African Art, 1996), 98, 102. 49. Allen  F.  Roberts, “Tabwa Tegumentary Inscription,” in Marks of Civilization, edited by Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1988), 41. 50. Thomas, Body Art, 37–38. 51. Holland Cotter, “Killing and Nurturing, All Surprising” [Review], The New York Times (December 19, 2014), C28. 52. Scott MacEachern, “ ‘Symbolic Reservoirs’ and Inter-Group Relations: West African Examples,” African Archaeological Review 12 (1994): 218. 53. Roberts and Roberts, Memory, 102.

Bibliography Berns, Marla C. “Art and History in the Lower Gongola Valley, Northeastern Nigeria.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1986. Berns, Marla C. “Ceramic Clues: Art History in the Gongola Valley.” African Arts 22 (1989): 48–59, 102–103. Berns, Marla  C. “Containing Power: Identities in Clay in the Eastern Gongola Valley, the Ga’ anda.” In Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, edited by

Mapping History in Clay and Skin   557 Marla C. Berns, Richard Fardon, and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 503–528. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011. Berns, Marla C. “Ga’ anda Scarification: A Model for Art and Identity.” In Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body, edited by Arnold Rubin, 57–76. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988. Berns, Marla C. “Introduction to Upper Benue Arts.” In Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, edited by Marla C. Berns, Richard Fardon, and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 465–475. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011. Chifartawa, Polycarp Ayuba. Topics in History of Ga’ anda. Vol. 1. Yola, Nigeria: Paraclete, 2009. David, Nicholas, Judy Sterner, and Kodzo Gavua. “Why Pots Are Decorated.” Current Anthropology 29 (1988): 365–389. Olivier P. Gosselain, “In Pots We Trust: The Processing of Clay and Symbols in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 2 (1999): 205–230. Hammandikko, Musa Wawu na, and Marla Berns. History of Ga’ anda/Tarihin Ga’ anda. Edited and translated by Marla Berns. Occasional Paper 21. Los Angeles: African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M. Adamawa Past and Present: An Historical Approach to the Development of a Northern Cameroons Province. London: Dawsons, 1969. MacEachern, Scott. “ ‘Symbolic Reservoirs’ and Inter-Group Relations: West African Examples.” African Archaeological Review 12 (1994): 205–224. Meek, C. K. Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria. 2 vols. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931. Nissen, Margaret. An African Church Is Born: A Story of a Lutheran Church in Nigeria [The story of the Adamawa and Central Sardauna Provinces in Nigeria]. Viby, Denmark: Purups Grafiske Hus, 1968. Roberts, Allen F. “Tabwa Tegumentary Inscription.” In Marks of Civilization, edited by Arnold Rubin, 41–56. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1988. Roberts, Mary Nooter. “Inscribing Meaning: Ways of Knowing.” In Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, 13–27. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art, 2008. Roberts, Mary Nooter, and Allen F. Roberts. Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1996. Thomas, Nicholas. Body Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Zahan, Dominique. “Colors and Body Painting in Black Africa: The Problem of the ‘Half-Man.’ ” Diogenes 23 (1975): 100–119.

chapter 28

R em em ber M e Sensibility and the Sacred in Early Mormonism Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The words “remember me” have a long and complex history. In the Hebrew Bible, they often appear in prayer, as in the psalmist’s cry, “Remember me, O my God . . . O visit me with thy salvation.” Hannah, a barren Israelite women who longed for a child, took the same stance when she “vowed a vow” and implored “O Lord of hosts . . . remember me.” In the Christian story, a thief hanging on a cross next to Jesus asked, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” In each of these cases, the speaker was a supplicant seeking divine favor.1 In the early modern world, ordinary people began using the same phrase to make a claim not on the deity, but on someone much like themselves. The words “when this you see, remember me” appear in autograph albums, on gravestones and embroidered ­samplers, in personal letters, in the margins of schoolbooks, and in graffiti chalked on the undersides of furniture. Sometimes the inscription is jaunty, as in an autograph from the nineteenth-century Ozarks: “Remember me early, remember me late/Remember me as your old schoolmate.”2 Sometimes it is somber, as on a powder horn from Revolutionary America: Oliver Graham it tis My Name At Saybrook I Was born, When this you See Remember Me, If I AM Dead and Gon.3

Regardless of tone, a request to be remembered by another person implied separation—an earthly journey or death. One of the most popular jingles appeared in ring games and ballads as well as in autographs and school-girl samplers.

Remember Me   559 When I am Dead and Laid in Grave And all my Bones are Rotten When this you see Remember Me And never let me be forgotten.

When framed with naïve embroidery, these words are as innocent—and as macabre—as a Mother Goose rhyme. Used in a game, they are saucy, like a boy whistling past a graveyard. The overall message is nevertheless the same: I will die. Remember me.4 Increasingly over the eighteenth century, the focus of remembrance shifted from the specter of death—memento mori—to the emotional state of the person left behind. In earlier settings, an overt display of sorrow signified lack of faith or an inability to submit to God’s will. Now an ability to “drop a tear” over the death or misfortune even of a stranger signified sensibility, a capacity to experience and express emotion. Sensibility—and the related terms sympathy and sentiment—linked a person’s inner life with the material world. Invocations to memory and to tangible objects were explicit. A poem, story, picture, scrap of fabric, or lock of hair triggered recollections that animated physical responses such as weeping, sighing, blushing, or moaning.5 Today when we say that a book or movie is “sentimental,” we are probably dismissing it as a “tearjerker” or a “chick flick.” Generally people associate sentimentality with women and with popular rather than high culture. When they dismiss a politician as a “bleeding-heart liberal,” they make a related point, suggesting that feeling should not contaminate public life. These attitudes were not always widely shared. In the eighteenth century, the word sentiment had mostly favorable connotations. Eighteenth-century philosophers argued that emotion, not reason, was the foundation for public as well as private virtue. Adam Smith, a philosopher better known today for The Wealth of Nations than for his Theory of Moral Sentiments, claimed that “sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded.”6 Physiologists as well as philosophers weighed in on the topic, arguing that moral instincts developed through the operation of sensory impressions on the strings or chords that led to the heart, and that benevolence, or disinterested concern for the public good, grew as a child formed affective connections. In the words of the Alexander Pope: Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race, Wide and more wide, th’ o’erflowings of the mind Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind.7

Reason was essential, but without feeling there could be no moral development. An entry in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie explained, “Reflection can produce a man of probity, but sensibility makes a man virtuous.”8 The simultaneous rise of the novel and of so-called heart religion in Britain and America helped to disseminate such ideas. In the early United States, sentimentality

560   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich infused itself into the domestic realm through popular poetry and fiction, parlor songs, embroidered family records, hand-painted valentines, portrait miniatures, locks of hair, and thousands of naïve memorials to the dead. In mourning pictures and family portraits, linked arms marked a new kind of emotional bonding often described as “friendship,” a concept that shaped relationships within as well as beyond households. Diarists and letter writers almost universally referred to their spouses and other close relatives as “friends.” Such a practice undermined hierarchical and legalistic notions of the family by emphasizing reciprocal feelings, if not reciprocal status, between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters. Theoretically, this chain of affection was meant to extend beyond the family to the community and beyond the community to all humankind.9 In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain lampooned nineteenth-century vernacular culture in the figure of Miss Emmeline Grangerford, whose talent for maudlin elegies even extended to a mourning picture dedicated to a bird. He was not alone in his distaste for mawkish effusions. In an 1867 review, novelist Henry James excoriated “the intellectual temper which, for ever dissolved in the melting mood, goes dripping and trickling over the face of humanity.”10 But in recent years historians have helped us to understand the powerful links between the eighteenth-century focus on emotions, the rise of evangelical religion, fictional challenges to patriarchy, political upheaval, and social reform. In earlier centuries, dripping and trickling had cultural and political power. The sentimental culture that Twain and James condemned was grounded in eighteenth-century literary, philosophical, and medical innovations associated with the concept of sensibility. Early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) were awash in sentimentality. They too created mourning embroideries, exchanged portraits, and constructed paper tokens to ratify relationships. They also adopted the vocabulary of sentimental friendship, and in the development of radical new rituals for dealing with the dead employed motifs present in the vernacular culture around them. To write about Mormonism in relation to sentimentality may seem odd, since to outsiders it seemed the epitome of grim-faced patriarchy, with its embrace of polygamy and attempt at theocratic government. A closer look at the rich materials preserved in its archives, however, shows the many ways in which early Saints used common cultural forms to express seemingly unique religious beliefs.

Mormons, Memory, and the Tangible The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in upstate New York in 1830. Its formal name defined it as a restoration, not a reformation, of the early Christian Church. By calling its members “Latter-day Saints,” it signaled the imminent second coming of Jesus, whom they believed would arrive in a temple built by their hands somewhere on the American continent. The nickname “Mormon” was first applied by outsiders. It acknowledged the church’s belief in The Book of Mormon, a volume said to have been

Remember Me   561 translated by the church’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith, from golden plates excavated from a hill near his home under the guidance of an angel. Mormons also accepted Smith’s other revelations, including a translation from a fragment of Egyptian papyri displayed alongside a mummy in their first temple. They believed it contained lost stories about the Biblical patriarch Abraham.11 Golden plates, angels, and Egyptian relics suggest a movement animated by wonder. Latter-day Saints were indeed transformed by the idea that hidden mysteries were about to be revealed. But according to Joseph Smith’s own account, the origin of those revelations was simultaneously divine and astonishingly “down-to-earth.” Smith’s angel sent him to a hill near his home to dig in the dirt, as he had done before in laying fence posts, excavating wells, and digging for the buried treasure his neighbors believed had been left by pirates or Indians. As one of his biographers notes, “The gold plates and angel scandalized rational Christians, while the religious impulse confused the money diggers.”12 There was no question about the religious content of the new texts, but they were both more and less than “translations.” Since the angel retrieved the golden plates once The Book of Mormon was in print, the relationship between the plates and his text is impossible to recover, but surviving fragments of papyri used in production of the Book of Abraham bear no relation to the text he produced, creating a challenge for believers. Some argue that his contemplation of physical documents inspired but did not direct what he wrote.13 The notion that contemplation of fragments or relics left by others might provoke new insights was not, of course, unusual at the time, though the expansiveness of Smith’s productions was indeed unusual. A similar combination of visionary zeal and investment in the material world appears in the lives of his followers. His chosen apostles were farmers, millers, potters, and cabinetmakers. Most of his female adherents were rural dressmakers, school teachers, midwives, and factory workers. In the early 1830s, they established communities in Ohio and Missouri, then after violent expulsion from Missouri built the utopian city of Nauvoo, Illinois, which by 1844 had 15,000 inhabitants gathered by Mormon missionaries from cities such as New York, Boston, and Manchester, England, as well as from backcountry settlements in the Ohio River Valley. Polygamy, or “plural marriage,” as the Mormons called it, developed in Nauvoo. After Smith’s murder, Brigham Young led most of his followers west. By 1860, the Territory of Utah, the enclave they established in the Rocky Mountains, had a population of 41,000.14 An 1837 watercolor painting of a rural New Hampshire family suggests the world from which many nineteenth-century Mormons emerged (Figure 28.1). A vernacular artist named Caroline Hill portrayed her parents and siblings seated around a clothcovered table with the family cat at their feet. The mother, in a ruffled white cap, sits in dignity to the left of the table, the father in a straight-backed chair on the opposite side. Between them are four grown daughters and a son. In one hand the father holds a large sheet of paper, folded in half and covered with handwriting. A moderately thick leatherbound volume sits on the table beside him. A slim open account book or journal rests on the table near the mother. On the wall behind them is a nicely framed family record, perfectly readable. It lists the names of the parents and the names and birthdates of

562   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Figure 28.1.  Caroline Hill, Job Hill and Family, Peterborough, NH, 1837. Ink and watercolor on paper. Peterborough Historical Society, Peterborough, New Hampshire.

seven children, with death dates for the two not sitting at the table. This inked document completes a family circle contracted by death. The letters, the bound volume, and the open journal would no doubt fill in other details, if we could only read them.15 This naïve painting exemplifies one rural family’s hope that through written documents they might maintain the unity exemplified by their family portrait. The poignancy in the picture, for us and perhaps for them, comes from the knowledge that the moment it portrays cannot last. In a region where farmland is marginal and new factory towns and the frontier beckoned, most of the family’s grown children will leave. Indeed, they did. When the US Census was taken in 1840, only the parents and one daughter remained. But Caroline Hill’s watercolor and a scrapbook of paintings and poems kept by her older sister Selina survived. In 2009, the scrapbook sold at auction for $15,000. The catalog noted that Selina attended a local academy for a time and that her mother and all the girls occasionally worked at a local factory making cotton sheeting.16 Families had always faced separation by death. In the nineteenth century, disruption of kinship relations accelerated as thousands left their ancestral homes for factory towns or better farms in the West. The Mormon concept of gathering gave spiritual purpose to these migrations but could not prevent them. Differences over religion probably also

Figure 28.2.  Wilford Woodruff, Record of Farmington, Connecticut baptisms, 1838. Ink on paper. Journal of Wilford Woodruff, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

564   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Figure 28.3.  Sutcliffe Maudsley, Lucy Mack Smith. Gouache on paper glued to fiberboard, 12 × 7 ¼ in. Museum of Church History and Art, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Remember Me   565 compounded ruptures. That tension is vividly portrayed in the life of Wilford Woodruff, an early Mormon convert who became an itinerant preacher and later a member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles. Born in Connecticut, an area pioneered by his ancestors in the 1600s, he discovered Mormonism after moving with his older brother to upstate New York in 1831. Leaving his brother behind, he followed his faith to Ohio and Missouri and then for a time preached in the backcountry of Tennessee and Kentucky. Returning to Kirtland, Ohio, he met and married Phebe Carter, who had left her own parents and siblings in Maine when she became a Latter-day Saint.17 In 1837, the Woodruffs served as missionaries in New England, where they reconnected with their families, hoping to entice them to join them in the new religion. Wilford’s brother, bitter over his abandoning the farm, greeted him coldly. His parents were happy to see him, but they did not initially respond to his message. Eventually, however, he convinced them and several other relatives to accept baptism by immersion as a token of their entrance into the Church. His diary entry for the day was ecstatic: On this seventh month the first day of the month and the first day of the week which is called Sunday some of the most important events transpired with me that I ever witnessed since I had a being, events worthy to be recorded upon the ARCHIEVES OF HEAVEN. Or to be engraven with an iron pen & laid in a rock forever upon the EARTH.18

Although he contrasted spiritual and material records—those kept in heaven with those engraved on the earth—his religious faith actually invited an amalgamation of the two. In Joseph Smith’s story the Book of Mormon was also of Heaven and Earth. So were the ongoing revelations dictated by Smith in the voice of God and printed in “Book of Commandments” (later called the “Doctrine and Covenants”). One of these began, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.” Another made the missionaries themselves responsible for creating scripture: “And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.”19 After baptizing his Connecticut relatives, Wilford created two ornamented pages in his diary to memorialize the event (Figure 28.2). On one page, under the curve of an elliptical arch, he described the baptisms in detail. On the other, he created a new kind of family record, using the format and calligraphic flourishes employed in New England family records like the one framed in the portrait of the Job Hill family. Woodruff ’s ornamented passages not only expressed a union of heavenly and earthly archives, but of spiritual and biological kinship. He was thrilled at being able to administer the ordinance of baptism to “a Father, a Mother, an ownly Sister.” But he was also happy to baptize Dwight Webster, who though “not of consanguine blood to me,” was “by the blood of Christ united.” In the ornamented record, he listed the others by kinship. He referred to “Webster” as “Priest,” giving him an ecclesiastical title in lieu of a familial one. (Among the Mormons, the lay priesthood was commonly bestowed on newly baptized men.)20

566   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Although Wilford had spent a few months as a young man at an academy near his home, his mastery of penmanship was incomplete. With a straight-edge and a compass, he was nevertheless able to complete an impressive display on pages that measured only four by six and three-quarters inches. Knowing that he and Phebe were about to leave New England, he created another ornamental record in an album that he purchased for her. He described the album as a “beam of memory” and “cashier of friendship,” assuring his wife that when the two of them left their families, the album would preserve the words of her loving father, her fond mother, her noble brothers and affectionate sisters, and the “speech of friends, of friends most dear.” To make sure that his intent was clear, he reminded her that though “Natures laws are strong, spiritual laws are Stronger still.” He knew that her parents were trying to persuade her to remain with them.21 Like other literate Americans, Latter-day Saints created ornamented documents in order to soften separations through travel or death. When Wilford departed on a proselyting mission to England in 1839, he deliberately left his unfinished journal where Phebe would find it, adding a note at the bottom of the page, “Remember me in your prayers especially as the sun sets on the western horizon.” Meanwhile, she tucked a note and locks of her own and her daughter’s hair into his luggage, reminding him to remember them.22 The Woodruffs’ friend Leonora Taylor, a Canadian convert, also used her pen to create links to family members far away. On a letter written when her husband was serving a mission in England, she had her children kiss a sheet of paper and then marked the exact spots where their lips had touched it so that he could respond in kind.23 Today DNA analysis gives credibility to the notion that by touching a piece of paper with one’s lips, a person might actually send a kiss through the mail, as many letter writers playfully did. Nineteenth-century Americans had their own scientific explanation for the way material objects conveyed the presence of a living person. They believed that a pen mark on a page or a twined lock of hair could animate invisible chords in the body that connected one person to another through memory. Zina Huntington, a young woman who grew up in rural New York, migrated with her family to Mormon settlements in Ohio and Missouri before arriving in Nauvoo, where she married, had two children, and sometimes taught school and worked as a nurse. After settling in Utah, she continued memorial practices already adopted in the Midwest. More than once, she wrote in a friend’s album: Say, would it afford you a pleasing sensation Some trace of a Friend to behold When the heart that now dictates has ceased it pulsation And the hand which now writes this is cold.

Zina knew from first-hand experience what it was to watch beside the bed of someone she loved. For her, a heart was not a valentine. It was a physical organ that pumped blood. When its pulsation ceased, a hand grew cold. But she believed that marks made by that hand remained.24 Zina called these physical manifestations of human action traces. In her world, an ink stroke or a twist of hair invoked an absent loved one.

Remember Me   567

Mormons, Sentimental Friendship, and Plurality Cultural motifs associated with the concept of sensibility helped early Mormons comprehend the astonishing new teachings of Joseph Smith, that there was no such thing as immaterial matter, that persons in heaven could be bound to persons on earth, and that writing and preserving people’s names in the form of written records had spiritual import. In Nauvoo, he introduced vicarious baptism for the dead. First in the Mississippi River and later in temples set aside for that purpose, he and others baptized church members “for and in behalf of ” relatives long dead. (These rituals motivated the passion for genealogical research that is still an important part of Latter-day Saint culture today.) His instructions on baptism rephrased a New Testament scripture about the power to bind things in heaven, telling his own Latter-day Apostles that “whatsoever you record on earth shall be recorded in heaven, and whatsoever you do not record on earth shall not be recorded in heaven.”25 Thus memorial practices for the dead were binding even upon God. One of Zina Huntington’s friends inscribed a calligraphy heart with a conventional sentiment: “The ring is round and hath no end, so is my love to you my Friend.”26 In one of his sermons, Joseph Smith transformed that metaphor into a theological bombshell, asking, “Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal and yet has a beginning? . . . I take my ring from my finger and liken it unto the mind of man, the immortal spirit, because it has no beginning.” He argued that all those born into the earth had existed before with God, that they were in fact “co-eternal” with God and had come to earth to gain bodies so that they, like God himself, might progress. He continued, “Moreover, all the spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.” Other Christians imagined the worthy dead ascending to realms of bliss. Smith imagined a universe of radically free intelligences who were both uncreated and capable in the eternities of becoming Gods themselves.27 In Smith’s theology, God is the organizer rather than the creator of the universe, a parent rather than a monarch, and Jesus is both a brother and a “friend.” One of Smith’s revelations, offered as the voice of Jesus Christ speaking to the church explains, “I will call you friend, for you are my friends, and ye shall have an inheritance with me.”28 Nothing was more important to Smith than friendship. In one of his own letters, he wrote of the eternities, “And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.”29 In a strange way, the concept of sentimental friendship may have supported the practice of “plural marriage,” or polygamy, which was first introduced to a small group of followers in Nauvoo between 1841 and 1844. (Although denied publicly, it spread rapidly in the years immediately following Smith’s death, though the church did not publicly acknowledge it until 1852 in Utah.) Smith taught that “plural marriage” was a divine law practiced by the ancient patriarchs and that men and women who embraced it would be

568   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich blessed with “eternal increase,” that is, with progeny as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sands on the seashore, as in the promise God gave to Abraham. “Plurality,” as the Mormon imagined it, was about more than marriage. It was about the ritual binding together of all of God’s children from Adam to the current day. For them, the key scripture was the last verse in the book of Malachi, which promised that “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord,” God would send the prophet Elijah to “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.”30 Without polygamy, the emphasis on binding parents to children seems like a straightforward pathway to a domestic heaven. Polygamy confuses things. Indeed, most scholars have seen it as a backlash against the new sentimental family, an attempt to restore male authority and tribal kinship against an ideal of marriage as two birds in one nest cheerfully feeding their chirping offspring. Approaching the issue from the vantage point of theology, Kathleen Flake has seen it as a manifestation of priesthood that included women as well as men.31 A closer look at paintings, mourning embroideries, family records, letters, and even sentimental parlor songs suggests something quite different—that cultural practices associated with the cult of sensibility may have helped early Latter-day Saints embrace a system that to others seemed scandalously retrograde. Consider, for example, a popular nineteenth-century parlor song, “Little Annie” by the American composer Stephen Foster. Although the song deals with the death of a loved one, it isn’t clear who it is that is mourning Annie’s loss. Is it a lover? A parent? A sibling? Or a beloved friend? It is impossible to tell. Because parlor songs were commonly sung by both sexes, the lyrics are perhaps intentionally ambiguous. Thou wilt come no more, gentle Annie, Like a flower thy spirit did depart; Thou art gone, alas! like the many That have bloomed in the summer of my heart. Shall we nevermore behold thee; Never hear thy winning voice again— When the Springtime comes, gentle Annie, When the wild flowers are scattered o’er the plain? We have roamed and loved mid the bowers When thy downy cheeks were in their bloom; Now I stand alone mid the flowers While they mingle their perfumes o’er thy tomb.32

Some lines suggest a male lover; he and Annie have “roamed and loved mid the bowers.” But the use of the plural “we” in the second stanza undercuts that assumption, ­suggesting that the mourner could be a good friend recalling how pairs or groups roamed and loved amid the bowers, a theme well supported in diaries from the period. Moreover, the first stanza describes Annie as one among many who had bloomed in  the mourner’s heart. Many lovers? Many friends? Or even many children? The

Remember Me   569 ambiguity allows anyone who has ever loved and lost to identify with the singer. As a writer in a popular ladies’ magazine observed in 1852, “Music is the voice of the great social heart.”33 In a poem written to her friend Eleanor Bringhurst, Mormonism’s sentimental poet Eliza Snow portrayed individual bonds as nodes in a vast network of loving relationships that spread across the face of the earth and “from earth to heav’n,/And still extending on from world to world/Unto creation’s undefin’d extent.”34 Latter-day Saints believed that very few persons—basically only those who had absolute knowledge of Christ’s divinity yet rejected him—would be damned. All others would be arranged in ascending kingdoms according to their condition and would continue to progress. Those who had not received the gospel in this life would hear about it in the next, and if those still on earth performed vicarious ordinances in their behalf, they would meet all the conditions of salvation. For Latter-day Saints, the restoration of priesthood authority made sacred what might have been mere sentimental bonds on earth. Thus, Wilford Woodruff used a ring of lacy hearts, much like those in friendship tokens, to mark temple covenants. Inside each heart were four keys representing human bonds ratified by priesthood authority. A different rendition of the same idea appears in a paper token Eliza Snow created for “President Brigham Young” and his lady “Presidentess Mary Ann Young” on the occasion of their sealing in the Nauvoo Temple. Brigham and Mary Ann had been married for years and had a houseful of children. Now that marriage would be authorized for all eternity through a sealing ceremony in the Nauvoo Temple. To signify that event, Eliza overlapped two hearts cut almost exactly like those in conventional valentines, working them together in a kind of love knot in the center with a key and an arrow. In her poetry, as in Woodruff ’s diary, arrows generally signified death. Thus, love bound through priesthood power conquered death.35 Some paintings and ornamental family records feature a single couple and their progeny. Others encompass additional relatives, including persons that letter writers like to describe as “friends.” In a high-style painting like John Singleton Copley’s portrait of his wife, children, and in-laws, the various persons lean toward each other, arms entwined. In naïve portraits from rural New England, linked arms manifest a similar focus on emotional connection. Although such paintings often maintain traditional gender divisions, lining up males on one side of the scene and females on the other, they emphasize affection as well an order, an affection seldom confined to a single pair.36 Mourning embroideries are even more expansive. Often it is difficult to know who is doing the mourning—a parent, a sibling, a lover, or a friend. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain left an unforgettable description of a memorial drawing by the fictional Miss Grangerford, which displayed a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the arm-pits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a  black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee

570   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.”37

His description of her work offered a surprisingly accurate depiction of motifs ­common in both silk embroideries and watercolors in the 1820s and 1830s. Whether ­rendered in stitchery or paint, mourning pictures almost always showed a group ­surrounding an obelisk or urn. Sometimes they held handkerchiefs before their faces to signify weeping. Usually, there were weeping willows or cypress trees in the ­background. In Mary  B. Danforth’s embroidered “Memorial to Enoch  H.  Long,” completed in 1826, there are twelve persons, seven males and five females, lined up according to height, walking toward a massive urn. Even the smallest male wears a top hat, and all the females wear black bonnets. Every one of them clutches a carefully embroidered white handkerchief. One can imagine the chorus of stifled sobs created by this remarkable display of unity across boundaries of age, gender, and family status. The inscription reads: “Forgive, blest shade, the tributary tear, that mourns your exit from a world like this: Forgive the wish that would have kept thee here, and stayed thy progress to the realms of bliss.”38 Passages in the diary of Hosea Stout, a Kentuckian who embraced Mormonism in the 1830s, display similar effusions. As he was leaving Nauvoo in 1846, he passed the place where he had buried his first wife, Samantha, seven years before. There was no monument on her grave, just a ragged fence, but for Stout, the emotional landscape was very much like that portrayed in antebellum embroideries. This was near to the place where I lived at the time my wife (Surmantha) [Samantha] died and was the place of many a mournful hour to me in days gone by when by her death I was deprived of all and the last bosom friend which I then had on earth in who[m] I could implicitly confide . . . I passed by the grave which was near to the road. I found the paling still round it which I put there seven years ago as a last token of respect due to her until the first resurrection . . . 39

Standing beside the grave, Stout participated in an almost universal ritual of mourning. But his conversion to Mormonism had added a startling new twist to this familiar story. The diary continued: How little did I then think that in so short a space of time, I should be married twice more to her who was now dead through the administration and kind office of the one who took her place in the flesh.

When Stout said he had been “twice married” to one who was dead, he was referring to vicarious rites performed first in the room over Joseph Smith’s red brick store in Nauvoo and then repeated after Smith’s death in the newly completed Nauvoo Temple. His second wife, Louisa, had not only stood proxy for Samantha in a sealing that affirmed the

Remember Me   571 eternal nature of her marriage to Hosea, she had participated in a sealing ritual that bound him to two additional women. Stout, like Job, had been more than repaid for the loss of his wife. As he explained: When I left this place I went disconsolate and alone mourning her untimely death and my own lonesome condition. But I went to Nauvoo to keep the commandments of God . . . Instead of being deprived of my last bosom friend I now had three equally dear and confiding to me.40

For Stout there was no boundary between plurality and sentimentality. Eliza Snow expressed similar ideas in a poem written for her friend Luke Johnson, whose wife Susan also died on the journey from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters, the Mormon refugee camp in what is now Nebraska. Eliza’s poem began with the conventional image of the grave as a portal to heaven, assuring the mourning husband that his beloved Susan had “gone above.” Then it took a peculiarly Mormon twist: God in kindness has appointed You another loving bride And in time to come will many More be clinging to your side.41

Stout used the term “confiding,” Snow “clinging.” Both terms imply a kind of intimacy usually associated with monogamy. It is surprising to see polygamists lavishing affection in the way ordinary lovers might do. Some restrained themselves for fear of seeming to favor one wife over another. Others lavished love with astonishing abandon. In 1851, Parley Pratt left Salt Lake City for a mission to Chile, taking two wives with him. Five others with their young children stayed behind in Salt Lake City. Overjoyed to receive letters from home, he responded with his trademark enthusiasm, “I am now inclined to believe that our father in heaven never associated in this Lower world of fallen nature, spirits more conjenial, Lovely and happy in each other, than we are as a family.” He praised Sarah for her improved writing, told Agatha that her letter was like herself “all Love and affection,” and admitted that he had recently dreamed about Mary. “O Could I get my mouth as near her lips as I did in a dream, I would immediately snatch one good Long hearty kiss. Lest in stoping to smile into her eyes I should awake with my mouth within about an inch of hers and go without a kiss as I did in my dream.” He also dreamed about Belinda. Troubled that in the dream she seemed vexed about something, he remembered that the last time he saw her, she was “seting in my lap with her arms around my neck in a meak and humble spirit and she said: ‘comfort me.’ And I did comfort her, with kind words while I enfolded her in my arms and pressed her to my heart.”42 If only he were home to do the same. Pratt’s letter reminds us that the past is indeed a foreign country. But in some ways his letter is no more alien to modern sensibilities than the one Mary Woolley wrote her husband, Edwin, in the spring of 1844 not long after he took a young English convert named Ellen Wilding as a plural wife. Woolley’s descendants believe Mary went home to

572   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich her Quaker family because she was upset over plural marriage, but the letter she wrote Edwin is expansive in its expression of love. “Oh, Edwin my heart is with thee and thee alone,” she wrote, “thee knows that I love no other on earth, for thee I live and thee I die, and I don’t know as I shall ever see thee in this world but I know that I shall in the world to come where no one can separate us for God has joined us together.” Then, remarkably, she added, “Give my best love to Elin and kiss her for me.”43 She may have resisted plural marriage, but she was not going to admit to anything but love for the former household helper who had become her husband’s plural wife.

