Material Culture Studies

Carol A. Edison

For over fifty years, Utah folklorists have been collecting, studying, and writing about the physical aspects of traditional culture surrounding them. Like many areas of Utah folklore and scholarship, this subject area was first explored by pioneering folklorists Austin E. and Alta S. Fife (see chapter 7) in the middle of the twentieth century; in fact, the first article on material culture in Utah, a study of hay derricks, was written by Austin and his brother James in 1948. For Austin and Alta, this field of inquiry developed over the fifteen summers they spent during the 1940s and ‘50s traveling with their two daughters in an old travel trailer with a bulky mass of recording equipment. Exploring Utah and surrounding states, they interviewed, photographed, observed, and took notes, documenting the folk traditions of the Mormon cultural region. Although their 1956 publication of Saints of Sage and Saddle devoted only two pages to the things people make, those pages included information on quilts and other textiles, rawhide and horsehair work, and vernacular fences, gates and hay derricks.

The following year, in “Folklore of Material Culture on the Rocky Mountain Frontier” (written in 1957 but not published until 1988), Austin explained that many objects are products of folk (nonprofessional) technology that result when knowledge passed down from antiquity combines with people’s innate ingenuity. He outlined what he deemed integral to understanding the frontier experience: the layout of frontier towns; the design and materials used in building houses; the construction and special relationships of domestic buildings; the making of furniture and other home furnishings; the production of tools, clothing, and occupational gear; the ornamentation of both interior and exterior spaces; and the construction of cemeteries and grave markers. This outline suggested not only the need to inventory significant objects but also the need to address their production, placement, and use in the community and on the landscape. It provided a blueprint establishing the parameters for the study of material culture in Utah and elsewhere, a blueprint that still shapes work being done today.

Folk cultural expressions are often classified intro three major groups according to their means of expression: verbal, customary, and material. In concentrating on verbal folklore (ballads, fairy tales, myths) and customary folklore (beliefs, rituals, festivals), folklorists in this country often neglected material folklore long after their European colleagues had embraced it. But by the mid-1960s, this field of inquiry began to be recognized by a few members of the American Folklore Society, including the Fifes, who were members of a committee devoted to this topic. In 1965, at the Denver meeting of the American Folklore Society, a session titled “Material Folk Traditions from the United States” appeared on the program--apparently the first AFS panel devoted to this topic. Austin Fife’s paper on rural mailboxes was part of the session.

In 1968, in an attempt to focus more attention on the still largely ignored area of material culture, the Fifes continued their path-breaking work by organizing and hosting the first meeting in the U.S. to focus on material and social traditions. Held at Utah State University in Logan and cosponsored by the American Folklore Society and the Folklore Society of Utah, the meeting included an intensive week-long course titled “American Folk Cultures and Their Crafts” taught by the Fifes and Henry Glassie, as well as the unveiling of an exhibit of American material folk culture. The next year, 1969, the proceedings of the conference were published in a monograph co-edited by the Fifes and Glassie and titled Forms Upon the Frontier. Austin contributed an essay describing the exhibit, which included artifacts and photographs such as woodsmen’s tools from Maine, headdresses from the Pennsylvania Dutch, pottery and chairs from the Eastern Seaboard, crafts from Swedish communities in Kansas, and a variety of forms from the Intermountain West that included rawhide and horsehair work and photographs of “house types, ornamental and practical arts of the ranch and farm, western furniture and symbolic forms, fences, mailboxes, gravestones” (p. 22). The monograph also contained papers and abstracts presented during the workshop. Utah-oriented essays included one on aspen tree carvings co-authored by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand and John C. Abramson and an abstract by art historian Maury Haseltine reporting on accomplishments and outlining work to be done in documenting Utah gravestones. Also of note is a section in Don Yoder’s paper on folk costume dealing with Mormon temple garments. Glassie concluded, “Together the papers provide a statement of the contemporary status of folklife studies in the United States, the areas in which they are strong as well as the areas in which they are weak. With this book we have, also, an exciting glimpse of folklife’s future” (p. 2).

In the 1970s, the field of material culture studies continued to evolve as other scholars became interested in the topic. Continuing the work begun in the Fifes’ Saints of Sage and Saddle (1956) and Forms Upon the Frontier (1969), the Folklore Society of Utah published a volume on folk culture titled Lore of Faith and Folly (1971). The Fifes’ thirteen-page essay, “Unsung Craftsmen,” continues their examination of crafts (quilting, rug making, whittling, horsehair work), the built environment (houses, fences, gates, hay derricks), objects people find important enough to collect (Indian relics, fossils, antlers), and graveyards and gravestones with symbolic images and text. Even activities such as canning and butchering were included, foreshadowing later work devoted to foodways. Also in 1971, Jan Harold Brunvand’s A Guide for Collectors of Folklore in Utah was published, a joint effort by the Folk Culture Committee of the Utah Heritage Foundation and the University of Utah’s Center for Studies of the American West. Designed as a call for readers to collect examples of the folklore around them and then submit materials to the university archive, the Guide listed folk material culture as one important area for collection, suggesting that “Material folk culture is probably the greatest frontier left in American folklore research and Utah’s heritage promises to be one of the richest and most interesting of all” (p. 110).

