ABSTRACT
The place of objects in anthropological investigation has, all too often, been secondary to the cultural and social. Objects are fitted into cultural contexts, while ‘things’ often are discussed only as the necessary material backdrop to the workings of society. Culture can be read from objects through symbolic analysis, sense is made of their form and use by reference to prior cultural systems of meaning (Strathern 1990). It is as if the category of the material, the inanimate, was a pre-analytic given, one of the basic building blocks upon which a social or cultural theory of meaning could (unreflexively) be built. That is, because the material and the object world exist in particular relation to the person of the analyst, and this relation is so thoroughly naturalised as to appear given by the human condition, much anthropological theory has relied upon ‘things’ material stability of form and substance, opposing objects to the persons who act, create and utilise them. ‘Things’ then populate our descriptions of others’ worlds with our own distinctions between mind (spirit) and matter, subjects and objects, agents and patients. One might say that we are already used to ‘thinking through things’. There seems work to do in becoming conscious of the effects these ‘thinkings’ have on the outcome of our endeavours.
