Interpretive Plan - Research Paper - Material Culture Studies by Bernard L. Herman

BERNARD L. HERMAN

Edward F. & Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History
Director, Center for American Material Culture Studies
University of Delaware
July 2002

I. Introduction

The field of material culture studies examines all aspects of the world of objects and images people make, use, and experience. The enormity of this enterprise has produced a variety of approaches and methodologies specific to particular research and interpretation problems. The research tools employed depend entirely on the nature of the questions posed by the object and its interpreters. The most basic questions are those that ask "why do objects look the way they do" and "what do objects mean." The former question is object-centered – it seeks to understand the nature of the artifact on its most material and immediate levels; the second question is object-driven – it strives to understand how the object operates within a variety of social and cultural circumstances. Neither approach is inherently better than the other; each approach, to be successful, relies on the perspectives of its counterpart.

Material culture studies begin with the proposition that the world of objects and images constitute a broad body of evidence that resonates with but is different from the documentary record. In this sense, material culture studies are archaeological in nature. They begin with the interrogation of the artifact, postulating possible readings, and testing those findings against a broader array of evidence. Material culture studies accordingly argue that objects function as actors and that artifacts exert agency in the performance of everyday life. The sense of this proposition is captured in the common idiomatic phrase, "events take place." Implicit in this formulation is the idea that events have the substance of their occasion. Therefore, place matters and place is dynamic. Place is also fundamentally material. Thus material culture studies scrutinize objects or groups of objects in light of the relationships they describe between people and the worlds they inhabit. How the house or chair or meal or landscape charts behaviors and the etiquette that superintends everyday interactions is central to understanding and narrating the past.

Stenton, its furnishings, collections, and archaeological remains constitute a constellation of objects that documents multiple contexts in the history of Pennsylvania, the region, and the formative years of the American colonies and the United States. Central to the problem of interpreting Stenton is the necessity for the stewards of Stenton to choose the contexts they wish to narrate and the strategies and approaches they need to research and tell those stories. Much of the basic research necessary to the formulation of those narratives appears to be in hand. The difficulty, however, is one of volume – the sheer weight of evidence, both material and documentary, offers an avalanche of possibilities that easily overwhelm the interpretive process. Thus, at the outset, a material culture approach to Stenton begins with a basic understanding of the object(s) and the stories they seem best suited to tell. Given the general messiness of everyday life, those stories may compete, but in their competition they reveal the richer textures of the Logans, their household, their visitors, and their successors. Three aspects of that complex history specific to the house and its furnishings are the public and private use of space, the aesthetics of the house in light of the heavily Quaker culture in which it was designed and built, and the issue of authenticity in terms of the house and its furnishings.

II. Authentic 18^th century architecture

Stenton survives as one of the preeminent examples of elite provincial American architecture erected in the early colonial period. Despite James Logan's claims to the contrary, Stenton was an ambitious house signifying the wealth and authority backing the Penn family's proprietarial founding of Pennsylvania. Those claims were iterated and reinforced by the interior finishes and furnishings of the house ranging from books to textiles to foodstuffs to furniture. In essence, Stenton was designed and furnished as the systematic expression of power that engaged both the public and private spheres in local, regional, and Atlantic world contexts. Although this assertion can easily be made in the abstract through documentary sources, the material culture of Stenton makes that argument visible and tangible. The interpretive advantage of Stenton and its period furnishings lies in our ability to engage visitors with the most basic of object-centered questions: why do things look the way they look? The question invites the closer critical examination of the objects: if these are objects associated with the Logan household, what do they tell us about the Logans?

