Book Review

Canada and the United States

A Winterthur book, this volume contains an introduction and fourteen essays by twenty scholars, all but two of whom hold mainly academic but also administrative positions in the United States. The essays include a wide variety of American topics that the relatively new field of material culture has isolated as appropriate venues for research. Material culturists contend that such topics have been overlooked in both subject and methodology by more established scholarly disciplines, whether history, sociology, anthropology, or art history, to name a few. The breadth of a field endeavoring systematically to study a subject as vast as is implied by the concept of "material culture" is borne out by the diversity of topics included in the volume, which range from an examination of the social meaning of portrait miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760–1820, to a treatment of the marketing of Tupperware in the 1950s and 1960s.	1
The introductory essay by the editors, Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, and the concluding one by Cary Carson look at the distance traveled by material culturists in the last two decades, using as touchstones the 1975 and 1993 Winterthur conferences on the subject. For the editors, progress over these decades is presented as certain, for "scholarship has become more nuanced and sophisticated," wherein a reliance upon "detailed description of objects" has advanced to "an appreciation of the context in which objects were made and used. Less certain about the existence of deep structural patterns by which people organized things into a meaningful relationship, we have become more interested in the role of human agency in particular historical circumstances" (p. 20). Carson, the only author who participated in both conferences, observed in 1975 that "the study of artifacts has contributed to developing the main themes of American history almost not at all" (p. 405). Twenty-two years later, he seems somewhat ambivalent about the progress made, asking "how can scholarship that we find so exiting" have had so little influence on peers and public alike? His conclusion appears to be the statement that material culturists, if they "wish to be taken more seriously by mainstream academics . . . must learn to ask and find answers to more important questions" (p. 20). The book, and Carson's essay, end with a master metalworker at Colonial Williamsburg who is regularly exposed to museum goers who "go away understanding that he molds more than brass in his rustic classroom," that Williamsburg succeeds "as a vehicle for a story of nation building" (p. 428).	2
The editors are forthright and candid about the pioneer scholars in the field—American, French, British, and Canadian—who knowingly or not laid the groundwork for the discipline of American material culture in the early 1970s. Henry H. Glassie emerges as a leading proponent, the field's "Old Testament prophet," relying upon the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky. But tribute is also paid to Clifford Geertz's emphasis on context (1973) and James Deetz's theory of "the science of material culture" (1977). A number of more recent anthologies are also cited, especially those edited by Ian Hodder, W. David Kingsley, Steven Lubar, Gerald Pocius, Robert Blair St. George, Thomas Schlereth, and Christopher Tilley, some of whom are poststructuralists, still acknowledging Lévi-Strauss, but also drawing on work by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Carson, however, cautions against his colleagues' borrowing from Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and others, reasoning that studies of peoples in Brazil, Britain, and France "were uprooted and plunked down on rural Virginia, Plymouth, and Annapolis without so much as a by-your-leave" (p. 412).	. . .