Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice

In their introduction to the volume, Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie evaluate the object biography framework that has seen robust application and development in anthropology and material culture studies since the 1980s. Cultural anthropologists often associate this framework with Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s contributions to The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), but the authors broadly contextualize it within the broader intellectual tradition of archaeological theory. Their critique of the biography framework is partially rooted in archaeological methodology: moving in a linear sequence, objects are “born” as they are constructed and they “die” upon internment into what become archaeological sites. After excavation, objects acquire “afterlives” when deposited into a museum. How does the biography concept account for the continued or punctuated movements of objects being taken apart, dispersed, or reproduced in media? They propose the concept of itinerary, which seeks to alleviate the awkwardness of using a human life course metaphor to discuss the circulation and movement of things. As Joyce notes, this is not simply a linguistic shift (37): the itinerary framework is rooted in deep engagement with anthropological and feminist theory, material culture studies, and science and technology studies. The authors first discuss the theoretical advances of the biography framework, emphasizing how it has fruitfully reoriented analyses to consider subject-object relationships, the mutual transformations of people and things, and the social agency of objects. The itinerary concept seeks to encompass these socially oriented analyses, while expanding notions of object movement, in part through an engagement with thing theory. “Itineraries of objects as things” engage with sites and temporal movements while also considering routes—pathways traversed by multiple objects (5). Another productive rendering of the itinerary concept questions the distinction between things and their representations, explored in the chapters by Neill Wallis and Gillespie. Particularly in the digital arena—an area of growing interest in museum practice—representations have the potential to travel quickly and far afield, and consideration of how these representations are positioned extends the analysis of object movement in innovative ways.