Turan’s article Material objects as facilitating environments: the Palestinian diaspora discusses in different ways the Palestinian diaspora remembers home. In many of the cases in the article the subjects were not born nor raised in the places that they hold a close attachment to. They have built this attachment through stories and objects that represent ‘home’. Mariam has a photo of her grandfather in Palestine that gives her a sense of comfort that she comes from real people that lived in a real place.
I found interesting how the body could be used as an object in the case of Bashar. Bashar has a tattoo of the Palestine flag that connects him to his roots and a nation he loves; very similar values to the rest of persons interviewed in the article. It is also interesting how these diasporic objects of memory and identity are private (tattoo) and public (photos/ flag on a wall). The ways that these object are used are distinctly individual but also similar in how they all stimulate memories.
Schamberger’s article Living in a material world: object biography and transnational lives discusses two main objects: Latvian national dress and musical instrument called the dan tre. Both of these objects mark significant moments in the subjects lives. The Latvian national dress was maid during Mrs. Kinnes life, she started making as a teenager and finished it years later. She wore her beloved dress when she meet her husband, when she protested for liberty in Latvia while she was living in Australia; this dress embodies Mrs. Kinne’s lived experiences from Latvia to Germany then lastly to Australia.
Both Turan and Schamberger discuss valuable objects of different people within a diaspora. Turan’s study of the Palestinian diaspora is mainly based on first generation Americans that are trying to keep the memory and heritage of their parents and grandparents; these objects and stories have become as Tolia-Kelly calls them re-memory. Re-memory is “not always a recall or reflection of actual experience” (Tolia-Kelly 2003: 316). It is the memories that are portrayed through objects of others/elders that young first generations have embraced as their own. Shamberger study is on two displaced persons and the objects that represent their dispersal, struggle and identity.
Overtime people change in physically and mentally, this constant change can also be applied to their possessions; objects change with the person, in their meanings, worth, and representation, and they are as transnational as the person who owns them. Lastly Schamberger refers to the importance in object biography in understanding object agency. Object biography “address the way social interactions involving people and objects create meaning’ and to understand how these meanings ‘change and are renegotiated through the life of an object” (Schamberger 2008 :277). I find difficult to understand object agency because agency is the capacity of an agent to act in the world, but how can an object be an agent and act on its own?
Question 1: How can object really have agency if it is not functional without a person to use it?
Hey Cat,
ReplyDeleteAbout your thoughts on objects and agency, I guess I thought of it kind of differently. I focused on how our capacity to act as agents is dependent upon having our actions perceived in cultural and social spaces. My agency isn't then what I am able to physically do, but how those actions are understood and positioned according to systems of meaning and value...none of us really 'act on our own.' The perspective of object agency then allows us to examine the roles and functions objects have without binding these to the individual.
I think the topic of object agency is a tricky one to grasp. Agency is of course a concept based in the human ability to have power over one's own being and actions (or the lack of power). While it's true that agency is a concept which requires placement of an individual or group into various spheres of idelogical discourse and hegemonic narratives, it must also be understood as a construct which is influenced by both internalized and externalized forces. So for an object, which was made by a human, ascribed meaning by a human, and exists to serve human ends, the question of object agency becomes increasingly complicated. By acknowledging that an object may have its own agency places a human characteristic onto an inanimate object, therby ascribing it to an individual or group either directly or indirectly.
ReplyDeleteHi Cat!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Gillian that material objects become important through the way that they are perceived and 'felt' in the context of the diaspora. In respect to your interpretation of an object's actual agency, I believe that they do take on a sort of agency in the lives of diasporic subjects, despite the fact that they may not be useful when regarded in terms of practicality. An object's usefulness can only be judged in terms of how useful it is to a particular individual, and in the case of diasporic individuals a seemingly useless object may in fact be pivotal to the way in which they construct and live out their identity.