Hello Everyone,

Below is the description of a proposed session at the Council for
Northeast Historical Archaeology meeting, coming up this October in
Trenton, NJ.  If you are interested in presenting a paper that would fit
into this grouping, please send one of the organizers an email (addresses
below).  The abstract submission deadline is June 24th, I believe.

Christa


Call for Papers! for CNEHA 2005 proposed session
"Status and Material Culture in the Northeast"
organized by Christina Hodge ([log in to unmask])  and Christa Beranek
([log in to unmask]), Boston University

We are inspired by the many current, innovative research projects treating
complex relationships between material culture, consumption, and social status
in the region. Material culture played a central role in defining and enacting
the shifting divisions of status as it related to other aspects of personal
identity.  In turn, these processes were intertwined with broader trends of
colonization, Georgianization, Americanization, urbanization, globalization,
and the consumer and industrial revolutions. The proposed session will include
a variety of social perspectives, including those of lower status social groups
and rural populations.

We would love to hear from people who are interested in presenting papers
related to this topic! Please email Christina Hodge
([log in to unmask]) as Christa Beranek will be away from her email
between June 9 and 18.

The topics of our own proposed papers for the session are as follows:

- a study of the shifting implications that the material symbols adopted by a
elite rural family took on during the Revolutionary period;

- a close reading of Ben Franklin's early 18th century critical essays on
consumerism; his awareness of, and antagonism toward, the new materialism of
the period illuminates middling values and challenges the idea that middling
consumers simply emulated elite tastes.