TO WHAT BEGINNING

A PROMPT FOR STUDY.

 

Collectives are responsible for constructing social conditions which manifest themselves into material cultures.  This is no new news, but receives less attention than it deserves.  It is the very concept that explains why we feel like we need to wear what’s worn around us, why we buy the cars that we do, why we paint our houses the colors of the ones we see in magazines, and why we send our kids to school with the coolest backpacks, swaggiest shoes, brightest crayons, poshest coats, and healthiest lunch foods, too.  We don’t just live our own lives anymore.  This idea is infeasible in today’s globalized state.  What we do instead, is we live the lives that we let ourselves live based on the constructed conditions around us.  We are inherently part of the collective that subjects us to a heteronormative type.  It’s all a matter of whether we participate and to what end.

 

In her article titled “Scaling Up: Material Culture as Scaffold for the Social Brain”, Dr. Fiona Coward, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Bournemouth University, covers this idea in more depth, as she “throws it back” to our predecessors, the chimpanzees, in order to talk about how our surroundings and conditions shape our consumption habits.  Here’s a quick quote from Dr. Coward to give some insight.                                              

“Material culture plays a vital role in conveying social information about relationships between people, places and things that extend geographically and temporally beyond the here and now -- a role which allowed our ancestors to off-load some of the cognitive demands of maintaining such extensive social networks, and thereby surpass the limits to sociality imposed by neurology alone…  I would argue that increasing reliance on material culture has enhanced the purely physiological social cognition afforded by our expanded brains to scaffold social relations and interactions among and between individuals and groups, establishing the potential for the large-scale cooperation which has proven fundamental to our survival in tough environments, and hence to our global expansion.”

 

In order to construct a social condition, we allocate ourselves into collectives.  Collectives are groups of people, usually bound by shared characteristics, such as race, religion, economic status, popularity, capital ownership, sexuality, gender, age, social status, political party affiliation, gang designations, hobbies or interests, and so on.  The social condition is what describes the current emotional, physical, psychological, and environmental state of a given collective.  Social conditions are often constructed by policy, theory, hierarchy, or by other immaterial concepts.  Most of these platforms are highly politicized, extra-loaded, and are talked about in the news from week to week because of the divides they create in society.  Essentially, these platforms are prompts for inequity.

 

Collectives are always in competition with one another.  They’ll work against each other for space, resources, and status, sacrificing the social condition of other collectives for the well-being of their own.  The points of intersection between collectives is contentious, debated, and indigestible from the outside. 

 

In this exploratory project, I’ll take a new approach to understanding a conflict between two collectives.  The conflict I’ve identified is the gentrification of Brooklyn in New York.  The collectives at stake are those “moving in” and those “moving out”.  I’ll begin to work on unfolding evidence of the gentrifying process by looking at the ways that “new money” reveals itself in a formerly low-income environment through manifestations in the material world.

 

By looking at Brooklyn through a material based lens, I believe that I will discover overlooked information about the ways that we’ve mobilized previous residents in order to make room for ourselves.  We’ve looked at gentrification politically, we’ve looked at it socially, and we’ve looked at it economically.  What can we learn from looking at it materially? 

 

My hypothesis is that, by using the deep reading method to survey the material and physical properties of our environments, in pair with studying our social surroundings, we can begin to better understand the inequities and conditions created by collectives within the world around us in ways that will make us more conscious of our otherwise subconscious societal footprint.