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What do objects do? A material and visual culture perspective.

(http://www.objectretrieval.com/node/266)

Things create people as much as people make them.

(Tilley, 1999:76)

From a theoretical point of view it is obvious that people do encode metaphorical meanings

into things which would themselves have no meaning. But from the point of view of

methodology, of the analysis of material forms, things once created work themselves to

reproduce or transform the social contexts in which they are encountered and move.

(ibid)

Introduction – biographical objects, objectification and the study of material culture

The application of the notion of biography to objects has distinct theoretical and

methodological consequences. What this essay question draws attention to is that comparisons

can be drawn between the biographies of persons and the biographies of things - people think

through the world through objects, and that objects, like human subjects have agency (Gell,

1998). The term biography means a written account of a person‟s life, which is usually done

by another. An object can never be the author of its own biography or of another object in the

way that humans are able to author their‟s and other‟s life stories. There is no escape from the

subject, but objects do to a certain degree dictate how they are appropriated, objectified and

re-contextualized over space and time – for example, the actual materiality of the object sets

limits on its social function, its production, and its modification through subsequent cultural

transformation of value through exchange and whether as gift or commodity (Thomas, 1991).

It is my intention to take as impetus Tilley‟s (1999, 1991) application of metaphor to material

culture in order to consider the implications of applying the term „biography‟ as a

predominantly textual and metaphorical term. Discussions concerning things which have

„biographies‟ highlight many issues and cover many disciplines such as art history

(Baxandall, 1974) and economics and consumption (Miller, 1995;Fine, 2002) – all of which

are far too numerous to mention within the space of this essay. My focus on what biographies

of objects bring to light will be on objectification (Miller, 1987), the metaphorical materiality

of text and image (Tilley, 2004, 1999, 1991), and recontextualization (Thomas, 2001, 1991)

and the artefact as event (Strathern, 1990).

The consideration of biographical objects challenges dominant, Western and Enlightenment

narratives that create a dualism between subjects and objects, whereby the object is always

seen as mute in relation to the subject as absolute agent of action. As Heidegger discusses in

his essay Age of the World Picture, the Enlightenment man of reason made a picture of the

world, and separated it off from himself in order to understand and exploit it. A methodology

which applies the notion of biography to things recovers man‟s embodied relation to the

world.

The current aim of material culture studies, as multi-displinary and within the anthropology

department at University College London (which include amongst others; Tilley, 1999, 1991;

Miller, 1995, 1987; Pinney, 2004; Kuchler, 2001), and from which I take my lead, is to

develop Hegelian, Marxist, and Bourdieurian materialist theories through ethnographic

research in order to de-fetishize objects and to find a more worthy model of engagement with

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the world. Anthropology is the study of social relationships and material culture is the study

of objects. Objects are closely linked to what people do and social processes, for as Simmel

argues… „human values do not exist other than through their objectification in material

forms‟ (Miller, 1998b:19). This rationalization can also be extended to allow a certain

rationalization of the being of objects and an argument for the ontology of things (Gell, 1998:

Latour, 1993).

The way individuals and groups objectify their identities allows an understanding of culturally

specific social practices. This approach aims to go beyond physiognomic analysis to question

the artifice of Enlightenment categorizations of the cultural and natural world which subjects

and objects inhabit. The recognition of the contextual, cultural, temporal and spatial

characteristics of things is crucial to this ethnographic re-assessment of modernity‟s

universalizing and homogenizing influences on notions of history. Material culture considers

the methodological consequences of realizing an object‟s agency, its response capacities and

its abilities to carry information; for example Gell‟s anthropological theory of art is; „the

social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency‟ (1998:7).

One of the most fundamental theories to the study of material culture, and by extension

biographical objects, is that of objectification. As Miller argues, „…social worlds are as much

constituted by materiality as the other way around…‟ (1998: 8). Objectification considers the

construction and translation of social relations, culture and value systems through artefacts,

and has three primary concerns. First of all the concept of knowledge and identity is possible

through objects. Secondly, knowledge is carried by relations among relations of things – i.e.

the object has a certain agency (Gell, 1998). Thirdly, there are methodological consequences

of objectification as a theory.

