Matter is everywhere and all around us. Much of it has been
crafted, designed, altered, or in some way or other manipulated by human hands
or minds. That manipulation was indicated by the Romans with the word
“cultura.” The world bears growing witness to the presence of humanity through
the material traces and alterations we leave behind. The aim of the Bard
Graduate Center book series “Cultural Histories of the Material World” is to slow
down and pay close attention to these traces, to follow these objects across
time and space and see what new histories they reveal. Through a broad scope of
scholarly disciplines and perspectives, this series explores and contextualizes
different facets of a diverse range of objects, spaces, structures, and other
manifestations of the physical in order to better make sense of our shared
human condition.
Whether the object of inquiry is large and conspicuous—the entire
Mediterranean or the Caribbean, for instance, as in The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (2013)—or small, overlooked,
or even disregarded—such as the crudely formed wax models of body parts left at
temple altars around the world, as in Ex
Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures (2016)—it is by paying close attention
to materiality and the forms of the physical world that we begin to see the
interconnectedness of time and place and (most importantly) of people
themselves as they relate to each other and to the environment they occupy.
Indeed, this interconnectedness is of central importance for
the author of our most recently published book. In the preface to the English
translation of his monumental In Space We
Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (2016; originally
published 2003), Karl Schlögel offers some timely advice:
Deterritorialization and increasingly
irrelevant boundaries in some areas contrast with newly drawn and enforced
demarcations elsewhere; the devastation of traditional places and spaces, with
the production of wholly new spaces. These simultaneous contrarian tendencies
create the urgent need for a fresh survey of our world. If we hope to find our
way in a new era, we need to be able to take our bearings in the space we
inhabit. If the old familiar landscape
is coming apart, we must seek to trace the contours and relief of the new world
that is coming into being.
We must, he admonishes through a series of brilliant short
essays, pay attention to place, to the circumstances and surroundings that have
brought us to the present. All the standard bric-a-brac of life—the old ticket
stubs, address books, timetables, crumpled cigarette wrappers, street signs,
lampposts—none of it is there just by chance. History, he insists, takes place. Everything now around us, while contributing to and shaping our
spatial identity, at the same time provides us with clues and insights into the
past. We must follow the grade school dictum and know our history in order to
understand where we are and where we are going; but in order for this to be
truly possible we must pay closer attention to the spaces that surround us and
to what actual things can tell us. We have to have an open mind.
In Ways of Making and
Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (2014), the
contributors critique the old Aristotelian division between making on the one hand and knowing on the other, arguing that
craftspeople—from gardeners to glassblowers to surgeons—obtain a direct, tacit
knowledge of nature through experience that is impossible to replicate through
any other method, whether illustrative, theoretical or in any other way
discursive. The editors argue that without direct knowledge of
materials—something that has always been essential for craftspeople and
practitioners—scholars are at risk of alienating themselves from entire worlds
of lived experience. This deprives their knowledge of a vital richness that
should be as much a part of history as the kind usually written in books such
as these. One long-standing deviation from this divide is found in museum
conservation departments that combine scholarly insights with a deep,
first-hand knowledge of materials. Paradoxically, material acumen in the modern
museum is often employed for the explicit purpose of denying the inevitably of
decay while artificially enhancing the longevity of an object. “Tangible things
are transformed by time,” the editors write in the introduction, “dying and
decaying, whatever we may try to do to preserve them …”
The study of dying and decaying things and our attempts to
preserve them is a line of inquiry that some of our volumes, such as Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in
Europe and China, 1500–1800
(2012) and The Anthropology of
Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives (2015), carry several steps further.
A multitude of authors across both of these volumes self-consciously explore comparative
aspects of their own disciplines—the history of antiquarianism on the one hand
and anthropology on the other—and unravel how, historically, scholars have
related to objects and to the people who created them. Historical studies such
as these will provide valuable touchstones for future scholarship on material
culture yet to be written, both in this series and elsewhere.
At present, in the four years, two publishers, and seven
books of the series’ existence, our distinguished writers—already numbering
over 100—have contributed an astonishing assortment of chapters. Taken together,
they give us a kaleidoscopic kind of insight into the kinds of histories that
open up when we give greater consideration to objects and the material world. By
looking closely at a diverse array of stuff
or things or bodies—whether reflecting on the consumption of swelling toad fish
from the Chesapeake Bay or the creation of monumental landscape inscriptions
carved into mountains in China—we continue to discover an ever-changing and
varied world that nonetheless is bound inextricably together by a shared human history
and by cultures that continue to bleed into one another, filling out space and
time.
