The Personhood of Objects

Tolia-Kelly’s examination of the role of visual and material cultures in forming re-memory and Schamberger et al’s paper on the use of object biographies in the Australian Journeys Gallery both articulate promising possibilities for the study of objects.

Re-memory is expressed as communal, social and cultural as opposed to memory which is largely understood as an autobiographical narrative located within the individual. Conventional understandings of memory are demonstrably insufficient to theorize processes of migration and identity because memory seems to privilege time over space whereas “Re-memory is memory that is encountered in the everyday, but is not always a recall or reflection of actual experience” (316). Tolia-Kelly argues for the significance of re-memory as methodology and the possibilities it offers for theorizing the experiences of diasporic communities. Re-memory relates to the totality of the everyday experience. It is spatially attuned and acknowledges how belonging is shaped in landscapes and lived environments. Re-memory is a valuable perspective or methodology for understanding what Tolia-Kelly refers to as “post-colonial space-time,” where identity and heritage don’t abide by or fit within formally recognized boundaries, and are established through material culture and commodities (315).

Schamberger et al explore the object biographies of the Australian Journeys exhibit through the lens of transubstantiation, the complex and layered meanings that are imbued in objects that allow objects to take on qualities beyond their physical form. The article explores how interactions create the meanings that are ascribed to objects. The notion of object biographies and attributing agency to objects challenges the traditional dichotomy and delineation between objects as passive and people as active. Instead the angle that this exhibit takes demonstrates how in our material world, or commodity culture people and objects are mutually constituted. But both of the examples were centred around objects that had meaning to particular individuals, and it would have been interesting to have an object biography that was less connected to autobiography included in the article. According to Schamberger there is a range of relationships between objects and people explored in the exhibit, “Not all of the biographies were about artefacts with detailed provenance or things strongly linked to a particular personal biography,” and I wish some of these had been showcased in the article (279). I didn’t think that the theoretical innovations that the article promised could be realized through the methodology of object biography were realized in the examples offered.

The narratives that emerge from Tolia-Kelly’s interviews are positioned as representing a cultural identity, not just personal, autobiographical stories. In Morrison’s application of the concept of re-memory black cultural identity is united by the experience of slavery, “Morrison proposes re-memory as a form of race-memory” (316). In that regard I found myself questioning the category of British Asian that Tolia-Kelly relies upon in her article. Is there a community, culture, or collective history of British Asian-ness? I wondered if in some ways the article was playing into how South Asian-ness is positioned in multicultural contexts as an essential category without questioning the existence and construct of that category. I thought Tolia-Kelly’s article collapsed some differences between and within South Asian women. The examples from interviews were focused upon Hindu mandirs yet India is also a poly-ethnic and religiously diverse society and thus is there a collective social memory in this context? Tolia-Kelly acknowledges the many differences between the black British experience and the dangers of simply applying Morrison and Gilroy’s theorizing of re-memory to another group, “For British Asians, however, there is not always rupture from a singular national culture or territory” (327). In some ways I think the discourse or re-memory idealizes a utopian notion of ‘back home’ that is constructed within the diasporic imaginary*. In the absence of a collective and shared historical narrative, is re-memory an appropriate concept or methodology?

By repositioning how objects can be understood Schamberger’s article prompts a questioning of the insistence upon separating people and things/objects as two separate categories. I think this has political and theoretical implications in understanding Western culture and the role of the Englightenment. Object biographies challenge the neat delineation and insistence upon people and things as separate by demonstrating how they shape each other and are mutually constitutive. Our insistence upon viewing people and objects as separate categories, with a firm boundary between them is central to how we conceive of ourselves as human, it is how we cling to and define personhood. We want to understand individuals as possessing agency, freedom, and rationality not as social and cultural constructs accorded meaning through culturally embedded hierarchies of meaning and value. The notion of personhood exists as a scalar quality that one’s humanity is dependent upon, and that can grow and diminish over time. Diminished personhood is a characteristic that unites marginalized and vulnerable social identities. Disability, sexuality, race, gender, and class are all categories according to which one’s personhood is socially, culturally, and economically adjudicated. It speaks to our epistemological system, economic, religious and cultural modes of being that we separate and elevate human-ness or personhood from objects and animals…but what exactly are these categories we cling to and what do they mean? How different are people and objects?

I’ve focused on Tolia-Kelly’s discussion of the concept of re-memory, and Schamberger et al’s questioning of the boundary between people and objects or things. Together these aspects of the articles pose important questions regarding how the study of objects can challenge current understandings of migration, disapora, and transnational identity. Both articles challenge the notion of the migrant as a discrete person.

*As I read the article I was reminded of a moment from the film Brick Lane where one of the characters challenges the idea of a Muslim brotherhood being put forth in response to post 9/11 Islamaphobia:

Mr. KAUSHIK: (As Chanu Ahmed) You think Islam unites us all? You think Islam is the place you come from? Islam is not a country. You think you are my brother more than the next man on the street because we are both Muslims? All this fighting talk that we are all brothers. Three million died in East Pakistan in this lifetime. It was Muslim killing a Muslim. Have you forgotten? Are you so lost? My Islam is in here, and that is the only thing worth defending.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91684115