Hegel‟s understanding of the dialectic between subject and object, in Phenomenology of the

Spirit ([1807]; 1977), has been of primary importance to the concept of objectification and

theories of object(s) agency, whereby the subject and object have a feed back relationship. In

perpetual fusion and separation, the subject and object leave an imprint on one another,

enabling a secondary objectivity. Subjectivity is objectified and vice versa, and it is this which

makes possible the application of the notion of biography to things.

Subsequent anthropological and material culture theories and methodologies have taken into

account this dialectical approach to objects and subjects in order to recover the significance of

things as making possible human social relations. Daniel Miller‟s (1998a) theory of shopping

in North London as an act of love, for example, critiques a modernist and post-modernist

assumption of consumption as an evil and excessive act to instead argue that the way people

appropriate objects is far from passive – consumption enables them to perform their specific

social identities. This dialectical understanding can also be linked to tactual and muscular

philosophy‟s of the act such as that of George Herbert Mead (1972) as adopted in post-

processual archeology (Hodder, 1995), and phenomenological methodologies (Merleau-

Ponty, 1962; Tilley, 2004; Pinney, 2004) in which the distinction between man (culture) and

the world (nature) is reexamined to instead posit a mutually intertwined „fleshy‟ relation to

one another:

Phenomenology involves the attempt to describe the objects of consciousness in the manner in

which they are presented to consciousness. It attempts to reveal the world as it is actually

experienced directly by a subject as opposed to how we might theoretically assume it to be.

(Tilley, 2004:1)

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A further ethnographically based approach is to problematize the dualism between gift (as

inalienable and non-Western) and commodity (as alienable and Western) as discussed by

Mauss (2001) [1925] in relation to gift giving, and Marx (1976) [1867] in relation to

commodity in systems of exchange (Miller, 2001). For Miller ethnography is the absolute

fulcrum of anthropological study, and it is this which teases out the limitations of

universalizing theory such as that of Bourdieu and Lévi-Strauss‟ structuralist method. It is

Miller‟s (ibid) argument that the gift can be alienable and the commodity can be inalienable in

different cultural contexts, and in terms of the performance of identity by individuals and

groups through objectification.

Not all objects are perceived to have a social life, and this is dependent on a number of factors

such as cultural context (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986), history (Lubar & Kingery, 1993),

and politics (Thomas, 2001):

In doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about

people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its 'status' and in the

period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from

and who made it? What had been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal

career for such things? What are the recognized 'ages' or periods in the thing's 'life', and what

are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing's use change with its age, and what

happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness? (Kopytoff 1986: 66)

To be thought of as having a social life, objects first have to be distinguished as artefacts of

interest by their human subject biographers. The consequence of this is that many objects are

simply ignored and not considered as having an agency that impacts upon, or is bound up in

that of their human counterparts. Bourdieu‟s (1977, 1984) application of the term habitus to

the Algerian Berber home, as the principle which negotiates between practices and objective

structures, functions as an analogy to the social systems in which Berber society operates. In

this case the object which is distinguished is subservient to and merely illustrative of the

person. The person-hood Bourdieu acknowledges in objects, through a sociological

methodology, has been widely critiqued as homogenizing and universalizing. This

physiognomic approach to objects is limiting and fails to take into account the specific

cultural temporal and spatial contexts which a concept of objects with biographies offers.

What is common to many theories concerned with the “life-histories” of things as a means of

understanding how human social practices are objectified, is their focus on cultural context.

Kopytoff and Appadurai approach in The Social Life of Things (1986) to mapping human

identities through the biographies of things has had a huge impact on material culture studies.

Their argument is that instead of contrasting objects with exchange value (such as

commodities) to those of use value (such as a Maussian notion of the gift), it is more

illuminating to attend to the social history or cultural biography of objects which instead

reveal the politics of value, whereby at any point an object‟s value or „singularization‟

(Kopytoff, ibid) may be reversed. An example of this could be the transformation from use to

exchange value that African artefacts undergo once circulating in the global art market.

