Agency, biography and objects

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AGENCY, BIOGRAPHY AND OBJECTS
Janet Hoskins
Anthropologists since Mauss (1924/1954) and
Malinowski (1922) have asserted that the lines
between persons and things are culturally vari-
able, and not drawn in the same way in all soci-
eties. In certain contexts, persons can seem to
take on the attributes of things and things
can seem to act almost as persons. Studies of
traditional exchange systems (from Boas and
Malinowski to Strathern, Munn and Campbell)
have elaborated on this insight by detailing how
objects can be given a gender, name, history and
ritual function. Some objects can be so closely
associated with persons as to seem inalien-
able (Weiner 1992), and some persons – slaves,
dependants – can have their own humanity
depreciated so as to approach the status of
simple possessions. Within this framework,
things can be said to have ‘biographies’ as they
go through a series of transformations from gift
to commodity to inalienable possessions, and
persons can also be said to invest aspects of
their own biographies in things.
AGENCY AND OBJECTS
The recent agentive turn in social theory had led
a number of theorists to speak in new ways
about the agency of objects. It might be useful to
trace the genealogy of this particular usage in
order to clarify its antecedents and its currently
controversial status. Laura Ahern sees the new
interest in agency at the turn of the twenty first
century as following on the heels of critical social
movements and critiques that have questioned:
impersonal master narratives that leave no room
for tensions, contradictions, or oppositional actions
on the part of individuals and collectivities. It is
because questions about agency are so central to
contemporary political and theoretical debates that
the concept arouses so much interest and why it is
therefore so crucial to define clearly.
(2001: 109)
Her definition, in which agency is ‘the socio-
culturally mediated capacity to act’ (2001: 110),
is deliberately not restricted to persons, and
may include spirits, machines, signs and
collective entities (ancestors, corporations,
social groups). It is also deliberately relative,
since just as different societies have varying
notions of social action, they may have diverse
ideas about who and what is capable of acting
in a particular context.
An open definition raises the question of
exactly what is meant by an agent. Does the
capacity to act imply individuality and distinc-
tiveness? Can it also apply to relatively generic
classes of objects? Can the agency of objects be
dissolved and decentred (as certain structural-
ists and post-structuralists have argued) or
does the notion of agency by itself imply an
idiosyncratic power to change the world? Such
questions need to be explored in relation to an
ethnographic study of objects as agents in the
world.
The proposition that things can be said to
have ‘social lives’ was developed in an influ-
ential edited collection (Appadurai 1986),
which drew attention to the ways in which
passive objects were successively moved about
and recontextualized. Appadurai’s essay in
that volume framed this explicitly as a process
of commodification and decommodification,
although of course ‘commodity’ is only one
of a wider range of different ‘identities’ (gift,
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talisman, art work, heirloom, ancestral legacy,
ritual sacra, memento) that an object can
assume. He was concerned with showing how
the capitalist spirit of calculation is still often
present in the gift (as Mauss was well aware,
since he spoke of its coercive power), and in
analysing the shifts in object identity created
by trajectories that took them through different
regimes of value. Fifteen years later, another
collection titled The Empire of Things: Regimes of
Value and Material Culture (Fred Myers 2001)
tried to carry that notion further by focusing
on contradictions among objects’ shifting
meanings for different constituencies.
Both of these collections emphasize com-
merce and external constraints over local
meanings and internal configurations, in keep-
ing with a broader disciplinary change from
‘local’ levels to ‘global’ ones, and from single-
sited field projects to multi-sited ones in order
to trace persons and things as they move
through space and time. The relationship
between objects and individual subjectivity
was given relatively short shrift, as was the
relation between objects and gender or person-
ality. Objects do indeed pass through many
transformations, and Appadurai’s call for a
study of the ‘paths’ and ‘life histories’ of things
inspired a whole series of new studies which
looked at the ‘mutability of things in recontex-
tualization’ (Nick Thomas 1989: 49). This
involves a form of ‘methodological fetishism’
which looks at the ways in which things may
be drawn into significant diversions from
familiar paths:
It is only through the analysis of these trajectories
that we can interpret the human transactions and
calculation that enliven things. Thus, even though
from a theoretical point of view human actors
encode things with significance, from a method-
ological point of view it is the things-in-motion that
illuminate their human and social context.
(Appadurai 1986: 5)
Kopytoff’s essay ‘The cultural biography of
things’ in the same volume focused these ques-
tions on particular objects, asking, Who makes
it? In what conditions? From what materials?
For what purpose? What are the recognized
stages development? How does it move from
hand to hand? What other contexts and uses
can it have? In effect, his essay encouraged
researchers to ask the same questions of a thing
that they would of people.
