Material Culture :

by Henry Glassie

Noted scholar Henry Glassie (Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Turkish Traditional Art Today), directs his attention to reinventing and reinvigorating thistory and art through the study of material culture. As Glassie puts it, "The concept of culture seems a secure achievements. In the future, history and art, as well as science and philosophy, will be understood to be, like culture, the creations of people who are alike in humanity, but different in tradition and predicament."

Genres: Material Culture, Art, Folklore, Nonfiction, History, Crafts, Anthropology

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Endale · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is the best folklore books

[cj · Rating 2 out of 5]

Folklorist and ethnographer Henry H. Glassie’s Material Culture (1999) pulls together thought and work developed over the course of the author’s career. Favoring straightforward expression over theoretical gymnastics, Glassie bemoans the loss of 1960s-style academic activism noting that the trend is to “refine theory past any empirical need, displaying academic virtuosity, while the world fades from attention” (76). He defines material culture as the “tangible yield of human conduct” and suggests that artifacts are nonverbal texts that are best understood within the many, overlapping contexts they occupy (41). The scholar’s job, therefore, is to join text to context through what Glassie calls compositional (description, analysis) and associational (discerning meaning, patterns, and connections in the data amassed in the compositional stage) “moves.”
The various contexts he proposes are not well delineated. He focuses primarily on creation, consumption, and communication but also mentions assimilation, preservation, compositional, conceptual (shared meanings), and physical contexts. While he notes that things must be studied not only in and of themselves as “sets of parts” but also as belonging to “parts of sets,” he means the study of like objects rather than, as Schelreth emphasized, objects of different sorts that participate in aggregates or systems.

Though Glassie’s bibliography does not include writings by Miller (or by Appadurai or Schelreth, for that matter), there is a common concern for man’s fate in an over-commodified world. Glassie finds redemptive power in acts of creation. By study the objects that artisans create, he believes that we can learn about others’ values and how they manage in the world. Such understandings might allow us to join together against the forces that “thwart” creation and together overcome “our separation in a oneness of humanity” (86). In assessing material culture studies, he laments the shift in focus from creation to consumption, from handcrafted artifacts to the study of “goods.” He sees this as yielding to capitalism’s “dominion” rather than opposing it through an affirmation of creation. At this point one wonders why the worlds of Miller and Glassie have not intersected. Like Miller, however, he ultimately decides that consumption can be creative, pointing to such things as customized cars as evidence of what he calls the assimilation context. Assimilation, Glassie states, is the last stage of consumption and is the context we shape for a thing out of our own concerns (59). There are parallels here to Miller’s notion of sublation as the process by which alienated culture is once again made personal, meaningful, and counter-hegemonic.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this ethnographic examination of how material objects function in cultural contexts, Glassie argues that the meaning of material culture has been lost to the late 20th century’s preoccupation with theory and the critical reformulation of academic paradigms. Glassie advocated for a trans-disciplinary approach, which focuses on interconnectedness rather than disciplinary and theoretical fragmentation, with a returned attention to the ways in which ideas are manifest in materiality.

[Julie H. Ernstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glassie has a wonderful eye and raises the vernacular world of material culture for thoughtful study and inquiry. The book is a classic for folks in many, many fields but--best yet--it is accessible to anyone. (For many of us, this book is a great way to try to explain to our families just what it is that we hope to do.)