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Journal of Material Culture
http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/11/3/318
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1359183506068808
2006 11: 318Journal of Material Culture
Caitlin DeSilvey
Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things
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318
OBSERVED DECAY: TELLING
STORIES WITH MUTABLE
THINGS
◆ CAITLIN DE SILVEY
Open University, UK
Abstract
The degradation of cultural artefacts is usually understood in a purely
negative vein: the erosion of physical integrity is associated with a parallel
loss of cultural information. This article asks if it is possible to adopt an interpretive
approach in which entropic processes of decomposition and decay,
though implicated in the destruction of cultural memory traces on one
register, contribute to the recovery of memory on another register. The article
tracks the entanglement of cultural and natural histories through the residual
material culture of a derelict homestead in Montana. In conclusion, the
article suggests that deposits of degraded material, though inappropriate for
recovery in conventional conservation strategies, may be understood through
the application of a collaborative interpretive ethic, allowing other-thanhuman
agencies to participate in the telling of stories about particular places.
Key Words ◆ entropy ◆ heritage ◆ memory ◆ Montana ◆ waste
If you are squeamish
do not poke among the beach rubble
Sappho (Barnard, 1958)
INTRODUCTION
The ideas in this article germinated at a derelict homestead in Montana
where I spent several years poking about in a scrambled deposit of
domestic and agricultural rubble. My excavations performed an ad hoc
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 11(3): 318–338
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[DOI: 10.1177/1359183506068808]www.sagepublications.com
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archaeology of the
recent past in a place
not yet old enough
to be interesting to
(most) archaeologists
(though see Buchli and
Lucas, 2001) and too
marginal and dilapidated
to be interesting
to historic preservationists.
The farm,
settled with a homestead
claim in 1889,
lay a few miles north
of the city of Missoula,
tucked into a swale in
the bare foothills of
the Rocky Mountains.
For most of the 20th
century, the Randolph
family ran a market
garden and subsistence
operation on the
site, but by the 1990s
these days of productivity
were long past.
The youngest son in
the family died in
1995, leaving behind
a complex of ramshackle
sheds and
dwellings crammed
with the debris of
decades (Figure 1). I
came along in 1997 and began to work with the site’s residual material
culture, first as a volunteer curator and later as a research student
working towards a doctoral degree in cultural geography.
As I worked in the homestead’s derelict structures, I often came
upon deposits of ambiguous matter – aptly described by Georges Bataille
as the ‘unstable, fetid and lukewarm substances where life ferments
ignobly’ (1993: 81). Maggots seethed in tin washtubs full of papery cornhusks.
Nests of bald baby mice writhed in bushel baskets. Technicolor
moulds consumed magazines and documents. Repulsive odours escaped
from the broken lids of ancient preserve jars. Rodents, moulds, insects
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FIGURE 1 The ‘Home Comfort’ cookstove holds its
own against a collapsing wall in the homestead
kitchen.
All photographs by Caitlin DeSilvey
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and other organisms, long accustomed to being left alone, had colonized
the excess matter. Packrat middens crowded attic corners with pyramids
of shredded text and stolen spoons. Hoardings deposited by animals and
humans mingled indistinguishably. I am not particularly squeamish, and
I did poke, but the edge of revulsion was never far away. I worked close
against the margin where the ‘procreative power of decay’ sparks simultaneous
– and contradictory – sensations of repugnance and attraction
(Bataille, 1993). In my early excavations, the degraded material presented
a problem that I could barely articulate, let alone resolve.
In her characterization of waste as a by-product of the creation of
order, Mary Douglas comments on the threat posed by things that have
been incompletely absorbed into the category of waste. ‘Rejected bits
and pieces’ which are recognizably ‘out of place’, she observes, still have
some identity because they can be traced back to their origins (1966:
160). ‘This is the stage at which they are dangerous’, Douglas writes,
‘their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in
which they obtrude is impaired by their presence’ (1966). Such obtrusions
of clarity were common in my encounters with the homestead’s
artefacts. A bundle of paper furred with mould; a tangle of stained fabric
and desiccated mouse carcasses; musty locks of human hair; a pair of
badger paws tacked above a door lintel; tin cans cloaked with rust and
cobwebs (Figure 2) – these things were caught up in the processes of
‘pulverising, dissolving, and rotting’ which would eventually render
them unrecognizable (Douglas, 1966). Their disposal, however, remained
unfinished (Hetherington, 2004).
