materiality and politicial resonance

'What should be done? I have poached the title of these reflections from Arjun Appadurai, who in 2005, twenty years after the publication of the seminal Social Life of Things, inquired about "materiality in the future of anthropology." Apapadurai noted that work on how things mutate back and forth between commodities, gifts, and other forms "now seems quaint," "somewhat aloof from wider debates about new technologies, new global economies and new civilizing forms and techniques." Instead of sticking to the biography of individual objects, he urged anthropologists to follow the systemic presence of materiality in global political economy, space, and security.' (pp285-286)

'Material culture mainly stops at the domestic doorstep, rarely connecting to urban networks, to the office, or to the brutal materiality of iron, steel, or bullets. The material world is mainly "soft," decorative and visible.' (pp287)

'Things are interesting because their appropriation promises to reveal processes of social stratification and identity formation.' (pp288)

'Objects are "bundles of meaning." But are they only that?' (pp288)

'Philosophers have long debated the boundaries between things and humans. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidigger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular emphasized their embodied relationship. For Heidigger, things showed theit thingness only in the process of being put to use, literally proving their readiness to the human hand (Zuhandhenhiet), whereas objects live in a state of distant presence or contemplation (Vorhandenheit).' (pp289)

Trentmann, F. (2009) Materiality in the future of history: things, practices, and politics. Journal of British Studies 48 (2), pp. 283-307