The discipline of material culture study has long been estranged from mainstream academic discourse and has been viewed commonly as the study of pots and pans. Historians are beginning to realize that material culture and cultural reconstruction offer vital insights into the past. Building upon new developments, my thesis sought to reconstruct the items painted by Joshua Reynolds in his famous painting of Lord Dunmore. Such an analysis allowed for the steps of unnamed tradesmen to be retraced, making a few people who were lost to history known once again. This was achieved by recreating every object in the portrait as it would have been done in context, through primary written documentation in tandem with extant artifacts. This study put to the test the benefit of material culture study and its place amongst academic history. the utilization of interdisciplinary means brought to light new insights into the past through combining experimental archeology, material culture studies, and academic history. The findings of this research provide insight into the effectiveness of the experiential analysis technique for the purpose of historical study and how it benefits, not only current understanding of artifacts themselves, but also fills gaps in the lives of those who created an used these items.

A sample of 41 vernacular houses from the Verloenvlei and Lange Vlei valleys in the Sandveld on the Cape West coast, have been subjected to a structuralist analysis of their form. As elements of human material culture these houses represent the physical objectification of invisible culture. They are the products of a culturally dictated mental process of design, and in their form reflect the successful mediation by their creators of a set of binary oppositions common to all human experience. The mental rules that guide this process of design, and therefore account for the physical form of the object, are called the artifactual competence. Because, as a product of this competence, an artifact has implicit within its form the set of rules that account for its being, it is theoretically possible, through an inductive analysis of artifactual form, to isolate this set of relational rules. The houses in the sample were all carefully recorded and then compared and contrasted. This resulted in the creation of a statement of architectural competence for Verlorenvlei vernacular architecture, based upon which an explanation of its function as an element of human material culture, and a participant in human social relations was attempted.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace / This dissertation explores what a new materialist line of thinking can offer the study of eighteenth-century Irish and British literature. It sees specific objects that were considered indicative of eighteenth-century Irish identity—coins, mantles, flax, and spinning wheels—as actively indexing and shaping the formal development of Irish character in fiction, from Jonathan Swift to Sydney Owenson. Through these objects, I trace and analyze the material origin stories of two eighteenth-century discursive phenomena: the developments of Irish national character and Irish literary character. First, in the wake of colonial domination, the unique features and uses of objects like coins bearing the Hibernian typeface, mantles, and flax helped formulate a new imperial definition of Irish national character as subdued, raced, and, crucially, feminine. Meanwhile, material processes such as impressing coins or spinning flax for linen shaped ways of conceiving an interiorized deep subjectivity in Irish fiction during the rise of the individual in late eighteenth-century ideology. Revising recent models of character depth and interiority that take English novel forms as their starting point (Deidre Lynch’s in particular), I show how Ireland’s particular material and colonial contexts demonstrate the need to refit the dominant, Anglocentric understanding of deep character and novel development. These four material objects structure Irish character’s gradual interiorization, but, unlike the English model, they highlight a politically resistant, inaccessible depth in Irish character that is shadowed by gendered, colonial violence. I show how, although ostensibly inert, insignificant, or domestic, these objects invoke Ireland’s violent history through their material realities—such as the way a coin was minted, when a mantle was worn, or how flax was prepared for spinning—which then impacts the very form of Irish characters in literary texts. My readings of these objects and their literary manifestations challenge the idea of the inviolable narrative and defend the aesthetics and complexity of Irish characters in the long eighteenth century. In the case of particular texts, I also consider how these objects’ agency challenges the ideology of Britain’s imperial paternalism. I suggest that feminized Irish objects can be feminist in their resistant materiality, shaping forms of Irish deep character that subvert the colonial gaze. Using Ireland as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates how theories of character and subjectivity must be grounded in specific political, material contexts while arguing that a deeper engagement with Irish materiality leads to a better understanding of Irish character’s gendering for feminist and postcolonial analysis. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This thesis considers, from a folklorist’s perspective, the people in Western society who believe that everyday objects have feelings. It establishes these people as a cohesive group for study, referred to as “people to experience the belief in object sentience,” then analyzes their personal accounts of the experience to find both commonalities and differences. From this analysis and discussion of folkloristic perspectives on belief, the main argument is established: people in this group have generally been marginalized and could benefit from a more careful consideration of their beliefs.

Magister Artium - MA / The advent of semiotic/Linguistic Landscapes (LL) as a new sociolinguistic enquiry has received considerable attention in the field of Language and Communication Studies. Although LL studies have been done in South Africa, none has problematised the languages and cultural objects such as statues and names of buildings and streets as constructing, including or excluding certain social- types. The aim of the study was to examine the material culture (languages and cultural objects) constituting the landscape at three established Western Province universities, namely the University of the Western Cape (UWC), the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Stellenbosch University (SU). Using the qualitative ‘walking method’ adapted by Stroud and Jegels (2014) and a handheld recording device/camera, the total collection of data consisted of [312] images captured at the selected research sites. The images were taken of varying street sign names (within a 2.5km radius), building structures – including their names, monuments, statues, artworks – and historically significant space(s) in place. / 2023

Magister Artium - MA / With advances and information technology innovation, and the rise of revenue through advertisements, producers and content creators have become creative in the selection of cultural and semiotic materialities, and linguistic resources for the production of advertisements. Bearing in mind, the political landscape of South Africa and its history, producers have an abundance of cultural and semiotic artefacts in time and space to draw from, and to indulge their creative licence to come up with novel designs and concepts for their advertisements and brand identities. The thesis explored the use of local and transnational linguistic and other cultural objects as semiotic material in the design and construction of selected Chicken Licken advertisements. The specific objectives explored include; 1) local and global cultural elements in selected Chicken Licken advertisements; 2) the local and global identity affiliations in advertisement selection and production; and, 3) the translocalization and transnationalization of cultural flows as represented through semiotic materials.

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This dissertation employs concepts of sense of place, consumption, and terroir (a French term often translated “taste of place”) to evaluate the ways that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century representations of southern agriculture – advertisements, art, events, landscapes, and material culture – jointly promote produce and place in and beyond the American South. Reconceiving terroir as a perception of place associated with various senses (including, but not limited to, taste) that circulates via non-edible forms, the project examines how Southern promoters used representations of agricultural goods, landscapes, and workers to market four specific products from their region—North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice—to consumers across the United States. I explore how various groups and individuals developed advertisements, art, events, and material culture that evoked elements of southern terroir to sell consumers fantasies of the region’s produce and attractions. By analyzing the ways that companies used visual and material representations to convey place-specific sensory qualities of food to national buyers, this project models a new approach toward understanding the localized meanings of Southern foodstuffs and expands on work in foodways studies that has focused on the material qualities of comestibles themselves. I connect the South to post-Civil War and twentieth century national advertising trends, particularly the widespread use of racist caricatures and evocations of social class, and I illustrate the pervasiveness of regional imaginings within the visual and material worlds of commodified agriculture. I also consider how representations of tobacco, peanuts, oranges, and rice created by members of the localized communities in which these products were grown creatively contributed to, reclaimed, or contested place-based identities and memories as intertwined with agricultural output. Addressing creators and consumers who have come to these products from a variety of geographic, financial, cultural, and racial backgrounds, my project demonstrates that twentieth century promotional representations of Southern produce functioned on local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately the dissertation shows that southern agricultural promotions and commemorations have long revolved around the consumption of place itself. / 2024-11-02T00:00:00Z

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