Cultural Histories of The Material World

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Cultural Histories of the Material World
THE BARD GRADUATE CENTER
CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE
MATERIAL WORLD
The Bard Graduate Center Cultural Histories of the Material World is
a series centered on the exploration of the material turn in the study
of culture. Volumes in the series examine the ways human beings have
shaped and interpreted the material world from a broad range of schol-
arly perspectives and show how attention to materiality can contribute
to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places,
ways, and means.
Peter N. Miller, Series Editor
Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800
Peter N. Miller and Francois Louis, Editors
The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography
Peter N. Miller, Editor
Cultural Histories of the Material World
Peter N. Miller, Editor

Cultural Histories of
the Material World
Edited by Peter N. Miller
The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2013
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
O Printed on acid-free paper
2016 2015 2014 2013 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-472-11891-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-02935-8 (e-book)

For Tony

A state of affairs (a state of things) is a
combination of objects (things).
It is essential to things that they should be
possible constituents of states of affairs.
-Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.01-2.011

Series Editor's Preface
With this volume, the full scope of our ambitions for this book series
is on view. Containing twenty-three contributions, ranging across the x,
y, and z axes of time, space and discipline, what the reader encounters
here is a collective project-not merely a collection of essays, but a state-
ment about how scholars from different fields and continents of learn-
ing are now thinking about how the past can be studied through its mate-
rial traces. Of course, we cannot here provide samples from every corner
of the world, but we have hopefully given enough to show how rich is the
potential for this new way of thinking.
We are, of course, not the first to notice this. But we are the first to
give this movement, trend, tendency-even fashion-a name: cultural
histories of the material world. What does this mean? What is its history?
First off, there are many kinds of stories one could tell about the material
world, this latter term referring to all things having some kind of physical
form. This could include space, whether interior or exterior; structure,
whether big or small; or thing, whether abiding, or only a vestige (in
Latin, a vestigium is a footprint, the mark that remains made by some-
thing that is itself no longer present). A cultural history of the material
world is, therefore, a story about materiality that is pointed toward issues
that might extend well beyond the contours of anything material. A book
about the circus could tell us something about views of animals, or no-
tions of equality; another, about the discovery of fractal geometry, could
tell us something about the relationship between drawing by hand and
mathematical imaging, and between seeing and knowing; a third, about

x Series Editor's Preface
textiles and furniture, could bring us to questions of the role of women
and the perceived values attached to different kinds of objects.
That all of these projects were undertaken as exhibitions at the Bard
Graduate Center in New York tells us something else about cultural his-
tories of the material world. The term is meant to make sense at a second
order of intellectual processes or approaches, which might each occupy
continuous parts of the spectrum of materiality, such as decorative arts,
or material culture, or design history-but also those that are discontinu-
ous, such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and the history of
technology. There is no reason, in fact, why parallel research agendas or
secondary literatures need communicate. And yet, to people interested
in how materiality speaks to us, it is clear that there is a common telos to
these varied learned initiatives. Cultural histories of the material world is the
term we have chosen to designate it.
The essays in this volume emerged from a meeting held at the Bard
Graduate Center in 2010 to launch the idea of this series. The contribu-
tors are all members of the editorial board (though not all members of
the editorial board are contributors). Each was asked to write a short
essay on what cultural history of the material world signaled to them. They
were told to feel comfortable writing in whatever genre they liked: aca-
demic article, essay, belles lettres, memoir, conversation, even fiction.
This breadth was sought precisely in order to model what we took to be
the possible range of themes and styles for books in this series. Reading
through this volume will, therefore, afford two simultaneous pleasures:
the first, of reading fine scholarship written by scholars with something
original to communicate and, the second, of seeing in the whole new
possibilities for scholars and scholarship in the years to come.

Acknowledgments
I first met Sabine MacCormack when she chaired a search committee for
ajob I did not get. She sent me Religion in the Andes with the inscription,
"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas." The next time I saw her, as
I was going off for a year's fellowship, she told me that I should return
having written the kind of book I could not have written before. Both
of these anecdotes capture something essential about Sabine, and why
her loss is so painful. She was passionately committed to discovering the
truth-in the past and in the present, about strangers, about her friends,
about herself-and she was actively hostile to the tyranny of convention
and of the formulaic. The challenge of self-creation was dear to her, in
her personal life and in her scholarly career, which spanned continents,
chronologies, and disciplines. On the external editorial board of Cul-
tural Histories of the Material World, she was helpful with suggestions and
advice. At the meeting that launched the series, and which resulted in
this book, she was a passionate advocate for serious but open scholar-
ship. We-I-will miss her.
The conference out of which this book grew was held at the Bard
Graduate Center in January 2010. I would like to thank Elena Pinto
Simon, Graham White, Han Vu, Alex Phelan, and Ben Rosenthal for
their help on the day, and Laura Grey and Kimon Keramidas on many
days that followed. Daniel Lee and Vanessa Rossi were visitors then; they
have since become an integral part of the team that produced this book
and this series. It is a pleasure to thank all of them here. As always, I am

xii Acknowledgments
indebted to the library and staff of the Bard Graduate Center, especially
Heather Topcik, for a constant supply of reading material.
Tony Grafton has been friend, guide, and inspiration for twenty years
now. If any one person could embody the ideal of precision and vision
represented by this series, it would be him. This book is dedicated in his
honor.
Contents
Introduction: The Culture of the Hand
Peter N. Miller 1
1. Art's Challenge
ONE Design History and the Decorative Arts
Glenn Adamson 33
TWO The Materiality of Art
Philippe Bordes 39
2. The Place of the Material
THREE Mutually Contextual: Materials, Bodies, and Objects
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak 47
FOUR Museum Display, an Algonquian Bow,
and the Ship of Theseus
Ivan Gaskell 59
FIVE Cultural Histories of the Material World:
Whose Material World?
Sabine MacCormack 74
six The History of Facebook
Daniel Miller 81
xiv Contents
SEVEN Dirty, Pretty Things: On Archaeology and
Prehistoric Materialities
Lynn Meskell 92
EIGHT Archaeology and Design History: A Thesis
and Nine Theses
Michael Shanks 108
3. Experience and Material
NINE Swelling Toads, Translation, and the Paradox
of the Concrete
Bernard L. Herman 119
TEN Materiality and Cultural Translation: Indigenous Arts,
Colonial Exchange, and Postcolonial Perspectives
Ruth B. Phillips 134
ELEVEN The Antiquarian, the Collector, and the Cultural
History of the Material World
Alain Schnapp 144
TWELVE Mountain as Material: Landscape Inscriptions
in China
Robert E. Harrist, Jr. 151
THIRTEEN Objects and History
Jas Elsner 165
FOURTEEN Beyond Representation: Things-Human
and Nonhuman
Ittai Weinryb 172
FIFTEEN Materialities of Culture
Bill Brown 187
4. Future Histories
SIXTEEN Toward a Cultural History of the Material World
Juliet Fleming 197
SEVENTEEN Thoughts on Cultural Histories of the
Material World
NancyfJ Troy 204

Contents xv
EIGHTEEN The History of Science as a Cultural History of the
Material World
Pamela H. Smith 210
NINETEEN Reflecting on Recipes
Deborah L. Krohn 226
TWENTY Music in the Material World: Cultural Traces and
Historical Cases
Elaine Sisman 233
TWENTY-ONE A Cultural History of the Material World
of Islam
Jonathan M. Bloom 240
TWENTY-TWO Franz Kugler and the Concept of World
Art History
Horst Bredekamp 249
TWENTY-THREE The Missing Link: "Antiquarianism,"
"Material Culture," and "Cultural Science" in the Work of
G. F. Klemm
Peter N. Miller 263
Contributors 283
Index
291

Introduction:
The Culture of
the Hand
Peter N. Miller
Rainer Maria Rilke looked at Rodin's sculptures and saw hands.
Rodin has made hands, independent, small hands which, without
forming part of a body, are yet alive. Hands rising upright, evil and
irritated, hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the
five throats of a hell-hound. Hands in motion, sleeping hands and
hands in the act of awaking; criminal hands weighted by heredity, and
those that are tired and have lost all desire, lying like some sick beast
crouched in a corner, knowing none can help them.1
This is dazzling. But Rilke is not casting about for a metonymic charac-
terization of the relationship between "hands" and "wholes." No, he is
on to something else. "Hands," he continues, "are a complicated organ-
ism, a delta in which much life from distant sources flows together and
is poured into the great stream of action." For him, hands are real, and
what they make is real. In fact, what they make is history. "Hands have a
history of their own, they have, indeed, their own Culture."2
This book, and this series for which it is named, is devoted to the
Culture of the Hand, on all the many levels gestured at, hinted at, or
only implied by Rilke. One of the reasons why "culture" is so much bet-
ter a word than the "civilization" used by the English translator of the
Rodin book is that it gives us access to the very material level conveyed
by the Latin term cultura-the human intervention upon nature-as well
as to the conceptualizations that are the result of the equally effortful

2 Cultural Histories of the Material World
work of tending the spirit: cultura animi. Rilke's Culture of the Hand
is, therefore, a way of defining human activity: training the hand, the
works of the hand, the world made by many hands. This broad domain,
in its many splendors, is the subject of this book: a book whose purpose
is to show possibilities and teach questions, not to foreclose them or to
preach answers.
For those of us interested in cultural histories of the material world,
the twentieth century began in the 1880s, in Bonn, with Karl Lamprecht.
This was the decade in which Aby Warburg was his student-later Marc
Bloch devoted his most assiduous reading to Lamprecht, and Johan
Huizinga engaged with Lamprecht at key stages of his career-and in
which he cemented a relationship with Henri Pirenne.' But most of all,
in this decade, Lamprecht launched projects which would define the
next century's chief initiatives. He published a book on ornamental pat-
terns in medieval incipits; he organized a collaborative "total history" of
an illuminated manuscript, treating it as an artistic, political, economic,
political, and material artifact; he published a four-volume study of the
medieval Moselle region that blended geography, economy and law; and
he launched himself into a multi-volume work on German history that
he characterized in terms of cultural history.
Of course, if he is at all known today it is because of the two-decade-
long polemic that broke out around him, and which centered on his
practice as a scholar-the verdict was dim-and his endorsement of
cultural history-then still a swear word among professional historians
in Germany.4 The Lamprechtstreit, like the contemporary Dreyfus Affair
in France, divided teachers from students and colleagues from one an-
other, forcing many who admired Lamprecht's originality to duck and
cover, if not actively disavow any sympathy for his approach.
Yet, in a very real way, Lamprecht is the most important historian for
the twentieth century, and in particular for those of us who tell stories
with-as well as about-things. As the teacher of Warburg-and even if
Gombrich went too far in making him the exclusive influence on War-
burg at the expense of Usener-and as the promoter of Pirenne, who in
turn inspired and was the godfather of the Annales (with Bloch and Feb-
vre in turn serving as godfathers to Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie, Ginzburg,
Davis, Glassie, and Darnton), Lamprecht stands behind the two most
innovative schools of history in the twentieth century, or at least schools
of cultural history, broadly understood.'
Our story, indeed, begins here. But it almost ends here as well. Be-
cause in 1929, the founding of the Annales marked the emergence of

Introduction 3
a material history with the culture shorn away, lest any flabby Geistesge-
schichte debase the new coinage. Later that same year, Aby Warburg died
in Hamburg. Over the next few years, the profile of his institute shifted
away from the more anthropological, and material, contexts that so at-
tracted its founder, to the intellectualized cultural history of Hercules am
Scheidewege and Studies in Iconology. With this equal and opposite purging
of the cultural from the material and the material from the cultural,
Lamprecht's innovative synthesis mostly vanished from view. Where it re-
mained active, in a clear example ofJurgen Kocka's notion of "ideologi-
cal regression and methodological innovation," was in the increasingly
racial Volks- and Landesgeschichte of the 1930s. Hermann Aubin, for
example, began as a Lamprecht-inspired student of Landesgeschichte at
Bonn, and wound up as the director of a Nazi ethnic demography insti-
tute at Breslau. (That he ended up back in Bonn, teaching through the
1950s and serving as a mentor to a new generation of spatial historians is
a reminder that there can be two sides to every coin.)6
Over the course of the twentieth century, like Aristophanes's ur-
hermaphrodite, these sundered perspectives sought, but never, or only
too rarely, found each other. In the last decade or two, however, the grop-
ings of material historians toward cultural explanations, and of cultural
historians for materializations-perhaps best embodied in the turn to
microhistory by social historians, histories of the book by literary schol-
ars, antiquarianism by classicists and art historians, and the history of
science by cultural historians-shows that the magnetism of Lamprecht's
synthesis still works, even if invisibly, and at a great distance. This vol-
ume represents an explicit attempt at union on both the practical and
theoretical levels: the essays do the work of joining cultural to material
history, and the self-consciousness about this work, and about the per-
plexities and antinomies of the historical metanarrative with which they
are in dialogue, is bound up with the desire of contributors to intervene
in and repoint a historiography.
A genealogy of the relationship between culture and material would
be a daunting undertaking, almost an encyclopedia of the West from the
most ancient times-or even earlier, as Horst Bredekamp suggests in his
essay-to the present. No one who has read through-or in antiquity,
listened to-Cicero's discussion of the liberal versus the manual arts-
one the province of the head and the free, the other that of the hand
and the enslaved-can have any doubt of the depth of the valorization
of the one, and depreciation of the other. This is an old but long-lasting
perspective. It was still potent at the beginning of the twentieth century,

when French and German scholars could debate their national superior-
ity in terms of the supremacy of Civilisation or Cultur. The threat of the
material and the quotidian loomed large over this debate: the French
saw in Cultur the anthropological lowest common denominator; the Ger-
mans, in Civilisation, the banality of everyday practice. That the single
most influential work of cultural history-Jacob Burckhardt's study of
Renaissance Italy-still bears its late Victorian mistranslated title illus-
trates the gravitational pull exerted by these century-old perceptions. (It
is, of course, "The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy," but Middlemore
could not bear precisely Burckhardt's gesture at practice, rite, and as we
might say today, habitus.)
The nineteenth century's problem with materiality is worth dilating
upon. For while the ancient bias remains powerful, it is also deeply chal-
lenged. By the middle of the century there is a broad attempt to incor-
porate a wider range of evidence, including that of material remains
and daily life, and new kinds of questions-including those that came
to found the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, folklore, and art
history. No longer could these claims simply be ignored; having been
made so forcefully, they now had to be rejected, equally forcefully. And
they were.
This rejection, which coincided with the establishment of history as
a modern university discipline, had the effect of setting back the history
of historical scholarship by at least a half, if not a whole, century-and
I mean by this the retarded rise of economic and especially social and
cultural history, which was stillborn ca. 1860. The rejection reflected an
insistence on the priority of history as practiced by professional academ-
ics over and against an insurgent popular practice; of the university over
and against the local association and the museum; of the legitimacy of
older, as opposed to more recent, history; and, of course, an underlying
discomfort with materiality. The specter, too, that haunts this rejection,
is that of Marx.
The revolutions of 1848 were not only, as Ryding and Dilly pointed
out long ago in a brilliant article, the crucible of cultural history, they
also launched the Communist Manifesto.7 And from then on, even to our
own day, talk of material history easily blurred in the listener's ear into
historical materialism. Marx, then-even as he opened perspectives for
some-became for others a tool for tarring. Of course, as anyone who
has looked to Marx for a discussion of material culture knows full well,
he makes no effort at all to show how material evidence tells us things
about society that we do not already know. Marx was, indeed, a prophet
Introduction 5
of materiality-of the idea that the material matters-but he was not
interested in exploring how it matters. Instead, he skips directly to the
implications of production for broader questions of politics and eco-
nomics. Indeed, what now passes for the study of material culture-close
attention to the way in which things and people mutually interact-he
classes, and dismisses, under the term "fetish." So, far from serving as a
resource for those then, or since, interested in materiality, Marx doubly
set it back: both in terms of a personal lack of interest, which he com-
municated to his followers, and in terms of the fear his political program
inspired, which led others to condemn the whole prospect of material
meanings. (Engels might represent a different set of possibilities, and a
different genealogy.)8
The death of Culturgeschichte in the middle of the nineteenth century,
and the botched attempt at revival by Lamprecht-bungled by doubts
about his own scholarly credibility even more than by resistance to his
questions-is a necessary backdrop to the project of this volume, for it
helps explain why the last few decades of scholarship on things in the
mainstream of the academy has so little precedent. Among professional
art historians, whose training ought best to have prepared the way for
an engagement with objects, material culture has labored under the
burden of not being art. Nancy Troy begins her essay here with George
Kubler's thought experiment about what art historians would have to do
if they broadened their purview to include all man-made objects. This
was clearly intended as a provocation, and as such, it has had some lim-
ited success-the appeal of visual culture conserves still some of its mo-
mentum.9
From the opposite end of the spectrum, archaeology, the science of
objects par excellence, has until recently also little succeeded in bringing
materiality to the center. Prehistory has served, from the start, as the
model for academic archaeology, emphasizing both the interpretative
virta of a discipline able to conjure meaning from mute objects without
contamination by texts, and the final liberation of professionals from
the haunting paternity of the embarrassing, dilettantish premodern an-
tiquary. Archaeologists' rejection of the mongrel, but richer, terrain of
textual plus material evidence-what is often called "historical archaeol-
ogy" to exclude the classical Greek and Roman periods, but which surely
includes the ancient as well as modern worlds-effectively constituted
the self-marginalization of materiality by its own priesthood, at least vis-
a-vis the other humanities.
And so, here we are, now, with a volume whose contributors are
drawn from history, art history, literature, music, archaeology, classics,
folklore, and anthropology departments, and include professors and
curators. They were charged to reflect on what a cultural history of the
material world might look like from their particular vantage point, and
to do so through a short text that could take the form of a loosely argued
essay, a personal reflection, a closely argued case study, a manifesto, an
exhibition or book review, or a short multimedia project. The goal was to
produce a kaleidoscope of great power and beauty. The pieces that fol-
low are just that: pieces. They offer small visions of what could be larger
or grander research projects, or even career paths. There is no attempt
here at comprehensiveness, nor even at coherence-only at insight. This
is a book that can be read from cover to cover like a monograph with an
argument-albeit sinuously articulated-or dipped into like a book of
essays, each one of which stands on its own, and amidst its own constel-
lation of questions.
This volume proposes that no one discipline owns material culture;
rather, things, objects, or materials look different, pose different ques-
tions, and do different work depending on the world of presupposi-
tions in which they operate. This volume also follows another of Rilke's
premises. He explained that "Rodin knows that the body consists of so
many stages for the display of life, of such life as in any and every part
can be individual and great."10 Objects, then, "stage" evidence just as
texts do, just as images can, and just as performance does. One of these
forms is not necessarily more eloquent, more perfect, more reliable
than the others-only different in the way that different forms yield
their content."
However much attention had been paid to objects in various disci-
plines, at various times in the past, the development of a self-conscious
discourse with material culture as its term of art is a function of the late
1960s and 1970s, and mostly in Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Echoes of
this persist: at a recent Franco-American workshop on material culture
and decorative arts, several of the French participants explained that
when they heard "material culture" they saw "materialism." Yet, even
the INHA-the French National Institute of Art History-now sponsors
a position in "Arts et Culture Materielle."12 Questions as broad and wide
as globalization are conducted in terms of the role and movement of
things.13 Even a tired term like "cultural studies" has sought reinvigora-
tion through reaching out to material culture.14
The proliferation of studies of materiality in its many forms is now
widely apparent. That so many of these are collective overviews, intro-

Introduction 7
ductions, guides, or readers suggests both a great hunger for content
but also an olla podria of methods, questions, fields, and horizons, with
all that this implies."
Our volume takes both this interest and this inchoateness for granted,
and begins one step further along the curve: asserting to an audience
already committed to materiality not to forget that before there was ma-
teriality there was material, and before people studied material culture
they probably studied art. As Glenn Adamson explains, the rejection of
decorative arts by material culture and design history-another cross-
disciplinary way of being in the world of things-trades in connoisseur-
ship and aesthetic identification with high style for a concern with evi-
dence. In this move, an object's individuality is subsumed into its class
typicality. This coincided, Adamson notes, with a shift to consumption
studies and social-economic situatedness, and away from art, which must
always be a unique experience-whether of consumption, or produc-
tion. Is this, he asks, really a step forward? Or have certain important
perspectives been lost in the process? Has this "material turn" repre-
sented something of a reductionism? Adamson notes that only in an art
history, with its emphasis on arts did humanists receive training in mate-
rials and making, not to mention style analysis-all of which are needed
if the maximum evidentiary value is to be extracted from artifacts, but
which have been marginalized, often sneeringly, by those with an animus
against the aesthetic (or at least a kind of Weberian unmusicality for the
aesthetic impulse). One could add that Carlo Ginzburg's powerful 1995
Art Bulletin essay on the connoisseur as detective proved that there is
no dichotomy, but only a continuity between object knowledge and the
object as evidence for something outside the object.16
Philippe Bordes recalls for us that, once upon a time, this reminder
that the object was not an either/or did not need to be articulated. Back
then, people spoke quite unself-consciously about the objet d'art. Bordes
asks us to view this taken-for-granted expression as instead a question
posed. For him, the triumph of illusionistic art over costume (textiles)
and jewels a la Burgundy, marks the start of the immaterial turn. The
modesty of the materials involved (paper, canvas) only emphasized the
power of artistic genius. The move to illusion was a move away from the
materiality of the substance of the object, or even of what it was repre-
senting. One can hear in this argument much of what Thomas Campbell
and Tristan Weddigen imply about what a history of art history would
look like if tapestry, not painting, defined its standard practice."
Bordes dares to suggest that the objet d'art is the most "consolidated
expression of art" since it combines the immaterial and the material. If,
however, the paintings which rose to head the canon in the Beaux-Arts
system of the nineteenth century displaced materiality by mimesis, he
worries that the late-twentieth-century swing of the dialectical pendulum
toward the material-however valuable it has been-could, nevertheless,
overcorrect and leave us only objects, with no art, but also no context.
The challenge of a cultural history of the material world, as he outlines
it, is to preserve the "twentieth-century rapprochement between form
and material," and the gains in our understanding of the social context
of art that is the "history" in art history.
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak puts Bordes's challenge in philosophical terms.
She begins with the presumption that the linguistic turn ought not be
simply negated by a material one, exchanging one incompleteness for
another. Indeed, she notes, scholars have not gone much for "processual
materialization of objects nor their ecological destiny." In fact, symbol-
ism, as in the seals she writes about, remains a major focus of interest,
which if not purely linguistic, is yet focused outward, on social phenom-
ena. If formed materials, with the cultural processes built in, as opposed
to raw materials on their own, seem the most common kind of historical
data, she wonders whether a cultural history of the material world is not
in fact a tautology. If all cultural histories are in some way materialized
histories, then any separation between them-however heuristically pro-
vocative-is, in the end, only artificial. Her response, or proposal, is to
focus on the clusters of meaning created by the intertwining of culture,
history and material, avoiding pendulum swings between dualisms, or
mere reductivism, or presentism, and acknowledging the multiple and
always-changing identities of what we might call the "living" thing.
Ivan Gaskell, in his contribution, redirects the question. If history is
about people, then a cultural history of the material world would refer
to the ways people transform nature, or imbue it with meaning. Where
Bedos-Rezak wants to navigate between the Scylla of ahistorical matter
and the Charybdis of over-historicized materiality, Gaskell sees a radical
opportunity: to dissolve the very notion of firm divisions between mate-
rial, culture, and history. Relocating the Sudbury bow from Harvard's
Peabody Museum of Anthropology to its Art Museum enabled him to
tease out the many possible meanings that may be found in material
depending upon its material context, which otherwise could be called
its cultural history. The museum turns out to be a site of immense com-
plexity because its intersecting identities as both material and cultural
facilitate the possibility of fine-grained analysis. That Gaskell and Laurel

Introduction 9
Thatcher Ulrich then pursued this idea through a series of courses that
fed another exhibition, entitled "Tangible Things," highlights the enor-
mous pedagogical possibilities of such a practice.18 As he shows, reloca-
tion is revelation: in this particular case, it turns out that reputed owner
of the Sudbury bow turns out not to have lived in Sudbury, and the event
which the object commemorates seems never to have occurred.
Sabine MacCormack pushes this challenge out the door of the mu-
seum and into the human present. She reminds us that there are many,
not just one, material worlds. The European model is founded on a dis-
tinction between the ability to do the work of making (opus), and the
ability to conceptualize it (ratiocinatio). MacCormack, taking the exam-
ple of Ines the Quechua, forcefully denies this dichotomy. But her point
is even bigger. In extensive terms, the separation of opus and ratiocinatio
cramps the possibility of a global vision because it assumes a universal
conceptual landscape, which we know to be false. In intensive terms,
like Momigliano's famous distinction between the antiquarian and the
historian, this one presumes falsely that the creator at the rock face can-
not also be the one to conceptualize and contextualize that creation.
In thinking about this subject area, she implies, we might need also to
rethink its conceptual foundations.
Still in the present, Daniel Miller uses the example of the history of
Facebook to treat ethnographically the impact of a cultural artifact on
individual people. In his in-depth treatment of "Nicole" and her rela-
tionship to this online world, we get a case study in the dynamic relation-
ship between cultural history and biography. If the ethnographer's lens
allows us to discover the historicity of a phenomenon generally viewed
as timeless because of our own time, it also models for us the extent to
which the meaning of a phenomenon is contingent upon its social life.
Lynn Meskell begins with a reflection on the impact of Miller's Lon-
don School and the current romanticization of objects-their presenta-
tion as vehicles for biography, genealogy, or self-fashioning. Perhaps the
most striking example of the power of this approach is the best-selling
book, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010).19 What does not get accounted
for now, however, according to Meskell, is the copresence of divergent
qualities inhering in, and held together by, the object itself. This insight,
which she traces to Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is then used
as the basis for her attempt to elucidate, in the context of her digging
at Catalh5yiik, the fully contextualized, synchronic meaning of an ob-
ject. Staying with the object in one time and place becomes, for her, the
model of a specifically archaeological interpretation. This idea that an

object is part of a conversation with its surroundings translates Bedos-
Rezak's vision of material as having "its own landscape of contingen-
cies which affects both the objects' destinations and meanings" into the
realm of archaeology.20
Among archaeologists, the past two decades have witnessed a long
march away from a social science model toward the humanities. This
invoked, first, the "post-processual," then the "interpretative," and now
the "social." We might single out Ian Hodder, and then two of the con-
tributors to this collection-Lynn Meskell and Michael Shanks-as lead-
ing examples of this development.21 It has offered archaeologists entirely
new domains in which to study material traces, and has given histori-
ans, art historians, and anthropologists a whole new portfolio of ques-
tions with which to reapproach their own realms. For Michael Shanks,
this trajectory continues beyond the borders of even this irredentist ar-
chaeology. Positing archaeology "as the study of what remains" makes
it a key tool for probing the contemporary environment. In particular,
he wants us to see how archaeology offers the foundation for a design
history capable of making sense of a world thoroughly dominated by
things. Perhaps inevitably this leads him to revalue the role of histori-
cal archaeology. If all this seems very different from Meskell's archaeol-
ogy, it is. Shanks, perhaps only partly tongue-in-cheek, has redefined his
practice, and perhaps that of "his" archaeology, as well: "Actually, I'm a
neo-antiquarian."22
John Pocock in his multivolume study of Gibbon has emphasized the
challenge he faced in finding a literary form in which to write an evidence-
rich narrative. The problem faced by the antiquaries in this new world
had as much to do with writing as with thinking.23 Our question here
then becomes: what is the heuristic style of the neo-antiquarian? Bernard
Herman presents it as dialectic, using his example of the puffer fish, or
toad, which is made into food "through a violent act of translation"-an
editing that takes what was extraneous and separates it from the com-
modity. (The puffer fish is rendered edible by cutting off the head and
pulling the skin so as to turn the fish inside out and make the flesh ac-
cessible.) Herman continues: "All encounters with things proceed in this
fashion-we are committed to the deadening of things as a means to
rendering them tractable-and then quickening them through descrip-
tion and interpretation." Herman puts the emphasis squarely on the
imaginative ability to use, see, and talk as the only way out of an impasse
which is otherwise entirely negative. He seems to imply that even if this

Introduction 11
ends up being a reduced reality, it can be vivid, full with information,
and provocative.
Herman began as a folklorist and art historian and the sensibility of
oral culture shapes his approach to material culture. Ruth Phillips is an
anthropologist, and she, too, focuses on experience and embodiment.
Both remind us that just as the antiquaries of old read, they also trav-
eled, handled, smelled, and tasted. But her focus here is on the slippages
between the visual and the material, where assumptions filter through
undetected and unexamined. Translation, she writes, following Peter
Burke, involves both decontextualization and recontextualization. The
ambiguities of material forms-what do they really mean to different
people? never being exactly the same-greatly facilitates that process.
Thus, looking at material translation enables her to shed light on cul-
tural encounters. Phillips concludes that we will need language, perfor-
mance, and also visual and material dimensions if we are to understand
as best as we can the complexity of the historical reality.
This brings us back to the model for studies of the material world: the
"original," early modern antiquaries who lived through the Age of Con-
tact, both with past and present worlds, and collected, described, and
compared objects, as well as texts, rituals, and naturalia. Alain Schnapp's
contribution to this volume is then all the more essential. He shows that
in antiquity our issues-what is materiality? what is culture?-were pres-
ent and were bound up with the biggest of questions: mortality. In the
realm of the material, this means that ruins and discarded objects are
useful because they are material, and at the same time are separated
from the commodity cycle.
Objects functioned already in antiquity as ways to re-enchant the
world. Schnapp figures the surviving presentations of this in both lit-
erary texts and inscriptions as Stein und Zeit-the relationship between
material memory and the problem of time. The Egyptians gave us the
genre of poetic reflection; the Mesopotamians that of archaeology, since
burying fragile mud bricks bearing inscriptions in the foundations of
temples presupposes that digging up such materials is what people of
the future will do. Robert Harrist turns to another example, perhaps
the most extreme one, of the application of antiquarian techniques to
ostensibly alien materials: writing on mountains. Going to China, back to
the Tang period, we find mountains turned into material: nature made
into a backdrop for the conveying of presence to posterity. In the pro-
cess, however, this act-which might have had political meaning when
done by or for an emperor, such as Xuanzong (712-756), or a personal
one when the act of an otherwise anonymous traveler or scholar-also
transformed space. Nature became an object through the human inter-
vention of writing.
Jas Elsner notes that this complex of issues has always been prob-
lematic for the discipline of art history. He reminds us how few objects
appear, for instance, in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
and how what does, such as the Arch of Constantine, functions purely
as a cipher, not only for Gibbon, but for Raphael earlier, and Berenson
later. Elsner wants us to acknowledge the strangeness of material culture
within the study of art. In part, he suggests it is a technical problem: how
to talk about things in words. But there is more. What Schnapp points
to as essentially human-the conflation of materiality with mortality-
Elsner sees as overdetermined. In this process, objects become emblems,
sometimes even losing all their historical specificity. In the hands of
professional art historians, Elsner writes, this tends always to treat the
material as materiality, and thereby reduce the uncomfortableness of
the object world to the familiarity of the symbolic. But since words and
things communicate meaning differently, what is really needed is a lan-
guage that is true to the varieties of materiality, but also makes sense to
other people. As difficult as this might be to conceive of, taking material
seriously, Elsner implies, offers the possibility of freeing scholars from
a vantage point anchored either in cultural apologetics or ideological
denial-absolutely essential for the modernization of art history as a dis-
cipline.
Ittai Weinryb's meditation on Marbod of Rennes (1035-1123) takes
up Elsner's challenge. Marbod's reflection on the meaning of the crack
he discovered in his "golden bowl"-a vase he purchased as a tourist
in Rome-reveals to us a medieval reflection on materiality that is not
about visual representation. But since Marbod was also the author of
the first medieval lapidary, we see that he was also able to appreciate
the purely material dimension of materiality, and to participate, in this
context, in the contemporary tendency to impute symbolism to matter.
That Marbod was capable of relating to the object world on these all
these distinct registers suggests that there is much to rethink in the his-
toriography of the Middle Ages, and much, potentially, to learn from it.
Addressing the current situation, Bill Brown argues that the time is
right for tackling the place of the material in the cultural sciences. He
notes the steady drumbeat of new publications including the Handbook of
Material Culture (2006), The Object Reader (2009), and the special issue of
Introduction 13
Critical Inquiry on "things" which he edited (2001)-to which we could
add the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture (2010) and the Cambridge
Companion to Historical Archaeology (2009). The expected big audiences
for these books reflect, he argues, a current materialist longing unsatis-
fied by Marx's historical materialism, and the craving of scholars from
elsewhere in the cultural sciences looking for help with "things." Brown
calls this, rightly, I think, the "post-postprocessual moment."
Following the arguments of Robert Friedel and Steven Lubar in their
pathbreaking History from Things (1993), Brown, like Elsner, suggests the
need to go back to the stuff itself, the Aristotelian "first cause" that is so
often skipped over by scholars en route to what they view as the more
interesting explanations. This is precisely where Juliet Fleming comes
in, strongly arguing for a new history of the book. The work of Adrian
Johns, Ann Blair, and William Sherman over the past decade has brought
reading into the world of writing, and both into the making of books.
What Fleming proposes is the possibility that writing is not formed by an
external material world pressing down upon us, but from our own mate-
rial reality extruded on to paper. From the premise that materiality is
inside us, Fleming reinterprets Derrida's grammatology as a new science
of cultural graphology, in which questions of being were encountered
and addressed as material. The horizon of analytical bibliography-the
"science of the transmission of literary documents"-does indeed open
fascinating material possibilities. But Nancy Troy, reviewing the fate of
her books at the hands of the Library of Congress's cataloguers, shows
us how precarious that transmission is. The gap between her assessment
of her work's telos, and theirs-and what theirs is based on-maps a new
vision of bibliography as cultural history.
The history of the book is one arena where a material focus has al-
ready created new areas of questioning. Another is history of science.
Pamela Smith reconfigures it as techno-science, such that treated as a
cultural history of the material world: (1) it becomes a deep history of
technology, and (2) is based on material and commercial exchange. The
first, "deep," part suggests that tools, the discovery of fire, the domestica-
tion of plants, and astronomical observation-all these paleo, meso, and
Neolithic skills-articulate an engagement with nature not very different
from our own higher tech. Exchange, in turn, emerges as one of the
principles of history of science practiced as techno-science. Exchange
points to the globalism of the early modern, but also to craft-between
urban culture and artisans-to the collective practice of science-as in
the Royal Society-and to the formalization of an exchange between hu-

mans and the natural world (for what are experiments if not organized
interventions in the natural world?).
The history of food seems ripe for this kind of treatment, but up until
now it has generally been ignored-by cultural historians because too
material, and by material historians because too ephemeral a phenom-
enon: the thing itself vanishes, either by intention or necessity, leaving
only representations in word or line. Yet, as Deborah Krohn shows, the
position of the culinary in premodern times lay precisely athwart the line
separating theoria from experience, or from tacit knowledge. The recipe,
which is the subject of her essay, is where these two extremes meet. Look-
ing at the development of recipes, then, enables us at a distance to chart
the meandering passage of tacit into formal knowledge, and food from
the impermanent to the theorized.
Music is even less material than food. Its materiality-leaving aside
of course instruments and staging-is "visible" only to the ear. Elaine
Sisman takes up this challenge of presenting music as a key contact zone
for exploring material issues. Music functions in this book as borderline
material-sound, vibration, the instruments, the effects on us. But at the
same time there is no there: it all happens in time. Sisman concentrates
on the example of Haydn's Creation, and the particular moment in time
of the creation of light and how Haydn represents it. Others, such as
Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, have written about the culture and material cul-
ture of audiality in the twentieth century.4
But Sisman also opens up a second front on the question of music
and materiality: that of performance. For music is embodied, not just
in audiences, but in how composers write it, how actors perform it, and
how singers voice it. She gives the example of Don Giovanni singing
and strumming-two material processes, sometimes working together,
sometimes working against each other. And then there are the words
he is directing at Donna Elvira's maid-also, maybe working together
or apart. This materiality is incredibly complicated, but, potentially, just
as generative. "In emphasizing musical issues that cultural history can
entail," Sisman suggests, "musicologists may set new terms for debate in
the cultural history they have long inhabited."25
Jonathan Bloom offers a model for art history, too, writing reform
from the perspective of Islamic art. He and Sheila Blair argue that Is-
lamic art offers a methodological opportunity for those wishing to re-
think the theoretical definitions of art history.26 The singular importance
of Islamic art for art history as a discipline is precisely that it stands out-
side the canon, and was thus spared all the diagnosed ills of discipliniza-
Introduction 15
tion. For him, the cultural history of the material world puts the empha-
sis on the things made, where the texts may tell us nothing. For him,
the movement is from things to questions: What was it made from? How
was it made? Who made it? When was it made? Where was it made? And
finally, why was it made?
These may seem obvious questions, but if we look at Renaissance
antiquarianism, which often provided the first layer of scholarship on
ancient and medieval artifacts, we see that much of what they did was
taxonomic in the same way-and this includes not only objects, but also
things like genealogies or reigns. These only seem basic questions be-
cause we already know the answers to them. Art history, by comparison,
is a very young field, and in some parts of it, such as Islamic art, there
remains so much still to know.
As examples, Bloom looks closely at two objects: a ceramic bowl from
Iran now in Copenhagen, and a minbar made in Cordoba for Morocco.
What Brown implies is that we need to draw in conservators and curators
to begin to answer these questions properly. Just as historians of techno-
science, such as Smith, routinely collaborate now with conservators,
Bloom suggests that a consequence of putting the material back in is that
historians, curators, and conservators will need to work together. This
accurate judgment-and laudable goal-will require a new attitude on
the part of institutional administrators toward staff time and goals. Right
now, how many curators, even at university museums, are encouraged to
work with professors, whether in the classroom or on research projects?
How many are actually viewed by professors as intellectual equals? And,
looking in the other direction, how many curators and conservators are
deeply interested in the questions professors ask about the world their
objects come from or move through?
Turning from Bloom's Islamic art-eccentric content, perhaps, to
Western art history-back to Bordes's European decorative art-closer
to, but still off-center-returns us back to the idea of the art object (objet
d'art). From this perspective, what Bloom proposes is what Bordes de-
scribes: the object as the lodestone around which everything swirls, and
no question is to be left behind. The CIHA meeting of 2012 was devoted
precisely to this point, though phrased somewhat differently: "the chal-
lenge of the object."
Horst Bredekamp also takes an off-center part of art history as his
starting point: prehistory. Bredekamps's jeu d'esprit, which begins with
the real making of art in prehistoric times, has a very serious outcome:
effectively rewriting the entire history of art. He focuses on Franz Ku-

gler, who worked on 40,000-year-old sculptures in the Swabian Alps. To
go back to this effort now, with Kugler at center, and a host of more
recent sculptural finds from the period 25,000-40,000 BCE is a way of
relooking at the question of art history's role in the humanities. Kugler's
Handbuch is about the history of man "as the form-conscious producer of
artifacts." Describing it this way turns inside-out the role of Near Eastern
and Greco-Roman antiquity in the narrative of the history of art. Get-
ting around this "block," as Bredekamp calls it, leads toward the materi-
als themselves. He outlines the possibility of our constructing a material
iconology by exploring the different approaches to stone and ivory-
the first alternative material-across the threshold between 40,000 and
30,000 BCE. For Bredekamp, this moment marks the "discovery of the
world and of man."
Bredekamp sees in Kugler a way of rethinking the narrative of art
history-no small matter since Jacob Burckhardt was his student just
then in Berlin. Miller looks at an exact contemporary of Kugler-G. F.
Klemm-and an exactly contemporary project, and sees away of rethink-
ing the Nachleben, not of the antique, but the antiquarian. Kugler's his-
tory of the Berlin collection (ca. 1838) exactly coincides with Klemm's
history of collecting (ca. 1837). In 1842, Kugler published his Handbuch
der Kunstgeschichte; in 1843, Klemm brought out his Allgemeine Kulturge-
schichte. His story, too, goes from prehistory to the present, and is global.
Where Klemm, however, winds up is not in prehistory, but anthropology.
Klemm ends his career by inventing (or at least giving the most ro-
bust first meaning to) the terms "materiellen Kultur" and "Culturwissen-
schaft."27 He began by citing early modern antiquarian literature in books
he called cultural history. Klemm's gambit shows how the study of things
in fact provides the crucial armature through which the early modern
framework of study-antiquarianism-became the modern, whether
called anthropology or archaeology. This ability to see in the early mod-
erns the way to new connections in modern times would not recur in
Germany again until Warburg-who, after all-called himself a "contem-
plative antiquary" (beschauerlich Antiquar), and did not register at all in
France nor in England.
The question now, is that if we find material culture being studied
continually between the Renaissance and the twentieth-first century-
whether Klemm is the missing link or no-then what does this say about
the taken-for-granted assumption that study of materiality has been mar-
ginal to the historical and cultural sciences? This suggests the possibility
of articulating an entirely new history of historical research, in which
the culture of the hand is much more essential than has been realized.28
Introduction 17
To explore the implications of this de- and re-centering, I propose to
return to Rilke. So far as I know, no student of material culture or its his-
tory has recognized in his oeuvre the absolutely compelling source it is.
For his was no "Neue Sachlichkeit," as was that of Williams, Ponge, or the
"Concrete" poets, which reacted dialectically against.29 Rilke came to ma-
teriality not against, but from, metaphysics. For us, here, interested as we
are in exploring the ways in which the material world offers opportuni-
ties for thinking about the varieties of the human historical experience,
Rilke is, therefore, indispensable. So, acknowledging the limitations of
space, and recognizing the violence of the experiment, let us embark
upon a reading of Rilke as Virgil to our cultural histories of the material
world.
Rilke, as noted at the beginning of this essay, began his book on Rodin
with the sculptor's hands. "Instinctively one looks for the two hands from
which this world has come forth. One thinks of the smallness of human
hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their
activity."30 If we noted that Rilke was not positing a merely metonymic
relationship between hands and wholes, we see here, much more clearly,
that he was actually thinking in terms of synecdoche. For Rilke was talk-
ing about the human when using the word "hand"-much as we might
use the word "heart," viz. "she was all heart." A history of the culture of
the hand, then, would be a human history in the broad sense, inflected
toward the varieties of making.
And, in fact, the lecture on Rodin, which was published as the second
part of the Rodin book, begins by reimagining what a historical practice
would look like that took this world as its subject. "If my subject were
personalities," Rilke began, "I could begin where you have just left off
on entering this room; breaking in upon your conversation, I would,
without effort, share your thoughts."31 This is history as it actually was-
Ranke's famous wie es eigentlich gewesen. But it is not the history Rilke
wants to write. "When I attempt to visualize my task," he continues, "it
becomes clear to me that it is not people about whom I have to speak,
but things."32
Saying "things," he explains, can evoke a silence. In part, we surmise,
this is because things are, notoriously, mute. And because things have
evoked so little attention among historians. But these are obvious. Rilke
wants us to think of another reason: for around things "all movement
subsides and becomes contour, and out of past and future time some-
thing permanent is formed: space, the great calm of objects which know
no urge."33 Things, in short, make space, and this too is part of the his-
torian's field.
But the silence could also be that of unresponsiveness, our dulled
human sensibility. To those who felt nothing at the term-"The word
'things' passes you by"-Rilke directed them to reflect on their own ear-
liest pasts. Return, he urges, "to any one of your childhood's possessions,
with which you were familiar. Think whether there was ever anything
nearer to you, more familiar, more indispensable than such a thing."
Threats and fears abounded, but not here. "If, amongst your early ex-
periences, you knew kindness, confidence and the sense of not being
alone-do you not owe it to that thing?" Later, older, "a holy joyfulness,
a blessed humility, a readiness to be all things," came to you "because
some small piece of wood"-the Cross-"had once shown you them all,
assuming and illustrating them for you." Moving from youth to old age,
and from toy to cross, Rilke then proceeds to generalize from cross to the
world. It "made you familiar with thousands of things by filling a thou-
sand roles, by being animal and tree, and king and child." In that object,
and thus, later, in all these objects, lay "the whole of human experience,
even to death itself."34
This relationship is so deeply within our own experience of the world
as to be, most of the time, completely invisible to us. But Rilke probes
just as deeply. "How does it come about at all that things are related to
us? What is their history?"35 Rilke's answer meets the depth of his chal-
lenge. He offers up a conjectural history of the creative soul easily on par
with the masterful models of Enlightenment social theorists.
Things were made very early, with difficulty, after the pattern of nat-
ural things already existing; utensils and vessels were made, and it
must have been a strange experience to see the made object as a
recognized existence, with the same rights and the same reality as the
thing already there. Something came into existence blindly, through
the fierce throes of work, bearing upon it the marks of exposed and
threatened life, still warm with it. . . This experience was so remark-
able and so great that we can understand how things soon came to be
made solely for its sake. For the earliest images were possibly nothing
but practical applications of this experience, attempts to form out of
the visible human and animal world something immortal and perma-
nent, belonging to an order immediately above that world: a thing.36
Things, then, came into being in the youth of the species, as in the
youth of an individual. Things connected both collective and singular-
ity with the breadth of nature and the depth of time. And these things
Introduction 19
which came from us but belonged "to an order immediately above that
world"-and Rilke returns us to this phrase-did they have to be beauti-
ful? "What kind of a thing? A beautiful thing? No." What counted were
the things in which we recognized significance. These things, he writes,
lurked all about us. "Do you remember such things? Perhaps there is
one which for a long time seemed to you simply ridiculous. But one day
you were struck by its urgency, the peculiar, almost desperate earnestness
which all things possess."37 Moments such as this, Rilke writes, restore
"things to their real life" ("die Dinge wieder in ihr Leben eintreten").38
By 1907, then, Rilke had developed an ontology that linked humans
and things. Upon this, he sketched out a model of what a historical study
fit for this approach might look like. And he also hinted at a possible
metaphysics, too, in which things explained not only the place of hu-
mans in this world, but our relationship to things eternal. This quest is
carried to a still more refined level of mindfulness in the Duino Elegies,
begun in 1912, and then completed, on the other side of the cataclysm
that was the First World War, in 1923. Here, the full implications of ob-
jects for our fullest human nature is at the center of the exploration.
Nothing less than the meaning of life is his inquiry.
Rilke began from the question of whether transcendence was possible
in this world without having to deny its very worldliness. This was a ques-
tion pondered also by his contemporary, Aby Warburg: was there a way
that led "from the lowlands of the scholar's study to the view from the
mountains of Sils-Maria"?39 Laying out the question this way put things
and materiality-not a word he used, but what he was referring to-at
the center of his reflection. It was this physical reality and the psychologi-
cal processes in us that it fostered over millennia that divided the human
from the angelic. But must it always be so?
Indeed, this question burst out in the first words of the first Elegy:
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?"
The problem is that "we are not really at home in our interpreted world"
(Elegy I). Interpretation, reflection, self-awareness-all these interposed
a layer between people and the world. Rilke holds out the hope that
a tree, or a street, or a habit, could slip past the border guards of our
self-consciousness and establish the missing unmediated connection. He
urges reflection on the star or wave or music whose light, form or sound
waits for us, if only we would notice them (Elegy I). The way to reach
this state, he suggests, is by close looking. Stare at a puppet in a theater
long enough "or, rather, gaze at it so intensely that at last, to balance my
gaze, an angel has to come and make the stuffed skins startle into life."
It is "our own presence" which had kept the realms of material and tran-
scendent apart; a practice of close observation could make the border
between worlds melt away (Elegy IV).
If the first six elegies are devoted to the various obstacles to this con-
nectedness, the final four make it the centerpiece of Rilke's quest for
healing. The turn in the tale, as in the Rodin biography, was made via re-
flection on childhood. "Children, one earthly Thing truly experienced,
even once, is enough for a lifetime" (Elegy VII) .4 This reflection leads
Rilke to affirm: "Truly being here is glorious" ("Hiersinn ist herrlich").
Even with the worst of this world-the garbage dumps, the poor-"your
veins flowed with being" (Elegy VII).
From a generalized affirmation of the world, warts and all, Rilke
began the process of connecting in the realm of ruin with the antino-
mies of the antiquarian. "Where once an enduring house was, now a ce-
rebral structure crosses our path, completely belonging to the realm of
concepts."" The things themselves were gone, but they had been recon-
structed and preserved as mental realities. Temples that once existed,
he writes, were no longer known. "It is we who secretly save up these
extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing
that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-just as it is, it
passes into the invisible world" (Elegy VII). This is indeed the fate of all
material things. But, Rilke argues, the recovery and reconceptualization
of these monuments within us, through imagination, is an even greater
triumph. "Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it
inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater!" (Elegy VII) .42
Objects and monuments once stood in the world, and even in their de-
cayed, ruinous state, were placeholders of materiality. "This once stood in
the midst of Fate the annihilator, in the midst of Not-Knowing-Whither, it
stood as if enduring."43 Those who have no ability to take the ruin inside
he calls "such disinherited ones, to whom neither the past belongs, nor
yet what has nearly arrived" ("solche Entberbte / denen das Fuhere nicht und
noch nicht das Ndchste gehirt"). Moving from inner to outer, from psychol-
ogy to archaeology, Rilke recapitulates the history of antiquarianism as
metaphysical assertion. To the angels, Rilke speaks the monuments of
Western culture: "Pillars, plylons, the Sphinx, the striving thrust of the
cathedral," Chartres and music (Elegy VII).
In the ninth elegy, it is not so much the grand monuments but the
monumentality of the ordinary that is Rilke's clinching proof. "Why then
have to be human"? he asks. "Because truly being here is so much," is

Introduction 21
his answer. Trying to "hold it firmly in our simple hands" was the goal,
but what could ever be taken into the realm beyond, of the angels?
The answer, he writes, was not something "unsayable" or transcendent
to humans-all this would be obvious to the angels. Instead, evoking
a Nietzschean descent from the mountaintops, Rilke's envoy brings
"some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gen-
tian." Unlike Warburg, then, Rilke did believe that there was a connec-
tion between the mountaintop and the lowlands. Flowers, simple in their
own way, could yet be staked against the eternal. And this, in turn, leads
Rilke into an extraordinary sequence of lines in which material culture
is pledged in the game of meaningfulness. "Perhaps we are here," he
writes, "in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree,
window-at most: column, tower.""
Rilke's choices are not random. These are not merely common ob-
jects: they each define a point on the map of human existence, and al-
together map the significant contours of life itself. The "house" stands
for family and human society; "bridge" for what connects people and
stories; "fountain" is the life giving power of nature for people; "gate"
marks thresholds and regulates crossings; "pitcher" is the man-made in-
strument for bringing sustenance from nature to bodies; "fruit-tree" is
both product of the elements and nourishment for people; "window" is
how we and through which we see the world; "column, tower" the monu-
mental scale of memory and association, but still on a continuum with
the prior, more domestic, functions.
"Praise this world to the angel," he argues. This human-all-too-human
reality. In the "unsayable" realm-that of experience and emotion be-
yond words-our ability to impress was too limited. Instead, Rilke insists
we focus on the here and the now. In some of his most arresting mix of
registers and images he writes:
... so show
him [the angel] something simple which, formed over genera-
tions,
Lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
By the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
[.. . Drum zeig
Ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlect zu Geschlechtern gestaltet,

als ein Unsriges lebt, neben der Hand und im Blick.
Sag ihm die Dinge. Er wird stauender stehn; wie du standest
Bei dem Seiler in Rom, oder beim Thpfer am Nil.]"
In the world made by things, which is of course the human world,
our knowledge is perfect. The "astonishment" of the angel is Rilke's way
of awakening our astonishment as well, to see things and practices of
making as exquisite bearers of identity, not simply as tools or products.
It is not an archaeological sensibility that Rilke is seeking to instill, but
a metaphysical one located in the object world itself. He proceeds to
describe things as "happy," "innocent," and "ours." Rilke imputes a con-
sciousness to things; they "know you are praising them; transient, they
look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all."46 So not only do
things exist as if a part of us, but they even need us to survive. With this,
Rilke takes the old antiquarian trope of Tempus Edax Rerum, in which
the fate of objects stood as a metaphor for the transience of all things
human and turns it around: that objects survive with meaning is because
we humans put meaning into them and thus can find meaning in them
years, decades, even centuries, later.
A cultural history of the material world, in Rilke's terms, can be no
tautology. On the contrary, it opens on to questions of personal identity
and meaning that go well beyond the realm marked out by Burckhardt
and his followers; even further than Aby Warburg believed possible. In
other words, while for Rilke culture and material are deeply intertwined,
thinking about the world they make is just as bound up with something
immaterial: man's quest for meaning amid his mortality. Moreover, Rilke
denies any specific hierarchy of goods; the simple potter or rope-maker
has as much to teach the angels as Michelangelo.
The chapters that follow, glimpses only of some of Rilke's possible his-
tories of the hand, are offered in his spirit: "Perhaps we are here in order
to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window-at most:
column, tower...."
But Rilke is not the only inspiration for the particular articulation of
this project. The other-and how much more unlikely!-is Emmanuel
Ringelblum.47 Trained as a social historian in Warsaw in the 1930s by a
Polish satellite of the early Annales, but shaped by his relationship to the
Vilna-based YIVO (Jewish Scientific Institute) with its commitment to the
material culture of everyday life, when forced into the Warsaw ghetto,
Ringelblum was ready. The famous research project he organized there,
the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was an early, and surely the most amazing
Introduction 23
attempt ever, at Alltagsgeschichte.48 It aimed to collect artifacts and experi-
ences that would document the contemporary life of the Jews under oc-
cupation and, later, death sentence. The tram tickets, restaurant menus,
doorbell buzzers, children's theater programs, photographs, field re-
ports, essays, and poems were all collected, and then buried for posterity.
This was a vision of material culture as life itself. It also speaks to a vision
of eternity very different from that of the pharaohs or Mesopotamian
kings-this is not about just one man, nor about old stones that cannot
be deciphered, but of people as they lived. No more serious argument
for its value can be made.
One document out of this world that survived did not survive in the
tin boxes and milk cans that emerged from the ground in 1946 and
1950 like antiquities from an unbelievably distant past. It was a poem
entitled "Things" (Rzeczy), by Wadyslaw Szlengel. It narrates the succes-
sive deportations of Jews into the Warsaw ghetto-into the successively
smaller, poorer, and more desperate confines of the always-shrinking
ghetto-and then finally to the Umschlagplatz and Treblinka. Szlengel
writes about Jews by writing about the Jews' things. As they move, the
inventory shortens.
Furniture, tables, and stools,
Small valises and bundles,
Bedding pots-yes, indeed!
But already without rugs,
No sign of silverware,
No more cherry wine,
No suits, no featherbeds,
No little jars, no portraits,
All these trifles left on Sliska.
After the next relocation, to a shop block-this would have been after
the Great Deportation, in September 1942-there is even less.
No more furniture, no stools,
No pots, no bundles.
Lost are the teapots,
Books, featherbeds, little jars.
To the devil went
The suits and plates;
Dumped together in a rickshaw

A valise and a coat,
A bottle of tea,
A bite of caramel;
On foot without wagons
The gloomy mob strides.
When the people are gone, though, the things remain, in homes
taken over by others, and are used as if owned. Until one day, when
all these Jewish things march away along the train tracks and disappear.
Szlengel's poem was itself only discovered in 1960, when a Polish peasant
was chopping up just such a vagrant table for firewood and came upon
the manuscript hidden within.49
Rilke to Szlengel by way of the Annales, the YIVO, and Ringelblum
describes the arc of ambition, possibility, and seriousness on which hang
our cultural histories of the material world.
NOTES
1. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, trans. C. Craig Houston, intro. by Wil-
liam Tucker (London: Quartet Books, 1986); "The Rodin Book" (First
part, 1903; second part, 1907), 18, translation modified. "Es gibt im Werke
Rodins Hande, selbstandige, kleine Hande, die, ohne zu irgendeinem K5r-
per zu geh5ren, lebendig sind. Hande, die sich aufrichten, gereizt und b5se,
Hande, deren funf gestraubte Finger zu bellen scheinen, wie die funf Halse
eines Hhllenhundes. Hande, die gehen, schlafende Hande, und Hande,
welche erwachen; verbrecherische, erblich belastete Hande und solche, die
mude sind, die nichts mehr wollen, die sich niedergelegt haben in irgen-
deinen Winkel, wie kranke Tiere, welche wissen, daB ihnen niemand helfen
kann." Auguste Rodin (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, n.d.), 32-33.
2. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 19. "Aber Hande sind schon ein kom-
plizierter Organismus, ein Delta, in dem viel fernherkommendes Leben
zusammenflieBt, um sich in den groBen Strom der Tat zu ergieBen. Es gibt
eine Geschichte der Hande, sie haben tatsachlich ihre eigene Kultur, ihre
besondere Schnheit; man gesteht ihnen das Recht zu, eine eigene Entwick-
elung zu haben, eigene Wfnsche, Geffhle, Launen und Liebhabereien."
Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 33.
3. Bloch taught Lamprecht for long after. See Francois-Olivier Touati, "Marc
Bloch et Mabillon," in Dom Jean Mabillon, figure majeure de l'Europe des lettres,
ed. Jean Leclant, Andre Vauchez, and Daniel-Odon Hurel (Paris: Academie
des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2010), 433n74; and Huizinga devoted his
inaugural lecture at Groningen in 1905 to the Lamprechtstreit in Germany.
See Gerhard Oestreich, "Huizinga, Lamprecht und die deutsche Geschichts-

Introduction 25
philosophie: Huizingas Groninger Antrittsvorlesung von 1905," Bijdragen en
Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 88 (1973): 143-70.
4. Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856-1915)
(Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1993); Gerhard Oestreich, "Die Fachhistorie und die
Anfange der sozialgeschichtlichen Forschung in Deutschland," Historische
Zeitschrift 208 (1969): 320-63; Luise Schorn-Schutte, Karl Lamprecht: Kul-
turgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Gottingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1984).
5. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975); Maria Michela Sassi, "Dalla scienza delle religioni
di Usener ad Aby Warburg," in Aspetti di Hermann Usenerfilologo della reli-
gione, eds. G. Arrighetti et al. (Pisa: Giardini, 1982), 65-91; Roland Kany,
Mnemosyne als Programm. Geschichte, Errinerungen und die Andacht zum Unbe-
deutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg, und Benjamin (Tubingen, 1987);
Bruce Lyon, "H. Pirenne and the Origins of Annales History," Annals of
Scholarship 1 (1986) 69-83; Bruce Lyon, The Birth of Annales History: The
Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921-1935) (Brussels:
Academie royale de Belgique, 1991).
6. Jurgen Kocka, "Ideological Regression and Methodological Innovation:
Historiography and the Social Sciences in the 1930s and 1940s," History
and Memory 2 (1990): 130-38; on Aubin see Eduard Mfhle, Fur Volk und
deutschen Osten. Der Historiker Hermann Aubin und die deutsche Ostforschung
(Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2005).
7. Heinrich Dilly and James Ryding, "Kulturgeschichtsschreibung vor und
nach der bfrgerlichen Revolution von 1848," Asthetik und Kommunikation 6
(1975): 15-32
8. I thank Bernie Herman for suggesting this. It reminded me that Walter Ben-
jamin, in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, had traced the line between Engels and
Franz Mehring, and between Mehring and Fuchs. That between Fuchs and
Benjamin was, of course, only implied. See "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and
Historian," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 260-302.
9. A very brief survey of attempts at terminological overview might include,
W. T. J. Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin 77
(1995): 540-44; W. T. J. Mitchell, "What Is Visual Culture?" in Meaning in
the Visual Arts: A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Irving Lavin
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 207-17; James Elkins,
Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); Whitney
Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011). I am grateful to my colleague Jeffrey Collins for a discussion of
these references.
10. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 19. "Rodin aber ... weiB, daB der Krper
aus lauter Schauplatzen des Lebens besteht ...." (Auguste Rodin, 33).
11. Thomas Nipperdey, long ago, in a series of influential articles, for example,
"Kulturgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, historische Anthropologie," Viertel-
jahresschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschcihte 25 (1968): 145-64; or "Die

anthropologische Dimension der Geschichtswissenschaft," in Geschichte
heute. Positionen, Tendenzen, Probleme, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Gottingen: Van-
denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), 225-55, presented the teleology of cultural
history as a form of Oppositionswissenschaft, organized to debunk dominant
ideologies. "Staging" offers the same possibility of decentering, but escapes
from the dialectical trap opened up by Nipperdey's definition.
12. However, outside of art history, this term persisted, from the work of Leroi-
Gourhan into the journal Techniques et Cultures.
13. For example, the "Roundtable on Globalization," October 133 (2010); and
especially the interventions of Nagel, Wood, and Flood on 7-8.
14. See for example, Frank Trentmann, "Materiality in the Future of History:
Things, Practices, and Politics," Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): 283-307.
15. David R. Brauner, ed., Approaches to Material Culture Research for Historical
Archaeologists: A Reader from Historical Archaeology (California, PA: Society for
Historical Archaeology, 1991; 2nd ed. 2000); Arthur Berger, What Objects
Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press, 2009); Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006); Karen Har-
vey, History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Approaching Alternative
Sources (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Dan Hicks and Mary C.
Beaudry, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Victor Buchli, ed., The Material
Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Christopher Tilley et al., eds., Hand-
book of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006); W. Kingery, ed., Learning
From Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); S. Lubar and W. Kingery, eds., History
from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995); Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture: A Research Guide
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985); Fiona Candlin and Raiford
Guins, eds., The Object Reader (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009); Ian Wood-
ward, Understanding Material Culture (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007);
Ian Hodder, ed., The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expres-
sion (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991).
16. Carlo Ginzburg, "Vetoes and Compatibilities," Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 534-
37.
17. Thomas Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Thomas Campbell, ed., Tapestry in
the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
Tristan Weddigen, ed., Metatextile: Identity and History of a Contemporary Art
Medium (Emsdetten/Berlin: Edition Imorde, 2011); Tristan Weddigen, ed.,
Unfolding the Textile Medium in Early Modern Art and Literature (Emsdetten/
Berlin: Edition Imorde, 2011).
18. "Tangible Things" was on display in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at Har-
vard's Science Center during the spring semester 2011. http://www.fas
.harvard.edu/~hsdept/chsi-tangible-things.html, and grew out of "United
States in the World 30. Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World His-
tory."
Introduction 27
19. Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
20. Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition. Powers and Hazards of Representation in
Indonesian Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997), 32.
21. For example, Ian Hodder, Reading the Past. Current Approaches to Interpreta-
tion in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; revised
editions 1991, 2003); Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2001); and edited collections including The Archaeology of Contextual Mean-
ings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Meanings of Things:
Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989);
Lynn Meskell and R. Preudel, Contemporary Archaeology in Theory (London:
Roudedge, 1991); Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biog-
raphies Past and Present (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Lynn Meskell and Bob Preu-
cel, eds., Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell's, 2004); Lynn
Meskell and RosemaryJoyce, Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyp-
tian Experience (London: Routledge, 2003); Lynn Meskell, Private Life in New
Kingdom Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
22. http://chorography.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/Home; http://www
.mshanks.com/2010/06/antiquarians-at-the-getty/. Also, The Antiquarian
Imagination (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012), 42.
23. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999-); Peter N. Miller, "Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to
a History," Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-
1800," ed. Peter N. Miller and Francois Louis (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012), 27-57.
24. Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkiunste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2001).
25. Sisman, in this volume.
26. Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, "The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflec-
tions on the Study of an Unwieldy Field," Art Bulletin 85, no. 1 (2003): 152-80.
27. Klemm's "materiellen Grundlagen der menschlichen Kultur" seems the
first use in a title, and is preceded-according to Google's Ngrams-by a
single reference to "materiellen Kultur" in Johann G. Miller's Der mexi-
canische Nationalgott Huitzilopochtli (Basel, 1847), 25; and then is followed by
another near the beginning of volume 2 of Lamprecht's Deutsches Wirtschaft-
sleben im Mittelalter (1885). Klemm is the first to use "Culturwissenschaft" in
the title of a work, though again, according to Google's Ngrams, there is a
fairly extensive example of prior use of the term in Moritz von Lavergne-
Peguilhen, Grundziige der Gesellschaftswissenschaft (1838), section 8 "Allgeme-
ine Kulturgesetze," (§63), "Kulturwissenschaft."
28. For one attempt to suggest what this "world turned upside down" might
look like, taking the history of antiquarianism as the example, see Peter
N. Miller Peiresc's "History of Provence," Antiquarianism, and the Discovery of
the Medieval Mediterranean, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
(Philadelphia, 2011).
29. I later came across N. M. Willard, "A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke,
Ponge," Comparative Literature 17 (1965): 311-24, but its ambitions lie else-
where.
30. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 3. "Man erinnert sich, wie klein Men-
schenhande sind, wie bald sie mfde werden und wie wenig Zeit ihnen gege-
ben ist, sich zu regen" (Auguste Rodin, 7).
31. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 45. "Hatte ich Ihnen von Menschen zu
sprechen, so knnte ich dort anfangen, wo Sie eben aufgeh5rt haben, da
Sie hier eintraten; in Ihre Gesprache einfallend, wnrde ich, wie von selbst,
zu allem kommen" (Auguste Rodin, 78).
32. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 45-46. "Aber, da ich es versuche, meine
Aufgabe zu fberschauen, wird mir klar, daB ich Ihnen nicht von Menschen
zu reden habe, sondern von Dinge" (Auguste Rodin, 78).
33. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 46. "Alle Bewegung legt sich, wird Kon-
tur, und aus vergangener und kfnftiger Zeit schlieBt sich ein Dauerndes:
der Raum, die groBe Beruhigung der zu nichts gedrangten Dinge" (Auguste
Rodin, 78).
34. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 46-47.
35. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 47. "Wodurch sind uberhaupt Dinge mit
uns verwandt? Welches ist ihre Geschichte?" (Auguste Rodin, 80).
36. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 47. "Sehr frnhe schon hat man Dinge
geformt, mnhsam, nach dem Vorbild der vorgefundenen natfrlichen
Dinge; man hat Werkzeuge gemacht und GefdBe, und es muB eine seltsame
Erfahrung gewesen sein, Selbstgemachtes so anerkannt zu sehen, so gleich-
berechtigt, so wirklich neben dem, was war. Da enstand etwas, blindlings, in
wilder Arbeit und trug an sich die Spuren eines bedrohten offenen Lebens,
war noch warm davon ... Dieses Erlebnis war so merkwnrdig und so stark,
daB man begreift, wenn es auf einmal Dinge gab, die nur um seinetwillen
gemacht waren. Denn vielleicht waren die frnhesten Gtterbilder Anwend-
ungen dieser Erfahrung, Versuche, aus Menschlichem und Tierischem, das
man sah, ein Nichtmitsterbendes zu formen, ein Dauerndes, ein Nacht-
sh5heres: ein Ding."
37. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 47. "Erinnern Sie sich solcher Dinge?
Da ist vielleicht eines, das Ihnen lange nur lacherlich erschien. Aber eines
Tages fiel Ihenn seine Instandigkeit auf, der eigentumliche, fast verzweiflte
Ernst, den sie alle haben" (Auguste Rodin, 81).
38. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 48.
39. " .. . es schien kein Weg aus der Flachebene der Gelehrtenstube zur Schau
auf den Bergen von Sils-Maria zu f hren ...," quoted in Kurt W. Forster,
"Warburgs Versunkenheit," in Aby M.Warburg. "Ekstatische Nymphe ... trau-
ernder Flufigott."Portrait eines Gelehrten, eds. Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers
(Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995), 196.
40. "Ihr Kinder, eine hiesig / einmal ergriffenes Ding galte fur viele" (Rilke,
Ahead of all Parting, 370-71).
41. "Wo einmal ein dauerndes Haus war,/ schlagt sich erdachtes Gebild vor,
quer, zu Erdenklichem vllig geh5rig, als stand es noch ganz im Gehirne"
(Rilke, Ahead of all Parting, 370-71).

