Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives
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.\ \...
Search in google:
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.
Acknowledgments1Introduction12The Betel Bag: A Sack for Souls and Stories253Domesticating Animals and Wives: Women's Fables of Protest594The Royal Snake Shroud: Local Weaving and Colonial Kingship835Spindles and Spinsters: The Loss of Romantic Love1156The Drum and Masculinity: A Healer's Story1377Green Bottles and Green Death: Modernity and the Ephemeral1618Conclusions: Stories and Objects in Lived Dualities183References199Index211
