Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-verbal Communication

by Pierre Lemonnier

Overview

This concise book shows the importance of objects that are considered ordinary by cultural outsiders and scholars, yet lie at the heart of the systems of thought and practices of their makers and users. This volume demonstrates the role of these objects in nonverbal communication, both in non-ritual and in ritual situations. Lemonnier shows that some objects, their physical properties and their material implementation, are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking, as well as sometimes the only means of expressing the inexpressible. Through the study of the most mundane technical activities such as fence building, creating models cars, or trapping fish, we often gain a better understanding of what these objects mean and how they work within their cultures of origin. In addition to anthropologists and archaeologists, this book will also be of interest to sociologists, historians, philosophers, cognitive anthropologists and primatologists, for whom the intertwining of “function” and “style” is the very mark of all cultural behavior.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611320572
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/31/2013
Series:	UCL Institute of Archaeology Critical Cultural Heritage Series , #10
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Chapter 1 Too Sturdy To Be Mundane: A Baruya Garden Fence; Chapter 2 Entwined by Nature: Eels, Traps, and Ritual; Chapter 3 The Anthropological Complexity of Unremarkable Drums; Chapter 4 Artefacts as Images or How to Relate Relations; Chapter 5 Race Cars, Dinky Toys, and Aging Boys; Chapter 6 What Materiality Means: Objects as Resonators; Chapter 7 What’s New? Blurring Anthropological Borders but Keeping “Technology” in Mind; Chapter 8 The Paradox of Marginal Changes;

Editorial Reviews

Pierre Lemonnier is one of the  few anthropologists of techniques trained in the tradition of Leroi-Gourhan. In his capable hands, daily objects from New Guinea, as well as from Europe, are taken out of the boring life granted to them by the common notion of 'matter' and begin to extend their connections to the whole social domain, forcing us to understand differently what is meant by 'materiality'.”

—Bruno Latour, Institut d'études politiques de Paris



“Lemonnier (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) addresses debates in anthropology on the role objects play in the lives of their makers and users. A proponent of the cultural technology (technologie culturelle) approach to material culture, Lemonnier focuses on the ways that objects contribute to the sharing of values and to the social relations of the people who engage with them. Using four examples, he argues that objects of everyday use can be just as meaningful as works of art or ritual objects. Three of the examples—garden fences, eel traps, and drums—come from the author's fieldwork with the Ankave and Baruya peoples of Papua New Guinea. The fourth stems from the author's experiences as a collector of model racing cars.... An important expansion of the cultural technology approach, the book takes a critical stance toward theorizing on material culture.  Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”

—CHOICE

From the Publisher