At base, the ideas in this article arose from my uncertainty about
which items to salvage from this deposit of co-mingled matter. In ruins,
Tim Edensor comments, ‘processes of decay and the obscure agencies of
intrusive humans and non-humans transform the familiar material world,
changing the form and texture of objects, eroding their assigned functions
and meanings, and blurring the boundaries between things’ (Edensor,
2005b: 318). As the curator of the site, I had responsibility for recovering
items of value from this inauspicious mess so they could be enlisted for
projects of cultural remembrance. ‘It is unpleasant to poke about in the
refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity’, Douglas observes
– sounding curiously like Sappho (1966: 160). Such slippery materials
produce ‘ambiguous perceptions’ that trouble the order of things (1966).
Conventional strategies for conservation and heritage preservation
neutralize these ambiguous perceptions through a set of value judgements
that render materials into distinct categories of ‘artefact’ and ‘waste’. In
this place, however, such an approach would have led to the disposal of
all but the most durable items.1 The homestead’s materiality required a
particular kind of attention to make sense of it, one that attempted not to
defuse sensations of ambiguity and aversion, but to work with them.
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I begin the article with a discussion of the way certain deposits of
material open up breaches in the categories we use to order the world
and to structure our attempts at remembering the past. A section on
memory work and heritage follows, with a proposal for a mode of
remembrance that might accommodate these shifty materialities and
yield to the collaborative energies of other agencies. I continue with a
rumination on how such approaches trouble the authority of the curator,
and move on to an experiment in collaborative ‘synchronic handiwork’.
The article is primarily concerned with problems of interpretation – how
can we think about these things, and how do we work with them without
eliding their ambiguity? Peter Sloterdijk writes of the need for people
who can work in a spirit of ‘liberating negativism’, pushing past their
nausea to confront material too unpleasant for others to contemplate
(1987: 151). The threshold of discomfort and aversion, Sloterdjik suggests,
can also be a threshold to other ways of knowing.
NESTING
I made a curious discovery one morning while I picked away at the
debris in the homestead’s old creamery shed – which had long ago been
FIGURE 2 Coffee cans collect leaf-fall on a shelf in a collapsing shed.
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given over as storage for miscellaneous matter. Against the shed’s back
wall, under a long bench behind a heap of baling twine and feed sacks,
sat a dingy wooden box, roughly two feet wide by four feet long. I pulled
off a covering piece of corrugated tin to disclose a greyish mass of fibre,
bits of woody material, seeds and plum pits filling the chest up to the
rim. But then I noticed a leather book cover, and another. A stack of
battered volumes nestled in among the litter. Leaning closer, I saw that
scraps of torn paper made up part of the box’s grey matter. I picked out
a few legible pieces: ‘shadowed’, ‘show’, ‘here’, ‘start’, ‘Christ’. The
words mingled with mouse droppings, cottony fluff, and leaf spines (and
the odd mouse skeleton). Tiny gnaw marks showed along the spines of
the books, half-moons of stolen print. I opened one mottled text, Bulwer’s
Work, to a chapter on ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ and read a purple
passage about the inhabitants of that ill-fated town.
An Encyclopaedia of Practical Information occupied pride of place in
the top centre of the box. The chunky reference text (copyright 1888)
seemed to be intact, save for a small borehole in the upper right corner
of the first page I turned to. I carefully lifted the brittle sheets to page
209, and a table on the ‘Speed of Railroad Locomotion’. Page 308 detailed
cures for foot rot in sheep; page 427 offered a legal template for a ‘deed
with warranty’; and page 608 informed me that ‘Ecuador lies on the
equator in South America, and is a republic’. The borehole tracked my
progress through the inches of brittle paper. At page 791, a table recording
the population of world cities (Osaka, Japan, 530,885, Ooroomtsee,
Turkestan, 150,000) I had to stop, lest I crack the book’s stiff spine.
Below, the pages disappeared into the litter of seeds and scraps, the
single hole still tunnelling down into the unknown.
Faced with a decision about what to do with this curious mess, I
baulked. The curator in me said I should just pull the remaining books
out of the box, brush off the worst of the offending matter, and display
them to the public as a damaged but interesting record of obsolete
knowledge. Another instinct told me to leave the mice to their own
devices and write off the contents of the box as lost to rodent infestation.
I could understand the mess as the residue of a system of human
memory storage, or I could see an impressive display of animal adaptation
to available resources. It was difficult to hold both of these interpretations
in my head at once, though. I had stumbled on a rearrangement
of matter that mixed up the categories I used to understand the world.
It presented itself as a problem to be solved with action – putting things
in their place. But what I found myself wanting to do most, after I recovered
from my initial surprise, was to take what was there and think about
how it got there. I wanted to follow the invisible bookworm into the
encyclopaedia.
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OBJECT AS PROCESS
In the box-nest, I had come up against a moment of ambiguous perception
in which my interest was torn between two apparently contradictory
interpretive options. To borrow a turn of phrase from environmental
archaeology, I found myself with a decision to make about whether I was
looking at an artefact – a relic of human manipulation of the material
world – or an ecofact – a relic of other-than-human engagements with
matter, climate, weather, and biology (Jones, 2005: 85). Cultural matter
had taken on an explicitly ecological function. To see what was happening
required a kind of double vision, attuned to uncertain resonances
and ambivalent taxonomies (Figure 3). ‘Thinking about natural history
and human history is like looking at one of those trick drawings’, writes
Rebecca Solnit, ‘a wineglass that becomes a pair of kissing profiles. It’s
hard to see them both at the same time’ (Solnit, 1999: 91).
If you’re only attuned to see the wineglass – the evidence of explicitly
human activity – then the onset of decay and entropic intervention
may look only like destruction, an erasure of memory and history. Paying
attention to one aspect of the object’s existence deflects attention from
another. But I want to argue in this article that if we can hold the wineglass
and the kiss in mind concurrently, decay reveals itself not (only) as
erasure but as a process that can be generative of a different kind of
knowledge. The book-box-nest required an interpretive frame that would
let its contents maintain simultaneous identities as books and as stores
of raw material for rodent homemaking. Michael Taussig touches on a
FIGURE 3 An accidental collage of seeds and text forms on the wall of a
dismantled cabin.
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similar theme in an essay on the peculiar character of bogs and swamps.
He muses on the ways boggy, rotting places expose ‘the suspension
between life and death’, flitting ‘between a miraculous preservation and
an always there of immanent decay’ (Taussig, 2003: 15–16). Taussig
acknowledges how difficult it can be to encounter amalgamated deposits
of cultural and biological memory in these places: ‘What you have to do
is hold contrary states in mind and allow the miasma to exude’, he writes
(2003: 16).
Taussig’s advice seems promising, but how exactly do we go about
letting the miasma exude? This is not a particularly easy thing to do,
especially when curatorial work assumes a certain responsibility for
stabilizing things in frames of reference that make them accessible to
those who come along afterwards. I soon came to realize, however, that
the drive towards stabilizing the thing was part of the problem.
In the past few decades, theoretical approaches that stabilize the
identity of a thing in its fixed form have given way to more complex
notions of identity as a mutable and living process (Appadurai, 1986;
Buchli, 2002; Thomas, 1991). As Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld recently
observed in a special issue of this journal, however, there remains in
museum and material culture studies a pervasive identification between
the social significance of an artefact and its physical permanence (2004:
246). Colloredo-Mansfeld and other authors show how routines of daily
life depend, often, on the material transformation of physical objects:
people use things up, expose them to the elements, consume and
combine (2004: 250). Objects generate social effects not just in their
preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal
(Hansen, 2003; Hetherington, 2004; Lucas, 2002; Van der Hoorn, 2003).
These processes facilitate the circulation of material and the maintenance
of social codes; the death of the object allows for the continued
animation of other processes.
This is also true of objects transformed or disfigured by ecological
processes of disintegration and regeneration. These things have social
lives, but they have biological and chemical lives as well, which may
only become perceptible when the things begin to drop out of social
circulation (Edensor, 2005a: 100). The disarticulation of the object may
lead to the articulation of other histories, and other geographies. An
approach that understands the artefact as a process, rather than a stable
entity with a durable physical form, is perhaps able to address some of
the more ambiguous aspects of material presence (and disappearance).
The book-box-nest is neither artefact or ecofact, but both – a dynamic
entity that is entangled in both cultural and natural processes, part of an
‘admixture of waste and life, of decadence and vitality’ (Neville and
Villeneuve, 2002: 2). Of course, in order to think this way it’s necessary
to defer the urge to ‘save’ the artefact. Interpretation requires letting the
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process run, and watching what
happens in the going. Though
this might seem wilfully destructive
to those who locate the
memorial potency of the object
in its unchanging physical form,
I want to suggest that a different
kind of remembrance becomes
possible in this kind of work.
In a broader sense, I want
to engage with the question:
‘What are the consequences of
seeing certain orderings and
not others?’ (Harrison et al.,
2004: 16). What difference does
it make to refuse to discard
objects that are mired in
advanced states of decay? What
kinds of alternative orderings
become accessible when
interpretation tries to scrutinize
things on their way to becoming
something else? Others have
drawn political, economic, and
aesthetic insights from engagements
with degraded and fragmented things (Benjamin, 1999; Edensor,
2005a; Hawkins and Muecke, 2003). Although these themes weave
through the fringes of the analysis I put forth here, the article is not
directly concerned with this body of work. I turn, instead, to a discussion
of how the homestead’s mutable artefacts inhabit the ‘blurred terrain
where nature and culture are not so easily (as if they ever were) distinguished
and dichotomised’ (Harrison et al., 2004: 9). It is here, where what
we call ‘human’ unravels into what we call ‘other’, that the ambiguous
perceptions seem to lie most thickly, and promise most fully (Figure 4).
MATRIX OF MEMORY
Edward Casey has written, ‘everything belongs to some matrix of
memory, even if it is a matrix which is remote from human concerns and
interests’ (2000: 311). In my dictionary, the ninth (and final) definition for
the word ‘memory’ reads, ‘the ability of a material to return to a former
state after a constraint has been removed’ (Collins English Dictionary,
1991 edition). The matter that makes up the homestead’s structures and
features exhibits just this kind of tracking backward, as well as a dynamic
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FIGURE 4 A tattered quilt, pieces of it
stolen to line the nests of resident rodents.
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evolution into other states. Human labour introduced temporary
arrangements – clear window glass, milled lumber, tempered fence wire.
But these arrangements are unstable. Century-old glass develops cloudy
irregularities in its gradual recrystallization. Faded scraps of newspaper
mingle with the husks of fallen leaves. Lichen grows on a standing
building, a symbiotic association of fungus and algae breaking down
milled clapboards to make them available for recycling into new saplings.
A lump of soft coal, pulled from the nearby mine 70 years ago, recalls
the organic matter of a 25 million year-old forest. The homestead, like the
abandoned Welsh farms described by Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson,
is a place where ‘the very processes of the archaeological are apparent:
mouldering, rotting, disintegrating, decomposing, putrefying, falling to
pieces’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001: 158). The formation processes that
mould the archaeological record are here just getting under way.
It is exactly these processes of mouldering and disintegration that
most conservation practices work to forestall. In conventional terms, in
order for the object to function as a bearer of cultural memory it must
be held in perpetuity in a state of protected stasis. Acts of counting,
sorting, stacking, storing and inventory convert things from the category
of ‘stuff’ to the status of museum object, and, as a curator at one
Montana heritage site commented to me, ‘if it’s museum property it
needs to be taken care of and preserved forever – that’s kind of the
responsibility of it being in that category’. Conservation technologies
slow or halt physical decay, while interpretive strategies present the
objects as elements of a static, unchanging past. Ephemeral things,
decontextualized and catalogued, acquire a ‘socially produced durability’
in carefully monitored environments (Buchli, 2002: 15). Objects are
kept in climate-controlled, rodent-proofed storage areas. Special paint
protects artefacts from damaging ultraviolet rays; chest freezers decontaminate
cushions and clothing of any lingering moulds and microbes.
‘Arrested decay’ – the maintenance policy applied to buildings to uphold
their structural integrity yet preserve their ruined appearance – also
works at the scale of individual objects. Most places designed to preserve
‘the past’ take great pains to ensure that the physical and biological
processes that underlie that past have been neutralized (DeLyser, 1999).
The memory encapsulated in these buildings and cushions is a resolutely
human history, and any loss of physical integrity is seen as a loss of
memorial efficacy – an incremental forgetting. But the state of affairs is,
of course, more complicated than it appears to be. Strategies to arrest
decay always destroy some cultural traces, even as they preserve others.
And decay itself may clear a path for certain kinds of remembrance
despite its (because of its?) destructive energies.
A thicket of box elder trees crowds the fenceline at the bottom of the
homestead’s decadent orchard. Given their girth and height, the trees
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appear to have seeded
within the last halfcentury.
Long before
then, the area along
the fence accumulated
an assortment of farm
implements and stockpiled
materials: a
spike-toothed harrow,
a stack of boxcar
siding, a grain binder.
Unneeded objects
came to rest in the
widening shade of the
weedy trees, and no
one paid them much
attention. Eventually,
the trees began to draw the snarl of iron and steel into their generous
vegetal embrace. The edge of a studded wheel fused into grey bark; a
branch thickened and lifted over the binder’s mass, carrying with it, and
gradually consuming, a loose length of chain; roots twined around steel
tines. The binder – designed to cut, gather, and fasten sheaves of grain
– became bound in place. Pale lichens encrusted the driving chains that
wound round the body of the machine. One of the binder’s moulded iron
handles now protrudes from a slim trunk as if to invite an adjustment
of the systems of multiplying cell and running sap (Figure 5). The hybrid
tree-machine works away at a perennial chore, binding iron and cellulose,
mineral and vegetable. The binder is too broken down and biodegraded
for recuperation in a conventional heritage strategy. If you start
to think about the decay of the binder in another way, however, it is
possible to see the ongoing intervention of the trees and the soil as
productive of other resources for recalling the past in this place. An
example from far afield might help explain what I mean by this.
Suzanne Küchler’s work in Papau New Guinea has documented the
construction of malanggan, monuments to the dead. Mourners construct
these assemblages of wood or woven vines and decorate the surface with
carvings of animals, birds, shells, and human figures. The perishable
monument is placed over a human grave as a marker. After a certain
amount of time has passed (when the human soul is understood to have
escaped the body), the malanggan are taken from the graves and set in a
location (often near the sea) where they are left to rot. Once the malanggan
have decomposed, the remains are gathered to fertilize gardens.
Küchler describes how this vital memorial tradition turns ‘the finality of
death to a process of eternal return’ (Küchler, 1999: 57). The mode of
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FIGURE 5 The handle of the grain binder
protrudes from a tree trunk.
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remembrance practised in the malaggan ritual, Küchler argues, does not
require a physical object for its operation, but draws instead on the
absence of this physical presence, the ‘mental resource created from the
object’s disappearance’ (Küchler, 1999: 62).
In her work, Küchler emphasizes the ‘anti-materialism’ of this
memorial practice. What strikes me, however, is not the rejection of
materiality per se, but the embrace of the mutable character of material
presence, the transformative powers of decay and revitalization. Küchler
(drawing on Walter Benjamin) asserts that ‘ephemeral commemorative
artefacts’ might ‘instigate a process of remembering directed not to any
particular vision of past or future, but which repeats itself many times
over in point-like, momentary . . . awakening of the past in the present’
(Küchler, 1999: 63). Cultural remembering proceeds not through reflection
on a static memorial remnant, but on the process that slowly pulls
the remnant into other ecologies and expressions of value – accommodating
simultaneous resonances of death and rebirth, loss and renewal.
I wonder if it is possible to approach the grain binder as a malaggan
of the American West, which, too, releases its meaning in decay. An
artefact of technological innovation sinks into the dark loam under the
box elder trees and recalls its origins in veins of ore under the dark earth.
The ruined machine sparks reflections on once robust economies, the
changing markets and agricultural consolidations that precipitated the
transformation of the western landscape (and the gradual obsolescence
of diversified farms like the homestead). Raw material returns to the
earth or is seized into the lignin and cellulose of a tree – the tree itself
an import from another part of the continent, brought to the West to
domesticate unfamiliar places. Now, the weedy trees signal the inexorable
‘rewilding’ of places that are left to their own ecological devices
(Cronon, 2003; Feldman, 2004). These suggestive interpretive resources
would not be available if the binder were sawed from the tree, repaired
and polished, and set alongside other mechanical agricultural dinosaurs
(such an action is probably impossible, at any rate, and would lead to
the destruction of both the tree and the implement). The binder suggests
a mode of remembrance that is erratic and ephemeral – twined around
the past and reaching imperceptibly into what has yet to come. In a
sense, the trees participate in the production of cultural memory as ‘an
activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continually
modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’ (Bal
et al., 1999: vii). Memory, in this sense, is based on chance and imagination
as much as evidence and explanation; the forgetting brought on
by decay allows for a different form of recollection. Such recollection
fosters an acknowledgement of agencies usually excluded from the work
of interpretation.
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OTHER EDITING
The farm’s root cellar – a cavernous space with crumbling earth walls
and a pervasive scent of sour rot – contained several maps in its dim
corners and crates, each one spectacularly degraded in its own way. One
excavation turned up a US Forest Service map of the Beaverhead and
Deer Lodge forest management districts, just west of Missoula. When I
unrolled it, I discovered an ornate fringe along the bottom edge where
an insect had consumed the map’s gridded territory (Figure 6). The
insects had intervened to assert the materiality of the map, and in doing
so they offered their own oblique commentary on human intervention
in regional ecologies. The forests in the physical territory depicted by the
disfigured paper map suffered from decades of poor management and
fire suppression, which made them vulnerable to the depredations of
other organisms. Over the last few decades, an infestation of destructive
bark beetles has killed many of the trees represented by the map’s green
patches. The destruction on the root cellar’s map can be read as a
metonym for the destruction of the surrounding forest. The disarticulation
of a cultural artefact leads to the articulation of other histories about
invertebrate biographies and appetites. In this speculative allegorical
example, ‘objects have to fall into desuetude at one level in order to come
more fully into their own at another’ (Gross, 2002: 36).
Other documents showed equally impressive evidence of insect and
rodent editing. In their degraded condition, these documents carried an
FIGURE 6 The forest map with the insect-eaten fringe.
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unusual charge. I came up against an absence in the record, but an
absence that seemed to carve out a window in the wall that usually keeps
cultural analysis separate from the investigation of ecological processes.
It required some imagination to work past the initial awareness of missing
information, but once this had been overcome I could see the emerging
shape of an engagement with the past that draws part of its force from
absence and incompletion (Küchler, 1999: 59). Christopher Woodward
(2002), in his observation of the creative resources that people generate
when confronted with ruins and remnants, identifies a sympathetic
association between structural incompletion and imaginative invention.
Degraded artefacts can contribute to alternative interpretive possibilities
even as they remain caught up in dynamic processes of decay and disarticulation.
The autonomous exercise of human intention gives way to a
more dispersed sharing of the practices of material editing and curation.
Miles Ogborn, in a recent essay on the ecology of archives, comments
on how archives and their contents, which arise out of a patently cultural
desire to preserve the human past, are also amalgams of animal skin and
wood pulp, chemical compounds and organic substances (2004). The
elements that make up the archive are open to breaches and interventions
– from heat, light, moisture, mould, insects, rodents. Ogborn writes,
‘The storehouses of memory, the central cortices of social formations
of print and the written world, are ecologies where the materials of
remembrance are living, dying, and being devoured’ (Ogborn, 2004:
240). The ‘nature of cultural memory’ becomes apparent in the gradual
consumption of evidence and images.
I found one of my favourite examples of these cultural ecologies at
work in a battered copy of National Geographic magazine, which had
been stored with others of its kind in a set of cranberry crate shelves in
the farmhouse kitchen. In the 40-year interval between human habitation
of the dwelling and my intervention hungry moulds and rodents
consumed the glossy pages. This particular copy peeled apart reluctantly,
to reveal a patchy scene brushed with delicate pink. The mould had
eaten away an image of a mountain town to expose a few bars of music,
an area of green, shards of unintelligible text. There was a curious loveliness
to the transformed scene – mountains and music and mould in a
montage of indeterminate effect (Figure 7). The cultural spore of mass
printed matter was caught up in the fungal ecologies of decay, its authority
an impartial documentation of a world ‘out there’ undermined by the
microscopic imperatives of a world ‘in here’. These were the kinds of
knowledges produced as other-than-human influences peeled back layers
of natural and social history sedimented in the homestead’s fragmentary
materials.
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CO-HABITATION
There was another register
in which the homestead’s
entangled artefacts worked
to remember the past in
place in unfamiliar ways.
The shacks and sheds at the
site were full of collections
of miscellaneous material:
sacks stuffed with feathers
and leaves, bushel baskets
of wool and fibre, neat stacks
of twigs, jars of seed and
sand. It was not always clear
to me how these gatherings
of materials were assembled.
The tidy collections troubled
the distinction I tried to draw
between animal and human
labour. The homestead’s tack
shed contained a few tin cans
packed with fruit stones –
rough pits from the wild
plums that grow in the gully
and the hard seeds of the
orchard pie cherries. Each of
the stones was neatly scraped
down to the woody centre,
and marked with a tidy
chewed hole through which
an animal had extracted the edible core. In the farmhouse pantry, I found
dozens of jars of saved garden seeds that were linked into a similar
collecting impulse. The root cellar’s dusty shelves held cloudy jars of
cherries, rhubarb, and tomatoes. In a crate below the shelves I found a
1937 postmarked envelope full of flower seeds, and a twist of catalogue
paper around a handful of white snail shells (Figure 8). Nearby a pillowcase
hung from a nail, the bottom eaten through to let out a slow leak
of feathers.
An odd affinity seemed to hang over these animal accumulations;
intertwined memories of seasonal harvest and hoarding seeped out of
the jars and tins and bins. As I worked along these lines, the human
activity that went into constructing the homestead began to look like just
another layer of habitation. I developed an appreciation for how other
organisms draw in the raw material of their world and animate it through
FIGURE 7 National Geographic landscapes
altered by moulds and age.
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their modifications – and an altered perspective on the material practices
of human dwelling (Hinchliffe, 2003; Ingold, 2000; Lorimer, in press). If
the boundary of the organism is ‘a process that continually redefines
what is considered living and non-living’ (Harrison et al., 2004: 34), this
place presented a curious record of several different species of extended
organisms. The memory in these accretions of matter spoke to decades
of co-habitation, of entangled lives and habits. People inhabit places with
books and tools and clothes; mice inhabit places with pits and leaves and
bones, and the matter people leave behind.
The finest grain of the (elusive) boundary between animal and human
habitation lay in the dust. As one of my first curatorial acts at the homestead,
I sorted the contents of the long-abandoned kitchen junk drawers.
After I had pulled out the household objects and set them aside, a layer
of minuscule detritus lay on the wooden bottom slats. I identified bits of
mouse droppings, rubber shreds, wood splinters, paper, lint, wire, insect
wings, plant stems, seeds, human hairs. An even finer grain of residue
underlay these legible fragments, a slightly greasy amalgam of human
skin, tiny fibres, crumbled deposits of mineral and animal origin. I
remember feeling dizzy while I examined these leavings, sharply aware
that I had reached the base level of materiality, the place where human
artefacts blended imperceptibly into mass of worldly matter (Edensor,
2005a: 122). As Phil Dunham points out, encounters with dust raise questions
about ‘what (if anything) is consistent or whole about our bodies,
and where (and indeed whether) a line can meaningfully be drawn
between the human and nonhuman worlds’ (Dunham, 2004: 100). These
encounters, though disagreeable, also served as a powerful reminder of
my own entangling with these borderline materials and their active
ecologies.
FIGURE 8 Collections of seeds and shells.
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My early decision to let the dust and the detritus into my interpretive
frame was not without its risks. As I began to allow myself to yield
to these messy remains (McAllister, 2001), I realized that in order to meet
them (so to speak) on their own terms, I had to accept that the outcome
of the situations I found myself in was not entirely in my hands.
‘[E]xpelling and discarding is more than biological necessity – it is fundamental
to the ordering of the self’, comment Gay Hawkins and Stephen
Muecke (2003: xii). In choosing not to discard materials that would, in
other circumstances, have been quickly consigned to the rubbish bin, I
also opened myself up to influences that unsettled my sense of curatorial
authority and allowed the material to ‘act back’ on me in unexpected
ways (Buchli and Lucas, 2001: 5). With the dissolution of standards of
value and significance, the sheer excess of eligible material mocked my
attempts at recovery and rationalization. Sometimes I found myself
pushing back against the chaos to assert some kind of (usually ineffectual)
order. But I also experimented a bit with strategies that took the
forces of decay on as allies, rather than adversaries.
COLLABORATION: SYNCHRONIC HANDIWORK
One day I came across an over-stuffed bushel basket in the homestead’s
harness shed. I pulled out the top layer of stained clothes to disclose a
stew of paper, fabric, and animal leavings. I tipped the whole thing on
the grass, where I could see scraps of printed matter mixed in with a
mass of pits and seeds, woolly fibre and feathers, long johns and holey
socks, a 1928 licence plate and a few delicate mouse spines. I had come
across similarly scrambled deposits countless times in my excavations,
and I usually gave in to the impulse to discard or burn all but the most
discrete items (only the licence plate, in this case). This time, however,
something about the mess drew me in, and I began to pick out the shards
of text from the other litter (Figure 9).
Later, I took some liberties and drafted a poem from the fragments:
the camera
may
record
odd
invented
museums
placed at
glare horizon
your service
makes
value
almost anywhere
cardboard box
on the wall
behind a picture
parts will
have a
numerous
synchronic
handiwork
that of
invention in
minimum
delight
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I like to think that
the mice and I share
authorship for this
work – with some
credit due as well to
the authors of the
articles in the shredded
magazines (which I
have tentatively identified
as an amalgam of
Popular Mechanics and
Seventh Day Adventist
religious tracts). I
suppose I should also
mention Tristan Tzara,
whose dadaist poem
instructions run like
so: Take a newspaper/
Take some scissors/
Choose from this paper
an article of the length
you want to make your
poem/Cut out the article/Next carefully cut out each of the words that
makes up this article and put them all in a bag/Shake gently/Next take
out each cutting one after the other/ Copy conscientiously in the order
in which they left the bag/The poem will resemble you (Tzara, 1992: 39).
