Biographical Objects

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing." Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways. Biographical Objectsis an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.

The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Historical biography has a mixed reputation: at its best it can reveal much not only about an individual, but the wider context of their life and society; at worst it can result in a narrowly focused work of hagiography or condemnation. Yet in spite of its sometimes inferior status amongst academics, biography has remained a popular genre, and in recent years has developed into new and intriguing areas. As the essays in this volume reveal, scholars from an array of different disciplines have embraced what biography can offer them, expanding the remit of biography from people to things, tracing the ‘life’ of their chosen object from creation to use to disposal to rediscovery. The increasing concern with the physicality of manuscripts and books has also meant an awareness of and interest in the ‘lives’ of these forms of material culture. Historians have also become increasingly interested in groups of individuals resulting in prosopographical studies. A book on the diversity of biography is therefore very timely, exploring the multi-disciplinary application of historical biography in the period 500-1700. It presents fourteen case studies offering new approaches to historical biography, written by early-career researchers from backgrounds in archaeology, English, art, architectural history and history, demonstrating different approaches and techniques. Overall, the collection is a strong and united statement by a group of early-career researchers who insist on the vitality of biography as a central concern of historians across the disciplines of the humanities. Contributors believe that the ‘life’ is a fundamental medium of study for the medieval and early modern periods, and thus . bolsters the move back towards biography as a primary tool of medieval and early modern scholars, as well as a tool for future research for humanities scholars interested in biography.

Exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, this collection of essays examines examples from the early 19th century to the present day.

This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

In 1866, Alexander Dunlop, a free black living in Williamsburg Virginia, did three unusual things. He had an audience with the President of the United States, testified in front of the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, and he purchased a tombstone for his wife, Lucy Ann Dunlop. Purchases of this sort were rarities among Virginia’s free black community—and this particular gravestone is made more significant by Dunlop’s choice of words, his political advocacy, and the racialized rhetoric of the period. Carved by a pair of Richmond-based carvers, who like many other Southern monument makers, contributed to celebrating and mythologizing the “Lost Cause” in the wake of the Civil War, Lucy Ann’s tombstone is a powerful statement of Dunlop’s belief in the worth of all men and his hopes for the future. Buried in 1925 by the white members of a church congregation, and again in the 1960s by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the tombstone was excavated in 2003. Analysis, conservation, and long-term interpretation were undertaken by the Foundation in partnership with the community of the First Baptist Church, a historically black church within which Alexander Dunlop was a leader. “Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation” examines the story of the tombstone through a blend of object biography and micro-historical approaches and contrasts it with other memory projects, like the remembrance of the Civil War dead. Data from a regional survey of nineteenth-century cemeteries, historical accounts, literary sources, and the visual arts are woven together to explore the agentive relationships between monuments, their commissioners, their creators and their viewers and the ways in which memory is created and contested and how this impacts the history we learn and preserve.

An alternative history of Roman Britain