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 the Author

Janet Hoskins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars,History and Exchange (1993), winner of the 1996 Benda prize in Southeast Asian studies.

Reviews

"[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." -- Indonesia
"The stories are beautifully told, and Hoskins makes it easy to enjoy them. ...she is a very welcome guide, helping the reader follow the chains of metaphors that turn experience into poetry. Any student who has suffered through Saussure and Levi-Strauss deserves the pleasure of reading this book." -- The Journal of Asian Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9780415920124
Author Janet Hoskins
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 410g