Mormons, Patriarchy, and the Sacred In the practice of plurality, sentimentality operated on many registers—husband to wives, wives to wives, friend to friend. However, one should not confuse sentimental expressions with behavior. There were conflicts and divorces—often bitter ones—in plural as well as monogamous marriages. And though the concept of friendship implied reciprocity, patriarchy prevailed. A man could have multiple wives, but a woman could be sealed eternally to only one man. When asked why that was so, Latter-day Saints switched abruptly from the language of the heart to the logic of the human reproductive system. While a man could sire many children, a woman had to invest many months in birthing and nursing each one. For that reason, plurality of husbands would not work. But even those who invoked biology as the foundation of their argument quickly reverted to sentimentality in portraying the consequences. In the words of Parley Pratt’s plural wife Belinda Marden, “The strength of the female constitution is deigned to flow in a stream of life, to nourish and sustain the embryo, to bring it forth, and to nurse it on her bosom . . . till mature age and approaching change of worlds, would render it necessary for her to cease to be fruitful, and give her to rest awhile, and enjoy a tranquil life in the midst of that family circle, endeared to her by so many ties.”44 One imagines a pious mother seated in a comfortable rocking chair surrounded by her family, as in the little portrait of the Job Hill family from New Hampshire. Among the Mormons, the concept of an aged mother evoked the memory of Lucy Mack Smith, the prophet’s mother. She was a figure of reverence because of her piety and her early support for her son, but also of pathos because four of her sons, including Joseph, had died in the service of the Church. Shortly after Joseph and his brother Hyrum were murdered, Wilford Woodruff visited Mother Smith. Heartbroken over the loss of her son, she asked him for a blessing. In his prayer, he thanked God that he had had the privilege of blessing “the greatest Mother in Israel,” promising her that she would “be had I honorable remembrance forever in the Congregations of the righteous.”45 When the Nauvoo Temple was completed in 1846, a watercolor portrait of her seated in her rocking chair may have been among the paintings exhibited there (Figure 28.3). Instead of a family record on the wall behind her, the artist portrayed a fragment of papyrus from the Egyptian records she had displayed in her home to visitors willing to pay a penny.

Remember Me   573 Mormons had no peers in their celebration of motherhood. Motherhood was next to godhood. In fact, it was godhood, as Eliza Snow taught the saints in the Nauvoo poem that became a beloved Mormon hymn. “O My Father” laid out the entire narrative of salvation, from the pre-existence to postmortal life, arguing for the existence of a mother and father in heaven. The first stanza offered a conventional invitation to God as father and then moved toward Mormon doctrine by alluding to the concept of a pre-existence. O my father, though that dwellest In the high and glorious place; When shall I regain thy presence, And again behold thy face? In thy holy habitation Did my spirit once reside? In my first primeval childhood Was I nurtur’d near thy side?

It then took a startling turn, reasoning toward an affirmation of the existence of a mother as well as a father in heaven. I had learned to call thee father Through thy spirit from on high; But until the key of knowledge Was restor’d, I knew not why. In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought make reason stare; Truth is reason—truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there.

The last verse contemplated the end of earth life, when the speaker would return to the place where she began as a spirit child nurtured by heavenly parents. Contemplating a joyous return, she asked: “Father, mother, may I meet you/In your royal courts on high?” No one knows when this poem was first set to music, but in Utah, it was sung to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Gentle Annie.”46 To the end of her life Zina Huntington keep a woven hair ornament and accompanying poem made by a friend named Sophia Bull: Dear friend accept the lock of hair Which you so oft have seen me wear. I’ve worn it when in friendships bower And passed with you the social hour This little present kindly take And keep it for the givers sake And when this lock of hair you see My dear dear friend do remember me.47

574   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich In the 1880s, women in the little Mormon town of Manti, an early settlement south of Salt Lake City that in the 1860s had welcomed hundreds of Scandinavian converts, offered a framed bouquet made of their own hair to the newly constructed temple in their town. The accompanying inscription echoed those exchanged for decades among friends: “These locks of hair, O Lord, thou hast seen us wear, so now we commit them to thy holy Temple’s care.” What looks like a golden vase holding the hair flowers is actually a miniature baptismal font complete with supporting oxen.48 This object and others like it demonstrate the intersection of spirituality and sentimentality in Latter-day Saint practice, and, more broadly, the capacity of human beings to adapt and transform popular cultural practices to new needs. Historians sometimes describe Mormonism as antithetical to nineteenth-century sentimentality. Without question, Latter-day Saints rejected the concept of marriage as a union of “two birds in one nest,” but that concept was but one strand in the pervasive reframing of human relations that emerged in England and America in the eighteenth century through the concept of sensibility. Far from being antithetical to Mormonism, much of early nineteenth-century sentimentalism actually supported it.

Notes 1. Psalms 106:44; 1 Samuel 1:11; Luke 23:42; Job 14:13; Judges 16:28; Nehemiah 13:31. 2 . Vance Randolph and May Kennedy McCord, “Autograph Albums in the Ozarks,” Journal of American Folklore 61 (April–June 1948): 183–184. 3. W. W. Beauchamp, “Rhymes from Old Power Horns,” The Journal of American Folklore 2, no. 5 (April–June 1889): 119. 4. Katherine  H.  Wintemberg and W.  J.  Wintemberg, “Folk-lore from Grey County, Ontario,”  Journal of American Folklore 31, no. 119 (January–March 1918): 83–124; Annie G. Gilchrist, “Note on the ‘Lady Drest in Green’ and Other Fragments of Tragic Ballads and Folk-Tales Preserved amongst Children,” Journal of the Folk-Song Society 6 (1919): 87; “Folk-lore in the News,” Western Folklore 10, no. 1 (January 1951): 83–84; Richard Wall, “Fleming’s Inscription,” James Joyce Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1982): 348–349; Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (New York: Doubleday, 1996); National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Sampler Survey, http://www.nscda.org/samplers/samp-home. php; Jennifer Davis Heap, “ ‘Remember Me’: Six Samplers in the National Archives,” Prologue Magazine 34, no. 3 (2002): http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/ fall/samplers-1.html#f11. 5. Classic works on sensibility include Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); G.  J.  Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11 (1999): 63–81. For a ­succinct summary and a more detailed bibliography, see Julie Ellison, “Sensibility,” in A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, ed. Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 38–53. For period uses of the term “drop a tear” in the United States, see The Search after Happiness: A Pastoral Drama; from the Poetry of Miss More. By a Lady in Connecticut (Catskill, NY: M.  Croswell & Co., 1789), 29; and William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1794), v. 1, 61; v. 2, 37.

Remember Me   575 6. Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of American’s Romantic Self-Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 7–8, 18–21. Quote from Smith on p. 16. 7. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man: In Four Epistles to H.  St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (New York: Smith & Forman, 1809), 65–66. This is but one of many editions of Pope’s work published in the early United States. 8. Quoted in Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 20. 9. Ellison, “Sensibility,” 38–39, 44–47. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80–110, is a succinct account of the relationship between print culture and private experience. Also see Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sarah Knott, Sensibility and  the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (1987): 37–58; Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and for examples of vernacular objects conveying these values, Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, Ruth Wolfe, 2 vol. (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2006). 10. Quoted in Howard, “What Is Sentimentality,” 74. 11. Recent brief overviews of the Latter-day Saint story include Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012). 12. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 206), 57. 13. On Smith’s translation projects in the context of the time, see Lydia Willsky, “The [Un) Plain Bible,” Nova Religio 17, no. 4 (2014): 13–36; and David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an official Latter-day Saint account of the Book of Abraham, see “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” http://lds.org/topics/translationand-hsitoricity-of-the book of abraham?lang+eng. 14. Dean May, “A Demographic Portrait of the Mormons, 1830–1980,” in The New Mormon History, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992), 121–125; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Newsroom, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/ facts-and-statistics/ 15. Caroline Hill, “Job Hill and Family,” Peterborough, NH, 1837. Peterborough Historical Society. 16. Charles Albert Hill, Peterboro N.H., 1842, New Hampshire Death Records, Ancestry.com; Selinda Hill, “Illustrated Album of Poetic Sentiments,” Skinner Auction 2482, November 8, 2009; D.  Brenton Simonds, “Families in Portraiture,” in The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England (Boston: New England Genealogical Society, 2002), 92–93, 111 n11. 17. For more on Woodruff, see my forthcoming book, A House Full of Females. 18. Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, ed. Scott  G.  Kenney (Midvale, UT: Signature Books, 1983), vol. 1, 263. 19. The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: 1989), 40, 126. Current editions of Joseph Smith’s revelations, including the Book of Mormon, are available at http://www.lds.org/scriptures. Also see transcripts, notes, references, and facsimiles of manuscripts at http://www.josephsmithpapers.org.

576   Laurel Thatcher Ulrich 20. Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, vol. 1, 263–269. 21. Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, vol. 2, 271, 272; Phoebe Whittemore Carter Woodruff Autograph Book, 1838–1844, Church History Library, MS 90, 1. 22. This becomes clear in a comparison of two of his manuscript journals in Wilford Woodruff Journals and Papers, MS 1352, Box 1, Fd. 2, and Wilford Woodruff Papers, Box 1, fd 9, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. 23. Leonora Cannon Taylor to John Taylor, March 12, 1840, John Taylor Papers, Church History Library, MS 1345, Box 1, Folder 1. 24. Sarah Melissa Kimball Autograph Album, Church History Library, MS 131. 25. Doctrine and Covenants, section 128, verse 8, 260. 26. Mary H. Reed friendship token, Zina Brown Card Papers, CHL. 27. Wilford Woodruff Journal, vol. 2, 382–388; Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 452–458, 532–537. 28. Doctrine and Covenants, 183. This is one of nine sections that use similar language. 29. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 471; Doctrine and Covenants, section 130, verse 2, 264. 30. Malachi 4: 5–6; Franklin D. Day, “Elijah,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, http://www.eom. byu.edu 31. Kathleen Flake, “The Emotional and Priestly Logic of Plural Marriage,” 15th Annual Arrington Lecture, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, October 1, 2009, http://digitalcommons.usu. edu/arrington_lecture/15, and “The Development of Early Latter-day Saint Marriage Rites, 1831–53,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1 (January 2015): 77–102. On the concept of a domestic heaven as it developed from the mid-eighteenth century onward, see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), chapters 7–8, with a brief reprise on twentieth-century Mormonism: 313–322. 32. Stephen Collins Foster, Gentle Annie: A Ballad (New York: First, Pond & Co, 1856). 33. Susan Key, “‘Forever in Our Ears’; Nature, Voice, and Sentiment in Stephen Foster’s Parlor Style,” American Music 30, no. 3 (2012): 295–297. 34. Eliza R. Snow, The Complete Poetry, ed. Jill Mulvay Derr and Karen Lynn Davidson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2009), 376, 377. 35. Wilford Woodruff Journal, vol. 2, 345; Eliza R. Snow, Paper Token, Brigham Young Papers, Church History Library. 36. John Singleton Copley, The Copley Family, c. 1788. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; James Osborne, Libby Family Record, Portland, Maine, 1830. Maine Historical Society; Rueben Barnes, Bennet Family Record, Portland, Maine, 1804. American Folk Art Collection, Smithsonian. 37. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1884), chapter 17, http:// www.gutenberg.org. 38. Mary B. Danforth, “Memorial to Enoch H. Long, 1826,” in Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence, vol. 2, 14–15, 362. 39. On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844–1889, ed. Juanita Brooks (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008, orig. 1964), 122. 40. On the Mormon Frontier, 122, 127. 41. Snow, Complete Poetry, 347, 348. 42. Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow, Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 293, 304, 305. 43. Preston W. Parkinson, The Utah Woolley Family (Salt Lake City, UT: priv. print, 1967), 195. 44. [Belinda Pratt], Defence of Polygamy by a Lady of Utah (1854), 6; David J. Whittaker, “Early Mormon Polygamy Defenses,” Journal of Mormon History 11 (1984): 53–57.

Remember Me   577 45. Wilford Woodruff Journal, vol. 2, 450–452. 46. Snow, Complete Poetry, 312–313; Karen LynnDavidson, Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1988), 295. 47. Sally A. Bull to Miss Zina Huntington, no date. Zina Card Brown Family papers, Ms 4780, Box 3, Folder 17, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. 48. Mary Wintch, Manti Temple Hair Wreath, 1885. LDS Museum of History and Art, LDS 85-244-2. A picture of the wreath can be found in Richard G. Oman and Robert O. Davis, Images of Faith: Art of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1995), 38.

Bibliography Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Bule, Steven. Sutcliffe Maudsley: Nauvoo Profilist. Orem, UT: A Better Place, 2002. Burstein, Andrew. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of American’s Romantic Self-Image. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred  A.  Knopf, 2006. Ellison, Julie. “Sensibility.” In A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright, 37–54. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Flake, Kathleen. “The Development of Early Latter-day Saint Marriage Rites, 1831–53.” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1 (January 2015): 77–102. Howard, June. “What Is Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999): 63–81. Katcher, Jane, David A. Schorsch, and Ruth Wolfe, eds. Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana. 2 vol. Seattle: Marquand Books, 2006. McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Oman, Richard G., and Robert O. Davis. Images of Faith: Art of the Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1995. Simonds, D.  Brenton, and Peter Benes, eds. The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England. Boston: New England Genealogical Society, 2002. Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A House Full of Females: Mormon Diaries, 1835–1870. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

chapter 29

Housi ng History The Colonial Revival as Consumer Culture* Thomas Denenberg

The development of a culture of consumption in the decades that bracketed the turn of the twentieth century created unprecedented opportunity for the dissemination of images, objects, and texts that engendered historical consciousness in the United States. Antiquarian activities, once the province of social outliers, the wealthy, or a creative class such as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or painter Edward Lamson Henry, became normative behavior in the new middle-class America. Gathering, ­collecting, and sorting historical material culture, an end unto itself in the nineteenth century, gave way to an aesthetic that prized real and imaginary “native” forms in a wide variety of media. Entrepreneurial individuals, including the minister turned antimodern colporteur Wallace Nutting, employed novel platforms such as advertising, department stores, mail-order merchandising, and mass-market publishing to encourage and fulfill middle-class desires for commodities and myths that answered contemporary social needs in an era of rapid economic and geographic change. The aggregate of these myriad influences is most often described as the Colonial Revival—a movement so popular in America that it is today popularly assumed to be monolithic, sui generis, and whole upon arrival rather than a complex and carefully constructed collective memory focused on idealized notions of domestic organization in an age of everincreasing cultural heterogeneity.1 The hegemony of the Colonial Revival has conspired to complicate a compelling ­theory of operation for the phenomenon. Frequently described as a constellation of aesthetic styles and building types, the Colonial Revival is most often taken to be an outgrowth of nationalist celebrations marking the United States centennial in 1876.2 Americans, according to this paradigm, looked to their past in an act of collective filial piety to create common symbols for the emerging industrial nation. The Colonial Revival became the national idiom in under a generation by means of an increasing and concerted interest in and exposure to historical material culture that produced a desire to replicate landscapes, buildings, and visual and decorative arts with a varying degree of specificity and success.

Housing History   579 Although the transcendent popularity of the Colonial Revival in the built environment has elicited considered and considerable attention from students and scholars, relatively little energy has been devoted to the visual culture of the phenomenon, with but a handful of articles or monographs exploring historicist American painting, sculpture, or photography. Furthermore, the ideologies embedded in the movement remain largely unexamined. Unpacking the work of popular twentieth-century architect Royal Barry Wills and painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses places the Colonial Revival on a  trajectory of consumer culture that begins with literary antiquarianism in the ­mid-nineteenth century and ends in the post–World War II suburb—a stage set for what the popular historian James Truslow Adams termed “the American dream.”3 Tracing the contours of the Colonial Revival over the course of a century demonstrates the persistence of the movement from an era of sentimental culture to a modernist moment in American history and graphically illustrates the centrality of domestic life to the collective ideal described by Adams.

The Literary Industrial Complex Edward Lamson Henry’s 1868 painting The Old Clock on the Stairs is a paradigm for the study of the role of images, objects, and texts in the service of literary antiquarianism, a movement that held sway in America in the mid-nineteenth century (Figure 29.1). The painting is a visual rendering of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1845 well-known poem by the same name some two decades after its initial publication and at an important juncture in American culture. After the Civil War, the country moved swiftly from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial economy. This sea change produced a competition between different conceptions of time, one deriving from the cycles of nature, the other to the discipline of the machine.4 The machine in question, an eighteenthcentury tall case clock, however, marks time in a soothing, if forbidding manner in the poem. In staging this historical drama, Longfellow and Henry make use of sentimental culture to provide a kind of rhetorical cover for modernity. The painting itself is small, a seductive cabinet-sized work that rewards close examination. Set in a hoary, eighteenth-century Philadelphia interior, the composition mirrors the cyclical structure of the poem (“through days of death and days of birth”), marking the passages of life. In a rear parlor sits an elderly woman, bathed in golden glow, reading a paper. A shaft of light transverses the hallway, spilling onto the foot of the stairs, inviting the viewer’s eye to climb to the landing and toward a fanciful tall case clock, with sun and moon phase works. The clock, the most complicated, expensive, and impressive object in the domestic interior of the eighteenth century, is rendered in quaint context in both the poem (“somewhat back from the village street, stands the old-fashioned country-set”) and through association with the kindly looking woman and her feline companion. The great timepiece is anything but obsolete itself, however, ­sitting in shadow and imposing in stature in the painting. Its role in the poem is even darker—even threatening as each verse is punctuated with the refrain, “Forever—never! Never—forever!”

580   Thomas Denenberg

Figure 29.1.  Edward Lamson Henry, Old Clock on the Stairs, 1868. Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 × 16 1/2 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum, museum purchase, acquired from Maxim Karolik. 1957–690.41.

Keeping time, of course, changes over time. In the eighteenth century, only the elite could afford a timepiece, certainly one as grand as illustrated by Longfellow and Henry. By 1845 the “middling” classes might hope to own a clock at home, and by 1868, mechanized labor, train schedules, and industrial production all conspired to make watching the clock an economic imperative. The relentless rhythm of Longfellow’s unsettling

Housing History   581 refrain (“Forever—never! Never—forever!”) paces larger cycles embedded in both works in less obvious ways. The very delivery system for each man’s vision proved to be predicated on a rhythmic pulse of modernity—the rotary press, a technological advance of quantum proportions.5 Not only did the development of economical means and methods of literary production allow Longfellow to become the most popular poet in the English language—virtually overnight in the antebellum era—but it also provided a forum for Henry, whose painting A Lover of Old China first appeared in popular consciousness in the form of an illustration in Clarence Cook’s influential volume The House Beautiful in 1881. A Lover of Old China from 1880 depicts two gray-haired connoisseurs standing in front of a corner cupboard, regarding the marks on an assembly of porcelain (Figure 29.2). The elderly woman—identified by Henry some years later as an aunt who lived to be 101— appears to have recently laid down her knitting, much like Henry’s earlier painting.6 The subject illustrates a subtle but important shift in American culture. In the antebellum era, such antiquarian activities were avant-garde—Longfellow himself was chided by a visiting critic as purchasing “trumpery antiquities” when he began collecting Queen Anne furniture for the Georgian mansion that was a wedding gift from his father-in-law, textile baron Nathan Appleton, in 1845.7 By the time Clarence Cook anthologized his writings as The House Beautiful, he wrote of “the rage that has sprung up of late for ‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers’—a kind of thing till very lately ignored, if not despised, in the bumptious arrogance of our social youthfulness,—it adds inestimably to the value of sideboard, andirons, and old china, if they have come to us by descent and haven’t had to be hunted up in a chaise. But everybody can’t have a grandfather, not things that came over in the ‘Mayflower,’ and those of us who have not drawn these prized in life lottery must do the best that we can under the circumstances.”8 By 1880, antiques had moved from being talismans of historical association— George Washington’s camp equipment on display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia—to an aestheticized commodity fit for the home.9 In the following decades a bibliography would coalesce and popularize knowledge once the province of wealthy collectors—like those depicted in Henry’s painting—and make it available to the rapidly expanding middle class. All that awaited was a mechanism to satisfy the demands of this newly scaled market for objects that engendered and reinforced an idealized colonial past.

Consumed by the Past Wallace Nutting, a Harvard-educated Congregational minister of modest reputation, changed careers in 1904 and became a household name. By the 1920s, the erstwhile clergyman’s fluid signature could be found coast to coast throughout the middle-class American home, penciled on hand-tinted photographs; branded into reproduction “colonial” furniture; and printed on the title page of sixteen books and the cover of innumerable magazines such as House Beautiful, Antiques, and the Saturday Evening Post.

582   Thomas Denenberg

Figure 29.2.  Edward Lamson Henry, A Lover of Old China, 1880. Oil on academy board, 12 × 12 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum, museum purchase. 1959–274. Photography by Andy Duback.

Historically minded consumers could keep track of the days on Wallace Nutting ­calendars, send season’s greetings on Wallace Nutting Christmas cards, and even visit five “restored” museum houses operating under the Wallace Nutting banner in three New England states. Wallace Nutting himself could be found preaching to college students in Kentucky, women’s groups in Maryland, and audiences throughout the United States on the idealized values of a time and a place he called “Old America.”

Housing History   583 Old America, a deft combination of myth and materialism, served as a master narrative for the minister’s interconnected series of historically themed business and scholarly endeavors. An evocative mélange of invented traditions and appropriated forms, Old America provided the entrepreneurial cleric with a new pulpit within the growing consumer culture of the early twentieth century. Part halcyon sermon and part corporate facade, Old America provided the forum for Wallace Nutting (the minister) to become “Wallace Nutting” (a trademark) and, in doing so, he organized and energized the market for nostalgic imagery as purveyed by Longfellow and Henry a generation earlier and anticipated the authority of the Colonial Revival at mid-century. This transformation had an unlikely genesis. Nutting, after two decades of service to the Congregational church in cities throughout the country, developed neurasthenia— an enervating malady of the new professional class.10 Increasingly enfeebled, the minister turned to his hobbies in search of therapeutic relaxation. Nutting and his wife, Mariet, toured the mountains and the coast by coach and, later, by automobile. They joined the throngs who took up the safety bicycle as a means of taking in the fresh air. Nutting became a dedicated amateur photographer, contributing to magazine competitions and exhibiting his work in a small print shop. Nothing worked to soothe his nerves, however, and Nutting stepped down from the pulpit of the Union Congregational Church in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1904. After a year in New York City, living in a studio on Twenty-third Street while trying to turn his avocation into an artistic career, Nutting (sicker than ever) fled the city and became an acolyte of what came to be called the country life movement. He moved up the rail line to Southbury, Connecticut, and purchased a derelict farm in 1905. As Kate Sanborn noted in her 1892 book Adopting an Abandoned Farm, droves of Americans, “weary of boarding at seashore and mountain, tired of traveling, and hating hotels” made the move “from Gotham to Gooseville.”11 Nutting and his wife restored the house in short order, drained an adjacent swamp, and christened the property “Nuttinghame” in a show of characteristic modesty. The minister made a go of becoming a gentleman farmer, purchasing livestock and constructing an elaborate cattle barn just over the hill from the main house. A passage from Nutting’s 1936 autobiography lends a sense of the couple as agrarian dilettantes: “The cattle were selected for beauty of black and white banding; the horses bought for handsome heads. The sheep and lambs because we loved them. If an animal would not pose for a picture, it was not for us.”12 Idealizations of agricultural life gave way to hard economic reality, however, and Nutting turned to photography as a means of support. The dabbling minister perfected a technique for hand-coloring his platinum prints by sizing them with amyl acetate, or “banana oil,” and tinting the individual photographs with commercially available Windsor and Newton pigments.13 He published ever-larger catalogs of his platinotypes in 1906, 1908, and 1912. By 1912, consumer demand was so great that the catalog reached ninety-seven pages in length and contained approximately nine hundred images with commentary about the historic beauties of select worthy locales, such as the upland apple orchards of New England.

584   Thomas Denenberg To meet demand for the photographs, Nutting hired a cadre of young women from the surrounding countryside and converted Nuttinghame into a compound that resembled the Arts and Crafts communes then springing up in such places as East Aurora, New York, and New Clairvoux, Massachusetts. Nutting wrote of the change: “when my picture venture grew, we moved out from the house [to the barn], cleansed the cement basement floor, where the farm animals had been kept, and finished the barn above into two stories, the first for work rooms, the second for dormitories for the girls from a distance who colored the pictures. With a chaperon and a cook we had under one roof a dormitory, a studio, offices, and, in the basement, storage.”14 By 1914, Nutting’s operation had outgrown Southbury and the converted cow barn. The minister and several of his colorists relocated to Framingham, Massachusetts, and it was from there that Nutting issued his largest catalog, the “Expansible” edition in 1915. Employing a clever flexible binding and an open system of stock numbers, Nutting could add to the catalog at any time without the expense of reprinting the volume. Surviving Expansible catalogs contain around eight hundred images grouped in thematic categories with a few recommended “bestselling” combinations. Prints were available in standard sizes with a variety of framing options to individualize the purchase. With a modern production and delivery system in place by 1915, Nutting began selling photographs hand over fist. Nutting offered an image to fit every aesthetic and a picture to fit every budget. There were views of abbeys and cathedrals, mountains and streams, bridges and blossoms. All in all, he offered nineteen categories of domestic art photography. The photographs sold for between $1.25 and $20.00, making them more respectable than a chromolithograph, but far less expensive than an easel painting. Approximately 20 percent of the 1915 catalog was dedicated to one category—“colonials” (Figure 29.3). These costumed tableaux became Nutting’s bread-and-butter product throughout the teens and into the 1920s. Although Nutting exposed literally thousands of different “colonial” views, two broad generalizations can be made about this rubric. In a world of “new women,” suffragettes, and flappers, Nutting’s female models were invariably posed in two conservative modes, the productive and the genteel. The working women are good mothers, sewing, cooking, or spinning like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Priscilla from The Courtship of Miles Standish or John Greenleaf Whittier’s mother in Snowbound. The minister’s more elegant women sit as eighteenth-century ladies of leisure, objects in the interior not unlike a chair, candle stand, or looking glass. Productive or genteel, both tropes served as archetypes of traditional female behavior in the very period when such roles were being actively renegotiated in the public sphere. In this way, Nutting’s colonials performed similar cultural work to that of the Boston School painters. Just as Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Joseph DeCamp provided wealthy Bostonians with timeless visions of docile women in quiescent, almost hermetic interiors, Nutting offered his middle-class customers a view of the home that reified idealized gender roles.15 Given their symbolic program, it comes as no surprise to discover that Nutting marketed his “colonials” as wedding gifts in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Housing History   585

Figure 29.3.  Trimming the Pie Crust, 1915. Photograph by Wallace Nutting. Courtesy of Historic New England.

As the photography line grew, Nutting became concerned that his interiors lacked a sense of authenticity. He exposed a series of images in the Cooper-Frost-Austin House, an early acquisition of the fledgling Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). Capturing a step in the most American of activities, Trimming the Pie Crust is one such photograph. The minister’s relationship with William Sumner Appleton of SPNEA soured over a spat concerning Nutting’s attempt to hire Appleton’s driver, however, and Nutting moved to assemble his own collection of house museums, calling the endeavor “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.” The chain of houses comprised five buildings in three New England states purchased by the minister between 1914 and 1916. With the chain, Nutting attempted to organize an auto tour of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture by including structures such as the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, Connecticut; the Wentworth-Gardner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and, in Massachusetts, the Hazen Garrison House in Haverhill, the Cutler-Bartlet House in Newburyport, and the Ironmaster’s House in Saugus. Nutting undertook extensive restoration work at each property, often reconfiguring the buildings with the assistance of Boston architect Henry Charles Dean. As with his personal homes, Nutting again displayed a predilection for anglophile names, christening the Saugus property “Broadhearth.”