The poem, perhaps, says more about my intervention in the homestead’s
sedimented histories than it does about the content of those histories.
But I include it here to suggest the terrain that might be explored by an
interpretive practice willing to engage in serious play with artefacts that
might otherwise be overlooked entirely.
This experimental engagement with some of Douglas’s dangerous
things allows other ‘sensible forms’ to work alongside the curator in the
generation of research materials (Whatmore, 2003). In this instance, an
act of ‘synchronic handiwork’ takes up the raw material of the past and
works it into a missive that speaks both to that past and to the lived
present. The method celebrates the artefact’s status as a temporary
arrangement of matter, always on its way to being something else. At
Hyde Park Barracks, near Sydney, Australia, rats collected the ephemera
of daily life in their nests between the floorboards. When restorationists
and curators discovered these hoards they decided to create a display to
celebrate the findings. ‘Rats are honoured at this site as the minions of
history,’ writes Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 168). I occasionally
attempted a similar strategy at the homestead, opening up my curatorial
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FIGURE 9 Raw material from the bushel basket.
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activities to the intervention of other organisms. Such strategies may
generate ‘interpretive ambiguities’ (Cronon, 2003: 42), but they also open
up different ways of ordering the world, working past an entirely negative
reading of material dislocation and dissociation.
IN CONCLUSION
The interpretive approaches I sketch out in this article – observed decay,
ephemeral commemoration, collaborative curation – are presented in a
speculative spirit. I am more interested to spark reflection than I am to
propose new orthodoxies. I recognize that the kind of material dissolution
and disappearance I advocate here would be difficult to implement in
most recognized historic sites. If the homestead were to perform as a truly
ephemeral monument, for example, the processes I have been describing
would be allowed to consume it altogether (Figure 10). This kind of interpretive
work is more likely to occur with materials that lie at the fringes
of conservation practice, or with things held in a state of limbo before
more formal arrangements around preservation and public access take
hold. It is possible, however, to imagine how established museums and
heritage sites might begin to introduce a focus on material process (and a
whiff of miasma) into a mode of interpretation that tends to come down
heavily on the side of stasis and preservation. The potential for ‘entropic
heritage’ practice remains, for the most part, untapped (DeSilvey, 2005a).
Even a subtle shift in interpretive focus would require some attempt
to hold those contrary states in mind – to accept that the artefact is not
a discrete entity but a material form bound into continual cycles of
articulation and disarticulation. When I was able to pull it off, this kind
of approach allowed me to see things that otherwise would have been
invisible to me simply because I lacked discursive frames to fit them in.
FIGURE 10 A sign posted as a talisman against the destructive effects of wildfire.
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Interpretation, in this sense, constituted otherwise unconstituted matter
(Buchli and Lucas, 2001). I was able to read the messages on a wall of
tattered newspaper scattered with box-elder seed, the occluded histories
in a rodent nest. Such work stakes out an expanded field for the telling
of local histories, allowing for the inclusion of inhabitants usually
entered in the margins, or consigned to their own separate texts. Instead
of asking the artefact to speak to a singular (human) past, such a method
works with an ecology of memory – things decay and disappear, reform
and regenerate, shift back and forth between different states, and always
teeter on the edge of intelligibility. Remembrance comes into its own as
a balancing act, an ‘art of transience’ (Hawkins, 2001) which salvages
meaning from waste things and reveals the complexity of our entangled
material memories.
Note
1. The state university’s lead archivist took one look at the clutter and reached
for a black plastic sack. The curator from the local historical museum refused
to even touch the homestead’s documents and artefacts for fear of spreading
their moulds to her collection. The degraded condition of the materials
mediated against their inclusion in public collections and archives – my
decision to carry on the work of excavation and curation despite this official
rejection is part of a story I do not have room to tell here (DeSilvey, 2005b).
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◆ CAITLIN DE SILVEY is research fellow with the Open University (UK) and
the caretaker of a Montana homestead. Her doctoral research developed a set of
alternative methods for the interpretation of residual material cultures. She also
works and writes on the history of allotment gardens, the geographies of
contemporary art practice, and the management of abandoned settlements in the
American West. Address: Geography Discipline, Social Sciences Faculty, Open
University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. [email: c.o.desilvey@
open.ac.uk]
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