Questions, ideas, notes for discussion
"There is something unsettling in the way things simply survive, through and beyond meaningful human signification, by continual deferral and deference. This is the strange life of things, animated and constrained by invisible relations and yet defiantly autonomous in their discrete physicality. The allure of the thing lies in the way in which it can never be completed, never be fully or perfectly discovered; and it is always set in motion, propelled by human relations. In this way, the thing always exceeds its own narration. And such authority in contingency, indeterminacy, and excess reveals an extra-semantic function of the magical object as the disclosure of powerful force in encounters of meaning and matter, life and death."
Carolyn Nakamura 2005: 23.
- At the recent annual meeting of the Ameriacan Archaeological Institute (AIA) there was a special session on object biographies: Material Culture in Motion: Archaeological Approaches to Object Biographies. Please take a look at their abstracts, to see the kinds of archaeological work being done these days on this issue. I particularly recommend the Colloquium Overview Statement.
- Kopytoff's discussion of slavery brings out some fascinating aspects of commoditization as a process. It makes a general point that objects/objectified persons are fluid and ever-changing in terms of their status, commodity value, cultural meaning etc in the social world and they are never stable beings (this is a subtle, but very important point: once a person is made a slave through capture or sale, his/her previous social status is annihilated, but he/she doesn't remain as a slave of this stripped social identity: he/she is resocialized into a new network of relationships). Let's emphasize this fluidity, perhaps we can make a broader statement about objects and their valuation/signification. The making of an object a commodity is then an event, a cultural process as Kopytoff argues: and cannot be assumed static for the length of the rest of its life.
- Anthropologically, to understand this shifting character of things, the "object biography" approach seems to be very useful. In the course of a thing's/objectified person's life, who has the agency, who has the power to determine the course of its/his/her life? In what ways do you think the commodified thing/person can have its/his/her own agency, independent of their makers, patrons, sellers and buyers? Let's compare Kopytoff and Shanks on this matter. Compare especially with the Derrida quote in p. 23 of Nakamura, where the commodity is defined as a thing with "automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life"! The market appears in this definition as a stage where the commodity performs its animated materiality, mechanical freedom.
- Kopytoff was one of the first who proposed the analogy between individuals and things, pointing out the similarity between the way "societies construct individuals and the way they construct things." Kopytoff's however remains a social constructionist approach where things go through a variety of singularizations, classifications and reclassifications (see Meskell's discussion of taxonomies) while he gives little space to the possibility of artifacts acting as social agents. Same goes true for slaves, as objectified, commodified individuals. In the light of Shanks, how can we critique Kopytoff (or vice versa!)?
- Compare Walter Benjamin's idea of aura (discussed bty Shanks) with Gell's concept of technology of enchantment. Shanks writes: "aura is not a quality which people bring to something." Can we think of agency in the same way? How does an object gain aura/agency?
- Reading Nakamura: the Assyrian apotropaic figurines are associated with performative agencies in close realtion to architectural spaces, which are seen open, vulnerable and fluid. The spaces themselves however are not conceived materially as distinct from their inhabitants, which are equally and similarly seen opne, vulnerable and fluid. Here is a fascinating case where humans, spaces, animals and objects mix and act upon each other; a condition in which objects (and animals) are agents while human subjects (and spaces) are vulnerable patients, in Gell's sense. Let's unPack and deBate!
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