These questions invite visitors to engage a second tier of queries that focus on three physical aspects of the artifact: form, construction, and ornament. Using the house itself as our example, we can ask questions about the form – that is the spatial design and organization of the house in terms of its most basic geometries. The literal form of Stenton with its balanced fenestration, two-story elevation, and interior arrangement of rooms raises questions about the ways in which the Logans imagined and designed their house. Construction encourages a discussion of the materials that were used to build the house, the ways in which those materials were prepared, and the manner in which the physical elements of the house were assembled. A discussion of ornament begins with decorative elements within the house and then proceeds to the examination of similarities or differences between rooms. The examination of form, construction, and ornament yield a sense of the elements the Logans chose for their house and, in doing so, raise questions about what were the Logans trying to achieve and why. The real advantage of "authenticity" at Stenton rests on the fact that it makes the abstract ideas concrete, the past immediate, history human and visceral.

III. Private/Public space and use of space

Stenton's architecture and collections provide a place to begin. Attempting to understand, for example, why the house looks the way it does opens two interpretive avenues, both of which rely on a basic understanding of the house. The first avenue focuses on the question of how the house worked simultaneously on multiple levels including sociability, family life, service, presentation of self, and in a variety of other contexts. These questions look inward to the organization of the house and the variable functions of its many elements. The second path looks outward and situates Stenton in a broader set of relationships that extend beyond the particulars of early Philadelphia and its environs and shed insight into the mechanisms of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Understanding the inner workings of Stenton invariably implicates the larger world that informed its design, appearance, and use.

Like elite houses erected on both sides of the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Stenton was organized around developing notions of public and private spaces, how those spaces worked within the overall life of the house, and how individuals moved between those spaces. A number of strategies have been developed that enable us to dissect the spatial anatomy of the house. The idea of a hierarchy of interior finishes communicating the relative importance of rooms or the use of access diagrams that map movement through the house evoke some of the lived experience of historic spaces. Assigning primary functions (for example, cooking or polite sociability) to individual rooms (kitchen or parlor) enables us to examine how the parts of the house worked in concert. Tying the material evidence to the documentary record enriches the interpretation of domestic space. Sarah Logan’s 1754 inventory itemizes objects by type and value. The types of furnishings found in individual rooms yield insight into how those spaces may have been used at a particular moment in time. The quality of furnishings indicated by value and material posit an impression of the relative importance of individual spaces. Linking the 1754 list to William Logan's 1776 inventory provides the opportunity to explore the evolving nature of the house over time. Reading between the two inventories and the architectural evidence of the house reveals that social and domestic topography of Stenton changed over time and in its transformation mirrored larger changes in the organization of both the public and private spheres of elite households.

These approaches rely on the implicit presence of people within the house. In this sense, the exploration of public and private spaces encourages the investigation of how people experienced Stenton.The tools for the reconstruction and interpretation of historic behaviors are varied, but at their root they depend on a distinction between place (where things occur) and space (the performance of place). The compiled biographies and vignettes provide a good starting point in this regard. Brief essays on Sarah Reed Logan, Hannah Emlen Logan, and Dinah yield a sense of who these people were, but not of how they lived. The story of Sarah Reed Logan contains wonderful elements including the excerpt from a James Logan letter: "Sally, besides her needle, has been learning French, and this last week has been very busie at the plantation in ye dairy in which she delights as well as in spinning but is at this moment at ye table with me (being First Day afternoon and her mother abroad) reading the 34th psalm in Hebrew." Within the compass of a few lines James Logan provides the curriculum of a young girl’s education (needlework, spinning, dairying, reading, languages, and religion), a sense of its objects (needle, spinning wheel, earthenware, and books) and spaces (dairy and her father's table). The degree to which the public and private worlds of Stenton are revealed in this passage is striking. Proficiency in the domestic arts constituted a category of display. Thus, far from being private, they represent a public pronouncement of certain abilities. The dynamic conversation between public and private lives exemplified in this brief passage runs throughout Stenton.