Introduction 29
42. "Viele gewahrens nicht mehr, doch ohne den Vorteil,/ daB sie's nun
innerlich baun, mit Pfeilern und Statuen, gr6Ber" (Rilke, Ahead of all Parting,
372-73).
43. "Dies stand einmal unter Menschen,/ mitten im Schicksal stands, im ver-
nichtenden, mitten im Nichtwissen-Wohen stand es" (Rilke, Ahead of all
Parting, 372-73).
44. "Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,/ Brfcke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug,
Obstbaum, Fenster,-Hchstens: Saule, Turm" (Rilke, Ahead of all Parting,
384-85).
45. Rilke, Ahead of all Parting, 384-85.
46. Rilke's imputation of a kind of consciousness to objects, which might have
been metaphorical only, has of course been followed up in dead seriousness
in recent years by Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and others.
47. Samuel Kassow's masterpiece will not be surpassed for a long time: Who
Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg
Shabes Archive (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007; then Ran-
dom House, 2009).
48. See Peter N. Miller, "What We Know About Murdered Peoples" (Review of
Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw
Ghetto and the Oyneg Shabes Archive), New Republic, April 9, 2008, 34-39.
49. The story is told in Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 318-19. I take the
translation from there, slightly amended.

PART 1
Art's Challenge

ONE
Design History and
the Decorative Arts
Glenn Adamson
I'd like to begin with two premises. The first is that decorative art history,
as a way of doing design history, is deeply out of fashion. The second is
that it needs to be rehabilitated.
For the last twenty years or so, the general feeling among historians
with an interest in objects has been that decorative art is a dream, and
that one of our main objectives should be to wake up from that dream.
Thus the phrase "decorative art" has been repudiated-both in terms
of subject area, and methodology. This is true of material culture stud-
ies in America and design history in Britain-which differ because of
prevailing currents in those two nations' academic structure, but not in
any fundamental methodological sense. Under both of these banners,
scholars have insisted on the importance of analyzing the quotidian, the
everyday: objects that belonged to the whole range of the population,
including the vast majority without access to what might be called "high
style" commodities-the artifacts with which museums now are filled to
bursting due to their high rates of survival, and enduring aesthetic and
market value. Both design history and material culture have rejected
the tools that belong to decorative art history, which were initially devel-
oped in the late nineteenth century. These tools are often summarized
under the catchall word "connoisseurship," but we might substitute for
this loaded term a list of seemingly neutral techniques such as formal
analysis, the reconstruction of lines of stylistic influence, and the de-
tailed study and classification of processes of making. The general trend
has been away from such interpretive tools and toward an emphasis on
33
evidence-often resulting in a focus on "objects considered not individ-
ually as works of art but collectively as industrial production," as Richard
Goldthwaite memorably puts it. So the shifts in design history toward the
study of consumption, toward social and economic history, have been
accompanied by a concomitant shift away from the techniques and at-
titudes of art history.
There are good reasons for this movement, many of which have to
do with the positive achievements of a broad, empirical study of artifacts,
and many of which have to do with inherent problems in the concept of
decorative art. These problems should be acknowledged. First and most
obviously, the very phrase seems to designate a subsidiary, even frivolous,
category, only one little step away from the even more out-of-fashion
term "minor arts." Defining a class of objects as "decorative" tacitly ac-
knowledges the existence of a pendant category of fine art, and it is hard
to employ that distinction without implying a hierarchy of historical im-
portance, in which paintings deserve more serious study than pots. Art
history itself has undergone a parallel shift, for precisely this reason-it
is no coincidence that the trend toward a social history of art and the
emergence of design history as a discipline were roughly simultaneous-
both were attempts to escape the prejudicial ranking system of the past.
So art historians are now looking at such areas as book illustration, por-
trait and snapshot photography, comic books, once-ignored academic
genre paintings, and other formerly debased genres with considerable
enthusiasm.
A second problem, which perhaps complicates the onejust described,
is the implicit elitism of the term "decorative art." This is partly a simple
matter of record-decorative art historians and institutions over the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries routinely structured
their discourse around the celebration of elite objects to the exclusion
of more commonplace ones, and even allowed representative objects to
be destroyed while exceptional ones were preserved. But even if we were
willing to overlook this history, we would have to acknowledge that elit-
ism is written into the very DNA of the idea of decorative art. While the
material culture of the wealthy is no more-and no less- material than
that of the poor, in most historical circumstances their decorative art was
certainly more decorative. Highly ornamented objects were so for a rea-
son-to mark them out as being more important, and better than other
objects. This relates directly to a final problem for the construct of deco-
rative art, which is the extension of this hierarchy into the present day
through the powerful forces of the marketplace. Auction houses, private

Design History and the Decorative Arts 35
collectors, and dealers have no trouble seeing themselves as involved in
something called decorative art. In fact, the turn away from decorative
art in design history has led to an equally emphatic departure from the
salesroom by many scholars in the field. The result is that well-informed
marketplace professionals often have connoisseurial knowledge about
canonical decorative art objects that is superior to most academically
trained curators, and vastly superior to that of nearly all academic design
historians. It has gotten to the point that many design historians imply,
perhaps somewhat defensively, that even to work on canonical decorative
art, something like Sevres porcelain, is regressive. And when, as members
of the design history field, we do study such material, we have a tendency
to pointedly avoid getting into anything that smacks of connoisseurship.
We do not enter willingly into discussion of fine details of construction,
matters of provenance and, above all, questions of style.
All of this is to say that decorative art probably seems to most of us,
as object historians, to be a limiting category-more a way of shutting
out vast tracts of the past than returning us to some kind of comprehen-
sive historical understanding. But there are reasons to return to the idea
of decorative art, not as a competing discipline for design history, but
rather as an aspect of its practice. The appeal of decorative art at this
point is perhaps partly due to the fact that it has been methodologically
dormant for some time, and is therefore ready to be refreshed.
We might begin by breaking the term decorative art into its constitu-
ent parts, "decorative" and "art." If we abstract the first of these into "the
decorative" it immediately becomes much more interesting: it suggests
a fundamental way of thinking about form which has invited comment
from many quarters, not only in design discourse, but in also in fields as
diverse as architecture, art, rhetoric, and philosophy. Ornament's many
guises-as supplement, didactic sign, instance of base materiality, zone
of animism, and so forth-make it an outstandingly flexible term for
analysis, but we do not read much about it in design history publications.
This is odd, given that the founders of design history were very much his-
torians of decoration-people like Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones, and
Alois Riegl. But today it is art and architectural historians, rather than
design historians, who have claimed these figures as their own intellec-
tual forebears-and here I am thinking of scholars like Margaret Olin,
Michael Ann Holly, or Kenneth Frampton. Similarly, it is noteworthy that
we hear so much about the traditions of Marxist thought, or about a so-
cially engaged theorist like Foucault, but comparatively little about a text
of art theory like Derrida's The Truth in Painting, which deconstructs aes-
thetics through the metaphor of the decorative frame. If ever there was
a book about art which should belong to design history more than art
history, The Truth in Painting would be it, yet while it is a staple of art his-
tory courses it does not seem to be a foundation stone for our discipline.
Broader and more contentious by far is the second word in decora-
tive art-a term that some design historians are uncomfortable using in
any context, and most try to keep at a distance. This is partly a matter
of disciplinary boundaries, or the lack thereof-design history's great
strength, institutionally speaking, is its interdisciplinarity, and so embrac-
ing the questions of art history again might seem a retrograde or limiting
maneuver. I admit to partiality here, as I was myself trained as an art histo-
rian and once had trouble stepping outside of that self-identification. Yet
without the concepts and tools of art history, it is hard to see how we can
account for what my colleague Marta Ajmar at the Victoria and Albert
Museum recently called "the individuality of objects." It is all too easy to
underestimate art history, and assume that as a field, it is still addicted
to a narrative of geniuses whose achievements demand decoding. But
as I have already mentioned, the remit of art history has expanded rap-
idly in recent years. The discipline has also devoted itself to a thorough
and fundamental theoretical engagement with the question of artistic
autonomy, and the way that this autonomy is maintained through the
power of institutions. Once artistic presence is established as a troubled
(and troubling) phenomenon, art history offers the great advantage of
a unique theoretical framework regarding its objects of inquiry, which
hangs upon the endless interpretability of objects.
Of course, this is the near opposite of design history's presump-
tions about its own objects of study. In the most extreme cases, designed
things-such as textiles or shoes-become data points which help to plot
economic and social networks. More usually, as in Jules Prown's influen-
tial metaphorical readings of objects, there is a single moment of inter-
pretation which unlocks the meaning of a given artifact. Without com-
pletely invalidating either of these approaches, it seems like there should
be room within the field to put the object in charge-to grant its power
at the outset, and assume that it can never be fully accounted for. This,
I would suggest, is to think like a decorative art historian. It does indeed
involve a danger of creeping elitism because it implicitly, but inevitably,
raises the specter of quality. If we grant that objects may be too complex
to tabulate as historical matter, then we might next wish to argue that
more complex and densely wrought artifacts (which often, though not
always, were elite artifacts when they were first made and used) will bet-
Design History and the Decorative Arts 37
ter sustain our attempts at analysis. Thinking in terms of decorative art
might, in the end, even involve a grudging admission that paintings are,
in fact, better able to sustain extended analysis than pots, and indeed
that some pots have more to say than others.
I find it remarkable that most design historians are not willing to
give this commonsense notion the time of day. My suspicion is that we
practice a kind of bad faith when claiming that all historical artifacts
are equally worthy of study. From a decorative art perspective, some ar-
tifacts (like some paintings) capture the irretrievable webs of meaning
that attended the moment of their production better than others, and
that qualitative difference must be respected. Such distinctions worry
design historians; they feel like ideological prejudice. But if they are real,
and pervasive within historical mentalities, then they cannot simply be
wished away, and I would suggest that decorative art might, after all, be a
good, even a necessary, framework to engage with them.
A last and perhaps even more controversial point I would make is that
decorative art history is, more than anything else, the history of style. I
mean this in a very conventional sense-which includes such terms as
baroque, rococo, neoclassicism, and so forth. Again, few words could be
less fashionable among design historians than style. The overwhelming
trend is to ignore such monolithic categorizations as both ahistorical
and overly general. Only when style becomes a tool of conscious political
and ideological reform, as in the use of classical architecture by the Fas-
cists for example, does it become an acceptable subject for study. But this
is no solution to the notoriously difficult question of a period style-it
just sets the problem to one side. It is worth recalling that one of material
culture's founding essays was Jules Prown's "Style as Evidence"-a phrase
that captures all the optimism of design history as an empirical field of
study, but also its pessimism regarding style as a self-standing achieve-
ment. If style is (just) evidence, then it is a more-or-less mechanical re-
flection of the social conditions that gave it birth, not something to be
dissected and analyzed in its own right. With this in mind, we might ask
how a term like "rococo" could be rehabilitated as a term of analysis for
the eighteenth century. Presumably this could only happen if it is taken
seriously, as a phenomenon whose alienness demands a circumspect se-
ries of analytic procedures, taking into account coterminous intellectual
history, as well as social history.
To conclude, then, I argue that the tools and terms of decorative
art-ornament, style, and connoisseurship among them-deserve a new
airing in our field. As head of research at the Victoria and Albert Mu-
seum, which was founded on the basis of those values and therefore has a
very socially elite collection, I can see that this is more than an academic
matter. There is a great need, institutionally, not just to worry about the
skewed sample that this museum's artifacts represent, but to exploit its
quality, if I may use that loaded word, in a progressive way. We need to
look at elite artifacts in a nonelitist way, while taking seriously the pos-
sibility that they have something to say to us that less exalted objects just
may not. The builders of the V&A's collection in the nineteenth century
thought they were assembling objects that would teach us. Though we
view these artifacts very differently today, it may be that we do not need
to dismiss this conviction entirely. We no longer believe in objective prin-
ciples of good design, and we certainly abjure the notion that some peo-
ple are intrinsically better than others, and that their possessions reflect
that difference. But we might well want to believe that some designed
objects, conceived as decorative art, could be held up as remarkable-as
things that should incite wonder, as well as analysis. Most of us began our
careers as design historians because we felt the power of objects when
confronted with them, and we felt we needed to do justice to that feel-
ing. There is an essential truth there-one that we may have lost sight
of. Through the unlikely and outmoded framework of decorative art, we
mightjust find a way back to that beginning.

TWO
The Materiality of Art
Philippe Bordes
works of art are enrolled by historians for their capacity to evoke the
material world of the past in two ways: as illustrations that offer a filtered
reconstruction of a fragment of that lost world, and as objects counting
among the most precious remains left to behold and study. Increasingly,
they are marshaled both as articulate images of that objectified world
and as an integral part it. Predicated on iconographical interpretation,
the former approach has been particularly favored by cultural, social,
and economic historians. At best, such studies of artistic strategies of
representation confront the surviving images with other sources of in-
formation and elaborate not only a history of such imagery-the proper
task of the art historian-but also recover the reality of usages and prac-
tices alluded to by the representation. The interpretative difficulty, of
course, is the hiatus between representation and reality that artists have
spanned with the help of visual codes, conventions, traditions, and in-
novations, while under the spell of a creative impulse and the duress
specific circumstances that historical investigation can rarely retrieve.
Historical fascination is stimulated by a fundamental paradox of artistic
representation: although it deprives objects of their actual materiality,
it can simultaneously underscore this quality. A number of contempo-
rary works of art have played with this paradox-either with reference
to traditional modes of illusionism, or recently as redefined by the im-
materiality of digital imagery. Artistic agendas continue to be inspired
by the potential of the modernist notion of truth to material, perhaps
most radically formulated by Diderot when, in wonder, he claimed that
39
the paint of a still life by Chardin had become one with the matter of the
object represented.
The second approach is related to this position since it envisions the
work of art as a material object in itself. More often than not, nearly
everything concerning its history is lacking, and there is very little hope
of understanding how it came to exist and survive. Whatever informa-
tion is available-authorship, date of execution, technique, provenance,
ownership, state of conservation-rarely reveals how the object was em-
ployed over time. Unfortunately, when considering the work of art in this
way, even art historians who should know better have been led to down-
play its artistic specificity. Studies in the history of collecting and the art
trade-driven by the belief in the spiritually uplifting dimension of the
taste for art, and mostly concerned with elite social practices-have sur-
prisingly much in common with the strain of Marxism that reduces the
artistic experience to the social appropriation of a commodity.
Both of these approaches fail to grapple directly with the artistic na-
ture of the work of art. Ignored in the first instance is the craft by which it
manages to deploy its mimetic iconography, and in the second instance,
the means by which it elicits a socially conditioned experience distinct
from the consumption of objects that are not art. The first approach
reduces the work to an image; the second, to a signifier. The key fault in
both of these approaches appears to be a lack of concern for the mate-
rial nature of the art object that determines the experience. Formulated
from within the particular conditions of art historical practice in France,
the critique aims to help reinvigorate the low-key modernist empiricism
that plagues the institutional and intellectual mainstream. Greater in-
tellectual investment in the materiality of art also entails reconsidering
relatively unfashionable theorists such as Gottfried Semper and Adrian
Stokes. Though reference to their metaphysical materialism might seem
retrograde, and though many of the progressive issues of visual studies
and material culture studies are here set aside, hopefully these sugges-
tions will not be read simply as conservative and bygone to those who
have chosen to move on in these directions and let the discipline that
flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries die its natural
death. By foregrounding its materiality, the point is not to restrict, but to
strengthen, available modes of interpretation of the work of art.
The concept of art predicated on individual creation and invention,
elaborated during the Renaissance and so crucial to the development of
the institutions of art history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
is founded on the value attributed to the immateriality of art. Around

The Materiality of Art 41
1500, the most advanced princely patrons competed openly with each
other to acquire works drawn on paper, or painted on plain woven fabric
by famed artists. They were eager to have in their possession just about
anything produced by a big name. The precious metals, gems, rare tex-
tiles, and labor-intensive workmanship continued to be an integral com-
ponent of the value of their most treasured possessions, but the materials
used to fabricate the paintings and drawings they now also coveted could,
in themselves, be negligible. As has often been stressed, the value of the
latter lay rather in the expression of divine artistic genius. The modesty
and fragility of the material resources engaged in the creative process in
fact reinforced the seemingly miraculous nature and high prestige of the
work of art. The traditional sense of materiality was further undermined
in all media by the systemic development of diverse modes of illusionism
that distracted the viewer from the complex and often highly creative
procedures of crafting. Part of the attraction of art was to see sky instead
of blue paint; flesh instead of marble; shiny hammered armor instead
of cast bronze. Some artists even sought to create the illusion that their
creation was without weight and form, freed from the natural laws of
gravity and chiaroscuro. Over time, as techniques evolved and as older
crafting processes became increasingly less familiar, the performance of
artists and artisans came to appear near magical. The quality of many of
the most hallowed and cherished works of art in museum collections and
scholarly publications is still today sanctified on these terms.
Along with this historical invention of art as we know it, since the Re-
naissance, great care and cost has been allotted to preserve, present, and
enshrine works of art, with ornamented frames and finely crafted protec-
tive cases and pedestals, part and parcel of an elaborate mise-en-scene
in homes, churches, and museums. All of these adjuncts are character-
ized by an insistent materiality that brings the work of art back down to
earth, so to speak. They activate visually what is basically an objectifying
and socializing process: framed or placed under glass, the painting or
drawing becomes a piece of furniture and part of the interior, the altar,
or the collection. The work of art trades its immediate vulnerability to
tear and wear for the burden of an efficient carapace that conventionally
is said to serve its visibility. But it can also be argued that such material
adjuncts as the frame and pedestal also transform, and even denature,
the work of art. One of the lessons of material-culture studies is that
the resulting complex of associated objects-painting and frame, sculp-
ture and pedestal, engraving and album-is both more and less than
the untampered state of the work of art. A visit to conservation labora-

tories, where one sees unframed pictures, disassembled sculptures, and
upturned objects, is always a jarring visual experience: the feeling can
be compared to being in a morgue, confronted with dead matter, or to
dining in a three-star restaurant, when the full force of a familiar taste is
revealed. The process of framing and staging locks the work of art into
a social environment and temporality external, and even at times alien,
to it. However successful, it seems to indicate a lack of confidence in its
capacity to sustain itself on its own. It makes clear that the self-sufficiency
of the work of art and its pure visibility, much like individual authorship,
are fictions of art history. The most extreme transformative operation of
framing occurs when the varnished surface of a painting hung on a wall,
seen from a certain angle, shoots back a blank reflective surface: as a
piece of furniture, it is experienced only as a material object.
Thought through, still more radically, this cautionary stance helps
to understand a common practice of art history and its significance for
the discipline: the illustration of works of art cropped of their surround-
ings, freely floating shapes on the surface of the page or screen. Indeed,
works of art are never experienced thus isolated from their immediate
and extended visual contexts. The critical concerns of material culture
have put on the agenda of art history the need to dispel this conven-
tional idealism, which has justified the now widespread and mutilating
practice of interpreting on the basis of reproductions. As certain crude
constructions of visual studies have proven, the dissolution of the work of
art is here at risk. That art historians are willing to take corrective steps
is suggested by a recent evolution in scholarly illustrations: paintings are
on occasion now reproduced with their frame or hanging in the home
of their owners, while in the graphic arts, the irregular contours of sheets
of paper are respected. Both of these trends mark a new concern for the
work of art as material object. In architectural and sculptural studies, one
can witness a recent impetus to research the geographical and techni-
cal extraction of the stones and marbles employed. Enmeshed aesthetic,
economic, and symbolic factors are invoked to historicize the new mate-
rial information collected.
As mentioned earlier, the emergence of the category of art during
the Renaissance did not prevent princes and patrons from continuing
to value what is currently referred to as objets d'art-finely crafted and
costly objects that might have no greater function or use other than to
attest to the magnificence of the owner. One need only to think of the
late medieval practice of showing off to guests rows of plates and vessels
in silver and gold, along with sets of tapestries resplendent with threads
The Materiality of Art 43
entwined with filaments of these same costly metals. Nonetheless, the
artistic design of these objects, whether through iconographical or orna-
mental embellishment, was increasingly perceived as a factor of the value
of the object. Although the applied arts were never quite admitted into
the realm of the fine arts during the reign of the academic and Beaux-
Arts systems, roughly from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, there were continuous points of contact and exchange through in-
dividual and collective initiative, and in response, to the fluctuations of
taste and fashion. Art history, with its focus on specific histories for each
medium, has not given such interactions and exchanges fully their due.
One promising perspective might be to overturn the traditional primacy
of the academic arts du dessin that art historians have internalized. It can
be argued that the objet d'art is the most consolidated category of the
work of art, insofar as it appears to reconcile more conclusively than any
other form or medium its defining material and immaterial qualities.
This perspective has been largely encouraged by developments in
twentieth-century art. The material nature of the work was newly fore-
grounded and often considered to be its primary content. Although
most explicit in sculpture, with the vogue for direct carving in the early
part of the century, and the recourse to large-scale industrial fabrica-
tion toward the end, the materiality of art has replaced the traditional
mimetic functions established during the Renaissance. This evolution
has led to a displacement of art historical focus, from the realm of in-
terpretation to that of meaning, from analysis based on external factors
to one founded on internal evidence. The material qualities of the work
have been the essential modes of entry to exercise this critical reevalua-
tion. The intense development of conservation studies in recent decades
is the most explicit and dynamic proof of this. It can also be troubling
for the historian, since it often seems a resurgence of late-nineteenth-
century scientism. Based on epistemological illusions, the discourse is
too often one of mystery solving. In many exhibitions and publications
highlighting restored works that are especially popular in countries with
a rich artistic heritage, the material diagnosis of the object could not be
more alien to the critical prospects of a cultural history of the material
world. When a historical perspective is invoked, it is more likely to be
that of the restoration practice than of the object.
Evolving approaches to twentieth-century art are another positive
sign, as the works are perceived more and more clearly as belonging to
their time. In other words, it becomes easier to see them historically and
culturally. As the social functions of their forms and materials become

more explicit, their affirmed materiality produces a noticeable shift in
art historical inquiry. In the course of the twentieth century, art histo-
rians were much preoccupied by the migration of symbols and motifs,
and once modernist formalism triumphed, by the migration of forms.
Formalists must be credited with having undermined the iconological
paradigm that dominated the discipline of art history after World War II,
and the consequent severe restrictions it placed on what might be admit-
ted as art. The twentieth-century rapprochement between form and ma-
terial, along with greater awareness of the primary role of the medium
in the creative process, have anchored formalism in the reality of experi-
ence and reinforced its authority. Still missing, however, is consideration
of the social life and impact of forms-an elusive effectuation that can
only be recovered through focused efforts of historical reconstruction.
The many failed attempts to extract meaning from a stylistic rapproche-
ment among objects produced across centuries-a regrettably common
practice in exhibitions and museum presentations in France-are elo-
quent testimony of to the price of this neglect. Perhaps most promising
from a contemporary context is the renewed attention given to those
supplementary formal elements-in particular, ornament-that now are
made to carry the weight of an aesthetic surplus that ultimately qualifies
the object as art. This suggests a mode of revisiting the past, in which
sociological concerns-the object as acquisition and possession, as suc-
cessively or concurrently private and public-are no longer dissociated
from the artistic dimension. When historically reconstructing the pro-
cess of production and reception, such a separation tends to mystify the
former and reduce the latter to a peremptory correspondence between
style and taste. Given this situation, the questions raised by material-
culture studies are stimulating indeed for the art historian. They can,
and should, be harnessed to respond to the strongly felt need to define
more clearly the objects of art history and the terms by which they can be
brought out of a dead past and back to life.

PART 2
The Place of the Material

THREE
Mutually Contextual:
Materials, Bodies,
and Objects
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak
For some time now, scholarship in the humanities and the social sci-
ences has seemed to be traversing a mountainside, zigzagging, one turn
after the other. We are, at the moment, well engaged in the material
turn, and it is tempting, in the sequential logic of such a road, to con-
sider that taking this particular turn puts us some distance from its pre-
decessor, the linguistic turn-immediate or not, depending if one is in-
clined to count the visual turn, the cultural turn, the mediatic turn, the
digital turn, the posthuman turn, and so forth. Should this temptation to
see the current interest in the material world as a reaction to, a liberation
from, the antecedent textualization of human experience be resisted? I
say yes. Firstly, chronological sequence does not imply consequence, and
has little, if any, explanatory power. Then, to oppose the material to the
linguistic would perpetuate those trapping dichotomies, which, despite
their conceptual force, are really limited to the predictable oscillation
of a pendulum that prevents the opening of new theoretical horizons.
Finally, to situate textuality and materiality as opposites is to disregard
the fact, as problematic as polarization, that the two have substantially
merged in the scholarship currently devoted to material culture. A cul-
tural history of the material world appears, therefore, fraught with the
hazards of paradox.
On one hand, such a history may reinscribe and perpetuate the di-
chotomies inherent in scholarly epistemologies such as: culture and
nature, mind and matter, real and ideal, matter and form, senses and
intellect, body and soul, abstract and concrete, subject and object, per-
47
son and thing, material and social, material and cognitive. Indeed, the
notion of a material world has already contributed-particularly in the
fields of anthropology and history-its own polarization, between mate-
rial and materiality.
On the other hand, a cultural history of the material world has had
the effect of subsuming the material world within hegemonic antimate-
rial and social constructivist theories.1 Thus, despite blogospheres and
scholarly literature, the material turn may not yet have occurred. Yet, if
a cultural perspective has focused on social and symbolic meanings to
the detriment of material relations, how might an alternate perspective
avoid yielding the precise opposite?
The underlying question lurking behind the conundrum of polar-
ization is the ontological and epistemological status of a material world
that is external to culture, outside society. To address this issue, I offer
a rapid survey of contemporary debates before sketching an agenda of
some relevant issues pertaining to the Middle Ages-my area of special-
ization. I conclude by suggesting some ways in which I believe that the
project of this series might advance our understanding of the material
world in history.
Poststructuralist positions are challenging to studies of the material
world. They are loath to acknowledge nondiscursive realms of reality and
experience. In promoting the primacy of language as a model for under-
standing culture, they endow the human sciences with a "textual anal-
ogy" in terms of which material culture should be conceived of and read
as text.2 The difference between things and texts is thus erased.
Although material things are transposed and represented in other
media, this is not to say that they are experienced solely as signs-
linguistic or other. A growing amount of newer scholarship on the mate-
rial world, while recognizing textualism as a vital source of inspiration,
nevertheless posits that things are present in the world differently from
words, by having a material dimension that is more than a matter of
mind, cognition, and communication.3 Such an appreciation of the ma-
terial qua material might be expected to require that it be granted full
participation in the human action visited upon it. An example of this
may be found in the case of basket making. Here, no material surface
is available as tabula rasa mutely to receive the force of an antecedent
mental blueprint. The surface of the basket emerges from the practice
of weaving reeds; its form develops from the mutual engagement of the
weaver's bodily skills with the material.4
This approach emphasizes the process of making things, whereby

Mutually Contextual 49
things comprehend objects and persons. It insists that artists and crafts-
men work within the world, knitting things together rather than acting
upon a material from outside.' It submits that both persons and objects
are being formed in the very moments of their entanglement while
making something.' Such an approach, with its phenomenological and
Heideggerian slant, challenges the still operative metaphysical separa-
tion of mind from matter on several levels. This dualism is still opera-
tive because histories of the material world tend to promote a mode
of enquiry focused primarily on a specific type of physical evidence,
artifacts-that is, objects that exist as already made.7 Locking the ma-
terial into its manufactured identity privileges conceptual, perceptual,
and intentional dimensions; the materiality of things comes to be as-
signed to their conceptualization, use, and agency as manufactured ob-
jects, and not in the stuff and physical processes of which they consist.
Thus, the place of the object in relation to its stuff remains unaddressed,
and materiality is turned into an abstraction, referring to the cultural
aspects of objects. By contrast, the "phenomenological" approach, in
its insistence that both stuff and its human users are material, limits the
experience and agency of materials to organic qualities-their capacity
to flex, bend, adhere, and color. Material properties, however, are not
fixed attributes, but emerge from the situation of materials: a feather
in a person's hair is an ornament; a feather on parchment is a pen. In
such cases, the object materializes with a practical activity, within a se-
ries of contacts between materials, hands, head, eyes, skin; creation was
not imported. Even if a craftsman has a mental image of the object he
or she wishes to produce, the object will actually emerge from contact
between material, tool, hands, and eyes. This kind of attention to the
relation between materials-an attention that takes into consideration
that humans are material-permits two anti-dualist remarks. First, that
the material is not an indifferent receptacle of culture-that artifacts
do not proceed uniquely from mental conception. Second, that objects
survive as such beyond specific use or interpretation, while they are vul-
nerable to all that can happen to things: wearing, tarnishing, eroding,
aging, and rotting. The occurrence of such events is not a matter of
socialization, although we tend to ascribe material degradation to use,
rather than to organic processes.8 These latter, however, should further
the understanding that their materials enable objects to resist being fully
social signs. True, they are at the mercy of codes and systems, but their
physical materiality has its own landscape of contingencies, which affects
both the objects' destinations and meanings.9

Neither the processual materialization of objects, nor their ecologi-
cal destiny, seems of much interest to scholars in the humanities and the
social sciences. Hence the thrust of the analytical shift away from the
textual focuses on things' symbolic communicative and representational
aspects, privileging a concern for the deeds of things in the world: the
ways in which physical objects interact with humans, shaping their lives
and experiences. Where the linguistic turn had dematerialized things,
the postlinguistic approach embodies and objectifies abstract social phe-
nomena, considering that artifacts, through representation, consump-
tion, and circulation, are active constituents of selfhood, values, social
categories, understanding of self and others. It is through the medium
of things that social and cognitive formations are enabled, reproduced,
or destabilized. In such epistemology, the attention is not to material,
but to material form. It is, once again, the formed material-the temple,
the statue, the book, the pot, the ax-that encompasses objectification
of cultural meanings, and embodiment, if not extension of personhood.
This in turn means that-when clothing, tapestries, relics, chests, and/
or enameled boxes are considered-they stand for the social relations to
which they provided, and continue to provide, a canvas of inscription.
Interpretation of things is thus situated within an unlimited hermeneu-
tics of meaning since the capacity of objects to work for given users is
not an inherent property, but must continuously be sustained by social
interaction. However participatory in the process of social being, the ma-
terial becomes an outcome of cultural processes that are not themselves
material, thus leaving the participation of material itself with little agen-
tive or explanatory power for these processes. Analysts looking at objects
created in the past see them as sources by which to access past people's
culture-a world beyond the material itself. The very fact of the ongoing
presence of the object as material stuff is rarely, if ever, taken into con-
sideration.10 Yet, where does the evidentiary nature of a twelfth-century
object that survives into the twenty-first century reside if its relevance
today emerges through our own interaction with it? How retrievable are
the earlier waves of social acts embodied by the object? Where are they
located? Conversely, how are we to deal with the disappearance of things
known to have existed? Such questions point to the difficulties inherent
in researching objects so as to uncover the ways in which they mattered
beyond their concrete existence, when the particularity of materials and
of their specific travail has been cancelled by the uniformity of social
operation. In the same way that culture organizes human beings beyond
their individual existence as physical organisms, materiality compre-

hends objects beyond their material properties. If materiality incorpo-
rates culture, a cultural history of the material world seems a tautology.
How then might we practice a cultural history of the material world
in which "the materials of which the objects are made are not swallowed
by the objects made from them?"" This question has a philosophical
dimension-one that concerns the definition of reality in general, and
particularly the ontological and epistemological status of a material world
conceivable as external to processes of valorization. In early twenty-first-
century culture, relativism advances the notion that there are only dis-
cursive claims about physical reality, and that such claims are only valid in
relation to a particular subjective way of perceiving that reality. Whatever
one's position about relativism and its ferocious anthropocentric posi-
tion, there is no doubt that claims about physical reality are multiple and
historically situated. That the contingency of these claims resides within
discourse still begs the question of the relationship of language to reality.
Claims, however, are made on the basis of observed physical evidence. In
the controversy about geocentrism versus heliocentrism, Robert Bellar-
mine (d. 1621) examined a book-the Bible-while Galileo Galilei (d.
1642) observed the sky through a telescope.12 We can safely say that Bel-
larmine, Galileo, the Bible, and the telescope existed, as still do the sky,
the sun, and the earth. The differentiated clustering of coexisting mate-
rial things-eye-bible, eye-telescope-however, yielded differing results.
His dogmatic Catholic views may have directed Bellarmine to a Bible,
but a similar system of beliefs did not stop Galileo from improving and
using the telescope. In this case, the relationship between cultural beliefs
and the material world was unsystematic at the personal level. However,
the Bible was at that point more available and more familiar than a tele-
scope, with the result that the seventeenth-century majority experience
of looking at the sky was principally mediated by bookish, rather than by
telescopic, evidence. In another domain-medieval medicine-physical
observation also involved books rather than the patients' bodies. The
things described by physicians, by Bellarmine, and by Galileo were com-
mensurate with the physical evidence they observed; the reasons for
their diverging claims reside in the things observed, not in the factuality
of that which they report. In my reading of these examples, I consider
material nexuses, in which physical, environmental, sensorial, and intel-
lectual elements are in play, not as independent interacting agents, but
associated in particular clusters of practical operations. Thus anchored
in pragmatic experience, all elements are mutually tested, constrained,
or enabled by their own work in such experience. Of importance, there-

fore, is the identification of these materials and their various clustering
in the flow of practice. There is the possibility of matching materials to
claims made about them, which is not to say that the world of materials
either dictates, or can be confused with, claims about them. From my
research on inscribed matter and imprinted material-medieval seals in
particular-I developed the notion that materials and objects have an ex-
istence that is independent of human experience; that materials gather
in unpredictable as well as in intended fashions; that objects index mo-
dalities of causation and situation that are not necessarily culturally in-
formed;13 that the properties in a given object will obtain various qualita-
tive relevance given its particular contextualization with other materials,
as well as with practice and interpretation; and finally, that since, by vir-
tue of this ongoing material clustering, the material properties of an
object will always be in excess of those that have obtained relevance in a
given gathering, material things remain unpredictable.14
Two examples may help substantiate these claims. A chirograph is-
sued in 1177 recorded in duplicate an exchange of goods between two
members of the French elite: Count Matthew of Beaumont, and the
Abbot of Saint-Denis, Geoffrey (fig. 1)." The original document was cut
in half, so that each party to the exchange would keep a record of the
transaction. On this particular chirograph, the two texts were divided by
a full, artistically rendered image of Christ on the cross (fig. 2).
It was through that image that the deliberate cut was made, splitting
the representation of the divine incarnate corpus. The very appearance
of a body on parchment draws attention to the fact that the parchment
is skin, implying material continuity between Christic and animal skin.
From this nexus, a paradigm of eternity emerges: the skin has become
everlasting parchment when separated from the animal's too mortal
flesh, even as the pierced body of Christ-itself a translation of eternity
into temporality-offered a triumph over death, an abrogation of the
temporal limits of human life. Skin, thus, clothed the contingency of so-
cial interaction as acts inscribed in eternity. The medium central to this
operation is the act of cutting, rendered possible and significant by the
medial quality of the parchment, while the cut itself reveals the material
innerness of mediality (fig. 3). The interaction between operation and
material substance not so much resembled as reenacted the Word made
flesh and crucified, as was also ritually performed in the sacrament of
the Eucharist. The rending of the chirograph, by literally penetrating
flesh, recapitulated the crucified Christ's sacrifice in a way that guaran-
teed the inscribed textual commitment even as Christ had guaranteed
divine commitment.16
Fig 1 Remsrce iorah Th 1uet eod4n ulct
an exc ang of g d s ber twee Math w C un f Be u o t andg~
Gefreabo f San-ei (117) Ea^pr-ogh hiorp
natonaes Pais J ~. 168 no 2 (EI/ 8 th abbaal otoi h
v* r
Fig. 1. Reconstructed chirograph. The document records in duplicate
an exchange of goods between Matthew, Count of Beaumont, and
Geoffrey, abbot of Saint-Denis (1177). Each part of the chirograph
had been kept by the relevant party, and are now housed in different
archival repositories. The comital portion is in the French Archives
nationales, Paris, J 168 no 2 (AE/II/181); the abbatial portion, in the
French Archives departementales du Val-d'Oise, Pontoise, 9 H 81.
(Photo by the author, with kind permission of the Archives nationales,
and of the Archives departementales du Val-d'Oise.)
A second example links the considerable body of seal metaphors de-
ployed by intellectuals of the central Middle Ages to the sealing practice
which they and their contemporaries employed.17 The basis of the seal's
utility as both a sign of authorization and a conceptual tool was its ac-
tual process of imprinting, which established and confirmed a regime
of causality (fig. 4). Such a process implied two things. Firstly, it gen-
erated the seal impression as an image of origin. Secondly, it involved
contact between tangible things-hands, seal-die, and wax-producing
a mode of reference that was organized around these very things and
their properties. The wax, for instance, was at once malleable, able to re-
ceive the form of the die and of the sealer's fingerprints, or alternatively,
was hard and unreceptive, or even unstable, apt to melt and thus to
1~>
&li:i)
_--
Fig. 2. Detail of the division
separating the two parts of the
chirography. (Photo by the
author, with kind permission of
the Archives nationales, and of
the Archives departementales du
Val-d'Oise.)
lose its image. Anselm of Bec (d. 1109), Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141),
Alain de Lille (d. 1202), and Peter of Blois (d. 1203)-to name just a
few commentators-remarked on this ability of the wax to move from
resemblance to dissemblance without any change in its own ontologi-
cal status. They made analogy between the wax image (imago) and man
who, though originally imprinted in God's image, lost his likeness to the
divine-but not necessarily his humanity. In both seal practice and seal
metaphor, there was acknowledgment that the image that was impressed
would alter the appearance of the wax, but also consideration that the
material and medial qualities of the wax informed and conditioned the
image received. Form and matter act reciprocally, although the appear-
ance of wax impressions, from unintended marks (fingerprints), defor-
mity (accident), to intentional resemblance (the goal of a proper stamp-
ing of the die), derives from the wax's intrinsic characteristics, not from
the idea or design of an image maker.18
In testing the heuristic of my earlier theoretical formulations, I have
directed attention to the clustering and mutual contextualizing of mate-
rials in twelfth-century image making, investigating the ways in which, in
their association, humans, gods, animals, and particular types of images
swapped properties and formed specific collectives.

1~7V ~---~- _72 4. V ji n'Fit~
Fi. 3.V A bbat-Cina pti f in i lrc1 hiv d) at mN-
In co clsin Im w;ul like t shar my sens f th shft mn discourszt ba
tha4:t Ctura" is,.toriesC ofri^ ;.err ii M aeia Wor"Cftrl ltft ". , ~-e:m t might ena e Thlsries l, ,,-is:t
jupn noa udmna an ogtadn eat-ht the nia-. tc r
ferenie 3 nt pi aoring the cth progra ng Archive ia reimes
tfdaltes ad Vativitises. Potois ue, 8.(hostoryn the uthorih wkrnd
peldrmtisn oef thfercies ne tatisenon-oppsdtiVal- andOriative
an an ionI would like to share my sense of the shrrfts a dicoe
thate ulta istis in thes Msayte, Wtorcl mit t eral.Te srties i
jumpng to fudaental atergaing bt
tur of relieah moment I be rie to egae bes n w ahd-
fercerits aot oeed ha t the tevsai ontestsicna utregiml
ofdaiisadngtvte.Tu utrhistory, an the material world? n nwri ay ok n ouet
wual emta bjen heit sien oamntat i s o a ande la-,
facilitating tllaoati, eatin, w avn e thn bot da chffioult
arendn te trndeateto the opic gato hnd Inkh curn)ht aaemcn
cliaed asin ths ra pae t era p d tsra tudie
hsdeotwyethe full aressdmte smert of objetsa.ybewetetx
srt txts 1 ' about objets~. WhaT t is thrtatus of 5 citee tx~ts i ~njr atullntalnes -a
hisoryo " tfr matni ' wrd One.t answer '"ism esy.- Bok abrnd document
ers ofgbent ad its meraity wouldstae left 4ei) Me tiatitrle
encolees (hand ser, pter e pt io, the nk anthat have in-
vered msso on the anu cipae.1 erhapsntmost difuVlt'Ofise tocon
Ide whetherione ma asumlie tosome sortenofmutualityifbetweenitheute
tual arumturan istis mfthaterial Augsteld. 430)t eciie That terei
knowlege wnoa beyndsensoal percepngtain adeacesible olytvianth

Fig. 4. Seal Matrix and detached
seal impression of the Colle-
gial Chapter of Saint-Quiriace
of Provins (early fourteenth
century). Archives nationales,
Service des sceaux, Collection de
matrices, no 18. (Photo by the
author, with kind permission of
the Archives nationales.)
mental image immanent to the soul and imperfectly remembered by
man.20 The idea was that the material world existed, but was not real,
and that signification did not refer to actual things, nor did it need to
refer to them in order to have meaning. Such a view was broadly ac-
cepted in the early Middle Ages and somewhat constrained the role of
the material world in informing practice and experience. When this per-
spective changed, at the turn of the second millennium, the cultural
landscape of the epoch (1050-1225) soon was filled with texts, images,
and artifacts in unprecedented numbers. When Mabillon drew materi-
als and meaning together in the 1680s, he was synthesizing in the spirit
and age of Descartes and Newton. We are now living through an equally
unprecedented revolution, and should expect an equally significant shift
in epistemologies of knowledge and exposition.

NOTES
1. Bjornar Olsen, "Material Culture after Text: Re-Membering Things," Norwe-
gian Archaeological Review 36, no. 2 (2003): 87-104, at 88.
2. See the literary analogies in many titles: Hodder, Reading the Past (1986);
Tilley, Reading Material Culture (1990); Tilley, Material Culture as Text (1991).
Regis Debray, Vie et mort de l'image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 53-60.
3. Christopher Tilley, "Theoretical Perspectives. Introduction," in Handbook of
Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 1-11,
at 8; B. Olsen, "Scenes from a troubled Engagement. Post-Structuralism
and Material Cultural Studies," in Handbook of Material Culture, 85-103,
reprinted in Olsen, In Defense of Things (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010), 39-62.
4. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling,
and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 339-48.
5. Julian Thomas, "Phenomenology and Material Culture," in Handbook of
Material Culture, 43-59, at 54, 57.
6. Tim Ingold, "Writing Texts, Reading Materials. A Response to my Critics,"
Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 31-38, at 35.
7. Tim Ingold , "Materials Against Materiality," Archaeological Dialogues 14
(2007): 1-16, at 1, 11. This article prompted a very interesting debate about
the epistemological meaning of materiality.
8. If I drop a plastic glass, it will not break, but a china cup will.
9. Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition. Powers and Hazards of Representation in
Indonesian Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997), 32.
10. It is significant that the otherwise comprehensive Handbook of Material Cul-
ture has an index with no entry to Carbon 14, DNA, pollens, etc.
11. Tim Ingold, "Writing Texts, Reading Materials," 33.
12. I am inspired to use these examples by John R. Searle, "Why Should you
Believe it," New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009, 88-92. In this essay,
Searle reviews the book by Paul A. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against
Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I wish
to thank my husband, Ira Rezak, for bringing this essay to my attention.
13. On this and the Perceian concept of abduction, see Alfred Gell, Art and
Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Think, for example, of the
ability of the clay to dry, of some metals to soften, of textiles to move in the
wind.
14. Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition, 1-28.
15. Each part of the chirograph had been kept by the relevant party, and are
now housed in different archival repositories. The comital portion is in the
French Archives nationales, Paris, J 168 no 2 (AE/II/181); the abbatial por-
tion, in the French Archives departementales du Val-d'Oise, Pontoise, 9 H
81.
16. A full analysis of this chirograph can be found in Brigitte Miriam Bedos-
Rezak, "Cutting Edge. The Economy of Mediality in Twelfth-century Writ-
ing," Das Mittelalter15 (2010): 134-61.

17. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, When Ego was Imago. Signs of Identity in the Mid-
dle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
18. Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Order of Material: Plasticities, Malaises, Sur-
vivals," in Sculpture and Psychoanalysis, ed. Brandon Taylor (London: Ash-
gate, 2007), 195-211, at 199-200.
19. Tim Ingold, "Writing Texts, Reading Materials," 13-14.
20. Stephane Dorothee, "Signum et le metalexique: la notion de signe linguis-
tique chez saint Augustin," in Latin et langues techniques (Paris: Presses de
l'Universite Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), 155-69, at 166-68.

FOUR
Museum Display, an
Algonquian Bow, and
the Ship of Theseus
Ivan Gaskell
In 2008, a new long-term exhibit opened in the Arthur M. Sackler Mu-
seum at Harvard University.1 Named Re-View, it draws on all parts of the
museum's collection. This highly selective presentation of the museum's
holdings is to be on view in successive versions while the neighboring
Quincy Street building that had housed the Fogg Art Museum since
1927 is closed for renovation and expansion. The first version of Re-View
closed in 2010.
One floor of the 2008-10 version of Re-View was devoted to the West-
ern tradition from classical antiquity until 1900. With only six galleries
available, the curators responsible had to compress the story they sought
to tell both chronologically and geographically. I was one of two scholars
responsible for planning the display of European and American art be-
tween 1600 and 1900 in three adjacent galleries, my collaborator being
Theodore Stebbins Jr. Rather than follow the common practice of divid-
ing the works by continent and tracing formal and stylistic developments
within each, we decided to treat the material as belonging to a single
extended moment in a single cultural area. We arranged the works we se-
lected thematically-showing, for instance, history paintings together (a
Poussin beside a Winslow Homer), and landscapes together (a Ruisdael
next to a Sargent). Two constant themes were the persistence of motifs
and modes of representation from classical antiquity, and the increase
in cultural encounter during this period, eventually encompassing the
world.
To exemplify cultural encounter, we included objects that are not nor-
59
mally considered part of the Western tradition. We showed a sixteenth-
century bronze staff finial representing a bird of prophecy from the
Benin Kingdom in what is now Nigeria beside a Giambologna bronze
falcon from sixteenth-century Florence. We presented a bow, said to
have been taken from an Indian by an English colonist in 1660, among
European and European-American history paintings. I shall use the bow
to explore aspects of what I take the production of cultural histories of
the material world to involve within an art museum.
The bow is delicately fashioned from a single piece of hickory wood. It
is over five-and-a-half-feet long, subtly asymmetrical longitudinally about
the handgrip. A faded inscription in ink states, "The bow was taken from
an Indian in Sudbury, Massts AD 1660 by William Goodenough who shot
the Indian while he was ransacking his house for plunder." This infor-
mation has long been accepted literally, causing the object to be known
as the Sudbury Bow.2 Successive members of the family of the man who
had captured it are said to have preserved it until Reverend Charles
C. H. Crosby donated it to the American Antiquarian Society in Worces-
ter, Massachusetts, in or before 1826.3 In 1895, the society presented it
to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard Uni-
versity, which generously lent it to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum for the
new exhibit in 2008.4 If the inscription, which is in what appears to be
an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century italic hand, indeed preserves
information that had previously been handed down orally, the bow must
be counted a very rare survival of an indigenous North American artifact
from the seventeenth century.
Before examining this possibility in a little more detail, let us pause to
offer an initial assessment of what such a thing might ideally provide to
historians. All material things available to us are traces of the past. Many
material things embody human making or intervention. When Western-
ers consider material things-things available to the human senses or
their extensions-they classify them, whether as things made, adopted,
or modified by humans on the one hand, or as things purely in nature on
the other. Human-made things-artifacts-are the result of the purpose-
ful modification of materials. The bow we are considering is an artifact.
Adopted things are not modified by humans, but are imbued by them
with particular qualities. They can be small and portable-like a shell
carried as an amulet-or vast like a river or mountain invested with so-
cially acknowledged properties. Modified things include living beings in
whose reproductive cycles humans have intervened, such as selectively
bred crops and domesticated animals. These definitions imply an an-

Museum Display, an Algonquian Bow, and the Ship of Theseus 61
thropocentric viewpoint, for they suggest that human making, adoption,
and modification are unavoidable wherever humans might be found, or
to whatever their reach extends perceptually, including the most distant
detectable heavenly bodies. It can be objected that histories of the mate-
rial world might be conceived in which humans play but a marginal role,
if any: a history of ocean currents, for instance, or of insects, or of the
formation of igneous rocks. This is incontrovertible. Humanity is but a
recent and vulnerable arrival on this planet. Yet the particular care of
history, as distinct from, say, oceanography, entomology or geology, is
the activity of human beings, even though this can usually best be un-
derstood in conjunction with other constituents of the material world.
Cultural historians of the material world are often, though far from
exclusively, concerned with artifacts. However, opinion as to what consti-
tutes the human-made varies from society to society. In the Christian tra-
dition, for instance, some devotees hold certain miraculous images that
might appear painted to be acheiropoietic-not the products of human
hands.5 Intimately connected with notions of divine making is variation
among societies regarding what is living and what is not, the animate
and the inanimate. Our bow may have been human made, but it does
not follow that those who made and first used it subscribed to a Western
understanding of its material-hickory wood-as once living, but sub-
sequently dead. To them, the bow, made of a once-living tree, may well
have retained its living status. As historians, we are obliged to bear in
mind that conceptions of materiality vary considerably among societies,
and that any given material object can be conceived of in more than one
way-whether simultaneously by different groups with different beliefs,
or consecutively within any given social group as uses and beliefs change.
As a historian, my aim is not ontological definition; rather it is to acquire
an understanding of any given thing that ideally takes as many socially
viable conceptions of it into account as possible, and to describe differ-
ences and-when appropriate-changes among them.
If non-Western conceptions of material objects can be peculiar, con-
fusing-or even nonsensical-to Westerners, the bases in Greek philoso-
phy of Western notions of materiality are also generally unfamiliar, other
than in colloquial derivations. Even before considering the binary dis-
tinction between the term material and its antonym, immaterial, puzzles
arise over identity, persistence, and the consequences of change over
time. In what sense is the bow that concerns us the same material thing
when displayed in the Sackler Museum as the bow previously displayed
in the Peabody Museum, or again as the bow belonging to the Ameri-

can Antiquarian Society, or to the putative William Goodenough, or, be-
fore him, to the unidentified indigenous person who used it, who may
or may not have been its maker? Museum scholars generally subscribe
to the persistence of identity of the objects with which they work. This
is no small issue, given the perceived need to intervene in their physi-
cal states through conservation treatment. Material things constantly
change, whether as a result of direct or indirect human action, or other
processes, both gradual and sudden. Curators and conservators usually
seek to arrest change, at the very least. The historian using a material
thing as a trace or source should ideally be well informed of the nature
and sequence of the physical changes it has undergone. This can often
only be attempted with the collaboration of conservators and analytical
scientists. Underlying any such analysis, though, is generally an assump-
tion of the persistence of the identity of the object concerned. At what
point, though, if ever, does a material thing change to such an extent
that its original identity is compromised or even lost? This is but one
puzzle among those that philosophers have long discussed under the
rubric, the Problem of Material Constitution (PMC).6
Identity presents a particular puzzle within the PMC.7 It found pro-
totypical articulation in the account of the Greek historian and philoso-
pher Plutarch (AD 46-ca. 122) of the Ship of Theseus, the legendary
founder-king of Athens. "The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of
Athens returned has thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians
down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus [ca. 350-ca. 280 BC], for
they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting new and stronger
timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing ex-
ample among philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow;
one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other con-
tending that it was not the same."8 Plutarch presents us with a paradox: a
thing that incrementally changes physically in its entirety, and yet retains
its original identity-or does it?
In his discussion of the individuation of material things, the
seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a fur-
ther complication to the Ship of Theseus paradox. He illustrates what
he counts as the absurdity of the idea that "two Bodies existing both at
once, would be one and the same Numerical Body" by supposing that
the planks removed for replacement from the Ship of Theseus could
themselves be reconstituted to form an identical vessel, so that there
would be not one but two vessels with claims to be the Ship of Theseus.9
Hobbes contends that identity is a matter of naming, a claim taken up

with respect to artworks (among other things) by later philosophers in-
cluding Nelson Goodman and Arthur Danto.10 Whether or not this pro-
vides a satisfactory solution to the Ship of Theseus paradox (and not all
agree that it does), Hobbes's analysis of individuation reminds us of the
role played by immaterial constituents (such as names) in the definition
of what we take to be material things.
In the case of the bow, we can be confident that, but for the effects
of aging on the wood and the loss of certain original appurtenances
(including the bow string), the item is materially substantially the same
as when it was made: physically, it is constitutionally simple, in that the
greater part of it, which survives, is not made of replaceable parts, but
is a single stave. Yet it now carries a name: the Sudbury Bow. Its identity
as such is culturally contingent. Its name is an element of its immate-
rial transformation from whatever it might have been in the minds of
its maker and first user into a trophy commemorating heritable family
pride in the subjugation of an enemy, and subsequently, into an anthro-
pological specimen. The latest immaterial transformation of the bow is
from a specimen displayed in the Peabody Museum to illustrate the ma-
terial lifeways of Eastern Woodlands Indians into an artwork displayed in
the Re-View exhibit in the Sackler Museum.
The two successive museum identities of the bow-as specimen and
as artwork-are the result of cultural appropriation. This is understand-
ably a distrusted phenomenon, but one that is not invariably offensive or
harmful." However, the power relationship between originating and ap-
propriating groups can be asymmetrical and persistently unjust, leading
to demands by originating groups or their successors for the appropriate
treatment of things by appropriators or their successors, including muse-
ums, even to the extent of their return. Just as important as an acknowl-
edgement of the fact of appropriation must be an appreciation of differ-
ences in dominant modes of perception of appropriated things fostered
by originating groups on the one hand, and by museums on the other.
The engagement of first users with tangible things was often multisen-
sory, involving actions such as touching, lifting, sounding, kissing, and
carrying. As Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips have
pointed out, far from being excluded in museums "multisensory engage-
ment with objects remained fundamental to the investigation of material
culture, but ... [as] part of the privileged access accorded to a new priest-
hood of curators and museum professionals."12 Curators, conservators,
and analytical scientists handle, heft, manipulate, smell, and occasionally
disassemble museum objects, whereas the experience of ordinary visitors

is confined to no more than visual inspection-viewing objects, either at
a distance or through a protective barrier of plexiglass. As Edwards and
her colleagues point out, this limitation is a necessary consequence of
mass access, a matter of security in its widest sense, preventing incremen-
tal damage, as well as accidents and theft. That this should be the reason
does not lessen the privilege these conditions confer on vision over the
other senses, exacerbating the differences between the engagement of
Western museum visitors with a wide range of tangible things, and that of
originating or successor groups, whose members likely value other forms
of sensory engagement. The same can hold true even within Western
culture: to what extent can we claim to understand the qualities of, say, a
particular kind of chair on display without being able to sit on it? Some
kinds of artifacts, including bows, are found in a variety of societies; so,
to what extent can we claim to understand the qualities of the bow re-
cently on display in the Sackler Museum without being able to assess its
balance in the hand, let alone to string it and feel its draw weight? In a
study room, a curator might be able to experience at least some of the
bow's tactile qualities, but, when presenting it in a gallery, the focus must
inevitably be on its visual characteristics. However constraining, this is
a condition imposed by the medium of museum gallery display, and it
undoubtedly has epistemological consequences. While it can illuminate
certain qualities of an object, display cannot exhaust it.13
Even with in the visual realm of display, there is, of course, more than
one way of exploiting the visual characteristics of a thing. In the Peabody
Museum, where the bow was displayed until its loan to the Sackler Mu-
seum, it was set vertically against a backboard in a large vitrine contain-
ing many other tangible things representative of the material culture of
Eastern Woodlands Indians. It was part of an ensemble-one of a num-
ber of varied things treated equally-rather than a focus of attention.
It took up as little space within the vitrine as possible, and its vertical
position implied that it was at rest. This display very effectively served
its curator's purpose of illustrating material lifeways shared by related
cultural groups. The display of the bow in the Sackler Museum was radi-
cally different, serving quite another purpose. In its temporary change
of location from an anthropology to an art museum, it is almost inevita-
ble that its character should have changed from that of a representative
specimen of a particular way of life to a thing with unique qualities pre-
sented for aesthetic contemplation. Different circumstances promote at-
tention to different aspects of a complex thing. No tangible thing reveals
all of itself in any one set of circumstances. Curators have a responsibility

to contrive specific circumstances in which particular characteristics of
specific things can become apparent. As the presentation of the bow in
the Sackler Museum exhibit was my initiative, I shall try to account for it.
First, I wished to encourage focused attention on the bow by pre-
senting it on its own, in the round, so that visitors might see it from as
many viewpoints as possible. In the context of an art museum, this means
presenting it on the same terms as a sculpture, implying cultural value.
Further, I aimed to present the bow not as a thing at rest (as it was in
the Peabody Museum display), but as a dynamic object, implying use.
I had a mount contrived for it so that it was inconspicuously supported
diagonally in space, at a commanding height, suggesting a drawn bow in
action. Although this presentation accentuated the dynamic, sculptural
aspects of the bow, and permitted viewers to see it in the round, as a
thing apart, there are problematic consequences.
The elongated curvilinearity of the bow brings to mind sculptures
by Constantin Brancugi (1876-1957), notably Bird in Space (first version,
1922-1923), an icon of European modernism prized for its balance and
refinement. Troubling questions follow. Did the presentation in the Sack-
ler Museum amount to an unambiguous invitation to view a seventeenth-
century American Indian bow in terms of a twentieth-century modern
European sculpture? If so, did it compound any offense caused by the
appropriation of the bow? Did this presentation amount to cultural mis-
representation? This is a delicate matter.
It might be helpful if we consider in a little more detail aspects of
what occurs in consequence of the cultural appropriation of material
things, such as this bow." When a thing moves from one society to an-
other, one or more of three attitudes is in play: (1) the new users employ
and interpret it solely on their own terms without regard to the uses
and interpretations of its earlier users, either oblivious to those earlier
uses, or purposefully to expunge them; (2) the new users discern famil-
iar characteristics that they value, and that they assume earlier users also
discerned and valued; (3) the new users attempt to learn the terms of
use, interpretation and value of the earlier users by means of cultural
acquisition and translation, acknowledging that these may differ from
their own wholly or in part, but in the belief that their acquisition will
bring them advantages.
I term these three attitudes, respectively, supersession, assumption, and
translation. Translation is especially complex, because in some instances
new users wish to understand a thing purely intellectually, and in oth-
ers with emotional engagement. All three attitudes are legitimate, but
this does not exempt their application from ethical scrutiny in individual
cases, nor from acknowledgment of their shortcomings. Ethically flawed
practices include depriving or withholding from subordinated social
groups artifacts that are properly their own, mistreating or unwarrant-
ably exposing artifacts that have sacred significance, and using artifacts
to promote or uncritically perpetuate asymmetrical power relationships.
Furthermore, the application of each of these attitudes varies depend-
ing on the terms in which a thing is considered. Westerners are more
likely to accept and incorporate subaltern aesthetic terms into their
own belief systems than they are to accept subaltern magical or religious
terms. Therefore, translation by Westerners in the case of the magical,
sacred, and divine is likely to be more reserved and cautious than in
cases of aesthetic values. Furthermore, there is likely to be greater scope
for assumption-recognizing or ascribing characteristics valued in com-
mon-in aesthetic than in sacred terms.
In their examinations of artifacts in both aesthetic and sacred terms,
Western scholars generally favor translation. They expect that through
translation they can retrieve the original, supposedly paramount, mean-
ing of a thing, thereby enhancing intellectual and aesthetic understand-
ing. This is often a worthy aim, but, even if this were possible-if transla-
tion were not itself a species of new use-translation ignores both vital
characteristics of things, and enduring human practice acknowledged by
supersession and assumption. Supersession and assumption recognize
that artifacts perdure and are physically and cognitively adaptable, and
that human beings put artifacts to various uses over time. Furthermore,
translation is as open to abuse as are supersession and assumption. West-
ern (and some other) anthropologists have persistently used translation
to promote colonialism and other forms of asymmetrical power rela-
tionship between hegemonic and subaltern peoples. Some of the draw-
backs of supersession and assumption are more readily recognizable.
Supersession-the uncompromising cognitive adaptation of an artifact
regardless of its earlier use-can unjustly promote the suppression of
the cultural identity of earlier users. Assumption can bolster hegemony
by fostering panculturalism-a belief that works from all cultures exhibit
common aesthetic characteristics. The error of panculturalism is not
that societies can produce, recognize, and value identical aesthetic char-
acteristics, but that such common characteristics count for more than
those that might be peculiar to a given society. Each attitude, therefore,
has its drawbacks, as well as its advantages.
Returning to the bow with these distinctions in mind, we should ac-

knowledge that humans view things comparatively, drawing on memories
of a wide range of items. For Westerners (and others) to view the bow in
implicit comparison with Bird in Space is one effective way of focusing on
certain of its characteristics (curvilinearity, balance, refinement). This
might be helpful, but only so long as it does not encourage the error of
panculturalism. As long as viewers do not make any comparison with a
Western item at the expense of the cultural peculiarity of the bow, they
are likely to respect its origin. Its display in Re-View did not explicitly
encourage viewing the bow in terms of European modernism through
directly available comparisons.15 Instead, it invited consideration of the
mythology of hunting, for the bow was juxtaposed with representations
of the hunt in the form of a fourth-century BC Greek red-figure nesto-
ris (attributed to the Choephoroi Painter) with a scene of the death of
Actaeon, and a monumental painting, Diana on a Chase (1805), by Wash-
ington Allston. The bow was on display because it is an Indian artifact,
presented as of value owing to its indigenous status. The juxtapositions
invited attention to its potential use as a hunting implement rather than
as a weapon of war, so as not to reinforce a Western stereotype of Indian
belligerence.16 As such, it was a reminder that the spread of European
settlement to North America-specifically New England-was not a his-
torical starting point, but that human presence-with all the cultural
complexity that this implies-long predates the arrival of newcomers
from beyond the ocean.
Let us consider the bow itself in more detail. The inscription informs
readers (implicitly understood to be European as opposed to indige-
nous) that it allegedly changed hands in violent circumstances during
the early years of the English colonization of what became New England.
What attraction might a bow have had for an English settler, presuming
that he actually took it from an Indian antagonist?
For the English, bows were characteristic of Indians, particularly Indi-
ans of high status. The Algonquian "weroan or great Lorde of Virginia"
represented from both the front and the back in an engraving by The-
odor de Bry in the 1590 edition of Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True
Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, after a watercolor by John White,
holds a strung bow. Harriot, a careful first-hand observer who learned an
Algonquian language, observed of the "princes of Virginia" that "They
carye a quiver made of small rushes holding their bowe readie bent in
on hand, and an arrow in the other, radie to defend themselves. In this
manner they goe to warr, or tho their solemne feasts and banquetts.
They take much pleasure in huntinge of deer where of there is great

store in the contrye . .."7 Harriot acknowledges three distinct uses of
bows by the Indians he had noticed: warfare, hunting, and ceremony.
A bow-bearing Indian even became the emblem of colonial endeavor.
The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, chartered in 1629, repre-
sents an Indian holding an arrow pointing downward in his right hand-
signifying peace-and a bow in his left, with the words "Come over and
help us" in a phylactery.18 This seal was in use until 1686, and again from
1689 to 1692.
Bows were more than signifiers of Indianness for English coloniz-
ers. As Joyce Chaplin has pointed out, they had a special place in the
colonizers' own self-image.19 Proficiency in archery was a value shared by
Indians and colonists, though in culturally distinct ways. Until the end
of the sixteenth century, the bow and arrow had remained the princi-
pal English missile weapon; enrollment of archers for military training
ended in 1595. Nonetheless, many English persons continued to view
prowess in archery as a measure of manliness-both individually, and
communally. Not until the lighter and more reliable wheel-lock arque-
bus superseded the ungainly matchlock did firearms make significant
inroads in North America.2' The Frenchman Samuel de Champlain and
his Indian allies' defeat of the Iroquois Mohawks beside Lake Champlain
in 1609 demonstrates that the wheel-lock arquebus, especially when mul-
tiply charged, was immensely effective against lightly armored Indian
archers used to fighting in close order.21 Indian battle tactics changed
swiftly in response to diminish warriors' exposure. They abandoned both
massed formations and wooden armor-and Indians rapidly acquired
firearms. Although gunpowder weapons began to replace bows, their
use continued in North America during at least the first third of the
seventeenth century, owing to supply problems (especially of gunpow-
der), cost, the relative efficiency of the respective weapons (reliability,
rate of fire, range, and accuracy), and cultural resistance. English colo-
nists continued to use bows regularly until about 1640. Thereafter, they
long retained a nostalgic respect for archery bolstered by similar sen-
timents expressed in the metropole by writers such as William Wood,
whose Bow-mans Glory; or Archery Revived was published in 1682.22 Nos-
talgia was compounded by identification. In the Indians who practiced
the fine crafting of bows, and their use in hunting, military exercises,
warfare, and ceremony, English settlers saw earlier, virtuous versions of
themselves. Nourished by studies of the works ofJulius Caesar and Taci-
tus, their dominant historical mythology led to a belief that just as the
Romans had civilized the valiant, virtuous ancient Britons-forebears

of the English-so their descendants-the modern English-would, in
turn, lead the Indians from savagery to civility. Confronting an Indian,
an English colonist saw a contemporary equivalent of his own ancestor:
savage, but uncorrupted. As Chaplin has pointed out, this measure of
identification was a condition of mutually intelligible conflict as well as
of peaceful coexistence. The bow acted as what she terms "a historical
marker" in this relationship.23
These circumstances may help to explain the continuing significance
of the particular bow we are considering to its first white possessor-
William Goodenough of Sudbury, Massachusetts, we are told-and to his
successors, to whom it likely served as a signifier of their forebear's mar-
tial settler skills. What, though, of the specific conditions of acquisition
by that first Englishman? A search of online genealogical databases and
Alfred Sereno Hudson's monumental History of Sudbury (1889) reveals
the presence in Sudbury, following its division from Watertown and its
incorporation in 1639, of five siblings-three brothers and two sisters-
named Goodnow. All had come from Wiltshire in England. The oldest
was John (1595/96-1654). The middle brother, Edmund (1611-1688),
was successively ensign, lieutenant, and captain of militia, and builder of
the fortified house known as the Goodnow Garrison.24 Thomas (1617-
1666), the youngest brother, was one of the Sudbury inhabitants who
moved to Marlboro-a new plantation to the immediate southwest of
Sudbury, incorporated in 1660.25 There is no record of a William Good-
enough, Goodnough, Goodenow, or Goodnow in such Sudbury records
as I have been able to consult. Although tensions certainly existed, nei-
ther is there any record of any violence between colonists and Indians in
either Sudbury or Marlboro in or around 1660. However, William Hub-
bard, one of the earliest to give an account of the later conflict known as
King Philip's War (1675-1676), noted in 1677 that "Further also where
it is said, p. 7. that the Indians had lived peaceably with the English here
near forty years, ever since the Pequod Warr; it is to be understood with
reference to publick acts of Hostility; for particular mischiefs have been
committed by several Indians in some parts of the Country but the ac-
tors not abetted therein by any of their Country-men."26 There may have
been an isolated incident in or near Sudbury that led to the death of an
Indian at the hands of a settler-one of the Goodnows-in or around
1660. In 1675-1676, things were very different. The New England colo-
nies came under the most severe military threat they were ever to experi-
ence. The assault on Sudbury by at least 500 Nipmuc warriors in April
1676 led to great loss of life. In addition to the Indian dead, over thirty
colonists, many of them members of a column sent from Boston, were
killed. Might this have been the occasion of the capture of the bow?
While not impossible, this is improbable, for by then most, if not all,
belligerents had firearms. Indicative of a wider symbolic shift from bow
to gun among Indians is the captive Mary Rowlandson's eyewitness ac-
count of a ritual that preceded the departure of a Nipmuc war party for
Marlboro and Sudbury in which the participants used guns, not bows.27
As we have seen, the inscription on the Peabody Museum bow is likely
to express an orally transmitted tradition. Oral tradition often preserves
true or plausible accounts, though in this case there is no corrobora-
tive evidence. Furthermore, there is much circumstantial evidence that
casts doubt on the account given by the inscription. Consequently, the
inscription is best taken as evidence of an enduring white, local-likely
family-tradition exemplifying one aspect of the New England mythol-
ogy of colonization.
Where does this leave the bow itself, independent of the inscription?
We should not dismiss the logical possibility that it is not what it purports
to be, whether as result of honest error or pious fraud. Relics-and this is
a secular relic-are notoriously subject to fakery.28 However, its status as
a bow of New England Indian manufacture has never been doubted (to
my knowledge), and there is no specific reason to do so now. I used it in
the Sackler Museum to proclaim an uncompromising Algonquian pres-
ence, challenging the implicit claims to hegemony of the Western tradi-
tion. The bow was not present to suggest inclusiveness-it was present to
remind viewers of the habitual want of acknowledgment of indigenous
peoples and their values in American society.29 It was, however, a com-
plex presence, and was irreducible to a single meaning. In any given dis-
play of any given thing, a curator can only gesture toward a limited range
of its characteristics, and the display of the bow is no exception. Cultural
historians can, and should, make use of curatorial manipulations of ma-
terial things to explore their contingencies and interrogate their imma-
terial, as well as their material, aspects. In doing so, they might take note
of the consequences of the Ship of Theseus paradox: while things may
perdure, they never stop changing.
NOTES
I should like to thank Peter N. Miller and the participants in the workshop, "Cul-
tural Histories of the Material World," at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in
January 2010. I also benefited from presenting a version of this paper at the col-
loquium "Materiality and Cultural Translation," at the Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs, Harvard University, in May 2010. I should particularly like
to thank the organizer, Ruth Phillips. I gave ajoint presentation on the Sudbury
bow at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in December 2009 with Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, who, as always, generously supplied me with invaluable insights and infor-
mation.
1. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is a constituent, with the Fogg Art Museum
and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, of what for many years was called the
Harvard University Art Museums, renamed the Harvard Art Museum and
renamed yet again in July 2010 the Harvard Art Museums.
2. Describing and discussing the bow in 1923, Saxton T. Pope referred to it as
"King Philips's Bow" (alluding to the Wampanoag sachem also known as
Metacom who led an Indian war of resistance to colonial settlers in 1675-
1676), despite transcribing part of the attached label, including the date
(1660) of its reputed capture: Bows and Arrows (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1962), 34. Originally published as A Study of
Bows and Arrows (University of California Publications in American Archae-
ology and Ethnology 13, 9, 1923).
3. Note in the Accessions Ledger, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Eth-
nology, Harvard University, 95-20-10/49340.
4. I should like to acknowledge the generosity of the staff of the Peabody
Museum, notably its then director, William Fash, who not only loaned one
of the most celebrated objects in its collection, but removed it from display
in the Hall of the American Indian.
5. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 55.
6. A useful recent discussion of the Problem of Material Constitution is offered
by Christopher M. Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus: Solving Puzzles
about Material Objects (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).
7. Particularly useful discussions include David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Randall R. Dipert,
Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993), especially chapter 7, "Toward a Metaphysics of Artifacts: Individua-
tion, Identity through Time, and Group Agency."
8. Arthur Hugh Clough, trans., Plutarch's Lives (New York: Dutton, 1910), I,
15.
9. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, the First Section, Concerning Body (Lon-
don: Andrew Crocke, 1656), 99-101 (1st Latin edition, De Corpore, 1655, II,
11, 7).
10. See, in particular, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: an Approach to a The-
ory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); Arthur C. Danto, The Trans-
figuration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981).
11. See A. W. Eaton and Ivan Gaskell, "Do Subaltern Artifacts Belong in Art
Museums?" in The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, ed. James O. Young and
Conrad Brunk (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 235-

67; also Ivan Gaskell, "Ethical Judgments in Museums," in Art and Ethical
Criticism, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2008), 229-42. Useful contributions to the discussion of cultural appropria-
tion include Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003); and James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation
and the Arts (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
12. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, "Introduction," in Sen-
sible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards
et al. (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 19.
13. Saxton T. Pope went to the trouble of making a replica of the bow so as to
be able to assess its functional characteristics. He reported a draw weight of
46 pounds, and a range with a flighted arrow of 173 yards, describing it as
"soft and pleasant to shoot" (Pope, Bows and Arrows, 34).
14. This discussion is adapted from Ivan Gaskell "Encountering Pacific Art,"
Journal of Museum Ethnography 21 (2009): 202-10.
15. Unlike, for example, the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of
East Anglia, Norwich, England, where sub-Saharan African, Oceanic, and
other subaltern artworks are presented for formal comparison with works
of European modernism (see A. W. Eaton and Ivan Gaskell, "Do Subaltern
Artifacts Belong in Art Museums?").
16. Presenting a cultural artifact from a society other than one's own ideally
entails consulting with representatives of any successor community with
a direct interest in the artifact concerned, about its status and appropri-
ate uses. My decision to emphasize hunting resulted from my discussions
with Tobias Vanderhoop, tribal administrator of the Aquinnah Wampanoag
Tribe, to whom I am grateful for insights and advice.
17. Thomas Harriot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia
(Frankfurt, 1590), pl. III. For the John White drawing, see Kim Sloan, A New
World: England's First View of America (London: British Museum Press, 2007),
120-21, cat. 13.
18. "The History of the Arms and Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts." http://www.sec.state.ma.us/pre/presea/sealhis.htm.
19. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-
American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 80-115.
20. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the
New England Indians (Lanham, New York, Oxford: Madison Books in coop-
eration with Plimoth Plantation, 1991), 32-36.
21. David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2008), 1-3, 268-70.
22. See Tony Kench, "Sir William Wood (1609-1691) and the Society of Fins-
bury Archers." Posted at the Web site of the Worshipful Company of Bow-
yers: http://www.bowyers.com/longbow/williamWood.html.
23. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter, 83, 101.
24. Alfred Sereno Hudson, The History of Sudbury, Massachusetts, 1638-1889
(Boston: Town of Sudbury, 1889), 34.
25. Alfred Sereno Hudson, The History of Sudbury, Massachusetts, 1638-1889, 37.
26. William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England,
from the first planting thereof in the year 1607. to this present year 1677. But chiefly
of the late Troubles in the last two years, 1675. and 1676. (Boston: Published by
Authority, 1677), "To the Reader."
27. Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together, With the Faith-
fulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restaura-
tion of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Cambridge, MA: Printed by Samuel Green,
1682), 51-52; discussed byJill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and
the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 97-98.
28. Compare the so-called Penobscot War Bow in the Canadian Museum of Civi-
lization (catalogue number III-K-84), Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, discussed
by Gordon M. Day, "The Penobscot War Bow," In Search of New England's
Native Past: Selected Essays, ed. Gordon M. Day, Michael K. Foster, and Wil-
liam Cowan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 14-159.
29. Regrettably, a comparison between the Arthur M. Sackler Museum display
of the bow and other art museum displays that include North American
indigenous works in conjunction with those of the colonizers, such as in the
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, is beyond the scope of this chapter.

