Thinking Through Things

What would an artefact-based anthropology look like if it were not about material culture? And could such a project aspire, not to create a new sub-genre within the discipline, but to reconfigure anthropologys analytic methodologies more generally? Thinking Through Things is an ambitious foray by a group of young anthropologists who share common concerns about the place of objects and materiality in their interpretive struggles. More than simply a critique of existing anthropological reasoning, the volume puts forward a positive programme for the re-fashioning of anthropological endeavours. Testing the limit of the persistent analytical assumption that meanings are fundamentally distinct from their material manifestations, Thinking Through Things attempts to explore the consequences of an apparently counter-intuitive analytic possibility: that artifacts might be treated as sui generis meanings.