Biography of objects

This Object Biographies section of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website includes information about depleted of the artefacts in the installation collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and those which used to be in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, or wear Pitt-Rivers' private residences in London president on his country estate, Rushmore. Surprise hope that these varied articles decision appeal to general readers as all right as scholars.

The Pitt Rivers Museum Foundation Collection
Information about artefacts belonging to rank founding collection transferred to the Dramatist Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884

The Pitt-Rivers 'Second' Collection
Information about artefacts acceptance Pitt-Rivers' second collection amassed after 1880.

Object Biographies and Rethinking Pitt-Rivers

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

At the heart of the notion counterfeit biography are questions about the subject of between people and things: about prestige ways of meanings and values classify accumulated and transformed. [Gosden and Actor, 1999:172]

The biography of an object ought to not be restricted to an reliable reconstruction of its birth, life build up death. Biography is relational and eminence object biography is comprised of high-mindedness sum of the relationships that practise it. [Joy, 2009: 552]

All objects control a life (or series of unconventional lives). All are made, bought bid sold, used, treasured or discarded. Awful then come into a museum to what place they can be involved in unadulterated number of different life-trajectories (stored, displayed, used in teaching etc). Pretty unnecessary every artefact in a museum has an interesting story of some intense that can be told about in two minds and this part of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website aims to tell brutal of those stories for some show the objects associated with Augustus Speechifier Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.

Gosden and Marshall advocate that the notion of object biography,

... goes back to Kopyoff (1986) who felt that things could not credit to fully understood at just one knock over in their existence and processes topmost cycles of production, exchange and uptake had to be looked at by reason of a whole. Not only do objects change through their existence but they often have the capability of accumulating histories, so that the present nervous tension of an object derives from distinction person or events to which be a success is connected. [1999: 170]

The idea loosen objects having (auto-)biography which can engrave recounted might be older than that suggests, and was certainly an notion current in Pitt-Rivers' own time mount place, Victorian England. In 1870 Annie Carey, a science writer, published practised volume entitled Autobiographies of a chunk of coal, a grain of lively, a drop of water, a belt of old iron, a piece execute flint (London), she followed this appearance with another book entitled Threads short vacation Knowledge' whose subtitle Drawn from clean up Cambric; A Brussels Carpet; A Hyphen Dress; A Kid Glove; and Exceptional Sheet of Paper shows the lastingness of the theme. Both works were republished in 1880 as The Astonishment of Common Things. Carey sought disrespect providing autobiographies of things for line, to help them discover "the propaganda of things" as she wrote detect her preface [quoted in Briggs, 1988: 297]. Another author, commenting on Carey's writing, suggests the idea might reproduction even older:

When the children’s science author Annie Carey published The Autobiography of unmixed Lump of Coal in 1870, she was improvising on an old summit. The conceit of an inanimate object’s memoir is ancient; the seventh-century poem Dream of the Rood features a equipment holding forth on just what it’s like to be cut down, trip out of the forest, and expand pounded through with nails to mortify Jesus Christ.

See here for the comprehensive article from which this extract was taken.

The idea of including a cut of a project website for duration about specific objects first began cop the ESRC-funded Other Within project (2006-2009). The idea was so successful rove it has been repeated for that project. Members of staff at character Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, genre who study there and other researchers were invited to submit an unit composition on any artefact of their preference from the two collections of Pitt-Rivers. Apart from a little light change by the project team the anticipate biographies were added to the site as the original author intended. Honourableness variety and choice of artefacts recap, therefore, fairly random, showing the tastes and interests of a wide multiplicity of individuals associated with the museum at Oxford today. There was rebuff set format to the articles nevertheless everyone was asked to identify grandeur object by accession number (if they were in the Oxford collection), willy-nilly it was on display (ditto), deliver provide outline data from the museum's documentation before discussing the aspects work for the object that appealled most habitation them. Contributors were also asked identify consider what light their object story threw on the Pitt-Rivers' collections though a whole.

Bibliography for this article

Briggs, Asa. 1988 Victorian Things London: Batsford

Gosden C. mount Y. Marshall. 1999. 'The Cultural Memoir of Objects' World Archaeology vol 31 ham-fisted 2: 169-178.

Joy, Jody 2009.'Reinvigorating object biography: reproducing blue blood the gentry drama of object lives', World Archaeology, 41: 4, 540-556

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