What is the source of power that objects (and material things more generally) have over people? Four points of view may be analytically distinguished:

1. that things become powerful when they are viewed as encoding or standing for or representing social relations among people. It is not just that they stand for social relations, but also that this semiotic value is not (or not fully) recognized by the people over whom the objects hold sway. Powerful objects qua material things are sign vehicles [Marx’s commodity fetishism argument; Durkheim’s totemism argument], but the sign vehicles are not publicly understood as such. This peculiar semiotic relationship imbues the objects with power.

2. that the power of objects derives from the meanings that are attributed to them through culture and language and meaningful personal experience. Objects become powerful when people imbue them with significance, whether or not they operate as disguised representations of social relationships. Their material characteristics may be relevant to the meanings that are attributed, but it is the meanings and not the characteristics that produce the power [Kopytoff’s “Cultural Biography of Things” argument]. This point of view grows out of the culturalist tradition more generally, going back to Boas’s observations about the color of seawater among Eskimos, and through Sapir’s idea that language cuts the grooves along which people think, and up to the present. This point of view is, in short, that culture makes objects meaningful.

3. that objects, and especially objects constructed by human beings (material culture, but also material instances of behaviors, speech, music, and the like.) are not only given meaning by culture, nor are they only (disguised) representations of social relations, but they are also themselves vehicles through which culture (as social learning) moves through the world. Their relation to people consists in providing the conduits for perception through which culture passes. Things may derive power from their role as conduits for culture.

There are other related positions that the seminar might explore as well, for example, that objects as such must be understood in the context of exchange theory and global capitalism [Fred Meyers’ edited volume The Empire of Things]. In proposing this seminar topic, we make no assumption that the answer will be the same for every object or kind of object— the cross, for example, or gold.

In addition to looking into the question of sources, the seminar should explore the nature of the power objects have. In particular, what is the relationship between power and “value”? The latter is central in exchange theory, but seems to direct attention to the desire to possess the object, rather than to the control the objects have, qua objects, over people.

We would like to break with Ethnohistory tradition somewhat (or perhaps to resuscitate an older tradition) in connection with this year (or two year) –long theme. In addition to drawing on individuals such as Fred Meyers (ed. The Empire of Things), Judy Attfield (Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life), Daniel Miller (ed. Car Cultures), and Colleen McDannell (Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America), who are actively working in this or closely-related areas, we propose to solicit position statements from a number of important social thinkers (Jean Comaroff or Paul Rabinow, for example) who have not necessarily directed their focus to objects in the past. The goal is to produce an edited volume, or perhaps two volumes, around the theme of powerful objects that focuses on specific objects, but that also explores the sources and nature of their power.