ABSTRACT
What would an artefact-oriented anthropology look like if it were not about material culture? And could such a project develop, not as a new sub-genre within the discipline, but as a means of reconfiguring anthropology’s analytic methods more generally? These are questions that preoccupy the contributors to this volume, all of whom share common concerns about the place of objects and materiality in their analytical strategies. Living in places where powder is power, where costumes allow access to other planes of existence, and where legal documents may not primarily concern reason or argument, ethnographers are obliged to question the assumptions underpinning their own surprise at such things. Rather than dismiss informants’ accounts as imaginative ‘interpretations’ – elaborate metaphorical accounts of a ‘reality’ that is already given – anthropologists might instead seize on these engagements as opportunities from which novel theoretical understandings can emerge. The goal of this volume is to gather a range of approaches that show how such moments of ethnographic ‘revelation’ – in which unanticipated, previously inconceivable things become apparent – may be taken seriously in anthropological discourse. In particular, how and to what degree might the artefacts that so often occasion these moments be engaged with on their own terms? Too often, perhaps, the anthropologist’s immediate reaction is to explain away their own surprise with recourse to more familiar conceptions – not least the presupposition that these artefacts are analytically separable from the significance informants seem to ‘attach’ to them. What would happen, we ask, if this wonderment were held in a state of suspension so as to resist the urge to explain it away? The idea is to develop a language for writing and speaking about ethnographic experience that unsettles distinctions central to the very origins of the discipline, the tools which underpin the work of anthropological explanation.
