What does John Kouwenhoven think we can learn from studying “things” instead of “words”? Do you think his argument makes sense? Looking at the portraits and objects from Puritan New England, would you say that Puritan populations were attached to worldly goods or dismissive of them? Why?
4 thoughts on “Everyday life and Material Culture in New England”
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Kouwenhoven calls for us to acknowledge the limitations and ambiguities that arise from relying solely on words to “interpret reality.” The world is composed of thousands of “individual particulars of existence” that are, in his opinion, incapable of being depicted accurately with words because this only leads to generalizations. He believes that words can only give meaning to those who share similar experiences with certain particulars. Therefore, he asserts that more focus should be given to the “things” than the actual words that describe them. And using our senses to interpret those “things” will, in Kouwenhoven’s opinion, offer a more accurate, specific account of what they actually are.
Looking at the Puritan artifacts, I can conclude from my “sight-thinking” that the Puritans were attached to worldly goods and, as mentioned in other posts, concerned a great deal with appearance. However, acknowledging the shortcomings in Kouwenhoven’s argument, sensory focus of theses “things” can only reveal to me so much about the Puritans. I do not learn a great deal about their mindset, practices, beliefs, etc from merely looking at these artifacts. This is similar to how we can not accurately understand/ grasp the awe the explorers felt when they first saw the New World because we don’t have similar experiences with those particulars. So, as Adam mentioned, we need a balance between both “things” and words.
Kouwenhoven states, “although words do have a generalizing characteristic, it is what makes human communication possible. I feel that since Kouwenhoven, (who earned his living as an English teacher), clearly recognizes that words can actually be more powerful than any other “thing” on the planet if strong enough. Having said that, I kind of think that this negates his whole argument about “things.” He tries to save himself with the idea of “feel-thoughts” and says those are specific thoughts, not generalized, but without language, there is nothing you can do with those senses, except feel. Right?
In terms of the objects and portraits from Puritan New England, I agree with both Anthony and Adam in saying that these people were, in fact, attached to worldly goods. This is not a real shocker to me, because appearance was everything for the Puritan people, and everything was kept very well-maintained. I thought the Chimney detail on slide 9 was pretty incredible for a house built in 1683. The exterior patterns of a chimney do not affect the function at all, so the design is just to increase the aesthetic value of the home.
I would respond to Kouwenhoven by first by saying that words can express ideas in a way things can’t. We can understand the way culture was thinking by looking at words. Additionally, we can understand a lot by what those words omit. For example, we can learn a lot by reading the account of unicorns and lions in French Florida. As we have been doing over the past few weeks in this course, we can examine those inconsistencies to see what they might tell us about the people writing them. The expectation of unicorns suggests that those Elizabethian seamen were conscious of the fact that they were in a foreign land. The report could even suggest an attempt to make the land seem more foreign that it really was in order to attract people to it. These things all seem more interesting to me than—if there had been unicorns—seeing the unicorn horns themselves.
I do understand where Kouwenhoven is coming from. The semantics school has a point that language is limiting. One can learn a whole lot about contemporary American culture by being dropped into Times Square. But they will have no context for it. Words need to provide that context. Why else do artifacts in museums have little word blurbs next to them? Things are limiting too. We need both together. Maybe this is Kouwenhoven’s point all along.
Looking at the pictures of objects, I would say that the Puritans were attached to worldly goods. This seems to be at odds with their theology. The furniture and the clothing they wore seems distinctly European. Perhaps these were their only connection to England and so they valued them as grounding in a strange land.
Throughout the reading it has become clear that John Kouwenhoven believes there are many advantages to learning from studying “things” rather than “words”. It would seem that while society is based upon “words” and “communication”; these methods are very limiting in terms of learning about the world around us. The author believes that the best way to learn about something is to use our senses. He believes that telling someone about an object, or experience is an ineffective learning tool; as he writes the only way to fully understand the sunlight on the West Coast is by traveling there and to see how the sunlight differs from other locations around the globe.
I think his argument has accuracies and inaccuracies. While I do believe that getting out and experiencing the world is an amazing way to find out about the world around us, that is not always an option. I do believe that words can convey a specific experience while he believes language is largely generalized. There are many authors who have done great jobs at conveying their experiences to their readers and since he is a professor of literature it seems odd that he has this notion.
When looking at the objects and portraits from Puritan New England it would seem that they were largely attached to worldly goods. It seems that their houses and the objects within them have a great attention to detail, showing that these people largely cared about their possessions. The portraits show the subjects very well dressed, once again showing how much appearance mattered to the Puritans.