Eliot Spencer
Ph.D. Candidate (ABD)
spencer@unc.edu
Major Field: Latin American History
Other Fields: Global History; the Atlantic World
Advisor: John Chasteen
Research Interests: My research focuses on Latin
American material culture; more specifically, the political, economic,
and sociocultural ramifications of imported material goods from the
imperialist hegemons—particularly Europe and the United States—to Latin
America from the end of the colonial period through the early twentieth
century. These implications center on transnational flows of
culture, what cultural theorists Fernando Ortíz and Mary Louise Pratt
describe as “transculturation.”* The topic of material culture in
Latin American history has attracted interest from the scholarly
community. A survey of the literature indicates that
anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and
cultural theorists have examined the impact of material culture in the
region. Most of these scholars describe the impact of material
goods on a society as real and intrinsic values of the items that one
possesses or seeks to posses. The values that people, families, and
communities attribute to specific material goods can have many
different forms. While scholars in these diverse fields of study
discuss material culture within the context of a larger analysis, few
of them explore human materialism in Latin America as a critical factor
in the formation of identity, class-consciousness, and sociopolitical
mechanisms in the independent republics. Herein lies the point of
departure for my own research.
I intend to investigate and interrogate the contention that not only
did imported goods create a powerful material culture, but also that
material culture played a vital and central role in the political,
economic, and sociocultural formation of the Latin American republics
themselves following independence. In other words, material
culture, while based on objects, does not exist as an autonomous entity
in Latin American history, or the history of any region. It is
interwoven in every aspect of human life and society—from family
relations, to electoral politics, to globalized trade. The “wants” of
society defined humanity as a whole in this time and place.
“Survival” of human society in nineteenth-century Latin
America—physical, emotional, psychological, and otherwise—became linked
inextricably to material culture and the objects comprising it.
My research shows that material goods were an omnipresent force
percolating in society throughout the history of the region. The
culture of objects bubbled to the surface of human consciousness not
only to establish culture trends, but also, and more importantly, to
establish Latin American nationhood after independence. In the
theoretical terms of Miles Richardson, the story of material objects in
Latin America indeed seems that of an “intersubjective world expressed
in physical substance.”** But I hope to illustrate that material
culture transcended the realm of the intersubjective. When
everything in the postcolonial experience was at stake, the power of
goods facilitated, and even precipitated, the political, economic, and
social transformations that defined Latin America and made the
experiment of the independent nation endure.
* Fernando Ortiz, “On the Social Phenomenon of ‘Transculturation’ and
Its Importance in Cuba,” Cuban Counterpoint (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 1995), 97-98; Mary Louise Pratt, “Criticism in the
Contact Zone,” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.
** Miles Richardson, “Being-in-the-Market versus Being-in-the-Plaza:
Material Culture and the Construction of Social Reality in Spanish
America,” American Ethnologist (1982): 422.