This thesis draws upon modern consumption theory to provide an interpretive research framework for examining material culture and consumer behaviour in the Roman world. This approach is applied to data from twelve Pompeian households to identify patterns of consumption, materiality, and motivations for the acquisition of commodities. Analysis of the assemblage data is performed at multiple levels comprising weighted ranking of goods and the application of Correspondence Analysis, with investigation performed on both functional categories and artefact types. Setting the results against theories of consumption and rationality, consumer choice in the ancient world is examined. From this detailed examination of twelve Pompeian houses, ‘core’ and ‘fringe’ commodities and recurring suites of goods are identified. Non-luxury goods are given particular attention as they provide information concerning the consumption of everyday utility objects. This approach also allows the evaluation of statements about the state of occupation of houses in sites such as Pompeii. The results validate this form of analysis as an important tool for assessing the role of the consumer in economies of the ancient world, moving beyond concepts of conspicuous consumption and group values. This research provides a structured interpretive framework upon which varied archaeological data can be superimposed to interrogate the motivations behind commodity acquisition. This research also raises the potential for future consumption modelling using multivariate statistics. Through the application of consumer theory to Roman data, discussion of ancient economies is shifted away from a focus on production to one of demand, choice, and sites of consumption.

Throughout the thesis I take symbolic communication and visual metaphors as starting points for developing a contemporary picture of diverse Craft practices in a small corner of Scotland.  This thesis is both an ethnography of Craft and a craft object, explicitly made to be a theory-laden object of material culture. This thesis aims to question a variety of epistemological regimes found not only in anthropology but also in the North-East of Scotland.  The main argument of this thesis is that in order to understand something about Craft and the experiences of its makers it is important to have an understanding of the ways in which they create that world as meaningful: that is, an understanding of the thirdness (or symbolism) that is an active, generative force in that world.  In the following chapters I argue two interwoven points: one, that a stash (collection) is a collection of stash (craft materials) and is also a site of thirdness in which symbolic thought and action are vital.  And two: that, as such, stash and the craft world in which it is embedded are well served by an approach to visual anthropology and that takes seriously a study of semiotics in which poetics become more than a subject of analysis; poetics are also allowed to develop into a method(ology) of engaging both informants and audience in a meaningful dialogue of knowledge production. By using images to contextualize ethnographic evidence and by making these previous points not only with words, but also through imagery, I aim to convince the reader of the integrity of my ethnographic analyses as well as that theories of visual anthropology are as useful for analysing anthropological subjects as for communicating ourselves.

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.

Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / This dissertation examines the formation of Christian identity in Europe through the ritual performances of baptism. Baptism was an essential act of social and religious initiation experienced by the majority of people in Europe, yet historians have struggled to understand its administration for ordinary lay participants as Europe transitioned from paganism to Christianity. Rather than a uniform indicator of Christian identity as described in clerical texts and current scholarship, baptism changed dramatically between the sixth and twelfth centuries. I show how what began as a flexible array of diverse religious practices located in watery landscapes, Roman-style baptisteries, portable spoons, lead tubs, and wooden buckets, evolved into a ritual standardized in the stone baptismal font, a form which persists to this day. I deploy an interdisciplinary methodology that engages robustly with church archaeology and art history to demonstrate how baptism created localized religious identities for new converts through its use of diverse ritual places and things. This study challenges our definition of a united medieval Christendom by radically reinterpreting the long-term practice of baptism as a slow process of Christianization in Europe from below. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Chinese newly rich consumers have gained substantial power in the luxury sector through their conspicuous consumption. Chinese consumers’ lack of cultural capital and inexperience in the purchase and use of material commodities in the luxury consumption field has led many to associate their conspicuous consumption with pecuniary display of their newly acquired economic capital. Scholars have either used cultural globalisation theory to suggest that the Chinese consumers are embracing and emulating Western material culture, or have used Chinese face theory to explain their conspicuous consumption in terms of the social norms associated with Chinese family kinship and peer group pressure. This study attempts to look beyond both these assumptions, and for the first time seek a detailed and holistic understanding of Chinese newly rich consumers’ status consumption practices, particularly the relationships between personal taste and the social structure and cultural forces shaping individual taste in the consumption field struggle. Hence, the research question is “What status consumption practices do Chinese newly rich consumers engage in to compete for social distinction through luxury fashion consumption?” Bourdieu’s field analysis has been undertaken in order to enable a new understanding of Chinese newly rich consumers’ luxury consumption practices. The key concepts; cultural capital, habitus, and fields (Doxa and Illusio), have been discussed with respect to Chinese social conditions. Using luxury fashion as a potent example of conspicuous consumption, a qualitative study has been conducted among ten carefully selected Chinese newly rich consumers (Generation 1) residents of Beijing. Data analysis has shown that informants used two distinctive status consumption practices, namely, the materialist status consumption practice, and the cultural idealist status consumption practice (Holt, 1998), which are aligned with their social trajectory route, volume and the composition of their cultural capital. Informants’ cultural idealist status consumption practice indicated two important forms of cultural capital as social distinction: embodied cultural capital and ‘deterritorialized cultural capital’ (Üstüner & Holt, 2010). The embodied cultural capital has been accrued through early socialization, centered on intellectual cultivation and nonmaterialistic daily lives, whereas the ‘deterritorialized cultural capital’ has been accrued in a similar fashion to their Turkish high cultural capital (HCC) counterparts (Üstüner & Holt, 2010), through engagement with the West, despite only having this contact during adulthood, unlike the Turkish HCC. These two forms of cultural capital are centered on non-materialistic aesthetic driven consumption practices, which are similar to Bourdieu’s (1984) and Holt’s (1998) HCC consumers’ cultural idealist consumption practices. Thus, the thesis answers calls for more detailed analyses of consumption practices in Less Industrialised Countries. In doing so it both confirms the suitability of Bourdieu for the study of consumption practices in an Eastern context and provides new insights into the Chinese newly rich group’s consumption practices in the field of luxury fashion.

This thesis examines the jewellery craft in Scotland between 1780 and 1914 with a focus on the relationship between materials, making processes, and the social and cultural meanings of objects. While dominant narratives of craft in this period frame producers as the victims of industrialisation, this thesis considers Scotland’s jewellers as cultural actors who shaped their own worlds during a period of profound economic, social and cultural change. A material culture approach is employed to examine the work of Scotland’s jewellers through the things they made. Fusing object-based research with a wide range of visual and textual sources, the thesis shows how producers applied their skill, knowledge and creativity to manipulate raw matter into meaningful objects that not only reflected, but brought about wider social and cultural shifts. Through a focus on materiality, the thesis builds on new methodological approaches to the history of material culture to show how the mutable meanings of matter and workmanship impacted on the ways in which jewellery was produced, consumed, worn and perceived. Scotland provides a rich area of focus for this study. The country has a long history of quality craft production in jewellery and silverware, with the geological and natural diversity of the region providing jewellers with precious metals, coloured stones and freshwater pearls. The study examines industry dynamics, artisanal education and making processes to show how jewellers fashioned an image of their craft that was rooted in ideas of history, inherited skill and quality. The life cycle of native materials is traced from their raw state through the workshop and on to owners’ bodies to reveal how changes in workshop production were inseparable from shifting aesthetics and cultural ideas relating to nature, landscape and the past. These findings complicate the persistent myth of the decline of craft as a result of industrialisation to show that the desire for Scottish-made jewellery stimulated new and revived skills and trades that cut across urban and rural areas. While the thesis is geographically specific to Scotland, it places luxury producers within the interdisciplinary domain of cultural history to provide new insights into the study of the multifaceted transformations that marked British industry during the long-nineteenth century.