FIVE
Cultural Histories of the
Material World: Whose
Material World?
Sabine MacCormack
Let me begin with a story about my friend Ines. She was born in the An-
dean punad high above the tree line, in an adobe house with a thatched
roof. Her first language is Quechua, which she now teaches at the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame. Her second language is Spanish, learnt at sec-
ondary school. The school was three-days' walk away from where Ines
was born. She walked there accompanied by her grandfather and by the
llama that carried the food she would eat during the coming month or
so-quinoa, freeze-dried potatoes, and dried maize. When periodically
she returned home for holidays and to pick up more food, her grandfa-
ther asked her to write what she had learned on a rock with a charred,
wooden twig. Quinoa and potatoes grow at high altitudes. After being
harvested, potatoes are left exposed to frost over night, and during the
day they unfreeze in the intense sunlight of the puna. Once unfrozen,
family members dance on them to squeeze out the moisture, leave them
outside for another night, dance on them again during the day, and re-
peat until they are completely dry. Now they are no longer called papa,
(potatoes), but chunu. Weighing little, chunu is easily transported, and
keeps for a long time-and you have to boil it for a long time too, to
render it edible. To keep Ines in school, her family provided her food,
sold some llamas to pay the school's fees, and in due course she earned
a degree at the University of Cuzco.
Not long after Ines arrived at Notre Dame, she had an appointment
on the thirteenth floor of a campus building. Entering the building, she
could not find the stairs. In the vestibule, people kept emerging from
74
Cultural Histories of the Material World 75
a double door that opened all of a sudden, and other people entered
that same double door which then closed behind them. Nothing else ap-
peared to be happening. Rather than trying to ask in her beginner's En-
glish what was going on, Ines took her heart in her hands and followed
someone into those doors. After the elevator had gone up and down a
couple of times, with people leaving and entering, Ines, having observed
that almost everyone pressed one of a row of buttons with a number on it
decided to try that too, in due course arrived on the thirteenth floor and
also returned to ground level, all without climbing the elusive stairs. Her
sense of triumph telling the story was great. Ines knows how to pasture
llamas and sheep, how to shear them and clean their fleeces, how to spin
yarn and weave the intricate reversible patterns of traditional Andean
cloth. She can raise quinoa, potatoes, maize, and other crops of the high
Andes, and she used to watch the moon and the sun to see when these
crops should be planted and harvested. Even in the United States, she
has an uncanny ability to predict the weather.
How are we to contextualize and understand such divergent expe-
riences of life in the material world, and do so historically? It would
seem-at least at first sight-that current interest in identity, gender,
class, status, and ideology all too often gets in the way. In a recent confer-
ence on the much discussed topic of Andeanness-"lo andino"-held in
Cuzco, this elusive quality was examined as a myth, an identity, a possible
obstacle to economic and political progress, as a marker of race or class,
and more. The historical and ongoing cultural achievements of Andean
people, among which their agricultural expertise must rank high,2 were
hardly mentioned in three days of conversations among some dozen par-
ticipants, but the photograph of a pair of Andean women appears on the
cover of the resulting publication titled Vigencia de lo andino, ("Norms
of Andean life").' The book is representative of a considerable body of
literature about Andean people in which agriculture and herding only
figure on rare occasions. The same can be said of the principal Andean
art forms, music, poetry, and weaving. There are, of course, reasons for
this state of affairs. If there is such a quality as "lo andino," then we must
allow for a great deal of regional variation that has profound historical
roots, as any student of Andean textiles will know.4 Besides, even remote
rural communities like the one where Ines was born are not islands, her-
metically sealed from the rest of the country. Schools, roads, electricity,
water and sewerage and-above all-migration to the city, especially to
Lima, have brought rapid and bewildering change. For migrants and
their children, traditional agricultural, artisanal and artistic skills tend

to become distant, if not irrelevant: they will not earn you a living in
Lima,' just as the skills Ines acquired as a child will not-at least on the
surface-help her to live in the material world we take for granted in
the United States. This is not to say that a person cannot live-whether
simultaneously or sequentially-in disconnected material, and even dis-
connected cognitive, worlds.
But what might be the cross-cultural understanding and epistemol-
ogy that we can address to the skills, the skilled work that is involved in
creating different material worlds, and also the skills and work of main-
taining these worlds? For without skill and understanding the material
worlds in which human beings live would never have come into exis-
tence. The search for such understanding is not new-it goes back at
least as far as Greek and Roman didactic poems and manuals on nature
in all its aspects, and on human work and artifacts,' among them the agri-
cultural manuals by Cato the Elder, Varro, Columella, and Palladius and
their medieval, early modern and modern descendants and successors-
where we might even include the contemporary Farmer's Almanac as a
distant heir. A concern expressed in several of these didactic works is that
the knowledge and skill communicated in them is a techne or ars-a spe-
cialized expertise with its own rules and, above all, its own dignity.7 This
is why at the beginning of the Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius outlined
for his patron, Emperor Augustus, the branches of knowledge thanks to
which architecture was an autonomous art,8 about which he himself was
writing not as an observer, but with both practical and theoretical exper-
tise, with what he described as his understanding of fabrica, practice or
opus, work on the one hand, and ratiocinatio, the grounds of this under-
standing, on the other.' Ratiocinatio has been translated as "reasoning,"
and in Vitruvius's usage, it can also mean a mathematical calculation,
and on occasion, it can also be translated as "epistemology."0
Like Vitruvius, so the Roman agricultural writers distinguished the-
ory from practice, the theoretical understanding of astronomy, climate,
seasons, soils, and the properties of plants and trees from the practi-
cal expertise of working a particular piece of land. For Cato the Elder,
there was, in addition, a religious ratiocinatio-although he did not use
this term-and for a religious practice, as he states several times, the
farmer must maintain correct relationships with the divine presences of
the countryside." Even so, Cato's main purpose was not religious, but
economic. He advocated farming because it was profitable and less risky
than trying to become rich by trade; besides, farming made for good
soldiers.12 Profit also interested Varro and Columella, even though Colu-
mella was at pains to urge that agriculture be recognized as an art, and
in pursuit of its elevated status as he perceived it, quoted regularly from
Virgil's didactic poem, the Georgics. Despite their different aspirations,
Cato, Varro, and Columella shared a general purpose: they addressed
their treatises not to individuals who were working the land themselves,
but to owners, and to some degree, also to managers of estates. Romans
valued agriculture as an honorable profession, distinct from commerce
and the artisanal trades, but this did not mean that one should labor
on the land or raise livestock with one's own hands.13 Notwithstanding
Vitruvius's explicit interest not only in ratiocinatio, but also in opus, the
same can perhaps be said of architecture-at least if we attend to the
message of folio 13r of the late antique Vergilius Vaticanus, depicting the
building of Dido's Carthage, where we see one architect and two over-
seers supervising five workers.14 The image invites us to conclude that
Vitruvius wrote primarily for the architect and overseers-masters of
ratiocinatio-and not so much for those who possessed the skills of stone
masons and construction workers.
Perhaps, however, Palladius-who wrote his three treatises on ag-
riculture, veterinary medicine, and grafting in the later fourth or fifth
century-was thinking of a rather different relationship between skill
and knowledge. For even if Palladius did not directly address those who
worked on an estate, he did write for an owner who personally partici-
pated in the running of his landed property. This, at any rate, is sug-
gested by the arrangement of the agricultural treatise. Palladius had read
Varro and Columella, and he used the latter extensively. But where the
earlier writers arranged their treatises by the different crops that were
to be grown, and different livestock to be raised, Palladius described the
labors to be performed each month, beginning with January and end-
ing with December. Less consistently, this approach had already been
employed by Pliny the Elder, and of course, by Virgil in the Georgics. As
for Palladius, he viewed the country estate from the inside, with the eyes
of someone living there month by month and season by season. In addi-
tion, like Vitruvius, he highlighted that he was not writing in an elevated
style because his text had a vital practical dimension: people working
the land, he observed, are not accustomed to making sense of difficult
Latin.15 This may help to explain the relatively sparse manuscript tradi-
tion for Cato, Varro and Columella, while Palladius generated over 100
extant manuscripts, and several late medieval and early modern vernac-
ular translations-including one into Spanish in 1385, which is at the
same time the earliest agricultural treatise in that language.16

Popular though Palladius was, one writer who did not read him was
the Andean historian Guaman Poma de Ayala, who in 1613 finished a
long illustrated history of the Incas, and of Peru under the Spanish-the
Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno. Nonetheless, as I try to show, Palladius
and Guaman Poma are akin in outlook in that we do not find in their
texts the distinction between opus, fabrica, and skill on the one hand, and
ratiocinatio, epistemology on the other.
The Nueva Cronica contains two agricultural calendars-one Inca,
and the other Spanish and Christian.17 Guaman Poma derived the for-
mat of his agricultural calendars, both extending from January to De-
cember, from the ecclesiastical calendars that were published in his day
as prefatory material in missals and breviaries. He appears also to have
seen published ecclesiastical calendars with illustrations that in turn
were derived from books of hours depicting the labors of the months.
But his understanding of work and skill, and of the grounds for his own
knowledge of organizing agricultural and pastoral work in the Andean
environment is indigenous. Multiple reasons led Guaman Poma to in-
clude these calendars in his Cordnica, including his desire to explain to
his addressee-Philip III of Spain-that Inca had been preferable to
Spanish governance, and more broadly, to explain Andean history and
culture. Throughout his two calendars, Guaman Poma described what
or ought to be, or was being, done as inseparably linked to how it was
to be understood.18 Like Palladius, he wrote from within the cognitive
system and the concurrent conglomerate of skills that were his subject,
accepting the inner coherence and validity of the conglomerate without
question.
Put differently, the skills and knowledge-opus and ratiocinatio, as it
were-of Andean people required no defense or explanation. Guaman
Poma took the value of both for granted without seeing any need to dis-
tinguish between them. This is where his vantage point, his gaze, differs
fundamentally from that of the contributors to Vigencia de lo andino, and
from similar publications. Perhaps more important, Guaman Poma's gaze
differed from that of most of his Spanish and Creole contemporaries, in
whose estimation Andean people required instruction and supervision,
just as centuries earlier, Cato, Varro, and Columella had believed that
the workers-who, for the most part, were slaves-laboring on an estate
had to be supervised by a manager. Skill, and the ability to perform the
work, were separated from understanding the work in its wider context.
Whether those who possessed the skill to do the work also possessed the
ratiocinatio, the epistemology to contextualize the work did not matter.19

In such a perspective, it is possible to separate the activity of the body-
that is, fabricatio or opus, from that of the mind and the soul, the locus of
ratiocinatio. One might then say that Ines-the Quechua-speaking child
of the puna, mistress of many skills-might not possess the ratiocinatio to
put those skills in perspective. The falsity of such a view is demonstrated
in a small way by Ines' experience of the elevator, and in a larger sense
it is demonstrated by the ability of thousands of Andean migrants to live
and survive in the city. That their experience would be more positive in
an epistemological regime that does not separate skill and knowledge,
opus and ratiocinatio, goes without saying.
Why is all this relevant to Cultural Histories of the Material World? As
I indicated earlier, the diverse material worlds in which we live are un-
thinkable without the work, skill, and knowledge that perennially cre-
ate, maintain, change, and also destroy them. I think our chances of
conceptualizing and describing these material worlds would be greatly
enhanced by joining opus and ratiocinatio into a continuous whole. How
this can be accomplished will of course vary, depending on the culture
or cultures in question, and on their time and space. But without the
historical perspective to see the question we will certainly be unable to
answer it.
NOTES
1. Puna: Quechua word for the highland plateaus of Peru and Bolivia.
2. This has been a perennial concern ofJohn Murra: see, in particular, his For-
maciones economicas y politicas del mundo andino (Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 1975); and his The Economic Organization of the Inca State (Green-
wich: JAI Press, 1980). See also, more recently, Peter Gose, Deathly Waters
and Hungry Mountains. Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean
Town (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Julia Meyerson, 'Tambo.
Life in an Andean Village (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Paul Tra-
wick, "The Moral Economy of Water: Equity and Antiquity in the Andean
Commons," American Anthropologist 103, no. 2 (2001): 361-79.
3. Xavier Ricard Lanata, ed., Vigencia de lo Andino en los albores del siglo XXI
(Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome de las Casas,
2005).
4. Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin, The Colonial
Andes. Tapestries and Silverwork 1530-1830 (NewYork: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2004); Kevin Healy, Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate. Multicul-
tural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 267-89, on ASUR, the weaving coop-
erative organized by Ver6nica Cereceda and Gabriel Martinez.

5. Karsteon Paerregaard, Linking Separate Worlds. Urban Migrants and Rural
Lives in Peru (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997).
6. Marco Formisano, Tecnica e scrittura: Le letterature tecnico-scientifiche nello spazio
letterario tardolatino (Rome, 2001) ; Manfred Fuhrmann, Das systematische Leh-
rbuch; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften in der Antike (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960).
7. The question as to whether household management is a techne or not is the
first to be addressed by Xenophon in the Oeconomicus.
8. Vitruvius, On Architecture, 2 vols, trans. and ed. Frank Granger (Cambridge
MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1955), I:1,18 de artis vero potestate.
9. Vitruvius On Architecture I:1,1 15.
10. For "reasoning" see the translation by Ingrid Rowland in Vitruvius, Ten
Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press 1999), I:1, 15; see also Oxford Latin Dic-
tionary s.v. "ratiocinatio."
11. Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer (Munchen: Beck, 1971 [1912),
37-38.
12. Marcus Porcius Cato, "Preface," in On Agriculture, ed. and trans. William
Davis Hooper (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1967).
13. See Silke Diederich, Rimische Argrarhandbiicher zwischen Fachwissenschaft, Lit-
eratur und Ideologie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
14. David H. Wright, The Vatican Vergil. A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 21.
15. Palladius, Opus Agriculturae. De veterinaria medicina. De Insitione, ed. R. H.
Rodgers (Teubner 1975), I:1 neque enim formator agricolaque debert arti-
bus et eloquentiae rhetoris aemulari, quod a plerisque factum est, qui dum
diserte locuntur rusticis, adsecuti sunt ut eorum doctrina nec a dissertissi-
mis possit intellegi.
16. Palladius Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus, Obra de Agricultura. Traducida y comen-
tada en 1385 por Ferrer Sayol, ed. Thomas M. Capuano (Madison, WI: His-
panic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990).
17. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cronica y buen gobierno, 3 vols., ed.J. V.
Murra, Rolena Adorno, and J. Urioste (Madrid Historia 16, 1987), I:235-59;
111:1130-1167 (of Guaman Poma's numeration).
18. Sabine MacCormack, "Time, Space and Ritual Action: The Inka and Chris-
tian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru," in Native Traditions in the Postcon-
quest World, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins (Dumbarton Oaks
1998), 295-343.
19. See Laura Lee Downs, "Toward an Epistemology of Skill," in Manufacturing
Inequality. Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries,
1914-1939 (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1995), 79-118.

SIX
The History of Facebook
Daniel Miller
In the introduction to this volume, Peter N. Miller eloquently argues for
three things: a respect for the culture of the hand, a respect for material
culture, and a respect for cultural history. To contribute a chapter about
a woman using Facebook in Trinidad1 looks, at first, like some absurd
misunderstanding that has gone topsy-turvy into the diametric opposite
direction. In fact, however, the intention of this chapter is to be entirely
supportive of the larger project. Because it seems of considerable impor-
tance to argue that these points are as important today with regard to
contemporary culture as they ever were, and there are few things more
emblematic of contemporary culture than Facebook.
In order to make that point, I would have to suggest that, contrary to
what seems intuitively obvious-to regard Facebook as anything but the
culture of the hand, or something that is material or historical-actually,
Facebook is an entirely appropriate example of all three. Furthermore,
there is a good deal at stake in this insistence. Recently, I contributed an
essay to accompany a new exhibition cosponsored by the Victoria and
Albert Museum and the British Craft Council called The Power of Making.
It was a celebration of the material culture of the hand, but the objects
that displayed were quite eclectic. They included ancient crafts such as
stonewalling and leather working, as well as highly contemporary objects
such as 3D printers, sculpture made from coat hangers, and dresses fab-
ricated from cassette tape.
In my essay "The Power of Making," I argue that this exhibition lies
in the core trajectory of the foundation of the V&A, which was originally
81
called the Museum of Manufactures.2 The intention was always to find
a route between art and industry that avoided reduction to either. This
also meant that the V&A would embrace the popular worlds of fashion,
house ornaments, and hairdressing. One reason for retaining this path
is that it celebrates the power of making as something in which everyone
can participate; it resists the restriction of craft to elites or those desig-
nated as artists.
On what grounds can we defend the inclusion of Facebook as exem-
plary of these more hallowed traditions? Several of the objects in The
Power of Making, including the aforementioned 3D printer, have been
made with the aid of digital technologies. Given the rise of computer-
aided design, it would actually be absurd to try and separate out design
that was mediated by digital forms from all others. The digital is an in-
tegral part of the design world. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that
this has led to an extraordinary democratization of creative work. Where
previously the general public had been a relatively passive audience with
regard to media, today almost everyone is involved in crafting websites,
or YouTube videos, or iPod playlists. I use the word "craft" deliberately.
These are things that are done well or done badly as attested to by our
peers, and can command considerable skill and aesthetic imagination
developed over years. In practice, the work of the hand always meant the
work of the mind realized by the hand, and this remains true of digitally
mediated communication.
We have got it equally wrong with the question of materiality. Most
people take it for granted that the rise of digital technologies represents
the demise materiality itself. Instead of physical books and CDs, we have
a merely ephemeral or vestigial culture. But in a recent introduction to
a book on digital anthropology, I have argued along with Heather Horst
that an insistence on the materiality of the digital should be one of the
six foundational principles of this subdiscipline.3 Christopher Kelty's de-
tailed account of the development of open source clearly illustrates how
the ideal of freely creating new forms of code was constantly stymied
by the materiality of code itself, since one line of development quickly
becomes incompatible with another.4 Matthew Kirschenbaum points out
the huge gulf between metatheorists-who think of the digital as a new
kind of ephemerality-and practitioners of computer forensics, whose
job it is to extract data from old or broken hard discs, and who rely on
the fact that it is actually quite difficult to physically erase digital informa-
tion. As he notes, "computers are unique in the history of writing tech-

The History of Facebook 83
nologies in that they present a premeditated material environment built
and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality."5
The study of cultural history generally implies a notion of depth in
time-either events or processes unfolding over some substantial pe-
riod. In this piece, I want to speculate about a different kind of cultural
history-where something that is more-or-less contemporary, existing
for a mere six years, can be considered an historical artifact. Given this
shallow depth of time, the temptation is to concentrate only on this
object as a new invention. The highly successful film The Social Network
played to this assumption by focusing upon the personality of Mark
Zuckerberg. By contrast, the kind of material culture fostered within an-
thropology would recognize that Facebook was just one of many such
social-networking sites-including MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster-
that might have become dominant, and were developed in quite differ-
ent circumstances, and that to understand the site in terms of cultural
history we need to turn from its inventor to its users. The success of these
sites connects to much bigger forces concerned with the reemergence
of forms of social relation that have been threatened by other aspects
of modernity. I argue elsewhere that it is conservatism, rather than any-
thing unprecedented, that accounts for Facebook's success.6 But in our
particular context, thinking about Facebook forces us to reexamine our
sense of the possible relationship between time and the historical arti-
fact.
For this reason, I am presenting Facebook from an entirely differ-
ent perspective, in which Mark Zuckerberg does not appear except as a
peripheral figure. Instead, I consider Facebook as an historical artifact
from the perspective of a single user-a young woman named Nicole,
who lives in Trinidad, and who is featured in my book Tales from Facebook.
I have called her "The History Woman of Facebook," to reveal how a
cultural artifact that is merely six years old may, nevertheless, be seen as
historically and culturally significant.
It seems crazy to think of Facebook as some dusty archive, yet for
Nicole, the Facebook she knew is already history. She talks wistfully, in
a spirit of pure nostalgia, about someone named "Mark." Of course the
"Mark" she refers to with such familiarity is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder
of Facebook. Nicole has never met him, but she speaks with heartfelt en-
thusiasm about their time together. In 2004, Nicole was studying in the
United States at one of the first colleges where Facebook became popu-
lar after its initial release from Harvard. Rather than being outwardly
focused, it initially reinforced Nicole's intimate small college experience
where everyone knew one other. Facebook was used to organize parties,
meet for dinner, and exchange news. Nicole associated it with the enjoy-
ment of her time as an undergraduate. This created an intense conser-
vatism with respect to Facebook. She desperately hoped that Mark would
not release his invention beyond the college environment, and that he
would not make changes to the original format. Facebook was something
she felt she owned, and that Mark in turn owed something to her and
her fellow pioneers. She clearly relishes the time when, in Trinidad, she
could look down on the MySpace brigades who simply did not know what
she was talking about. She returned as John the Baptist-denounced
such false prophets, and gave hints that the social-networking messiah
had come down to earth and would eventually be revealed (though only
to university students).
She still retains a level of scorn for the newbies of social network-
ing. People today do not use Facebook-they defile it. She cannot bear
to hear mention of games such as Mafia Wars. Her original Facebook
friends all wanted to fly off when their fledgling swan turned into such
an ugly duck. But, as she puts it, by that time, "We were so frigging ad-
dicted to Facebook, we were not going to get off it, so that's that." Far
from it-she reckons that, until her child was born, she was on Face-
book for only half her waking hours. It could have been more. It is still
very rare that, on waking up, she reaches for her toothbrush before her
keyboard. The problem is that Facebook is just too close to friendship.
The more you put up, the more friends will comment. The more they
comment, the more you feel you have to comment on them. You cannot
withdraw without causing slight and offence. Over the years, they have
given you so much comment and concern that you cannot just fold your
cards when they are still up for the game.
Recently though, she has started to become uncomfortable with this
ratcheting up of Facebook's place in people's lives to the extent that you
have not been to a restaurant unless you have posted that you have been
there. "The Twitter effect," as she calls it. For example, her friend Na-
feisha was over the other day and had pulled some songs from a mutual
friend's iTunes over the wireless connection. An hour later, she notes
that Nafeisha has posted that she was "cooking up some tunes from the
razorshop." And Nicole was thinking, cooking up what tunes? All she did
was download some songs from a friend's hard drive. But then, for other
people, this was "cooking up some tunes in the razorshop." Today, on
Facebook, an individual must present oneself as a kind of cool-sounding,

popular person to whom other people will respond. The temptation is to
dismiss all this as some kind of mask or artifice that makes us more super-
ficial. But Nicole knows both Facebook and people too well to be dismis-
sive. She knows that Nafeisha would be doing much the same thing with
or without Facebook. When did you ever see Nafeisha not doing every-
thing in her power to look cool and sexy? Not only that, but you could
spend all day crafting these postings intended to make yourself seductive
and powerful, and still end up being seen by your peers as a pretentious
fool. Given how easy it is to get things wrong, it was perhaps not such a
bad way of being judged-cheaper than a new pair of shoes, and more
authentic as a reflection of a person's labor and ability. Nicole sees all
this, but still cannot help feeling that these games and performances
have diminished Facebook itself. She still stalks her putative boyfriends'
ex-girlfriends on Facebook, but even this feels wrong, not because it is
stalking, but because in the "old days" people put up really interesting
stuff about their likes and dislikes on the information page and now it is
as though they cannot be bothered. So when she finally did reduce her
commitment to Facebook, it is not certain that the birth of her son was
entirely the cause.
Nor is it as if Facebook just had two phases: the pioneer phase, and
the present. It continually changes, producing a succession of these be-
trayals of her commitment. Earlier on, "We clamoured and shook our
fists at Mark for cheapening our elitist little circle." More recently, Nicole
got into groups. She liked the way these might be scattered across the
world: they brought all sorts of people together in a small virtual commu-
nity. She would check out her groups every day. Her favorite was a group
called "I stay up late and I don't do anything productive." She thought
much of it was hilarious. But then someone hacked into it, and started
posting racist and anti-Semitic material. Then gradually, people seemed
to lose their commitment to groups in general, just when she felt they
had become more worthwhile, not less. In this case, she could not blame
Mark; it was the users who were fickle.
Although she spends so much time complaining about these changes,
Nicole can still be an "early adopter" for developments she actually quite
likes. She quickly took to window-shopping, if not actual shopping, on
Facebook. Her favorite clothing store is a Facebook site that only adver-
tises its stock online. She browses it regularly, and if she had the money
she would buy from there. But with an infant to look after, this is out of
the question. Still, whenever you see her, she can tell you what items she
would buy if she could. Currently, it is a white corset top.

Nicole knew that she could easily become a Facebook history bore.
No one was too interested in the old days, in the black-and-white snap-
shots of Facebook's time as a toddler network way back in 2004. But Ni-
cole's historical relationship to Facebook took a perhaps even less ex-
pected turn. She really did turn it into a dusty archive. A couple of years
ago, there was a difficult personal issue when she met a guy she had had
a "thing" with some time before, and who had come back into her life.
If she was going to reenter his orbit, she had to decide for herself what
there was to learn from the earlier encounter. How much of it had been
his fault, and how much of it hers? She knew that now she was a different
person, which is what made it so difficult to determine. So she turned
to Facebook. She patiently trawled backwards, turned the pages one by
one, retracing every conversation and posting that documented this re-
lationship all those years ago so that she could once reappraise what had
been, and determine whether it was sensible to reengage with him in the
present. This was a pretty laborious procedure, even when she isolated
wall-to-wall postings. On the other hand, there was an unexpected divi-
dend. What she unearthed was extremely funny. She felt she had been
hilarious in those days, as was he. In response, she carefully copied all
the best bits, "all those insane stupid things," from 2004 onward, and put
them into a paper "novelty book" she could keep as a memory of who
she had once been, and what she had been capable of in those times.
Nicole found other ways to deepen Facebook's relationship to the past
well beyond its own relative youth. She used Facebook to get in touch
with friends as far back as primary school-a formative time, full of sharp
memories. As it happens, her parents had always been into recording
and photographing and making films, so she has many pictures of those
years. From these, she had created an album, posted it on Facebook, and
tagged pretty much everyone that she remembered from school. There
was a huge reaction. Everyone was pleasantly shocked: "they were all 'Oh
My God, where did you get those pictures,' blah blah blah." After that,
they really started to reestablish contact in a more intimate, serious kind
of way. It was essentially a new set of friendships-based not on com-
mon experiences in the present, but on a shared past. It has produced a
broader range of friendships than her contemporary circle in Trinidad.
Nor have these remained solely online. There were invites to weddings
she otherwise would definitely not have received.
Facebook transformed itself for her once more, when she fell in love.
Indeed, it made her realize just how closely intertwined the very experi-
ence of love itself can be with Facebook. Ever since college, Facebook
had played a role in her various relationships. Students had seen it al-
most instantly as a helpful buffer against awkward or embarrassing situa-
tions. You did not really know whether you wanted to go out for a drink
with this guy, but in those days adding someone to Facebook felt natural,
a noncommittal mutual agreement to check each other out.
I know someone for a while. So I speak to them. I saw them. I hadn't
seen them in a while. I saw them at the gym. They said "Oh, add me
to Facebook." We were talking about this charity thing. "So no prob-
lem. I will add you" And so "oh your pics are amazing, do you want to
go out for a drink" and this is on Facebook.
She was not one of those who approved of couples quarrelling pub-
licly online; that was kind of horrible. Instead, she would put up a post-
ing consisting of a song lyric about how she was feeling, but indirectly, so
that no one else would be able to interpret it. For example, she posted
the lyrics from a band called Paramour, "I put my faith in you. So much
faith in you. But youjust threw it away." At the time, she was annoyed with
her boyfriend because she wanted him to go to a party, but not drink too
much. But he drank just as much anyway. He recognized the import of
the lyric, but no one else did. Why she needed the public domain of
Facebook to do this was less clear. She concludes that it must have been
cathartic, like writing a poem, but not using her own words. But then ca-
thartic is the term she uses to explain Facebook postings more generally,
none of which prepared her for the role that Facebook would eventually
play in her falling in love.
She had known this guy forever. He was friends with her friends, and
moved on the periphery of her circles. There had been plenty of face-to-
face encounters, but always shallow ones, since she had come to a very
early conclusion that he was pompous. And that was the problem. Once
you decide, even as a teenager, to label a guy, then everything about him
gets sort of filtered through these categories, and you never have a rea-
son to go beyond that. He almost certainly would have just stayed on the
periphery. But when she expanded her Facebook friends, he naturally
became a presence there, and, equally naturally, when she is bored she
tends to maco even the more distant Facebook friends.
And then I realized this guy had a lot of stuff in common with me.
So just one day I think I asked him if he went to see Ironman and
we started to talk about comic books and stuff. From there on and
after that we started chatting all the time. [What other things did you
find you had in common with him?] Um, taste in movies, um type
of music uh, I think that was probably it. The movies and ... oh and
video games.
Typically, in Trinidad, people do not use Facebook as a key medium
for more intimate courting. Things tend to migrate to a combination of
texting and speaking by phone, as happened in this instance. But that
does not mean that once it has shown people how much their tastes and
opinions are aligned, and has brought them together, Facebook then
fades out of the picture. Facebook has also become one of the most im-
portant expressions of her boyfriend's love for her. Nicole had never
considered herself pretty, and for that reason tended to hate it when
people took photos of her and posted them. But he has now taken some
400 photos of her, and tagged every one of them across Facebook. At
first, as someone who almost entirely avoided public photographs, she
was horrified. But she recognized this is an act of love; a love that is
proud of itself, and proud of this wonderful creature that is its object.
An act brimming with confidence that the whole world should see who
it is he loves. Nicole also knows that this requires her to believe that he
really does think she is pretty. And this confirmation that someone can
see such beauty in her has started to change her own idea of what she
looks like. Of course, her mother had said things like that, about how
pretty she was, but that was just what mothers do. But her boyfriend has
done this so systematically, so publicly, through Facebook itself, that she
is almost beaten down by his truth which is now starting to become her
truth. Perhaps she is, at least, sort of pretty.
While this is, by any standard, rather an extreme case, she has noted
something parallel in the way some of her friends have become promi-
nent online. She sort of expected that it would be the extroverts who
would colonize Facebook-that the friends who were always in your face
would be in your Facebook. But she also has a circle of friends from
central Trinidad's East Indian community. Several of them were very shy,
completely immersed within conservative family life-traditional and de-
mure. Their parents tended to send them to the Presbyterian or convent
schools-even though they were Hindus or Muslims-schools that main-
tained traditional values with respect to deportment and how women
should behave in public. What Nicole finds curious is that, although sev-
eral of these friends remain shy and retiring when you meet them, not
just in front of men, but even with girlfriends such as Nicole, some of
these same women have been extremely active on Facebook, constantly
putting up material, nothing brazen or shocking, not acts of rebellion,
but still extensive personal information, opinions, and commentary that
give vastly more insight into what they are thinking (often quite surpris-
ing thoughts) than you would have ever encountered otherwise. On
Facebook, they are not extroverted in the sense of performing or being
silly, but they are easily a more dominant presence in Facebook than the
extroverts from their real lives.
If those friends were posting more, then Nicole was posting a whole
lot less than had ever been the case since that memorable year when
her peer group had played midwife to the newly born Facebook. The
problem was her own newly born baby. It wasn't just that she had less
time to post; it was that she had less to post about. She knew that oth-
ers had the diametrically opposite experience. She had friends who had
barely posted in their Facebook lives, but, once they had a child, it was
as though the entire world needed to know every single thing that baby
did. If they could have broadcast the baby burping on Facebook, they
probably would have. She had honestly not known whether she would
become that kind of Facebook mother, but rather hoped she would not.
She knew that this would not be under her control, that you never can
tell what kind of mother you will turn out to be. If anything, things had
gone in the other direction. At first, she thought she had some version
of postnatal depression. As time passed, she rationalized her response to
childbirth rather differently. She had always thought that babies were ex-
tremely boring. You just put stuff into them and cleared up the stuff that
came out of them. It took a year or two before they had much personal-
ity. She had always felt this, but assumed that, as a mother, she would
inevitably react differently to her own infant-but she had not. The fact
that she found this stage pretty tedious did not mean she was less likely
to bond fully with the personality this baby would no doubt develop over
time. Instead, she was quite happy that being a mother did not leave her
bereft of the powers of reason and observation that had always made her
a top-notch student. She did not feel she would be any less emotional or
less in love with her children in the long term. It was just that she was not
particularly attached to changing diapers and being woken up several
times a night.
If she was bored by what babies did in their first few months, there
seemed no reason to bore the rest of the world with intimate details of
babyhood. But there was a wider problem. It was notjust that mothering
was boring. Life in general was inevitably less interesting. A year earlier,
when she was out partying, liming, and going to the beach, she would
post constantly because there was much to post about. She had become
one of those "I just did this"/"I am home now" people on Facebook,
keeping everyone updated on every detail. Life had been fun and worth
sharing, so if she was not posting now, it was largely because it no longer
was.
But that had complicated consequences she had not really thought
through in advance; Facebook was so much part of her previous life, and
remained so much part of the life of her friends who did not have babies.
What was the impact of Facebook on this divergence between her and
her friends? Did it compound the problem? Not only unable to partici-
pate in their offline life, she was now unable to participate in the equally
vibrant and important online life. Where Facebook might have compen-
sated, was it now just too-evident testimony to what she no longer was?
Although she had far fewer postings of her own, she had more time than
ever to spend looking at all her friends' postings.
There is a bittersweet tinge to this activity. Facebook keeps her up-to-
date with her friends. They remain part of her everyday life, as before.
This was a huge part of what Facebook could do for you. On the other
hand, it constantly reminded her of what she was not doing, could not
be doing, and would have just loved to have been doing with them-
the limes she is not taking part in, the parties she cannot go to. This
has become a critical test of her relationship to Facebook. While her
friends' style of posting has remained the same, these take on a com-
pletely new significance for her because of her changed circumstances.
She has turned into a mother, and she cannot entirely fathom what is
happening. She did not have a child in the pre-Facebook era, so she is
unable to compare the two experiences. Overall, she thinks that, for all
the pangs of missing out, Facebook has the benign effect of making her
feel she has not completely lost touch. When the time comes, it will be
much easier to rejoin that world, though that might not be true for oth-
ers. She recognizes that she is probably more self-conscious about this
than her peers. She remains hugely interested in Facebook, and notjust
in its impact on her life. She also sees her life as a kind of documentary
about Facebook-what it is, and what it is constantly becoming.
Nicole is Facebook's history woman. For each phase of her life, she
has had a completely different Facebook. There was the original identi-
fication with the Mark Zuckerberg enterprise. Then came the Facebook
that found her love and changed her image of herself. Later, there were
the compromises with Facebook as she became a mother. But if each

phase has seen Facebook expressing a different woman with different
concerns and needs, then Nicole's experiences have also revealed the
degree to which, within a few years of its invention, Facebook itself has a
significant history.
I hope that this substantive case fully confirms the assertions made
in my introduction to this paper: that Facebook can be regarded as en-
tirely eligible for a consideration of the culture of the hand, of material,
and of cultural, history. As in all craft work, we see a constant tension
between the creative aspirations of the user and the material constrains
imposed by the structure that is dictated by Facebook as a company. But,
as I would argue is the case of all true craft, there is a clear sense that
the struggle with these constraints and the subsequent retained engage-
ment with this creative process is what crafts the person, as well as their
visual expression, on Facebook itself. We have every reason to respect
this culture of the hand, the material, and the actually quite deep sense
of history that already pertains to this particular craft. Its advantage as an
example is that it ensures that the wider points made by this volume are
as relevant for our understanding of contemporary material culture as
for the past and for the entire population, not merely a fragment.
NOTES
1. The substantive section is taken from Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 136-44.
2. Daniel Miller, "The Power of Making," in Power of Making, ed. Daniel Charny
(London: V&A Publishing and the Crafts Council), 14-27.
3. Daniel Miller and Heather Horst, "The Digital and the Human," in Digital
Anthropology, ed. Heather Horst and Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2012).
4. Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
5. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 135.
6. See Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook.

SEVEN
Dirty, Pretty Things:
On Archaeology and
Prehistoric Materialities
Lynn Meskell
Looking over the exciting new initiatives and publications devoted
to objects of late, a central question remains unanswered for me: why
has archaeology-the study of the human past through its material
remains-been largely omitted from a new canon of materiality studies?
In this new wave of writing you are more likely to find literary theorists,
geographers, anthropologists, historians, and even classicists discussing
the constitution of the object world and our human engagement with
things, instead of archaeologists. This situation extends beyond a simple
statement on the disciplinary standing of archaeology, the misplaced
anxiety that theory in archaeology is derivative or weakly applied, or
the now-outdated position that the past is generally irrelevant to con-
temporary issues. I would suggest that the omission of an archaeological
contribution is more revealing about a broader scholarly reticence to
engage with the messiness of things, their fundamental embeddedness,
and their myriad historical residues and entanglements.
Currently, ruminations on the object are squarely focused on free-
standing things-those unencumbered by complicated contexts and
other substances. One need only think of some idiosyncratic case studies
in The Object Reader: a rock, a pixel, a tricycle, a surfboard, a snow shaker,
etc.1 And this selectivity frees us to imagine the multiple meanings that
radiate out from the object rather than the materials, subjects, things,
and settings that coproduce it. The object in and of itself then is mani-
fest as a salient set of representations and significations: it is the locus
of histories, politics, personalities, and so on, that can be read off the
92
Dirty, Pretty Things 93
artifact.2 From this centripetal perspective the chosen thing resides at
the center-it has primacy and is elevated to a new status, whereas its co-
products and the matrices in which it is embedded are rendered second-
ary and supplemental. One example of this way of thinking is evinced
by the popular theme of object biographies or the afterlives of objects
beyond their initial crafting.' We make things-not just at the moment
of creation, but over and over we layer histories of meaning onto objects.
These dense genealogies can be traced and unpacked. Another strand
of scholarship is that is that things make us-best highlighted by the
anthropological concern with the project of self-making through things,
explorations of identity, and constitutive material culture.4 Other pro-
ductive directions have, following Mauss,' successfully reimagined object
agency further diluting the subject/object (or maker/made) bifurca-
tion.' In some of these domains, archaeological evidence has been con-
vincingly brought into play, however, most often this has been achieved
with visually evocative, complex, historical data.
So I return to my opening question: why does archaeology not pro-
vide the stuff of materiality for a broader audience? Have we fallen short
in our intellectual contribution, or have we actually succeeded in de-
mystifying our objects so completely as to render them mundane? One
thought is that archaeology is simply too gritty-that its focus on expos-
ing contexts and spatiotemporal matrices, upon the material networks
that surround objects, its literal and metaphorical embeddedness-is
overwhelming. Contemporary archaeology has moved away from a
purely, or purist, object-oriented approach, and concerns itself with
multiple associations, layerings, scalar analyses, and specializations. For
example, my own work on Neolithic figurines-once the domain of ar-
tistic descriptions and quasi-religious projections-is situated within a
diachronic spatial analysis, clay sourcing, and manufacture, and simi-
larly involves ascertaining the volumes of midden deposits, comparisons
with the percentages of species in faunal assemblages, considerations of
human body shape from isotopic data extracted from human bone, and
so on. In archaeology, such chains of evidence and associations build a
greater richness and understanding of things, but in doing so perhaps
things lose their boundedness, their discrete qualities, and what makes
them special or separate.
I see a great romance developing around things of late. Candlin and
Guins epitomize the captivation and mystification people experience
around all manner of objects such as "gifts, money, gadgets, toys, blan-
kets, string, dildos, bird's nests, baskets," and so on.7 Emotions and ac-
tions encircle these items, binding us to them, and their myriad social
meanings are unpacked by a now-familiar set of luminaries including
Mauss, Simmel, Barthes, Winnicott, Heidegger, and Latour. The London
School of Material Culture has also made enormous strides in taking
things seriously-specifically, the abundant stuff of modern life, in its
banality and glory.8 They take materiality as a set of cultural relationships
that explore the constitution of the object world and its concomitant
shaping of human experience. Significantly, many prominent scholars
of material culture were initially trained as archaeologists, but have lat-
terly come to eschew the discipline. Daniel Miller suggests that until now,
there was "no academic discipline whose specific area of study would be
artefacts, the object world created by humanity."9 Archaeology seems eas-
ily elided from this revisionism. In Miller's recent account, the entire dis-
cipline of archaeology is cast as a parody of exoticism, lost civilizations,
drunken expeditions coupled with an over-weaning love of pottery. His
recent books present microethnographies of individual attachments to
things, the centrality of stuff within modern life, and they also exem-
plify the scholarly turn to the social life of things and our own entangle-
ments.10 This is the very reason I began my own book on archaeological
materiality with the qualification that this was not a book about coffee
mugs, madeleines, wedding rings, or art works by Duchamp." Archae-
ologists can offer different perspectives from the vantage of analyzing
materials, contexts and associations-which is not to say better, but sim-
ply different, and it is a perspective that has some time depth of its own.12
The process of archaeology, both in its methodology and interpre-
tation, reminds us of Hegel's discussion of the associative qualities of
thinghood, but perhaps even more like Webb Keane's description of
bundling. Archaeologists must necessarily operate within the framework
of the assemblage, and we have the techniques to traverse archaeologi-
cal science, materials analysis, and social theory. Ian Hodder argues
that prior materiality studies simply focus on evocative things or object
agency rather than probing the actual constitution of things, how people
are entrapped by their material surroundings, trapped into maintaining
them as they falter, fail, decay, and so on. He argues that most archaeo-
logical and anthropological accounts of materiality, material agency, or
material cognition remain firmly human centered. From his experience
working at Catalh5yiik he inverts this dominant view, suggesting instead
that artifacts entrap people in long-term relationships of material invest-
ment, care, and maintenance so that, in fact, people became entangled
and domesticated by things.13 The examples he draws from Neolithic
Catalh5yiik (ca. 7400-6000 BC) are as diverse as clay sourcing and brick
making, early domestication of cereals, the development of pottery for
cooking and the types of food that this afforded, and so on. An archaeo-
logical sensibility thus offers a certain methodological fetishism, to echo
Appadurai." It requires following the things themselves, starting from
their constitution, rather than their significations. This is a point empha-
sized by Bill Brown, when he underlines the dominance of fetishizations
of the subject, the image, and the word.15
I turn here to Hegel because, despite his lack of scientific grounding,
he was one of the earliest thinkers to capture the multiplicity of the ob-
ject, embedded within relational fields, and for his focus on composition
as well as sensuousness. For Hegel, the object was a "thing with many
properties," what he termed the mediated universal or thinghood.16
Firmly situated in the here and now, thinghood constitutes a simple to-
getherness of a plurality, grounded in a material sensuousness. Hegel's
famous example-and one I use often-is that of salt, and he unpacks
this substance in a highly archaeological fashion. While salt, as a thing,
is very present in material form it is, at the same time, manifold. It is si-
multaneously white, tart, and it is also cubical in shape: salt has a specific
gravity, texture, and so on. Hegel's list of also's builds, and is cumulative,
rather than reductive. Indeed, all these qualities or aspects of the thing
are copresent: they are here, they interpenetrate, and none has a dif-
ferent "here" or presence than the other quality. Each and everywhere
these aspects remain the same, united in the materiality of the thing,
rather than being separate. In 1807, Hegel did not recognize that the
chemical properties of substances might indeed have effects on a sub-
stance's shape, color, or gravity, but I do not believe this detracts from
his fundamental ideas about copresence. All those "heres," as Hegel
explains, do not affect each other in their interpenetration: whiteness
does not affect cubical shape, nor does it affect the tart taste. Diverse at-
tributes are thus held together, or fused, by the medium of thinghood.17
Keane's notion of bundling also rests on the recognition of copresence,
and that the necessary attribute is that embodiment that inescapably
binds object qualities.18 Both these perspectives seem to me very archeo-
logical in their approach, and offer us productive ways forward.
Prehistoric Materialities: Unearthing (Catah6yiik
What would a prehistoric materiality look like? If we take materiality
to be the underlying philosophy of the material world that is operative
in a particular cultural context, how would prehistory be different, if

at all, from historic and contemporary settings? Moreover, what might
it mean methodologically to examine materiality in deep prehistory?
When there is no textuality, no leverage from written evidence, and no
informants, might we indeed pay closer attention to the lifeworlds of
things? We should not assume that this means less data or more license
for imagination, but that we are inclined to be more archaeological in
our approach, to reveal the layers, pay attention to the processes, trace
the circulation, and discard and the multiple lives of objects within and
across assemblages.
But is addressing prehistoric materiality more difficult, or just differ-
ent? When I decided to work at the archaeological site of Catalh5yiik in
central Turkey, several colleagues expressed a certain satisfaction that I
would now experience the difficulties of writing social archaeology in a
context without the texts, houses, tombs, and the elaborate social system
of ancient Egypt.19 Yet what Catalh5yink lacks in its written sources, it
more than makes up for in the richness of its contextual archaeology,
the range and depth of repetitive practices across the settlement, and the
complexity of retrieval of its myriad diverse evidentiary sources from the
intensely micro to macro scales.20 Social anthropologists working at the
site like Webb Keane admit that they were drawn to this project because
of the "fascinating evidentiary problems posed by archaeological work.
In Catalh5yink, the materials seem both rich and recalcitrant. It has been
surprising to me." Keane goes on to state that it has been, nonetheless,
"surprising to see how sophisticated the new technologies in archaeol-
ogy have become."21
Catalh5yiik was identified by archaeologist James Mellaart in the
1950s, and became famous through his popular and scholarly publica-
tions from the 1960s excavations.22 The site became known for its distinc-
tive architecture, art and symbolism through Mellaart's evocative visual
reconstructions and narratives. New excavations at Catalh5ynk directed
by Ian Hodder began in 1993, and have challenged many of the sensa-
tional claims and associations marshaled previously.23 However, the site
still remains associated with controversial narratives of prehistoric matri-
archy and mother-goddess worship.24 Those ideas were forged around
the discovery of clay and stone figurines from the site-specifically, cor-
pulent female forms. Significantly, it is the zoomorphic figurines that
predominate in the figurine assemblage rather than the anthropomor-
phic, and certainly more than any identifiable female examples. Because
of that centrality and ubiquity, I want to think more carefully about the
materiality of animal figurines.

1 _1
7 ;A
Fig. 1. The Neolithic site of Qatalhoynk, 4040 Area. (Photo courtesy of
the Catalhoynk Project, Stanford University.)
Consider the six cattle figurines made of unfired clay that fell apart
as soon as they are removed from their 9,000-year-old matrix of earth
and domestic debris. Their makers intended that each of the figurines
would represent wild cattle, yet they were hastily made and roughly
shaped-albeit with careful delineation of the tail. At Catalh6ynk, heads
and tails were deemed the most salient markers of animality across an
array of media-from wall paintings, to figurines, to installations. All
the figurines found in this one archaeological unit were broken in some
way-some were stabbed or punctured, others malformed. They were
ostensibly dumped alongside an assemblage of animal bones, potsherds,
chipped stone, organic matter, and other debris to constitute the fill for
a raised platform in the southwest corner of Building 49. At Catalh6ynk,
platforms are constructed and repeatedly plastered white, and some-
times they later become places of interment: they are built, then suc-
cessively dug down into to place the dead. Some platforms thus become
a site for human remains, but also sites of mixing with other artifacts,
animal bones, house sweepings, and debris. Therein lies a window into
the cultural history of the Neolithic material world. Its "natural" taxono-
mies between people and things, or people and animals were radically
. .y
Fig. 2. Animal figurines from Building 49. (Author's photo.)
different to our own, yet were entirely sensible and legible within the
Neolithic lifeworld.25 It was one of embeddedness, connectivity between
categories of things, blurring the living and the dead, and gritty, broken-
down things.
Building 49 is small, but was lived in for a considerable period of time
given the number of successive wall plaster applications and the number
of people buried within the house walls. Carrie Nakamura and I have
argued that this building seems to have a strong association with animals:
not just those of a representational nature like the figurines, but with liv-
ing animals. Within the building, fill excavators uncovered several cattle-
horn cores, some of which were plastered to materially emulate their
living or fleshed state, and a high proportion of sheep and goat bones.
Wild cattle were immensely significant at Catalh6ynk: they dominated
large painted murals, their skulls were plastered and painted, and their
horns were installed on benches and pillars and emerged from house
walls. The inhabitants of the settlement plastered cattle remains to re-
vivify them to their lifelike state as their heads and horns protruded from
surfaces, whether walls or floors, materially inserting their presence in
human daily affairs.
In the makeup of this particular platform in Building 49, and mixed

Fig. 3. Animal figurines with associated finds. (Author's photo.)
with the six quadruped figurines, was an unusual assemblage of small
mammals bones: at least three different species of birds, large amounts
of eggshell and fish bone, as well as equid, pig, deer, and dog bones;
small quantities of cattle bone, antler, some turtle shell; a hedgehog
bone; three juvenile sheep, and at least one perinatal sheep/goat.6
There were also concentrations of eggshell, and even three tiny caches
of whole crushed eggs in the platform fill. Taken together, we might
imagine that the occupants of the house were successfully engaged in
hunting, herding, and gathering practices, but we might equally imagine
that these material remains of animals-faunal and figural-were the
stuff of magical manipulation or ritual activities. A powerful concern for
material manipulation can be found in the figurines themselves.
Such figurines are not mere vehicles for social practices or signifi-
cations, thus we cannot dismiss them as conduits or proxies. Following
Keane, such things
can never be reduced only to the status of evidence for something
else, such as beliefs or other cognitive phenomena. As material
things, they are enmeshed in causality, registered in and induced by
their forms. As forms, they remain objects of experience. As objects,

Fig. 4. Building 77, horned pedestals around a platform. (Author's
photo.)
they persist across contexts and beyond any particular intentions and
projects. To these objects, people may respond in new ways ... These
materializations bear the marks of their temporality.27
While these quadrupeds were rather expediently made, their final
deposition might indicate a concern for rather greater longevity, sealed
within a platform and repeatedly plastered over. Despite their rapid man-
ufacture they are easily recognizable as animal forms, and their makers
emphasized the angular, fleshy forms of cattle, focusing on their torsos
and distinctive tails, instead of legs or hoofs. The clay that was used to
mold these pieces came from within 100 meters from the settlement: it
was clean, largely inclusion free, and highly malleable. It has even been
suggested that the reason for people settling at the site in the first place
was its abundant and rich clay resources.28 Recent work conducted by
Louise Martin and myself suggests that Neolithic figurine makers mod-
eled quadrupeds like deer and cattle primarily on the palm of their left
Fig. 5. Assemblage from Building 49, reassembled. (Photo courtesy of
the Catalhoynk Project, Stanford University.)
hand, evidenced by distinctive shaping marks corresponding to the palm
and fingers. Some of these examples were never completed. Others were
halted in progress and partly destroyed. Intentional puncture marks and
deformation of the figurines were practices carried out while the clay was
still plastic, and were left in that state rather than manipulated further or
"finished" in a modern sense. Cutting or piercing of figurines might also
indicate food sharing, partitioning of meat from the hunt, thus reflect-
ing decision making about animal bodies. Animal figurines, like most of
their anthropomorphic counterparts, were expediently made and inevi-
tably discarded, rather than revered in burials, placed in niches, buried
in caches, and so on, like other materials such as obsidian, ceramics, or
ground stone.29 Of the hundreds of examples of animal figurines exca-
vated from Qatalh6ynk, we can say that, after a complete spatial analysis,
they were primarily found in middens and building fills, representing
secondary deposition. It was the act of making that was significant, rather
than some notion of a final product, since these figural objects were not
fired like pottery and may never have been intended to endure.
The activities associated with Building 49 might appear to have been
highly ritualized to modern eyes, yet it is important to remember that
they form part of a suite of repetitive practices we see across the site
for over a millennium, suggesting that figural practices were not radi-
cally set apart from everyday life. Given the many of hundreds of animal
forms that we have uncovered, it is likely that figurine making was part of
quotidian activities and constituted the everyday Neolithic materialities.

