Termite Mounds and Slavery Chains

Marguerite Deloney
A response to Discussion Week 2: Materiality: ethnographies of material culture

Posted: February 12, 2007 12:05 pm.

No one can deny that we as human beings, whether cognitively or intentionally, charge inanimate objects with personal, social, or political meanings. We all recognize these meanings and adhere to them on a daily basis through our use of material objects, yet we rarely pursue why or how they exist. Within the last fifty years, though, there has been increasing ongoing debate and dialogue about such questions of materiality that has given birth to several theoretical frameworks addressing the meaning of objects, the most popular being objectification, the social-life-of-things approach, and consumption studies. All of these approaches have their own drawbacks and advantages, which have been discussed by various authors (Preucel and Meskell 2004, Tilley 2001, Hodder 2003, Olsen 2003). One major grievance present in all these authors’ writing regarding previous theories of materiality is that there has not yet been a manner of studying material culture that holistically encompasses all aspects of an object’s being. Bjørnar Olsen, for example, has issues with material culture studies being “increasingly focused on the mental and representational – material culture as metaphor, as symbol, icon, message, and text – in short, as something other than itself” (2003: 94, Löfgren 1997: 103).

Olsen’s point is a valid one and I agree with it, but I feel that we will continue to think of objects metaphorically until we can over come the difficulty of viewing objects as merely lifeless physical things. Albeit difficult, we need to begin to approach objects as living things. Only then can we truly grasp concepts of agency and further develop theories of materiality. Two modes of thinking about objects that can lead us in the right direction can be found in Carl Knappet’s (2005) discussion of fuzzy objects in “Animacy, agency, and personhood” and Igor Kopytoff’s (1986) discussion of object biographies in “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process.” The manner in which these two authors speak of objects, in my opinion, most clearly demonstrate how objects can and do have life. Knappet offers us the concept of fuzzy objects and extended organisms—that organisms’ interactions with their environment blur the lines of the animate and the inanimate as objects are integrated into and become an extension of an organism’s living system. His examples of termite mounds, earthworm soil, and coral’s calcite foundations effectively demonstrate his point (2005: 16). These organisms could not possibly survive without the incorporation of inanimate objects into their biological organization and the same can be applied to humans and their environment. By being a part of a living organism, by being attached to it for survival, objects then also take on a degree of livingness. If we think of objects in terms of the termite mound, then we can at least begin to see them as being physically part of a living system, opening the doors to understanding the social livingness of things.

Like Knappet, Kopytoff also approaches objects as animate things by giving biographies to them. Biography is something that is usually reserved for living organisms, and more specifically humans. By stating that objects have a biography is in itself attesting to the livingness of those objects. You cannot have a biography without a life. Kopytoff’s main focus is on the process of commoditization, but it is his discussion of slavery that I feel best aids in our pursuit of understanding objects as living. As Kopytoff points out, the line between human and object is not so clear-cut when one considers slavery as a commodity. Taking a closer look at the commoditization of slavery allows us to vividly see how it is possible for the life of an object to be similar to that of a human if we place them on the same leveling plane. Let us consider the commoditizing process of slavery as presented by Kopytoff:

Slavery begins with capture or sale, when the individual is stripped of his previous social identity and becomes a non-person, indeed and object and an actual or potential commodity. But the process continues. The slave is acquired by a person or group and is reinserted into the host group, within which he is resocialized and rehumanized by being given a new social identity. The commodity-slave becomes in effect reindivualized by acquiring new statuses (by no means always lowly ones) and a unique configuration of personal relationships. In brief, the process has moved the slave away form the simple status of exchangeable commodity and toward that of a singular individual occupying a particular and social niche. But the slave usually remains a potential commodity: he or she continues to have a potential exchange value that may be realized by resale (1986: 65).

What Kopytoff has just provided us with is a “biographical consideration of enslavement as a process.” I find this biography of slavery quite effective for it is an example to which we as people can connect. It is easier to see slaves as being able to hold some form of social value because they as humans were part of society, but what is important to remember (although sad) is that slaves were seen/treated as objects, as a commodity. Therefore the process of commoditization we see in slavery suggests that the commoditization of other things may usefully be seen in a similar light, that all objects have a cultural biography of social integration and individualization, use and disuse.

Although these ideas of extended organisms and biographies may seem a little abstract, and even a bit of stretch, I still think that they are effective in getting us to move away from viewing objects as mere pieces of stone and wood, but as something more, as something living. As Knappett suggests, we can approach objects as being physically alive by integration into the human system biologically, but we can also see objects as having cultural biographies due of that same integration socially, as Kopytoff demonstrates. Thinking in these abstract manners can give us better understanding of materiality so when we ask ourselves why objects have such significance in our social lives, we can say that it is because they are living things with biographies that are extensions of ourselves.

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Posted at Feb 22/2007 11:36PM:
Omur: This is a very interesting and theoretically rigorous paper that explores one of the central problems in material culture studies: how does one cope with understanding the complex nature of material objects without reducing them solely to their technologies of production, usefulness, styles, symbolisms etc. In achieving this, it seems a number of steps are vital:

recognizing objects as social beings and their agency;
acknowledging the fluidity, fuzziness of boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, and the hybridity of human, animal and material worlds;
acknowledging the animacy of objects, things, artifacts by means of their own own trajectories of life histories (social life/cultural biography), independent of the intentions and agencies of their makers;
understanding the intimate interaction between human subjects and their material world, where seemingly inanimate beings (objects, architectural spaces) can act as extensions of human bodies (Knappett's fyborgs).

The list can go on, but these are the things that your essay made me think of and reformulate in my own mind.