Feasting and shared drinking are long suspected to have been practiced in Anatolian settlements during the Early Bronze Age (EBA). New drinking vessels of metal and ceramic seem meant for drinking together with others. Platters and bowls seem intended to display food and vessel handling. No study has examined these practices in detail. This is largely because of a lack of evidence for the production of special beverages, for instance wine, beer, or mead. The Early Bronze Age is a period of intensifying personal distinction. It is characterised by developments in metallurgy, craft production, long-distance exchange, and at some sites, monumental architecture. Yet how EBA Anatolian communities were organised is unclear. A lack of writing and a limited number of seals suggest that there was no central administration within settlements. This contrasts with contemporaneous sites in southeastern Turkey and in Mesopotamia, whose metallurgy, craft production, architecture, and other developments were overseen by temple and palace complexes. This thesis uses feasting and drinking as a way to examine the social complexity of EBA Anatolian sites. It compiles evidence for these activities in both north-central and western Anatolia. It analyses the incidence of different drinking and pouring shapes across sites, and qualitatively assesses vessel features and the contexts in which they are found. This thesis also evaluates the role of drinking and feasting within settlements. It assesses the settings where drinking and feasting was practiced, together with other indices from each site. Two theoretical models are used to evaluate these activities. One details how the use of objects facilitate social relationships. Another specifies how communities may be organised. Both models provide a wide spectrum for assessing the drinking, feasting, and organisational evidence from sites. These models allow for variation: in how drink and food are used to form social relationships, and also in social complexity. The approach is able to distinguish between different organisational and social strategies across sites and regions. This detail is key for beginning to understand Anatolia's unique development during the period.

Esta pesquisa trata da representação de gênero nos anúncios publicitários da loja Mappin veiculados entre os anos de 1931 e 1945. Ao circularem pela sociedade, os anúncios divulgavam produtos ao mesmo tempo em que difundiam as noções de feminilidade e de masculinidade do período. Partindo do pressuposto de que as identidades não são constituídas previamente no âmbito do abstrato e posteriormente materializadas em imagens e outros artefatos, mas que estes participam ativamente de sua construção, serão analisadas as características, as posturas e os hábitos associados às mulheres e aos homens do período. / This research deals with the representation of gender in the advertisements of the Mappin store published between the years of 1931 and 1945. As they moved through society, the ads spread products while imparting insights into what would constitute the femininity and masculinity of the period. Assuming that identities are not previously constituted within the abstract and subsequently materialized in images and other artifacts, but that they actively participate in their construction; the characteristics, postures, and habits associated with women and men of the period will be analyzed.

This dissertation studies examples of social and cultural memory and identity manifested in the art of the southwest, present-day Sichuan province, during the Eastern Han dynasty. Through the study of the southwest's material culture, considered special for its distinct artistic style and content by scholars in the field of Chinese art, combined with analysis of early textual sources, it highlights a number of important findings associated with the region's social make-up, economic activities, burial practices, education and governance, all of which contributed to the formation of a distinct regional identity. The southwest's geographical isolation and its great distance from the Central Plains; the difficulties and dangers of road and river transport from all directions; its multi-ethnic make-up and the engrained cultural prejudice from the north, especially from the capital's governing elite and literati, were all factors that contributed to a sense of regional separation that manifested itself in a distinct material culture and is hinted at in early textual sources. The main sources of material culture examined in the dissertation are pictorial brick tiles and stone reliefs discovered in stone and brick chamber tombs; decorated stone sarcophagi placed in the region's cliff tombs; and commemorative and ancestral stelae erected for the governors of Shu and Ba commanderies. In its methodology, the dissertation employs Western theories on social and cultural memory and identity. It also bridges two fields of study, cultural and art history, which are often pursued separately due to their distinct specialisations. The dissertation's findings aim to contribute to our knowledge of the southwest and to the study of regional identity in early imperial China.

A collection of poetry exploring eighteenth-century material culture connected to empire and enslavement on display in museums.