Bourdieu‟s (1977, 1984) application of the term habitus to the Algerian Berber home, as the

principle which negotiates between practices and objective structures, functions as an analogy

to the social systems in which Berber society operates. In this case the object which is

distinguished is subservient to and merely illustrative of the person. The person-hood

Bourdieu acknowledges in objects, through a sociological methodology, has been widely

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critiqued as homogenizing and universalizing. This physiognomic approach to objects is

limiting and fails to take into account the specific cultural temporal and spatial contexts which

a concept of objects with biographies offers.

What is common to many theories concerned with the “life-histories” of things as a means of

understanding how human social practices are objectified, is their focus on cultural context.

Kopytoff and Appadurai approach in The Social Life of Things (1986) to mapping human

identities through the biographies of things has had a huge impact on material culture studies.

It can be argued that the rehabilitation of material culture in anthropology and other

disciplines, and the focus on things with biographies is an attempt to re-instate the sovereignty

of the subject. I intend to come back to the ramifications of a theoretical and methodological

focus on biography and the cultural contexts of things which make the object subservient to

the subject in the conclusion. Things and the metaphor of „biography‟

From the standpoint of culture, the values of life are civilized nature…they appear as

developments of a basis that we call nature and whose power and intellectual content they

surpass in so far as they become culture…the material products of culture…in which natural

material is developed into forms which could never have been realized by their own energies,

are products of our own desires and emotions, the result of ideas that utilize the available

possibilities of objects…by cultivating objects, that is by increasing their value beyond the

performance of their natural constitution, we cultivate ourselves…

(Simmel, 1997: 37)

My understanding of biography in terms of things is that it functions as a metaphor to

highlight the analogies between human and non-human life-cycles. The notion of „biography‟

is predominantly tied to the textual and the cultural as exemplified in language as an arbitrary

system of convention and meaning. The object, in comparison is traditionally thought of in

terms of a visual, less mediated and natural system of communication. To describe an object

as having a biography is a metaphorical strategy to enable fresh perspectives on the dualisms

of subject/ object, nature/ culture, and image/ text; „…speech, phonetic writing and material

culture all involve a similar materialist practice…All are fundamentally to do with

communication between persons and the creation of meaning‟ (Tilley, 1991:16). Lévi-Strauss

(1966, 1962), the anthropologist and Structuralist thinker, was influential in considering how

elements of the natural world – such as animals were used as „signs‟ by “primitive” man to

objectify and communicate complex kinship and social systems. Similar to Nancy Munn‟s

study of Australian Aboriginal Walpiri visual systems (1973), Lévi- Strauss‟ structural

methodology aims to question the view of so called “primitive” modes of communication to

reveal the similarities in complexity to “non-primitive” communicative systems, and the fact

that seemingly disparate objects of study share similar underlying structures. This method can

be criticized on two accounts; firstly, it fails to take account culturally specific historical

contexts, and secondly, it reduces visual systems and objects as modes of meaning making to

“non-primitive” linguistic models and analysis. Lévi-Strauss struggles with the use of

metaphor within a social science methodology, and it is this that Tilley (1999) attempts to re-

address in Metaphor and Material Culture, and later through a phenomenological approach in

Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (2004).

The application of the notion of biography, (as temporal and spatial), to objects is an

inherently metaphorical and ontological methodology. The recognition of objects which have

biographies embeds man and social relations within the „fleshiness‟ of the world. This can be

seen as a move away from post-modernist (Baudrillard, 1996 ) and post-structuralist (Derrida,

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1976) thought which fails to escape the confines of man‟s artificial construction of the world

(in the absence of it being presented to him as it really is) through the creation of speech,

phonetic writing and material culture.