Christopher Steiner argues (Steiner 2001: 209)
that anthropologists who focused on the agen-
tive elements of objects had misinterpreted the
seminal idea of the ‘cultural biography of things’
articulated in Kopytoff’s article in The Social
Life of Things (1986). The processual model of
commoditization that Kopytoff proposed, he
argues, had an impact in anthropology because
it coincided with a broadening of research par-
adigms to include transnational movement and
connection.
Yet in their zeal to explore the social identity of
material culture, many authors have attributed too
much power to the ‘things’ themselves, and in so
doing have diminished the significance of human
agency and the role of individuals and systems
that construct and imbue material goods with
value, significance and meaning. Thus, commod-
ity fetishism has been inscribed as the object of the
model rather than its subject ... . The point is not
that ‘things’ are any more animated than we used
to believe, but rather that they are infinitely mal-
leable to the shifting and contested meanings
constructed for them through human agency.
(Steiner 2001: 210)
It is perhaps more accurate to see these as
two separate directions of interpretation, one
stressing the ways in which things are com-
modified and lose personality, the other look-
ing at the processes by which they are invested
with personality and may have an impact. The
malleability of objects, and the many different
ways they may be perceived, are linked to
what Gell might call their instrumentality or
even – in his provocative new use of the term –
their agency, the ways in which they stimulate
an emotional responses and are invested with
some of the intentionality of their creators.
Others have also looked at the ways in which
things actively constitute new social contexts,
working as technologies (such as clothing) that
can make religious change (conversion to
Christianity) or political allegiance visible as a
feature of people’s behavior and domestic life.
Gell has formulated a theory about the cre-
ation of art objects that could in fact be a theory
about the creation of all forms of material
culture. He asserts that things are made as a
form of instrumental action: Art (and other
objects) are produced in order to influence the
thoughts and actions of others. Even those
objects which seem to be without a directly
identifiable function – that is, objects which
have previously been theorized as simple
objects of aesthetic contemplation – are in fact
made in order to act upon the world and to act
upon other persons. Material objects thus
embody complex intentionalities and mediate
social agency. The psychology of art needs
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to look at how patterns and perception have
specific effects on viewers, and are designed to
arouse fear, desire, admiration or confusion.
His work suggests a more active model of an
object’s biography, in which the object may not
only assume a number of different identities as
imported wealth, ancestral valuable or com-
modity but may also ‘interact’ with the people
who gaze upon it, use it and try to possess it.
Gendering objects in itself allocates aspects of
agency and identity to things (Strathern 1988,
1992), and Gell’s model of the ‘distributed
mind’ which we find scattered through objects
has a strong kinship with Strathern’s notion of
the ‘partible person’ who is divisible into
things that circulate along specific exchange
trajectories.
The equivalence suggested between the
agency of persons and of things calls into ques-
tion the borders of individual persons and col-
lective representations in a number of ways. It
implies that we need to pay more attention to
the phenomenological dimension of our inter-
actions with the material world, and interro-
gate the objects which fascinate us as well as
our reasons for feeling this fascination.
The theoretical frame that he elaborates for
making new sense of these objects – both the
‘traditional ones’ like cloth and the new ones
like photographs – comes from Gell’s ideas
about the technology of enchantment and the
enchantment of technology. He defines his
concept of technical difficulty as producing a
‘halo effect’ of resistance (a notion related to,
but sill somewhat different from, Walter
Benjamin’s notion of the ‘aura’). Works of art
make it difficult for us to possess them in an
intellectual rather than a material sense, so
their effect on our minds is ‘magical’ – it is a
form of enchantment.
In Art and Agency (1998), Gell takes this argu-
ment further by arguing that anthropological
theories of art objects have to be primarily con-
cerned with social relations over the time
frame of biographies. He rejects the linguistic
analogies of semiotic theories and insists that
art is about doing things, that it is a system of
social action – and that we have to look at how
people act through objects by distributing
parts of their personhood into things. These
things have agency because they produce
effects, they cause us to feel happy, angry, fear-
ful or lustful. They have an impact, and we as
artists produce them as ways of distributing
elements of our own efficacy in the form of
things. Art objects use formal complexity and
technical virtuosity to create ‘a certain cogni-
tive indecipherability’ (1998: 95) which may
tantalize and frustrate the viewer in trying to
recognize wholes and parts, continuity and dis-
continuity, synchrony and succession. He analy-
ses involuted designs intended to entrance and
ward off dangerous spirits, tattoos and shields
in Polynesia, and idols which are animated
in variety of ways, and able to bestow fertility,
sickness, cures or misfortunes.
