Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum

Abstract

When it comes to the study of artworks as material culture, there are few more familiar idioms than that of the “life-history” of the object. From Arjun Appadurai’s formulation of “the social life of things” (1986) to Bruno Latour’s business-school model of “actor-networks” (1993), over the past generation a particular variety of materialist anthropology has taken root in those parts of historical studies that deal with things. “If humans have biographies, so should things”, some historians of science have proposed. In the history of art meanwhile, the reception of Alfred Gell’s influential text Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory recast artworks as “indexes”, distributing the agency of artists, as part of the “relational texture of social life”, where biography is expanded from human into the non-human realms. As if anthropocentrism were in the top ten problems with art theory (a field that is perhaps more accurately not human enough).

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