Material Culture
What is material culture?
What objects say
The semiotics of stuff (i.e. signifiers)
Agency - whether objects innately have agency over people, what they do to you
Object Oriented Ontology
- objects can also expose lies
Choices in acquisition and/or collection... what does that say about people?
Materiality
Inclusivity of material culture vs. visual culture studies
Material Culture as Popcorn - you can make sense of it through all of your senses
Rituals attached to objects
Dramaturgy - the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage
Chicago: cutting though buildings to get to places faster, vs. being considered "bad manners"
"I'm not here to identify what is visual culture and what is material culture. You can go and drink beer and argue about chickens and eggs if you want to, I'm not going to get into that."
Funk's research
Within school systems/where people learn:
- architectural spaces
- artifacts
"People have always known how to read, they just haven't always read books. You read a space and know whether you're supposed to be there or not... In our country, there were very literal symbols that said 'whites only,' there were certain areas of land where Native Americans were put and told, you know, 'stay there'... Very simply, social closure is usually seen as an alternative to Marxian theory. Marx talks about struggle of socio economic forces and the struggles whereas Vader would say that inequality has never been something that is a given. We make structures that exclude people and in doing so we create inequality."
"If we know how those things were made, can we unmake them? Can we reverse them?"
"There is a whole section of history that has been left out but you can read them in the architectural spaces of a place."
Public school system = mass media, source of propaganda/curriculum
Dwight Perkins - Chicago school architect
- worked for the superintendent, a social Darwinist; believed that most of the people going to high school were what he defined as "backward" (c. 1908 meant that you were feeble-minded)
- Anglo-Saxons dictated where the lower classes should be allowed to work, what they had access to, etc. - these lower classes were not permitted access to the fine arts
Jane Adams and other teachers/Chicago women's clubs - resisted this, partnered with Dwight Perkins and designed schools that supported student development with adequate light and working conditions with open space ("open-plan"), allowing students to "evolve" even if they were being held back by school policies from "on top"
Foucault's "heterotopias"= little utopias; people negotiate between the different "utopias," i.e. mass media, schooling, department store shopping, etc.
Perkins = "civic architect," designed solaria and medical buildings, park recreation centers, parks, etc.
- designed Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL
Correlative Causation - to prove something without a doubt
Analogy - explaining something by painting a picture so someone who doesn't understand the terminology can comprehend; material culture does a similar thing
