Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Chapter 1 Cultural Identities, Migration, and Heritage in Contemporary Europe: An Introduction
- Chapter 2 Narratives of Resilient Heritage and the “Capacity to Aspire” during Displacement
- Chapter 3 Museum Theatre, Refugee Artists, Contingent Identities, and Heritage
- Chapter 4 Museums, Activism, and the “Ethics of Care”: Two Museum Exhibitions on the Refugee “Crisis” in Greece in 2016
- Chapter 5 Heritage Education from the Ground: Historic Schools, Cultural Diversity, and Sense of Belonging in Barcelona
- Chapter 6 Heritage Processes following Relocation: The Russian Old Believers of Romania
- Chapter 7 Doing Things/ Things Doing: Mobility, Things, Humans, Home, and the Affectivity of Migration
- Chapter 8 Staging Musical Heritage in Europe through Continuity and Change
- Afterword. Superdiversity and New Approaches to Heritage and Identities in Europe: The Way Forward
- Index
Chapter 7 - Doing Things/ Things Doing: Mobility, Things, Humans, Home, and the Affectivity of Migration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Chapter 1 Cultural Identities, Migration, and Heritage in Contemporary Europe: An Introduction
- Chapter 2 Narratives of Resilient Heritage and the “Capacity to Aspire” during Displacement
- Chapter 3 Museum Theatre, Refugee Artists, Contingent Identities, and Heritage
- Chapter 4 Museums, Activism, and the “Ethics of Care”: Two Museum Exhibitions on the Refugee “Crisis” in Greece in 2016
- Chapter 5 Heritage Education from the Ground: Historic Schools, Cultural Diversity, and Sense of Belonging in Barcelona
- Chapter 6 Heritage Processes following Relocation: The Russian Old Believers of Romania
- Chapter 7 Doing Things/ Things Doing: Mobility, Things, Humans, Home, and the Affectivity of Migration
- Chapter 8 Staging Musical Heritage in Europe through Continuity and Change
- Afterword. Superdiversity and New Approaches to Heritage and Identities in Europe: The Way Forward
- Index
Summary
In short, we need to show how the things
that people make, make people.
Daniel Miller, Materiality, 2005, 38What we don’t feel, we forget.
Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking, 2012, 248MATERIAL CULTURE THEORISTS engaged in understanding materialities have long explored the ways in which people depend on objects. From this dependence, objects have been mapped in terms of subsistence, technology, social relations, structures of meaning, ideologies, and embodiments, and therefore as artifacts, commodities, tools, belongings, tokens, and material signifiers. In this framework, anthropologists and archaeologists have explored “travelling objects,” the “biography of things,” and the “meaning of things.” From the late 1990s there has been an increasing attempt to move away from subject/ artifact dichotomies and to understand this relationship in entangled terms, that is the embedded collective sets of dependences and dependencies between humans and things. Influenced by the works of Bruno Latour, entanglement focuses first on human and nonhuman interaction through a process of mediation, and second turns into a scholarly interest on nonhumans as active actors (actants, in Latour’s words): on the being of the thing, on how things manifest themselves, and on how things are active agents of social life. Under this perspective things do not solely exist thanks to human subjectivity, but act and have performative potential in constructing the subject. Following this course of “thingification,” I analyze things that move along with people when they are dislocated from their original homes, voluntarily or involuntarily, and how the humans– thing entanglement operates during mobilities.The things here are common and available objects that are taken rather than just carried by a migrant as “salvaged-object souvenirs”;they serve a role of embedding memories, creating new present experiences, and triggering future mobilities and/ or stillness. Most of the literature on migrant objects acknowledges objects’ roles in remembering past experiences, as nostalgic souvenirs,as testimonies, or as representations of a mobile past. Instead, this chapter explores the entangled relationship between mobility, things, and migrant subjects, focusing on travelling salvaged objects as performers because of the emotional features embodied in them. I suggest that this acting of the thing is a source of affective materialities,identity construction, and place-making for those who move along with them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Heritage Discourses in EuropeResponding to Migration, Mobility, and Cultural Identities in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 83 - 98Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020