Displaced Things explores the movements of material things from
the starting point and perspective of the object. It does so
through the lens of displacement, drawing on earlier work on forced
migration and conceptualising displacement in relation to
anthropological ritual theory. It aims not only to augment
understandings of the significance of things and the complexities
of their relationships with human beings, but also to problematize
notions of the settings through which objects move including those
of museum and heritage, definable as they are by their particular
approaches to the re-contextualisations of things. Furthermore, the
book contends that displaced things are no more lost or rendered
somehow inauthentic or useless, than are displaced people; rather,
the series of shifts by which contexts, meanings, values and even
material attributes may alter over time are part of a continual
process of change sometimes gradual, sometimes abrupt and each
moment and state along the way has its own validity and
opportunity. In this perspective, the book suggests, an
object-centred view has profound implications for envisioning the
possibilities of things.
The book develops its arguments through discussion of an array
of displaced objects, including the forcibly migrated, the
collected, the institutionalised, and the bereaved. It draws
particularly but not solely on examples from the author's
anthropological field research in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) and
brings in too cases from elsewhere, considering artefacts that have
been dislocated or exiled from their original or principal
geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal
contexts. The book is structured by the stages of the ritual
process used to theorise displacement, passing in three parts from
the crossing of the boundary, through liminality, to incorporation.
The first part examines some of the ways in which things
translocate from one setting to another, the importance of
thresholds and what it means to become displaced. It opens up a
view in which narratives of the materiality of human forced
migration and of object acquisition and movement illuminate both
each other and the spatiotemporal phenomenon of displacement
itself. The book then moves on in its second part to explore issues
of representation, metaphor and the re-ordering of categories,
structures and values in the place of exile be it a refugee camp,
museum or elsewhere. It looks in detail too at continued
relationships, real and imagined and the many forms they take with
the pre-displacement past, embodied by and enacted through objects.
And finally the volume explores the ways in which the objects are
experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the
implications and potentialities they carry. "
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