Week 73: 3rd – 9th February
Susan Pearce has previously stated that most examples of collecting show that “a collection is not a collection until someone thinks of it in those terms”. (Pearce, 1994, p.158) However, for individual objects to become a collection, there must first be a period of selection and classification. As Cardinal and Elsner summarise in their introduction to The Culture of Collecting: “Classification precedes collecting… Collecting is classification lived, experienced in three dimensions. The history of collecting is thus the narrative of how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appropriate, and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have inherited.” (Cardinal and Elsner, 1994, 1-2)
Interpreting objects
The idea of the classification of artefacts therefore brings us back to the first section of essays, ‘Interpreting Objects’, in Pearce’s edited volume, ‘Interpreting Objects and Collections’. In understanding the ways in which objects can be classified to become part of a collection, it is useful to consider the frameworks by which objects are interpreted. These frameworks, usually referred to as ‘material culture theory’ have been developed over a period of time between the mid-nineteenth century and the present day, largely as a result of archeological research. (Pearce, 1994, p.2)
Methods of interpretation have changed dramatically throughout this period. As Miller recalls in his essay, ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’: “Social anthropology has seen a steady growth in the dominance of models derived from linguistics… [with] the emphasis in structuralism and post-structuralism… on ‘word’, ‘text’ and ‘discourse’.” (Miller, 1994, p.15) Thus, in 1977, Barthes identified that objects operate as part of a semiotic network, through reinterpreting Sassure’s language/speech divide, langue/parole, as signified/signifier. “For Barthes, these concrete performances or embodiments [parole]…have no necessary connection with the signified meaning which they carry… Together, the union of signified and signifier gives us a signe, that is the social construct which members of the group can recognize and understand”. (Pearce, 1994, 21) The relationship of objects to social and environmental factors therefore, helps us to decide how these objects might be classified, in the case of both contemporary and historical artefacts. (Miller, 1994, p.13)
Methodologies for interpretation
“Although art museums, historical societies, museums of history and technology, historic houses, open-air museums, and museums of ethnography, science, and even natural history, have long collected, studied, and exhibited the material of what has come to be called material culture, no comprehensive academic philosophy or discipline for the investigation of material culture has as yet been developed”. (Prown, 1982, p.1)
So begins Jules David Prown’s ‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture and Method’. Essays such as this and E.McClung Fleming’s ‘Artifact study: a proposed model’ from the Winterthur Portfolio, sparked renewed interest in developing new methodologies for analysing artefacts. One such attempt is documented in ‘Towards a material history methodology’ by R.Elliot et al., which followed the attempts of a graduate history seminar at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton to devise a new research model by adapting information from Fleming’s ‘Artifact Study’.
Process and model
Before developing the research model the group first had to find a workable methodology from the available social science disciplines.They decided to work with an archaeological model as it offered the best example of working directly with the object. (Elliot, 1994, p.109) From this they listed five core properties of the artefact to investigate: Material, Construction, Provenance, Function and Value. Each property was examined for evidence under three separate headings: Observable (through the sensory and empathic experience of the object), Comparative (comparing the artefact with similar objects), and Supplementary (through written/oral history or recorded images of the object). (Elliot, 1994, p.110-112)
Each of the properties were defined and a series of questions were drawn up in order to establish repeatable methods of investigation for each object. Questions ranged from the observable through to the interpretive, ie. ‘Did the materials used influence the object’s final form?’ to ‘What cultural values does it reveal?’ This methodical approach to interpreting objects allowed the group to determine how much information each object held, and provided a useful exercise in classification, which could be reapplied to further artefacts. (Elliot, 1994, p.117)
