Craft and Objecthood

A common complaint about the study of material culture is that it proceeds backward and in doing so merely confirms what we already know. As Cary Carson, a historian and vice president of research at Colonial Williamsburg, stated the problem at a conference on American material culture a decade ago: "[R]esearch often starts not with questions worth asking but with a collection of objects searching for something worth answering" (qtd. in Martin and Garrison, 411). Scholars in literature, a field increasingly orienting itself toward material culture, may not recognize this as a problem. After all, we routinely assemble and display what we take to be interesting textual (and increasingly, material textual) objects. Our sense of scale, the feeling that a single work is a proper unit of analysis and worthy of chapter-length treatment, derives from older forms of textual appreciation and explication, forms that might seem antiquated in light of the historicism of recent decades but are hard to shed and are generally taken to be constitutive of literary study itself. We often begin with intensive textual analysis and claim to move outward from particular textual objects to some general understanding of culture, though it is obvious that we also spend much of our time situating the objects that interest us in preexisting interpretive frameworks. We imagine that we are still largely a field of (independent, exporting) textualists rather than (dependent, importing) contextualists, and there is no doubt that other disciplines have benefited from our methodological exports, but how frequently does the promise of textualism become realized in the form of truly novel contexts?How many studies of literary history end up merely offering additional examples of phenomena we are already familiar with, fleshing out long-standing frameworks, drawing upon preexisting interpretive contexts to confirm what we know? To put the question bluntly: Are scholars of literary and cultural history really just collectors and curators at heart, gathering textual and material objects for exhibition and display in advance of hard and meaningful questions for which the intensive study of those objects is a means to an answer?

The fields of literary and social history are in the midst of an object turn, a turn taken earlier (though in appreciably different ways) by anthropologists, archaeologists, art and architectural historians, folklorists, museum curators, and sociologists. The books under review, one on the "Age of Manufactures" and the other on the "Age of Homespun," invite cultural and social historians to rethink basic disciplinary assumptions of their crafts by thinking about and with objects. They take different approaches, some governed by discipline, but they share a number of common features beyond their attention to craft and objecthood. In an age of consumption studies, both books center on production. In a scholarly climate that increasingly takes nationalism as its topic and the nation as the basic unit of analysis, they are both unapologetically regional studies. They both deserve readers beyond their primary disciplines, but both importantly use their periods to reflect on the current practices of their disciplines. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, for instance, sees Horace Bushnell's 1851 "Age of Homespun" address as a founding document of social history, embodying both its strengths (an attention to everyday material life in an almost Braudelian way) and its weaknesses (an anti-institutional and anti-individual bias that freezes people into a "collective anonymity that denies either agency or the capacity to change" [20]). For her part, Laura Rigal hopes to exploit and critique the representational practices she studies, characterizing her own work as a cultural historian as counter-assembling materials and discovering "a mode of analysis as well as a mode of production in the uneven, multiform, quintessentially intermediate processes signified by the American manufactory" (17). Taken together, these books occasionally exemplify but more often offer ways around some of the problems of material culture...