The artefact in relational networks indexes the social relational networks in which it

circulates, „…the stipulation I make is that the index is itself seen as the outcome, and/or the

instrument of social agency‟ (Gell, 1998: 15). One of Gell‟s most central premises is the

notion of patient and agent relations, where at any point a patient can become and agent and

vice versa. However, it is worthwhile noting that Gell privileges the agent-hood of humans

over and above that of objects. Gell as a biographer of efficacious objects advances the

proposition that it is possible to make the social lives of objects analogous to the human

biographies.

Gell (1998) makes use of Husserl‟s notion of time and protension and retension in order to

draw attention to the way societies construct themselves through complex subject and object

networks of relations, which are not necessarily representative of a linear understanding of

past, present and future events. Similarly, Strathern makes use of a non-linear historical

appreciation of things in her essay „The Artefacts of History: Events and the interpretation of

Images‟ (1990). What Strathern and Gell suggest is that objects simultaneously allow a past

and a future in a present, whatever that may be and in light of cultural and contextual

differences. However, Strathern is far closer to the Latourian point of view which sees objects

as far more than animated illustrations or indexes of human social relations. I will come back

to this point later.

In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour is radically opposed to theories of the

„animism‟ of the object (as expounded by Gell for example). Latour argues that since the

seventeenth century and the age of the Enlightenment, subjects and objects have been

artificially separated off from one another through the separation of the natural and social

sciences as a means for categorization of objects. Latour explores the notion of quasi-objects

to question such historical distinctions and the social, political and cultural significance of the

terminologies of human and non-human. For Latour we have always been at home in a

“nonmodern” world of hybrid permutations of social/ natural objects – for him modern (post-

Enlightenment) narratives of the world house inescapable internal contradictions. Similar to

Heidegger‟s concerns in his essay „Age of the World Picture‟ as referred in the introductory

section of this essay, Latour names this as the „”impossible process of purification”‟, in which

“culture” was made distinct from “nature”. For Latour the notion of biography is too deeply

rooted in “culture”, making it a masked methodology for the re-inscription of man‟s

rationalization of the world and therefore not that distant from the subject/ object dualisms it

claims to be dissolving.

Two biographies of objects

1) African pots

If one wants to distinguish an object of interest it is relatively easy to do so. Telling an objects

life-story illustrates how societies relate to the material world beyond abstract thought. It

offers the anthropologist the opportunity to draw attention to many rich and diverse social and

cultural contexts. I will take two brief examples to illustrate how artefactual evidence

illustrates systems of knowledge.

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Pots in African cultural contexts are often metaphorical visualizations of people‟s perceptions

of the world:

The overwhelmingly majority of African pots are made by women…Pottery and female

bodies and their powers are often associated, so that procreation may be explicitly compared

to the process of potting…The patterns used to decorate pottery are not infrequently those

used to mark the human body, so that pottery becomes an idiom in which to think about

fundamental issues of life, death and social transformation. (Barley, 2000)

Like Bourdieu‟s example of the Berber home, African pots can be seen as objectifying

structures of social practice. Many examples of African pots can be found in the Sainsbury

Gallery at the British Museum, London. These objects have been re-contextualised (Thomas,

1991) away from their place of origin and social function, and transformed into decorative art

objects within a museum setting . These (often anthropomorphic) objects, as used in small-

scale societies, and function as crucial metaphors of the human as an embodied social agent.

They constitute some of the most primary ways in which people and cultures make sense of

an otherwise unfathomable world, and support Tilley‟s claim that „things are ontologically

constitutive of our social being‟ (1999: 10). The biographies of objects such as African pots

support Kopytoff and Appadurai‟s (1986) claims that things objectify culture. Artefacts are

objectifications of self-knowledge of individuals and groups – they are a concrete

embodiment of an idea or concept. The metaphorical analogies between the pots and the

beliefs held in traditional and modern African social life is discussed at length by Nigel

Barley (1994):

…official ideologies of African villagers and Western archeologists show that humble pots

are involved in other levels of culture than the practicalities of everyday life and enter into

maps of human knowledge. They lend themselves to the embodying of power relations.

