INALIENABLE INTERIORS: CONSUMERISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 1890 TO 1920 By Aaron Wayne McCullough                 A DISSERTATION  Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of  American StudiesDoctor of Philosophy  2016             ABSTRACT  INALIENABLE INTERIORS: CONSUMERISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 1890 TO 1920  By  Aaron Wayne McCullough  In this dissertation, I examine how and why anthropology became a significant discourse through which consumers, taste makers, and authors attempted to understand and navigate the consumer marketplace of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Anthropology, in perceived primitive objects as unconscious and unchanging expressions of identities defined by culture, race, or natural physiography. In a marketplace of alienable commodities, of objects circulating not only from producer to consumer, but also within and across the boundaries of identities, anthropology allowed consumers a discourse through which they could understand the objects of others; and through which they could imagine, identify, or idealize objects that expressed their own racial, national, class, or cultural identity. I call the consumer that emerged from this discourse of consumption, borrowing from historian James Clifford, an ethnographic consumer: an anthropologically aware, rational, consumer self, capable of navigating a cosmopolitan marketplace by perceiving and idealizing objects as culflâneur, through the writings of Arts and Crafts polemicist Irene Sargent, through the pages of The Craftsman arly twentieth century. If anthropology was used to evaluate and navigate a marketplace of alienable objects, it was also used to imagine a domestic material culture: in the dreams of fiction and the practice of architectural design, the hut was a locus of withdrawal, an imagined place where the material objects that composed the home could securely express race, culture, class, or   nationality. And in both the marketplace and the domestic interior, the idea of a primitive material culture allowed white, midinalienable material cultures, while displacing this static version of material culture onto the primitive. This displacement allowed consumers to ultimately claim the mobility and rationality of a modern self. Yet objects posed difficulties for those who would attempt to identify them as expressive of a particular identity. As Will Cather shows in The Song of the Lark, the objects we create circulate across the borders of individual or collective meaning systems and, in their simple material persistence, beyond the life of an individual or collective identity, oppose our attempts to define them.               iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS    Like most writers of dissertations, I have never written one before and likely never will again; which is to gesture towards the idea that a dissertation is not only a unique and immaterial kind of document but also the result of a unique confluence of opportunities and individuals. This one was written mainly in libraries and quiet rooms at home, but it would not have been possible without the guidance, influence, and aid of others, whose voices were often present when they were not. I would like to thank my committee members, Kenneth Haltman, Ann Larabee, Ellen McCallum, Douglass Noverr, and Stephen Rachman, for leading graduate seminars, for modeling teaching, for familiarizing me with Marxist theories and American Studies, for introducing me to methods for analysis of verbal, material, and visual products of culture, for asking hard questions, for opening new doors. I want to particularly thank my chair, Stephen Rachman, for his determined faith in this project that helped me carry it across the finish line.  Many thank their parents, but mine are in these pages more than most, along with my grandparents. I grew up in a family that not only valued education, but foregrounded literature and art, as well as a unique relationship to household objects that has influenced my thinking exive cycles of consumerism confounded me when I was young. Now their attitudes and practices inspire me.  I give thanks to my fellow graduate students and colleagues in years teaching at Xavier University, Miami University, and Michigan State University, for providing a community of educators, scholars, artists, and activists. I give thanks to my students who often inspired me with their intellectual openness and energy, and kept me sharp when research was slow. And I v attles, who single-handedly kept intellectual inquiry in my life these last two years and provided proofreading and encouragement when it was needed most. Two institutions provided invaluable material support, allowing for months of research: the Michigan State University Graduate School and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. In particular, at Winterthur, I was not only given access to archival materials but access to a community of material culture scholars and librarians whose knowledge of American material culture of the United States was both daunting and, unfortunately, rare.    vi TABLE OF CONTENTS    LIST OF FIGURES                                                                                                                       vii  Introduction: Ethnography and the Persistent Mobility of Objects                                                 1       Chapter 1:  and Crafts applied to Wood and Leather                                                                                       22  Chapter 2: The Craftsman                                     67  -of-the-Century U.S.  Fiction and Consumer Practices                                                                                                   107  -Dweller Objects and  Willa The Song of the Lark                                                                                            154  WORKS CITED                                                                                                                           182                    vii LIST OF FIGURES    Figure 1: Woodblock-Style Print Depicting Three Basket Weavers, The Craftsman, June 1907, p. 268.                                                                                                                           67                                                                                                           Figure 2: -The Greatest of Expositions:  Completely Illustrated, p. 68.                                                                                                          90    Figure 3: J. H. Troy Landscape Gardener Advertisement, Country Life in America, Sept. 1909.                                                                                                                                    152                1 Introduction: Ethnography and the Persistent Mobility of Objects  A sense of unfitness and unreality will forever pervade and haunt the imitation which, through the lack of spontaneity, has no justification for being; which has no basis of artistic truth, and we reach the conclusion that any art worthy of the name must strike its roots deep into the life of the people, and must produce as freely and naturally as does the plant in summer. (Anonymous   An interior haunts the pages of The Craftsman bankruptcy in 1916. A hybrid -mell products of many ages and c1 It creates feelings of  -defined use, which must require the entire time of one persoLabyrinth, which, by day, has its perils in the form of threatening bric-a-brac, and through which, passages above, this is an interior that produces mimicry and affectation as opposed to purity and authenticity, wealth and waste as opposed to utility or sincerely American, middle-class needs, and irrational consumer desires as opposed to rational, modern, and often Anglo-Saxon taste. It is also an unmanageable, excessive space that crosses the borders of national, racial, and ethnic vapid and unrelated reproductions or modifications of the past, filled with junk, the hall of Italian Renaissance, the reception room blamed on one of the useful Louis, the library Jacobean, the                                                            1 See Hamlin and  2 Breakfast room Georgian (Colonial having now become plebian), th(126). Imposed on middle-class Americans by producers, department stores and marketers, each one havininto public space, transgressing the domestic interior. The objects that comprise it, in the Arts bent on self-interested business, but they are thus by virtue of suggesting multiple races, cultures, nationalities, or historical periods.  The Craftsman was easily the most successful of the early twentieth-century American Arts and Crafts magazines, communicating a wide range of Arts and Crafts ideals to a middle-class, American audience; and it should come as no surprise, given the values implicit in the above descriptions, that the Arts and Crafts movement has been described by its historians as nationalist and Anglo-Saxon-ist, a movement whose members desired the security of a national, white material culture. Indeed, many pieces published in The Craftsman, from art and architectural criticism to home decorating articles, from historical and travel essays to the monthly article that published the plan of a Craftsman home, attempt to describe the material culture that would meet the tastes of such a national, white, middle-class identity. Not surprisingly, many of these articles idealize English or German styles, or the American past constituted through Pennsylvania Dutch, Colonial, or log cabin styles, while modifying them to 3 fit their concept of modern American taste. As this multiplicity of idealized cultural heritages implies, however, the idea of a racially or culturally unified national style was produced through a verbal, visual, and material discourse rife with its own divisions and tensions. To claim that the Arts and Crafts movement comprised a national and Anglo-Saxon material culture is to claim that material objects and their corresponding subjectivity did clearly and coherently exist; moreover, that the Arts and Crafts movement was by and large a unified movement. We might appropriate time and place, as a displacement, a way to exorcise difference or hybridity, and name the real, the authentic, the true demand of the American consumer, unified in race, class, and ethnicity. Yet the experience of cosmopolitan interiors indicated in the brief passages I have cited above is not merely a displacement.2 Rather, these passages presuppose and work to define potential relationships between human subjects and material objects. As they do so, they begin to describe and evaluate the mechanisms by which material objects should circulate from producer to consumer, or from private property owner to private property owner, but also within and across the boundaries of race, nationality, class, or culture. They attempt to define the terms by which humans can imagine, create, desire, appropriate, display, and live with material objects. On the one hand, they define (and idealize) a version of material culture that ought to be very                                                            2 By arguing that this interior is more than a displacement, I indicate my commitment to taking seriously the relationships between subjects and objects. In this instance, I locate the subjectivity implied within these passages, not merely the stability-seeking subjectivity that would like to displace it. While it is possible to read texts such as those from The Craftsman I cited in my opening paragraphs as creating a particular identity, I would argue that this is premature. Rather, there are other subjectivities implied in these texts and others like it, subjectivities that want to but cannot find their material objects, subjectivities that probe and explore what it means to have an identity with material objects. I will argue of these subjects that their anxieties and desires are real, and that their political limitations and possibilities are worth examining.  4 familiar to material culture scholars today, in which objects express, transmit, enforce, and substantiate the values of the group identity that produces and consumes them.3 In The Craftsman version of material culture described above, human subjects ideally produce and consume objects that express their racial, national, class, or cultural subjectivity. On the other hand, these passages propose another relationship to culturally significant objects, one in which human subjects relate to material objects much like the experience of modernity the historian James Clifford has described  -5).4 The imagination of the interiors referenced above senses and theorizes that objects are capable of splitting off from their human, cultural, racial, or national origins. The interiors created out of this sensibility are made up of a material world of objects alienated from a bounded historical period, place, or group, yet capable of indicating that bounded identity.  This tension between objects as a necessarily interior element of human identities and objects as exterior to human identities continues through the first decade of The Craftsman. Far from merely withdrawing into the boundaries of a racial, national, or cultural identity, The Craftsman consistently turned outward, towards the historical past, towards others defined as                                                            3 that the Arts and Crafts used these words or deployed them in precisely the same way that scholars of material culture do today. However, I do mean to argue that the idea of material culture deployed by scholars and implicit in more popular practices, including both museums and popular culture, can be traced to this kind of early twentieth-century discourse on the relations between human subjects and  (though this is not an origin story  that would be beyond the scope of my argument). As Jules David Prown describes it in the 2000 collection American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture-made objects reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of the individuals who commissioned, fabricated, purchased, or used them, and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger  4 In fact, ere traditions can form rooted materially  5 nations, races, and cultures, towards Russian peasants and Germans and American Indians, no less than towards Anglo Saxon, white, middle-class Americans. This dual inward and outward relationship to objects, in The Craftsman, was assisted by the adaptation of professional anthropology for a popular audience, and for the purpose of aesthetic judgement. Not only did The Craftsman subject mthe people who produced them, The Craftsmanhome architecture, furniture, and jewelry borrowed from anthropological discourse to create the authentically express the cultural or racial identity of white, middle-class Americans.  The Craftsman was not alone in American popular culture in its use of anthropology to understand, evaluate, and navigate the consumer marketplace in the early years of the twentieth al unity. Moreover, official and unofficial guidebooks of the fairs used anthropology in a more experiential way: as an interpretive lens to attempt to understand a bewildering marketplace of cosmopolitan exchanges. Architects, interior decorators, and novelists such as Willa Cather and Jack London used the image of the primitive hut to create a temporary withdrawal from the alienations of the modern consumer marketplace. This dissertation argues that the uses of anthropology in these situations was a reaction against and a return to modernity  a way to create on the one hand a modern, rational, mobile self, that could comprehend and move through a marketplace of alienated, comprehensible objects and, on the other hand a stable, inalienable, primitive interior that could be inhabited and left behind, like a shell.  6 Clifford posits in The Predicament of Culture. For Clifford, ethnography is both an academic practice, tied to the discipline of anthropology, and also a general, even popular practice. In examining ethnography as an academic practice, Clifford examines the ways that professional ethnographers developed strategies of participant observation and written rhetocoherent, fictional, cultural whole over which the professional anthropologist presides as author and authority (40). The ethnographies Clifford studies emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as professional anthropologists turned to ethnography as a new form of methodology and professional currency. However, it is the general form of ethnography that he states to be his tion of off-centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinctrepresentations of culture within academic anthropology and in popular texts, both produces this off-centeredness and becomes a necessary way to navigate it, given what Clifford identifies as the increasing interconnectedness that occurs in globalization. Clifford turns to Bakhtin to understand this condition as a version of heteroglossmakes it increasingly hard to conceive of human diversity as inscribed in bounded, independent boundaries that enforce purity and difference, self and other, and often in unequal relationships of power. Yet ethnography always reflects heteroglossia and Clifford argues that ethnography 7 also takes part in the project of challenging such notions of static wholeness and absolute difference. Clifford argues that this general predicament persists outside of academic practices, however his subject matter extends little beyond literature and high art. The texts I turn to from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal that the concept of culture developed in anthropology was already influencing how individuals tried to make sense of their lived experience, in particular of their experience of the consumer marketplace. While consumer marketplaces were hardly new to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, they had begun to take on a new significance, both in terms of their growing scale and their increasing importance as a means of individual self-fashioning and fulfillment (Leach; Jackson-corresponding, new set of relationships to the objects exchanged through them. In a basic, economic sense, the means of production shifted from the home and small producers to industrial factories or other large scale, production facilities owned by capital (Marx, Capital). Although I do not mean to suggest that this shift was or is absolute or complete, these economic transformations produced a general economic and cultural alienation of individuals from capitalist production, individuals who in turn entered the marketplace as consumers appraising objects, the possession or non-possession of which depends on ratio91). Yet this alienation of object from labor was not nearly as rational an experience as Georg Lukacs would indicate, as consumers entered not simply a world of rationally evaluated objects but also a relatively varied, bewildering, and disorienting fantasy world of objects whose meaning was enhanced by advertising and display art. And if from an economic perspective, commodities were defined by their exchangeability, for which their origins as objects of labor 8 and production were immaterial, for some commodities, the national, cultural, or geographic place of production, alien to the consumer, was absolutely central to their appeal.  Kristin L. Hoganson, in Domesticity, shows that white, middle-class women, among others, turned to home decorating, fashion, and food with cosmopolitan origins. These American consumers selected interior design and imported objects from European countries such as France and Germany as well as from countries that revealed a more Orientalist impulse, such as Turkey, Japan, and China. They made, ate, and critiqued food from around the world, food affiliated with colonizers and colonized, defined and experienced as cultivated and primitive. Hoganson argues that these interests were partially a protest against the confinement produced by American domesticity and Yet, Hoganson argues, although these practices could reflect and create a greater openness to desire to affiliate with imperialism abroad (48).  In this dissertation, I turn to consumer practices similar to those defined and described by Hoganson. However, one significant difference is my argument that such cosmopolitan, capitalist marketplaces are structures that produce disorientation and alienation. The concept of capitalism, and, more broadly, studies of subjects and objects in modernity. Marxist usages of the terms tend to into a commodified or reified thing that becomes both possessible and exchangeable by capitalist subjects (Marx; Lukacs). This usage implies a forced separation of a previous unity, as in a part 9 of a subject forced from a subject, or an object from a subject; and this connotation has made possible the usage of the term as the forced separation of the subject from power to which the subject has a right, a power which the alienated subject actually has in some prior or imagined state.5 These usages also assume a prior natural or original unity or relationship of stability between a subject or object and that which it is alienated from. And this is what those who refer to the alienable qualities of life in modernity suggest: the physical and subjective separation of the individual from society, without, necessarily, implying the power imbalances of the Marxist position. In these usages, the subjects in modernity experience a disorienting mobility created both by their own alienability and by the alienability of objects, and these mobilities create both loss and loneliness and also great freedom. But this concept of alienability both implicates and creates its oppositions: unity, stability, connection, and belonging. In this way, noting the alienability of objects or styles implicates the very possibility of their inalienability: for my study, the possibility of a material culture in which subjects and the objects they create have a proper, stable relationship of race, place, and/or culture.  The texts I turn to, in various degrees of consciousness and attentiveness, find the alienability of objects in consumer capitalism to be troubling. Capitalist marketplaces normalize and prioritize a valuation of objects that perceives them as commodities, defined by their relation to other objects in the marketplace, and comparable by price, design, or status potential, among other possible valuations. As Bill Brown argues through a reading of John Dewey and James Livingston, these practices a culture in which all things seem to have                                                            5 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, although the alienation Hebdige explores is expressed through the semiotics of style (18). 10 German gothic house, say) can grant its owner some sense of stable identity  a culture in which (47). Yet it should go without saying that objects can also present other meanings for consumers; they can leave tracesproduct of human labor, because of their distance or difference from that labor, or simply because of their status as consumers, objects speak of their creation in various volumes, effort, if we are prompted, to imagine the factory labor that might have created a chair we are appraising, even though the factory might be insignificant in our decision to purchase it. Other objects speak loudly to us of origins, historical, geographical, and cultural, despite the fact that their exchangeability as commodities allows them to move across various borders. The discourse of anthropology, through the concept of culture, was a language through which objects could speak of their origins. Yet a cultural conception of objects is partially at odds with the treatment of objects as commodities. Commodities, through their alienability, are able to move across geographical and cultural borders. Cultural conceptions of objects, however, perceive them as created within a bounded identity grouping and the cultural significance of an object generally is determined by that identity for which and within which the object is created and circulates. As the passages I presented in my opening paragraph indicate, some early twentieth century consumers and tastemakers found a cosmopolitan marketplace, where alienable objects and styles circulated together, speaking of their cultural origins, to be a disorienting experience.6                                                             6 In white, middle-class, American women displayed objects in their households that indicated a ve outlook that demonstrated a fami14). Displaying such objects in their home implied access to objects that signified a cosmopolitan array of identities; and Hoganson describes how American women travelled to European and 11 Ethnographic representations of relationships between human subjects and material objects offered a way to navigate this confusion, both by providing knowledge through which a consumer could understand objects and by imaging a stable, cultural relationship between humans and the objects they created and/or used. In a section of her chapter on food, Hoganson examines how ethnography was used by white Americans to represent various food cultures. Ethnographic food writing, she argues, offered Americans a sense of exploration and discovery, the power of scientific authority, and a way to define foreign others, usually to maintain feelings of national superiority (123-128). The texts I turn to perform similar cultural work, yet show that popularized ethnography was hardly confined to discussions of food culture. And ethnographic consumption not only allowed consumers to claim knowledge of and superiority over others, it also allowed them to claim and define their own cultural identity, an identity that would then imply their own proper taste for particular objects. Ethnographic consumption was a way for some consumers to both claim a modern, informed, rational identity and describe their own bounded, stable identities of race, nationality, and class. In response to a cosmopolitan                                                                                                                                                                                            non-European countries, purchasing priced pottery in Egyptian bazaars and the  while less affluent consumers were able to purchase goods imported to their localities (22). In using the temarketpsuch as the travel of consumers and producers, and the importation of objects, that allowed commodities to cross various national, cultural, and racial borders. But also I mean to broadly describe less tangible practices that allowed for the exchange of commodities that signified foreign identities, for instance, the circulation of designs and styles, and the knowledge deemed necessary to identify, purchase, and display foreign objects. An andiron created and sold at a Craftsman store in New York could yet signify a Turkish identity. A couch made in Michigan could indicate both an American and an 18th century French identity. Department stores created elaborate displays meant to create a fantasy of fairs brought craftsman, salesmen, and consumers from around the world to promote and exchange wares and ideas.   12 marketplace, ethnographic consumption worked to define relationships between subjects and objects, relationships that make up what were conceived of as cultural.  The significance of anthropology to the practices I label ethnographic consumption marks Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture, Eric Aranoff shows that the idea of culture was significant to spheres outside of professional anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s. Aranoff writes against the narrative that would center anthropology as the historical locus for the definition and deployment of culture, which then only moved beyond disciplinary boundaries in from a thoroughly interdisciplinary debate in the period [of literary modernism], involving social scientists, literary critics, philosdiscipline of anthropology remains central to my dissertation because the texts that I examine borrow directly from anthropology, and for several interrelated reasons. First, anthropological discourse afforded a professional, scientific status to those who used it. Second, until just past the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology was both institutionally housed in museums, as opposed to universities, and was focused on material culture as a result; speaking of objects in terms from anthropology made sense at the time. And third, these texts are concerned with the idea of the primitive  in many ways the central object of anthropology  and the version of culture it underpinned: a version defined by unconscious, unreflecting, repeated behavior, and bounded homogeneity. Marianna Torgovnick shows in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives that the primitive is a category that reflects on the self that deploys it more than on the other to whom it 13 against an other that, depending on how we might want to define ourselves, can be promiscuous, superstitious, or quite simply sub-human (9). The texts I examine tend to imagine primitive material culture according to several intertwined characteristics that are opposed to both modern selves and capitalist commodities. Primitive material cultures are defined as bound by the dictates of their own customs and opposed to change. They are defined as irrational, lacking in reflexivity, or the ability to examine and improve upon their own production techniques. They are isolated and unified, their boundaries geographically, racially, or by force of custom, fixed against change through adoption of other cultures. Because of this, they are unchanging or slow to change. If the category of the primitive happens to apply to people currently living, they are capable of comprehending or entering into modern production techniques with only various degrees of success, depending on the ranking system used by the person describing them. Yet if the primitive is, quite clearly from our current critical perspectives, a category designed to serve the interests of the selves who define their own modernity against it, the return from the primitive is not simply a return, across a discrete divide, to a modern, rational, aware relationship ocial of the primitive is fundamental to how those who used it tried to perceive themselves and their material objects as cultural.  In my first two chapters, I argue both that anthropological concepts of material culture were fundamental to the consumer practices of The Craftsman and that anthropology understood as a discourse of consumption can help to elucidate possible subject/object relations in the early twentieth-century United States that still operate today. I use the Arts and Crafts discourses of The Craftsman 14 themselves alienable and alienated, navigate a marketplace of alienable and alienating commodities in which both objects and styles circulated beyond what was perceived as their appropriate place, culture, or race. In turn-of the century America, I argue, the threat of such cultural change was managed by recourse to the idea of native material cultures, which offered the possibility of stable racial, cultural, or national identities, as expressed through objects. Anthropologists, by means of an evolutionary discourse in which biological organisms evolved through environmental pressures, perceived those defined as primitives, along with their objects, as tied to physiography. Material objects and styles, based in the natural environment of the primitives that created them, were understood to be a kind of evolutionary organism, capable of progress or regress. Moreover, such evolution was perceived to have occurred through natural selection; change within the material culture of primitive societies was perceived as the result of unconscious, evolutionary forces. The Arts and Crafts discourses of The Craftsman replicated this concept of material culture. Not only did The Craftsman, throughout its fifteen-year run, include numerous articles of popular anthropology, discussing the abilities and limitations of the material culture of -class audience, anthropological thinking seeped into other articles, from do-it-yourself design and cabinet making to architectural and jewelry criticism. In these articles, the object of anthropological understanding was both the primitive, racialized, and ethnicized other and the modern, Anglo-Saxon American. Here, then, the idea of a native material culture could represent the very possibility of unity through the suppression of differences within the racial and national interior, differences made possible by both the distinction between design and production and the movement of objects and styles across the borders of place and identity. Indeed, it was often this anthropological discourse of 15 material culture, rather than the socialism generally associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, that was deployed as an attempt to heal the subject-object split produced in modernity and reproduced within consumer capitalism. The (re)union of self and object imagined in primitive societies and in Arts and Crafts production (either through Arts and Crafts businesses or through do-it-yourself projects) depended on the idea of local, home-based, and unthinking/ unconscious material production; the fantasy of this unification provided escape from the multiple alienations of capitalist modernity. Yet this redeployment of anthropological discourse produced anxieties and slippages, for both Arts and Crafts polemicists and practitioners and their anthropologist counterparts who similarly attempted to use their ethnological lens to understand modern peoples of European descent. If European races were potentially modern by virtue of their self-awareness and rationality, and especially by virtue of their ability to rationally manipulate reified objects, how could their material culture then unconsciously express their innate, racial abilities? And how could such an evolutionary discourse of material culture jive with the evidence of pervasive trade across geographic, racial, ethnic, tribal, and/or national borders in the past and in many primitive societies, no less than in the modern, capitalist, cosmopolitan present?  