“Animated Words, Will Accompany My Gestures” Seismographic Choreographies of Difficult Heritage in Museums

This chapter offers an ethnographic analysis of two choreographic projects – The Sysmograph (2019) by Pélagie Gbaguidi, which addressed the Venetian “Museo del Manicomio. La follia reclusa” in the context of the Ultrasanity symposium in Venice and the planned contribution of Dorothée Munyaneza on the Marseille ethnographic collections in the framework of a symposium during Manifesta 13 (2021). Both choreographies are analysed as performances that sense and mediate traumatic pasts, object agency, and the continuation of modern legacies in museums. The objective of this contribution is to open a discussion on the possibilities of choreographies and dance not as illustrative practices, but as mediating, embodied, translated investigations of active matter, difficult heritage, and the traumatic pasts inscribed in museological narratives, objects, and spaces.

NFTs: Digital things and their criminal lives

The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.

From the Coin’s Point of View

“Money talks” is an old adage in need of a fresh interpretation. Building upon the foundational narratives of modern novelists, numismatists may now use theories of memes and object agency to explain the behaviors of coins as if our money were independent of human control. This exercise allows the reader to think of coinage in an entirely new way, giving coins an active life cycle that is Darwinian in its struggles to survive and replicate. This explains in turn some odd human behaviors, such as deferring important decisions to flipped coins, manufacturing coins that cost far more than their face value, idling large amounts of change into “nuisance jars,” and making most coins round for the past 2,600 years.

When Money Talks

This book tells the story of numismatics, the study of coins, as part of the larger history of money. It explains why and where coinage was invented and how this monetary revolution spread around the world. By examining sources ranging from Aristotle and the Gospels to modern novels and TV sitcoms, this book highlights how historians, philosophers, poets, and religious leaders have used coinage to investigate, teach, and preach about human societies. It uses new ideas about memes and object agency to ask whether coins can act as though independent of human oversight. It details how numismatists have become more scientific since the Renaissance, although misuses of physiognomy and phrenology still hamper the field. Coins are studied not solely as individual works of art, but also as meaningful groups brought together as treasures called hoards. The analysis of buried hoards offers many interesting insights into human behavior, particularly in times of political turmoil and natural disaster. Although numismatics shares a common origin with archaeology, these disciplines have clashed in recent history, particularly over the disputed rights of amateurs to collect artifacts of historical importance. This book explores the ethics of coin collecting and considers whether paleontology might provide a model for the future of numismatics. New forms of numismatic investigation, such as Cognitive Numismatics, also pave a novel path for one of the oldest and most respected contributors to the arts and humanities.

Taking the Wrong Turn? Re-examining the Potential for Practice Approaches in Archaeology

Is the ‘material’ or ‘ontological’ turn a major new paradigm in archaeological theory? Or is it another iteration of the cycle of piecemeal innovation which has created a very fragmented discipline? While there are insights from recent scholarship in this vein which are certainly important, this paper will err toward the latter view. Even though ‘symmetrical’ and other object-agency approaches are still growing in mainstream archaeological debate, much of the source literature upon which they draw has been around for several decades, and accumulated a fair amount of critique. At the very least, therefore, we need to learn from the way the materiality debate is playing out in other sub-fields. Beyond that, I will argue, we should go back to the turn before this one—the practice turn—and explore that road a bit more thoroughly, if we are to find the most useful approaches to develop in the future.

Posthumanism, New Humanism and Beyond

In this paper, we analyse some of the issues associated with the posthumanist rejection of Humanism. First, we discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that New Materialism and the Ontological Turn have brought into archaeology in terms of understanding past ontologies and decolonizing archaeological thought. Then, focusing on the concept of agency, we reflect on how its use by some posthumanist authors risks turning it into an empty signifier, which can have ethical implications and limit archaeology's potential for social critique. The concept of things’ effectancy is presented as a valuable alternative to previous conceptualizations of ‘object agency’. While we acknowledge the heuristic potential of many posthumanist proposals, we believe that humanist perspectives should not be rejected altogether. Instead of creating rigid divides, we argue that elements of New Humanism, as recently defined by philosophical anthropology, can hold value when facing current societal challenges.

More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects

Although papyri serve as critical forms of evidence for the study of ritual in the late antique Mediterranean, much about their function and significance in ritual performance remains unknown. This paper investigates this dimension of ritual texts through an examination of three papyri from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 4242, 2833, and 5304) – a horoscope, a sortes collection, and a magical formulary. Pairing close readings with an object-centered approach to the study of ritual in the ancient world, this paper addresses the text of each papyrus as well as its visual and physical characteristics including size, columniation, layout, evidence of wear, and marginalia. This analysis illuminates not only the role of each papyrus within the practice of astrology, divination, or magic, but also its influence on ritual performance. By mediating the experience of ritual participants, these papyri exert object-agency. Therefore, this paper argues that such texts are not simply passive instruments consulted by practitioners but rather active participants and collaborators in the performance of ritual.

The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

In Search of Cloudstones? The Contribution of Charismatic Rocks Towards an Understanding of Mesolithic and Neolithic Communities in the Montane Regions of South Norway

This paper discusses whether a consideration of the capacity of rocks to affect humans in terms of their charisma or object-agency can aid in understanding identified variation in patterns of lithic procurement, distribution, and use. Lithic assemblages at sites dating to both the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in two separate areas of the central mountain plateau in southern Norway demonstrate use of locally available rock. Their use contrasts with that of flint which could only be sourced at the coast. While the use of flint in regions with a restricted range of available and suitable rock types is understandable, the presence of flint in regions rich in flint alternatives is more puzzling. In order to understand the choices and actions of prehistoric communities we must consider other factors, such as a sensorial exploration of the ability of raw materials to affect humans, together with the diverging ontological perspectives that shape human–material relations and the social situations of practice. This paper argues that, in addition to their straightforward utility, lithic raw materials had socially situated object-agency and inherent characteristics of charisma and that these exerted powerful influences on human choice, perception, and preference.

Against object agency 2. Continuing the discussion with Sørensen

This paper expands upon some of the arguments and issues surrounding object agency that have been discussed in this journal (Lindstrøm 2015; 2017; Ribeiro 2016a; 2016b; Sørensen 2016; 2018). More specifically, it challenges Sørensen’s support of object agency in his latest discussion on the topic (2018). The paper is divided into three parts: first, it questions the relevance of replacing the conventional usage of ‘agency’, generally attached to sociological studies and reserved to describe human action, with one supported by the New Materialists; second, it identifies a series of contradictions in how agency is defined according to the New Materialisms, namely how it can be very labile and scalable yet simultaneously universal and applicable across all cultures and time periods; and lastly, it questions the quality of the philosophical ideas supporting the New Materialist conception of agency, and its disadvantages in light of the current re-emergence and repopularization of processual archaeology.