Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-53). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University, 1909. / Summary in French. "This study compares a collection of decontextualized objects in McGill's Redpath Museum." Includes bliographical references (leaves 203-227).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-162). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-233).

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1999. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 26, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Sandra Harmon (chair), Lawrence W. McBride, M. Paul Holsinger. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-189) and abstract. Also available in print.

My dissertation emerges from a curiosity about the mundane objects and machines with which we live and it pauses in Britain’s kitchens to ask what we might learn from looking in the fridge. Considered by many to be a rather ordinary and unremarkable appliance, the refrigerator forms a virtually ubiquitous backdrop to routine activities of feeding, provisioning and storing, but rarely is it brought into explicit focus. This study traces the ‘career’ of the mechanical refrigerator and is based upon interviews and archival work in Britain. I unravel intersecting histories and geographies of cooling, discuss a global trade in ice, explore changing understanding of the nature of heat and cold and show how varied ideas and technologies contributed to achieving the creation of artificial cold. The means by which these techniques were translated into the home is central to my discussion and I show how the domestication of refrigeration also played a role in the reconfiguration of associated practices, such as freezing, shopping and eating. I consider the process of normalisation through which refrigerators shifted category from novel products to essential appliances and argue that in many ways the refrigerator has now become integral to the constitution of domestic space. My research follows the lifecourse of the refrigerator and its journeys through multiple sites and spaces, enabling me to analyse diverse refrigerator knowledges and practices from repair shops and recycling facilities to scrap yards and museums, in addition to the home. Although using a refrigerator is frequently dismissed as something ‘self-evident’ or ‘obvious,’ I argue that fridge practices are not innate but learned. I explore ways in which these knowledges travel and pay particular attention to the translation of scientific and technical knowledges into domestic contexts. The ‘reach’ of the domestic refrigerator is considerable and I use one of the more notorious moments in its career, when refrigerators were implicated in global climate change, as a way to show how day to day activities like chilling milk and lettuce can have far-reaching effects at a range of scales. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Bibliography: p. 207-227. / The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to elucidate the relationship between material culture and social relations, and to counter the analytical separation of cultural form and social practice, which is a pervasive problem in archaeology and material culture studies in general. This problem is addressed with reference to museum practice, focusing in particular on the social role of artefacts in two contextual domains - that of everyday life, as interpreted in ethnographic fieldwork, and that of a museum, which is in itself a complex cultural artefact. These two contexts are linked by the concept of recontextualization, which I suggest is a pivotal process in both museum practice and archaeology. The theory of 'structuration', as formulated by Anthony Giddens, is drawn on to overcome the problematic separation of cultural objects from social subjects. This leads to the conceptualization of meaning in material culture as being socially constituted and context-related, and the relationship of material culture to social relations as being one of mediation rather than objective reflection. Emphasis is thereby given to material culture as a resource that is actively implicated in the construction of social relations and identity. This theoretical approach is applied in two field studies and two museum studies. The former, undertaken in Transkei and the Transvaal Lowveld, investigate material culture in the social matrix of everyday use; the latter, undertaken with reference to the Ethnography section of the South African Museum, illustrate the process of recontextualization, which I regard as operating at both physical and cognitive levels. It is argued that processes of recontextualization, inherent in museum practice, inevitably change both context and the object-subject relationship, and therefore alter the range of meanings that objects evoke once located in a museum. Despite the apparent authenticity of exhibited artefacts, I argue that museum representations are composite artefacts of museum practice, rather than objective reflections of reality. I suggest that reflexive awareness of professional practice as social practice should be built into both archaeological texts and museum representations, through which knowledge of the social past is conveyed to the general public. This is consistent with the argument throughout the dissertation for an integration of object and subject, and a recognition of human agency, past and present. In conclusion, I argue for a more sensitive, reflexive approach to museum practice that would encourage an awareness of social context, and invite a more active participation by viewers in the generation of meaning. The dissertation is a contribution to this end.

Bibliography: pages 127-137. / The original aims of this thesis were to analyze all the material remains from the previous excavations and collate all written reports on Andriesgrond Cave. Only one article has been written on Andriesgrond Cave (Parkington 1978), while several articles have referred to single unpublished reports or additional projects. Artefacts are analyzed and grouped according to their relevant chapters, and in the conclusion an interpretation of these finds is given in conjunction with social psychological theory of stress coping strategies and inter- and intragroup processes.

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