Mundane Objects ─ Materiality and Non-verbal Communication

This concise book shows the importance of objects that are considered ordinary by cultural outsiders and scholars, yet lie at the heart of the systems of thought and practices of their makers and users. This volume demonstrates the role of these objects in non-verbal communication, both in non-ritual and in ritual situations. Lemonnier shows that some objects, their physical properties and their material implementation, are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking, as well as sometimes the only means of expressing the inexpressible. Through the study of the most mundane technical activities such as fence building, creating models cars, or trapping fish, we often gain a better understanding of what these objects mean and how they work within their cultures of origin. In addition to anthropologists and archaeologists, this book will also be of interest to sociologists, historians, philosophers, cognitive anthropologists and primatologists, for whom the intertwining of “function” and “style” is the very mark of all cultural behavior.

Pierre Lemonnier is a Director of research at the CNRS (Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Oceanie, Aix-Marseille-Universite, France). He conducted repeated field research from 1978 to 1982 among the various Anga people of Papua New Guinea and has worked on numerous topics including war and peace-making, and the anthropology of technology. In 1982, he chose an Ankave valley for long-term anthropological fieldwork, to which he regularly returns. He has been recently involved in debates on lost tribes with the media and has written a book on sorcery and cannibalism among the Ankave (Le sabbat des lucioles, 2006). His other fields of interest are the interpretation of the Ankave and Baruya male initiations and the comparative study of Anga cultures. Pierre Lemonnier has published several books in the field of the anthropology of technics (Elements for an Anthropology of Technology, 1992, and Technological Choices, 1993), as well as numerous articles.