This week, please respond to William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Chapters 1 and 3, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 1-29 and 53-78. Try to get beyond the novelty of Rathje's project in your response. Try to answer the following questions: Is Rathje really practicing material culture study? Compared to the material culture studies we have already read and considered, how is Rathje's brand of material culture similar or different?
8 comments:
William Rathje and Cullen Murphy's book Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage is a interesting read from the chapters we read this week. Rathje and Murphy discuss what the Garbage Project is. The Garbage Project is a program started by students and professors at Arizona University. The program consists of them going out to a landfill particularly in these chapters the Fresh Kills landfill and digging for artifacts out of the mounds of garbage. Their research can tell us how we viewed material culture from the present to the past near the early 1900s.
I found a lot of what Rathje and Murphy discussed really interesting especially the section on going celebrity garbage digging. It sounds kind of like something a stalker would do but ultimately you really can find out a lot about people by what they throw out. The immediate question that ran through my mind after reading that is what is the jurisdiction behind doing that. That was also answered later in the first chapter when Rathje and Murphy went over how law enforcement uses trash as evidence.
From the reading I feel Rathje and Murphy are practicing the study of material culture from what we learned in class. Rathje and Murphy are digging deep with organizing their find, measuring it, smelling it, touching it, and just visually describing what is there for the readers to get an idea. This is what we do in class until we come upon a logical theory about what our material is.
I think Rathje and Murphy's brand of material culture is similar to the other articles in the method of describing and experiencing the items. The only major difference is that Rathje and Murphy are doing this on a larger scale with multiple items at one time.
Rathje and Murphy's the Archaeology of Garbage for me was one of the most interesting chapters we have read so far. It talked about the Garbage Project, what it was and how it was started. Students and professors at Arizona University started it. They for the most part go to one particular landfill. Fresh Kills on Staten Island in New York which is the largest active landfill. they also got a lot of "fresh sorts" which were right from the trucks in different parts of the city and at different times. Their research tells us and breaks it down how we can view others trash as artifacts of material culture. They talked about everything from soda caps to shortages of food where you would think people would conserve food but in those times they wasted more.
The section that grabbed me the most was about the Spike Effect it talks the consumption of red meat over a certain period of time and how people tended to round their number up or down. it goes on to say that this was not random. that upper-income places where eating healthy was a main concern and they could prove it from what they had in their trashes they tended to round down the amount of beef and pork they were eating while lower-income and middle-income neighborhoods where eating meat is often a sigh of status, they rounded up. this just really struck me and I had never thought about something so simple as that until now.
I absolutely think they are studying material culture. They are doing everything we have studied in class from touching, smelling, and categorizing the trash they dig up to studying what they find to learn more about where it came from and more about the people who used it in a certain area. the biggest difference so far from what we have read up until now it's always been a single object or a small group of objects at a time. This is material Culture just on a massive scale. It really makes you wonder what someone could tell about you from your trash.
Rathje’s discussion of the garbage project is very similar to practicing a material culture study. It started out of an anthropology class, which focused on, “how to discern links between physical evidence, often fragmentary, on one hand, and mental attitudes and patterns of behavior on the other”, just like our other studies. By recording those specific dates, times, and, patterns, the studies being conducted rely on the procedures of a material culture study, which facilitate how we live, and the market. The archeological research assists in the significance of garbage, as it is something our culture tries to hide, or is thrown out because it is unimportant.
It is different from the other culture studies, as it is stuff people haven’t kept, stuff that is not necessarily in it’s original form (parts may be missing), and it is studied in piles. There may be several items in a single pile. Most of the items are also from today’s culture, although there have been studied conducted in dumps, and other than those few details, the studies are very similar.
What separates Rathje's Garbage Project from other material culture studies is that Rathje seems to be concerned mainly with the sociological implications of the study. Whereas most students of material culture analyze their objects as a vessel for cultural meaning, Rathje's study analyzes garbage as an indicator of many different social factors.
While socioeconomic implications drawn from analysis are one important factor in material culture studies, Rathje seems to focus on nothing else. Analyzing garbage dumps for information about the people who produced the garbage, the composition of the garbage, and how the composition of such garbage differs from one social group to another is an interesting and important study, but it does not offer insight into certain aspects of garbage; for example, why one brand of meat was bought more than another or how/why the packaging of one particular product has changed during the years of operation of the Garbage Project.
eric easterday
Just in comparison to what we are doing, they are taking the bar of examining material culture to an extreme when they do their findings. They do what we do when we analyze an object but they do it on a more grand scale by looking at multiples rather than the singular. Finding from the research present what they found of the past and present patterns with everyday materials.
The way they analyzed the garbage to show comparisons to the times around them with food shortages and consumption rates is pretty interesting. The conflicting findings to the times shows how the situation around a particular moment gave way to reversal on how certain classes reacted to how they were to more than likely to behave.
In class we study an object for its meaning more so but with their studies it seems to point out the social comments from the usage there of.
I found Rathje's and Murphy's articles really intriguing. I found it especially interesting that when they studied particular groups of trash where the producers of the trash were aware of it, the descriptions of their own trash and what was actually discovered about their trash never matched up. I think this is definitely a study of material culture. It is different mainly in that their approach is broader - they aren't studying a specific object but rather trash in general as their object. Their goals may also be slightly different; they are looking at how consumption and waste has changed over time, certain types such as meat, and comparing the waste of different social classes and areas of the country. It seems to me when we look at objects we are trying to figure out things like what the maker had in mind when they created the object, what it's purpose was, how people at the time used it or perceived it.
The article discusses studying garbage as a method of understand our culture; past, present and future. Indeed, as the article states, studying garbage is nothing new. In fact it's the basis of archeology, but normally the garbage is hundreds of thousands of years old, not tens. Garbage, being the waste of a society, tells nearly the entire story of a civilization. From what they ate to what they used to catch cook and serve the food. In a modern sense studying garbage can give us an idea of our eating habits (as an example), giving us an insight to our present condition as well as our past. I know from personal experience what they are doing is basic archeology; take samples, analyze, assert. The more variety of objects to study, the easier it is to make accurate assertions, and there is no lack of trash from the past hundred years.
I find the results of these studies to be far too informative to be limited to the University and taken into consideration by officials.
It seems in this present era where going green and environment is very important, that this should become more of a utility, or how our trash is processed. Of course alot of people in Midtown recycle...but it shouldnt be a choice...it shouldnt be if you want to go out of your way.
The Waste Managment companies should go towards the route of wearing white coats rather than being just Sanitation Commissioners. Im sure there are plenty of ways to turn this profitable.
The amount of recyclable goods ought to be vast, of course processing is expensive, but if recycled goods were put back into the market rather than "sitting on a shelf" It could be made more into a civil duty of the bigwig General Steels n whatnot. And there are plenty of landfills that can be dug up and processed, and with these extra 'recyclables" more profit can be churned up for the cause.
And if the day comes that we run out of landfills...and we are processing the trash quicker than it comes in...Hopefully the industry will be very well established and some inflation had come to the recycled goods.
Just one aspect, on the other hand, the grants and overall value of the research in how to better our ways and impact on our planet and economy, i believe, would be somewhat priceless and an essential part to know in the cycle of "materialism"
From production to use to trash and reintroduction to production.
Post a Comment