586   Thomas Denenberg Not only did each link in the chain serve as a backdrop for Nutting photographs, but each played a role in the larger consumer empire of Old America. The WentworthGardner and Cutler-Bartlet houses, for example, served as exhibition spaces for ­platinum prints, and Broadhearth evolved into a “front of the store” identity for the minister’s manufacturing endeavors. Nutting established a forge at Broadhearth, employing an English blacksmith named Edward Guy to produce reproduction ­ironwork. Recognizing the need for high-end wrought iron hardware in restoration work, Nutting also sought to cultivate the new construction market. This was the era of the small house movement, and a pair of Nutting hinges lent an air of authenticity to many a cape, saltbox, and gambrel roof cottage. Far more important than the picturesque smithy, however, was a factory that Nutting acquired on adjacent property in Saugus. There he combined a second photography studio with a woodworking shop. Having gathered a sizable collection of furniture to use as props in his colonials and to decorate his museum houses, Nutting prototyped them and went into the reproduction furniture business. Nutting hit upon an ingenious pattern with the furniture company—a pattern of marketing and production that he repeated time and time again. In 1917, he authored a guidebook to American Windsor furniture—one of the first specialty texts on the subject.16 A year later he issued a catalog offering dozens of Windsor chairs in a number of historic styles. At the same time, tourists could visit the originals in his chain of houses for a twenty-five-cent admission fee. Nutting branched out to offer seventeenth-century forms by the time of his 1924 catalog, marketing the furniture as a “Great American Idea.” High-end pieces, Nutting’s reproductions far surpassed the more typical Grand Rapids mass-market offerings, and they were positioned to appeal to informed consumers. As with the Windsor chair market, Nutting provided a scholarly context, publishing The Furniture of the Pilgrim Century in 1921. This weighty volume, and later publications, provided yet another way for the entrepreneurial minister to realize a return on his investment in the furniture arena. Cross marketing became the watchword in Old America as Nutting sold these tangible history lessons for the home using the most up-to-date methods. He issued mail-order catalogs from Saugus and later Framingham when he consolidated the business there in the early 1920s. The minister made widespread use of department stores as arbiters of taste and purveyors of home furnishings throughout the country. Temples of consumer culture in the early twentieth century, department stores in Baltimore, Maryland; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Omaha, Nebraska, are but a few that carried the integrated Nutting lines. Nutting advertised widely in the growing field of shelter magazines, often employing the George Batten Company of Madison Avenue to promote his business.17 His ads appeared throughout the 1920s and reached an apogee with the promise of “Beauty, Construction, and Style” in a series of ads for The Magazine Antiques in 1926. Nutting also made strategic use of placements, contributing articles to Antiques and other magazines. In this covert way, the minister played an important role in the organization of the Americana market in the 1920s.

Housing History   587 Throughout this period of economic growth, Nutting expanded his anti-modern conglomerate. His catalogs outgrew the Pilgrim Century aesthetic to encompass eighteenth-century forms such as high-style Newport, Rhode Island, furniture, and a copy of a mahogany desk-on-frame from the collection of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. His access to public and well-known collections documents his rising stature as an antiquarian on the national stage. The staying power of his writings further solidified his reputation as the foremost authority on early American life. The Furniture Treasury, initially published in 1928, remained in print and a standard for generations. Nutting’s stature, and pocketbook, increased with the States Beautiful series of travel books in the 1920s, which confirmed his position as an authority on all that was wrong with the present and right with the past. A catchall of reused text from the minister’s late-nineteenth-century sermons and recycled photographs from the teens, the States Beautiful books updated an earlier rubric of rustic travelogue popular at the turn of the century and anticipated the WPA Guides of the 1930s.18 They helped define New England, and other “worthy” and historic states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia, as venerable and quiescent regions despite the hustle and bustle of modern life. They also cemented Nutting’s image and reputation, and made Old America what it was, which is to say a close ancestor of the biography-based corporations that proved to be so popular in the era of late capitalism. Nutting’s inventions, from moralizing colonial platinotypes to machine-made seventeenth-century furniture, fed upon one another to create a seamless narrative of traditional forms and styles that made a virtue of the past for the modern era. In this way, Nutting employed the fantasy of Old America to sell an idealized notion of American history to a nation fervently embracing a culture of consumption as an antidote to the vicissitudes of modern life.

A Landscape of the (Historical) Imagination In 1938, as Wallace Nutting was winding up his many businesses and winding down personally, Life magazine organized a design competition for a new middle-class home, inviting eight architects to submit projects—four modern and four traditional. The article, ostensibly about housing for a nation in the grip of economic depression, proved to be a showdown between the aesthetics of the machine age and the Colonial Revival.19 Frank Lloyd Wright submitted a Usonian design to Life, but the winner proved to be a Bostonbased architect Royal Barry Wills and his soon-to-be ubiquitous Cape Cod house (Figure 29.4).20 Simply put, history won. Wills, according to Richard Guy Wilson, went on to become the “most popular architect among the American middle class after World War II.”21 By the time of his death, his firm had completed more than 2,500 houses. Indeed, by 1958, the Saturday Evening Press

588   Thomas Denenberg

Figure 29.4.  A House in Duxbury, Massachusetts, by Charles Crombie. Graphite on vellum. Reproduced in Royal Barry Wills, Living on the Level: One Story Houses, 1954, pp. 94–95. Courtesy of Historic New England.

remarked that “Many a would-be home owner, surveying the infinite variations on Mr. Wills’ Cape Codders in plan books and magazines has concluded that he is the man who somehow invented the design.”22 A more accurate measure of Wills’s influence can be found, like Nutting, in his writings. Life, maintaining interest in the winner of their 1938 competition, profiled the architect again in 1946 and noted that his five books had reached some 520,000 copies in print, making him the most published architect of the modern era—this during World War II.23 Writing in a genial voice—occasionally punctuated with humorous cartoons lampooning modern architecture, the Boston-based MIT-educated Wills eschewed the scolding tone of Wallace Nutting’s writings to position himself as an avuncular professional. His modest designs built upon the practice of earlier architect/historians such as Joseph Everett Chandler and J. Frederick Kelly as well as national interest in the small house movement of the 1920s and 1930s to create a hybrid structure, thoroughly modern in materials, plan, and construction yet inspired by an invented colonial past.24 When clustered, as in the case of so many suburban developments constructed in the 1950s, it becomes clear that idealized notions of the New England village provided a Colonial Revival landscape for modern America. “The New England Village,” writes geographer Joseph Wood, “represents a past we have gained” rather than any sort of archaeological or architectural verisimilitude.25

Housing History   589 The processes by which this “gained” past became animated in the popular imagination of the 1950s returns to the question of visual culture. In an era that prized Abstract Expressionism as the apogee of modern painting, a rebuttal of sentimental “Victorian” modes of visual expression, and reflection of the alienation of the atomic age, one of the most popular image makers of the day proved to be a woman of advanced age, trading in a naïve style and technique as if from an earlier, and simpler time. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, popularly known as “Grandma Moses,” created a nostalgic oeuvre that leveraged her public persona in much the same way as Wallace Nutting, but to greater effect and lasting fame. Moses, born in 1860 in upstate New York, endured an early life as a peripatetic hardscrabble farmer, giving birth to ten children, five of whom survived infancy.26 She began to paint in her seventies, and her work was “discovered” by a traveling collector in 1938. Within a year, her work was included in a private exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called Contemporary American Painters, which featured the work of a number of “housewife” painters as well as a coterie from northern New England, a region understood to be hermetic, quiescent, and historic in the popular imagination of the Great Depression. In 1940, Moses secured representation at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, and within a decade found herself a celebrity. Initially working from collaged and altered clippings from magazines and nineteenthcentury prints, Moses created a world for 1950s America based upon preindustrial fantasies of community and social economy. Haying, now in the collection of the Bennington Museum, is an iconic Moses painting (see Figure 29.5). Framed by a line of mountains in the distance and elaborate trees in the foreground, a nucleated New England village is organized in tidy fashion, complete with white-washed houses, horse-drawn vehicles, and the spire of a (presumably) Congregational church dominates the landscape. Moses’s imagined community is clearly prosperous and provides a visual ancestry for the suburban developments populated by Wills houses then under construction in the postwar era. Marketing Moses became big business in the 1950s. Within months of her New York City debut in 1940, she was featured at Gimbel’s department store—literally. Moses herself spoke to crowds at a Thanksgiving festival while her paintings graced the walls of the store. She licensed her images for consumer goods, such as textiles, that could be turned into window treatments or other applications in the home. In this way, her customers could themselves consume a narrative about “the olden days” in the increasingly complicated present. By the time she turned 100, Moses was celebrated at the White House and on television as a national treasure, a kind of living ancestor. The ideology of Moses’s halcyon imagery repeats and amplifies that of Wills, Nutting, Henry, and the constellation of actors that performed roles in creating the Colonial Revival. It is important to recognize the narrow confines of the material record employed to invent these traditions and animate these spaces. It is equally critical to see the movement as ideology in the service of nationalism. William Rhodes has sagely examined the myriad ways the Colonial Revival served as a backdrop for a dominant ethnic group’s performance of authority over new faces in the land.27 A wider lens, however,

590   Thomas Denenberg

Figure 29.5.  Grandma Moses, Haying. Copyright © 1957 (renewed 1985) Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.

allows for a broader spectrum of interpretation. Faced with the challenges of a rapidly expanding country, the Colonial Revival as collective memory and consumer culture provided a way for Americans to purchase and perform a past. It provided a way for a heterogeneous population to participate in social rituals with symbols and objects that created community and cohesion. The rise of the Colonial Revival evolved against a backdrop of fierce contention about immigration and, at times, open class conflict in America. With advocates for immigration restriction, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in positions of influence, the role of history in the new culture on consumption reads as progressive, even democratic, in retrospect. Nostalgia, best understood as an enervating, even paralyzing, malady in the midnineteenth century (“Forever—never”), developed into an attractive consumer platform by the turn of the century that shaped the very landscape of an expanding nation and provided answers for myriad social challenges. The development of consumer culture in the United States allowed the collective memory of the Colonial Revival to become the national idiom, a master narrative for an ever-more complex industrial society. The power of objects—especially when animated by images, texts, and spaces to engender and reinforce ideology—is manifest in a knot of invented traditions centered on idealized notions of domestic space, from genre paintings to house museums and small suburban homes, which came to represent the landscape of middle-class America.

Housing History   591

Notes * This chapter, as always, would not exist without the input and forbearance of Amber Degn. 1. My use here is indebted to Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2. Rodris Roth, “The New England or ‘Olde Tyme’ Kitchen Exhibits at Nineteenth-Century Fairs,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 159–183. 3. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1931). 4. Amy Kurtz Lansing, Historical Fictions: Edward Lamson Henry’s Paintings of Past and Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2005), 35. 5. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. The History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: AAS and UNC Press, 2007). 6. Elizabeth McClausland, “The Life and Work of Edward Lamson Henry, NA,” New York State Museum Bulletin #339 (Albany, September 1945). 7. Kathleen Catalano, “The Longfellows and Their ‘Trumpery Antiquities.’ ” American Art Journal 15 (Spring 1983): 21–31. 8. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: Scribner’s, 1881 edition). 9. Briann  G.  Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 10. Jackson Lears is especially perceptive on the question of neurasthenia. See Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981). 11. Kate Sanborn, Adopting an Abandoned Farm (New York, 1892), 6. 12. Wallace Nutting, Wallace Nutting’s Biography (Framingham, MA, 1936), 59. 13. For more on the hand-tinting process, see Joyce Barendson, “Wallace Nutting, An American Tastemaker: The Pictures and Beyond,” Winterthur Portfolio 18, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1983): 187–212; and Thomas Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), especially chapter 2. 14. Nutting, Biography, 60. 15. For two excellent studies of the Boston School, see Trevor Fairbrother, The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870–1930 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), and Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001). 16. Wallace Nutting, Correct American Windsors (Framingham, MA, 1917). 17. George Batten and Company proofs are pasted into an advertising scrapbook kept by  Nutting or his secretary. The scrapbook is in the Local History Collection of the Framingham Public Library. 18. Wallace Nutting’s Vermont Beautiful (Framingham, MA, 1922) led a series that eventually included volumes dedicated to Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. 19. Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 20. “Eight Houses for Modern Living,” Life 5, no. 13 (September 26, 1938): 44–67. Richard Guy Wilson’s pithy exploration of Wills graphically demonstrates the importance of the architect’s vision in postwar America. Richard Guy Wilson, The Colonial Revival House (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 179.

592   Thomas Denenberg 21. Wilson, The Colonial Revival House, 179. 22. Arnold Nicholson, “Big Man in Small Houses,” Saturday Evening Post 230, no. 39 (March 29, 1958), 36. Quoted in Wilson. 23. David Gebhard, “Royal Barry Wills and the American Colonial Revival,” Winterthur Portfolio 27, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 45–74. 24. Keith  N.  Morgan and Richard Cheek, “History in the Service of Design: American Architect-Historians, 1870–1940,” Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 61–75. 25. Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 136. 26. Jane Kallir et al., Grandma Moses in the 21st Century (New Haven, CT: Art Services International in association with Yale University Press, 2001), 20. 27. William B. Rhodes, “The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants,” The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 341–361.

Bibliography Axelrod, Alan, ed. The Colonial Revival in America. New York: Norton, 1985. Denenberg, Thomas. Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and the Wadsworth Atheneum, 2003. Gebhard, David. “Royal Barry Wills and the American Colonial Revival.” Winterthur Portfolio 27 (1992): 45–74. Greenfield, Briann G. Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1991. Lansing, Amy Kurtz. Historical Fictions: Edward Lamson Henry’s Paintings of Past and Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2005. Lears, Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Marling, Karol Ann. George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals in American Culture, 1876–1986. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Morgan, Keith N., and Richard Cheek. “History in the Service of Design: American ArchitectHistorians, 1870–1940.” Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 61–75. Nutting, Wallace. Wallace Nutting’s Biography. Framingham, MA: Old America Company, 1936. Wilson, Richard Guy. The Colonial Revival House. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Wood, Joseph S. The New England Village. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

chapter 30

Collecti ng as Histor ica l Pr actice a n d the Con u n drum of th e U nmoor ed Obj ect Catherine L. Whalen

“I have read with interest your vain struggle against the truth of History.”1 So wrote Horace Taft to George Dudley Seymour in 1914, commenting upon his friend’s latest attempt to reconstitute the past of his desires. Seymour, a patent lawyer, collector of New England antiques, and self-described “born antiquarian,” had recently acquired a ramshackle farmhouse in Coventry, Connecticut, reputed to be the childhood home of Nathan Hale.2 Seymour idolized Hale, an American spy captured and hanged by British forces during the Revolutionary War, and reverentially referred to the dwelling as the “Birth-Place,” which he hoped to turn into “a national shrine to perpetuate the name and fame of the patriot.”3 However, soon after purchasing it, he learned that Hale could not possibly have lived there because the building dated from the year of his death, 1776. Seymour was devastated. But even as he confessed his disappointment, he maintained that his hero was indeed born on the site, albeit in an earlier structure. His correspondent, sympathetic but shrewd, knew his colleague well. Nothing could have been more typical of Seymour than to try to salvage some shard of authenticity from a dream wrecked upon the rocks of incontrovertible historical evidence. Time and time again, his penchant for the dramatic and evocative upended his commitment to the specific and verifiable. Throughout his life, Seymour, the protagonist of this story, traversed continuums between seemingly opposite realms—fact and fantasy, material and ideal, documentation and art—attempting to reconcile them all. His determination to bend “the truth of History” to suit his desired narratives inspired his most creative efforts; key objects, like

594   Catherine L. Whalen this eighteenth-century farmhouse, were crucial fodder for his material imagination. Their sheer physicality implied veracity, but as Seymour’s experience with the Birth-Place demonstrated, when subjected to careful scrutiny, they could just as easily undermine as uphold his most cherished interpretations. His predicament poignantly exemplified the dilemmas faced by collectors of artifacts who sought to create credible accounts of the past based upon them. For academic historians, by the turn of the twentieth century, valid scholarly evidence meant primary sources in the form of written documents, to be wrestled into printed prose.4 If Seymour and his fellow collectors wished to take part in the dance of words being performed by professionals, they were at a great disadvantage. The collector-historians who met this challenge helped lay the foundation for US material culture studies. Many did so in the context of the Colonial Revival, a long-standing manifestation of American romantic nationalism that ostensibly peaked between 1880 and 1940, although many scholars argue that it began as soon as United States achieved independence from Britain in 1783 and has persisted ever since. This popular fascination with colonial America and the early days of the US republic informed many modes of cultural production. Significantly, they included antique collecting, museum exhibitions and acquisitions, and historic preservation, all essential for future material culture scholarship. The revival also inspired imaginative interpretations of early American forms in architecture, interiors, and decorative arts as well as painting, sculpture, prints, and photography. Dramatic performances enlivened visions of the past on an unprecedented scale, encompassing parades, pageants, theater, film, and radio, alongside commemorative events ranging from local anniversaries to worlds’ fairs. Novels, short stories, and poems reached national audiences, as did newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements. Historical accounts, whether amateur or professional—often a fluid divide—found many readers, especially through journalism. With the nineteenth-century expansion of the American literary marketplace, publications delivered fact and fiction to large and varied readerships within an increasingly complex mélange of aesthetic, commercial, and ideological interests.5 In this milieu, collector-historians wrote, or underwrote, many of the first accounts using American artifacts as historical evidence. They did so in concert with, or doubling as, dealers, curators, institution builders, preservationists, and independent scholars. Together, they demonstrated the value of studying things ranging from antique ­furnishings, old buildings, and farm implements to arrowheads, potsherds, and gravestones. Their endeavors were meaningful forays into object-driven histories, exemplifying the constitutive interplay between collecting material culture and interpreting the past. Their work, once codified in publications and institutionalized in museums and academia, significantly contributed to Americana’s ascendant cultural and economic value. And, as more and more items flowed into these settings, they expanded the terrain for future scholarship. Conversely, collectors who failed to produce or sponsor histories consonant with increasingly stringent professional standards courted obscurity. Individuals like Seymour who drew upon material culture to construct history recognized the difficulty of doing

Collecting as Historical Practice   595 so. They needed convincing evidence to fix their intended meanings to artifacts. For example, when one of Seymour’s contemporaries, Francis P. Garvan, gave his renowned collection of early American decorative arts to Yale University in 1930, he proclaimed that an object’s documentary record was “absolutely vital” to understanding its past. Here he not only refuted his earlier belief that “the piece itself recited the history,” but also acknowledged that textual support significantly enhanced material culture’s value in an academic setting.6 Often, collector-historians faced the conundrum of interpreting artifacts long since unmoored from their points of origin. Their presence in the here and now superseded their travels across space and time. Nonetheless, their would-be interpreters grasped for tethers with which to secure them to their desired historical narratives. As Seymour experienced, however, these moorings could be hopelessly frayed or altogether elusive. What strategies did collectors use to anchor these recalcitrant objects to their interpretive frameworks? How could they best imbricate words and things? What characteristics of artifacts and modes of engagement with them were, and remain, especially useful for historians? Seymour’s case illustrates the efficacy of integrating multiple approaches to interpreting history and material culture within a biographical framework. He sought out Nathan Hale’s traces in texts, images, objects, and places. However, given Hale’s relative obscurity prior to his sensational demise at age twenty-one, he left few records. He grew up on a farm, attended Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, and briefly taught school before becoming a soldier.7 This scant archive frustrated Seymour, but he successfully expanded upon it with three material strategies. For him, inscribed objects were key, specifically those bearing words that explicated or at least intimated their own histories. He sought out text-laden artifacts pertaining to Hale, and when they were insufficient, he commissioned commemorative ones. Pictorial imagery was likewise important to Seymour, especially figural representations of Hale; even when speculative, they vivified his subject. His third approach was to marshal space and place; that is, a particular site and interrelated objects, as in his restoration of the Birth-Place. By combining these strategies in order to more fully interpret an individual’s life story, Seymour produced a synthetic historical narrative that he could not have achieved through relying on textual sources alone. In doing so, he demonstrated the special utility of biography for object-driven scholarship.

Figural and Textual Representation: Materializing Nathan Hale All scholarship is in some way autobiographical, even if this truism sometimes sits uncomfortably beside professional historians’ long-standing, if unobtainable, quest for objectivity. Seymour, though, freely attributed his “lifelong interest in Hale” to his favorite

596   Catherine L. Whalen childhood poem, “Hale’s Fate and Fame,” written by Francis Miles Finch in 1853.8 Unsurprisingly, Seymour’s first encounter with his idol came via a literary source, given the many retellings of Hale’s final hours in plays, poetry, speeches, and songs.9 Finch’s verse focused on the youthful spy’s capture and hanging, the climactic moment of brief military career. Seymour often quoted the first stanza: To drum-beat and heart-beat, A soldier marches by: There is color in his cheek, There is courage in his eye, Yet to drum-beat and heart-beat In a moment he must die!10

According to Seymour, this popular poem helped keep Hale’s memory alive during the latter half of the nineteenth century. His favorite lines evoked the soldier’s body moving through space in real time, their rhythm sounding out the doomed youth’s footsteps and heartbeats as he marched toward death. Yet overall Finch’s description of Hale’s physical appearance was scant. No matter how stirring Seymour found the poet’s verse, he was frustrated by such imprecise textual renderings of his hero’s likeness. Thus, he turned to sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt to create an “ideal conception” of Hale. In 1898, the artist sculpted a clay sketch model, which Seymour touted as a great success. For more than a decade, he campaigned for Yale University, Hale’s alma mater, to implement Pratt’s vision. With the financial support of alumni, he eventually achieved this goal. In 1914, Seymour proudly recounted, the university erected a life-size bronze cast of Pratt’s design in front of the building where Hale resided as an undergraduate.11 The statue incarnated the youthful spy “bound for sacrifice” just moments before his death (Figure 30.1).12 An imaginary breeze flaps at Hale’s coat and scarf, and ropes secure his wrists and ankles. His alleged dying words, deeply incised in capital letters, ring the circular base: “I ONLY REGRET THAT I HAVE BUT ONE LIFE TO LOSE FOR MY COUNTRY.”13 Conveying Hale’s legendary final utterance was essential, as was chiseling his name and dates upon the statue’s granite pedestal. With no recognized portrait of Hale to draw upon, Pratt could not unambiguously represent him through form alone. Late eighteenth-century colonial American garb and bound limbs signaled the subject’s identity, but only if one already knew his story. Crucially, text mediated meaning, and indeed this statue’s realization owed much to Seymour’s way with words. As artists vied for the commission, the lawyer pleaded his case in “The Familiar Hale: An Attempt to Show by What Standards of Age, Appearance, and Character the Proposed Statute to Nathan Hale for the Campus of Yale College Should Be Judged” (1907).14 To guide Pratt, Seymour culled written accounts of his hero’s likeness. Hale was, he asserted, “above medium height, well built, and of fair coloring,” athletic, and “clever with his hands” (6). The young man was a “handsome, frank and lively fellow of winning naturalness” who “belonged to the epic Age of Homespun” and “came from sturdy stock;” thus, he was no “different in appearance or breeding from

Collecting as Historical Practice   597 Figure 30.1. Bela Lyon Pratt, Nathan Hale, 1913, Yale University; bronze, 78−¼ × 23−½ × 23 in. Roman Bronze Works. Author’s photograph.

the average country boy brought up on a farm by God-fearing, hard-working parents” (6–7). Seymour further edged Hale toward the present by declaring, “His modesty and manliness, his scholarship and attractive personality, won friends for him just as they win friends to-day” (7). Material culture further demonstrated the youthful soldier’s exemplary character. Seymour enthused, “we can get nearer to Hale than through any contemporary account of him” via his personal effects, specifically “His clumsy camp basket and powderhorn” (10). The “born antiquarian” felt space and time collapse in the presence of these artifacts and presumed others could too. While appreciating Hale’s handwritten letters and diary for their content, he especially cherished them as instantiations of his essence. Seymour delighted in Hale’s correspondence with “his intimates,” in which he sensed “whole-souled” friendship as “fresh as though the letters were written yesterday” (10). Likewise, he avowed, “No one can read the faded pages of the diary without feeling that it brings us close to the real Hale—an everyday, wholesome, self-poised young man, deeply in earnest, mature in many ways, but still frankly boyish” (10). Seymour explicitly distinguished between the diary’s historical value and its ineffable power as a talisman: “precious as every word of it is to every one of us as the personal record of Hale, it is not in any way remarkable in cold type, but the impression produced upon the reader by the original in the handwriting of Hale is

598   Catherine L. Whalen incommunicable” (11). For him, the diary was a reliquary as well as a document, making tangible the intangible Hale. Pratt was not the first to portray the elusive Hale. Seymour, however, disdained prior incarnations of him as a workaday soldier or, worse, an overly theatrical courtier. Indirectly, he attacked the work of sculptor Frederick William MacMonnies, whose 1890 rendition of Hale enjoyed widespread acclaim, enhanced by its location in lower Manhattan near the martyred spy’s reputed execution site.15 Seymour faulted MacMonnies for representing Hale as too old, contemptuous, and overly sophisticated; fussily attired in a ruffled shirt and full-skirted coat, he seemed a gentleman dandy rather than an upright youth. Rather, Seymour argued, the fresh-faced captain should “be made to live again” without pretension or affectation, and he promoted Pratt’s Hale as an ideal materialization of wholesome masculinity and patriotism (14). He undoubtedly pitched his appeal to the wealthy Yale alumni whom he hoped would fund the project, but it was undeniably heartfelt. What drove Seymour to take on such a pivotal role in realizing Pratt’s Hale? Certainly he felt intellectual and emotional ownership of the sculptor’s work. Moreover, with Hale’s life-size embodiment installed at Yale, less than mile from his longtime New Haven residence, he and his hero truly shared common ground. Tellingly, Seymour also retraced the “Footsteps of Hale in New Haven,” detailing the people and places encountered by the undergraduate.16 He even invoked the younger man’s physical presence in specific buildings, imagining how he might have looked while standing in these phantom tracks. Seymour’s sensual, if not homoerotic, fascination with Hale’s body fueled both his Pygmalion-like desire to realize Pratt’s sculpture, and his continual search for more precise descriptions of the young man’s physique and demeanor. As Seymour himself later admitted, he had a “Hale complex.”17 Much to his delight, just before Pratt’s statue was erected, Seymour uncovered new pictorial and written evidence of its subject’s appearance. Both sources, he averred, supported the artist’s vision. First, he discovered “Hale’s Shadow Portrait.”18 Seymour cited a letter dictated by one of Hale’s nieces telling of a silhouette, “incised on the inside of the door opening into the northwest bedchamber” of the Hale family’s house.19 She described “a head showing the front features of the face in profile, drawn about the size of life as though by the means of a shadow on the door from a distant light, with one continuous strong line from neck over & to neck again.”20 The shadow portrait’s locale was none other than the Birth-Place, and in part Seymour bought the property—the house, farm buildings, and three hundred acres of land—to obtain it. Although Nathan Hale never resided in that house, Seymour contended that the door came from the previous dwelling on the site, in which his hero had lived, and was reused in the subsequent structure. He removed the door, and an art restorer removed several coats of paint to reveal the portrait’s full outline. In Seymour’s estimation, it matched Hale’s niece’s description exactly. He then kept the cherished door and three Hale autographs in a New Haven bank vault, all invaluable inscribed traces of the young man’s body.21

Collecting as Historical Practice   599 Soon thereafter, Seymour finally found a manuscript with a physical description of Hale. The author was his lieutenant, Elisha Bostwick, writing some fifty years after his captain’s death. Despite Hale’s superior rank, Bostwick considered himself,  . . . always in the habits of friendship & intimacy with him: & my remembrance of his person, manner & character is so perfect that I feel inclined to make some remarks upon them: for I can now in imagination see his person & hear his voice—his person I should say was a little above common stature in height, his shoulders of  moderate breadth, his limbs strait & very plump: regular features—very fair skin—blue eyes— flaxen or very light hair which was always kept short—his eyebrows a shade darker than his hair & his voice rather sharp or piercing—his bodily agility was remarkable.22

Here, Seymour rhapsodized, “Hale fairly steps before us.”23 He regarded Bostwick as Hale’s “ranking witness,” whose words conveyed the “quality of living truth!”24 He also echoed the author’s wistful query, “why is it that the delicious (in the sense of delightful, probably) Capt Hale should be left & lost in an unknown grave & forgotten!,” a sentiment he ardently shared.25 With the confluence of Pratt’s statue, the shadow portrait, and Bostwick’s sensuous “graphic word-picture” of “The Patriot,” Seymour took another step closer to the “real Hale.”26

The Hale Homestead: Space, Place, and Performance Places traversed and items used by historical actors can be both evidentiary and evocative. Once Seymour attained satisfactory representations of his hero, he focused on re-creating the Hale Homestead. Here he imaginatively situated the young man in a private setting under his complete control (Figure 30.2). Through his bodily engagement with these environs, Seymour enjoyed a material, albeit virtual, relationship with Hale. And, lest he be accused of falsifying history, he installed an engraved stone marker near the house explaining ill-fated spy’s admittedly tenuous relation to the site.27 Turning the Birth-Place into Hale’s shrine required appropriate furnishings and especially relics. Seymour most dearly wanted Nathan Hale’s former possessions, but also sought out objects “known to have been in the houses during his lifetime” or prior to the death of his father, Richard Hale.28 He even kept small Hale family items in a “Reliquary”—a chest of drawers—in the Homestead’s parlor.29 But with so few documented heirlooms, Seymour primarily equipped the house with his own collections. A self-described specialist in “pre-Revolutionary household things,” he touted his early Connecticut pottery, Mohegan Indian basketry, and “old silver,” along with his New England furniture.30 These items and more filled the Hale Homestead: “old china and glass,” “slip-ware crocks, bottles, jugs, [and] plates,” “brass and copper pails and kettles,”

600   Catherine L. Whalen

Figure 30.2.  Hale Homestead with second casting of Bela Lyon Pratt’s Nathan Hale statue installed on site, Coventry, Connecticut, n.d.; photographic reproduction. Author’s collection.

