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 to debates over whether artifacts “possess a special form of agency” (Mendoza-Collazos & Sonesson, 2021) that is secondary to that of humans, or conversely, whether artifacts are productive of more-than-human worlds (Creese, 2017). 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 both ritual practices and everyday life, objects are variously imbued with spirits, power, intention, and responsibility (Battaglia, 1983; Hugh-Jones, 2009).  They occupy a relational category of personhood, and their human kin have responsibilities to such lively artifacts.  As such, reorienting our understanding of artifacts from forms of property to living relations demands a subsequent reconsideration of practices of collection and display.

The relative agency of humans and objects is a subject of some contention. Take, for example, the discourse around the social force of art.  Art has agency - it does things beyond just its representational capacity (Creese, 2017: 644; see also Gell, 1998).  Alfred Gell’s writings on art and agency and “technologies of enchantment” (Gell, 1998; 1992) have been influential in developing this train of thought, particularly in how Gell aims to “consider art objects as persons” with social agency (Gell, 1998: 9; see also Creese, 2017; Fortis, 2014; Henare, Holbraad & Wastell, 2007).  However, some scholars have critiqued Gell’s tendency to relegate art to the status of secondary social agent (see Ingold, 2013).  Gell is not alone in this approach— Mendoza-Collazos & Sonesson (2021), for example, distinguish the agency of artifacts from that of “true agents” —humans — who possess a unique capacity of design, suggesting that artifacts possess a special form of agency that primarily derives from their incorporation as prosthetics of human intention (30). Other theorists have explicitly resisted this temptation to subordinate the agency of art and artifacts to that of humans. For example, in theorising the life of art, Creese (2017) argues that more-than-human agents also produce emergent forms of signification — they at once weave and are entangled in semiotic webs that sometimes involve humans but are not exclusive to the latter (645; see also Kohn, 2013). While art is animated by human systems, it also partakes in a “‘life of signs’ beyond the human” (Creese, 2017: 645).  As Harvey (2012) writes, “artifacts are not simply products of human labour that reveal (human) social dynamics. They make and offer meanings. Sometimes these meanings are of an other-than-human world” (208; see also Henare, Holbraad & Wastell, 2007).  These perspectives on more-than-human world building trouble human exceptionalism and expose the permeability of categories of personhood. In this respect, Gell’s invocation of “distributed personhood” (1998: 21; following Strathern, 1988) when thinking about art’s agency — though it perhaps failed to  “imagine a way in which the agency of objects does not ultimately depend on individual human creativity” (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell, 2007: 27; see also Creese, 2017) — contains the seeds for a more expansive understanding of how artifacts make worlds and become relations (Creese, 2017: 646).

Attending to art and artifacts in context allows us to better understand the relational forms of personhood that are produced intersubjectively between humans and “things” (Glaskin, 2011). As Glaskin (2011) notes, the categorical boundaries of when an object is a “person” or a “thing” are slippery, emergent, and context-dependent (87; see also Matthews & Roulette, 2018; Strathern, 1999). This is among the reasons that Harvey (2012) argues that we (human and non-human alike) become persons in relation to one another. Importantly, personhood is a relational, emergent category that signifies both rights and responsibilities. Furthermore, many Indigenous perspectives on object agency impose far less of a hierarchy on these relations, particularly when artifacts or erstwhile “objects” are engaged in relations of reciprocal exchange (Harvey, 2012).  From this perspective, object relations are a matter of kin.

As kin, humans and (art)ifacts are engaged in a mutuality of being (Creese, 2017: 647, drawing from Sahlins, 2011). Take, for example, the exchange that Creese describes between the Iroquois pinch-faced pipe and its smoker:

“The pipe is itself a body. The smoker and the pipe inhale and exhale as one. Both respire and in the process consume the sacred plant. The one entails the other, so that for the smoker to draw breath is for the pipe to exhale; for the one to receive, the other must give, and we are back to reciprocal exchange and, inevitably, the status of conjoint being that defines kin” (Creese, 2017: 650).

As Creese goes on to note, this kinship relationship does not require one to believe both smoker and pipe are alive, but that the act of smoking “animates the pipe and smoker alike” (650). What matters here – quite literally – is the relationship between the bodies of the pipe and smoker and how they coproduce each other as kin.

Building off conversations with North American Indigenous (Mi’kmaq and Ojibwe) and Maori peoples, Harvey (2012) notes the matter-of-fact way that Indigenous peoples often refer to the capacity for human artifacts to “act relationally” (195). Sustaining relations with non-human participants in the powwow, for example, required “effort and practice,” and yet the casual incorporation of these “relational behaviours” reveals how the animacy of object-persons is taken as a given.  This extends to lively forces like the powwow fire, which are seen by participants to have appetites:

“it was important to feed the fire not only with wood but also with gifts and sacred herbs and even with the first portion of the food prepared for all powwow participants. ‘Feeding the fire’ was not just a metaphor, the fire was understood to desire and even require food, and be grateful to those who made offerings” (Harvey, 2012: 196).

Even objects that Western ontologies view as manifestly “inanimate” are given life in ceremony — the hot stones that animate the sweat lodge are called in as “grandfathers” and function as collaborators (Harvey, 2012: 197). Indeed, a broader discussion of how to rethink “animism” in anthropology has departed from a famous exchange between ethnographer Irving Hallowell and an Anishnaabe elder.  Hallowell asked the elder, “Are all the stones we see around us here alive?”, to which the elder replied, “No! But some are” (Hallowell, 1960, as cited in Matthews & Roulette, 2018: 173).   As Matthews and Roulette (2018) note, this enigmatic answer points us towards the relationality of Indigenous concepts of personhood and agency.  Unthinking an approach to object agency premised on human exceptionalism requires learning what Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) calls the (Indigenous) grammar of animacy – and unlearning the language that relegates relations to the status of object. As, Kimmerer notes, in the Potawatomi language many of the things we treat as objects (in English) are assumed to be living:

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive” (Kimmerer, 2013: 55).

While studying artifact agency embraces a call to unwrite the human exceptionalism of anthropology, doing so also enables richer insights into the human cultures and networks that these objects at once animate and are animated by. As Fortis (2014) argues, “By considering objects as persons we de-objectify them, and by de-objectifying objects we gain better insights into their makers’ ontology” (89). For the Kuna people of Panama, for example, artifacts are not so much made as grown, drawing a parallel between the birth and development of human and artifactual bodies (90). This parallel informs not just the language of artifacts but their production; Kuna woodcarvers, for example, are careful to craft their anthropomorphic nuchu figures with the nose stemming from the root of the tree, since “nuchukana are born in the same way as human babies are, with the head positioned downwards” (Fortis, 2014: 92). Fortis notes that the nuchukana are considered co-residents and protectors of homes, and so the Kuna nourish and remember them by offering food or the smells of cooking, puffing tobacco over them, or by bathing them in herbs. It is clear from Fortis’ account that the Kuna understand these artifacts to be living relations who play a role in the household, and, like any other member, have needs and appetites that must be sated. Fortis’ account of the relationship between the Kuna and nuchukana resonates with those of other anthropologists studying the role of idols and statues in culture; the practices surrounding these artifact-persons are often as much about making kin as they are worshipping ancestors or gods (Lau, 2021; Venkatesan, 2020; Whitehead, 2018).

While many cultures associate artifacts with bodies, Hugh-Jones (2009) notes the importance of not collapsing or oversimplifying the variety of forms this association takes across cultures. There are “multiple ways of being a thing” (Santos-Granero, 2009) that reflect different social structures and cosmologies (Hugh-Jones, 2009: 35). For the Maori (in New Zealand, and in the diaspora), the meeting house where they feast is a whare tipuna: a “house ancestor” with welcoming arms and expansive (raftered) ribs (Harvey, 2012: 206).  For the Mamaindê people of Brazil, body ornaments like beads and headdresses are part of what constitutes personhood and consciousness, to the point that illness is often understood as the loss or “exchange of one’s body ornaments with those of other beings” (Miller 2009: 61).  To the northwest of the Mamaindê in the Amazon, the Tukanoan understand their ancestors to have emerged from the assemblage of divinely-gifted artifacts — the “Instruments of Life and Transformation” like rattle lances, stools, and ceremonial staffs (39). The “stuff” of Tukanoan life is associated with body parts in this cosmology — gourds with the womb, cigars and cigar holders with the penis, lances and flutes with bones, and feather ornaments with skin — and so the human body is fabricated out of these things (Hugh-Jones, 2009: 41). Reassembling the various artifacts that make up the body of absent ancestors effectively renders them present in ceremony (47). For the Tukanoan, artifacts are the building blocks of human life and embody capacities for social, material, and sexual reproduction (52).  Thus, humans do not just give form to artifacts but are given form by them.

The “culture of things” (Harvey, 2012) may be much richer than their life as objects in the ocularcentric museum space would indicate, and artifacts that might not be deemed visually appealing enough for prominent display may have a fascinating sensory life in context. Take the Śiva liṅga: its visual form is relatively uninteresting to the Western eye (“a smooth cylindrical shaft made of heavy stone emerging from an hourglass-shaped stone pedestal” [Davis, 1997: 18]), and so it is rarely displayed.  However, in the context of the south Indian temple it was not an object to be known by eye alone.  Rather, it was “smeared with unguents,” bathed in flowers and assorted liquids, opulently clothed and jeweled, serenaded, and feasted with “sumptuous meal[s]” (Davis, 1997: 19). Beyond the display case, the Śiva liṅga is lavished with sensory delights; it is only once framed in the static gaze of the museum that its sensoriality becomes impoverished. In isolating and presenting such a lively artifact for the eye alone, the museum cannot hope to approximate the culture of this thing. Like the other artifacts detailed above, the Śiva liṅga only makes sense in relation.

The question for museology that inevitably follows is this: if not display (and its colonial bedfellow, preservation), then what?  Having acknowledged the emergent and relational personhood of artifacts in context and in culture, how do we imagine a new life for collections — one that honours the agency of artifacts and resists the modernist tendency to discipline their (sensory) relations?  Following scholars like Carpenter et. al (2009), Cornu (2013), and Matthews (2014), it can be argued that reorienting our understanding of artifacts from forms of property to living relations demands a subsequent reconsideration of practices of collection and display. This subject is taken up in the probes that follow.

Works Cited

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