Digital Interactive Trail: Pineapples, Things and Stuff

Article | Updated 7 years ago

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1.1 Cultural ‘Things’

Culture is made in the everyday, just as many everyday objects are inherently cultural. Explore the museum’s Discovery Centre and see for yourself.

Place

The Discovery Centre

Cultural Objects

Have you considered how the device you are holding is an important cultural object? What about what you had for breakfast, or the clothes you are wearing?

While museums often display objects of great cultural significance and beauty, the reality is that most forms of material culture are just everyday things. Cultural life isn’t just a new art exhibition, a music festival, or a heritage display. For the most part, it is the small, routine, day-to-day practices that instil our culture with the bulk of its substance. Cultural practices can be as simple as the morning commute to work, turning the air conditioner on in summer, or looking up cat videos on the Internet. Material culture is also made in the workings of everyday life. Consumer products, cars, coffee, phones, Ugg boots: all things that reflect forms of human culture.

Culture is something that is crafted through the relationships and forms of meaning we share with those around us, a fact that is reflected in the materials we surround ourselves with. It is something that is made in day-to-day life; the Discovery Centre is a great example of this. Here we have a seemingly random group of things — from skeletons and butterflies to axes from Papua New Guinea to pineapple-shaped jugs, all with varying levels of provenance, however all still decidedly cultural ‘things’. This trail is about these cultural ‘things’. It explores ways of thinking about material culture through the places and objects that we deal with in day-to-day city life.

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Nice Start! We know very little about this pineapple-shaped jug. Its provenance is unknown, so why is it on display? We like it because it embodies the randomness of cultural things. Why would someone want to buy such a jug? What does it say about them and what does it say about their culture?

1.2 Ritual

What do bars, beer and monkeys have in common? Well, if the monkeys are people and the time is a Friday night, then beer and bars are things of ritual.

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The Brass Monkey

The Practice of Ritual

Of all the varying facets of culture, ritual is perhaps one of the most universal aspects of human social existence. From the casual rituals we embark upon in day-to-day life to symbolic ceremonies, the practice of ritual is an important part of any cultural landscape because of its ability to transform social life. Regardless of whether it is sacred or everyday, exotic or mundane, celebratory or sorrowful, ritual is something that can subtly change social spaces or social beings; and that’s exactly why a pub is a great example of ritual in material culture.

Opened in November 1896, ‘The Great Western Hotel’ was a lavish building which catered to the needs of the hopeful, the prosperous and the unlucky as they travelled to and from the Goldfields. It served as a venue for the fortnightly Trades and Labor Council meetings during the late 1890’s and has remained a vibrant social venue since its conception.

Nowadays it’s known as the Brass Monkey. You can meet with friends and family, heckle pedestrians from the balconies, or simply stop for a few drinks on a night out. Each of these activities is given cultural meaning by those involved. For instance, meeting for a meal with family can reiterate mutual care for one another; while gathering for an 18th birthday marks a friend’s figurative transformation into adulthood.

Now think about how we perform these rituals. A night out wouldn’t be complete without a drink (perhaps a beer, cider, wine or—even cooler—water), just as a meal at a pub wouldn’t be complete without the proper food, cutlery, tables and chairs. Objects can demarcate and add meaning to a ritual in ways that compliment the events social production. They can even act as tools with which rituals are practised. Thinking about objects from this perspective can help bring to light the complexities of cultural tradition. After all, Friday night courting rituals can be a minefield at the best of times…

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Good work! Fun fact: the Brass Monkey Hotel was renamed after a type of beer brewed by the Matilda Bay Brewing Company. The beer was called Brass Monkey Stout, due to its unique coppery colour.

1.3 Reflection

Walk through Chinatown and experience Perth’s other worlds. Sometimes the difference between what we do and don’t see can tell us a lot about material culture.

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China town

Cultural Symbols

Perth’s Chinatown stands out in the city’s Northbridge district, not only because of its physical separation from adjoining spaces, but because of the various cultural symbols that demarcate it as a different or ‘other’ social space. The pai fang gate, Mandarin and Cantonese signage, the smells and sounds of Asian cuisine are symbols that we have learnt to decode from personal heritage or prior experience. They tell us about the things we might (or might not) expect when entering the area.