“old iron hardware,” fireplace equipment; spinning wheels; “splint baskets and bee hives,” “wooden carpenter’s tools,” and even wooden coffins in the garret.31 Not all objects dated from the colonial era, but the adjective “old” elided their disparate vintages. Here, Seymour followed the ongoing practices of historic houses and museum period rooms. In these aggregate settings, approximations were less conspicuous. Seymour and his contemporaries generally regarded these composites of architectural elements and furnishings as credible facsimiles of historic environs. Curators and audiences alike considered them informative, enjoyable, and tasteful. Additionally, those featuring Americana were sources of patriotic inspiration, compelling instantiations of objectbased cultural nationalism.32 Aesthetics and edification mattered to Seymour, but so did sociability and theatrics. The Birth-Place was both a memorial to Hale and a rural retreat in which to entertain guests. A self-described lifelong bachelor with an active social life, Seymour regularly hosted friends, family, and colleagues there. At the Homestead, certain objects prompted fantasy-rich social performances that elided time, or at least conjured up a bygone age. For example, with dramatic flair, Seymour often greeted visitors to the Hale Homestead

Collecting as Historical Practice   601 Figure 30.3.  George Dudley Seymour, Hale Homestead, Coventry, Connecticut, June 1920; photographic print. Author’s collection.

garbed in a green “ancient linsey-woolsey riding cloak found long ago in a garret” (Figure 30.3).33 At times he also eschewed modern transportation for horseback riding, even as he recounted such practices with self-deprecating humor.

Biography and Autobiography: Nathan Hale and Henry Solon Graves At the Birth-Place, Seymour most fully intertwined Hale’s biography with his own, and especially with his soulmate, Henry Solon Graves. The two men met around the time Seymour began campaigning for Hale’s statue at Yale. He described Graves—cofounder and dean of Yale’s Forestry School and later Chief of the US Forest Service—as his “lifelong friend” and “Boy Dean.”34 Graves was thirteen years younger than Seymour, whom he addressed as “Dear Old Man” and his “best of friends.”35 Graves married in 1903, but his relationship with Seymour continued to deepen. While he was away conducting fieldwork, he lamented their being “torn asunder” and vowed to work less so that they could spend more time together.36

602   Catherine L. Whalen At the Hale Homestead, Seymour aligned his ardor for Nathan Hale with Graves’s professional endeavors. Here the two men nourished their intimacy while ostensibly pursuing loftier goals. Because of Graves, Seymour explained, he became interested in forestry. Together, they strove to develop the site’s “two-fold educational appeal,” first as a font of history and patriotism, and secondly as a model of woodland management.37 After one of his stays, Graves wrote, “My visit to the Birthplace and sojourn with you has meant much to me,” adding “it was a joy to commune with you.”38 Subsequently, he wrote, “I would most like to spend a Sunday with you upon your country estate in the atmosphere of friendly repose, and with full liberty to expose the evils of my innermost soul.”39 Clearly, Seymour and Graves cherished their trysts at the Homestead. In Graves, did Seymour find a surrogate Hale; or perhaps the reverse? Pratt’s “ideal conception” offers a possible clue. The sculptor’s clay sketch model remained Seymour’s favorite rendition of his hero, and he was especially fond of a bust-length photograph of it, which conveyed more detail, immediacy, warmth, and sensuality than the finished statue. When compared to a similarly composed circa 1890–1910 photo of Graves, convergences between the two likenesses appear (Figure 30.4 and Figure 30.5). Although I do not claim that Graves was Pratt’s model—possibly a Hale descendant was—each

Figure 30.4. Bela Lyon Pratt, clay  sketch model for Nathan Hale, 1898;  photographic print. Author’s collection.

Collecting as Historical Practice   603 Figure 30.5. Henry Solon Graves, c.  1900; photographic print. Library of Congress, Digital ID: cph 3c25775.

image depicts a boyish young man with similarly configured high brows, straight noses, full lips, and cleft chin.40 Graves excelled at athletics, as Hale purportedly did; and, raised in Marietta, Ohio, he may have seemed equally “young, fresh, unspoiled, [and] country bred.” In him, perhaps Seymour found his “Familiar Hale.”

Antiquarian or Dilettante? Autobiography, Posterity, and the Infidelities of Portraiture Seymour was hardly alone in finding pictorial works beguiling while desiring textual interpretations to fix their meanings. Iconography, he hoped, might ensure legibility. He reveled in symbol-laden representation, especially his own. He sat for several portraits throughout his lifetime, yet found all of them wanting. The most ambitious—and the most frustrating—was The Green Cloak, painted by his close friend Cecilia Beaux in 1925 (Figure 30.6). The portrait’s history reveals the roles of artist, sitter, and objects in defining

604   Catherine L. Whalen Figure 30.6. Cecilia Beaux, The Green Cloak: Portrait of George Dudley Seymour, 1925; oil on canvas, 72 × 45−½ in. Wadsworth Atheneum, 1983.683, bequest of George Dudley Seymour.

and forging likeness; and how it both failed and prevailed as Seymour’s iconic self-image. Most of all, it fully bares his persistent doubts that visual imagery could truly express his intentions without written explanation. From the outset, Seymour conceptualized The Green Cloak as his posthumous self. It was to signify his character, interests, accomplishments, and personal relationships. By illustrating certain artifacts—antique furniture, archival documents, intimate gifts, and the Birth-Place—the painting would encode his identities as collector, researcher, and preservationist, plus his relationship with Henry Solon Graves. After the portrait’s completion, however, Seymour became uneasy with the persona it might convey. Beaux painted Seymour wearing the green “ancient linsey-woosley” cloak he often sported at the Hale Homestead, hence the portrait’s title. Seymour expected that upon his death, The Green Cloak would be displayed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside his collection of regional furniture, which he planned to donate to that well-regarded institution. However, after loaning items in advance, he found them languishing in the museum’s basement rather than prominently showcased. Disgruntled, Seymour bequeathed his cherished possessions to the Connecticut Historical Society instead, although he ultimately gave The Green Cloak to the Atheneum.41 In 1925, however, Seymour still planned to leave this legacy to the latter, along with Beaux’s portrait to signpost his largess.

Collecting as Historical Practice   605 In the finished painting, Seymour sits in profile, wearing a dark green cloak over an ivory-colored suit. Behind him, his upturned top hat rests upon the caned seat of a ladder-back chair. Before him is a “William and Mary” style dressing table, laden with books, papers, and a pair of silver candlesticks. Artist and sitter discussed clothing and especially props in great detail, as Seymour fretted about their misinterpretation. For example, Beaux suggested including some bowls, but he feared that in the eyes of the “American man,” such objets d’art would mark him as a dilettante.42 As a compromise, he proposed a bowl containing “a pine cone, brought long ago to me from somewhere out west by the Honorable Mr. Graves,” to “symbolize my interest in forestry.”43 However, after consulting with a male friend, Seymour requested books and pamphlets instead. He also asked Beaux to include some oak panels, because, “Any collector” would recognize that “they were taken from a 17th century New England oak chest of the so-called ‘Connecticut’ design.”44 To him, the panels were a metonym for his own collection of regional furniture, which contained many pieces made from similar wood. Clearly, Seymour wanted his portrait to communicate specific meanings to its audience, especially men and other collectors. Wood was an important signifier, both as a self-defining material metaphor and an expressive medium of friendship, joining his life’s passions together in an organic whole. Under Graves’s influence, he bequeathed considerable acreage surrounding the Birth-Place to the state of Connecticut as the Nathan Hale memorial forest. The two men even associated each other with soft versus hard woods; Seymour singled out the “Boy Dean[’s]” research on conifers—hence the pine cone—while Graves likened the “Old Man” to hickory, a strong but flexible hard wood.45 Seymour also gave Graves a (reputed) fragment of Connecticut’s famed Charter Oak, which grew in Hartford until felled by a storm in 1856.46 The tree was the legendary hiding place for the colony’s 1662 Charter, granted by England’s King Charles II. When a royal representative threatened to revoke it, locals allegedly stashed it in the tree. For Seymour, perhaps this sliver of oak connoted both his furniture collection and his family history, which he traced back to seventeenth-century Hartford.47 In the end, The Green Cloak featured neither pine nor oak, nor did it refer to Graves. Poignantly, Seymour had already tried and failed to link the two men together with Beaux’s work. Years earlier, he asked her to draw them individually, and she did.48 Seymour arranged for lithographs of both drawings, and in one instance he framed the prints with Graves’s visage atop his own, implying a sense of affective intimacy. Sadly, when Seymour gave this item to Yale for a library of portraits, the zealous recipient discovered both likenesses and decided to frame them separately, destroying this erstwhile memorial to the two men’s friendship.49 Thus, portraiture was a treacherous endeavor, or so Seymour felt after such casual betrayals. Wary of contributing to its duplicity, of all the elements in Beaux’s painting, Seymour agonized the most about a pair of silver candlesticks that he desired but did not possess. He preferred late seventeenth-century examples, but owned none, even as he admitted, “Fame is indifferent to candlesticks and will not care whether those in front of me in the portrait are of the period of Charles the Second or Queen Anne.”50 Yet they

606   Catherine L. Whalen mattered to him, and perhaps to “History,” if not “Fame.”51 Perhaps he imagined that they would evoke Connecticut’s Charter and by extension his colonial ancestors, as well as Restoration England and its resplendent king. Seymour hankered after a massive, rectilinear pair wrought by early American silversmith Jeremiah Dummer but instead obtained a modest “Charles II” set from contemporary craftsman Arthur J. Stone of Gardiner, Massachusetts.52 But in Beaux’s portrait, he could have those that he really wanted, and did, although he later regretted his choice. Despite his painstaking negotiations, Seymour found The Green Cloak embarrassing when complete. Writing to his friend Royal Cortissoz, a well-known art critic, he complained that the portrait gave “the impression of an elderly gentleman in fancy dress looking at himself in a mirror beyond those candles in tall, Charles the Second silver candlesticks.”53 While Seymour acknowledged his “tendency towards dilettantism,” he nonetheless regarded “The dilettante and the cosmopolitan” as “the last of God’s creatures.”54 He also grumbled, “the picture was designed to be hung with my collection of old furniture after I have repaired to my ‘Heavenly mansion’, ” but scorned the table and chair that Beaux depicted as “entirely unworthy” of it.55 Plus, the artist declined to include “a very small representation in outline of the Birth-Place,” intended as a reference to Hale.56 Above all, Seymour rued the green cloak. He claimed that Beaux insisted he wear it, even as she countered that she had warned him “to reflect upon whether [he] wished to go down to posterity in costume.”57 As a last resort, Seymour asked Beaux not to exhibit the portrait. She refused, but allowed him to copyright the image so that he could control its reproduction. She even suggested renaming the painting “An Antiquarian,” Seymour’s preferred self-descriptor, to shift attention away from offending garment and perhaps forestall the perceptions he so feared.58 That said, the label “antiquarian” could be pejorative, implying a narrow-minded focus on obscure historic artifacts and irrelevant texts. Seymour fully understood his status as an amateur rather than professional historian and candidly admitted his dilettantist inclinations. A “cosmopolitan,” though, was another matter. The appellation connoted an urbane sophisticate, possibly homosexual, then a recently coined term pathologizing same-sex attraction.59 Perhaps informing Seymour’s reconsideration of his garb was the lingering notoriety of English author and aesthete Oscar Wilde. During his well-received American tour in the early 1880s, Wilde wore a cloak in protest of typical menswear and redolent of crossdressing. In 1895, however, he was widely reviled after his criminal conviction for sexual relations with other men. If Seymour feared his cloak impugned his sexuality, its hue may have added to his angst. In the infamous novel The Green Carnation (1894)—a transparent fictionalization of Wilde’s relationship with a younger male lover—elegant and effeminate men in London identified each other by wearing the eponymous flower.60 The color’s association was both persistent and transatlantic; during the early to mid-twentieth century, New York urbanites considered a man in a green suit a homosexual.61 The ambiguous significations of material culture and its visual representation put painter and sitter at odds. Clearly, each pictured the portrait’s audience very differently. While Beaux expected to exhibit it widely, Seymour envisioned it displayed at the

Collecting as Historical Practice   607 Atheneum with his furniture collection, part of a larger whole of his own making. Had it referenced the Birth-Place and Henry Solon Graves, it truly could have become his surrogate. But, when he anticipated the finished painting’s reception, he grew anxious about its potential meanings. Rather than a distinguished collector from a venerable Connecticut family, he might seem an old, vain, unproductive dilettante, and possibly a sexually suspect cosmopolitan. Granted, once Beaux’s work received some critical acclaim, Seymour’s attitude softened, and at times he gave out photos of it. Nonetheless, he often attached one of two labels to modulate the potentially untrustworthy image; the first described the green cloak’s appeal to artists, and the second quoted Cortissoz’s professional praise of portrait. What might one ultimately make of this likeness? In it, Seymour sits bathed in light from an indeterminate source to the left, his face and hands highlighted. Interior floorboards are visible, but walls are indistinct. An impression of sky and clouds fills the upper portion of the canvas, an amorphous, even turbulent, psychic space. His “ancient linsey-woolsey” cloak enfolds him, transforming his modern-day suit; he appears at once a monk, a scholar, and a judge. Behind him, his discarded top hat occupies the seat of a commonplace chair. He faces, but does not touch, revered surrogates of the seventeenth century, interposed with a stack of papers suggesting his research and writing. Beaux’s portrait seems to spatialize time. Entering from the right, Seymour leaves behind his contemporary self on the chair and almost genuflects before an altar to history, the light of truth mediated via the written word. Yet he remains suspended in a shadow between present and past, literally an arm’s length from either. But perhaps Beaux’s portrait intimates that if he could, Seymour would rise up, wrap himself in his forest green cloak, and cross the threshold of time, a knight in pursuit of his quest. In the imagined realm of The Green Cloak, Seymour might have relinquished his vain struggle against the truth of History and found in fantasy all that he so longed to materialize in his own life.

Space, Place, and Performance (Again): Putting Nathan Hale on the National Map Figural representation can enliven the sparsest of histories, and Seymour fared far better with Hale’s than he did with his own. In 1925, Seymour’s beloved photograph of Pratt’s clay bust of Hale became the basis of a new federal postage stamp (Figure 30.7). For over two years, Seymour besieged US presidents and a federal postmaster to authorize the stamp. With nearly three billion issued, he considered it his greatest success at publicizing “The Patriot.” Seymour boasted, “In a very real sense, these stamps, freely circulating everywhere from coast to coast, have made the nation ‘Hale-conscious’ ” and truly put

608   Catherine L. Whalen Figure 30.7. ½-cent Nathan Hale US postage stamp, canceled June 6, 1935, South Coventry, Connecticut; brown ink on paper. Author’s collection.

his hero “on the map.”62 As with Pratt’s statue, Nathan Hale’s name appeared below his image, ensuring its legibility. The story of the Hale stamp exemplifies how politics affect the creation and (re) interpretation of material culture. Compelling narratives are key; those resonating with prevailing cultural currents more readily find an audience, and this case was no different. The stamp’s success owed much to Seymour’s perseverance, the support of Postmaster General Harry S. New, and a receptive public.63 The imminent sesquicentennial of Hale’s death and the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, to be celebrated in 1926, helped their cause. Additionally, a stamp honoring a self-sacrificing soldier likely had special meaning given American casualties during World War I. Significantly, Seymour’s campaign also coincided with ascendant racism and nativism in the United States during the early to mid-twenties, manifested in popular eugenic discourse, drastic immigration restrictions, and ever more strident attempts to assimilate foreign-born residents.64 Seymour and New carefully considered the stamp’s design in this light. Pratt’s Hale evinced “a perfectly marvelous countenance,” the postmaster enthused, adding, “If that face doesn’t carry on it the stamp of nobility, I am no judge of physiognomy.”65 New’s remark echoed Seymour’s characterization of Hale as “a perfect Nordic”; that is, a scion of white racial superiority.66 According to eugenicists, Scandinavian Nordics and fellow northern Europeans were responsible for the Western world’s most vaunted achievements. Adherents of this theory feared that alleged inferiors, inevitably represented as darker skinned and more fecund, would soon outnumber these exemplars. Deploying this rhetoric, they successfully campaigned for anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration legislation.67 In this milieu, Seymour touted the Hale stamp as an active agent of cultural assimilation. He proclaimed the ill-fated spy “our youthful national hero” and “next to the flag, our highest symbol of patriotism.”68 Given the stamp’s widespread circulation, he confidently stated, “I am sure it is fulfilling its intended purpose not only as a memorial to Hale but as a means of Americanization.”69 In this context, Hale’s popularity surged as Seymour and others positioned him as the ideal citizen-soldier; namely, one who would die for

Collecting as Historical Practice   609 one’s country, the perfect patriot for recent immigrants to emulate. Building upon this success, Seymour found still other ways to promote Hale.

Material Texts: Inscribing the Ideal Friendship of Hale and Wyllys Substantiating one’s historical interpretation is no easy matter, nor is finding an audience for it. In his later years, the indefatigable Seymour increasingly turned to writing and self-publishing. Rendering decades of research in paper and ink—yet another material strategy—he produced two books on Hale for distinctly different readerships. The more ambitious and enduring of the two was his monumental Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (1941).70 A 627-page compilation of official and private documents annotated by Seymour, many previously unknown, it has long been a valuable resource for scholars. By contrast, eight years earlier he issued a very different book, Captain Nathan Hale, 1755–1776: Yale College 1773; Major John Palsgrave Wyllys, 1754–1790: Yale College 1773 (1933).71 Here Seymour recounted the two men’s lives in a rambling narrative that he described as “A Digressive History” (title page). In an effusive seventy-five-word subtitle, he characterized the pair as “Friends and Yale Classmates, who died in their Country’s Service, one Hanged as a Spy by the British, and the other Killed in an Indian Ambuscade on the Far Frontier” (italics original, title page). He told his tale “with many Antiquarian Excursions, Genealogical, Architectural, Social, and Controversial,” including an account of “a Great Patrician Family [the Wyllyses], their “Manorial Establishment in Hartford, their Custody for Generations of the Charter of King Charles the Second, and the Story of the Hiding thereof ” (italics original, title page). Here, Seymour’s esteem for the patrician Wyllyses and the fabled Charter Oak located on their land (80) resonated with his reverence for his own Hartford ancestors. Clearly, Seymour wished to tell Hale’s story in two forms, the first romantic and evocative, the second factual and credible. That said, Documentary Life still included many digressions, suggesting that the author never fully resolved the conflict between the history of his dreams and his dream of historical truth. Nonetheless, Seymour correctly anticipated that professional historians would consult this publication. By contrast, he wrote Hale and Wyllys for “born antiquarians” like himself, whom he presumed would tolerate and even relish his meandering narrative. Even so, this volume contained twenty appendices of primary sources. Perhaps only through these oppositional yet overlapping accounts could he convey the “real Hale.” Again drawing upon the rhetoric of popular eugenics, Seymour exalted his protagonists as examples of “Earth’s best blood.”72 But Wyllys was not as well-known as Hale, nor did this book make him so. So why did Seymour devote over two hundred pages to him and barely fifty to Hale? Moreover, why did he highlight their friendship, which, given the absence of correspondence between them, scarcely filled five pages?73 Besides their

610   Catherine L. Whalen shared history as Yale classmates, Seymour offered few commonalities beyond the unknown whereabouts of their corporeal remains. Yet without definitive documentation, Seymour might more freely imagine the ideal, “whole-souled” friendship that he ardently desired for Hale, unfettered by exacting professional standards. If nothing else, perhaps the pair provided a safe locus for his arguably homoerotic obsession with his hero. One might speculate that of the two men, Seymour identified with Wyllys rather than Hale, whom I have suggested he associated with Graves. Seymour relished reiteration, repeatedly expressing himself in multiple media. Around the time he published Hale and Wyllys, he inscribed the dyad in silver as well as print. He  commissioned two tankards in their honor from Arthur  J.  Stone’s shop (Figure 30.8), the source of his reproduction Charles II candlesticks.74 These lidded vessels resembled mid-eighteenth-century Boston examples, with lengthy inscriptions extolling their dedicatees’ patriotism and self-sacrifice. Coats of arms adorned each tankard; for the “Patrician” Wyllys that meant his family’s, but not so for the unaristocratic Hale. Rather, Seymour substituted his own self-designed coat of arms. For years, Seymour employed a winged shield as his personal insignia, but here playfully added a winged hourglass and plow along with the legend “Speed the Plow,” invoking an old verse celebrating the happy life of a self-sufficient farmer (Figure 30.9).75 Thus, he referenced his “farm,” the Hale Homestead, while the winged hourglass evoked the motto tempus fugit, or “time flies.”76 The sentiment was particularly appropriate for the elderly antiquarian, then seventy-two-years old. Through these tankards, he coalesced Hale and Wyllys, the Birth-Place, and his own persona into durable, ceremonial objects, encoded with texts and images.

Figure 30.8.  Arthur J. Stone Shop, Wyllys Tankard and Hale Tankard, 1932; silver, 6−½ in. (without thumbpiece). Berkeley College, Yale University, Gift of George Dudley Seymour.

Collecting as Historical Practice   611

Figure 30.9.  George Dudley Seymour with Arthur  J.  Stone Shop, Coat of Arms, c. 1932. Author’s drawing.

In his fascination with insignias of all kinds, Seymour’s antiquarianism dovetailed with his professional practice as a patent lawyer. He was zealously attentive to their import, whether as proclamations of authority, affinity, or ownership. Such symbols are intermediaries between words and things, or in the case of heraldry, a rule-bound visual language. Seymour reveled in this discourse, even as he disregarded its constraints while designing his own arms. His interest in heraldry was hardly unique; what I wish to emphasize is his attraction to such a clearly defined system of denotation, coupled with his willingness to abandon it in order to achieve more apt self-expression. Seymour never hesitated to spell out his intended meanings. When he gave the Hale and Wyllys tankards to Yale in 1940, new inscriptions on the body of each vessel bore his name and date of gift, further conjoining him with both men. In an accompanying letter, he provided detailed information about the tankards’ fabrication and their dedicatees for the benefit of future “antiquaries” who may be writing about them “a hundred years hence.”77 Seymour’s keen historical consciousness reached back into the past, encompassed the present, and stretched toward the future. Tirelessly documenting his own history, Seymour set the stage for encore performances of his personal identity. Even sooner than he predicted, at least one future antiquary pondered Seymour’s tankards and the narratives they entail.

612   Catherine L. Whalen

Final Words, Persistent Things “O, call back yesterday, Bid time return.”78 When the Earl of Salisbury speaks these words in William Shakespeare’s Richard II, he rues a lost army of soldiers who, falsely believing their king dead, had dispersed the day before. The playwright’s phrasing is ambiguous; does the line express a wish to travel back in time or to summon the past into the present? George Dudley Seymour, who chose it for the epigraph of Documentary Life as well as his own epitaph, seems to have wanted both. He was an amateur historian, in the sense of “lover of,” who wished not only to understand his subject’s historical circumstances but also to make him “live again,” aims not so unlike those of his professional peers. His passionate search for anything and everything connected to Hale resulted in lasting outcomes, including the Hale Homestead’s eventual opening to the public under the auspices of the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society (later Connecticut Landmarks), which he helped found. Furthermore, Seymour published on subjects ranging from the lives of prominent Connecticut colonists to early American furniture and especially architecture. A long-standing civic activist, he was an important advocate for New Haven’s City Beautiful movement, park systems, and historic preservation.79 Regarding Hale, Seymour’s most enduring efforts to resurrect his hero crossed boundaries between fact and fantasy. Chief among them was the realization of his and Pratt’s “ideal conception,” and the stamp based upon it. Pratt’s statue became iconic, especially in military, governmental, and ideological contexts. In 1940, the right-wing publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert  R.  McCormick, erected a full-size copy outside the newspaper’s tower to “serve as a constant inspiration to patriotism” and “an ever-present reminder of a great sacrifice made for our country.”80 Seymour bequeathed the second casting of Pratt’s statue, which originally stood outside the Hale Homestead, to the federal Department of Justice in Washington, DC, where it was installed in 1947.81 In 1973, the US Central Intelligence Agency erected a replica of Pratt’s Hale on its campus in Langley, Virginia. Unsurprisingly, the agency, dedicated to foreign surveillance, honored him as the first American executed for spying.82 Hale further surfaced in debates on covert operations and counterterrorism following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, invoked by both advocates and detractors of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and its subsequent renewals.83 In a New Haven cemetery, Shakespeare’s words, “O, call back yesterday, Bid time return,” adorn Seymour’s headstone along with his dates and winged emblem (Figure 30.10). The granite marker echoes the outline of early New England gravestones, a form he knew well, as he peppered the Connecticut countryside with similarly shaped monuments dedicated to local worthies, including his own ancestors.84 In accordance with his will, Seymour shared his burial plot with Henry Solon Graves, albeit with the latter’s wife, Marian Welch Graves, interposed between them.85 While the bodies of Hale and Wyllys lay “unmarked, forgotten,” these two men materially achieved their final union.

Collecting as Historical Practice   613

Figure 30.10.  Headstone of George Dudley Seymour, Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1945; granite. Author’s photograph.

Conclusion: Future Antiquaries As one who self-consciously laid a trail for “future antiquaries,” Seymour’s last marker could hardly have been more fitting. Gravestones remain favorite artifacts of American material culture scholars, subjects of careful scrutiny, thorough documentation, and sophisticated interpretation. In their iconic incarnations—featuring names, dates, epitaphs, sculptural form, imagery, fixed locations, and durable materials—they are paradigmatic examples of moored objects. They possess the selfsame advantages for historical inquiry that Seymour found so useful: inscription, iconography, space and place, and biography. Tethering objects to particular individuals both fires historical imagination and provides a powerful means of embedding them in cogent narratives. Even when not acknowledged as such, a biographical approach is a frequent go-to strategy for material culture scholars aspiring to interpret the imbrications of people and artifacts. Collectors are particularly apt subjects for such inquiries, as they so often express the interconnections they make between material things and immaterial values, especially

614   Catherine L. Whalen when they seek to make their own meanings legible to others. Their motives for doing so may include the cultivation of taste and aesthetic refinement, political influence, cultural hegemony, and emotional sustenance; often, they encompass knowledge creation and historical consciousness. In concert, collecting drives scholarship, a dynamic that undergirds the fields of history and material culture studies, among many others. Given that both written documents and objects exist in physical form, the categorical distinction between them is specious. But in practice, the demarcation matters, governing what things—text-laden or not—that scholars deem worthy of attention. Those strategizing how to use material culture as historical evidence are justifiably wary of its ambiguity, its obstinate resistance to fixed meaning and shared understanding. Words, of course, are slippery, too; witness poststructuralist theorizations of a linguistic sign’s inability to unambiguously denote its referent.86 Nonetheless, texts are the historian’s stock-in-trade, along with methodologies that address their complexities and perfidies. Material culture may appear to be merely another category of evidence, yielding to other modes of analysis. Or, just as for the impassioned collector-historian, it can be an especially revelatory path to the histories of one’s desires.

