The Magic of Material Culture

Red Victorian boots

The Liberty Cap Foundation aims to “cultivate curiosity about coins, culture, and history,” so why is there an image of bright red boots and not a coin, above? Our focus is to understand ourselves through the objects we make, though the artifacts created by material culture, and red Victorian boots are as much a cultural artifact as a 1979 penny.

Material culture embodies the beliefs and practices of a culture. Cultural artifacts, such as coins or combs or cars or comics, are part of material culture. Material culture offers us concrete examples of how people have thought of their relationships with each other or with the natural world or with systems of belief.

When we think about material culture, we can reconsider what we thought we knew about people. For instance, if we think about the Victorian era (1832-1901) most of us would think of plain colors or Queen Victoria wearing black for mourning. Looking at material culture changes that view. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK has an exhibit on “Colour Revolution,” about how the creation of synthetic dyes—vs. natural dyes from plants or rocks or animals—radically changed what Victorian society looked like. Victorian society, it turns out, was way more colorful than we consider it.

Cultural artifacts, such as dresses or boots or vases, help us rethink the society and the individuals who might have owned those boots. If we turn back to coins, every one of us has held a coin in our hand. The coin—the material object— links us to the lives of countless hundreds or thousands of people who have held it. It can link us to the people who designed the coin, and to the way the coin was manufactured. Cultural artifacts are resolutely physical connections to the past.

That said, so many of us—me included—barely use physical money anymore. We tap cards or touch watches and money moves electronically and immediately from there to here. There is no sound of money.

I was in the UK for three weeks in 2022, and I touched money exactly never. I tapped. I swiped. I was happy.

What does this cost us, though, this growing divorce from the material world in favor of the unseen workings of the digital world?

Clearly, I’m writing digitally and you’re reading digital material. My words and images can reach across immense physical barriers, and, as the utopian creators of the internet thought, that can democratize knowledge and change the world. And it has changed the world, for good and for bad. Don’t worry. This blog post is not a rehash of the virtues (or vices) of digital culture. Instead it’s a call to action that we humans reconsider the power of the world of material objects and artifacts, that we reconsider how it stimulates our curiosity and our engagement with the physical world in which we live.

So many of us retreat into digital worlds throughout our day. We use it as a respite. Yet like the physical world, the digital world is changeable. We all know the frustration of dead end 404 or 504 errors. In an attempt to preserve information found on various (vanishing) websites the International Organization for Standardization created DOI (Digital Object Identifiers), which anchor articles or documents with a permanent, immutable address, much like library cataloging information for books. We use the language of the physical world for the structure of the internet. Geography lends us internet “addresses”. Storage lives in “the cloud”. And yet, though it mirrors the physical world, it distorts our engagement with it as a mirror flips an image.

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In 2022, I decided to take a 70 mile walk around the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England. The path was simple, just a circle, mainly around the edges of the island, with a few detours inland given geography and erosion. After one of those detours and unsure of my route, I fought my way up an overgrown path to come across this tiny, perfect church. 

I read the sign, thought “Huh, nearly 1000 years old,” looked at my watch—I was on vacation and my time was my own—and kept walking up the road until sanity struck me and I turned back and investigated the church some more. 1000 years old and rebuilt in the 19th century, the interior photo shows the depth of the rock walls, and though the windows were small, the church had ample natural light. 

I touched the stones, explored the simple altar with a jug of wildflowers on it. Felt lulled by the light through the window. I read the welcome letter set out by members of the church. I plopped down on a chair to take in the space. Outside I strolled through the tiny graveyard—then made my way up the lane and continued my journey.  

As I walked, I mulled the rebuilding of the church. I wondered what was left when it was rebuilt. I wondered how the original church covered the windows. I pondered the small graveyard with markers nowhere near as old as the church. My engagement with the church as material object instead of as a part of a religion led me through a landscape of curiosity.

And that is the magic of material culture and cultural artifacts. They offer us a landscape of curiosity we can explore. How or why was a coin designed that way? How did they press the cents? Who were the people who worked in the mint? The material world and the materials made by people link us to our senses, to the tactile feeling of sliding the pad of a finger across the cut edges of a book, or of gazing at a beautiful coin encased in plastic, or touching a handmade linen shirt and thinking of the people who planted the flax and harvested it and then spun it into yarn, which was then woven into fabric. Material objects capture acts of transformation of materials and link us to history both broad and individual. They link us to the lives of important people and ordinary people and in that way, they share the democratic goals of the internet.

We are very happy you are here.