In other words, we interpret the material world around us through cultural lenses, bringing certain preconceived notions—certain frames of reference—to each and every social encounter we take part in. These frames are important, because they help us to make sense of symbols we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, these frames of reference can also sometimes cloud how we interpret objects as we apply our own preconceived ideas and notions upon what we see.

Thinking about objects (especially when encountering them in novel forms) requires one to remain open to possibilities of use and meaning. Did you know that the inscription of the pai fang gate reads: ‘China town in a golden city’ in Mandarin? The back inscription reads ‘Spring comes to the world’. For another example, try to find the three medallions placed above the courtyard’s central building. The figures depicted are three Chinese star gods: Fu Xing, Lu Xing and Shou Xing (or the Sanxing; ‘Xing’ meaning ‘star’). This visage can found on the facades of Chinese temples or ancestral shrines, in homes, and around many Chinese-owned shops. Each figure is said to personify the three attitudes of a good life: Fu (prosperity) on the left; Lu (status) in the middle; and Shou (longevity) on the right. Would you have seen these figures or gathered this information when looking around the shopping district? Unless this visage forms a part of your heritage, or have a special interest in this area, we would guess not.

When investigating material culture, it is important to be aware—or be reflexive—of our own cultural biases, including our subconscious choices to see or interpret certain symbols. By doing so, we open ourselves up to the various different meanings objects and their symbols present.

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Your reward is the greatest gift of all: knowledge! Fun Fact: legend has it that Shou Xing spent nine years in the womb and was born with an extraordinarily large forehead! He is the keeper of the peach of immortality in Chinese mythology.

1.4 Functionality

Sometimes you can spend all your time horsing around with symbolism — don’t forget that many cultural things are functional objects too.

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The Horseshoe Bridge

Functional Things

The Horseshoe Bridge was constructed in 1904 as a response to increased traffic congestion between the north and south of the city. The U-shaped design was met with criticism from pedestrians because it involved the demolition of the William Street pedestrian footbridge. Those arguing against closing the footbridge pointed out that the project diverted foot traffic away from growing retail centres along the north end of William Street. In reality however, Perth’s pedestrians were simply disgruntled by the extra walking distance now required to pass over the train line. For pedestrians, the bridges form inhibited ease of passage over the train line, and so this functional ‘thing’ became a contested space.

By nature of their intended use, most cultural objects are (for the most part) functional things. The way objects are designed often dictates how we identify with and use them; the same way we recognise a cup by how it is crafted for drinking, a door for entering or exiting, or a spear for hunting. By investigating how objects around us are shaped for particular functions, we can gain insights into routine cultural practices of everyday life.

Returning to our example of the Horseshoe bridge—its purpose as a bridge has not changed since its creation, even though it was initially designed, with the extended U bend shape, to cater to horse-drawn vehicles and trams which required an especially gradual incline. Though its use has expanded beyond what it was initially intended for as Perth began to use motorised vehicles such as cars, bikes, the original function of the bridge—as a means of transportation over an obstructed area— remains the same.

Studying the bridge as a functional “thing” gives us an opportunity to look at not only how its form has shaped its function, but how social factors have transformed its specific use over time despite its original intended purpose.

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Your reward: more knowledge! Did you know…the pair of black lanterns at the top of the bridge which don’t match the others mark one of the original entrances to the Perth Railway Station, which is why they are closer together and out of sync with the others along the bridge.

1.5 Clothed in Culture

Walk down Prince Lane and discover how the emperor’s new clothes were socially constructed.

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Prince Lane

Forms of Culture

You’ve probably heard the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. A vain emperor is promised a fabulous suit, which appears invisible to anyone unfit for their position or ‘hopelessly stupid’. The weavers ‘create’ this suit and mime dressing the emperor, who cannot see the clothes but pretends to do so. Not wanting to appear stupid, his court advisors follow his lead, as do the villagers when the emperor begins his march through his kingdom wearing not a stitch of clothing. Only a child, too young to understand why everyone is pretending to see the obviously invisible clothes, cries out that the emperor is naked! But what does this story tell us about fashion, culture and the individual?

