How to Evaluate Artifacts xxiii
cowbells were used at 1930s football games. Intercollegiate football began
in the 1870s between Ivy League schools and gained wider popularity as a
spectator sport in the 1910s and 1920s; the cowbell is an ideal tool for spec-
tators: handheld, extremely loud, and even obnoxious to visiting teams.
More recently, in the 2002 Winter Olympics an American importer, Elizabeth
Halvorson, began selling Norwegian-made cowbells. In Scandinavian win-
ter sports it has been common for decades to have spectators make incessant
noise with cowbells as skiers perform their runs, and American spectators
now cheer U.S. Winter Olympics athletes with cowbell cavalcades as well.
The cowbell’s well-known use as a percussive instrument probably started
in the 1910s with the first American jazz bands. Today, most percussive in-
strument instructional manuals start with guidance on modulating the tone
of the cowbell. In the Saturday Night Live skit, the point of the humor is the
use of the cowbell as a percussive instrument in rock music. Its heyday was
in the mid to late 1970s, when bands such as the Blue Öyster Cult and per-
formers such as Jimi Hendrix used the cowbell for its metronomic rhythmic
beats. Glenn Kotche of the 1990s band Wilco loves the cowbell for its “abil-
ity to distinctly rise above so many amplified sounds.” Therein lies the cow-
bell’s appeal as a nonelectrified, low-tech musical instrument. The Saturday
Night Live skit’s humor arises from this tension between the electrified,
heavily produced sounds of 1970s rock music and the insistent human-
produced clank of the cowbell.
So, the cowbell is a human-produced artifact. It is an artifact embedded
in social processes such as production, distribution, and use at sporting
events and musical performances, and it is an artifact assigned meaning.
The meaning a cowbell has depends on context, use, and significance: Blue
Öyster Cult’s 1976 recording of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” used the cow-
bell’s sound in its repertoire of hard rock songs. Albert Bouchard (1947–)
played the cowbell on the recorded track without irony or humor. But the
context of the instrument changes when Will Ferrell, as the cowbell percus-
sionist in the skit, picks up the cowbell. The cowbell becomes a blunt instru-
ment of humor, and its significance hinges on the contradictory tensions
between the smooth vocals and produced sound of the rest of the band and
the clang-clang-clang of Ferrell’s cowbell dance.
What we just did with the cowbell is a method of studying material cul-
ture. There are several methodological frameworks for studying objects;
most scholars use some version of one or more of these. When you read
about a building or the built environment, the history of an object such as
a quilt or a video game console, an ancient Mayan ruin, an arrowhead from
800 CE, or how corn was bred for higher yield, you are reading the result of
the study of material culture. The model used to analyze the cowbell looks at
five basic properties of an artifact (history, material, construction, design, and
function) and then four operations that the researcher should do (describe the
Previous Page Next Page