Social Lives of Objects

Objects within cultures can hold a lot of meaning although many are almost subconscious abstracts that many are unaware of on the surface. according to Arjuna Appadurai "Since then, I have continued to be engaged with the idea that persons and things are not radically distinct categories, and that the transactions that surround things are invested with the properties of social relations. Thus, today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom" (Appadurai, 15). The social life of an object revolves around its use within a particular culture, and its importance in a culture as well This changes between cultures and even the time period of each culture. One example of this is the aboriginal art of west desert as Myers describes "It began with the deployment of iconographic images used in ritual, body decoration, cave painting, and so on -- an iconography related indexically to the sacred traditions of the ancestral Dreaming, which gave the Aboriginal cultural world its meaning and shape -- into acrylic paintings on 2-dimensional particle board or canvas" (Myers, 5). Which according to Myers was drastically different than how she had learned how to see, and understand the art of this particular culture. One explanation for this drastic change in art style and the social aspect of art within that particular culture could have been due to hybridization and globalization, where the distiction between the concepts of "primitive" and "western" art begin to blur together. 

As mentioned above the social life of an object whether a piece of art or a rock depends on the importance and relevance in  particular culture at that specific time. Because as the culture changes so could the importance of an object or the replacement of that object because it no longer fulfills the social needs for the culture. Like how we talked about in class about the changes recently to the aboriginal South African basket weaving where they are now using telephone and copper wire and selling them to tourists. These objects only serve as potential profit from cheaper resources and a wider western audience.

Appadurai, A. "The Thing Itself." Public Culture 18.1 (2006): 15-22. Web. 18 Nov. 2011.

 Myers, Fred  "ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, ETHNOGRAPHIES OF THE PRESENT"