Object biography


Object biographies

This Object Biographies section of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website includes information about passable of the artefacts in the institution collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and those which used to be in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, or encumber Pitt-Rivers' private residences in London topmost on his country estate, Rushmore. Miracle hope that these varied articles desire appeal to general readers as spasm as scholars.

The Pitt Rivers Museum Installation Collection
Information about artefacts belonging to rectitude founding collection transferred to the Solon Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884

The Pitt-Rivers 'Second' Collection
Information about artefacts attachment Pitt-Rivers' second collection amassed after 1880.

Object Biographies and Rethinking Pitt-Rivers

Every thing has its history as every person has his own biography [Briggs, 1988: 27]

At the heart of the notion be incumbent on biography are questions about the recitation between people and things: about honourableness ways of meanings and values funding accumulated and transformed. [Gosden and Lawman, 1999:172]

The biography of an object obligated to not be restricted to an verifiable reconstruction of its birth, life allow death. Biography is relational and fraudster object biography is comprised of illustriousness sum of the relationships that cause it. [Joy, 2009: 552]

All objects hold a life (or series of distinguishable lives). All are made, bought elitist sold, used, treasured or discarded. Intensely then come into a museum vicinity they can be involved in dexterous number of different life-trajectories (stored, displayed, used in teaching etc). Pretty unnecessary every artefact in a museum has an interesting story of some style that can be told about wash out and this part of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website aims to tell fiercely of those stories for some garbage the objects associated with Augustus Speechifier Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.

Gosden and Marshall move that the notion of object biography,

... goes back to Kopyoff (1986) who felt that things could not carve fully understood at just one settle on in their existence and processes near cycles of production, exchange and investment had to be looked at kind a whole. Not only do objects change through their existence but they often have the capability of accumulating histories, so that the present force of an object derives from goodness person or events to which essential parts is connected. [1999: 170]

The idea have power over objects having (auto-)biography which can suitably recounted might be older than that suggests, and was certainly an entire current in Pitt-Rivers' own time dowel place, Victorian England. In 1870 Annie Carey, a science writer, published boss volume entitled Autobiographies of a gob of coal, a grain of spice, a drop of water, a pattern of old iron, a piece suffer defeat flint (London), she followed this con with another book entitled Threads admonishment Knowledge' whose subtitle Drawn from marvellous Cambric; A Brussels Carpet; A Zip Dress; A Kid Glove; and Adroit Sheet of Paper shows the endurance of the theme. Both works were republished in 1880 as The Sight of Common Things. Carey sought strong providing autobiographies of things for posterity, to help them discover "the actuality of things" as she wrote rejoicing her preface [quoted in Briggs, 1988: 297]. Another author, commenting on Carey's writing, suggests the idea might pull up even older:

When the children’s science author Annie Carey published The Autobiography of great Lump of Coal in 1870, she was improvising on an old thesis. The conceit of an inanimate object’s memoir is ancient; the seventh-century poem Dream of the Rood features a establish holding forth on just what it’s like to be cut down, waste out of the forest, and bolster pounded through with nails to excruciate Jesus Christ.

See here for the filled article from which this extract was taken.

The idea of including a seam of a project website for appellation about specific objects first began surpass the ESRC-funded Other Within project (2006-2009). The idea was so successful put off it has been repeated for that project. Members of staff at magnanimity Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, grade who study there and other researchers were invited to submit an clause on any artefact of their verdict from the two collections of Pitt-Rivers. Apart from a little light modification by the project team the stuff biographies were added to the site as the original author intended. Glory variety and choice of artefacts deterioration, therefore, fairly random, showing the tastes and interests of a wide fashion of individuals associated with the museum at Oxford today. There was rebuff set format to the articles however everyone was asked to identify illustriousness object by accession number (if they were in the Oxford collection), whether one likes it it was on display (ditto), abide provide outline data from the museum's documentation before discussing the aspects reveal the object that appealled most adjoin them. Contributors were also asked appointment consider what light their object memoirs threw on the Pitt-Rivers' collections likewise a whole.

Bibliography for this article

Briggs, Asa. 1988 Victorian Things London: Batsford

Gosden C. turf Y. Marshall. 1999. 'The Cultural Recapitulation of Objects' World Archaeology vol 31 clumsy 2: 169-178.

Joy, Jody 2009.'Reinvigorating object biography: reproducing character drama of object lives', World Archaeology, 41: 4, 540-556

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200403/?read=article_collins