Notes 1. Horace Taft to George Dudley Seymour, October 1, 1915, George Dudley Seymour papers, MSS Group 442, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Box 28, Folder 277. Taft founded the eponymous school in Watertown, Connecticut, and was a brother of US President William Howard Taft. 2. Theodore  S.  Woolsey, quoted in George Dudley Seymour and Donald Lines Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family (New Haven, CT: self-published, 1939), 570; and George Dudley Seymour, Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (New Haven, CT: self-published, 1941), xxi, 460, 467. The American Revolutionary War lasted from 1775 to 1783. Upon Britain’s defeat, the former colony became the United States of America. 3. Seymour, Documentary Life, xxi. 4. See Robert B. Townsend, History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 5. See J. Ritchie Garrison, “Material Cultures,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 295–310; Catherine L. Whalen, “American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility, and Academia,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, no. 1 (2001–2002): 108–144; The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York: Norton, 1985); Re-Creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival, ed. Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Eyring, and Kenny Marotta (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); and Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, ed. Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

Collecting as Historical Practice   615 6. Francis P. Garvan to John Marshall Phillips, Garvan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box 8, File “Yale Corr. w/J. Marshall Phillips, 1930–31.” 7. Seymour, Documentary Life, xxv–xxxiii. 8. Seymour, Documentary Life, 597. 9. Mary Beth Baker, “Nathan Hale: Icon of Innocence,” Connecticut History 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–30. 10. Seymour, Documentary Life, 598. 11. Seymour, Documentary Life, 553, 563. 12. Seymour, Documentary Life, 563. 13. Seymour, Documentary Life, 378, 563. Seymour opined that Hale’s “last words” derived from Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1712), “What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.” 14. George Dudley Seymour, “The Familiar Hale: An Attempt to Show by What Standards of Age, Appearance, and Character the Proposed Statute to Nathan Hale for the Campus of Yale College Should Be Judged” (New Haven, CT: Yale Publishing Association, 1907). 15. Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New York: Crowell, 1968), 422; and David Kirby, “Making It Work; Nathan Hale Was Here . . . and Here . . . and Here,” New York Times, November 23, 1997. 16. George Dudley Seymour, “Inventory of the Household Furniture and Personal Effects in the Estate of George Dudley Seymour,” 1945; and George Dudley Seymour, New Haven (New Haven, CT; self-published, 1942), 447–458. 17. Seymour, New Haven, 512. 18. Seymour, Documentary Life, iv. 19. Seymour, Documentary Life, 415. 20. Seymour, Documentary Life, 421. Rebekah Abbot dictated the letter in 1856. 21. Seymour, Documentary Life, 418, 420, 424; and Seymour, “Inventory of the Household,” 21, 31. 22. Elisha Bostwick, as quoted in Seymour, Documentary Life, 324. 23. Seymour, Documentary Life, 1. 24. Seymour, Documentary Life, 414. 25. Bostwick, as quoted in Seymour, Documentary Life, 414. 26. Seymour, Documentary Life, ix, 1, 172. 27. Seymour, Documentary Life, 564. 28. George Dudley Seymour, Last Will and Testament of George Dudley Seymour (self-published, c. 1945), 26. 29. Seymour, Will, 13; “Inventory of the Household Furniture and Personal Effects in the ‘Hale Homestead and ‘Strong Homestead,’ Coventry, Conn. Belonging to the Estate of George Dudley Seymour,” 1945, 20. 30. Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 417–418. 31. Seymour, Will, 10; Seymour, “Inventory of the Household,” 1–11, 20, 31. 32. R. T. H. Halsey and Elizabeth Tower, Homes of Our Ancestors (Garden City, L.I.: Doubleday, Doran 1925); Dianne H. Pilgrim, “Inherited from the Past: The American Period Room,” The American Art Journal 10, no. 1 (May 1978); and Winterthur Portfolio 46, no. 2 (2012). 33. Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 544. 34. “Henry Solon Graves,” Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased During the Year 1950–1951, Bulletin of Yale University 48, no. 1 (1952): 20–21; Seymour,

616   Catherine L. Whalen Will, 2; and Cecila Beaux to George Dudley Seymour, September 5, 1902, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 3, Folder 29. 35. Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, July 1, 1906, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 114. 36. Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, June 11, 1908 and August 9, 1909, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 114; and “Henry Solon Graves,” Obituary Record, 21. Henry Solon Graves married Ella Marian Welch on December 19, 1903. 37. Seymour, Documentary Life, xxi. 38. Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, November 11, 1916, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 115. 39. Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, March 12, 1917, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 115. 40. Bela Lyon Pratt to Sarah Victoria Whittelsey Pratt, April 30, 1899, Bela Lyon Pratt Historical Society. Edward Everett Hale, grand-nephew of Nathan Hale, let Pratt have five photographs of his sons, among them Pratt’s friend Philip Hale. 41. George Dudley Seymour to Royal Cortissoz, November 25, 1925, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 4, Folder 33; George Dudley Seymour’s Furniture Collection in The Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, CT: The Society, 1958); Seymour, Will, 8; and The Green Cloak, Object files, Wadsworth Atheneum. 42. George Dudley Seymour to Cecilia Beaux, February 15, 1924, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 4, Folder 33. 43. Seymour to Beaux, February 15, 1924. 44. Seymour to Beaux, February 15, 1924. 45. Seymour, Will, 27; and Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, March 8, 1929, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 114. 46. Henry Solon Graves to George Dudley Seymour, June 26, 1930, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 12, Folder 118; Seymour, Hale and Wyllys, 80. 47. Seymour, Hale and Wyllys, 135, 137–138; and Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 21. 48. Cecilia Beaux to George Dudley Seymour, September 5, 1902, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 3, Folder 29. 49. Andrew Keogh to George Dudley Seymour, December 20, 1923, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 4, Folder 33. 50. George Dudley Seymour to Cecilia Beaux, March 7, 1924, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 4, Folder 33. 51. Taft to Seymour, October 1, 1915, and Seymour to Beaux, March 7, 1924; Seymour papers, Yale. 52. American Silver, the Work of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Silversmiths (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1906), 56; George Dudley Seymour, annotated photograph of Arthur J. Stone candlesticks, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 102, Folder 1469. 53. Seymour to Cortissoz, November 25, 1925. 54. Seymour to Cortissoz, November 25, 1925. 55. Seymour to Cortissoz, November 25, 1925. 56. Seymour to Cortissoz, November 25, 1925. 57. Cecilia Beaux to George Dudley Seymour, April 19, 1925, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 4, Folder 33. 58. Beaux to Seymour, April 19, 1925.

Collecting as Historical Practice   617 59. Estelle B. Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 193. 60. Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 22, 43; and Robert Smythe Hitchens, The Green Carnation (New York: D. Appleton, 1894). The author based this roman à clef on the love affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. 61. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 52–54. 62. Seymour, Documentary Life, 554–555; Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 417. 63. Seymour, Documentary Life, 554–555. 64. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 65. Seymour, Documentary Life, 554–555. 66. George Dudley Seymour to A. B. Meredith, March 29, 1926, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 64, Folder 900. 67. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916); “Immigration Act of 1924,” H.R. 7995; Pub.L. 68–139; 43 Stat. 153; 68th Congress; May 26, 1924; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 78–90. 68. Seymour, Documentary Life, 600. 69. Seymour to Meredith, March 29, 1926. 70. Seymour, Documentary Life, title page. 7 1. Seymour, Hale and Wyllys, title page. 72. Seymour, Hale and Wyllys, 3. 73. Seymour, Hale and Wyllys, 49–53. 74. E. B. S. (Elizabeth B. Stone) to George Dudley Seymour, October 11, 1929, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 28, Folder 272; Elenita C. Chickering and Sarah Morgan Ross, Arthur J. Stone, 1847–1938, Designer and Silversmith (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 1994), 169. Arthur Hartwell made the Hale tankard, and Herbert Taylor made the Wyllys tankard. 75. George Dudley Seymour to Mrs. Arthur  J.  Stone (Elizabeth  B.  Stone), May 11, 1932, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 28, Folder 272; Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 574–575. 76. Seymour to Stone, May 11, 1932; Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 574. 77. George Dudley Seymour to The President and Fellows of Yale University, February 22, 1940, Seymour papers, Yale, Box 26, Folder 253. 78. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (c. 1595), Act III, scene ii, line 69. 79. See Seymour, Documentary Life, 407–421; and Catherine  L.  Whalen, “The Alchemy of Collecting: Material Narratives of Early America, 1890–1940” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007). 80. John A. Menaugh, “The Immortal Nathan Hale,” Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1940. 81. “Early Visitor,” The Washington Post, November 26, 1947. 82. “The Nathan Hale Statue,” Studies in Intelligence 17 (Fall 1973): 13–15. 83. Eric Lichtblau, “At Home in War on Terror,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2002; US Senator Robert Byrd, “Senate Floor Debate on Domestic Surveillance, Patriot Act Reauthorization,” Congressional Record: December 16, 2005 (Senate), S13738. Lichtblau profiled Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, noting

618   Catherine L. Whalen his invocation of Nathan Hale. Byrd, speaking out against extraordinary rendition of Iraqi suspects, rhetorically asked, “Is this the America that Nathan Hale died for, when he said I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country?” 84. Seymour and Jacobus, A History of the Seymour Family, 455, 517, 520, 524. 85. Seymour, Will, 2. 86. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27.

Bibliography Axelrod, Alan, ed. The Colonial Revival in America. New York: Norton, 1985. Baker, Mary E. “A Born Antiquarian: George Dudley Seymour.” The Connecticut Antiquarian 41, no. 1 (1990): 11–28. Barnett, Teresa. Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Gonzalez, Jennifer A. “Autotopographies.” In Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, edited by Gabriel Brahm and Mark Driscoll, 133–147. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Greenfield, Briann. Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Martin, Ann Smart, and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds. American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1997. Murphy, Kevin D. “‘Secure from All Intrusion’: Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Turn-ofthe-Twentieth-Century American Resort.” Winterthur Portfolio 43 (Summer/Autumn 2009): 185–228. Pearson, Ralph L., and Linda Wriglely. “Before Mayor Richard Lee: George Dudley Seymour and the City Planning Movement in New Haven, 1907–1924.” Journal of Urban History 6, no. 3 (1980): 297–319. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Schlereth, Thomas  J., ed. Material Culture Studies in America. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982. Stillinger, Elizabeth. A Kind of Archaeology: Collecting American Folk Art, 1876–1976. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. Trask, Jeffrey. Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Wilson, Richard Guy, Shaun Eyring, and Kenny Marotta, eds. Re-Creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Conclusion The Meaning of Things* Peter Burke

Most handbooks present the state of knowledge as it was just before the time of ­publication. What is challenging about this one is that the chapters are oriented toward the future, introducing new concepts ranging from “sensiotics” to “material engagement,” and implying that scholars need to talk more about the ways in which they talk about things. Listening to the papers at the conference that launched this volume, I  began to imagine a dictionary of concepts—A is for Agency, for instance, B is for Bricolage, C is for Classification, D is for Distinction, and so on. This dictionary would help us to his­tor­i­cize the concepts that we employ, as well as reflecting on their individual strengths and weaknesses. What follows will focus on two case studies, M for meaning and T for translation. What do things mean? More exactly, what kinds of meaning do people—different groups of people—give to things? It is, of course, impossible to avoid the philosopher’s question, What do we mean by meaning? As Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards showed long ago in The Meaning of Meaning, the concept has different definitions. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, defined the meaning of words as their use.1 In the case of art, the “Hamburg school” (Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, William Heckscher, and others), reacting against the formalism of Heinrich Wölfflin, put meaning at the top of their agenda, although the subsequent debate over iconography and iconology has revealed some of the problems of the concept.2 If we were to adapt Wittgenstein, we might say that the meanings of things are their uses. The meaning of a tap, for example, is to be turned on to provide water, and so on. However, the notorious example of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, submitted for exhibition in 1917 under the title Fountain, reminds us that the meanings (like the uses) of a single object may be multiple thanks to its “re-employment,” as Michel de Certeau called it. They give testimony to the power of the imagination: one of the ways in which the psychologist Liam Hudson tested children’s capacity to imagine was to ask them, “How many uses for a brick can you think of?” One of the answers he liked best was “a tombstone for a mouse.”3

620   Peter Burke Emphasis on the nonutilitarian meanings attributed to things in the course of their “careers” follows the relatively recent discovery of material culture by historians, who have come to see the importance of things as clues to a whole culture.4 Directly or ­indirectly, these studies are inspired by what is sometimes described as “thing theory,” the work of sociologists and anthropologists, among them Jean Baudrillard, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Arjun Appadurai.5 More exactly, this discovery, driven by the awareness of the importance of consumption in our own time, is a rediscovery. Archaeologists have been trying to reconstruct cultures from their material remains since the beginning of their discipline in the early nineteenth century. Folklorists in Scandinavia and elsewhere were collecting traditional objects from the late nineteenth century onward and still publish on the subject.6 Curators in the many museums founded in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote about a wide range of things, as well as looking after them and displaying them. Wilhelm von Bode, for example, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, wrote on carpets and ceramics as well as on the paintings of Botticelli and Elsheimer.7 Sociologists and anthropologists also examined things as clues to the cultures that produced them. Pioneers include Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) studied items of what he called “conspicuous consumption” or “conspicuous waste” as symbols of social status, and Franz Boas, who took his interest in material culture with him when he moved from being a museum curator to teaching anthropology at Columbia University.8 However, even the nineteenth-century discovery of things by professional academics and curators was a rediscovery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of amateurs, who were known as “antiquaries,” collected old or exotic things for their “cabinets of curiosities” and also wrote about them.9 Among the seventeenth-century studies of this kind are books by Benoît Baudouin (1647) and Giulio Negrone (1667) on ancient boots and shoes, Fortunio Liceti (1621) on lamps, Thomas Bartholin on bracelets (1647), Johann Kirchmann on rings (1657), and Johann Scheffer on ships (1643). Of all the scholars who have been concerned with things, the sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have paid most attention to questions of meaning. Some, like Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu in their studies of social “distinction,” have concentrated on status symbols. Others, like Mary Douglas, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Arjun Appadurai, and Daniel Miller, have tried to retrieve a wider range of meanings, especially for cherished objects. Csikszentmihalyi, for example, a social psychologist, conducted interviews with 315 men, women, and children in the Chicago area in the 1970s, asking such questions as “If you had a fire in your home, what objects would you save?”10 That question reminds us of the importance of associations as part of the meaning of things: the ring my mother gave me, the sash my father wore, and so on. A West African mask has one range of meanings in the place where it was made (for the carver, for members of the secret society that used it, and so on), and another range of meanings for the visitor who views it in a Western museum, where it may be regarded as exotic or primitive or associated with Picasso.11

Conclusion   621 How can we recover the meanings of things for people who died hundreds of years ago? Much as they might like to do so, historians of early modern Europe concerned with the meanings of things for people living at that time are unfortunately unable to follow the example of Csikszentmihalyi, asking direct questions, or that of the anthropologists who observe while sharing the lives of the people they study. What early modern historians can do is to try to fit together different kinds of ­evidence. In the first place, the evidence of things themselves (following the lead of archaeologists), looking for signs of wear, as in the case of the thirteenth-century bronze statue of St Peter in St Peter’s in Rome, the foot worn away by centuries of touching and kissing, still to be seen every day in the basilica. There are also inscriptions on objects—proverbs, quotations from the Bible or from poems, like a dish from Deruta that quotes a verse from Petrarch.12 External evidence includes documents such as inventories and wills, and literary texts such as poems, plays, and romances. Among others, Catherine Richardson has shown how the close reading of inventories can help in the reconstruction of material culture.13 There is also the testimony of images: paintings or engravings representing different kinds of objects. The inventories tell us about the uses of different things and their place in the home. Wills, letters, memoirs, and other literary texts often refer to attachment to particular things by their owners (or attachment through things to people, places, or communities). Pictures of the interiors of houses show which things were placed together in the same room. It is, of course, necessary to bear in mind that, like texts, images may mislead historians who treat them as evidence. For example, expensive objects such as oriental carpets, represented in early modern portraits, may be studio props, displayed in order to lend status to the sitter. The evidence of still-life paintings also needs to be treated with care since this increasingly popular genre (especially in the seventeenth-century Netherlands) had its own agenda, notably to reveal the folly of attachment to things by showing clocks, hourglasses, and skulls as symbols of the transience and so the “vanity” of human life.14 The meanings of things varied a great deal in this period, according to everyday or special occasions and different kinds of people—male or female, old or young, rich or poor, urban or rural, living in different parts of Europe, and in different centuries. Remembering these variations and also the overlap between categories, it may still be useful to distinguish six main kinds of meaning for things in early modern Europe. They were viewed as items of display, devotional objects, gifts, souvenirs, symbols of identity, and finally collectibles. It is of course possible to add to this list. Thinking of the medals that were struck from the fifteenth century to commemorate both individuals and events, we might want to describe their meaning not only as a “souvenir” but also as “propaganda,” especially when, in the case of medals issued by the government of Louis  XIV, for instance, they offered official interpretations of controversial events such as the sack of Heidelberg by French troops or the bombardment of Genoa by the French navy.15 In the first place, display has had the lion’s share of sociological attention from Veblen to Bourdieu, though anthropologists such as Mary Douglas place less emphasis on it,

622   Peter Burke while Csikszentmihalyi regretted that “this one dimension has so overshadowed the rest.”16 All the same, there can be little doubt that objects were often used in early modern times to impress visitors with the wealth, status, taste, or education of the owners, and thus to distinguish them from their rivals. Bourdieu’s key term, “distinction,” was already used by the seventeenth-century Florentine patrician Jacopo Soldani, who referred in one of his satires to “the distinction from others that a rich man claims today” (la distinzione/Che ‘l ricco sopra gli altri oggi pretende).17 Again, the Neapolitan lawyer Francesco d’Andrea, writing to his nephews in the 1690s, referred to the “desire to outdo others” (appetito di soprafar gli altri) as well as “the obligation to live with splendour” (l’obbligazione di viver con fasto).18 In other words, things might be status symbols, not only in a narrow sense of the term “status” but also including a good education and good taste. Busts of Roman emperors, for instance, or ancient statues might suggest to guests that their host was interested in what we call the “Renaissance,” the movement to revive the culture of classical antiquity.19 The sixteenth-century Lombard nobleman Sabba di Castiglione advised his readers to decorate their house with classical statues or, if these were not available, with works by Donatello or Michelangelo.20 Although the term “fashion,” more exactly la mode, emerged only in the seventeenth century, it seems appropriate to speak of the interest in ancient Greek or Roman objects or of objects imitating them as a fashion, or even, perhaps, as “Renaissance chic.” In the second place is devotion. For most of us today, the number of religious objects to be found in early modern European homes, especially but not exclusively in Catholic regions, is one sign that “the past is a foreign country.” Even the poor owned some of these things, while the houses of the better-off were filled with religious paintings and statues, often small in size. From the late Middle Ages, these aids to private devotion in the homes of the laity multiplied. In a treatise on the family, a fifteenth-century Italian friar recommended parents to display sacred images in the house for their effect on the behavior of the children. The friar would clearly have agreed with Csikszentmihalyi that “interaction with objects promotes socialization.” 21 It must be admitted that “devotion” is a rather vague term, and that religious images had various purposes and meanings in this period. Some people, especially the clergy, viewed them as a means to instruct the illiterate. Others, particularly the laity, regarded them as agents, potential or actual workers of miracles, as ex-votos from this period remind us. Ex-votos include body parts made of wax or silver placed in chapels, recording cures following an appeal to Mary or the saints (often an appeal to a particular image of Mary or a saint), or simple paintings telling a story of deliverance from danger (falls, fires, brigands, and so on).22 For the clergy, such as Gabriele Paleotti, a sixteenthcentury bishop of Bologna, it was God who worked miracles “in” or “through” images. For the laity, it was often a particular image, such as the Madonna of Montallegro (near Rapallo), filled with supernatural power, that produced the miracle.23 The thing was treated as a person: touched, kissed, dressed up, taken from one place to another (as the Virgin of Impruneta was taken to Florence in time of drought in order to make rain), ducked in water if a miracle failed to occur, and even pelted with dung by a blasphemer,

Conclusion   623 as in a legendary case, once again from Florence. In this case the image took its revenge. Images not only punished blasphemers but moved their eyes, wept, bled, sweated, and spoke to worshippers.24 In early modern times, images of the Virgin Mary and of Christ, especially the Crucifixion, were coming to be used more and more frequently as aids to meditation, prompting a shift in style and composition, as Sixten Ringbom writes, “from icon to ­narrative.”25 It is, of course, necessary to ask who bought these images and used them in this way. A study of objects in seventeenth-century Rome by Renato Ago, based for the most part on inventories, concludes that “the paintings women owned in large part depicted devotional images,” while “men preferred profane subjects.”26 The meaning of religious objects was contested at this time, especially after the Reformation. Critics claimed that sacred images encouraged what they called “idolatry” or at the least “superstition,” on the grounds that ordinary people confused a representation with the person it represented. The waves of iconoclasm that accompanied the Reformation are well known, whether we describe them as conspicuous nondevotion or as devout destruction.27 Hence, there was less scope for devotional images in Protestant cultures. In their place came quotations from the Bible, to be seen on the facades of dwellings and on objects in the household.28 In the third place are gifts. Ex-votos were a kind of gift, more exactly a “counterprestation.”29 Gift giving was an important practice in the social life of early modern people and took many forms. Gifts were exchanges not only between equals such as relatives, friends, and neighbors, but also between superiors and inferiors, moving in both directions, since powerful patrons, like women, needed to be courted. Favorite gifts included rings and gloves (common gifts from lover to beloved), books and ancient coins, ­especially for scholars, and food, from the chickens that peasants might present to their doctor or lawyer in lieu of a fee to the more noble birds and animals (pheasants or venison, for example) exchanged by the upper classes. New Year’s Day, rather than Christmas, was a favorite occasion for gift exchange at this time, as in the case of the jewels that courtiers gave Queen Elizabeth.30 Other occasions were christenings, betrothals, and weddings. One reason for giving was for the giver to be remembered. In the fourth place, things were valued as souvenirs or mementos, known in early modern English as “remembrances.”31 The word souvenir will be employed in what follows in a wide sense to refer to any object intended by the maker, donor, or owner to evoke certain memories. Among the most impressive of these mementos were funeral monuments in churches, of which some four thousand from the early modern period remain in England alone, transmitting memories of the persons represented as well as acting as a more general memento mori.32 Some of these souvenirs were heirlooms: family portraits, jewels, or weapons that were inherited and so reminded the owner of his or her father or mother or grandparents. Mourning rings were made and worn in memory of particular persons. Wills made frequent reference to objects bequeathed to family and friends so that they would remember the donor with affection, including tables, cauldrons, gowns, and mattresses,

624   Peter Burke a reminder of the long life of the kinds of object that later generations might throw away every decade. These wills also illustrate “affection for objects.”33 Other souvenirs included religious objects brought back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, or Loreto, for instance; trophies, such as weapons taken from the enemy in battle, displayed in the family home; or objects brought back from the Grand Tour that many young noblemen, from England to Poland, undertook at this time as part of their education. In the eighteenth century, portraits of these “Grand Tourists” by Pompeo Batoni, who worked in Rome, show them with some of their prized possessions, some of which may still be seen in English country houses. Other objects commemorated events such as the launching of a ship or the birth of a child.34 Marriages in particular were commemorated in this way. The marriage chests or cassoni of the Italian Renaissance were made not only to hold clothes but to commemorate a wedding, like plates or paired portraits of man and wife inscribed with the date of the event.35 The cult of friendship was also expressed by material objects, such as the portrait of friends together or the album amicorum in which friends wrote their names, poems, and sentiments.36 A more unusual object with a similar purpose is an English mug, dated 1748, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, inscribed “Prosperous and Happy May They Be/Who Give Ben Brown Their Company.”37 What might be called “institutional souvenirs” should not be forgotten. For example, Cambridge colleges are full of silver, much of it dating from the seventeenth and eight­eenth centuries, given or bequeathed to them by former students and fellows. The donors gave these objects remembering their time in the college, while the college remembered and indeed still remembers them by naming the objects “Professor Smith’s Cup,” “Dr Brown’s candlestick,” and so on. In any case, the name of the donor and the date of the donation are often inscribed on the things themselves. In the fifth place, things had particular meanings for individuals; indeed, they helped individuals construct their identities. The critique of the theory of things as status symbols has emphasized the varieties of meaning that similar objects may have for different individuals, along the lines of the argument advanced by Michel de Certeau, in a study of France in the 1970s, to the effect that consumers are not passive but active, giving their own meanings even to mass-produced objects by selecting and arranging them, so much so that consumption may be regarded as a form of production.38 In similar fashion, Csikszentmihalyi described things as a “means of individual differentiation,” and Mary Douglas noted that novelists such as Henry James were sensitive to the point that a room full of objects reveals “the occupant’s life and personality” as well as their place in society.39 In early modern times, individualized things included objects that carried the name or the initials of the owner, or in the case of the nobility, a coat of arms, and of course portraits. Portraits not only represented the sitter, they illustrated the sitter’s self-presentation (aided, of course, by the artist). Individuals were often represented together with objects that were presumably dear to them and acted as so many props to their identity.40 Just as kings were painted together with their crowns and scepters or

Conclusion   625 bishops with their miters, soldiers had their arms and armor, generals their batons, scholars their own books, physicians their copy of Hippocrates or Galen, lawyers the Codex of Justinian, lovers the poems of Petrarch, and other individuals their favorite books, including Montesquieu”s Esprit des Lois or the works of Shakespeare or Rousseau. Lady Anne Clifford had herself painted with no fewer than forty-one books, representing her credentials as a learned lady. Representations of individual identity have received a good deal of attention, from  Jacob Burckhardt’s classic discussion of Renaissance individualism to Stephen Greenblatt’s account of Renaissance self-fashioning.41 However, signs of collective identity were at least equally important in the early modern period. Portraits of individuals, which may appear to us as symbols of individualism, were often intended to be displayed in groups, whether of family members or holders of a particular office, such as mayor, over the generations. Other portraits, such as the mass-produced images of Martin Luther or Queen Elizabeth I, were signs of allegiance to a form of religion or a ruler. At times, images of rulers represented political choices, like the dishes with images of James II and William III.42 Sacred images associated with particular cities or villages became symbols of those places. Other kinds of object, with collective owners such as guilds, fraternities, colleges, clubs, and regiments, symbolized the group and might be used in rituals that affirmed the solidarity of that group, such as the “standing cups” that were passed round the table at a feast or the drinking horns that served a similar purpose. In the sixth and final place come things as collectibles, in a period that saw the rise of collections of old, exotic, or beautiful objects, housed in galleries, “cabinets of curiosities,” or Wunderkammern.43 Collecting was another prop to identity, witness a number of portraits of collectors holding their beloved objects (coins, statues, shells) or surrounded by them. Collections were also a form of display, winning respect for their owners. For historically minded collectors, the antiquaries, old objects were valuable as “remains,” material traces of the past that offered information that could not be found in texts. When they did not own these remains, antiquaries studied and sketched them. Collectibles offer the clearest examples of objects (whether a part of nature or made by human hands) that were valued primarily for their own sake rather than for their associations: collected because they were old, because they were beautiful, because they were rare, because they came from faraway places such as Japan or Africa, or because they were made of some precious or unusual material. These things were decontextualized, taken from their original settings, and recontextualized as collector’s items, often from an aesthetic point of view. The idea of a class of object called a “work of art” dates from the early modern period, a gradual development between Renaissance and Enlightenment.44 Even when things remained in their original place, their meaning might change. Take the case of English funeral monuments, erected as expressions of piety, power, and status but viewed by some people as early as the seventeenth century as “historical documents.”45 From the sixteenth century onward, treatises were published advising collectors on what to collect (how to detect fakes, for instance) and how to classify, organize, or “methodize” their collections. Early examples include Enea Vico’s Discorsi sopra le medaglie (1558)

626   Peter Burke and Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones (1568). By the eighteenth century, the figure of the collector, especially the collector of antiquities, was so well-known as to be the target of satires and comedies, including Carlo Goldoni’s La Famiglia dell’Antiquario. Count Anselmo, the collector, is presented as uninterested in the outside world and obsessed with what his wife calls “the usual medal madness,” his ambition being to own a complete series of the coins and medals of the Roman emperors. The world of things has changed a great deal since the year 1800. Since the Industrial Revolution, for instance, the number of objects per household has increased to a vertiginous extent. The contrast between the emptiness of a fifteenth-century Florentine palace and the cluttered houses of middle-class Victorians, for example, is a dramatic one.46 Things have also become less durable, partly because they are expected to be less durable, to be thrown away after a few years rather than passed down the generations. Thanks, in turn, to lithography, photography, and the digital revolution, we have moved from shortage to glut, from a situation in which images were relatively few to one in which they are everywhere. It should be added that photographs, sometimes the same photographs, have different meanings for different people or groups of people. For example, when India formed part of the British Empire, photographs of Indians generally represented types rather than individuals for the British who took the photos or looked at them.47 Souvenirs changed their forms. The so-called friendship jugs (pichets d’amitié) from mid-nineteenth-century Normandy, given to newlyweds and inscribed with the names of the couple and the word “souvenir,” were traditional in meaning but new in form (these objects may be seen at the Musée de Normandie in Caen, together with a cooking pot dated 1700, a wedding present inscribed once again with the names of the couple). The rise of taxidermy allowed successful hunters, shooters, and fishers to display trophies that both reminded themselves and informed visitors of their prowess as sportsmen. Photographs, including picture postcards, such as the English seaside postcards (which began to circulate in the 1890s), were a more widespread new form of souvenir. The rise of mass tourism has encouraged the proliferation of souvenir dolls, keyrings, plates, dishcloths, and so on, down to this day. In the early nineteenth century, antiquarianism morphed into archaeology, in the sense of “digging up the past,” guided by the awareness that the level or stratum at which a given object was discovered offered valuable clues to its date and uses. At much the same time, private collections (to which select visitors might be admitted) were supplemented by public ones, which were at least nominally open to everyone. The epoch of museums had arrived. A great variety of things now became accessible to many more people—visually accessible, at least, since glass cases now protected most objects from touch. Museums have, of course, more than one purpose: to educate the public in general, for instance, or artisans (as in the case of what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in particular; to encourage imperial, national, or local loyalties, and so on. Their power should not be underestimated. The labels and the guides tell us not only what we are looking at but how to look at it, what to see, while the arrangement of the museum tells

Conclusion   627 its own story.48 Different museums in different periods have supported the aesthetic gaze, the historical gaze, the imperialist gaze, and the anthropological gaze. Some displays confirm the prejudices of the visitors, while others undermine them: I shall never forget a visit to a museum in Oslo in 1975 and the sight of an ordinary milk bottle in a glass case, a reminder that what we take for granted as part of everyday life is also part of history (as the more recent replacement of milk bottles by cartons has confirmed).49 On the other side, continuities between early modern attitudes to things and late modern or postmodern ones are obvious enough. The display of status via the display of things continues, even if the kind of thing chosen, from Rolex watches to Gucci bags, has changed over the centuries. The critique of idolatry, mounted by Protestants at the Reformation, continued, as a nineteenth-century missionary hymn reminds us: “The heathen in his blindness/Bows down to wood and stone.” The problem, in both periods, is for an outsider to know what a worshipper means by bowing before an image. The seventeenth-century lawyer-historian John Selden posed the question with his customary acuity: “Put case I bow to the altar, why am I guilty of idolatry? Because a stander by thinks so?”50 Miraculous images are still venerated in some places, from Italy to Brazil, though they may be viewed online instead of in their original setting, while ex-votos are still offered, now including votive motorcycle helmets.51 These images continue to symbolize local identities, as in the case of the Madonna dell’Orto of Chiavari and the Madonna of Montallegro near Rapallo, both venerated among the Genoese diaspora in Buenos Aires and elsewhere in South America.52 In short, Hans Belting’s distinction between the “era of the image,” essentially the Middle Ages, and the “era of art,” from the Renaissance onward, needs reformulation to refer not to presence versus absence but to dominant attitudes versus subordinate ones.53 Affection for objects continues, including treating them like people. The playwright Alan Bennett has confessed to thinking of some of the wooden spoons in his kitchen as more “friendly” than others.54 The nineteenth-century cult of secular heroes, whether they were warriors, writers, or artists, resembled the cult of the saints in its emphasis on material objects such as swords, pens, or locks of hair that belonged to the hero. This form of secular sanctity was extended in the twentieth century to film stars (as a well-known French sociologist observed with a certain malicious pleasure), and also to pop singers and soccer players (remembering that the word fan is derived from “fanatic”).55 Returning to the idea of a “biography” of a thing, we need to consider not only aging but also movement and re-employment or “translation.” As objects were taken from one place to another, their meaning often changed. Take the case of the many items of Chinese porcelain that were exported to Europe. There were “at least 300 million pieces of chinaware arriving on European docks in the three centuries after the Portuguese reached China.”56 The functions of these cups, plates, dishes, and so on remained the same, but their meaning changed on arrival in Europe because they became signs of an exotic culture. The “museumification” of objects, for instance, was a trend that provoked debate right from the start. On one side, supporters of the museum movement emphasized not only