If taste was unconscious and innate, always  In both chapters, I argue that the Arts and Crafts movement that became popular in the United States posited a consumer that I will call, borrowing from Clifford, an ethnographic consumer: an anthropologically aware, rational, consumer self, capable of navigating a cosmopolitan marketplace. In my first chapter, I focus on one particular Arts and Crafts text, evival of Old Arts and Crafts applied to 16 particular Arts and Crafts philosophy. In my second chapter, I trace this self through the pages of The Craftsman magazine and then out into other texts and marketplaces of the first decade of the twentieth century. I argue that this consumer self can be understood as a version of Walter  flâneur, a figure of the marketplace whose mobility depends on knowledge of the marketplace. Indeed, the ethnographic consumer was a contradiction, depending on the idea of culture to stabilize subject-object relations in capitalist exchange across culture borders, while at the same time maintaining a position of rational, knowledgeable distance that facilitated the mobility of the free, alienable, and rational self. In my third chapter, I turn to the idea of the hut and other forms of primitive dwelling, such as log cabins and sod houses. If ethnographic consumption offered a way to navigate the marketplace through anthropological knowledge and forms of taste based in that knowledge, primitive dwelling offered an imaginative withdrawal from the consumer marketplace of alienated and alienating commodities. Of course, huts, like other elements of a primitive material culture, could work to identify a cultural and racial status against which to define the modern progress associated with American, white, middle-class domesticity and its corresponding architectural forms. As I argue through a readThe Lion City of Africa, the hut could be an object of anthropological and architectural knowledge whose association with geographical and racial limitations could allow whites to claim the rationality and cosmopolitan movements of the modern self. However, the hut also allowed whites to fantasizing about their own evolutionarily produced geographical limitations that secured their race as an inherited, biological characteristic. As The Lion City of Africa hints, the hut could offer an attractive idea of withdrawal from the cosmopolitan marketplace, where alienable 17 identity. Houses produced by professional, modern architects and designers and the consumer objects of the modern domestic interior exemplified a capitalist marketplace alienated from The Sea Wolf, I show how the hut offered a lifestyle unmediated by a feminized consumer marketplace, where especially men could fantasize about a material lifestyle similar to the do-it-not only gendered. From a more simply ethnographic perspective, the idea and materialization of primitive dwelling could be used to construct a native, chthonic architecture for the white, American middle class. In The Craftsman and other lifestyle magazines, the bungalow became the house form most associated with this organic architecture, as its proponents incorporated design elements and rustic, local materials to exemplify primitive dwelling. This primitive dwelling then suggested an inalienable connection to locality through the materiality of primitive design elements, yet it was also a characteristic that could be displaced through a return to the modern, as bungalow designs were also depicted as full of modern convenience. This movement across the modern/ primitive binary is exemplified by Willa Cather who, in O! Pioneers, turns to the forgotten architecture of sod houses to claim an inalienable right to locality that then justifies the capitalist property rights necessary to alienate and profit from the agricultural commodities of that locality. As Gaston Bachelard shows in The Poetics of Space, dreams of huts offer a retreat and a refuge from the modern house, a refuge characterized by intimacy and wholeness. The hut dreams and architectural practices I examine offer the refuge and fantasy of a domestic material culture, where the material world and identities of race, culture, and gender mutually expressed themselves.  Hut dreams offered the idea of complete withdrawal from the cosmopolitan marketplace 18 into the security of a homogenous material culture, a material culture where subject and object The Song of the Lark offers a revision of these anthropological perspectives of material culture that go unquestioned in O! Pioneersarchaeology both with and against popular and academic anthropology that attempted to resurrect Cliff Dweller culture through archaeological analysis in order to concept of culture in The Song of the Lark is influenced by her own aesthetic of incompletion and loss. While anthropology imagined culture and race to be resistant to change, and material objects to be clear expressions of a relatively immutable identity, Cliff Dweller objects were expressions of a people long dead, their identity both mysterious and subject to debate. Willa other forms of human art move and persist beyond the boundaries of a culture both geographically and temporally. Expressions of loss and incompletion, always lacking, never completely defined, material objects take part in processes of cultural exchange and transformation, processes that reveal anthropology and its concept of static culture to be not simply wrong, but bad art. The persistence of material objects not only makes possible their mobilities in capitalism, but allows them to be given as gifts, to be inherited, to be lost and found, uncovered or discovered, or to carry traces of others, even as they are appropriated by a new cultural subjectivity. They are easily defined; that is, they appear amenable to definition, yet their persistence means they are ultimately irreducible. This quality of material objects allows them to Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things19 always defined by their definition by human subjects, things occupy a kind of materiality that exists outside of human definition. Humans can acknowledge one part of this materiality through -9). While I understand the importance of distinguishing between materiality as an object of human subjectivity, caught up and dominated by processes of cultural or psychological signisuggest that material objects have a life that exceeds our ability to control or frame them. Besides as it enters thing status, would appear to have lost its difference from other objects. For me, the word materiality maintains the idea that an object can be unique and irreducible to a generic material thingness, even if all material objects ultimately share that quality. The inescapable fact that objects persist, in their unique or particular materiality, beyond the boundaries of possession by a producer, an owner, a culture, or a people allows objects to both reveal that they are irreducible to any single meaning system and, through that irreducibility, also influence processes of cultural change.  The possibility of articulating a study of culture, and material culture in particular, that understands its subject of study as divided, mobile, transformative, porous, and incomplete is why I would argue, with Aranoff, that attempts to dismiss culture as a lens for and object of study are premature. As Aranoff notes, recent critics of culture in both anthropology and cultural studies have become rightly skeptical of culture. For some, culture has become too ubiquitous, used as a default explanatory tool, lacking precision. For others, culture is a replacement for race or national identities, necessarily implicated in the desire for bounded wholeness, absolute difference, and hierarchical thinking. Aranoff himself argues that modernist texts consistently 20 use the idea of culture for the sense of bounded wholeness it provides. In his conclusion, he by drawing relations between elements, to derive meanings that are always mediations, to call  7 Aranoff, of course, is focused on texts, and on the act of writing. I would argue that objects can be uniquely significant to this critical redeployment of the idea of culture. The persistent stability of objects, and their apparent quietude, on the one hand, has made them suited to cultural scholarship that presumes them to be the expression of a single culture, understood as an unchanging structured whole. Yet it is their very persistence that allows them to move across borders: of property, geography, and culture, and even to move beyond death, from the life of one person or group to the life of another. An early twentieth-century dresser bought at an antique mall suggests to me the previous owners, even as it suggests to me those who designed indicating simultaneously generational difference and inheritance. These objects are mine; they are expressive of me and what has shaped me. Yet they are also not me or mine and cannot ever be completely. Even more than texts, which need a subjectivity to make meaning of them, objects suggest an outside, and the limits of stability and subjectivity. Through their basic                                                            7 As I see it, this relationality and provisionality depends on seeing culture as divided, as a nebulous organism with indeterminate and innumerable parts, more process than whole. Cultural structures generate difference. Subcultures generate conflict. Individuals make alliances, articulate disagreements, change minds, exhibit internal contradictions, wage wars, stage revolutions. Objects, individuals, ideas, and practices move across borders of internal and external difference. A shift towards understanding culture as a process that generates stability and change, as simple as that sounds, is all that is needed to counter most arguments that would want to dismiss culture as a term of study.  21 possessed only because of our own perspectives, which must also acknowledge that they have persisted through a past and will take their part in a future that necessarily exceeds us.  22 Chapter 1:  applied to Wood and Leather  Although it would be a mistake to identify one individual as the cause of a phenomenon that relied on widespread beliefs and practices, Irene Sargent is certainly a significant voice in The Craftsmanbecause of her  largely overlooked  influence within the Arts and Crafts movement, and because of the work her writing does. While hers is hardly an unwritten name within the history of the American Arts and Crafts movement, historians have begun to speculate that she was more than simply the first editor of and most prolific contributor to The Craftsman, more than a hired arguably due to a self-effacing personality that left little documentation about her own life, which was certainly doubly obscured by the gendered marketing façade that aggrandized the stereotypically masculine Stickley.1 Where the idealized biography of the furniture maker and                                                            1 industrial machine labor by reunifying worker and designer, consumer and producer, mind and body, home and workplace. In a way, he works to embody the modern individual, in control and rational, in a marketplace that poses threats to the individual through the division of labor or the supposed dictates of fashion, imposed on the individual from on high. As Sargent laments in ntelligent, alert and vigorous workman declines, until he seems to form a part of the machine which he operates; his human intellect obeying a mechanical power, his individuality forfeited, and his physical liberty confinWithin the magazine, Stickley becomes both the explicit and implicit representative of this manly individual as real or implied author, such as in his do-it-House of  leader, who, striking out for himself, folldevoid of restless, picturesque the strength of ancient traditions, though he scornfully I suppose I one would accuse him of slavish self-promotion, either.     23 polemicist would have him on his own impulses and initiative discovering the European Arts and Crafts movement through books by Ruskin and Morris, visiting Europe to view Arts and Crafts products, beginning his own American line of Arts and Crafts, and devising and launching The Craftsman, documentation does not support this strict chronology of events. Historian Catherine conversion to Arts and Crafts production and the mind behind The Craftsman. Sargent was highly educated: though she never received a college degree, she had taken classes at Harvard with Charles Eliot Norton, through whom she may have been introduced to the Arts and Crafts movement, and in 1895 she had become an instructor of languages at Syracuse University, its great potential  was remembered by her students as an intense, imposing lecturer, if also a kind and helpful instructor; knick-her superior intellect to Harvard medical college for study (Zipf 146). Her writing for The Craftsman bears out both the range of her scholarly interests and the weight she seemed to have assigned her scholarly role. Devoting the first two issues to Morris and Ruskin, her subsequent writings ranged from jewelry criticism to European literature to the pottery and basket making techniques of native peoples. In fact, the persona of the Craftsman, with Stickley as its representative, probably owes its aura of prhetorical skill. Throughout her writings, her critical judgments on subjects varying from Russian socialist reform to the importance of the clock to the Anglo-Saxon home were based in art historical and anthropological discourses of race and culture.    24 While it would be speculative and slightly essentializing to argue, as Zipf has, that the relatively uneducated son of a bricklayer was unlikely to have originated a plan to turn to publishing at a time when he was also just beginning a new business enterprise, it does seem likely that Stickley did not conceive The Craftsman by himself, as both he and most Arts and Crafts historians have claimed.2 rous editorship, Stickley seems to have taken relatively little interest in the magazine. What would become the most widely-read American Arts and Crafts magazine of the early twentieth century was probably attractive to Stickley because of its marketing and, in a broader sense, its branding possibilities (Zipf 154).3 At the same time, while both brought their different insights and goals to the magazine  in fact Sargent would resign her editorship in 1905, most likely because of these differences  to overly distinguish between the two would also be a simplification.4 Sargent was a ghostwriter for 159). And both educator and businessman were tastemakers, attempting to influence how their audience navigated the contemporary marketplace as consumers. In fact, the first documented the year 1900, Stickley paid Sargent fifty dollars to compose the text for his 1901 Chips from the                                                            2 Mary Ann Smith also speculates that Sargent may have played a formative role in the origins of the magazine, though she reasons from the evidence that he was clearly too busy with his furniture business (34). 3 And, though it achieves more than these marketing goals, it is very easy to see the magazine as, in part, an engine designed to enhance consumer desire. Throughout its run, The Craftsman s content within the magazine. And, more generally speaking, many articles work to create the Craftsman persona, with Stickley as its usual specific representative. 4 Zipf speculates that a shift in focus from historical to contemporary art and politics may have led Sargent to resign her editorship (159).   25 Workshops of United Crafts.5 applied to  is significant  or as a document linking American Arts and Crafts to the British movement; it is an essay whose taste-making bridges the gap between the guild-faced socialist design criticism of the would appear consistently beginning at the end of 1901 in the pages of The Craftsman.  Scholars of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States have long perceived it as a reaction against the experiences of modernization; yet most work has tended to emphasize its relations to the late nineteenth-century British Arts and Crafts movement, especially the socialism of one of its core theorists, the writer, craftsman, and decorator, William Morris. Some have gone so far to argue that the Arts and Crafts posed a distinct alternative to industrial production practices. These authors have tended to take Arts and Crafts claims at face value and have perceived the guild-faced corporations of businessmen Gustav Stickley and his brothers or middle-class planned communities such as Byrdcliff and Roycroft, as alternatives to capitalist production (Boris; Kaplan). Others, such as T. J. Jackson Lears, have been more critical in their No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, these modernization. For Lears, the Arts and Crafts took part in the therapeutic revitalization of the middle-class individual; its challenge to corporate bureaucracy, industrialization, and ideologies                                                            5 Both Cathers and Zipf, the two most recent scholars who have researched and speculated on the need to stimulate consumer demand for his novel designs. Both have identified it as a significant text in circulating Arts and Crafts ideology in the United States. original contributions to Arts and Crafts ideology, as they read it as an extension of British principles.    26 of progress was ultimately contained through capitalist consumption. As a poor copy of the more sustained critique of Morris, the American Arts and Crafts would heal the wounds of the modern, middle-class individual, while ultimately supporting capitalist hegemony (74-96).  and nationalist expressions of this contradictory relation to modernity. For instance, Kristin Hoganson argues that the American Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction against the  (41). Along with the colonial revival and mission styles of architecture and -a part of a  The irony of these nationalistic and racially inflected styles was, of course, their mixed  antecedents. Both fans and critics of the colonial revival acknowledges that its origins  were more English than American and that it also reflected Oriental influences  the East  India company had introduced lacquer, porcelain, and Chinese rugs to England in the  sixteenth century, and Chippendale furniture was heavily influenced by Chinese design.  The arts-and-crafts movement likewise had British origins and Japanese inflections. (41) Indeed, home architectural and interior decorating styles promoted in the popular Arts and Crafts magazine The Craftsman borrow from Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and Native American styles, among others.    27 are only ironic from a certain perspective.6 Rather, I would argue that American Arts and Crafts movement was no less cosmopolitan than the practices Hoganson mainly focuses on as it attempted to articulate what can be cultural about objects and consumers in the early twentieth century consumer marketplace. Though it mainly idealizes the objects of European folk cultures,  and slightly alters  turn-of-the-onstruction of the relation between human-made objects and their respective races or cultures. Moreover, as a text that attempts to create demand, it itself becomes a record of a subjectivity of taste through which consumers might navigate a marketplace of commodities. In this chapter, then, I read both attempt to manage the tendency of material objects to circulate across the borders of place, culture, and race. In the Arts and Crafts imaginary found here, objects might substantiate the interiority of an identity, they might transgress the boundaries of an identity, but they might also, as a condition of both possibilities, negotiate between identities.  The essay is unsigned; written in the voice of workers at United Crafts, it is worldly, intellectual, calm, and reasonable. Perhaps mimicking, perhaps compensating for the sparsely decorated furniture it describes, the essay is exceptional even for the often lengthy and reasonable-sounding advertising copy of the period. It transforms the catalogue; though sketches and photographs of the new furniture line occupy a few more pages than the essay, the text is                                                            6 While the Arts and Crafts did attempt to offer a masculine form of domestic interior, to say simply that it was masculine overlooks the way the Arts and Crafts participated in gendered discourse across a masculine/feminine gender structure, as well as overlooking the many women who took part in the movement, themselves negotiating across the intersections of race, class, and gender.   28 placed throughout the catalogue, such that it becomes unclear whether the text introduces the furniture or the furniture illustrates the text. It might be said that Sargent has taken it upon herself to produce a manifesto. United Crafts and its voice within the Arts and Crafts movement by alluding to British Arts and Crafts leaders, and idealizing Medieval and European folk art and architecture. However, Sargent reworks these affiliations. Her polemical targets are not the usual Arts and Crafts enemies: industrialization, mechanization, or capitalism and the alienation of labor from its products; her goal is not a socialist transformation of labor. Rather, the alienability of commodities from laborers within capitalism becomes the precondition of a greater crisis: the alienability of objects from their appropriate race, culture, time, or place. Attempting to define a native taste that will both produce and desire objects expressing that national, cultural identity, Sargent blends anthropology, art history, and Arts and Crafts discourses to navigate a world of objects that is part consumer marketplace and part museum.    Clearly prefiguring the Stickley craftsmaindividual, yet it speaks for the workers of United Crafts, as well as consumers. And as both individual and collective, Sargent punctuates her essay with a repeated if unattributed citation of British arts and crafts polemicist, craftsman, and socialist William Morris to describe the ideal socialism. For Morris, as stated in his address to the Birmingham Society of Arts and Design delivered on Feb. 19, 1879, the ideal art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user,on of the laborer, fundamentally. Arguing from a definition of the human being as a kind of laboring thing, and even merely a part of nature   29 which itself is made up of things that achieve their identity in work, the ideal object is simply the object is the happiness that originates in the laborer; the displeasure caused by industrially produced objects is the feeling that an object has been made without justice for labor, where the we the public  how can we bear to pay a price for a piece of goods which will help to trouble one man, to ruin another, and starve a third? Or, still more, I think, how can we bear to use, how can we exchange of commodities, valued only in relation to each other, Morris substitutes an exchange of objects whose aesthetic qualities are determined through a consequent ethics-based exchange inct racial and cultural identities, generally speaking the objects of human labor substantiate social relationships between all makers and users: producer and consumer are bound through the expressive object socialism. of pain and grief, or economic ruin and starvation, but rather the presence of cultural or racial similarity. That is, Sargent imports into her Arts and Crafts manifesto an anthropological thinking about objects through which she attempts to guide her reader to an understanding of their own identity, and their own true, native and innate, racial and cultural demand, their own material culture.  To this end, Sargent begins her consumer manifesto by defining the purpose of objects in   30 relation to both human cultural and racial identity. Where all humans create objects for both become the result of innate racial and cultural difference: ittle skill his few  household goods, his weapons and his clothing. If now this savage belongs to one   of the superior races, he manifests his embryonic capabilities in the relations  between the constructive and the decorative features of the object which he  creates; in the sweep of his line; in his use of dyes and stains. Thus we find the  most ancient sun dried pottery of the Greeks to be modeled upon the subtlest  curves. We find the early inhabitants of Central and Northern Europe showing in  their ornament the germs which slowly developed into the splendid art of the  Middle-Ages.             If it is so proven that the intellectual capacity of the races, even in semi- civilization, is clearly discernible in their ornament, it is no less true that the  character of each age, or period, is expressed in the objects of use and luxury then  created.           A cogent example of this fact lies in the productions of the medieval crafts.   With these objects before our eyes, we realize the meaning of an art developed by  the people, for the people, as a reciprocal joy for the maker and the user. Perhaps the clearest expression of early twentieth-century anthropology manifest in this passage is SargeFor anthropologists and sociological theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Edward Tyler, Lewis Henry Morgan, Alfred C. Haddon, or Otis T. Mason, human culture experienced progressive evolution. Their models of   31 cultural transformation argued that progress had occurred in multiple areas of human activity, the highest being those achieved by modern European societies. For instance, for these thinkers, human beings advanced from stone tool making to modern industrial production, from simple social interactions to complex modern states and bureaucracies, from matriarchal to patriarchal social organization, from concrete and irrational to abstract and rational modes of thought, or from lower to higher ethical codes. The New York anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan developed an often used model  The Craftsman  categorizing this progress as a three-part movement from savagery to barbarism to civilization.7 Yet savagery and barbarism were not simply past stages of development, known only through the work of archaeology or history. Rather these stages continued to be represented by others, especially by those considered lesser races whose abilities kept them from entering  on their own  into the stage of civilization occupied by Europeans. Many anthropologists  Franz Boas would become a notable exception  argued that it was therefore possible to understand the past, if not precisely the origins, of all humanity by studying these belated peoples, since people of all races had progressed through similar stages. For Sargent, objects take part in this evolution. Yet, at the same time, and perhaps as a Useful and decorative objects  spears, vases, furniture, etc.  are clear expressions of the identi                                                           7 Fair Anthropology Department (Rydell 160). t, see Victor The Material Culture Reader (4).   32 project: her desire to name and describe the cultural and racial taste of her white, middle-class, as the objects that both emerge from and are desired by that taste. As she guides her reader through a world of objects that is part museum and part consumer marketplace, the objects of Germans, Tyrols and Americans, French aristocrats, and others continue and their needs such that these can be perceived by her and her reader, presumably members of a group that does not share those characters, values, or needs. In the passage cited above, Sargent imagines her clear-eyed viewer outside of hierarchically arranged races and periods, but in contact with, examining, those objects and ornamental styles that communicate that hierarchy.  orical period, but present to a knowledgeable subject capable of understanding rational proof and whose gaze perceives the racial and cultural qualities of objects. The objects themselves reflect distinct cultural identities and, at the very least, identities that situate them at particular periods in the developmental model of cultural transformation. In other words, before alluding to Morris or even the objects of the United Crafts, Sargent interpolates her reader through an anthropological discourse of material culture.  Objects were instrumental to early anthropological study, both within the discipline and to popularize anthropological theories outside the discipline by means of such institutions as museums and international exhibitions. Museums, as the institutional base for anthropological -presumed in the object lessons of schoolhouses or department-store show windows indicate the broader context behind and beyond this institutional connection (Brown 89). In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, objects became a powerful medium of   33 communication, capable of educating or influencing an audience in ways that words could not.  Objects not only supplemented the lack of presence in language, but could speak to those multiple others who were perceived to need such a supplement to language-based learning: for instance children, immigrants, primitives, the masses, or members of the working classes. Bill Brown has argued that we can understand the use and display of objects within such institutions as schools, museums, department stores, and international exhibitions as a part of a distinctly turn-of-the-century American shift in the ways that objects could contain meaning within them.  One of the meanings objects could contain  and express  was cultural, racial, or national identity.  I would like to tease out the implications and complications of this idea, in particular continue outside of that race or culture to communicate that interior identity to others.   The debate between the anthropologists Franz Boas and Otis T. Mason about the proper method of museum display, to a certain extent, illustrates how objects could communicate culture and race at the turn of the century. For Mason, and other anthropologists, objects should be classified as biological specimens in an evolutionary hierarchy. A particular class of object could then be displayed in a progressing lineage in order to illustrate the improvements which various peoples had contributed to the design of a particular object, culminating in the material uction. The classification of human beings according to an evolutionary model of race and culture was fundamental to this form of display, as not only did the objects communicate the progress of human industry but also the biological advancement in racial National Museum is simply stated, yet it implies an important shift in anthropological   34 ,ike causes produce like effectscould have vastly different uses and meanings depending on cultural context. For instance, a (Boas 61). Behind these various uses are various historical and environmental causes that determine the use and form of the particular, individual object in question. For Boas, both the the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it passed, and the people with whom it came into Shaping 64). Difference between the particular objects of particular cultures undermined the possibility of arranging objects according to technological advancement, especially if the goal of such displays was ethnographic illustration.  then could a particular object express its true meaning as the ideas and values of the people who used it. Boas writes, studying its productions as a whole. In the collections of the national museum the marked character of the North-West American tribes is almost lost, because the objects are scattered in Shaping 62). For Boas, the display organized by tribal alienated from their perhaps never incapable of expressing cultural significance, yet in its proper context, it expresses identity. Whereas Boas has emphasized the historical   35 character of ethnographic study as concerned with migration and cross-cultural influences, the the complete expression of the tribal other within the western museum. Outside of their own display, they express too much of us, too little of them. And alienation is not the characteristic of the object outside its society as it crosses cultural borders. Rather, alienation is the characteristic of the object outside of its proper display case. In effect, Boas displaces the alienation of the object itself onto improper museum arrangement. Their alienating displacement  different parts of the building transformation through cross cultural appropriation or exchange becomes merely a bad display. The transnational, or transtribal, circulation of objects by means of anthropological study becomes a means of maintaining difference; for Boas, the objects do not transform our culture,  Yet something does cross the boundary between the space of the display case and the space of the viewer. The ability of objects to express difference becomes the precondition of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far Shaping 66). The ethnographic display, for Boas would not only communicate the ideas and values of the tribe, but it would also produce a kind of reflexivity culture, perhaps as reified as the display case; that produced in the moment it confronts the wholeness of the civilization within the display case.    36 The relativism produced by anthropological viewing depends on establishing the boundary that maintains the difference , Boas implies, are not theirs, and though neither has any prior claim to truth, the boundary zed in the ideal display case.8 But in a museum, the objects are meant to be apart from the viewer. They remain on display, available only to imaginative appropriation; they are not meant to be taken home. The museum is a space where the viewer can momentarily confront another culture and potentially leave it behind, even if converted to multicultural relativism. In a society whose material relationships were so often structured through commodity production and the rights and practices of private property ownership, the museum is a space of collective ownership, yet one where the other remains other, and is not wholly owned, even by the collective. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the museum was only one space where Americans could confront ancatalogues, and magazine advertisements displayed and sold a wide range of goods that indexed 9 And, partially contrary to histories of taste that argue that the American white middle class purchased to indicate their own innate rational, civilized, modern sensibilities, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed the                                                            8display  and the geographical method of anthropological study implicit in it  could also be used to perpetuate an evolutionary model of cultural and racial progress. Chicemphasis on geographic tribal context with an evolutionary model. The difference between Mason and Boas was potentially less than Boas different (81-82). 9For a description of these marketplaces, see Kristin Hoganson, Consumers Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity.   37 popularity of the material culture of those considered savage, barbaric, indigenous, primitive, folk, peasant, or otherwise belated subjects of modernity (Hoganson). Of course, the idea that consumer taste is central to differentiating categories of identity is not new. Pierre Bourdieu, in his study of French consumer society from which he derives his theories of taste, has argued that taste hierarchies create cultural distinctions that help reproduce class hierarchies within consumer capitalism. Scholars of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States have similarly argued that taste, closely allied with hierarchies based in ethical sensibilities, was one way the white, middle class worked to naturalize their racial and class hegemony within the economic systems of slavery and industrial capitalism. Whites ethically consumed a modern, civilized material culture.10 produce cultural hierarchies through the category of taste. Yet her essay, at the same time, negotiates the very boundaries of taste that scholars take for granted. What did it mean for an material culture? What made it possible to think about the relationships between taste, race and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century? What did it mean for an object to be both inside and outside, or to cross the boundaries of a material culture?  What I intend to show is that the marketplace she navigates becomes a space where borders are crossed and negotiated, and where hybridity is both experienced and managed by means of circulating consumers and circulating material objects, both defined through their relationship to ethnography. That is, the consumer she constructs is not at all firmly placed within their own material culture, consuming                                                            10 See chapter  Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth Century Domestic America Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature.   38 objects that help to establish that identity. Rather, attending to her essay allows us to see a consumer whose identity, and whose material culture, is not at all given.  [in this case Medieval] objects before our eyes, we realize the meaning of an art developed by the people, for objects was, of course, a staple discursive move for the British and American Arts and Crafts movements. Yet what I would like to draw attention to here are the two discursive mechanisms , which serves to argue a clear, homogenous identity), as well as other material cultures confronted within the essay, come to express cultural meaning. In the first place, the precondition of this ability is punctuated in the paraphrase of Morris, which recurs four times throughout the essay. works to substantiate the taste that springs from the values, activities, and abilities of the people that creculturally and racially cosmopolitan marketplace, confronting and leaving behind various material cultures, in order to locate their own true taste, and their own inalienable things, their own material culture.  mechanism by which distinctive cultural tastes bind identities across production/ consumption circuits, as well as across hierarchical social arrangements. For if Sargent, mobilizing anthropological discourse to navigate a consumer marketplace, imagines objects expressing is that such objects be a response to a demand that arises from within that race or culture, and   39 on of medieval arts, she begins by idealizing the products of the medieval artisan as himself unified, -artisan, is oftenest the product of the perfect union and cooperation of the brain, the hand, and the pleasure of the creator; as we may find by examining the household furniture and utensils handed producer with the industrial system that splits designer and management (brain), laborer (hand), and consumer taste (pleasure), she holds out the possibility that production can be unified into one individual, that then reproduces itself, and expresses both itself and its unification, through the object. the king, or the yeoman, we see the same honesty of material, the same thoroughness of construction, the same skill in decoration, the same depage preceding this passage, stating two of her first principles, S; and then again echoing  becomes the pleasure the social hierarchy and among producers and consumers. Sargent then can conclude this section with the second restatement of her refrain: they are all products of an art developed by the people, for the people, as a reciprocal joy for the mak  40 community through the expressive object, and are the qualities of an object within a community thusly bound. But, in these passages, in addition to this communal identity formed and stabilized  In this passage, Sargent describes an ideal relationship between human subjects as producers and consumers and the objects that work to bind them together such that they can constitute a unified material culture. Yet she also continues to construct, to interpolate as her reader, what I will call, modifying Clifford, an ethnographic consumer. On the one hand, Clifford locates in twentieth-century anthropological texts a constructed ethnographic authority, one that claims to be able to know, understand, and interpret the cultural object of study. On the other, he locates both this self and the cultural wholes it produces as its object of knowledge, the problem of personal and cultural dissolution. In this second case, the ethnographic subject becomes not simply a way to describe a form of academic disciplinary authority, but to locate a more general response to the dislocations of modernity. In his chapter Heart of Darkness Diary and his ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific of a snotion of off-centerednmainly in relation to their place in museums. We can think of the ethnographic subject in   41 e its collective identity/ies, yet at the same time, capable of circulating, of alienating objects, in its positioning as a modern self. The dilemma for this self is, then, to both possess and reify objects and to be possessed by objects that necessitate an emotional, racial, cultural, or national, unconscious, response. This dilemma both undermines collective identity and makes it possible.  He or she needs the objects of the racially or culturally defined other to construct him or herself both as a true collective identity, and to displace that identity, to enter the modern marketplace (which here includes the home, as well as production and consumption spheres of economic activity) as alienable. As the Boasian museum-goer defines his or her own culture in confronting own.  In the paragraph immediately following her description of medieval production, Sargent writes: In order, then, to bring on an age of artistic activity, of widely-diffused artistic  knowledge, which shall be similar in character to the Middle Ages, the maker and  user must understand and value each other. The maker must bend his energies to  produce objects uniting in themselves the qualities of utility, of adaptability to  place, of comfort, and of artistic effect. The user must choose with discretion the  objects which shall decorate his home; carefully providing that they express his  station in life and his own individuality; furthermore that they respond to his  everyday needs. In this passage, then, the consumer and the producer meet in the marketplace to exchange objects that express each other. The precondition of this intersubjectivity is recourse to their separate,   42 rational, conscious understanding of themselves, their art, their homes, and their place within seem to suggest that the consumer and maker should both pursue something like the needs of the rational, autonomous modern self. Yet if such needs were identified and pursued, the result could not help but be a culture and a material culture, a complete, whole identity  whether racial or d interior to that identity and an imperative to create it  becomes the precondition of both free, even rational, individual choice, and the substantiation of  On the following page, Sargent both elaborates on the characteristics of cultural taste, even as she continues to construct her form of ethnographic consumer subjectivity. Sargent asks her reader to imagine a middle-class American consumer who purchases and displays seventeenth- or eighteenth-century aristocratic French innot animate the picture whose background he has prepared with so much pFrench interior she imagines, having sprung organically from the cultural demands of the French, aristocratic past, cannot continue in the present within the marketplace defined by the home-market circuit. Such styles must be displaced to the museum or theater where they can remain firmly outside othe past, severed from the present. To the ethnographic consumer who perceives the cultural temporary   43 inorganic, flat and lifeless.  Yet, if the French aristocratic interior, along with those cosmopolitan interiors that are proper middle-class American demand, her ethnographic consumer can still enter, evaluate, and consume the objects of a cosmopolitan marketplace. Attempting to define a middle-class taste that doero72nd Street New York House  a decidedly cosmopolitan interior. And then she argues that: To find the same characteristics of beauty, elegance and effectiveness [as  displayed in the Tiffany House], we need only to reconstruct from extant objects  the Tyrolese peasant interiors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; always  bearing in mind that these objects were the possessions of sons of the soil; that  they were created from materials which lay ready to the hands of the craftsman,  who were themselves the every-day laborers of their own hamlets. And in these  objects, as well as in the household fittings of other European countries, as also in  the American colonial furniture that belonged to poor people, we see everywhere   must be developed by the people, for the people, as a reciprocal joy for the maker  and the user.  In this passage, Sargent places her ethnographic consumer before objects that once more suggest cultural qualities  yet the qualities are even more specific. The objects both suggest indigeneity within a natural environment, and within a b-  44 static, chthonic material culture  a culture that produces objects and interacts with them in such a way that they are inalienable, that they express and constitute a bounded cultural identity. Yet this unconscious everyday, it would seem, only works to stabilize a cosmopolitan circulation of objects. For not only do the peasant, folk objects that Sargent idealizes seem to anchor and in a way make more inalienably possessible the cosmopolitan qualities of the Tiffany House, she yet partially displaces these inalienable qualities of objects. The third restatement of her echo of Morris serves to further suggest that it is possible for the American middle-class to organically middle class possess these qualities, or are the qualities necessarily alienable because of their center in relation to them?; what might it mean to ultimately be off center in relation to the qualities of taste and demand that  The fact that she continues to move with her audience through a cosmopolitan marketplace of various material cultures, suggests that the refrain from Morris, and the whole, organic, inalienable material cultures it forms, serves to anchor the movement. That is, these cultures provide some stability, some imaginative respite for the modern self within an alienating modern world of alienated subjects and objects. But this interpretation is perhaps too close to theories of the modern self, its alienation within modernity, and its need of stability. It presumes a self prior to the self in modernity, a self that lacks stability within modernity and searches for that which it lacks. Yet the ethnographic consumer that Sargent creates for her audience is hardly   45 the suffering, alienated self lamented by many cultural critics of modernity. Rather this subject is implicitly valued as clear-eyed, rational, strong, controlling, intellectual and, above all, mobile. In fact, we might say that this subject is crafted in an opposition to the static, unconscious, racialized, whole material cultures it views. Yet, I will argue, that both are necessary, that both ethnographic consumer and material culture are a solution to a tension within early twentieth century discourses of race and especially of whiteness; that the ethnographic consumer works to create a modern self that is also racially, culturally, and nationally whole. For if the modern self is supposed to be rational, controlling, and mobile, able to manipulate reified things, and free of emotional, uncontrollable connections to objects, as a white self, different from other races, it must also have those qualities that make it racial. It must somehow be biologically, emotionally driven by a connection to the material world. It must be both modern and non-modern. The ethnographic consumer and the material cultures it perceives, becomes a way to navigate a potentially disorienting marketplace of cosmopolitan commodities, while maintaining a racialized, modern consumer self.  The ethnographic consumer that Sargent constructs in this essay emerges in relation to a marketplace of objects that are mainly western in identity. Eighteenth-century French, German peasant, Medieval European  these are the interiors, styles, or design patterns she and her reader materialize through their cultural knowledge. Yet, within the essay, Sargent hints at a broader conception of the contemporary marketplace. Ancient Egyptian and Greek styles or interiors are examined and partially or fully displaced. But besides entering a marketplace of western or historically canonical objects and designs, Sargent works to appropriate the objects and designs   46 significant decorative factor; as we may find by reference to the work of savage tribes, in their The Craftsman proper. Here the semicolon and the fact that United Crafts performs decidedly modern consumer discourse and the anthropological discursive knowledge she only alludes to here.   For the relationships between human subjects and the objects they create and desire, as well as the relationship between the ethnographic self and the bounded material cultures it perceives, bears more than passing resemblance to anthropology, the anthropological subject, worth remembering that Sargent begins her essay, as I have shown, by referencing a developmental model of cultural evolution, and by discussing the productive abilities and  as unconscious demand, based in a bounded identity, bounded also by natural environment that to a certain extent determines that demand  reflect contemporary anthropology. I turn now to close readings of the texts of two turn-of-the-century anthropologists to show how the cultural n anthropological discourses of primitive material cultures. These texts work to construct the boundaries of material cultures through unconscious demand, tied to local, natural physiography, which links taste to the hierarchies produced in the developmental model of cultural and racial evolution. These relationships work to construct the terms by which a group of people can possess a material culture. Yet in turning to these texts I hope to show not simply how Sargent borrows discursive knowledge from anthropology, but how the very tensions Sargent attempts to resolve through her   47 and produce as their objects of knowledge, bounded, pure, static material cultures. These texts, I will show, construct a category of primitive material culture that works to make the concept of bounded, coherent material cultures possible, at the same time that they both interpolate a modern self, as their anthropologically aware audience, and attempt to use their anthropology to understand the modern, white, civilized self.   The British biologist and ethnologist, Alfred C. Haddon, provides a clear and sustained argument from the period claiming that decorative art should be studied scientifically through evolutionary biology. In the first place, Haddon argued, art could be studied, like plant and animal species, in their geographical distribution, and in their change through time, their han metaphorical similarity to biology; as the product of biological forces, decorative art was, in fact, a product of evolution and so could be studied not merely like biology but as biology. Art could be said to evolve or devolve.  Moreover art, as an expression of a more or less advanced, more or less complex human being, would be an expression of its place in an evolutionary hierarchy. Inasmuch as elements of  elements that indicated species being. Variation of decorative art between various ethnicities and races could indicate differential ethnic or racial ability and/or the hostility of a particular natural environment. Yet variation within an ethnicity or race could indicate evolutionary progress since evolution, Haddon argued, depended on variation in order for art, with the human species, to evolve. The natural selection of particular patterns and designs becomes for Haddon an   48 explanation of taste, though Haddon mainly discusses natural selection as operating through producers, not consumers. Consumption becomes a secondary reflex of racial or ethnic production such that racial or ethnic demand follows seamlessly from production. The evolution that operates through production, Haddon argues, occurs not through rational, conscious choice,  (309). corative arts that evolution. To support his contention, Haddon refers to current theories of national development that found nations to progress or regress according to racial or ethnic characteristics, and not the conscious direction of particular individuals. But his consistent argument, one fundamental to his Evolution in Art, Haddon finds modern western societies too complicated to be objects of study; for a very complex matter, and its complete unravelment would be an exceedingly difficult and of New Guinea, he argues for the study of a more simple society, and echoes evolutionary erstand civilized art we must study barbaric unconscious natural selection of decorative art occurs in civilized, industrial societies, can be overcome, Haddon  The natural selection of decorative art operates, for Haddon, in a complex interaction   49 with the environment beginning with visual impressions of reality. Whereas aesthetic criticism is lies in  the object that produces is any guide, would depend on a complex set of environmental factors that would take into account racial and ethnic human variation but would depend fundamentally on natural environment. Haddon writes: same operation of external forces, but the material on which these forces act is also infinitely varied. The diverse races and people of mankind have different ideas and ideals, unequal skill, varied materials to work upon, and dissimilar tools to work with. Everywhere the environment is d the human hands would evolve within the environment of a particular geographical region such that objects would become an expression of geography. Yet this would not preclude trade and other forms of cultural mixture and Haddon argues eloquently for material culture as a form of cultural to a certain extent, dematerializes cultural borders such that culture, in the form of material objects, crosses boundaries and transforms identities. Indeed, objects can do so more than people, for Haddon, since they can circulate beyond the society that produced them.   Still, if Haddon acknowledges change through a boundary-crossing object, his arguments consistently work to stabilize and resist this form of influence. In providing examples of how designs evolve, for instance, he cites an 1849 study by Sir John Evans of ancient coins in which   50 becomes simpler and more symmetrical is a taste for foreign decorative art, these objects are partially transformed as they become ultural rank of the people that import a particular object can transform it according to their own different abilities, the category of the primitive or the savage works to essential conservatism of the human mind is a fact of prime importance. Savages, children, and the less mind reveals species-specific characteristics, HaddonAnd the category of savage or primitive offers a similar displacement in relation to geographical locality where the artist; and in order to understand the designs of a district, the physical conditions, climate, flora, fauna, and anthropology all have In this passage, cultural exchanges are minimized, as are, implicitly, the ability of a human society to somehow act on their environment. subject to the same operation of external fo determining factors of a materinatural selection reproduces the pleasurable sensations of visual impressions of the environment according to racial or ethnic abilities, fundamentally, cannot provide for a demand that would initiate cross cultural exchange or trade.  In fact, whereas his concept of visual impressions   51 seems to make material culture a reflection of environment through the mirror of racial ability, he ends his book seconding the British anthropologist Flinder ds of a race. Each group of mankind has its   When   we see on the Celtic work of the period of La Tene, or on Irish carvings, the same  forms as on mediaeval ironwork, and on the flamboyant architecture of France,  we realize how innate is the love of style, and how similar expressions will  blossom   language, which may be borrowed, like language, from one race by another, but  which survives changes and long ecl For Petrie and for Haddon, taste and the objects that correspond to it are alienable, but only to a limit. They can be borrowed, but not, it seems, owned, other than by the race of which they are a cial character is found then in taste for particular objects.  It is the clarity with which the anthropologist identifies this taste that produces the ultimate subject of this passage. ethnographic subject as clear-eyed and rational in relation to the obvious and unquestionable wholeness of racial and cultural taste and its corresponding material expression. And yet Petrie cultural exchange, but it ultimately works to stabilize and resist cultural transformation. What is borrowed must ultimately be returned according to the dictates of property rights. If cultural   52 exchange is merely a borrowing, it must eventually recourse to purity, to wholeness, to wholeness depends. Such moments where the exchange of cultural objects seems to hazard the possibility of disruption and transformation are common in anthropological textbooks on material culture.11   Indeed, for Otis Mason, still considered one of the more racist anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (possibly because of his conflict with Boas), it might be considered a central, persistent, motivating tension. His 1895 monograph Origins of Invention: A Study of Industry Among Primitive Peoples similarly locates taste in relation to racial hierarchy and geography. Like Haddon, he takes as his focus the material culture oWhereas Haddon is concerned to show that material culture is an unconscious expression of a particular people, Mason argues for a conscious problem solving that he argues occurs in invention, a process that occurs in primitive peoples no less than civilized. Indeed, Mason is concerned to argue that primitive or savage peoples are very capable inventors, not mercapable of invention. Yet this hardly prevents Mason from ordering inventions into a hierarchy and telos of progress. Indeed, all of culture, from art to technology to government becomes, for gory of Enlightenment science. ll chan                                                           11 Since many such styles and objects were literally sold at the time, and not simply borrowed or lent, it seems possibly to argue that capitalist commodity exchange challenges the reification of the boundaries of race and culture.     53 culture:  Exactly as the inventive faculty, the things invented, and the rewards have passed through interesting evolutions, in which also the old ever survives into the new,  so in the matter of stimuli there has been a parallel history. The pains of hunger  are not the same in savagery and civilization. The desire for houses and clothing,  and conveniences and art-products, and society and literature, and the explanation  of things are childish in the one case, most exalted in the other. The evolution of  human want therefore, is a part of the history of invention. (19) If human needs evolve, they are hence intimately related to the environment in which they those that act from within the individual, and thos (18). While the former include the desire for food, drink, and the desire for shelter or safety (18). If wants are a result of disharmony with a particular environment, material culture, as the response to that disharmony, exists in harmony with that environment:  Just as there is an intimate relation between animals and plants on the one hand, and  terrestrial phenomena and resources on the other, giving rise to phytogeography and  zoogeography, so in the natural history of inventions there is the same relation never to  be neglected. This correspondence or harmony between arts and industries and all that   goes to make up environment enables the ethnologist to comprehend the properties of   each region, and often to decide whether an art is indigenous or exotic. (19)  Here, however, there is a tension. If evolution occurs in relation to environment, then an   54 evolving material culture, if not the wants it satisfies, must be indigenous. If objects that are across the boundaries of a geographically, culturally, and/or racially defined people?   remains open  or is perhaps troubled by the tensions he encounters  is illustrated by comparison with his 1894 article in the Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, written one year before The Origins of Invention. Writing to explain the principles behind his classification of ethnographic exhibits at the Worlds Columbian Exhibition, Mason imagines a primitive time period where racial separation produced a correspondence between geographical region, race, language, and material culture, with material culture especially conditioned by geographical region:  it must be observed that in the primitive period of the races, physiography  suggested a rule for the arts, and society created a demand for their products. The  activities of each race depended upon the atmosphere, its density, temperature,  moisture and degree of purity. And intimately associated with these phenomena  would be the amount of distribution of rainfall, dew, frost, ice and snow. Each  region would have its natural scenery, sea-shore, plains, lowlands and highlands.   Also its mineral productions, its plants and animals, as a whole, would be to each  of these areas a sort of genus loci. In contact with this environment each race  would be compelled to invent a series of arts connected with food, clothing,  shelter, developed in the exploration of nature for material and the preparation of  the material in various crafts and the consumption of the product. The intimate  association of these arts with the locality would operate independently of    55 races when they came together in the centripetal process of commingling them.  (209). Here, geography, in its minute detail, constitutes material culture as well as taste.  Races are  And such are the ties between physiography and material culture that even in the next geographical limits, material culture is not alienable  that is, even if human beings attempt to take their material culture with them in migration, they are under the governing power of h culture area indigenous. They are materialized under the patronage and t and reproduce. Yet later, Mason imagines a temporal progression whereby progress in taste undoes this correspondence between material culture and geography, and frees the primitive group from environmental control. In fact, Mason has opened up a possible slippage between region decides what food, clothing, shelter and bed men must use. But as they progress, they become independent of this law, they widen the culture area by the multiplication of wants and the refinement of taste until the whole world becomes an unique, comprehensive and undivided The Origins of Invention undergoes a progression from savage to civ  56 local to cosmopolitan. Of course, his description of progress in taste might be said to refer only to white Europeans and thus be said to justify domination  the loss of a geographically bound taste justifies the migration of the imperial subject into those lands it would subjugate. We might also say that the alienability of the non-primitive individual depends on the ability to free himself from the physical and subjective confinements of geographical location and that the freedom to move across boundaries and yet be at home depends on this discourse of taste. And this also then depends on the maintenance of boundaries such that there are still homes  to be at home anywhere presumes that there are still localities to be at home in, and hence still those who are able to become cosmopolitan.   Yet, in this passage, home, apparently the material cultures for which this cosmopolitan  for if we take home here to refer to the material culture of a geographic locality, as a withdrawal from the foreign, or  culture that expresses a bounded identity, depends, for Mason, on the primitive. For Mason cannot locate the primitive he describes in the present. Having spent so much time outlining the relation between human identity, material culture and geography, his conclusion undercuts the possibility of substantiating any stable relation. If the modern savage is generally the precondition for describing the savage lost to history, the primitive of the past, Mason concludes acknowledging that this purity is lost:     57 Already this dispersive work had begun when America was discovered.   Commerce had scattered mineral substances far and wide. No one knows where  the Pueblo people, the Mexicans, the Peruvians obtained their corn, melons and  multitudinous beans. The history of the Plains Indians regarding their houses,  bows and arrows, and even their dress, will be difficult to write. Even the ideal  forms, the artistic forms and patterns, had begun to scatter and to possess this  continent. It would be difficult to decide whether the curious shell gorgets  described by Mr. Holmes were made on the spot in Tennessee from a shell bought  in Florida, or bought already made in Florida by one who had migrated from  Mexico; or bought in Mexico already made from a Florida shell and carried to  Tennessee. The number of examples might be multiplied but I think I have made  myself clear. [italics added] (216) Trade, exchange, the migratthe possibility of a local racially or culturally pure home. In this passage it is no longer the geographic region that determines or rules the material culture. Objects, moving beyond locality, has moved from environment, to the cosmopolitan human, and finally to a cosmopolitan object.  This last subjectivity, within objects themselves, and based in their ability to move across cultural and geographic boundaries as if alive, poses difficulties for the anthropologist looking for intellectual clarity, the ethnographic self looking for cultural or racial identity.12  and decorative shells, in the end, indicate movement, dislocation, and                                                            12  (Sense of Things 89).   58 transformation more clearly than they indicate cultural stability, geographical determinism, and conservatism.      I have spent considerable time focusing on the writing of Mason and Haddon because The Arts and Crafts discourses of The Craftsman do not simply reflect such anthropological thinking, but operate within similar tensions  between objects that somehow circulate across racial, cultural, and geographic boundaries, and between evolving material cultures tied to locality by an evolving taste; between human beings as rational producers, manipulating objects to solve problems and human beings as unconscious organisms whose material culture, with biology, evolves in response to environmental conditions; and fundamentally between modern, indigenous, and hence inalienably linked to geographical locality through evolution. Both constructions that not only produce the wholeness of material cultures; they also must navigate the dislocations they perceive, objects that move across cultural boundaries, carrying ghostly United Crafts: Considered purely from the artistic point of view, our models offer an interesting  study in the evolution of form. We have, in accordance with what we feel to be  the demand of the future, abandoned the historic styles, which were movements  justified and natural in their time, but which correspond to conditions now, to  some degree, nonexistent. Occasionally, in some pieces of our work, the student  will catch a faint, distant echo of a world-famous ornament, but he will be a    59 Darwin of design who can trace the intervening links between the primitive form  and our own presentation of its evolutionized descendant. Such is our use of the  lotus, the convolvulus, and other beautiful plant forms, which, to speak     Linking United Crafts not simply to an economic  simply put, what will soon be popular  she defines their products as the next step in the evolutionary progress of the species. Moreover, she places her audience, again, in the position of an ethnographic viewer   who might be able to perceive what the objects somehow express: both the process of evolution they have undergone in transcending the primitive past, and their transcendence. speak sciensuch that the objects that are produced and reproduced fit the ideal she repeats, for the fourth The joy felt within the material culture that corresponds to its true identity works to substantiate the interiority of the authentic middle-class American identity.  