During the mid-1970s, Utah writers from other disciplines became interested in related topics, a not-too-surprising development given longtime local interest in pioneer times and traditional ways. Horace Sorenson’s Pioneer Village (a collection of pioneer-era buildings that was ultimately moved to an amusement park), the many Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) relic halls--small museums--found throughout the state, and volumes of pioneer reminiscences--Heart Throbs of the West, An Enduring Legacy, and Our Pioneer Heritage--published by Kate B. Carter and the DUP starting in 1939, attest to this interest. Material culture studies really took off in the 1970s with Connie Morningstar’s well-illustrated book on pioneer furniture, Shirley Paxman’s book on the domestic arts of the pioneers, and Chris Rigby Arrington’s article on the short-lived pioneer silk industry. Cultural geographer Richard Francaviglia, whose earlier work had helped define what he called the “Mormon cultural region,” continued the Fifes’ investigation of hay derricks. Richard Poulsen studied the graves of Iosepa, the misplaced settlement of Polynesian pioneers in Utah’s west desert, and historian Helen Papanikolas wrote about the social and material traditions of Utah’s Greeks in Toil and Rage in a New Land. Papanikolas also edited a landmark book, The Peoples of Utah, containing fourteen essays—some of which address material culture--about various ethnic groups in the state. The 1970s ended with the publication of two important pieces: Allen D. Roberts’s comparison of the historical and contemporary uses of symbol in Mormon material culture and Richard Poulsen’s “Folk Material Culture of the Sanpete-Sevier Area,” which related the dwindling use of symbol to the loss of cultural identity. Both pieces helped move the study of material culture beyond inventories and descriptions by using culturally understood symbols that decorate or embellish material objects as a starting point for understanding not just the meaning of the symbols but the cultural significance of the objects they decorate.

The decade of the 1980s marked the flowering of material culture studies, beginning with the publication of Utah Folk Art: A Catalog of Material Culture, the first attempt to deal comprehensively with the subject. The publication was based on an exhibit of largely historical objects curated by Hal Cannon, who also edited the catalog, which featured articles and photo essays on historic and contemporary material expression. Anthropologist Ann Elizabeth Nelson and folklorist Thomas Carter wrote essays on Native American material traditions and folk architecture, respectively. Historian Nancy Richards wrote on Mormon crafts, focusing the most energy on pioneer furniture makers and thereby helping move the discourse from the artifact to the artisan. Two essays probed beyond the descriptive towards the symbolic, hypothesizing about function and meaning. Art historian Richard Oman and writer Susan Staker Oman provided an essay titled “Mormon Iconography” with emphasis on the persistent use of the beehive symbol, and the Fifes contributed “Gravestone Imagery,” with nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples fleshing out their earlier work on the subject. Cannon’s photo essays featured frontier furniture, ranch crafts, domestic crafts, woodcarving, and whittling, plus a selection of mostly historical paintings illustrating folklife subjects.

Cannon produced a second exhibition and catalog, The Grand Beehive, in 1980, also under the auspices of the Utah Arts Council. This project explored the use of the beehive symbol in historical as well as contemporary times, in both folk and fine art, and by government and commercial entities; the exhibit succeeded in refreshing memories and revitalizing use of this multifaceted state symbol. In the early 1980s, Mark Hamilton further added to the study of iconography with his monograph about the Salt Lake Temple. Elaine Thatcher wrote her master’s thesis on nineteenth-century Cache Valley furniture, and Sandi Fox wrote a catalogue on Utah quilts for an exhibit at the Salt Lake Art Center. Shirley Paxman continued her study of domestic crafts and Richard Poulsen, in The Pure Experience of Order, expanded his investigation of folk symbolism by analyzing farming practices and the decoration of western fences in addition to discussing architecture and gravestones. Contemporary cultural expressions were also investigated in a supplement to the Deseret News on Polynesian-Utahns with an article by anthropologist Joyce Hammond on Polynesian quilts.

A growing interest in studying gardening, farming, and food preservation and preparation led to a number of studies of Utah foodways throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Philip Notarianni, Richard Raspa, and Steve Siporin produced articles on Italian food traditions. Carol Edison documented Mormon foodways in Grouse Creek, Koosharem, and Fountain Green, and Jan Anderson compiled a cookbook of Utah recipes. Later, in 2003, the Utah Humanities Council developed a program called “Key Ingredients,” with articles by Mary Peach and Andrea Graham on regional foodways. Jacqueline S. Thursby and Jill Terry Rudy both published articles on Mormon foodways.

