Catalogue of Practices of Production, Animation, and Socialization of Artifacts

(Living) Things: Sentient artifacts in context and culture

by Dr. Erin E. Lynch

In our modern world, the term “artifact” signifies a thing out of time and place, preserved and decontextualized, often presented for an alien audience.  But what is absent from this understanding of artifacts is the sheer aliveness of “things” in many cultures, where what more limited imaginings of materiality position as pure objects – things that may be owned - are more aptly object-relations or “object-persons” (Harvey, 2012)– things that may be owed. The power such (living) things hold in cultural practice has led some to argue that artifacts “possess a special form of agency” (Mendoza-Collazos &  Sonesson, 2021). This probe surveys relevant literature to explore how artifacts are treated as sentient beings in their cultures of provenance, with appetites that must be fed, wills of their own, and as agents in networks of relations.  It also examines how sensory, decolonial, and posthumanist approaches reveal the kinship relations entangled with art and religious objects (Creese, 2017; Davis, 1997, Glaskin, 2011) and how bodies and “things” come to inform one another (Fortis, 2014; Hugh-Jones, 2009, Miller, 2009). In these practices, objects can stand in for persons (Battaglia, 1983) or are sometimes possessed in the more necromantic sense of the term – imbued with spirits or manifestations of power, intention, or responsibility (Hugh-Jones, 2009). Likewise, their human kin often have responsibilities to these artifacts. Following scholars like Carpenter et. al (2009), Cornu (2013), and Matthews (2014), I also argue that reorienting our understanding of artifacts from forms of property to living relations demands a subsequent reconsideration of practices of collection and display.