Salvage memory: Constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 401-424

  DeSilvey, Caitlin ^a,b  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b Moon Randolph Homestead   (United States)

Author keywords

Cultural memory; Historical geography; Material culture; Montana

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY;

MONTANA; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 34547548070     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007078206     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Ione Randolph King shared her stories with me and with others over the course of several years. One recorded interview (conducted by Bob Oaks, Jo Bernofsky and Sarah DeSilvey on 21 August 2001) provides the majority of the material excerpted in this essay. The rest of the material is drawn from my notes on unrecorded conversations and from email correspondence between Ione and myself in 2002 and 2003.
2. From its settlement in 1889 to its purchase by the City of Missoula in 1996, the following people called the homestead home: Ray and Luella Moon (1889-1894); George and Helen Moon (1894-?); William and Emma Randolph (1907-1956); sons Keith Randolph (1907-192?; 1932-1936), Robert Randolph (1907-192?), and Bill Randolph, Jr. (1911-1995); Keith Randolph's family, Bonnie (wife) and daughters Ione, Irene, Norma Jean (1932-1936) and Shirley An (1935-1936).
3. C. DeSilvey, 'Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things', Journal of material culture 11 (2006), pp. 317-37; 'Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead', Journal of historical geography (in press); 'Practical remembrance: material and method in a recycled archive', in Elizabeth Gagen, Hayden Lorimer and Alex Vasudevan, eds, Practicing the archive: reflections on methods and practice in historical geography (London, Historical Geography Research Group Monograph Series, in press).
4. V. Buchli, 'Introduction', in V. Buchli, ed., The material culture reader (Oxford, Berg, 2002), p. 17.
5. The salvage project I carried out at the homestead resonates with recent research in archaeology and cultural geography. See V. Buchli and G. Lucas, Archaeologies of the contemporary past (London, Routledge, 2001)
6. H. Lorimer and F. MacDonald, 'A rescue archaeology, Taransay, Scotland', Cultural geographies 9 (2002), pp. 95-102.
7. Other work on memory and waste has influenced my approach in this essay. See G. Hawkins and S. Muecke, eds, Culture and waste: the creation and destruction of value (Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003);
8. B. Neville and J. Villeneuve, eds, Waste-site stories: the recycling of memory (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002);
9. M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer, eds, Acts of memory: cultural recall in the present (Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1999);
10. M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley, eds, Material memories: design and evocation (Oxford, Berg, 1999);
11. S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin, eds, Regimes of memory (London, Routledge, 2003).
12. K. Hetherington, 'Phantasmagoria/phantasm agora: materialities, spatialities and ghosts', Space and culture (2001), pp. 24-41, p. 26.
13. W. Benjamin, 'Eduard Fuchs, collector and historian', in W. Benjamin, One-way street and other writings, trans. E. Jephcott (London, Verso, 1997 [1979]), pp. 349-86, 351.
14. H. Foster, Compulsive beauty (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1993), p. 162.
15. W. Benjamin, 'Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia', in Benjamin, One-way street, pp. 225-39, 227.
16. A. McRobbie, 'The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin, cultural studies, and Marxist theories of art', Cultural studies 6 (1992), pp. 147-68, p. 165.
17. See D. Miller, ed., Material cultures: why some things matter (London, UCL Press, 1997).
18. See E. Hallam and J. Hockey, Death, memory and material culture (Oxford, Berg, 2001);
19. M. Kwint, C. Breward, and J. Aynsley, eds, Material memories.
20. It could also be argued that Ione's presence in the essay binds me to the place through my acquaintance with one of its former inhabitants. For a different approach to re-memory and material artefacts, see D. Tolia-Kelley, 'Locating processes of identification: studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home', Transactions Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004), pp. 314-28.
21. J. Hoskins, Biographical objects: how things tell the stories of people's lives (New York and London, Routledge, 1998), p. 5.
22. For discussion of the distortions and condensations that arise in oral recollection, see also S. Radstone, Memory and methodology (Oxford, Berg, 2000).
23. S. Rose, The making of memory: from molecules to mind (London, Bantam, 1993).
24. E.S. Casey, Remembering: a phenomenological study (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 205.
25. Freud's technique for using free-association in dream analysis is also relevant to this analogy. S. Freud, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (London, Hogarth, 1952).
26. M. Pearson and M. Shanks, Theatre/archaeology (London, Routledge, 2001), p. 156.
27. Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act on 12 May 1933. By July an emergency purchase program was in place, with government appraisers sent out to reimburse farmers for stock and crops culled to meet the allotted sale limits.
28. See R. Barnard, The Great Depression and the culture of abundance (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
29. See T.H. Watkins, The hungry years: a narrative history of the Great Depression in America (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1999).
30. For illustration of this tendency, see L.F. Haaglund, Tough, willing and able: tales of a Montana family (Missoula, Montana, Mountain Press, 1997);
31. J. Westin, Making do: how women survived the '30s (Chicago, Follet, 1976).
32. The imprint of the Depression and World War II on the nation's collective memory can work to drown out some of the particularity of individual stories. K. Ross Toole wrote in 1972: 'Someday someone will write a monograph on that long sleep: Montana in the 1930s and 1940s. But it is apt to be a dull monograph. The New Deal came, the New Deal went, the war came, the war went. What the nation did, Montana did. Perhaps a fillip here, a fillip there. Still, what it really was was twenty years of deep somnolence'. K. Ross Toole, Twentieth-century Montana: a state of extremes (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 271.
33. A. Gordon, Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 4.
34. While the application of Benjamin's ideas at the scale of the micrological and subjective may seem to work counter to his broader historical materialist project, others have demonstrated that his work can be used productively in such intimate analyses. See E. Leslie, 'Souvenirs and forgetting: Walter Benjamin's memory work', in Kwint, Breward, Aynsley, Material memories, pp. 107-22;
35. J. Wolff, 'Memoirs and micrologies: Walter Benjamin, feminism, and cultural analysis', New formations 20 (1993), pp. 113-22;
36. A. Latham, 'The power of distraction: distraction, tactility, and habit in the work of Walter Benjamin', Society and space 17 (1999), pp. 451-73;
37. J. Campbell and J. Harbord, eds, Temporalities, autobiography, and everyday life (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002).
38. See Barnard, The Great Depression, and T. Smith, Making the modern: industry, art, and design in America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993).
39. Gordon, Ghostly matters, p. 66.
40. Watkins, The hungry years, p. 126.
41. As commentators lamented the capitalist 'tragedy of waste' that fixed cycles of overproduction as the norm, industries and the government tried to boost consumption through advertising and by linking citizenship with purchase practices. Bamard, The Great Depression; J. Lears, Fables of abundance: a cultural history of advertising in America (New York, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 241.
42. M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984).
43. M. Shanks, Experiencing the past: on the character of archaeology (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 63.
44. S. Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993), p. 135.
45. T. Edensor, 'The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space', Environment and planning D: Society and space 23 (2005), pp. 829-49.
46. K. Stewart, A space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an other America (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 107.
47. V. Buchli and G. Lucas, 'The absent present', in Buchli and Lucas, Archaeologies of the contemporary past, pp. 3-18, p. 14.
48. Gordon, Ghostly matters, p. 69.
49. Ibid.
50. In his chronicle of his Berlin childhood, Benjamin wrote: '[R]emembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers'. 'A Berlin chronicle', in Benjamin, One-way street, pp. 293-346, p. 314.
51. Hetherington, 'Phantasmagoria', p. 39.
52. A. Fisher, Let us now praise famous women (London, Pandora, 1987), p. 99.