Fig. 6. Zoomorphic figurine, cut on the left side (identified by Louise
Martin, 2010). (Photo courtesy of the Catalh6ynik Project, Stanford
University.)
Representing and engaging with animals occupied a central role in the
Catalh6ynk lifeworld and extended to social, economic, historical, and
spiritual realms. But we can go further than this by using archaeological
techniques to comment upon species specificity in particular arenas of
social life. Employing the results of faunal analysis we can determine
what type of animals were salient in different contexts, whether repre-
sentational spheres, or in actual domestic consumption. Our evidence
in fact demonstrates that wild cattle, like those represented by our six
figurines, make up 54 percent of all faunal remains placed in installa-
tions and special deposits at the site. Wild cattle also dominate in the
animal wall reliefs (46 percent), but surprisingly only constitute 15 per-
cent of the animal remains that were consumed on site. So while they
were highly prized in symbolic materializations, they comprised only a
small proportion of the Neolithic diet. Contrast this with domesticated
sheep, which make up 56 percent of the site's faunal remains, and thus
the bulk of meat consumption for the people of Qatalh6ynk. Yet as living
animals, domesticated sheep were not considered symbolically salient in

Fig. 7. Plastered horns and bucranium from Building 52. (Author's
photo.)
the elaboration of village houses. They only feature in 19 percent of the
wall reliefs, and 13 percent of installations and deposits.30 Tacking back
and forth between objects and related data sets allows us some vantage
on Neolithic thinking about materializing certain categories of things-
wild cattle versus domestic sheep, clay versus plaster and paint.
The materials and properties just described characteristically form
clusters with other phenomena, and thus are historical in character.31
Animal imagery and figurines, the fascination with wild cattle, and the
installation of plastered faunal elements, also shares a dense web of con-
nections with anthropomorphic figurines, headless figurines, human
skull removal and plastering, and other objects of material culture. These
associations continue with considerable resilience over the centuries in
domestic buildings, which were themselves repeatedly constructed one
upon the other. At Qatalh6ynk, I have suggested that the greatest paral-
lels occur between humans and cattle in material traditions, since they
occupy the most attention, are both shaped, modeled, painted, in both
two- and three-dimensional media.32 I have previously shown that an

Fig. 8. Face pot combining human and cattle heads. (Photo courtesy of
the Catalhoynik Project, Stanford University.)
evocative materialization of this conceptual assemblage is encapsulated
in one remarkable ceramic vessel. Inscribed on the surface, molded,
and incised, human and cattle heads mutually constitute each other:
the horns of the bull form the eyebrows of the human faces, while the
human ears can also form those of the bull when the vessel is turned. In
the past, archaeologists would have once typically classified this object as
pottery, and considered this distinct from the taxonomies of figurines,
plastered bucranium and faunal remains, human representations, and
so on. Paying attention to prehistoric materiality, to the constitution of
the Neolithic lifeworld, and tracing these material instantiations in fact
sutures together objects and philosophies that might otherwise be per-
ceived as separate.
Through this brief contribution I hope to have sketched some po-
tentials inhering in the study of prehistoric materiality. By attending to
things, by following them in an archaeological sense, the discipline of
archaeology offers a different vantage on material histories and culture.
For example, understanding the priorities of figurine makers enables an
insight into indigenous taxonomies that transcend those that we mod-
erns consider "natural."33 While the material groundedness or embed-
dedness of things is central, so too is the very process of crafting the
thing. In terms of figurines, their making and manipulating was an ev-
eryday performance that was as salient, if not more so, than the creation
of end products. Indeed, it is difficult to trace exactly when the efficacy
of some objects ceased for the inhabitants of Qatalh6ynk. The group of
animal figurines deposited under the platform in Building 49 may be
exemplars of an extended object efficacy that continued even after their

final deposition or discard. While scholars cannot always determine a
priori the precise meaning or salience of things for individuals-whether
in the deep past, or even in contemporary settings-in the case of eat-
alh6yik, we can stitch together some strands of Neolithic practice, pre-
occupation, and preference. The complexity of archaeological contexts
like Catalh6yiik reveals rich potentials for multilayered constitutions
of the material world. Uncovering prehistoric materialities may indeed
be different from art historical, anthropological, or cultural studies ap-
proaches to things, but they are no less theorized or sophisticated. We
simply draw upon different bodies of evidence, interpolating a relational
approach to things with the acknowledgement that our objects and sub-
stances are contextually embedded. That perspective, I would argue, has
much to offer our current studies of materiality by seeking to go beyond
individual things and more fully understand cultural histories of the ma-
terial world.
NOTES
1. F. Candlin and R. Guins, eds., The Object Reader (New York: Routledge,
2009).
2. J. Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996).
3. C. Caple, Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past (London: Routledge, 2006);
C. Gosden and Y. Marshall, "The Cultural Biography of Objects," World
Archaeology: The Cultural Biography of Objects 31 (1999): 169-78; J. Hoskins,
Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives (London and
New York: Routledge, 1998); N. Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Mate-
rial Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991); S. Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007).
4. T. Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Clean-
liness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996);
Hoskins, Biographical Objects; D. Miller, A Theory of Shopping (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1998); D. Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things
Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); D. Miller, The Dialectics
of Shopping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
5. M. Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1990); M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London:
Routledge, 2001).
6. A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998); C. Gosden, "What Do Objects Want?" Journal of Archaeological
Method and Theory 12 (2005): 193-211; L. M. Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient
Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present (London: Berg, 2004); L. M.
Meskell, "Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer Than They Are," in Material-
ity, ed. D. Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); D. Miller, ed.,
Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); P. Pels, "The Spirit
of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy," in Border Fetishisms: Material
Objects in Unstable Places, ed. P. Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91-121.
7. Candlin and Guins, The Object Reader, 1.
8. D. Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); D. Miller, Stuff
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
9. Miller, Stuff, 2.
10. T. Ingold, "Materials against Materiality," Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007):
1-16; T. Ingold, "Writing Texts, Reading Materials: A Response to My Crit-
ics," Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 31-38.
11. Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt.
12. Ingold, "Writing Texts, Reading Materials."
13. I. Hodder, "Human-Thing Entanglement: Towards an Integrated Archaeo-
logical Perspective," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2010).
14. A. 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.
15. B. Brown, "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1-22.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 68.
17. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 69.
18. W. Keane, "Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things," Language
and Communication 23 (2003): 414.
19. L. M. Meskell, Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class, Etc., in Ancient Egypt
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); L. M. Meskell, Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
20. I. Hodder, ed., Changing Materialities at (atalhoyiik: Reports from the 1995-
99 Seasons (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
2005) ; I. Hodder, ed., Inhabiting (atalhoyiik: Reports from the 1995-1999 Sea-
sons (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2005);
I. Hodder, The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of (atalhoyiik (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2006).
21. Quoted in I. Hodder, "Conclusions and Evaluation," in Religion in the Emer-
gence of Civilization: (atalhyik as a Case Study, ed. I. Hodder (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 350.
22. J. Mellaart, "Excavations at Catal Huynk: First Preliminary Report, 1961,"
Anatolian Studies 12 (1962): 41-65;J. Mellaart, "Excavations at Catal Huynk:
Second Preliminary Report, 1962," Anatolian Studies 13 (1963): 43-103; J.
Mellaart, "Excavations at Catal Huynk: Third Preliminary Report, 1963,"
Anatolian Studies 14 (1964): 39-119; J. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the
Near East (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965); J. Mellaart, "Excavations
at Catal Huynk, 1965: Fourth Preliminary Report," Anatolian Studies 16
(1966): 165-91; J. Mellaart, Fatal Hilyik: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1967); J. Mellaart, The Neolithic of the Near East
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
23. I. Hodder, ed., On the Surface: (atalhoyiuk 1993-1995 (Cambridge: McDonald

Institute, 1996); I. Hodder, ed., Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The
Example at (atalhiyiik (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological
Research, 2000); I. Hodder, "Peopling Catalh5ynk and Its Landscape," in
Inhabiting (atalhoyik: Reports from the 1995-1999 Seasons, ed. Hodder (Cam-
bridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2005); I. Hodder,
ed., Changing Materialities at (atalhoyik: Reports from the 1995-99 Seasons
(Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006); Hod-
der, The Leopard's Tale.
24. See C. Nakamura and L. M. Meskell, "Articulate Bodies: Forms and Figures
at Catalh5ynk," Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 205-
30.
25. I. Hodder and L. M. Meskell, "A 'Curious and Sometimes a Trifle Macabre
Artistry': Some Aspects of Symbolism in Neolithic Turkey," Current Anthropol-
ogy 52, no. 2 (2011): 235-63.
26. N. Russell, K. Pawlowska, and K. C. Twiss, with a contribution by E. Jen-
kins and R. Daly, "Animal Bone Report," in Qatalhiyiik 2004 Archive Report
(2004), http://www.catalhoyuk.com/archive-reports/2004/ar04_l7.html:
www.catalhoyuk.com.
27. W. Keane, "The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion,"
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): S124.
28. Hodder, The Leopard's Tale.
29. L. M. Meskell, C. Nakamura, R. King, and S. Farid, "Figured Lifeworlds and
Depositional Practices at Catalh5ynk," Cambridge ArchaeologicalfJournal 18
(2008): 139-61.
30. N. Russell and S. Meece, "Animal Representations and Animal Remains at
Catalh5ynk," in (atalhoyik Perspectives: Reports from the 1995-99 Seasons, ed.
I. Hodder (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
2006), table 14.5.
31. Keane, "The Evidence of the Senses."
32. L. M. Meskell, "The Nature of the Beast: Curating Animals and Ancestors at
Catalh5ynk," World Archaeology 40 (2008): 373-89.
33. M. Douglas, "Rightness of Categories," in How Classification Works, ed. Doug-
las and D. Hull (Edinburgh: Edinbugh University Press, 1992), 239-71; J.
Dupre, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Sci-
ence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

EIGHT
Archaeology and Design
History: A Thesis and
Nine Theses
Michael Shanks
Archaeologists research design and design history, but their work is
rarely described this way. To understand archaeology's relationship with
design, one should first lay aside those identifications of archaeology
with methodology and technique, with survey and excavation, with work
in the finds lab. Archaeologists do, of course, practice fieldwork and
survey-popular representations of archaeology in the media emphasize
excavation and discovery, and introductory texts are usually dominated
by field and lab techniques-but research agendas in archaeology have
always been driven by questions concerning the place of artifacts in his-
tory and in human culture. Archaeologists deal in the artifact traces of
society, past and present.
In saying this I do not presume a particular notion of artifact, for the
distinction between the natural and the artificial, for example, has always
been contested in archaeology. Human biology and the environment are
by no means self-evidently "natural" in archaeological perspectives on
human history; they may be termed artifacts of a sort because they have
always been mediated by cognition, perception, and ideology, and a radi-
cal distinction between culture and nature is only of local relevance. The
classificatory schemes of natural history and principles of evolution and
natural selection have also frequently been taken to apply to technology
and goods. The human body, as much as domesticated plants and ani-
mals, is an artifact as well as biological form, and systems of categories
for organizing the perception of the natural world are objects of design.
I am also careful to use the term "trace." Ruins and remains are the
108
Archaeology and Design History 109
stuff of archaeological interest, but it is important to recognize that this
should not imply the primacy of social relations and cultural forms over
some kind of material expression such as an artifact or monument, as
implied by the notion of "remains," or what is materially left of society in
the wake of historical change.
Archaeological research occurs at the hinge between materiality and
immateriality, culture and artifacts, people and things. I argue that ar-
chaeology has a unique perspective to offer design history and design
studies because of its long-term and comparative perspective on these
relationships, with archaeological sources being our sole access to most
of the 120,000 years or so history of our species. Specifically, I argue
that any resolution of distinction between person and thing, natural and
artificial, material and immateriality is local and historically contingent,
and none the less real for this. Two slogans capture much of this: we have
always been cyborgs, and making things makes people.
Person and thing, materiality and immateriality: the focus on these
relationships places archaeology firmly in the context of modernity's re-
lationship with goods and references familiar tensions between cultural
values and material forms, the humanities and sciences, between tech-
nology and the aesthetic, reason and the emotions. My argument is that
archaeology is a recent and particular manifestation of the relationship
between people and the life of things. Elsewhere,' I have outlined the
character of this modern archaeological sensibility that includes a sensi-
tivity to the material passing of self and other, ruin and loss, processes of
entropy and decay, the piecing together of traces. The past in the present
is the prime component, for example, of the heritage industry, part of
the largest economic sector in the global economy today-cultural tour-
ism, as the remains of the past are conserved and offered up for local
and global consumption in the politics of personal and local, ethnic and
national, identity. My case here is that archaeologists do not discover the
past, even as they excavate some "lost" civilization. It is far simpler: ar-
chaeologists work on traces of the past. This productive and even creative
labor, this poetics connects archaeology with all kinds of memory prac-
tice and makes of all of us an archaeologist of sorts. The argument also
involves a reflexive symmetry between past and present. Motivated by an
interest in the translations between people and things, between mate-
rial and immaterial goods, archaeologists track and model the dynamics
of social and cultural change. In this they study the history of design,
but also-in excavation and survey, in making models, forging analyses,
offering interpretations, and constructing narratives-archaeologists

make the past what it is for us today. Indeed, the main professional sec-
tor in archaeology is commonly termed cultural resource management.
As much as the study of the history of design, conceived as interactions
between people and material goods, archaeologists are in the business of
designing contemporary culture. This archaeological sensibility is, I sug-
gest, a conspicuous component of contemporary culture and so of the
design of goods and systems, but I will not say much of it in this chapter.
I think the broader implications of the theoretical apparatus I present
for archaeological understanding of design will suffice to emphasize the
indissolubility of history and design practice.
I have started to use the word "design" now in an archaeological con-
text. I am less interested in tightly defining a concept of design than in
recognizing that the word has considerable contemporary currency. For
me, design is best treated as a diverse and contested field with a ramified
genealogy and sometimes contradictory, but cognate, components. This
is evident in the debates in archaeology that are outlined in this chapter.
It connects with the multidisciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary, applica-
tion of the term: from God's intelligent design to Giorgio Armani, from
architecture to cybernetics, objects to intangible experiences. Never-
theless, let me start by saying that, for me, design refers to processes of
originating, conceptualizing, and manufacturing a product or system-
material or immaterial. In archaeology, simply because of the charac-
ter of its material sources-the remains of society, but also for strong
analytical reasons regarding the nature of cultural systems, these pro-
cesses are inseparable from the distribution, consumption, discard, or
abandonment of the product or system, and its subsequent decay. Sub-
sumed are matters of individual agency and intentionality-what people
want to achieve with the outcomes of their making, and how making
things is at the heart of the reproduction of society. As an anthropologi-
cal field, archaeology has always set design, so conceived, in the context
of human ecology and culture, social and cultural change. I draw on a
key archaeological concept of assemblage in connecting the understand-
ing of design with a methodology that traces connections through fields
of relations, as well as scrutinizes the features and qualities of an artifact.
Nine Archaeological Theses on Design
Let me present nine theses that summarize some key trends in archaeo-
logical research into design. This is not a statement of any current ortho-
doxy in the discipline; it is my personal assessment.

One: The Fallacy of Expression
Does an artifact express its maker's intentions or the context of its ori-
gin? I argue it does not, or often does so only minimally. Things are
not well explained by referring them to some outside agency or force,
such as an artist's will or economic necessity. While there may indeed be
strong connections between maker and artifact, artifact and contexts of
manufacture and use, these are not well understood as relationships of
expression because this subordinates materiality to the will of a maker or
the strength of social structure, immediately begging, but leaving unan-
swered, questions of the nature of raw materiality, of mediation, of the
force behind the expression, of what drives the imposition of form upon
raw matter, of how things get made. In my work in the design of the an-
cient Corinthain aryballos (perfume jar), I proposed that it is very reduc-
tive to argue that such pots were expressing social structure, or that they
were representing Greek myth or an appropriation of Eastern design,
even though there are connections with the organization of society, with
narrative and Eastern iconography.
Anthropologist Marc Bloch gives an illustration of this point from
his fieldwork in Madagascar. Topic: the meaning of architectural decora-
tion. Asked what was the significance of a carving he was cutting into the
structural beam of a house, the carpenter replied that it had no mean-
ing; it was just what was proper to carve. A weak thesis here is that the
carver was simply not aware of the signification of his work, or could not
put it into words (though he did not see the point of trying). In contrast,
the work of the anthropologist is sometimes seen as one of establishing
what aspects of person and society are expressed in material culture. A
strong thesis is that it may not be appropriate to look for this kind of
expression, but that the significance of artifacts is better sought in the
processes of their making (thesis five).
Two: The Fallacy of Context
To understand an artifact's design it is crucial to look beyond the thing it-
self. But how is this context to be characterized? If we predefine "context"
as involving components such as economic relations, raw material extrac-
tion, cultural values, and political ideologies, we invoke two problems.
First, we assume the essential character of context, that it involves com-
ponents such as these listed, and we risk overlooking heterogeneity. Sec-
ond, this establishes, a priori, separation of the artifact from its context-
something that interpretation and explanation then have to overcome.

Better, I suggest, is not to begin with a separation of artifact from its
life cycle of origination, manufacture, distribution, consumption, con-
ventional conceived as context, but to begin in medias res, with a specific
artifact in specific practices and processes (thesis five). The context of
an artifact is better identified by studying how the artifact worked, how a
monument, for example, was built and used, and how it related to other
aspects of contemporary experience. I call this an heretical empirics, be-
cause it does not assume certain categories that organize society and ex-
perience, but looks to define such categories in the process of empirical
investigation, and so to generate potentially unorthodox and heterodox
characterizations of an artifact (theses six and seven).
Three: The Fallacy of Invention
Many approaches to understanding the design of an artifact give primacy
to origin and invention, and seek to understand how and why certain
inventions occurred. But it is increasingly clear that invention is by no
means an uncommon phenomenon. All the basic components of the
farming of managed domesticated species, for example, existed for mil-
lennia before the widespread adoption of agriculture in several inde-
pendent parts of the world. The long-term background of the history of
design is one of constant human creativity and innovation. I suggest that
invention be distinguished from innovation, and that the key question
is not what led to an invention-a question of origin-but rather what
prompted the adoption of certain assemblages of artifacts and practices:
this is a question of genealogy (thesis eight). A corollary that applies
in much of human history is that tradition and cultural stability is an
active state of hindering adoption of new designs and solutions. Social
structure, values, and norms are the medium, and simultaneously, the
outcome of practice. People make their world what it is, but under inher-
ited conditions not of their own choosing. This means that every social
act is an iterative and creative one of reconstituting the past in forms that
enable future practices.
Four: We Have Always Been Cyborgs
This is rooted in the argument and evidence for the coevolution of cul-
ture and biology, that for as long as we have been our human species,
and probably before that, (material) culture and biology have been part
of the same evolutionary process. Given also the duality of structure, the
way an action such as making is distributed through sociocultural struc-

tures, past and future, people have always been embroiled in mixtures of
material and immaterial forms and systems. With respect, therefore, to
both people and things, we should adopt a relational, distributed ontol-
ogy. Connections, internal relations, make an artifact or person what they
are; we find ourselves in others. People have always been prosthetic be-
ings, sharing their agency with others, with things and processes beyond
them. We have always been cyborgs-hybrid beings, human-machines.
Five: Making Things Makes People
I propose that understanding the design of an artifact is best done by
looking at processes, uses, techniques, and performances, rather than
treating the artifact primarily as a discrete bundle of attributes or quali-
ties. Under this distributed ontology, in these networks of connections,
these hybrid forms that incorporate both people and things, materiali-
ties and immaterialities, values and intangibles, we do well to look at
what work is being done. It is useful to think of these assemblages as
machines, with the definition of a machine as an interconnected set of
resistant parts and functions, of whatever nature, that performs work.
Designing and making is thus much more than simply producing a
discrete form. Under the principle of the duality of structure, design-
ing and making are enabled by the preexisting structures, values, forms,
expectations, knowledge, and resources available to the maker, and, si-
multaneously, design and making reconfigure the same into machinic
articulations, reweaving the threads of the social fabric. Given also that
people are both biological and cultural beings that live in societies, mak-
ing things makes people what they are.
This is illustrated by a project I ran with DaimlerChrysler, aimed at
plotting the future of the use of vehicles, particularly involving media,
over the next ten years. The marketing departments of the corporate
world are used to understanding products in terms of demographic
groups, with particular products appealing to groups defined according
to class, income, ethnicity, and region. My lab's research pointed to a
different kind of relationship that can be summarized as follows: it is not
who you are that makes you want a Dodge pickup truck; using the Dodge
makes you who you are.
Six: The Artifact As Scenario
An artifact is so much more than a list of defining attributes. Think less
of discrete things, and more of the thing as a gathering, forging hetero-

geneous connections in its making and use. I call these heterogeneous
because all kinds of different things and experiences might be con-
nected: consider again my two examples and how they brought together
what appear to us now to be extraordinary associations of know-how and
ideologies, past and present. Again, given the duality of structure, we can
treat these gatherings as scenarios: models or outlines of contexts, and
sequences of possible events. Every act of design and making relates to
constraints and possibilities, sketching utopias, and containing the pos-
sibility of unimagined and unwanted consequences.
Is Fussell's Lodge a prehistoric earthen long barrow? Yes, but it is also
so much more. It acted as a node of articulation-gathering all kinds
of practices and experiences, real and imagined, past and future. The
monument's attributes are only the beginning of its story.
Seven: The Heterogeneity of Value
Any artifact is an irreducible multiplicity. Some of this is captured in
the notion of the total social fact. What an artifact is depends upon how
we trace the connections that run through its origination, manufacture,
distribution, use, and discard.
Value is a key component of any understanding of design. It is im-
plicit in all choices made in this life cycle: one material or manufactur-
ing process over another, the value of one ancient Greek perfume jar
assessed against another by the visitor to a sanctuary. With a perspective
of design and artifacts as dispersed and heterogeneous, systems of value
or worth are similarly heterogeneous. The value of one aryballos over
another intended for gift to divinity depended upon a local assessment
of the fit of one aryballos over another.
This is something different from saying that such systems of value
are culturally relative and so incomparable. It means we should look to
specific contexts of use, technique, performance, and engagement to
understand how makers and users assess worth, and how we, as design
researchers, may assess the worth of a particular design solution. These
may well be comparable across different times and cultures.
Eight: Temporal Topology
Seeking origins and invention in an attempt to understand the design of
an artifact implies a linear chronology of discovery and adoption. View-
ing design as process and assemblage implies a complementary folded

temporality-a topology that can juxtapose old and new with the pros-
pect of yet-unrealized futures. An aryballos contained age-old technolo-
gies and techniques, forms and iconographies reworked into a radically
new assemblage fit to the emerging city states of the Mediterranean. The
temporality of an aryballos is thus multiple, including, yes, its date of
manufacture and consumption, but also the genealogy of its constituent
components. These topological foldings of time can be highly significant
in some experiences: for example, in urban planning, where a walk down
a street can be a percolating ferment of past traces and remains tied to
material embodiments of utopian futures. Landscapes, as built environ-
ments, can be similarly rich examples ofjuxtaposition of ancient features,
routes and ways, place-names of forgotten origin, recent plantings that
may last only a season, building projects intended to last a millennium.
Understanding the temporality of an artifact can be likened to trac-
ing a genealogy in that the present, the state of an artifact, is unthink-
able without an ancestral past of multiple lineages. But these relation-
ships imply no teleology of necessity, no necessary or unavoidable line of
descent from past to present, no necessary coherent narrative, because
each generation reworks its past and can, in its historical agency, change
direction.
Nine: The Unspoken Life of Things and the Noise of Life
If we look at processes as well as discrete objects, we can be led into a
myriad of connections and trajectories. In the heterogeneous network-
ing that is the engineering of a thing, there is no end to ramification.
An artifact disperses through its scenarios, networks, and genealogies of
origination, manufacture, distribution, use, and discard.
Interpretation, as rearticulation, can track certain affiliations or lines
of connection, as I sketched with the aryballos. There is always more
that remains unsaid, unacknowledged, unseen, because interpretation
may not go down a particular track. This is so evident in archaeological
fieldwork, or indeed in any scientific research, where there is always a
choice to be made of what matters to the research interest. What is left
behind, ignored, or discarded is the background noise of history and
experience. This is far from inconsequential. First, because something
important may have been overlooked: science constantly takes a second
look at things and finds something that was missed. Second, because
things stand out as significant against this background; without it, there
could be no story, no message, no understanding. Third, because this is

the noise of the ambient everyday work that makes society what it is-it
is the noise of the life of things constantly reweaving our social fabric.
NOTE
1. Michael Shanks, The Archaeological Imagination (Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press).
PART 3
Experience and Material

NINE
Swelling Toads,
Translation, and the
Paradox of the Concrete
Bernard L. Herman
"Toads? We'll have a ton!"
-Kelli Gaskill, Big's Family Restaurant, Painter vic.,
Virginia (January 2010)
"since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you ..."
-e. e. cummings
The charge that lies at the heart of our enterprise contends, "His-
torically oriented scholars are finding in the physical embodiments of
knowledge new questions and new perspectives from which to address
seemingly 'closed,' or at least familiar, issues." Materiality, embodiment,
epistemology. Even as we embrace the simultaneity of things as subject
and object, as the medium for interrogation and its focus, we curiously
tend to accept with little comment the concrete nature of things. And
yet it is the graspable substance of things that fascinates us. Things (and
by this I intend the grand universe of objects and their evocations) fur-
nish and shape experience even as they are shaped by perception, imagi-
nation, and engagement. Writing on how objects operate in the world
tends to reductions around design, making, use, and waste. From the
outset, then, any exploration into "the physical embodiments of knowl-
edge" is necessarily about writing (a thing in itself), and what happens
when things are rendered as words.
119
Francis Ponge begins his 1941-1944 meditation on the carnation, "Ac-
cept the challenge things offer to language." Ponge continues, "Given an
object, however ordinary, it seems to me that it invariably presents cer-
tain unique qualities which, if clearly and simply expressed, would elicit
unanimous and invariable comment. . . What's to be gained from this?
To bring to life for the human spirit qualities, which are not beyond its
capacity and which habit alone prevents it from adopting."1 Ponge speaks
to a poetical instability of things. His prose poem Soap, for example,
returns again and again to the observation that soap is known finally
through water and laving hands-substance and action that leave the
object realized and reduced in one sense, and transformative through
the physical communication of itself in another.2
There is a tendency to embrace the artifact as, well, fact-and to situ-
ate the object in tension with or subordinate to an uncontested notion
of text. My contribution to this conversation explores first the problem
of translation-of how language informs materiality-and second, the
paradox of the concrete through a consideration of the ambiguities in-
herent in things, the questions things enable, of how objects compel us
to see beyond the force of habit and convention, and how we might resist
the temptation to relegate the materiality of things to the role of illustra-
tion. Simply, how we talk about objects all too often constructs the frame-
work that defines and limits how we know them as things. The ownership
of the authoritative voice resides at the heart of interpretation. When we
actively seek multivocality, however, the object opens itself in ways that in-
vite fresh considerations of what have been described as "object worlds."3
Objects are haunted by the paradox of the concrete. Objects possess
substance-real and perceived-and substance carries with it the power
of certainty. The material qualities of things are somehow reassuring in
the ways through which they engage us. The concrete qualities of things
speak to embodied experience through sight, sound, touch, smell, and
taste. Things possess the aura of heft, of manifesting themselves not as
abstractions, but as tangible and real. Their paradox resides in the un-
certain relationship between what things are and what things mean. The
paradox of the concrete inspired the concrete poetry movement of the
1950s. In concrete poetry (also referred to as visual language), the em-
phasis falls on the material aspects of writing, drawing attention to the
appearance of words and letters (typography) and their positioning on
the page, rather than solely on their meaning content. Concrete poetry
"abandons the linear arrangement of words for a greater emphasis on
design, layout, and organization of space" in which "words point beyond

Swelling Toads, Translation, and the Paradox of the Concrete 121
themselves to ideas, to mood/memory experience, extending the way
in which language can be used to communicate-to produce an experi-
ence" through the viewer's "direct confrontation with the poem."4 Two
fundamental acts define concrete poetry: first, the act of emptying words
of their assigned meanings or content and viewing them as objects or
images in their own right; second, rendering the word as thing open
to reinscription through design, visualization, and viewing. Thus, a con-
crete poem is "a 'minimal' art of maximal involvement" composed of
"compound elements, each clearly articulated & with plenty of room
for fill-in" by the reader.5 The larger implications concrete poetry holds
for the material turn are significant. Concrete poetry reminds us that
objects-including words-possess an existence independent of their
reified meanings, and that periodically the object needs to be emptied
of its assigned meanings and read anew for its material presence. In es-
sence, the material certainty of the thing as an object, epitomized by
the example of the concrete poem, is offset by the inconstancy and am-
biguity of what objects might mean. This paradox of the concrete-the
interplay of material certainty and semiotic ambiguity-constitutes what
we might think of as the first iteration of a material turn. The second
iteration revolves around the question of translation.
Translation is an act of rendering something (word, image, action,
thing) accessible in terms that are familiar and comprehensible. To ren-
der, like most useful words, is one of many meanings. To render is about
giving up and giving in-an act of surrender carrying implications of
duress. To render is to cook down to an essence that is at once a reduc-
tion and distillation, for instance cooking fat to yield oil. To render is
to represent and approximate through expressive means-a modeling
that can be literary, visual, performative. To render is to plaster, to cover
one surface with another in an action that masks, protects, and unifies.
When objects are brought into view, all of these renderings come into
play. Translation also entails the belief that what is foreign can be made
familiar, and the recognition that the process of translation is always in-
complete in its inability to fully communicate nuance and idiom. Thus,
the material turn embraces the ambition of translation as the means to
render things comprehensible in words. At the same time, the material
turn accepts the incompleteness of translation in that endeavor. The
problem is not that translation fails in its directive, but rather falls short
in accounting for its limitations. At some juncture, the material turn
needs to engage the substance of things beyond the words that make
things visible. The material turn, quite simply, owes a responsibility to

the objects it engages beyond the limitations of words. What that respon-
sibility, inevitably constrained by language, might be remains limited by
convention. Thus, the first act of translation in a material turn is not just
to make the alien familiar, but also to render the familiar strange.
The material turn I choose is a fish-specifically, the swelling toad or
northern puffer [Spheroides maculates of the family Tetraodontidae] (fig.
1). The voices I engage include the fisherman, the marine biologist, the
cook, the gourmand, and the student of things. The choice of swelling
toads (known by many names including puffers, blowfish, green-eyes, sea
squab, and simply, toads) resides in a critical conversation about what
constitutes an artifact and the limits of description. The definition of
an artifact is straightforward enough: any thing-real or imagined-that
enters human perception and inescapably becomes subject to the ne-
cessity of making and communicating sense of and in the world. The
limits of description speak directly to the fact that encounters with things
engage all the senses, but that our representations of their materiality
are mediated and constrained through approaches that privilege sight
(image and text) and hearing. Taste, touch, smell, and proprioception
are reprised, for example, through synaesthetic acts that let the visual
and verbal stand for the tactile or spatial.
In an effort to get at the nature of things and the operations and
limits of description in sense making, the Bard Graduate Center orga-
nized in 2009 a "materials day" around fish from their acquisition at the
New Fulton Fish Market through their preparation and consumption.
The concept behind materials day affords "opportunities for students
to observe and participate in the making of things in order to experi-
ence materiality from a maker's perspective." Our tasks for a materials
day based on what we titled "the fish project" were several: to grasp the
object in ways that engaged all the senses; to comprehend at the most
visceral level the ways in which we transform and make sense of things
as creature, commodity, ingredient, food, waste, and memory; to expose
the limits and possibilities of representation, particularly in relationship
to new media. The goal was to explore strategies for interpretation and
representation within a range of epistemological registers, each defined
as a "social space characterized by a system of norms, conventions, and
procedures." Each register-biological, culinary, ethnographic, artistic,
historical-possesses its own expressive conventions of formality, vocabu-
lary, and syntax.6 Thus, our goal was "to get at the inherent paradox of
objects: the concrete qualities of things in full array and their constantly
evolving situational and semiotic significances" and to explore catego-
ries of how we know things.7

Fig. 1. Swelling toads gleaned from crab pots. Bayford Oyster House,
Bayford, Virginia, August 2009. (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
Project participants prepared by conducting research on topics that
ranged from recipes to the patent histories of objects related to seafood
processing. The critical pivot of our endeavor, however, unfolded in a
rain-drenched, predawn November visit to the fish market (reportedly
the second largest in the world). In a hangar-size anteroom, we re-
ceived instruction not just on the history of the market in its current
location, but also safety warnings about the traffic patterns of speeding
forklifts. Crashing, grinding industrial noise levels, the numbing chill of
wet concrete and damp air on the tongue, the sweet scent of clear-eyed
fish gravel-packed on ice. We interviewed, photographed, filmed, and
recorded stall proprietors, inspected and acquired fish. We scaled, gut-
ted, and filleted our fish under the guidance of Molly O'Neill, one of the
leading American food writers and author of One Big Table.8 In a simple
transformative action, we dipped our hands into the chill silent intimate
guts of creatures once living, and grasped for an instant the vast senso-
rium of things. And then, ingredients (fish no longer) in hand, we left

the market, stepping into the warming blue-sky brilliance of an autumn
morning.
In the course of our experiential excursion, I unexpectedly found
myself in search of toads, a peculiar fish I associate with the foodways of
the lower Chesapeake Bay of Virginia and the North Carolina sounds.9
Swelling toads (toads for short) are awkward-looking fish that range up
to a foot or so in length. Taxonomic descriptions by marine ichthyolo-
gists paint a dim portrait of the toad's pigmentation.10 The toad that I
know, however, is a far more colorful creature with a prickly hide mottled
tan, gray, and brown with yellow highlights on top, and a brilliant bright
white abdomen. Reading coloration offers an early clue to the problems
of translation that beset the reception of the concrete. A marine scientist
views the toad within a palette that categorizes. A different perspective
sees the same skin hues in aesthetic terms.
Toads possess an abrasive sandpapery skin, eyes that move indepen-
dently, and beetled horn-like brows. Their skeletal system is composed
of little more than skull and vertebra. The arrangement and muscula-
ture of their fins makes them slow and wallowing swimmers. At rest, a
toad displays a paunchy physique; threatened, they inflate themselves
into taut spheres. Warm-water fish, toads migrate with the seasons, mov-
ing into nearshore and estuarine waters in late spring, and returning
offshore in late autumn. They appear, for example, in the Chesapeake
Bay in May (the females laden with eggs), and depart in early November.
The warm months offer an extended period during which toads spawn
their young, depositing their sticky eggs in shallow depressions on the
bay floor. Unlike some of their distant cousins whose parent (usually the
male) tend the eggs until they hatch, the toads of the Chesapeake Bay
are left to their own devices." Toads were conspicuous in their absence
at the New Fulton Fish Market, but just as a reluctant acceptance of a
toadless reality was taking hold, the proprietors of the Blue Ribbon Fish
Company remembered a few "in the back," and brought them out for
our inspection.
A toad is a complicated object. As our fishmonger hosts were quick
to point out, the toad is noteworthy for its capacity to inflate itself into a
prickly sphere intended to gag its predators (fig. 2). For fishermen, the
swelling toad's defense mechanism out of water was a source of amuse-
ment and, occasionally, ribald humor. Virginia waterman Marshall Cox,
sitting at W. T. and Tammy Nottingham's kitchen table, gestured to an
apple, laughingly pretending that it was a toad inflated with air, "Now
pick that toad up. Look it over. Now hold it up next to your ear. Shake
Swelling Toads, Translation, and the Paradox of the Concrete
125
Fig. 2. Inflating a swelling toad. New Fulton Market, New York, Novem-
ber 2010. (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
it. Shake it! Shake it hard. You hear anything? No? Then it must be a
female, because if it was a male you'd hear its balls rattling."12
The toad tests the boundaries of Leviticus and the dangers of gastron-
omy. Naturalist chefs, for example, describe toads in contexts that range
from their migratory habits to cuisine, noting the existence of well over
100 species, and remarking on the legendary lethal toxicity of Pacific
blowfish or fugu. Toxicity, a protective mechanism discouraging would-
be predators, is limited to the skin, viscera, and reproductive organs.
Careless handling during cleaning, however, can taint the meat. The fact
that fugu improperly prepared can kill the diner led to investigations of
the toxicity of Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina toads in the 1960s.
Trapping toads in a variety of locations, scientists dissected the animals,
liquefied isolated elements of skin, flesh, and viscera, and injected traces
into laboratory mice. Two test mice died. The conclusion stated: "The
most pressing question, that of whether or not the northern puffer is
a safe food, seems to be answered in the affirmative . . . The evidence
of toxicity found in certain of the viscera by us and other investigators

would hardly lessen the safety factor, since the puffer is eviscerated and
skinned before marketing."13 Still, hesitation tempers gustatory abandon
when it comes to toads.
Toads of the Eastern Seaboard possess hard, beak-like mouths that
enable them to crunch through hard-shell blue crabs. The preference
for crabs leads toads into crab pots where they can corner and consume
the trapped crustaceans. Although toads are not considered a fish that
schools, they often exhibit group behavior-a fact remarked upon by
fishermen, but not elaborated in the scientific and natural-history litera-
ture.
Once considered a "trash fish" consumed largely by the poor, Atlan-
tic toads eventually garnered the culinary devotion of a certain class of
connoisseurs. In Southern fishing communities, discernment takes on
an enthusiastic cast that is as much about identity couched in terms of
terroir and nostalgia as it is about gastronomy. A November 2009 Face-
book entry trumpeted: "Exmore Diner. Today we have Swelling Toads
$10.95 . . . served with 2 vegetables and rolls," to which a local gour-
mand joyously proclaimed, "Swelling toads for $10.95! This is why I love
the Eastern Shore!"" Evonia Hogan, who grew up in nearby Cheriton,
just behind the tomato cannery, recalled her first encounter with toads,
touching on themes of delicacy, danger, souvenir, pleasure, and the local.
The toad's capacity to inspire culinary rapture is a comparatively
recent phenomenon, and one that increasingly anchors local identity.
When the Gaskill family first served toads in their restaurant, they labeled
the entree "chicken of the sea." Subsequently, they changed their mar-
keting strategy to advertising the availability of "toads" (fig. 3). Eastern-
shore people knew exactly what the word entailed and came to dine on
their "local" histories. A display at the door, complete with photographs,
educated diners from "away," and whetted the appetites of those with a
taste for the exotic and the local. In either instance, the toad entered the
privileged sphere of Eastern Shore of Virginia terroir Part of that process
inspired the Gaskills to create specialties including toads stuffed with
crab meat (fig. 4).
Toads, once reviled as bycatch, are now the focus of a small, but dedi-
cated fishery. Fishermen catch toads in special crab-pot-like traps baited
with crab waste collected from local picking houses, or haul them up in
pound nets. Edward Smith of Tangier Island pots: "They used to use the
hard crab pot with the bigger mesh for the bigger toads. Now they've
fished a few of them out and gone to peeler pots now. Bait them up
with crab scrap ... October is usually the best month for them up in the
it fa- to be, Seted
t SOU AR 036x.
Fig. 3. Swelling toads on the menu. Big's Family Restaurant, Painter,
Virginia, May 2010. (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
shallows up off of Onancock. Down this way, I'm not sure. Follow the
seasons-work their way right on out the [Chesapeake] Bay . .. Grand-
pop used to eat quite a few of them. That was the 60s then-the early 70s.
Been around for a while-eating them."15
The reality of cleaning a toad, as Danny Doughty testified, is rough
business-an act of translation from nature/animal to ingredient/com-
modity (figs. 5, 6, 7). The skill and speed involved in cleaning a large
catch, as Eddie Watts of Hungars Creek remarked, was a point of pride
with some watermen. Instructions for cooking toads attend to the clean-
ing process with concision:
Wear gloves when cleaning it. The first step is to cut off the head.
Then peel back the skin like a glove, from neck to tail. The innards
will drop out, leaving in your hands the backbone with all the meat
on it. This can be fried or baked whole, rather like a chicken's leg or
a frog's leg.16
Fig. 4. Swelling toads served at Big's Family Restaurant, Painter, Vir-
ginia, November 2011. Fried toads stuffed with crabmeat (right), and
pan-fried toads (left). (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
A flap of skin connecting the severed head to the body provides suf-
ficient purchase to turn the fish inside out leaving head, skin, and en-
trails in one hand, and the meat of the fish in the other: "You skin him.
The guts come with it, and the roe . . . In the fall, of course, he doesn't
have any roe-so you're just skinning fish."" Theodore Peed, an Eastern
Shore of Virginia home cook renowned for his annual game dinner fea-
turing snapping turtle and gravy, emphasized the abrasive skin and hand
strength at the center of the translation of fish into ingredient: "It takes a
man to skin a toad!" W. T. Nottingham and Marshall Cox, pound fisher-
men, described cleaning toads shipboard: "You take your knife, cut him
right behind the head, peel him like that. Flip him over, put the knife
Fig. 5. Cleaning a swelling toad. First cut behind the head. Eastville,
Virginia, May 2010. (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
on his head and pull back." What captures my attention is Cox's vivid
description of the deft gesture that turns the swelling toad inside out.
The toad is rendered a delicacy through a violent translation that
relies on two actions resulting in an array of binary relations: flesh and
waste, delicacy and poison, creature and commodity. Skinning a toad is
a visceral wrenching editing that separates the animate (everything that
defined the toad as a living thing) from the ingredient (the residue that
we consume). All encounters with things proceed in this fashion-we
are committed to the deadening of things as a means to rendering them
tractable-and then quickening them through description and interpre-
tation. Second, turning the toad inside out approximates our desire to
discover the hidden and intimate nature of objects through critical acts
that are in some measure always violations of the autonomy of things.
What the toad in its translation teaches us is an awareness of the criti-
cal violence we inflict on things, and how that violence animates the
meanings that we cultivate. Thus, a swelling toad plucked from the sea,
made the object of jokes, skinned and gutted, cooked and consumed,
remembered and narrated, speaks to the unnatural life of the material

Fig. 6. Cleaning a swelling toad. Removing head, skin, and viscera from
meat. New Fulton Market, New York, November 2010. (Photograph:
Bernard L. Herman.)
turn. Every accounting of a materiality is a rendering: giving up, melt-
ing down, parging over. Thus, objects remind us at every turn-at every
material turn, at every turning inside out-of how we know the world.
Toads teach us as well about the analogical operations of critical
translation. Watermen describe how toads approach the baited pot in
the fashion of minnows. Food writers note that the edible relic of the
swelling toad yields an alternative to shellfish and frog's legs. A recipe
for Toad Provencal notes, "I love frog's legs, but they're hard to find,
and often very expensive. The blowfish fillets are every bit as satisfying,
but inexpensive."" Simply and sadly, as most gastronomes opine, it is
"like chicken"-a quality that elevates its status on the basis of a lack of
distinction. The toad succeeds as a delicacy through the perception that
it is like something else. Something of a gustatory chameleon, the toad
bends to the dominion of other flavors-an act of translation in itself.
For folks, who grew up with toads on the seasonal table, they taste like
home; for diners unfamiliar with the fish, it tastes like authenticity-
especially when well seasoned with narrative. An object, distinctive in its
found condition, the toad is translated and consumed through analogy.
The toad as artifact, as Susan Stewart might describe it, is a creature that
is haunted by all its histories.19
What has the natural and culinary history of the toad taught us? In
Fig. 7. Swelling toad meat and roe ready for cooking. Eastville, Vir-
ginia, May 2010. (Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.)
its rendering, the swelling toad entails surrender, representation, and
masking-a forcible intervention into what is naturally hidden and al-
ways present-a conversion of the animate into the material and its re-
animation as a thing that is culturally revealed and still, flesh divided into
delicacy and waste. Ponge offers a way of reaching into the material turn
written as a series of resolves on the fraught relationships between mate-
riality and writing. Conjured in a meditation on the Loire, Ponge offers a
series of declarations: (1) "Never sacrifice the object of my study in order
to enhance some verbal turn discovered on the subject, nor piece to-
gether any such discoveries in a poem"; (2) "Always go back to the object
itself, to its raw quality, its difference, particularly its difference from what
I've just then written about it"; (3) "Recognize the greater right of the
object, its inalienable right, in relation to any poem"; (4) "The object is
always more important, more interesting, more capable (full of rights): it
has no duty whatsoever toward me, it is I who am obliged to it"; (5) "The
reciprocal clash of words, the verbal analogies are one of the means for
studying the object in depth"; (6) "Never try to arrange things. Objects
and poems are irreconcilable." Ponge concludes:
The point is knowing whether you wish to make a poem or compre-
hend an object (in the hope that mind wins out, comes up with some-
thing new on the subject). It is the second phase of this alternative
that my taste (a violent taste for things, and for advances of the mind)
leads me to choose without hesitation. [1947] 20
The swelling toad leads us finally to the paradox and perils of translation
and the concrete.
The toad exists in nature as a native fish, but it relies on culture for its
natural histories-narratives that are, in fact, wholly unnatural. In every
iteration, the toad metaphorically comments on the material turn-as a
process that translates the world into narratives of sense. The prepara-
tion of the toad, as ingredient, also speaks to the many ways in which
we turn all things inside out, separating what is delectable from what
is waste. But, waste possesses its own importance, and the material turn
would do well to focus an auguring eye on the entrails and the critical
futures they portend. In all of its manifest identities (organism, pest, del-
icacy, waste, commodity, ingredient), the swelling toad possesses the tan-
gible certainty of its materiality. It is the very nature of its concreteness
that enables the toad to accrue and shed meaning over time. Like all
things, it satisfies needs that are situational, circumstantial, and semiotic.
Individual and collective acts of perception make and remake the arti-
fact: the toad is fish that swells defensively in the gorge of its enemies; it is
a chicken-of-the-sea substitute for frog's legs, shrimp, and scallops. In its
materiality, the toad (and, as Ponge reminds us, all things) abducted by
language renders all readings possible, and in the end, tentative, chang-
ing, revelatory.
NOTES
1. Francis Ponge, "The Carnation," in Mute Objects of Expression, trans. Lee
Fahnestock (New York: Archipelago Books, 1976 and 2008), 37.
2. Francis Ponge, Soap (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).
3. Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and
Present (London: Berg, 2004).
4. MichaelJoseph Phillips, ed., "Afterword," 4 Major Visual Poets (Indianapolis:
Free University Press, 1980).
5. Jerome Rothenberg, "Pre-Face" in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard
Kostelanetz (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 384.
6. Francesco Panese, "The Accursed Part of Scientific Iconography," in Visual
Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building
and science Communication, ed. Luc Pauwels (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth Col-
lege Press, 2006), 63-89.

7. Catherine Whalen, personal communication, October 13, 2010.
8. Molly O'Neill, One Big Table: 600 Recipes from the Nation's Best Home Cooks,
Farmers, Fishermen, Pit-Masters, and Chefs (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2010).
9. J. Lyczkowski-Shultz, "Tetraodontidae: Puffers," in Early Stages of Atlantic
Fishes: An Identification Guide for the Western Central North Atlantic, 2 vols., ed.
WilliamJ. Richards (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2006) 2439-48.
10. Robert L. Shipp and Ralph W. Yerger, "Status, Characters, and Distribution
of the Northern and Southern Puffers of the Genus Sphoeroides," Copeia,
August 29, 1969), 425-33.
11. J. Lyczkowski-Shultz, "Tetraodontidae: Puffers," 2446.
12. Marshall Cox and W. T. Nottingham, interview with Bernard L. Herman,
December 31, 2009, Townsend, Virginia.
13. Paul F. Robinson and Frank J. Schwartz, "Toxicity of the Northern Puffer,
Sphaeroides maculatus, in the Chesapeake Bay and Its Environs," Chesapeake
Science 9, no. 2 (June 1968): 136-37.
14. http://www.facebook.com/pages/ExmoreDiner/101742584979?v=feed&st
orytfbid=202420827776.
15. Edward Smith, interview with Bernard L. Herman and P. G. Ross, March 8,
2010, Westerhouse Creek, Machipongo, Virginia.
16. Davidson (1979), 163.
17. H. M. Arnold, interview with Bernard L. Herman, December 23, 2009, Bay-
ford, Virginia.
18. Peterson, Fish and Shellish, 83.
19. Susan Stewart, "Lyric Possession," Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995): 39.
20. Francis Ponge, "Banks of the Loire," in Mute Objects of Expression, 3-4.
TEN
Materiality and Cultural
Translation: Indigenous Arts,
Colonial Exchange, and
Postcolonial Perspectives
Ruth B. Phillips
In 1992, an eighty-four-year-old Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) woman named
Madeleine Katt Theriault published her autobiography, From Moose to
Moosehide. She narrated a life whose first three decades were lived ac-
cording to a centuries-old pattern of movement across the lands of
northern Ontario. Most things people needed came from the lakes and
forests, the fruits of cooperative labor organized through the extended
family group. She used the example of a successful moose hunt to dem-
onstrate the social relations generated by the hunting life: "While people
gathered together, the men made birch bark canoes. Women would set
fish nets and pick blueberries, while the children joined in the picking.
Everyone was happy and had lots to eat. Women helped one another to
tan moose hide and make moccasins for all. My great-grandmother often
mentioned how wonderful it was to see Indians help one another and
share everything with one another."1
When Mrs. Theriault's children were born, her father crafted a cra-
dleboard in which to carry them, and her mother created a fine outer
wrapper or "moss bag" embellished with glass bead embroidery in floral
designs (fig. 1). "When I had babies," Mrs. Theriault wrote:
I kept them in a papoose cradle. The cradles have three different
sizes: small, medium and large. You would change the back board as
the baby grew out of it. We used moss in place of diapers. Using moss
on a baby is most healthy.
The baby always smelled sweet and was always warm. We would
134
Materiality and Cultural Translation 135
Fig. 1. Michel KattJr. and Eliz-
abeth Katt Petrant, moss bag
and cradleboard, 1919-38.
Wood, metal, cotton, printed
cotton and woolen cloth,
flannel, hide, seed beads
and cotton thread. 65 x 27.5
cm. (Royal Ontario Museum
998.134.1. With permission of
the Royal Ontario Museum ©
ROM.)
change them every so often by discarding the damp moss and replac-
ing it with some clean and fresh smelling. No washing to do, how nice!
We kept our babies in a papoose cradle for ten to fourteen months.
Some might be walking and still in a papoose board. The board was
made of cedar wood, because it is the lightest wood. The front bar is
made out of maple wood as it won't break when bent. It also had a
board at the feet for standing and a cloth or leather for lacing up the
baby inside it. The babies seemed to like to be in a papoose cradle for
they would cry to get in it. It was always very hard to break away from
this cradle, but they can become too heavy to carry around.2
At the end of her life, Mrs. Theriault gave her cradleboard to the
Royal Ontario Museum, where it has come to be interpreted by people
like myself as a quintessentially hybrid object. In structure and design
it is the product of inventions made long before European contact. En-

Fig. 2. Anishinaabe artist,
cradleboard ornament, late
18th or early 19th century.
Hide, porcupine quills, metal,
glass beads, animal hair. (Ca-
nadian Museum of Civilization
III-G-848. Photo @ Canadian
Museum of Civilization.)
closed by its protective wooden frame, swaddled and padded with moss,
rocked by the movements of its mother's travel by foot, snowshoe, and
canoe, the cradleboard would have provided Mrs. Theriault's children
with embodied and sensory experiences very similar to those of Anishi-
naabe babies in 1400 or 1700. The visual imagery displayed by the moss
bag, however, departs radically from precontact traditions, and reflects
the impact of four centuries of European trade and Christian mission-
ization. A century earlier, an Anishinaabe cradleboard would have been
ornamented not with floral motifs embroidered with thread and glass
beads, but with ochre paints and decorations of dyed porcupine quills
woven into images that invoked the protective powers of the great Thun-
derbirds who dominate the upper cosmic zone of the Anishinaabe uni-
verse (fig. 2).
The way of life Mrs. Theriault described came to an abrupt end in
the late 1920s, when a new law deprived the Ontario Anishinaabeg of
the right to hunt and fish off-reserve. Other laws removed her young
children to distant residential schools, and tuberculosis raged through
Anishinaabe communities during the first half of the twentieth century,
killing Mrs. Theriault's husband while he was still in his thirties. As her
life story eloquently demonstrates, Mrs. Theriault experienced these
traumatic changes as severe deprivations that were material and sensory
and as a radical alteration of the sociality of a communal way of life that
could no longer be sustained. Thrust suddenly into modernity, she sup-
ported herself through many new kinds of activities-some of which en-
abled her to continue to wear and make traditional Anishinaabe things,
and others requiring new kinds of making and dressing. She reenacted
earlier Anishinaabe ways of life for summer tourists at fishing resorts,
sewed Indian costumes for a Hollywood movie, worked at menial jobs in
a town, and hooked hundreds of rag rugs.
As this snapshot of a twentieth-century Anishinaabe world suggests,
for the historian of Native North American art, a cultural history of the
material world must be framed by an intercultural perspective. I also
argue that intercultural art histories can usefully be investigated as pro-
cesses of cultural translation whose dynamics inevitably entail losses, but
are also productive of new inventions. The example of Mrs. Theriault's
cradleboard, finally, also suggests a need to distinguish the ways that
cultural translation occurs in relation to visual, material, and discursive
components of expressive processes. A kind of splitting appears to occur
in the space between the continuities of material forms and the imagery
they support-and between the embodied experience provided by ma-
terial forms and the visual apprehension of their outer appearance. In
seeking to understand how translation operates at the nexus of the lin-
guistic, the visual, and the material, it will be useful to look briefly at the
succession of "turns" in academic research during the past few decades
that have led to our contemporary focus on materiality.'
I briefly map the shifts of emphasis in art history, anthropology, and
history during the past four decades in order to urge the need for a more
integrated approach to the investigation of cultural histories. Through
such an approach, the disjointed and disrupted ways in which the mate-
rial and visual forms of Anishinaabe life and thought have survived into
the present can more easily be understood as parts of a unified project
of cultural translation.
Genealogies: The Linguistic, the Visual,
and the Material Turns
As Peter N. Miller has suggested, the material turn that marks recent
scholarship in the humanities and social sciences can be understood as a
reaction against the limitations of the "linguistic turn" that ran through
art history, anthropology, and history during the 1970s and 1980s. I
would also propose, however, that the current focus on materiality in
all of these disciplines both emerges from, and overlaps two intervening
developments. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, literary and art
historical scholars like W. J. T. Mitchell, James Elkins, Nicholas Mirzoeff,
and Michael Ann Holly generated a "visual turn," which led to the for-
mation of a new interdisciplinary field of visual studies that has primarily
taken root in a number of American universities.4
Visual studies draws heavily on theories of the gaze and the spectacle
developed within poststructuralist literary and psychoanalytic work, and
it insists on the formative psychic and social importance of visual expe-
rience as manifested through a broad range of media comprehending
art, film, television, new media, advertising, and scientific imaging. The
second development was the renewal of interest in material culture and
the anthropology of art that began around the same time among a small,
but influential, group of primarily British anthropologists. The work of
scholars such as Alfred Gell, Howard Morphy, Nicholas Thomas, Mari-
lyn Strathern, Daniel Miller, Christopher Pinney, and Tim Ingold draws
on phenomenology, Marxist understandings of production and con-
sumption, and Actor Network Theory. They theorize the ways in which
a similarly broad range of material phenomena inclusive of landscape,
the built environment, tools, technology, and works of art interacts with
humans in processes of social reproduction.
Visual studies, the new material anthropology, and material history
share a democratizing and leveling impulse that manifests itself through
comprehensive definitions of the phenomena to which they attend. This
inclusivity resonates with the broadened range of visual and material
expressions addressed within the social history of art, a subfield of art

history that has grown steadily in prominence since the advent of the
"new art history" in the early 1980s. In all three disciplines, the new con-
cerns have introduced novel sources of evidence for the investigation
of histories and cultures. For historians, the material turn has placed
new emphasis on the technological, the embodied, and the experiential.
For art historians-for whom visual images have, of course, always been
central-the visual and material turns have disrupted long-standing
hierarchies of fine and applied arts and brought renewed attention to
artistic media, techniques, and connoisseurial methods. For anthropolo-
gists, the return to material culture studies has fostered renewed criti-
cal attention to the colonial accumulations of museums, produced new
theorizations of the anthropology of art, and encouraged a focus on con-
sumption in contemporary societies. For all three groups, unaccustomed
methods of study have been needed, causing abandoned practices to be
dusted off, and new ones to be developed. As already noted, the vari-
ous avenues leading back to the study of material forms promote inter-
disciplinarity and convergence. Particularly notable-especially for art
historians-has been the intersection that occurs at the site of art works,
which have become a subset within the broader compass of visual and
material phenomena.
This brief genealogy suggests that the current emphasis on material-
ity reacts against the reductive tendency of the visual turn, just as that
movement had reacted against the tendency of semiotic and other lin-
guistic theories to reduce all images to texts. It also points, however, to
slippages that have occurred as emphasis has shifted from textuality, to
visuality, to materiality. I would argue that visual anthropology, the an-
thropology of art, and visual studies all tend to elide important distinc-
tions between images and objects, and the different ways they operate in
society. In visual studies, this can result in the treatment of material items
as disembodied visual images; conversely, a focus on the material proper-
ties of objects through which images are manifested and circulated can
disenfranchise the power of the image, whether the object of study is a
carte de visite or a computer.
These slippages are particularly problematic in the context of colo-
nial art histories where, given the asymmetries of power, the disappear-
ance of particular visual images does not necessarily indicate permanent
loss, since images can continue to be expressed and transmitted through
forms of verbal discourse. From the perspective of indigenous art stud-
ies, furthermore, the visual turn is problematic because it perpetuates a

hegemonic Western ocularcentric tradition that privileges visuality over
other senses, impeding understandings of the synaesthetic and holistic
nature of much non-Western aesthetic and expressive culture.'
Postcolonial Art History and Translation
Overall, visual studies, the social history of art, the new anthropology
of art, and material history have helped to break the hold of primitivist
canons long dominant within modernism, and have proved hospitable
to a postcolonial study of indigenous arts and cultures. Since the 1970s,
a central project of art historians and anthropologists who study indige-
nous arts has been the development of "emic" understandings that more
accurately reflect the intentions and meanings of indigenous produc-
ers and consumers-a goal that has obvious connections to postcolonial
critiques of colonial power relations. In this context, the material turn
holds particular promise because it is friendly to the critical analysis of
alternative sensory regimes. It is not accidental that a concern with mate-
riality has accompanied the rise of global consciousness and the refram-
ing of curricula and research in "world" terms-e.g. "world" history, art
history, and literatures. We return to such global frameworks of study,
however, with a very different politics than those that pertained a century
ago, when the hierarchical orderings of world cultures rationalized by
social evolutionary theories were dominant.
How, then, might cultural translation function at the site of material-
ity? There is an obvious connection between the notion of translation
and the issue of hybridity that has been at the heart of postcolonial stud-
ies, as theorized by Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford,
Robert Young, and others. Translation, I would argue, is the active voice
of hybridity. The shift from noun to verb urges attention to processes
rather than products, and implies outcomes that are inexact, unfinished,
and open to revision. Material culture functions differently in intercul-
tural contexts from language, providing both an extralinguistic channel
of communication and also a greater latitude for the attribution of diver-
gent meanings to a common sign.
On one level, material translations can involve the identification of
coincident or intersecting beliefs, practices, and images. It seems reason-
able to believe that when Jesuit missionaries to New France displayed
the radiating forms of silver monstrances to their congregants, these
men and women recognized this instrument of the mass as an image of

the (personified) sun-the most powerful spiritual power in their own
cosmos. On another level, translation processes can establish systems of
analogues through which equations are proposed between indigenous
and exotic valuables. As George Hamell has shown, for example, in the
early years of contact in northeastern North America, luminous and
light-reflective materials such as glass beads and trade silver became ana-
logues for indigenous valuables of white shell and crystal that were re-
garded as spiritually empowered.' As cultural translations, such material
equivalencies can be more forgiving than the relatively more precise re-
quirements of language. The ambiguity inherent in material translations
can have advantages in intercultural contexts.
A recent statement by Peter Burke points to the potential value of
linking the study of material forms to processes of cultural translation.
Whether translators follow the strategy of domestication or that of
foreignizing, whether they understand or misunderstand the text
they are turning into another language, the activity of translation
necessarily involves both decontextualizing and recontextualizing.
Something is always 'lost in translation.' However, the close exami-
nation of what is lost is one of the most effective ways of identifying
differences between cultures. For this reason the study of translation
is or should be central to the practice of cultural history.7
Although Burke refers to language in this passage, I suggest that his
point is also relevant to the realm of the material. The conjunction be-
tween translation and materiality has not yet been well worked out, and
invites further investigation-ideally through comparative and interdis-
ciplinary work. I offer a further Anishinaabe instantiation, not so much
as a resolution or a conclusion, but as a contribution to such a future
project.
Translating Thunderbirds
At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the disappearance of
thunderbird imagery from Anishinaabe visual art during the middle
decades of the nineteenth century. For centuries, Anishinaabe people
have been representing these great hawk-like beings, who appear in the
sky in spring, emitting the flashes of lightening that mark their powers
and bringing rains, fertility, and other blessings to human beings. They
appear on bags in the earliest collections from the Great Lakes, dating
to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. They become even
more numerous in later-eighteenth century collections made by British
military officers who fought alongside Anishinaabe warriors during the
wars for control of North America. That these images and the belief sys-
tems they reference are far older can be inferred from the many repre-
sentations of raptorial birds that occur in the 2,000-year-old archaeologi-
cal finds from Middle Woodland cultures in the Great Lakes.
With the influx of settlers into the central Great Lakes after the War
of 1812, a period of rapid change began. Geometric and floral designs
came to displace the images of the great manitous of the Anishinaabe
cosmos by the middle of the century, and Anishinaabe women also in-
vented a range of new weaving and embroidery techniques suited to the
media of cloth and beads. Some Anishinaabe continued to observe the
old spiritual practices, and, although the bags they wore looked differ-
ent, the broad zigzag bands they display continued to evoke the lightning
emanating from the thunderbird's eyes. Despite the near disappearance
of thunderbirds from visual culture by the 1930s, anthropologist A. Ir-
ving Hallowell was still able to interview people who could hear thun-
derbirds talking and receive their protection. As recently as the 1990s,8
Maureen Matthews was able to add further detail to Hallowell's classic
account, providing a fascinating example of the survival of visual and ma-
terial imagistic concepts in language. Although no examples of shoulder
bags-floral or otherwise-had existed in Anishinaabe communities for
decades, the grandson of one of Hallowell's informants used the image
"one wears them"-gigshka-waa-to explain to her the closeness of the
relationship between thunderbirds and people they "cherish."9
During the 1940s, an Ojibwa shaman named Moses Nanakonagos
poured similar accounts into the receptive years of his grandson, Norval
Morrisseau, and his stories stimulated in the younger man a determina-
tion to give these beings visual and material form once again through
the medium of easel painting. Morrisseau's work, it could be argued,
stretches the notion of translation. Arguably, his renderings become
"prime objects," in George Kubler's terms, rather than resumptions of
an interrupted series.10 However that issue may be decided, this highly
telescoped account illustrates the kinds of adaptations of imagery, ma-
terials, and techniques that characterize the artistic traditions of many
colonized peoples. They are translational processes made necessary by
deprivations and oppressions, but they are also made desirable by the
stimulus of new artistic influences and materials. They illustrate, too, the
slide of key cultural concepts into and out of material forms, and visual
and verbal images. As such, they argue for the need to maintain the lin-
guistic, the visual, and the material dimensions of expressive culture in
tension in order to develop understandings adequate to the complexity
of historical process.
NOTES
1. Madeleine Katt Theriault, From Moose to Moosehide: The Story of Ka Kita Wa Pa
No Kwe (Toronto: Natural Heritage/Natural History, Inc., 1992), 59.
2. Madeleine Katt Theriault, From Moose to Moosehide, 61.
3. W. J. T. Mitchell, 1986, "What is an Image?," in Studies in Iconology: Image,
Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 7-46.
4. See Margaret Dikoviskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cul-
tural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and my essay "The Value of
Disciplinary Difference: Art History and Anthropology at the Beginning of
the Twenty-First Century," in Anthropologies of Art, ed. Mariet Westermann
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Clark Art Institute, 2004).
5. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
6. George R. Hamell, "Trading in Metaphors, The Magic of Beads: Another
Perspective on Indian-European Contact in Northeastern North America,"
in Proceedings of the 1982 Glass Trade Bead Conference, ed. Charles F. Hayes III
(Rochester, NY Rochester Museum and Science Center, 1983).
7. 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), 38.
8. A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour and World View," in Cul-
ture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. Stanley Diamond (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
9. Maureen Matthews, Repatriating Agency: Animacy, Personhood and Agency in
the Repatriation of Ojibwe Artefacts (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2010), 176.
10. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).

ELEVEN
The Antiquarian, the
Collector, and the
Cultural History of
the Material World
Alain Schnapp
The notion of a cultural history of the material world is, without doubt,
a sound strategy to avoid the contrived and problematic separations be-
tween disciplines, and thus manage the space between archaeology, art
history, and social history. Those of my generation who had the opportu-
nity to engage l'&cole des Annales have seen the value of an interdisciplinary
approach to the historical event-both materially and immaterially. The
reflections that follow are embedded within this mode of engagement.
The artifacts that one collects-the ruins, the discarded objects (to
take Francesco Orlando's apt formulation)-these bring into relief the
cultural history of the material world because they are solid, concrete.
Their matter, their style, their age: these comprise their material density
while their discarded nature, their disuse, separate them from the chains
of production and use through which they come into existence, and thus
render them also immaterial. The interest with which we approach these
artifacts do not reveal an actual material world so much as our desire to
understand, to listen, to see, to be enchanted. Discarded artifacts are a
means to return enchantment to the world.
To collect rare objects-remote both in time and space-to explore
ancient monuments, these are pursuits closely linked to the virtuosi of
the Renaissance, who laid the foundations for an appreciation of the
rare, the exotic, and the antique. This is a sensibility akin to the cabinets
de curiosits, or the Wunderkammer, to use the term in vogue in the Ger-
man courts. This type of collection associating artficialia with naturalia-
the works of humankind, and those of nature-has been closely studied
144
The Antiquarian 145
by numerous scholars, from Julius von Schlosser, to Walter Benjamin, to
Krzysztof Pomian in his first major work. Yet from the fifteenth century,
curiosity was no longer limited to princes and aristocrats, but became
central to a shared culture linking the nobility with the bourgeoisie. Cu-
riosity encompassed the past and the present, the near and far, nature
and culture to the point that our modern disciplinary classifications
cannot be easily placed within this complex topography of knowledge.
Paleontology, archaeology, geography, ethnography, and other modern
disciplines have their origins within this vast movement to explore both
world and spirit. It is a movement of ideas embracing society from its in-
tellectual to its economic practices, and contributes to the development
of cosmology, topography, natural history, astronomy, physics, and medi-
cine, and in turn influences political practices and national traditions.
This curiosity was not an invention of the Renaissance: there were
collectors and antiquarians in the Middle Ages, and the portraits left to
us by Catullus, Horace, and Cicero provide important evidence of the
role played by collectors both in Hellenistic Greece and Ancient Rome.
Moreover, the notion of the "Museum" of Alexandria clearly material-
izes this interest in human works-be they material or immaterial-and
concerned with both the observation of nature and society. The act of
collecting can be reduced to the extraction of a material object (either
fashioned by human hands or produced by nature) from its milieu, and
to its re-embedding within one framework or another. The traces of this
collecting are revealed by the presence of "intrusive objects"; that is, dif-
ferent from those we use in our everyday lives and in religious ritual,
found in stratified archaeological contexts or in monuments. When this
type of object contains a label or inscription, as is the case in Egypt and
Mesopotamia, then the intention is clear. In Mesopotamia, the practice
of deporting the defeated enemy's cult images attests to the existence
of collections seized from the vanquished and often quite ancient, care-
fully deposited in palaces and temples. These collections of objects and
inscriptions, gathered for a reason not easy to determine-religious, in-
tellectual, political-are well-known in several Mesopotamian cities, in-
cluding Sippar and Babylon. How is this different, then, from the Wun-
derkammer? For the majority of historians of collecting, these are tied to
an intellectual agenda: the exploration of the world, the establishment
of classificatory schemata, the identification of the origin of objects, the
description of their find-spot or place of excavation, the social and po-
litical use of objects, the "chamber of wonders" meant to reaffirm the
owner's status. Samuel de Quicchelberg established the conventions for

this type of collecting in 1565, in a system that extends to the world of
things the classificatory practices of the world of ideas.
To organize objects is to organize the world. One does not need to see
the Wunderkammer as a collection of inanimate objects; rather, the cham-
ber of wonders is tied both to botanical and faunal collections of rare and
exotic species, inheritors to the "paradise" of the ancient Persians. And,
as emphasized by P. Falguieres, the glory of these chambers of wonders is
also deeply connected to a renewal in historical consciousness, in inter-
est for the past: the genealogies of species, of works and families, were
a means to reaffirm the kingdoms' identities, and to contribute to the
writing of an ordered chronicle of past events. The chamber of wonders
is also the material expression of a desire for knowledge and a mastery
of the world proper to the prince yet not forbidden to the rich and the
learned: the historical chronicle, much as the collection, thus becomes a
political strategy. In 1452, the city of Augsburg was the first city in Europe
to entrust, to a monk named Sigismond Meisterlin, the writing of a civic
history. This work of local history, illustrated with original illuminations,
was among the first to give us a prehistory of Europe based both upon
Latin sources and the observation of place and customs.
The Poetics of Ruins as Knowledge of the Past in Ancient
Egypt: Stein und Zeit
In ancient Egypt, the taste for the rare, the exotic, and the antique were
counted among the sphere of pursuits appropriate to the pharaoh, as
well as of his dignitaries and scribes. Khaemwaset (ca. thirteenth century
BCE), son of Ramses II, is without doubt, among the best known and
most visible of the antiquarians and restorers of monuments in ancient
Egypt. From him comes one of the earliest surviving testimonies concern-
ing a fortuitous discovery: engraved upon a statue of his distant predeces-
sor Kaemois, Prince of Ka-Wab and son of Kheops, is an inscription testify-
ing to the historical conscience and curiosity about the past that mark the
true antiquarian. Through the centuries, the learned thus communicated
the one with the other, addressing each other through these inscribed
messages. The observation of monuments, the emphasis upon the inter-
pretation of ancient inscriptions are pursuits familiar to scribes and those
close collaborators of pharaoh who did not hesitate, in certain cases, to
excavate the soil in order to discover monuments and restore them.
An interest in monuments, in ancient artifacts, in rare texts was not

The Antiquarian 147
limited to pharaoh, but was also actively cultivated by the learned. This
curiosity is intimately connected to a sense of history often manifest in
annals, and in a dynastic conception of the past. Faced with crisis, the
death of a sovereign, war, floods, battles, the scribe's immediate response
was to turn to these annals in search of parallels and, if these were not
found, to declare the uniqueness of the moment, and the extraordinary
and exemplary action of the sovereign. The latter then sought to assert
himself as a founder, yet a founder nonetheless respectful of the past as
explored by these learned scribes. For the Egyptians, the sense of passing
time seemed an immanent aspect of their self-consciousness that deter-
mined the special character of their perception of the past. The past was
a means to understand the present-a reservoir of behaviors and actions
that all men, priest or warrior-could invoke in due place. From this
then comes the impetus to preserve it in the shape of rigorously inter-
preted texts and, of course, as monuments.
For what else could account for the Egyptian preoccupation with
monuments if not this defiance of time? Jan Asmann has written on
this theme in his aptly titled Stein und Zeit, where he asserts that stone
(Stein) is indeed a form of being (Sein). Memory cannot exist without the
perpetuation of sovereigns, of nobles, and elites: it becomes necessary
then to master the written word, as well as monumentality, in their com-
plementary roles. When the son of Ramses II, Khaemois, discovers in
Memphis the statue of his distant predecessor Ka-Wab, he is not content
merely to extract it from the earth, to read the inscription and restore
the statue-he proceeds with a ritual of reinstallation and engraves upon
it the circumstances of his discovery. To collect ancient inscriptions, dis-
cover monuments, to restore and interpret them were thus not simple
pastimes, but the duties of the learned. This type of endeavor is a sign of
a particular attitude and social engagement that as time passes continues
to develop and to flourish.
Petosiris, a priest in the fourth century BCE, has bequeathed to us
an extraordinary testimony: "the Temple of Heqat was found in ruins
after much time. The Nile's water had shifted in the course of each year,
so that the location of the structure was no longer in accord with the
description entitled 'details of the Temple of Heqat,' as we call it. . . I
called upon the scribe I found in the temple to this goddess. I gave him
payment without measure to erect the monuments there on this day. I
caused to be built a great colonnade surrounding the precinct to for-
bid the waters from being seized. I consulted each wise man about the
proper nature of the ritual."

