Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples' Lives

by Hoskins,Janet

• ISBN13: 9780415920117
• ISBN10: 0415920116
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-11
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing." Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways. Biographical Objectsis an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
1. INTRODUCTION	1	(24)
2. THE BETEL BAG A Sack for Souls and Stories	25	(34)
3. DOMESTICATING ANIMALS AND WIVES Women's Fables of Protest	59	(24)
4. THE ROYAL SNAKE SHROUD Local Weaving and Colonial Kingship	83	(32)
5. SPINDLES AND SPINSTERS The Loss of Romantic Love	115	(22)
6. THE DRUM AND MASCULINITY A Healer's Story	137	(24)
7. GREEN BOTTLES AND GREEN DEATH Modernity and the Ephemeral	161	(22)
8. CONCLUSIONS Stories and Objects in Lived Dualities	183	(16)
REFERENCES	199	(12)
INDEX	211