No abstract

That the meanings and value of things can be transformed through their circulation was brought to the foreground of anthropological studies more than 30 years ago with the publication of The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986b). The last decade, however, has seen a move away from “object biographies” in favor of frameworks that better account for objects’ complex entanglements. Recent work on object itineraries extends and challenges many elements of the biography approach and represents an intersection with critical interventions regarding materiality and agency, networks and circulation, and heritage discourses. This review evaluates the legacy of The Social Life of Things in the context of anthropological studies of the material world and suggests that thinking about itineraries rather than biographies allows us to collapse the distinctions between past and present (and future) and, thus, fully consider objects’ present entanglements as central to their story.

The question of the origins of the Philistines, who settled in the southern Levant in the early Iron Age (12th century BC) has long been the subject of debate. Traditionally, they have been understood to lie with the 'Sea Peoples,' raiders who were thought to have wreaked havoc in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. A new conceptualization of the 'Sea Peoples' phenomenon as the emergence of decentralized maritime trade leads to new questions regarding the settlements associated with it, namely those along the southern Levantine coastal plain and especially those considered 'Philistine.' It is the aim of this paper to reinterpret these sites in terms of their functional role within this decentralized network and it is suggested that they were established and maintained specifically for that purpose. Finally, the development of this network of interconnections is related to the parallel emergence of the Phoenicians and the Israelites in the eleventh and tenth centuries.For more than half a century debate has raged regarding the origin of the Philistines and the nature of their settlement in the southern Levant in the years following the end of the Bronze Age. A new book by T. and M. Dothan (1992), based largely on the recent excavations at Tel Miqne, has revived questions regarding their ethnicity, and a new series of papers have focused on when and how they settled (

2011) New directions in museum ethics, Museum Management and Curatorship, 26:2, 91-95,