In Africa…they also provide models for thinking about the human body, the seasons of the

year, processes of procreation and reincarnation. They are, as Lévi-Strauss would say,

eminently „good to think‟. (ibid: 17)

Things often objectify the person who produces and makes use of them, such as Hoskins

describes in relation to Betel bags for Sumba people in Biographical Objects (1998). Once the

thing circulates in a different network and context its life can undergo change, and it may take

on a different personhood. Two things impact on this: firstly, the way the thing (once marked

as an object of distinction) is objectified by the subject – i.e. its functionality may completely

change; and secondly, its materiality affects how it may be used and adapted – there are

certain limitations, so its response capacities to some degree dictate how it continues to “live”.

As an exhibit within the British museum, these pots index much more than their social

function at their place of production. They tell a story of the European colonization of Africa

and the subsequent diasporic effect this has had upon peoples and objects; they tell a story of

the regimes of value and knowledge of people who have collected artefacts as illustrations of

material evolution and the supposed intellectual dominance of the post-Enlightenment

Occident. What the British Museum would now hope they objectify is that they are part of a

trans-national world, the British Museum as a global resource and representative of the many

different ethnic and cultural identities of “British” people today.

These pots are images and objects as events. As Tilley (1999) argues in relation to

Batammaluba architecture in West Africa, objects „take on important theatrical and

dramaturgical roles during the staging of social world‟ (ibid: 48). Things are objective models

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of human experience. They are seeds that encapsulate the complexity of time and cultural

contexts – at any one moment holding a past, present and a future such as that described by

Strathern or Gell.

2) Hieratic pottery

Things are not merely mimetic of temporal and spatial human social relations, but embedded

within them – and similar to language, material things are metaphorical as carriers of meaning

and as tools for communication (Tilley, 1999).

The notion of things with a biography functions as a metaphor to bridge the gap between the

verbal as abstract thought and the non-verbal as sensual experience, linking the textual

description of objects to the world which is home to them (Tilley, 1999). Metaphor allows

distinct domains to be understood in terms of one another, similar to Lévi-Strauss‟

structuralist method. There are continual debates within the social sciences between the

dualisms of language versus object, text versus image, and culture versus nature, and the

application of the notion of biography to things is important in overcoming such dualisms.

The ancient Egyptian hieratic pottery held in The Petrie Museum, University College London,

combines both text and image. These fragments of pottery (ostraca) as objects tell their own

biography through their form, but also through the hieratic cursive and non-cursive script

(predominantly used from the first dynasty c.3050 - 500 BC) inscribed upon their surfaces -

these objects have material, visual and linguistic elements. It is possible to distinguish the

biographies of these ostraca precisely because the cursive and non-cursive hieroglyphs and

text on them work in harmony with their form, and tell their history in the present. For

example, Fig. 3 has a hieratic account of grain payments or issues in seven lines.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are by their nature pictorial, and combine ideograms, hieroglyphs

representing the meaning of the word, determinatives representing the class of the thing to

which the object belongs, and phonetic signs. Hieratic script is adapts hieroglyphics to make it

quicker to inscribe. Before 7th century BC, hieratic script was used in all areas of Egyptian

life – administrative, business, diplomatic, literary, didactic and private. Hieratic and the later

demotic (c.700 BC- 400 AD) script became more cursive and developed into less pictorial

forms, as the Rosetta Stone, currently held in the British Museum, and known as the most

famous piece of rock in the world, testifies (Parkinson, 2005).

Hieratic pottery (Hope, 2001) has been used to re-construct ancient Egyptian social systems

and kingdoms through an evolutionary model of material and technological development –

their biography has contributed to Egyptology. What the pottery reveals is the way ancient

Egyptians used image as a kind of text. The material and textual elements of each piece of

pottery function dialectically and stand in opposition to the current “modern” dualism of text

versus image. For example, the symbol for a house can be signified through an image as well

as a cursive symbol.

The principal characteristics of the pottery of the main periods of Egyptian history have now

been determined. With this information it is possible to analyze the pottery from most

contexts and suggest a reasonably secure dating, or range of dates, for the material. This

method of dating is used in conjunction with information derived from any inscriptions and

other objects found in the deposit. As well as providing dating evidence for a site, pottery can

indicate the activities carried out on some sites or part of them. (Hope, 2001: 49)

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As relational (Gell, 1998) objects their story is part of that of the Rosetta Stone, which has

been used to “tell” (predominantly western) modernity and the development of language as

well as script from pictorial to cursive over time. Their biography is bound up in a story of

modes of communication that saw the progression from describing objects and the world

through image to text. The two worlds of the textual and the material come together upon the

site of these pieces of hieratic pottery. As metaphors, hieratic pottery can „…thus be said to

constitute the flesh of our language and the flesh of things. Linguistic metaphor and the solid

metaphors of material forms doubly constitute our meaning‟ (Tilley, 2004:23).

The artefact as seed

Beginning as an object that is out there, embedded and undistinguished from the rest of

nature, fixed first by sight and then touched by the magic of the hand, the artefact, in its

artifice, becomes a „collapsed act‟, a structure whose response is given in advance (Mead

1972: 121-2, 368-70). Thus, more than a geological specimen and more too than a

technological device, the artefact is a document that describes our past, an image that reflects

our present, and a sign that calls us on to the future. (Richardson, 1989:172)

These two biographies (of African pots and hieratic pottery) reveal how biographies of objects

aid human construction and re-construction of social practice through objectification. From

this point, I would like to move away from the term, „biography‟ to instead focus in the idea

of artefacts as seeds or events.

An Australian Aboriginal object known as a coolamon is an all-purpose bowl carved from a

tree trunk. Aboriginal coolamons are extremely useful in aboriginal life, and are one of the

few core material possessions constantly carried by Aboriginal people. These bowls are made

just from the bark of a tree, and are made by cutting the outline of the bowl into the bark and

then peeling it from the tree in one piece (this process leaves the tree scarred). After the bark

is obtained, it is then heated to make it pliable and the ends folded upwards. Coolamons are

used in a myriad of symbolic ways - for digging, carrying bush foods, separating grass seeds

from their husks, storage of food and water, cradles for newborn babes, ceremonial

boomerangs and shields.

The particular coolamon I will refer to has been used as a water carrier, but is now

temporarily under the guardianship of a British family in South London. What it now contains

are personal items of significance to both the original Australian Aboriginal owner and the

family to whom they presented it as a gift. The object has been recontextualised (Thomas,

1991, 2001), and in gifting it, the original owner has invested in his relationship with the

current hosts. The significance of this is that the object has taken on the combined stories of

people from different cultural contexts through the different objects it contains and its

movement through varying cultural territories. What is maintained is the way both parties see

it as a sacred object. The coolamon in this instance objectifies friendship and conjoins the past

and present social contexts through which it has lived. As a result, possible futures are

envisioned – both in its social life and that of its human guardians.

In her essay Artefacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Image (1990), Strathern

refers to Sahlin‟s proposition that there „…is no event without system and this is how

anthropologists make knowledge for themselves, by investigating the system. The irreducible

relationship between event and structure is that between knowing subject and objects of

knowledge‟ (ibid: 27). An account of an object‟s biography can be seen to be just such an

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investigation. The study of artefacts is linked to the study of time - events can be understood

through artefacts and events are the outcomes of social arrangements which do not necessarily

anticipate those events. The social transaction between the original Australian Aboriginal

owner and the South London family was one of making a gift. This gifting was an event:

„…both past and future time do not have to be placed into a historical context, for they

embody history themselves‟ (op.cit:25). Neither party could explain the exact reason why it

felt right that this once inalienable object should move to London, but just said that it “felt the

right thing to do”. As for the Malangan sculptures which Kuchler (2001) refers to, the image

still remains for the previous guardian – its absence is what makes the image so potent. With

its new guardian there is a real sense of the traces of the previous owner – it is this which

symbolizes the deep friendship that has developed over time as a result of a professional

encounter.