In 1988, The Tangible Past: Studies in Material Culture, a special issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly focusing on nineteenth-century materials, was edited and introduced by Thomas Carter. As Carter explains in his foreword, material culture studies can deal with such questions as the origin, development, and existence of a regional style and how such inquiries can contribute to our understanding of history and culture. The volume includes articles on furniture (Elaine Thatcher), gravestones (Carol Edison), pottery (Kirk Henrichsen), and domestic landscaping (Esther Ruth Truitt). Carter followed this project with another landmark publication co-authored with Carl Fleischhauer for the Library of Congress. The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey reports on an innovative project that investigated the possibility of conducting an inventory of cultural resources, both tangible (material objects) and intangible (verbal or social expressions), with historic preservation specialists and folklorists working together. The work speaks eloquently about the continuity of historical and contemporary folk traditions and suggests that folk communities should be addressed as entities rather than as collections of various expressive genres. A third landmark publication came out at the same time when Alta Fife completed the editing of Exploring Western Americana, a compilation of sixteen of Austin’s articles, published and unpublished, including five that addressed material culture.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Utah gravestones became a particularly popular topic for folklorists. The Fifes’ early interest in gravestones seemed to be bearing fruit. Carol Edison wrote about nineteenth-century markers in Parowan and Salt Lake and about twentieth-century markers in Utah and the Mormon cultural region, addressing carvers and their styles as well as the emergence of Mormon temples as the principal symbol on contemporary Mormon grave markers. George Schoemaker wrote about the cultural and symbolic changes that resulted from technological advances in gravestone production and the parallel changes in symbolism reflected over time on Mormon temples and gravestones. Arizona folklorist Keith Cunningham wrote about a nineteenth-century carver in Utah’s Long Valley and published a cross-cultural comparison of Mormon, Zuni, and Navajo graves.

Utah furniture seems to be another area of particular interest among folklorists. Moving beyond inventories of products and producers, Elaine Thatcher’s survey of nineteenth-century Cache Valley makers and their products (1988) wrestled with the question of local style, an issue Thomas Carter explored in depth by focusing on the Sanpete Valley’s pine cupboards in “Spindles and Spoon Racks.” His systematic analysis of a controlled group of objects showed how diverse stylistic elements can come together to create a distinctive local form, conveying previously unrecognized values and attitudes. Anne F. Hatch’s piece on her family’s pioneer-era “beehive buffet” deals with the important question of how objects can perpetuate and articulate meaning.

Throughout Utah’s academic community, the last decade of the twentieth century seemed to be a time for summarizing and taking stock. Historian Martha Bradley wrote an entry on folk art and Elaine Thatcher wrote one on material culture for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992). Carol Edison contributed an essay, “Folk and Ethnic Arts in Utah,” to Utah: State of the Arts (1993) and an entry on Mormon material culture for Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the U. S. In the same publication, art historian Richard Oman described Mormon quilts and Mormon pine furniture in his essay, “Sources for Mormon Visual Arts.”

In the mid-1990s, the material culture of Utah’s rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population was described by Edison in “Hispanic Folk and Ethnic Arts in Utah,” based on fieldwork done under the auspices of the Utah Arts Council with staff folklorists Anne F. Hatch and Craig R. Miller. The essay was included in their jointly edited publication, Hecho en Utah [Made in Utah]: A History of Utah’s Spanish-Speaking Communities (1995). Another project of the Utah Arts Council’s Folk Arts Program resulted in the 1996 publication of Willow Stories: Utah Navajo Baskets, a publication edited by Edison and containing her article, “Willow Stories: An Introduction.” Both publications explore the importance of historical and contemporary material traditions and their value in perpetuating community-based skills and values.

In 1995, Marilyn Barker’s coffee-table book, The Legacy of Mormon Furniture, was published. Primarily a compilation of early furniture makers and a description of their styles, Barker also included information about commonly used finishing techniques such as grain-painting, thereby expanding her audience to antique collectors and reproduction craftsmen. In the same way, Mary Bywater Cross’s 1996 Quilts and Women of the Mormon Migration provided extensive information for those interested in women’s history, migration history, and textile history through text supplemented with a variety of tables and charts. Kae Covington also wrote about quilts, sharing the photographic images and biographies of quilters gathered through a series of Quilt Documentation Days sponsored by the Utah Quilt Guild. And Elaine Bapis’s analysis of the form and function of home altars in Greek Orthodox homes offered a contemporary expansion of some of Helen Papanikolas’s earlier ethnographic work.

Only two titles appeared between 2000 and 2003--an overview of nineteenth-century gravestone carvers by Edison and an essay by Jacqueline S. Thursby on the use of Mormon temple images on gravestones. But given the history of interest and activity in documenting, analyzing, and writing about Utah’s material culture and its crafts traditions--native, domestic, ethnic, and occupational--chances are good that more scholarship and writing about Utah’s rich material traditions will take place in the future. Research by academic and public-sector folklorists will continue to expand our understanding of Utah material culture and of the legacy provided by Austin and Alta Fife, pioneers in the study of Utah’s traditional culture who played a key role in establishing the study of material culture not only in the state, but in the United States as a whole.