While we might like to think that we wake up each morning and make a conscious decision on what to wear (perhaps based on our personal ‘style’), our decisions are constantly mediated by the forms of culture we take part in. Did you decide to wear those new chino shorts because it’s hot? Or is it because everyone else is wearing them? What happened to cargo pants?

What you choose to wear in the morning is your choice, yes. Jeans or skirt, buttons or zippers, sleeves, collars — we make these decisions through our individual preferences. But you wouldn’t necessarily go to your wardrobe in 2016 and select an enormous powdered wig inspired by Marie Antoinette for a day at the office. Nor would you choose to wear your underwear over your pants a la Superman for a big date on a Friday night. By right of his powerful position, the emperor believed that he could socially construct his own clothing, and without anyone to challenge him, he may have gotten away with it! Unfortunately for him, our clothing choices are influenced not only by how we want to appear, but also by how we do in fact appear to others!

Clothes, objects, cultural ‘things’; our materiality exists on a two-way street between us (the individual) and everyone else (our culture) and so it’s important to remember when investigating material culture that objects exist upon a continuum. Certain parts of an object are individualised, while other parts are culturally representative.

Prince Lane

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Did you know… this warehouse was raided on suspicion of an illegal gambling ring in 1904? Of the men who were arrested 46 pled guilty and five not guilty. Of those five, only one — a reporter following up a story about Perth nightlife — was acquitted while the others (who argued they had been showing the reporter around… or followed their friends… or had felt ill and gone upstairs for respite) were fined the same as the others.

1.6 Identity

Sometimes art can be still; other times it’s pretty moving. Either way, art is a window into forms of cultural identity.

Place

Wolf Lane

Identity Expression

Crafting material culture is a form of identity expression. A skilled crafter (be it an artist, a cook, even an office worker) will knowingly or otherwise inscribe the ‘things’ they create with parts of their identity. Sometimes a particular group of likeminded people will all make similar inscriptions of identity upon the stuff that they create, so much so that we might call this collective inscription a form of cultural identity. The cool thing about material culture is that we can read and decode these inscriptions in order to tell us a bit about the crafter and his or her cultural group. Take the street art in this lane as a perfect example.

The bright and intricate murals that line the walls of Wolf Lane were part of PUBLIC 2014 Art in the City, a project which invited street artists from across the world to leave their mark on Perth’s CBD. Artists from Amsterdam, Puerto Rico, the United States, Belgium, Western Australia- the collection of murals is a particularly global one, but the style of the pieces makes them easily recognisable to anyone familiar with the artists’ work.

For example, ROA, an anonymous world-renowned Belgian artist, painted an enormous snake biting its tail on Wellington Street, a numbat mural in Fremantle, and the possum featured here in Wolf Lane; the distinctive black and white sketched creature so indicative of the artists style. The same goes for the incredibly intricate sea-horse mural by Alexis Diaz (also here in Wolf Lane), which took two weeks to paint. Diaz is known worldwide for his chimerical animal/object/people combinations. Amok Island’s semi-geometric, boldly coloured Dolphin Fish in Wolf Lane also matches a series of pieces around Perth and the world, including Praying Mantis in Fremantle and Possum Sugar Glider in Perth.

In thinking about art as an object, what we choose to create or surround ourselves with can reflect our own cultural identity. The Wolf Lane murals are incredibly personal objects representative of the artists’ identities, but they are also collective things, shared en masse with the public everyday. Just like these pieces, the cultural ‘things’ we make, collect, and surround ourselves with can tell us a lot about our own culture and identity. Objects act as windows into our lives, and so learning to decipher what these things can tell us about identity proves invaluable when thinking about who we are, and what our place is in society.

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Did you know…the word graffiti comes from the Italian verb graffiare which means ‘to scratch’.

1.7 Power and Knowledge

It seems in this digital age that places without enough electrical outlets could be in for a power struggle. Take a walk on Hay Street to contemplate power and knowledge.

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Apple Store

Mediums of Communication

Power and knowledge are important (though not always positive) mechanisms to the workings of any culture because they help us regulate social relationships. Paying respect to ones elders or abiding by the law are good examples. Likewise, forms of material culture can be implicated in power relationships. For instance, our roads don’t descend into utter chaos because those who drive follow the speed limit designated by road signs (for the most part).

