Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things

shifting contexts of material culture through time and space

Hans Peter Hahn, Hadas Weis, Hadas Weis

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782970842
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

Things travel around the globe: they are shipped as mass consumer goods, or transported as souvenirs or gifts. There are infinite ways for things to be mobile, not only in the era of globalisation but since the beginning of time, as the earliest traces of long distance trading show. This book investigates the mobility of things from archaeological and anthropological perspectives. Material Objects are characterised by temporal continuity, embodying a prior existence with lingering effects. Yet the material continuity disguises the transformations they may undergo, which only become evident upon closer examination. Objects are in perpetual flux, leaving visible traces of their age, usage, and previous life. While travelling through time, objects also circulate through space, and their spatial mobility alters their meaning and use with respect to new cultural horizons. As objects transform through time and space, so does the value attributed to them. Mapping out itineraries of value in the realm of the material, allows us to grasp the nature of a given social formation through the shape and meaning taken on by its valued 'stuff'. It also provides insights into the nature of materiality, through the value ascribed to objects at a given point in time and space. This edited volume brings together studies of material culture, materiality and value, with regard to the mobility of objects, with the aim of tracing the ways in which societies constitute their valued objects and how the realm of the material reflects upon society.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Biographies, travels and itineraries of things

Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss

“We want to convey the sense that a ‘world’ – an often fragmented and fragile set of material and non-material assumptions and resources – can itself be made mobile, seemingly translated from one […] location to another, even as it is transformed in the process”

(Basu and Coleman 2008, 313, our italics).

In his well-known essay, ‘Resonance and wonder’, Stephen Greenblatt (1990) starts with an anecdote about a priest’s hat, displayed in an exhibition about the history of Christ Church College in Oxford. There is more to this red hat than meets the eye. Beyond being the hat of Cardinal Wolsey, the founder of the college, it had been a Christ Church College archived item since the mid-nineteenth century, after an itinerant history that included several owners. As Greenberg notes, it is this particular tale of the object’s shifts and moves, including occasional threats to its material existence, which evokes the visitors’ interest and curiosity. Cultural artefacts never stand still, are never inert. Their existence is always embedded in a multitude of contexts, with tensions surrounding their roles, usages and meanings. Objects are meaningful only in relation to conflicts, negotiations and appropriations. Things shift in a wide range of modes, and very often it is through these particular alterations that they assume a specific meaning. The specific advantage of this focus on mobility is to “shed light on hidden as well as conspicuous movements of peoples, objects, images” (Greenblatt 2009, 250). The objective of this volume is to raise awareness of mobile things and their various kinds of shifts, and subsequently, of their changing roles and meanings.

The contributions to this volume deal with the mobility of things from the point of view of different disciplines. Within the framework of material culture, questions about mobility and the focus on shifts of location and meaning have been addressed predominantly through two concepts, biographies of things and travelling objects. Both concepts refer to shifts in space and time, as well as to the transformation of things through different contextualizations. When preparing for the conference that provided the opportunity to present the chapters assembled in this volume, we had the impression that, although each of these concepts is useful, they also have some serious limitations.

In the following pages we shall present our perceptions of the achievements and shortcomings of these concepts before trying to present a synthesis. We deal with these concepts by understanding them as metaphors. Object biographies and travelling objects work through metaphorical associations, drawing their meaning from quite different domains of the social. This contributes to their success, as they have come to be two of the most frequently used metaphors for dealing with material culture. And yet, some of the associated images are misleading or at least problematic. The aim of this volume is therefore to overcome the unnecessary reduction in how we perceive the mobility of things, which is arguably an unintentional by-product of these metaphors.

We shall underline our objective by suggesting another metaphor, which appears to be much better suited to capturing the mobility of things, and particularly the mobility of those objects featured in the chapters of this volume. We propose the term itineraries. The idea of an itinerary combines the pathways, stations and transitions of modern-day travellers, as prescribed, for example, in a flight schedule, with the much older idea of a particular path such as a pilgrimage, leading to the transformation of the traveller by successfully passing through discrete stages.

Biographies of objects

Since the appearance of Igor Kopytoff’s seminal article ‘The cultural biography of things’ (Kopytoff 1986), first published in the edited volume ‘The social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986), the biographical perspective has been salient. ¹ Looking at the biography of an object as a means of approaching its social life is a widely adopted strategy. The passages of an object from its birth to its death or destruction – that is, to when it becomes rubbish – occur through different stations, and each moment in the object’s lifespan seems to have a distinct role (Hahn 2005, 40–45). For example, a new car evokes a quite different context compared to a used one, and once a car has achieved the status of a classic car, it is again quite differently perceived. Changes not only happen at the level of perception and contextualization, but also in usage: what is new warrants greater care and caution, whereas a car of a certain age may be expected to resist more enduring practices. Again, if the car is quite old, and if it has become a rare item, special caution is called for to preserve what is then considered something unique and therefore of specific value.

