What do you think?
Rate this book
In Defense Of Things
In much recent thinking, social and cultural realms are thought of as existing prior to―or detached from―things, materiality, and landscape. It is often assumed, for example, that things are entirely 'constructed' by social or cultural perceptions and have no existence in and of themselves. Bjornar Olsen takes a different position. Drawing on a range of theories, especially phenomenology and actor-network-theory, Olsen claims that human life is fully mixed up with things and that humanity and human history emerge from such relationships. Things, moreover, possess unique qualities that are inherent in our cohabitation with them―qualities that help to facilitate existential security and memory of the past. This important work of archaeological theory challenges us to reconsider our ideas about the nature of things, past and present, demonstrating that objects themselves possess a dynamic presence that we must take into account if we are to understand the world we and they inhabit.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published July 16, 2010
5 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 2, 2019
One of the most readable of the archaeological theory books I've read on the "material" turn in archaeology.
"Ingold seems to misrepresent or underestimate our own modern habitual knowledge and involvement with things. People from all over the globe and in all contexts intimately engage with things. Our ready-to-hand involvement with things and materials has probably never been greater and more diverse. Each academic conductin gan 'abstract analysis _of_ things already made' possesses an enormous reservoir of tacit knowlege related to driving, biking, walking, food preparation, IKEA furniture assembling, computer work, dressing, writing, drinking, eatching, teaching, book handling, shopping, and so forth" (16)
"We had the processualists or 'new' archaeologists who were concerned with explaining things' functional, technological, and adaptive importance,while on the other hand we had the postprocessualists struggling to interpret their social and cultural meaning (their role as signs, metaphors, symbols, etc.)" (25)
"The material was a _source_ material, treated not for its _thingness_ or sociality, 'but rather as a mediating windown onto ancient life' (Meskell 2004:14). The archaeological record, past things in the present, was conceived of as an incomplete _representation_ of the past, as traces of an _absent presence -- not as part of the past society (or the past) itself. As pertinently remarked upon by Mark Leone, 'things, or artifacts, were indicative of and not essential to culture . . . . the whole productive idea of using artifacts to reconstruct the whole of an extinct society saw artifacts as leftovers, not as essential to the very existence of social life" (2007:206).
In Material and Culture (1999), Henry Glassie discusses the ways in which handicrafts and local communities in northern Turkey create things whose meaning and place shifts through time. A handwoven rug means one thing in the community of the weaver. To the purchaser it is a reminder of a trip to Turkey. To the purchaser's child it is a reminder of childhood afternoons playing on the rug; to her child it is an old item inherited from a parent's home, used as a dog bed; to that child's child, it is an item to be placed on the rag heap. (49)
"Despite the inevitable presence of the past inour lives -- and the seemingly obvious fact that things and entities can exist at different times, and thus what is past can also be present -- it is still common to claim that the past is 'gone,' leaving us with a void that can only be filled by our historical reconstructions and imaginations: 'the actual past has gone . . . The presence of the past is manifested only in its historicized traces . . . . Such traces signify an absent presence' (White 1990:174). This conception of the past as gone, that we are living in a new time that radically breaks with the past (accessible only through the fragmentary traces it has left behind), rests on several partly (but not necessarily) interrelated premises." (111)
"The modern feeling of living in a temporally labile time, of time as shifting -- actually as moving faster and faster -- is to a large extent orchestrated by things, mainly ephemeral consumer objects mobilized in support of this regulatory ideal of progressive time" (111) most visible in the fashion industry.
"The modern concern with the past requested a certain attitude of 'forgetting' - a 'blindness' toward the temporality and 'pastness' of the 'present' material world" (112).
Heidegger: "The 'antiquities' preserved in museums (household gear, for example) belong to a 'time which is past'; yet they are still present-at-hand in the 'Present.' How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historical interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? . . . . suppose that they were still in use today, like many household heirlooms; would they then be not yet historical? All the same, whether they are in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. what is "past"? Nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. (Heidegger 1962: 431-432).
"Heidegger (and Stephen Mulhall) seem to fall back on a conception o fhistory as a series of synchronous and homogenous states of lifeworlds. To each such state there corresponds a unique 'equipmental totality,' which is replaced by another 'world' (or Umwelt) equally well united and close knit. no entity can exist at different 'times'; overlapping and enduring durations are ruled out . . . rendering the human subject as the only temporal being able to transcend its confined momentary historical location" (115).
habit memory as bodily memory preserved by repetitious practice (116)
What the excavating archaeologist encounters is always a set of hybridized conditions such as mixed layers, superimposed structures, artifacts, stones, soil, and bones mixed together – in short, sites that object to modernity and historicism’s wished-for ideal of completeness, order, and purified time. However, rather than actively using this material record to challenge historicism, the opted-for solutions have nearly always been to purify this entangled mess and to reassemble the entities to conform to the expectation of linear time and narrative history. What we have left is the distorted impression of “compressed” time; that beyond and prior to the exposed entangled mess, there is a historical order to be restored, a pure temporal specificity. We lose that which makes these sites what they are: the outcome of a gathering past constantly conditioning the conduct of the present. In this sense, the palimpsestal archaeological record is providing a far more realistic and accurate image of the past than any historical narrative.
Bjornar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects, p. 127
"Ingold seems to misrepresent or underestimate our own modern habitual knowledge and involvement with things. People from all over the globe and in all contexts intimately engage with things. Our ready-to-hand involvement with things and materials has probably never been greater and more diverse. Each academic conductin gan 'abstract analysis _of_ things already made' possesses an enormous reservoir of tacit knowlege related to driving, biking, walking, food preparation, IKEA furniture assembling, computer work, dressing, writing, drinking, eatching, teaching, book handling, shopping, and so forth" (16)
"We had the processualists or 'new' archaeologists who were concerned with explaining things' functional, technological, and adaptive importance,while on the other hand we had the postprocessualists struggling to interpret their social and cultural meaning (their role as signs, metaphors, symbols, etc.)" (25)
"The material was a _source_ material, treated not for its _thingness_ or sociality, 'but rather as a mediating windown onto ancient life' (Meskell 2004:14). The archaeological record, past things in the present, was conceived of as an incomplete _representation_ of the past, as traces of an _absent presence -- not as part of the past society (or the past) itself. As pertinently remarked upon by Mark Leone, 'things, or artifacts, were indicative of and not essential to culture . . . . the whole productive idea of using artifacts to reconstruct the whole of an extinct society saw artifacts as leftovers, not as essential to the very existence of social life" (2007:206).
In Material and Culture (1999), Henry Glassie discusses the ways in which handicrafts and local communities in northern Turkey create things whose meaning and place shifts through time. A handwoven rug means one thing in the community of the weaver. To the purchaser it is a reminder of a trip to Turkey. To the purchaser's child it is a reminder of childhood afternoons playing on the rug; to her child it is an old item inherited from a parent's home, used as a dog bed; to that child's child, it is an item to be placed on the rag heap. (49)
"Despite the inevitable presence of the past inour lives -- and the seemingly obvious fact that things and entities can exist at different times, and thus what is past can also be present -- it is still common to claim that the past is 'gone,' leaving us with a void that can only be filled by our historical reconstructions and imaginations: 'the actual past has gone . . . The presence of the past is manifested only in its historicized traces . . . . Such traces signify an absent presence' (White 1990:174). This conception of the past as gone, that we are living in a new time that radically breaks with the past (accessible only through the fragmentary traces it has left behind), rests on several partly (but not necessarily) interrelated premises." (111)
"The modern feeling of living in a temporally labile time, of time as shifting -- actually as moving faster and faster -- is to a large extent orchestrated by things, mainly ephemeral consumer objects mobilized in support of this regulatory ideal of progressive time" (111) most visible in the fashion industry.
"The modern concern with the past requested a certain attitude of 'forgetting' - a 'blindness' toward the temporality and 'pastness' of the 'present' material world" (112).
Heidegger: "The 'antiquities' preserved in museums (household gear, for example) belong to a 'time which is past'; yet they are still present-at-hand in the 'Present.' How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historical interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? . . . . suppose that they were still in use today, like many household heirlooms; would they then be not yet historical? All the same, whether they are in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. what is "past"? Nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. (Heidegger 1962: 431-432).
"Heidegger (and Stephen Mulhall) seem to fall back on a conception o fhistory as a series of synchronous and homogenous states of lifeworlds. To each such state there corresponds a unique 'equipmental totality,' which is replaced by another 'world' (or Umwelt) equally well united and close knit. no entity can exist at different 'times'; overlapping and enduring durations are ruled out . . . rendering the human subject as the only temporal being able to transcend its confined momentary historical location" (115).
habit memory as bodily memory preserved by repetitious practice (116)
What the excavating archaeologist encounters is always a set of hybridized conditions such as mixed layers, superimposed structures, artifacts, stones, soil, and bones mixed together – in short, sites that object to modernity and historicism’s wished-for ideal of completeness, order, and purified time. However, rather than actively using this material record to challenge historicism, the opted-for solutions have nearly always been to purify this entangled mess and to reassemble the entities to conform to the expectation of linear time and narrative history. What we have left is the distorted impression of “compressed” time; that beyond and prior to the exposed entangled mess, there is a historical order to be restored, a pure temporal specificity. We lose that which makes these sites what they are: the outcome of a gathering past constantly conditioning the conduct of the present. In this sense, the palimpsestal archaeological record is providing a far more realistic and accurate image of the past than any historical narrative.
Bjornar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects, p. 127
Displaying 1 of 1 review