Final Research Paper Proposal
Working Title: Around the Merry-Go-Round: The Cultural Biography of an Amusing Landscape
For my final research paper I am going to continue with my proposal for the Industrial Ruins project. I want to take some theoretical approaches at looking at materiality/material culture studies, particularly agency and lifecycles, and apply them to a study of landscape. In this regard I will be treating Rocky Point and its landscape as an artifact that has its own cultural biography and agency within the community. Because I will be exploring the life cycles of Rocky Point, I will be looking into the history of the amusement park from its early inception to post-abandonment. There are three phases in particular that I would like to focus on: the beginning stages of its construction/opening, the middle stages and hey day of its use as a recreational park, and its latest stages of desertion/dismantle/decay. I do not only want to retrace the mere historical timeline of the park, but more importantly I want to investigate the social aspect of the park, or how people have interacted with, perceived, and experienced the park throughout its various stages. In order to answers such question of agency, landscape, biography, and social experience I intend to take a multi-dimensional approach/methodology and combine a variety of resource for my data to include archival/historical research, material culture studies, landscape studies, archaeological theory and thought, as well as some ethnography.
Preliminary Bibliography
Edensor, Tim; 2005. Industrial Ruins: Spaces, aesthetics, and materiality. Oxford: Berg.
Gell, Alfred; 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press.
Gosden, Chris and Ywonne Marshall; 1999. “Cultural biography of objects,” World Archaeology 31: 169-178.
Gross, Paul; 1996. Rocky Point Park. Providence: Broadsides.
Hoskins; Janet. “Agency, biography and objects” in Handbook of material culture. C. Tilley et. al. (eds.). London: Sage Pub., 74-84.
Knappett, Carl; 2005. “Animacy, agency and personhood,” in Thinking through material culture: an interdisciplinary perspective. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 11-34.
Lewis, Rob and Ryan Young; 1998. Rhode Island Amusement Parks. Charleston: Arcadia.
Macaulay, Rose, Dame; 1966. Pleasure of Ruins. New York: Walker.
Schlereth, Thomas J.; 1980. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville: American Association for State and Local Histyory, 1980.
Shanks, Michael 1998. "The life of an artifact" E-publication at traumwerk.stanford.edu.
Tilley, Christopher; 1994. “Space, place, landscape and perception: phenomenological perspectives,” In A phenomenology of landscapes: places, paths, monuments. Oxford/Providence: Berg, pp. 7-34.
Wyatt, Donald W.; 1997. Rocky Point: a Rhode Island Treasure. Warwick: Beacon Communications.
Posted at Apr 16/2008 02:42PM:
omur: Hi Marguerite,
Taking landscape as a cultural artifact and exploring aspects of "social life" and "cultural biography" is indeed an intriguing approach. Wendy Ashmore and Bernard Knapp talk about this alittle bit in the intro to Archaeologies of Landscape. I see that Pat has a piece on this topic: Rubertone, P. 1989 Landscape as Artifact: Comments on "The Archaeological Use of Landscape Treatment in Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis. Historical Archaeology 23(1): 50-54. Spiro Kostof's famous volume The City Shaped speaks about "City as Artifact" which may be fun to look at. I alsp suggested David Leatherbarrow's Topographical Stories.
Rocky Point Final Paper Notes.doc