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Andrews, Lindsay N - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Thresholds of Curating: Literary Space and Material Culture in the Works of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather 1870–1920
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2020Co-Authors: Andrews, Lindsay NAbstract:THRESHOLDS OF CURATING: LITERARY SPACE AND Material Culture IN THE WORKS OF HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD, EDITH WHARTON, ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER, AND WILLA CATHER 1870-1920 Lindsay N. Andrews, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2020 Advisor: Guy Reynolds This dissertation explores the polycentric intersections between Material and literary Culture in four case studies spanning 1870-1920. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather are four women whose work reflects a capacity to defy the genre-specific boundaries for which they are canonically renown. Harriet Prescott Spofford was an important contributor to the interior design movement in the early Gilded Age following challenges to finding publication resources for her fiction within a male-dominated publishing community. Edith Wharton’s ties to Material Culture are well known, but less attention is granted to the ways in which her own expertise in interior design is Materially and spatially manifest in her fiction. Combined with her own interest in fashion, Willa Cather’s fine art connoisseurship and professional journalism inform the sartorial flourishes she inserts in her novels. Isabella Stewart Gardner is not just a collector—she is a curator of the Material ephemera she purchased or stewarded in her museum. Her vitrines, specifically, reflect a narrativization of her relationships and express authority over the ways in which those artifacts are arranged. The interdisciplinary scaffolding this dissertation adopts will survey the ways these women exploit the boundaries of the genres in which they were participating. To arrive at this point, the technical scope of this dissertation will excavate literary and Material artifacts by using the complementary techniques of formal analysis and close reading. Combined with archival Material and primary sources to convey the range of literary and artistic history, the case studies selected for analysis strive to explore the mechanisms by which women anchor “things” as a way of securing themselves within the boundaries of meaningful relationships—with Material Culture, with personal relationships, or with genre-specific explorations of art. The overarching argument the thesis will propose is that as each woman asserts control over her own work, at the same time, she creates a cultural economy that supports and promotes her friendships, patronages or individual acts of artistry
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Thresholds of Curating: Literary Space and Material Culture in the Works of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather 1870-1920
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2020Co-Authors: Andrews, Lindsay NAbstract:This dissertation explores the polycentric intersections between Material and literary Culture in four case studies spanning 1870-1920. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather are four women whose work reflects a capacity to defy the genre-specific boundaries for which they are canonically renown. Harriet Prescott Spofford was an important contributor to the interior design movement in the early Gilded Age following challenges to finding publication resources for her fiction within a male-dominated publishing community. Edith Wharton’s ties to Material Culture are well known, but less attention is granted to the ways in which her own expertise in interior design is Materially and spatially manifest in her fiction. Combined with her own interest in fashion, Willa Cather’s fine art connoisseurship and professional journalism inform the sartorial flourishes she inserts in her novels. Isabella Stewart Gardner is not just a collector—she is a curator of the Material ephemera she purchased or stewarded in her museum. Her vitrines, specifically, reflect a narrativization of her relationships and express authority over the ways in which those artifacts are arranged. The interdisciplinary scaffolding this dissertation adopts will survey the ways these women exploit the boundaries of the genres in which they were participating. To arrive at this point, the technical scope of this dissertation will excavate literary and Material artifacts by using the complementary techniques of formal analysis and close reading. Combined with archival Material and primary sources to convey the range of literary and artistic history, the case studies selected for analysis strive to explore the mechanisms by which women anchor “things” as a way of securing themselves within the boundaries of meaningful relationships—with Material Culture, with personal relationships, or with genre-specific explorations of art. The overarching argument the thesis will propose is that as each woman asserts control over her own work, at the same time, she creates a cultural economy that supports and promotes her friendships, patronages or individual acts of artistry. Advisor: Guy Reynold
Carl P. Lipo - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture
Journal of Archaeological Research, 2007Co-Authors: Jelmer W Eerkens, Carl P. LipoAbstract:Cultural transmission (CT) is implicit in many explanations of Culture change. Formal CT models were defined by anthropologists 30 years ago and have been a subject of active research in the social sciences in the ensuing years. Although increasing in popularity in recent years, CT has not seen extensive use in archaeological research, despite the quantitative rigor of many CT models and the ability to create testable hypotheses. Part of the reason for the slow adoption, we argue, has been the continuing focus on change in central tendency and mode in archaeology, instead of change in dispersion or variance. Yet archaeological research provides an excellent data source for exploring processes of CT. We review CT research in the anthropological sciences and outline the benefits and drawbacks of this theoretical framework for the study of Material Culture. We argue that CT can shed much light on our understandings of why Material technology changes over time, including explanations of differential rates of change among different technologies. We further argue that transmission processes are greatly affected by the content, context, and mode of transmission and fundamentally structure variation in Material Culture. Including ideas from CT can provide greater context for explaining and understanding changes in the variation of artifacts over time. Finally, we outline what we feel should be the goals of CT research in archaeology in the coming years.