Lets use another example: the device you hold in your hand. Released on the 29th of June 2007, Apple’s first generation iPhone fundamentally altered the flow of global information. Though not the first to attempt of its kind, here was an already incredibly useful object (a mobile phone), that facilitated quick and easy connections to the Internet, music collections, computer applications, and other people. Design conscious and innovative in form and function, the iPhone quickly became embedded in everyday life. Eight years later, Apple reported a profit of $18 billion for the third fiscal quarter of 2015, making it the most profitable company on the planet…ever.

Now you might be thinking, does Apple control our lives with this medium of communication? The answer is probably yes, but this trail is about things, so let’s focus on the cultural power of the object. Nowadays a mobile phone isn’t for just contacting people. It’s a calendar, a camera, an organiser, a personal assistant … you can even use it to avoid awkward eye contact with people on the train!

Objects like the iPhone force us to consider the type and structure of relationships we form with the material word. Cultural objects are mediators of power and knowledge and can impact of how we communicate, altering the outcome of a particular cultural practice. Think of all the numbers, coffee dates and birthdays you’d miss if you lost your phone! Thinking about our relationship with the material world through notions of power and knowledge can help to reveal stories about our sociality, or our ability to connect with other people.

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Did you know…this building was originally the site of the Metropolitan Dental Company which boasted as being the biggest and most progressive dental clinic in the entire southern hemisphere! They were so certain of this that their newspaper adverts cordially invited the public to come and inspect their sterilising equipment for themselves.

1.8 Objects in Social Life

Cultural things like coffee or liquor have different meanings to particular persons and across particular contexts. Head up the stairs to Moana Café. The challenge will be worth your while!

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Moana Cafe

Social Lives

It should come as no surprise that the things around us have social lives; that they have a biography that can be recounted in much the same way as your life history. A cup of coffee doesn’t just materialise into existence (although how great would that be?). Beans are grown on a plantation, picked, transported to Australia, roasted, transported again to a coffee shop, ground, leached with water and the resulting concoction often combined with milk and/or sugar. Along this social history, ‘coffee’ will take on a variety of cultural properties. Just as a farmer identifies with coffee in a different manner to a barista, objects are given different meanings across different social contexts within their lifetime.

Opened in 1908 as Moana Café, the building you are standing in has been repurposed and readapted throughout the 20th century, from coffee house to dance hall to night club and back to coffee house again! Its colourful past includes instances of rioting and assaults, police raids for illegal alcohol and cabaret evening shows.

The cafe appeared in the newspapers quite routinely under proprietor Saul Epstein, who was convicted twice after police raids found substantial liquor stores on the premises without a liquor license. In 1942, the site was reopened as Club Cabarita, a nightclub open for morning tea and luncheons by day, and by night a cabaret club. Jointly owned and run till 1947 by Mrs Jessie Levien, Mary Harrington (otherwise known as ‘ace musician...one of Perth's daintiest’ Molly Wagner) and Nora Hassell, Club Cabarita was a hotspot of Perth dancing, music and smuggled alcohol.

Now days Moana café is back to serving coffee, but the shop still gives us a good example of how material culture lies upon a continuum of cultural life, demarcated by both particular stages of being and social use. It is important to remember that material culture is constituted in part by how people use objects across time and space. Following these forms of use (or how people make things into material culture) is a powerful method for investigating particular ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ materiality.

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Interestingly enough, Moana’s customers have included Prime Minister John Curtin and his wife Elsie, who dined on tea and cakes on their wedding day in 1917, and a Malaysian royal couple: His Highness Tunku Temmongong Ahmed and Her Highness Unki Malmunak, who celebrated His Highnesses birthday when the building was a nightclub in 1947.

1.9 Authenticity

How do inauthentic things become authentic? Through the practices of culture of course.

