beyond 3 sigma :Essays by Jennifer K. Mulcahy

The Synthesis Of Past and Present in
American Material Culture

by Jennifer K. Mulcahy

A relationship between humankind and material culture is inevitable. No matter
where we grow up or live during our lives, we use and place meaning in inanimate objects in our environment. Throughout history, cultures have made, kept and adapted traditions and meanings within their lives; governing the sizes and shapes of their houses, the decoration and form of cooking tools, the way they dressed, the toys their children played with, the furniture they used, as well as a countless array of other material goods used in daily life. Different styles of all of these types of things can often ' be traced to nationality and period from their distinctions. I feel that America, especially as we move further and further away from colonial times, is a somewhat ambiguous blend between past European-influenced artifacts and modem American pieces of equipment. In my own life experience growing up in New England, I have found a romanticism of the "quaint" and "simpler" life of America's past combined with the modem need for convenience, entertainment technologies, and tools with which to keep up with the pace of a much faster world. This mixture leads to an odd mixture of artifacts were my own house to be excavated someday, along with both some potential confusion and several cultural implications to be gained from the consideration of these objects.

My parents and I live in a medium-sized house in a fairly small rural town called Clarksburg, Massachusetts. Our house was built sometime in the 1950's, and therefore it has a more suburban look to its structure than anything else. However, a look at the outside of our house is the first clue that our belongings are an odd mixture of the old and new, integrated in ways that I feel make the result our own kind of material culture. An old-fashioned fence runs across our front lawn, with a wooden wheelbarrow from the first half of this century to one side and an old cast-iron lamppost to the other. Attached to our white aluminum siding are brass lantern light fixtures, and our front door has an
old brass knocker found at a flea market somewhere. The Victorian lace curtains seem to go well with the rest of tile decor, yet an unmistakably electric light flows almost constantly from our family room as my father watches television on our wide screen TV and the antique wheelbarrow seems to watch with fascination when the garage door opens automatically, allowing my mother to return from work. Rather than clashing, these contrasting material styles and objects seem to complement each other.

Inside our house, there are rooms of both mixed style and some of one or the
other. Our kitchen is one of the rooms where the biggest mixture lies. There is an oak commode, cabinet, desk, and a couple dressers from the early 20th century. There is an antique cherry table with matching chairs and assorted other relics. In addition. There is a modem plastic counter, linoleum floor, a microwave, stereo speakers, a dishwasher, and other modem appliances. Our dining room has a long oak table from the early 1900's and there are a few more antique commodes and very old glassware. This carries over into our reading room, which has many more of these kinds of antiques, with a state-the-
art stereo hiding in one of the cabinets. Our living room has a wide screen television, surround sound, exercise equipment, a modem sofa and chair and some antique lamps and chairs as well. Our upstairs has all antique furniture along with computer equipment and other electronics. People excavating this house might be confused by the array of periods our belongings come from. Deetz discusses a bit of confusion over dating 'sites due to "hand-me-downs" and other inconsistencies (1). This problem might seem to parallel this one, however if any of the modem equipment survived in the excavation the
date would automatically be brought up to at least that date, so our decorative
anachronism could still be accurately dated.

The kitchen's contents and setup are telling of the values of a time. Instead of spending a lot of time eating together, our family all eats separately and quickly. This could be told from our microwave oven, coffee pot, our cupboards of ready-to-eat snacks and our refrigerator full of plastic containers containing microwaveable meals. Caffeine addiction could be readily deduced by the dominance of coffee mugs over any other sort of food container or server. The second largest group are our Tupperware and other microwaveable dishes. These show how we live, much like the cookware of early New England. Their cooking pots also served as bowls, much like our microwaveable dishes do. This also suggests that meal time was not formalized, but was rather treated more as a necessity. (2) However, during holidays our attitude towards food takes on a different flavor. Rather than serving a Technomic unction, another set of dishes serves a Socio-technic function. Dishes are highly embellished and food is prepared for aesthetic purposes as well as taste and the technical purpose of feeding. Eating becomes a social event, and much time is taken in preparation and consumption. At Christmas time, a special set of dishes and trays with symbols of the season are used, and our meal service takes on a pointedly Ideo-technic function. Much like Deetz's example of the different
uses for candles, food containers, cookware and serving utensils take on all of these different functions depending on their context and sort. (3)

My father has a fascinating hobby that ties right in with my discussion of the past and present material cultures of New England blending. He takes antique clocks and puts new clockwork inside them to make them run again, and he canes and revarnishes antique chairs that he finds at antique fairs and shops all over the northeastern United - States. The clocks have an old-time facade with brand new insides, and while they appear to be completely of a different time and style of our own modem time, their internal mechanisms are often quite up to date. This makes me think of a sort of time- cyborg, a mix of old and new where it's difficult to tell just where the old ends and the new begins. This sort of redevelopment and reworking of the past also applies to my father's work on chairs. Deetz recalls a time, beginning around the early seventeenth century, and progressing onward from there, when chairs became more common in households and began to hold symbolism and meaning. At least one chair was usually owned even by poor early Plymouth colonists, and the popularity of chairs grew in both Anglo-America and England. This popularity inspired the design of a wide variety of different kinds of chairs. Our house has an impressive variety of these different sorts of chairs.(4) My father's favorite kind to work on, however, is the kind with no seat of wood or leather, but an open circular seat with holes for caning to be tied and woven. He has purchased a few books on the art of caning, but I believe he really has a natural talent for this largely lost art form. He adds to this creative restoration by varnishing the chairs to make them appear their best. The result is a chair that is beautifully new yet hauntingly old at the same time. Some people may think that my father is doing the antiques a disservice by altering them in this way, but I find his creative renewal of our nation's earliest beauty to be innovative and inspiring.

My environment at home is one that, at first glance, may seem chaotic and confusing. This is not an instance of George Washington suddenly finding an IBM compatible laptop on his fireplace mantle, though. These times are times of such technology, but the past is ours to borrow from as well. From hiding our stereo in an antique commode to putting my computer on my grandfather's old desk in my room to my father's renovation of antiques using his modem knowledge and his own creativity, I feel that this is not an odd patchwork quilt of mismatched material culture struggling to have synthesis. On the contrary, I feel that these are all ways of keeping our American heritage and past alive while at the same time weaving our own ideas and technology into the best of the past and present, creating the future of American material culture.

Endnotes
Footnotes;
(1) Deetz,p. 18
(2) Deetz,p. 52
(3) Deetz,p. 51
(4) Deetz, p. 121-122

Bibliography
Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten- Anchor Books, Doubleday,
New York,NY. 1977.

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