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cultural transmission copying errors and the generation of variation in Material Culture and the archaeological record
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2005Co-Authors: Jelmer W Eerkens, Carl P. LipoAbstract:Archaeologists are adept at analyzing variation in artifacts. The discipline has well established and tested methods to track change through time and to evaluate the function of artifacts that depend upon measures of variation in the archaeological record. Although a critical concept, the means by which variation in Material Culture is generated is not well understood. This paper explores one source of variation, copying errors, and systematically examines how cultural transmission processes act to amplify, reduce, or maintain such variation. Using simple models, we generate expected distributions for the amount of variation that occurs through time under varying circumstances. This variation is caused by small errors that are transmitted from one person to another in the propagation and replication of cultural traits. These baseline values provide useful null models for explaining variation in prehistoric assemblages of artifacts. We use measurements of projectile points from Owens Valley and Woodland ceramics from Illinois to demonstrate the value of this approach.
Jelmer W Eerkens - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture
Journal of Archaeological Research, 2007Co-Authors: Jelmer W Eerkens, Carl P. LipoAbstract:Cultural transmission (CT) is implicit in many explanations of Culture change. Formal CT models were defined by anthropologists 30 years ago and have been a subject of active research in the social sciences in the ensuing years. Although increasing in popularity in recent years, CT has not seen extensive use in archaeological research, despite the quantitative rigor of many CT models and the ability to create testable hypotheses. Part of the reason for the slow adoption, we argue, has been the continuing focus on change in central tendency and mode in archaeology, instead of change in dispersion or variance. Yet archaeological research provides an excellent data source for exploring processes of CT. We review CT research in the anthropological sciences and outline the benefits and drawbacks of this theoretical framework for the study of Material Culture. We argue that CT can shed much light on our understandings of why Material technology changes over time, including explanations of differential rates of change among different technologies. We further argue that transmission processes are greatly affected by the content, context, and mode of transmission and fundamentally structure variation in Material Culture. Including ideas from CT can provide greater context for explaining and understanding changes in the variation of artifacts over time. Finally, we outline what we feel should be the goals of CT research in archaeology in the coming years.
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cultural transmission copying errors and the generation of variation in Material Culture and the archaeological record
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2005Co-Authors: Jelmer W Eerkens, Carl P. LipoAbstract:Archaeologists are adept at analyzing variation in artifacts. The discipline has well established and tested methods to track change through time and to evaluate the function of artifacts that depend upon measures of variation in the archaeological record. Although a critical concept, the means by which variation in Material Culture is generated is not well understood. This paper explores one source of variation, copying errors, and systematically examines how cultural transmission processes act to amplify, reduce, or maintain such variation. Using simple models, we generate expected distributions for the amount of variation that occurs through time under varying circumstances. This variation is caused by small errors that are transmitted from one person to another in the propagation and replication of cultural traits. These baseline values provide useful null models for explaining variation in prehistoric assemblages of artifacts. We use measurements of projectile points from Owens Valley and Woodland ceramics from Illinois to demonstrate the value of this approach.
John Robb - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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12 what do things want object design as a middle range theory of Material Culture
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 2015Co-Authors: John RobbAbstract:Material Culture theorists in archaeology often argue directly from abstract philosophical models to the interpretation of specific examples which exemplify a particular paradigm well; there has been little attempt to develop methods which work across the entire range of Material things we make and which relate the social projects they form part of to the actual Material characteristics of things. This paper attempts to refocus attention upon objects by asking the design question: what social task are they intended to accomplish, and what characteristics (Material and otherwise) enable them to do it? It develops a general model in which objects incorporate knowledge of the responses they are intended to provoke; this incorporated knowledge gives archaeologists analytical purchase for understanding ancient things. This thesis is illustrated both by a survey of some common strategies of Material efficacy and by two capsule examples of how aesthetic style as a design feature provokes specific reactions on the part of people using objects, linking them into particular kinds of social relationships.
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Material Culture landscapes of action and emergent causation
Current Anthropology, 2013Co-Authors: John RobbAbstract:After a century of research, there is still no widely accepted explanation for the spread of farming in Europe. Top-down explanations stress climate change, population increase, or geographic diffusion, but they distort human action reductionistically. Bottom-up explanations stress the local, meaningful choices involved in becoming a farmer, but they do not account for why the Neolithic transition in Europe was so widespread and generally unidirectional. The real problem is theoretical; we need to consider the transformative effects of human–Material Culture relationships and to relate humans, things, and environments at multiple scales. This article views the Neolithic as a set of new human-Material relationships which were experimented with variably but which had unintended consequences resulting in an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrowly based social world. This interplay of local human action and emergent causation made the Neolithic transition difficult to reverse locally; the Neolithic wa...
BjØrnar Olsen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Material Culture after text: Re-membering things
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2003Co-Authors: BjØrnar OlsenAbstract:Why have the social and human sciences shown such disinterest in Material Culture? How has this neglect affected archaeology? How do things and Materiality at large relate to human beings and ‘social life’? These questions are addressed in this article which also critically examines social constructivist and phenomenological approaches to Material Culture. Arguing against the maxim that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, it is claimed that to understand important aspects of past and present societies, we have to relearn to ascribe action, goals and power to many more ‘agents’ than the human actor —in other words, to re-member things.