Stenton also operated as a house of state for the Penn family's primary agent in their colonial enterprise. As a privately owned public building, Stenton furnished the stage for an array of encounters. The oft told story of the Native American encampment on Stenton's grounds, the receptions for which the upper story front rooms were designed, and ground floor best parlor and office divided by a heated reception hall are events, objects, and spaces that speak directly to the flexibility with which Stenton and its furnishings could address specific occasions ranging from the everyday to the extraordinary. In both its public and private functions, Stenton operated as a place where people interacted. Its spaces, inside and outside, provided a physical setting that shaped the flow of family, community, provincial, and international associations. Movement in and out of the house relied on literal thresholds, but acts of passage acquired symbolic import based on the types of thresholds people crossed, their status within those passages, and the texture of the connections affirmed or contested in those movements. Thus, the material culture of movement is situational, it is defined by the interaction of people and the spaces they inhabit. The experience of Stenton's reception hall depended a great deal on who you were and how you got there. For the neighbor on local business, the Native American delegation on a diplomatic mission, the servant admitting and announcing visitors, or the Logans greeting their guests, the reception hall represented a variable threshold unified only in its role of providing a proscenium that enabled the definition and performance of its actors. This defining, liminal quality extends through the house and to the very way in which it occupied its historic landscape at the doorstep of the City of Philadelphia.

IV. Quaker aesthetics

Stenton and its furnishing raise significant questions about Pennsylvania Quakers and the values that shaped the textures of their material world. Central to the continuing debates on Quaker aesthetics is the notion of plainness and what it denoted in eighteenth-century Quaker material culture. In a forthcoming essay on Quaker aesthetics I offer the following points:

A Quaker aesthetic is not intrinsic to the physical appearance of objects, but is grounded instead in the circumstances of individual and group expression and reception. It is situational, provisional, and selective. Thinking of aesthetics in this way deflects our attention away from the world of fashion that glosses the text of the house and toward concerns about the ways in which the physical and visual qualities of domestic space shape those relationships… Discussions of the aesthetics of Quaker domestic architecture almost invariably begin from a flawed understanding of the "plain". Working from a presumptive understanding of what constitutes plainness, historians of Quaker houses have promoted a problematic set of assertions regarding the character and meaning of Quaker dwellings. These arguments present at their very core the idea that no matter how elaborate or how stylish a Quaker family's dwelling might be it somehow projects an air of restraint. Even the most insightful readings of a Quaker style that link buildings to the nonsectarian design traditions of English vernacular architecture often fall prey to this tendency to equate "Quaker" with "plain." However, given the range of housing options in the early colonial period, the surviving dwellings of the Delaware Valley's well-to-do Quaker families were truly extraordinary mansions in their own day. In fact, there are numerous examples of Quaker built dwellings that contain in a single room the total area of the average residence. Moreover, there is scant evidence for a member of the Society of Friends being read out of meeting because their house was too grand. The close examination of eighteenth-century houses throughout the Delaware Valley suggests that reading plainness into these residences is a product of more modern interpretive needs and stereotypes, projecting late nineteenth-century values.

Stenton stands as a particularly pointed example of these issues. As built, Stenton dominated its early eighteenth-century landscape. Brick construction in rural settings typically identified the houses of local elites. The classically inspired design of the house spoke to an audience defined by cosmopolitan values and behaviors. The sheer scale of Stenton and the many rooms within its walls described a level of architectural experience and segregation of domestic and social functions that few Pennsylvanians could share. The square footage of the ground floor best parlor, in fact, was equal to more than an estimated three-quarters of rural dwellings recorded in the lower Delaware Valley at the close of the eighteenth century. Stenton's interior features—a fully paneled parlor and double drawing room in the second story, for example – represented a level of sophistication foreign to the everyday lives of most eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians.

Stenton in the context of Quaker aesthetics presents an unparalleled opportunity to raise a host of interpretive possibilities including what it meant to be a Quaker in early Pennsylvania, the conflict between worldly and spiritual values, and the relationship between religious identity and secular power. These themes can be introduced through current events such as the ongoing debates about the proper relationship between matters of church and state. The theme of Quaker aesthetics also provides the opportunity to connect Stenton to other historic sites in the region. Wright's Ferry Mansion in Columbia, Primitive Hall in Chester County, and the Abel and Mary Nicholson House in Salem County, New Jersey represent Quaker-built historic houses that address issues of personal authority, collective power, and conflicted worldliness in consonant ways. If the theme of public and private space offers an interpretive context for Stenton that places the house, its furnishings, and its people in an Atlantic context, then the theme of Quaker aesthetics provides a venue for the exploration of a broadly defined regional culture.

