Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do \nwith things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors \nand commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic \nand disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical \nwritings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and those \nof his collaborators in the Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective \n(1986). As will become clear, our interests have less to do with formulating \ncritiques or theory-driven responses to this seminal work than with \nsetting out to explore possibilities for ethnographic expansions, revisions, and \nvariations on its themes, and for linking the 'social life of things' to questions \nof modernity, nationalism, and transnational cultural projects and dilemmas. \nIn our discussions, we observe that as things become unmoored or dislodged \nfrom their place of origin, manufacture, or intended use, they are inevitably \nsnared in new hierarchies of value, exchange, and recognition. Thus our discussions \nhave to do with the social and moral orbit of things that have broken \nloose from some prior 'life,' or that mimic the lives of other objects. Different \nscenes of exchange and consumption are clearly influential in the shaping of \nsuch hierarchies. But so, too, are the national and international projects that \nencourage social identities and anxieties to attach to certain kinds of objects. \nFor this reason, we have felt obliged to take a look at the moral debates and \ncrises of mourning that travel along with circulating objects.
Source: Ethnos
Author: Kenneth M. George
Institution: University of Oregon
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2053975421