About

About the Latin American Material Culture Museum

Critical analysis of a society’s material culture – the objects that individuals produce, consume, and covet – gives insight into a wide range of historical questions.  How did the local environment shape the goods created?  What was the relationship between consumption and identity?  What rituals surrounded the use of objects?   What does the study of an object reveal about colonial power and consumption?

Using Arnold J. Bauer’s Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002) for inspiration, students in the fall 2009 History 215: Colonial Latin America curated a collection of objects to illuminate the material world of Latin America in the early years of contact (before 1600) and as the bounds of colonial society became more entrenched (between 1600-1825).   For each stage of the project, students worked together to identify an object to investigate, research both its history and that of similar objects to place the source in a wider context, analyze how other historians have interpreted the object and the issues it raises, explore how the object and its cultural significance changed over time, evaluate what the object can reveal about colonial Latin America, and communicate their historical analysis through short written annotations. 

Themes students investigated included the encounter between New World, African, and Iberian societies; the transformation of indigenous social, religious, economic, and political frameworks; the creation and maintenance of colonial rule; the evolution of the Atlantic world economy; and the creation of new Latin American cultures and identities.

This project would not have been possible without the support of the College of Wooster’s Department of Instructional Technology: Joe Benfield, Jon Breitenbucher, Matt Gardzina, and Jed Rex. 

Katherine Holt is assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster.  She teaches courses on Latin American history, Atlantic World slavery, and U.S./Latin American relations.  Her research focuses on slavery and domestic life in nineteenth-century Brazil.