Object Biographies

An object biography is a story told through an object. The term biography literally means the writing of a life, a life told as a story. Usually, a biography is meant to describe a person's life, but a thing can speak volumes about its makers and possessors, its various uses, its inherent qualities. Object biographies can thus provide key material and symbolic indicators that illuminate the values and beliefs of consumer culture.

Igor Kopytoff argued that just as the commoditization of persons could have a biographical trajectory, so too could objects be viewed biographically as having “careers.” He used enslavement as an example of the process of turning a person into a commodity but one in which the slave could take on a new identity, even while remaining a potential commodity of future exchange. Things could be viewed similarly as involving telling trajectories between commoditization and the singular, between signifying exchange value, or signifying personal meaning. In their book, The Meaning of Things, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton systematically examined the ways transactions between people and their possessions reveal much about identity, family relationships, and the making of meaning in domestic life.

The stories told through objects have played a crucial role traditionally in archaeology and more recently an increasingly significant one in anthropology, history, sociology, and other disciplines, as well as emergent fields such as material culture and consumption studies. Objects can act as cultural indicators through which inferences about people, institutions, practices, beliefs, places, epochs, and even evolution can be made. Consumption of objects involves beliefs attributed to or deriving from objects, which become sources of study by consumption researchers. Object biographies may be taken as the stories people tell about their things or as the stories' things, as objects, themselves tell.