Thing Theory Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Things, artifacts, objects... These are our intimate companions as we live in and make sense of the world. We tend to categorize them as fetishes, souvenirs, heirlooms, tools, knick knacks, voodoo dolls, marionettes, toys, furniture, relics, object d’art, rocks, fossils, buildings, landscapes, amounting to what we cumulatively call “material culture”. Art historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians among others have attempted to make sense of the past (and the present) through the material residues, artifacts, remnants of human practices. Things, fetishized or not, become protagonists in our reconstructions of the past, as we increasingly believe that societies construct their world through the making of things, their use, circulation, discard. However, are things happy about such instrumentalization, categorization and secondary positioning as inanimate and silent members of the world? The recent interest in the academia on materiality has brought about a new age of things, the so-called “material turn,” revisiting old theories of materialism and asking fresh questions about alternative, object-oriented ontologies. In this course we will explore new work on thing theory, materials and materiality, the social life and the cultural biography of objects, their ability to configure social realities, human subjectivities, and cultural identities.

In this seminar, we will pay close attention to the contemporary theories in the field of material culture studies with a special focus on the materials, materiality, agency, and technologies of production. This includes new materialist perspectives on the potency and vibrancy of things, everyday objects, and works of art and architecture, while addressing issues of materiality, technology, and agency through archaeological and art historical case studies, drawn from ancient, medieval, and modern contexts. We will explore new studies on object-oriented ontologies that challenge the long-held divide between subjects and objects, and question the assumed superiority of the human race over animate and inanimate beings.

Archaeological, historical, contemporary and ethnographic case studies will be explored to understand the social relations behind skilled craftsmanship and the poetics of making. This includes bodies of evidence such as prehistoric figurines, ancestor statues, Mesopotamian and Greek cult statues, fetishes of the African- Portuguese early colonial encounter, Byzantine icons, an 18th century chess-playing automaton, Trobriand canoe-prows and Assyrian sculpture recent destroyed by ISIS among others. We will be concerned with how objects take over their own agencies and consider how they should be seen not as completed, fixed entities but as things always in the process of becoming. We will explore the ways in which collective memories are preserved, performed and obliterated in material bodies. We will take a close look at human subject - material object relations in everyday life and question the Western categories of objecthood and subjecthood.