Material World

PBS presents some of Peter Menzel's photos from the 1990s.  He set out to document the possessions of "average" families from around the world.  Opal reminded me of this project and it seems relevant also to the reading from Jonathan Butler.

Butler describes the results of a late 17th century consumer revolution in the North American colonies.  Of course the change involved how much people had and how they got those things; it also involved which things they wanted.  The symbolic function of material possessions (including food, clothing, shelter, and other movable goods) becomes more evident when we consider desire for one item rather than another that fills the same practical function.

If colonial North Americans were negotiating their identity as Europeans who did not live in Europe by means of the stuff they wanted and perhaps had, many people today are doing something similar relative American stuff and its symbolic value. Which is not to say that Americans have ceased doing so.  Surely paying attention to the origin of the items on our room inventories would lead us to ask more questions about economic networks, about advertising, about markers of status, about the source of our desires, about the notion that St. Olaf students are preparing to be citizens of the world.

"The goods found inside the wide variety of colonial homes raise fascinating questions not only about the expanse of material objects across the colonies but about the origins of these products and, hence, about 'Europeanization,' 'Anglicanization,' or 'Americanization' in the  eighteenth century British mainland colonies."  J. Butler, "Things Material," Becoming America, p. 154.