This object has a relation to two kinds of person-hood; one that contains and retains, and one

that is concerned with sending something out in the hope that something comes back. The

latter is very much linked to a projection of the future, whereby any number of potential

outcomes of this gifting have yet to be played out. The coolamon takes on a significant

dramaturgical role, similar to that described by Strathern (1990) in relation to the event, as a

result of an image or an object, that is already provisionally provided for in the imagination of

the human biographer, yet brings pleasure when the surprise of what happens is more than

either guardian (as biographer) could have envisioned.

The coolamon was sent out in friendship and it retains the image of the previous guardian for

the current one because it is in their house. It means that something will come back, the event

of the return of the first owner to the family‟s house, or something beyond that. One of the

possibilities that had been discussed is that this coolamon, due to the fact that both guardians

work professionally in the arts, might be used in its originary function as a water carrier as

part of a ceremonial performance of the washing of the statue of Captain Cook outside the

Queen‟s house on The Mall in London.

The coolamon has been brought into being through nature and culture simultaneously - the

guardians recognize the way they have been folded in to it as an object and vice versa. Any

number of events, not yet anticipated may occur.

Conclusion

The response to this essay can either be „yes‟, or „no‟. A yes or no response can be argued

through any number of schools of thought (structuralism, post-modernism, phenomenology),

and each school permits both responses. I will discuss the theories of the postmodernist

thinker, Jean Baudrillard (1996) [1968] as a brief example of this. The theoretical intentions

of objectification stand in direct contrast to Baudrillard‟s belief that things, and specifically

technological objects, have a hyper-biography beyond man‟s control and comprehension. It is

possible to make use of Baudrillard‟s theory of simulation and simulacra, which is the process

whereby representations of things come to replace the things being represented, as a critique

of the possibility of applying the notion of biography to things. Baudrillard‟s argument is that

man in the modern technological era is no longer reassured by his power over objects because

he no longer participates in their physicality, and their embedded biography within in the

physical matter of the world – the body of man is no longer in contact with the functional

aspects of what he has produced. This theory advances the notion that things have a

biography, though it enforces a subject/ object split that is irrecoverable.

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In comparison to Baudrillard‟s lament that technological objects manifest their own order

within self-organizing systems which dictate man‟s biographies it is possible to see that

objects, whether technologically or mechanically produced, work in harmony with man to

mediate and make possible his/her experiences of the world. The notion that „…man has

become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him…organizing his

surroundings and thus appropriating his actions‟ (Baudrillard, 1996: 50-51) can be put to

positive effect, whereby objects are ontologically a natural extension of subjects existence and

vice versa. Theories of objectification reveal that mechanically produced objects are often as

complex, in terms of the complexity they encapsulate, as technological objects. In his essay

The Technology of Enchantment and The Enchantment of Technology, Gell (1982: 173)

argues for the fact that we are enchanted by a certain „magical‟ technology and efficacy of the

object which we cannot necessarily comprehend:

…technical virtuosity is intrinsic to the efficacy of works of art in their social context, and

tends always towards the creation of asymmetries in the relations between people by placing

them in an essentially asymmetrical relation to things‟

The term 'biography' is metaphorical, and through the case studies of African pots and hieratic

pottery in this essay I have shown how comparisons can be drawn between biographies of

people and biographies of things. However, what is significant to this is that to be seen as

having a biography objects must first be distinguished as things of interest and allowed to

speak by human subjects. For example, African pots show how the term „biography‟, once

applied to things is a metaphorical means adopted by African potters to bridging the gap

between non-verbal and verbal experiences, and to play out possible reasons for their

existence on earth. Hieratic pottery also reveals how material metaphors were folded into

linguistic metaphors by the ancient Egyptians, as well as providing the discipline of

Egyptology to develop over time and the historical significance this has had for the

development of theories about modernity.

