American Material Culture

Catalog description

This course covers American material culture defined as the interconnection of tangible, human-made forms in contexts representing cultural ideas and practices. It investigates the links of genres such as architecture, art, craft, dress, and food to one another in natural and social contexts such as landscapes, communities, and oceans. The spaces examined can be small, such as a desk, and analyzed ethnographically and historically. They can also be larger such as the built environment of suburbia and its symbolic meaning between city and country. Students identify aspects of form, construction, and use in such spaces and the patterns they express, including regional, ethnic, gender, religious, and class associations. The spaces can be "real" such as the house and body, and virtual, such a representation of environments that users build or that appear in video games. The course has a goal of analyzing cultural meanings and influences of material environments people create on human selves and their society.