In teaching business writing, I tell my students that when presented with a mass of information they must organize then present coherently, they must first ask the question, “How do I structure this.” Then I tell them the bad news: there is no ‘one way,’ no one format or formula they can reliably use to structure everything, although there are many ‘patterns readers expect’ to be gleaned from our media culture. The student’s final piece, hopefully, will shape the story inherent in the information with an expected pattern readers will recognize, to create an effective communication.
So, to read the Lower Swedish Cabin and then tell its story, I can rely on two effective structures and one non-structure, namely the methodology suggested by Montgomery in “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts” and Prown’s “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” as synthesized through Ingold’s position ‘things are in life – not life is in things’ position he presents in “Materials against Materiality.”
First, to diverge from Prown and Montgomery and embrace Ingold, my rubric has the shape of a color wheel, as opposed to a linear procedural list:
Method Map
This wheel takes me from synthesis of these three approaches to a synesthetic blending of colors that suggest intellectual moods (Prown’s invitation to emotion, Montgomery’s cataloguing and storing, Ingold’s challenge to materiality) and moods that suggest seasons and seasons that suggest the cabin in its environment.
Then there is the inventory of the material qualities of the object, suggested by both Prown and Montgomery. However these qualities can be placed anywhere on the wheel. Here, the basic nature of the object will dictate categories:
The cabin is a 350 year old shelter made of logs and stone that is situated in a wooded area next to a creek.
The cabin is a folk building, a utilitarian object that emerged from this landscape (through human agency) in response to a lifeway strongly characterized by subsistence.
People maintained this object according to changing physical and stylistic needs (enlarged to accommodate more people, whitewashed to make it attractive).
Finally, people restored this object according to modern physical need (material loss to decay) and emotional need (nostalgia for the past).
Categories for observation taken from Montgomery include:
Overall appearance; techniques employed by the craftsman; function; style; date; attribution; the history of the cabin and its ownership — over time; condition — over time.
However, Prown warns us that, to find the mind or belief of the object’s maker, “works of art are more direct sources of cultural evidence than are devices.” (Prown, Mind in Matter, p. 15) So, to be able to perceive the minds that built then maintained the cabin, I will observe and consider the style of the maintenance and then preservation of this object. A tiny, decaying, 350+- year old cabin was not permitted to exist because it was a great place to live. The people in the community that evolved around the vulnerable little thing at least recognized its age and more or less protected it from destruction.
I borrow this methodology from Prown to get at the minds of these builders, maintainers, and preservers:
Description of the cabin and its environment, as a substantial analysis (physical dimensions, inventory of the materials it is made of); deduction, the “empathetic linking of the material (actual) or represented world of the object with the perceiver’s world of existence and experience,” (Prown, p. 8) to include my sensory experience and emotional response to the cabin. Hopefully, I will gather sufficient ‘information’ to begin speculating about my theory of this cabin’s role as ‘shelter’ for the people who know of it, take care of it, or actually lived in it.
Through Prown, I arrive at Ingold, who challenges me to consider the cabin as an object wholly integrated with me and its environment, as something that is “born and [grew] within the current of materials, and participate[s] from within in [its] further transformation.” (Ingold, Materials against Materiality, p. 12) Ingold didn’t offer a clear methodology for considering the qualities of an object, but from his article I deduced this method:
Photograph the cabin from the same angles of previous documentary images to show changing styles of maintenance and preservation over time; image the cabin in isolation, to document its idealization, then image the cabin to include intrusions of the modern; image and note the environment of the woods, the nearby creek, the plants, the relative humidity, the soil, nearby structures, commemorative signs and structures; note the cabin’s materials and investigate their local origins; discern original and modern materials and speculate about their meaning to the people who used them.
What is this “preserved” cabin that once sheltered colonists from a harsh and uncertain existence, that now shelters our imaginings of the past.
1908 Postcard from the Keith Lockhart Post Card Collection of Chester County. Please visit his Delaware County PA history website at: http://www.delawarecountyhistory.com/
The black and white original image, photographed in 1900, can also be found at the Chester County Historical Society, Chester, PA.
References:
Ingold, Tim, “Materials Against Materiality” in Archaeological Dialogues 14, (United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Montgomery, Charles, “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts,in Material Culture Studies in America, edited by Thomas J. Schlereth (The American Association for State and Local History, Tennessee, 1982)
Prown, Jules David, Mind in Matter: An Introduction to a Material Culture Theory and Method, in Winterthur Portfolio, Vol 17, No. 1 (Spring 1982) (The University of Chicago Press for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum)