Objects on the loose: Ethnographic encounters with unruly artefacts a foreword

Abstract

The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do with things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors and commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic and disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical writings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and those of his collaborators in the Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). As will become clear, our interests have less to do with formulating critiques or theory-driven responses to this seminal work than with setting out to explore possibilities for ethnographic expansions, revisions, and variations on its themes, and for linking the 'social life of things' to questions of modernity, nationalism, and transnational cultural projects and dilemmas. In our discussions, we observe that as things become unmoored or dislodged from their place of origin, manufacture, or intended use, they are inevitably snared in new hierarchies of value, exchange, and recognition. Thus our discussions have to do with the social and moral orbit of things that have broken loose from some prior 'life,' or that mimic the lives of other objects. Different scenes of exchange and consumption are clearly influential in the shaping of such hierarchies. But so, too, are the national and international projects that encourage social identities and anxieties to attach to certain kinds of objects. For this reason, we have felt obliged to take a look at the moral debates and crises of mourning that travel along with circulating objects.