Privileged Paths of Access

All humans undergo a passage from birth, through nurturing and aging, to death.  En route they experience the realities of the physical world: gravity, a sense of up and down, awareness of night and day, of straight, curved and crooked, of enclosure and exclusion.  Through the channels of the senses they taste sweet, sour and bitter, smell the acrid and the fragrant, hear sounds loud and quiet, perceive through touch the difference between rough and smooth, hot and cold, wet and dry; and see colors and shapes.  They know hunger and thirst, illness and health, pain, sexual passion, bodily functions, loss and discovery, laughter and real tears.  The human body constantly provides a sense of scale.  It all adds up to a tremendous body of experience that is common and transcultural.  That experience is transformed into belief that finds material expression in artifacts, the analysis of which---material culture--provides privileged paths of access for us to an understanding of other peoples and other cultures, of other times and other places.

   ----Jules David Prown, "The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?"  In American Artifacts:  Essays in Material Culture (2000)

When the Wind and Sea Dream...

"When the wind and sea dream the storms stop."

Magnetic poetry found at the Snow City Cafe in Anchorage, Alaska. August 2010.