Ivan Gaskell
Biographic Data
| ID | 981440 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ivan Gaskell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ivan |
| FAMILY NAME | Gaskell |
| SIGNATURE | GASKELL I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3194-0970 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 33 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Chronology and Time: Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500–1050
This chapter uses material culture, textual sources, and associated social practices to explore how cycles of time and memory influenced the development of coastal societies and their expressions of identity in northwest Europe, between c. 500 and 1050. There are three themes. First, how memories of earlier material culture traditions and social practices were used to create new identities in eastern and western maritime Britain, between c. 450 a…
Food and Cognition: Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia
Through the lens of Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia , a harrowing account of a royalist exile’s 1649–1650 journey from Oliver Cromwell’s England to British America, this chapter explores the interplay of material culture and cognition. The coevolution of things and people, however, is not just about “how” we know and evolve with and through things but also about aesthetics and affect in everyday life. Norwood punctuates the account of his jo…
Heritage Religion and the Mormons
This chapter teases out the various ways that religion intersects with historical material culture to create “heritage religion.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintains a series of “historic sites” across the United States. Like nonreligious historic sites, Latter-day Saint sites use material culture, historic re-enactments, educational videos, and sophisticated media technology to teach visitors about sacred places and histori…
Science, Play, and the Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood
This chapter uses the example of the child’s chemistry set to explore the way that American children’s material culture has shaped, and been shaped by, changing perceptions of acceptable risk in the home environment in the twentieth century. Chemistry sets, first sold in the United States in the 1910s, changed over the twentieth century, as companies worried about lawsuits have excluded potentially dangerous elements and presumed less initiative …
Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450
In later medieval Europe, a rising tide of wealth changed the material regime and, with it, the relationships that defined the matrix of persons and things. Some of our best evidence for the changes afoot in the era can be found in the massive documentation generated by the legal institutions of the period. Featured in this chapter are household inventories and inventories of debt collection from the cities of Marseille and Lucca. Although the th…
Ebony and Ivory: Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861–1870
This chapter examines the American Civil War history of the piano to shed light on the enormous socioeconomic changes that occurred on the plantation during this tumultuous period. The war sent people and objects in motion. Union soldiers were sent into battle as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida, and they occupied the South for more than fifteen years after the war began in 1861. Confederate soldiers also went on the move, f…
Material Culture, Museums, and the Creation of Multiple Meanings
This chapter aims to show that ideas of the sacred, the numinous, and the contested, rather than of the rational, are most important in understanding how the meanings of material culture are formed and the role of museums. It considers how museums have offered rich contexts in which the changing, conflicting, and multiple meanings of material culture have developed. Scottish national identity, contested and unsettled, is shown in the contribution…
Housing History: The Colonial Revival as Consumer Culture
The rise of a culture of consumption in the decades that bracketed the turn of the century created unprecedented opportunity for the dissemination of images, objects, and texts that engendered historical consciousness in the United States. Antiquarian impulses, once the province of social outliers, the wealthy, or the creative, and encoded in the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) and the narrative paintings of Edward Lamson Henry (1…
Material Time
Material culture theorists have had limited success in integrating the material qualities of objects into social and historical interpretations. Following Ingold, this chapter argues that material qualities have to be understood as experientially mediated affordances for human action. One of the most salient material qualities of an object is its inherent temporality—how the processes it forms unfold in time. The temporal qualities of materials d…
Making Knowledge Claims in the Eighteenth-Century British Museum
Since at least the eighteenth century, Western museums have constituted a technology for making knowledge claims based on the selection, observation, and categorization of a wide range of material things. The underlying schema of museums has changed little since that time, and it assumes certain fundamental distinctions such as that between things in nature and things human-made (the natural and the artificial), and between interchangeable repres…
Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order: A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry
Since ancient times, pearls have been put to a wide range of uses—from decorative functions garnishing religious and secular objects, to medicinal applications for the cure of several maladies. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular, European scholars and aristocrats avidly collected and studied diverse specimens that became available thanks to new trade routes and markets. By means of these organic gems, scientists sought …
Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850
Despite fine studies of foodways, women’s work, domestic technology, and architecture, we still know too little about the important changes that took place in American and Western European kitchens between 1800 and 1850. This chapter argues that the majority of early modern kitchen technologies emerged before most domestic advice and reform literature recorded their presence. While most households did not have the technologies explored here by 18…
Boston Electric: Science by “Mail Order” and Bricolage at Colonial Harvard
Electricity was a new and developing field of research during the eighteenth century. With a focus on the experimental apparatus employed and the sociable exchange of ideas, this chapter examines how electricity was taught to Harvard students and members of polite society in the Boston area over the course of the century. Without local instrument makers or suppliers of glass and brass parts, colonial American experimenters had to import equipment…
The Sensory Web of Vision: Enchantment and Agency in Religious Material Culture
Scholars can interpret images as historical artifacts that perform enchantment. I will define enchantment as the action that images perform as part of a network of other things such as people, other images, and places. To this group of agents, we may add other actors such as lore, ritual, and the physical setting in which people encounter images. Taken together, these components form the ecology of vision. An image does not operate alone, but as …
Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific
With the aim of interrogating material culture in the origins of the globalized discipline of history, this chapter considers some objects of historical narration in the wider world. The focus is on how these material objects engaged with the physicality of print. There were entanglements and layerings of materiality, across the problematic and traditional divides of oral and textual, ephemeral and durable, localized and global. Two different con…
The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains
This chapter engages the concept of the numinous and applies it to the material culture of the sacred body in American material culture, with two examples from early American history. It introduces early twentieth-century scholar Rudolph Otto’s idea of the numinous , and it proposes that it can help dispel confusion over the nature of sacred matter, leading to a better grasp of the phenomenological complexity of religious material culture, especi…
Symbolic Things and Social Performance: Christmas Nativity Scenes in Late Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile
The nativity scenes discussed in this chapter reveal the eloquence of material culture as a contemporary agent, as a medium for interrelating material and immaterial dimensions, and as a historiographical source of relevance for researchers today. This chapter focuses on nativity scenes in late nineteenth-century Santiago de Chile as objects that hold special significance for religious communities that, through the performative ritual they enhanc…
Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object
Collecting drives scholarship. Historians rely upon texts, preserved in libraries, archives, and private hands. Scholars of material culture seek out artifacts, whether held by museums, galleries, historical societies, or individual owners. Historians contemplating material culture evidence are justifiably wary of its frustrating ambiguity; especially recalcitrant are objects unmoored from their points of origin with no textual support. How can o…
Artifacts and Their Functions
How do artifacts get their functions? It is typically thought that an artifact’s function depends on its maker’s intentions. This chapter argues that this common understanding is fatally flawed. Nor can artifact function be understood in terms of current uses or capacities. Instead, it proposes that we understand artifact function on the etiological model that Ruth Millikan and others have proposed for the biological realm. This model offers a ro…
The Material Culture of Furniture Production in the British Colonies
Artifacts have long been markers of wealth, status, self-identity, or taste. As a result, most studies of social distinction in British and American material culture have tended to focus upon the consumption/possession perspective. To explore the production side of material culture distinction, this chapter focuses upon furniture history, examining the structures of furniture making in colonial British society. Comparative exploration of America …
Words or Things in American History?
This chapter uses John Kouwenhoven’s 1963 essay “American Studies: Words or Things” as a touchstone to examine the history of the relationship between material culture and the study of the past. Material culture studies promised access both to the history of those who left no written records and to a different kind of cognitive insight than could be gained from traditional historical sources. While this was of a piece with the development of the …
Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond
The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the essential unity of body and mind in opposition to an enduring and distorting Cartesian dualism and distinction between mind and body. The senses are crucial to understandings of material culture, history, and more. The theoretical and methodological approach that incorporates this premise is sensiotics . Sensiotics is the study of the senses in the formation of material forms, persons, cultures,…
Mapping History in Clay and Skin: Strategies for Remembrance among Ga’ anda of Northeastern Nigeria
Ga’anda people of northeastern Nigeria employ various strategies to preserve and transmit key knowledge of historical events, including the production of material objects decorated to serve as landscapes of memory. The most important of these objects are the ceramic vessels that women artists produce to contain Ga’anda spirit protectors and culture bearers—especially Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi, who are credited with leading Ga’anda people in …
Remember Me: Sensibility and the Sacred in Early Mormonism
This chapter explores the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility as it took form in popular culture in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Although later generations made fun of the weeping sentimentality of parlor poetry and embroidered memorials to the dead, nineteenth-century Americans believed that a pen mark on a page or a twined lock of hair could animate invisible chords in the body that connected one person to another th…
Street “Luxuries”: Food Hawking in Early Modern Rome
The history of eating on the street presents particular challenges as the extant material culture is especially limited. This chapter reveals the variety of food sold on the streets of early modern Rome through the study of a series of images of street sellers printed in the late sixteenth century in response to the growing ethnographic interest of travelers to the city. This chapter turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early mod…
The Ever-Changing Technology and Significance of Silk on the Silk Road
Silk production was invented in China, where the development of its technology did not stop, having been stimulated especially by cultural exchange along the Silk Road. There were four steps of the development of silk technology on the Silk Road. All of the information is based on archaeological and scientific research rather than derived from historical or linguistic sources. The first development was of the ancient system during the Han dynasty…
Display
The display of religious objects takes many forms. While sculpture on the exterior of religious buildings is visible for the long term, relics, cult images, and masquerades are shown only occasionally. One way of emphasizing the potency of an object is to reveal it infrequently. In many religious systems display is restricted, for some things are dangerous to inappropriate viewers, while others are too powerful to be seen by anyone. When access i…
Transformations of Cervantes's 'La Gitanilla' in Dutch Art
The Imagery of Incitement
For the Sake of Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation by R.W. Scribner (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 2), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981, 299 pp., 194 ills, £25
Art for the Oligarchs
Gods, Saints and Heroes. Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) Washington, DC, 1980, 308 pp., 151 ills, 15 colour pls, c. £11 Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) by Clifford S. Ackley , Boston, Mass., 1981, xlviii and 322 pp., 248 ills, 8 colour pls, £70 Carel Fabritius, Complete Edition with a ‘catalogue raisonné‘ by Christopher Brown , Ithaca, NY and Oxford: Cornell Univer…
Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts
This collection brings together thirteen essays by some of the most respected contemporary scholars of Schopenhauer's aesthetics from a wide spectrum of philosophical perspectives. The dynamics of the empirical will and Will as a thing-in-itself in the interplay of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and philosophy of fine art has important implications for the freedom, salvation and tragic suffering of the artist, the representation of Platonic Ideas in …
Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Edited By S. Kemal And I. Gaskell. (Cambridge UP, 1993. Pp. ix + 278. Price £37.50.) Matthew Kieran Matthew Kieran University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 183, April 1996, Pages 269–271, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956403 Published: 01 April 1996
Harvard's Art Museums: 100 Years of Collecting
Museums-Crossing Boundaries
Rembrandt's Genius, Wittgenstein's Warning
Performance and Authenticity in the Arts
The Singularity of Sculpture
Journal Article The Singularity of Sculpture Get access Roberta Panzanelli (ed.), Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, with a translation of Julius von Schlosser's History of Portraiture in Wax (translation by James Michael Loughridge), ( Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 2008), 336 pp., 34 colour and 93 b/w illns, hardback £31, ISBN 978-0-89236-877-8. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations betwee…
Explanation and Value in the Arts
Explanations and Value in the Arts
Sacred spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World Exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2009-2010
(2010). Sacred spain: art and belief in the spanish world exhibition at the indianapolis museum of art, 2009–2010. Material Religion: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 263-265
Display
The display of religious objects takes many forms. While sculpture on the exterior of religious buildings is visible for the long term, relics, cult images, and masquerades are shown only occasionally. One way of emphasizing the potency of an object is to reveal it infrequently. In many religious systems display is restricted, for some things are dangerous to inappropriate viewers, while others are too powerful to be seen by anyone. When access i…
Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art
In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? I focus on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China, and argue that artworld art is far from the only art currently being produced. I describe four connected kinds of art currently made in China: Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde, which are artworld art, and mass commercial, which is not. Practi…
Museums and Philosophy - Of Art, and Many Other Things Part I
This two-part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century - of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology - still persist.…
Museums and Philosophy - Of Art, and Many Other Things Part II
This two-part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century - of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology - still persist.…
Cultural Heritage Ethics: Between Theory and Practice
Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind, to adapt a phrase from Immanuel Kant. The sentiment could not be truer of cultural heritage ethics. This intra-disciplinary book bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together a stellar cast of academics, activists, consultants, journalists, lawyers, and museum practitioners, each contributing their own expertise to the wider debate of what cultural heritage mea…
Works of Art and Mere Real Things—Again
Citing works by Marcel Duchamp and others, this article argues that the transformation of what Danto termed a mere real thing into an artwork, and of an artwork into a mere real thing, are not symmetrical operations. It argues that mere real things and artworks not only belong to different categories, but that these categories are themselves of different kinds—the former being closed, and the latter open. Viewing mere real things through the lens…
Chronology and Time: Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500–1050
This chapter uses material culture, textual sources, and associated social practices to explore how cycles of time and memory influenced the development of coastal societies and their expressions of identity in northwest Europe, between c. 500 and 1050. There are three themes. First, how memories of earlier material culture traditions and social practices were used to create new identities in eastern and western maritime Britain, between c. 450 a…
Food and Cognition: Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia
Through the lens of Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia , a harrowing account of a royalist exile’s 1649–1650 journey from Oliver Cromwell’s England to British America, this chapter explores the interplay of material culture and cognition. The coevolution of things and people, however, is not just about “how” we know and evolve with and through things but also about aesthetics and affect in everyday life. Norwood punctuates the account of his jo…
Heritage Religion and the Mormons
This chapter teases out the various ways that religion intersects with historical material culture to create “heritage religion.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintains a series of “historic sites” across the United States. Like nonreligious historic sites, Latter-day Saint sites use material culture, historic re-enactments, educational videos, and sophisticated media technology to teach visitors about sacred places and histori…
Science, Play, and the Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood
This chapter uses the example of the child’s chemistry set to explore the way that American children’s material culture has shaped, and been shaped by, changing perceptions of acceptable risk in the home environment in the twentieth century. Chemistry sets, first sold in the United States in the 1910s, changed over the twentieth century, as companies worried about lawsuits have excluded potentially dangerous elements and presumed less initiative …
Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450
In later medieval Europe, a rising tide of wealth changed the material regime and, with it, the relationships that defined the matrix of persons and things. Some of our best evidence for the changes afoot in the era can be found in the massive documentation generated by the legal institutions of the period. Featured in this chapter are household inventories and inventories of debt collection from the cities of Marseille and Lucca. Although the th…
Ebony and Ivory: Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861–1870
This chapter examines the American Civil War history of the piano to shed light on the enormous socioeconomic changes that occurred on the plantation during this tumultuous period. The war sent people and objects in motion. Union soldiers were sent into battle as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida, and they occupied the South for more than fifteen years after the war began in 1861. Confederate soldiers also went on the move, f…
Art (39 works) · History (35 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Aesthetics (27 works) · Archaeology (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Art history (19 works) · Visual arts (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works)