Itinerant Objects

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.

Boundary Things in the Eastern Maya Lowlands: Negotiating Allied Relations From Terminal Classic to Postclassic Times

“…We consider both objects and buildings as “boundary things” and apply a relational model to understand how people, things, and places in the landscape serve as agents in bridging boundaries. Even buildings, despite being fixed places in the landscape, “ live through new encounters, contexts, and modifications and are not the same structure they were when first built” (Bauer 2019:343, our emphasis). As conduits, boundary things mark “the between” (sensu Mitchell 2015), both separating and connecting visitors (fathers and sons, senior and junior council members, husbands and wives, and locals and foreigners), each with a vastly different experience depending on where they came from (Gosselain 2016) and their age and position in the “life process” (Ingold 2010).…”

“…A relational approach offers an exciting avenue of exploration in boundary studies, taking into account the agency of materiality and the role various kinds of objects and other nonhuman social actors played in negotiating relationships within and between boundaries. From this perspective, phenomena like objects, buildings, and other forms of materiality are viewed not in isolation but as part of relational collectivities, emphasizing “the interconnectedness or entanglement of people, things, ideas, bodies, relations, and landscapes, with agency itself distributed among them” (Bauer 2019:342). We consider this entanglement in the context of “boundary things” where materiality and immaterial things, such as social roles and obligations are mutually constituted and operate as a relational totality (Hatala 2013:17)—or what Heidegger (1971) has termed “the four-fold” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals.…”

Itineraries, iconoclasm, and the pragmatics of heritage

“…Each engagement with an object seemingly fixed in space can therefore be seen as a new semiotic encounter, in a pragmatic, performative sense (see Crossland and Bauer, 2017;Parmentier, 1997). Just as one can never step in the same river twice, because it is always moving and reconstituting itself, so the concept of itineraries pushes back against specific temporalities and life histories, allowing us to transcend the arbitrary separation of past from present (and future) and explore the ways that entanglements extend out in all directions and even implicate contemporary practices (Bauer, 2019). This last point is crucial for understanding the ways in which objects and monuments may simultaneously act as signs in history and signs of history, shifting between these ideal positions even when they have not moved physically.…”

A wall of stuff: object itinerary as a framework for writing the souvenir

“…Indeed, although both the object itinerary and its influential older sibling, the object biography, were originally theorised as ways to narrativise the circulation and social connections of artefacts, the object biography uses the metaphor of a human life to achieve this, viewing things through a potentially distorting anthropomorphic lens (Joyce, 2015). Object itinerary, on the other hand, is an iteration of the object biography that has emerged in large part as a corrective to the latter's anthropomorphising tendencies (Bauer, 2019). The object itinerary seeks to conceive of the power of things as something thing-like, rather than human-like (Joyce, 2015).…”

“…The object itinerary seeks to conceive of the power of things as something thing-like, rather than human-like (Joyce, 2015). It emphasises qualities such as relationality (Joyce & Gillespie, 2015) and a focus on nonlinear journeys and narratives (Bauer, 2019). It is interested in breaking down temporal distinctions between the past and present (Bauer, 2019), and in the relationships between things and their representations (Joyce & Gillespie, 2015).…”