2007 Thinking through things: theorizing artefacts ethnographically (original) (raw)

How might anthropologists deal with artefacts, if not as ‘material culture’? And what implications might such an approach have, not only for sub-disciplines focused upon objects, but for analytic methodologies more generally? Thinking Through Things offers a positive programme designed to query habitual theoretical assumptions about the relationship of things and meanings, objects and subjects, materiality and sociality. Its contributors share common concerns about the place of objects in their interpretive strategies, regarding them as more than just vessels of meaning or indexes of human agency. Working through diverse ethnographic contexts (including Melanesia, Cuba, Swaziland, New Zealand, Mongolia and Britain), they explore ways in which objects encountered in the field might precipitate the terms of their own analysis, instead of simply being slotted into categories determined by a pre-existent theoretical repertoire. The aim is thus to think through the things that present themselves in ethnography toward the development of new theory. As a rejoinder to those currents within social theory still preoccupied with ‘problems of representation’, the book helps to set the terms of a renewed interdisciplinary dialogue which links anthropological debates about knowledge and personhood with fields that place artefacts at the centre of inquiry. Presenting ethnographic accounts of things as diverse as cigarettes in a Papua New Guinean prison, shamanic costumes in Mongolia, Swazi legal documents, and the creative outputs of scientists’ and artists’ collaborations in Britain, this collection of essays suggest the productivity of artefact-oriented approaches that draw theory from the very substance of their inquiries.