Artifacts and Their Functions

How do artifacts get their functions? It is typically thought that an artifact’s function depends on its maker’s intentions. This chapter argues that this common understanding is fatally flawed. Nor can artifact function be understood in terms of current uses or capacities. Instead, it proposes that we understand artifact function on the etiological model that Ruth Millikan and others have proposed for the biological realm. This model offers a robustly normative conception of function, but it does so naturalistically by employing our best scientific theories, in particular natural selection. To help make this case, it proposes “living artifacts” (organisms designed for human purposes through artificial selection) as a bridge between the artifactual and the biological realms.

Street “Luxuries”

The history of eating on the street presents particular challenges as the extant material culture is especially limited. This chapter reveals the variety of food sold on the streets of early modern Rome through the study of a series of images of street sellers printed in the late sixteenth century in response to the growing ethnographic interest of travelers to the city. This chapter turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early modern economy as these images suggest the range of foodstuffs which cannot be simply understood as daily necessities to meet the basic nutritional needs of the city’s inhabitants such as raw cooking materials or hot fast food. Instead, these images suggest that labor-saving products such as hulled rice or even products such as sweetmeats, which were normally associated with the work of the steward of an aristocratic house and the elite “dressing” of the table, were being sold on the streets. Therefore, despite the inherent ephemerality of the act of selling and eating food and the lack of surviving material culture, these images reveal the complexity of determining social distinction through food choices in early modern Rome.

Mind, Time, and Material Engagement

The study of material culture is changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming. This chapter proposes that a focus on the phenomenon of material engagement provides a productive means to situate and integrate evolutionary, historical, and developmental processes. The material engagement approach brings with it a relational conceptualization of human cognition as profoundly embodied, enacted, extended, and distributed. This conceptualisation opens the way to, on the one hand, reanimate the importance of history and development in the study of human cognitive evolution, and on the other hand, allow a new approach to historical analysis, one in which minds and things play a more central role. Specifically, we explore some of the implications of the view that humans and things coconstitute each other for understanding the processes by which human cognitive abilities develop and change in different cultural and historical contexts.

Boston Electric

Electricity was a new and developing field of research during the eighteenth century. With a focus on the experimental apparatus employed and the sociable exchange of ideas, this chapter examines how electricity was taught to Harvard students and members of polite society in the Boston area over the course of the century. Without local instrument makers or suppliers of glass and brass parts, colonial American experimenters had to import equipment and repair parts from London. When time and money discouraged imports, they became bricoleurs, incorporating recycled, traded, and ready-to-hand materials into their apparatus. Benjamin Franklin was an important intermediary in getting scientific instruments from London to Boston and Cambridge, and he shared instructional know-how so that locals could assemble their own Leyden jars and other electrical instruments.

Food and Cognition

Through the lens of Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia, a harrowing account of a royalist exile’s 1649–1650 journey from Oliver Cromwell’s England to British America, this chapter explores the interplay of material culture and cognition. The coevolution of things and people, however, is not just about “how” we know and evolve with and through things but also about aesthetics and affect in everyday life. Norwood punctuates the account of his journey with recitations of the foods he encountered, their preparations, and their consumption, and through that framing device reveals a deeper engagement with civil discourse. Recuperating Norwood’s natural, cultural, and culinary contexts reveals social ecologies that range from how individuals and communities addressed factors as diverse as climate change, ennobled governance, and global sensus communis through objects as plain as a mussel shell spoon, a well-ordered table, or a pot of oyster and turkey stew.

Words or Things in American History?

This chapter uses John Kouwenhoven’s 1963 essay “American Studies: Words or Things” as a touchstone to examine the history of the relationship between material culture and the study of the past. Material culture studies promised access both to the history of those who left no written records and to a different kind of cognitive insight than could be gained from traditional historical sources. While this was of a piece with the development of the “new social history” in the 1960s, the chapter looks back to the early twentieth century to put Kouwenhoven’s call for the study of material culture in a longer historical context, and it traces what happened to material culture studies over the last half-century. The chapter suggests that despite its many accomplishments, the use of material culture remains on the edges of most historical work, especially after historians took the linguistic turn, which refocused their attention on texts rather than things.

