Scholar extracts cultural clues from everyday objects

Here they come again: the once-a-year tablecloths, good china, special foods and clan gatherings.

Ann Smart Martin, UW–Madison’s first Chipstone Professor of Decorative Arts, says our holiday rituals also underscore the importance of material objects to the way we present ourselves and how we envision our culture.

Martin has spent her professional life gleaning meaning from material objects. “Objects are more than mere tools. Humans use them to create and mediate social interaction and relations. Furniture, pottery, silver, pewter, glass and textiles are complex bundles of social and cultural meaning grafted onto something that can be seen, touched and owned,” she says.

For example, a transition from “eating” to “dining,” which started in Renaissance Europe, continued in colonial America, Martin’s research specialty. “This transition meant eating with a fork rather than your hands, from cooking joints of meat to preparing dishes with sauces,” she says. “In material terms, it meant moving from coarse ways of life to smooth.”

That shift opened the first door to consumer culture, which America enthusiastically continues to celebrate, she says.

“The goal of my work is to see how a period of major historical change affected everyday people. Through accounts of sales and payments from the 18th and early 19th centuries, I can do a kind of consumer behavior study: Who purchased what and why? This has grown into a study of the environment and practice of shopping — an architectural study of period stores, leaders and followers of style, and the role of women and enslaved peoples in purchasing decisions,” she says.

With such a broad area of interest, Martin’s research extends in many academic directions. And that is precisely why she came to UW–Madison from a previous position at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

“Faculty in UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology are already active in material culture. The history department includes internationally recognized specialists in women’s studies and early American culture. Other allied disciplines — art, anthropology, geography, landscape design — are all here so students can study multiple approaches to the material world,” she says.

This semester, those students are no doubt taking one of Martin’s two courses in her home Department of Art History. “I want to show the students how to look at objects” to extrapolate their meaning, she says. “The scholarship of material culture is essentially examining small things to learn about the big issues of life.” For example, Martin says that by the end of the 18th century, even middle-class homes served coffee, tea and sugar in Chinese porcelain on neoclassically inspired tables. This bit of behavior tells a tale of international trade, enchantment with the newly excavated classical world and the Far East, and new social activities such as card- playing and afternoon tea, she says.

Stories future scholars might extract from our own material culture could reveal our quickened lifestyle and broadened scope of consumerism, Martin says. But on the other hand, many aspects of our lives have stayed the same over the course of 200 years. “Our houses have grown larger and we spend less time in them,” she says. “But we still fill them with objects to be read as symbols of social position or aesthetic preference. Studying the past provides lessons we need to continue our evolving relationship to the material world in the new millennium.”