Kopytoff’s particular achievement is to connect the passage through different contexts to different valuations. It is not always use value, but in some moments of an object’s life also a mnemonic value or a personal value, which is attached to the object. Whereas the new object may appear on someone’s horizon as a commodity with a fixed or negotiable price, in later stages of the biography there may be moments when the very same object becomes an unalienable personal object (Weiner 1992; 1994). More generally, Kopytoff points to two opposing tendencies, which can be identified in almost all biographies of things. He labels these tendencies ‘commoditization’ and ‘singularization’ (Kopytoff 1986, 65). It is never simply an individual owners’ desire to sell an object at a given moment, but a topic of social and cultural negotiations, which gives more or less legitimacy to each of these tendencies, and sometimes even intentionally excludes one of them when dealing with an object. For example, once they reach a certain age objects of art are no longer allowed to be sold on the art markets of many European countries.

Particular moments in the life history of an object may be more revealing for its social embedding; a closer look at these instances can show how significantly the role of an object has changed. The ways in which histories of objects and people inform each other can be described through a closer examination of the moments of transformation of objects and also of people themselves (Gosden and Marshall 1999). This is not only a question of socially acknowledged meanings like stigma or prestige, but also a practical question of the knowledge required for dealing appropriately with the object in question. Furthermore, the stories associated with an object and evoked by its presence require special care (Svensson 2008). This applies to old things that may have special relevance as memory objects, reminding the owners about specific events in their lives. The close relationship between durable objects and tradition has already been highlighted by historians (Assmann 1992; 1995). Objects of tradition can be regarded as actors of evocation (Seremetakis 1994). They can be relevant for individuals, but also for collective events, which significantly change the course of many people’s lives (Kuntz 1990).

In his book ‘Tradition’, Edward Shils (1981) devotes an entire chapter to sometimes astonishing effects of the shifting meanings of objects with a particular longevity. At first glance this text consists of little more than a list of the kinds of objects that exist for a long time and therefore play an important part in the memory of earlier historical eras. The sometimes varied and dramatic histories of monuments, archaeologically identified treasures etc. are good examples of object biographies. These things appear, then they disappear or are forgotten – sometimes for centuries – and then, in new horizons of time, or in different environments, they reappear to play an entirely new and different role. There is no doubt about the continuity of the material objects as such, but sometimes this continuity is simply the basis for a completely new definition of them. A poignant example in this volume is how the beehive huts among the Mao of Ethiopia have lost their erstwhile practical functions to become phantom dwellings, which, as Alfredo González-Ruibal explains, was necessary to produce an idealization of the Mao as an independent forest people that was no longer tenable. Currently, studies of memory and material culture have stressed this point: even materially unchanged objects and memorized topics might assume quite different roles. The stories associated with things are also relevant for new objects, that is, innovations. In cases in which people have little experience in practical matters, they are more sensitive to cautionary tales reporting harmful consequences. These warnings are especially frequent in the context of technological innovations, but new kinds of food are also typical. People are inclined to believe stories about the malfunctioning or harmful consequences of the consumption of new foodstuffs, and it may take some time for individual experiences to become sufficiently widespread for such fears to be overcome.

All these implications can be related to the concept of biographies, and they show how much an object’s perception can change during its lifespan. More recently Janet Hoskins (1998) has shown convincingly that objects can be charged with meaning within quite brief moments if they are present in specific contexts of an individual’s or a family’s life. Objects that were present during a marriage, or in the instance of an accident, are subjectively much more important than other, materially identical objects that have not been present at the event in question. Biographies of things, Hoskins says, are entangled with people’s histories. They jointly create a network of relevancies. The immanence of an object cannot explain why it is meaningful at a later moment.

This brings us back to our initial scepticism about the metaphorical meaning of the term biography. A biography covers a lifespan, representing a basic linearity of ageing that unfolds a multiplicity of attached stories, meanings and so on. Hoskins extends this notion by referring to the image of a network. The network has knots which are constituted crossings between things and people. Instead of the suggested linearity of a biography, the network of lines, that is, the many biographies, and the nodes, or crossings of the lines, better represents the mutual transformations caused by the interaction between people and things (Küchler 2001).

