The Leisure Class versus the Tourists: The Hidden Struggle in the Collecting of Pueblo Pottery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Attention to class is proposed as a heretofore unexplored part of the explanation for the development of the “native arts” market in North America. A focus on the collecting of Pueblo pottery around the turn of the twentieth century frames the discussion. Class differences account for variability in shapes, designs and sizes of ceramic items produced by Puebloan potters for sale and determined the kinds of ceramic items that were sought. Distinctions in class played themselves out in the expression of conflicts over taste. The branding of some pottery as “good” and some as “bad” masked the reinforcing of boundaries between the elite and lower classes. Pueblo potters’ labour and the products of that labour were influenced and conditioned by these different kinds of class habitus. Discussion of particular collectors and their motivations as well as the quantities, prices, and descriptors of items demonstrates these points.

Keywords:

• Class
• Pueblos
• Pottery
• Taste
• Collectors

Notes

[1] These were probably two‐handled ceramic canteens less than fifteen centimetres in width.

[2] He founded the Southwest Museum on the outskirts of Los Angeles and was a pal and supporter of Edgar Hewett and the School of American Research in Santa Fe. He made substantial contributions of Pueblo pottery to the Southwest Museum (Accession Records, Southwest Museum; Chauvenet 1983).

[3] This is probably a misprint. Batkin probably meant “rain” gods.

[4] Now a swanky and upscale establishment with hundred‐dollar items on its restaurant menu, it catered primarily to travelling salesmen at the turn of the twentieth century.

[5] My thanks to graduate students Deborah Faust (MA, University of Denver, 2003) and Mary Elizabeth Rudden (MA, University of Denver 1999) for assistance with this research.

[6] I am grateful to Carrie Beauchamp (MA, University of Denver, 2000) for assistance with this research.

[7] Mary Hemenway died two years later and the collection found its way into Harvard’s Peabody Museum (Wade & McChesney 1980, 1981).

[8] These included Alexander Stephen, Frank Cushing, Matilda Coxe Stevenson and James Stevenson, Victor and Cosmos Mindeleff, Jesse Walter Fewkes, Gustav Nordenskioeld, Henry ten Kate, Edward Ayer, Charles Lummis, William Henry Jackson, Ben Wittick, Adam Clark Vroman, Thomas and Peter Moran, Willard Metcalf, A. J. Scott and photographer‐tour leader George Wharton James.

[9] One of the pots that she and her husband bought, identifiable through the name “Ayer” penned on a small sticker on the bottom, ended up in the possession of Kaloyi Wohlegemuth, who sold it to Vienna’s Natural History Museum in 1903. It is now in Budapest’s Museum of Ethnography (Accession Catalogue, Neprajzi Muzeum [Museum of Ethnography], Budapest). Thomas Moran also collected pottery, but I have no data on whether or not Warner, Otis, Grey, Muir, Maude or Peabody did so.

[10] One of his tours also took visitors to the Havasupai, deep in the canyon.

[11] Together with his brother, who invented cornflakes, he founded the Kellogg Company.

[12] In 2004 dollars.

[13] Bourdieu (1984: 264) notes that small employers are close to the working class in their tastes.

[14] Previously the AI’s excavations had all been in Italy and Greece.

[15] Maria’s son, and also later a potter