We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once.
Adopting an ‘object-centred’ approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how ‘things’ mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies.
An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. The Inbetweenness of Things
Paul Basu, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
Museums as Sites of Inbetweenness
2. The Inbetweenness of the Vitrine: Three Parerga of a Feather Headdress
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Independent Artist/Curator, UK
3. The Buzz of Displacement: Liminality amongst Burmese Court Objects in Oxford, London and Yangon
Sandra H. Dudley, University of Leicester, UK
4. Object and Spirit Agency: The G’psgolox Poles as Mediators within and between Colonized and Colonizer Cultures
Stacey R. Jessiman, Stanford University, USA
Masquerades and Mediation
5. At the Centre of Everything? A Nigerian Mask and Its Histories
John Picton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
6. Amòdu and the Material Manifestation of Eégún
Will Rea, University of Leeds, UK
Syncretism, Intercession and Iconoclash
7. Desire, Imitation and Ambiguity in Asmat Sculpture
Nick Stanley, British Museum, UK
8. Animating Relationships: Inca Conopa and Modern Illa as Meditating Objects
Bill Sillar, University College London, UK
9. Visual Diplomacy: Art Circulation and Iconoclashes in the Kingdom of Bamum
Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada
Hybridity in Form and Function
10. Mediating between Mayas and the Art Market: The Traditional-yet-Contemporary Carved Gourd Vessel
Mary Katherine Scott, University of Wyoming, USA
11. Queen Victoria’s Samoan Bonnet
Catherine Cummings, University of Exeter, USA
12. The Indigenization of the Transcultural Teacup in Colonial Canada
Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, Simon Fraser University, Canada and Lisa Truong, Carleton University, Canada
Between Image, Text and Object
13. ‘Curious Statues so Cunningly Contrived’: Plato’s Silenus, Inwardness and Inbetweenness
Lucy Razzall, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
14, Coinage between Cultures: Mediating Power in Roman Macedonia
Clare Rowan, University of Warwick, UK
Index
About the Author :
Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, UK
Review :
Provocative and absorbing, The Inbetweenness of Thingsprovides a diverse set of case studies of past and present things of our world. Taking movement or “inbetweenness” as its core analytic, Paul Basu and this volume’s contributors demonstrate how productive research on materiality can be. This volume is a vibrant addition to the interdisciplinary study of objects, and should be widely read.
Paul Basu makes a unique and compelling contribution to the fields of anthropology, material culture and museology. Pioneering in cutting-edge scholarship, Basu opens up the fascinating world of "inbetween" objects to a broader audience, with an analysis of a gamut of anthropological tropes from the fetish to the exotica of the European Wunderkammer.
