Things and Patina

This weekend, I spent some quality time with Bjønar Olsen’s In Defense of Things (2011). It had been a few years since I had read this survey of “thing” studies in archaeology and I having read a bit more broadly and intensively on things lately, I found it even more useful and insightful. (Hat tip to Federico Buccellati’s comment on my post last week and suggested I return to this book!).  

Re-reading Olsen has prompted me to do three things which I’ll post over the course of the next few hours (so, do check back if any of this interests you!).

First, I think that I want to add a brief introduction to my chapter that frames how many scholars respond to my interest in both contemporary and past things. I’ll write that and add it to this blog post.

Update 1: 8:47 am 2/17/2020:

When people here that I am an archaeologist and have worked in Greece, they frequently assume that my work involves temples, museum quality artifacts, and, just maybe, precious metals. When I reveal that I’m a survey archaeologist and most of my favorite finds involve broken and abraded sherd found in olive groves or an isolated and humble hilltop fort, there is inevitably a kind of disappointment. The modest or even mundane character of the things that I find fails to resonate with popular expectations of archaeology which still tend toward sensation and singular objects and monuments. Cooking pots and storage vessels, rural installation and forts, and seasonal shelters and roof tiles are often the stuff of archaeology, especially in the Mediterranean basin, the ordinary character of these things rarely evokes any interest among the general public and the most common response is a kind of incredulity. “You’re just studying sherds?” (See Holtrof 2006 for a review of popular attitudes toward archaeology).

If the mundane character of survey archaeology produces public incredulity, the work of archaeologists of the contemporary world often creates professional confusion. As Bill Rathje related, when he first started the Garbage Project, colleagues questioned whether his work was archaeology (Shanks et al. 2013: 358). Sorting modern garbage seemed too close to the Start with references to the bewilderment met by many people when I described my interest in the Atari dump. Not only was my interest in a landfill seen as unusual, but many of my colleagues saw the experience as repellant. As Rathje noted in his conversations with Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore, discarded things, despite being the typical object of archaeological research, the abject character of contemporary trash situated it at the furthest margins of public interest. Moreover, our interest in a deposit of Atari games also garnered a certain amount of suspicion. After all, the fate of the Atari games themselves seemed primarily of interest to nostalgic “fan boys,” the dig itself was little more than an elaborately staged effort to sell Microsoft products, and it seemed possible to discover the fate of the Atari dump through some careful documentary research. The skeptical attitude toward the archaeological value of this excavation stemmed in no small part from the status of these games as such obvious commodities. Both our interest in the Atari games and the global media attention that the dig attracted appeared like a particularly egregious example of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism (Olsen 2011, 92-94; Dawdy 2016, 137-142). For Marx, our fetishization of things obscured the alienation of labor in their production. This attachment to things, then, overwrote out attachment to people and concern for social relations and contributed to further alienation of the worker. An interest in things necessarily represented a lack of interest in people, social relations, and reality. The prevalence of this attitude toward things in contemporary culture makes understandable the response of my students, when initially encouraged to document the objects left behind in faculty offices and labs in an abandoned building on campus: the offices were filled with “just stuff.”

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Next, I need to clarify the significance of the work of Ian Hodder, Daniel Miller, Michael Shanks, and others in the early 1980s. I recognize that their work created a more robust context for understanding things as constitutive of culture and social relations, but I don’t really mark out how different that was from, say, the work of Deetz, where things were essentially the manifestations of culture and society.   

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Finally, I feel good about my decision to move from Schiffer’s work on the portable radio in the 1990s to Shannon Lee Dawdy’s Patina (2016). While this is a significant jump chronologically, many of the themes introduced in the first chunk of this chapter find a place in Dawdy’s work. I’ll post what I write on that below here later this morning.

Update 11:09 am 2/17/2020

Shannon Lee Dawdy’s demonstrates the enduring significance of the social readings of contemporary material culture in her study of post-Katrina New Orleans (Dawdy 2016). Dawdy’s work takes a critical interest in the concept commodity fetishism in contemporary New Orleans and seeks to rehabilitate the concept of the fetish to understand the role that things have in creating social relationships in “antique cities.” By expanding the concept of the fetish from its narrow use in Marx as a veil which obscures the labor and social relations necessary to produce an object, to include concepts developed by Freud and the work of historian William Pietz (Dawdy 2016, 138-139), she argues that the status of certain objects as fetishes serves not to obscure labor but to transform them into objects that exist outside of commodified experience of consumer capitalism. Dawdy develops the sacred character of fetishized antiques and “Granny-had-ones” against the backdrop of the social displacement of post-Katrina New Orleans to show how old things created a sense of community and resilience in the face of the profound devastation of Katrina and the remaking of the city through new arrivals. Following Kopytoff (1986), Dawdy drew upon a wide range of interviews and objects to demonstrate that the personal stories and histories attached to objects as well as the physical signs of age, the literal patina in the book’s title, allowed them to shed their status as commodities and reemerge as objects of singular value. A plain wardrobe owned by a long-time white resident of New Orleans took was meaningful because it evoked the story of its purchase by the interviewee as a teenager as well as certain physical characteristics that marked it as a piece of traditional furniture (129-130). The singular nature of this object parallels the celebrated ”throws“ distributed by participants in Mardi Gras parades which have themes and markings identifying them to particular years and groups. These cheap plastic novelties are not only valued through their association with a specific occasion, but also serve as a blatant critique of capitalist culture. Mardi Gras throws often imitate currency, jewelry, and table wares made of precious metals and by doing so critique the acquisitive character of capitalism by not only giving these “precious” objects away, but by doing so at such quantities that they saddle many long-time New Orleans residents with bags of throws from the parade season. While residents discard most of these objects, some of Dawdy’s informants kept a few from each year as distinctive souvenirs of particular parades, themes, and experiences.

Dawdy is careful to note the difference between white and black attitudes toward the antiques and old objects. Her black informants rarely had the same attitude toward old things as her white informants. The reasons for this were socially complex. On a simple level, Dawdy noted that many black residents had difficulty finding stable housing where they could collect, store, and display old objects. More subtly, she argued that remembering New Orleans past also evoked memories of slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic discrimination which negatively impacted generations of black New Orleans residents. Dawdy also develops further Kopytoff’s comparison of the commodified object to an enslave individuals. Kopytoff argued that the movements of enslaved people into commodified status in the slave market is only temporary. Enslaved individuals soon re-establish agency, personalities, and individuality both in bodily form and in relation to others over the course of their time as slaves. Objects likewise have moments of commodification which then give way to more diverse and dynamic “biographies” that leave a physical imprint. Dawdy suggests that commodification of objects with biographies that give them special significance to individuals may evoke the experience of the slave market in ways that are deeply uncomfortable for New Orleans’ black residents (151).

Dawdy’s study of objects in contemporary, post-Katrina New Orleans allowed her to argue that the patina on objects in New Orleans offered a material critique of consumer culture. The desirability of objects effaced by time and embedded with stories from the past subvert consumer culture by valuing the old and singular more than the new and improved. The fabric of old things preserves and communicates the evidence for their age and experiences and gives these objects a kind of material agency that refuses to obscure their life histories and reminds us that objects exist within a dense network of social relations between both individuals and things. The central role that such old things play in the social, material, and culture fabric of New Orleans both makes this city as visible reminder of contemporary resistance to the our of capitalism and also shows how the character of old things construct these cultural and social attitudes.