Yet this joy also exceeds the boundaries of the distinct cultures of which it is the precondition, expressing the demands of others to those ethnographic consumers who can attend to the objects.    60 clear. Is it physiographic determinism or a determinism based in race or culture or is it simply a would seem to suggest?   The first issue of The Craftsman, devoted almost exclusively to William Morris and published in 1901, ends with several short, unsigned essays. advertisements for the United Crafts furniture, photographs of which illustrate the essays. Written, or at least influenced, by Sargent, they repeat and develop many of the values, and even cultural demands to which it is a response. Imagining the falsehoods of reproducing sixteenth- or eighteenth century French or Gothic within an American metropolis, these essays argue that an life, movement, and inventnd 13 The                                                            13 Gustav Stickley, in recounting his conversion to Arts and Crafts design in a 1913 Craftsman article, eight years after he and Sargent had parted ways, would confess that he had started building Arts and Crafts styles before he became a convert to the movement. Yet his reflection His Arts and Crafts style originates, he implies, not in capitalist business considerations, or through the influence of other Arts and Crafts practitioners, but fully as a result of evolutionary forces. Interestingly The Craftsman becomes a further extension of these same unconscious     61 material culture in these essays thus works to navigate and reconcile several tensions; the cosmopolitan city and the implici Moreover, this material culture environment and the essays argue against the use material cultures determined by local physiography. And yet, perhaps strangely, it is precisely this interest in native materials that seems to produce a completely rational, conscious consumer within the text, displacing the more unconscious elements of demand. In other wordhonest, and clearly expressing structure through style, also connect the modern, rational, comfort-seeking consumer both to the rational system of production and to the natural landscape:  -day, with the idea of development everywhere dominant,  in the sciences,  in educational methods, in all that furthers human intercourse, comfort and  progress  we find the mood of the century impressed upon the material and  necessary objects by which we are surrounded. Even our beds, tables and chairs,  if planned and executed according to the newer and sounder ideas of household  art, offer us a lesson taught by their form, substances, and finish. We are no  longer tortured by exaggerated lines the reason for which are past divining. We  have not to deal with falsifying veneers, or with disfiguring so- We are, first of all, met by plain shapes which not only declare, but emphasize  their purpose. Our eyes rest on materials which, gathered from the forests, along    62 the streams, and from other sources familiar to us, are, for that reason, interesting  and eloquent. We may, in the arms of our reading chair, or in the desk before  which we pass our working-day, study the striking undulations in the grain of oak,  ash, elm, or other of our native woods, and in so doing, learn the worth of patient,  well-directed and skilled labor, of that labor which educates. (iv) harelationship to objects is no longer the response of unconscious joy, but the clear-of the rational, modern individual perceiving the qualities of human-made things, intelligently, clarity that meets, and hence perhaps validates, the needs of the modern consumer, connecting them to a comforting yet modernizing system of production. With passages like this it is no wonder that the Arts and Crafts has been perceived by its historians as a precursor to modernist 14 Yet, this figure, perhaps wholly modern, is formed in opposition to the desire for cosmopolitan goods, or materials that circulate beyond familiarity. This consumer, and their sentences that produce a rational, unemotional consumer serves to still movement and change,                                                            14  In his more sober passages, Loos argues that ornament is a waste of time and money, not least because it promotes the has no connection with us, has absolutely no human connections, no connections with the world    63 and to produce an interior formed against cosmopthe rational consumer, unmoving and contemplative at home or work, is further calmed by materials that similarly do not circulate beyond the boundaries of familiarity, boundaries that serve to further place and define the modern individual.  seem to resist circulation, that meet the rational needs of the modern self, or that meet the unconscious demand of the culturally determined consumer. Neither passively reified, nor structural, nor still, but active, affective, even ornamental, the grain suggests liquid movement; a movement, I would argue, that is ultimately unpossessable, that does not respond to the needs so carefully defined by Sargent. This passage works to suggest a different quality of material goods, s, I would argue, this is a quality that resists cultural identity, that is not definable by cultural meaning.    Ultimately, both the conditions that determine the demand of the consumer and the objects that respond to that demand remain open; as does the experienced through properly produced objects. And for all her attempts to craft a bounded material culture for a bounded identity, Sargent and the Arts and Crafts interior remain open to the material culture of others. There is another interior that would soon haunt  or rather inhabit, in a more homely fashion  the pages of the Craftsman, occupying the Arts and Crafts home by means of wall coverings, stenciled friezes, floors, rugs, and other furnishings; an interior that does not turn to Anglo-Saxon Europe, past and present, or the national past of Anglo-Saxon European immigrants as a way to create an imagined, stable continuity in race and nationality.  A Dutch-styled, rugged summer house overlooking an equally rugged coast line in Maine possesses   64 -a-design whose architecture is meant to recall a Swiss or English Cottage, rough weave of a Navajo blanket, in tones of reddish brown with stripes of dull green and a cold motif in the desiup by soon-to-be Craftsman architect and designer Harvey Ellis, contains numerous Donegal  (Ellis 321). In such Arts and Crafts decorating schemes, the objects, styles, and production techniques of   are accepted, even idealized. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a house celebrated within The Craftsman that did not make room for nations. Moreover, these are hardly the cozy corners, themed rooms, or carefully arranged collections that, like museum exhibits, separate out objects and the bounded, distinct identities throughout the houses it inhabits, integrated into the general decorating scheme. What are we to make of these apparently transgressive interiors? What are they if they are not, apparently, guilty of imitation, affectation, or cosmopolitan confusion?  Perhaps they continue to provide that inalienable material culture, a link to home, to the relationship between private property and locality, house and homeland, that the white, modern, middle-class individual can both possess and displace to the primitive other, becoming alienable in the process. Perhaps they work to navigate the cosmopolitan marketplace, and hence to provide the very possibility of a stable identity within a capitalist consumer culture that links   65 then becomes central to producing a modern self within a globalizing world, a cosmopolitan Art I have already examineproducts of an art developed by the people, for the people, as a reciprocal joy for the maker and eem to be outside, looking in. ethnographic observers, merely examining the cultural qualities of objects;  are not simply lost consumers,  scientific, rational, moderns;  possibilities and its limitations for the significance of material objects as political agents? What other feelings or connections might a material object that expresses others to an ethnographic consumer elicit?15                                                            15 Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine. For Greenblatt, there is a kind of wonder that ingenia  though I hope have drawn attention to the way it elicits a softening of boundaries, where    66 produces an ethnographic consumer out of a mixture of anthropological, Arts and Crafts, and popular home design discourses. My main focus has been to show how this ethnographic consumer is invested in locating the possibility of an inalienable material culture to navigate a mainly imports anthropological thinking to attend to European historical and folk objects, in my next chapter, in which I continue to explore the Arts and Crafts writing of Irene Sargent and Gustav Stickley, I turn more particularly to representations of those others considered modern or it is not until later, The Craftsman, that the articular, I turn from the ethnographic consumer Sargent interpolates in her trade catalogue essay, to one that navigates more concrete cosmopolitan marketplaces such as international expositions and trade shows. And while I show that the anthropological concept of material culture continues to work at producing stability for an off-centered ethnographic consumer, I hope to attend to those moments of tension where purity is undermined, and both objects and subjects work to meaningfully cross borders and challenge hierarchies, creating unexpected forms of connection and coalition. 67 Chapter 2: The Craftsman   Figure 1: Woodblock-Style Print Depicting Three Basket Weavers, The Craftsman, June 1907, p. 268.  Three women sit arranged in a triangle in the foreground of a flat, white field. Baskets are scattered beneath them, beside them, and before them, most finished and two in the process of being created, held by the women who are weaving them. A woman with dark hair and braids sits in the rear of the group and looks down at the basket she works on, absorbed in her work. Her hair color and features are ambiguous; does her dark hair, in braids, suggest that she is an American Indian? The baskets that have been made are meant to suggest American Indian patterns. But the weaving woman in the right foreground is clearly meant to be of European descent, her white hair and features suggesting Anglo Saxon racial typing. And the features of the braided-haired woman, though simplified and obscured, are not clearly meant to suggest that  68 she is an American Indian. The white woman holds her unfinished basket and, in the process of weaving, yet looks up from her work, to the left of the image, apparently at the third woman. This third woman looks away from the picture plane, down at two baskets that occupy the center of the image, or perhaps off into the background. Her hair is white echoing the white hair of the woman in the right foreground. But, wrapped in a blanket whose patterns echo those of the baskets, her body and features are so obscured that she is lumpish, material; more object than subject, the shapes that suggest her body more so suggest the baskets she sits among. She does not weave. In the background of the image are two, short, gently sloping hills that cross each other symmetrically.   This simple, unsigned woodblock-style print, composed in three tones   black, dark gray, and white  suggests a simplified economy composed of natural environment, the human beings that transform it, and the material culture produced through that transformation. And the image arranges these terms to produce a series of correspondences. The large baskets suggest the  heads. The shallow baskets suggest the shape of the hills in the distance, as do the decorative bands on several of the larger baskets. The baskets two of the women hold near their bellies, suggest wombs, the rushes they weave straying to the ground like umbilical cords. The figures, through objects made of a living part of the environment, are still organic organisms, linked to the environment. Outside of a marketplace in which people trade things across borders, here production occurs firmly within the borders composed of natural environment. The hills not only separate foreground from background, but create a bounded place. There is no exchange, apparently no producers and consumers, no private sphere, no homes or department stores, or industrial production. It is a purified economy, in which there is only a kind of indigenous production that happens effortlessly, without history  69 or thought. And as women, they suggest a form of primitive industry; anthropology of the time suggested that women had been  and continued to be  the primitive inventors and producers.1  Yet there are differences. In the appearance of the figures, racial difference is both suggested and denied. And in their gestures, too, there is difference. The potentially American Indian woman looks down, absorbed in the object. However, looking up from her work, gazing at the woman whose form most suggests objecthood, the white woman seems to have the greater awareness of the three. She transforms the work of indigenous production from unconscious absorption in, and reflection of, the landscape, to something that is conscious, gaining subjecthood in the process. She is also, I would suggest, the individual the white, middle-class viewer  who, like her, gazes, but at the image  is most asked to identify with. Yet, occupying the landscape with the other figures, she returns from alienated consciousness, hence enjoying the unalienated production suggested in the other figures, who occupy various states of objecthood. Like the baskets they weave, the three figures work to merge with and emerge from the environment they occupy. But the possibility of emerging from and circulating beyond the material environment rests with the white woman, whose expressions and gestures produce a liminal, indeterminate position. The placement of the image, similarly, suggests a liminal space, an in-between hybridity that attempts to navigate and reconcile cultural tensions and anxieties. Appearing in the June 1907 issue of The Craftsmanpiece of tragic fiction about a middle-class, white man who suffers from neurasthenia and marries poorly (Harboe); while the article that follows is a piece of popular anthropology by Frederick Monsen, who made his living as a photographer of and lecturer on American Indians.                                                            1 For the argument that women were primitive inventors reproduced within The Craftsman, see George   November 1903, pp. 124-137.  70  organically linked to their desert locality through objects and values, irrational in their beliefs, belated subjects a modern world has left behind.2 The text preceding the wood block is a narrative meant to suggest particular individual subjectivities which the reader can perceive and feel because of a shared cultural understanding, while the following text is a detailed account of a culture more object than subject. Thus plaover-tragedies the first makes possible.  The white woman in the image who produces the material culture of the indigenous primitive, seems to have found the peace this form of production implicitly makes possible, but she remains apart, capable of returning beyond the image. Indeed, since only one kind of thing is produced  basketry  the image perhaps manages to elude the more complete acceptance of the other that would be suggested if the white woman were depicted in the midst of a greater cultural milieu.3 Yet by its very neglect of a greater imagining, displaced to the piece of anthropology that follows and supplements it, in which Monsen himself undertakes various strategies to emphasize hierarchic difference, to make the other completely other, the image would seem to hazard that very possibility. Indeed, it is impossible to know the racial or cultural identity of the lumpish woman looking away from picture plane  suggesting both white American and American Indian, she is a completely hybrid figure: becoming object, other and also self, linked                                                             3 It is also possible to say that the image works to stabilize industrial capitalist production in which one product is also produced over and over again, by placing such production firmly within the environment, yet away from any sign of the domestic sphere of consumption.  71 more materially and inalienably to the other. If the recognizably white woman becomes subject through gazing at this unidentifiable woman/object, it is not clear whether she objectifies one like herself or another, whether she gazes through power or alienated longing or both, in a kind of displacement through which she both maintains her freedom, her alienability, and locates a kind of stable, inalienable relation to environment and material culture. Turning the page from fiction to ethnography, the reader of The Craftsman perceives themselves reflected in the page as an ethnographic consumer  a modern self, a cultural and racial self, a self that somehow also   Such distinctions and tensions can be found throughout The Craftsman, which had published its first number at the end of 1901, almost a year after the Chips catalogue. By 1907, Sargent was two years past the end of her affiliation with Stickley, but in 1901 she was firmly in icles.  And while the first few issues would focus on the British Arts and Crafts movement  the first two were devoted to Morris and John Ruskin respectively  the magazine slowly enlarged its compass to include home plans, interior decorating tips, do-it-yourself columns on crafts such as woodworking and weaving, and a wide variety of criticism, from architecture, to painting, to industrial arts such as pottery, textiles, jewelry and home furnishings. In fact, as a journal of home decoration, serious about the criticism of contemporary arts and crafts, The Craftsman consistently engaged issues of production and consumption that produced a cosmopolitan perspective.   Showing direct knowledge of the contemporary manufacturing and design movements of other nations was an important component of developing a reputation as an important designer or  72 s reflections in Craftsman articles mythologizing his transformation of the 1890s, trips abroad were key components of the narrative, substantiating his new products through a well-worn, and well-respected form of self-advertising. But the many articles in The Craftsman that report on international design movements would seem to suggest that this kind of information was not only important for professional designers and craftsman in garnering respect and authority, it was of some interest to the public themselves. Writers for The Craftsman reported on American design movements, but also on crafts and design movements of Germany, Russia, England, France, China, and especially Japan, among others.4 This is not to say that the magazine argued consistently for cosmopolitan consumption. Rather, in their criticism, the  One relatively consistent basis for judgment was the criterion that contemporary craft be both rooted in national, cultural, and/or racial traditions, and so represent a particular national, cultural, or racial material culture. Throughout the magazine, anthropological thinking, as in  applied to Wood and Leathersuch judgments; the subject/object relations produced in anthropological discourses of evolution and the primitive were deployed to repair multiple forms of alienation and navigate social differences within an international consumer marketplace (with transnational cross-currents). Anthropology served to create the past which the progressive present had evolved from and also to produce the borders of material cultures, including the cultural tastes that secured those borders. And as anthropological discourse became a basis of criticism in The Craftsman, the subject produced within this discourse, the ethnographic consumer similarly emerges. In this                                                            4 Often Craftsman articles were based in the reporting of other journals such as the international design magazine, The Studio, though occasionally the articles were written on the basis of first-hand reporting (and often the articles are written as if the reviews are on the basis of first-hand observation, even if they rely on secondary sources).  73 marketplaces of trade shows, international exhibitions, and travel routes. But the significance of this figure is hardly confined to the Arts and Crafts movement, and I compare this figure to other consumers who similarly expose rifts in U.S. material culture; figures such as Uncle Hank in sque Around the Pan from 1901. I argue that, emerging in the writing of Sargent, Stickley, and others, the ethnographic consumer works to establish stable boundaries; -centered figure is involved in a circulating movement that attempts to manage cultural boundaries but also reveals moments of transformation that cannot be contained. emergence and persistence of anthropology within The Craftsman, since evolution and native taste form the basis of both praise and criticism. Several recent scholars of the American Arts of mascambiguous, however, as revealed in the debate between A. D. F. Hamlin, who wrote the often 902 issue, and Jean seven months later in July of 1903. Hamlin interprets the Art Nouveau as merely a reaction against the past, a loosely affiliated movement united only by a At its worse, writes Hamlin, it is unrestrained, unnatural, artificial, given to individual caprice expense of attention to nature and tradition. Moreover, it can be disturbingly cosmopolitan as in  74 one  personal, capricious, eccentric, and obviously impossible to harmonize with any room less art colony in Darmstadt, Germany allows Hamlin to name a true American taste, exemplified by his own taste:  The furniture in this colony, all strikingly novel, seems to the comfort loving American  singularly ungraceful, stiff and uncomfortable. There is, it seems to me, a notable lack of   simple American house at Lake Forest, Ill., by H. Van. D. Shaw, likewise built for its  designer. It is equally straightforward, but less ostentatious and affected, and inclines one  to query whether we do not here already possess, as the result of a natural process of  evolution, responding to national conditions, what is being sought for with much blowing  of trumpets and hard labor in the Old World. (139)  Here, then, by contact with an international marketplace, and perhaps, also a movement that transgresses a national taste, Hamlin is able to link his own taste to American taste, and then again to an example substantiated through the idea of evolution and the well-defined domesticity produces the imperative   -conscious creations. Strangely, he quotes the Belgian critic most naïve, the most vigorous works are those which most perfectly display the impress of that natural seal  the personality of a people or tribe  because they were executed outside of all  75 the anthropological underpirent of public taste, to a real demand  argues that the Victorian period was one given over to bric-a-brac and imitation, a problem that originates in factory production in which the workman is only responsible for reproducing earlier designs. For Schopfer, this constitutes a break with the evolution of earlier styles of western decorative art, such as the Romanesque and the Gothic which break with evolutionary principles, it is the result of too consciously copying preceding styles.  ts period, constituting a kind of unconscious production based in period taste (236). However, when the factory worker can only produce imitations of earlier periods (Schopfer strategically desire of invention became extinct in the practitioners are free to produce as their individuality demands, and since, through cultural and  76 environmental determinism, individual cNouveau reconstitutes the natural evolution of western style. Art Nouveau thus is the product of a liberal economy in which free individuals produce their own style; yet they are limited by evolutionary pressures. Copying, consciously appropriating the styles of preceding periods is outside the dictates of factory production such it can be an evolving thing, an expression of the craftsman that, by virtue of evolutionary pressures, is also a response to the demands of an evolving people. , the alienating relationship between consumers and their possessions is potentially repaired through recourse to an evolved and evolving taste  one that is unconscious, unimposed, and that emerges organically from producers and consumers cosmopolitan marketplace where styles circulate beyond their appropriate locality, society, or historical time. Anthropological discourse helps these art critics to name a unified interiority of mopolitan marketplaces.   The relationship between anthropology and marketplace produced in this article and in other articles within the pages of The Craftsman echoes another early twentieth-century  1851, international expositions, or -states gathered to share the products of their various industries for comparative, competitive, and educational purposes. Descendants of country fairs and closely related to traditional markets, international expositions were designed to display those products, inventions, and ideas that indicated the most up-to-date state  77 of scientific and technological progress among modern nation states. In addition, they were spaces where individual nations could attempt to create foreign demand for their industries and so compete with other nations for foreign consumers. Host nations and (especially in the United States) host cities, used international expositions to boost themselves and their products  though As hegemonic cultural productions, they projected a vision of progress that mitigated particular social conflicts and general feelings of disorientation brought on by modernization. In their spectacle, the good of capital, the middle classes, and the working classes were represented as one and the same. In the United States, they could serve to create a shared national, white identity, benefiting the elites who planned the fairs by producing a vision of national capitalist society in which hierarchic difference was minimized. And international expositions in the U.S. of imperialism.  anthropologists, including Franz Boas, George Mason, and W. J Mcgee planned anthropological exhibits as educational tools for the American public to illustrate racial and cultural hierarchies.  While many of these exhibits were simply collections of objects, beginning in the United States peoples considered primitive, inferior, and necessitating colonial rule.5 These people, in many                                                            5 Rydell, in  identifies the 1889 Paris Fair as the primary antecedent for live anthropological villages at U.S fairs (55). Otis Mason and fellow Smithsonian anthropologist, Thomas Wilson, as delegates to the Paris fair, constitute a causal link. For the  78 cases new imperial subjects of the United States, were asked to reproduce their own material culture at the fair to illustrate their way of life, and the racial and cultural limitations their material culture was meant to embody in the shadow of such structures as the buildings of the Pan American Exposition of 1901. Exhibition buildings and their contents that indicated the modern, white, rational, and civilized were opposed to native villages that indicated the savage, the primitive, and the racially limited, the latter doomed to assimilation or cultural or racial extinction within the narrative of evolutionary progress. One popular commentator, writing about meaning of Anthropology and the scope of the department in order to see the unity of the these strange exhibitions of life, so foreign to his own, this earth, he became a thoughtful spectator, his conception of the exhibition was broadened and his admiration for its well-through an anthropological lens could the visitor become a conscious viewer, able to understand and not simply consume. Without this anthropological understanding the disunited fragments  (Everett) Yet, even as fairs mapped a temporal distinction between a primitive past and a civilized modernizing present onto various racial and cultural distinctions, they can be seen as spaces that allowed people to reproduce the very boundaries of racial and cultural difference. Anthropological villages, and the cultural relationship between people and things they                                                                                                                                                                                            footnote 36 to chapter 2, where he references Mason describing his experiences in Paris before the History of Human Habitations Display at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.  79 attempted to teach, were significant to this project. Mason was impressed with the 1889 Paris  great emphasis was placed on the use of indigenous materials within indigenous economies of production and consumption. At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the American fair where scholarly anthropology had its greatest moment, this emphasis was especially pronounced. Anthropological villages continued to express the possibility of authentic, bounded identities through material culture. The nine Ainu that traveled from Japan to participate in the St. Louis Fair brought not only all of their possessions but an original dwelling bought by the American anthropologist that accompanied them on their journey (Breitbart 65). Where native villages would seem to indicate the indigenous, the local, and the environmentally limited, many fair exhibition buildings and sculptures signified both modernization and modernity. Transient and fleeting, built of plaster of Paris and wood, they were temporary structures, most built for a season only. Thus opposed to the permanence and locality perceived in indigenous cultures, the temporary structures expressed an alienable materiality, through which the alienable individual to transform and educate their visitors. But modernization itself would have been the spectacle, where visitors were asked to idealize the modern, rational, and the bureaucratic creators of the modern material world, and consume this material world in passive amazement. The transformative element was mitigated both by the idea that the spectacle was a part of a material culture continually changing into the future, and by its very spectacular nature, since it was at least partially alienated from the visitors that nonetheless consumed it.6 Anthropology not only                                                            6 In this way, one might see anthropology as a way to resolve the alienation a society of the  80 served to create distinctions between modern and primitive, it also served as a way to dissolve the tension between spectacle and visitor, and to name the possibility of a bounded material culture, or to create the idea that visitors could be participants or non-participants in this culture. In many ways The Craftsman, through its ideological attempt at taste-making, was engaged in a similar educational project. While Rydell has argued that the fairs taught their visitors anthropology, Craftsman reviews of worperspective with them. Unsurprisingly for a magazine devoted to the criticism of world design movements, The Craftsman ing both designers are prevalent throughout The Craftsman during the time period under examination here  especially reviews of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase ExhibAmerican Exhibit is featured in several articles (United Crafts shared an exhibit with the Grueby 1900 and the Milan exposition of 1906. Several of these articles are signed by Stickley or Sargent and reflect the kinds of values that Sargent and Stickley often brought to their criticism.  scourse as a polated fairs visitors though anthropological exhibits, arts and crafts criticism of the fair can show how anthropology already inflected the tastes of some of the fairs visitors. Reflecting and producing a way of experiencing the material                                                                                                                                                                                            spectacle promotes, which Guy Debord describes.  