My dissertation provides the first full-length study of representations of domestic material culture in contemporary Canadian women's fiction. The first chapter presents two metaphors, the elephant in the living room, and the open secret, and indicates their usefulness in explaining the cultural and critical tendency to overlook the meanings communicated by contemporary domestic material objects and spaces. Drawing on cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken's research into the role of consumption in the preservation of hopes and ideals, the second chapter examines gendered patterns of consumption in Joan Barfoot's first two novels. I suggest that Barfoot's female protagonists reject their suburban homes out of an awareness of the ways these spaces function as repositories of values with which they can no longer live. In the third chapter, I situate my discussion of the Hardoy, or "butterfly chair," in Marion Quednau's novel of the same name, against the backdrop of twentieth-century design debates between modernists and traditionalists. The chair is the object in which the novel's main tensions, which relate to notions of comfort, history, and authority, are embedded. In the fourth chapter I maintain that the central concerns of Diane Schoemperlen's fiction are couched in her representations of domestic material culture. Interpersonal relationships are consistently represented in her fiction as mediated through domestic objects and spaces. Her characters' struggles over issues of control, and the ambivalence characteristically associated with these struggles, often materialize in their manipulations of their domestic environments. Such manipulations make explicit the process of self-fashioning via material culture which every individual engages in on a daily basis, albeit at the level of the tacit.

This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.

This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.

The Jew’s harp is unique among instruments, and in its apparent simplicity it is deceptive. It has been adapted to a wide array of cultural contexts worldwide and a diverse range of playing techniques, which, upon closer examination, reveal much about the cultures that generate them. Drawing on perspectives from organology, ethnomusicology, comparative musicology, ethnography, material culture, and the anthropology of the body, I situate my approach to the study of musical instruments as one that examines the object on three levels: physically (the interaction between the human body and the body of the instrument), culturally (the contexts in which it is used), and musically (the way it is played and conceptualized as a musical instrument). Integrating written, ethnographic, and musical evidence, this study begins broadly and theoretically, then gradually sharpens focus to a general examination of the Jew’s harp, finally looking at a single Jew’s harp tradition in detail. Using a case study of the Balinese Jew’s harp genggong, I demonstrate how the study of musical instruments is a untapped reservoir of information that can enhance our understanding of the human relationship with sound.

Sahul, the combined landmass of Australia and New Guinea, provides a record of behavioural modernity extending over at least the last 50,000 years. Colonised solely by anatomically and behaviourally modern humans, this continent provides an alternative record in the investigation of behavioural modernity to the extensively studied Middle Stone Age African and Upper Palaeolithic Eurasian archaeological records. In the past, the archaeological record of behavioural modernity in Sahul has been described as simple, sparse and essentially different to those records of Africa and Eurasia. These differences have been attributed to either low population densities during the Pleistocene or the loss of behavioural ‘traits’ on the journey from Africa to Sahul. While a number of studies have been undertaken, no single researcher has attempted to investigate the role of taphonomy and sampling on the representation of behavioural modernity in the archaeological record, despite Sahul being characterised by extreme environments, highly variable climates, and archaeologically, usually only small excavations. This study compiles the most complete record of chronology, evidence for behavioural modernity and excavation details for 223 Pleistocene sites yet attempted. It is also the most extensive dataset assembled for the examination of the issue of behavioural modernity on a single landmass. Site spatial and temporal distribution, site characteristics, excavations, absolute dating, preservation and sample size are examined to determine how the behavioural complexity of a modern human population is characterised on this isolated southern continent and the impact of taphonomy and archaeological sampling on that representation. Results demonstrate that preservation and sampling play a significant role in structuring the spatial and temporal representation of behavioural modernity in the archaeological record of Pleistocene Sahul. Contrary to previous findings, the evidence for behavioural modernity in Sahul is found to resemble the archaeological records of the African Middle Stone Age and Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic in terms of behaviour and artefact diversity. In terms of global narratives, these results also indicate that current understandings of behavioural modernity are incomplete and may misrepresent levels of behavioural complexity in early periods in some regions.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-138). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Bernard L. Herman, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "May, 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-191). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1980. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-229).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kentucky, 2004. / Title from document title page (viewed Oct. 12, 2004). Includes clips from videos taken at various estate sales and interviews. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 117 p. : ill. Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-116).