My first real look at literature on material culture studies happened in a Historical Methods seminar during my M.A. Each student chose a different type of historical source (travel writing, diaries, fiction, letters, etc.), and then we presented our little projects in the seminar. I chose material culture because I had stumbled upon a large collection of feminist political buttons held at the University of Ottawa's archive and had decided I wanted to write about them for my Master's major paper, but I did not have the slightest clue how to approach them as historical sources. I needed some sort of standardized methodology to use.
In my search, one of the first articles I came across was Jules David Prown's “Mind in Matter: an
Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method."
Basically, Prown's method has three steps:
1. Description
2. Deduction
3. Speculation
Though since its 1981 publication, much more has been written about objects and how to 'read' them, I still find it a useful piece. Most of all, I appreciate how Prown's method emphasizes starting from a close description of the object -- really looking, touching, seeing it on its own terms first -- before moving on to analysing or speculating (about what it is, when it was made, or who made it, for example). In visiting museum collections with other researchers, I have found this approach to be the one we take intuitively, and it has led to clever insights and nuanced questions that would not have emerged had we not taken the time to really look closely at the object.
You can find Prown's article here: blogs.ubc.ca/qualresearch/files/2010/09/Mind-in-Matter.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment