Materiality: The Anthropology of Things

Abstract

Where do things begin and end? What are the role of things in our everyday lives? The things that we make, use, discard, admire, hate and struggle to understand have long been explicit and or implicit topics of anthropological scrutiny. This seminar engages with a diverse set of recent works that explore the topic of materiality with a global cross-cultural emphasis. Participants will examine, and become conversant in various approaches that have influenced – critical race and social justice theory, digital anthropology, decolonial perspectives, feminism, new materialism, as well as science and technology studies – the study of things: architecture, the body, the digital, the environment, everyday objects, food, infrastructure, and technology. Students will think through ways of bringing these overlapping but at times divergent perspectives into a dialogue with one another and discuss a variety of methods used to understand materiality. Due to the current closure of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, students will meet on the George Washington Campus. Over the course of the semester students will apply the range of approaches examined during to explore a single thing or discrete set of things. The course is intended to help demonstrate how the core lessons of SIMA – understanding museum objects through close multisensorial engagement and other forms of analysis – can be applied to objects in our everyday life.