628   Peter Burke the increased accessibility of interesting things but their conservation and their display in an environment that enabled them to be seen much more easily than (say) in a dark church. On the other side, critics of museums lamented the fact that the objects had been torn from their original environment and had lost their original meanings. In 1796, for instance, in a letter to General Miranda, and again in 1815, the French scholar Quatremère de Quincy denounced the looting of Italian works of art by Napoleon, Lord Elgin, and others on the grounds that this uprooting or déplacement deprived the objects of their cultural value. Quatremère’s point was precisely that the meaning of an artifact depends on its uses and its location. To displace it is to destroy it. The appropriate setting for Italian artifacts was Italy itself, which he described as a kind of museum without walls, “le museum integral.”57 It may be useful to discuss the biography of things in terms of translation. Laura Johnson refers to what she calls “material translation.” I shall speak, more traditionally, of “cultural translation” in the sense of the adaptation of an item of culture to a new use or situation, a process of decontextualization followed by recontextualization.58 I happen to be working at the moment on cultural hybridity in the Renaissance, including a range of hybrid objects, semiclassical and semigothic, for instance, or objects that are often described today with hyphenated names—“Veneto-Saracenic” metalwork, for instance, or “Indo-Portuguese” furniture, or “Afro-Portuguese” ivories.59 To refer to these objects as “hybrid” may be useful as a kind of shorthand, but the term is simply descriptive and has the disadvantage of assimilating culture to nature. The most interesting question surely concerns the process by which objects such as these came into existence. At this point, the idea of translation seems to be illuminating. We can sometimes follow the artisans who translated the local traditions of Damascus, Gujarat, Benin, and so on, into a form that would appeal to a market in Venice or Lisbon. The concept of translation has the advantage of focusing attention on agency, where “hybridization” does not. It allows us to ask both what is gained and what is lost in the process of receiving and adapting forms that originated outside a particular region or ­culture.60 However, the concept also raises problems of its own, especially the problem of studying collective, multiple translators, including not only the craftsmen themselves but also the mediators who transmitted to Damascus or Benin information about what would appeal in Venice or Lisbon. We know all too little about this process of negotiation, even less than about similar processes in the case of chintz or willowpattern porcelain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documented in East India Company records.61 When working with a concept, it is illuminating to test it, to stretch it to see how far we can go with it before the fabric tears irreparably. We might, for instance, stretch the concept of translation to include the changes that an object undergoes while remaining the same but crossing a cultural frontier either in space or time. These objects are “translated” in the sense of transfer, as in the case of African art “in transit” (as Christopher Steiner puts it) from West Africa, where the images have a religious meaning, to Paris or New York, where they turn into “primitive art.” On occasion, objects circulate in the literal sense of traveling back to their place of origin, as in the case of the glass beads produced in Venice and elsewhere in Europe to

Conclusion   629 exchange for goods in Africa. These “trade beads” are now bought by Western tourists and dealers. “While the beads themselves have not really changed . . . the meaning of the beads has been drastically altered.”62 The beads offer a vivid example of what Igor Kopytoff, in a now classic essay, has called “the cultural biography of things.”63 Again, objects of devotion made in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance were converted or translated later into works of art when they were transferred from churches or bedrooms to private collections or public museums. They were “disenchanted”—imagine the surprise if someone knelt before a holy image now on display in the British Museum! However, re-enchantment can also occur. For example, in the year 2001, some visitors to  the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where the twelfth-century icon known as the “Virgin of Vladimir” was kept, were seen to be “ostentatiously venerating the icon.”64 My Cambridge College owns a statue of the Buddha, displayed on a plinth outside the Senior Combination Room. A few months ago, an orange and a glass of water appeared on the plinth next to the statue, suggesting that for someone in the college the Buddha is a holy image rather than a work of art. We might say that the anonymous Buddhist student has “retranslated” the image back into the original language. Let me stretch the concept of translation a little further, even though it must be fraying by now, and consider the case of unconscious translation. In early nineteenthcentury Rio de Janeiro, and other Brazilian cities such as Recife, there was a fashion for British products, including furniture. Some Chippendale chairs were copied locally (whether from imported examples or from pattern books). However, as the distinguished Brazilian historian-sociologist Gilberto Freyre observed in his book Ingleses no Brasil (1948), now at last translated into English, the angular forms that he considered to be typically English were smoothed out in what he called, perhaps frivolously, the “tropical climate,” while straight lines became curves (as they did a hundred years later when Oscar Niemeyer adapted Le Corbusier).65 In other words, the local artisans did not copy but rather translated the British models with which they were furnished. Was the process conscious? Probably not. My guess is that the local craftsmen were often slaves, brought from West or Central Africa. Their eyes saw English chairs, but their “mindful hands” (perhaps trained in Africa) translated them. This was not so much deliberate, self-conscious adaptation as the effect of the habitus (as in the case of the idea of distinction, I still find Bourdieu good to think with). In the case of the Renaissance, I believe that some mixtures of classical with gothic forms can be explained in a similar way (appropriately enough, since Bourdieu found the concept of habitus in Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism).66 This example reminds us not to limit meanings and associations to the conscious mind. As Pascal might have said, “The unconscious has its reasons.”

Notes * This chapter draws on material presented in “The Meaning of Things in the Early Modern World,” in Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu, and Mary Laven (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015), 2–11.

630   Peter Burke 1. Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1946); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.  E.  M.  Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). 2. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955); Ernst Gombrich, Symbolic Images (London: Phaidon, 1972); Charles Hope, “Artists, Patrons and Advisers in the Italian Renaissance,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy  F.  Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 293–343; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); cf. Ivan Gaskell’s forthcoming book, Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (New York: Routledge), chap. 2. 3. Liam Hudson, Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy (London: Methuen, 1966). 4. On the “career” of an object, Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. 5. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984); Appadurai, Social Life. Compare with Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. B. Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–22. 6. Bjarne Stoklund, Tingenes Kulturhistorie (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2003). 7. Wilhelm von Bode, Ancient Oriental Carpets (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1908); idem, Die Anfänge der Majolikakunst in Toskana (Berlin: Bard, 1911). 8. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1912); Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits,” in Objects and Others, ed. George  W.  Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75–111. 9. Oliver Impey and A. Macgregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 10. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Meaning of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 11. Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 12. Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, C.24–1932. 13. Catherine Richardson, “Written Texts and the Performance of Materiality,” in Writing Material Culture History, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 43–58. 14. Kristine Koozin, The Vanitas Still Lives of Harmen Steenwyck (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990). 15. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 16. Douglas and Isherwood, World, 4, criticizing Veblen for a “crude” emphasis on “competitive display”; Csikszentmihalyi, Meaning, 29. Cf. John Plotz, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory,” Criticism 47 (2005): 109–118. 17. Jacopo Soldani, Satire (Florence: Albizzini, 1751), 189. 18. Francesco d’Andrea, Ricordi (Naples: Lubrano, 1923), 168, 208. 19. Peter Burke, The European Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 187. 20. Sabba di Castiglione, Ricordi (Venice: Gherardo, 1555), no. 109. 21. Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare (Florence: Garinei, 1860); Csikszentmihalyi, Meaning, 50.

Conclusion   631 22. Bernard Cousin, Le miracle et le quotidien: Les ex-voto provençaux, images d’une société (Aix-en-Provence: University of Aix, 1983; Megan Holmes, “Ex-votos,” in The Idol in the Age of Art, ed. Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 159–181. 23. Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 7 (on Paleotti); Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, Spectacular Miracles (London: Reaktion, 2013). 24. On the blasphemer, Holmes, Miraculous Image, 9. Many more details both in Holmes and in Garnett and Rosser, Spectacular Miracles. 25. Sixten Ringbom, From Icon to Narrative (Åbo: Åbo akademi, 1965). 26. Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, trans. B. Bouley and C. Tazzara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 144. 27. Solange Deyon and Alain Lottin, Les Casseurs de l’été 1566 (Paris: Hachette, 1981); Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert  W. Scribner (ed.), Bilder und Bildersturm (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990); Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique (Paris: Minuit, 1991). 28. Fitzwilliam Museum, C.201–1928. 29. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1989). 30. John Cunnally, “Ancient Coins as Gifts and Tokens of Friendship during the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Collections 6 (1994): 129–143; Natalie Z. Davis, The Gift in SixteenthCentury France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 31. Lena  C.  Orlin, “Empty Vessels,” in Everyday Objects, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richards (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 299–308, at 301–303. 32. Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 33. Ago, Gusto, 58. 34. Fitzwilliam Museum, C.1723–1928. 35. Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jacqueline M. Musacchio, Art, Marriage and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 36. Peter Burke, “Humanism and Friendship in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 262–274. 37. Fitzwilliam Museum, C.1204–1928. 38. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 39. Douglas and Isherwood, World, 5–6; Csikszentmihalyi, Meaning, 33. Cf. Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 40. Peter Burke, “The Presentation of Self in the Renaissance Portrait,” in Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 150–167. 41. Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.  G.  C.  Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1944), chap.  2; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 42. Fitzwilliam Museum, C.1644–1928; C.1631–1928. 43. Impey and Macgregor, Origins; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, trans. E. Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Jaś Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds.), The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion, 1994). 44. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 45. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, 347.

632   Peter Burke 46. Traian Stoianovich, “Material Foundations of Preindustrial Civilisation in the Balkans,” Journal of Social History 4 (1970–1971): 205–262; Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 47. Chris Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion, 1997), 53–64. 48. James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi. 49. Peter Burke, “Popular Culture in Norway and Sweden,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1977): 143–147. 50. Quoted in Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, 258. 51. Garnett and Rosser, Spectacular Miracles. 52. Garnett and Rosser, Spectacular Miracles, 261. 53. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image in the Age of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 54. Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts (London: SCM Press, 2007): 113. 55. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. R. Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 56. Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 57. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology and Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 58. Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R.  Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 7–38; idem, “The History and Theory of Reception,” in The Reception of Bodin, ed. Howell A. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 21–38. 59. William Fagg, Afro-Portuguese Ivories (London: Batchworth Press, 1959); Sylvia Auld, “Veneto-Saracenic,” in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, vol. 32 (New York: Grove, 1996), 160–162; Percival Noronha, “Indo-Portuguese Furniture and its Evolution,” in Goa and Portugal, ed. Charles J. Borges (Delhi: Concept, 2003), 183–196. 60. Paul Binski, “Lost in Translation? The Movement of Things and Ideas in the Gothic Era,” in Artistic Translations between the Fourteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Zusanna Sarnecka (Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 2013), 9–19. 61. Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian textiles for the West (London: V&A Publishing, 2008). 62. Steiner, African Art, 127. 63. Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography.” 64. Ivan Gaskell, “Sacred to Profane and Back Again,” in Art and Its Publics, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 149–164, at 157. 65. Gilberto Freyre, The English in Brazil, trans. C. Tribe (London: Boulevard Books, 2011). 6 6. Peter Burke, Hybrid Renaissance (Budapest: CEU Press, 2016).

Bibliography Ago, Renata. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.

Conclusion   633 Burke, Peter. The European Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Meaning of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Davis, Natalie Z. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods. London: Allen Lane, 1979. Elsner, Jaś, and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion, 1994. Garnett, Jane, and Gervase Rosser. Spectacular Miracles. London: Reaktion, 2013. Impey, Oliver, and A. Macgregor, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things.” In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Llewellyn, Nigel. Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Sheehan, James J. Museums in the German Art World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Steiner, Christopher B. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Index

Note: Figures and Tables are indicated by an italic “f ” and “t”, respectively, following the page number. Abgar cloth of  268 Veil of Veronica and  262–63 Abiodun, Rowland  283 Abstract Expressionism  589 accelerating processes  129 accidental invention  40–41 A. C. Gilbert  241, 243–44 actor network theory  128–29 Adams, Henry  23 Adams, James Truslow  579 Adams, John Quincy  186 Adopting an Abandoned Farm (Sanborn)  583 affect 73 Stewart, K., on  74 theory 277 agency  111, 260, 271, 297 archaeology and  112 dandy and  92, 94, 102 divine 267 furniture production and  461, 466, 471n26 material culture and  113 mechanization and  259 nativity scenes and  319 objects and  10, 112, 298, 318–19 spectacularity and  92, 96 translation and  628 Ago, Renata  418, 423, 623 agrarian society  323 Agrippa, German Heinrich Cornelius  57 Ähälēpola 518 children of  519 Ähälēpola Darūwan Märīma 520f Ähälēpola Hatana 519 Albala, Ken  424

Aldrovandi, Ulisse  58, 59f Alfonso X of Castile (king)  57 allegorical religious plays (autos sacramentales) 331 Allston, Robert Francis Withers  439 American Civil War Battle of Port Royal in  437 Cashin and  435 collective memory and  435 Confederate troops in  438 domestic art movement in  435 Du Pont and  437–38 federal government in  438–39 Forten and  435, 443 freedmen and  444–45, 445f, 447 funding 438 Higginson and  435, 442 industrial economy after  579 looting and pillaging in  438–39, 444 McKinley and  443 missionaries and  434, 436 Nelson and  435–36 pianos and  435, 436–37, 439–45, 445f, 446f, 447, 449n29 Pringle in  439–42 Sea Islands and  434, 438, 448n14 slaves in  437 soldiers and  436, 442 South Carolina First Volunteers in  442 The Star Spangled Banner and  445, 446f, 447 Towne and  439 American dream  579 American folklore studies  29, 32n12 American Frugal Housewife (Child)  151–52 American Quarterly 25

636   index American Studies  24, 28 culture and  26–27 material culture and  25 at University of Pennsylvania  26 “American Studies” (Kouwenhoven)  17–18, 24, 31 American Studies Association  25, 26 The American Women’s Home (Beecher and Stowe) 441 Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (Hunter)  201–2, 213 Angas, G. F.  529 Anglo-French wars  459–60 An Lushan Rebellion  228 Anscombe, Elizabeth  38 anthropology  9, 24, 106, 114, 318, 527 colonialism and  380 cultural  29, 204 materiality and  124 origins of  1 anthropomorphism  49, 256 enchantment and  257 Antiquarian and Landmarks Society  612 antiquarianism  299, 416, 475, 578, 620 country life movement and  583 literary 579 material culture studies and  1 Nutting and  581–82 Old America and  582–83, 586 sentimentality and  579 Seymour and  606, 611 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland  482, 483 Aotearoa. See New Zealand Appadurai, Arjun, 620 Appleton, William Sumner  585 archaeology  105, 318 agency, vitality and  112 euroarchaeology 106 Europe in Middle Ages and documentary  384, 388, 389, 392 experimental 6 historical 8 material temporality and  135–36 measuring time in  125 MET and  106 piano and  437 style in  109

Armezzani, Angel  326 Artaud, Antonin  318 art history  1, 9, 216–17, 276, 318 Arthur J. Stone Shop  610–11, 610f, 611f artifact hermeneutics  37–38 artificial selection  45–47, 51n25 Artist/Rebel/Dandy exhibit at RISD  94 Baudelaire and  91 Brewer, Irvin on  95, 103n8 Brummell and  91, 95 masculinity and  96 materiality and  90 McLaren and  92–93 Mouanda and  100 personality and  93 Sapeurs and  100–101 Smith, John W., on  91–92 spectacularity and  90, 92, 100 straight pin and  95–96, 98, 99 Aryanism Māori and  527, 530 Sinhalese people and  527 The Aryan Maori (Tregear)  527 Augustine (saint)  11, 13n8 Augustus of Saxony  66 Augustus the Strong  57, 63 Green Vault of  63, 66, 67f aura 310n17 Australia 466f Assignment System in  463, 464 Butler in  463, 464f convict genealogy in  467 free craftsmen in  465 Indian furniture makers and  462–63, 463f local wood in  464 Lycett and  465 prejudice in  467–68 Probationary System in  464 settlement colonialism and  465–66 Tiwi people of  553 unfree labor model and  463–64, 467 automobiles cigarette lighter receptacle in  41 internal combustion engine  43 network and  260 autos sacramentales (allegorical religious plays) 331 Ayoola, Gabriel  289

index   637 Bailey, Geoff  113, 114 barbarism 7 Barnett, Theresa  299 baroque pearls  55, 59, 60, 61–62, 63 Bartholin, Thomas  620 Bartlett, Carolyn  478 Basalla, George  46 Basset Hound  46 Batchelor, David  75–76 Battle of Port Royal  437 Baudelaire, Charles  91 Baudouin, Benoît  620 Baudrillard, Jean  76 Baxandall, Michael  38 Beaux, Cecilia audience and  606–7 The Green Cloak by  603–5, 604f, 606–7 becoming. See human becoming Beecher, Catherine  141–42, 158, 161 The American Women’s Home by  441 piano and  441 Treatise on Domestic Economy by  151, 152 Belozerskaya, Marina  56 Belting, Hans  309, 627 Bennett, Alan  627 Berkeley, William  77 Bernard (saint)  319 bio-artifacts 46–47 etiological account of function and  45 Black, Susan Easton  343 Blackburn, Robin  64 Black Death  384, 388 Bladh, Carl  331 Boas, Franz  620 Bode, Wilhelm von  620 body change and  127–28 cognition and  275 death and  300 Foucault on bio-power and  300 material temporality and  127 objects and  319 sacred and  295, 300 body arts  536, 555n24. See also Thleta scarification communication and  553

memory and  537 Zahan on  552–53 Boga 550–51 Bolton, Andrew  93 Bonet, Bonafos  384–85, 385f, 388 wine business and  386–87 Boodt, Anselmus Boëtius de  58, 60 Book of Mormon  560–61, 565 Boorse, Christopher  42 Bostwick, Elisha  599 Bourdieu, Pierre  620, 622 Bowdoin, James  179 boyhood and science accidental injury and  238–40, 245–46 A. C. Gilbert and  241, 243–44 Chemcraft Clubs and  242–43 chemistry sets and  238, 240–41, 242–43, 242f, 245 Child Protection and Toy Safety Act and  244, 247 consumer protection laws and  244 Daily Kos on  236–37 Edison and  239 gender and  238, 240 harm and  238 home spaces and  241–42, 250n34 household products and  236, 244–45, 246 interwar years and  239–44 marketing and  240–41 mass culture and  245 nature-study movement and  239 overprotection of  236–37, 248 postwar material culture and  244–48 television and  245 Boyle, Peter  215 boy scientist  239 Bradley, Richard  128 Brambilla, Ambrogio  420, 427n15 audiences of  427n16 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae and  415, 416, 418, 421f, 422f, 427n12 visual genres and  417–18 Brewer, Laurie Anne  95, 103n8 bricolage  93, 182, 192, 619 natural philosophy and  192n2 Bridenbaugh, Carol  457

638   index British Museum  215, 629. See also Museum Britannicum Cotton and  201 de Gheyn and  205–6, 205f, 218n18 Department of Natural History at  203–4 forms of attention and  204 guided tours at  200–201 Harleian Collection of Manuscripts at  201 informational and aesthetic picture making 204–6 opening of  201 prototype and  216 Republic of Letters and  481 Sloane, E., and  201 taxonomies of  203 van Rymsdyk, J., and  201–2, 206 Bronner, Simon  26, 27 Bronze Age swords  476 bronze leaf-shaped swords  476 Brooke, James  101 Brown, Bill  310n13 Brown, J.  308–9, 313n62 Browne, Malcolm W.  237 Brownrigg, Robert  520 Brummell, Beau  91, 95 Buckland, William  456, 467 Buddhism  515, 521 Buddhist image  629 Bull, Sophia  573 Bunn, James  461 Burckhardt, Jacob  625 Bureau International des Poids et Mesures  123 Burnett, Henry  458f Burnham, John  246 Butler, Lawrence  463, 464f Byzantine Orthodoxy  264 ‘Bәna  542, 555n22 Callon, Michel  260 Cancer, Fray Luis  403 capitalism  137, 587 industrial 466 material culture and  7 material temporality and  130–31 postmodern 339 punk and  98 Shanghai and  365

Captain Nathan Hale, 1755–1776: Yale College 1773; Major John Palsgrave Wyllys, 1754–1790: Yale College 1773 (Seymour) 609 Carlucci, Pedro  326 Carter, Phebe  565, 566 Cashin, Joan  435 Catholicism 622 cult of the saints and  301 Roman  266, 269 sacred material culture and  299–300 Scotland and  484 Shanghai and  355 Spanish Catholic Monarchs  57 Cavallo, Sandra  418 CBGB  90, 93, 96 Cellini, Benvenuto  61 Treatise on Goldsmithing by  61 Central Mediterranean Neolithic period  131–32, 133 Cerankowski, Karli  99 Certeau, Michel de  619, 624 chaîne opératoire  132–33, 134, 135 chambers of wonders. See Wunderkammern Champagne, Philippe de  270, 270f, 271 Champlain, Samuel de  65 Charles I (king)  74 Charles II (king)  74, 605 Charles V (emperor)  63, 64–65 Charlton, Stephen  83–85 Chartier, Roger  323 chemistry sets  238, 242f gender and  240 marketing for  241 postwar years and  245 safety and  243 cherished objects  620 Chicora 401 Chicora Wood plantation  439 Chifartawa, Polycarp Ayuba  536 Child, Lydia Maria  142 American Frugal Housewife by  151–52 Child Protection and Toy Safety Act  244, 247 children. See boyhood Chile. See nativity scenes, Chile China. See also silk and sericulutre Han dynasty  5, 223–25 Huizong and  357

index   639 Hundred Flowers movement in  358 material culture in  357–58, 368 Ming dynasty  357 Qing dynasty  229, 357–58, 368 Shang dynasty  224 Song dynasty  228, 229, 230 Tang dynasty  229 Yuan dynasty  228, 230 Zhou in  358–59 China, Cultural Revolution  356f burning objects in  359, 361–62 class and  362, 367, 368, 371 clock museum on  369–70 collecting artifacts after  368–71, 370f Commerce Bureau in  366 confiscated materials in  364–66, 374n50, 374n53 counterrevolutionary and  361, 362 Cultural Revolution house search museum in 369 Cultural Revolution museum  359, 359f, 370–71 elites in  360–61 exhibitions by Red Guards in  361, 362, 366 Fan in  368–70 five black categories and  364–66 “four olds” and  355, 357, 358, 359–63, 366–67, 368 house search in  359–62, 360f, 363–64, 367, 373n39, 374n45 mirror museum on  369 “new society” objects and  357, 359, 371 “old society” objects and  357, 358, 359, 362, 371, 372n6 Party Committee in  363 pianos in  363, 364f propaganda and  362, 363, 368, 371 property in  367, 371, 372n13 Public Security Bureau in  361 qipao in  359, 372n20 Red Guards and  355, 359, 361–62, 363–64, 366, 371 Shanghai Bureau of Education and  363 Shanghai Party Committee in  367 Shanghai Revolutionary Committee in  363, 366 trauma of  367 Yang in  368, 370, 371

Chromophobia (Batchelor)  75–76 Chronicles of Chicora Wood (Pringle)  439 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. see Latter-day Saints cigarette lighter receptacle  41 civilization 7 Civil War. See American Civil War The Civil War and American Art (Harvey) 436 Clapperton, Hugh  290 class  27, 451 China Cultural Revolution and  362, 367, 368, 371 clock and  580 piano and  436–37 textiles and  399–400, 402 Classen, Constance  278 Worlds of Sense by  276 classification of genealogies  522 museum  477–78, 480, 485 of palm-leaf manuscripts  515 Clifford, Anne  625 clock class and  580 museum and China Cultural Revolution 369–70 Clunas, Craig  357 coastal zones, of Britain  510n21 aristocrats in  505 artisans in  504, 506 brooches in  495–96, 501f, 505 Christianity in  496 consumption and connection patterns around 498 Coppergate helmet in  505–6 dye and  497 Edward the Confessor and  505 E-ware pottery and  497 Flixborough  498, 499f, 500, 500f, 502–3, 504 forgetting in  504 in c. 450–600  494–97 France and  496, 497 gender and age imbalance in  508 Ghent  506–7, 507f graves in  495–96 hunting birds in  504

640   index coastal zones, of Britain (Continued) identity and  494–95, 496, 505 imports to  496–97, 500 Ingold and  507–8 Jutland  495, 498, 500 Kent 494–95 local wild resources in  502–3 maritime cultural landscapes and  493 maritime networks and  494 memory and  495, 496, 505, 507 Middle Ages and  493, 498, 503, 506 North Sea and Kattegat (c. 650–1000)  498–503, 499f orpiment mineral and  497 port towns (c. 900–1050)  503–7 pottery in  495, 496, 497, 500, 503 Rhineland and  495, 496, 498 Roman memory and  497 salt and  502 Stavnsager and  495, 498, 500, 501f, 503 stones and  497 trade in  497, 503, 504 traditions and  494–95 western Britain  496–97 cognition  18, 115, 278 body and  275 material culture and  10, 11, 73, 107, 108–10 verbal 276 writing and  11 cognitive science  112 representational view of mind and  106 Collaert, Hans  60 collectibles 55 early modern  62 meaning and  625 pearl  60–61, 62, 63, 64 Wunderkammern and  59 collective memory  578 American Civil War and  435 Colonial Revival and  590 Ga’anda and  535 ritual and  319 collector-historian 614 interpretation by  595 material culture studies and  594 Collinson, Peter  175, 178

colonialism. See also furniture production, in British colonies Ähälēpola Hatana and  519 Australia and settlement  465–66 genealogy and  529 history and  514–15 palm-leaf manuscripts in Sri Lanka and  515, 519, 521, 529 Colonial Revival  583 collective memory and  590 material culture and  578 New England village and  588 Nutting and  578 Rhodes and  589 Wills and  579, 587–88, 588f Columbus, Christopher  57 Compendium Physicae (Morton)  171 Conrad, Joseph  31 conspicuous consumption  620 Constantinople  262, 266 consumer protection laws  248 Child Protection and Toy Safety Act  244, 247 conventionalism  39, 44 accidental effects and  41–42 Cook, Clarence  581 cook stove  147–48, 155, 161, 163 Copley, John Singleton  569 Coppergate helmet  505–6 Cornall, Graham  465 Cortissoz, Royal  606, 607 Cotton, John  201 The Courtship of Miles Standish (Longfellow) 584 cowboy (huaso)  322, 323, 325 crèche  319, 325 commemoration, contemplation and  330 materials for  318 re-enactment and  331 spectators relationship to  329–31 symbolism and  333–34 Cros, Charles  49 Crowding, Peter  143 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly  620, 621–22 cultural evolution  106–7, 115 acquired information and  108–9 DST and  110

index   641 dual-inheritance theory and  108 gene-culture coevolution theory  109–10 metaplasticity and  110 neo-Darwinian synthesis and  108–10 Niche-construction theory and  110 cultural translation  628 culture-gene coevolution theory  108 Cummins, Robert  43 Cuvier, Georges  207 Daily Kos 236–37 dandy  103n27. See also Artist/Rebel/Dandy exhibit at RISD agency and  92, 94, 102 Baudelaire on  91 masculinity and  96, 99 performance and  99, 100, 102 queer theory and  99–100 race, sexuality and  100 spectacularity and  90, 92, 100 Wilde as  99–100 Danforth, Mary B.  570 d’Anghiera, Peter Martyr  57–58 Darwin, Charles  31 Daughters of the Mormon Battalion  340 Daughters of the Utah Pioneers  340 David, Nicholas  537 de Áviles, Pedro Menendez  407–8 Debord, Guy  277 de Bry, Theodor  405–6, 405f debt collection  391–92 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums”  480 Deetz, James  455 In Small Things Forgotten by  25, 30 Defoe, Daniel  87n4 de Gheyn, Jacques, II  218n18 Three Studies of a Dragonfly by  205–6, 205f Delaunne, Etienne  60 Delbourgo, James  203 Delumeau, Jean  420 Dennett, Daniel  37 Derrida, Jacques  474 Desaguliers, Jean T.  174 de Soto, Hernando  401, 411n40 violence of  403 Zamumo and  402

