The anthropological category of objects is traditionally defined as any portable or non-portable elements of the material world including artefacts, ecofacts, sediments, features and places (LaMotta (2012). These are all summed up as materialities which are produced by repeated sets of human actions but most importantly they also exhibit their own specific inherent behavioural characteristics and act beyond human control (Gosden 2005; Hodder 2000). This is because objects use human muscles and skill to bring about their own reproduction thereby gaining agency by being embedded in social relations with people (Hanare et.al 2007).Similarly in thinking about materialities in this project – we present objects as living cultures that speak, offer suggestions, make demands and pose problems. Living cultures as a concept encompasses many different traces of life such as agency, animism, spirituality, subjectivity and intelligence (Muller and Langhill 2022).
We therefore critique the anthropological category of ‘objects’ that project the makers, users and owners as anonymous, wherein the meanings behind these objects are obscured (Minott, 2019). We also underscore that in a Zimbabwean context, objects have potency and are treated by communities as living beings which they can use, touch, smell and taste. These ‘objects’ have individual biographies and carry with them important meanings connected to their ritual and cultural functions located in societies of origin. At the centre of our inquiry during this engagement with the participants were the ‘objects themselves’ that function as contact points for dialogue being vital materialities that bring people together to create new, more equitable forms of relations and constellations of co-produced knowledge (Bennet 2010). We analysed the social relations that these objects engender as well as their power in view of their presence away from home, meanings, memories, and stories that they contain.
However, materialities must be viewed as not only actively constructing the world within which people act, but also the people themselves. Material culture is thus central in creating agents and expressing agency. Wobst (2000:42) harmonised this position by recognising objects in their intimate articulation with human agency in what he terms ‘material interferences’. Interference denotes the use of objects by human agents for the desire of change , “or to prevent change that would take place in the absence of those objects” (Wobst 2000:42). Material culture is thus not a direct, non-problematic reflection of a distinct people or a spatial footprint of some past culture. Instead, “material culture results from a series of past processes and spatial relationships that impacts on behavioural activities and processes”(Wheatley and Gillings 2004:5). Torres (2002:35) also argues that, “the context within which the technological action takes place leaves its sign in the material culture and therefore, we can research that context through the examination of these remaining clues”. As such, ideas are as important as things, which mean that material objects which are carried by the migrants are not just mere objects but they also represented their ideas and beliefs (Schmidt 1983). Material culture is thus also primarily concerned with, “the study of beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions of a particular society or community at a given time through the examination of their objects.”
The relationship between people and objects can further be elucidated using the biographical approach which is underwritten by tracing the life of an object from its birth (creation) to death (disposal). The biography of an object is characterised into eight processes which are; procurement, manufacture, use, maintenance, reuse, cultural deposition, reclamation and recycling (LaMotta 2012; Walker and Lucero 2000). Generally, the biographical approach allows objects to take on human qualities in terms of human life cycles to become anthropomorphised objects (Lucero 2012). Moreover, objects possess a dual nature which entails that they simultaneously belong both to the physical and the mental realms (Faulkner et.al 2010: 4). This is because in our descriptions of objects we considers both the physical and mental categories with people ending up being materialised or objectivised within particular technologies (Faulkner et.al 2010). The dual nature concept thus underscores the idea of seeing an object as constituted by both its physical properties and functions associated with it.
Objects also have an interpretive flexibility in which, “…different interpretations or social representations can be assigned to them, and these different interpretations assign different properties to them, not just regarding their function but also regarding their technical content” (Brey 2005:67). This whole process is sometimes described as a textual metaphor in which objects are regarded as texts that allow different readings. Closely linked to the idea of interpretive flexibility is what Pfaffenberger (1992:3) refers to as the affordance of objects “…which are social representations that are legitimated by symbolic discourses that are brought to life through secular rituals”. According to Brey (2005:68), “affordances are not objective design features of artefacts but rather social constructions or social representations as they depend on a selective and constructive process of reading certain uses or meanings into artefacts”.
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