With the passing of time, a revolution was wrought upon the historical
conscience of the Egyptians. Their will to scrutinize the past remained
the same, but their point of view shifted. From the reign of Ramses an
intellectual break becomes evident-a break between the past and the
present. Tradition, Asmann states, is placed upon a pedestal. It is rei-
fied, yet in a manner that still permitted them to stand apart from it
and critique it. Already by the Middle Kingdom, the famous Khakhper-
reseneb set himself in opposition to tradition, repetition, and citation:
"I commanded unknown expressions, original formulae, new turns of
phrase that have not been overturned, that do not comprise any repeti-
tion, any oral traditional formulae as uttered by the ancestors." Faced
with the crushing weight of tradition, of constantly repeated formulae, a
dissident voice was elevated to reaffirm the autonomy and originality of
writing. Despite the heavy weight of tradition, Egyptian civilization was
nonetheless able to master time, to create the conditions for reflection
and dialogue, to develop antiquarian practices different from those of
the Renaissance, yet still highlighting the brevity of human existence,
the fragility of empires, and the immensity of time. The Egyptians privi-
leged stone: they erected structures both solid and monumental, and
engraved majestic inscriptions to testify to their grandeur for subsequent
generations. The Mesopotamians were more discreet, entrusting to their
frail baked-brick constructions individual inscribed tablets with the aim
of commemorating their munificence.
Combating Erosion in Its Own Domain:
Tablets against Time
The sovereigns of great empires have all attempted to master time either
by bequeathing to posterity ineradicable traces of their reigns or-and
often for the same reasons-by establishing links to a particular place
that in turn connects them to their predecessors. From this perspective,
the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Mesopotamians, and the ancient Chi-
nese all deployed an "Oriental despotism," if you will forgive the expres-
sion, which, in turn, appears rather a vast laboratory for domesticating
the arts of memory.
Nevertheless, there are identifiable differences in comportment and
technique. The pharaohs undertook to resist the erosion of time by de-
ploying an indestructible mass of immense stone monuments. Mesopo-
tamian sovereigns instead turned to a different solution: that of insert-

The Antiquarian 149
ing into the foundations of their palaces and temples carefully buried
brick inscriptions. These bricks bore inscriptions testifying to the glory
of the sovereign ruler, to his piety, and his munificence. They constituted
a message that each ruler sought to communicate to his descendants,
even as they proclaimed his knowledge of the discoveries of his prede-
cessors. This savoir-faire, nonetheless, was rather ironic: it was not the
solidity of walls, the sumptuousness of painted and sculpted decorations,
that were to testify to the grandeur of the sovereign, but rather the bricks
of baked earth dried in the sun and carefully inscribed by scribes. Faced
with the majestic stone monuments of the pharaohs, Mesopotamian
rulers understood the fragility of their clay constructions, and so pro-
claimed loud and clear their grandeur with recourse to this very differ-
ent means of communicating with the future. This subtle strategy rests
upon inherited knowledge uniting scribes throughout the millennia; it
presupposed a philological aptitude, an ability to master archaic scripts
and the diplomatic traditions that characterized the early Mesopotamian
scribes, who were collectors of inscriptions, as well as skilled translators.
Egyptians and Mesopotamians thus showed the same faith and the same
interest for the past, yet the means by which they explored this inter-
est were quite different. Conscious of the fragility of their clay construc-
tions, the Mesopotamians set out to combat erosion through knowledge:
their palaces, quickly destroyed once no longer in use, still preserved
their foundation bricks, now protected by the ruins. To communicate
with the past, it was therefore not sufficient to inscribe messages piously
deposited upon the soil, but to ensure throughout the passing of genera-
tions that kings and scribes would search this same soil and recover the
indestructible traces of the past: the foundation bricks. This eagerness
to explore the soil, to sift through previous layers, to date and interpret
the walls, objects, inscriptions thus discovered, seem rather familiar to
the modern archaeologist, who cannot but entertain in these explorers
predecessors as passionate as themselves.
The study of the past is thus an exercise in piety that reclaims com-
plex systems of knowledge. The king and his scribes must be capable of
deciphering ancient inscriptions in order to validate their discoveries;
they must recognize the traces of ancient temples, of sites of cult, of
topography and climate, in order to uncover ancient sites. In short, anti-
quarian knowledge rests as a central function and practice of royalty-a
means to affirm both the grandeur of the sovereign and his (or her) link
to the divine.
Egyptians and Mesopotamians, much as our great Western antiquar-

ians, knew how to engage in dialogue with the past, to locate and orga-
nize strategies of commemoration and preservation of the past. They
elaborated these specific doctrines in order to manage the fragile equi-
librium between memory and oblivion: to my eyes, the cultural history of
materiality can thus contribute to better navigate the forest of signs, the
fragile constructions aptly termed by Borges "los memoriosos."

TWELVE
Mountain as Material:
Landscape Inscriptions
in China
Robert E. Harrist, Jr.
"Cultural Histories of the Material World," as a line of inquiry, holds out
the promise of innovative scholarship in which artifacts of all kinds-
everything from portraits to pencil sharpeners-will be the shared focus
of various branches of the humanities. For art historians, the word "ma-
terial" has special resonance, as generally the first thing we consider in
studying a work of art, or at least should consider, is the material from
which it is made-marble, gold, bronze, oil on canvas, ink on paper,
plexiglass-the familiar terms found in catalogue entries or museum la-
bels. In many cases, identifying the material of a work of art illuminates
the meanings it conveyed to an original community of viewers. One
thinks of Michael Baxandall's work on the significance of pigments in
fifteenth-century Italian painting, or Wu Hung's analysis of the ritual uses
of jade and bronze in ancient China.1 This chapter introduces another
material of great importance in China-unquarried stone on mountains
used as the surface for inscribed texts.2 These inscriptions, which began
to appear in the first century CE, are found at countless sites in China
and constitute, like the writing system itself, one of the distinguishing
features of Chinese civilization,
Embedded in the natural landscape, mountain inscriptions embody
memory and knowledge in a network of language spread across the
places they mark. They visually alter and demarcate terrain and generate
meaning in the places where they are intended to be read, creating what
might be called a "landscape of words." This is a landscape that must be
experienced and understood as a dynamic interaction of language and
151
terrain. In his survey of stone inscriptions from the Roman world, Law-
rence Keppie points out that "the most important thing to remember
about any Roman inscription is that it is inscribed on something."3 Kep-
pie's observation refers to plinths, arches, temples, and other structures
bearing carved Latin texts. Adapting his idea, I would argue that the
most important thing to remember about any mountain inscription is
that it is carved at some place, and the only way to fully understand its
meaning is to go there.
Describing a landscape bedecked with carved texts, a seventeenth-
century poet, Chen Yuanlong, said that "gazing at the mountains is like
looking at paintings; traveling in the mountains is like reading history."4
Much of the history embedded in mountain inscriptions consists of short
records of visits to the sites where the texts appear. Consider an example
carved on Mount Wu in Fujian Province that reads "Chen Xiuzhai was
here," followed by a date corresponding to the year 1176 (fig. 1). In ad-
dition to whatever else we may know or learn about the mountain-Mr.
Chen, a minor local official-saw to it that he became a part of its history,
and he did so by producing an inscription that belongs to that universal
genre of graffiti, "so and so was here." But unlike the scribblers and spray
painters of modern times, or those who simply scratch their names on
walls, Mr. Chen made sure his writing would last by having it carved on
stone. Although the clerical script characters are not explicitly identified
as Chen's own handwriting, the reader assumes that they were brushed
on the stone by Chen himself and then carved to make them a perma-
nent feature of the landscape. Interpreted as a piece of calligraphy-the
most esteemed of all the arts in China-the writing would have been
seen as a graphic expression of the mind and moral cultivation of the
writer, as a form of self-revelation through which Chen presented him-
self to the world.
The word "graffiti" suggests violation and vandalism-mark making
that is furtive and illicit.5 But in writing his inscription, Chen Xiuzhai
was participating in a venerable tradition of public writing sanctioned by
the rulers of China themselves. Imperial inscriptions can announce that
the writer visited a mountain, but emperors rarely limited themselves
to simply recording their names. On the summit of Mount Tai, China's
Sacred Mountain of the East, Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-756 CE) of
the Tang dynasty had carved on a polished granite cliff a long text that
documents his successful performance of solemn rituals dedicated to the
deities high Heaven and to his imperial ancestors (fig. 2). Although the
emperor did not climb up ladders and scaffolding to brush the charac-
Mountain as Material 153
F ig. 1. "Chen Xiuzhai was
here." Stone inscription,
-r 1176. Mount Wu, Fujian
Province. (Photo author.)
ters directly on the stone, the calligraphy was traced from his own hand-
writing before being incised on the mountain and inlaid with gold. In
addition to recording factual information about the reasons why he went
to Mount Tai, the text includes hymn-like passages that voice for all eter-
nity, the emperor hoped, his veneration of his ancestors. The scale of the
writing-seventeen meters high, and its location-reachable only after
many hours of climbing, also made the inscription a compelling form
of political representation through which Xuanzong appropriated the
ancient sanctity of the mountain to glorify his own reign.
In addition to commemorating past events-a private outing or an
imperial progress-writing on mountains sanctified landscape by re-
cording the names of deities and the words of sacred texts. On a cliff
at Mount Hongding in Shandong Province, a Buddhist monk of the
sixth century inscribed the name of the "Great Vacuity King Buddha" in
characters over nine meters high (fig. 3). Overlooking a wide valley, the
name imbued the landscape with the presence of this deity and likely
was a focus of worship in its own right, approached with reverence and
made the object of offerings and prayers. We know both from historical
records and from observing religious practices of our own time that writ-
4<.S
Ap CA
- ,, I
Fig. 2. Emperor Tang Xuanzong (r. 712-756). Inscription for the Record
of Mount Tai (Ji Taishan ming). 726. Stone inscription inlaid with gold,
total height 71.1 m. Mount Tai, Tai'an, Shandong Province. (Photo
Author.)
Fig. 3. Great Vacuity King
_ Buddha (Da kong wang Fo).
564. Stone inscription, total
S. .height 930 cm. Mount Hon-
gding, Dongping County,
Shandong Province. (Photo
courtesy of Lis Jung.)
ing can function in this way. At the Nan Putuoshan Temple in southern
Fujian Province, the giant character "Fo," or Buddha, is the object of
veneration for worshippers who erected an altar in front of the carv-
ing and kneel before it to pray and offer incense, just as they might in
the presence of a Buddhist image (fig. 4). Even those believers who are
otherwise illiterate would be able to recognize the word "Buddha" and
respond accordingly.
Depending on how they are displayed, inscriptions can promote a
different type of religious experience by compelling a reader to move
through space. On Mount Gang in Shandong Province, the text of a
Buddhist sutra was transcribed in the sixth century on a sequence of
boulders at progressively higher elevations (fig. 5). In order to read
the sutra text, one ascends the mountain gradually, going from one in-
scribed passage to the next. Through this act of peripatetic reading, a
pilgrim follows an itinerary that parallels the gradual attainment of en-
lightenment and entry into paradise that the text of the sutra describes.
Fig. 4. Worshipers before the inscribed character "Fo" (Buddha), Nan
Putuoshan Temple, Xiamen, Fujian Province. (Photo author.)
Whether it is the emperor marking sites in his domains or a Buddhist
monk invoking unseen deities by carving their names, writing on moun-
tains asserts power over sites. The act of naming places in landscape is
a special form of power through which peaks, boulders, or streams are
wrested from the otherwise anonymous continuum of nature and given
identities that have new meaning. Where once there was only land, in-
scribed site names produce landscape made up of places such the Sword
Pond and Iron Flower Cliff on Tiger Hill outside the city of Suzhou,
Cloud Peak Mountain in Shandong Province, the Stone Gate in Shaanxi,
and countless others. Although such names simply may be carried in
the minds of the inhabitants of a place or noted in the guidebooks of
tourists, when they become part of the physical reality of a place, they
give tangible form to the historical, political, or religious discourses that
human beings bring to the experience of looking at nature.
One type of response to mountain scenery distilled in site names is
triggered by the familiar, but complex, mental and visual habit of dis-
cerning likenesses within the shapes of geological formations: a process

Fig. 5. Passage from the Lankvatara Sutra, ca. 580. Stone inscription,
each character ca. 40 cm high. Mount Gang, Zou County, Shandong
Province. (Photo courtesy of Lis Jung.)
that psychologists call "projection." In the contorted shape of a boulder
or the irregular outline of a cliff, name-giving viewers have imagined all
manner of real and fantastic beings, animals, birds, and manmade arti-
facts. A rounded boulder on Tiger Hill has become the "Stone Peach"
(fig. 6). A cliff with a pendant overhang on Mount Tai bears the inscribed
words "Elephant Trunk Peak." And a rock on Mount Lao in Shandong
bears three characters that proclaim it to be "The Lion Peak." Much as
a title shapes or points to a particular reading of a work of art, these site
names determine the way a viewer perceives the formations on which
they appear. While different viewers might discern different likenesses,
once a particular name is in place, like the flag of a colonizer claiming
a territory, it fixes an act of nomination. These inscriptions also assert
authority over landscape, and over a viewer, by establishing a vantage
point from which a formation must be seen in order to discern the re-
semblance. What the inscriptions imply is: "stand where you can read
this to see the likeness the name evokes."
In addition to labeling and describing sites, writers of inscriptions-
like critics evaluating works of art-assess and rank the attractions of
landscapes. At several places on Mount Tai, inscriptions identify it as
"Number one famous mountain under heaven." Similar expressions

Fig. 6. "The Stone Peach"
(Taoshi). Stone inscrip-
tion on Tiger Hill, Suzhou.
(Photo courtesy of Dr. Jane
Elliott.)
adorn hills, streams, and other topographical highlights throughout
China to express pride in local scenery. An inscription on Mount Tian-
ping in Jiangsu Province announces the location of the "Number one
stream in the state of Wu." Another inscription on the mountain iden-
tifies the location of "The number three stream," suggesting that two
others, even better, must be somewhere else. Inscriptions also prompt
specific forms of interaction with mountain scenery. On Mount Tai,
inscriptions urge travelers to "Listen to the stream," "Look up in ad-
miration," or, beside a plunging cascade, "Look at the waterfall." Some
inscriptions on mountains offer encouragement to weary tourists. Four
characters carved on Mount Gu in Fujian Province urge those headed
upward, "Don't rest only half-way up the road!"
Mountain inscriptions consist of very different kinds of texts, but in
all cases they can be labeled by the Chinese term moya, which appears to
have been coined by the eleventh-century scholar and epigrapher Ou-

Fig. 7. Stele at the Temple
of Mount Tai inscribed by
Emperor Song Huizong (r.
1100-1125). 1124. Temple of
Mount Tai, Tai'an, Shandong
Province. (Photo author.)
yang Xiu (1007-1072). The literal meaning of the two characters is "pol-
ished cliff," or "to polish a cliff." This refers to the practice of smooth-
ing stone to prepare it to receive carved characters, as was done for the
imperial inscription on Mount Tai. The polished rectangular surface
of such inscriptions recalls that of the most common of all epigraphic
forms in China: the bei or free-standing stone stele (fig. 7). What makes
the moya inscription different is the fact that the stone remains in place
in its original geological setting. The term moya or "polished cliff" is also
used, somewhat illogically I admit, to designate inscriptions carved on
untreated, unsmoothed stone, for which the characters are adapted to
the irregularities of the natural surface.
Producing any inscription required at least two steps: writing the
characters with a brush and then carving them in stone. In the simplest
and the most ancient method, called shudan or "writing in cinnabar," a
calligrapher brushed characters directly on stone using red pigment to
make them easier to see-a process that was distinct from adding col-
ors to the finished inscription, which came later. After the writing was
done, carvers completed the inscription by transforming the strokes into
chiseled incisions. An inscription created in this way demanded that the

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Fig. 8. "Inscribing a cliff" (Tibi tu). 1609. Woodblock illustrated from
Assembled Pictures of the Three Realms (Sancia tuhui). (Photo courtesy of
Starr Library, Columbia University.)

calligrapher go to the site, ideally with the help of a servant to carry his
writing supplies. This act is depicted in Chinese pictorial art and was il-
lustrated in the Ming dynasty encyclopedia Assembled Pictures of the Three
Realms (Sancai tuhui) published in 1609 (fig. 8). This woodblock image is
labeled tibi or "writing on a wall," but the wall is actually a stone cliff. Un-
like a person seated at or standing before a writing table, bending over
to produce calligraphy, the writer of a cliff inscription stands upright, his
erect body parallel to the writing surface. This is why the contemporary
scholar Guo Rongzhang describes this process of writing as a dialogue
between the site in the landscape and the body of the calligrapher.6
According to a definition formulated by a nineteenth-century epig-
rapher, "to go to a mountain and carve it, this is called moya."7 Implicit
in this definition is the assumption that inscriptions were produced by
a calligrapher standing outdoors, writing a text intended for a reader
who would stand in the same place, It was not always necessary or practi-
cable, however, for calligraphers to write directly on the stone where an
inscription was to appear. Instead, they could brush characters on sheets
of paper that were entrusted to expert craftsmen who transferred the cal-
ligraphy to stone using a clever transfer process. To do this, the original
brush-written characters were traced on a sheet of translucent paper and
outlined in pigments on the back. The paper was then pressed against
the surface where the text was to appear and the outlines transferred to
the stone. Carvers armed with mallets and chisels then set to work, just
as they would if the characters had been brushed directly on the stone.
The transfer process just described sometimes resulted in carved cal-
ligraphy turning up on mountains where the writer never set foot. This
has been especially common in modern times when local officials have
appropriated the writing of famous people to ornament the parks and
scenic areas they control. This happened on Mount Tai, where a large
display of Chairman Mao's calligraphy in flowing cursive script appears
on a stone about halfway up the mountain (fig. 9). The writing was en-
larged from one of Mao's poetry handscrolls and then traced onto the
stone. The text is a poem about the heroic Communist Long March of
the 1930s that has nothing to do with Mount Tai, and Mao himself never
visited the site.
Over the past few years, I have been asked more than once whether or
not the writing is actually a defacement of the beauty of Chinese moun-
tains-a complaint similar to that sometimes voiced about the Chinese
habit of writing all over paintings. Doubts and reservations about writing
on mountains are not new. Consider the complaints of Zhang Dai (ca.
Fig. 9. Mao Zedong (1893-1976). Poem on the Long March. Undated.
Stone inscription based on a hand scroll transcribed in 1962. 85 x 280
cm. Munt Tai, Tai'an, Shandong Province. (Photo author.)
1597-ca. 1679), a writer of the seventeenth century who participated in
a package-tour pilgrimage to Mount Tai and wrote an essay about his
journey. Zhang was appalled by the coarseness of his fellow tourists and
by the beggars he encountered on the mountain. He was disgusted also
by the practice of visitors, as he put it, "inscribing on rocks such trite
phrases as "Venerated by ten thousand generations" or "Redolence con-
tinuing for an eternity." While the beggars exploited the mountain for
money," Zhang thundered, "the visitors leaving behind their inscribed
names exploited Mt. Tai for fame."8 Another harsh critic of stone inscrip-
tions was the eighteenth-century scholar and editor Fang Bao (1688-
1749), who complained bitterly about the "scraping and gouging of ig-
norant monks and vulgar scholars" who inflicted their names and poems
on mountains.9
These doubters must be allowed their say, but Chinese concepts of
the relationship between the eternal order of nature and the actions
of human beings offer another way of thinking about the inscriptions.
The eleventh-century philosopher Shao Yong (1011-1177) wrote: "that

which completes heaven and earth and the myriad things is called a
human being." In this view of the cosmos, the natural and the human
are eternally joined, complementary forces. Writing on natural stone
surfaces, calligraphers do not deface, but complement and complete the
mountains of China.
Those who left writing on mountains availed themselves of what Mir-
cea Eliade called "the hardness, ruggedness, and permanence of the ma-
terial itself." In his book Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade muses on
the relationship between human beings and stone.
Above all, stone is. It always remains itself and exists of itself. Rock
shows human beings something that transcends the precariousness
of humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionless-
ness, its size and its strange outlines are none of them human; they
indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts
and threatens, all at once. In its grandeur, its hardness, its shape and
colour, stone represents a reality, and a force that belong to some
world other than the profane world of which humans are a part.0
Like all products of the material world, writing is haunted by mortality:
we sign a letter, or inscribe a landscape, and then pass from the scene.
Perhaps it is the stark contrast between the durability of stone and "the
precariousness of humanity" that lends a strange poignancy to inscrip-
tions on mountains, where writers attempted to claim for their words
something of the permanence of the earth itself.
NOTES
1. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Florence: A
Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972); Wu Hung, Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
2. For the early history of inscriptions on Chinese mountains, see Robert E.
Harrist, Jr., The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval
China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
3. Lawrence Keppie, Understanding Roman Inscriptions (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1991), 15.
4. Chen Yuanlong, "Longyin dong" (Dragon hiding cave), Guangxi tongzhi
(Comprehensive gazetteer of Guangxi) 1781, Siku quanshu edition, 125.7a.
5. "Graffiti," Oxford Art Online. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/.
6. Guo Rongzhang, Shimen moya keshi yanjiu (Research on the polished cliff
stone inscriptions at the Stone Gate) (Xi'an: Shaanxi meishu chubanshe,
1985), 16.
7. Feng Yunpeng and Feng Yunyuan, eds., finshi suo (Inquiry into metal and
stone), Shiku quanshu edition, 1.1a.
8. Zhang Dai, "Daizhi" (Records of Mt. Tai.), in Langhuan wenji (Changsha:
Yuelue shushe, 1985), 66-75; Wu Pei-yi, trans., "An Ambivalent Pilgrim to
T'ai-shan in the Seventeenth Century," in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China,
ed. Susan Naquin and Chun-fang Yu (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1992), 65-88.
9. Cited by Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writingfrom Imperial
China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 401.
10. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 216.

THIRTEEN
Objects and History
Jas Elsner
The place of material culture in relation to the writing of history has
always been fraught. We know that Gibbon was a serious Grand Tourist,
who knew his honored objects as well as the next man-in fact, probably
rather better-but very few objects, most notably the Arch of Constan-
tine, made it into his Decline and Fall.1 And when the arch got there, the
job it served was as the emblem of all that the book was itself about-a
perfect and monumental summary of decline.2 Gibbon got his model
(not only the specific discourse on the arch as archetype of artistic deca-
dence, but even the terms in which he could characterize its embodi-
ment of the fall) from great predecessors-Vasari and Raphael himself.'
But he translated their use of the emblem (as a paradigm of artistic deca-
dence in the retreat from classical styles and naturalism in late antiquity)
to an historical usage as the epitome of a decline that was much grander
in concept than just in the visual arts (though, of course, the arch's use
by Gibbon was proof that this decline included the arts too). Gibbon
bequeathed the miseries of the Arch of Constantine as emblem for the
woes of the world to numerous successors-of whom Bernard Berenson
is the most interesting. Written in 1941, in a work only published in Ital-
ian in 1952 and in English in 1954, Berenson's excoriations of the Arch
of Constantine as exemplar of all things in chaotic collapse read like a
rant that is entirely out of control if one sees it in relation to the monu-
ment; they can only be understood as a commentary on his own time and
context as a Jew caught in Italy, and observing firsthand the dismantle-
ment of all that he held precious in European civilization on a scale
165
never experienced before (except perhaps when the Huns and Vandals
ravaged the Roman Empire roughly around the time the arch was put
up).' In Berenson's hands-some of the most distinguished hands in the
history of art history writing-the arch is effectively entirely removed
from its contextual historical reality as an honorific monument for a tri-
umphant emperor and turned into a pure symbol of all that is worst in
the demise of Western culture, a harbinger of the Dark Ages, both medi-
eval and contemporary.
Now the point of this swift canter through a monument's most unfor-
tunate historiography-actually the most unfortunate (and some might
say also undeserved) historiography of any monument in the history
of Western art-is to stress the strangeness of the entry of any material
culture into history. For to be discussed within an argument, objects
must first be translated out of their nontextual being (as two- or three-
dimensional works of art, as fragments or relics or spoils, or whatever)
and turned into a descriptive piece of prose-a process that is always and
inevitably tendentious in that the translation is done to suit the purpose
and needs of the context into which the object is being inserted, and to
suit the ends and arguments of the person who has done the translating.
Second, they must bear much more weight within the given argument
than any poor bit of material culture really deserves to bear: however im-
pressive and sturdy the Arch of Constantine may be, it cannot carry the
weight of cultural claims placed upon it by its historiography from Ra-
phael to Berenson. Third-and most interesting for our purposes here,
as well as most problematic-monuments in the process of translation
into verbal discourse have a tendency to take on an emblematic reso-
nance, which in the case of the Arch of Constantine comes to signal the
collapse of all civilization as we know it.'
It may be that all of this is just to say that when history finds itself deal-
ing with material culture, it is forced to turn from its more usual rhetori-
cal and discursive methods to ekphrasis-which has been, since antiq-
uity, the specific trope of vivid rhetorical description. Ancient ekphrasis,
according to the rhetorical handbooks probably produced for genera-
tions of Greco-Roman schoolchildren (our earliest is first century AD),6
need not be about art (despite the way the word "ekphrasis" is used in
most modern practice).' Indeed, the handbooks cite Thucydides's de-
scription of a night battle as a classic case,8 and that is, of course, an oc-
currence within a paradigmatic example of history. But, even in antiquity
and through a series of purple passages spanning the Middle Ages and
modernity, ekphrasis of works of art has been a privileged form of the

Objects and History 167
genre in which the writer may pause and examine his or her own artistic
practice, poetics, potential readings of his or her bigger project by means
of the metaphor of a work of art described in the text, and evoking va-
rieties of emotions and responses within the fictive world of the text.9
That is, the long history of writing about works of art (whether fictional,
like the shields of Achilles in the Iliad and Aeneas in the Aeneid, or ac-
tual, like Josephus's account of the Temple in Jerusalem) is inextricably
tied up with the tendency to turn the object into an emblem and the
urge to see it as a metaphor. How consciously this pattern of emblematic
tendentiousness in the ekphrasis of material culture was present in the
minds of Raphael, Vasari, Gibbon, or Berenson when each launched his
rhetorical torpedo against the Arch of Constantine, is impossible to say,
but in a sense it is unnecessary to ask, for the pattern is written into what
we might call the rhetorical unconscious when it comes to the practice
of ekphrasis.
All this has got me round to saying that objects make the narrative
flow of history stumble. They should do-for against our speculations
about motives and character, actions and causes in the past, they place
a material obstacle (of course, an obstacle voiced rhetorically) that al-
ludes within the discursive patterns of writing to an actuality or there-
ness exterior to the written. Objects affect narratives in two ways, which
are frequently not in perfect harmony: they are inevitably part of what-
ever story, agenda, theme they have been summoned to help on its way,
but they are also reminders of real and tangible things, things we know
or can conjure in our imaginations from a space of real-life experience
outside the narrative. What matters here is their appeal "outside the nar-
rative," as well as within it. For it is in that space-whether a Marxist
materialist reality check, a relic's or icon's material link into a spiritual
realm greater than mere history, the German phantasm of Bildung as de-
veloped through the experience of high culture and great art-that the
ideological phantasmagoria which I have evoked by means of the Arch
of Constantine can come into powerful play.
The challenge of executing a series of cultural histories of the mate-
rial world might be thought the reverse of the process of summoning im-
ages and objects to do their bit for history. It is the attempt the make his-
tory out of the material world. But we have to be doubly careful. For that
means the adaptation of discourses principally created for the appropri-
ation of textual documents to materials which do not signify in the ways
that texts do. Indeed, we do not even have any kind of general agreement
as to how objects mean, how they signify, whether they communicate at

all. We have very few studies of the varieties of materiality-the ways imi-
tation, replication, miniaturization, enclosure, invagination, inscription,
texture, volume, etc., let alone issues of function and instrumentality-
direct the beholder's (often the holder's) attention and imagination. We
may, if we are sensitive to this, have some sense of how a work of art or
music may affect us (one day-but is it the same or remotely similar the
next?), but to what extent is any of this transferable to how other peo-
ple-or the generality of people-may respond? And is it the case that
all categories of material culture actually signify in the same ways-from
high art in two dimensions (e.g., painting) via high art in three dimen-
sions (e.g., sculpture) via high art in three dimensions which encloses a
beholder's space (e.g., architecture) via every other form of non-high art
from ancient archaeological artifacts to all kinds of modern packaging
and ephemera-from books as artifacts themselves to the illustrations
within them-and so forth. The question is analogous on the level of
text to whether a poem means in the same ways as a will, or an epitaph,
or a political speech-let alone a historian's narrative. What I mean by
all this is that the cultural history of the material world-meaning the
world of man-made artifacts at specific times and across time-is a great
experimental adventure in which few rules have yet been written, and
many pitfalls and heffalump traps remain to be fallen into.
Now it might be fairly claimed that at least we have some selected his-
toriographic models to help our enterprise along: examples of good his-
tories of material culture and- perhaps even more usefully-examples
of bad ones, roads better left untraveled. But here again I am skepti-
cal. The history of art-an area where one might reasonably expect to
find such models-has largely been a series of ideologically charged
discussions of objects tied into a scheme borrowed from history and
coordinated-through most of the twentieth century at least-by a spe-
cially constructed jargon around questions of style and form. Berenson's
The Arch of Constantine or the Decline of Form may stand as a particularly
mad, fascinating, and extreme example, from a giant among art histori-
ans. The model of Warburg-of great current critical interest-has fre-
quently been adduced. But here we have a further problem, which has
rarely been articulated, but is essential to the challenge.
We work and write at a time when the products of high art-especially
literature, music, and the visual arts-no longer have the same cultural
standing across Western culture as a whole (let alone in the context of
globalization) that they did for Warburg, or indeed for anyone brought
up and trained in the values that predominated before the Second World
War, which includes most practitioners within the academy-which has
been conservative in preserving those values-both after the war, and
until today. The reason for the collapse of those values in the culture
generally may be traced fundamentally to the breaking of what I would
call the "cultural contract" that prevailed in the 150 years before the
Nazi government in Germany. This contract affirmed that great art was,
above all, valuable because it created the conditions for Bildung-the
intellectual, ethical, and philosophical formation of human beings to
make them better people-and that the fostering of Bildung itself led
to the generation of more great art in new and experimental forms, as
well as scholarship, humanism, and human development. Of course, the
values and arenas to which the products of Bildung extend are larger
than the fine arts-including at least music and literature, in all of which
criteria such as beauty might be seen to resonate. But there is little doubt
that Winckelmann's seminal art historical project of the 1760s not only
helped to inaugurate the formulation of a series of canonical master-
pieces on which Bildung could be based, but also prompted much of the
great scholarly explosion of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries in which the project of Bildung was developed.10 Although Bildung
is supremely a German enterprise, many of its values and assumptions
were shared and remain implicit-if no longer fully or wholeheartedly
believed-in the other Western cultures.
The orchestras that played Mozart as the cattle cars were emptied,
and their occupants marched to the gas chamber have broken forever
the fantasy that art can deliver anything by way of Bildung, and that Bild-
ung has any certainty of making a man a better man. I know this person-
ally. My mother's piano teacher, who lived in Krakow before the war, and
in London after the war-Natalya Karpf-survived Auschwitz by playing
Chopin for Amon Goeth. The point is that the appreciation of art has no
effect at all on the capacity of a man to conduct genocide on a daily basis.
No amount of education in any of the great achievements of humanism
necessarily makes any difference. But the problem with the breaking of
the cultural contract is that most people who believe in it-or want to
do so-are either in denial, or enter apologetic mode. Most art histori-
cal writing-especially by the best art historians after the War-is, in my
view, both interestingly and highly problematically caught in apology as
it tries to find ways of justifying value which can no longer have a basis,
and as far as wider contemporary culture is concerned, do not."
The cultural history of the material world in our time cannot be
caught in apologetics and must, therefore, be wary and skeptical about

its debts to earlier traditions. It must, of course, absolutely not be art
historical in the old-fashioned sense, in that its focus must be on a much
wider range and remit of material culture thanjust high art. But the chal-
lenge is not made easier by the lack of models from which to start, and
the lack of much conceptual understanding of how objects in all their
variety may make meaning in their cultural settings. My hunch is that we
need to get a lot more material and hands-on in our approaches-just
at a historical juncture when museums are making it that much more
difficult to handle anything, and as our students, tied more than ever
before to a high sophistication of the two-dimensional image as deliv-
ered on the flat screen of a computer, are less literate than ever before
in questions of three-dimensional materiality. We need, therefore, to be
both closer to our objects in understanding their materiality, and more
theoretical than we have so far been about how that materiality and its
decorative semiotics translate into cultural meanings, both in their pe-
riods of production and over longer trajectories of time and reception.
That theoretics needs to be materially grounded in the ways objects
themselves exist spatially and chromatically; the turn to forms of theory
rooted in linguistics and literary criticism, which dominated art history
in the 1980s and 1990s, is not particularly helpful here. In fact, I do not
think much is obvious about how we should proceed, but some things
are clear about how we should not.
NOTES
1. See F. Haskell, History and Its Images (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1993), 186-91.
2. See E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776),
ed. J. B. Bury (New York: The Limited Edition Club, 1946), 331; or ed. D.
Womersley (London: Allen Lane, 1994), vol. 1, 428.
3. The text of Raphael's letter of 1519 is in E. Camesasca and G. Piazza, eds.,
Raffaello, Gli Scritti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), 257-322; with discussion and
translated in R. Goldwater and M. Treves, Artists on Art (London: Kegan
Paul, 1945), 74-75; the discussion of Vasari is in G. Vasari, Le vite de' piu
eccellenti pittori, scultori ed archittetori, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence: Barbera,
1878 [1568]), 224-25 (Proemio delle Vite, 5). On the stylistic rhetoric running
these accounts, see J. Elsner, "Style," in Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed.,
ed. R. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
98-109. On Gibbon's debt to "written sources," see Haskell, History and Its
Images.
4. See B. Berenson, L'arco di Costantino o Della decadenza della forma (Milan:

Electa, 1952); and The Arch of Constantine or the Decline of Form (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1954); see the discussion of J. Elsner, "Berenson's
Decline, or his Arch of Constantine Reconsidered," Apollo 148 (July 1998):
20-22.
5. This paragraph summarizes a much longer argument in J. Elsner, "Art His-
tory as Ekphrasis," Art History 33 (2010): 8-33.
6. These handbooks (the so-called Progymnasmata) are conveniently translated
and introduced by G. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Com-
position and Rhetoric (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). For dis-
cussion, see R. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetori-
cal Theory and Practice (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 39-60.
7. See Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion, 1-3, 61-86.
8. See Theon, Progymnasmata 7; Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 10; see Aphtho-
nius, Progymnasmata 12; respectively in Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 46, 86, 117.
9. Useful recent discussions include S. Goldhill, "What is Ekphrasis For?" Clas-
sical Philology 102 (2007) 1-19; V. Cunningham, "Why Ekphrasis?" Classi-
cal Philology 102 (2007) 57-71; Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion,
167-92 (on the poetics of Ekphrasis).
10. On Winckelmann, one might start with A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winck-
elmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1994); E. Decultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Enquete sur la genese de
l'histoire de l'art (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000); and E. Pom-
mier, Winckelmann, inventeur de l'histoire de V'art (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); on
his place at the origins of the German cultural obsession with Greece, see
S. Marchand, Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany
1750-1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7-16; C. Gut-
henke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism 1770-1840
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25-32.
11. The history of the effect of the breaking of the cultural contract across all
the arts (not just material culture, but also music and literature), and in
all the scholarly disciplines of humanism, remains to be written. The topic
is not only vast but by no means simple-differently modulated among
Germans and German-Jewish emigres, among the other nations of Europe
(with various degrees of collaboration and resistance to Nazi rule, and vari-
ous degrees of postwar guilt, most of it suppressed or expressed mutedly),
in the most significant receivers of postwar Jewish emigration-namely, the
United States and Israel. It cannot be wholly differentiated from colonial-
ist/imperialist assumptions about civilization, which were again differently
modulated among the great imperial powers of the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries (including the United States).

FOURTEEN
Beyond Representation:
Things-Human and
Nonhuman
Ittai Weinryb
There is a gallery in Rome where I take myself
while wandering about;
Looking for new things, I found a sapphire vase.
The ignorant vendor was selling incense with
the sapphire;
My companion bought the incense for thrice
three pennies
And I lavishly bought the vase for three and a
half shillings.
Since I was concerned about carrying it with-
out jarring it,
I paid the price of an elegant wicker box.
The vase was put in whole, I remember about
that, brought out cracked:
I feel very sad and unhappy about that.
If it had been carried in among court nobles
As it had been put in then, it would have been
of high value.
But the porter pressed down on it-may no
day be prosperous for him!1
In an imaginary stroll through the streets of Rome, while looking for
new things (res, which usually signifies an object, but could also be un-
derstood as matter or material), the bishop and poet Marbod of Rennes
(1035-1123) reveals a hitherto concealed aspect of the early twelfth-
century attitude toward the material world. A newly purchased vase was
broken on the way home. Noting the crack it now bore, Marbod com-
172
Beyond Representation 173
ments that if the damage had been made in the past, it would be ac-
ceptable. In fact, an historical crack would have delighted Marbod, for
it would have made the precious vase even more valuable. Since cracks
bore witness to an object's historicity, he saw, in a calculated manner, that
broken objects could have value in the Middle Ages.2
The poem likely narrates a fictional journey. Modern scholars have
stressed the importance of such journeys as exegetical, and as exemplars
of mnemonic contemplative practice. But in addition to this, however,
the poem reveals that Rome, for the Frenchman Marbod, was a place
of difference, and even alterity. In the heart of this foreign region, as in
the essence of the poem, lies an understanding that the value of objects,
particularly ones with temporal marks postdating their fabrication, ex-
tended far beyond their material form.'
As a broken res, the vase offered, apart from a promise of a form
that was now lost, a material presence that bore formidable significance.
The poet's understanding that the vase was once whole, and his subse-
quent dismay due to the porter's mishandling of it, are simply echoes of
a contemplative notion. According to Marbod, as an object combines its
material form with marks of its "history," its wholeness is transformed
so that the material presence of the broken vase exceeds, in a sense, its
functional value.
For a medievalist, especially one who developed his scholarly outlook
in an art history department, the reality that there was a material world
in the Middle Ages, and that this material world is not with a collection
of pictorial representations, is of extreme importance. Until now, the
study of medieval art has focused almost exclusively on the analysis of
pictorial representations: it is the disembodied representation that bears
meaning, especially when it is combined with networks of text, primarily
those relating to the Holy Scriptures. From this point of view, all images
produced in the Middle Ages are seen to either participate in-or to be
in discourse with-other types of representation. Thus, conventionally,
the material world is only engaged insofar as it provides a potential sur-
face for studying such representations.4
Marbod's poem offers a rare glimpse into medieval object lore, for it
considers an object's material state as a primary component of its signifi-
cance. Here, materiality conveys not representation, but presence. The
"being" of the object is not necessarily perceived by sight as the primary
tool of cognition, but rather through networks of significations that lie
beyond the visible. This is to say that pictorial representation, if it existed
on the vase, would have been of secondary importance to Marbod. Based

on this story, at least, we might propose that, in the study of interactions
between humans and objects, it is not the study of the representation,
but rather the rigorous assessment of the presence of an object that is-
or ought to be-of significance to historians.
While examining pictorial representation has been the primary
method used to scrutinize objects, Marbod's poem provides something
substantial that cannot necessarily be understood through a conflation
of text and image. The poem demonstrates that meaning lies beyond
a mere understanding of "things" as allusions to this or that text. The
poem suggests that the merit of an object lies in its material presence,
where text-or at least text in its direct referential function-is not criti-
cal to an understanding of the object. The "histories of things" of the
Middle Ages are sometimes written as histories of materials. At pres-
ent, this constitutes a growing field of research where the symbolism of
materials is determined largely by looking to texts that derive from the
Scriptures and their commentaries. Sometimes known as the "Iconology
of Material," this mode of analysis assumes that physical matter has a
certain metaphorical value, which is constituted by texts that are inde-
pendent of, and unrelated to, the object itself. It is the meaning of the
material in the text that enhances an understanding of an object made
from a specific material.'
Marbod's engagement with the broken sapphire vase, and in a sense
his preoccupation with its materiality, is not about the metaphorical
value of the sapphire. His interest in the vase lies primarily in his "dis-
covery" of it. Marbod, a foreigner in Rome, realized the vase had been
displaced from the site of its fabrication-or at least the place where
its material substance was excavated. This awareness thus produced the
possibility of imagining the locale where the sapphire originated. With
the understanding that material cannot be created ex nihilo, but must
always be made or brought from somewhere else, materials were always
designated as either "local," or extraterritorial. This foreign place could
be a geographical location or an imagined site. Yet, in both cases they
were understood as elsewhere-a place unreachable at present, if ever.
This precondition has generated several studies relating to materials and
their significance, particularly in the field of spolia studies, where the
reuse of specific, geographically dislocated materials is understood as an
indication of political or religious ideology.' In both the case of spolia
studies, as in Marbod's poem, foreignness is a prerequisite for a discus-
sion of materials and their representation. It is only when Marbod is away

from his native habitus that he discovers the material presence of the
vase and makes note of its cracks.
Other works written by Marbod additionally underscore his interest
in materials. Notably, he wrote the first medieval "book of gems," or lapi-
dary. His manuscript, penned in hexameter and based on an Aristotelian
model, discusses the secrets of sixty different stones, while also assessing
their medicinal qualities. The property of each stone-which Marbod
does not locate in the stone's decorative potential, nor in its representa-
tional value-is embedded in the material itself. Marbod's lapidary marks
a shift in the interests of the monastic and clerical community.7 Scholars
such as Gerald Bond have suggested that the lapidary demonstrates a
revival of naturalism indicative of a "Twelfth-Century Renaissance."8 I
would like to claim more than that, for the interest here is in the power
of material. Marbod touches upon this at the onset of his lapidary.
Their different kinds, their varying hues I teach,
What land produces, what the power of each ...
For sure, the hidden powers of gems to know,
What great effects from hidden causes flow,
A science this to be confines and viewed with admiration by
mankind.'
In this passage Marbod insists that the different origins of materials
and the concealed knowledge of their power are cause for their admi-
ration. Indeed, knowledge of the qualities of organic entities like the
gems was known only to few, who understood the material presence of
each stone only through its apparent magical power. Attesting to his con-
noisseurship, Marbod presents himself reflexively in the poem, insisting
on the legitimacy of his knowledge. A few lines earlier, he remarks that
the book's readership ought to be tightly restricted: "whoever vulgarizes
mysteries reduces majesty, and things known to the crowd do not remain
secret."10 There is knowledge in matter, in its materiality, and in what
comprises material culture. He attributes powers-even vitalism-to
nonhuman objects. It is this his belief in this knowledge that might have
motivated, at least in part, Marbod's purchase of the vase, as well as his
endeavor to classify the marvelous gems of the world." Marbod seems
to believe that a nonhuman object can possess power independent of its
appearance because of its material, and that this power could affect hu-
mans and nonhumans alike.12 A few decades after Marbod described his
Fig. 1. The vase of red porphyry was made in Egypt or imperial Rome.
The mount of gilded silver in the form of an eagle was added before
1122 in the Abbey of Saint Denis under Abbot Suger (1081-1151).
MR. 422. Louvre, Paris, France. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
New York.)
fictional purchase, another vase (fig. 1), still extant, was sought by Suger,
Abbot of St. Denis, as is mentioned in his De Administratione (1147).13
This particular object was an antique Egyptian vase, a spoliated work ac-
quired by Suger. He embellished the vase with the head, feet, and wings
of an eagle-all made of gold.14 The container, made of porphyry, was
transmogrified into an elaborate sculpture. Yet, as Suger commemorated
in an inscription appended to the neck of the vase, the original material
was still fundamental to the transformed object.
This stone deserves to be enclosed in gems and gold. It was marble,
but in [these] settings it is more precious than marble"
Scholars dealing with this well-known object usually emphasize its liturgi-
cal function within Suger's newly expanded treasury. In doing so, they
highlight the symbolic character of the porphyry as related to royalty.16
The vase is also frequently cited as an example of the interest in spolia
within the "treasury culture" of the Middle Ages.17 Aside from the vase,
Suger commissioned bronze doors for St. Denis, which have an inscrip-
tion stating that the "work suppresses the material" (materiam suberabat
opus). Recently, both the vase and the doors have been the center of a de-
bate about whether the work referred to in the inscription relates to the
creative capabilities of the artist, or whether it refers to the devotional
work of the worshipper-in this case, Suger, whose belief is stronger and
more valuable than the preciousness of the material. In comparing Mar-
bod's vase with that of Suger, we see that both men were invested in the
object not as a representation of form, nor as a representation of a cer-
tain temporal past, but rather as an integral part of a network of meaning
that extends beyond the formal appearance of the object.18
In transforming the vase into an eagle, Suger bestowed upon it the
features of an animal and, in doing so, the object was imbued with an
animate spirit-that is, with vitality. This process of enlivening an object
is also found in the material essence of the sapphire vase in Marbod's
poem.19 In his book of gems, Marbod associates the precious qualities of
the sapphire with kings and nobles, presenting it as a material that also
enlivens the body, binds the soul of a loved one, and even breaks pris-
oner's chains.20 Such ascriptions were recently conceptualized by Jane
Bennett as "thing-power"-by which she means that the inherent vital-
ism of material is not the result of efficacy, nor does it aspires to affect;
rather, it grants independence to materials and objects. Their meaning
lies beyond the definition that their makers or users give them.21
The inscription Suger placed on his vase seems to suggest that the
vase was transformed purely for financial enrichment: it was worth more
when embellished with gold and gems. Indeed, the inscription might be
read as a calculated assertion of vase's absolute monetary value. Marbod
likewise seems to view his purchase in monetized terms. Yet, in his lapi-
dary, Marbod forwards the argument that the functional value of a stone
is its essence, and that this value has an impact on the natural world.
Suger, too, presents the porphyry's materiality as something living, thus
inserting it into the natural world. Curiously, Marbod and Suger express
surprisingly similar attitudes toward material presence in their terminol-
ogy: Marbod endeavors to look for things (res), while Suger's inscription
refers to the vase as stone (lapis).
Objects, for both Marbod and Suger, exist as embodiments of materi-
als, not as forms, and the meaning of these materials lies beyond picto-
rial representation. In a passage of his manuscript, De Administratione,
Suger describes looking at both a screen reliquary, known as the crista,
and the jeweled Cross of St. Eloi.
Then I say, sighing deeply in my heart: every precious stone was thy
covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite, and the
onyx, and the beryl, the sapphire, and the carbuncle, and the emer-
ald. To those who know the properties of precious stones it becomes
evident, to their greatest wonder (admiratione), that none of these is
missing except the carbuncle, but that they abound most copiously."
As in Marbod's book of gems, Suger emphasizes that the meaning of
stones lies beyond representation-a meaning that is knowable only
to a chosen few cognoscenti-the same intellectual elite for whom Mar-
bod wrote his book.23 Viewing materials as representations induces this
response; "things" are approached as if they were living, animated ob-
jects. Both Suger and Marbod explicitly differentiate between humans
and nonhumans-a division in which nonhumans are not presented as
figural representations, but as "things" whose meaning extends beyond
representation.24
What I suggest is that a certain type of vitality begins to be ascribed
to the materiality of objects in the early twelfth century.25 Outlining the
multiplicity of reasons for this development is well beyond the scope of
this chapter. However, to understand this ontological change, one needs
only to think of the formation of Salerno's medical school in the second
half of the eleventh century, and the translation of Arabic knowledge

into Latin, which elicited a new conceptualization of the human body,
particularly in regard to blood circulation and the function of the hu-
mors.26 Similarly, the translation of scientific texts by Constantine the
African at Monte Cassino and his successors likewise promoted new ways
of conceiving the material body.27
These movements ought to be viewed both synchronically and dia-
chronically. More specifically, the translation of texts from Arabic and
Greek to Latin seen alongside the commentary on Marbod's vase and
Suger's transformation of his vase are critical to interpreting the recep-
tion of both texts and the objects. This movement promoted an under-
standing of both humans and stones as made of minerals. An equality
of materials is at play: sapphire, agate, and porphyry are as human as
flesh, bones, and blood. Conversely, these materials should be regarded
as nonhuman. In the early to mid-twelfth century, both humans and
nonhumans embodied an animation whose origins were not found
in figural representation, but rather in the vitalism assumed in their
material essence-the magical and spiritual properties of which were
beyond the boundaries of any pictorial display. During this period, the
interaction between humans and objects was conceived of as an interac-
tion between two material-based entities, whose distinction in relation-
ship to humanity was not necessarily as obvious as it is to our twenty-
first-century minds. At the onset of the twelfth century, the material
world and the world beyond representation collapsed: materiality-as
opposed to the impression of forms-motivated interaction between
humans and objects.28
A rigorous examination of the notion of materiality, shared between
humans and nonhumans of diverse historical periods and geographi-
cal regions, defines what could well be called the cultural history of the
material world. Given the current questions concerning stem-cell re-
search, DNA replication, and material cloning, the thoughts of men such
as Marbod and Suger, both of whom humanized the inanimate world,
should well illuminate our own moral dilemmas.29 Men and women of
the twelfth century were constantly engaged in understanding their im-
mediate surroundings, while simultaneously coming to terms with their
place in the world. Their relationship with things-as much as, or even
more than, their social fellowship-was a core aspect of cultural produc-
tion of the period. The objects and minerals considered as res demand
new interpretive historical and art-historical methods and frameworks
that we have yet to uncover, but which we certainly will grow closer to
establishing in this new series.30

NOTES
1. Porticus est Roma, quo dum spatiando fero me/ Res quaerendo novas, inveni de
saphyro vas/ Institor ignotus vendebat cum saphiro thus/ Thus socius noster tres
emit denatorios ter/ Vas tribus et semi-solidis ego prodigus emi / Hoc inconcussum
dum tollere sollicitus sum/ Pro cofino mundo de viminibus pretium do/ Ponitur
introrsum sanum vas, inde memor sum,/ Extrahiturfissum, tristis miser inde nimis
sum./ Inter convivas magni foret hoc pretii vas/ Si foret allatum, sicut positum
fuerat tum/ Lator at hoc pressit, cui prospera nulla dies sit (PL 171.1685). I follow
Gerald A. Bond's excellent translation. See also Gerald A. Bond, The Loving
Subject: Desire, Eloquence and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1995): 94-95. See also Charles Witke, "Rome
as 'Region of Difference' in the Poetry of Hildebert of Lavardin," in Papers
of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renais-
sance Studies, ed. Saul Levin and Aldo S. Bernardo (Binghamton, NY Center
for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1990), 403-11. Witke interprets
Rome in the poem he studies as an imaginary place rather than the actual,
visited city.
2. This popular poem, which survives today in fifteen distinct copies, exhibits
an overlooked relationship between people and objects in the Middle Ages.
Traditionally, the poem is interpreted as a self-reflective, almost meditative
piece, and is often compared with the passage: "I am forgotten as one dead
from the heart. I am become a broken vase" (Psalms 30:13, oblivioni traditus
sum quasi mortuus a cordefactus sum quasi vas perditum). In this chapter, how-
ever, I present a different interpretation. See Gerald A. Bond, The Loving
Subject, 95.
3. Exile as a process that leads to of discovery because of its potential to alert
the senses, is a concept best described by literary scholars such as Edward
Said, especially in his discussion of Erich Auerbach. See Edward Said, Reflec-
tions on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 173-86. For recent arguments on issues of exile and discovery as
related to questions of cultural mobility, see Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Cul-
tural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009);
Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-
Muslim" Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
4. For various assessments of the "state" of the field, see Herbert L. Kessler,
"On the State of Medieval Art History," Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 166-87; Her-
bert L. Kessler, "Medieval Art as Argument," in Iconography at the Crossroads,
ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59-
73; Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough, ON: Broadview
Press, 2004);Jeffrey F. Hamburger, "The Place of Theology in Medieval Art
History: Problems, Positions, Possibilities," in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theo-
logical Argument in the Middle Ages ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie
Bouche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 11-31; Jeffrey F.
Hamburger, "The Medieval Work of Art: Wherein the 'Work'?; Wherein the
'Art'?," in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages,
374-412. See also the articles in Conrad Rudolph, ed., A Companion to Medi-
eval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
5. Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der
Werkstoffe (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994); Gnther Bandmann,
"Bemerkungen zu einer Ikonologie des Materials," Stadel-Jahrbuch 2 (1969):
75-100; and Wendy Stedman Sheard, "Verrocchio's Medici Tomb and the
Language of Materials: with a Postscript his Legacy in Venice," in Verrocchio
and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture: Acts of Two Conferences Commemorating
the Fifth Centenary of Verrocchio's Death, ed. Steven C. Bule (Florence: Casa
Editrice Le Lettere, 1992), 63-90. Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art,
19-42; Bruno Reudenbach, "'Gold ist Schlamm': Anmerkungen zur Mate-
rialbewertung im Mittelalter," in Material in Kunst und Alltag, ed. Monika
Wagner and Dietmar Rbel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 1-12; and
Hans-Rudolf Meier, "Ton, Stein und Stuck: Materialaspekte in der Bilder-
frage des Frnh- und Hochmittelalters," Marburger Jahrbuch fur Kunstwissen-
schaft 30 (2003): 35-52; Friedrich Ohly, "On the Spiritual Sense of the Word
in the Middle Ages," in Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs and
the Philology of Culture, ed. Samuel P. Jaffe (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 1-30. More generally, see Monika Wagner, Dietmar Rbel, and
Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Lexikon des kiinstlerischen Materials: Werkstoffe der
modernen Kunst von Abfall bis Zinn (Munich: Beck, 2010), Dietmar Rbel,
Monika Wagner, and Vera Wolff, Materialdsthetik: Quellentexte zu Kunst,
Design und Architektur (Berlin: Reimer, 2005).
6. Dale Kinney, "Rape or Restitution of the Past?: Interpreting 'Spolia,"' in The
Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan C. Scott (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995), 52-67; Dale Kinney, "The Concept of 'Spolia,"' in
A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed.
Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 233-52; Philipe Buc, "Conver-
sion of Objects," Viator 28 (1997): 99-143; Anthony Cutler, "Reuse or Use?
Theoretical and Practical Attitudes Toward Objects in the Early Middle
Ages," in Ideologie, pratiche e reimpiego nell'alto Medioevo, XLVI Settimana di Stu-
dio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo 46 (1999), 1055-79; Avinoam
Shalem, Islam Christianized: Islamic Portable Objects in the Medieval Church Trea-
suries of the Latin West (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998); Beat Brenk, "Spolia
from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics Versus Ideology," Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 103-9; and also Rebecca Mller, Sic hostes Ianuafran-
git: Spolien und Trophen im mittelalterlichen Genua (Weimar: VDG-Verlag und
Datenbank fur Geisteswissenschaften, 2002).
7. The literature on early medieval lapidaries is not extensive: see Joan Evans
and Mary S. Serjeantson, English Mediaeval Lapidaries (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1933); Robert Halleux, "Damigeron, Evax et Marbode:
l'heritage alexandrin dans les lapidaires medievaux," Studi medievali 15, no.
1 (1974): 327-47; Paul Studer, Anglo-Norman Lapidaries (Geneva: Slatkine
Reprints, 1976); William Holler, "Unusual Stone Lore in the Thirteenth-
Century Lapidary of Sidrac," Romance Notes 20 (1979): 135-42; Stefano
Pittalunga, "Marbodo e Teofilo," in Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century:
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies Cam-
bridge, September 9-12, 1998, ed. Michael W. Herren, C. J. Mcdonough, and

Ross G. Arthur (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 302-16; and Serenella Baggio,
"Censure Lapidarie," Medioevo romanzo 11, no. 2 (1986): 207-28. See also
Sharon Farmer, "Low Countries Aesthetics and Oriental Luxuries: Jacques
de Vitry, Marie de Oignies, and the Treasures of Oignies," in History in the
Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. Rachel Fulton
and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 205-22.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen recently published an article dealing with Marbod's
book of stones: "Stories of Stone," Postmedieval: ajournal of Medieval Cultural
Studies 1 (2010): 56-63.
8. Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject. Among the extensive bibliography, see
Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cleveland:
The World Publishing Co., 1967); Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable,
"Introduction," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Rob-
ert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1991), xvii-xxx; R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth Century Renaissance (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1999), 1-11; Melve Leidulf, "'The Revolt
of the Medievalists': New Directions in Recent Research on the Twelfth Cen-
tury Renaissance," Journal of Medieval History 32, no. 3 (2006): 231-52; Sara
Ritchey, "Rethinking the Twelfth-Century Discovery of Nature," Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 225-55.
9. Hoc opus excerpens dignum componere duxi/ Aptum gestanti forma breviore libel-
lum . . . Scilicet hinc solers mediocorum cura juvantur/ Auxilio lapidum morbos
expellere docta. John M. Riddle, ed., Marbode of Rennes' De Lapidibus: Consid-
ered as a Medical Treatise with Text, Commentary, and C.W. King's Translation,
Together with Text and Translation of Marbode's Minor Works on Stones (Wies-
baden: Steiner, 1977), 34.
10. John M. Riddle, ed., Marbode and Rennes'De Lapidbus, 34.
11. On medieval wonder and the "wonder" as an object, see Jaques Le Goff,
"The Marvelous," in The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 27-46; Lorraine Daston and
Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone
Books, 1998), 13-87; Caroline Walker Bynum, "Wonder," American Historical
Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 1-17; Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone
Books, 2001), 37-76; and, most recently, Robert Bartlett, The Natural and
the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
12. In this respect, the medieval nonhuman can be regarded also as an autom-
aton-a functional and efficacious machine of some sort. On medieval
automata, see Kurt Weitzmann, "The Greek Sources of Islamic Scientific
Illustrations," in Archaeologica orientalia in memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, (New
York: Augustin, 1952), 244-66; Alfred Chapius and Edmond Droz, Autom-
ata: A Historical and Technological Study, trans. Alec Reid (Neuchatel: Edi-
tions du Griffon, 1958); Derek J. de Solla Price, "Automata and the Ori-
gins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy," Technology and Culture 5
(1964): 9-23; Reinhold Hammerstein, Macht und Klang: Thnende Automaten
als Realitat und Fiktion in der alten und mittelalterlichen Welt (Bern: Francke
Verlag, 1986); Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from
Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophi-
cal Society, 1990); and Elly Rachel Truitt, "From Magic to Mechanism: Medi-
eval Automata 1100-1550" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007).
13. Susanne Linscheid-Burdich, Suger von Saint-Denis: Untersuchungen zu seinen
Schriften "Ordinatio", "De consecratione", "De administratione" (Munchen:
Saur, 2004); Andreas Speer, "L'abb6 Suger et le tresor de Saint-Denis: une
approche de l'experience artistique au Moyen Age," in L'abbi Suger, le mani-
feste gothique de Saint-Denis et la pensee victorine: colloque organise a la Fondation
Singer-Polignac, le mardi 21 novembre 2000, ed. Dominique Poirel (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2001), 59-82; Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State
in Early Twelfth-Century France (London: Longman, 1998); Andreas Speer,
"Art as Liturgy: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis and the Question of Medieval
Aesthetics," in Roma, magistra mundi: itineraria culturae medievalis, ed.Jacque-
line Hamesse (Louvain-La-Neuve: College Cardinal Mercier, 1998), 855-75;
Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the
Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990); and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-
Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA: Classical Folia Editions, 1978).
14. For basic bibliography on the vase, see Le Trisor de Saint-Denis: Musee du Lou-
vre, Paris, 12 mars 17juin 1991 (Paris: Bibliotheque nationale, Reunion des
musees nationaux, 1991), 184-87; Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, "Suger's Litur-
gical Vessels," in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, ed. Paula Lieber
Gerson (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 283-93. See also
George T. Beech, "The Eleanor of Aquitaine Vase, William IX of Aquitaine,
and Muslim Spain," Gesta 32, no. 1 (1993): 3-10.
15. Include gemmis lapis iste meretur et auro. Marmor erat, sed in his marmore carior
est. In Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, trans.
and ed. by Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. by Gerda Panofsky-Soergel (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 78-79; see also Peter Cornelius
Claussen, "Materia und opus: mittelalterliche Kunst auf der Goldwaage," in
Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrft fur Matthias Winner zum 11. Mirz 1996, ed.
Victoria V. Flemming and Sebastian Schntze (Mainz am Rhein: von Zab-
ern, 1996), 40-48. More recently, Jeffrey Hamburger associated the inscrip-
tion with the Middle Ages' complex relationship between physical objects
and spiritual devotion, "The Medieval Work of Art; Wherein the 'Work'?;
Wherein the 'Art'?," 374-412.
16. Josef Deer, The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der
Materialien, 134-41; and Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Pres-
ent: Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill,
2009), 144-52.
17. Beat Brenk, "Sugers Spolien," Arte Medievale 1 (1983): 101-7; and Beate
Fricke, Ecce Fides: die Statue von Conques, Gitzendienst und Bildkultur im Westen
(Munich: Fink, 2007), 281-310; and Pierre Alain Mariaux, "Collecting (and
display)," in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern
Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 213-32.
18. See Martin Bfchsel, "Die von Abt Suger verfaBten Inschriften: gibt es eine
asthetische Theorie der Skulptur im Mittelalter?," in Studien zur Geschichte
der europaischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck (Frank-
furt: Henrich, 1994), 57-73; and Peter Cornelius Claussen, "Materia und
opus: mittelalterliche Kunst auf der Goldwaage," in Ars naturam adiuvans:
Festschrift fur Matthias Winner zum 11. Marz 1996, ed. Victoria von Flemming
(Zabern: Mainz am Rhein, 1996), 40-49. See also, as part of a more exten-
sive trend of shifting Suger from a Panofskian art lover to a zealous image-
theologian, the various editions and translations made under the direction
of Andreas Speer, especially the collected writings and translations: Andreas
Speer, Gunther Binding et al., eds., Abt Suger von Saint-Denis. Ausgewahlte
Schriften: Ordinatio, De consecratione, De dministratione (Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005). Recently, on this debate, see Jeffrey
F. Hamburger, "The Medieval Work of Art: Wherein the 'Work'?; Wherein
the 'Art'?" On the significance of work, material, and their relations, see
Peter Cornelius Claussen, "Materia und opus," 40-49. On the phrase mate-
riam suberabat opus in relation to material iconology in the Middle Ages, see
Thomas Raff, "'Materia superat opus': Materialien als Bedeutungstrager bei
mittelalterlichen Kunstwerken," Studien zur Geschichte der europaischen Skulp-
tur im 12./13.Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Durkop
(Frankfurt: Henrich, 1994), 17-28; and Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materi-
alien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe (Munchen: Deutscher Kunst-
verlag, 1994), 27-49.
19. On enlivenment, see primarily these studies: David Freedberg, The Power
of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989); Hans Belting, "Image, Medium, and Body: A New
Approach to Iconology," Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302-19; Horst Bre-
dekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).
20. Nam corpus vegetat, conservat et integra membra. John M. Riddle, ed., De Lapi-
dus, 42.
21. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 1-38. See also Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years
of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 11-103.
22. See Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 63.
23. From the endless bibliography, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998),
13-66.
24. I cannot but evoke the work of Bruno Latour, especially in regard to the
Actor-Network Theory. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: an Intro-
duction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and
John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).
25. Many things are ascribed to the twelfth century, and the notion of the
"twelfth-century Renaissance" has long been an over-encompassing frame
aimed at dealing with that "change" that took place in the twelfth century,
see Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, "Introduction," in Renaissance
and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Con-
stable (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991), xvii-xxx; and R. N.

Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 1-11. Most recently see Melve Leidulf, "'The Revolt
of the Medievalists': New Directions in Recent Research on the Twelfth
Century Renaissance," Journal of Medieval History 32, no. 3 (2006): 231-
52. Animation and Vitalism could be regarded as another aspect of the
"twelfth-century Renaissance."
26. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Con-
tribution to the History of Learning," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 17
(1945): 151-57; Charles Singer, From Magic to Science: Essays on the Scientific
Twilight (New York: Dover Publishing, 1958); Ilse Schneider, "Die Schule
von Salerno als Erbin der antiken Medizin und ihre Bedeutung fur das
Mittelalter," Philologus: Zeitschrft fur klassische Philologie 115 (1971): 278-91;
Morris Harold Saffron, "Maurus of Salerno twelfth-century 'Optimus Physi-
cus' with his commentary on the prognostics of Hippocrates," Transactions
of the American Philosophical Society 62, no. 1 (1972): 5-104; Gerhard Baader
and Gundolf Keil, Medizin im mittelalterlichen Abendland (Darmstadt: Wis-
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982); Monica H. Green, "The De genecia
Attributed to Constantine the African," Speculum 62, no. 2 (1987): 299-323;
Brian Lawn, The Prose Salernitan Questions: An Anonymous Collection Dealing
with Science and Medicine Written by an Englishman c. 1200, with an Appendix
of Ten Related Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Gerhard
Baader and Gundolf Keil, Medizin im mittelalterlichen Abendland (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982); Tony Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medi-
cine I: Roger Frugard's "Chirurgia", the "Practica Brevis" of Platearius (Wood-
bridge: Boydell Brewer, 1994); Monica Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Com-
pendium of Women's Medecine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001); Paolo Delogu and Paolo Peduto, eds., Salerno nel XII secolo: Istitutzioni,
society, cultura: atti del convegno internazionale, Raito di Vietri sul Mare Audito-
rium di Villa Guariglia 16/20 giugno 1999 (Salerno: Centro Studi salernitani
"Raffaele Guariglia," 2004); Peter Murray Jones, "Image, Word, and Medi-
cine in the Middle Ages," in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural His-
tory, 1200-1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide
(Aldershot, UK- Ashgate, 2006), 1-24; Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Para-
vicini Bagliani, eds., La Scuola Medica Salernitana. Gli autori e i testi. Convegno
internazionale Universit degli Studi di Salerno 3-5 novembre 2004 (Florence:
Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007); Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A
History of the Humours (New York: Ecco, 2007). For an overview of these
issues, see David C. Lindberg, The Beginings of Western Science (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1992), 321-56.
27. On Constantine the African, see Dominique Haefeli-Till, Der Liber de oculis
des Constantinus Africanus: Ubersetzung und Kommentar (Zrich: Juris-Verlag,
1977); Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart, Constantine the African and Ali
ibn al-Abbas al-Magusi: The Pantegni and Related Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994);
Fuat Sezgin, Constantinus Africanus (11th cent.) and his Arabic Sources: Texts
and Studies (Frankfurt: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at
the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1996); and Thomas Ricklin, Der
Traum der Philosophie im 12. Jahrundert: Traumtheorien zwischen Constantinus

Africanus und Aristoteles (Leiden: Brill, 1998). On the translation move-
ment of the twelfth century, see Marie-Therese d'Alverny, "Translations
and Translators," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Rob-
ert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 421-62; Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning
into England: The Panizzi Lectures, 1996 (London: The British Library, 1997);
Charles Burnett, "The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program
in Toledo in the Twelfth Century," Science in Context 14 (2001): 249-88;
Charles Burnett, "A Group of Arabic-Latin Translators Working in Northern
Spain in the mid-twelfth Century," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1977):
62-108; Charles Burnett, "Arabic into Latin in Twelfth-Century Spain: The
Works of Hermann of Carinthia," MittellateinischesJahrbuch 13 (1978): 100-
134; Charles Burnett, "Some Comments on the Translating of Works from
Arabic into Latin in the Mid-Twelfth Century," in Orientalische Kultur und
europdisches Mittelalter, ed. Albert Zimmerman (Berlin De Gruyter, 1985),
161-71; Charles Burnett, "The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain," in
The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill, 1992),
1036-58; and Jeanette Beer, Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997). For an overview of these ques-
tions, see David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 193-225. To
my knowledge, the issues promoting a blurriness in the distinctions between
animate-inanimate and human-nonhuman did not exist in the original Ara-
bic and Greek texts, but resulted from the conflation of different texts arriv-
ing from different sources, and from their interpretation through Latin
commentaries.
28. This development should be viewed as a phenomenon developing side
by side with anthropomorphic three-dimensional sculpture, which served
either as shrines for relics or as cult images. See recently Beate Fricke, Ecce
Fides.
29. W.J. Thomas Mitchell, "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Repro-
duction," Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 481-500; Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen, Stories of Stone.
30. In 1994, when asked to comment on the future of medieval art, Michael
Camille argued that if the cathedral nave was read by scholars in the nine-
teenth century as a book, as a "summa in stone," then scholars of the twenty-
first century would regard the very same nave as a computer interface. What
I describe suggests a further development, beyond the computer desktop
dotted with icons signifying pictorial representations to which Camille
alluded, into the domain of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. See
Michael Camille, "Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies,"
in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 362-82.

