Kopytoff object biography of william shakespeare

Post a Comment. Tuesday, 29 March The cultural biography of things: commodification as process. Stuart Hall Library reading group discussion post.

Kopytoff object biography of william shakespeare

Thursday 10th March. Kopytoff, Igor 'The cultural biography of things: commodification as process' in Arjun Appadurai ed. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge UP, reprint , pp. Labels: reading group. No comments:. Newer Post Older Post Home. Kopytoffs argument suggested that things and commodities specifically are subject to change so their meaning cannot only be understood at a single point in time.

They move through production, exchange, and consumption processes, all of which change their function, meaning, and relationship with people; Kopytoff parallels this changing history with how the lives of people change. Kopytoffs original argument has been adapted and modified by numerous authors to explore how both people and objects change.

Janet Hoskins ; see also , for example, has used objects as a way of investigating the biographies of people, arguing that our social being is determined by our relationships with objects. They argue that the meanings of objects change as they move through exchange networks, as they are caught up in social interactions, and that for long-lived objects their biographies shift as they persist through time Gosden and Marshall, Two key early examples from the themed issue of World Archaeology edited by Gosden and Marshall illustrate these different approaches: Nick Saunders discusses the movement of pearls across the Atlantic, and Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard explore a single stone from the Late Neolithic henge of Avebury in the UK see Figure 5.

For the Amerindians pearls were valuable because of their appearance as a material that glitters and shines, which evoked for them cosmic power Saunders, As pearls were moved across the Atlantic between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, their value became a product of their rarity, exotic origin, flawless appearance, and colour — and over time — their association with fashion and wealth Saunders, For Saunders, the meanings of pearls change as a result of a.

They focus on a single stone from Avebury and how its meaning has shifted, without it moving or being exchanged, as it persisted from the Late Neolithic to the present. Joy suggests that the biographical metaphor can be seen as limiting; he argues that objects are not restricted to single trajectories and that they might die multiple times.

Despite this, he advocates for the continued utility' of the approach, arguing for the importance of seeing biographies as relational, a product of the different relations that exist between objects and people at different times and in different places Joy, Considering specifically the application of the biographical model to the study of monuments, Holtorf argues that our current approach to this area of study fixates on the birth and early childhood of sites as we focus attention upon their original form, construction, and meaning.

What Holtorf is effectively critiquing is a focus upon origins at the expense of process and history see also Gamble, ; Chapter 1. Holtorf is certainly correct to argue that, all too often, object biographies, particularly of monuments, focus on the original construction and form, effectively presenting the site as static from that moment forward.

This is not a product of biography as an approach, but rather the archaeological deployment of it; indeed, in traditional biographies childhood might be underplayed in comparison to adulthood.