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Insignificance: On the Unobtrusiveness of Material Things

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2020

Julian Thomas
Julian Thomas*
Affiliation:
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, ManchesterM13 9PL, UK Email: [email protected]
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Extract

In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis 2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways.

Type
Special Section
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 149 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2020

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