The Material Culture of American Utopias
| dc.contributor.author | Leone, Mark P. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-05-09T16:57:09Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-05-09T16:57:09Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1980 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The problem I am interested in is why our culture has produced a set of utopian groups whose mundane objects--material culture--often operate explicitly at a religious as well as a utilitarian level. Both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American utopian groups isolated themselves from mainline American society and in doing so often established a direct relationship between their religious principles and the objects in daily use. This was, and remains, very different from the rest of America. We today do not have large ranges of objects whose religious or ideological significance is explicit and apparent to the population at large. There are, of course, iconographic items but these are in a different category since their explicit function is to represent the ineffable; they have no primary utilitarian value. Further, utopian groups usually consciously eliminated all such items. They were not concerned with crosses, emblems, statues, colored windows, and the rest of traditional Christian representationalism. Utopian groups often explicitly contained anti-iconographic statements in their doctrines. | en_US |
| dc.identifier | https://doi.org/10.13016/z2jc-s3fw | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/28603 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | University of Maryland (College Park, Md) | |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland | |
| dc.title | The Material Culture of American Utopias | en_US |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en_US |