Dēvamitta, Kitalagama  519 developmental systems theory (DST)  110 devotion  304, 307–8. See also sacred material culture meaning and  622, 629 in Middle Ages  622 Veil of Veronica and  262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 271 Dickinson, Jonathan  397–98 Diderot, Denis  559 Dikötter, Frank  358 Dinglinger, Johann Melchior  63–64 Blacks Carrying Platters with Pearls and  66, 67f disenchantment 259 DIY (do it yourself)  93, 94, 95, 97–98 documentary archaeology  384, 388, 389, 392 Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (Seymour)  609, 612 do it yourself. See DIY Donatello 622 Douglas, Mary  620, 621–22, 624 D’Oyly, John  518, 518f, 520 DST. See developmental systems theory dual-inheritance theory  108 Duchamp, Marcel  619 Dufay, Charles François de Cisternay  177 Duis, Perry  25 Du Pont, Samuel Francis  437–38 Dürer, Albrecht  60 dye 380 Chinese silk and  224–25, 226, 227, 228–29, 231, 232 coastal zones of Britain and  497 in Marseille  386 Native/European contact in Florida and 406 synthetic 40 Dyer, Christopher  395n19 East India Company  459 caste system and  460 Ebrey, Patricia  357 Edison, Thomas boyhood and  239 phonograph and  41, 49

642   index The Education of Henry Adams (Adams, H.) 23 Edward the Confessor  505 electricity. See also Franklin, Benjamin; Harvard College, electricity and Collinson and  175, 178 electrical machines  182–92, 183f, 185f, 187f, 189f, 190t Franklin and  170, 175, 179–82, 192 glass and  172, 173f, 174, 175, 176f, 177–78, 179, 180, 187–88 Gravesande and  172 Gray and  177 Greenwood and  174–75 Hauksbee and  172, 181 Holyoke and  171–72, 175, 177, 182, 183f, 184, 195n35 Kinnersley and  179–80 Leyden jar and  175, 178–82, 191, 192 lightning rod and  179, 180, 186, 187f Martin and  184, 185f, 196n62 Morton and  171, 172 Newton and  172 Prince and  187–89, 189f, 190f, 191–92 Spencer and  175, 178 thunder houses  170, 186, 191 Williams, S., and  186 Winthrop and  177–78, 180–82, 184–85, 186 Elfe, Thomas  457 Eliade, Mircea  353n39 Eliot, Thomas  444 Elizabeth (queen)  623 Elton, Charles  47–48 Emancipation Proclamation  434 enchantment 256 anthropomorphism and  257 disenchantment 259 Jesus image and  262 libation and  257–59, 258f network and  259–60, 267–68 re-enchantment 259 ritual and  257 Veil of Veronica and  267, 271 environmental psychology  124 Epperson, Frank  40 Essays, Political, Economical, and Scientific (Rumford)  143, 146

ethnographic present  29 etiological account, of function  44, 46–49 bio-artifacts and  45 euroarchaeology 106 Europe, in Middle Ages  394, 395n20. See also Lucca, in Middle Ages; Marseille, in Middle Ages affordances and  379–80, 381 archives of  382–83 collections and  393 consumerism and  395n25 documentary archaeology and  384, 388, 389, 392 hoarding behavior and  381, 392, 393 pottery and ceramics in  381, 387 tangible things in  383 taphonomic process and  381–82 wealth in  379–80, 381 evangelical religion  560 evidence material culture as  614 material things as historical  12 meaning and  621 evolution. See also cultural evolution constructivist 48 function and  47, 51n25 history and  114 evolutionary psychology  110, 112, 115 assumptions of  107 human cognitive becoming and  107–8 experimental archaeology  6 ex-votos  267, 622, 623, 627 Fabian, Johannes  29 familial dynasties  452 Fan, Jianchuan China Cultural Revolution and  368–70 The Great Museum Slave by  370 Farge, Arlette  3 Fellows of the Royal Society  172 fetishes 310n17 Freud on  11 Feynman, Richard  237 Ficino, Florentine Marsilio  57 Finch, Francis Miles  596 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  319, 330 Fisher, Phillip  28

index   643 Fitzwilliam Museum  624 five black categories  364–66 Flake, Kathleen  568 Fleming, E. McClung  27 flexible materiality orality and  515 of palm-leaf manuscripts  516 Flixborough  498, 499f, 500, 500f, 502–3, 504 Florida. See Native/European contact, in Florida Florio, John  430 Foneda, Hernando Escalante  407 Foner, Eric  25 food. See also Norwood, Henry; street vendors, in Rome at table  414 food silences  75–76, 79 power and  78 Ford, Henry. See also Henry Ford Museum history museum and  21–22 material culture and  19–20 Mercer Museum and  20–21 politics of  20 reading objects  27 technology and  23 fork evolution of  47 function of  36–37, 36f, 41, 47, 48–49 in India  52n40 Forten, Charlotte  435, 443 Foster, Stephen  568–69 Foucault, Michel  474 bio-power and  300 semantic web of resemblance and  211 Francis I (king)  62–63 Francis of Assisi (saint)  319 Franklin, Benjamin  170, 175, 192 electrical machine and  182 Leyden jar and  180, 181 lightning experiments of  179 Freedberg, David  276–77 Free Range Kids  236 French, Austa  444 Freud, Sigmund  11 friendship Latter-day Saints and  567–69, 573–74 meaning and  624

memorials and  569–70 polygamy and sentimental  567–68 sentimentality and  567–68, 573–74 Smith, Joseph, and  567 Woodruff and  569 Frothingham family  452–53 Fuller, Robert  298 function accident and  40–41 artifact hermeneutics and  37–38 artificial selection and  45–47, 51n25 capacity and  42–43 context and  38 conventionalism and  39, 41–42, 44 etiological account of  44–49 evolution and  47, 51n25 of fork  36–37, 36f, 41, 47, 48–49 importance of  36 intentionalism and  40–41, 44 living things and  35 malfunction and  42 museums and social  474–75 naturalism and  38, 39 normative  38–39, 43 parts and  37 performance and  39, 41–45, 46–48, 50 of phonograph  49–50 proper  44–45, 48 token artifacts and  43–44 The Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (Nutting) 586 furniture production, in British colonies  454f, 457f agency and  461, 466, 471n26 agricultural economy and  454 Anglo-French wars and  459–60 Australia and  462–68, 463f, 464f, 466f British forms and  358 Buckland and  456, 467 Burnett and  458f caste and  459, 461, 466, 467 creativity and  453 dovetailing and  452, 453, 455, 458, 465, 470n12 East India Company and  459 Elfe and  457 façade and  455

644   index furniture production, in British ­colonies (Continued) familial dynasties and  452–54, 466 Frothingham family and  452–53 Goddard shops and  452–53 Gothic design and  465 Holmes and  455, 469n9 Indian  459–63, 460f, 462f, 466, 467, 471n23, 471n24, 471n25 interpretive model of  455 ivory and  459, 460f, 461, 462f, 467 Mason and  456, 467 merchant producer model and  455, 469n9, 470n12 Pollard and  456f protectionist lobbies and  459 settlement colonialism and  465–66 shop organization and  451–52 shortcuts for  455 social distinction and  451 status of makers and  465, 467–68 thematic approach to  451 Townsend shops and  452–53, 453f unfree labor model and  455–59, 463–64, 467 upward mobility and  452 woodworkers and  452 The Furniture Treasury (Nutting)  587 Ga’anda 555n20 belief systems of  556n43 Boga and  550–51 brides  543, 545, 545f, 547 ‘Bәna and  542, 555n22 Chifartawa and  536 collective memory and  535 compounds of  540 defeat of Zubeiru and  538 Fulani and  538 gender and  536, 543–44, 549 Hammandikko and  536, 538, 541, 544 harvest of  551 historical narratives of  538, 540–42 language  535, 536, 544, 550, 552–53, 554n13, 555n20 Mafa and  548 Mbir’thleng’nda and  538, 539f, 542, 543, 547–49, 552

Ngum-Ngumi and  540–43, 547, 549, 549f, 555n28 orality and  536 Sabta endurance tests of  544 settlements of  535 skin changes and  548–49 spirit vessels of  536–37, 537f, 538, 539f, 540–43, 541f, 547, 549–54, 552f Theman and  540, 556n43 Thlanga and  540 Thleta scarification and  536–37, 538, 543–45, 544f, 546f, 547, 552–53 Galle, Philip  60 Garvan, Francis P.  595 Gavua, Kodzo  537 Geary, Patrick  266 Gell, Alfred  112 genealogies in Australia  467 classification of  522 of Latter-day Saints  342 genealogies, in Polynesia  514, 521 Bible recordings of  524 Christianity and  526–27 colonialism and  529 Hawai’i and  526–27 Māori and  522–24 performance and  522, 525 gene-culture coevolution theory  109–10 George and Charity Stearns house  143, 158, 159f, 167n33 cook stove in  161 fertility and  162 floor plan of  160f offices in  159, 161 open-hearth cooking at  161 George and Mary Read II house  142, 144f, 164n9 cook stove in  147–48 Crowding and  143 floor plan of  145f fuel consumption and  148 open-hearth cooking and  143, 146 roaster in  146 service wing of  144 steam boiler in  146–47, 148f George III (king)  520 George IV (king)  91

index   645 Ghent  506–7, 507f Gibson, James  124 Gillis, John R.  236 glass electricity and  172, 173f, 174, 175, 176f, 177–78, 179, 180, 187–88 Leyden jar  175, 178–82, 191, 192 Wistar Glassworks  180–81 Glenbow Museum  485 globalization  7, 513 Glynn, James  299 Goldoni, Carlo  626 goldsmith Cellini and  61, 62 minting 379 pearls and  60–61, 62 Goodyear, Charles  40 Gordillo, Francisco  401 Gould, Stephen J.  46 grave  303, 594 in coastal zones of Britain  495–96 collectors and  613–14 of Graves  612 remember me and  558, 570 of Seymour  612, 613f Graves, Henry Solon  603f forestry and  602 grave of  612 Seymour and  601–3, 604, 605, 612 Gray, Stephen  177 The Great Museum Slave (Fan)  370 Greeks 23 art of Ancient  475 Greenblatt, Stephen  625 The Green Carnation (Hitchens)  606 The Green Cloak (painting)  603–5, 604f audience for  606–7 sexuality and  606 Greenfield Village  19, 21 nostalgia and  30 Philadelphia Independence Hall in  20 Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe)  63, 66, 67f Greenwood, Isaac  174–75, 177 Grey, George  526, 533n54 Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs by  525

grocer’s guild (pizzicaroli) 419 Grossberg, Lawrence  73 Grünes Gewölbe. See Green Vault Guy, Richard  592n20 Hale, Nathan  595 appearance of  596–97, 599 Bostwick and  599 diary of  597 family of  599 final words of  596 Hale Homestead  593, 594, 598, 599–601, 600f, 601f, 605, 610, 612 Hale postage stamp and  607–8, 608f, 612 “Hale’s Fate and Fame” and  596 Nathan Hale memorial forest and  605 Nathan Hale sculpture  596, 597f, 598, 600f, 612 Patriot Act (USA) and  612, 617n83 performance and  600–601 popularity of  608–9 Pratt, B., and  596, 597f, 598 talisman of  597–98 tankard for  610–11, 610f, 611f Yale University and  595, 596, 598 “Hale’s Fate and Fame” (Finch)  596 Half a Truth Is Better Than None (Kouwenhoven) 25 Hall, Basil  333 Hammandikko, Musa Wawu na  536, 544 defeat of Zubeiru and  538 Ngum-Ngumi and  541 Han dynasty Chinese expansion in  5 silk in  223–25 Hardcastle, Valerie  40, 41 Haring, Kristen  250n34 Harriet Beecher Stowe Center  347 Harrison, Edward  459 Harvard College, electricity and electrical machines at  182–92, 183f, 185f, 187f, 189f, 190t electricity and  170–72, 173f, 174–75 Franklin gift to  170 Greenwood at  174–75, 177 Holyoke at  171–72, 175, 177, 195n35 Morton and  171, 172

646   index Harvard College, electricity and (Continued) Prince at  187–89, 189f, 190f, 191–92 Winthrop at  177–78, 184–86 Harvey, Eleanor Jones  436 Hauksbee, Francis  181 electrical generators and  172 Hawai’i 526–27 Haying (painting)  589, 590f Hebrew Bible  558 Das Heilige. See The Idea of the Holy (Otto) Hell, Richard  94, 101 Henderson, Alexander  476 Henry, Edward Lamson A Lover of Old China by  581, 582f The Old Clock on the Stairs by  579, 580f Henry, Tricia  95–96 Henry Ford Museum Greenfield Village and  19–20, 21, 30 object-based epistemology and  20 heritage history and  343, 344–45, 347 industry 339 Latter-day Saints and  343, 349 material culture and  344, 345–46 Mormon Battalion Historic Site and  339–40, 344 re-enactment and  339–40, 344 religion  338, 346–47 tourism 349 Heritage Park Victorian Village  339 Hewison, Robert  339 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth  435, 442 Hill, Caroline  561–62, 562f Hinckley, Gordon B.  341, 343 Hinduism 291 history academics and  24 art  1, 9, 216–17, 276, 318 as Church priority  340–41 colonialism and  514–15 evolution and  114 habitat and  380 heritage and  343, 344–45, 347 material culture and  4, 18, 25 material engagement and  113 materiality of  514 material pluralism and  7 material temporality and  135, 136–37

memory and  10, 513 microhistory 25 missionary and  344 pre-history 5–6 theater and  319 world  515, 530, 531n5 Hitchens, Robert Smythe  606 hoarding behavior  381, 392, 393 Hobe Indians  397–98 Hodder, Ian  37, 260 Hoffmann, Roald  238 Hollis, Thomas  174, 192 Holmes, Nathaniel  455, 469n9 Holyoke, Edward  171–72, 175, 195n35 electrical machine of  182, 183f, 184 as president of Harvard College  177 Homesick and Happy (Thompson, M.)  236 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean  474, 485 Hormuz, Island of  58 The House Beautiful (Cook)  581 Howes, David  278 huaso (cowboy)  322, 323, 325 Huckleberry Finn (Twain)  560 memorial in  569–70 Hudson, Liam  619 Hughes, Robert  467 Huizong (emperor)  357 human becoming  106, 112–13 Hundred Flowers movement  358 Hunt, Charles  481 Hunt, Walter  97 Hunter, William Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus by  201–2, 213 van Rymsdyk, J., and  201–2 Huntington, Zina  566, 567 Bull and  573 Hurley, Elizabeth  93–94 hygiene 418 The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige) (Otto)  296 identity coastal zones of Britain and  494–95, 496, 505 meaning and  624–25, 627 museums and  475 Scotland and national  483–85 Thleta scarification and  543, 544

index   647 Illustrations Prepared for John White’s Ancient History of the Maori (White)  525 Indian furniture makers  471n23, 471n25 Australia and  462–63, 463f caste and  459, 461, 466, 467 East India Company and  459, 460 ivory and  459, 460f, 461, 462f, 467 Parkes on  471n24 prejudice and  461–62, 466 protectionist lobbies and  459 indigenous people  6. See also specific topics repatriation and  479–80, 485 Stó:lō people  477–78 Western legal processes and  480 Industrial Revolution  626 Ingold, Tim coastal zones of Britain and  507–8 material temporality and  124, 126, 132, 134 Ingrīsi Hatana  516–19, 517f, 531n13 Innocent III (pope) fourth Crusade of  266 Veil of Veronica and  262, 263–64, 266, 268 In Small Things Forgotten (Deetz)  25, 30 institutional souvenirs  624 intentionalism naturalism and  40–41 psychology and  44 internal combustion engine  43 interpretive model  455 intersemiotic translation  408n1 Irvin, Kate  95, 103n8 ivory  459, 460f, 461, 462f, 467 Jackson, Helen Hunt  338 Jacob, Willem  172 Jacquard, Joseph Marie  231 Jacquard loom  231–32 James, Henry  560, 624 Jefferson, Thomas  4–5 Jesus. See also nativity scenes, Chile; Veil of Veronica human-divine nature of  319 Jie, Li  361 John 77 John of Damascus  262–63 Johnston, Alexander  520, 529 Johnston, Tom  484 John XXII (pope)  265

Jōrgī Aśtaka 520 Joseph and Betsey Maybury house  142, 153f, 154, 166n25 cook stove technology in  155 floor plan of  154f industrialization and  152–53 planning of  156 refrigerator in  156–58, 157f storage in  153 Joyner, Charles  25 J. Paul Getty Museum  62, 62f Judaism Hebrew Bible  558 Jews in Marseille in Middle Ages  384, 387 synagogue in San Diego  339 Jutland  495, 498, 500 Kaiser Friedrich Museum  620 Kandy, kingdom of fall of  520 palm-leaf manuscripts and  516, 518–19, 520 Kansas Barbed Wire museum  21 Keckotanks  75, 80–82 Keene, Suzanne  481 Kemp, Martin  60, 62, 67 Kenseth, Joy  54–55 Kent 494–95 Kessler, Herbert L.  264, 265, 268 king. See royalty Kinnersley, Ebenezer  179–80 kinship  562, 565, 568 kitchen and  144 metaphor and  398, 403, 406 Kirala Sandēśa 519 Kirchmann, Johann  620 kitchen 163n2 Beecher and  141–42, 151, 152, 158, 161 Child and  142, 151–52 cook stoves in  147–48, 155, 161, 163 cultural change and  143 domestic productivity and  162–63 fertility and  162 George and Charity Stearns house  143, 158–59, 159f, 160f, 161–62, 167n33 George and Mary Read II house  142, 143–48, 144f, 145f, 164n9 health and  142, 151–52, 162, 163, 166n24

648   index kitchen (Continued) Joseph and Betsey Maybury house  142, 152–58, 153f, 154f, 157f, 166n25 kinship and  144 Krimmel painting of  141, 141f open-hearth cooking  143, 146, 161 refrigerator in  140, 143, 156–58, 157f, 163 Rumford and  144–45, 146, 148 Samuel and Olive Stearns house  142, 149–52, 149f, 150f, 153 Slater and  147, 148f steam boiler in  146–47, 148f technology and  140, 142, 143, 144–45, 146, 148, 155, 158, 163 Knight, Jeremy  497 Kodak film  380 Kopytoff, Igor  476, 505, 629 Kouwenhoven, John  27, 29 “American Studies” by  17–18, 24, 31 Barnard College and  24 Half a Truth Is Better Than None by  25 on language  17–18 sensory thinking and  18 Krimmel, John Lewis  140, 163 kitchen painting by  141, 141f Landers, Richard  290 language  142, 230, 275, 277, 529. See also semiotics Ga’anda  535, 536, 544, 550, 552–53, 554n13, 555n20 Kouwenhoven on  17–18 Mafa 548 Māori  522, 526, 527 material culture and  17–18 metaphor and  397, 398 Pali 520 palm-leaf manuscripts and  516 resemblance and  217 senses and  277 Timucua 406 Laqueur, Thomas  300 las Casas, Bartolomé de  64–65 Last Child in the Woods (Louv)  236 Latour, Bruno  256, 259, 312n38 Latter-day Saints  337, 338. See also Mormon Battalion Historic Site apostles of  561

baptisms of  563f, 565 Book of Mormon and  560–61, 565 Carter and  565, 566 families and  347 friendship and  567–69, 573–74 genealogy and  342 heritage and  343, 349 Hill and  561–62, 562f Hinckley and  341, 343 historical context and  343 historical sites of  342–43, 350n18, 352n31 Huntington and  566, 567, 573 material culture and  338 Maudsley and  564f as missionaries  565 Mormon Battalion and  337–38 motherhood and  572–73 mourning embroideries and  569–70 multiculturalism and  348 Nauvoo and  342, 561, 569, 572 patriarchy and  572 polygamy and  561, 567–68, 571–72, 574 Pratt, P., and  571, 572 re-enactment and  341, 342, 343 sentimentality and  560, 566, 567–68, 569, 571, 573–74 Smith, Joseph, and  341, 343, 349, 560–61, 565, 567, 570, 572 Smith, L., and  564f, 572 Snow and  571, 572 Stout and  570–71 Woodruff and  565, 569, 572 Young, B., and  343, 345, 352n25 Laudonnière, René Goulainede  404, 405–6 Lee, Ann  299 Lee, Jesse  307–9 Leonardi, Camillo  61 Lepore, Jill  345 Letter of Publius Lentulus  265 Lewis, Peirce  27 Lewontin, Richard  48, 50, 110 Leyden jar  175, 182, 191, 192 design of  178–79 Franklin and  180, 181 Winthrop and  180–81 libation Macron vase painter and  257–59, 258f Thucydides and  258

index   649 Liberata, Doña  325–26 Library of Congress  4 Liceti, Fortunio  620 Life and Death in Shanghai (Nien)  360 lightning rod  179, 180, 186, 187f linguistics linguistic turn  27–28 metaphors and  397 signs and  614 Linnée, Carl von  207 “Little Annie” (song)  568–69 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Courtship of Miles Standish by  584 The Old Clock on the Stairs by  579, 580–81 Loudon, J. C.  465 Louis XIV (king)  621 Louv, Richard  236 Louvre 477 A Lover of Old China (painting)  581, 582f Lucca, in Middle Ages  382 collections and  393 debt collection in  391–92 luxury in  390 material and visual archaeology in  384 regional costumes in  391 Lycett, Joseph  465 Lydon, John  97 Macdonald, Sharon  28 MacMonnies, William  598 Macron vase painter  257–59, 258f Madonna of Montallegro  622–23 Madsen, Michael  343 Mafa 548 Mahāvaṃ sa 515 first publication of  520 Sinhalese people in  521–22 translating 520–21 Maines, Rachel  299 maintenance schedules  129 Malafouris, Lambros  48 Mallus, Petrus  262 Mao, Zedong material culture and  355–56, 368–69, 370f new society and  358 Māori 486 Aryanism and  527, 530 British print histories of  515

British wars with  525 carved staffs of  523, 523f Christianity and  526 genealogies and  522–24 Grey and  525–26 language  522, 526, 527 Ngāpuhi tribe  523–24 orality and  522–23 taonga and  478 Taonui and  523–24, 526, 532n25 Treaty of Waitangi and  523, 526 whare and  522–23 White and  523–25 Marburg Museum of Religions  297 Marden, Belinda  572 Marees, Pieter de  65 maritime orientation. See also coastal zones, of Britain cultural landscapes and  493 networks and  494 time and  498 marriage 255 Ga’anda brides  543, 545, 545f, 547 Marseille, in Middle Ages  382, 383 Black Death in  384, 388 Bonet in  384–87, 385f, 388 collections and  393 diffusionist models of cultural change and 387–88 dye in  386 economy of  384 Jews in  384, 387 luxury in  386, 387, 389 material and visual archaeology in  384 material temporality and  390 object hierarchy in  388–89 Vital in  384, 386 Martin, Benjamin  184, 185f, 196n62 Martinville, Leon Scott de  49 Martyr, Peter  401, 410n28 masculinity  92, 96, 99, 598 Mason, George  456, 467 material culture  123–24 agency and  113 American studies and  25 biological and  109 boyhood and postwar  244–48 capitalism and  7

650   index material culture (Continued) in China  357–58, 368 cognition and  10, 11, 73, 107, 108–10 Colonial Revival and  578 defining  2, 28–29 as evidence  614 Ford and  19–20 Hale postage stamp and  607–8, 608f, 612 heritage and  344, 345–46 history and  4, 18, 25 language and  17–18 Latter-day Saints and  338 making 341 Mao and  355–56, 368–69, 370f material engagement and  115 memory and  10, 11 microhistory and  25 Mormon Battalion Historic Site making  341, 342, 345 nature of  109 network approach to  259–60 prejudice and  5 reading 27 Seymour and  594–95 street vendors in Rome and  418, 425 technology and  10, 11 time and  113–14 time management and  129 writing as  10–11 Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indians (Wissler) 28 material culture studies antiquarianism and  1 collector-historian and  594 golden age of  24 in journals  24 linguistic turn and  27–28 New Social History and  27 sacred material culture and  301 time, place and  26 material engagement  105 history and  113 material culture and  115 material engagement theory (MET)  106, 110  115 materiality  105, 110 anthropology and  124

Artist/Rebel/Dandy and  90 flexible  515, 516 of history  514 of Mbir’thleng’nda  548–49 MMA punk exhibition and  90 orality and  513, 515, 529 resonant 515 of speech  126 temporality and  124–25 vital 113 material pluralism  9, 12 history and  7 material temporality  123 accelerating process and  129 archaeology and  135–36 body and  127 capitalist production and  130–31 Central Mediterranean Neolithic period and  131–32, 133 chaîne opératoire and  132–33, 134, 135 cross-links of  133–34 history and  135, 136–37 Ingold and  124, 126, 132, 134 maintenance schedules and  129 object biographies and  135 political logic of  136 retarding processes and  129 scales of time and  133 stone and  126, 128, 134, 136 storage and scheduling and  130 strategies of temporal management and  127, 129, 134 material translation  628 Maudsley, Sutcliffe  564f Maybury house. See Joseph and Betsey Maybury house Mbir’thleng’nda  538, 539f, 542, 552 Ga’anda women and  543 materiality and meanings of  548–49 size of  547–48 Thleta scarification and  547 McCormick, Robert R.  612 McDannell, Colleen  300, 301 McKinley, Emilie Riley  443 McLaren, Malcolm Artist/Rebel/Dandy and  92–93 MMA punk exhibition and  92–93, 94

index   651 Mead, Hirini Moko  478 meaning biography and  627 cherished objects and  620 collectibles and  625 devotion and  622, 629 evidence and  621 friendship and  624 giving and  623 identity and  624–25, 627 Madonna of Montallegro and  622–23 material things and  11 Mbir’thleng’nda and  548–49 nonutilitarian 620 photographs and  626 re-employment of  619 religious objects and  622–23, 624 souvenirs  624, 626 of spirit vessels  553–54 status and  622, 624 street vendors and social  424–25 Mechanick Exercises (Moxon)  452 Medici, Anna Maria Luisa de’  63 Meek, C. K.  535 memento mori  559 memory. See also collective memory body arts and  537 coastal zones of Britain and  495, 496, 505, 507 history and  10, 513 kissing letters and  566 material culture and  10, 11 remember me  558–60, 570 spirit vessels and  550, 553–54 time and  493 writing and  566 Mercer, Henry  21, 30 technology and  23 Mercer Museum  20–21 merchant producer model  455, 469n9, 470n12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  319 Merriman, Nick  481 MET. See material engagement theory metaphor kinship and  398, 403, 406

Native/European contact and  397–98, 403, 407, 408 textiles and  398, 403, 408 metaplasticity 113 cultural evolution and  110 meter 123 Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA)  587 Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) punk exhibition annual costume galas at  94 antiestablishment aesthetic and  93 CBGB and  90, 93, 96 Hell and  94 materiality and  90 McLaren and  92–93, 94 property and  93 race and  101–2 safety pin and  93–94, 96–98, 99 spectacularity and  90, 94, 102 Versage safety pin dress and  93–94 Mexican-American War disputed land of  338 Mormon Battalion and  337–38, 348 national attitude toward  348 Michelangelo  393, 622 microhistory 25 Middle Ages  493. See also Europe, in Middle Ages coastal zones of Britain in  493, 498, 503, 506 devotion in  622 era of image and  627 European wealth in  379–80, 381 pearls in  57 Veil of Veronica and  262, 264, 266 Miller, Daniel  620 Millikan, Ruth  38, 45, 49 mirror neurons  279 missionary 295 American Civil War and  434, 436 history and  344 Latter-day Saints  565 Native/European contact in Florida and 403–4 Whitefield and  307 Wilkins and  296 Mitchell, J. Allan  238 MMA. See Metropolitan Museum of Art

652   index Mohun, Arwen  246 Montaigne, Michel de  392 Moore, Thomas  156 Morgan, David  318–19 Mormon Battalion  337–38, 348 Mormon Battalion Historic Site  337 actors at  341–42 buildings at  338–39 courthouse at  347–48 Daughters of the Mormon Battalion and 340 fundraising for  340 goal of  344 heritage and  339–40, 344 Heritage Park Victorian Village and  339 heritage religion and  338, 346–47 material culture made for  341, 342, 345 multiculturalism and  348 period costumes and  339, 341 students at  346–47, 353n42 tourism to  338–39 Zemira Palmer and  343, 345, 347–48 Mormonism. See Latter-day Saints Morton, Charles  172 Compendium Physicae by  171 Moses, Anna Mary Robertson  579 Haying by  589, 590f marketing 589 Mouanda, Baudouin  100 mourning embroideries  569–70 Moxon, Joseph  452 mulberry tree European system and  230 Hu 228 Jin  223, 228 Lu 223 sericulture and  222, 223 Museum Britannicum (van Rymsdyk, J., and van Rymsdyk, A.)  201, 202, 207, 208f, 212f Bohemian horse-mussel with six pearls in  213, 214f depiction in  211–15 engravers and  213 as exhibition  215 landscape in stone and  211 resemblance in  208–9 Scythian lamb in  209–10, 209f

museum movement  627–28 museum objects  486 Ancient Greek art as  475 biography of  475–76 Bronze Age swords  476 bronze leaf-shaped swords  476 numinous objects and  477–80 status and  477 Museum of Comparative Zoology  32n10 museums  22. See also specific topics American museum building  20 art 23 classification by  477–78, 480, 485 culture of  480–81 curators in  23 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums”  480 education and  626–27 Henderson and  476 human remains and  481 identity and  475 national  482, 485 numinous and  475 repatriation and  479–80, 485 research universities and  24 as sacred places  481 Scotland and  475, 482 social functions of  474–75 technology and  215–16 texts and  28 Nader, Ralph  247 NAGPRA. See Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Nairne, Edward  184, 188 Nardi, Gioielleria  68 narrative Ga’anda and historical  538, 540–42 history museums and  23 Nathan Hale (sculpture)  596, 597f, 598, 600f National Council on Public History  24 National Museum of American History  23 National Museum of the American Indian 295 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)  295, 479, 480

index   653 Native Americans National Museum of the American Indian 295 Navajo 18 repatriation of numinous objects and 479–80 sacred material culture and  299 utility and  398 Native/European contact, in Florida  411n49 Chicora and  401 de Áviles and  407–8 de Bry and  405–6, 405f de Soto and  401–3, 411n40 Dickinson in  397–98 dye and  406 Foneda and  407 French and  404–8 Hobe Indians in  397–98 Laudonnière and  404, 405–6 metaphor and  397–98, 403, 407, 408 mission and  403–4 nakedness and  407–8 Native Americans in  397–98, 401 Ocute in  402–3 Ribaut and  404–5 ritual encounters in  398–99, 401, 402, 403, 404–5, 408 slavery and  401–2 textiles in  397–98, 399, 400–401, 402, 406–8 violence and  403–4 Zamumo in  402 nativity scenes, Chile  334n2 agency and  319 agrarian society and  323 appropriation and  332 autos sacramentales and  331 belonging and  332, 333 Bladh on  331 Carlucci, Armezzani, and  326 characters in  321–23, 325, 330, 331 Clarisa nuns and  321 crèche  318, 319, 325, 329–31, 333–34 earliest 335n40 feelings and  333 food, drink and  328 gifts for  326–28

Gospel of James and  334n12 historicity and  329 huaso and  322, 323, 325 Liberata, Doña, and  325–26 materials for  318, 321, 324 performance and  317, 318–19, 331 pottery, ceramics and  321, 325, 326–27 preparation for  323–24 public 318 Quito artists and  320, 320f shopping for  321, 321f, 322f, 332, 334n11 songs and  328, 330, 332, 333 symbolic  317, 326, 333 theater and  317, 326, 329, 330, 333 viewing  326–29, 327f, 328f votive practices and  323–26, 324f Natural History (Sloane, H.)  213 natural history museums  20, 21, 22, 23, 215 naturalism function and  38, 39 intentionalism and  40–41 natural selection  45 nature-study movement  239 Nauvoo  342, 561, 569, 572 Navajo 18 Negrone, Giulio  620 Nelson, Megan Kate  435–36 neo-Darwinian synthesis  106–7 cultural evolution and  108–10 Neolithic period  131 axes in  132 Central Mediterranean  131–32, 133 pottery in  131–32, 136 network automobiles and  260 enchantment and  259–60, 267–68 maritime orientation and  494 Neues Museum  477 neuroscience  114, 277, 279, 281, 381, 391–92 New, Harry S.  608 New Museology  474 New Social History  27 Newton, Isaac  172 New Zealand. See also Māori Aryanism and  527, 530 Treaty of Waitangi and  523, 526, 527, 528f, 529

654   index Ngāpuhi tribe  523–24 Ngum-Ngumi  540–41, 549f, 552 Boga and  550–51 gender and  543, 549 offerings to  542 Thleta scarification and  547, 549–50, 555n28 weapons and  550 niche 47–48 Niche-construction theory  110 Nicholas of Cusa  266 Nien, Cheng  360 Nigeria. See Ga’anda Nitsitapiisini 485 Nörenberg, Henning  297 Norwood, Henry Charles I and  74 Charlton and  83–85 Crassostrea virginica oysters and  81 food and  75, 77 food silences and  75–76, 78, 79 on John 77 Keckotanks and  75, 80–82 meal in transit for  77–79 meal with Virginia planter and  83–87 meal with werowance and  79–83 shell spoon and  80–81 Sneere death and  85–87, 88n34 social imaginary of  77, 78, 87 A Voyage to Virginia by  74, 77 wine and  78–89 nostalgia  8, 29, 31, 371 place and  30 Novick, Peter  24 numinous categorization of  297 museums and  475 Otto and  296–97 sacred material culture and  297, 299 Whitefield and  307, 308–9 Wilkins and  303 numinous objects Māori taonga 478 repatriation of  479–80 Scotland and  479 Stó:lō people and  477–78 Nutting, Wallace advertising by  586

antiquarianism and  581–82 Colonial Revival and  578 country life movement and  583 The Furniture of the Pilgrim Century by  586 The Furniture Treasury by  587 Old America and  586 photographs of  583–84 small house movement and  586 SPNEA and  585 Trimming the Pie Crust  585, 585f “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses” and  585–86 Windsor furniture and  586 Nyong, Tavia  101–2 object-based epistemology  20 objects of desire  11 Samuel and  12 Ocute 402–3 Ogden, Charles  619 Ogúndipẹ̀ 279 Old America  582–83 Nutting and  586 The Old Clock on the Stairs (Longfellow)  579, 580–81 The Old Clock on the Stairs (painting)  579, 580f open-hearth cooking  143, 146, 161 Opoku, A. M.  281 orality flexible materiality and  515 Ga’anda and  536 Māori and  522–23 materiality and  513, 515, 529 palm-leaf manuscripts and  516, 521 Yorùbá sensoria and  281–82 Oshitola, Kolawole  283, 284, 290 Otto, Rudolf  301 The Idea of the Holy by  296 numinous and  296–97 Ötzi 135 Paleotti, Gabriele  622 palm-leaf manuscripts, in Sri Lanka Ähälēpola and  518, 519 Ähälēpola Darūwan Märīma 520f

index   655 Ähälēpola Hatana 519 British honored in  519–20 Buddhism and  515 classification of  515 colonialism and  515, 519, 521, 529 D’Oyly and  518, 518f, 520 flexible materiality of  516 Ingrīsi Hatana  516–19, 517f, 531n13 Johnston, A., and  520, 529 Jōrgī Aśtaka 520 kingdom of Kandy and  516, 518–19, 520 Kirala Sandēśa 519 language and  516 Mahāvaṃ sa  515, 520–22 orality and  516, 521 process of making  515–16 Sinhalese people and  519, 521–22, 527, 530, 531n8 Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha and  516, 517–18 translating 520–21 Vadiga Hatana 519 Parkes, Fanny  471n24 patriarchy 572 Patriot Act (USA)  612, 617n83 Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 295 pearls Aldrovandi on  58, 59f Alfonso X of Castile on  57 baroque  55, 59, 60, 61–62, 63 Blacks Carrying Platters with Pearls  66, 67f blister 57–58 as collectibles  60–61, 62, 63, 64 Columbus and  57 goldsmith and  60–61, 62 Hercules Raising the Pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar  62, 62f historical properties of  56–57 jewelers, artists and  60–63 “Madre Perla grandetta”  58–59 in Middle Ages  57 Pendant in the Form of a Captive Black Boy  54, 55–56, 55f, 67 power of rulers and  62–63 Renaissance and  60 slavery and  54, 55–56, 55f, 64–68

Tempesta and  59 in Wunderkammern 59 Pennell, Sara  418–19, 423 Pennsylvania Dutch  18 Pepys, Samuel  415, 417 performance  38, 78, 90, 444. See also re-enactment dandy and  99, 100, 102 function and  39, 41–45, 46–48, 50 genealogies in Polynesia and  522, 525 Hale Homestead and  600 nativity scenes and  317, 318–19, 331 Seymour and  600–601 studies  318, 319, 344 Yorùbá and  285, 288, 291 Permoser, Balthasar  66, 67f Peter (saint)  330 Phillip II (king)  404 phonograph disc jockey and  50 Edison and  41, 49 function of  49–50 piano American Civil War and  435, 436–37, 439–45, 445f, 446f, 447, 449n29 archaeology and  437 Beecher and  441 China Cultural Revolution and  363, 364f class and  436–37 elites and  442, 447 feminine culture and  436, 441–42, 444 forced playing of  444 fortissimo 441 freedmen and  444–45, 445f, 447 Gilbert’s of Boston  443 McKinley and  443 Pringle and  439–42 Reconstruction period and  447 square  440, 440f The Star Spangled Banner and  445, 446f, 447 Union soldiers and  442 white Southerners and  436, 442, 447 pin 11 safety  93–94, 96–98, 99, 102 straight  95–96, 98, 99 pizzicaroli (grocer’s guild)  419

656   index plasticity 108 of culture  110 metaplasticity  110, 113 of object  111, 114 Pliny the Elder  56, 57–58 plural marriage. See polygamy Pollard, John  456f polygamy 561 affection and  571 friendship and  567–68 Pratt, P., and  571, 572 sentimentality and  567–68, 572, 574 Woolley and  571–72 Polynesia. See genealogies, in Polynesia Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (Grey) 525 Pomeroy, William  165n17 pope Innocent III  262, 263–64, 266, 268 John XXII  265 Pope, Alexander  559 popsicle 40 PostImpressionists 23 postmodernism  23, 474 capitalism and  339 poststructuralism  27, 28, 382, 614 pottery and ceramics  49, 52n38, 259 agriculture and  52n38 Bode and  620 in coastal zones of Britain  495, 496, 497, 500, 503 color and  381 Continental  495, 496, 497, 500 in Europe in Middle Ages  381, 387 Ga’anda spirit vessels  536–37, 537f, 538, 539f, 540–43, 541f, 547, 549–54, 552f gender and  536 nativity scenes and  321, 325, 326–27 Neolithic  131–32, 136 surface decorations on  536–37 Pratt, Bela Lyon  596, 597f, 598, 600f, 612 Pratt, Parley  571, 572 pre-history 5–6 Prince, John  187–89, 189f, 190f, 191–92

Pringle, Elizabeth Allston Chronicles of Chicora Wood by  439 feminine culture and  441 piano and  439–42 Promey, Sally  299–300, 301 propaganda 621 China Cultural Revolution and  362, 363, 368, 371 in Sri Lanka  519 Protestants 296 sacred material culture and  299–300, 301 prototype 216 psychology cognitive 381 environmental 124 evolutionary  107–8, 110, 112, 115 intentionalism and  44 of religion  296 punk 103n27. See also Metropolitan Museum of Art punk exhibition capitalism and  98 CBGB and  90, 93, 96 DIY and  93, 94, 95, 97–98 politics and  98 race and  101–2 safety pin and  93–94, 96–98, 99, 102 sexuality and  101 spectacularity and  90, 94, 102 symbolic and  93 unemployment and  96–97 Pye, David  39 Qing dynasty  229 material culture from  357–58, 368 queen. See royalty queer theory dandy and  99–100 spectacularity and  99 Quexo, Pedro de  401 Quiccheberg, Samuel  625–26 Quincy, Quatremere de  628 Rajapaksa, Mahinda  515 Ramona (Jackson)  338 Rancière, Jacques  318 Randolph, Benjamin  456f Ransom, John Crowe  30

index   657 Ray, John  415, 420 Read II house. See George and Mary Read II house Red Guards  355, 371 confiscations by  365 education of  361 exhibitions by  361, 362, 366 “four olds” attacked by  355, 359, 361–62, 363 re-enactment 6 of birth of Jesus  320 crèche and  331 heritage and  339–40, 344 Latter-day Saints and pioneer  341, 342, 343 re-enchantment 259 Reformation 623 idolatry and  627 refrigerator  140, 143, 163 in Joseph and Betsey Maybury house  156–58, 157f remember me gravestone and  558, 570 in Hebrew Bible  558 jingle and  558–59 memento mori and  559 Revolutionary America and  558 sentimentality and  559–60 remote control  255, 256 Renaissance  622, 628 as era of art  627 individualism and  625 pearls in  60 unconscious translation and  629 repatriation 485 NAGPRA and  295, 479, 480 retarding processes  129 Revolutionary War  593 Reynolds, Joshua  202 Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD)  90. See also Artist/Rebel/Dandy exhibit at RISD Rhodes, William  589 Ribaut, Jean stones and  406 Timucuans and  404–5 Richard II (Shakespeare)  612 Richards, Ivor  619

Ricoeur, Paul  30 RISD. See Rhode Island School of Design Museum rituals 255. See also nativity scenes, Chile Christmas 318 collective memory and  319 crystal and  257 enchantment and  257 encounter  398–99, 401, 402, 403, 404–5, 408 re-enactments of birth of Jesus  320 Roberts, Allen F.  553 Roberts, B. H.  340 Roberts, Mary Nooter  553 Roberts, Warren  30 Robinson, Emily  31 Robinson, William W.  206 Rome. See street vendors, in Rome Rondelet, Guillaume  58, 61 Rosenzweig, Roy  345 Royal Society  172, 210 royalty Alfonso X of Castile  57 Charles I  74 Charles II  74, 605 Charles V  63, 64, 65 Elizabeth 623 Francis I  62–63 George III  520 George IV  91 Louis XIV  621 Phillip II  404 Rudolph II  60, 66 Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha  516, 517–18 Titus 263 Rudolph II (emperor)  60, 66 Rumford, Count (Thompson, Benjamin) Essays, Political, Economical, and Scientific by  143, 146 kitchen technology and  144–45, 146, 148 Sacks, Oliver  237 sacred material culture  298 American material culture studies and  301 Catholicism and  299–300 Native Americans and  299 numinous and  297, 299 Protestants and  299–300, 301

658   index safety pin Hunt, W., and  97 punk and  93–94, 96–98, 99, 102 Versage safety pin dress and  93–94 saints Augustine  11, 13n8 Bernard 319 Francis of Assisi  319 Mass of Saint Gregory  265f, 268 Peter 330 salt 502 Samuel, Raphael  347 objects of desire and  12 Samuel and Olive Stearns house  142, 149, 149f, 152, 153 basement in  150–51 floor plans of  150f Sanborn, Kate  583 Sanusi 279 Sapeurs 100–101 savagery 7 Scheffer, Johann  620 Schlereth, Thomas  24, 28–29 Schneider, Rebecca  344 science. See also boyhood and science cognitive  106, 112 in colonial American  170–71, 248 Scotland Agricola and  475 Catholicism and  484 Denmark and  482–83 museums and  475, 482 myths of  482 national identity of  483–85 numinous objects and  479 Scott and  482, 484 Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry in  483, 484 Society of Antiquaries of  482, 483 Wilson, D., and  482 Worsaae and  482–83 Scott, Walter  482, 484 Sea Islands American Civil War and  434, 438, 448n14 Pringle on  439–42 Selden, John  627

selection artificial  45–47, 51n25 natural 45 semiotics 275 intersemiotic translation  408n1 Saussurean 276 senses language and  277 symbolic and  278, 281, 285, 286–87 tyranny of visual and  275–77 Yorùbá sensoria and  281 sensiotics culture and  278 expressive culture and  277 Hinduism and  291 mirror neurons and  279 past and  276 Yorùbá-speaking peoples and  275, 276 sensorium 276. See also Yorùbá sensoria culture and  278 sensory thinking  18 sentimentality antiquarianism and  579 friendship and  567–68, 573–74 heart religion and  559–60 Latter-day Saints and  560, 566, 567–68, 569, 571, 573–74 plurality and  571 polygamy and  567–68, 572, 574 remember me and  559–60 Twain and  560 sericulture. See silk and sericulutre settlement colonialism  465–66 Sex Pistols  92, 97 sexuality dandy and  100 punk and  101 queer theory and  99–100 of Seymour  606 Seymour, George Dudley  601f as antiquarian  606, 611 candlesticks of  605–6 Captain Nathan Hale, 1755–1776: Yale College 1773; Major John Palsgrave Wyllys, 1754–1790: Yale College 1773 by 609

index   659 Documentary Life of Nathan Hale by  609, 612 Graves and  601–3, 604, 605, 612 gravestone of  612, 613f The Green Cloak and  603–5, 604f, 606–7 Hale Homestead and  593, 594, 598, 599–601, 600f, 601f, 605, 610, 612 Hale postage stamp and  607–8, 608f, 612 “Hale’s Fate and Fame” and  596 iconography and  603 interpretation and  595 material culture and  594–95 Nathan Hale memorial forest and  605 performance and  600–601 sexuality of  606 tankards commissioned by  610–11, 610f, 611f Wadsworth Atheneum and  604 Wyllys and  609–11 Yale University and  596, 598, 611 Shakers 301 Lee, A., and  299 Shakespeare, William  612 Shang dynasty  224 Shaughnessy, Thomas  463 Shurtleff, Nathaniel B.  306–7, 313n53 sign and signified  276 Silberman, Steve  237 silence food silences  75–76, 78, 79 form and  76 silk and sericulutre. See also weaving dye and  224–25, 226, 227, 228–29, 231, 232 European system and  230–32 in Han dynasty  223–25 An Lushan Rebellion and  228 Maritime Silk Road  230 mulberry tree and  114, 222, 223, 228, 230 Oasis Silk Road  230 Persian system and  226–28 reeling  226, 228, 230, 232 silkworm and  222, 223–24 weaving  225, 226–28, 229, 231–32, 233n23 woven pictures and  232 Silk Road  223, 230

silkworm bivoltinism and  224 domestication of  222 voltinism and  223–24 Silverman, Kaya  312n43 Sinhalese people  519, 531n8 Aryan ancestry and  527 in Mahāvaṃ sa 521–22 racial superiority of  530 Slater, John  147, 148f slavery 629. See also American Civil War Blacks Carrying Platters with Pearls  66, 67f Charles V and  64–65 Emancipation Proclamation and  434 garments in art of  66 God and  64 Jefferson and  4–5 Native/European contact in Florida and 401–2 pearls and  54, 55–56, 55f, 64–68 Pendant in the Form of a Captive Black Boy  54, 55–56, 55f, 67 South Carolina and  434 unfree labor model and  457–59 sleep 8–9 Yorùbá ajítẹní and  289 Sloane, Eric  30 British Museum and  201 Sloane, Hans  203, 210 Natural History by  213 Smail, Daniel  111, 115 small house movement  586 Smith, Adam  559 Smith, George  465 Smith, John W.  91–92 Smith, Joseph  341, 343, 570 Book of Mormon and  560–61, 565 friendship and  567 revelations of  349, 561 Smith, L., and  564f, 572 Smith, J. Z.  295 Smith, Lucy Mack  564f, 572 Smith, Mark M.  276 Smithsonian Institute  24 National Museum of American History and 23

660   index Snow, Eliza  571, 572 Snowbound (Whittier)  584 social ontology  105, 113, 115 Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA)  585 Soldani, Jacopo  622 Sombart, Werner  389 Song dynasty  228, 229, 230 South Asia  514. See also palm-leaf manuscripts, in Sri Lanka souvenirs  624, 626 Soyinka, Wole  281 spectacularity agency and  92, 96 dandy and  90, 92, 100 punk and  90, 94, 102 queer theory and  99 race and  100 technology and  94–95 Speculum Lapidum (Leonardi)  61 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae 421f, 422f, 427n12 direct observation and  416 modern Rome in  417 production of  415 value of  418 speech materiality of  126 recording 127 temporality of  126–27 Spencer, Archibald  175, 178 spirit vessels  536–37, 537f custodians of  538, 540 Mbir’thleng’nda  538, 539f, 542, 543, 547–49, 552 meaning of  553–54 memory and  550, 553–54 Ngum-Ngumi  540–43, 547, 549, 549f, 555n28 shrines for  540, 541f, 552 thlef ’ncha  551–52, 552f women compared to  542–43 SPNEA. See Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities Sri Lanka. See also palm-leaf manuscripts, in Sri Lanka Aryanism and  527

Buddhism in  515, 521 kingdom of Kandy in  516, 518–19, 520 propaganda in  519 Rajapaksa in  515 Sinhalese people  519, 521–22, 527, 530, 531n8 Śri Vickrama Rājasiṃ ha (king)  516, 517–18 Stafford, Barbara  210, 215 Stallybrass, Peter  400 Stations of the Cross  264–65, 266, 268 Stavnsager  495, 498, 500, 501f, 503 Stearns house. See George and Charity Stearns house; Samuel and Olive Stearns house Sterner, Judy  537 Stewart, Kathleen  74 Stewart, Susan  477 Stoller, Paul  278 Stó:lō people  477–78 Stone Age  107, 136 Stonehenge  128, 131 stones  124, 208, 209, 211, 213, 259, 525 ash houses and  165 coastal zones of Britain and  497 Hinduism and  291 Huamanga 321 masons and  504, 505 material temporality of  126, 128, 134, 136 pearl diving and  65 precious  55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 68 pumice 418 Ribaut and  406 storage and scheduling  130 Storey, Tessa  418 Stotz, Karola  110–11 Stout, Hosea  570–71 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  161 The American Women’s Home by  441 straight pin  95–96, 98, 99 street vendors, in Rome  414, 429n32, 430n56 Ago and  418 apothecaries and  423 bakers’ guild  420, 424 bandi and  420, 429n45 Brambilla and  415, 416–18, 420, 421f, 422f, 427n15, 427n16 clothing and  417

index   661 Delumeau on  420 eels and  422f, 425, 432n79 guilds and  419, 420, 423, 425–26 home cooking ingredients and  423, 424 hygiene and  418 Jubilee years and  425–26 Maddalena the weaver as  423–24 material culture and  418, 425 meat byproducts and  422–23, 422f, 430n55 papal government and  419–20, 423 Pepys on  415, 417 pizzicaroli and  419 population and  425 publics for  417 Ray on  415, 420 social meanings of food and  424–25 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae and  415–16, 418, 421f, 422f, 427n12 street vendor portraits  415–16 sweetmeats and  415, 421f, 424 tax records and  419 Vaccaria on  415, 416 Valcalcarel and  417 wild birds and  420, 421f Stroud, Ellen  300 subaltern groups  4, 5. See also indigenous people outsiders and  6 Sutton-Smith, Brian  238 Swan, Claudia  205–6 Swartz, Edward  247–48 Swiss Army knife  107 symbolic  10, 11, 242, 255 color and value as  277, 286–87 nativity scenes  317, 326, 333 punk and  93 senses and  278, 281, 285, 286–87 textiles and  398–99 Taft, Horace  593 Tait, John  238 Tang dynasty  229 taonga (treasure)  478 Taonui, Aperahama  523–24, 526, 532n25 taphonomic process  381–82 technology Ford and  23

kitchen  140, 142, 143, 144–45, 146, 148, 155, 158, 163 material culture and  10, 11 Mercer and  23 museums and  215–16 spectacularity and  94–95 writing and  11 Teflon 40 Teixeira, Pedro  58 television 245 Tempesta, Antonio  59 temporality. See also material temporality of body  127 materiality and  124–25 of speech  126–27 wealth and  136 textiles. See also silk and sericulutre class and  399–400, 402 metaphor and  398, 403, 408 Native/European contact in Florida and  397–98, 399, 400–401, 402, 406–8 power and  399–400, 410n33 Thelen, David  345 Theman, Felix  540, 556n43 Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen)  620 Thlanga 540 Thleta scarification  536–37, 538, 544f, 546f communication and  552–53 economic exchange and  545, 547 government regulations and  543–44 identity, belonging and  543, 544 Mbir’thleng’nda and  547 Ngum-Ngumi and  547, 549–50, 555n28 process of  543 resistance to  544 stages of  545, 547 Thomas, Nicholas  553 Thompson, Benjamin. See Rumford, Count Thompson, Michael  236 Thucydides 258 time. See also temporality archaeology and measuring  125 maritime orientation and  498 measuring 125 memory and  493 religion and  353n39 Titus (king)  263

662   index

Uffizi Tribuna  58, 60 unconscious translation  629 unfree labor model Australia and  463–64, 467 Charleston and  457–58 indentured servants and  455–56, 467 skilled slaves and  457–59 United States  7 Upton, Dell  27–28

van Rymsdyk, Jan British Museum and  201–2, 206 Hunter and  201–2 Museum Britannicum by  201, 202, 207–15, 208f, 209f, 214f Vasari, Giorgio  60 Veblen, Thorstein  389 Theory of the Leisure Class by  620 Veil of Veronica  261, 261f, 269f Abgar and  262–63 arma Christi and  264 Champagne and  270, 270f, 271 devotion and  262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 271 enchantment and  267, 271 Innocent III and  262, 263–64, 266, 268 John of Damascus and  262–63 John XXII and  265 Kessler and  264, 265, 268 Mass of Saint Gregory and  265f, 268 Middle Ages and  262, 264, 266 Nicholas of Cusa and  266 Stations of the Cross and  264–65, 266, 268 suffering and  273n29 as transitional artifact  267 trompe l’oeil effect and  267, 268, 269, 270, 271 Zurbarán and  269, 269f, 271 Vergo, Peter  474 Versage safety pin dress  93–94 Vico, Enea  625–26 Victorian cult of the dead  295, 303 Vital, Bonet  384, 386 Vlatch, John Michael  26 votive practices  323–26, 324f A Voyage to Virginia (Norwood)  74, 77 Vrba, Elisabeth  46 vulcanized rubber  40

Vaccaria, Lorenzo della  415, 416 Vadiga Hatana 519 Valcalcarel, Juan de  417 Van Horn, Jennifer  435 van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie  208, 210 van Rymsdyk, Andreas  201, 202, 207–8, 208f, 209f, 214f

Wadsworth, Benjamin  184–85 Wadsworth Atheneum  604 “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses”  585–86 Wallach, Alan  28 Walters Art Museum  54, 55–56, 55f, 67 Wang, Jian  228

token artifacts  43–44 Towne, Laura  439 Townsend shops  452–53, 453f translation agency and  628 biography and  628 Buddhist image and  629 cultural 628 intersemiotic 408n1 material 628 unconscious 629 Treatise on Domestic Economy (Beecher)  151, 152 Treatise on Goldsmithing (Cellini)  61 Treaty of Waitangi  523, 526 Tregear and  527, 528f, 529 Tregear, Edward The Aryan Maori by  527 Treaty of Waitangi and  527, 528f, 529 Trimming the Pie Crust (photograph)  585, 585f Troulliot, Michel-Rolph  76 Tullibardine, Lord  483, 484 Turner, Frederick Jackson  22 Turner, John G.  352n25 Turnour, George  520 Twain, Mark Huckleberry Finn by  560, 569–70 sentimentality and  560 Tyrolean Ice Man  135

index   663 war. See also American Civil War Mexican-American War  337–38, 348 Revolutionary War  593 World War I  608 Washington, George  581 wealth debt collection and  391–92 in Europe in Middle Ages  379–80, 381 temporality and  136 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, A.)  559 weaving back-strap loom  225 compound  224, 229 European system and  230, 231–32 Jacquard loom  231–32 Maddalena the weaver  423–24 parti-colored clothing and  390 patterning loom  227–28, 229 pattern-weaving loom  225, 227 silk  225, 226–28, 229, 231–32, 233n23 treadle loom  225 weft-faced 233n23 Zilu loom  227 Weber, Max  259 Welke, Barbara  247 Wertham, Frederic  245 Westerdahl, Christer  493 Westwood, Vivienne  92, 93 Whiston, William  174 White, John  523–24 Illustrations Prepared for John White’s Ancient History of the Maori by  525 Whitefield, George  296 Brown, J., and  308–9, 313n62 Lee, J., and  307–9 mission and  307 numinous and  307, 308–9 preservation of rib of  306 rib of  305–6, 306f Shurtleff and  306–7, 313n53 Warren Anatomical Museum and  305–6 Whittier, John Greenleaf  584 “Why Pots Are Decorated” (David, Gavua and Sterner)  537 Wilde, Oscar  99–100, 606 Wilkins, Ann burial of  303–4 daguerreotype of  302–3, 302f, 304–5

death of  302–3 mission and  296 numinous and  303 Victorian cult of the dead and  303 Williams, Raymond  30 Williams, Samuel  186 Wills, Royal Barry  579, 587–88, 588f, 591n20 Wilson, Andrew  92–93 Wilson, Bee  52n38 Wilson, Daniel  482 Winfrey, Oprah  48, 52n40 Winthrop, John electric air thermometer and  186 electrical machine and  182, 184–85 at Harvard College  177–78, 184–86 Leyden jar and  180–81 lightning rods and  186 Wise, Winifred Esther  239 Wissler, Clark  28 Wistar Glassworks  180–81 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  619 Wittgensteinian principle of family resemblance 2 Wölfflin, Heinrich  47, 619 Wood, Joseph  588 Woodruff, Wilford  572 baptisms and  565 friendship tokens of  569 woodworkers 452 Woolley, Mary  571–72 Worlds of Sense (Classen)  276 World War I  608 Worsaae, J. J. A.  482–83 Wright, Frank Lloyd  587 Wright, Larry  43, 51n18 Wunderkammern (chambers of wonders)  59, 625 Wyllys, John Palsgrave  609 tankard for  610–11, 610f, 611f Yáì, Ọ̀ lábíyì 281 Yale University Garvan and  595 Hale and  595, 596, 598 Nathan Hale at  596, 597f Seymour and  596, 598, 611 tankards for  611 Yang, Peiming  368, 370, 371

664   index Yorùbá sensoria  275, 279, 282f balance and  281 color and  285–86, 286f Ẹ̀f ẹ̀/Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ and  280, 280f form and  281, 282 hearing and  282–83, 291 Ifá divination and  283–84, 283f, 285, 286, 287f ilutí and  283 location and  280–81 motion and  281, 289–91 names and  284–85 orality and  281–82 Orò and  285 performance and  285, 288, 291 senses and  281 smell and  288–89, 289f tattoo and  288, 288f

touch and  287–88, 288f trance and  290 “white man” skit and  290–91 Yorùbá-speaking peoples artists 276 Ogúndipẹ̀ and  279 Sanusi and  279 sensiotics and  275, 276 Young, Brigham  343, 345, 352n25 Young, James O.  6 Yuan dynasty  228, 230 Zahan, Dominique  552–53 Zamumo 402 Zemira Palmer  343, 345, 347–48 Zhou, Enlai  358–59 Zucchi, Florentine Jacopo  65 Zurbarán, Francisco de  269, 269f, 271