15 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2017
  2. spring2018.robinwharton.net spring2018.robinwharton.net
    1103U1G1.pdf
    15
    1. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      Prownian analysis

      https://gregcotter.wordpress.com/prownian-analysis-2

      Jules David Prown is the Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of Art History at Yale University, and developer of the “Prownian Method” in which is included “Prownian Analysis”. Prownian Analysis is a means of identifying, and examining objects through detailed physical description, guessing at uses of the object, and treating the object as a fiction as a way of relating the object to more broad concepts. By applying Prownian Analysis to the examination of an object, the examiner should end with a rich description of the object, as well as a vivid idea of why the object was produced, and for whom.

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    3. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      students wi!J find value principally in learning from the models that these readings offer of how such interpretation can be carried out.

      This is to be viewed as more or less a practical guide, a manual for entering into the practice of understanding material culture.

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    4. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      These are the objects we as historians in the field of Material Culture seek to understand. Our investigations-analysis followed by interpretation-necessarily begin in the material realm with the objects themselves but gain analytic hold and open upon interpretation only through vigorous attention

      Material culture begins in the tangible, physical realm, in the purpose of not just examining the artifact itself, but also to understand the culture surrounding it through the way they used artifacts and the value and worth they imbued it with.

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    5. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      It seems to depend on a linkage-formal, iconographic, functional-between the object and some fundamental human experience, whether engagement with the physical world, inter-action with other individuals, sense of self (often expressed anthropo-morphically), common human emotions, or significant life events

      Prown's explanation of how to choose an object that is worthy of undergoing material cultural analysis.

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    7. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      smooth/rough

      Prown juxtaposes the binary, philosophical bedrock of a culture that objects often are able to express, with physical traits of objects themselves, such as smooth and rough, light and dark. His argument is that an object's physical characteristics are linked to a culture's greatest values and beliefs, and that the study of the link from Physical to Metaphysical is material cultural analysis.

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    9. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      Matenal culture begins with a world of objects bur takes place in a world of words. While we work 14With" material objects, i.e. refer "to" rhem, the medium in which we work as cultural historians is language.

      When we examine material culture, we don't then express our analysis in our own culture's form of material culture, we express it in rhetoric.

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    10. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      The key to good description is a rich, nuanced vocabulary. Technically accurate language (nominative, for the most part) plays an important role in this, but ultimately not the most important role which is reserved, per-haps somewhat counter-inruitively, to descriptive modifiers (adjectives) and, most crucially, to terms expressive of the dynamics of mterrelation (verbs, adverbs, prepositions).

      It's interesting that in an essay about material culture, Haltman spends so much time elaborating about words and writing; the realm of words, not the realm of objects.

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    11. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      Composing and revising an objective-as-possible description frees one to move from a narrow focus on the object itself to a focus on the rela-tionship between the object and oneself as its perceiver

      As we write, we are forced to examine our own cultural biases and the full implications that those biases might have on clouding our analysis.

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    12. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      Having addressed an object intellectually, and experienced it actually or empathetically with our senses, one turns, generally not without a cer-tain pleasure and relief, to matters more subjective. How does the object make one feel?

      After we describe the object in all forms, "material, spatial, and temporal." and examine our own biases, we can then proceed to subjectivity; 'how does this make me feel?', 'what does it do to me?'

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    13. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      Whereas the transition from description to deduction flows so easily we need to slow it down, subsequent moves from deduction to speculation, because they involv~ven require--creativity, can pose a greater challenge. But interpretive hypotheses, or questions about meaning, will flow just as organically out of our process of deduction provided that we open our imag-ination ro embrace, beyond its material facticity, an object's thematic reso-nance.

      Description to deduction, deduction to questions, questions to speculation.

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    14. Xandermcintosh 31 Aug 2017
      this sequencing of the stages of interpretive analysis ought not to be resisted as a straightjacket but instead exploited as the logical result of a decades-long pedagogic experi-ment carried out in numerous academic settings where it has been subject to adjusttnent and modification. The method as thus configured works because it works.

      These stages of the analysis of material culture are done in this particular order because it effectively extrapolates true the cultural impact of an object

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