Material Culture Culture is printed two times a year for members of PAS:APAL. It is abstracted and indexed in: JSTOR, ProQuest, History and Life, Historical Abstracts, GeoAbstracts, and the MLA International Bibliography. You may download a PDF of the table of contents of the current issue here. The Fall 2025 issue of Material Culture includes:
Exploring Santa Barbara in Sound: The Intersection of Music, Place, and Materiality in Emma Lou Diemer’s Santa Barbara Overture
Mark Joseph Sciuchetti Jr., Associate Professor of Geography, and Jianping ‘Coco’ Huang, Associate Professor of Marketing and Management, Jacksonville State University
Abstract: Emma Lou Diemer’s Santa Barbara Overture (1995-6) serves as both a musical homage to the city and a sonic map that encodes its geographical, cultural, and historical dimensions. By integrating elements such as mission bells, ragtime rhythms, and pentatonic motifs, Santa Barbara Overture engages with the diverse cultural influences that have shaped the city it evokes. The work’s instrumentation, rhythmic structures, and melodic gestures evoke Santa Barbara’s sonic environment and engage with its material conditions, including the physical presence of Spanish mission bells and the historical trade networks that brought diverse musical traditions and instruments to the region. The piece functions as a sonic monument, preserving and transmitting the essence of Santa Barbara across time and space.Drawing from archival research, performance analysis, and spatial theory, this article explores how Santa Barbara Overture transforms sound, space, and materiality into an embodied musical representation of place. By positioning the work within broader discourses of music geography, cultural memory, and material culture, this study highlights how music can function as both a repository of memory and an active force in shaping perceptions of place.
Bernard Gagnon, Santa Barbara Mission, photograph, Wikimedia Commons, 2008.
Amtrak’s Sustainable Futures: Slow Tourism and a Nationalization of Industrial Heritage
Mark Alan Rhodes II, Associate Professor of Geography, and Kathryn L. Hannum, Assistant Professor of Geography, Michigan Technological University
Abstract: Amtrak is the United States’s only nation-wide, intercity, publicly owned transit system. This public ownership of what remains of intercity passenger rail in the country offers a unique perspective to focus upon that rail heritage and its broader connections to industrial heritage via a more sustainable, experiential, and non-consumerist form of travel: slow tourism. From the working-class communities left behind by the retraction of industry to the redevelopment of post-industrial chic, how might we approach the applied industrial heritage of Amtrak? Using auto-ethnographic introspection from an Amtrak-based program on landscape, deindustrialization, and tourism, this paper asks how Amtrak navigates its potential for industrial heritage, sustainable tourism, and equitable development. “America’s Track” has faced financial difficulties since its inception. The broader economic geographies of all public transit, however, must consider direct and indirect externalities beyond the false hope of financial solvency. These include cultural and historical landscapes, collective memories, and the industrial heritage potential Amtrak provides to the neighborhoods it serves. In such cases, cultural resiliency and gentrification often come into conflict. This paper finds that Amtrak, while not immune to such conflict and controversy, offers a unique possibility in the United States to engage the geographies of heritage and tourism from a more “slow” perspective. Slow Tourism asks visitors to focus on absorbing experiences rather than maximizing consumption and on concentrating their time, travel, and money on fewer and more local destinations. However, some argue that Amtrak cannot fit such a bill to deliver both a slow tourism experience and a marketable product even with their $22 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In this paper, we resist the inference that slow tourism must equal slow growth. Instead, we illustrate multiple possible futures via Amtrak where we replace a growth mentality focused upon the consumption of space to a stewardship mentality valuing place.
Encountering the Cowboy: Remembering, Relating, and Reclaiming the Legacy of Philadelphia’s Black Horsemen
Courtney Berne, Ph.D., Lecturer/Instructor, Department of Geography, Rutgers University
Abstract: Beginning by observing a Black cowboy in a coffee shop, this paper weaves ethnography with theoretical frameworks regarding memory and encounter. By incorporating Helen F. Wilson’s (2016; 2017a; 2017b; 2019a; 2019b; 2020) work on multispecies encounter as context from which to examine how horse and rider alter the terms of urban entanglements, this piece challenges dominant spatial orders. Entreating Till’s (2012) and Hill’s (2013) work on memory, the author looks at kinesthetic relationships, which produce positive mental outcomes for Black urban riders. In addition to the spatial reclamation of trotting through city streets, this leads to a discussion of Black horsemanship as informal equine assisted therapy. Moreover, the embodied practice of riding horses re-maps historical memory while contributing to affect geographies through the empirics of urban equestrianism. The aim of this article is to show how Wilson’s work on encounter has inspired an outsider to think about movement and memory in new ways, as multispecies entanglements reimagine spaces of gentrification, affect, and place.