Imagine my surprise...
I'm looking up the citation for Igor Kopytoff's germinal article on object biographies, and this pops up:
Antiques Roadshow --!
Apparently, someone at PBS, bless 'em, decided to provide a
teacher's guide to material culture as well as a
definition of material culture.
The Teacher's Guide has a block quote from Kopytoff, expressing the essence of Kopytoff.
My experience with Kopytoff comes from a 2008 course on Museum Anthropology I took with fabulous, fabulous anthropologist and human being David Odo. The concept of "object biography" -- telling the life story of the object in all its relationships -- was the cornerstone of our research work in that course.
In the past, when I taught anthropology to high schoolers [yep, you read that right -- one of the few in the country doing
that and lovin' every minute of it], we watched
"The Gods Must Be Crazy." In many ways with that film, we did a post-modern deconstruction of the messages implied in that film and then proceeded to learn about much-improved methods of portraying peoples and cultures.... but if one thinks about the thinks about the life of the Coke bottle, then one has got the essence of Kopytoff's object biography.
But I hadn't read of or heard of Kopytoff at that point (c. 1989-2000).
To think, all I would have had to do was go to
Antiques Roadshow.... oh, wait, websites with teachers guides were rare then, too.
Anyway, awesome useful theory crops up in all sorts of places!
Here's the full cite:
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 64-91.