However, artefacts should not be used as mere illustrations of social or cultural contexts in

theory and in methodology. It is Strathern‟s argument in Artefacts of History: Events and the

Interpretation of Image (1990), that Melanesians have a reluctance to give exegesis, because

they do not see, as the anthropologists does, that there is an object plus an explanation or the

interpreted happening. It is her argument that we should extend the concept of performance or

event to artefacts to celebrate unexpected happenings. Therefore the artefact as event is a seed

that does not merely reflect back on linear time through a notion of biography which is

cultural and mute in the face of human biographers. The artefact as event is a seed that

contains data and outcomes, and not simply an animated form that is passively used to

objectify and analyze human social practices.

Material objects have intransigent qualities; they are hybrids and quasi-objects of both the

natural and the social sciences as Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern (1993).

Strathern anticipates Latour‟s proposition when she writes, three years earlier, in relation to

the relatively recent effort to recover material culture studies to the discipline of

cultural/social anthropology (such as Kopytoff and Appadurai, 1986 attempt):

Making social (or cultural) context the frame of reference had one important result. It led to

the position that one should really be studying the framework itself (the social context =

society). The artefacts were merely illustration. For if one sets up social context as the frame

of reference in relation to which meanings are to be elucidated, then explicating that frame of

11

reference obviates or renders the illustrations superfluous…frames of reference are intrinsic to

the modernist anthropological exercise. These are relationships within which we place our

discoveries about people‟s cultural lives. The reason that objects appear so intransigent is

precisely because they are not the framework itself. Rather, they occupy a dual position, both

its raw material and illustrative of its principles (at once “nature” and “culture” in relation to

the system. This creates a problem for the understanding of Melanesian perceptions.

In supplying social context, the enquiring ethnographer does not merely translate other

people‟s referencing into his or hers, but weights the perception of an object.

(Strathern, 1990:38-9)

The application of term „biography‟ to things (Appadurai & Kopytoff, 1986), for Pinney

stresses (2002: 227):

…their tendency to appear differently according to cultural context, while couched as a

radical critique of earlier concerns about the fixed identities of objects, might be seen as the

paradoxical fitting into place of the last humanist fragment of an anthropocentric „man‟ –

besotted puzzle. Pinney takes his lead in his description of the „wavy‟ meaning in relation to

Automonsters (ibid) from Bruno Latour, whose critique in We Have Never Been Modern

(1993) is that of the continued privileging of cultural agency (man) in what is actually a

“natures-cultures” situation. Pinney describes this as „zones inhabited by hybrids in which

humans and non-humans are „folded into each other‟‟ (2002: 228). The idea of folds is not a

new one, as Deleuze interestingly discusses in relation to Leibniz and the Baroque (2004).

Strathern‟s notion of the object as seed and event also takes a similar perspective; „…wavy

meaning…allows a different kind of narrative, one that brings out the complexity of the car-

network‟ (Pinney, 2002: 230). This approach recognizes the complexity of the form as well as

the cultural properties of the object, which „biography‟ as a tautological mapping fails to

attend to.

Strathern description of the artifact as seed is similar to the approach of Latour and Pinney

who argue that an examination of the object through its social biography and cultural context

continues to re-instate man‟s binary assumptions of modernity post-Enlightenment in a more

subtle way. The coolamon is an event and a seed, at any one point encapsulating its past, its

present and any number of possible futures. However it is an intransigent seed – its

materiality limits the notions of biography which are projected onto it. The term „biography‟

when applied to objects is a metaphorical way of apprehending the world, similar to that of

„society‟ or „culture‟. The cultural context is not the only way to approach objects, and

perhaps instead we should focus on the way objects as forms demand to be perceived and

appropriated, „…for we can extend the same metaphor – talking about events as artefacts – to

visualize how people act as though they had power when confronted with the untoward‟

(Strathern, 1990:40). It is this that both guardians of the coolamon celebrate; perhaps this is

why they felt unable to provide an exegesis for the reason one made a gift of it to another, and

why the event “meant” and continues to “mean” something. Both are waiting to see what

surprises it will offer – as a dramaturgical seed it has been staged to be innovatory. In the

meantime it quietly keeps a friendship going even though those friends and it guardians, may

not be physically present to one another.

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