The anthropology of objects

collections, museums, and heritage

Abstract

Material objects have never been absent from the history of social or cultural anthropology and especially from the ethnographic literature. However, anthropologists have not always been interested in objects as a specific topic of description and analysis. In this essay I expose some anthropological interpretations of material objects and the way these interpretations express changes in the theoretical paradigms of anthropology. Once material objects are con­tinuously circulating in social life, I suggest that in order to understand them it is necessary to describe and analyze their displacements and transformations (or re-classifications) through diverse social and symbolic contexts: from ceremonial and commodity exchanges to institu­tional and discursive spaces such as collections, archives, museums, and cultural heritages.