Hans Peter Hahn - Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: shifting contexts of material culture through time and space

Published by
Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK

Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2013

ISBN 978-1-84217-525-5
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-78297-084-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mobility, meaning and the transformations of things : shifting contexts of material culture through
time and space / edited by Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss.
pages cm
The contributions to this book are based on presentations and discussions at a conference, held in
October 2011, entitled Itineraries of the Material: Shifting Contexts of Value and Things in Time and
Space at the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-84217-525-5
1. Material culture--Case studies. 2. Material culture--Congresses. I. Hahn, Hans Peter, author,
editor of compilation. II. Weiss, Hadas, author, editor of compilation. III. Title.
GN406.I75 2013
306--dc23

2012044311

This book is an outcome of the academic work of the Research Training Group Value and
Equivalence (http://www.value-and-equivalence.de/) (GRK 1576). the printing of the book
has been sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Printed in Great Britain by
Short Run Press, Exeter

Preface

Movements of things mark the relevance of material culture in shaping identities and negotiating cultural relations. Things move close to people, they recede or they create connections between people. With every shift, they change their role and meaning. People expend a great deal of energy and resources to bring things closer to them, but also to get rid of them. In some contexts, the value of an object is determined by the journey it has made before coming within ones reach. This book addresses a wide range of movements of things and the corresponding shifts in their valuation. It intends thereby to overcome the perception of objects as static and unchanging. It focuses on how the objects change through movements in time, space or social spheres.

Combining approaches from archaeology and social anthropology, this book amasses evidence of the variability of things in relation to their mobility. Avoiding the pitfalls of overemphasizing the agency of things, the different contributions reflect on the adequate metaphor to capture the transformations of things though their mobility, as well as the transformation of people through the acquisition and appropriation of things. All of the contributions share the assumption that a closer examination of the shifts of meanings, time and materiality, grants a deeper understanding of objects themselves.

The contributions to this book are based on presentations and discussions at a conference, held in October 2011, entitled Itineraries of the Material: Shifting Contexts of Value and Things in Time and Space at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. The event was part of the scientific program of the Research Training Group Value and Equivalence (GRK 1576). The publication of this book and the conference proceedings were supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We would like to express our gratitude to Robert Parkin and Bjrn Schipper for helping with the editing process. We also want to thank the anonymous referees whose close readings and trenchant advice have contributed substantially to the quality of the texts in this volume. Finally, we extend our sincere gratitude to all of the contributors to this publication.

The conference and this book bring together some accomplished and experienced researchers in the field of material culture and object biographies with the doctoral students of the Research Training Group that organized the event. We are pleased to have found common ground for a fruitful discussion, and to have established a high standard for communicating the range of studies and perspectives. The book presents the most compelling insights achieved through the conference, and we expect it to be an important contribution to the study of material culture.

Hans Peter Hahn
Hadas Weiss

Chapter 1

Introduction: Biographies, travels and itineraries of things

Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss

We want to convey the sense that a world an often fragmented and fragile set of material and non-material assumptions and resources can itself be made mobile, seemingly translated from one [] location to another, even as it is transformed in the process

(Basu and Coleman 2008, 313, our italics).

In his well-known essay, Resonance and wonder, Stephen Greenblatt (1990) starts with an anecdote about a priests hat, displayed in an exhibition about the history of Christ Church College in Oxford. There is more to this red hat than meets the eye. Beyond being the hat of Cardinal Wolsey, the founder of the college, it had been a Christ Church College archived item since the mid-nineteenth century, after an itinerant history that included several owners. As Greenberg notes, it is this particular tale of the objects shifts and moves, including occasional threats to its material existence, which evokes the visitors interest and curiosity. Cultural artefacts never stand still, are never inert. Their existence is always embedded in a multitude of contexts, with tensions surrounding their roles, usages and meanings. Objects are meaningful only in relation to conflicts, negotiations and appropriations. Things shift in a wide range of modes, and very often it is through these particular alterations that they assume a specific meaning. The specific advantage of this focus on mobility is to shed light on hidden as well as conspicuous movements of peoples, objects, images (Greenblatt 2009, 250). The objective of this volume is to raise awareness of mobile things and their various kinds of shifts, and subsequently, of their changing roles and meanings.

The contributions to this volume deal with the mobility of things from the point of view of different disciplines. Within the framework of material culture, questions about mobility and the focus on shifts of location and meaning have been addressed predominantly through two concepts, biographies of things and travelling objects. Both concepts refer to shifts in space and time, as well as to the transformation of things through different contextualizations. When preparing for the conference that provided the opportunity to present the chapters assembled in this volume, we had the impression that, although each of these concepts is useful, they also have some serious limitations.

In the following pages we shall present our perceptions of the achievements and shortcomings of these concepts before trying to present a synthesis. We deal with these concepts by understanding them as metaphors. Object biographies and travelling objects work through metaphorical associations, drawing their meaning from quite different domains of the social. This contributes to their success, as they have come to be two of the most frequently used metaphors for dealing with material culture. And yet, some of the associated images are misleading or at least problematic. The aim of this volume is therefore to overcome the unnecessary reduction in how we perceive the mobility of things, which is arguably an unintentional by-product of these metaphors.