Gell argues that an object acts as an agent
when the artist’s skill is so great that the
viewer simply cannot comprehend it and is
therefore captivated by the image. This notion
of captivation asserts that an object is art on the
basis of what it does, not what it is. Gell’s
approach allows him to sidestep the problem-
atic distinction between Western and non-
Western art, and to present a theory about the
efficacy of an object’s appearance – about
cross-cultural visuality, in other words – rather
than specifically about art. Objects which are
often treated as material culture or crafts,
rather than art (like textiles, betel bags, etc.)
therefore deserve equal attention, since their
making is a ‘particularly salient feature of their
agency’ (Gell 1998: 68).
Gell defines captivation as ‘the demoralisa-
tion produced by the spectacle of unimagin-
able virtuosity’ (1998: 71), an effect created by
our being unable to figure out how an object
came into being. Many imported objects in
remote locations in Melanesia or South East
Asia emerge as ‘captivating’ – the smooth,
shiny surfaces of porcelain ceramics (given
ritual status as the anchors of the polity, Hoskins
1993), the explosive sounds and fatal bullets of
guns, and of course the mysterious lifelike
two-dimensional images of the camera. In the
1990s, when tourists began to come to this once
remote area in substantial numbers, they were
considered predatory voyeurs, ‘foreigners
with metal boxes’ who used the hose-like aper-
ture of their zoom lenses to extract blood from
children and take it home to power electronic
devices in the industrial West. The cameras
that every tourist brings to capture images of
headhunters and primitive violence became
the very emblems of the exotic violence that
they were designed to capture (Hoskins 2002).
Rather than using these stories to produce
yet another version of the colonial cliché of the
credulous native, Gell’s theory provides us
with the insight that there is nothing irrational
or even particularly ‘primitive’ in seeing the
camera as a technology of enchantment – all
forms of visual representation share this trait.
Photographs themselves were rarely shared
with their subjects in ‘tribal’ or ‘adventure
tourism’ – instead, people in remote villages
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saw a parade of intimidating gadgets which
seemed to steal away some aspect of their lives
that they had no access to or control over. The
story of the bloodthirsty camera encodes a crit-
ical awareness of global inequities in access to
and use of technology. Gell’s notion of captiva-
tion helps us to isolate a realm of specifically
visual power, which – while obviously embed-
ded in a wider political economic context of
unequal access to technology – is also enchant-
ing in its own way.
Looking at photographs and paintings in the
context of ancestor worship and animism helps
us to isolate the ‘agentive elements’ of certain
technologies, and disengage these elements
from simple differences in representation
between a hand-drawn image, say, and one
produced by chemicals working to record lines
of light and shadow. Much of Gell’s argument
builds on what was left unsaid in Walter
Benjamin’s ‘A short history of photography’,
where he first criticized the ‘fetishistic and fun-
damentally anti-technical concept of art with
which the theoreticians of photography sought
to grapple for almost a hundred years’
(Benjamin 1978: 241).
In fact, Gell acknowledges his debt to
Benjamin only through his spectral re-
incarnation as Michael Taussig, who has seized
on Benjamin’s insight that ‘it is through pho-
tography that we first discover the existence
of this optical unconscious’ (1978: 243) – which
is the secret that shows us how our own
eyes work to construct coherent visual images.
Benjamin described the new visual worlds pro-
duced by photography to ‘waking dreams .. .
which, enlarged and capable of formulation,
make the difference between technology and
magic visible as a thoroughly historical vari-
able’ (1978: 244). Benjamin argued that ‘The
first people to be reproduced entered the
visual space of photography with their inno-
cence intact, uncompromised by captions’
(1978: 244). While sitting for long exposures
they had to focus on life in the moment rather
than hurrying past it, and thus ‘the subject as it
were grew into the picture’ (1978: 245) and felt
a sort of participation in the process that is no
longer true of the quick snapshot.
Rather than seeing the celluloid image as
the ‘last refuge of the cult value of the picture’,
it is possible to see it instead as the wedge
of a postcolonial perspective on modernity.
Photographs of revered figures from the past,
ancestors and heroes, can be used not only to
commemorate them in traditional ways, but
also to re-create them visually for a new world
of globalized imagery. The ‘resistance’ which
Gell talks about in art objects – their ability
to challenge us and captivate us visually –
suggests that the ‘magic’ of mechanical repro-
duction will not remove the aura of art objects
but only enhance it. John Berger makes a simi-
lar argument when he notes that ‘The bogus
religiosity which now surrounds original
works of art, and which is ultimately depen-
dent upon their market value, has become the
substitute for what paintings lost when the
camera made them reproducible’ (Berger 1972:
230). The new craze for photography in the
Third World stems from a global political econ-
omy in which mechanical visuality is restricted
to certain peoples and certain institutions, and
these lines of access are marked by differences
of race and culture as well as class.
