The “Meaning” of Pottery

ONTEMPORARY POTTERY from traditional sources in modern and C emerging nations, what can be called folk pottery, is seldom collected and is poorly represented in museum collections in this country. In Eastern and Western Europe, where peasant cultures have been studied for some time, collections of folk pottery can be found and are still being made for museums. A perennial problem is that such collections have to compete for scarce space. Other problems are: the relative lack of interest in material culture among ethnologists and ethnographers in the period following World War 11, the emphasis on problem-oriented research, the seeming abundance of folk pottery, still made in many parts of the world, and the general lack of theory. This situation has been changing in the last 10 years among cultural anthropologists, and archaeologists themselves are beginning to do ethnographic research to test hypotheses about historic and prehistoric artifacts. Where folk pottery is collected, documentation is surprisingly poor and fails to include data that will be needed by future researchers. A further measure of the low esteem in which folk pottery research is held is that i t is seldom collected; museums prefer old and indigenous pieces to examples of folk pottery. An exception is American colonial folk pottery . My focus in this paper is on utilitarian pottery, which constitutes the bulk of material found in archaeological sites and in contemporary societies where traditional pottery is still used. My purpose is to show that this pottery can be studied not only to increase our knowledge of technology, social and craft specialization, political and economic life, and change, but to enhance our understanding of the symbolic significance and "meaning" of folk pottery in society, And, I might add, it can enable us to fathom its persistence and resistance to change. Often