Peter N. Miller begins this edited volume with Rainer Maria Rilke’s contemplation on hands. Rilke looks to Rodin’s sculptures, bronze objects carved from the work of an artist, and sees the confluence of hand work, as Miller quotes: “Hands…are a complicated organism, a delta in which much life from distant sources flows together and is poured into the great stream of action” (1). It is an apt introduction to this series of essays that examine the multiple actions of the hands, the material interventions in nature that shape cultural histories. Using the words of a poet to examine material forms, Miller sets the tone for a central tension in the book—the dilemma of translation, the challenge of communicating material forms with text. While the various authors uphold this tension throughout the book, it is rarely their focus. Instead, the authors approach the material world from their own disciplinary perspectives to raise new questions and, as Miller writes, “show possibilities…not to foreclose them or to preach answers” (2). In fact, the volume of essays does more to propose theoretical trajectories to pursue for further scholarship, than to make definitive claims or attempt to approach a unified concept of materiality.
The volume is the result of a larger project that came out of individual exhibits at the Bard Graduate Center and now continues as a publication series. The book has twenty-three essays plus an introduction from Miller. As he emphasizes, studying materiality leads beyond the object, and the volume’s goal is not to define a new interdisciplinary focus named “cultural histories of a material world,” but rather to learn from scholars focused on material culture and objects what this so-called “new” designation may mean, or where it may lead. Representing multiple disciplines in the humanities—art history, anthropology, archaeology, history, music, material culture, folklore—the authors take different approaches to the project’s charge: some examine theoretical inquiries, some assess disciplinary approaches to studying objects, and some suggest new directions in scholarship. The result is a somewhat disjointed volume of interesting individual essays, loosely grouped into four sections: “Art’s Challenge,” “The Place of the Material,” “Experience and Material,” and “Future Histories.”
The two opening essays exemplify the contradictory issues and perspectives taken in this volume. The only contributions to the section “Art’s Challenge,” Glenn Adamson’s and Philippe Bordes’s essays, positioned firmly within an art historical perspective, present a familiar quandary for material culture scholars: how do our interventions as scholars and curators change an object’s meaning and importance? Adamson notes the challenges and pitfalls of exalting certain objects over others, but suggests that analysis of exemplary objects remains useful and can perhaps teach us things that everyday objects cannot. Bordes does not offer a direct argument against Adamson; rather, his essay acts a counterpoint. He highlights the problems of historicizing an art object—the processes that put an object on display in a museum or marks it as worthy of art historical study—and suggests that much analysis then reflects the institutional and academic histories of the object. As a result, this kind of focus has overshadowed the processes of creation: the sociological and cultural influences, as well as the materiality of the object itself. The challenge of identifying the object and our approaches to its study foreground the series of essays in this volume as the authors grapple with not just the role of studying material within disciplinary boundaries, but also in undertaking the question of materiality itself.
Throughout the volume, many of the essays approach objects in their shifting contexts, drawing upon the tensions of studying a seemingly fixed object as it moves through the world. Whether in making, use, display, or disposal, material objects, as the authors approach them, provide a dynamic source, open to multiple interpretations, for understanding cultural histories. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak’s essay, “Mutually Contextual: Materials, Bodies, and Objects,” is one of the more useful in the series, in my opinion. She draws from Tim Ingold and Webb Keane extensively to highlight the fluid and multiple contexts and the meanings and existences (uses) of things to argue that objects should be understood as ongoing knowledge-making processes, found at the intersections of these multiplicities. She calls this process an “ongoing material clustering,” calling attention to objects as ever-changing and unpredictable (52).
Bernard L. Herman’s contribution, “Swelling Toads, Translation, and the Paradox of the Concrete,” pairs nicely with Bedos-Rezak in its emphasis on the multiple interpretability of objects. Herman, the only folklorist included in the collection, addresses the issue of translating objects into text. He writes that translation is a process that renders objects understandable, making the foreign familiar. The results, however, are always incomplete, and Herman uses a metaphor of the swelling toad—a process to make the toad edible—to underscore the practice of translation. In preparing the toad for consumption, we inevitably dispose of the waste, physical parts of the toad that belonged to its very being. The discarded elements and the residues overlooked in our translations of material objects carry useful information—nuance and specificity—worthy of acknowledgement, if not attention. A material approach, Herman argues, contains limitations and fragmentations, and our scholarship should recognize that its very process, to render an object knowable, is an ongoing, incomplete task.
For folklorists studying material culture, examining objects in context and as cultural processes has been central to our studies, and some of the underlying tenets of many of the essays will not be new. They do, however, provide some insight into how different fields may treat similar concepts, and individual essays could work well as introductions to disciplinary perspectives on material culture. The book, in its entirety, will be of use to scholars mapping an intellectual history of material culture studies. The essays are short and the titles are relatively descriptive so that readers could also quickly scan the table of contents to find those that appeal to their own interests. One central theory does not emerge in this volume, but a consistent recognition that to understand our histories, looking at, listening to, and touching its objects is imperative; how we do that is endless, but the multiple approaches are vital.
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[Review length: 1023 words • Review posted on March 30, 2016]