FROM AGENCY TO BIOGRAPHY
Asking questions about the agency of objects
has led to the development of a more bio-
graphical approach, particularly in Melanesia,
where Malinowski (1922) first described the
distinctive ‘personalities’ of shell valuables.
The malanggan, an intricate wooden carving
produced for mortuary ceremonies in New
Ireland, is the most widely collected object in
the global world of ‘primitive art’. They are
laboriously produced, then displayed for a few
hours at the end of a ceremony. It is only the
internalized memory of the object which is
locally valued, so it can be ‘killed’ with gifts of
shell money – and then made available for sale
to collectors. Gell describes this process as
making the malanggan ‘an index of agency of
an explicitly temporary nature’ (1998: 225). By
providing the ‘skin’ for a deceased relative, the
process of carving objectifies social relation-
ships and brings together the dispersed agency
of the deceased – visualizing his social effec-
tiveness as ‘a kind of body that accumulates,
like a charged battery, the potential energy of
the deceased’ (Gell 1998: 225). Küchler, in the
most detailed ethnography of malanggan, says
it serves as a container for ancestral life force,
which mediates and transmits agency from
one generation to another (2002), as a visual-
ized memory which is publicly transacted. The
‘cognitive stickiness’ of art works, which
allows them to be the vehicles of a technology
of enchantment, lies in their ability to absorb
death and represent it as a new form of life.
Küchler’s work finishes with the observa-
tion that malanggan themselves are memory
objects which work in the opposite way of our
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own museum displays. She notes that ‘the
extraordinary theatre of memory that we have
enshrined in our museums is the result of a
laborious and systematic work of displace-
ment of objects by images’ (2002: 190). While
we value objects because of the memories
attached to them, the people of New Ireland
value them instead for their work in detaching
memories, undoing and displacing relations
between persons and things. In this way, ‘sur-
faces can be vehicles of thought in ways that
we ascribe to living kinds only’ (Küchler 2002:
193). The ‘animated skins’ of New Ireland are
made deliberately to affect the thinking and
feeling of those who look upon them.
Gell argues that consciousness is a mental
process through which subjective temporality
is constituted through transformations over
time. Nancy Munn’s (1986) work on Gawa
canoes and wealth objects describes this as
‘value creation’ over a biographical cycle, in
which the canoes start life as trees grown on
clan land, are then transferred to other clans to
be carved, then sailed and traded against yams
or shell valuables. The canoe itself is demateri-
alized but still ‘owned’, although in another
form, and it is ultimately converted into what
Munn calls ‘sociotemporal space-time’. A
famous kula operator is able to ‘move minds’ at
great distances and becomes so enchantingly
attractive and so irresistibly persuasive that the
exchange paths of all the most desirable valu-
ables converge in his direction. His person-
hood is distributed through a series of objects
linked by his strategic actions and calculated
interventions, which anticipate the future to
guide each transaction to the most useful end.
Gell’s review of the politics of Melanesian
exchange leads him back to the idea that the
oeuvre of a Western artist can be seen as a form
of distributed personhood, a way of collecting
‘a life’ through collecting representations
which cull the memories of that life and give
them visual expression. His argument recalls
the distinction made by French sociologist
Violette Morin (1969) between a ‘biographical
object’ and a ‘protocol object’, or a standard-
ized commodity. Though both sorts of objects
maybe produced for mass consumption, the
relation that a person establishes with a bio-
graphical object gives it an identity that is
localized, particular and individual, while
those established with an object generated by
an outside protocol are globalized, generalized
and mechanically reproduced. Morin distin-
guishes three levels of mediation as character-
istic of biographical objects – their relation to
time, space and the owner or consumer.
In relation to time, the biographical object
grows old, and may become worn and tattered
along the life span of its owner, while the
public commodity is eternally youthful and
not used up but replaced. In relation to space,
the biographical object limits the concrete
space of its owner and sinks its roots deep into
the soil. It anchors the owner to a particular
time and space. The protocol object, on the
other hand, is everywhere and nowhere, mark-
ing not a personal experience but a purchasing
opportunity. The biographical object ‘imposes
itself as the witness of the fundamental unity
of its user, his or her everyday experience
made into a thing’ (1969: 137–8), while the
public commodity is in no way formative of its
user’s or owner’s identity, which is both singu-
lar and universal at the same time. People who
surround themselves with biographical objects
do so to develop their personalities and reflect
on them, while consumers of public commodi-
ties are decentred and fragmented by their
acquisition of things, and do not use them as
part of a narrative process of self-definition.
OBJECTS AS THE SUBJECT
OF BIOGRAPHIES
Thinking about objects as in some ways similar
to persons has led to several experiments with
biographical writing about objects. These
various experiments have taken two dominant
forms: (1) those ‘object biographies’ which
begin with ethnographic research, and which
thus try to render a narrative of how certain
objects are perceived by the persons that they
are linked to, and (2) efforts to ‘interrogate
objects themselves’ which begin with historical
or archaeological research, and try to make
mute objects ‘speak’ by placing them in a his-
torical context, linking them to written sources
such as diaries, store inventories, trade records,
etc. The first has been primarily the domain
of anthropologists (MacKenzie 1991; Hoskins
1993, 1998; Keane 1997; Ferme 2001), the
second primarily the domain of art historians
(Arnold 2002), historians (Saunders 2003;
Ulrich 2001) and archeologists (Bradley 1990;
Meskell 2004; Fontijn 2002; Tilley 1996,
1999; Thomas 1996, 1999). Breaking up that
comfortable symmetry has been the work of a
few anthropologists who have worked exten-
sively with archives (Elizabeth Edwards 2001;
Ann Stoler 2002) or with museum collections
(Shelly Errington 1998; Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 1998).
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Among the first anthropologists to explicitly
take a biographical approach to the study of
objects was Maureen Mackenzie in Androgynous
Objects: String Bags and Gender in Central New
Guinea (1991). She explicitly focuses on the ‘the
lifecycle of an object’ in order to ‘uncover the
relations and meanings which surround it’
(1991: 27). The objects she examines, bags made
of looped twine from bark fibres (bilum), are
used to hold young children, vegetables, fish,
firewood, and carried by both men and
women, with women carrying them from the
head and men carrying them from the shoul-
ders. As ‘the most hard-worked accessory of
daily life’ (1991: 1) in Papua New Guinea, the
string bag mediates and manifests a whole
series of social relationships for the Tekefol
people – nurturance, decoration, supernatural
protection, spirit divination, gift exchange, etc.
A new tourist and export market has also given
the string bag value as a trade commodity, and
it can be spotted on the shoulders of teenage
girls in American shopping malls as well as
Melanesian villages. Particular styles of string
bags are badges of regional identity, initiatory
grades and ritual status. By looking at this
‘seemingly insignificant domestic carryall’,
MacKenzie concentrates ‘on the different types
of agency and the different competences which
gender demarcates’ (1991: 22), rejecting an ear-
lier suggestion from Annette Weiner (1977: 13)
that the string bag represents a domain of
female control and autonomy. Her theoretical
contribution is to present a case study of an
object which crosses over from male to female
worlds: ‘My biographical focus on a single arte-
fact ... as a complete object made by women
and men, will give me a technological and soci-
ological understanding of its combinatory sym-
bolism, and reveal spheres of activity that an
analysis of either female work or male cult
activity would miss’ (1991: 28).
The approach taken in a series of studies of
material culture, history and exchange on
Sumba is also ethnographic, but it focuses more
on narrative elaboration than variations in
physical form (Hoskins 1993, 1998; Keane
1997). The Kodi people of Sumba, eastern
Indonesia, have a series of named ‘history
objects’ which demarcate and preserve a sense
of the past and collective memory. These are
called the ‘traces of the hands and feet’ (oro
limya oro witti) of the ancestors, and consist of a
heirloom gold valuables, porcelain urns, spiri-
tually potent weapons, and musical instru-
ments used to communicate with the spirit
world. The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on
Calendars, History and Exchange (Hoskins 1993)
examined the use of prestigious objects in the
annual cycle of ritual ceremonies, and their sig-
nificance in preserving and authenticating
memories of ancestral exploits. Recent encoun-
ters between traditional objects like a suppos-
edly unmovable urn containing holy water and
the colonial ‘staff of office’ bestowed by Dutch
invaders on local leaders (rajas) were traced to
show local perceptions that prestigious objects
could help to make history by ‘choosing’ their
proper location and exerting a mysterious influ-
ence on their human guardians to assure that
they ended up there. Certain ritual tools – the
‘possessions of the ancestors’ – were believed to
be repositories of magical power which could
affect the processes that they came to represent.:
‘Power objectified in a concrete object preser-
ves an impression of stability even when the
object comes into the possession of a rival; thus,
it can legitimate usurpation while maintaining a
fiction of continuity’ (1993: 119).
