Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples' Lives - Softcover

Hoskins, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415920124 ISBN 13: 9780415920124

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions.

About this title

Review:

[T]he book's heart really lies in the vicissitudes of personal experience, and the ethnographer's relationships with certain individuals. In this respect, the book properly takes its place among other recent works that center on the particularities of experience. Here the author's long fieldwork in Kodi serves her well.

Synopsis:

In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing." Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways. Biographical Objects is an ethnography of persons which takes the form of a study of things, showing how the object is not only a metaphor for the self but a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool for autobiographic elaboration, a way of knowing oneself through things.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0415920124
• ISBN 13: 9780415920124
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224