Against this background it is unsurprising that a fair amount of recent research on object biographies deals with the assumed end of things. More than any other moment of an object’s life, describing the end of an object reveals the problems with the metaphor of a biography. The end of an object is a vexing perspective.² Even the observation of decay can be accompanied by disgust as well as with empathy and the specific revaluation of the object in question (Buchli and Lucas 2001; DeSilvey 2006). The change of the surface of an object is a feature that can engender positive emotions as well as its dismissal. An object can fall into pieces and be re-established (Gregson et al. 2009). The idea of a definite disappearance or final step, similar to the death of a person, that is inspired by the term biography hardly captures all of the changes that can be observed in the context of an object.³ As Anamaria Depner suggests in chapter six with respect to a single discarded earring, new meanings can emerge for an object that ended its use during its first life-span – considering the after-live as a second life. This invites us to imagine those things that become waste. We find many cases in which they just cause more trouble in the status of waste, or produce new meanings and permit new usages after being discarded. Archaeological evidence show that objects may gain new functions once they have been designated as rubbish by their original owners (Rathje and Murphy 1992). Radical changes in the valuation of materials and objects may also lead to the re-use of waste. What had been classified as worthless becomes at a later moment an object of valuation and desire (Stam 1999).

And how does one classify items in tombs that are dedicated to accommodating the dead in their afterlife? Two contributors to this volume provoke such a reflection. Joseph Maran treats amber objects found in Early Mycenaean burials as challenging their assumed usage as jewellery alone, while Gordana Ciric examines Roman coins in medieval cemeteries in terms of their transformed functions. Are these things dead, or is it more appropriate to speak about a second life, as they are rediscovered by archaeologists, or worse, by a robber? Objects might become valuables merely by virtue of their having been excluded from everyday life at an earlier stage of their existence. These reflections about the afterlife or second life of things do not sit well with the metaphor of biography. This lack of fit should be perceived as a problem in the concept as such. We should look for a different understanding, a more differentiated concept, taking into account the aforementioned aspects of networks as the mode of production of meaning, as well as the surprising relevance of resurrections of things.

Travelling objects

This perspective on the mobility of things is closely related to the idea that things follow specific pathways, which may be routes and destinations that have little in common with those of people, institutions or traditions. An important example of this is the diffusion of cultivated plants, which were adopted in many places worldwide, even though the farmers growing these plants might have had no idea about the origin of these plants (Hancock 1992). The global distribution of plants like maize and coconuts indicates how things may travel and thereby change peoples’ ways of life wherever they arrive.

For the objective of this edited volume, it is of some relevance to inquire about the specific features of things as material objects when they travel. Since the important essay of James Clifford (1992), ‘Traveling cultures’, the mobility of cultures in a larger framework has loomed large in cultural anthropology. The same applies to archaeology, as shown in the works of Mary Helms (1988). However, the interest of the contributions in this volume is more specific. It is not about the travelling of cultures as such, but more distinctively about the mobility of the objects, which sometimes differs from cultures. Stepping beyond Clifford’s seminal paper, we need to conceptualize the specific modes and transformations that occur when things move.

In many cases, things that are perceived as originating elsewhere play a specific role. They may be assigned a superior value on account of their coming from elsewhere (Orlove 1997; Hooper 2000). One possible reason for this is the idea that traces from the origin have been inscribed in the actual object (Benfoughal and Boulay 2006, 16). Another possible reason is an imagined distance between origin and actual place of usage. Travelling over a great distance without damage lends these things an aura of particularity.⁴ Archaeology has many examples of things of outstanding value and renown that were transferred over long distances. This holds true for Mediterranean imports to the Celtic cultures of Southern Germany. These valuable objects represented the particular social rank of their owners and helped distinguish the class of noblemen from the rest of the society (Biel 1985). A good example in this volume is provided by Annelou van Gijn and Karsten Wentink, who show how, in the Middle Neolithic, Michelsberg tools imported to the wetlands lost their original function and acquired a special status that helped define the identities of the importing societies. Similar phenomena have been observed for modern societies, for example, in the case of Western Goods in many previously colonies (Belk et al. 1997). The particular appreciation of things that had been travelling is usually explained by the general acknowledgement of a social or cultural hierarchy. In the context of modern colonialism, Richard Wilk (1996) speaks about ‘emulation’, articulated by such preferences for things from abroad. Through the acquisition of goods from the metropolises, consumers in the former colonies may overcome the subjectively perceived desynchronisation. The sense of being backward can thereby be eliminated.

We should not forget the more general fact that the European history of consumption has always included a preference for exotic commodities. Examples of this are tea, coffee, silk and Indian cloth (Wills 1993), but also porcelain and many other goods. More recent exampl...