What is Material Culture?

At last week's New History Lab session, one of the comments on Miriam's paper about Trekkie material culture was that they had never understood what material culture was and how it could be useful. "Typical historian, stuck in a book," I grumbled inwardly to myself. "It's not such a mystery!" But then I realised that this sort of reaction was not conducive to the spirit of collaboration that we were trying to achieve, and indeed that our upcoming session on A History of Leicester in 10 Objects could be very helpful in giving people insights into exactly that.

But what is it about stuff that makes people so terrified of working with it? Did they have traumatic childhoods with hoarder parents where they spent their fifth birthday stuck under a collapsed pile of ancient National Geographic magazines, and now they can't bear the thought of looking at objects? You'd be surprised at how prevalent this phobia of material culture is: a very highly placed individual at one of the national museums in this country admitted to the fact that if he was locked in a room with objects, he wouldn't know what to do with them. Good thing he's not often called on to be a curator, I guess!

Unfortunately, people who claim to look at material culture often don't. Descriptions of how this or that domestic good was described in novels or parish records isn't material culture - it's still literary and historical studies, I'm afraid. However, the best kind of material culture studies marry these descriptions with surviving artefacts and its visual depictions. They have a grasp of the wider social context of an item's production and consumption, as well as how its very materiality affected the behaviours of people who encountered it. The amazing thing about stuff is that it stymies you with its presence: it's there, undeniably. You can't claim that it can be put down to some error of punctuation or a slip of the brush; no, it was made, and used, and has survived. And you can touch it and use it in your own ways - sometimes physically, sometimes not.

Because sometimes, an object is not an object. Or rather, it's not just an object. It can stand in as a physical metaphor, a symbolic good; by being a product of a nexus of needs and associations and identities, it can reflect all or some of them - it just depends what prisms you choose to use! And that is what we will attempt to demonstrate next week, each in our own esoteric interdisciplinary way: that Leicester, its history, and its objects, have materiality and meanings in and for the present and the past. And hopefully, you will learn that material culture is good to think with.

History and Icons: The Cheese And The Worms

Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-history follows the trials, tribulations and re-trials of a sixteenth-century miller, Menocchio. Inquisition records following Menocchio’s interrogation for heresy provide the basis for this historical exploration into his ‘cosmos’, which Ginzburg reveals was informed by a surprising range of texts as well as oral traditions. I rarely stray into early modern territory, being firmly of the belief that history really began with the building of Edinburgh’s New Town, but even I can’t resist a good heretic! And the broad range of Ginzburg’s analysis considering ideas, reading practices and oral culture of the Italian peasantry in the 1500s, provides a delicious labyrinth of historical possibilities.

Peter Burke described Menocchio as an ‘extraordinary ordinary man’, and indeed it’s the insight into the creativity of the millers thinking that is so absorbing to the reader. You’ve got to respect someone who under interrogation from the holy Church admits they’ve had doubts about the virginity of the virgin Mary and proceeds to describe his singular cosmology:

“in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were fixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed -just as cheese is made out of milk- and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” (pp. 5-6)

How’s that for a creation story!?!

Of course, while this kind of eccentricity makes Menocchio endearing, it’s how Ginzburg traces his engagement with a wide range of literature and ideas that has assured The Cheese And The Worms iconic status in historiography. Through his analysis of Menocchio’s cosmos Ginzburg reminds us that the content of metaphors is never accidental. In Menocchio’s case his mental and linguistic world was rigorously literal and must be understood as such when studying his speech. He didn’t use the metaphor of ‘cheese and worms’ to illustrate his thoughts, rather it was the product of his engagement with the world around him, and evidence of ‘organic intellectualism’ in sixteenth century Italy.

As a historian of the twentieth century I hope to I can inject a similar dynamism into our historical understandings of popular culture. Histories of post-1950s pop culture too often relegate people to the role of ‘consumer’ rather than ‘producer’. While there is agency in being part of the audience, or the crowd, surely there is also room to explore how elements of extraordinary creativity figured in the ‘everyday’?