Intro to Material Culture

I am going to looooooove this class called SOSC 301. It's mostly lecture, no tests, no group assignments and a few small assignments with a final project. Yay! The only reason I signed up for it was that I needed any SOSC class, and it was the earliest one available. Naturally it's too easy to get caught up in visual culture at an art college, so thinking about "stuff and where it comes from" as a macro level is really exciting.

We watched some slides by photographers who photographed people, their belongings, and sometimes both. The idea was to get a sense of who the person was from their belongings. Here's my purse contents:




Our first assignment was to make a list of all the things in our bedrooms from memory. The second part is to actually make the list. The third part is to swap lists so that another student can draw inferences about us. Whoever gets mine is in for a puzzler :-D Another project is a "personal, reflective essay"..

The textbook for the class is Understanding Material Culture by Ian Woodward. I forked over $63 for a dead tree version. The Kindle versionw as $35...but the Android Kindle app is really finicky and I kind of need my book to be available :-D