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President: Tuajuanda C. Jordan, PhD
Iris Ford, associate professor of anthropology
April 2016
Iris Ford has been a member of the faculty since 1993. What promoted your interest in material culture? Some years ago, I visited an estate in England and saw a beautifully appointed carriage. I thought: Wow, they pimped their rides. I started thinking about carriages and other extravagances that constituted a very rich 18th-century materialism and consumption. I wondered what carriages would reveal about the role of materialism in human life. I particularly wondered how the complex social and economic dimensions of carriage culture shaped how men and women imagined and fashioned gender. I learned that carriages literally reshaped social practice and transformed the social individual in 18th-century England—raising disquieting questions about wealth and poverty, character and equality, the individual and the state, and collective and individual identities built on class and gender—questions that we continue to grapple with today. Do the things we make, make us? If material culture is the “culture of things,” one might think of food, clothing, adornment, but today there is a trend towards simplifying possessions (in the U.S. anyway) in favor of “experiences” like travel. Can experiences be examples of material culture? In societies like ours we have the privilege of reinventing ourselves. But we need props—material culture—to shift our identity and broadcast our status. We want “tiny houses” so we can work less and experience more. Tiny houses are a kind of “poverty appropriation” that are not so simplifying in terms of the power of privilege to invert status. And experiences like travel require an amazing complement of material culture: Just think about all the things required to prepare to get there, to get there, to experience the there there, and to commemorate being there— “there” made possible and pleasurable by materiality and material culture. What impact does the digital world have on the material world? It may appear that we have selective, fleeting relationships with objects—that we’re in charge. But research on peopleobject relationships indicates that objects may have a type of hold on us, that they cease to be external to the individual, that people actively seek out and require bonds with them. I am
thinking of actor-network theory, which explores the agency of inanimate objects. On a college bus trip, I marveled at the cell phones in the laps of almost all of the sleeping students. Cell phones that are so much more than merely “phones.” They are cameras, recording devices, and a gateway to an unprecedented mass of information. A computer, a cell phone, a fitbit—all are at the very foundation of our quite recent, but quickly taken for granted, capabilities in this world. We cannot survive without the digitized material world.
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Are there examples of symbols that are interpreted completely differently by different ages/ cultures and how does the study of material culture address these? Yes, but anthropologists look at those differences to discover similarities. For thousands of years people throughout the world have decorated their bodies with a remarkable variety of jewelry made from a great range of materials. But jewelry has always had many other functions beyond simple adornment: Ornaments have served to protect the wearer against evil and misfortune, to proclaim status and identity, and as a form of financial investment. We have to learn how to “read” objects like jewelry by acquiring and applying ethnographic knowledge, practicing attentiveness to detail, and employing a multidisciplinary approach, which enables us to see artifacts in all their many complexities—and thus understand how they contribute to what it means to be human. Is there such a thing as material culture citizenship? I am not sure about “citizenship,” but there is responsibility. There are profound ethical and environmental consequences resulting from the production and consumption of material culture— from blood diamonds to global warming. As one anthropologist warns: Material culture is ubiquitous and problematic, but whatever our environmental and ethical fears, we cannot
simply oppose ourselves to it in service to the mythical view of a pure and unsullied humanity. In fact, perhaps the best way to understand, convey, and appreciate our humanity is through our fundamental materiality. And as another anthropologist reminds us: “Materialism is neither good nor bad—it’s all there is.”
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Alumni & Prospective Student Reception in San Francisco Katie Caffey ’12 and Lena Nicodemus ’12 were among the 40 alumni and prospective students and families that were greeted by President Tuajuanda C. Jordan and members of the Alumni Relations team at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on March 19, 2016. Caffey works at Asha Tea House in Berkeley; Nicodemus is counseling intern and expressive arts teacher in San Francisco.
NSF Grant to Fund Mathematics Immersion Experience Sandy Ganzell (prof. of math) and Casey Douglas (assoc. prof. of math) have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will support a research program for undergraduate students, to be held three summers over a five-year period at SMCM. The program is a designated NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site and will commence summer 2016. The program will bring 12 underrepresented college students to SMCM to help them prepare for majoring in mathematics, for graduate school and for careers in STEM fields. Students will also benefit from academic and professional-development activities. According to Ganzell, “This REU is unique in that it is only open
to students early in their college careers. Our goal is to improve retention among underrepresented students by providing access to research typically only available to those who are already highly accomplished in the discipline.” Ganzell and Douglas’s award builds upon an 11-year success record of Emerging Scholars Programs at SMCM.