FIFTEEN
Materialities of Culture
Bill Brown
It seems to be a propitious time for a monograph series to unfold
under the rubric of "The Cultural History of the Material World." Sev-
eral disciplines-history, art history, the history of science and science
studies, literary studies, anthropology, political science, media studies,
even philosophy-these have taken a "material turn" of one sort or an-
other. The editors of The Handbook of Material Culture (2006) begin their
introduction by asserting that "studies of material culture have under-
gone a profound transformation during the past twenty years and are
now among the most dynamic and wide-ranging areas of contemporary
scholarship in the human sciences."1 And with unbridled excitement,
the editors of The Object Reader (2009) report that "the study of objects
is intensifying across the arts, humanities, and social sciences": "it seems
that everywhere one looks in the academy, objects abound."2 More dis-
passionately, I noted, in my introduction to Things, a special issue of Criti-
cal Inquiry (2001), that "these days you can read books on the pencil, the
zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat"-a
list to which one could now add (among other things) the cell phone,
the Twinkie, corn, nylon, salt, beans, the iPod, and the toothpick.3 A
Victorianist literary critic publishes Ideas in Things (a history of calico
curtains, of mahogany furniture, of "Negro Head" tobacco as these in-
form the novels of Gaskell, Bront8, and Dickens), and a critic of the
eighteenth century in England publishes The Things Things Say (an ac-
count of property law, object autobiographies, and slave narratives); one
philosopher argues on behalf of Thing Knowledge (the effort to develop
187
a materialist epistemology that recognizes instruments as the bearers of
knowledge that themselves shape science), and another argues on be-
half of Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (an
"object-oriented philosophy" that has no truck with the analytic and con-
tinental traditions); historians of science and of art converge to contrib-
ute essays to Things That Talk (isolating particular objects to investigate
how matter means).' Forty years ago,Jean Baudrillard could lament (and
denounce) the way that the object, considered "only the alienated, ac-
cursed part of the subject," had been rendered unintelligible, "shamed,
obscene, passive."5 But by the turn of the twentieth century, figures such
as Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Jacques Ranciere described a kind
of ontological democracy where persons and things-the human and
the nonhuman-can be understood as living together and as speaking
to one another.' Bringing its audience in medias res, "Cultural History of
the Material World" may help us perceive the complications, equivoca-
tions, and possible destinations of that "democracy" (present, past, and
future). At the very least, the current frisson of fascination with the in-
animate object world presents this project with unusual possibilities, and
with particular problems.
For on the one hand, there is now a much broader scholarly audi-
ence for the history of material culture; there is a materialist longing
unsatisfied by Marx's historical materialism, eager to discover aesthetic
and semantic dimensions of the material world which economic atten-
tion tends to elide, and no less eager to convey the sense (and sensa-
tions) of the human encounter with the physical environment. But on
the other hand, scholars trained neither in history nor in material cul-
ture (as taught within art history, anthropology, or archaeology) might
very well lay claim-consciously or unconsciously-to practicing the cul-
tural history of the material world. How, then, does a publishing project
make use of the transdisciplinary energy that has newly catalyzed the
interpretive focus on objects while simultaneously insisting on the dis-
cipline (or the specific interdisciplinarity) that distinguishes this series
from any number of publications seemingly devoted to both materiality
and culture? It did not take long for anthropology to develop an allergic
reaction to cultural studies, with the sense that its central concept had
been poached. It did not take long for art history to develop an allergic
reaction to visual studies, with the sense that its central object threatened
to blur. How does the cultural historian of the material world produce
an (abstract) object of analysis and a mode of analysis that establishes
knowledge claims that distinguishes this practice from others? How does
Materialities of Culture 189
a series that is not invested in stabilizing an academic field, but rather
in recognizing an epistemological field that has emerged from distinct
disciplines-say art history, design history, history, anthropology-
achieve coherence? What kind of historiographical and methodologi-
cal self-consciousness will energize (or enervate) the series? To borrow
from what I tend to call the post-postprocessual moment in archaeol-
ogy, what strategies can be marshaled for remaining empirical without
being empiricist? What certainties about the terms "culture," "history,"
and "the material world" should be shared? Which uncertainties should
be staged?
The cultural history of the material world can hardly help but evoke
its inverse-the material history of the cultural world-which may mean
little more than pausing to think about the mutual mediation of culture
and materiality. Culture-as it is studied and as it is lived-is materially
mediated, and materiality is mediated culturally. However casually one
thinks about Athenian culture, ca. 500 BCE; or Kwakwaka'wakw culture,
ca. 1900; or NewYork culture, ca. 2010, the thought will no doubt involve
some image of the object world-of built space, of dress, of practical
things, and of decorative things. Within ethnology, the culture concept
as such emerged from curatorial questions about how to display objects:
when Franz Boas decided to abandon the exhibition of artifacts within a
technological history (of knives or baskets or pots), and to exhibit them
instead within a dioramic scene of their use, the coherence of the scene
depended on recognizing and organizing cultural specificity.7 Even
though he abandoned museum work, unconvinced that culture could
be apprehended through objects alone-without attention to language,
for instance-culture remains, nonetheless, the medium through which
we understand material artifacts to attain meaning and value.
In both ordinary and specialized language, materiality can refer to
different dimensions of experience, or dimensions beyond or below
what we generally consider experience to be. Like many concepts, mate-
riality may seem to make the most sense when it is opposed to another
term: the material serves as a commonsensical antithesis to the spiritual,
the abstract, the ideal, the phenomenal, the virtual, and the formal, let
alone the immaterial. Still, Epicurean or Spinozan convictions about
the materiality of the imagination would seem to have resurfaced within
neurophysiology. And yet materiality has achieved a specificity that dif-
ferentiates it from its superficial cognates, such as physicality, reality, or
concreteness. When one admires the materiality of a lead-glazed earth-
enware bowl, one is admiring something about its look and feel, not sim-
ply its existence as a physical object. These days, within the melodrama
of besieged materiality, digitization has been cast as the most likely vil-
lain. Describing the "dematerialization of material culture," Colin Ren-
frew laments the current separation "between communication and sub-
stance," the image having become increasingly "electronic and thus no
longer tangible." Because "the electronic impulse is replacing whatever
remained of the material element in the images to which we became
accustomed," the "engagement with the material world where the mate-
rial object was the repository of meaning is being threatened." All told,
by Renfrew's light, "physical, palpable material reality is disappearing,
leaving nothing but the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat."8 None-
theless, media history, media theory, and cybercultural studies now draw
attention to the "materiality of the medium," the "materiality of infor-
mation," and the "materiality of communication," ranging from a focus
on the material substratum of media, to a focus on the human body's
interaction with technology, to a focus on the socioeconomic systems
which support that interaction.' Moreover, within the history of media
aesthetics, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer (among others) in-
sisted that new media-specifically, photography and film-can disclose
a material world that remains otherwise inapprehensible.10 A digital proj-
ect devoted to the cultural history of the material world will have to face
the contemporary cultural fact that the digital and the material have
become-for many people-antagonists. Which is only to say that some
participants in the project will probably need to reiterate the Benjamin-
ian point-that new technologies can enrich the perceptual field, dis-
closing new details and new structures of the material world.
In his contribution to an anthology of essays on material culture,
History from Things, Robert Friedel points to what Aristotle designated
the "first cause" of things-the material cause, as that which has been
elided in studies of material culture that emphasize instead the design,
the maker, and the purpose. "It is ironic," Friedel writes, "that studies
of material culture should so neglect the actual materials that go into
creating culture." Using the example of two teapots-one manufactured
from tin, the other from blown glass-he insists on what might be con-
sidered obvious: that only by considering the material of each object can
we begin to understand the cultural significance of each." A striking
example of such consideration appears in the overture of Eric Slauter's
study of the cultural origins of the U.S. Constitution, The State as a Work
of Art. He begins by drawing attention to the mahogany speaker's chair
of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, to the iconography

invoked by Benjamin Franklin in what Madison recorded as the final
words of the constitutional debates: the painting of a half-eclipsed sun,
whose ambiguity (as a rising or a setting sun) had troubled Franklin dur-
ing the convention until, at last, he "had the happiness to know that it is
a rising sun." But Slauter concentrates notjust on the iconography of the
chair that George Washington occupied as he presided over the sessions
of debate. He concentrates as well on the history of the chair's fabrica-
tion by John Folwell, which includes the chair's material constitution:
"That Folwell fashioned this symbol of liberty [a liberty cap atop a pole]
from a wood harvested by slaves in Central America and the West Indies
was a material fact that would not have registered with many contempo-
rary viewers, black or white, who found themselves in the Pennsylvania
State House. To them, the chair would have symbolized the revolution-
ary promise that the rise of liberty could be as natural as the rising sun."
What Slauter calls the "material fact" of the chair's origin in the log-
ging of mahogany (at the close of what Percy Macquoid, the historian
of English furniture, designated the "Age of Mahogany," ca. 1720-1770)
amounts to a cultural history congealed within the material that is at
odds with the cultural history of the object.12 Scholars from different
disciplines have shown how particular objects more legibly stage a nego-
tiation between different cultures.13
In her inspiring essay, "Beyond Words," Leora Auslander argues that
"historians of all periods should be attentive to, and train themselves in
the use of, material culture" because "people have always used all five of
their senses in their intellectual, affective, expressive, and communica-
tive practices"; because "objects not only are the product of history, they
are also active agents in history"; and because "most people for most of
human history have not used written language as their major form of ex-
pression."" Even within my own remote sphere-literary studies-from
which the linguistic turn gained such serious momentum, it has become
possible to glimpse a circle that only some cultural history of our material
world will be able to bring into focus. The history of the book is a subfield
that may seem to provide literary criticism with historical, archaeological
relief from theory. But one could argue instead that the field has, in fact,
affirmed the very concerns raised by the most iconic of theorists: con-
cerns about paratexts, frames, folds, borders, margins, authorship and
authority, typing and printing, gathering and dispersion,... the "ma-
teriality of the signifier."15 In turn, it is hard to imagine a scholar in the
distant future being able to write a history of what was once called theory
without providing a short history of the material components of the em-

bodied text, such as paper: "the basis of the basis, the base figure on the
basis of which figures and letters are separated out," as Jacques Derrida
wrote in "Paper or Me."16 How else to explain the moment in 1967 when,
questioning the unity of the book-of his books-Derrida gestured to-
ward the rematerializing fantasy of stapling Writing and Difference between
the two parts of Of Grammatology with Speech and Phenomena appended
as a "long note."17 Thirty years later, he was willing to assert that he had
"never had any other subject" than "paper, paper, paper," the subject-if
not the substance-that precipitated the themes of the mark, the trace,
the fold, all circulated within an overarching "tenacious certainty ... that
the history of this 'thing,' this thing that can be felt, seen, and touched,
and is thus contingent, paper, will have been a brief one."18 Even as Der-
rida points out how theory, too, inhabits the cultural history of the mate-
rial world-things felt, seen, and touched-we must be ready to sense
how and when cultural history summons its own theorization.
NOTES
1. Chris Tilley et al., eds., Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006), 1.
2. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader (London: Rout-
ledge, 2009), 3.
3. Bill Brown, "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 2. This spe-
cial issue was expanded and republished as a book, Things (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2004).
4. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Jonathan Lamb, The Things
Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Davis Baird,
Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 2004); Graham Harman, Guerilla Meta-
physics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court,
2005); Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and
Science (New York: Zone, 2004).
5. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phillip Beitchman and W.G.J. Nies-
luchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 111-12.
6. See, in particular, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Cath-
erine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Pandora's
Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999); and, more recently, "Objects Too Have Agency," in Reas-
sembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 63-86.
7. On Boas, see George Stocking Jr., "Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in
Historical Perspective," Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology, 1883-1911 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 195-

233. On objects and the culture concept in both anthropology and litera-
ture, see Bill Brown, "Regional Artifacts," A Sense of Things: The Object Matter
of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chapter
3; and Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American
Literature, 1865-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
8. Colin Renfrew, Figuring It Out (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 185-
86.
9. See, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds.,
Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1994); Timothy Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific
Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998); and Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle, eds., Data Made Flesh:
Embodying Information (New York: Routledge, 2004).
10. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ-
ings, vo. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 512; and Siegfried
Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
11. Robert Friedel, "Some Matters of Substance," in History from Things: Essays
on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 41-50.
12. Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1-5. Percy Macquoid, The Age
of Mahogany (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1906).
13. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonial-
ism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Ruth B.
Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the
Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an
American Myth (New York: Vintage, 2002).
14. Leora Auslander, "Beyond Words," American Historical Review, October
2005. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.4/auslander.
html.
15. On the history of the book, see, for instance, among his many books, Roger
Chartier's Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Elev-
enth to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and see Adrian Johns, The Nature of
the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998). For the literary-critical deployment of this history, see Leah
Price, "Reading Matter," PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 9-16. This is her introduc-
tion to PMLA's special issue on the history of the book.
16. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2005), 53.
17. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), 4.
18. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, 40.

PART 4
Future Histories

SIXTEEN
Toward a Cultural
History of the
Material World
Juliet Fleming
Analytical bibliography: the study of books as
physical objects; the details of their produc-
tion, the effects of the method of manufacture
on the text. When Sir Walter Greg called
bibliography a science of the transmission of
literary documents, he was referring to analyti-
cal bibliography. Analytical bibliography may
deal with the history of printers and booksell-
ers, with the description of paper or bindings,
or with textual matters arising during the pro-
gression from writer's manuscript to published
book.
-Terry Belanger1
Of Grammatology is the title of a question: a
question about the necessity of a science of
writing, about the conditions that would make
it possible, about the critical work that would
have to open its field and resolve the epistemo-
logical obstacles; but it is also a question about
the limits of this science.
-Jacques Derrida, Positions2
The best contribution I can make to this project is to offer a rationalized
prospectus of the book I am currently writing, and to sketch in brief its
concern with how, within literary studies, we might newly address the ma-
terial world. I know next to nothing about the discipline and traditions
197
of cultural history, so excuse myself from that part of our task-although
what I imagine must be the fundamental questions of cultural history,
"how do things move us? And how are those movements of the mind or
heart transmitted?" are also questions at the center of my own concerns.
My first book, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, led
me to be identified, with Peter Stallybrass and others, as a "new material-
ist," and a contributor to what is sometimes, and unfortunately, called
"the new history of the book."3 But I think the term "material" as used
in such work is often an alibi for concepts that, however useful they may
be in practice, have not been rigorously scrutinized, and I continue to
believe that if there is something consequential to be achieved within
a renovated history of the book we will find it only by pushing further
with the question of what, theoretically rather than practically, we can
know about writing and its materials. My current project is to read Der-
rida's Of Grammatology (1967) against the grain of even its most positive
reception, and to find within it the outlines of an intellectual practice
that should markedly sophisticate what is currently being called, within
literary studies, "the new materiality."
The book I am currently writing, "Counter-productions: Analytical
Bibliography after Derrida," takes as its leading term a neologism coined
by Sebastiano Timpanaro, the Italian critic whose professional interests
ranged from philology and cultural history to the theory and practice
of materialism. In The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism,
Timpanaro took issue with Freud's proposition that the unconscious was
the agent of linguistic errors by referring the immediate cause of such er-
rors to the material properties of the language systems within which they
occurred, as when a hard term is replaced by one more familiar, when
phonically or semantically similar words are transposed, or when words
are repeated, omitted, or introduced from elsewhere in the text.4 Draw-
ing on his experience as a proofreader, Timpanaro demonstrated that
many instances of what Freud judged to be linguistic parapraxes (that is,
actions bungled when conscious intentions were derailed by the interfer-
ence of unconscious thoughts) were, on the contrary, typical scribal or
typographical errors, and that what Freud regarded as Begunstigungen-
circumstances that favored, but did not cause the slip of tongue, pen,
or memory-were themselves the sufficient conditions for many of the
errors in question.
Timpanaro called such errors "counter-productions," a term that
happily underlines what appears to be their double nature, for slips of
the pen are both held to be accidents and judged to have a thoroughly
Toward a Cultural History of the Material World 199
material cause. As Timpanaro defined them counter-productions occur
outside the conscious mind, and can therefore be said to frustrate its
wishes, but their cause must be referred, not to the deeper intentions
of unconscious thought, but to the neurophysiological processes of the
brain. Even when they concern the substitution of one extant word or
phrase for another, counter-productions are thus not words, at least as
that concept is commonly understood, for the substituted term repre-
sents the trace of a perception rather than the expression of a conscious
or unconscious thought. So where, for Freud, verbalization is always
linked with the bringing of something to consciousness, for Timpanaro
it is a process that can be referred, instead, to the physiological mecha-
nisms of memory, forgetfulness, and concentration.
Timpanaro's analysis has given me fruitful pause for three reasons
(none of them having to do with the status of psychoanalysis as a theory
or practice):
1. It picks up a question that briefly interested Derrida, and
continues to interest me-the question as to what Freud was
really up to when, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he first
adduced and then overrode the issue of slips of the pen.
2. It raises the issue of chance and its links with determinism. For
here the fact that chance, being always materially determined,
is not chance at all, is no longer surprising. Counter-production
comes about because the material world is not an external force
that oppresses human actors but is inside us: it is the grounds
of our agency. Furthermore, as the unpredictable appearances
of counter-production can remind us, the material world is not
implacable, massive, and recalcitrant, but in motion, volatile,
and reactive: its events are unpredictable not because they are
set against human intention but because they are the outcome of
an incalculable number of material variables-including human
actions-as these adapt and respond to each other. A properly
"new materiality" would now recognize that the humans sciences
have, at least since the nineteenth century, always been addressed
to the problem of human life as it unfolded in the middle of
environmental affordances, and would continue to develop the
work done there in order to describe the feedback relations
between the material and the social worlds. Thus, it would not
accord priority to nature over thought, or to the biological over
the socioeconomic or cultural levels, but would do away with

these divisions as it worked to read human practices of all sorts
as responses to the complexities of the real material process. In
literary studies, a new materiality could then work to develop,
as something that illuminated the rest of our work, a sense of
language in its various forms as the intercommunication of forces
and sensations felt in a continuous process of psychogenesis.
3. As described by Timpanaro, counter-production is a writing
practice so thoroughly alienated from anything that usually goes
by that name, and yet so intimately bound to it, that it renders
writing enigmatic. As I see things, it is from just such a position,
of having unlearned or forgotten what writing is, that we can best
approach Of Grammatology.
When, in later life, Derrida looked back at Of Grammatology he saw it
as the "seed-bed" of his subsequent intellectual career. But it may also
be said to contain a path not taken. Gayatri Spivak, whose dazzling and
influential introduction to her English translation of the work appeared
in 1974, and has since continued to dominate its Anglophone reception,
certainly thought so. As Spivak saw it, Of Grammatology is a work of Der-
rida's intellectual apprenticeship, marked by the overprominence within
it of the topic of writing "in the narrow sense." Noting that part 1 is an
expanded version of Derrida's earlier review of three books-Madeleine
V. David's Le dibat sur l'&critures et l'hieroglyphe aux xviii siecles, Andre Leroi-
Gourhan's Le geste et la parole, and the papers of a colloquium called
"L'ecriture et la psychologie des peoples"-Spivak wondered "if all this
overt interest in an account of writing in the narrow sense-rather than
the interpretation of texts-is not simply due to the regulating pres-
ence of the books to be reviewed." Arguing that "in the Grammatology ...
we are at a specific and precarious moment in Derrida's career," when
"writing' so envisaged is on the brink of becoming a unique signifier
and Jacques Derrida's chief care," Spivak noted with relief that "arche-
writing" and "other important words in the Grammatology do not remain
consistently important conceptual master-words in subsequent texts,"
but are replaced by other terms, while Derrida "quietly drops the idea of
being the authorized grammatological historian of writing in the narrow
sense."5
I do not think Spivak was wrong to conclude as she did. Considering
the comparatively early date of her translation there is much in its pref-
ace that is remarkable for its prescient grasp of Derrida's consequence.

And yet, with hindsight we can see that Derrida, who described himself
as never wanting to let anything go, retained to the end of his career an
interest in writing "in the narrow sense," as is attested by a late collection
of essays, published in 2001 and translated in 2005 as Paper Machine.
More consequentially, I think that Derrida continued to worry-albeit
in oblique ways-the path not taken in Of Grammatology, holding it in
reserve as a line of inquiry that might have led, not to a newly sophisti-
cated history of writing "in the narrow sense," but to the articulation of
an entirely new discipline. Reading Of Grammatology under the guidance
of Spivak's preface and through the prism of her pathbreaking but overly
literal translation, English readers have been led away from one of Der-
rida's most audacious thought experiments-and from an idea whose
moment has perhaps now come.
The new discipline would have been a science of writing conceived
and prosecuted at two levels: grammatology, and cultural graphology.
At the level of its most radical and necessary generality, grammatology
could not, thought Derrida, be one among the sciences of man. Rather,
it would be the science of man, and, before that, it would be at the root
of all sciences. Following the lead of paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-
Gourhan, grammatology would understand man as an epiphenomenon
in the history of the program or "natural technology" that is the progres-
sion of life on earth. Derrida called this program writing in its largest
sense, and it is as the science of this writing that grammatology could
be imagined. Had the two disciplines ever been established, cultural
graphology would have been the regional science of grammatology. But
again, it could not have behaved as just one among the regional sciences.
For its subject, which Derrida envisioned as the investigation of all the
"investitures" to which the forms and substances of writing are submitted
by and within the collective mind of peoples, could not have been con-
tained within a traditional understanding of writing, nor could the con-
cepts of ideality and objectivity, which underpin the study of writing in
the narrow sense, have proved an adequate foundation for its researches.
Sketching the outlines of the new discipline in twenty rarely read
pages of the Grammatology, Derrida could only announce its prohibitive
difficulties-only the most decisive of which was that it would have "to
stop receiving its guiding concepts from other human sciences or, what
nearly always amounts to the same thing, from traditional metaphysics."
It is such formulations that have licensed Spivak and others to see the
topic of writing in Derrida's work as an early and local manifestation of
his larger commitment to the questions of being and presence. But in

Writing and Difference-a collection of essays published in the same year
as Of Grammatology, and conceived as part of that work-Derrida seems to
have been, for the space of two pages, almost sanguine about the chances
of a new science of writing. "Such a radicalization of the thought of the
trace would," he speculated, "be fruitful, not only in the deconstruction
of logocentrism, but in a kind of reflection exercised more positively, in
different fields, at different levels of writing in general, at the point of
articulation of writing in the current sense and of the trace in general."6
At that point of articulation, cultural graphology could presumably
address writing in the narrow sense as a privileged site where, within our
traditions of thought, the problem of being (or, what for Derrida is the
same thing, the effect of differance) had been encountered, noted, dis-
simulated, and dismissed, without being understood. Its first contours
might therefore lie in those places where common sense and the aca-
demic disciplines had already tried and failed to account for writing,
and Derrida went so far as to indicate four fields where it might begin
its work. Three of these are: a history of writing that resisted its own
tendency to privilege phonocentrism; a literary theory newly attentive
to the "originality of the literary signifier," rather than to nonliterary
signified meanings; and a "psychoanalytic graphology" that would draw
on the work of Melanie Klein to explain how it is that, "on the stage of
history," writing has been regarded both as food that nourishes and as
the letter that kills. The fourth field, which appears first on Derrida's list,
and which (at least at first appearance) has a more local dimension than
the other three, would have comprised "a psychopathology of everyday
life in which the study of writing would not be limited to the interpreta-
tion of the lapsus calami, and, moreover, would be more attentive to this
latter and to its originality than Freud himself ever was."
Having said so much, Derrida fell silent. After 1967 he never pursued
either part of the grammatological project by name, and although his
later work makes signal contributions to the question of what-in its wid-
est and narrowest senses-writing could be said to be, he said no more
concerning the pursuit of cultural graphology as a unified field. I do
not doubt that Derrida knew what he was doing, any more than I doubt
that he continued the work of grammatology elsewhere, otherwise, using
the opportunities that everywhere presented themselves to his extraor-
dinary reach. Nevertheless, in the years in which I have been teaching
and thinking about Of Grammatology I have found myself wondering if
the seam he abandoned might not contain enough riches to reward fur-
ther exploration, and for the past few years I have been following the
most general form of his "ghost" discipline, engaging topics in litera-
ture, psychoanalysis, and the history of writing in order to discover the
consequences of recombining them under the single aegis of cultural
graphology.
NOTES
1. Terry Belanger, "Descriptive Bibliography," in Book Collecting: A Modern
Guide, ed. Jean Peters (New York and London: R. R. Bowker, 1977), 97-101.
2. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981).
3. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
4. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism
(London: NLB, 1976).
5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976).
6. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978), 230

SEVENTEEN
Thoughts on Cultural
Histories of the
Material World
Nancy J. Troy
Let us suppose that the idea of art can be
expanded to embrace the whole range of man-
made things, including all tools and writing in
addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic
things of the world. By this view the universe
of man-made things simply coincides with
the history of art. It then becomes an urgent
requirement to devise better ways of consider-
ing everything men have made. This we may
achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather
than from use, for if we depart from use alone,
all useless things are overlooked, but if we take
the desirableness of things as our point of de-
parture, then useful objects are properly seen
as things we value more or less dearly.
-George Kubler, The Shape of Time
Asa scholar trained in the history of modern art, I have worked primar-
ily on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe. More
specifically, I have focused, in turn, on the art, architecture and design
of the Dutch De Stijl movement, modernism and the decorative arts in
France between 1895 and 1925, and the conjunction of art and fashion-
able women's clothing in early twentieth-century Paris. Although I have
always identified myself and the core concerns of my research with the
history of art as a discipline, it gradually became clear that my intellec-
tual trajectory could not be located on the conventional map of modern-
204
Thoughts on Cultural Histories of the Material World 205
ist art history that is embodied, for example, in the chart drawn up by
Alfred Barr in 1936, in conjunction with his groundbreaking exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art.
De Stijl figured prominently in the narrative of modernism that Barr
was tracing, but decorative art was anathema at MoMA, where indus-
trial design in the Bauhaus mold was collected and praised instead, and
contemporary fashions figured at the museum only when its galleries
became the setting for photo shoots ordered up by advertisers or the edi-
tors of women's magazines. Thus, despite Barr's diverse and surprisingly
eclectic interests, MoMA's focus developed more narrowly-mirroring
his chart more faithfully-than its founding director might originally
have wished.
Given my departure from the paradigm of modern art secured and
promoted by the dominant institution in the field, I should not have
been surprised when my books were catalogued by the Library of Con-
gress, which saw to it that each seemed to stray further than the last
from the history of art as a discipline-no matter where I thought they
ought to be situated. MoMA's multimedia, yet insistently formalist model
of modernism's development had ceded ground to a socially grounded
history of art by 1983, when The De Stijl Environment appeared, and my
study of the interaction between painters and architects could therefore
be located at the heart of the discipline, if one were to judge by Library
of Congress cataloguing categories.
Indeed, the categories applied to that book corresponded closely to a
conventional history of art defined by styles (neoplasticism), articulated
in the writings of artists (the journal De Stijl), and located, generally, in
place and time ("Art, Modern-20th century-Netherlands"). That my
second book, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau
to Le Corbusier, occupied a different position, outside the center of art
historical gravity, was evident from its first two Library of Congress cata-
loguing categories, organized around what most historians of modern
art dismissed as the mere decorative arts (against which many modern
artists had oriented their work), while the third category, "Modernism
(Art)-France," recognized the fine-art quotient of the book, though
only parenthetically. In 2003, the categories applied to my third book,
Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion-ranging from cos-
tume design to the clothing trade-seemed alien to my own knowledge
base; art made an appearance only once, and then not as a self-sufficient
category, but only in relation to fashion.
What now seems worth remarking about this trajectory outward to

the margins of art history is that it was not a deliberately selected path:
I never tried to aim my practice anywhere other than at the center of
what I regarded, perhaps naively, as a fairly flexible disciplinary discourse
capable of embracing multiple points of view and a disparate array of
material objects. I embraced Kubler's suggestion that "the universe of
man-made things simply coincides with the history of art," and saw no
need to distinguish between objects of use, and those destined for con-
templation. This was the spirit in which I approached the discipline's
flagship journal, the Art Bulletin, during the years I was its editor. (The
fact that I was selected for that post may be taken as a sign that the con-
ventional distinctions were anyway loosing their force, at least to some of
those at the discipline's center.) As editor, I sought to publish a range of
viewpoints and invited contributions representing widely divergent theo-
retical perspectives. Far from seeing my goals as subversive, I thought art
history was capable of celebrating difference and I wanted the Art Bul-
letin to embody change-made especially visible in relation to the status
quo that many art historians thought the journal represented.
As far as my own work was concerned, I was unnerved when the Li-
brary of Congress cataloguers repeatedly overlooked the art historical di-
mension of Couture Culture, acknowledging my attention to fashion while
ignoring my discussions of such staples of modernist art history as cub-
ism and the work of Marcel Duchamp. The cataloguers seemed oblivious
to the fundamental premise of my book-namely, that art and fashion
were more similar than different, insofar as they were organized accord-
ing to a common logic, a parallel structure of copying, and innovation.
Fashion, it could therefore be argued, was actually not marginal at all.
Yet when I saw the Library of Congress' cataloguing-in-publication
data for Couture Culture, I worried that my scholarship might not become
visible to many of those who I considered to be my intellectual interlocu-
tors-my primary audience. Few, if any, of their books would be retrieved
by a subject search of fashion designers, much less of fashion merchan-
dising or costume history, where my work was being located. However,
I was aware that ambitious research was being devoted to fashion-in
several cases, by costume historians who knew how to interrogate the
material specificity of a dress-which I did not. Indeed, my knowledge
of costume history was, and remains, fairly narrow, and my interest in
the field is correspondingly limited. I did not particularly seek to be in
sustained dialogue with costume historians, from whom, nevertheless, I
had learned an enormous amount in the course of preparing my book.

If writing about early twentieth-century fashion and the decorative
arts threatened to make my work peripheral to art history as typically
practiced-even by those with whom I wanted to be in dialogue-my
training, professional experience, and intellectual commitment to the
discipline also made it awkward when I found myself identified with cos-
tume history or the history of the decorative arts. For example, when
potential graduate students would ask about the possibility of working
with me in those fields, I felt compelled to explain that my approach to
both decoration and couture was through the history of art; I focus on
visual materials and images, issues of representation, and the discursive
construction of art and other visual objects in social and institutional
contexts, studying those other media and practices in order to illuminate
conditions and practices germane to the history of art. I would not be ca-
pable of training a student in the material history of fashionable clothes
or the decorative arts, nor am I interested in trying to do so.
While my work has sometimes been marginal to conventional art his-
torical practice, and I nevertheless cling to my disciplinary roots, nowa-
days I find myself aligned with those who study visual culture-a field that
is, according to Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Pryzblyski, "constituted
less by its topical repertoire and more to the degree that it produces a
discursive space where questions and materials that have been tradition-
ally marginalized within the established disciplines become central."
The study of visual culture accommodates works of art, but concen-
trates more on images or materials that typically circulate outside the
realm of art, cannot be evaluated according to aesthetic criteria, and are
therefore alien to the philosophical traditions that have underwritten
the hierarchies on which modernist-art discourse was based. This is both
the promise and the problem of visual-culture studies, insofar as the field
has been, to some degree, shaped by attacking or rejecting the elitism
of art and its institutions, as well as the history of art as a disciplinary
practice. I have trouble recognizing the caricature that this construction
of art history has produced. While I believe good art history can be writ-
ten about bad art (or furniture, or clothing), I continue to learn from
those who insist on studying the so-called masters of modernism, and
I would not want to sacrifice the attention to specific formal, theoreti-
cal, and material issues that they bring to this work. Simple high/low,
insider/outside dichotomies are too limiting when applied to the disci-
plines, whose boundaries, as Svetlana Alpers once remarked, ought to be
a subject of investigation, rather than either reification or denial. With

this in mind, I can embrace the interdisciplinary potential of visual- and
material-culture studies, which are capable of producing cultural analy-
sis that is rigorously grounded historically and intellectually.
Where has this led me in my scholarly practice today? In a sense, I
have come full circle because I am once again working on the De Stijl
painter and theorist, Piet Mondrian. This time, however, I am studying
the historical construction of the artist that took place after his death
in New York City in 1944. I aim to demonstrate that the understanding
of Mondrian was not simply given in the artist's paintings or his writ-
ings about them, nor was it the result of disinterested scholarship or the
straightforward exhibition of his work. Instead, Mondrian's place in the
narrative of modernism was contested, shaped, and in some ways trans-
formed as his work was conserved, copied, collected, displayed, studied,
described, marketed, and publicized in a wide variety of venues ranging
from art museum exhibitions to the pages of women's magazines-none
of which were neutral or disengaged factors in the process. I plan to
show that while Mondrian's international reputation as a master of high
modernism was being secured in posthumous exhibitions and publica-
tions, his work simultaneously followed a parallel trajectory in the realm
of popular culture, where his signature abstract style became instantly
recognizable as a result of its appropriation by graphic designers, coutu-
riers, and hotel owners, among many others. In fact, it is misleading to
speak of parallel trajectories, because these were intertwined and mutu-
ally reinforcing rather than discrete or distinct from one another. Mon-
drian's work accrued value in the marketplace not only because it was
recognized in the museum, but also because it was circulating widely in
the popular sphere. My interest, then, lies in the discursive as well as the
actual construction-and reconstruction-of Mondrian's oeuvre, which
should be attributed not only to the artist and his contemporaries, but
also-and arguably just as importantly-to the many others, myself in-
cluded, who have engaged with his work in scholarly, elite, commercial,
or popular contexts during the nearly seventy years since his death. Far
from collapsing the differences between the various constituencies who
have had a stake in Mondrian's work, I want to illuminate the degree to
which they are mutually dependent and cumulatively ramifying precisely
because they approach the discursive space in which Mondrian is con-
stantly being constructed from different historical positions and highly
differentiated points of view.
What can we learn from this example about the history of the mate-
rial world and how it might be written? First of all, we should recognize
that history is always in a process of being written and revised-and not
only, or even principally, by scholars who self-consciously seek to do so.
One way to imagine how we could write a history of the material world
would be to inquire into how material objects and processes become
historically relevant to us. This, it seems to me, involves both the ways
in which they are constructed historically, and the ways in which we dis-
cover them in relation to that constructed narrative. Objects are not
simply intrinsically meaningful, apart from their discursive environment
and culturally imbedded circumstances, including their reception and
circulation in time. Instead, they resonate within historically specific dis-
cursive conditions that we cannot afford to ignore. What the most excit-
ing scholarship brings to this process is an insight into the character of
the historical discourse, an ability to tease out the kinds of questions that
may profitably be posed with respect to particular theoretical perspec-
tives, and a sure sense of what is at stake in changing, or at least challeng-
ing, received paradigms. In this context, the disciplinary perspective of
art history continues to be useful, even indispensable. Yet, it seems to me
to be impossible to prescribe how a compelling history of the material
world should be written, and what methods would be appropriate-or
not. The material world is much too unwieldy to be tamed by any single
methodological framework, and it is in the nature of intellectual inquiry
to question any absolute or overarching structure-whether disciplin-
ary or not. What we can do, I think, is work within, and against, the
constraints of the (art) historical narratives we have received, analyzing
and expanding them in ways that challenge us to think differently about
things in the world-historically, and in the present.

EIGHTEEN
The History of Science
as a Cultural History
of the Material World
Pamela H. Smith
One of the most powerful manifestations of human culture today is the
combination of science and technology that has come to be codified
in the natural sciences.1 This manner of human engagement with na-
ture has brought into being structures and systems of knowledge, belief,
education, and of communities, and has come to provide a means of
arbitrating competing knowledge claims. Nothing like the system that
exists today to produce knowledge about the natural world-a system
that includes structures of education and research, and a generally stan-
dardized method of obtaining and presenting knowledge-ever existed
on a similarly global scale in previous ages. Many historians view this
new mode of producing knowledge as having emerged in Europe in the
early modern period during the Scientific Revolution (ca. 1400-1700),
although components of this revolution can be traced back to Greco-
Roman antiquity, and even to ancient Babylon. These historians view this
revolution culminating in the nineteenth century during the Industrial
Revolution when techno-scientific research came to be regarded as the
basis of material progress and national strength, and then coming to full
flowering with the military sponsorship of scientific research in the Sec-
ond World War and the boom in industrial and state-sponsored research
in postwar society.
This conventional narrative of the growth of science is Western, trac-
ing the development of the theoretical and mathematical sciences (as-
tronomy and physics) from ancient Mesopotamia, to Greece, to Europe
(often neglecting altogether the Roman and Islamic periods, or viewing
210
The History of Science as a Cultural History of the Material World 211
them as constituting only reproductive transmission, and translation,
or as being overly focused on applied science), and, finally, diffusion
out to the European colonies from European metropoles during the
nineteenth century. This, of course, neglects huge swaths of the world-
Africa, China, and the Americas-and it creates hierarchies closely cor-
related to the ideology of nineteenth-century European imperialists.
Moreover, it entirely neglects material factors such as, for example, the
centrality of new energy regimes for human interaction with, and con-
trol over, the immediate environment: the shift from wood energy to
fossil fuels-first coal in the 1780s, then petroleum in the early twentieth
century, and nuclear energy in the mid-twentieth century.2
With eighteenth-century philosophical positivism, and on into the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, if science was seen to have a
history at all, it was viewed as the history of truth (or Truth). Truth's
history was told as the slow revelation and accumulation of an ever
more accurate reflection of nature in the mirror of the human mind,
expressed by individuals in theories about the natural world. Philosophi-
cal positivists viewed the growth of science as an inevitable process of
discoveries about the natural world, which allowed increased scientific-
technological human capabilities, a greater control over natural pro-
cesses, and revealed an ever more accurate picture of the natural world.
The truth of the scientific world picture was viewed as the result of a
unique method that involved a combination of theory, experiment, and
observation. Scientific knowledge was regarded as trustworthy because it
relied upon replication and recording of evidence in unbiased circum-
stances, often by use of instruments, and because the subjective experi-
ence of the observer/theorizer was strictly separated from the objective
process of the method.' This history of truth gave way in the 1920s and
1930s to a new view of the scientific enterprise which, while still realist
in its view of the relationship of scientific theories to nature, regarded
ideas about the universe that later came to be viewed as outmoded-
such as the geocentric model of the universe-not so much as the errors
of past individuals, but the results of a different worldview based on less
precise or less use-oriented categories. For example, Aristotle's philoso-
phy of nature was viewed by Alexandre Koyre as based on the dictates
of commonsense experience.4 At the same time, other authors came to
see the development of a mode of knowledge making that combined
theory and experiment-informally known as the scientific method, or
by some authors as the "experimental philosophy"-as a story of human
civilization itself.5 The interwar period was very fertile for the history
of science, for it was also at this time that Ludwig Fleck put forward his
famous idea of a Denkkollectiv (thought collective), which exercised such
influence through its articulation in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Sci-
entifc Revolutions (1962).6 Kuhn no longer saw scientific knowledge as
emerging inexorably and progressively only by means of the scientific
method properly employed, but rather viewed natural knowledge and
the methods of obtaining it as contingent upon, and constructed within,
particular communities and their place in social and intellectual struc-
tures, as people make use of ideas, information, and techniques available
in that society.7 Since the publication of Kuhn's book, sociologists and
anthropologists of science have put forward a picture of science that is
ever more human, seeing science as not set apart from other everyday
human cognitive functions or from other kinds of human practice. In
the current view of historians and sociologists of science (if not of the
public at large), science is not, then, something apart from human soci-
ety and the material world, but very much intertwined in both.8 Starting,
then from this point, this chapter offers two possible versions of the his-
tory of science as a cultural history of the material world: (1) a sketch of
the "deep" history of science and technology, based on the definition of
science as active engagement with the natural world, and (2) a view of
the relatively recent development of a standardized scientific method as
the result of material and commercial exchange.
Deep History of Science
All human societies interact in a variety of ways with their environment
for survival and, out of the experience gained through that interaction,
certain skills and knowledge emerge.9 Taking an expansive perspective,
we can see that this engagement with nature and the resulting accumula-
tion of skills and knowledge has occurred throughout the long human
past. The emergence of tool use in the Paleolithic era may have led to
the development of language, which took on written form about 5,000
years ago, apparently growing out of commercial exchange and the need
for keeping track of trade goods. The discovery of the uses of fire among
early hominids allowed the manipulation of materials such as clay and
native metals, whereas the ability to control fire itself led to high tem-
perature furnaces in which minerals could be smelted (e.g., bronze-a
mixture of copper and tin-ca. 3,500 BCE, and iron ca. 1,500 BCE), and
glass produced (ca. 1,500 BCE), which led to the use of progressively
sturdier artificially produced materials. The domestication of plants dur-
ing what has been called the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years
ago, and of animals further in the past,10 and their subsequent cultiva-
tion and breeding for food, medicine, textile production, and other sur-
vival uses was based on long-term systematic observation of patterns in
nature, which led to a significant increase in skills and knowledge. So
too did the accumulation of celestial observations evident first in Neo-
lithic grave and religious monuments, and then emerging in calendrical
form (often pictorial, or monolithic constructions such as Stonehenge)
at various times in Africa, ancient Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe, and the
Americas, and eventually in written form in Egypt and Babylon. These
observations enabled the codification of a planting schedule divorced
from immediate meteorological observations, and, by this means, num-
bers, arithmetic, and the calculation and prediction of celestial events
emerged.
Such skills-sometimes referred to as crafts"-grew out of a collec-
tive interaction with the material world-sometimes apparently emerg-
ing spontaneously in different places, and at other times traceable as
they spread throughout various regions by means of trade. Some see
the modern scientific and technological capability of human beings as
essentially different from these earlier developments, but there is no rea-
son to regard the present development and accumulation of techniques
and knowledge by means of the natural sciences as radically different
from the very long-enduring human engagement with the environment.
There is a difference in the quantity and speed at which knowledge is
accumulated, as the system of knowledge production that we call science
now involves many people and exists in a highly networked world where
information travels very fast.
Some observers might point to the recent history of science and the
discoveries of individual scientists as evidence of new processes of knowl-
edge production occurring since the advent of modern science, but such
a view grows out of a limited perspective on human history arising from
historians' overwhelming reliance upon the written word. The existence
of a written record for the exceedingly short recent present of human
history-only about 7,000 of the approximately 200,000 years since
Homo sapiens emerged-gives historians the sense that they can pin
scientific discoveries and inventions to individuals. Upon further inves-
tigation, however, those discoveries are found to have been the result of
collective and collaborative processes12-much like those that produced
bronze, writing, glass, and moveable type-to name a few examples.

One such discovery was of the Gulf Stream in the eighteenth
century-often ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, but actually the common
knowledge of whalers (and mariners before them). Timothy Folger,
Franklin's cousin and a Nantucket whaleboat captain, informed Frank-
lin of the existence of the Gulf Stream, and mapped it for him.13 There
is no doubt that the transition of knowledge from oral to written form
as happened in this case is an extremely important step, but writing is
not necessary to transmit knowledge from one generation or region to
another, although it can be more efficient. Innovation, intelligence, and
creativity (sometimes labeled "genius") have often been thought about
as located in, and manifested by, individual brains, but in reality, they
emerge and occur within social fields. Of course, individuals can still be
important in developing particular aspects of innovations, in focusing
ideas and methods emerging out of the social field, and in giving writ-
ten form to ideas or methods, as we see in the case of the Gulf Stream.
Reliance by historians on written records and on identifiable individuals
(whose papers or works are still extant) living in the recent human past
has had the effect of misleading us about the collective and distributed
nature by which all knowledge, but especially knowledge of our natu-
ral environment, is produced. Moreover, recent institutions such as the
Nobel Prize have reinforced the view that science develops by means of
discrete inventions and discoveries made by individuals.
The results of this perceptual and technical engagement with the en-
vironment are often codified, especially in relation to health and the
prediction of agricultural or hunting cycles. Such codification has been
recorded in texts, tables, and taxonomies in some societies, such as Mes-
opotamian cuneiform tablets containing the risings and settings of the
stars and planets brought together in the library at Nineveh in the sev-
enth century BCE. In others, this knowledge has been encoded in myths,
songs, or rituals, such as the oral songs and mnemonic devices by which
Polynesian peoples transmitted from one generation to the next the
knowledge needed to navigate thousands of miles over the open ocean.14
Human beings are also tool users, and human societies often manipu-
late natural materials-such as minerals, metals, plants, and animals-in
order to produce useful effects and products. The manipulation of natu-
ral materials is also codified, although it is more often transmitted from
master to apprentice or via rituals and the spoken word, rather than by
texts. And its transmission is often facilitated or organized by the body
politic, as in the case of state intervention in agriculture throughout the
two millennia of imperial rule in China (221 BCE-1911 CE),15 or in min-
ing, controlled in Egypt by the pharaohs as early as the third millennium

BCE. The codification of this knowledge often leads to the creation of
certain culturally specific identities, such as shamans, medical doctors,
and craftspeople, and, today, scientists and engineers. Such codification
has also been used as a marker of more general cultural identity and
character, expressed in such contrasts as those often drawn between Chi-
nese and Western medicine, between modern and premodern modes of
understanding, and between universal and local ways of knowing. Some-
times, problematically, the possession of scientific knowledge has also
been viewed as indicating a superior intellectual capacity or way of life.
Human engagement with nature has also led to the construction of
views of the cosmos, often undertaken as a means of determining agri-
cultural cycles, or arising out of the processes of manipulating natural
materials. Historians have usually labeled such attempts to understand
the cosmos and nature as "science," and the manipulation of natural
materials as "technology," while the attempt to understand human
health and disease has been called "medicine." In premodern societies,
these spheres of culture were generally not separate from each other,
and some historians of science and technology argue that these three
realms are still deeply imbricated today. One recent historian sees sci-
ence, technique, and technology as functioning together as parts of a
whole to produce knowledge about the natural world. Science, she says,
is "knowledge about natural, material processes expressed in declarative,
transmissible form; its representations generally aspire to be authorita-
tive beyond the time and place of their production." In other words, it
is the knowledge about nature usually written down in texts that claims
to be valid at all times, and in all places. Techniques are the "skilled
practices that go into the material production of knowledge as well as
the production of artifacts." These are the skills by which nature is ma-
nipulated, knowledge is gained, and objects are produced. On the other
hand, technology can be thought about as an entire system involving a
variety of people, practices, machines, raw materials, and institutions by
which knowledge is both made and applied. In her view of the produc-
tion of knowledge, the three areas of science, technique, and technol-
ogy are "not separate kinds of activity but rather overlapping phases of
an organic process of knowledge production."16 Moreover, they are not
separable from social relations and human institutions, but rather are
embedded within them. Indeed, at a more general level, if we conceive
of techniques as arising at the interface of the human senses and human
body with the natural environment, even the material world and human
culture cannot be separated.17
Building on this insight, we can propose an even more deeply ma-

terial history of science, in which all science begins in matter. Matter
possesses particular properties that enable the manufacture of certain
kinds of materials and objects by means of specialized practices and tech-
nologies. Humans assign meanings to these practices and objects, and
these meanings are both embedded within, and help to extend, systems
of belief-or theories-about the matter, practices, and objects they in-
corporate. This forms a reciprocal dynamic by which matter gives rise to
practices and objects, which themselves produce systems of belief, which
in turn inform ideas about materials and practices. Analysis of this dy-
namic could form the stuff for a research program aimed at providing a
framework for a history of science as the deep history of human engage-
ment with natural materials.
An example of this flow from materials to ideas can be provided by
the deep red pigment, often called vermilion, manufactured by heating
mercury and sulfur together at a high temperature for a long period
of time. As these substances combine, they go through dramatic color
changes, which result in a bright-red powder deposited around the rim
of the heating vessel. Vermilion had been made in Europe since the
early Middle Ages; the technique of combining sulfur and mercury ap-
parently moving east from China through the Islamic realms.18 In China,
sulfur and mercury were central medicinal agents, used for their heating
and cooling properties, and the making of vermilion was viewed as part
of an esoteric system of belief and practice.19 In Europe, vermilion was
especially associated with the blood of Christ; scribes and illuminators
marked with a cross the places where vermilion was to be used in their
manuscripts.20
In the Islamic world, the same ninth- and tenth-century scholar prac-
titioners who experimented with mercury compounds also began to
articulate a theory about the basic composition and transformation of
metals that came to be called alchemy.21 This theory, which explained
the substance and properties of metals, taught that sulfur and mercury
were the two fundamental components of all metals; mercury embody-
ing the liquefiable nature of metals, and sulfur their flammable nature.
This theory was taken up avidly in twelfth-century Europe, where schol-
ars and practitioners began to manipulate these materials, and elaborate
alchemical theory in their studies and workshops.22 Clearly, aspects of
vermilion production and alchemical theory overlapped-most obvi-
ously, of course, in their common bases in the two metals-sulfur and
mercury. In addition, a central component of the sulfur-mercury theory
of metals was the possibility of transforming a base metal, such as lead,

made from impure sulfur and mercury into noble silver or gold by elimi-
nating the impurities from the two elemental metals. Such a process was
described as subjecting the metal to a process of putrefaction and regen-
eration, which brought about a series of color changes not unlike those
observed in the making of vermilion. The metal mass was described as
black in the putrefaction stage, and bright red just before it transmuted
into gold. Some alchemical writers believed that it might be possible
to derive a substance that could effect this purification of base metals
instantaneously. This "philosopher's stone," which was theoretically ca-
pable of transmuting a mass of base metal into shining gold through a
dramatic series of color changes, was often described as a red powder,
like vermilion. Thus, pigment making and alchemical theory appear
to have been intimately related in more ways than one. Not only were
the two principles of metals in alchemical theory also the ingredients of
vermilion production, but the outward manifestations of both processes
of combination also involved spectacular transformations, which bore
strong resemblances.
The practice of vermilion production everywhere predated the ar-
ticulation in texts of a theory of metals. It would appear, then, that the
sulfur-mercury theory of metals emerged from the practices of making
vermilion-from the work of craftspeople manipulating materials with
certain properties to produce a substance with particular cultural reso-
nance associated with spectacular transformation, with gold, and with the
vital substance of blood. In other words, one of the most pervasive and
long-enduring metallurgical theories of matter and its transformation-
the alchemical sulfur-mercury theory-flowed from the making of a valu-
able material.23 Here is an instance of materials giving rise to practices
that produced objects, which in turn shaped theories. These complexes
of ideas then fostered more practical work with those substances, which
further articulated the knowledge system while it simultaneously shaped
further the products of that practice both as objects of study, and as ob-
jects of material exchange.
The Development of Scientific Method as the Result of
Material Exchange
While the process of interacting with nature, developing skills, and build-
ing theories about natural processes has been constant from the advent
of recorded history to the present day-although the resultant practices

and theories have varied markedly-the development of a explicit and
codified method through which nature is investigated and understood
by means of the exercise of reason and practice can be traced to a quite
specific beginning point: in Europe, between the fifteenth and nine-
teenth century. During this period, scholars and practitioners alike put
forth a new method of philosophizing that was intended to bring about
material, spiritual, and intellectual reform. While many elements of this
new method can be found in earlier times and places, European scholars
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries asserted its superiority over
all other methods of gaining natural knowledge, and it was consolidated
in rhetoric about European distinctiveness and institutionalized in scien-
tific societies. And it spread across the globe with European political and
institutional hegemony in the following centuries.
While many early modern and modern European scholars have
viewed the construction of this new method of science as purely a Eu-
ropean creation, it is better seen as a process of amalgamation as novel
ideas, techniques, inventions, scholarly manuscripts, and books entered
Europe through diverse routes of world trade.24 Arabic numerals (actu-
ally Hindi numerals) began to be used by European merchants in the
fifteenth century, and sophisticated mathematics and astronomy entered
Europe from the Islamic world. Gunpowder, papermaking, and the use
of the compass, among other crucial technologies, endured complex
routes of transmission that stretched back to Asia, while tales of marvels
that helped to legitimate curiosity as a motor of discovery were transmit-
ted by literature from South Asia. The movement of peoples and the
search for commodities fostered new modes of collecting information
in unfamiliar environments by means of observation and testing.5 New
attitudes to nature arose as a result of viewing natural objects as com-
modities convertible into monetary values that could be sent around the
world. In the process, these natural goods were decontextualized and
shorn of their original religious and cultural significance. World trade
also brought about the dominance of Europe by the nineteenth cen-
tury, as European nations established colonies, in which cultural forms,
such as the pursuit of science, were constructed as superior modes of
knowing that distinguished the modernity of the European colonizer
from the "primitive" colonized subject. In colonial India, for example,
the pursuit of science functioned as a dividing line between colonizer
and colonized, as individuals of Indian extraction were not allowed to
be members of the Asiatic Society in Mumbai (founded in 1830)-the
premier scientific institution in South Asia.26

In the Middle Ages, the idea had solidified that learning was ob-
tained only at university by means of reading and engaging with texts,
but this began to be challenged about 1400, as new arenas of action
opened up for all kinds of practitioners who had not been trained at
university. The rapidly growing cities and territorial courts through-
out Europe from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries became
places to which claimants to natural knowledge-such as craftspeople,
alchemists, architects, and practitioners of all sorts-came to assert new
standards of proof, and make new claims about their ability to obtain
certainty in natural knowledge.27
As cities in the global backwater that was Europe in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries burgeoned, a new group of people emerged in Eu-
ropean society-city dwellers. These urban dwellers, making their liv-
ing as craftspeople and merchants, gained power in city governments
throughout Europe. As their social and political power increased, it
raised their intellectual status and that of their de facto epistemology,
in which practices such as observation, repeated trial and error testing,
and demonstration and proof by producing things that worked, often
counted for more than texts and textual authorities. Craft could not
generally be taught by texts, as observation and experience were more
important in building the skills required to respond to the variability of
materials and forces involved in producing goods. Similarly, the mer-
chant required news of markets, information about goods, the ability
to discern among products, and a working knowledge of mathematical
functions. As for knowledge of natural things, merchants viewed knowl-
edge as a product that could travel and be converted into units of value,
and their natural commodities were treated in this way. Historians have
recently argued that this created a new type of objectivity in the early
modern period because natural objects were stripped of their polyvalent
meanings and religious significances to become interchangeable units
of information and value-a reductionist and nonreligious approach to
nature that became typical of modern science.28
This attitude to natural knowledge became especially prevalent
as the commercial and territorial expansion of Europe and the Otto-
man Empire, and the formation of long-distance trading networks in
East and Southeast Asia in the early modern period led to an unprec-
edented movement of individuals, objects, and trade goods. The search
for commodities and the investigation of nature went hand in hand on
the European voyages of navigation and conquest. These voyages-often
joint enterprises between merchants and the emerging territorial pow-

ers of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England-certainly
encouraged the viewing of nature as the source of material gain, and
even the material improvement of society. Moreover, navigation itself,
which had brought knowledge of a new continent to Europeans, was
seen by them, along with the printing press and gunpowder, as proof of
the moderns' superiority over the ancients. This novel idea of progress
took hold from the seventeenth century, and the knowledge of nature
was viewed as a motor of that progress. In the mid-seventeenth century,
societies imbued with these notions of material reform and progress,
such as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural
Knowledge, and the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris, were estab-
lished, and began to sponsor information gathering of all kinds. These
institutions were allied directly with the centralized territorial powers,
and proclaimed their method as a means to arbitrate disputes about
natural questions.
The model of knowledge making promoted by these societies was col-
lective and cumulative, and it involved the gathering and partial testing
of particular facts, rather than posing general theories. They advocated
both skepticism in the face of received wisdom and textual authorities,
and empirical work of observation and hands-on experiments in the lab-
oratory. Indeed, the laboratory became the hallmark of the new method
of philosophizing promoted by these societies. The laboratory, as a space
where nature was investigated by engaging with the material world it-
self and getting the hands dirty, can be traced back to the workshops of
craftspeople and to the hands-on activities of alchemy.29 Laboratories ex-
isted in noble courts in Europe and in medical faculties up through the
late eighteenth century, and, although they were a centerpiece of a new
model of knowledge making, they were mainly used for the demonstra-
tion of already-established facts of nature rather than for research into
the unknown. It was not until the early nineteenth century that scientific
research was instituted at the most elite universities, first in Justus von
Liebig's (1803-1873) chemical laboratory at the university at Giessen in
Hesse-Darmstadt, and then in the French and Anglo-American spheres.
The presence of original scientific research continues to be a measure of
academic quality today.
By the end of the seventeenth century, then, the knowledge of na-
ture, mediated by European men who called themselves new experi-
mental philosophers, was becoming a tool of centralizing territories
seeking wealth through commercial projects, including colonies and
manufactories. In distinction to past ages, these natural philosophers

viewed knowledge of nature as cumulative, and continually refined and
improved by new methods rather than contained in a fixed corpus of
texts, and, importantly, one that was productive of material goods. In
other words, natural knowledge had come to be seen as active, not con-
templative: a way of doing that involved manual work in the laboratory,
and tangible products. It was as certain as human knowledge could be,
but it also produced effects, thus turning inside out Aristotle's tripartite
schema of theory, practice, and techn8 that had endured for a millen-
nium. Natural knowledge was now believed to be capable of bringing
into being useful inventions and knowledge that would contribute to a
limitless progress of humanity and its material and intellectual culture.
Since the mid-twentieth century, scientific research has been carried out
in industry- and state-sponsored institutions, including universities and
corporate laboratories for the purposes of war, medicine, and commod-
ity production. Natural philosophy-once of interest to a very limited
group of individuals-has come to be of intense interest to the entire
body politic, and its material and productive aspects are now viewed as
possessing great national importance.
Conclusion
By focusing on the material dimensions of the human engagement with
matter over the deep human past, and by following the flows of material
objects and techniques as well as the flows of ideas, we can provide a pic-
ture of science as it emerged out of material, social, and cultural fields.
Such a focus can work to integrate the narratives of material and intellec-
tual culture that have remained separate in the overarching narratives of
the history of science. A history of science and technology that traces not
only the reciprocal process by which the mundane production of mate-
rial things (involving the manipulation of matter and natural forces) in-
formed and transformed theoretical formulations of knowledge, but also
the ways that the transfer of practical techniques across space fostered
new ways of controlling both nature and other people, will make clear
the means by which the flows of goods and the people who mined, pro-
duced, transported, and consumed them helped to constitute the social,
cultural, and medical complexes of belief that structured and fostered
this exchange. Such a view has the potential to transform the history of
more recent engagement with nature from a Eurocentric master nar-
rative to a history that takes into account the movement of knowledge,

things, and practices-not only over geographic space, but also over the
epistemic distance between the knowledge systems of different social
and cultural groups.
NOTES
1. For the purposes of this essay, I am defining "science" as the combination
of technology and science that historians have recently labeled "techno-
science." In the interests of length, I have provided only a bare minimum of
references below. Parts of this essay appear in somewhat different form in
my essay "Science," in The Oxford Companion to History, ed. Ulinka Rublack
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 268-97. For a fuller account of the
deep history of science, see that essay.
2. Jack A. Goldstone, "The Problem of the 'Early Modern' World,"Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 249-83.
3. The precise meaning of "objectivity" has varied over the centuries. See Lor-
raine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
4. Alexandre Koyre, "Galileo and the Scientific Revolution," Philosophical
Review 52, no. 4 (1943): 333-48.
5. George Sarton, "East and West," in The History of Science and the New Human-
ism (New York: George Braziller, 1956), 59-110.
6. Ludwig Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache:
Einfiihrung in der Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollectiv (Basel: Benno Schwabe
and Co., 1935), translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn as Gen-
esis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979).
7. A founding introduction to the place of the community in making science
can be found in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), and the recent understanding of
the social nature of science is treated byJan Golinski, Making Natural Knowl-
edge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998).
8. This short sketch compresses much work in the history, sociology, and
anthropology of science. Some of the most important shifts came through
the work of Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Michael Callon, John Law, Simon
Schaffer, and Steven Shapin. See, for example, Harry Collins, Changing
Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985);
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987); Michael Callon, "Some Elements of Sociology of Translation: Domes-
tication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay," in Power, Action
and Belief A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (London: Routledge,
1986), 196-233; John Law, "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering,"
in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociol-
ogy and History of Technology ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and
Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 111-34;

and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle and the Experimental Life (1985), 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011). See also Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Andrew Pickering, ed., Sci-
ence as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
9. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling
and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). This is a view that owes
much to pragmatism and Heidegger's view of technology. Interestingly, this
view has resonance with that expressed by George Sarton, the founder of the
History of Science Society and its journal Isis. In a 1931 essay, Sarton called
for a view of science as a part of human cultural evolution. He believed
that the accumulation of techniques and ideas throughout human history
in various cultures had brought about the progress of humankind over the
very long duree. His history of science was the history of human civilization
itself. George Sarton, "East and West." Sarton's call for a long history of
science as the slow accumulation of techniques and ideas was neglected by
subsequent generations of historians.
10. Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of
Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
11. Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). See especially chapter 6.
12. Several decades ago, Robert K. Merton pointed out the phenomenon of
multiple scientific discoveries: Robert K. Merton, "Singletons and Multiples
in Scientific Discovery: a Chapter in the Sociology of Science," Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society 105 (1961): 470-86. Reprinted in Robert K.
Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 343-70. In recent years, there have
been both scholarly and popular accounts of the collective nature of inven-
tion and innovation. For example, see Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity,
2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Clifford D. Conner, A People's
History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks" (New York: Nation
Books, 2005); Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
(New York: Basic Books, 2007).
13. Joyce E. Chaplin, "Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circula-
tion of Atlantic Knowledge," in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed.
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York and London: Routledge,
2008), 73-96.
14. Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, "Science and Other Indigenous
Knowledge Systems," in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila
Jasanoff, Gerald E. Marble, James C. Peterson, and Trevor Pinch (London:
Sage Publications, 1995).
15. Francesca Bray, "Science, Technique, Technology: Passages between Matter
and Knowledge in Imperial Chinese Agriculture," BritishJournal for the His-
tory of Science 41 (2008): 319-44.
16. Francesca Bray, "Science, Technique, Technology," 320-21. Thomas P.

Hughes was influential in introducing the view of technology as a system,
especially in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). On the definition of
technology, see also David Edgerton, "From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic
Theses on the Historiography of Technology," History and Technology 16, no.
2 (1999): 111-36.
17. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, and Bruno Latour, We Have Never
Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
18. Daniel V. Thompson Jr., "Artificial Vermilion in the Middle Ages," Technical
Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts 2 (1933-34): 62-70. See also R. D. Har-
ley, Artists' Pigments 1600-1835, 2nd ed. (London: Archetype Publications,
2001), 127. I have published more on this in "Vermilion, Mercury, Blood,
and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking," in Materials and Exper-
tise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein
and Emma Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 29-49.
19. Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 219; and
Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilization in China, vol.
6, part 6: Medicine, ed. Nathan Sivin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 38-45. See also Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science
and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974); Joseph Needham, Ho Ping-Yu, and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and
Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 3: Chemistry and Chemical Technology (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Fabrizio Pegadio, Great Clar-
ity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2006).
20. John Gage, "Colour Words in the High Middle Ages," in Looking through
Paintings: The Study of Painting Techniques and Materials in Support of Art His-
torical Research (Leids KunsthistorischJaarboek XI), ed. Emma Hermens (Baarn:
Uitgeverij de Prom, 1998), 35-48, 39.
21. Georges C. Anawati, "Arabic Alchemy," in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic
Science, vol. 3, ed. Roshdi Rashed (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
853-85.
22. Robert Halleux, "The Reception of Arabic Alchemy in the West," Encyclo-
pedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 3, ed. Roshdi Rashed (London and
New York: Routledge, 1996) 886-902.
23. For more on vermilion, see Pamela H. Smith, "Knowledge in Motion: Fol-
lowing Itineraries of Matter in the Early Modern World," in Cultures in
Motion, ed. Daniel Rogers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
24. As Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, in The Way and Word, express it: "the
cosmopolitan blend of Syriac, Persian, ancient Middle Eastern, Indian, East
Asian, and Greco-Roman traditions that formed in the Muslim world. This
blend entered Europe beginning about A.D. 1000. ...", xiii. See also the
early articulation in Sarton, "East and West."
25. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire

and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006);
and Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science,
Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
26. David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge:
Cambridge, 2000), 31.
27. Edgar Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," Americanjournal of Sociol-
ogy 47 (1942): 544-62; Edgar Zilsel, "The Origin of William Gilbert's Scien-
tific Method," Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 1-32; and Edgar Zilsel,
The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed. Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn,
and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). See
also Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era,
trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper and Row, 1970 [published in
Italian in 1962]); Arthur Clegg, "Craftsmen and the Origin of Science," Sci-
ence and Society 43 (1979): 186-201; A. C. Crombie, "Science and the Arts
in the Renaissance: The Search for Truth and Certainty, Old and New," His-
tory of Science 18 (1980): 233-46; Reijer Hooykaas, "The Rise of Modern
Science: When and Why?" BritishJournal for the History of Science 20 (1987):
453-73; J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James, eds., Renaissance and Revolution:
Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Rethinking the Scientific
Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000) ; and Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the
Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
28. Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch
Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
29. See Pamela H. Smith, "Laboratories," in The Cambridge History of Science,
Vol. 3: Early Modern Europe, ed. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 290-305.

NINETEEN
Reflecting on Recipes
Deborah L. Krohn
Among the most famous recipes in English literature is that found in act
4, scene 1 of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth. Three witches circle a
cauldron as they add a series of ingredients.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of pow'rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
The refrain of their incantation is well known.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
And more ingredients follow.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' th' dark,
226
Reflecting on Recipes 227
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chawdron,
For th' ingredience of our cau'dron.
This is a recipe for disaster, as becomes clear in the course of the play.
But it crystallizes several characteristics of recipes that I would like to
discuss.
On the most basic level, a recipe is a list of ingredients. The word
in English is actually an imperative form derived from the Latin recipere
(to take), and is what still appears at the beginning of a doctor's pre-
scription, abbreviated in good notarial shorthand as the Rx symbol, as in
"take two aspirin and call me in the morning." The French term recette
is also derived from the same Latin verb, though in a different form: the
past participle. In English, the word "receipt" is still used today.
It is worth noting that both English and French uses of the vernacular
of this Latin verb to refer to what we call a recipe are first noted in the
High Middle Ages. As scholars of medicine, food, the arts, and material
culture concur, this is when broad shifts in the transmission of knowl-
edge about how to deploy the natural world to advantage begin to be
discernible in Europe. From the rise of pharmacopeia and the flourish-
ing medical cultures of Salerno and Montpellier, to Theophilus's treatise
De diversis artibus, generally dated to the first half of the twelfth century,1
to the earliest surviving postclassical culinary compilations,2 recipes are
an important index of the rise of the documentation of empirical knowl-
edge, and link together an array of physical manifestations.
But recipes are also a form of magic, as the citation from Macbeth
demonstrates. As the witches throw the grisly ingredients into their caul-
dron, they return to a kind of refrain: "Double, double toil and trou-
ble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." Words and things join together
to seize mastery over matter. Language is the accomplice of agency in
the transformation of discrete ingredients into a powerful substance that
will dictate action. For the spell to work, words are just as important as
ingredients. The recipe is understood as both word and deed, both a
noun and a verb, to echo the two forms for the term in the Oxford English
Dictionary. Though the witches' spell in Macbeth is a real-time demonstra-
tion of the creation of the potion, and thus includes the acting out of the
recipe, most recipes are in the imperative form: take your capon, take
your herbs, etc. They embody the voice of experience, commanding the
user to act in prescribed ways to achieve the desired end.
The witches' power in Macbeth is harnessed to effect a kind of bloody
diplomacy, but it harks back to an archaic fear of latent female power,
as visible, for example, in Hans Baldung Grien's Witches Sabbath (1510).
The combination of odd ingredients wielded by the witches can be con-
textualized in a variety of ways in late Renaissance Europe.3 Beyond the
obvious nod to the periodic outbreaks of witchcraft and the attempts by
official culture to control it, Shakespeare's witches may have reminded
an early seventeenth-century audience of the genre of books of secrets
that proliferated in the course of the sixteenth century: a topic upon
which William Eamon has written extensively.4 Books of secrets, as the
genre is widely called, contained a dizzying selection of recipes for every-
thing from hair care, to stain removers, to fertility enhancers. The most
famous example was the Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese, first
printed in 1555, which became an international best-seller and model
for countless other similar books. The title page for Giovanventura Ro-
setti's Notandissimi secreti de l'arte profumatoria from 1555 indicates that it
will enable the reader to make oils, waters, pastes, pomades, etc. the way
it's done in Naples, Rome, and Venice. The Italian secreti might also be
translated simply as "recipes."
The genre spread across Europe as the printed book became eco-
nomically profitable and socially desirable, and as numbers of readers-
i.e., literacy, increased.5 Many of the more popular tracts, which went
into multiple editions, were translated into several European languages.
If the first stage of the rise of the recipe can be identified in the phar-
macopeia and cookery compilations of the High Middle Ages, the next
stage must be the rise of these ironically titled "books of secrets" which
were not always proper books, but often pamphlets or booklets, and cer-
tainly anything but secret. What they traded on was their appeal as keys
to understanding materials and processes, and the mastery over matter.
They also enabled regular folks to practice craft skills and techniques
that were available previously only to professional artisans, making mani-
fest what has been called tacit knowledge.
Another example of the rise of the recipe might be a treatise written
in the 1550s by Cipriano Piccolpasso (1524-1579), called the Arte del
Vasaio (The Art of the Potter). Though it was the first comprehensive
description of the manufacture of pottery since Abu'l Qasim of Kashan's
1301 treatise, it was not published until the nineteenth century. Like
Baldassare Castiglione's courtier, Piccolpasso was more a virtuoso than
a craftsman, and spent much of his life in the service of aristocracy. His
interest in pottery was related to his role as military and civil engineer,
inspecting the fortifications along the Adriatic coast which were main-
tained by the duke of Urbino. He was also a founding member of the
Accademia delDisegno in Perugia in 1573-one of the earliest artistic acad-
emies in Italy.
The Arte del Vasaio was commissioned by the Cardinal de Tournon,
Archbishop of Lyons, who had spent time in Piccolpasso's native Castel
Durante, a major center of majolica production. Tournon was interested
in stimulating the pottery industry in Lyons, and intended to publish the
treatise so that the secrets of the Italian masters could be disseminated.
The treatise included information on the composition of clays, kilns, pat-
terns, and recipes for glazes-in some cases, even regional variations of
the same glaze. Had it been published for the Lyons craftsmen in the
sixteenth century, as was planned, it would be possible to talk about its
influence on ceramic production since it would probably have enjoyed
wide distribution. But since it was not, it now has a different role in the
historiography of Renaissance ceramics. Clearly a luxury manuscript-
from its size, to its copious illustrations, it represents a stage in the pro-
cess of professionalization for artisans such as potters who achieved this
status, counterintuitively, through the dissemination of knowledge and
its packaging in discrete formulae in the recipe.6
Culinary culture offers important insights into the material culture of
the recipe. Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera, first published in 1570, was by no
means the first Italian recipe collection to be printed, but it was the first
cookbook to feature a series of technical illustrations to supplement the
procedural instructions provided in the recipes. Scappi's publishers, in
underwriting an illustrated cookbook that paralleled texts like Giorgius
Agricola's De re metallica (1556), or Agostino Gallo's Vinti Giornate (1564)
must have grasped the transformation from the magical to the scientific
that was in the air.
Early cookbooks-pretty much without exception-did not provide
measures or indications of time, but simply, ingredients that were to be
used for a particular dish, and some indication of how to combine or
prepare them for mixing or blending. The earliest postclassical culinary
recipe collections grew out of medical or nutritional guides such as the
eleventh-century treatise compiled in Baghdad, and which entered the

European arena as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, known primarily now from
several luxury manuscripts illuminated in and around the Milanese
court in the late fourteenth century.7 Food was considered a therapeutic
substance that could be manipulated to influence human nature and
health, based on Aristotelian and Galenic humoral theory from the
ancient world. Ingredients were tempered or blended to produce the
desired effects in conjunction with age, gender, season, and weather
conditions. By the middle of the sixteenth century, recipe collections
were frankly cut loose from this moral and medical tradition, and were
clearly more about taste and spectacle. The need to specify instructions
concerning how much or how long would come much later, as empiri-
cal science moved on from the purely visual, and developed methods of
fine measurement that enabled degrees of heat to be calibrated by ther-
mometers, or time to be measured by individuals in their own domestic
spheres rather than by communal clocks or church bells.8
Until the modern period, few recipes actually provided enough
information-either in the form of ingredients, or instructions-to cre-
ate the object for anyone other than a skilled craftsman, or someone who
had already received training. They functioned as a kind of shorthand
for the workshop, or as a record of practice.
Peppered in the literature of recipes, one can also find allusions to
the failure of the system, to moments when the instructions were not
adequate, or things just went wrong. The first three recipes in the Vi-
andier of Taillevent, a recipe collection attributed to Guillaume de Tirel
(d. 1395), chef to King Charles V, were for correcting errors: how to fix
a soup that was too salty, or to take away the burnt taste from a stew that
had perhaps lingered too long on the fire.9 An anecdotal example of a
recipe that did not work out as planned comes from Benvenuto Cellini's
autobiography, where he describes in breathless detail the casting of the
Perseus in molten bronze. As Cellini's carefully constructed system begins
to fail, he retreats in fever to bed. He then reemerges to take over the
process after being told that the metal was curdling. Instructions for his
assistants were not adequate, whether in written form or not. Cellini af-
firms the importance of personal intervention.
When I had got my clothes on, I strode with soul bent on mischief
toward the workshop; there I beheld the men, whom I had left ere-
while in such high spirits, standing stupefied and downcast. I began
at once and spoke: "Up with you! Attend to me! Since you have not
been able or willing to obey the directions I gave you, obey me now
that I am with you to conduct my work in person. Let no one contra-
dict me, for in cases like this we need the aid of hand and hearing,
not of advice.10
In this literary version of the failed recipe, there is no handbook to
follow-he attempts to raise the temperature of the molten bronze by
tempering the alloy, flinging in all of his household pewter dishes to
achieve the goal.
As in many forms of knowledge, the availability and increased stan-
dardization of print changed the role of the recipe. In looking briefly
at a range of examples, from Cellini to Shakespeare, as well as at a few
culinary recipe collections, I think we can begin to outline a shift in
the cultural significance of the recipe between late medieval and early
modern Europe. Once a recipe is available in written form, it becomes a
thing. Once printed, its material life can be mapped through time and
space. Recipes are also a key to understanding process, and allow us to
cut through the traditional social hierarchies that tend to organize the
way objects are created, collected, and displayed. They take us back to
the first instance in the creative cascade, to the moment when materials
are gathered and organized, and the workshop is prepared for the labor
of making. Recipes exist as conceptual elements whether or not they are
recorded in any kind of permanent form-either in workshop notes, or
a printed text. They span the transition period from script to print. It is
an ongoing debate on just how this shift affected the status of the recipe.
Did fixing it in a more-or-less static form inhibit the process of innova-
tion, or did it instead lead to greater competition through the availability
of knowledge and its diffusion? Finally, how does studying the evolution
of the way knowledge is transmitted give us insight into the knowledge
itself? Discussed a great deal by people who study the history of science,
this question is also of great relevance for the histories of the decorative
arts and material culture.
NOTES
1. Theophilus, De diversis artibus, ed. G. R. Dodwell (London, Edinburgh, Paris:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1961), xxxiii. A compilation of earlier arti-
sanal recipes, possibly dating to the 600 C.E., in manuscripts from the ninth
century onward, is known as the Mappae clavicula. See C. S. Smith and J. G.
Hawthorne, Mappae clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974).

2. Libellus de arte coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book, ed. and trans. by
Rudolfe Grewe and Constance B. Hieatt (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi-
eval and Renaissance Studies, 2001).
3. On witches and witchcraft, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of
Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971). For a more recent study of witches in
art with a feminist perspective, see Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art,
Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2005).
4. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval
and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
5. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, esp. chapter 3, where he
discusses print culture and the genre of the Kunstbiichlein, 93-133.
6. Cipriano Piccolpasso, The three books of the potter's art. I tre libri dell'arte del
vasaio: a facsimile of the manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London,
trans. Ronald Lightbown and Alan Caiger-Smith (London: Scolar Press,
1980), xi-xxiv.
7. The illustrated manuscripts were most likely created between 1390 and
1410. See Cathleen Hoeniger, "The Illuminated Tacuinum Sanitatis Manu-
scripts from Northern Italy c. 1380-1400: Sources, Patrons, and the Cre-
ation of a New Pictorial Genre," in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural
History, 1200-1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen Reeds, and Alain Touwaide
(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 51-81.8.
8. See Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300-1700 (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1967), especially chapter 1.
9. Taillevent, Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts, ed. Ter-
ence Scully (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988), 35-56.
10. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. John Addington Symonds (New
York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910), 379.

TWENTY
Music in the Material
World: Cultural Traces
and Historical Cases
Elaine Sisman
Played by material instruments, sung by voices emanating from bod-
ies, heard live in specially constructed rooms or acousmatically through
speakers, music fills a span of time and then vanishes, leaving only in-
tangible traces on its shaken and stirred auditors. If nearly every way we
can describe music is metaphorical-the height of pitch, the thickness
of sonority, the darkness of minor mode, the texture woven of melodic
strands, the painting of its accompanying text-its effects are not, as the
motions of the music both mirror and direct the motions of the listen-
ing body, while the dynamics can make us strain to hear, grip us during
a crescendo, or assault us with nearly material force. "Immaterial" sonic
vibration, like the invisible wind, can knock us around some.
Music's materiality has always been regarded with admiration and sus-
picion, and its cultivation, as well as its effect on human emotion and be-
havior has been the subject of philosophical and political critique since
ancient times. Plato feared powerful musical modes and suggested their
social control; Aristotle offered an intrinsic class distinction between
(low) virtuosic technicians and (high) judges of quality; Augustine wres-
tled with the morality of music's pleasure even as he understood its ne-
cessity in worship. As a mirror of the harmonic perfection of the cosmos,
"number made audible," music was embedded in the history of science,
astronomy, and mathematics until the birth of romanticism preferred its
mysteries to its clarities. But science also allowed sound to become newly
material in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as developments in
physiology of the ear, sound-spectrum studies, and the development of
233
technologies to create new sources of sound allowed for a kind of labo-
ratory focus on sound's materials. Timbres were deconstructed and re-
constituted; electronic instruments changed the nature of composition,
performance, and listening, as well as the relationship between timbre
and the other elements of music, acoustic and acousmatic instruments;
spectral composers today invent new sonorities based on the sound spec-
trum. As if to emphasize their materiality, real-world sounds subject to
electronic manipulation were collectively termed musique concrete.
Considered historically, music's resonance in culture emerges from
every aspect of its production, including composition, performance, and
publication, and its reception, whether by writers, by the public, or in
the home. Aspects as disparate as the secular afterlife of Handel (which
began a valorization of the past in new communal events previously un-
known outside the church), and the beginnings of a musical canon in
the late eighteenth century, the emerging interest in collecting (and
later studying) composers' sketches and manuscripts in the nineteenth
century, and the recovery of the sound of earlier music instruments in
the twentieth century, suggest that more or less self-conscious interpreta-
tions of the materials of music's cultural history have always been with
us, but without the theoretical frame and impetus of the project under
discussion.
Encouraged by a framing device that conjures with culture, history,
material, and world, I offer a few historical cases of the materiality of
music's performance intersecting, at times colliding, with cultural pre-
occupations. The time is the eighteenth century, the culture is Austro-
German with recognizable echoes in France and England, the music is
primarily vocal/orchestral, and in every case the larger picture, as I un-
derstand it, has never been drawn.1
The Sound of Light
April 29, 1798, marks the first time that we know a composer deliber-
ately kept secret a special effect before the premiere. The introduction
to Haydn's oratorio The Creation represents the "idea of chaos"-before
anything is formed, as Haydn said-so the music is obscure, meandering
around a dark-hued C minor, until the chorus finally sings, very quietly,
"And God said 'Let there be light,' and there was LIGHT!" A nearly in-
audible pizzicato chord serves as the signal, the switch thrown, the snap-
ping of divine fingers; we sense the languid synapse between God's and
Music in the Material World 235
Adam's fingers on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling now filling with an ener-
gizing neural impulse whose echo is the flooding of the entire created
world with light. Baron van Swieten, who prepared the libretto, famously
suggested that Haydn set these words only once. Both van Swieten and
Haydn surely knew the contemporaneous discourse on the sublime-
the aesthetic category accounting for overwhelmingly powerful effects,
vividly described and theorized by Edmund Burke in 1757 and Imman-
uel Kant in 1790. Both the dread of darkness and the sudden shock of
brilliant light were felt to contribute to the overpowering effect of the
sublime, and a tradition dating to antiquity held that the biblical phrase
"And there was light"-short, sudden, simple, and powerful-was the
ultimate source of feelings of transport and awe.
But how was one to render the visual shock of light in music? Via the
sonic shock of overpowering loudness, a sudden tremolo conflagration
of the entire orchestral ensemble in fortissimo, in C major, the Masonic
key of light. Haydn's "Light motif," adapted from Handel, skips up a
fourth, dominant to tonic, landing on the downbeat; in short: arrival,
resolution, order, light. The blazing, even raucous light in The Creation
reveals nothing less than the beginning of historical time-an effect
emphasized by the magnificence of its Handelian cadence. Its further
history is demonstrated by Haydn's return to the motif in fully four cho-
ruses, three of which end parts 1, 2, and 3. The radiant light of creation
radiates through the work. The materiality of the sonic shock invites us
to consider the cultural importance of dynamics in the history of music,
and evaluate the reception of music's sublime, at the time attached
almost exclusively to works with massed instruments and voices, in dy-
namic terms.
The Castle as Island
We imagine eighteenth-century composers grappling, at their writing
desks, with patrons and publishers-often in the most imploring and
obsequious terms; or at their keyboards, with pupils and paper-where
they are masters. Yet despite the preservation (and veneration) of birth-
places and dwellings, we have not fully taken the measure of the spatially
material-places and spaces, landscapes and decor-in the temporal
imagination of the composer. Haydn worked in the Esterhazy palaces
of Eisenstadt and Eszterhaza from 1761 to 1790, where the princes had
a long-standing, even dynastic, interest in astronomy, collecting celes-

tial globes, telescopes, and such curiosities as an equatorial sundial table
in the form of a "noon-day cannon," which would create an explosion
when the sun's noon rays ignited a bit of gunpowder concealed in it.
Yet Haydn's "times-of-the-day" symphonies of 1761, and the astronomi-
cal and meteorological "painting" in his late oratorios The Creation and
The Seasons, not to mention his London visit to Herschel's telescope
(through which the planet Uranus had been discovered in 1784) in
1792, have never been associated with princely collecting, nor with his
own interest in the remarkable astronomical events of his era. Oddly,
critics were contemptuous of musical painting, even of the sun, moon,
and stars, perhaps because it was so popular. Indeed, the apparent neces-
sity for critics to revisit this subject frequently suggested that the public
simply refused to find brilliantly evocative and sometimes hilariously ac-
curate tone pictures trivial. (A cultural history of music in the material
world that deals with cultural histories of music's representation of the
material world would be something to see.)
Haydn passed nearly every day for nearly twenty-five years through
the symmetrically encircling arms of isolated and remote Eszterhaza Pal-
ace, behind which Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy landscaped his immense
grounds with a deer park, pavilions to the sun, Diana, fortune, and
Venus, and a labyrinth modeled on the one at Versailles. Responsible
for hundreds of opera productions at the palace theater from 1776 to
1790, Haydn seems to have made a subspecialty of producing operas
situated on islands, and when the prince turned sixty-five in 1779, Haydn
wrote one himself, offering the venerable Imperial court poet Metas-
tasio's celebrated libretto "The Uninhabited Island" (L'isola disabitata),
imagining the benevolent side of the "island" of Eszterhaza, as his prince
would recognize it. This island sustains life without effort-perfect for
the abandoned wife and her baby sister to subsist on for thirteen years,
before her husband returns. In the creation of a new-if miniature, and
temporary-society, Metastasio had set out the paradox of the ruler-less
existence designed to appeal to the sovereign as reflecting his "natural"
empire, showing how the sovereign "creates" nature on the "island" of
his inherited lands. For the Spanish king traveling by riverboat to the
royal theater in Aranjuez-the original commission of the libretto in
1753-as for the Esterhazy prince viewing with satisfaction his nearly
completed remote Eden, the libretto conjoins Enlightenment philoso-
phy, colonial exploration, and social relations in an imaginary natural
world, in which animal, vegetable, and mineral abundance share the

stage with human understanding as it unfolds against the accidental, the
contingent, and the enduring.
Metastasio's island is a garden: it is nature tamed and softened and
turned to the use and enjoyment and sustenance of its human inhabit-
ants. But the island is also dominated by a large stone, into which the
abandoned heroine has been chiseling her epitaph for thirteen years,
and stone imagery is everywhere in the libretto. The stone symbolism is
the first indication that we are dealing with a labyrinth; the garden has
been marked as a test, an emblem of circular wandering and the melan-
choly it engenders, of seeking to avoid the possible evil or trauma-or
truth-that lies in the center. Haydn's operatic structure appears to un-
derstand this, and his tormented heroine must sing in the rare key of
A-flat major, the key of the "Plutonian realm" (Vogler), as well as pre-
sent her bleak vision in keys a tritone apart, the "diabolical" interval
suggestive of the devil lurking at the heart of the Christian labyrinth, and
garden.
Musical labyrinths-a topic predating the eighteenth century, but
newly associated with wandering harmonic relationships-also make
vivid music's correlation with movements of the soul, of the nerves, and
of the psyche: they map an interior geography only hinted at by the mate-
rial garden. The labyrinth is the ultimate paradoxical emblem, embody-
ing chaos and order, circle and thread, the infinite and the bounded.
In Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice of 1762, a touchstone work for the era and
quoted by Haydn, the dark rock-strewn cave of the "tortuous labyrinth"
marks the space between the underworld and the living from which the
hero and heroine must escape. The interpretation of actual and con-
ceptual physical spaces joins a revaluing of musical representation as a
desideratum for cultural historians of music.
Don Giovanni's Mandolin
Operatic characters are only infrequently called upon actually to sing
on stage; mostly they speak to each other in song. Serenades and self-
consciously sung offerings as such must be marked in some way. When
Cherubino sings his charming "Voi che sapete" to the Countess in act
2 of The Marriage of Figaro, he is accompanied by Susanna on guitar,
rendered in the orchestra by pizzicato strings playing accompanimental
broken chords, while winds forecast and then entwine with the vocal
melody. In Don Giovanni's act 2 serenade to an unseen woman, how-
ever, he accompanies himself on the mandolin. The most celebrated en-
graving of the first production (Prague, 1787) shows this scene, with the
handsome young star Luigi Bassi holding the mandolin and gazing at a
lighted window.
The so-called canzonetta, "Deh! vieni alla finestra," is full of importu-
nate imperatives. With images of sweetness, sugar, and honey very similar
to those in his wooing of the peasant Zerlina on her wedding day, he
expresses not only his pains and longing, but a come-on so direct that
one wonders how Zerlina would have reacted: "Tu ch'hai la bocca dolce
pin che il miele, / tu che il zucchero porti in mezzo core" ("You who
have a mouth sweeter than honey, you who have sugar at the core of
your heart [inside you]"). With fully three endearments in eight lines of
text-o mio tesoro (line 1), gioia mia (line 7), mio bell'amore (line 8)-Don
Giovanni alternates flattery with urgency. With the simplest tonal means,
he creates a great wheel of desire. The first two lines of each stanza pres-
ent basic tonal progressions in the tonic and toward the dominant. The
second two lines, however, see melody and bass moving together rhyth-
mically, but in contrary motion melodically with a sudden upward reach
and the sense even of overshooting the return home. The circular shape
of the chord progression, after a heart-stopping move to minor and flat-
side harmonies, gives the text a surge of momentum no woman on stage
could resist.
But what of the mandolin? The orchestra accompanies a real man-
dolin with pizzicato strings. Its melody is ornate and plays continuously
throughout the two-strophe song. Three of its four lines stretch upward
questioningly or questingly; the fourth drops down. The grain of sound
of this archaic instrument is at once tinkly, and hence unthreatening,
and thickly tactile, every note clearly the sound of finger stroking against
string. It is virtuosic where the voice is declarative, suggesting the per-
fect combination of skill and ardour. Where Cherubino and Susanna
together create a love song that conjures up a sweetly diffident pastoral,
Don Giovanni is deceptively double-tracked between mouth and hands.
The pointed appearance of concertante instruments in an aria, an instru-
mental counterpoise to the voice set apart from the rest of the orches-
tra-as also in Susanna's idyllic but duplicitously sensual "Deh vieni non
tardar" -may be understood in embodied terms that then carry over
into genres without voice, where cultural topoi like the gestures of social
dance, pastoral, learned style, Sturm und Drang, and lament maintain
their communicative power.

Of these three case studies, each turns on the materiality of music in
and as performance, on culturally resonant texts, and on interpretations
available to their initial audiences. In emphasizing musical issues that
cultural history can entail, musicologists may set new terms for debate in
the cultural territory they have long inhabited. The ideas sketched here
are offered as part of that initiative.
NOTE
1. These case studies draw respectively on my recent essays: "The Voice of
God in Haydn's Creation," in Essays in Honor of Ldszl6 Somfai: Studies in the
Sources and the Interpretation of Music, ed. Vera Lampert and Laszl6 Vikirius,
139-53 (Lanham, MD, 2004); "Haydn's Solar Poetics: The Tageszeiten Sym-
phonies and Enlightenment Knowledge," Journal of the American Musicologi-
cal Society 66/1 (Spring, 2013, 5-102); "Fantasy Island: Haydn's Metastasian
'Reform' Opera," in Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism, ed. Mary
Hunter and Richard Will, 11-43 (Cambridge, 2012); "The Marriages of Don
Giovanni," in Mozart Studies, ed. Simon Keefe, 163-92 (Cambridge, 2006).

TWENTY-ONE
A Cultural History of
the Material World
of Islam
Jonathan M. Bloom
I am not quite sure what a cultural history of the material world is, but as
a historian of Islamic art I am taking it to mean how studying the things
men and women have made might tell us something about the shape of
the times in which they were made, and how the activities and institu-
tions associated with these things might have-or have not-changed
over time. In that sense, historians of Islamic art have been doing just
that for a long time, inasmuch as many historians of other kinds of art
would dismiss much, if not most, of what we study-among them pots,
pans, plates, rugs, and curtains-as decorative art or material culture
rather than real art.
Assuming that one accepts that such a field exists at all, Islamic art
tends to have a broader definition than many other disciplines of art
history, which are generally limited to the fine arts-painting, sculpture,
and architecture-in a particular place (France, Italy) at a particular
time (Romanesque, Renaissance).' As it is generally understood today,
Islamic art is said to range geographically from the Atlantic coast of
Spain to the Pacific islands of Indonesia, sometimes including the re-
cent Muslim diaspora to Western Europe and the Americas. Chronologi-
cally, Islamic art begins with the revelation of Islam in the early seventh
century and continues to the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, or even
twenty-first century, depending on one's point of view. Some radicals
say that it ended-if indeed it ever existed at all-around 1500 with the
emergence of the great empires (Alawi, Ottoman, Safavid, Uzbek, and
Mughal); most scholars, however, would say it ended with European co-
240
A Cultural History of the Material World of Islam 241
lonialism or the emergence of nation-states around 1800. In that view,
Iranian Islamic art, for example, was succeeded sometime in the nine-
teenth or twentieth century by a distinct Iranian art. Others, of course,
claim that artists from Seattle to Singapore are still producing Islamic art
by virtue of their religion.2
Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, Islamic art is also
thought to comprise an extraordinary variety of media, ranging in scale
from monumental architecture to exquisitely fine jewelry, in durability or
permanence of medium from cast metal and carved stone objects to gos-
samer textiles and works on delicate paper, and in function from deeply
religious to straightforwardly secular, and even humorous or bawdy. Fi-
nally, Islamic art also includes a wide range of patronage-from imperial
and royal commissions from famous artists to anonymous works made
by or for sale to nomads, peasants, and the bourgeoisie of merchants,
tradesmen, scholars, etc. In short, virtually none of the traditional hier-
archies developed for the study of Western art applies to Islamic art in
general, although they may be applied to particular subfields within it.
Indeed, such a broad definition raises the reasonable question
whether Islamic art is a valid category at all: Walk into any museum with
a collection of Islamic art and try to explain what, say, an illustrated leaf
from a fifteenth-century Persian copy of the Shahnama (Book of Kings)
has to do with a ceramic dish from twelfth-century Syria, let alone a
nomad tent hanging from nineteenth-century Central Asia. Although all
were produced in societies where Islam is the dominant religion, none
of them has anything to do with the actual religion of Islam, and none
of them has very much to do with the others. Objects on display that
do have an Islamic religious component, such as leaves from a Koran
manuscript or prayer carpets, tend to form a relatively small part of col-
lections of Islamic art, even in such "Islamic" settings as the new Museum
of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. No wonder that visitors to such exhibitions
are often mystified. Nevertheless, after some forty years of studying and
writing about Islamic art, I have come to the conclusion that "Islamic
art" is the worst term to describe the subject, except for all the alterna-
tives that have been tried.
Many scholars of Islamic art, particularly those working in the later
periods, have chosen to follow a logocentric or text-based approach to
their research, in which they use documents and texts to help explain
works of art. Although this kind of approach can occasionally be used in
the earlier periods, it is often more successful for the later ones because
of the greater numbers of documents, texts, and works of art that have
survived from this period. Yet this logocentric approach, which is by no
means unique to Islamic art, tends to minimize the special contributions
that the study of the material world can make.
I learned this lesson in the 1970s when I was a student in Cairo. I
rashly purchased a ten-volume set of folio books entitled Stelesfuneraires,
which cataloged a collection of about 4,000 inscribed tombstones in the
Cairo Museum of Islamic Art.' I had no particular need of the books,
but as they were incredibly cheap, I thought the matched set would look
good in my modest library. A year later, while writing my dissertation, I
found that I needed to learn something about the funerary practices of
Egyptian women in the ninth and tenth centuries, and discovered that
nothing pertinent had been written on the subject, since most scholar-
ship about funerary practices-if it had been done at all-had been writ-
ten by and about men. Much to my surprise, however, I discovered that
my ten volumes contained a wealth of information about the funerary
beliefs and practices of women, since approximately half of the epitaphs
commemorated them. What I learned from this experience was that a
study of material culture (one could hardly call many of the epitaphs
art) could tell me things that are inaccessible from text-based research.4
I see a cultural history of the material world working from a perspec-
tive exactly opposite that favored by a text-centered approach to art his-
tory, which tends to envision culture in terms of texts with the physical
remains serving as illustrations. People, however, have always expressed
themselves in various media: some people express themselves through
words or sounds; others through making things. A cultural history of
the material world puts the emphasis on the things people made, and it
assumes that objects can tell us things that texts may not be able to. To
follow such an approach, one should, I believe, start with the thing itself
and work through a series of questions. What was it made from? How
was it made? Who made it? When was it made? Where was it made? And
finally, why was it made?
Let me give two examples of how I might apply this approach. The
first is a ceramic bowl in the David Collection, Copenhagen (fig. 1).'
This earthenware bowl, measuring 10.5 inches (26.5 cm) in diameter is
covered with a white engobe, and painted in brown and red slip under
a transparent lead glaze. Probably made in northeastern Iran or Central
Asia in the tenth century, it is one of a relatively large group of earthen-
ware bowls and plates attributed to the cities of Samarqand and Nisha-
pur, which are decorated elaborately and often exclusively with Arabic
inscriptions. The inscriptions are like puzzles, written in a decorative

Fig. 1. Earthenware bowl covered with a white engobe, and painted in
brown and red slips under a transparent lead glaze. Northeastern Iran
or central Asia, tenth century. Diameter: 27 cm. Copenhagen, David
Coll. 22/1974. (Photo courtesy of the David Collection.)
angular script embellished with extraneous knots, bumps, and flourishes
that make the texts extremely hard to read. The inscription on this bowl,
written clockwise starting from six o'clock when looking down into the
bowl, records a well-known saying that "He who believes in recompense
[from God] is generous with gifts" (man ayqana bi'l-khalaf jada bi'l-'atiya).
The proverb is a hadith or tradition attributed to the Prophet Muham-
mad, as well as to his cousin and son-in-law Ali, the fourth caliph and a
major figure in Shia Islam.
A cultural history approach to this piece might begin with an exami-
nation of the materials from which the bowl was made. Whence did the
clay come? How was it collected, transported, and refined? (Recent de-
velopments in petrographic analysis began to allow scholars to ask such
questions.6) Were the engobe and slips collected and refined in the same
way? What about the lead oxide for the glaze? Where was that found?
How was it extracted and how was it transported to Samarqand, assum-
ing that is where the piece was made. How were materials ground into a
powder? Once the materials were assembled, one might begin to think
about how the piece was formed: how many people were involved in the
production? Was the decorator the same person as the potter? Was the
decorator literate in Arabic, or did someone else provide him a design
to copy? If he was copying a design, on what material was that design
done? Was this a unique piece or one of many with the same decoration,
but of which only this one has survived? What kind of kiln was used to
fire the bowl? With what was the kiln fired? How and where was the fuel
collected? Was this bowl commissioned or made on spec for sale in the
market? How much might it have cost? Was it part of a set with matching
or complementary examples? Was it used for food, and if so, what kind of
food? The cultural history approach might also ask questions about why
and how it was preserved for centuries, and why and how it ended up in
the David Collection in Copenhagen.
Having considered-if not answered-such questions, we might then
turn to the more traditional art-historical questions about the style of
the writing and the content of the inscription. The style is comparable
to the new scripts that were being developed in the tenth century for
copying manuscripts increasingly written on paper. The same saying is
found on several other pieces of different shape, but does its presence
here represent the veneration of the Prophet, a particularly Shii milieu,
or merely conventional platitudes? The inscription allows us to place the
piece within a milieu in the midst of Iranophone Central Asia that was
comfortable enough in Arabic so as to take pleasure in deciphering com-
plex Arabic script as something appropriate to do after a meal. The writ-
ing on the interior invites a person holding the bowl to empty it of food,
and then turn it in his or her hands to read it. While the art-historical
questions are interesting indeed, the first set of questions appears much
more wide-ranging and likely to tell us more about the history of culture.
My second example is the minbar (pulpit) from the Kutubiyya Mosque
in Marrakesh, Morocco, which we know to have been commissioned by
the Almoravid ruler of Spain and North Africa on NewYear's Day in 1137
in Cordoba, Spain, for a mosque in Marrakesh (fig. 2). Now in a museum
in Marrakesh, the minbar is the subject of a handsome monograph put

Fig. 2. Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque, Marrakesh, Morocco, now
in the Badi' Palace Museum, Marrakesh. Photo fromJonathan M.
Bloom et. al., The Minbarfrom the Kutubiyya Mosque (New York, 1998),
fig. 25.
together under the auspices of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which
was responsible for a project to restore it.7 A triangular wooden struc-
ture measuring nearly 12 feet (3.86 m) high, the minbar comprises a
frame of cedarwood onto which was glued an extraordinary marquetry
of colored woods and bone. The entire visible surface of the minbar
was completely enveloped in this web of carved and inlaid decoration,
although much has fallen away. Each of the minbar's triangular sides
is decorated with a geometric strapwork pattern exactly coordinated to
the minbar's stepped profile, in which marquetry bands of bone and
colored woods separate hundreds of small carved panels (fig. 3). The
Fig. 3. Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque, detail. (Author's photo.)
risers and backrest are similarly decorated with panels of vegetal decora-
tion, and the edges and sides of every other surface were once covered
with magnificent carved or inlaid ornament, comprising several million
individual pieces of wood.
Conservators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art were able to ex-
amine the minbar closely and identify the woods with which it was made
and decorated, as well as the various techniques and tools used (although
one of the techniques used to make miniscule inlaid tiles remains com-
pletely unexplained). The woods included African blackwood, box, and
jujube; what was first thought to be ivory turned out to be bone. From
where were these woods imported? Why was bone used instead of ivory
when no other expense was spared to make this minbar? The nature of
certain cuts led the conservators to discern the use of the fretsaw-a tool
that had previously thought to have been invented only three centuries
later in the Italian Renaissance. The quality of the carving of the indi-
vidual panels is so exquisite that is it equal to or finer than the carving on
the famous ivory boxes produced in Cordoba about 150 years earlier-
perhaps the reason that the first scholars to study the minbar thought
that the panels were carved not from wood but from "darkened ivory."
The minbar is one of the great masterpieces of Islamic art, and it is
about as different as possible from the bowl discussed earlier. It was a
unique object produced by and for the highest levels of society, being a
royal commission for a royal mosque from the most able artisans around
who, even as a team, probably took several years to complete it before
shipping it in pieces 500 miles over mountains and the Straits of Gibral-
tar for assembly in Morocco. Since the minbar is firmly localized and
dated, it provides a fixed point for the understanding of the cultural
history of the period, and a close examination of it turns on their head
many of the accepted facts about the period, most of them derived from
reading the historical sources.
For example, historians normally say that the Almoravid patrons of
the minbar were uncouth Berbers from North Africa who had no inter-
est in the visual arts. Wrong! Art historians normally say that that the
art of carving ivory and all the other arts declined after the fall of the
Umayyad caliphate in the early eleventh century when the ivory carvers
were forced to move to Cuenca. Wrong! The minbar clearly shows that
Cordoba must have remained a great cultural center despite the tex-
tual laments of contemporary chroniclers. Historians have also tended
to separate Spain from Morocco, but the minbar shows how the two re-
gions were linked in a single cultural realm. Historians have speculated
how artisans worked out geometric designs in advance, but the minbar's
missing panels show that designs were scribed directly on the wooden
structure, showing that paper had not yet become common for prepara-
tory sketches. Some historians have recently speculated that an Islamic
interest in geometric decoration was directly linked to a "Sunni revival,"
and that geometric decoration spread from east to west. Wrong! One
could go on and on, but the point is made: a close examination of the
minbar from the perspective of material culture begins to reveal many
aspects of history that would not appear otherwise.
In terms of Islamic art, I envision a cultural history of the material
world treating the artifact as a product of human endeavor equivalent
to the written text. Just as written documents cannot tell us everything
about every aspect of society, so too a study limited to material culture
will not tell us about every aspect of society, but the two approaches can
be combined to provide a fuller, more nuanced picture. As material cul-
ture was not necessarily produced by the same milieux that produced
written culture, it may provide access to different aspects of society that
are not necessarily revealed by written documents-including women,
nonliterates, nonelites, or nonurbanites such as nomads and villagers.

Texts and documents are wonderful things, and the Islamic world has
produced more than its share of them, thanks to its early adoption and
spread of paper and papermaking technology.' But not all human activi-
ties are conceived with words, and so a cultural history of the material
world might help to put some art back into the venerable field of art
history.
NOTES
1. For a general introduction to the issues related to the delineation and study
of the field, see Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, "The Mirage of
Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field," Art Bulletin 85,
no. 1 (March 2003): 152-84.
2. For modern Iranian art, see, for example Hossein Amirsadeghi, ed., Differ-
ent Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2009); for modern Islamic art, see Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art:
Development and Continuity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).
3. Hasan al-Harawy, Hussein Rached, and Gaston Wiet, Stelesfuneraires, 10 vols.
(Cairo: Musee Arabe, 1932-1942).
4. Jonathan M. Bloom, "The Mosque of the Qarafa in Cairo," Muqarnas 4
(1987): 7-20. The irony does not escape me that previous text-based schol-
ars had basically ignored the texts of the epitaphs not only as texts, but also
as material culture.
5. 22/1974. Most recently published in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Cos-
mophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen (Chestnut Hill, MA:
The McMullen Museum, 2006).
6. Robert B. J. Mason, Shine Like the Sun Lustre-painted and associated pottery from
the medieval Middle East (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, in association
with the Royal Ontario Museum, 2004), chapter 6.
7. Jonathan M. Bloom et al., The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque (New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).
8. Gflru Necipoglu, The Topkapz Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Archi-
tecture, Topkapz Palace Museum Library MS. H 1956 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995); and Yasser Tabbaa,
The Transformation of Islamic Art During the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2001).
9. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the
Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

TWENTY-TWO
Franz Kugler and the
Concept of World
Art History
Horst Bredekamp
Kugler's History of World Art
The art historian Franz Kugler had an astonishing career. In 1831, he
earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin with the theme of medi-
eval book illuminations; his habilitation followed three years later with
writings on the architecture of the Middle Ages, Islam, the Egyptians,
and India.1 Kugler had thereby completed his habilitation at the age of
twenty-five, but without receiving a professorship; he became a professor
at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in 1835,2 but taught continuously at
the university; the course catalogs from 1833/1834 to 1842/1843, when
he took a position as an art expert in the Prussian Ministry of Culture,
show a total of nineteen semesters of teaching.3 The emphasis of his re-
search and instruction was on the Middle Ages in Europe, but Kugler
reached out as far as India as if this were a matter of course.
He made special reference to the Kunstkammer in Andreas Schliiter's
Berliner Schlofi (Berlin's City Palace), which still housed lavish stocks of art
and handicrafts, though objects had been transferred out several times,
giving birth to Karl Friedrich Schinkel's first autonomous museum-the
Altes Museum-as well as the Berlin University and its collections.4 Ku-
gler expresses his liberal understanding of these works, which do not fall
within the category of high art, in his Beschreibung der in der Kinigl. Kun-
stkammer zu Berlin vorhandenen Kunst-Sammlung (Description of the art
collection present in the Berlin royal art cabinet), published in 1838. It
was devoted to the collection's carvings, enamel, seals, medallions, statu-
249
ettes, reliefs, drawings, ivory carvings, glass apparatus, goldsmithing, and
cabinetmaking-i.e., to the core of the inventory found today in Berlin's
Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Arts and Crafts).' Of special interest is
that, in the foreword to the work on the works of art in the Kunstkammer,
Kugler refers to the stocks of the ethnographic collections, whose trea-
sures he at least summarily underscores with a view to the art of India,
China, Persia, Australia, and Mexico.6
The material in the art cabinet offered Kugler the basis upon which
he could construct his universal history of art.7 Published in 1842, this
Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Handbook of art history) opened to view a
history of world art that did not restrict the concept of "art" to Europe,
but described it as a possibility of all peoples. The Kunstkammer, with its
works of European handicrafts offered the model for opening up the art
of all times and all peoples from prehistory to the present, lacking almost
any hierarchization. His developmental-historical pattern employed cat-
egories that, from the start, pointed beyond Europe: the preliminary
phase of non-European and pre-Hellenic art, the classical phase of
Greek and Roman antiquity, the Romanesque phase of the Middle Ages
and Islam, and the modern phase from the Renaissance to the present.
Among the sources Kugler used in addition to the Kunstkammer of
the Berliner Schlofi is Alexander von Humboldt's collection of ancient
Mexican sculptures, which made a strong impression on Kugler.8 But Ku-
gler's approach differed markedly from Humboldt's. Humboldt found
the Mexican idols interesting in terms of cultural, not of art, history; for
Kugler they possessed a genuine art-historical value. Kugler thereby had
his own standards, inasmuch as he compared all the world's pictorial cul-
tures without giving Europe and the Mediterranean world a privileged
status. Kugler regarded the Mexican finds as standing higher than the
art of Egypt.'
Equally as impressive as the horizontal line of art history's globalized
panorama is the vertical temporal stratification that Kugler undertook.
With no mention of the hand axe, Kugler not only begins his history of
art in planet-spanning vastness, but also at the origin. The first pictures
in the illustrated edition of Kugler's Handbuch, compiled by Ernst Guhl
andJoseph Caspar and published in 1851, show the outlines of the mate-
rial; Stonehenge, for example, is relatively clearly recognizable (fig. 1)."
According to Kugler, the mental penetration of material that leads
to form has already crystallized in this earliest prehistory: "In the selec-
tion of the variously shaped stones as given by nature (as detritus or in
the quarry), in the particular manner of their presentation, their ar-

Franz Kugler and the Concept of World Art History 251
jr~
RCIIT-_ TR T. .--
Cabi;;:heand Arw~h<-mrnkmraler
'i,~-
AL
- at° , a,, a,
Fig. 1. Joseph Caspar, Monuments of the North European Antiquity,
1845. (Photo: Ernst Karl Guhl/Joseph Caspar, Denkmaler der Kunst,
Bd. I, 1851, Taf. 1.)
rangement, they were at any rate already able to achieve the more gen-
eral impressions of sublimity, proportion, and even harmony."" With
an impressively matter-of-course approach, Kugler begins his art history
with intentionally hewn and collected stones, continuing with the mon-
umental testimonies known to his time, like the stones of Carnac and
Stonehenge.
The Problem of Prehistoric Art
In a remarkable article in 2007, Ulrich Pfisterer used the lectures from
the Warburghaus to reconstruct how, as early as the 1830s, a compre-
hensive concept of art history was developed that ranged from the first
artifacts to the present.12 At the center of his article, however, stands the
shock of the discovery of Altamira in 1879 and 1880. After doubts about
the authenticity of these paintings were allayed, these objects were soon
accepted as part of art history-especially because of their formal prox-
imity to the art of impressionism.
The art history that focused on European post-ancient art was par-
alleled by an art history focusing on the legacy of prehistory. Pfisterer
convincingly shows that its strict lining up of objects in comparisons re-
sembled the forms of comparative analysis employed by the Hamburg
School around Aby Warburg. Along with this widening of the gaze, a
temporally vertical viewpoint also developed, finding a high point in
Herbert Kuhn's book of 1923, Die Kunst der Primitiven (The art of the
primitives): "Our age-rich and poor at the same time-stepped out
of the narrow confines of European contemplation of art; the view is
expanding immeasurably; the first steps are taken toward a world his-
tory of art. . . Winckelmann's and Goethe's concepts no longer suffice
to interpret the art of the primitive or natural peoples. An age for which
the pinnacle of art apparently means doing the same thing and solely the
Renaissance and for which every stylistic invention seems a decay cannot
understand the art of primitive peoples."13
But then Pfisterer traces the squandering after 1900 of the opportu-
nity to turn art history and its methods into the kind of all-encompassing
leading field of study that Kugler had striven for. The idea that the first
artifacts are to be seen not as art, but as a kind of pictorial language, and
not as objects made for their own sake, but as magical tools, played a
decisive role in separating the entire field of prehistory and early history
from art history. The art of the so-called Naturvlker (natural peoples)
was thereby no longer part of an expanded art history.
Three problems that have been ever more heatedly discussed in re-
cent years show that this separation from art history created an unsolved
problem. They all focus on the question of the phase of human develop-
ment that marks the beginning of what we can genuinely speak of as art.
That is, we can add, at what point art history in Kugler's sense begins.
In 2010, an exhibition in Stuttgart was devoted to the development of
art up to the end of the Ice Age. In it, a wealth of stone axes and their fur-
ther development to blade tips was displayed. The hypothesis that they
can be entirely subsumed under their practical function is countered
by the no less vehemently argued interpretation that, from the begin-
ning, they were suffused with form-conscious semantics-i.e., that homo
faber's creation of form can be equated with becoming human.14 In this

sense, Kugler's handbook would be a book on the history of man as the
form-conscious producer of artifacts.
Gottfried Boehm has long been using the reflection of the stone axe
in its character as "image," producing an "iconic difference."15Just over
ten years ago, Heinrich Klotz took the excavations of the ruins of Catal
Hyik-a Stone Age urban complex in Anatolia-as the occasion to
attempt to characterize the human species as homo faber. During the
founding phase of the Karlsruhe Zentrumfur Kunst und Medientechnologie
(Center for Art and Media Technology), he presented an interpretation
of the stone axe as the primal matter of modernity, as if paralleling the
transformation of a prehistoric man's flying weapon into a space station
in the initial sequence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He pro-
vided a succinctly condensed motto-a bridge between modernity and
the art of humanity's early period. Klotz said what is captivating about
the stone axe is "its artificiality, its harmonious regularity, and its sym-
metry, which indicate the intensity of human shaping. We can even call
this form beautiful and ought to see confirmed what was considered a
doctrine of modern functionalism: a form that thoroughly serves its util-
ity must also be beautiful."16
The following proclamation shows the methodological dilemma, but
also the possibilities, inasmuch as he defines the art of Homo erectus as
more modern than modern art itself: "Even if not all designed shape
can be recognized in the functional aesthetic of Modernism and if that
aesthetic's generalization leads to dogmatism, it can nevertheless be ap-
plied to the first object created by a human being. The artificiality of the
stone axe is also art, and its functionality is also beauty."" This statement
holds a concentrate of the entire problematic. Modernism sees itself in
the art of prehistory, just as categories are taken from the perspective of
this prehistoric art to explain modernism.
One could smirk at this anachronism, but the material immediately
has its revenge. That people were conscious of an "iconic difference"18
more than 100,000 years ago is shown by collections of fossils that a
framing design accentuated as a picture within the picture.19 Stone axes
like these have been found in numbers that rule out coincidence. The
Stuttgart exhibition showed one such fossil piece from England.20 The
finesse with which the fossils were recognized as special, and apparently
also prized and centrally emphasized, reveals that these predecessors of
the-anatomically-modern human being were such highly sensitive
and skillful humanoids that the distinction becomes problematic.

In 2008, the press was full of the photo of a series of shells that are
supposed to be among the earliest art forms from the Indian Ocean.21
The individual pieces all have holes in the same spot; they were created
by pressure or a blow. Two or three similarly designed objects could have
come about by chance, but the number of six shells assures the critical
observer that these are the components of ajewelry chain. A fundamen-
tal condition for proving that something was conceived as an object to be
viewed is the assembly of a sample large enough to rule out coincidental
formation, and that is the case here. Based on investigations carried out
primarily in South Africa and Morocco, a small, triumphant group of re-
searchers is currently shifting the question of the birth of the individual
from the fifteenth century back by about 80,000 years.22
Figures of the Ivory Age
But the real sensation unfolded over the last five years in the Swabian
Alb. Widely perceived up to now only in the examples of spectacular
individual items, finds in this region have led to a new revolution in our
image of the development of humankind.
Sculptures have been found that are 20,000 years older than the pic-
torial culture of Altamira and the associated sites in France, which are
themselves about 20,000 years old. These sculptures cast doubt on the
current theory of development because they are shaped completely in
the round and their three-dimensionality displays a stupendous mixture
of mimesis and abstraction. Thus, the approximately 3-cm mammoth-
ivory figure found in the cave Vogelherd (fig. 2) is an astounding pre-
sentation of the contours of this extinct animal, situated somewhere be-
tween individual characterization and abstraction. It shows the plastic
modeling of the massive body in the swelling surface, under which the
shoulder blades and hip structure are both visible. Peculiar rows of x-
shaped crosses cover the back and belly.23
Also, humanoid figures have been found in the last years. Up to now,
the Venus of Willendorf has been the undisputed star among prehistoric
figures, with her emphasized sexual characteristics, her corporeal os-
tentation, her enigmatically covered head, and her hand-fitting dimen-
sions.24 But in 2008 in the cave of Hohle Fels, a 6-cm ivory statuette was
found; aged about 35,000 to 40,000 years old, it is 5,000 years older than
the Venus of Willendorf. This could be the earliest figurative sculpture
yet found. But what is probably the most impressive figure from the
Fig. 2. Mammoth-sculpture, made of mammoth ivory, 5 cm. long, 3 cm.
tall, carved notch, discovered 1931 near Vogelherd, ca. 32,000 years
old. (Photo: H. Jensen, © University of Tubingen.)
cave in Hohlenstein-Stadel, conspicuous for its height of almost 30 cm,
was created about 32,000 years ago (fig. 3). The legs seem to belong to a
predator standing on its hind legs, while the arms are those of a human.
The head has mutated into a lion's. Together, the tension in this figure's
body and the body components fused into a chimera have a mysterious
effect.26
The Material Iconology
Against the background of the most recent finds, the image of the his-
tory of art is changing-both in terms of its objects, and its disciplinary
history. The finds on the Swabian Alb turn Kugler's magnum opus into
what it equally declamatorily and futilely claimed to be: a handbook of
art history. As in a picture puzzle, this work-with its liberal gaze plunges
into the world's cultures, and its concept of art tracing back to the stone
axes-moves from the periphery to the center of the discipline.
This process is not just a vision born from the occasion; rather, it is
the product of processes developing from both sides, from art history
S .
~, '
Fig. 3. "Lion-man," made of mammoth ivory, ca. 35,000 years old.
Ulmer Museum. (Photo: Thomas Stephan © Ulmer Museum.)

and from pre and early history. The walls of the Stuttgart exhibition were
covered with definitions of art from Pablo Picasso to Marcel Duchamp.
They intend to make these artifacts, some of them 40,000 years old, un-
derstandable as parts of modern art. People like to speak of objects of
modern art as having been created by a type of person who is to be re-
garded as modern him or herself. The real conceptual problem here
is swept under the rug, of course. It is that antiquity lies like a blocking
mountain range between the modernism of early history and the mod-
ernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, formally eluding this
system of relations.
One way to subvert or integrate this barrier lies in the power of the
material. The figure with the lion man (fig. 3) seems to develop its own
semantics of material, inasmuch as the skill acquired in stone is used
for unimagined ways of ensouling matter in the soft, organically pro-
duced material of the mammoth tusks (fig. 2). As long as stone was the
only material for sculpture, there could be no iconology of the material.
Only in the contrast between various working materials are their specific
qualities visible as such. Taking everything currently known into account,
ivory therefore represents the first condensed field of a material iconol-
ogy, as it was developed by Gottfried Semper27 and others, up to Monika
Wagner in our day.28
Among the first was Kugler, who made a comprehensive claim to
understand art history as a universal human history of artifacts. His
Handbuch is the implementation of this goal. The material and its iconol-
ogy lie at the beginning of a development from which art history can be
understood as a history of humankind and its disconnection from the
animal kingdom.
The epochs of early history are customarily divided in accordance
with materials: the Stone Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the
Iron Age. We have seen how ivory and its first known figurative forms
force their way into the Stone Age. This is the research result of the last
three years that can only be called spectacular. The Ivory Age-the mil-
lennia between 40,000 and 30,000 BCE-should be inserted between the
other prehistoric epochs named for materials.
This has consequences, because in this material, even more than in
the other name-giving materials, we see that, considering the organic
softness of the material, art history's form-specific methods, oriented to-
ward aesthetic appearance, themselves appear as the objects' desideratum.

.. t
Ear,
Fig. 4. August Friedrich Staler, stairway hall, Neues Museum. (Photo:
BPK/Neues Museum, Berlin/Art Resource, New York.)

Museums and Material Iconology
As Peter N. Miller has shown, the second founding father of this ap-
proach is Gustav Friedrich Klemm. His ten-volume Allgemeine Cultur-
Geschichte der Menschheit, whose first volume came out in 1843, breathes
the same spirit as Kugler's Handbuch from 1842.29 Klemm added a small
text on the founding of a museum for all cultures of mankind,30 and his
own collection became the core of the Ethnology Museum of Leipzig.31
In a parallel movement, Kugler's concept was also realized at least
approximately embodied as a museum: August Stuler's Neues Museum in
Berlin. Its conceptualization began in 1843-i.e., one year after Kugler's
Handbuch was published (fig. 4) .32 This museum, which was reopened
after Chipperfield's removal of war damage in 2010, can be regarded as
the vessel of a universal claim to found a general history of art-from the
stone axe, through Egyptian objects, to Mexican book illumination-
that grasps the entire pictorial inventory of human artifacts as one cos-
mos in which, from the beginning, form is tied to semantics: in which,
in a universal Aristotelianism, the intrinsic connection is emphasized in
such a way that the art-historical methods are applied in genuine self-
evidence, and not merely in coincidental bridge-building.33
The study of material culture could take a starting point in rethinking
Kugler's and Klemm's epochal trials to create a universal art and cultural
history.
NOTES
1. Jbrg Trempler, "Franz Kuglers Promotion und Habilitation oder die Zeich-
nung als Prnfungsgegenstand," in In der Mitte Berlins: 200 Jahre Kunst-
geschichte an der Humboldt-Universitdt, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Adam S.
Labuda (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 55-65.
2. Kilian Heck, "Die Bezfglichkeit der Kunst zum Leben: Franz Kugler und
das erste akademische Lehrprogramm der Kunstgeschichte," Marburger
Jahrbuchfiir Kunstwissenschaft 32 (2005): 7-15.
3. Horst Bredekamp and Adam Labuda, "Kunstgeschichte, Universitat,
Museum und die Mitte Berlin 1810-1873," in In der Mitte Berlin: 200 Jahre
Kunstgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universitt, 25-54, 33f.
4. Christoph Martin Vogtherr, "Das K6nigliche Museum zu Berlin: Planung
und Konzeption des ersten Berliner Kunstmuseums," Jahrbuch der Berliner
Museen 39 (1997); Bredekamp and Labuda, "Kunstgeschichte, Universitat,
Museum und die Mitte Berlin," 27-29.
5. Franz Theodor Kugler, Beschreibung der in der Konigl. Kunstkammer zu Berlin
vorhandenen Kunst-Sammlung (Berlin: Carl Heymann Verlag, 1838).

6. Franz Theodor Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 2 Bde. (Stuttgart,
1842), ix-xi. See Henrik Karge, Franz Kugler, and Carl Schnaase, "Zwei Pro-
jekte zur Etablierung der 'Allgemeinen Kunstgeschichte,"' in Franz Theodor
Kugler: Deutscher Kunsthistoriker und Berliner Dichter, ed. Michel Espagne,
Benedicte Savoy, and Celine Trautmann-Waller (Berlin: Academie Verlag,
2010) 83-104.
7. Franz Theodor Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte.
8. Henrik Karge, "Welt-Kunstgeschichte: Franz Kugler and die geographische
Fundierung der Kunsthistoriographie in der Mitte des 19.Jahrhunderts," in
"Kunsttopographie:" Theorie und Methode in der Kunstwissenschaft und Archaolo-
gie seit Winckelmann (Stendal: Stendal Verlag, 2003), 29-31.
9. Franz Theodor Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 35.
10. Ernst Guhl and Joseph Caspar, eds., Denkmaler der Kunst zur Ubersicht ihres
Entwicklungs-Ganges von den ersten kiinstlerischen Versuchen bis zu den Stand-
punkten der Gegenwart, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Ebuer and Seubert, 1851) A., plate 1.
11. "Bei der Auswahl der verschieden geformten Steine, wie sie die Natur (als
Ger5lle oder im Steinbruche) gab, bei der eigenthnmlichen Weise ihrer
Aufstellung, ihrer Zusammenordnung konnten immerhin schon die allge-
meineren Eindrncke der Erhabenheit, des Maases, selbst der Harmonie
erreicht werden." Franz Theodor Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 4.
12. Ulrich Pfisterer, "Altamira-oder: Die Anfange von Kunst und Kunstwissen-
schaft," in Vortrage aus dem Warburg-Haus, vol. 10 (Berlin: Academie Verlag,
2007), 13-80.
13. "Unsere Zeit-arm und reich zugleich-tritt heraus aus dem engen Rah-
men europaischer Kunstbetrachtung, ungemessen erweitert sich das Bild,
die ersten Schritte werden getan zur Weltgeschichte der Kunst ( . . .). Die
Begriffe Winckelmanns und Goethes reichen nicht mehr zu, die Kunst der
Urv6lker, der Naturv6lker zu deuten. Eine Zeit, die das Griechenland und
Renaissance allein als die Hohe der Kunst erscheint und jede stilisierte
Richtung als einen Verfall, wird kein Verstandnis haben fur die Kunst der
primitiven Volker." Herbert Kuhn, Die Kunst derPrimitiven (Munchen, 1923)
7; cited in Ulrich Pfisterer, "Altamira," 63.
14. Thomas Wynn, "Archaeology and Cognitive Evolution," Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 25, no. 3 (2002): 389-402.
15. Gottfried Boehm, "Die Wiederkehr der Bilder," in Was ist ein Bild? (Munich,
1994), 11-38, 30; Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des
Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), 34-38.
16. "Wir erkennen an ihm seine Kfnstlichkeit, seine EbenmdBigkeit und seine
Symmetrie, die auf die menschliche Gestaltungsintensitat verweisen. Wir
knnen sogar diese Form als schon bezeichnen und mntBten bestatigt
sehen, was dem Funktionalismus der Moderne als Lehrsatz gegolten hat:
eine Form, die konsequent ihrer Nftzlichkeit dient, musse auch schon
sein." Heinrich Klotz, Die Entdeckung von Catal Hoyuk. Der archaologischeJahr-
hundertfund (Munchen: C. H. Beck, 1997), 13.
17. "Wenn sich aus der Funktionsasthetik der Moderne auch nicht alle gestalt-
ete Form erklaren IBt und deren Verallgemeinerung zu Dogmatismus

ffihrt, so IBt sie sich doch auf den ersten, vom Menschen geschaffenen
Gegenstand anwenden. Die Kfnstlichkeit des Faustkeils ist auch Kunst und
seine Funktionalitat ist auch Schnheit." Heinrich Klotz, Die Entdeckung von
Catal Hoyuk. Der archaologischeJahrhundertfund, 13.
18. Gottfried Boehm, Was ist ein Bild?, 11-38.
19. Michel Lorblanchet, La Naissance de l'Art. Genese de l'art prshistorique (Paris:
Editions Errance, 1999), 82, 89ff.
20. K. P. Oakley, "Emergence of higher thought 3.0-.2 Ma B.P.," Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B. Biological Sciences 292, no.
1057 (1981): 205-11, fig. 2.
21. Francesco d'Errico, Christopher Henshilwood, Marian Vahaeren, and
Karen van Niekerk, "Nassarius kraussianus Shell Beads from Blombos Cave:
Evidence for Symbolic Behavior in the Middle Stone Age," Journal of Human
Evolution 48 (2005), 3-24. Ulrich Bahnsen, "Das Geheimnis der Gravuren,"
in Die Zeit. Welt- und Kulturgeschichte, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Die Zeit, 2005) 543-
47, 547.
22. C. Henshilwood and Francesco d'Errico, "Being Modern in the Middle
Stone Age," in The Hominid Individual in Context. Archeological investigations of
Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts, ed. Clive Gamble
and Martin Porr (New York: Routledge, 2005), 244-64, 251f, 257f.
23. Reinhard Ziegler, "Nilpferde im Rhein, Affen auf der Alb. Die Saugetiere
aus dem Eiszeitalter in Siddeutschland," in Eiszeit: Kunst und Kultur (Ostfil-
dern: Thorbecke Verlag, 2009), 43-50, 43.
24. Nicholas J. Conard, "Die erste Venus," in Eiszeit: Kunst und Kultur, 268-71.
25. Harald Floss, "Kunst schafft Identitat. Das Aurignacien und die Zeit der
ersten Kunst," in Eiszeit: Kunst und Kultur, 248-57, 249.
26. Ulmer Museum, Der Lowenmensch. Geschichte-Magie-Mythos (Ulm, 2005);
see Kurt Wehrberger, "Der Lowenmensch von Hohlenstein-Stadel," in Les
chemins de l'Art aurignacien en Europe / Das Aurignacien und die Anfange der
Kunst in Europa, Actes du colloque 2005 d'Aurignac / Tagungsband der gleich-
namigen Internationalen Fachtagung, ed. Harald Floss and Nathalie Rou-
querol (Aurignac: Editions Musee-forum Aurignac, 2007), 331-44.
27. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil, 2 vols. (1860/1863).
28. Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001).
29. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, 10 vols.,
(Leipzig, 1843-1857). See Peter N. Miller, "The Missing Link: 'Antiquarian-
ism,' 'Material Culture' and 'Cultural Science' in the Work of G. F. Klemm,"
in Cultural Histories of the Material World, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2013).
30. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Fantasie fiber ein Museum fur die Culturge-
schichte der Menschheit," Supplement vol. of Allgemeinen Cultur-Geschichte
der Menschheit (Dresden: B. G. Teubner, 1841); see Peter N. Miller, "The
Missing Link."
31. Peter N. Miller, "The Missing Link."
32. Elsa van Wezel, "Die Konzeptionen des Alten und Neuen Museums zu Ber-
lin und das sich wandelnde historische BewuBtsein," Jahrbuch der Berliner
Museen 43 (2001); Elke Blauert and Astrid Bahr, eds., Neues Museum: Archi-
tektur, Sammlung, Geschichte (Berlin: Nicolai, 2009).
33. Horst Bredekamp, "Der lange Atem der Kunstkammer: Das Neue Museum
als Avantgarde der Vorvergangenheit," in Museale Spezialisierung und Nation-
alisierung ab 1830: Das Neue Museum in Berlin im internationalen Kontext, ed.
Ellinor Bergvelt, Debora Meijers, Lieske Tibbe, and Elsa van Wezel (Berlin:
G + H Verlag, 2011) 25-36.