81 cultures and the tastes of others, these articles can, in turn, serve as an opening to begin to are often yet invested in similarly hierarchical knowledge. riticism of the St. Louis fair as a whole is that the participating nations have not selected displays based in the presented arts and crafts that owe too much to failed to select and display objects that either represent actually existing national designs or indicate true national characteristics (492). The mimicry that Stickley finds , it allows Stickley to name both the possibility of an authentic material culture and the culture that would end, such as to adorn some special place or apartment, with whose architecture they each nation participating should be distinctive, original, plainly indicative of racial traditions and  82 uld transform modern social organization into a people and protect those innate racial expressions that Stickley seeks. In a later passage Stickley attempts to manage the slippage between nation and race or nation and culture by idealizing state control thyet directing it, in such a waprogress within a national marketplace would be maintained (495). The state becomes a kind of ideal consumer whose taste ensures the purity of national taste, a taste that itself, however, is already innate, unconscious. Only then, argues Stickley, when all nations participate in such a museum, technical school, workshop, and universal market, and would constitute a congress and s fair becomes a space through which to displace hybridity and imagine a collection of pure racial and national identities exchanging themselves, but remaining unchanged in the exchange. Stickley imagines a static cosmopolitan marketplace as if there were a boundary that could allow cultural exchange without producing cultural transformation. But the authentic objects that would meet the conditions of this exchange are not present within the majority of the exhibits. We might say possibility of crafting and possessing the true originals. Irene Sargenthat manages to locate the authentic material culture that Stickley, in the above essay, cannot.  83 Yet rather than lamenting a cultural or racial lack in modern, western societies, Sargent uses The Craftsman issue of October 1903, contains a preface written by Sargent which runs without apparent break into her translation of an essay with the same name, originally written in French by the poet and dramatist Gabriel Mourey. defense of the European discovery of the value of Russian peasant art and its revitalizing powers, more particularly ftive schemes icularly to theorize the subjectivity of taste orthodox cathedral Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky built in 1861), she writes:  The barbaric splendor of the place proves that there is a beauty other than the one which  is subdued by rules and refined away by civilization. The sensitive heart bounds in  response to the unfamiliar, crude modulations of the unaccompanied chants; the eye,  grown languid by delicate feasts of soft shades, receives a vitalizing shock from the  almost blinding gold and the primary colors of the altar and icons and vestments. modern civilization and return to a ed as she continues, she writes itive, elemental character which suggests the wildness and freedom of the steppes, and open vistas into past ages, when the  84 passfantasy of primitive life, whole, self-contained, and identical to its past, is sparked by a e touch of the Byzantine works of his imagination and intell In these passages ethnography provides the basis for a taste that sparks a fantasy of primitive life. Yet, this is no anthropologist tourist or consumer spectator, but also absoluteoutside but capable of experiencing great pleasure in accessing the interiority of that life, in longer notes ththe Russian historical past. Rather this vision works to expel the hybridity of the Russian racial identity already described and categorized  only the primitive and the barbarous is pictured.  separate out a people based in behavior, artistic production, and race. Yet the subject that experiences this vision has become more tangible as Sargent describes this subject navigating the real city of Paris to discover a kind of ethnographic display enacted by real people. And the subject that continues in the translated material, which Sargent notes had been published two  85 months earlier in the French magazine Art et Décoration, merely allows this ethnographic aris  by his ability to circulate through the space of the city which, overwritten by texts the flâneur has and has not consumed, allows him to step, literally walk, outside of himself. Benjamin refers to city in the flâneur, producing their knowledge and experiences and their desire to know and knows about the domicile of Balzac or of Gavarni, about the site of a surprise attack or even of a baracade, to be able to catch the scent of a threshold or to recognize a paving stone by touch, like bourgeois self, and even the human self, to know and experience the city through the other. Yet lurking in the 1935 expose and even in the convolute is a different version of the flâneur, one  The 1939 essay begins with a theoretical depiction of a reified world, arranged by an inventory point by  86  the which the flâneur apparently was adept at identifying through physiognomy. Before the phantasmagoria of the crowd and of consumer objects, the flâneur was free to circulate. Yet this freedom was in league, according to Benjamin, with the capitalist and the detective.  From the flâneur emerges the consumer in the department store who wanders and dreams of commodities, and occasionally buys them. Like the detective, the flâneur identified people and things by their features, categorized them, or followed the traces they left to produce knowledge of them.  Individuals become representative of static types or members of the crowd. reflections in the convolute on flâneury suggests that this ability of the flâneur and other aroused in the urbanite by other people, people whom, in the overwhelming majority of cases, he more intimate knowledge of the other, and this lack of knowledge produces anxiety. But it seems possible to think about the phantasmagoria of the marketplace and the crowd as a way to manage and make knowable other kinds of unsettling otherness and to keep it distant.   Thus we find Sargent and Gabriel Mourey, translated by Sargent, imagining a flâneur who experiences the phantasmagoria of the city and the exposition through the lens of anthropology as a way to create managed borders, dispelling hybridity, keeping the other knowable, discrete, and distant. Mourey guides the reader into a display where wholeness provides the fairs counterpoint: the Russian peasant art exhibit, whose everyday household  a whole of curious, ingenious  87 resurrection, and new management of peasant art production, which tends to provide figures with which Mourey and his invoked reader can identify. Much like the state imagined by Stickley in  spiration only in the familiar sights of their life and surrounding nature, allowing their racial imagination to flow freely through their describing the househMourey, are art that works to define the true artistic tradition of Russia and the Russian race. The art of the people, as anthropological objects, works to create the possibility of national and racial purity. The essay, however, constructs the managing upper classes as appreciative of these works, but different. Like the bourgeois aspect of the flâneur, they are the conscious subjects, able to understand, identify, and appreciate. Moreover, they are not bound by this identity they yet foster, and both claim but do not claim as their own. This dynamic is made more tangible for the reader in the eanthropological exhibits at the 1900 Paris fair, yet there were none in the Russian pavilion.  And so the imagined scene supplements this lack, and perhaps even further allows the domestic scene of production to withdraw from the marketplace of the fair into a self-r, ingeneous, passionate, childlike, grave,  88 sorrowful soul of the people which has never suffered the corrupting touch of high civilization corrupting knowledge of capitalist exchange that enables wants to multiply beyond the borders of a stable identity, the imagined people captured in their domestic interior work to produce the reader as modern and capitalist.  The articles in The Craftsman reveal the ways in which ethnographic discourse was not simply a part of the official narratives of the exhibitions. This official narrative echoed and perhaps reinforced a subjectivity of taste based in ethnography that had already distributed through popular culture. Yet these Craftman articles also reveal that this form of subjectivity and the figure it produced, which I have called the ethnographic consumer, were not simply an attempt to create hierarchies, but were an attempt ds ability to resist change, to produce, like the fashion cycle, a world where the impression of newness hides a persistent structure. But we can also see the fair as a place where various phantasmagorias produced by bourgeois subjectivity were challenged, where coherence was overturned, and where we see a different kind of flâneury that works to break down reified identities. I turn now to several texts published in conjunction with U.S. expositions which reveal how popular understandings of culture, race, or nationality worked to navigate experiences of the exhibitithese texts also imply the presence of other voices and  In 1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company published two official books of  89 photographs illustrating fair with photographs or engravings of photographs taken by the  Official Photographic Company, including two unnumbered but varying editions of The Grandeur of the Exposition at St. Louis: an Official Book of Beautiful Engravings Illustrating the World's Fair of 1904 (one found at the Winterthur Library and another from the University of California) and a much longer text titled The Greatest of Expositions: Completely Illustrated. These texts work to both replicate stable boundaries and establish figures capable of navigating these boundaries freely. The photographs separate out national buildings in discrete photographs and describe the various participants in the fair as engaged in replicating national tastes through architecture, food, or interior décor. For instance, the caption for an image of a Japanese tea house modeled after Kikakuji, found in both The Greatest of Expositions and the Winterthur version of The Grandeur of the Exposition at St. Louis, keepi, found in both versions of The Grandeur of the Exposition at St. Louis as well as The Greatest of Expositions, in particular tend to reinforce these stable boundaries, where live participants are found in all three texts, albeit for varying images, Moros, who come from the inlanout these various people represented by national or cultural exhibits are made discrete through ating their uncontrollable resistance to circulation), fair patrons are often pictured moving across these various boundaries.   The photograph of the Japanese tea house (figure 2) is particularly striking as several women in western dress are pictured walking across a wooden walkway bridging a lake placed  90 before the tea house. Unidentified and unidentifiable other than as fairgoers, these figures seem to stand in for the viewer of the images, the reader of the text, as they blithely move across the page, through a world of otherwise stable identities. On the narrow bridge, they move through the exhibit remaining separate and untouched. Fairgoers are of course depicted sitting in the open courtyard of the teahouse, while other fairgoers step up to observe them; it is as if the tea drinkers were actual participants in the exhibit. Yet the caption for the image works to reestablish Figure 2-The Greatest of Expositions: Completely Illustrated, p. 68.    91 boundaries based in race and taste, and to maintain the freedom of the fairgoers to continue their cosmopolitan, flâneur-for it or not, just for the pleasure of being served by the dainty and charming maidens whose the fairgoer experiences is one that seems to reinforce difference: the inability of the Japanese workers to fully escape their own culture as they interact with their freer patrons.  The greatest degree of cultural transformation is hazarded in the caption to two photographs found only in the Winterthur edition of The Grandeur of the Exposition at St. Louis, a one page dyptic, depicting a group from the Philippines, all said to be Filipino Igorrotes. The image at the top of the page depicts two men working over a large pot, while another man looks on from the stoop of a door to a wooden structure. The image below this depicts seven men, women, and children grouped for a portrait, facing the camera before a wooden house thatched with straw. The images themselves seem to work like other images of anthropological exhibits, to frame the participants for the fairgoer as typical of their cultural or racial being, which is more or less primitive, more or less restricted to non-modern patterns of daily life. Yet the caption suggests otherwise:  The Igorrotes learned many American customs since they have been in this country. Lately they have  taken up the bicycle and are learning to ride. One of the members of the tribe has become  quite proficient in operating the typewriter and has written a letter in fairly good English  to a friend at the islands. The accompanying picture shows the home life of the Igorrotes  while at the Fair. They are preparing a meal using American cooking utensils. The hut to   92 the background is a typical Nipa dwelling built by the Igorrotes on the island.  The caption begins to produce an idea of cultural transformation, where the Igorrotes are capable  life. Of course, one way to interpret this caption is as an argument in support of American colonization. Rydell notes that the Philippine village at Buffalo had provoked discussion over what role Filipinos would play as new American subjects; many imagin photograph of Filipinos, both Igorrotes and Moros, has described the Igorrotes in particular as a  people capspecifically tied to their potential membership in a defined American way of life, while they are  The caption continues with a description of one of the individuals in the group portrait: description of Antonio works to similarly navigate the line between colonized assimilation and difference, the caption continues to frame Antonio and his wife as becoming modern, middle-class Americans. The caption describes Antonio as one of a group of Igorrotes who had visited President Roosevelt. And thus sanctioned as Americans by their visit to the head of state, s home is the telephone which he has learned to use. The phone is  93 connected with the office of Dr. Hunt, who has charge of the tribe at the fair, and Antonio makes  interpolated into an American consumer society, engaged in making modern improvements to their home. If we are invited to think of Antonio as a typical American newlywed, engaged in the American pursuit of home improvement for himself and his bride, Dr. Hunt becomes a kind of consumer.   But this celebration of American industrial production, potentially a validation for colonial expansion and imperial rule, also works to destabilize boundaries, to hazard a kind of exchange into a binary hybrid: American culture and Igorrote culture, different, discrete, and identifiable. Indeed, American culture, in a way, gains its discreteness from being placed next to n production, does American production adapt to Igorrote consumer needs? Or has Antonio become completely American, interpolated into an American consumer society that produces his wants and meets them at the same time, as bicycles, typewriters, cooking utensils, and telephones?  Of course we subject who assures the reader that these wants are acceptable, either American or unthreateningly Igorrote. Yet these are, a. Igorrote or American, perhaps neither Igorrote nor American, they are ultimately unknowable to the reader, indefinite yet capable of being communicated to Dr. Hunt with a kind of openness  94 that is not defined by the caption or the images.7 ideologies. The cosmopolitan circulations of products and people and the exchanges of objects and ideas these fairs promoted could be framed by the official, hegemonic narrative. But there are other experiences that these dynamics inspired  experiences that could be seen as critical of Around the Pan, which narrateExposition, is perhaps an unlikely source for these experiences. In fact, Rydell has referred to this text as a justification of racist and imperialist ideology that worofficial narrative. Yet the text is far less homogenous than Rydell has claimed. Uncle Hank is a stereotypical Yankee, an object of national pride, a cosmopolitan consumer with an anthropological perspective on other races, cultures, and nationalities, and a trickster whose joking exchanges with others work to destabilize anthropologically justified differences between cultures and races, between modern and primitive, and between colonized and colonizer. Through these shifting identities, over his multiple day stay in Buffalo, Uncle Hank navigates a fair populated by others who, often as interested as he in jokes and tricks in their social or economic exchanges, challenge cultural or racial stereotypes. Certainly a scene depicting two                                                            7 That this caption imagines a transgression of boundaries is suggested by its absence from both the University of California edition of The Grandeur of the Universal Exposition at St. Louis as well as The Greatest of Expositions. While the Philippine exhibits are absent from the University of California edition of The Grandeur of the Universal Exposition at St. Louis, they are foregrounded in The Greatest of Expositions. The one page introduction to The Greatest of Expositions  exchanges described in the Winterthur edition of The Grandeur of the Universal Exposition at St. Louis here are minimized as amiability while the Filipino people are generally described and depicted as primitive types.  95 black men borrows from black-face stereotyping. And Uncle Hank is a character who engages in nationalist competition with men and women from European, South American, and Asian countries, as well as from the Philippines and American Indian tribes. Yet the tensions depicted in the text do not simply produce racist and imperialist ideologies.  Popular adaptations of official anthropology play a minor role in the narrative. However, regional and national cultural and racial difference is central to the text. The narrative opens by envisioning the Buffalo fair as a place where difference is produced, and difference itself is the object of humor: In its humourous aspect it was replete with interesting features. There was the Arab, with  his baggy trousers; the Mexican, in his preposterously widebrimmed sombrero, and the  absurdly togged- who were all rich in mirth- provoking possibilities. The visitors, coming from every walk in life and from every  locality, frequently contained specimens of humanity of such queer make-up that not to  laugh would stamp one as entirely devoid of the sense of the ludicrous. (15) others, and a normal self, indeed a comic, ethnographic flâneur, who perceives, identifies, and mocks difference. Uncle Hank is partially a character who reproduces this experience of the fair for the reader. And Uncle Hank, well informed about current global events, new technologies and consumer goods, is a character who is also defined by his knowledge of current anthropological studies of others. He enjoys visiting the live anthropological villages located , admires first objects representing new technologies and then life groups cast in plaster representing Native  96  Uncle Hank reflects current concepts of great beelever in pictures and statoos tew educate ther people. Naow look et them figgers! You cud read a hull book thru and not git half the information frum that ye cud get from one glance at (166). In these passages, we might perceive Uncle Hank as moving from a display viewed because of his interest in the modern technology of his own culture to a display viewed because of his interest in the technology and culture of the primitive other, thus working to support cultural distinctions reinforcing hierarchy-producing ideologies. Bill Brown has noted how the life-group exhibit, popularized by the Nordic exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial exhibition, became a staple of anthropological display in the 1890s. Life-group exhibits were displayed at the Chicago exposition and the Atlanta exposition mise-en-scene meant to dramatize how particboth life groups and regionalist writing are a part of a late nineteenth-century cultural practice -cal displays that, like those of Otis Mason, arranged a particular kind of object in a group meant to illustrate a linear narrative of technological progress. However, such life groups also presuppose a modern ethnographic subject, one predisposed to comprehend the primitiveness of the life groups in  97 comparison to the modern technologies displayed elsewhere. Though Uncle Hank does seem to approach these displays with seriousness, accepting such dominant ideologies without reservation, his one joke at this exhibit poses a challenge to the idea that the modern products of the United States would benefit all humanity; for he continues teachin em tew wear more clothes sprimitive to help produce and justify the modern, and in turn to justify imperial expansion, Uncle Hank expresses a populist sentiment that perceives one impetus behind imperial expansion to be , one or another version of this particular joke is a refrain throughout the text, either told by Uncle Hank or the cultural or racial others he confronts. The first time this joke appears is when Uncle Hank retitles one of the to tell a narrative celebrating meant to represent the more current stages of modern progress. Uncle Hank, observing the statue e Desa tyrant whose chariot is being pulled by struggling slaves, decides that it has been titled incorrectly and, crossing out the old title with a piece of charcoal, and capitalist United States, Uncle Hank reminds readers of the inequalities produced by turn of the century U.S. capitalism. InsteaStates as a unified society where modern capitalism produces abundance for all, Uncle Hank  98 locates a divided society that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Indeed, this act of graffiti is the first act which begins to frame Uncle Hank as a countercultural trickster.  As a trickster he works to disrupt, to expose fissures, to probe borders. He produces mirth both as an object and a subject of knowledge and comedy. If Uncle Hank is an ethnographic subject and consumer, capable of circulating through the fair by turning others into objects of knowledge, he is often also an identity defined by his locality, a resurrected, distinctly American comic figure from the 18th and 19th centuries. Constance Rourke describes the Yankee, in his comic elements, as a talker, a trader, a teller of stories, and a player of elaborate practical jokes (6--sided and nimble, from the gray rocks of his ce of the s defined by his geographic and cultural origins as a phantasmagoric object. Yet this cultural figure is also a trickster and, although a part of a distinctly American tradition, he is nonetheless capable of shifting identities.  His jocular exchanges with others work to destabilize anthropologically justified differences between cultures and races, between modern and primitive, and between colonized and colonizer. He and the other trickster figures he encounters potentially open up, in the words of Elizabeth Ammons,  Uncle Hank becomes an object of humor when he visits the Philippine anthropological village, where a Filipino native in the village takes on the role of trickster to counter imperialist  99 and capitalist ideology. Deciding whether or not he should pay the quarter entrance fee, Uncle Hank observes the following scene:  At the entrance there was a stage built to display some of the attractions for the purpose  of advertisement. On this stage was an exceedingly interesting group consisting of a  Filipino mother and her two children. As Uncle Hank approached, one of the children  held out its hand to him. It represented to him so very forcibly the attitude of the Filipinos  toward Uncle Sam that his heart warmed to the little one and he resolved to enter to learn  In this scene, Uncle Hank perceives a life-group like display, albeit with living human beings, through which he is interpolated as a believer in the United States ideology of imperial expansion that frames the Filipino subject as a childish primitive, in need of the help of the advanced American society, and capable of being a possession of the United States. The passage constructs him as a figure espousing this belief system. His subsequent observations of the were busy transforming hemp into a puts em out of businessthis  forgotten as he has become a nationalist and an imperialist, associating with American capitalism and the modernization with which he associates it. In fact, it would seem that in these passages text begins to side with imperialism.  100 Yet, we can also read this passage as a humorous setup, since an encounter with a Filipino man turns the tables on Uncle Hank and his imperialist sentiments. The narrator begins Uncle quoting in its entirety. Uncle Hank begins the exchange:            -  he skin him Filipino, send big trust he chocke him  Filipino  send Noo Yorka Polica-a-man tip off cock fight, bull fight, rob him! Filipino  prospare ?        Uncle Hank was dazed by the logic of this home trust, but soon recovered his wanted  assurance.               ed States will put the trusts in the Phil- with a sneer.       The old man soon saw that he had an incorrigible case to deal with and made no  further effort to convert the native to the dogma of the superiority of Un system of government. (116-117) like Uncle Hank both a phantasmagoric stereotype and a trickster, whose counter-jokes work to expose the self-ag 101 with his hand extended and the groups engaged in industry themselves become the object of humor and ridicule are based in an ideology that borrows from imperialism, capitalism, and argues that U.S. economic expansion is simply inevitable, a matter of economic competition, solely. Yet the Filipino reminds Uncle Hank of the force involved in imperial and economic larn at thes to cial learning Uncle Hank expects at the exhibit and the learning he ultimately receives. The passage argues to readers that other kinds of knowledge could be gained than those produced by the fairs official educational mission. Where displays, advertisements, and official exhibits might interpolate visitors according to particular ideologies, visitors did not necessarily conform to those ideologies. Nor were the living human beings at those exhibits necessarily always willing to be quiet in the face of those interpretations. Such encounters occur throughout the text, as people from different and even warring societies meet each other and exchange words and occasionally goods and money, with one or both getting the better of the other through humorous jokes or tricks. Geronimo and General politics winning their verbal battle and producing a momentary friendship. An Iroquois woman  102 who speaks better standard English than Uncle Hank gets the better of the otherwise tightfisted, expert-bargaining Yankee in both her humor and in the sale of one of her baskets, leading him to grudgingly acknowledge her business sense; incapable of succeeding in the capitalist marketplace. Indeed, the work of humor, even a humor that exposes and reproduces conflict, for Uncle Hank and his narrator becomes a practice for navigating the disorienting field of cultural difference produced by the fair and its cosmopolitan circulations. Citing the well-h of this axiom was strongly emphasized in Uncle , then, produces not merely the cultural other as described in the opening chapter, but also works to create a new space where self and other become an object of humor and laughter creates a new  Around the Pan identities, cultural borders, and structural hierarchies are both reproduced and challenged. It imagines a modern space where appearances circulate as surfaces that hide shifting and uncertain depths of alternative politics, identities, objects, and desires. It is not surprising, then, that we find texts such as more official representations of the fair or Craftsman articles attempting to control and create stability  a phantasmagoria of others - out of these kinds of circulations.  These dynamics did not end with the end of the fairs. While The CraftsmanEuropean and American design subtly borrowed anthropological discourse, the magazine actually published articles of popular anthropology that then crossed into explorations of taste  103 and design criticism, as my opening discussion of figure 1 indicates. Sargent herself composed articles of this sort, such as Most of these kinds of articles were more akin to those written by Frederick Monsen or the journalist George Wharton James, who also often wrote as an anthropological expert to describe the lifestyle and material culture of American Indians. In these articles, racism perpetuated through anthropological discourses of the primitive mixed with political activism that argued against only some of the more genocidal practices of white Americans. The assumption in many of these articles is the usual one: that the cultures of primitive races are unchanging and that, slaves to tradition, they were equally determined by their natural environment. These articles of popular -class audience on the cultures produced an ethnographic consumer. Articlpartially devoted to articles on contemporary and historical world design, were a version of this genre of criticism.   A Frederick Monsen piece from March of 1907, Indians well illustrates the tensions involved in constructing the figure of the ethnographic consumer through these discourses of taste and anthropology. In this article Monsen relates his travels as a recorder of Indian life to argue against white interference in Indian religion, art, and preserve so much of their original vigor and individuality has been due to the fact that the Indian is dominated in such a marked degree by his environment, and also that these Indians live a life  in  104 9). Objects emerge from subjective Hopi, for Monsen, yield a problematic hybrid since  all his standards are upset and his mind is set adrift in unknown seas of incomprehensible   the assurance that only by these can he earn a living and so his own ancient and   natural expression  of art that our modern civilization can ill afford to spare. (690) Hopi art provides an authentic expression and a real connection to the land that is lacking in to survive within capitalism is by selling authentic Hopi goods to white or modern Americans. And not only does Monsen observe American Indians through the lens of anthropological discourse, he attempts to reproduce it through his camera. He writes of his photographic methodology that he works ve, or the freedom from consciousness that is so desirable when cartridge films and the rapid action of the hand camera, one is able to snapshot any number of charming, (686). Here the authentic Hopi culture is reproducible only as unconscious behavior, unposed by  105 the white artist.8 The wholeness of the material culture imagined by Monsen emerges in relation to natural environment and religion but as his description of his methodology implies, this unconscious, unchanging daily life must be maintained by the ethnographic photographer; indeed tion of this ethnographic subject is also implied, since minimized by his verbal and photographic discourse.  And while he argues that whites should manage this primitive authenticity by teaching the Hopi to revive older craft methods, he actually celebrates a kind of cosmopolitan o give greaview It is all a matter of taste, which in turn is a matter of custom, and the man who is  privileged to learn a sufficient catholicity of taste to appreciate and enjoy both sides adds  greatly to the interest of life. The white man is horrified at the thought of eating dog, but  heartily relishes a meal of roast pig, the Indian is revolted and disgusted at the idea of  using pig for food, but is delighted with a dish of savory stewed dog. If one can learn to  eat both dog and pig with relish it follows that he greatly widens his field of experience  and doubles his capacity for enjoyment. (685)   against particular foods. Monsen does suggest the possibility that both Indian and white man can                                                            8 ake nude photographs of bathers, see the third article of his Craftsman -178. There, Monsthat one employs in tHe continues on for more than a page with the same human/animal metaphorical structure governing his narrative, his role, and the roles of the bathers.  106 essentialized boundaries of the preceding sentence. Yet, in the end, he implies that this freedom, experience of Indian life might be as broad as possible, I drifted from one village to another, always accepting their customs, eating their food, interesting myself in what interested them, and while he himself is both inside and outside the culture he records and takes part in. Hopis cannot understand it. Yet white men or women are capable of consuming Hopi objects which supplement their lack of authenticity. In this passage, it is only Monsen, the white man, who can partake in the perception of difference, who can become the ethnographic consumer, in this case, a cosmopolitan flâneur both able to perceive, enjoy, and self-alienate frthrough navigating a cosmopolitan cultural marketplace. 107 Chapter 3: Dreamers of Refuge: The Primitive Home in Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Fiction and Consumer Practices  efuges dreams of a hut, of a (30); with this early passage from The Poetics of Space, the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard begins a short exploration of the way the image of the primitive home serves to produce feelings of simplicity, intimacy, and refuge that substantiate the very possibility of inhabiting. The passage introduces a dialectic through which the house itself insufficiently provides that refuge from the world the dreamer desires. The dwellings of the primitive (whose relation to the animal Bachelard here draws attention to) provide the dreamer with a supplement to the house; the hut is where the dreamer turns when the world intrudes to undermine security.  -crowded of modernity from which the house is no refuge. Indeed, it becomes the very possibility of withdrawal from the city. The modern infiltrates the house through the material crowding of people or consumer objectin natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one.   108 Picard, suggests that leaving the house into the modern city necessitates a turn towards the artificial and the mechanical, words often associated with industrial production and consumption.  pes indicates the idea of a lack of control and agency over oneself Where the house itself becomes a part of a system of industrial production, the image of the hut works to substantiate the possibility of withdrawal lacking in the house.   In part, this withdrawal is dependent on the idea of unification, on a oneness that rejects -root of the function of inhabiting. It is the simplest of human plants, the one that needs no ramifications in order to branches, its extensions into the world are immaterial to its existence. Bachelard writes repeatedly of the powers of concentration belonging to the hut image. Of the hermits hut, for  about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation destsolitude depend on a lack of material possessions that belong to the exterior, the social, and the that Bachelard is hardly discussing the difference between physical and spiritual planes, but the difference between the material world and the world of imagination. The hut dream provides refuge because it is does provides escape. The needs of modernity  artificial, outside ourselves, producing a consuming need outside us like the sucking of pipes  are no  109 longer with us in the hut dream, where needs are restored to the individual and gain a lost organic quality. Fng is concentrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, we could start a images recreate an idea of inalienable need and possession concentrated within and belonging to the human being.            cares, of mechanical and artificial production and consumption, are not dialectically related. In lamp, he is living in the round house, the primitive hut, of pretime as it is elsewhere, beyond the boundaries of the modern house and the city, it is nearly perhaps dependant upon their immaterover-primitive dwellings  as dreams that are elsewhere. Yet, these dreams are perhaps also dependent upon the modern marketplace, if it is the lamp that produces the immaterial, yet material, walls of the hut dream. Turning to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, to the heart of modernity, we can see a preponderance of primitive dwellings that are hardly immaterial, and hardly elsewhere, though they did not cease to connote an elsewhere and an  110 n architecture, as a framing metaphor for middle-class domestic architecture, and as a significant presence in some literary works of the period. While the hut could still be understood as a kind of dwelling that stood in opposition to contemporary, modern forms of architecture and the races and cultures associated with them, the hut was also to became an ideal, offering a retreat from the alienating domestic materiality of consumer capitalism. ices create ultimately works to repair tensions in the modern self, providing both a withdrawal from the marketplace, and the ability to return to the marketplace as an alienable, autonomous, and rational modern individual. Moreover, the hut was a racialized form of dwelling that could offer whites both the idea of a secure racial identity and the attempt to create a chthonic, native architecture through the concept of the primitive borrowed from their conception of other races and cultures. The relationshiseeing the home in modernity as a process of withdrawal from the overlapping spheres of the marketplace and the foreign, but a process that is never complete. In a series of books beginning in the 1990s, geographers and globalization studies scholars have begun to examine the idea of home in relation to the globalizing forces in the modernity or postmodernity of the contemporary world; though these monographs and anthologies focus on more recent timeframes, they are yet useful for understanding concepts of home at the turn of the nineteenth century. These scholars understand home as a place of stability and belonging that anchors the self within the instabilities of contemporary life; in this sense home is created in the overlapping interiors of local communities and identities, family life, gift economies, houses, and private lives. David Morley, in Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity, follows sociological research  for instance,  111 Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo  in al objects, persons or argues, this formation of home generates conflicts. He also situates his politics here, in the possibility of a concept of home that accepts the hybridity that already exists there. Yet, despite his politics, Morley might be said to overstate the difference between home and mobility. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, editors of Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, argue for a more dialectical understanding of the stability/instability distinction, where home can exist in movements such as travel and where movement exists within the home. Understanding the creation of the turn-of-the-century home through such processes depends on understanding the relationship between the home and the marketplace in modernity. spheres, in particular on the domestic  of production and consumption. In this relationship, the domestic can be understood as the sphere of private property, and is partially produced by the withdrawal of alienable commodities from the consumer marketplace into the sphere of private property owners, possessive individuals as C. B. withdrawal into a world of inalienable people and things: a sphere where relationships between people and between people and things are not driven by market concerns, by economic competition and exchange value. In the domestic sphere, the intimacy of friends and family and an intimate world of objects counter the alienations, conflicts, and mobilities of the capitalist  112 marketplace. Feminist scholars of the nineteenth-century United States have argued that the feminine values implicit in the domestic sphere presented a vital challenge to masculine capitalist values and practices. Yet, as literary scholar Gillian Brown cautions, the stability and security created in this withdrawal was dependent on the marketplace itself; moreover the modern individual in the marketplace depended on the idea of domestic withdrawal to define the stability and security of his or her own interior self. Since domestic life depended upon the marketplace from which it was supposed to be a withdrawal, the marketplace could yet be perceived as infiltrating the domestic sphere in the form of alienable and alienating commodities, primitive home and the primitive lifestyle of production and consumption associated with it, helped produce a turn-of-the-century domesticity that navigated these tensions.  Of course, the return from the primitive house was used as both an idea and a material sanitation, associated with the modern marketplaceCraftsman articles often Irene Sargent yet ideal Artisans lived in miserable huts, unfloored, windowless, and almost -part series on result of a basic drive for  113 primitive house becomes a way to name the human house in relation to the animal; and this naturalist understanding of the house implanimal past, no longer dominated by an environment. When Wharton discusses the specific    architectural forms of various societies, he employs a discourse of religious or cultural materialism; that is, specific houses are the unconscious, unreflecting, and repeated application of tradition. And this materialism works to imply the conscious and rational progress of modern European forms. This is the particular lesson taught by the British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor, whose 1881 textbook frames primitive architecture as a part of an evolutionary continuum, simple and inferior to complex, more advanced architecture; indeed the primitive is e labels primitive is palpable throughout the text, yet his simultaneous desire to establish modern whites as advanced is often civilization is when people begin to build their houses square- the boundary separating modern from primitive was capable of being crossed. Wharton himself offered ex Basketry of the              on entering one of these huts, a novice will immediately back out to get a      breath of fresh air, but if there is hope of a basket to be found, the collector cannot  be kept away, and soon making a strong mental effort, he takes a breath of air and   114 dives in, not breathing again until he comes to the surface with his trophies.   These must be aired before they can be stored away. (577) Porcher in particular, implies a divided subject: on the one hand, the taste for beautiful objects made outside the industrial system of production, in primitive homes, and on the other, the taste movement into the hut, and back out, produces the sensibility of the modern basket collector.  The collector refusing to breathe, finaexplicitly racialized creators and the implicitly racialized collector. And the basket must undergo a ritual cleansing before it can enter the modern interior of the collector, before it can become his property: and not private property in this case, but a property of culture and race. Yet if the basket is changed to allow it to circulate beyond the hut, the basket yet persists in signifying the place of production: closed off from sanitary modern production and modern sensibility, yet also desirable perhaps for those very reasons.  Such hut narratives, to some extent, stem from an earlier concept of the primitive home. The Lion City of Africa, an imperial adventure novel  or more precisely, an anthropological adventure novel  written in 1880 by popular novelist Willis Boyd Allen, highlights how this oppositional relationship between primitive and modern home architecture helped produce the the book instead draws heavily on the works of the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley, in particular, How I Found Livingstone, for its representation of Africa, and its concept of the primitive. The young hero and narrator, David Livingstone Scott, is raised and educated by a New England father with a passion for travel narratives. He himself enters Harvard to train to  115 -century anthropological racial and cultural knowledge, knowledge which becomes useful during an unplanned expedition across equatorial Africa. When he and fellow Harvard graduate Ned Hastings are marooned by an unscrupulous captain on their way to Cape Town, their journey from the coast to locate a white settlement confirms this anthropological knowledge and the racial discourse it produces. The Africans they encounter are depicted as primitive and animalistic, irrational, driven by their emotions, superstitious, dominated by their environment, and generally unable to understand events and ideas beyond the borders of their locality. Ned and David, on the other hand, are rational and self-controlled, and it is precisely these racialized characteristics and their modern knowledge that allow them to successfully overcome the dhouses   Ned and David see, and occasionally stay in, are generally merely resting places that function to confirm their knowledge of the primitive others they encounter. In this way, How I Found Livingston  in fact, not only is David Scott named after Livingston, the twoccasionally trace his past movements, and even accidently discover a box containing articles The Lion City of Africa, function to produce the modern, white self that David and Ned represent by binary opposition. Yet one particular hut is central to the narrative and the dialectics of interior and exterior, stability and mobility, the narrative and the hut help produce.  116 Mbongo and a pygmy child named Lulua whom they are determined to rescue from heathenism, they locate an undiscovered mountain range, covered in snow. Claiming thand Ned plan to season there until the cannibals somehow lose interest in them. Not only does the snow line represent the boundary between superstitious natives and rational whites (the mountain), it also stands to represent a biological, evolutionary, racial boundary. When David and Ned send the carriers away to locate a rescue party, they insist that Mbongo leave as well while Ned and David flourish in an environment similar to those they have apparently evolved to survive in as whites native to a colder European climate (307). That is, though the theory of evolution is never mentioned, in the anthropological logic of the novel, races are at least partially the product of environmental forces such that environment can represent a limit beyond which races cannot circulate. And though the majority of the novel serves to connote the mobility of a modern white identity, it soon is divulged that David had contracted a fever from his journey through the jungle, one that he is long in recovering from.   In a portion of the novel where environment emerges to dominate both black and white, is surprising to find that the shelter they build produces a hybrid material and social space. Within a day of arriving on the mountain, they set their native carriers to work building a hut of  117 bamboo and stone to serve as a shelter for them and especially Lulua until they can either leave the mountain or until a rescue party arrives. Their cultural knowledge allows them to plan the hut to shelter them from the environment; its roof is modeled after the chalet dwellers of the alps to help it best stand up to wind, while its chimney is mod-to efficiently funnel smoke from the fire. For the sake of discretion, they build one partition so that Lulua can have a private apartment. And in fact, she becomes the domestic who, as soon as she  woman within the novel serves as a liminal place, a place of cultural hybridity. Built by natives, planned by the two whites, and modeled afit becomes the product of trans-racial and trans-cultural exchanges. And as a shelter from the elements, it becomes a plac, and a representative of perhaps the an African people that Ned and David perceive themselves to have met, can become the angel in the house for two white Americans. In fact, towards the beginning of the novel, David writes passionately for the benefits of trade across international borders, the globe- ot precisely clear, though it would seem that both alienable ideas and goods potentially circulate through trade across borders. And these cosmopolitan exchanges not only provide new ideas and objects not produced by the consuming society, but also lessen enmity, and seem to increase acceptance.   Yet it is quite clear that the cosmopol occur on terms that affirm the superiority of modern whites. They are the planners of the house, where the  118 carriers are merely the laborers, with no control over their labor, reaffirming the mind/body dualism central to racial theories that would define modern whites as superior to primitive abilities. The anthropological knowledge Ned and David deploy serves more to affirm their scientific expertise about other peoples and their rational ability to overcome the challenge of a hostile environment, than to show any kind of cosmopolitan acceptance. In fact, it is their ability as rational, modern, ethnographic selves that allows them to comprehend, alienate, and reapply cultural knowledge as a form of architecture. A cosmopolitan architecture, in this passage is the property of those who can alienate both themselves and material culture to transcend environment, culture, and race. Cosmopolitan exchange is beneficial for those who can reify cultural knowledge and objects and reapply culture rationally.1 Yet, the Bachelardian hut dream that this cosselves.  apparent from the start.  In fact, the book is framed by the hut, as David begins writing in the hut and begins the narrative describing the hut and the wintery mountain environment that surrounds him: Wait  I must throw more wood on the fire. There, the blaze springs up cheerily,  answering with its crackly and hum the wind that is shouting outside, and the                                                             1  student at one of our Southern colleges, where she is preparing herself for noble work among her neglected and unhappy sisteto Christianity, being that she will undertake missionary work in Africa (318). Though a negotiation with the native and primitive, the withdrawal the hut produces works as a way to confront and transcend the primitive, moving more fully into an idealization of the modern and white.    119 snow that we can hear now and then, sifting against the sides of the hut. There  are other sounds, too, which fall on our ears when the wind dies down and the fire  forgets for a moment to laugh.  Do you hear them?  there, it was quite plain,  then,  that low, deep rumble, like far away thunder, or surf on the rocks.  No    fire, and whirling   set about jotting down the strange events and really marvelous adventures and  escapes which have resulted in my sitting here at this minute, in a rude, snow- bound hut on one of the high peaks, or rather table-lands of Equatorial Africa; hitherto, I must believe, totally unknown to explorers or geographers. (9-10) uge from an antagonistic nature and the primitive other that belongs there as well as a rest from the sound of wind and snow that penetrates the walls, while the drums of the pursuing cannibals   provide the future memory of an adventure that can be recalled from the safety and shelter of the hut. And Willis Boyd Allen emphasizes that the rbeing actually here by my side; clothed like me in the skins of wild beasts; enjoying with me the glow and warmth of the blazing fire; shuddering with me at the deep hollow roar that has floated also dialectically recalling adventure   and fear   120 in his own house would dreadelighted in imagining that we were living in the heart of the woods, in the well-heated hut of charcoal burners; I even hoped to hear wolves sharpening their claws on the heavy granite slab reader involves a dialectic confrontation and withdrawal from an antagonistic exterior.   Bachelard argues that these dialectics serve to enhance the intimacy and refuge of the hut a boundary between the modern, civilized self and the primitive, savage other. That is, the emphasis is not so much on withdrawal, or the return to the refuge of the self, but on the movement out to the other from the house to the hut. At this meeting point, the hut provides only minimal protection, but also the ability to confront the other and substantiate the self. On the one hand, this confrontation becomes a way to define the other and the self, to define them as the result of racialized biological adaptation to geographical environments, and hence place them and separate them, creating an unbridgeable geographical division between the two. Through the dialectics this hut produces, the white, modern self gains the well-defined borders attributed by anthropological thinking to the primitive. It becomes a more inalienable, essentialized identity. On the other hand, this negotiation works to partially transform the other. This partial transformation of the primitive to the modern self is performed through the figure of Lulua, who becomes not only domestic, but Christian, and educated through traveling and living with David and Ned. And this tChristian, and modern attitudes, behaviors, and values can be affirmed. In this way, the  121 n to justify imperial expansion and exploitation.2   this confrontation, ultimately separation and withdrawal is the goal the text argues for. The hut works to produce a lack of exchange across borders, or rather, a withdrawal from exchange. And David Scott gives up his ty not far from ultimately this transformation is contained. While values and ideals might be mobile, as the text argues, racialized identities are not wholly free to circulate beyond their geographically and/or culturally defined places. If the white, modern self is freer than other selves to circulate beyond its borders and make cultural objects circulate beyond their borders, ultimately the hut dream provides a way to withdraw from the marketplace, back into an idea of home. Though the novel closes with appendices  including many passages lifted from the works of Henry Morton Stanley  that celebrate western colonization and exploitation of the African continent, this separation the fictional account argues for could be said to place limits on the rightness of imperial rule. The hut that allows for this negotiation finally creates a withdrawal  it is only a                                                            2 This indicates that the hut dream may be similar to or a part of the dynamic domestic sphere Amy Kaplan excavates in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture where the domestic is central to the creation of home, not merely by distinguishing it from the foreign, but by working in and at the borders of family and nation to expel the foreign within.  122 capable of working within the capitalist marketplace but satisfied with doing business without ind of belonging to a geographically confined environment.   Written in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, The Lion City of Africa reflects and produces an idealized concept of the modern self whose relationship to the primitive is mainly one of self in relationship to the primitive, while only hinting at the end of the novel at the desire for the modern self that the The Sea Wolf, written in 1904, is much more repair tensions between the white, modern individual and the corporate, industrial, system of production and consumption that could counter the freedom and power of the individual. And though it is significant that both David Scott and Ned Hastings are men, the problem of gender              The Sea Wolf begins with an ironic meditation on the weaknesses of modern civilization.   The vehicle for this irony is the narrator of the novel, a poetry critic named Humphrey Van muses on the benefits of modernization:  I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor which made it  unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation, in order to visit   123 my friends who lived against an arm of the sea. It was good that men should be  specialists. The peculiar knowledge of the pilot and captain sufficed for many thousands of people who knew no more of the sea and navigation than I knew.  On the other hand, instead of having to devote my energy to the learning of a  multitude of things, I concen -2) This is a relatively common celebration of modernization, where specialists produce specialized products, while many benefit as consumers from this specialization. Indeed, van Weyden notes with pride a fellow passenger reading his article in The Atlanticspecialist in modern scientific knowledge. When confronted by an old sailor with the notion that crew] know the direction by compass, the distance, and the speed. I should not call it anything more thaYet this comfortable modern civilization, an economy as the uncertainty produced by wind and fog causes a collision with another ship.   This crisis in the power of modern economic production and the power of the individual below the surface of the modern illusion. As the ship sinks, the white, middle--preservation. Their screaming becomes the most memorable quality of the ship wreck, and Van Weyden returns to it again and  124 -interested survival is a primal urge, is only Van Weyden is separated by the flowing tide from other passengers that have gone overboard, he to be creatures belonging to that primordial world (7): the crew of The Ghost, a seal hunting vessel specimens of their nationalities, races, and even classes.3 The slow-witted sailor, Johnson, who almost effeminate face of the man who has absorbMugbridge is not merely of the native Cockney type, but also evolutionarily classed, as Van light suffused his face and his eyes glistened as though somewhere in the deeps of his being his  Yet if the racial types Van Weyden identifies are products of evolutionary adaption to class and natural environments, one figure in particular represents these evolutionary forces, and puts them into play on the ship. Immediately after these scientific observations, Van Weyden                                                            3 edge of race is never divulged, though Campbell Reesman, in racialism was under constant revision throughout his life, and his shifting ideas about race are reflected in his writing. The Sea Wolf, I would argue, offers fairly simple, hierarchical thinking produce the idea that this anthropological knowledge is not only an integral part of modern cultural knowledge, but that it is also unquestioned and unquestionably true. While the novel argues that the mathematical certainty of specialized production is a mere illusion, the novel argues that the struggle of men and races for survival and superiority in nature is a reality.  125 indulges himself in an anthropologically validated  yet no less homoerotic  verbal swoon, when he perceives the captain of the ship, a Nietzschean, evolutionary superman, the Scandinavian Wolf Larsen:  Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchway, and savagely chewing the end  of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me from the sea. His  height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten and a half; but my first  t was a  strength we are wont to associate with things primitive, with wild animals, and the  creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to have been  a strength  savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of  motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which many forms of life have been  molded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the head is cut  off, and the snake as a snake is dead, or which lingers in a shapeless lump of turtle  meat and recoils or quivers from the prod of a finger. (13)   primitive origin. While identity on the Ghost is almost wholly a product of evolution and brutality, as he dominates the ship by force and fear, creates a space for these identities to engage in competition whose rule is survival of the fittest. Yet the cosmopolitan interactions on The Ghost serve to illustrate racial competition only as a subtext; rather the competitive primitive marketplace serves mainly to produce the m 126 Van Weyden, by forcing him to sign on as cabin boy (22). While Larsen is driven by a kind of implied class warfaWeyden frames his own transformation in anthropological and evolutionary terms. The plot, which describes the evolutionary pressures Larsen imposes on his crew, idealizes the progression of Van Weyden, who must evolve from weak, unmanly, and overcivilized, towards the ideal  The relationship between Van Weyden and Larsen puts into play the new tensions that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century upper- and middle-class men often navigated as they attempted to define and display their masculinity. While the primitive and animalistic had been perceived to be a part of men before, these characteristics became positively valued by the American middle-classes during the late nineteenth century (Rotundo 227).  The uncontrollable anger, and lust were no longer antagonistic to the virtuous male character of the earlier nineteenth century, who had been asked to display the self-control these passions were thought to undermine (Rotundo; Baederman 12). Though it was written during the time when primitive masculinity was gaining power as an ideal and a practice, The Lion City of Africa, produces these earlier notions of white, middle-class manhood.  By the year London published The Sea Wolf, western travel, soldiering, athletics, and fighting had been popularized, producing and sustaining this new kind of man. These values and practices were part of a new shift in thought, an uncertainty about the value of civilization. This shift was, in part, a revaluation of separate sphere ideology that was seen to reproduce the moral values of white, middle-(Rotundo 246). Historian Anthony Rotundo finds that this revaluation of the separate spheres  127 was also a revaluation of the roles of women as primary nurturers and educators that helped to create and shape male social institutions for socializing men.    These shifts were initiated by economic and social changes occurring during the time period. The transition from an economy of independent business men to an economy of corporate hierarchies where no man had clear authority over his own labor created a workplace that undermined a masculinity that depended on self-control and authority. Even if a man were to have independence or control within the workplace, the instability of national and international markets hardly made success a matter of self-control and prudence (Rotundo 249; Baederman 12). But it was not simply shifts in the structure of the economy that undermined past sources of increasing numbers, women were entering the workplace and other areas of the public sphere. Clerical work, increasingly the most widely available entry level position for men was also being made available to women, who were perceived as infiltrating and feminizing what had been a masculine sphere (Baederman 12; Rotundo 250). And outside of the workplace, women as well as working-class and immigrant men took part in cultural shifts that challenged previous forms of upper- and middle- the political sphere, immigrants and the working classes formed political parties that often successfully won control of city governments from the parties of middle-class white men (Baederman 13). Labor unrest challenged the authority of middle- and upper-class men nationally (Baederman 14). And women took part in social and political movements that sought to use their authority as custodians of influence politics, and specifically legislate against behaviors and places, such as drinking, brothels, and lodges (Rotundo 251-253).    128 behavior; but it was also a part of a shift toward consumer practices as middle-class white men could no longer locate a relatively stable identity in politics or economic production. Middle-class men began to fear the idea of overcivilization, or a weakness of mind and body perceived as feminization, and found evidence for it in neurasthenia, physical weakness, and homosexuality (Rotundo 251-55; Baederman 14-15). These anxieties turned men not only to doctrines of the primitive, but to those practices that would foster primitive characteristics outside of the public spheres of business and politics and in consumer and leisure activities in which they would have some form of autonomy and control (Baederman 13). This is not to say that these tensions caused clearly delineated boundaries and behaviors for different places, as white middle- and upper-class men still maintained ample authority in political, economic, and or that white men claimed power as primitives over others that were not primitive.      From the beginning of the narrative, The Sea Wolf imagines a masculine, primitive society, made up of clearly delineated racial types, whose racial make-up determines their varying degrees of masculine vitality. But it is also, quite clearly, not on the outside of the modern American political, social, and economic landscape. The primitive world London imagines exists in the interstices of the capitalist economy  at borders that are not only exterior but within the interior. This is perhaps most clearly signaled by the economic venture The Ghost is engaged in. Pacific seal hunting is simply the very violent and very lucrative beginning of a product chain whose final consumer destination is the hands of modern women: they will middle-class economic structure establishing a masculine sphere of production, organized along  129 ption. This division works to displace feminine behaviors to the mainland where the sealskins are transformed to gloves and where Van Weyden was made into the feminine man he is at the beginning of the novel. His nickname as a and he consistently describes himself as physically weak, fearful, and unable to master the situations he finds himself in on The Ghost, where strength, physical labor, and often violence, is necessary to move up the socioeconomic hierarchy. Moreover, he cworks to produce the distinction between primitive masculine production and feminized consumption (though there is mainland production, the producers are depicted as mainly consumers, whose productive powers are narrow and circumscribed by the modernized, mainland economy); but this distinction produces an outside that is also on the inside, that simply exists to transform the inside.   The Ghost clearly is shown to be beyond the world of the modern mainland, what we could simply call the domestic economy of consumption and production; this division is produced at the very beginning when Wolf Larsen forcibly abducts Van Weyden from coastal socioeconomic organization no longer apply. But it is also very clear that The Ghost has never left the mainland and is constructed to echo and transform the domestic economy. This is produced by the very immigrant, racialized, and anthropologized identities that Van Weyen encounters on The Ghost. These identities also not simply transnational migrants; they help produce a racialized and immigrant version of the domestic economy that exists to masculate -class men, with their strikes  130 and primitive customs, seemed to possess a virility and vitality which decadent middle-class men The Ghost these working-class, immigrant men create a society within which transformation begins when Van Weyden bests his superior, the cook, Thomas Mugbridge, who had been tormenting and abusing him, by threatening him with a knife. In the corporate hierarchy of The Ghost, Van Weyden achieves promotion, moves up the corporate ladder from his entry level position, through engaging  But if The Ghost reimagines the domestic economy of production, transforming it and Van Weyden through the primitive practices, it does so through metaphorically echoing early twentieth-century consumer practices that many men participated in to idealize and produce their own primitive masculinity. Social historian John Kasson has explored how the white male body became central to these shifts in masculinity. A narrative producing the transformation from the feminized weakling confined by modern bureaucracy to the free, primitive, strong man popularized the nude bodies of such cultural icons as strongman Eugene Sandow and escape artist Harry Houdini. Gail Baederman has argued that the ideal male body shifted in the late nineteenth ody, which the narrator seems to imaginatively reveal and fetishize through a verbal disrobing, echoes these turn-of-the-not so much seal skins for ladies gloves, but body building. Van Weyden jokes near the conclusion, after Wolf Larsen favorably notes this  131 arsen becomes a nutritional supplement. Yet, the consumer practices that the novel advocates to counter over-civilized, masculine weaknesses do not end with such well-documented practices as bodybuilding.   ation when he must escape Larsen to rescue from impending rape the similarly shipwrecked poet and love interest, Maude Brewster.  Thwarted by bad weather from reaching Japan in their stolen dinghy, they manage to land on an uninhabited island seal rookery, and are forced to rough it by building huts with the only suitable material at hand  seal skin. Van Weyden proves his evolutionary fitness by clubbing them to death  d The youth of the race seemed burgeoning in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old hunting days and forest nights of my remote and forgStruggling in and dominating the environment, Van Weyden locates his species and racial being that proves his fitness to survive and procreate: indeed, it is the subsequent night that he feels his deepest love for Brewster, watching its loudest. These huts, not a cultural architecture quite, but rather the result of a biological and racial drive, serve to remake domestic production, and domesticity itself, into a material, biological force, a trait inherited from an evolving past into an evolving present, yet possible only outside urban civilization and the feminizing influences of modern, industrial capitalism. The hut that Brewster and Van Weyden create with local materials, and as a shelter from the environment, sphere, the self-made hut could serve to create a new space, a space of masculine withdrawal. In  132 that yet creates a space apart from the economic sphere represented by The Ghost.  ding and his new, general handiness with physical objects that allows him to sail, repair ships, club seals, and design and build huts, reflects the kind of do-it-yourself masculinity historian Stephen Gelber identifies, but one given impetus by discourses of primitivism and racial inheritance. If we read The Ghost as an economic sphere that is both beyond and within the borders of the U. S. mainland economy, the hut that Van Weyden and Brewster build can be seen as its complimentary: an architecture that materializes a domestic sphere, both a new, white, primitive home, that recalls and transforms the modern, perhaps suburban, house and also its corresponding domestic sphere. For Gelber, the do-it-yourself eassertion of traditional direct male control -71). This new control exercised in the house would supplement a lack of control in the workplace. Yet where Gelber se-it-ion of mastery over heavy tools(Gelber 72), -it-yourselfer, as a newly primitive man, has learned to control his environment without the mediation of heavy tools. By dominating the environment directly, by producing a house out of f Van Weyden achieves something closer to complete autonomy and mastery of his property and the domestic sphere whose material boundary he creates and has the ability to reinforce. This control over self and environment borrows from the anthropological discourse of the primitive, where mastery depends on physical strength, cunning, and a more  133 primitive masculinity in opposition to the domestic responsibilities, such as help with child rearing and housework, many early twentieth-century men were undertaking.4 It also works to imagine a masculine domestic economy that offers the sense of masculine control lacking in both the workplace and the house. Van Weyden becomes the producer of what he consumes, directly transforming the environment into raw material and raw materials into products, repairing the  Though The Sea Wolf clearly reflects this newly dominant form of primitive masculinity, it does not reserve these primitive behaviors for men.5 Though Van Weyden clubs the seals, the two build and plan their shelter together. Their plans and discussions of the project echo the discussions of a middle-class husband and wife as they plan their home. Here, however, they are outside the usual capitalist division of labor, its web of architect, builders, and the various components of the materials economy. The problem for Maude and Humphrey is not whether to use wall paper, burlap, or rice matting for wall decoration, but how to provide the best shelter from the environment given the materials at hand.  In fact, Van Weyden jokes about ordering glass for a window from a glass company, reinforcing the idea that they are outside the corporate, industrial economy out of middle-firm, Red, 4451, I think it is,  where stone is an easy solution for the walls, the distinction between a moss or a sealskin roof becomes the real stickler; whether to simply thatch with grass and hazard exposure to the elements or to skin seals and risk death at the teeth of a ferocious bull. Through Maude Brewster,                                                            4 - 5 Writers such as Jack London, Zane Grey, and Ernest Thompson Seton, in fact, preferred the .  134 cures her of a lifelong weakness she had taken her sea voyage to amend, and despite her apparent frailty, she continually surprises Van Weyden with her strength as they prepare their huts.   -it--It is their practice of creating refuge from an antagonistic environment through struggling within it that ends up producing the domestic feeling of home. Throughout the hut-building scenes, the text is sprinkled with domesticity-producing practices such as -, we resigned that London imagines for his readers does not simply work to create a dialectical feeling of refuge from the environment; it works to create a domesticity for both men and women that is engages in a kind of gender crossing that can be seen as partially challenging contemporary middle-class stereotypes and norms of feminine sentiment and consumerism. Maude says of ext is never completely comfortable with the primitive world it imagines.   135 -weakened grasp, he turns to Maude, who seems ready to join battle. Van Weyden observes that she e, and at  that moment she followed my gaze down to it. The club dropped from her hand as  though it had suddenly stung her, and at the same moment my heart surged with a  great joy. Truly she was my woman, my mate-woman, fighting with me and for  me as the mate of a caveman would have fought, all the primitive in her aroused,  forgetful of her culture, hard under the softening civilization of the only life she  had ever known. (234)  The novel nearly offers women the kind of primitivism that it produces for men. Yet the ambiguity of the passage suggests that Brewster should remain a standard for civilization and  -as Brewster continues to  in fact the him expression of domestic refuge, a kind of embodied hut. And this primitive self that produces a  136 primitive refuge and that exists as an embodied refuge can be seen not in complete opposition to the civilized, modern self, but as a way to repair it, and protect it.6   consumption and production, that exists elsewhere, beyond the borders of the civilized interior of the nation, even as it echoes and works to offer imaginative solutions to American middle-class anxieties. Maude Brewster and Humphrey Van Weyden are rescued, but the narrative ends before they can return home. Yet the work that Loperforms as it takes its reader elsewhere continued within the borders of the American nation. Much as David Scott returns ,continuing something close to their primitive life on the mainland. And perhaps it is not were also a way to live within the borders of the nation. One way we can see this work contturn-of-the-century camping finds middle-ilization, Kroppe argues that camping allowed its practitioners to experience both nature and culture, civilization and gender differences as men and women often approached camping differently, with women working to produce a semblance of civilized comfort within the wilderness. Yet camping is                                                            6 -of-the-century theories of race and evolution, such as those proposed by G. Stanley Hall and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Hall believed that primitive masculinity was merely a fact, a biological drive that drove men to dominate nature, and each other. This evolutionary drive would lead whites to kill off inferior races, and would eventually produce a white superman. By allowing Van Weyden to marry, and implicitly reproduce, while wholly primitive superman as the next stage of Anglo-Saxon evolution. SeMasculinity and Civilization for extensive explanations of these theories.    137 implies, camping depends on recreating a modern economy. It depends on both deprivation and a playful recreation of civilized comfort and plenitude in the wilderness. Consumer goods are essential to the significance of camping. Horace Kephart, in an article written against the consumerism implied in early twentieth-Yet even this rejection of modern camping through a kind evolutionary agency depends on the the idea of a permanent and unmediated relationship to the natural environment. As Bachelard such practices as camping. Yet The Sea Wolfeamthrough its characteristics of permanence and complete withdrawal from the modern economy into the natural and primitive, actually relates more closely to concepts of home architecture current in the early twentieth century.    While The Sea Wolf reveals a primarily gendered relationship to primitive dwelling, madwelling that, as the conclusion to The Lion City of Africa foreshadows, imagine primitive dwelling to be a potential property of the white, modern, middle-class self. The multiplicity of available architectural styles led American architects and critics to lament the lack of a national  A Study of the fluential Chicago architect Louis Sullivan argues against the  138 falsity and sterility he finds in contemporary American architecture that fails to express resuldepends on an inescapable truth: the fact of the environmental and cultural materialism that produces the unity of a peoplThe peopl-piece and distinctions of social and econnd their thought. Not surprisingly, a 1906 Craftsman review of an architectural exhibition by the New York architectural league, argues against 32). Yet the components that would come together in the slow process of adaptation could be those very foreign styles, in this case Renaissance, are in many cases, being modified and simplified into something that can be termed was a common solution to the problem. The historian and ambassador Andrew White argued that Americans should continue to adapt the French and English prior adaptations of classical architecture717). Occasionally this argument for adaptation would take a more open and challenging turn, desiring a less racially essentialized notion of style. For instance, a 1909 Country Life in America  139 unified national style and for an emerging admixture of immigrant styles, among which the author included Italian, Dutch, and Japanese.  Yet in this and in most cases, whatever architectural styles could be appropriated for a white, American, middle class could serve to prove the sociobiological adaptation of whites to their environment. That is, home architecture, understood as a material culture, could serve as a domination and ownership of the land, and provided particular individuals with the idea of a stable connection to home and land through their private property. The concept of the unconscious adaptation. This displacement allowed them to also maintain the idea of free, modern, rational selves, capable both of belonging to home and homeland, and also alienating interior of self, home and homeland, while also defining and empowering the modern  The Californian poet and architectural critic, Charles Keeler, provides the most concrete example of this dynamic. His manifesto The Simple Home from 1904 argued against architectural styles and materials that were not appropriate to race or environment, with environmental considerations taking the upper hand. He begins his book sounding much like a evolutionary cycles. The aerie of the eagle, the woven cradle of the oriole, the tunneled retreat of the fiel 140 material is worked into a shelter, and the tradition of form once established, is handed down form the possibility of home for the civilized, modern self, a dwelling whose potential for refuge depends on concepts of an environmentally, traditionally, even biologically determined production of material culture, unconscious of a marketplace that would exchange objects and styles across racial, cultural, or environmental borders. And yet, when he attempts to articulate a way for white Americans to apply these theories, he looks beyond local physiography and tradition to a transnational, global, marketplace. Striving to articulate a style of home appropriate  out that all sound art is an expression springing from the nature which environs it. Its principles may have been imported from afar, but the application of those principles must be native. A home must be adapted to the climate, the landscape and the life movements, but then to make them domestic. These dynamics take an interesting turn when he writes of borrowing froimitate either, or make a vulgar mixture of the two, but rather, by a careful study of both, to select those features which can be best adapted to our own life and landscape, so that a new and distinctive garden may be evolved discourses of adaptation and evolution work to create a material domestic life outside of and also work to appropriate and stabilize these circulations by transforming them through evolutionary processes of selection and adaptation. It is difficult, however, to know which is primary for Keeler: the chthonic and the traditional which define the interiority of the local, or the cosmopolitan which can be selected and adapted in the  141 process of local evolution. Much like David and Ned in The Lion City of Africa, those who would produce and consume a domestic architecture would be able to choose, alienate, and apply those styles that would fit culture and environment. Yet their selection results not from rational planning only, but also from a demand voiced from an interior that itself is changing racially and culturally. In fact, both processes of production and consumption seem to Keeler equally valid standards for an ideally domestic material culture. While the former provides the possibility of a stable identity, the later seems a practical method for maintaining the possibility of group identity within a diverse nation that depended on the transnational flows of goods and people.   or modern American progress, it seems possible that these dynamics of selection and adaptation provide a model for beginning to think about radical acceptance of those defined as other through race or culture. Though Japanese and Italians were not wholly discriminated against, they were certainly stereotyped and racialized at the time; and incorporating some of their styles into a dynamic, nonessentialized process of transculturation could be seen to be an early twentieth-century version of acceptance. But for many, this process of adaptation depended on conforming to a naturalistic, even sociobiological harmony with the environment. This anthropologically framed concept of architecture that could make the house a domestic place: a home.  The home architectural form known as the bungalow deferred to this ideal. In fact, one might say that this value of evolutionary adaptation was central to the definition of the bungalow, and not necessarily the often cited but often transgressed definition of a house containing one and a half  142  construction to give it the feeling of growth rather than Craftsman praised a mountain retreat in southern California, designed by the influential Arts and Crafts that: The American bungalow has, at present, more general interest than any other form  of house. Whether its rough and rugged exterior and the primitive features of its  construction result from the carefully planned effects of some skillful architect, as  in the case of this mountain shelter, or from the crude workmanship of the  amateur who, following out the instincts of his forebears, builds his own  rambling, one-story shack, the bungalow has more individuality than any other  dwelling place. (331)   as planned by skilled, rational, professionals, in control of materials. Yet, at the same time, these vare supplemented and substantiated by the possibility of instinctual, nonrational production. It is perhaps this concept of the bungalow that London was thinking of when he composed his short g the life of a middle-aged lawyer who compulsively lives out a secret, inherited, adavistic identity as a primitive Germanic man with superhuman strength, an ability to swing from trees, and an instinctual knowledge of prehistoric  143 German. Before a fight to the death with a bear cures him of this identity, he lives in a bungalow in the countryside, and sleeps caged in a sleeping porch to protect others from his nightly escapades. This ideal existed in less fantastic forms as Craftsman authors, and others, often idealized house plans and already constructed homes whose materials, especially the local field stones that would create the foundation for many Arts and Crafts-style houses, were gathered from the local environment. London imagines a modern white man living out a white primitive past inherited from Europe, but often this concept of a primitive architecture, and the idea of primitive refuge and withdrawal it signified, was represented, and displaced to, the primitive of another race. Two particular houses described in The Craftsman illustrate precisely this dynamic.   is sweeping so much of modern thought away from the artificial and back to the simple and such, the house is expressed through a sincerity of  With its sturdy proportions and its few simple lines, the whole building seems to  belong to the soil from which it rises, and to be as much a part of the landscape as  the trees that shelter it. The foundation of split field rubble is sunk so low in the  ground that the floor of the porch is but a few inches above the grassy slope of the  terrace, giving that sense of closeness to the earth that is one of the great charms  of all primitive dwellings, and cutting off the harsh angle of the steps with a  charmingly gracious curve of turf. (254) visually weds the house to the landscape, yet the primitive here is hardly a rejection of  144  the challenge of the primitive to modern artificiality is grammatically encircling it. And just in case the reader is still too unsettled by the savage earthiness of trees is of the class of that of an Indian teepee or a Mexican adobe hut, and yet it satisfies all the -259). That is, the primitive home is merely a metaphor for a house that, though Arts and Crafts, is decidedly modern. This passage amples, manages to simultaneously displace the -class, white readers, a modernity that is also emphasized by four pages of exterior and interior drawings and side and front elevation which is hyphenated at page 254 and resumes at page 259  visually associating the house with modern advancements. The architectural elevations, especially, connote the reassuring modernity of the trained architect. lop into strong, sincere men and women domesticity, a cultural form that works to produce human beings that are both modern and primitive, cured of modern artificiality. While this house is merely compared to a primitive house on the basis of its relationship homeowners, Arnold L. Gessel, actually claims to have taken th 145 materials from the suggestion of Yet it also uses the concept of the primitive to produce an idea of home. He begins a description of his planning process, writing:  There were a few things the builder of this bungalow was sure of from the start: It  should be an outdoor house, suited to rural surroundings  light, open, airy,  unplastered and unpapered. It should be a long, low structure like the Mexican  hut whose simple, comfortable, horizontal lines seem architecturally so  harmonious with the landscape and atmosphere of our Western country. Another  primary suggestion came from the beautiful tall eucalyptus tree (which often  grows beside the Mexican hut). This tree is one of the characteristic features of  southern California. Though a native of Australia, it thrives on the Pacific Coast    The passage presents a disorienting dialectic of the indigenous and the foreign, through which the foreign itself makes possible the adaption of material home life to a particular locality. The writer begins the description with a familiar rejection of the civilized and the modern  here represented by plaster and wallpapers  in favor of the uncivilized  represented by the structure that allows the house to harmonize with the California landscape. And yet the writer emphasizes that the landscape is Emphasizing that he and his white middle-class readers do in fact possess the land, this ownership has not produced an indigenous architecture  it is decidedly lacking. It must not only be imported, but produced by the  146 eucalyptus trees that will be used in the building of the house  a tree that grows beside the er attempts to describe a house that harmonizes with local physiography   like a primitive hut  to displace locality, and to maintain a free, modern self through the manipulation and domination of the primitive and the local, and the freedom from the materialism the local and primitive imply.   personalization of the building, arguing that it springs from their own needs, desires, and personalities, organically. Gessel emphasizes the lack of modern architectural planning and training. He writes: we built a miniature house at the start. It is hard for the untrained mind to think in  three dimensions and the putting together of the house model suggested many  possibilities which a struggle with pencil on plane surface alone could never have   dy to  use the stone. (695)  And this lack of modern training and planning, emphasized by the spontaneity celebrated by the author, makes possible the ideal domestic living that the author desires, outside of the modern marketplace of alienated production more than a character can be developed for you, and the more of yourself that goes into the get out of li 147 the beginning of the article. The very possibility of a spontaneous, happy domesticity, outside a  It is within such a discursive environment uch as and Death Comes for the Archbishop tend to explore, problematize, and revise early twentieth-century anthropology; I analyze these  writing in my concluding chapter. Yet, O! Pioneers from 1913, applies anthropology to less progressive ends, as Cather attempts to imagine a way for modern whites to belong to and inhabit the American natural environment in a way that works to justify white hegemony and capitalist property rights. This project is signaled at the beginning of the novel through a meditation on the relationship of the northern European immigrant pioneers to the Nebraskan Divide they farm:  ally tucked away in low places; you did not see  them until you came directly upon them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and   insignificant, like the feeble scratches left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they  may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings. (19- 20) This observation, which places the reader in the position of an ethnographic subject with the immigrants as their object of knowledge gives way to a narrative describing the struggles of the environment, an experience echoed by most of the other poor immigrants. Here sod houses seem  148 to signify a connection to natural environment, but also the inability of the pioneers, like primitives, to overcome the environment that dominates them. Creating an idea of prehistoric dwelling for white immigrants both places them in an indigenous relation to the land but also implies the coming of history, and the transcendence of environment that Cather will associate with modernity and capitalism. This is most likely the reason that Cather resurrects the tradition of the sod house and not the form most associated with pioneer life, the log cabin. Of course, there were plenty of log-playhouses drew on this form to resurrect the frontier life associated with it. These could take the form of modest lodges whose interiors were filled with symbols of frontier life: rugged furniture, the heads of hunted game, and the ubiquitous Navajo blanket. Or they could take the form of a  -even built a pioneer room in their urban Dutch Colonial house. In a Country Life in America article of 1910 the wife writes of this secret room, hidden beyond the stairway, and behind a mirror:  On close inspection, you find it to be a mirrored door with a buckskin latch string   which by the way is always out; you pull it and hear the click of a latch lifted;  you open the door and, leaving all that is modern, you are ushered into a log  cabin, primitive and rough in every detail. Before you is a room laid up entirely of  barked pine logs, its pitched ceiling, its simple furnishings of fur rugs, balsam  pillows, Indian blankets and trophies from many hunting trips, and its eight foot   149 mantel and huge hewn oak shelf, giving you a rousing welcome with its roaring  log fire. On the crane the old iron pot, filled with boiling water, gives its   which are ever ready, and make some coffee or broil some lake fish and tell  stories of past happy times in other cabins. Already this has become the meeting- place of many congenial friends, especially the men, and it is the pride of the   If the mirror seems designed merely to reflect back at the guest, and this articlmodern world, to remind them of their modern selves, the opened door suggests that this modern life is kept secret, sheltered from the taint of the marketplace that exists in the modern house.  It is a place for men (but also women) to produce a primitive self, to act on an already interior -cabin interior. however, is only experienced beyond, yet also somehow inside of the modern marketplace, withdrawn into the interior of the modern house. In this interior fantasy world, the modern self can create intimate relationships perhaps not possible among the alienated individuals of the implication the cold, impersonal modern world beyond the secret door.   Yet there are perhaps limits to this kind of log cabin dream that kept Cather from replicating it in O! Pioneers-also from Country Life in American, suggests why Cather would turn to the sod house for her characters. The description of how children should play in the house, taming the continent as  150 developing control over the land, through displacing prior inhabitants. Log cabin dreams work to celebrate a kind of domination and control that works to replicate capitalist relationships to private property.7 Sod houses, rather, resist this process of control that would indicate a transition into the world of modernization and capitalist extraction of value. At the same time, sod houses give way to the modern. They are generally perceived in O! Pioneers as merely a preliminary house, a first step to log houses and then more modern houses as the farms become more profitable. Yet they come to signify  materialize  a connection to the land not completely lost as the farmers enter modernity and become able to dominate the land and extract value from the land and labor of hands. For the St. Francis-like character, the Russian horse doctor known as Crazy Ivar, the sod house is an end in itself; and echoes his own environmental connection to the land that the narrator obserfor three years in the clay bank without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him hknowledge is at worst idiosyncratic, at best a survival of outdated folk knowledge. Yet John useful. Indeed, it is her own connection to the land that allows her a visionary understanding of                                                            7 Such architectures and consumer practices clearly reflect the dynamics of frontier ideology in popular culture identified by cultural historian Leonard Slotkin, especially in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, where the frontier becomes a place for whites to justify ownership and political control of the nation imagined as homeland. Slotkin does not, however, discuss such material recreations of the frontier mythology.  151 its value in relationship to international markets, to see its value as an investment in the capitalist marketplace. Cather writes of Alexandra Bergson that  for the first time, perhaps since that land emerged from the waters of geological ages, a  human face was turned toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich   breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The  history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman (65).  Anthropological constructions of primitive relationships to the land, then, underscore her nation founding vision, which in turn validates her capitalist property rights as cultural property, her justification for circulating her agricultural commodities into international markets. When Ivar  as a hand. Though the sod houses are destined to give way to the modernizing improvements that allow capitalists to better extract she farms, an inalienable, indigenous right that the text yet displaces to the primitive Ivar, substantiating her capitalist property rights.8  Such primitive homes, in turn, might suggest some reasons as to why middle-class Americans brought primitive dwellings onto their property and called them rustic garden power that could be ultimately left behind, displaced to the primitive past, to return to the freedoms and constraints of the capitalist marketplace. In which case, I think they would have                                                            8 As a Russian folk character, Ivar is a kind of primitive being. Though this text displaces Native seems a European stand-in for a native identity.  As such, he replicates those perceptions of savageCultures of United States Imperialism, that would see natives as incapable of being citizens because incapable of participating in capitalism as responsible private property holders.  152 been pleased to have found Edward B. Tylor noting in his Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilizationa memory of them in the round thatched summer-houses in our gardens, which are curiously like  Figure 3: J. H. Troy Landscape Gardener Advertisement, Country Life in America, Sept. 1909   These consumer practices and the texhouse could be an image through which to practice withdrawal, a turning inward away from the modern world, as Bachelard shows, and further into the refuge of the domestic. The primitive becomes a way to reinforce and stabilize identities that are made unstable by a marketplace of alienated producers and consumers, by a modern and modernizing world. This primitive domesticity helps to propose a world in which the alienable modern self, a self that reifies,  153 reflexively consumes, and leaves behind identities can achieve the stability and refuge of home. In this home, the material refuge substantiates a self that is withdrawn and belongs to this withdrawal. Consumer and producer, private property owner and property, self, land, and material objects become identical  difference. Yet this withdrawal and the identity it makes possible is never complete, as we are also offered the return to the modern. Objects, ethnicities, localities, land, and races both belong and fail to belong to this self. The primitive home is never completely primitive; it is always capable of allowing  indeed producing  a return to the modern world that is also always there in the house. This primitive home in fact is not primarily, or necessarily, a relationship to the modern house, but a property of the modern individual. It is an imaginative and material practice available to alienable modern selves as they navigate an interior and exterior world populated by difference. Like the ethnographic consumer, primitive domesticity is a practice that produces the waking world of alienations and mobilities as much as it produces a dream of refuge. 154 Chapter 4Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet : Cliff-The Song of the Lark  culture has been a theme of recent critical readings of her novels, especially The Song of the Lark, , and Death Comes for the Archbishop (Aranoff; Stout; Swift and Urgo). In her introduction to the 2005 collection of essays, Will Cather and Material Culture: Real World Writing, Writing the Real World, Janis P. Stout outlines the multiple meanings objects might have to Cather herself and speculates that, during her time in New York, Cather certainly would have heard of, and may have met, Franz Boas; and that because of this, Boas would have influenced her thinking about material culture. Regardless of her personal connections to anthropologists, many of her novels clearly reference the texts and practices of anthropology and archaeology, use anthropological discourse, or simply reflect a concern with the values and practices that comprise the concept of everyday culture (as in Shadows on the Rock, for instance). The extent to which Cather reflects conservative and imperialist concepts of culture is of central concern in these analyses, which primarily investigate whether Cather reflexively produced reified representations of race and culture or whether Cather produced stereotypical representations of native races and cultures that reinforced hegemonic ideologies and imperialist practices. As I argued in my third chapter, O! Pioneers anthropological understandings of culture work to imagine a relationship between the material world of nature and the material objects of human production that places European immigrants and the capitalists they become, creating an interior identity tied to regional and national identity. This concept of culture, through Alexandra Bergson, works to justify capitalist property rights and ultimately  155 connotations of work can be read as a direct engagement and occasionally a critical revision of twentieth-century anthropology has not often been recognized. Anthropology appears explicitly or implicitly in chapter, I argue that The Song of the Lark directly engages with and contributes to early twentieth-century anthropology to produce an aesthetic theory of artistic production that elusive because it is always changing and from the perspective of stability, always lacking stability, always incomplete (304). If anthropology so often offers its practitioners a primitive, unconscious wholeness, an object through which to create their own identity as conscious, rational, autonomous individuals, as ethnographic subjects, The Song of the Lark offers a different version of culture. In this novel, artistic objects are a part of the culture they emerge from, produced out of the longings, needs, and fears of the people, but also through a complex environment of cultural exchange, transformation, incompletion, and loss.  Perhaps the most obvious reason that The Song of the Lark has been read as a reflection of professional anthropology are the passages that depict the archaeology of the abandoned cliff-dwellings of the southwest United States, which are central to . Cather would not have had to speak with Franz Boas to learn what anthropologists and archaeologists understood of Cliff Dwellers, given the amount and variety of writing on the cliff dwellings known as Mesa Verde, which were grouped and preserved in a national park by a 1906   156 which people created them, what level of civilization they indicated, and what caused them to be abandoned  began with a November 3, 1874 New York Tribune article, written by Ernest Ingersoll, a journalist who had traveled with the Hayden Survey and documented a group of ruins in Colorado known as the Castle Rock Pueblo. Several theories gained prominence and were dispelled, including the theory that the Cliff Dwellers, because of their impressive architecture, were related to the Aztecs (Mendeleff 111). By the late 1890s, however, anthropologists seemed determined to take the Cliff Dwellers down a notch in the scale of their cultural and racial hierarchies, finding that the dwellings did not indicate a superior race or culture, but rather were the result of the environment itself. Cosmos Mindeleff writes in 1898 in the Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York that because  and in a few generations comes directly under the sway of the country in which he lives which that art developed; or to put the matter in a more concrete form, the origin of the cliff dwellings is to be found in the study of their geographical environment.   These kinds of arguments, to varying degrees, recurred well into the twenties such that we can Annals of the Association of American Geographers, presuming that its subjects are nearly completely defined by geography, Cliff-Dweller objects and dwellings an expression of natural habitat. The article concedes that in   157 Outside of professional anthropological writing, there were others who wrote about their experiences of the material objects of Cliff Dwellers; in popular anthropology, certainly, but also in Arts and Crafts criticism, travel writing, and in poetry. The Arts and Crafts movement, of course, was more likely to address these objects through the discourse of professional anthropology. George Wharton James, for instance, discusses cliff dwellings in his 1905 The Craftsman, which I examined partially in chapter three. James imagines the Cliff Dweller developing their homes through slow accretions of new developments:  In the canyons of the water courses and wherever nature had formed a cliff, the cave dweller found everything ready for his stone ax and flint hammer. Continued peckings, with an occasional heavy blow, excavated quite a cave, and thus his rude shelter was formed. Later, he began to pile up rock in front of his sleeping place, that the blasts might not blow upon him too severely, and when he learned from the birds and the insects the lesson of mortar, mud or cement, he made a solid wall which shut in his cave. Thus in time it became  when perched in the wall of a cliff  what we now term a cliff-dwelling. tion of the slow, natural, nearly evolutionary architectural developments works to resist any hint of conscious rational problem solving or agency in the architects. The origin story of shelter that James imagines, through which he develops an idea of the dwelling, are connected to contemporary architecture in a November 1916 Craftsman article perhaps the best examples of protective habitation evhills surrounding Los Angeles, California (Marple 192). The author Albert Marple describes the  158 courageous ha-Dweller architecture serves as a substantiation of a basic hierarchy-of-needs conception of the home as shelter. Yet, the Californian homes perhaps lings, past or current architectural movements.  occurs when Thea Kronberg  ranch in Panther Canyon. On the one -style resembling camping or the cultural practices Philip Deloria has identified in Playing Indian. Cather writes, Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete  conceptions in her mind  almost in her hands. They were scarcely clear enough to be  called ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and colour and sound, but almost   to  another  as if it mattered! And now her power to think seemed converted into a  power of sustained sensation. (299-300) It would seem that she moves across the modern/ primitive binary as she moves from culture to nature, from mind to body, from conscious subject to unconscious object. The implication that Thea Kronberg is engaging in early twentieth-century Indian play is most apparent as the narrator describes her feelings when walking the trail to the Cliff- 159 herself trying to walk as they must have walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins which she had never known before  which must have come up to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back as she 302). As a reading borrowing observations from Deloria might suggest, Kronberg and oria 99). The problematics of modernity focused on to Panther Canyon worn down by her attempts to advance in her voice training, which has been set in a Chicago whose modernity, comprised of crowds and consumer culture, Cather has Thea (300). That is, it is alienated from her, an object to be studied and hopefully controlled. But in Panther Canyon her voice is unaliena300).  Yet, The Song of the Lark asks us to question the authority of anthropological discourses which he bases in self-directed reading and then applies to his experiences excavating Cliff-Dweller burial mounds. In a conversation between Ray and the young Thea, Thea reports of the Ray responds:   160 could them Indians cut houses out of the living rock, when they knew nothing about the  hose old fellows had learned to work metals   -day, the corners  as true as the Denver Capitol. They were clever at most everything but metals; and that   a race. I guess it was civilization proper that began when men mastered metals. (115-116) Comparing the material culturDenver, with that of Cliff Dwellers, works to expose the logic that would depend on a real conflict, either game or war, of such spatially and historically distant people. And his notion that -twentieth century ethnographic consensus, repeated later in the novel, that Pueblo Indians were the descendants of Cliff Dwellers, and so had not become extinct. The passage works to gently effort to imagine extinction as a result of racial inferiority.   al among experiences at Panther Canyon. He explains that  the ancient people had developed masonry and pottery far beyond any other crafts. After they had made houses for themselves, the next thing was how to house the precious water. He explained to her how all their customs and their ceremonies went back to was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element  161 itself. The strongest Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars, fashioned slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel. (303-304) ons of industry, gender, and psychology, also implies the typical concept that Cliff Dwellers were dominated by their granted by the novel to his anthropological depiction, it is also introduced with the qualification 303). The Cliff-Dweller objects on the property he is caretaker of exceed his ability to provide explanations of them.   Knowledge that would exceed anthropology is perhaps gestured towards in Theophil account published in  in 1896, which engages with anthropology, yet hopes to establish a position outside of anthropology. Prudden begins by affecting the writing persona of   record in haphazar  group of prehistoric Americans who had finished their strenuous and narrow lives, and  faded into tradition and myth before the Spanish, zealous for God and athirst for gold,  had penetrated to the heart of our continent, and even before Columbus had ventured  across the unknown seas. (545). ms rather inclined to find connection with, rather than difference from, the people expressed by the objects he experiences,  162 if only on the terms of Anglo-American language and history signaled by his use of the word ather thin within several paragraphs, however, when he about the haunts and ways of the American Cliff-should be to readers of this dissertation a familiar knowledge base for the popular and scientific dissemination of anthropology. Moreover, his article is structured much like scientific overviews of the Cliff-Dwellers, beginning with a description of the environment, followed by a description of Cliff-Dweller structures and artifacts, and ending with suggestions as to Cliff Dweller psychology and behavior.  Yet, Prudden readily admits to a variety of other experiences, knowledges, and feelings, charge of delving a little in the burial-places, rather with the greed of the collector than the calm  attempts a kind of all landed safely in a sunny Elysium long before the strangers unearthed their bones and carried off those varied furnishings of their graves which kindly hands had placed beside them for their allows him more imaginative connections as Prudden excitedly wonders about Cliff-Dweller smoking habits: And the Cliff-dweller smoked a pipe! I feel constrained to leave it to the archaeologist to    163 decide whether he smoked for the fun of it, or with devotional or ceremonial intent, and  what he smoked. But one short-stemmed pipe of clay, decorated in red, and blackened  within from use, and one half shaped in process of construction, are in my own  collection. It is a dreamy land, this which he lived in, and I hope that he lay in the  shadows sometimes in the lulls of his strenuous life, and, with no urgent thought of his  gods or his etiquette, puffed idly and at ease his little dudheen. (558) his attempt to imagine the Cliff Dweller as more than a primitive being bound by dictates of culture, but the fact is, he does do so and through two objects he reports to own. Of course, his word for small pipe as the Irish were apt to be stereotyped as constrained by an inherited the basis for an imaginative connection based, at least partially, in his unlearned, populist   That this connection is short-lived and limited in its politics is suggested in the book that emerged from this article and one other article (published in The American Anthropologist) composed by Prudden: the anthropological travel monologue On the Great American Plateau: Wanderings Among Canyons and Buttes, in the Land of the Cliff-Dweller, and the Indian of Today published in 1906. In the chapters surrounding the revised 1896 article from , Prudden affects a much more confident and impersonal anthropological discourse, where his more scientific, objective depictions of living people and Cliff-Dweller remains, and the archaeological and anthropological research that underpins those depictions, are compelled by  164 the fear that, given the inevitable extinction of Indian culture, that culture must be scientifically documented:  It is humiliating, not only for an American, but for any educated human being, to realize that in this great, rich, powerful United States, boasting ever of its general enlightenment, there is neither the intelligent public spirit, nor the sustained private devotion to the wider aspects of science, to secure the myths and traditions and lore of these wonderful people before this page now open upon the Story of Man shall be closed forever. For nowhere else on this planet does this particular illumining phase of human life exist, nor will it come again.    Here, the vanishing Indian ideology, as Deloria has called it, promotes anthropological study. The emotions and knowledge are mainly produced within anthropology as opposed to through an experiential knowledge of people or objects outside of anthropology. The Song of the Lark extends this potential gap between a kind of knowing brought about by expe-Dweller aesthetic revelation. At first, after Biltmer has offered his anthropological analysis of Cliff-[which] flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water  The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself  life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had  165 intervals. (304) has dialectically given rise to her revisions. Through a shift into metaphor, Thea transforms esthetic observation that allows her to exceed the understanding provided by anthropology, and to see humans as fundamentally, inevitably engaged in a process of creation and loss, creation that bears within itself the inevitability of loss, of an emptying out that may be understood as death or, alternatively, simply transformation and change. As if to clarify that this observation has implications for anthropology, Thea develops t they had expressed it as beautifully as they could. Food, fire, water, and something else  even here, in this crack in the world, so far back in the night of the past! Down here at the beginning, that painful thing was already stirring; the seed of sorrow, and of so much delightneeds supplied by the environment, which Biltmer finds to be determining, but gestures towards an addition  aesthetic aspira305).1 somewhat condescendingly th                                                           1 Song of the Lark which argues that this novel merely repeats nineteenth-cdevelopment, which could be placed within a hierarchy of evolutionary stages along a historical Schedler 109).  166 mista-consciously engaged in the problem of representation and artistic creation. Cather herself, in an without being specifically named therethat, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself (6). Absence is built into the artistic novel, which chapters and sections, as an exploration and exposition of her own efforts as author to capture hurrying past us and running away, even beyond our position as an audience for what is generally defined as art. In fact, the novel asks us to take this aesthetic position as a criticism of the experience. Ray foreshadows this gap between the experience of an archaeological site and  167 ve ever 118use they seemed more adequate than 116). Ray himself, in his was] so full of vanished mysteriousl116). Though there is comedy -criticism foreshadows and develops the definition of art arrived at by Thea in Panther Canyon and, in this light, becomes a much broader satirical representation of all human creative expression.  kind of anthropological discourse created by Biltmer that Song of the Lark, on the surface, -Dweller are aware of, in alienating the objects, in removing them from the space they have been left in (303). The removal of Cliff-Dweller pottery, parts of ruins, and human remains had been a controversial practice since before the Swedish aristocrat and archaeologist Gustaf Nordenskiold excavated the Mesa Verde ruins and was nearly arrested for transporting artifacts back to Sweden. (He was allowed to continue because no law had been found that he had broken). Nordenskiold would go on, before his untimely death from tuberculosis, to publish one of the first scientific studies of Mesa Verde, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, Southwestern Colorado: Their Pottery and Implements, in 1895. The geographical removal of artifacts by foreign archaeologists, or even simply nationally affiliated archaeologists, was one of the central  168 evils opposed by Virginia McClurg in her arguments for Mesa Verde to become a state park, although she supported local artifact collectors and even purchased a collection from another local relic collector in 1892 (Browman 60). As James E. Snead argues, for McClurg and others like her, the removal of artifacts from southwestern archaeological sites challenged their attempts to create a southwest regional identity (Snead 52). 2 We find similar practices of alienating objects in popular culture. Deloria has noted that one way the modern individual found -116). For Ernest Thompson Seton, among bearing with them the sign of Thea and Biltmer, but his difference from Biltmer is significant. If Ray participates both in the replication of anthropological discourse and in the removal of Cliff-Dweller objects, in his case, 116). And both his shame and the knowledge he gains of history in opposition to books leads to his own revelation. As he tells Thea, When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang out of a doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You begin to feel what the human race has been up against from our best, on account of those fellows having it so hard. You feel like you owed them something. (118) his humanism glosses over cultural difference to find a similarity that allows him to feel                                                            2Ann Raine has argued that own argument for revitalize the commercialized and industrialized modern urban life (131).  169 connected to those his anthropology would transform into primitive others. Second, this (through his death, he is able tsince he understands the Cliff-in primitive architecture (there is also perhaps an implicit joke at the expense of Ray who could lumsy language bores Thea it is noted -blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up for the can hardly be insignificant, especially given the importance of the relationship between readerly forecloses on a relationship to human beings and their creations that allows for that feeling. This potsherds and liked better to leave them in the dwellings where she found them. If she took a few bits back to her own lodge and hid them under the blankets, she did it guiltily, as if she were 305). Whereas to alienate the objects of the primitive other as he accounts for them in anthropological discourse, Thea finds the objects imbued with the presence of their feel- and water-inspired  170 implies that her feelings are connected to her revision of anthropology, which supplement his book learning and his own lecture language and make it marginally an aesthetic theory, made poignant through archaeology, that begins to develop a way to understand both reading novels and material culture, or to be precise, human relationships to objects.   New Republic in 1922, of course explicitly compares the two  world of objects and writing  as it proposes an unfurnishing of the novel. rejection of objects and clutter that points to the modern home interiors that would follow three not with the accumulation of things that cling, as with velcro, to our ordinary lives, but with the few selected things that will best convey associated antithetical to individual freedom. I would suggest that the furnishing and unfurnishing the essay opposes is rather a more complex affair. Stout is perhaps closer to the mark when she finds Cather in disagreement with consumer culture (3). Cather indeed begins her essay arguing gument is not that these things gum up everyday life  rather it is the opposite, that succession of new things that are quickly threadbare and can be lightly thrown  171 necessarily explained by her definition of popular novels as commodities. That is, bad realist novels are not necessarily popular novels, but nor are they necessarily art. For Cather, the in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufacturies and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing  pa creates a slightly different attitude than the one created by the Cather cannot reduce the canonical Balzac to the transience of trash (pulp writing as well as the inevitable future state of the commodity), she finds that the realistic novel fails to arrest the reader who can only approach it from an outside even when the novel is as totally representationally faithful as Balzac. Both the commodified and the realist novel produce art that, one might say, lacks materiality. The eye that reads the realist novel remains unaffected. Similarly, pulp creates no lasting relationship to its reader. The difference is merely that for pulp it is tbinding, affective purchase. ritical depiction of the realist novel to the because both create the idea of totality. Indeed, both create an attitude toward their subject matter. Anthropology creates the counter-fiction of the rational self, outside the culture it explains, and also able to alienate its objects without feeling. The anthropological attitude toward  172 cultural products, in Song of the Lark leads to Biltmer. The realist novel creates a reader on the outside, an outside which can further be understood as the position of that other modern self, the almost de-humanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimulibe arguing not against material objects, but against materialist representations of human society or culture.  But, rt] must select the eternal the shining, elusive element which is life itself  life hurrying past us and running away, too mateveryday life of modernity and specifically the fleeting instability produced in consumer capitalism. Her dialectic definition of art as a selection of everyday life is then structured by the definition of art, dialectically relying on anthropology, is able to also understand the production and consumption of human creative acts in their everydayness, as a part of the life they attempt to stabilize.  173 Indeed, while the 1922 essay would seem to have developed out of an aesthetic theory Cather attributes to Thea in Song of the Lark, the earlier text attributes a far more limited power to art, since art is a failed attempt to capture life, limited as it is by time, decay, and death. In can be eternal. Yet, for Thea, art is an imperative only because lieveryday acts of production and consumption outside of the opposition between consumer culture and art that starchaeology influenced by Cliff-Dweller objects helps to produce an aesthetic theory that resists become known as Cliff Dwellers are objects whose mystery is created by loss  the loss of societies, of ways of life, of a death that seems more total because of the gap between the created object that is present and the creators that are long gone. They are objects of everyday life, yet there is no longer life, except the ghostly trace produced by the objects.  Song of the Lark are open to other ways of experiencing Cliff Dweller objects that notice these quaPoetry, while not engaging with environmental determinism. The p-9) and this oppression leads to the sentimen-13). Yet the  174 -16). The animation of objects in these lines is -gray flock of doves / [which] ush-poem works to express surprise at the audacity and persistence of life on the mesa, a vitality expressed by both animal life and the objects that are the remains of human life, and still work to express that life. Yet if the poem does not explicitly engage in environmental determinism, the mental determinism, which argues that animals and primitives have adapted to harsh conditions that white Europeans have not adapted to. notable not so much for what it does describe in its narration of a guided horseback tour through the recently created Mesa Verde State Park, but for what it resists writing. The author, Eva Mills Anderson, rarely deviates from a simple narration of events as they happen or a description of landscape features as they occur within the narration. Written in the present tense, the article does not mention Cliff-Dweller ruins or objects until they appear within the sequential time of the narrative. The first mention of an archaeological site occurs only half-way through the article, chasm at Spruce Tree Hphysiography, Cliff-Dweller architecture, or beginning an anthropological analysis of Cliff- 175 archaeological sites, as does nearly every other travel, geographical, or anthropological account I ladies have the opportunity to admire masculine dexterity in the cuisine while the guides prepare canyon, dig for pottery, finding only some broken pieces and a flint arrow head, and watch the horses being taken to the feeding grounarchaeological observations that would attempt to gain access to, to understand and resurrect the Cliff Dwellers, are merely placed within a present stream of events experienced by the narrator and her fellow tourists. After camping, Anderson narrates a climb along the canyon edge, a narration that ends with the Mesa Verde structure named Balcony House.  In describing Balcony House, Anderson becomes relatively expansive, noting the - and only  time, Anderson mentions the human beings that must have created the structures whose remains she experiences:  doorways or what seem to be such, are low and narrow. The windows are various shapes, a few circular or nearly so, most of them rectangular. These openings frequently are bordered by a frame of wattled twigs, especially across the top. Apparently when the builder had no stone long (203). It is as if, even though she attempts to provide description of only what she experiences, that experience unwittingly suggests a prior human life. Yet, despite the attention to detail she provides in this section, it is tinged with failure, with an inability to find what she is looking for, and an inability to produce presence. This lack is first signaled when she notes that  176 It is said that much pottery was found in these [rooms], but all these dwellings have been absolutely rifled of everything portable. Pottery, mummies, wall pictures, relics of every kind have been made merchandise of by those who visited these ruins only to sack them. Not only were the things taken out but walls that hindered the search were ruthlessly torn down so that it is difficult to tell what is the work of time and what that of the iconoclasts. (203) In a momentary burst of emotion, as if felt in the midst of her exploration, Anderson suggests indignation, anger, and confusion. Of course, as I have noted, the removal of Cliff-Dweller artifacts for private collectors was often criticized for the unscientific motives of the tomb raiders. Yet Anderson, almost ironically, finds the removal of the objects to be an iconoclastic reaction, given that she has never actually named the Cliff Dwellers nor does so, except to name in spite of, or perhaps because of, her resistance to naming human beings.  Anderson ends her narration of the visit to Balcony House with a haunting description of rooms, indicating upper stories, but no floors now exist. We wander long in these apartments, often pursuing some course, climbing over walls, crawling through narrow openings only, at last ness, and an even more ghostly suggestion of human use, but, for Andersen, it is almost impossible to know more, to name that prior presence. Even her own presence there  a course unnamed, perhaps unnamable,  177 ruins. Anderson finds the Cliff-Dweller ruins and artifacts producing not the presence of an other and a self but the mutual limits of self and other, the limitations of defining the self through the other, the impossibility of locating an ultimate presence of other or self. If objects, in their stability and persistence, are often understood as stabilizing identity, culture, or human life, the Cliff-Dwelpersistence is impermanent, mutable. For both Thea and Anderson, this impermanent, mutable persistence becomes a way to name loss, the loss of wholeness or of the idea of wholeness. Yet for Cather, unlike for Anderson, this experience suggests a return from archaeology, a way to understand artistic production and consumption within an everyday life made up of less dramatic, minute impermanence.  obvious dialectical engagement with anthropology, The Song of the Lark more directly explores anthropological concepts of the human creation of culture in some of its early passages on Moonstone. In fact, certain passages directly appropriate the late-nineteenth century anthropological assumption that human behavior can be determined by culture as a product of physiography. The German immigrant Paulina (Mrs.) Kholer is the most obvious expression of  engage in cultural exchange and  178 plainbeyond the borders of her garden, she was stupid and 23). Rather, 23). This desire to reproduce her parent culture extends to purchasing mail order seeds from Germany as she creates a garden in which 25). In this passage, the narrator reflects this resistance to circulation, identifying language with nationality, neglecting to use the word English, which would have opened up a slippage between language and home-land. When there is an American species and name, as in the case of the linden or basswood, Mrs. Kholer produces the kind which would have been in Germany; for , which was honey coloured, blooms in summer, with a fragrance that surpasses all trees and flowers and drives 26). The horticulture of other German immigrants is described in a similar manner, preserving their cultural heritagis hardly a German family in the most arid parts of Utah, New Mexico, or Arizona, but has its oleander trees. However loutish the American-born sons of the family may be, there was never one who refused to give his muscle to the back-breaking task of getting those tubbed trees down 26). But what distinguishes the ts attention to hollyhocks  giant hollyhocks. Besides the fruit trees there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two lindens, and even a Ginko  a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped 25-26).    179 relationship between human beings, their environment, and their material culture, it makes this anthropological relation to environment, where environment dominates human beings, into an act of artificial aesthetic creation. This active cultural reproduction is 3 (28the narrator reproduces in text the det29). But for all their active reproductions. The garden is, in fact, a private garden, and not natural physiography, or cloth which must be maintained and protected from destruction and decay. The garden is a 25); moreover it is a creation that must actively be protected from the 23). The cloth piece is one whose subject Fritz Kohler was allowed to select and then, as a treasured family keepsake, is one that has been protected but 29). Indeed, if both the cloth mosaic and the Kholer garden recall, in their devotion to reproduction, the realist or materialist perspectives Cather The Song of the Lark both articulates and rather lovingly celebrates.                                                            3 This reproduction, as described in The Song of the Lark, would seem to be based on the 1820s .  180 maintaining cultural produexchange, the liquid transformations culture and even cultural productions partake in and create. We see this symbolized in the garden itself, where the prairie begins to encroach despite Mrs. 26). But Cather is quick to supply possible tenors for the vehicle of these metaphors. Even though Mrs. Kholer rarely circulates beyond the German culture represented in exchange  a reproduction of a German painting of the French emperor in Russia. Although Mrs.  (29). And this foreshadows a later passage, which very clearly illustrates the minutia of cultural transformation and exchange, when Thea returns to Moonstone from Chicago and attends a cross cultural exchanges; from sexual flirtation to the sharing of songs. One song, which Thea down; Brazil, Venezuela, may-bee. I learn it from some fellow down there, and he learn it from another fellow. It is-227). The song itself is caught in a only does Thea learn the song from Spanish Johnny, continuing the process of exchange and transformation, but the section ends as the narrative shifts in space from the dance to the Kholers in their bedroom at their window:   181 Across the gulch the little house of the Kholers slept among its trees, a dark spot on the white face of the dessert. The windows of their bedroom room were open, and Paulina had listened to the dance-she could bear it no longer. Then she wakened Fritz and they went over to the window ng to a Mexican part-song. (234-235)  encroachment but becomes an active enjoyment   of a cultural product across Mrs. Khole What The Song of the Lark teaches us is that cultural products, objects no less than music, do not only indicate a cultural interior; they are not merely an attempt to stabilize identity. In revising early twentieth-century anthropology, at a time when it was not only preoccupied with defining static racial and cultural identity and difference but with material culture, Cather can help us to understand and move beyond the idea that objects are passive and inert containers of the borders of property and identity, race and culture inevitably shift. Material objects are  partially an attempt to arrest identity, arrest is not their full purpose. Even from the moment that they are created, they exceed their origin and gesture towards an outside, an outside that is already there and an outside that is new. Not only do they, in their materiality, persist beyond the ability of a single person or society to lay claim to them, at the moment of creation, they are taken up in a process whose past is lost, and whose future is exchange and transformation.    182             WORKS CITED    183 WORKS CITED  The Craftsman. April 1906, pp. 32-45. The Craftsman October 1901: iii-iv. 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