In more private, domestic spheres ordinary
objects like a spindle, a betel bag, and a woven
cloak also used as a funeral shroud illustrate
connections between people and things that are
less ritualized but equally intimate. In Biographi-
cal Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s
Lives (Hoskins 1998) six women and men nar-
rate their own lives by talking about their pos-
sessions, using these objects as a pivot for
introspection and a tool for reflexive autobiog-
raphy. The metaphoric properties are deeply
gendered, and established through the conven-
tional use of paired couplets in ritual language,
which portray the betel bag as containing the
fertile folds of a woman’s body, or the spindle
and the spear as the probing force of masculine
penetration. The desire to possess another
person in a sexual sense may be deflected on to
the possession of a beloved thing, often a surro-
gate companion or spouse (sometimes actually
buried with an unmarried person ‘to make the
grave complete’). Pervasive themes of dualism
and the search for the counterpart are projected
on to the object world, where fantasies of whole-
ness and completion are more easily fulfilled.
Webb Keane’s Signs of Recognition: Power
and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian
Society (1997) examines similar themes in the
exchange transactions of Anakalang, another
Sumbanese domain. His approach is less bio-
graphical – in that it does not address many
individual lives – and more processual. He
looks at the ways in which words and things
are invested with social value as they are trans-
acted in tandem, introducing an economic
dimension to speech events, so that verbal
descriptions are part of a complex political
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economy in which things are not always what
they seem. He argues that agency should not
necessarily be located in biologically discrete
individuals, but is instead most salient in
formal ceremonial contexts, which ‘display and
tap into an agency that is assumed to transcend
the particular individuals present and the tem-
poral moment in which they act’ (1997: 7).
So agency on Sumba can be located in disem-
bodied ancestors, lineage houses, inter-clan
alliances, and even heirloom valuables, all of
which are subject to ongoing construction and
transformation.
Material objects can be used to both reveal
and conceal secret histories, as explored in
Mariane Ferme’s The Underneath of Things:
Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone
(2001). Looking at the connections between cola
nuts, cloth, palm oil, clay, houses and hair
styles, she finds a hidden history of slavery and
oppression, which has left is mark on gender
relations as well. As ‘the material bearers of col-
lective memory’ (Ferme 2001: 9) these everyday
objects are inscribed with biographical and his-
torical resonances. Clay and oil, for instance,
are ‘biographical substances that inscribe tem-
porality on the body’ (Ferme 2001: 17), produc-
ing heat or coolness in various life-cycle rituals
which socially construct gender and maintain
its force through bodily memories. Ferme
argues, ‘the material world matters, but . .. the
life that objects and substances take on, from
circumstances not of their own making but of
their made-ness, produces unstable meanings
and unpredictable events’ (2001: 21). The circu-
lation of everyday objects takes place within
not only a visible political economy but also
‘an occult economy’ in which hairstyles and
clothing patterns fix the significance of histori-
cal events in time and act as ‘mnemonic clues’
to secret strategies developed by people used
to living close to death. An ‘aesthetics of ambi-
guity’ has developed as a way to live with per-
manent danger. The civil war that has raged
throughout the country since 1991 has created
new narratives around objects linked to pain
and violence, objects which hide their real
meanings underneath the surface. Ferme sug-
gests that there are stories in the shadows of
this African nation which need to be retrieved
and understood in relation to many different
levels of concealment and circulation.
Ferme’s study is inspired, in part, by the
micro-history of Carlo Ginzburg, which focuses
on tiny details as clues to wider social processes
and transformations, constructing a complex
social reality from apparently insignificant mate-
rial data (Ginzburg 1989). A similar agenda lies
behind historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The
Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the
Creation of an American Myth (2001). Shifting
from studying the lives of ordinary people,
through wills and diaries, to studying their arte-
facts, Ulrich looks at baskets, spinning wheels,
needlework and cloth to interrogate a total of
fourteen objects and uncover details about their
makers and users and the communities they
built. She portrays eighteenth-century New
England as a battleground of Indian, colonist,
slave and European cultures, each leaving its
mark on the design of these ‘surviving objects’.
Ulrich also examines the construction of cultural
memory, by quoting the work of theologian
Horace Bushell and examining the perennial
American nostalgia for the ‘good old days’,
when clothing and other necessities were mostly
made at home by family labour. Aiming to study
‘the flow of common life’, in order ‘to discover
the electricity of history’, Ulrich identifies many
individuals involved with these artefacts. But
it is objects themselves that emerge as the
strongest ‘personalities’ in the book. We learn
that American Indians (like Ferme’s Sierra Leone
women) saw wigwams and house construction
(as well as hair plaiting) as forms of ‘weaving’,
that French stitchery inspired needlepoint
framed in Boston homes, and that wealth objects
were displayed in coveted Hadley cupboards
to document and preserve family prestige.
Questions of provenance are explored in a series
of detective stories, which then lead to further
linkages of geography, genealogy and history.
Dana Arnold brings together a series of essays
in The Metropolis and its Image: Constructing
Identities for London, c. 1750–1950 (2002) that
present the biography of a city on the model of
a human life story. The collection looks at key
moments in the emergence of London as a
metropolis and different ways its image has
been conceived and represented. The complex-
ity of London’s different identities is revealed
in the tensions and contradictions between
manifestations of civic and national pride, the
relationship between private and governmen-
tal institutions and urban planning issues.
Specific questions of architectural style are
examined in the context of the relationship
between the City of London and London as a
metropolis. Urban identities are explored with
a methodology which looks at how the city has
been anthropomorphized as it is pictured in
the visual arts, planned by the architects and
urbanists, and studied by historians who inter-
pret its various alter egos and former identities.
Archeologists have also adapted biographi-
cal methods. Lynne Meskell’s Object Worlds in
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Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies in Past and
Present (2004) looks at how excavated objects
reveal ancient Egyptians’ lives and preoccupa-
tions. What do Egyptian burial practices tell us
about their notions of the person, gender and
bodily experience? Do giant pyramids and the
preservation of the body through mummifica-
tion signal a particular concern with embodi-
ment and memory, so that the physical body is
required for the social legacy? Meskell’s notion
of the ‘material biography’ brings together
questions of personhood and the meanings of
objects in relation to an ancient culture that is
heavily documented but still incompletely
understood. She also asks comparative ques-
tions about why Egyptian antiquity has been of
such great popular interest, from Parisian land-
marks to the modern temples of commerce that
are Las Vegas casinos. The mysteries provoked
by this vanished world suggest ways in which
ancient objects are used to mediate between
past and present, and to summon up an alter-
native cultural space to explore contemporary
concerns with mortality and materiality.
David Fontijn’s Sacrificial Landscapes: Cultural
Biographies of Persons, Objects and ‘Natural’Places
in the Bronze Age of the Southern Netherlands
(2002) looks at elaborate metal valuables which
were left behind in various watery locations.
Why did the communities that buried them
never return to retrieve them? Controlled exca-
vations of local settlements and cemeteries
have revealed few of these objects, while more
remote streams and marshes have them in
great abundance. The selective deposition of
these bronze objects is related in his argument
to the construction of various forms of social
identity, such as male or female, or of belong-
ing to local or non-local communities. He then
discusses the ‘cultural biographies’ of weapons
(axes, spears, daggers), ornaments and dress
fittings, and tries to reconstruct the social con-
texts in which these objects once ‘lived’.
Somewhat further afield, a recent collection
on the history of scientific knowledge looks at
the Biographies of Scientific Objects (Daston
2000) and asks, Why does an object or phe-
nomenon become the subject of scientific
inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain
provocative, while others fade from centre
stage? Why do some objects return as the focus
of research long after they were once aban-
doned? Dreams, atoms, monsters, culture,
society, mortality and the self are among the
objects addressed, and the book ranges from
the sixteenth century to the twentieth, explor-
ing the ways in which scientific objects are
both real and historical. Marshall Sahlins has a
contribution entitled ‘Sentimental pessimism
and ethnographic experience: or, Why culture
is not a disappearing object’. While the notion
of ‘biography’ here is obviously to some extent
a rhetorical conceit, it is used deliberately to
suggest a life trajectory, a process in which
a concept or diagnosis can have a ‘youth’, a
period of ‘mature development’ and even a
‘death’, so that its life span resembles that of an
individual. Objects of inquiry are discovered
and invented, become popular for a period and
then may experience a waning of their influ-
ence, and they grow more ‘real’ as they become
entangled in webs of cultural significance.
Cloth has attracted particular attention as a
biographical object, because it is worn on the
body and is often a marker of identity. Between
the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives and Travels from
Sumba (Forshee 2001) begins each chapter with
a photograph of a textile, and follows it with a
description of the individual who designed
and wove the textile, showing how motifs and
colours can reflect the creator’s personality.
The new development of trade, tourism and a
commercial market on the island reviews how
these cloths have travelled as commodities as
well as expressions of artistic inventiveness.
Clothing the Pacific (Colchester 2003) looks less
at the issue of authorship and more at shifting
social and historical contexts, particularly
influences from missionary and colonial
authorities who had their own ideas of how
Pacific Islanders should be dressed. Conversion
to Christianity is often marked by changes in
dress, and new composite styles are prominent
in diasporic communities, suggesting that a
new way of dress is also a new fashioning of the
self, a biographic process of changing the inner
person to fit new outer garments. Clothing is
analysed as a technology that ‘recreated certain
contexts anew’ (Colchester 2003: 15) in the
hybrid forms of modest ‘Sunday best’ costumes
in Tahiti and Samoa, Cook Islands appliqué
quilts and even T-shirts in Polynesian Auckland.
CONCLUSION
Anthropologists have long argued that things
can, in certain conditions, be or act like persons:
they can be said to have a personality, to show
volition, to accept certain locations and reject
others, and thus to have agency. Often, these
attributes of agency are linked to the anthropo-
morphizing process by which things are said to
have social lives like persons and thus to be
appropriate subjects for biographies. Gell’s
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challenge to anthropological theory came from
a phenomenological perspective. In an earlier
reflection on theories of the occult (Gell 1974: 26)
he argued that ‘magical thought is seduced by
the images it makes of something that by defi-
nition cannot be represented’, but ritual acts try
to represent it anyway. In a similar fashion, his
theories of the technology of enchantment sug-
gest that objects that challenge our senses or
our comprehension have their most powerful
effects on our imaginations.
His approach has proved controversial.
While some collections have obviously been
inspired by its challenges (Pinney and Thomas
2001), others have been more critical (Campbell
2002), or have seemed to react by largely ignor-
ing it (Myers and Marcus 1995; Phillips and
Steiner 1999). In The Art of Kula (2002) Campbell
examines the layers of encoded meaning on the
carved and painted prow boards of Trobriand
canoes, arguing that colour associations and
other formal elements ‘speak’ to the islanders
about emotional and spiritual issues. This
would seem close to Gell’s arguments about the
agency of art objects, but Campbell finds his
approach ultimately too restrictive. While she
applauds the interest in intention, causation,
result and transformation that is part of seeing
art as a vehicle for social action, she hesitates to
cast aside ‘those approaches that examine the
way formal elements encode meanings and the
processes of representing significant relation-
ships and the context in which these communi-
cate’ (2002: 8). Art has long been investigated as
a visual code of communication, and the
problem of indigenous aesthetics is an impor-
tant component of this. She does say that the
biographic elements of art, and the ways in
which it may provide an abstracted or indirect
‘visual biography’, must remain central to the
discipline.
Gell argued that a biographical approach to
the study of objects is also a particularly
anthropological approach, because ‘the view
taken by anthropology of social agents
attempts to replicate the time perspective of
these agents themselves’ (Gell 1998: 10). In con-
trast, history or sociology could be described
as supra-biographical and social and cognitive
psychology as infra-biographical. Because
anthropology tends to concentrate on ‘the act’
in the context of ‘the life’ – or a particular stage
of ‘the life’ – it is necessarily preoccupied with
the life cycle and the individual agent. The
specifically biographical depth of focus defines
a methodology that works best in the spaces
traversed by agents in the course of their biogra-
phies. Anthropology studies social relationships
over the life course, and its approach to the
study of art objects should, accordingly, focus
on their relations to the persons who produce
and circulate them.
The large number of works which have tried
to present cultural biographies of objects or to
talk about the social lives of things testify to the
fact that it is not only anthropologists who have
been inspired by the biographical frame. But
they also show that the notion of biography –
borrowed from literary theory – has provided
new perspectives on the study of material
culture, and prompted new questions about
how people are involved with the things they
make and consume. While anthropological
research has expanded beyond the study of
small societies to larger global contexts and
connections, the emphasis on the individual
agent and stages of the life cycle remains
important in the discipline, and is perhaps
a trade mark of even multi-sited fieldwork.
When historians, philosophers of science and
art historians borrow certain methods and
concepts from anthropology, they are paying
homage to insights developed in a biographi-
cal context and expanded to account for wider
social and cultural movements. The agentive
turn which has become prominent in various
forms of practice theory requires attention to
biographical frames of meaning and individ-
ual relations established through things with
other persons. Future research will continue to
question the cultural contexts established for
whole classes of objects (clothing, jewellery,
body parts, etc.) and the assumptions that
their contexts entail. Objects themselves may
not be animated, but their relations have cer-
tainly animated many debates about the ways
to understand society, culture and human
lives.
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