Place

Perth Town Hall

Authentic Objects

An important part of investigating material culture lies in identifying the social value or significance of particular cultural things. While a difficult task, one particularly useful method for doing so is to consider an objects authenticity. A great example of this can be found in the plaque before you. Painted by George Pitt Morrison a century after the fact, The Foundation of Perth, Mrs Dance strikes the first cut (replicated here) was commissioned for the centenary celebrations of Perth in 1929 and depicts the felling a large tree. Morrison took special care to keep the details of the painting as historically consistent as possible, working from eyewitness accounts in 1829 and portraits for reference. The Surveyor General John Septimus Roe's face, for example, was constructed from a portrait depicting him 20 years older, which Morrison compensated for by stripping him of his full beard. The painting (referenced at the bottom of this plaque) is only an interpretation of the event that founded Perth, and even now the exact location of the felled tree near the town hall remains a mystery. Nevertheless, Morrison’s depiction inspired a plays performed at the Town Hall during the centenary celebration in 1929, advertisements for WA Week at Kmart and Coles in the 1970s, and even textbooks! Though it does not present a factual account of Perth’s foundation, the painting is now largely treated as such in the public domain. So how authentic is Morrison’s painting?

Well… that depends upon how we—or rather the people of Perth—measure authenticity in the first place. For many, recorded provenance, signs of wear and tear, or perhaps maker’s marks establish the authenticity of an object. But what about objects that are made authentic by the social practices they are implicated in? Even though the painting is only historically representative, it still performs authentic qualities by right of how it is interpreted in the public consciousness. The credence given to The Foundation of Perth by the community due to its age, the depth of Morrison’s research into the event, and its re-imagining across different mediums has resulted in the image being constructed into something entirely authentic in its own special way.

Thinking about how objects become or are presented as ‘authentic’ can therefore tell us a lot, not only about their particular cultural importance, but also about the importance of certain cultural practices they are associated with. Morrison’s The Foundation of Perth illustrates how important understanding heritage is to the people of Perth.

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Fun fact: Details like the characters’ positioning, Mrs Dance's flowery bonnet and the picnic hamper included by Morrison behind the tree appear in both the 1958 and 1979 renderings of the event by other artists, adding further credence to the original paintings authentic qualities. If you feel like looking at the real painting, it is on permanent display in the Art Gallery of WA.

1.10 Change and Diversity

One thing that is constant in life is change (especially if you’re a cashier). Our material culture is no different; shifting and transforming as a consequence of our social lives.

Place

Yamatji Art Installation, WA Museum

Material Culture

Different people think about cultural ‘things’ in different ways. That much should be obvious to anyone who has been reading so far. Sometimes though, people don’t just see things from a different point of view, instead their whole conception of material culture is fundamentally different (what anthropologists would call a different ‘way of knowing’).

Take this display for example. With the installation of the Murchison Widefield Array in Yamaji Traditional country (315 km north east of Geraldton), astrophysicists and Yamaji Traditional Owners found themselves exchanging worldviews that were very different. When the astrophysicists looked into the night sky, they saw the stars, the planets, the constellations. Through the Widefield Array they could literally listen to sounds (or radio signals) of the past, produced by cosmic events at the dawn of our universe. On the other hand, Yamaji peoples saw the negative space between stars, the Emu in the Sky. Look up into the night and it is hard to miss; adjacent to the Southern Cross, the Emu’s head is formed by the Coalsack nebula, while the body and legs are formed by dust and gas clouds in the Milky Way. Yamaji peoples see the appearance of the Emu at night as a signal that it’s time to collect emu eggs, forming part of a story that has been recounted for many generations.

Even for something as universal (pun intended) as the night sky, these two cultural groups saw and interpreted its composition in vasty different ways: One group looked to the stars, the other looked at the negative space in-between. While the night sky may be different from the objects we surround ourselves with in day-to-day life, the different ways of knowing held by the astrophysicists and Yamaji people illustrates the importance of thinking about cultural ‘things’ from alternative perspectives.

The ideas talked about along this trail are just some of many ways in which we can investigate material culture. Each point has described a possible method for investigating ‘things’ and a possible way to explore different ways of knowing held by cultures around the world. Remember though that these ideas apply not only to objects in museums or art galleries, but also to things in everyday life. Culture is embedded in absolutely everything, and so the more methods we have at our disposal for understanding everyday material culture, the better we can appreciate different peoples and different ways of life.

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