Kopytoff begins his essay voicing support for Appadurai’s unusual methodology that follows things-in-motion, as if they had biographies and social lives as humans do. “In doing the biography of a thing,” Kopytoff counsels, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people” (66). He asks: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its “status” and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it?What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized “ages” or periods in the thing’s “life,” and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness (66-67)? As a cultural anthropologist, Kopytoff insists that such a biographical approach be culturally informed, for things are culturally constructed as people are culturally constructed.“A culturally informed economic biography of an object would look at it as a culturally constructed entity, endowed with culturally specific meanings, and classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories” (68).
Why go to all this trouble to track the so-called life of mere things? Kopytoff argues that cultural biographies of things “make salient what might otherwise remain obscure” about the culture in which things take part (67). Put another way, things are particularly dense semiotic objects, all the more so when they are in motion.Kopytoff finds his own fieldwork among the Suku of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to be much enriched by this method. Suku huts, for example, enjoy exciting biographies far beyond what their appearance as simple, mundane, and utilitarian shelters may suggest.
A hut begins its ten-year lifespan housing a couple or, in the case of a polygynous arrangement, a wife and her children. The hut enters a new phase as it ages, becoming a guesthouse or a house for a widow, before subsequently becoming a kitchen or a hangout for teenagers.Finally, in its twilight years, the structure might be used to house goats or chickens until it collapses. According to Kopytoff, the many biographical turns of the life of the hut convey significant cultural messages. If a visitor is housed in a hut that is old enough to be a kitchen, it may say something derogatory about the visitor’s status.
If the compound lacks visitors’ huts, it may indicate that the husband is lazy or inhospitable. The evocativeness of the lives of things is true in our own culture as well.The New York Public Library’s 2005 sale of Asher Brown Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits to the Walmart heiress Alice Walton, for example, set off a frenzy of anger and even panic in elite circles. One indignant critic condemned the sale as “New York’s most egregious act of self-desecration since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station. ” That the painting was to be installed at a free public museum in the middle of the country offered little solace. It seemed to add insult to injury.
The people of tiny Bentonville, Arkansas, the site of Walton’s new museum, were very pleased, however.So too were Sotheby’s and the Library, for whom the “priceless” Kindred Spirits fetched more money at auction than had any piece of American art, ever. “The cultural responses to such biographical details,” argues Kopytoff, “reveal a tangled mass of aesthetic, historical, and even political judgments, and of convictions and values that shape our attitudes to objects” such as those labeled fine art (67). The Durand episode, indeed, revealed much about the competing and deeply felt cultural mores in play by elite literati, capitalists, and middle-American museumgoers.
