Overview

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an ‘object-centred’ approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how ‘things’ mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

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9781474264778

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Reviews

Provocative and absorbing, The Inbetweenness of Thingsprovides a diverse set of case studies of past and present things of our world. Taking movement or inbetweenness as its core analytic, Paul Basu and this volume's contributors demonstrate how productive research on materiality can be. This volume is a vibrant addition to the interdisciplinary study of objects, and should be widely read. Joshua A. Bell, National Museum of Natural History, USA Paul Basu makes a unique and compelling contribution to the fields of anthropology, material culture and museology. Pioneering in cutting-edge scholarship, Basu opens up the fascinating world of 'inbetween' objects to a broader audience, with an analysis of a gamut of anthropological tropes from the fetish to the exotica of the European Wunderkammer. Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria

Author Information

Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

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