H

ow might the journeys, encounters, and transformations of objects, persons and ideas emphasise dynamic experiences of transition that are not conventionally featured in scholarly accounts of history and mobility? Inspired by Michel de Certeau’s proposition that “there are countless ways of ‘making do’” (1984: p. 29), our provocations offer new ways of thinking with, through and about the history of objects and the relationships that objects have with mobility and materiality. This collection of essays explores how objects and ideas in motion connect people and places to produce richly textured forms of public culture. We recast attention to a variety of objects — letters, photographs, jute sacks, maps, model boats, roadside shrines and grains of wheat-observing these from the crevices of urban walls, and in warehouses, farmlands, churches, and museum cases. In so doing, we reveal a new set of connections about public culture.

Cutting across the disciplines of anthropology, art history, religious studies, museum studies and cultural studies, this collection seeks to unpack the ways in which objects anchor and produce distinct forms of value. As such, the objects explored in this volume touch upon every aspect of human lives, from private remembrances and community narratives of self-identification to the movement of capital and the degraded land, to the revival of dominant mythologies and institutions of nation-building. As well as offering windows into the entangled relationships of the past, the objects we consider provide an expansive and capacious prism through which we can distil the values of the contested global present. Moreover, the essays that follow recognise value as unstable, and subject to appropriation, transformation, and even the negation that can arise from the condition of simple neglect.

Combining the tactical movements of de Certeau with our contributors’ attention to diverse objects and their physical and metaphysical journeys, we suggest that objects set into motion the transmission of ideas, capital, people and politics across space and time. Mobility offers an analytic entry for anchoring practices and compulsions that define social life and public cultures. Mobility also, interestingly, becomes a method to approach the understanding and analysis of the circuits of capital, and circulation of ideas and labour that have been historically aligned with processes of crisis and renewal.

There is an anachronism at the heart of progress-oriented narratives of global history that characterise the movement of objects and capital, and the exchange and transmission of information as evidence of human achievement. Parallel to these histories that are commonly inscribed in texts and museums, and narrate heroic histories of mobilities, are other (but no less monumental) narratives that continue to play out in the most ordinary and everyday forms of social life. We show how objects come into being through new and renewed circuits of exchange, consumption and belief systems as well as though human practices of building and adaptation. In this collection, we re-engage with mobility as a defining feature of social life and public cultures.

The volume’s opening essay, by Tony Bennett, begins from the premise that all things, but especially museum things, are no longer what they used to be. Re-contextualised, things in museums speak to and across different forms of distance. Things speak to museums as sites and vessels and are, in turn, transformed by the materials they hold. Following Latour, Bennett presents the museum as an assembly of things that operates as a site for materially mediated controversies, that is, as a place for mediating the relations between conflicting knowledges and publics. And yet, as he argues, museums continue to function - in a somewhat different register from the objects they hold - as contemporary public instruction. This dual focus is perhaps even more notable in museums today than in the 19^th century institutions Bennett has written about previously. