Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-01T01:15:35.162Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 7 - Doing Things/ Things Doing: Mobility, Things, Humans, Home, and the Affectivity of Migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2020

Get access

Summary

In short, we need to show how the things

that people make, make people.

Daniel Miller, Materiality, 2005, 38

What we don’t feel, we forget.

Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking, 2012, 248

MATERIAL CULTURE THEORISTS engaged in understanding materialities have long explored the ways in which people depend on objects. From this dependence, objects have been mapped in terms of subsistence, technology, social relations, structures of meaning, ideologies, and embodiments, and therefore as artifacts, commodities, tools, belongings, tokens, and material signifiers. In this framework, anthropologists and archaeologists have explored “travelling objects,” the “biography of things,” and the “meaning of things.” From the late 1990s there has been an increasing attempt to move away from subject/ artifact dichotomies and to understand this relationship in entangled terms, that is the embedded collective sets of dependences and dependencies between humans and things. Influenced by the works of Bruno Latour, entanglement focuses first on human and nonhuman interaction through a process of mediation, and second turns into a scholarly interest on nonhumans as active actors (actants, in Latour’s words): on the being of the thing, on how things manifest themselves, and on how things are active agents of social life. Under this perspective things do not solely exist thanks to human subjectivity, but act and have performative potential in constructing the subject. Following this course of “thingification,” I analyze things that move along with people when they are dislocated from their original homes, voluntarily or involuntarily, and how the humans– thing entanglement operates during mobilities.The things here are common and available objects that are taken rather than just carried by a migrant as “salvaged-object souvenirs”;they serve a role of embedding memories, creating new present experiences, and triggering future mobilities and/ or stillness. Most of the literature on migrant objects acknowledges objects’ roles in remembering past experiences, as nostalgic souvenirs,as testimonies, or as representations of a mobile past. Instead, this chapter explores the entangled relationship between mobility, things, and migrant subjects, focusing on travelling salvaged objects as performers because of the emotional features embodied in them. I suggest that this acting of the thing is a source of affective materialities,identity construction, and place-making for those who move along with them.

Type
Chapter
Information
Heritage Discourses in Europe
Responding to Migration, Mobility, and Cultural Identities in the Twenty-First Century
, pp. 83 - 98
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×