Engaging Smithsonian Objects Through Science, History, and the Arts by Mary Jo Arnoldi

Author:Mary Jo Arnoldi [Arnoldi, Mary Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935623-73-1
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY

Style and technology share two key features: particular ways of doing things and choices between alternatives. Style has been fundamental to the scholarship of archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians for over a century because it helps to establish some control over the unknown (e.g., a museum collection with uncertain or poor provenience such as the Ward Collection) and makes it comprehensible. A style, whether relating to time-space systematics, social communication, or human cognition, is usually defined by a specific set of formal attributes on the surface of an object that are generally separate from the physical actions that produced them. Style analysis has involved grouping objects by a selection of similar attributes or assigning newly found objects to previously constructed groups based on similarity. Recent debates and reviews of style, however, have refined its basic definition through consideration of its relationships to object function, object production, and various sociocultural processes and contexts.

The attributes that describe a technology—a system of materials, tools, skills, knowledge, and behaviors involved in the production of objects—may be on the surface of or intrinsic to an object as a product of physical action. Technology, defined as a material and social process, has only recently become the subject of direct study. Efforts to combine aspects of style and technology have yielded important theoretical approaches, including technological style, an anthropology of technology, and the sociotechnical system.5 Although each has a different emphasis, these concepts all incorporate the ideas that (1) patterned behavior derived from choices made during manufacture is stylistic and (2) styles of behaviors and material products actively communicate information about the social groups and systems of meaning that helped structure them.

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