Material Culture and Object Biographies
|
As people move, the objects that interact with them are also moving and are shaped by the movement. In Finds Stories for the study we followed an approach based on the theoretical framework of 'Object Biographies' while we introduced their creative interpretations as research tool.
Drawing heavily from social anthropology and ethnographic studies, object biography is an established tool in material culture analysis. It builds on the theoretical basis that material artefacts in the course of their production, use, and circulation become imbued with meanings that are open to transformation and negotiation, and make them dynamic agents in social relations. The archaeological application of the biographical approach was crystallised in the World Archaeology issue “The Cultural Biography of Objects” (1999), still relevant today. As highlighted in that volume, objects, through diverse context specific processes, such as exchange, mobility, or performance, acquire layered histories, play a central role in interactions among humans and affect how people act, or perceive themselves and the world around them. Contributing to the ever-growing object-biographical discourse, Finds Stories focuses on the intersectionality between materiality and interregional/long-distance human mobility, by putting under examination a wide range of material culture elements. The artefacts analysed for the purpose of the project derive from a series of representative case studies that chronologically extend from classical antiquity to contemporary examples of migration, return migration, and transhumance. They are selected with the intention to encompass a broad spectrum of biographical parameters. For some of them, discussion centres on their formal and technological attributes, as they relate to the evolution of styles, the chaîne opératoire, or the duration and nature of usage. These parameters, however, provide only a partial understanding of the life of the artefacts, as the reconstruction of the full life of the objects further requires the consideration of the social contexts of their production and use, and the meanings ascribed to them upon manufacture and throughout their many metaphorical lives and deaths, as they enter and leave people’s lives. Pursuing the entire diachronic scale of the relationships between people and artefacts can be hampered by the fragmentary character of the physical record, when dealing with archaeological material. The associations between objects and individuals also get progressively muddled the farthest back in time the examination extends. This does not prohibit piecing together a narrative, by utilising the available data and taking under consideration material parallels or associated anthropological evidence that could elucidate multiple sides of human-object relationships. On the other hand, material related to the modern transnational case studies covered by Finds Stories offers ample ground for coherent as well as more personalised object biographies, as accompanying contemporary accounts and interviews facilitate more comprehensive biographical analyses. The application of a biographical approach in the study of present and past mobility, in particular, treads a new path in the exploration of materiality in migratory settings. It gives the opportunity to examine the interplay between the agency of objects and the manner identities are constructed, communicated and performed in contexts of migration, relocation, or displacement. It, thus, offers a material-focused take on the history of interregional and long distance mobility with an emphasis on the ways objects are embedded in the processes of shaping and expressing identities and social relations across time and space. |
|