TWENTY-THREE
The Missing Link:
"Antiquarianism,"
"Material Culture," and
"Cultural Science" in the
Work of G. F. Klemm
Peter N. Miller
Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802-1867) is well and truly forgotten. The
last stand-alone piece devoted to him made him into a prophet of Nazi
racial theories and was published in a volume of essays cheerfully entitled
Kultur und Rasse.1 And yet, it is in his work that the concepts of "material
culture" (Materiellen Cultur) and "cultural science" (Culturwissenschaft)
were first developed. In a way, then, our steps toward the reuniting of ma-
terial culture and the cultural sciences lead back to Klemm. But, because
he placed himself at the end of a long line of collector-scholars originat-
ing in the early modern period, our steps back to him take us back still
further, to antiquaries like Ole Worm and Peiresc. Klemm, then-last of
the antiquaries, first of the cultural scientists, around whom pivots pre-
modern and modern epistemologies of material culture.
Klemm explained in later life that his interest in realia was first
aroused by the sight of the different armies passing back and forth
through Chemnitz in the Napoleonic wars, with their weapons, gear,
uniforms, and different ethnic composition. He fell in love with Greek
and Latin at the gymnasium, while the tercentenary celebrations of Lu-
ther in 1817 focused his attention on to the Middle Ages in Germany.
Intellectually, the key text for him was Ebert's Bildung des Bibliothek-
ars (1820)-not a book that figures largely in our conception of key
texts of the later Goethezeit-which showed him how a collection could
function as the foundation for encyclopedic learning.2 He read Herder
and Voltaire, from whom he realized for himself the "goal of studying
human conditions in family, state, war, religion, science and art." He
263
took to excerpting medieval historians and travel writers, but especially
found it useful to concentrate on Germany. During his school vaca-
tions, he wandered through Saxony and Thuringia with a sketchbook,
drawing weapons, tools, buildings, and tombstones. With help from
Montfaucon and Moller when necessary, he turned his own drawings
into the basis of "a collection of antiquarian illustrations." By 1825,
his collection was already giving him a general sense of the history of
human conditions.3
In the summer of 1830, Klemm worked in Leipzig with the famed
naturalist Hofrath Tilesius-and then went back to old German monu-
ments, comparing them, as a scientist might. By then he was appointed
to his position in the Royal Porcelain Collection in Dresden, with whose
reorganization he was charged. This gave him the opportunity to study
more about China and about the history of technology. His earliest
publications-on porcelain and old Germanic Europe-followed.4 This,
in turn, led him to wide-ranging reading "of the most important travel
works of old and more recent times."5
1.
In these works of the mid-1830s, Klemm explicitly identifies himself with
a tradition of early modern scholars and scholarship which he called
"antiquarian." In the preface to his Handbuch der Germanisches Alterthums-
kunde (1836) Klemm explained that he realized that his "antiquarian
studies" contained sources and supporting evidence for the cultural his-
tory of the oldest Germanic period.6
With his next publication, also of 1836-1837, Klemm distinguished
himself. Zur Geschichte der Sammlungen fur Wissenschaft und Kunst in
Deutschland is, or would be if it were known, one of the pioneering trea-
tises in the history of early modern learned collecting. With its detailed
information about Kunst- und Wunderkammern and libraries, it could
have been the model book thatJulius von Schlosser's Die Kunst- und Wun-
derkammern der Spdtrenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens.
Ein Handbuch fur Sammler und Leibhaber (1908) became.
The table of contents reveals the volume's early modern center of grav-
ity: it begins with libraries from the fourteenth century, then churches as
medieval museums, then sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kunst- und
Rarititenkammern-with probably the first serious effort to understand
the treatises of Samuel Quiccheberg and Lorenz Hofmann-and con-

The Missing Link 265
cludes with eighteenth-century museums. The main thrust of the argu-
ment about early modern cabinets is establishing the link between the
study of antiquities and the study of nature. Travel plays a central role
here. Klemm recognized the triangular relationship that Momigliano
revived in our own time between antiquitates, nature, and ethnography.
Klemm devotes no space to non-German collections, and his study of
the German ones really gains traction only in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury. But we ought not to assume that Klemm had not thought about the
earlier period. Long quotes from Einckel's Museographia make plain that
the history of the earlier period and, indeed, the literature on it (such as
existed), was completely familiar to him. Indeed, it is very much the earli-
est period in the history of the Kunst- und Winderkammern that directly
inspired him. Here, however, it is Ole Worm who figures as the key.
Worm's Museum Wormianum (1653) represented for Klemm, as it
does still for historians of collecting, the moment when a mature litera-
ture on collecting the man-made met a mature reflection on the study
and collection of nature. The Museum's frontispiece is famous (there is
a reconstruction of the frontispiece in the Danish National Library, and
a performance artist re-created it in 2005 for a temporary exhibition at
Harvard's Peabody Museum of Anthropology). Its principle of inclusive-
ness puts the human inside the natural, and sees human history as part
of nature's history. Klemm devotes a long passage to ekphrasis of Worm's
frontispiece. It served as his own model.7 Thus, he made space in his
account for "Geschichte, Alterthnmer und Ethnographie" and placed
tools and scientific instruments alongside natural, artistic, and histori-
cal materials. For Klemmn, the eighteenth century marks the great leap
forward in museum organization and content, especially in the natural
sciences. Klemm is deeply committed to the details of this history: he
even provides the opening hours for the Berlin Museum, as if recogniz-
ing that access-and sensitivity to the importance of access-denotes a
wholly changed attitude to the purpose of collecting and its audience.8
As he was finishing his history of German collections, he was selected
as tutor to accompany the Saxon heir on his Italian trip in 1838. As with
Bachofen a few years later, this trip would trigger an explicit shift; in his
case from antiquarianism to cultural history. "A few months after the
end of my travel, the plan of a Cultural History and Cultural Science was
sharply outlined in paper I sent to my friend A.B. v. Lindenau."9 It was
at this point that he took to organizing his own collection: to broaden in
new directions, to renew in older ones. He purchased a complete collec-
tion of South Sea materials (Gewerbszeugnisse), followed by objects from

Africa and the Arctic, and worked diligently on their disposition.10 By
1840, his collection numbered 1,257 objects, and was distributed through
five large rooms divided into fourteen sections, by function: tools and
weapons/jewelry/clothing/vessels/dwellings and furniture/writing ma-
terials and writing/coins, weight and measure/vehicles/musical instru-
ments/the sacred/ arts/history of writing. In terms of origin, the objects
were distributed as follows: 700 from Africa, 500 from America, 600 from
Russia, 350 from the Arctic, 600 from China/Japan, 600 from the Near
East, 500 Greco-Roman, 400 early German, and 1,200 from the medieval
era." Klemm explained that the "goal of the collection is none other
than to bring to understanding the creation of various human artistic
and manufactured products out of naturally found materials and their
further development, and with that to ground a Culturwissenschaft whose
foundations the ten volumes of my Cultur-Geschichte illustrate."12
In 1841, the first volume of that Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Mensch-
heit was ready for the press. As he had done in his earlier work, Klemm
begins at the beginning: volume 1 is devoted to the history of the earth.
What follows is a march through space and time, beginning with the
peoples whom he considered most natural ("passive") and progressing
by stages through those who were most cultured-culture understood
here in its fully anthropological sense as referring to those who made
increasingly complex interventions upon the natural world. The catego-
ries of analysis became increasingly complex, too. They can be used to
chart the way cultural history can be written from the material world in a
way that acknowledges differences of culture. For example, the "passive"
folk, or the "Wild men in the primeval forests, on the sea coasts or the
arid plains," under one heading which encompassed basics such as food,
drink, weapons, tools, decoration, shelter, family, religion, and warfare.13
The major expansion of categories comes with the discussion of China
and Japan-the first advanced societies. Klemm introduces after food,
beverages; after dwelling: shipping, pack animals; after commerce, cattle
breeding, agriculture and horticulture, crafts, mining, pottery; after fam-
ily life: acting, political organization, government, provincial administra-
tion, urbanism, finances, legislation, penal code, public transport; after
religion: Confucius, science and literature, art.14 Finally, for the most
modern societies of medieval and early modern Europe the categories
expand still further, to include: the constitution of the body, clothing,
abodes, ugly furnishings, ways and means, commercial activities, family
life, social life, games, funerary rites, public life, political organization,
classes, constitutions, state administration, head of state, laws and judi-

ciary, military affairs, defensive weapons, attacking weapons, religion,
holy places, worship, sciences, history.15
Klemm's introduction to the project takes the form of the prehistory
of what he was calling cultural history. He begins, conventionally, with
the Greeks and Romans, but his story only takes off with a long discus-
sion of historical renovatio in the sixteenth century, and then a survey of
antiquarianism, emphasizing the Dutch-German tradition from Lipsius
and Cluverius through Conring before turning to the mass of histori-
cal critique in the eighteenth century. From antiquarianism he turns di-
rectly, and with no felt need for justification, to cultural history. Voltaire
is presented as its pioneer (this too was conventional). With the French
Revolution, politics reasserted itself as the centerpiece of universal his-
tory.16 Against the political tendency of the age, Klemm enlisted science
as a way of bringing the cultural world back into the story.17 It was this
scientific perspective, Klemm asserted-not the political nor the liter-
ary, artistic, antiquarian, or technological-that provided him with his
vantage point. He would follow the development of mankind from wild
childhood to the division into social bodies, and by reference to specific
conditions of existence.18
The sources for such a project were as comprehensive as the project
itself. What distinguished them was not their content but how they were
examined-namely, as historical evidence. "Coins, coats of arms, medals
and reliefs, statues and figural groups, entire buildings dedicated to war
or peace, sacred or profane use are, like art objects, important sources
for the historians, above all if they contain information about the time or
the place of their creation or their creator."19
Klemm then insists that the source base for understanding the past
needs to move well beyond the confines of the image or the art work.
"Those image-less, often style-less things, tools, clothes, weapons, models
of vehicles, buildings etc. which managed to survive to us from a distant
time or space are of no little worth." Up until now, Klemm continued, de-
scriptions and representations of such objects were incomplete or poor.
"As in Mineralogy, Zoology, Botany, Archaeology, Numismatics and Pa-
leography, so too in History, direct perception of objects is the best aid
(Hilfsmittel) to correct understanding."2 As in all these other fields, so
too in history the best supporting science was the direct encounter with
the evidence. In the case of nonfigural objects, this meant extracting
information from their material constitution and form.
Klemm's vision of human history, as sketched out in his book by cat-
egories, was a collector's vision. In fact, to the first volume of the Cul-
turgeschichte, Klemm appended a startling text, a "Fantasy of a Museum
for the Cultural History of Mankind" (Fantasie aber ein Museum fur die
Culturgeschichte der Menschheit) .21 Here Klemm retraces the narrative of
cultural history laid out across the ten volumes proceeding not through
time, but space: as if through the rooms of a museum, with each room
mapping a volume of the Culturgeschichte. Since Klemm did, in fact, build
the diachronic narrative out of the study of the material artifacts rather
than the other way around the "Fantasy" is no daydream, but the blue-
print for the actually completed project.
Klemm noted that since Buffon there had been recognition that mu-
seums were linked to Bildung, and, specifically, that the cabinets of cu-
riosities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needed to be seen
as the ancestors of modern scientific collections.22 But the idea of estab-
lishing a collection to illustrate "the progress of Mankind and its Cul-
tural history" had never been scientifically attempted since those early
modern collections.23 It was only now that so much material had been
gathered to one place that it was possible to launch the cultural historical
enterprise that Klemm was thinking about. He describes it thus: "From
now, however, fundamental historical research no less than natural sci-
entific could be based solely on the perception of monuments and was
possible through comparison and evaluation of the evidence."24
At the heart of this project lies the argument that static artifacts con-
tain within themselves information relevant to dynamic change. Klemm
acknowledges that an embodiment of cultural history makes the choice
of illustrative objects of paramount importance.25 And since not every-
thing could be illustrated, the focus had to be on the illustration of
disjunction-which also meant that if there were periods of little change
these would not be illustrated.26 Klemm's vision was of a museum as a
" Codex probationum der Wissenschaft."
If there was danger in having too many individual pieces, there was
also danger in having too few. The curator could not omit what he did
not like, or was not interested in. Paraphrasing, and perhaps poking fun
at Ranke, Klemm declared that "this is the real impartiality and justice
of the Historian" (Die]) ist die wahre Unpartheilichkeit und Gerechtigkeit des
Historikers), and separated him from the "Kunst-dilettante" who, for in-
stance, would never include the carvings of the Eskimos, or images of
the Mexicans and Chinese, alongside the Medici Venus or a Raphael
Madonna. Just like the student of nature, the student of the human past
could not treat some artifacts with more seriousness and care than oth-
ers. They were all evidence.27

Behind this fantasy, as behind the table of contents for the project as
a whole, lay Klemm's own collection. He described it as containing the
smaller objects, of little worth, that others would have no interest in, but
which worked for his argument.28
2.
Present in this vast cultural historical narrative, and brought to exquisite
clarity in his "Fantasy of a Museum of the Cultural History of Mankind,"
is the idea that cultural history can-and in some cases can only-be
written from objects. Klemm soon gave a name to this idea. In 1851, he
delivered a a lecture in Vienna to the Anthropological Society, entitled
"Foundations of a General Cultural Science" (" Grundideen zu einer allge-
meinen Cultur-Wissenschaft").
Klemm sets up his argument in terms of the opposition between na-
ture and culture. Cultura, for the Romans, was what humans do to change
the world. A cultural science would have therefore to do with food, cloth-
ing, and shelter, but also with vessels, tools, and machines. Studying their
origin and development, he writes, constitutes the first axis of a future
Culturwissenschaft.29 The second was to explore objects through human
relations: from man and woman to family, children, clan, tribe, city, state.
The third examined the spiritual life of man through his creation of art
and science. With this, Klemm succinctly plotted archaeology, anthro-
pology, the history of religion, and art history on to Culturwissenschaft.
Klemm summarized all this very clearly.
Cultural Science begins with the material foundations of human life,
with the representation of bodily needs, the means of their satisfac-
tion and the products arising from that. It then represents human
relations within the family and their broadening into the state. The
final section of it, however, deals with the results of human explora-
tion and experience, and displays the spiritual creations of mankind
in science and art.30
Klemm's major treatment of this subject is his Allgemeine Cultur-
wissenschaft of 1855, with its fantastic cross-cultural discussions of fire,
food, drink, narcotics, tools, and weapons. The work is a remarkable
achievement in terms of vision and scope. Its introduction, too, is fasci-
nating. In it, Klemm contextualizes his own work in the history of ency-
clopedism, seen from the perspective of the organization of knowledge-
obviously written in the light of both his own Allgemeine Culturgeschichte
and his fantasy of a museum of human history. Klemm then turned di-
rectly, and without pause to collections, and the history of collecting.31
This lead directly in to a brief survey of the history of cultural history via
a survey of the late seventeenth-century genre of historia literaria, citing
Lambeck and Morhof, up through Voltaire. It is at that point, he writes,
that moeurs, family life, religious forms, art, and science began to become
independent subjects for inquiry. The great subsequent step forward was
driven by the work of Linnaeus and Buffon, and the arrival of new ma-
terials from the South Seas, the Americas, China, and Siberia. Finally, it
became possible to envision a global human science.32
Culture meant for Klemm something like a civilizing process: "the
improvement or refining of the entire spiritual and bodily force of men
or of a people." But it also referred to the broadest range of human in-
terventions in nature: when someone turned a tree branch into a spear
to throw at an animal, or to rub two branches together to make a fire to
cook that animal, or when using fire to burn down the hut once inhab-
ited by his father and now housing his corpse, or when he painted his
body whether for war or decoration. "These are all signs of drives and
properties that distinguish him from animals."33
Like the natural sciences, the cultural sciences were a "science of
experience" (Wissenschaft der Erfahrung), based on the appearances of
things. Its object was not one part of the human race, or one state, or
one part of the earth (neatly acknowledging, while still rejecting, the
overarching claims of ethnology, statistik, and geography), nor one of the
many activities and achievements of man, neither commerce, nor war,
nor law, nor literature. Culturwissenschaft, according to Klemm "had the
task of representing human nature as a whole, as an individual." Whereas
Culturgeschichte treated this individual in his developmental aspect, mak-
ing progress in his circumstances, Culturwissenschaft showed him in his
varied fundamental postures, in family life and society, in war and in
peace. "In a word: Culturwissenschaft had the task to bring into view the
whole of human activity and their monuments at all times and places."34
Klemm expanded upon the three axes laid out in his Vienna lecture.
This meant starting with the fundamental transformation of natural into
human products. "Food, Clothing and Ornament, Tools, Shelter, vehi-
cles and tools, these are the material foundations of human culture."
Explaining their origin and development constituted the first task of Cul-
turwissenschaft.35 The second part of any future Culturwissenschaft would,
in turn, focus on the relations between people. The priest-king combina-
tion produced organs of society; commerce created new relations; the
king was paterfamilias; everywhere, religion and politics begin and blend
together. The second task of Culturwissenschaft was then to represent
the connectedness of these phenomena and their development toward
the state.36 The third and final task was to narrate the "achievements of
human inquiry and experiment, as well as the spiritual creations of peo-
ples in science and art."37 Thus, what his younger contemporary Burck-
hardt defined as cultural history was for him but a part-and the last at
that-of a much bigger project.
Not included as a specific chapter in the Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft,
clothing, nevertheless was exactly one of the kinds of subjects amenable
to such a treatment. In 1854, Klemm delivered a lecture to the "Gewerb-
vereins" of Dresden on its twentieth anniversary, with the title Die
Menschliche Kleidung: Culturgeschictliche Skizze.38 Also in 1854, "The Hat"
(Der Hut) was the subject of a stand-alone piece. Both of these essays
were transhistorical and geographical in scope. In the event, no further
parts of the Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft seem to have been undertaken.
Klemm's large project of the period 1854-1858 was historical: a six-
volume encyclopedia of women's history, Die Frauen: Culturgeschictliche
Schilderungen des Zustandes und Einflusses der Frauen in den verschiedenen
Zonen und Zeitaltern (1854-58). After this, he eyes seem to have begun to
fail, and his prodigious scholarly production began to diminish.
A significant, even defining, feature of Klemm's intellectual pro-
file was the role allotted to objects not merely as foci of investigation,
but as their stimuli as well. This is the role of his own collection. After
his death-through a circuitous path-it was purchased for the city of
Leipzig, and became the core of its Ethnology Museum.39 Historians
seem not to have paid much attention to Klemm.
But others did. Edward Tylor, for example, introduces Klemm's con-
cept of culture history on the very first page of his Researches into the Early
History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) .4 Augustus
Pitt-Rivers cited Klemm frequently, and borrowed his approach of clas-
sifying by forms. The disposition of the museum bearing his name, to
this very day reflects the principle of the Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft.
Klemm's biggest impact was in the United States. Otis Mason, a profes-
sor at Columbia University, read the report on Klemm's collection that
had appeared in a Leipzig newspaper and translated it into English

while incorporating Klemm's vision into his instructions to agents of the
newly founded Bureau of American Ethnology. They were, he wrote, to
seek out artifacts to "present savage life and condition in all grades and
places," without leaving anything aside "because they are either rude or
homely.""
The "dog that did not bark," however; the reception that did not
occur, might be the most fascinating of all: Karl Marx. There is no in-
dication that Klemm read Marx, or that Marx read Klemm. Yet Marx,
who was not interested in things, at exactly the same time that Klemm
provided the most comprehensive contemporary presentation of mate-
rial life, provided the most compelling contemporary discussion of the
meaningfulness of material culture (the German Ideology was written in
1845-1846; the Allgemeine Cultur-geschichte, in 1843-1852). Moreover,
like Klemm, Marx provided an account of the development of society in
which change was geared to material life. What separates the two is that
Klemm was interested in the material; Marx, in the materiality; Klemm,
in the details of ever-intensifying material culture; Marx, in the chang-
ing political forces driving it. The chronological proximity of their argu-
ments tells us a great deal about the 1840s and 1850s in Germany. Their
conceptual proximity, however, helps clarify not only the later disciplin-
ary parting of the ways of anthropology and political economy, but also
the earlier intertwining of cultural history and political thought in the
preceding period.
One crucial source might be Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen's Grund-
zilge der Gesellschaftswissenschaft (2 vols., 1838 and 1841).42 The second
volume of this largely forgotten work is devoted to "Die Kulturwis-
senschaft." Lavergne-Peguilhen devotes an entire section to "General
Laws of Culture" (Allgemeine Kulturgesetze), which begins with a section
devoted to "Kulturwissenschaft." The use of the term, he explains, has
nothing to do with the formation of artists or scholars or individuals in
general, but with the population as a mass.43 The goal was the integration
of "Production, Cultural and Political activity" for the perfection of the
"mass of the population."44 This could only be achieved through what he
called "Kulturwissenschaft."45
Dedicating the first volumes of his study of Gibbon's world to Mo-
migliano and Venturi was the way John Pocock acknowledged the early
modern heritage of enlightenment social process.46 Thinking about the
relationship of Klemm and Marx as mediated through the term Kultur-
wissenschaft suggests that the further exploration of the worlds of anti-
quarianism and social thought might well be worthwhile.

3.
What might it mean that material culture and cultural science were born
twins? This is a huge question. Even outlining what an answer might
look like extends far beyond the scope of this chapter. For one thing, it
antedates the serious reflection on the Kulturwissenschaften by Dilthey by
several decades and, significantly I think given Dilthey's geistesgeschicht-
lich orientation, shows us that originally the material world was seen as
a crucial part of its armature. In the German tradition, materiality and
the Kulturwissenschaften would not begin to be reintegrated until War-
burg, and this process was interrupted, in quick succession, by his death
in 1929, and the disruption of German academic life after January 30,
1933. In France, where so much of the impetus of the Annales was anti-
Diltheyan in its fullest sense, neither material culture nor the Kulturwis-
senschaften were terms to conjure with, and it remains the case to this very
day. In the Anglophone world, material culture returned in the 1960s,
but totally cut off from this nineteenth-century story, and severed from
any link to the Kulturwissenschaften.
We can even date this story precisely. In his Einleitung in die Kulturwis-
senschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, published in Leipzig
in 1934, Warburg's then heir apparent Edgar Wind devoted a section
to explaining Dilthey's conception of the Geisteswissenschaften and War-
burg's rejection of it for its lack of historical specificity. The latter's invo-
cation of the Kulturwissenschaften was intended as making an alternative
pathway." The English translation of this volume, published in London
that same year (the Institute having relocated there in 1933), begins with
an apologia for retaining, even in the title, the "untranslatable" German
term Kulturwissenschaft.48 Wind explained that Warburg's entire project
was unintelligible without it.49 In elaborating on Warburg's foundation
in the work of Burckhardt and Usener, spanning the realm of evidence
from art, to anthropology, to folklore, to religion, to science, Wind of-
fered the first self-conscious justification of Kulturwissenschaft since
Klemm, but only as valedictory.50 The section on Dilthey, which put all
this in context, was dropped from the English edition, leaving Kulturwis-
senschaft well and truly marooned.51 Ernst Cassirer, Warburg's close col-
league, himself responded to the outbreak of the Second World War with
a call to action entitled, DerLogik derKulturwissenschaften. But by the time
he, too, came to an English-speaking world (Yale) and offered the book
for publication, it had become The Logic of the Humanities-which, ironi-
cally, would have translated back into German as Geisteswissenschaften-

precisely the Diltheyan notion that Klemm avant la lettre and Warburg
apres both opposed. A half-century further on-"cultural science," or
"the cultural sciences"-still have not made it into English usage.
Arnaldo Momigliano pointed to the years around 1870 as the break-
ing open of the humanistic disciplines and the beginning of their re-
shaping into something resembling our own-or at least the beginning
of our own. He pointed to Tylor, Bachofen, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt
as key figures in this change. Karl Lamprecht, in the generation that
followed, was fascinated by social psychology and art, and deeply com-
mitted to integrating material evidence into cultural history. But he had
no working concept of Kulturwissenschaft. Reflecting on the history of
this kind of history, Braudel looked from Klemm to Burckhardt, and
wondered if perhaps our received view of center and periphery in the
practice of cultural history needed some correction.52
Finally, that Klemm self-consciously and repeatedly presents his work
as emerging out of early modern antiquarianism brings the history of
early modern antiquarianism much closer to the threshold of modern
historical practice than we might have thought. That Klemm may have
been the "last of the antiquaries" might seem uninteresting, but if the
last of the antiquaries is also the first of the Kulturwissenschaftler, and
first of the anthropologists, then things become more intriguing. And,
pace the gap between Klemm and Lamprecht (in point of fact, barely a
decade), putting Klemm back into the picture makes visible a long and
unbroken chain of scholars who used material evidence to explore the
history of human culture-a chain that extends back at least to Cyriac
of Ancona, and moves through Pirro Ligorio to Peiresc, Leibniz, Caylus,
and Schlkzer to Barthelemy, and on; beyond Klemm, to Lamprecht, Pi-
renne, Bloch, and Braudel. If the "counter-history" includes so many key
historical thinkers, and all periods up to the present, then we may need
to rethink the more familiar narrative of history's history in which writ-
ing from things plays no significant role.
NOTES
1. M. Heydrich, "Gustav Klemm und seine kulturhistorische Sammlung," Kul-
tur und Rasse. Otto Reche zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Michael Hesch and Gunther
Spannaus (Munich and Berlin: J. F. Lehamnns Verlag, 1939), 305-17.
2. Friedrich Adolf Ebert, Bildung des Bibliothekars, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Steinaker
and Wagner, 1820). Ebert was secretary of the Royal Library of Dresden, and
therefore Klemm's predecessor.

3. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 2 vols. (Dresden:
Romberg, 1854-55), 31-34.
4. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Die Kiniglich Sachsische Porzellan-Sammlung (Dres-
den: Walther, 1834); Klemm, Handbuch der Germanisches Alterthumskunde
(Dresden: Walther, 1836).
5. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 35.
6. "Bei meinen antiquarischen Studien sah ich mich seit mehrern Jahren
vergeblich nach einem Buch um, worinnen die N6thigen Nachweisungen
der Quellen und Hflfsmittel zur altesten vaterlandischen Culturgeschichte
enthalten." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Handbuch der Germanisches Alterthum-
skunde, v. This discussion of Klemm is part of a longer project on the history
of the study of things from Peiresc to Lamprecht.
7. "Will man sich nun dies Alles recht vergegenwartigen, so schlage man das
Museum Wormianum auf, wo das grosse Kupferblatt hinter dem Titel uns
einen deutlichen Blick ins Innere einer Kunst- und Naturalienkammer des
17ten Jahrhunderts gestattet...." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Zur Geschichte
der Sammlungen fur Wissenschafi und Kunst in Deutschland, 2nd ed. (Zerbst
1837, 1838), 165.
8. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Zur Geschichte der Sammlungen fur Wissenschaft und
Kunst in Deutschland, 300, 228, 239-40.
9. "Wenige Monate nach Vollendung meines Reiseberichts stand auch der
Plan zur Culturgeschichte und zur Culturwissenschaft in scharfen Umrissen
auf dem Papier, den ich meinemjetzt verwigten vterlichen Freunde A.B. v.
Lindenau vorlegte." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft,
35.
10. Klemm described his collecting as a salvage project: "die Zeit wohl nicht
mehr fern ist, wo die eigenthnmlichen Gerathe und Kunstwerke der wilden
Nationen gegen europaische Producte vertauscht, und in alle Welt zerstreut
sein werden." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, 27.
11. The figures are given in M. Heydrich, "Gustav Klemm und seine kulturhis-
torische Sammlung," 312. "Thus emerged," Klemm later wrote, "the col-
lection about which I have already given closer account in my ten volume
Culturgeschichte." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft,
35.
12. "Der Zweck der Sammlung ist kein anderer, als die Entstehung der ver-
chiedenen menschlichen Gewerbs- und Kunsterzeugnisse aus den von
der Natur dargebotenen Stoffen und die fernerweite Entwickellung der-
selben zur Anschauung zu bringnen, somit aber eine Culturwissenschaft
zu begrntnden, deren Grundlage die zehn Bande meiner Cultur-Geschichte
bilden." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit,
vol. 10, lii.
13. "Nahrung, deren Erwerb und Bereitung; Die Jagdwaffen; Jagd der Last-
hiere und Vogel; Kleidung und deren Bereitung; Schmuck und Zierrathen;
Wohnung und Ruhestatte; Werkzeuge, Gerathe und Gefasse; Fahrzeuge;
Gestand und Familienleben; Geselliges Leben; Spiele und Festlichkeiten;
Tanz; Oeffentliches Leben im Frieden; Kriegswesen; Religiose Begriffe
(Glaube, Gottesdienst, Zauberei); Cultur (sprache, lieder, erzahlungen,

Bilderschrift, Brief eines Mandan, Gemalte Robe, Zahlen, Zeiteintheilung);
Geschichte." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, 19-20.
14. After "Nahrung: Getranke;" after "Wohnung: Schiffart, Lastthiere;" after
"Gewerbe: Viehzucht, Ackerbau u. Gartenbau, Handwerke, Bergbau, T6p-
ferei;" after "Familienleben: Schauspieler, Staatsverfassung, Die Regierung,
Provinzialverwaltung, Stadtwesen, Finanzen, Gesetzgebung, Die Strafen,
Der 6ffentliche Verkehr;" after "Religion: Kung-tsen oder Confucius, Wis-
senschaft und Literatur, Kunst." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-
Geschichte, 19-20.
15. "K6rperliche Beschaffenheit; Die Kleidung; Wohnstatten; Hasliche Ein-
richtung; Fortbewegungsmittel; Die Gewerbthatitkeit; Die Familienleben;
Das gesellige Leben; Spiele; Todtenbestattung; Das 6ffentliche Leben; Der
Staatsverfassung; Stande; Verfassungen; Staatsverwaltung; Das Staatsober-
haupt; Gesetze u. Rechtspflege; Kriegswesen; Schutzwaffen der Menschen;
Angriffswaffen; Religion; Die heiligen Orte; Gottesdienst; Wissenschaften;
Geschichte."
16. "Wie frfnherhin der Theologie, so muBte nun alles der Politik dienen: Reli-
gion, Kunst, Poesie, Geographie, Handel und Gewerbe, alles wurde aus
dem Gesichtspuncte der Politik betrachtet; und wie fruherhin die Kirche,
so nahmjetz der Staat Alles fur sich und seien Zwecke in Anspruch." Gustav
Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, 19-20.
17. "So wie die Naturwissenschaft die Rede und die auf, an in und bei derselben
vorkommenden Erscheinungen, die sie umgebende Luft, die Gewaffer, die
Gebirge, die Rinde, die Gesteine, Gewachse, die Thiere und Menschen
als Theile eines und desselben gewordenen und bestehenden Ganzen im
Einzelnen untersucht und im Ganzen betrachtet, eben so soll der histor-
iker die Menschheit als ein Ganzes, auch allen seinen Gliederungen, nach
seiner Entstehung, Entwicklung, seine Wesen, Seyn und Werden, in allen
Beziehungen und Richtungen erforschen und zu erkennen und darzustel-
len suchen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, 21.
18. ". . . in Bezug auf Sitten, Kenntnisse und Fertigkeiten, hausliches und
6ffentliches Leben in Frieden und Krieg, Religion, Wissen und Kunst, unter
den von Clima und Lage von der Vorsehung dargebetenen Verhaltnissen zu
erforschen und nachzuweisen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-
Geschichte, 21.
19. "Mfinzen, Wappen, Medallien und Reliefs, Statuen und Gruppen, Mon-
umente und ganze dem kriegerischen oder friedlichen, dem hiera-
tischen oder profanen Gebrauche gewidmete Gebaude werden-wie alle
Kunstwerke-fur den Historiker wichtige Quellen, wenn sie zumal Angaben
fiber die Zeit oder den Ortihrer Entstehung, ihrer Kfinstler enthalten. Sie
sind auch bereits vielfach ffir historische Zwecke benutzt, und ihre Kunde
in der Archaologie, der Kunstgeschichte zu eigenen Gebieten des Wissens
erhoben worden." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte, 26-
27.
20. "Nicht geringen Werth haben jene bildlosen, oft formlosen Sachen,
Gerathe, GefdBe, Kleider, Waffen, Modelle von Fahrzeugen, Gebauden
u.s.w., welche aus fernen Zeiten oder Gegenden zu uns gelangen.... Wie in
der Mineralogie, Zoologie, Botanik, Archaologie, Numismatik und Palaog-
raphie ist eigene Anschauung der Gegenstande auch in der Geschichte das
beBte Hulfsmittel zur rechten ErkenntniB." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allge-
meine Cultur-Geschichte, 27
21. Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, 10 vols.
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1843-1854), vol. 1. Beilage. "Fantasie fiber ein Museum
ffir die Culturgeschichte der Menschheit."
22. "dass die Museen der haltpunct der Erfahrungswissenschaften sind, und
diese ErkenntniB war die Ursache, daB der Curiositatenkammern des 16.
und 17. Jahrhunderts einem ernsten bewuBten Streben in Anlage und
Pflege wissenschaftlicher Sammlungen weichen muBte." Gustav Friedrich
Klemm, "Fantasie fiber ein Museum ffir die Culturgeschichte der Men-
schheit," 355.
23. "Seltsam aber bleibt es immer, daB das BedfirfniB einer Sammlung ffir die
Uebersicht der Fortschritte der Menschheit und ihrer Culturgeschichte
sich nicht dringend geltend machen konnte, und zwar um so seltsamer, als
es seit frfiher Zeit an mannichfacher Anregung dazu durchaus nicht gefehlt
hat." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Fantasie fiber ein Museum ffir die Cultur-
geschichte der Menschheit," 353.
24. "Da nun aber eine grfindliche historische Forschung nicht minder auf
eigener Anschauung der Monumente beruht, als eine naturwissenschaft-
liche, da durch sie nur eine Vergleichung und BeweiBffihrung m5glich
wird, so will ich in der historischen Ueberzeugung, daB jede Idee, welche
eine Wahrheit enthalt, auch zu seiner Zeit zur Ausffihrung kommen werde,
meine Ansichten fiber Begrfindung, Anordnung und Inhalt eines culturhis-
torischen Museums hier niederlegen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Fantasie
fiber ein Museum ffir die Culturgeschichte der Menschheit," 355.
25. "Ffir die Ausffihrung einer solchen Darstellung, einer solchen Verkrper-
ung der Culturgeschichte bedurfte es allerdings zuvorderst der sorgfialtig-
sten Prfifung des dargebotenen Materials." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Fan-
tasie fiber ein Museum ffir die Culturgeschichte der Menschheit," 359.
26. "Bei allen Nationen sind uberhaput die Zeitlater, die Ur-anfange und
Fortschritte stets sorgftalltig zu sonder und gesondert vor Augen zu stel-
len." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Fantasie fiber ein Museum ffir die Cultur-
geschichte der Menschheit," 359.
27. "Wie der Naturforscher die Bandwnrmer, Scolopendern, Krten und deren
Genossen mit derselben Theilnahme betrachtet, wie die Labradorsteine,
Magnolien, Argus, Colibri und Gazellen, so bieten dem Historiker die
schmierigen Pelze und Gerathe der Bosjesman und Eskimo nicht minder
Stoff zum Denken dar, als die Federkleider der Mexicaner oder die Mar-
morstatuen der Hellenen. Er hat jedem gleiche Aufmerksamkeit, gleiche
Sorgfalt zu widemen und beide haben gleichen Anspruch dazu." Gustav
Friedrich Klemm, "Fantasie fiber ein Museum ffir die Culturgeschichte der
Menschheit," 361.
28. "Anstatt nun das Beste und Wesentliche auszulesen und dem Ganzen am
gehrigen Ort einzuverlieben, wird oft ein etwas weniger glanzend in die
Augen fallendes Stfick beseitigt und den neuen Ankmmlingen ein unge-
bnhrlich groBer und passender Platz eingeraumt, nur um mit der Menge
prahlen zu knnen." Quoted in M. Heydrich, "Gustav Klemm und seine kul-
turhistorische Sammlung," 307. For this same idea of making ugly objects
speak historically see Peter N. Miller, "The Antiquary's Art of Comparison:
Peiresc and Abraxas," Philologie und Erkenntnis. Beitrdge zu Begnif und Problem
frihneuzeitlicher 'Philologie,'ed. Ralph Hafner (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Ver-
lag, 2001), 57-94.
29. "Nahrung, Kleidung, Schmuck, Wohnstatte, Fahrzeuge, Gef'asse und
Werkzeuge, das sind die sachlichen Grundlagen des gesammten mensch-
lichen Lebens, und die Betrachtung ihrer Entstehung und Entwicklung, das
wnrde der erste Abschnitt der Aufgabe sein, welche die Culturwissenschaft
zu h6sen hat." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Grundideen zu einer allgemeinen
Cultur-Wissenschaft," 175.
30. "Die Culturwissenchaft beginnt mit den materiellen Grundlagen des men-
schlichen Lebens, mit der Darstellung der krperlichen Bedurfnisse, den
Mitteln zu deren Befriedigung und den daraus entspringenden Erzeugnis-
sen. Sie stellt sodann die menschlichen Verhaltnisse in der Familie und in
ihrer Erweiterung zum Staate dar. Der letzte Abschnitt derselben aber hat
die Betrachtung der Egebnisse menschlicher Erforschung und Erfahrung,
so wie die geistigen Schpfungen des Menschen in der Wissenschaft und
Kunst zu entwickln." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, "Grundideen zu einer allge-
meinen Cultur-Wissenschaft," 184.
31. "Mittlerweile begann man aber auch die Denkmale der menschlichen
Kunst- und Gewerbthatigkeit naher zu betrachten, wie man vorher die
Naturkrper gesammelt und beschrieben hattte." Klemm, Allgemeine Cultur-
wissenschaft, 2:18.
32. "Man betrachtete seitdem die Sitten, das Familienleben, Staats- und Reli-
gionsformen, Wissenschaft und Kunst nicht als einzeln neben einander
bestehende, selbstandige Erscheinungen, sondern man sah ein, daB sie
eben unter einander in innigen Zusammenhange und in steter Wechsel-
wirkung stehen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 28.
33. "die Veredelung oder Verfeinerung der gesammten Geistes- und
Leibeskrifte des Menschen oder eines Volks...." Gustav Friedrich Klemm,
Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 37.
34. "Die Culturwissenschaft aber ist gleich den Naturwissenschaften eine Wis-
senschaft der Erfahrung, die auf der Anschauung von Thatsachen beruht.
Ihr Gegenstand ist nicht die einzelne Menschenrasse, ein einzelner Staat
oder einer der Erdtheile, aber auch nicht eine der vielen Thatigkeiten
und Erzeugnisse der Menschen, wie etwa die Gewerbstatigkeit, der Krieg,
das Recht, die Literatur. Sie hat die Aufgabe, die Menschheit der Natur
gegennber als ein Ganzes, als ein Individuum aufzufassen und darzustel-
len. Wahrend nun die Culturgeschichte dieses Individuum in seiner Ent-
wickelung nach fortschreitenden Zustainden und in Volker geschieden
betrachtet, hat die Culturwissenschaft dasselbe nach seinen Beschaftigun-
gen, z.B. bei der Erwerbung und Bereitung der zur Befriedigung seiner
Triebe nothwendigen Bedurfnisse, dann im Familienleben, im Staatsver-
ein, im Kriege wie im Frieden, bei seinem Forschen und Dichten, Traumen
und Denken aufzufassen, mit einem Wort: die Culturwissenschaft hat die
Aufgabe, die gesammte Menschenthatigkeit und deren Denkmale in allen
Zonen und Zeiten zur Anschauung zu bringen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm,
Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 37-38.
35. "Nahrung, Kleidung und Schmuck, Werkzeuge, Wohnstatten, Fahrzeuge
und Gef'aBe, diese sind die materiellen Grundlagen der menschlichen Cul-
tur, und die Betrachtung ihrer allmaligen Entstehung und Entwicklung, das
bildet den ersten Abschnitt der Aufgabe, welche die Culturwissenschaft zu
16sen hat." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft, 42.
36. "die gesammten im Staatswesen sich darstellenden Erscheinungen zu
betrachten, die Anfange derselben in der Familie nachzuweisen, die
allmalige Entwickelung und Gliederung derselben zu verfolgen, die Gestal-
tung der Verwaltung, der Gesetzgebung, der bfirgerlichen und religi5sen
Verfassung, des friedlichen Verkehrs der Viker und Staaten unter ein-
ander, wie auch das Kriegswesen und die Kriegsverfassung nach seiner Ent-
stehung und Ausbildung zur Anschauung zu bringen." Gustav Friedrich
Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschafi, 52.
37. "Der dritte aber hat die Aufgabe, die Ergebnisse menschlicher Erforschung
und Erfahrung so wie die geistigen Sch6pfungen der V61ker in Wissenschaft
und Kunst darzulegen." Gustav Friedrich Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissen-
schaft, 52.
38. Die Menschliche Kleidung. Culturgeschictliche Skizze. Lecture given on the twen-
tieth anniversary of the Gewerbevereins of Dresden, January 31, 1854 (Dres-
den, 1856).
39. After Klemms's death on August 25, 1867, his sonJ. Gustav Klemm took over
the sale. In 1868, the British Museum bought his German antiquities. The
University of Leipzig decided against buying the rest, saying it was not of
scientific worth. The materials ended up with a private medical doctor who
catalyzed a committee of thirty-eight well-known Leipzigers who published
on November 24, 1869, in the Leipziger Tageszeitungen an "Aufruf zu Beitra-
gen fur die Erwerbung der culturhistorischen Sammlung des verstorbenen
Hofrats Dr. Klemm zur 'Begriindung eines allgemeinen anthropologischen
Museums."' They acted both for its scientific use, and to prevent it from all
going abroad: they were successful. In 1870, negotiations for the purchase
went ahead, and in 1871 the collection was bought for the "Deutschen
Zentralmuseums fur Anthropologie zu Leipzig." This was the first ethno-
graphic museum on the Continent. The Neues Museum in Berlin (1868)
had many ethnographic objects in the collection, but only much later was
a dedicated ethnographic museum founded there. In 1904, the Leipzig
museum changed its name to "Stadtisches Museum fur V61kerkunde,"
and in 1926 moved into a new building-the Grassi Palace-which was
destroyed in an air raid during World War II. For more on this history see
Alfred Lehmann, "85 Jahre Museum fur V61kerkunde zu Leipzig," Jahrbuch
des Museums fur Vlkerkunde zu Leipzig 7 (1951): 11-51; and Fritz Krause,
"Chronik des Museums 1926-1945," Jahrbuch des Museums fur Vlkerkunde zu
Leipzig 10 (1926/1951): 1-46.
40. Edward Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development
of Civilization, ed. Paul Bohannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964 [1865]), 1.
41. Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), 23.
42. Engels rejected the view that Marx could discover "der materialistischen
Geschichtsanschauung" via a "Prussian Romantic of the historian school."
See Angela Stender, Durch Gesellschaftswissenschaft zum idealen Staat: Moritz
von Lavergne-Peguilhen (1801-1870) (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2005),
15. Moreover, in a letter to Franz Mehring of September 28, 1892, Engels
denied any influence of Lavergne-Peguilhen on Marx, who at the time was
interested only in "pure" philosophy, and not in either economics or his-
tory: Angela Stender, Durch Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 15.
43. "Die Kulturwissenschaft hat es daher nicht mit padagogischen Untersu-
chungen zu thun, oder mit den Mitteln zur Bildung von Kfnstlern und
Gelehrten, sie setzt vielmehr die dahin ffhrenden Wege als bekannt voraus,
wie denn uberhaupt nicht das Individuum, sondern die Bevllkerungs-
masse Gegenstand ihrer Forschung ist." Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen's
Grundziige der Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 2 vols. in 1 (Leipzig, 1838), 2:3-4.
Even Stender, who surveys not only Lavernge-Peguilhen's reception history,
but also that of its constituent parts, treats Kulturwissenschaft, by contrast, as
a term with no history and in need of no further elucidation. See Angela
Stender, Durch Gesellschaftswissenschaft zum idealen Staat.
44. "Diese allgemeinen Verhaltnisse des Wechselverkehrs und der Gegenseitig-
keit gewahren der Kulturwissenschaft, deren Aufgabe es ist, die weigen
und unwandelbaren Gesetze zu erforschen, die der Vervollkommnung der
Bev6lkerungsmassen zum Grunde liegen, die wichtigsen Hulfsmittel ... Es
treten demnach die Bewegungs-, Productions- und Staatswissenschaften in
den Rang mittlebarer Kulturwissenschaften ein, weil jede gesellschaftliche
Bewegung im Allgemeinen und jede Productions- und Staatsthatigkeit im
Besonderen, in Folge jenes organsichen Grundgesetzes, eien nothwendige
Ruckwirkung auf die Kultur erhalten muB." Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen,
Grundzge, 3.
45. By defining the place of Kulturwissenschaft between philosophical and prac-
tical learning, Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen indicates his triangulation
between the positions of Kant and Herder; it is the linking of the term to
social process and Productionswissenschaft that seems to mark off the start of
a new trajectory. Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen, Grundzge, 6.
46. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), vols. 1 and 2.
47. Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike. Erster Band Die
Erscheinungen desfJahres 1931, ed. Hans Meier, Richard Newald, and Edgar
Wind (Leipzig-Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1934), "Kritik des Geistesgeschichte,"
vii-xi.
48. A Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics. First Volume. The Publications of
1931. The Text of the German edition with an English Introduction (Lon-
don: Cassel & Company, 1934), v: "This word is full of odd connotations.
English readers might feel themselves reminded of war-time slogans which

succeeded in rendering the word 'Kultur' altogether disreputable. German
scholars will think, with some mortification, of the time when their philo-
sophical professors discovered the difference between natural and cultural
sciences and became involved in profound discussions as to which science
deserved the name of 'cultural.'-These times are past, and there is, at least
on the part of the editors of this book, no intention to revive them. If nev-
ertheless the portentous word 'kulturwissenschaftlich' has been retained on
the title page, it is for two distinct reasons."
49. "He [Warburg] used it in order to designate his attempt to tear down the
barriers artificially set up between the various departments of historical
research. Historians of science were not to work independently of histo-
rians of art and of religion; nor were historians of literature to isolate the
study of linguistic forms and literary arts from their settings in the totality of
culture. The idea of a comprehensive 'science of civilization' was thus meant
to embody the demand for a precise method of interaction and correlation
between those diverging scientific interests in the humanities which have
shown a tendency to set up their subjects as 'things in themselves,"' Wind, A
Bibliography, v.
50. Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien was one model "which, by
embracing all phases of culture-science, art, and literature, as well as social
customs and superstitions-, became the model for further 'Kulturstudien,'
the word 'Kultur' as used by Burckhardt meaning the expressions of a his-
torical period taken as a whole. In a similar way, the work done by Her-
mann Usener, who applied the comparative methods of anthropology and
folklore to the study of ancient rituals and myths, had a profound effect in
enlarging the scope of cultural studies, although he never intended any
more than did Burckhardt, to give philosophical definition to what he really
meant by cultural traditions. Thus, the word 'kulturwissenschaftlich' may
also better be explained by reference to these two names, Burkchardt and
Usener, than by any abstract definition, and it is in this sense-as a reference
to a tradition of research ('Forschungsweise'), rather than as an abstract
postulate-that the term is to be understood," Wind, A Bibliography, vi.
51. This section, "Kritik der Geistesgeschichte," appears in the German edition
at vii-viii.
52. "It would be useful to see how far Jacob Burckhardt fits into the movement
of German Kulturgeschichte, projected as early as Herder (1784-91) and
popularized by the publication of Gustav Klemm's book (1843-52)." Fer-
nand Braudel, "The History of Civilizations. The Past Explains the Present,"
in On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 186.

List of Contributors
Glenn Adamson is head of research at the Victoria and Albert Mu-
seum, and a specialist on the history and theory of craft and design.
He is coeditor of the triannual Journal of Modern Craft, the author of
Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&A Publications, 2007); The
Craft Reader (Berg, 2010); and The Invention of Craft (Berg, 2012). Dr. Ad-
amson's other publications include the coedited volumes Global Design
History (Routledge, 2011); and Surface Tensions (Manchester University
Press, 2012). His most recent curatorial project is a major exhibition and
accompanying publication for the V&A entitled Postmodernism: Style and
Subversion, 1970 to 1990.
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is professor of history at New York Univer-
sity. A specialist of diplomatic media, she has published extensively on
medieval seals as conceptual tools, markers of identity, and social agents,
including Form and Order in Medieval France (Andershot, 1993), "Medi-
eval Identity: A Sign and a Concept," American Historical Review (2000),
and When Ego was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2010).
In her book in progress, she considers the technicity of imprinted matter
in medieval culture and society.
Jonathan M. Bloom shares the Norma Jean Calderwood University Pro-
fessorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College, and the Hamad
bin Khalifa Endowed Chair in Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth
University with his wife and colleague, Sheila S. Blair, with whom he has
283
284 Contributors
written and edited many books and hundreds of articles on all aspects
of Islamic art. His book Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper
in the Islamic Lands (Yale University Press, 2001) won the Charles Rufus
Morey Award for a notable book in the history of art from the College
Art Association in 2003, and he has just revised his 1989 book, Minaret:
Symbol of Islam, for a new, expanded edition to be published in 2013 by
Edinburgh University Press
Philippe Bordes was founding director of the Musee de la Revolution
Franqaise in Vizille, France, from 1984 to 1996, and is currently professor
of art history at the University of Lyon.
Horst Bredekamp received his PhD in art history in 1974. After an intern-
ship at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, Germany (1974-1976), he became
an assistant professor at Hamburg University, where he tenured as a pro-
fessor of art history in 1982. Since 1993, he has been a tenured professor
of art history at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a permanent
fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin). Among his awards are the Sigmund Freud Award from the Ger-
man Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt, Germany (2001),
the Aby M. Warburg Award from the city of Hamburg, Germany (2005),
and the Max Planck Research Award from the Max Planck Society and
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2006).
Bill Brown is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the Univer-
sity of Chicago. He is the author of The Material Unconscious: American
Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Harvard University
Press, 1997) ; A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
(University of Chicago Press, 2003); editor of Reading the West: An Anthol-
ogy of Dime Westerns (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997); and coeditor of Critical
Inquiry.
Jas Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art and
Archaeology at Corpus Christi College Oxford, and Visiting Professor
of Art History at the University of Chicago. He works on all areas of
ancient and early medieval visual culture, including its receptions both
in its periods of production (for instance, on themes such as viewing,
description, and pilgrimage), and in its receptions in later contexts (that
include collecting, academic historiography, the history of archaeology,
and museum display). His most recent sole-authored book was Roman
Contributors 285
Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton University Press,
2007).
Juliet Fleming is Associate Professor of English at New York University.
Her primary research interests are Renaissance literature and literary
theory. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern
England (Reaktion Press, 2001).
Ivan Gaskell is professor for cultural history, and for museum studies at
the Bard Graduate Center, New York City, where he also runs the Focus
Project, coordinating research, teaching, exhibiting, and publishing. His
work on material culture addresses intersections among history, art his-
tory, anthropology, museology, and philosophy. His many publications
include Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Muse-
ums, and six books coedited with Salim Kemal in the series "Cambridge
Studies in Philosophy and the Arts." Gaskell has contributed to numer-
ous journals and edited volumes in history, the history of art, and phi-
losophy. He has curated many experimental exhibitions, most recently
Tangible Things (with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich) at eight venues at Harvard
University, where he taught and curated between 1991 and 2011.
Robert E. Harrist, Jr. is the Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of
Chinese Art History at Columbia University, and a former Slade Profes-
sor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on
Chinese painting, calligraphy, and stone inscriptions, and he has written
also about topics such as gardens, clothing in modern China, and the
contemporary artist Xu Bing.
Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of
American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Three of his books received the Abbott Lowell Cummings
Award as best work on North American vernacular architecture. Her-
man has published essays on quilts, self-taught and outsider arts, food-
ways, historical archaeology, vernacular photography, and theoretical
approaches to the study and interpretation of objects. Herman teaches
courses on visual and material culture, contemporary craft, vernacular
art, architectural history, everyday life, and humanities-based commu-
nity engagement. His recent research projects include Thornton Dial:
Thoughts on Paper an exhibition and book at the University of North
Carolina's Ackland Museum of Art; Quilt Spaces, an oral history explora-

286 Contributors
tion of Gee's Bend, Alabama, quilts and quilt makers; and Troublesome
Things: In the Borderlands of Contemporary Art, for which he received a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
Deborah L. Krohn is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
Her fellowships include the American Association of University Women,
the American Association of Learned Societies, Peter Krueger-Christie's
Fellowship, Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum, the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, Harvard Whiting, and Fulbright-Hays. Her publica-
tions include Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta
Van Varick (Yale/Bard Graduate Center, 2009); Art and Love in Renais-
sance Italy (coeditor, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008); and numerous
articles and reviews.
Sabine MacCormack was, at the time of her death, Rev. Theodore M.
Hesburgh, C.S.C. Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre
Dame, with a joint appointment in the departments of history and clas-
sics. Most recently she wrote about the impact of Roman thought and
culture in the works of Augustine of Hippo-The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil
in the Mind of Augustine (University of California Press, 1998), and on the
role of the classical and patristic heritage in the formulation of religious
and cultural policies in the Spanish empire-On the Wings of Time: Rome,
the Incas, Spain and Peru (Princeton University Press, 2007).
Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeol-
ogy Center at Stanford University. She has conducted fieldwork in the
Middle East, the Mediterranean, and in Africa. Her most recent books
include Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present
(Berg, 2004); Embedding Ethics, coedited with Peter Pels (Berg, 2005);
and the edited volumes, Archaeologies of Materiality (Blackwell, 2005); and
Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (Duke University Press, 2009). She is founding
editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Her recent research examines
the constructs of natural and cultural heritage and the related discourses
of empowerment around the Kruger National Park, ten years after de-
mocracy in South Africa. This forms the basis of her book The Nature of
Heritage: The New South Africa published by Blackwell in 2011.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of
Anthropology, University College London. Recent books include Blue
Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary (with S. Woodward, University of California

Contributors 287
Press 2012); Digital Anthropology (with H. Horst, Berg, 2012); Migration
and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia (with M. Madianou,
Routledge, 2012); Consumption and its Consequences (Polity, 2012); Tales
from Facebook (Polity, 2011); Global Denim (with S. Woodward Berg, 2011);
Stuff (Polity, 2010); and The Comfort of Things (Polity, 2008).
Peter N. Miller is Professor and Dean of the Bard Graduate Center in
New York City. He is the general editor of Cultural Histories of the Material
World and in this series has edited Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in
Europe and China, 1500-1800 (with Franqois Louis) and The Sea: Thalas-
sography and Historiography. He has published extensively on the history
of historical research.
Ruth B. Phillips is Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture
and Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, and has
also served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of
Anthropology. Her research and writing focus on Native American art
history and critical museology. Her books include Trading Identities: The
Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 1998); and Museum Pieces: Toward the Indi-
genization of Canadian Museums (McGill-Queens University Press, 2011).
Alain Schnapp is professor of classical archaeology at the Universite of
Paris I (Pantheon Sorbonne). His work is dedicated both to Greek ico-
nography and the history of archaeology. He is the author of Le chasseur
et la cite: chasse et erotique en Grece ancienne (Paris, 1996) ; and The Discovery
of the Past (London, 1996).
Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Clas-
sical Archaeology in the Department of Classics at Stanford University.
He is also Visiting Professor of Archaeology at Durham University in the
United Kingdom, and Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Humani-
ties Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, and has also taught
at the University of Wales Lampeter in Ceredigion, United Kingdom.
He has worked on the archaeology of early farmers in northern Europe,
Greek cities in the Mediterranean, has researched the design of beer
cans, and the future of mobile media for Daimler Chrysler. Currently, he
is exploring the English borders with Scotland in the excavations of the
Roman town of Binchester, and investigating the Anglo-American anti-
quarian tradition as a key to a fresh view of the early history of science.

288 Contributors
His publications include Reconstructing Archaeology (Routledge, 1987); So-
cial Theory and Archaeology (University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Experi-
encing the Past (Routledge, 1992) ; Art and the Early Greek State (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); and Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge, 2001).
Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Colum-
bia University. She has published widely on music, rhetoric, and aesthet-
ics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Haydn and the
Classical Variation (Harvard University Press, 1993), Mozart: The 'Jupiter"
Symphony (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and the volume edited for
the Bard Music Festival, Haydn and His World (Princeton University Press,
1997). A board member of the Joseph Haydn-Institut in Cologne and the
Mozart-Akademie in Salzburg, she served as President of the American
Musicological Society in 2005-6 and was elected to Honorary Member-
ship, its highest honor, in 2011. Her current project is a book on the
music of illumination in the Enlightenment, exploring scientific knowl-
edge, astronomical observation, and art and melancholy within musical
conceptions of shadow and light.
Pamela H. Smith is a professor of history at Columbia University, and the
author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman
Empire (Princeton University Press, 1994); and The Body of the Artisan:
Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press,
2004). She coedited Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in
Early Modern Europe (with Paula Findlen, Routledge, 2002); and Making
Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800
(with Benjamin Schmidt, University of Chicago Press, 2008). In her pres-
ent research, she attempts to reconstruct the vernacular knowledge of
early modern European metalworkers from a variety of disciplinary per-
spectives, including hands-on reconstruction of historical metalworking
techniques.
Nancy J. Troy is Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art, and chair of
the Art & Art History department at Stanford University. In addition to
The De Stijl Environment (MIT Press, 1982), she is the author of Modernism
and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1991); and Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion
(MIT Press, 2002). In her current book project, The Afterlife of Piet Mon-
drian, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, she revisits the
site of her earliest art historical interests-the work of Piet Mondrian-

Contributors 289
studying its trajectories after the artist's death through the realms of elite
and popular culture, and the ways in which the dominant historical nar-
rative of Mondrian and his work has been shaped by art-market forces.
Ittai Weinryb is an assistant professor for medieval art and material cul-
ture at the Bard Graduate Center, NewYork. He was previously a doctoral
fellow at the Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florence, Max Planck Institut.
In 2010, he received his PhD fromJohns Hopkins University for a disser-
tation on medieval bronze doors. He is currently revising his dissertation
into a book manuscript, and is curating an exhibition on ex-votos at the
galleries of the Bard Graduate Center.

Index
Abu'l Qasim, 229
Actor Network Theory, 138, 184n24
agriculture, 75-78
Ajmar, Marta, 36
Alain de Lille, 54
Alpers, Svetlana, 207
Anishinaabe, 134-38, 141-42
Annales school, 2-3, 22, 24, 144, 273
Anselm of Bec, 54
anthropology, 4, 6, 16, 48, 66, 83,
92-93, 110-11, 137, 138-40, 188,
269, 274
antiquarianism, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16,
22, 144-50, 263, 264, 267, 272, 274;
ancient, 146-50
Appadurai, Arjun, 95
archaeology, 5, 10, 11, 16, 92-105,
108-16, 144, 145, 168, 269
architecture, 35, 37, 42, 76, 168
Arch of Constantine, 12, 165-67
Aristotle, 13, 190, 211, 230, 233
art history, 5, 7-8, 12, 14-16, 33-36,
39-44, 137, 138-40, 144, 151, 166,
168-70, 173, 188, 204-9, 240, 249-
52, 269. See also Islamic art
artifacts, defined, 122, 151
Asmann, Jan, 147, 148
Aubin, Hermann, 3
Augustine, 55-56, 233
Auslander, Leora, 191
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 265, 274
Baird, Davis, 187-88
Baldung, Hans, 228
Barr, Alfred, 205
Barthelemy, Jean-Jacques, 274
Barthes, Roland, 94
Baudrillard, Jean, 188
Baxandall, Michael, 151
Belanger, Terry, 197
Bellarmine, Robert, 51
Benjamin, Walter, 25n8, 145, 190
Bennett, Jane, 177
Berenson, Bernard, 12, 165-66, 167,
168
Bhaba, Homi, 140
Bildung, 169, 268
Blair, Ann, 13
Bloch, Marc, 2, 111, 274
Boas, Franz, 189
Boehm, Gottfried, 253
Bond, Gerald, 175
book, history of the, 191-92, 197-98
Borges, Jorge Luis, 150
Brancugi, Constantin, 65, 67
Braudel, Fernand, 2, 274
291
292 Index
Brown, Bill, 95
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, 268,
270
Burckhardt, Jacob, 4, 16, 22, 271,
273, 274, 281n50
Burke, Edmund, 235
Burke, Peter, 11, 141
Camille, Michael, 186n30
Campbell, Thomas, 7
Cassirer, Ernst, 273
Catalhoynk site, 94, 96-105, 253
Cato the Elder, 76-77, 78
Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 145
Caylus, Count de, 274
Cellini, Benvenuto, 230-31
Champlain, Samuel de, 68
Chaplin, Joyce, 68, 69
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon, 40
Chen Xiuzhai, 152
Chen Yuanlong, 152
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3, 145
Clifford, James, 140
Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus,
76-77, 78
"concrete poetry," 120-21
connoirsseurship, 33, 35, 175
conservators, 15, 62, 63-64, 70
Constantine the African, 179
"counter-production," 198-200
Cox, Marshall, 124-25, 128-29
Critical Inquiry, 13, 187
"cultural contract," 169, 171n11
cultural resource management, 110
culture, defined, 1-2, 4, 269
cummings, e. e., 119
curators, 15, 62, 63-64, 70
Cyriac of Ancona, 274
Danto, Arthur, 63
Darnton, Robert, 2
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 2
decorative art, 33-38, 204-7, 240
Derrida, Jacques, 13, 35-36, 191-92,
197-203
design history, 33-38, 108-16
De Stijl movement, 204-5, 208
De Waal, Edmund, 9
Diderot, Denis, 39-40
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 273-74
Doughty, Danny, 127
Eamon, William, 228
Ebert, Friedrich Adolf, 263, 274n2
Edwards, Elizabeth, 63-64
Einckel, Caspar Friedrich, 265
ekphrasis, 166-67, 265
Eliade, Mircea, 163
Elkins, James, 138
Engels, Friedrich, 5, 25n8, 280n42
Esterhazy, Nicolaus, 236
Facebook, 9, 81-91
Falguieres, Patricia, 146
Fang Bao, 162
Febvre, Lucien, 2
Fleck, Ludwig, 212
Folger, Timothy, 214
Folwell, John, 191
Foucault, Michel, 35
Frampton, Kenneth, 35
Franklin, Benjamin, 191, 214
Freedgood, Elaine, 187

Index 293
Hallowell, A. Irving, 142
Hamell, George, 141
Handel, George Frederick, 234, 235
Harman, Graham, 188
Harriot, Thomas, 67-68
Haydn, Joseph, 14, 234-37
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9,
94-95
Heidegger, Martin, 49, 94, 223n9
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 263,
280n45
Hobbes, Thomas, 62-63
Hodder, Ian, 10, 94, 96
Hofmann, Lorenz, 264
Hogan, Evonia, 126
Holly, Michael Ann, 35, 138
Horace, 145
Horst, Heather, 82
Hubbard, William, 69
Hugh of St. Victor, 54
Huizinga, Johan, 2
Humboldt, Alexander von, 250
Ingold, Tim, 138
inscriptions, 11, 70, 145-49, 151-63,
177-78, 242
Islamic art, 240-48
Jindra, Ines, 9, 74-76, 79
Johns, Adrian, 13
Jones, Owen, 35
Kaemois, 146, 147
Kant, Immanuel, 235, 280n45
Keane, Webb, 94, 96, 99-100
Kelty, Christopher, 82
Keppie, Lawrence, 152
Khaemwaset, 146
Khakhperreseneb, 148
Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 82
Klein, Melanie, 202
Klemm, Gustav Friedrich, 16, 27n27,
259, 263-74
Klotz, Heinrich, 253
Kocka, Jnrgen, 3
Koyr6, Alexandre, 211
Kracauer, Siegfried, 190
Kubler, George, 5, 142, 204, 206
Kugler, Franz, 15-16, 249-53, 255,
257, 259
Knhn, Herbert, 252
Kuhn, Thomas, 212
Lamb, Jonathan, 187
Lamprecht, Karl, 2-3, 5, 274
Latour, Bruno, 94, 184n24, 188,
222n8
Lavergne-Peguilhen, Moritz von, 272,
280nn42-43, 280n45
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 274
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, 26n12, 201
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 2
Library of Congress, 13, 205-6
Liebig, Justus von, 220
Ligorio, Pirro, 274
Linnaeus, Carl, 270
London School of Material Culture,
9,94
Lubar, Steven, 13
Mabillon, Jean, 56
Macquoid, Percy, 191
Mao Zedong, 161
Marbod of Rennes, 12, 172-75, 177-

294 Index
Mellaart, James, 96
Metastasio, Pietro, 236-37
Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart, 14
Miller, Daniel, 94, 138
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 138
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 138
modernism, 65, 67, 140, 204-5, 207-
8, 253
Moller, Georg, 264
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 9, 265, 272,
274
Mondrian, Piet, 208
Montfaucon, Bernard de, 264
Morphy, Howard, 138
Morrisseau, Norval, 142
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 14, 169,
237-38
music, 14, 233-39
Nakamura, Carrie, 98
Nanakonagos, Moses, 142
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 274
Nipperdey, Thomas, 25n11
Nottingham, W. T., 128-29
Object Reader, The (Candlin and
Guins, eds.), 12, 92-93, 187
Olin, Margaret, 35
O'Neill, Molly, 123
Orlando, Francesco, 144
Ouyang Xiu, 158-59
Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilia-
nus, 76, 77-78
Peed, Theodore, 128
Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 263,
274
Petosiris, 147
Pfisterer, Ulrich, 251-52
Phillips, Ruth, 63-64
Piccolpasso, Cipriano, 228-29
Pinney, Christopher, 138
Pirenne, Henri, 2, 274
Pitt-Rivers, Augustus, 271
Plato, 233
Pliny the Elder, 77
Plutarch, 62
Pocock, John, 10, 272
Pomian, Krzystof, 145
Ponge, Francis, 17, 120, 131-32
Pope, Saxton T., 71n2, 72n13
Pratt, Mary Louise, 140
Problem of Material Constitution
(OMC), 62
Prown, Jules, 36, 37
Quicchelberg, Samuel de, 145-46,
264
Ranciere, Jacques, 188
Ranke, Leopold von, 268
Raphael, 12, 165, 167
recipes, 14, 226-31
Renfrew, Colin, 190
Riegl, Alois, 35
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1-2, 6, 17-24
Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 22, 24
Rodin, Auguste, 1, 6, 17
Rosetti, Giovanventura, 228
Rowlandson, Mary, 70
Ryding, James, and Heinrich Dilly, 4
Sarton, George, 223n9
Scappi, Bartolomeo, 229
Schlosser, Julius von, 145, 264

Sudbury Bow, 8-9, 60-65, 67, 69-70,
71n2, 72n13
Suger, Abbot, 177-79
Szlengel, Wladyslaw, 23-24
Tacuinum Sanitatis, 230
Taillevent (Guillaume de Tirel),
230
Theriault, Madeleine Katt, 134-37
"thing-power," 177
Things That Talk (Daston), 188
Thomas, Nicholas, 138
Tilesius, Hofrath, 264
Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 198-200
toads, 124-32
Tournon, Cardinal de, 229
translation, defined, 121, 140, 141,
166
Tylor, Edward, 271, 274
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 8-9
Usener, Hermann, 2, 273, 281n50
van Swieten, Gottfried, 235
Varro, Marcus Terentius, 76-77, 78
Vasari, Giorgio, 165, 167
Venturi, Franco, 272
Index 295
Virgil, 77, 167
visual studies, 138-39, 188, 207
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, 76-77
Voltaire, 263, 267, 270
Warburg, Aby, 2-3, 16, 19, 22, 168,
252, 273-74
Washington, George, 191
Watts, Eddie, 127
Widdigen, Tristan, 7
Williams, William Carlos, 17
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 169,
252
Wind, Edgar, 273
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, vii
Wood, William, 68
Worm, Ole, 263, 265
Wu Hung, 151
Xuanzong, 12, 152-53
YIVO (Jewish Scientific Institute),
22-24
Young, Robert, 140
Zhang Dai, 161-62
Zuckerberg, Mark, 83-84, 85, 90

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Cultural histories of the material world / edited by Peter N. Miller.

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This work is protected by copyright law (which includes

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE

The Bard Graduate Center Cultural Histories of the Material World is

a series centered on the exploration of the material turn in the study

arly perspectives and show how attention to materiality can contribute

to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places,

ways, and means.

Peter N. Miller, Series Editor

Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

Peter N. Miller and Francois Louis, Editors

The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography

Peter N. Miller, Editor

Cultural Histories of the Material World

Peter N. Miller, Editor

the Material World

Edited by Peter N. Miller

The University of Michigan Press

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including

illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107

press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

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O Printed on acid-free paper

2016 2015 2014 2013 4 3 2 1

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combination of objects (things).

It is essential to things that they should be

possible constituents of states of affairs.

-Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.01-2.011

is on view. Containing twenty-three contributions, ranging across the x,

here is a collective project-not merely a collection of essays, but a state-

potential for this new way of thinking.

give this movement, trend, tendency-even fashion-a name: cultural

form. This could include space, whether interior or exterior; structure,

whether big or small; or thing, whether abiding, or only a vestige (in

Latin, a vestigium is a footprint, the mark that remains made by some-

thing that is itself no longer present). A cultural history of the material

tions of equality; another, about the discovery of fractal geometry, could

tell us something about the relationship between drawing by hand and

mathematical imaging, and between seeing and knowing; a third, about

textiles and furniture, could bring us to questions of the role of women

and the perceived values attached to different kinds of objects.

That all of these projects were undertaken as exhibitions at the Bard

order of intellectual processes or approaches, which might each occupy

continuous parts of the spectrum of materiality, such as decorative arts,

or material culture, or design history-but also those that are discontinu-

ous, such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and the history of

technology. There is no reason, in fact, why parallel research agendas or

secondary literatures need communicate. And yet, to people interested

in how materiality speaks to us, it is clear that there is a common telos to

term we have chosen to designate it.

demic article, essay, belles lettres, memoir, conversation, even fiction.

This breadth was sought precisely in order to model what we took to be

through this volume will, therefore, afford two simultaneous pleasures: