Material Objects, Materiality and Social Lives

Abstract

Scholars have long invoked ideas of totemism, fetishism and anthropomorphism as ways of conceptualizing the relation between humans and their material world. All perspectives, I believe, offer modes of ‘being’ for both the subjects and objects, transcending and shuffling subjectivity with desired objectification as and when socially necessary and culturally permissible. Neither the human subjects nor the material objects remain constant subjects and/or objects across space and time. subjectivity is objectively constituted and reciprocally, objectivity is also subjectively articulated. So, what becomes essential here is the appearance of objects and the meaning they entail, as assigned by the experiencing subject to the objects it manages, engages with and feels through and for them. The experiences arise in an intersubjective negotiation, whereby the material object is transported from its natural to a culturally-defining set up, then again returned to its ‘nature’ over time. The object travels through a life along with its subject, followed by periodic injunctions of sociability and renewal of its being. This cyclical journey from cultural significance to objectification to acquiring subjective agency and then returning to its naturalness again, the object produces a social life that’s no less significant than that of its human associates. This paper shall remain an epistemological exercise for brining into foray these notions and empirically delineating a similar discourse.