Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts in Ethnographic Perspective

Description

CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX

Conveners:

Amiria Henare (Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Martin Holbraad (Department of Anthropology, University College London)
Sari Wastell (Department of Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

What would an artefact-based anthropology look like if it were not about material culture? And what could it offer disciplines that continue to separate 'things' from the meanings that attach to them? 'Thinking Through Things' initiates a renewed interdisciplinary debate about knowledge, social life and materiality with fields that place artefacts at the centre of inquiry.

This conference aims to explore how the study of artefacts, broadly conceived, can offer theoretical insights and analytic affordances not available through other means. In so doing, it offers a challenge both to disciplines that treat materiality as something on top of which sociality is elaborated, and to those which restrict their enquiries to the study of discourse and behaviour as if these were fundamentally immaterial things. Instead of supporting the growth of subdisciplines dedicated to material culture, then, the conference seeks to reposition artefact-based research at the heart of anthropology among other social sciences and humanities.