Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically

by Henare; Amiria

• ISBN13: 9781844720712
• ISBN10: 1844720713
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-12-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
1 Introduction: thinking through things	1
AMIRIA HENARE, MARTIN HOLBRAAD AND SARI WASTELL
2 Smuk is king': the action of cigarettes in a Papua New Guinea Prison	32
ADAM REED
3 Taonga Mäori: encompassing rights and property in New Zealand	47
AMIRIA HENARE
4 The 'legal thing' in Swaziland: res judicata and divine kingship	68
SARI WASTELL
5 Collection as a way of being	93
ANDREW MOUTU
6 Separating and containing people and things in Mongolia	113
REBECCA EMPSON
7 Talismans of thought: shamanist ontologies and extended cognition in northern Mongolia	141
MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN
8 Differentiation and encompassment: a critique of Alfred Gell's theory of the abduction of creativity	167
JAMES LEACH
9 The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana, again)	189
MARTIN HOLBRAAD
Index	226