Revisiting ‘Entangled Objects’

The Biography of Things and the Anthropology of Difference

Sailen Routray

The history of anthropology is the history of the theorizing of alterity. The said alterity is theorized not merely in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘the savage’ and the ‘civilized’. Dualism is built into the nature of theorizing, the rods through which the scaffolding of explanation is built; tradition and modernity, clan and class, capitalistic and non-capitalistic, and last but not the least, gift and exchange. 

Such dualisms are not merely abstractions that inform theory. They have seeped into popular consciousness of the ‘other’ and have become the bricks with which the post-colonial ‘other’ constructs his/her subjectivity. Any radical critique of anthropological ‘alterization’ have to account for the fact that such ‘othering’ is now a politicized process that is central to post-colonial identity creation. The book Entangled Objects is an important text in this context, and by this 30^th year of its publication it has become essential reading. 

It deals with a very old subject, that of exchange of gifts and commodities. The early history of anthropology can be seen as the history of entanglement of cultural and economic analysis. In classical anthropology (as evident in the works of anthropologists like Mauss and Malinowski) economy and culture were inevitably connected. 

In fact, early anthropology presumed the existence of ‘total phenomena’ in pre-modern and pre-capitalistic societies that were presumed to be undifferentiated compared to modern capitalist societies. Although theorists such as Mauss tried to see extant traces of prior modes of exchange like gift in the contemporaneous West, but what underlies such ‘tracing’ is the presumed residual nature of the category in specific societies. 

There is a confusion here that Entangled Objects tries to clear up, and the confusion is a fundamental and recurrent one in anthropological literature. This is the confusion of setting up an analytical frame in terms of a set of dichotomies and then taking the dichotomies for real objects whose ‘traces’ can be sought in objects brought into existence by the very act of analysis. For example, Mauss sets the category of gift that stands for a particular mode of exchange that can only exist in contradiction to a commodity mode of exchange. But then he goes on to trace the apparent persistence of ‘the gift’ in modern societies. 

Entangled Objects provides an innovative handle to try and get away from such potential confusion. One of the most important points that the book makes and emphasizes upon is that “objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become.” Thus, from discussions surrounding modes of exchange, the book tries to shift the analytical gaze to the ‘social life of things’ themselves.

The author Nicholas Thomas borrows from Arjun Appadurai’s work to argue that objects need not be seen as passive constituents of two analytically distinct kinds of exchanges but as potential ‘subjects’ for biographies that have a ‘life’ and pass through ‘commodity phases’ and also have ‘commodity candidacies’ and ‘commodity contexts’ (Ferguson 1988). 

This is a part of the broader theoretical move that the author makes. As he states, “there should be a movement from economic abstractions to historical forms.” The shifting of the focus from modes of exchange to the biography of objects helps us to theorize about the various historically contingent forms of exchange that need not be subsumed under economic abstractions. 

This also ties up with another important theoretical move that is made in this text. Thomas correctly identifies a central problem in anthropological theorizing, where there is either a multitude of ethnographies that document a variety of forms and practices or there are grand theoretical abstractions like ‘the gift’ and the ‘the commodity’. What Thomas attempts, is to undertake mid-range analysis rather than to contribute to theory building per se. 

In the discussion of the social life of things Thomas correctly focuses on the question of alienation and value. Like Appadurai, he also borrows from Simmel (although far less explicitly) and assumes that exchange predates value. He does it by arguing for a multi-semiotic understanding of objects in which objects do not have essential, use-specific value that can predate exchange.

Alienation, due to the Marxist undertones that it carries as a concept, presupposes notions of exchange specifically involving ‘commodities’ rather than ‘gifts’. With the help of primary and secondary ethnographic data Thomas expands the conceptual load that alienation can be made to carry and shows that alienation can be integral to particular kinds of gift exchanges provided one is willing to unpack the ‘value’ that an object has for its users in the course of its ‘life’.

Such a move has far more important consequences than meets the eye in the first instance. This focus on the contingent alienability of gifts and inalienability of commodities helps in tracing the multitude ways in which extant social forms of indigenous island societies in the Western Pacific shaped their subsequent history in terms of engagement with colonialism.

Another way in which Thomas attacks the same issue is by pointing out the complex history through which indigenous communities appropriated Western goods. Here again the focus is on respecifying particular historical forms of exchange rather than on the creation of overarching economistic categories. He narrates the history of exchange of specific goods. By emphasizing on the polysemiotic nature of objects, he is able to trace the complex ways in which objects are appropriated and reappropriated. 

Thomas picks up the history of exchange of objects like whale teeth, pigs and muskets and exposes the mythical nature of narratives that trace the origin of colonialism unequivocally to the greedy appropriation by the ‘natives’ and their consequent loss of sovereignty. The gaze is also turned back at the colonizers and their various appropriations of indigenous goods are counterposed to the ‘native’ appropriation of colonial goods, so that the narrative restores agency to the indigenous people.

The aim of the narrative of Entangled Objects is to detail difference, rather than build theory. Still, it fails to draw some fairly obvious conclusions. There is an oversight of the similarity of the processes of Western appropriation if one sees the problem in the context of power asymmetry and domination.

The ‘modes’ of appropriation of objects might be different and the objectives of the various groups of Westerners in appropriating the objects might be context-specific depending upon the contingent ways in which these new objects fit into a pre-ordered semiotic system of objects. But what stays constant is the ground in which such appropriation is taking place, that of social worlds reconstituted by colonial violence.

This brings us back to an important question that can be seen as central to the enterprise of social theorizing: theorizing difference. Unlike Appadurai, Thomas does not completely erase the difference between gifts and commodities. He uses the dichotomy between them as a heuristic device that makes the subsequent discussion possible. 

In fact, Thomas erases one set of differences (that between gift and commodity, clan and class) to theorize about another set of differences; those within the indigenous island societies in the Western Pacific. This in turn is entangled in another set of arguments about the need to bridge the difference between the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilized’ that lie at the heart of anthropology and argues for its final erasure.

It is one thing to show that human groups embody differences that cannot be placed in terms of a hierarchy and another thing to retheorize these differences without taking recourse to any strict notion of hierarchy. This seems to be necessary in the context of post-colonial identity politics that draws its legitimacy from this very process of ‘othering,’ as is evident from Thomas’s fieldwork in Fiji itself. 

Post-colonial Fijians revel in their otherness and emphasize the communal nature of their social existence as opposed to Western or Indian individualism. Entangled Objects does only the first half of the project. But yet it does it with a finesse and clarity that is rare.

Details About the Book: Nicholas Thomas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. Acknowledgments, Introduction, Notes and Index.