An interview with Dr. Gerald Pocius

In the Loop with Dr. Gerald Pocius, Professor Emeritus, Memorial University, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

This spring (2026), I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Gerald Pocius, Professor Emeritus, Folklore Studies at Memorial University. Dr. Pocius’ work has been a beacon in my own work and the work of my students, who I continue to point in the direction of his important 1991 edited volume Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture. The volume, which serves as resource for material culture students in areas of theory and methodology, established a benchmark for the academic study of objects in Canada that extended from the work of Henry Glassie, Jules David Prown, and Don Yoder. Living in a Material World, the conference and the volume of expanded essays, served as inspiration for the Material Culture Collective’s own inaugural conference that sought to respond to and reignite interest in bringing together material culturalists from a variety of scholars, curators, architects, archaeologists, folklorists, and practitioners. Meeting with Dr. Pocius was the perfect opportunity to discuss how far material culture studies has come since 1986. Here are some excerpts from our delightful discussion.

Gerald Pocius, Ed. Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research and Memorial University Press, 1991).

Vernacular Architecture and a Memorial University Field School

Binkley: Can you share with us a bit about your work at Memorial University?

Pocius: Back when I taught at Memorial, we used to run a field school that ran for three weeks in Keels, Newfoundland, where students had to do measured drawings of houses and interview the owners of the houses as a way of understanding the “three last fishing families in the community and this as the end of a 500-year fishing tradition. The field school ran with eight students, and those students were tasked with studying houses and outbuildings, and the surrounding landscape.

During the first week, I invited friends from the American Folk Life Centre and other places to teach students methods of research, such as photography, interviewing, and how to document material culture and buildings. During the second week, students worked in partnerships and dedicated their time to investigating a particular house. The final week’s work focused on bringing together all the documents including, interviews, which revealed a cultural history of the families connected to the fishing community, the vernacular architecture of the village, and how they lived.

This material culture approach to understanding vernacular architecture focused on having students learn about objects and their materiality, and placing this information within a cultural context, which involves as much historical information. It was important for students to talk to people: “you cannot understand these buildings without talking to the people in the community – you know, its materiality, its interviewing, its drawing, it’s really a wide range of things to finally understand how to read those objects.”

Again, my thinking about what I do or what I’ve done over the years is really what Henry Glassie wrote in an article about Archaeology and Folklore: If folklorists or archaeologists did not dig, we would both be the same and you know, we’re both in disciplines that deal with items, objects, things.

Images from an interview by Meghann E. Jack showing some of Pocius’ methods and his students at work, 2012. For the full article, Jack, Meghann E. 2021. “Gerald L. Pocius”. Material Culture Review, no. 90-91 (April):164-75. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/31892.see https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/download/31892/1882528038?inline=1

What has happened in the last 40 years with material culture?

Binkley: In planning a book that follows our 2025 conference, we have been thinking about what has changed and what major themes have emerged since 1986 conference in the field of material culture studies. There seems to have always been a deliberate approach to decentering Western approaches to research, which are now furthered through ideas of decolonization. This is one of the valuable attributes to working with objects. A second theme that emerged at the conference touched on ideas of affect, emotion, emotions of making, and ideas of care in research and in thought.

Pocius: There is this book by an anthropologist and philosopher, Robert Plant Armstrong called The Affecting Presence. This was a book that I was put onto two years ago and there are, you know, objects that move us. Affect becomes a very important issue when you deal with all kinds of cultural creations. During one of my courses at Memorial, when I used to take students to the Harlow campus in the UK, we went to Canterbury Cathedral. I was there with 15 – 20 students, a lot of them were not religious, you know, never been in a church, and they walked in and were awestruck at the space and the verticality and the colour and the light and so on. And I said, that’s an affecting presence. And so, we need to understand more about emotion and affect.

Binkley: Another theme that emerged is the concept of practice and experience; some refer to it as experimental archaeology.

Pocius: Right and that book of mine was born in me in many ways being at Winterthur (Museum and Gardens) for six months or however long it was. When I was there, it was a great experience, and I just lived objects every day. When I was an undergraduate, I learned hand weaving at a course at the Philadelphia College of Textiles. I was interested in creation, so I found a discipline that included these ideas of creation and emotion. I discuss this with my students of folk music that I teach now. Yesterday, we were talking about Peter, Paul and Mary, and a couple of the students shared how this particular song really emotionally moved them.

Binkley: In my forthcoming book, Canadian Quilts and Their Makers, I tried to make each of the styles of quilts that I wrote about. I write about a homespun quilt made in 1810 in Nova Scotia and learned how to spin wool and weave. I was gifted an early nineteenth century countermarch box loom that I built in my garage. When I was in Ireland, I went to the Ulster Folk Museum to see a countermarch box loom and how it operated. I wanted to understand the loom and its haptic sensibilities: I wanted to hear the thud of the beam and I wanted to feel the dampness of the house (which had to be kept humid for the flax), and when I was warping my loom, I wanted to feel how back-breaking it was to warp the loom. The senses and emotions evoked by my experiences in seeing and operating a loom added to my understanding of the object.

Pocius: These are not things that easily fall within a social sciences way of thinking.

Do you have any advice for us as a collective moving forward?

Pocius: I think there are a lot of challenges within the academic world in terms of disciplinary territoriality. Whether we are furniture fanatics or folklorists, or historians, or whatever, we have a shared passion in talking about the material objects. What you are doing with the collective is a great way to encourage people to continue to look at objects and understand the culture that surrounds them.

If you are interested in learning more about Dr. Pocius and his work, see his profile at https://www.mun.ca/folklore/people/dr-gerald-pocius/.

And if you are interested in Dr. Pocius’ research, see the Dr. Gerald Pocius Folklore Collection in the Digital Archives Initiative at Memoria University Libraries https://dai.mun.ca/digital/pocius and at the Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory - Central Newfoundland collection

We welcome interviews, short articles, and profiles about anything material culture related. To share something you are working on or an interview, send your article to In the Loop at materialculturecollective@gmail.com.