Heritage Religion and the Mormons

This chapter teases out the various ways that religion intersects with historical material culture to create “heritage religion.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintains a series of “historic sites” across the United States. Like nonreligious historic sites, Latter-day Saint sites use material culture, historic re-enactments, educational videos, and sophisticated media technology to teach visitors about sacred places and histories. However, Latter-day Saint historic sites have the additional mission to spiritually uplift members and convert nonbelievers. By using recently renovated Mormon Battalion Historic site of San Diego as a case study, this chapter illustrates how the secular “heritage industry” and traditional religion merge to become “heritage religion.” Heritage religion is defined as a set of generic religious beliefs, cast into the past, and translated into media and material culture. Through heritage religion, faith communities use the past to make sense out of their present and craft an agenda for the future. “Heritage Religion and the Mormons” illustrates how a specific historic site can be constructed to convince visitors that they can easily understand the past because they share similar values and mutual struggles. Through material culture, history is made familiar and the complexities of interpretation fall away. Through heritage religion, church leaders for the Latter-day Saints can reinforce religious practices that resonate with wider American values and beliefs.

Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850

Despite fine studies of foodways, women’s work, domestic technology, and architecture, we still know too little about the important changes that took place in American and Western European kitchens between 1800 and 1850. This chapter argues that the majority of early modern kitchen technologies emerged before most domestic advice and reform literature recorded their presence. While most households did not have the technologies explored here by 1850, owner-occupied dwellings of the middling and wealthier sort often had at least some of them. Managed mostly by women of varying ages and conditions, kitchen technologies in this era were often experimental hybrids. Implementation was strategic but near-universal adoption of the things pioneered in this era was incomplete until the mid-twentieth century. This study is grounded in fieldwork because objects materialized behaviors and ideas differently than advice literature. Buildings show the aesthetic and spatial dimensions of work and social relationships; the advice literature reflected the period conversations associated with gender roles and daily experience. The four buildings analyzed address specific cases to remind us that remaking the kitchen was a bumpy process of experimentation in the places where people were powerful.

Chronology and Time

This chapter uses material culture, textual sources, and associated social practices to explore how cycles of time and memory influenced the development of coastal societies and their expressions of identity in northwest Europe, between c. 500 and 1050. There are three themes. First, how memories of earlier material culture traditions and social practices were used to create new identities in eastern and western maritime Britain, between c. 450 and 600. Second, how cycles of maritime orientation on the part of coastal societies in England and Denmark varied between c. 650 and 1000, despite situation next to the sea, maritime resources, and communications. And third, how social practices, representation, and memory were used in major port towns of Flanders and England, in emulative and competitive relations between seafarer-merchant-patricians and older landed elites, between c. 900 and 1050.

Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order

Since ancient times, pearls have been put to a wide range of uses—from decorative functions garnishing religious and secular objects, to medicinal applications for the cure of several maladies. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular, European scholars and aristocrats avidly collected and studied diverse specimens that became available thanks to new trade routes and markets. By means of these organic gems, scientists sought to understand nature’s mysteries while artists showed off their ingenuity and creative power. Especially appealing were large, irregular pearls, which were often transformed into expensive objects of virtue treasured over generations: an oddly formed pearl could become the body of a lion, a dragon, or a monster, whose heads, legs, and tails were recreated with gold, enamel, and other precious materials; or they could be transformed into a mermaid or a triton referencing thus the marine nature of the precious gem. They could even take the form of a caravel or a black captive, referring thus to the industry and commercial networks that made such treasures available to European patrons. Then as now, the labor cost of such desirable objects was concealed behind a veneer of beauty and opulence. In reality, by the turn of the sixteenth century, the pearl trade had become one of the most brutal forms of human exploitation. This chapter seeks to unveil the significance of objects usually deemed as innocuous decorative items.