Periodizing things

Abstract

The notion of ‘material histories’ unfolding in recent scholarship does not just offer a new term for an old idea. While inspired by the works of scholars like Sidney Mintz (1985), Igor Kopytoff (1986), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), we appear to be entering an intellectual moment characterized by a rekindled attention to how following materials might offer a productively different perspective on history that extends beyond concerns about production, consumption, and commodification—or the material confirmation of text-based historical narratives. These newer strands of scholarship (see Stahl 2010; Joyce 2012; Joyce and Gillespie 2015; Stoler 2016; Bauer 2021) aim to produce more than just histories of materials. Instead, contemporary material histories simultaneously show how material culture becomes bound up in lived socio-historical processes and how historical accounts are themselves material (Stahl 2010). They approach ‘materiality not as stuff, but as medium’ (Joyce 2015b, 188)—the traces through which the enmeshed worlds of humans and nonhumans can be gleaned. What is more, a material histories approach views space, time, and matter as coproductive. Because ‘spatial stories are also temporal’ (Joyce 2015a, 23), to speak of materials in this way is to presume that they occupy a certain spatiality and temporality. Much scholarship since Kopytoff’s foundational essay, ‘The cultural biography of things,’ positions the material world as comparable to the human world: materials can be said to be birthed, to live, and to die. But as Rosemary Joyce contends, approaching materials biographically misrepresents the trajectories of nonhuman things in the world. She argues that instead of focusing on the anthropomorphic construct of biographies we ought to shift our perspective to consider what she calls object itineraries. This approach is open-ended and multidirectional, viewing objects holistically by reaching back to consider the matter from which they were formed and reaching forward to consider the transformations they have and might yet undergo (Joyce 2015b; Bauer 2019, 341–46). While it might seem that this approach is most relevant for conventionally portable objects, it applies to all worldly phenomena and their material extensions (Joyce 2015b, 183–84). To attend to an object’s itinerary—or its ‘route’—is to trace its whereabouts and activities through time and space. Thus, even things that move less through space than through time (such as buildings) can be approached within the itineraries framework. ‘Even when we cannot be sure of the entire route,’ Joyce tells us, ‘seeking to trace a thing’s itineraries forces us to ask where it came from and