V. Recommendations

Material culture adds a substantive reality to the presentation and interpretation of history and the many abstract themes it superintends. The following general strategies incorporate a material culture approach to Stenton's interpretive programs.

Let the objects ask the questions. The material culture of Stenton lends immediacy and authenticity to its interpretation. Objects may range from the whole of the house to individual items such as the redware bowl with a trail-glazed Native American figure in the bottom.
Using the resources at Stenton, teach visitors how to look, and in the process of looking how to see. Ask visitors to speculate on why things look the way they do by beginning with the basics of looking at an object.
Identify the interpretive themes that are best represented by the architecture and collections at Stenton. Focus on the "rule of least and best"—that is the resources that enable interpreters to most effectively get to the narrative points desired.
Emphasize the life of the house in all its many voices. Develop action statements out of the material and documentary evidence associated with the Logans and their contemporaries. Use the evidence of objects to suggest how the life of the house may have played out in the physical circumstances of the house.
Using the material culture of Stenton, design interpretive strategies that present visitors with problems, not just conclusions. Enlist visitors as partners in the interpretive process. Answer questions with questions that invite critical thinking about how objects worked in ways that ranged from the utilitarian to the symbolic.

VI. Suggested steps for further research

Research at Stenton and on the Logans already stands at a high level, but it seems to lack a focus that enables an interpretive translation from the abstract to the immediate. It is as if the relationship between the material culture of Stenton, its people, and the "big ideas" that could be addressed has not been resolved. One way to think about this dilemma is through a distinction between arguments that are asserted and those that are demonstrated. Asserted arguments might be thought of as thesis statements: for example, Philadelphia's belles lettres society enabled the women of Stenton to create and participate in a powerful feminine community in early Pennsylvania and that their engagement in this literate and literary society provided a means to express feminine authority within the generally masculine world of the intellectual forment that helped lay the foundations for American independence. How would we demonstrate the substance of this assertion with the material culture of Stenton? First, we can attempt to locate feminine voice within the design, organization, and operation of this house. Second, we can ask how the material culture of Stenton reflects assumptions about gendered identities in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Third, we can also ask how the house contained and facilitated behaviors that articulated distinctions between women on the basis of rank, race, and property. Each of these questions demands a proof or demonstration that can be located to some extent in the material world. The identification of research needs depends entirely on the stories you wish to tell, the lessons you wish to teach. Suggested steps for future research begin by

Identifying a set of interpretive narratives particularly suited to Stenton
defining the audiences you wish to address
formulating the strategies for communicating those narratives.

Specific research needs can only be defined once a general narrative assertion is stated. Each theme, however, needs to be demonstrated through the research materials and strategies best suited to the nature of the evidence – artifact or document – and the desired outcome. Research needs can be articulated only after the larger thematic and programmatic goals are set. Whatever those needs are, though, any effective research strategy must link the diverse bodies of evidence together into a strong and effective narrative whole.

Bibliography

The following sources represent works that I have found particularly useful for thinking about objects and their interpretation. I have winnowed this down to eleven works, although there are more that could be added. These are not works that address the specifics of Pennsylvania's colonial architecture, eighteenth-century Quaker politics and society, or the biographies of the Logan family. The list also excludes journal articles. I list one of my own works as an example of a material culture approach to social and cultural history.

Barbara G. Carson, Ambitious Appetites : Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Press, 1990).

Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: United States Capitol Historical Society and the University Press of Virginia, 1994),

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Bernard L. Herman, The Stolen House (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 second edition).

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1982).

David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth Of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991 translation of 1988 edition).

Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: The Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North carolina Press, 1998).

David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1997).

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

back to reports Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New York: The Architectural History Foundation, 1986, republished by Yale

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