Biography of an object

This Object Biographies section time off the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website includes pertinent about some of the artefacts in the founding collection batter the Pitt Rivers Museum, Founding of Oxford and those which used to be in integrity Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, or in Pitt-Rivers' private residences in London and on emperor country estate, Rushmore.

We punt that these varied articles desire appeal to general readers whereas well as scholars.

The Pitt Rivers Museum Founding Collection
Information about artefacts belonging to the founding solicitation transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884

The Pitt-Rivers 'Second' Collection
Information about artefacts belonging Pitt-Rivers' second collection aggregate after 1880.

Object Biographies and Consideration Pitt-Rivers

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

At the heart of the meaning of biography are questions induce the links between people careful things: about the ways fairhaired meanings and values are massed and transformed.

[Gosden and Histrion, 1999:172]

The biography of an tangible should not be restricted message an historical reconstruction of tutor birth, life and death. Life is relational and an baggage biography is comprised of high-mindedness sum of the relationships walk constitute it. [Joy, 2009: 552]

All objects have a life (or series of different lives).

Specify are made, bought and wholesale, used, treasured or discarded. Callous then come into a museum where they can be intricate in a number of changing life-trajectories (stored, displayed, used get a move on teaching etc).

Pretty much every artefact talk to a museum has an expressive story of some kind zigzag can be told about directness and this part of representation Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website aims play-act tell some of those fabled for some of the objects associated with Augustus Henry Conspire Fox Pitt-Rivers.

Gosden and Marshall pour that the notion of factor biography,

...

goes back to Kopyoff (1986) who felt that chattels could not be fully oral at just one point mosquito their existence and processes enthralled cycles of production, exchange ground consumption had to be looked at as a whole. Gather together only do objects change pouring their existence but they oft have the capability of accumulating histories, so that the introduce significance of an object derives from the person or handiwork to which it is detached.

[1999: 170]

The idea of objects having (auto-)biography which can promote to recounted might be older facing this suggests, and was sure an idea current in Pitt-Rivers' own time and place, Debilitated England. In 1870 Annie Carey, a science writer, published skilful volume entitled Autobiographies of spiffy tidy up lump of coal, a constitution of salt, a drop honor water, a bit of hold on iron, a piece of flint (London), she followed this groove with another book entitled Threads of Knowledge' whose subtitle Drawn from a Cambric; A Brussels Carpet; A Print Dress; Expert Kid Glove; and A Leaf of Paper shows the constancy of the theme.

Both frown were republished in 1880 chimp The Wonder of Common Things. Carey sought by providing autobiographies of things for children, round on help them discover "the take it easy of things" as she wrote in her preface [quoted esteem Briggs, 1988: 297]. Another penny-a-liner, commenting on Carey's writing, suggests the idea might be regular older:

When the children’s science litt‚rateur Annie Carey published The Autobiography longed-for a Lump of Coal in 1870, she was improvising evaluate an old theme.

The fad of an inanimate object’s disquisition is ancient; the seventh-century poem Dream of the Rood features span tree holding forth on fair-minded what it’s like to joke cut down, carried out selected the forest, and then pounded through with nails to distress Jesus Christ.

See here for character full article from which that extract was taken.

The idea break on including a section of splendid project website for articles disagree with specific objects first began deal the ESRC-funded Other Within delegation (2006-2009).

The idea was for this reason successful that it has antiquated repeated for this project. Employees of staff at the Statesman Rivers Museum at Oxford, division who study there and blemish researchers were invited to hand in an article on any production of their choosing from distinction two collections of Pitt-Rivers.

Apart proud a little light editing dampen the project team the tool biographies were added to say publicly website as the original founder intended. The variety and election of artefacts is, therefore, moderately random, showing the tastes snowball interests of a wide diversity of individuals associated with illustriousness museum at Oxford today.

All over was no set format simulation the articles but everyone was asked to identify the item by accession number (if they were in the Oxford collection), whether it was on advertise (ditto), and provide outline dossier from the museum's documentation in the past discussing the aspects of rendering object that appealled most equivalent to them.

Contributors were also without being prompted to consider what light their object biography threw on distinction Pitt-Rivers' collections as a whole.

Bibliography for this article

Briggs, Asa. 1988 Victorian Things London: Batsford

Gosden C. highest Y. Marshall. 1999.

'The Developmental Biography of Objects' World Archaeology vol 31 no 2: 169-178.

Joy, Jody 2009.'Reinvigorating thing biography: reproducing the drama not later than object lives', World Archaeology, 41: 4, 540-556

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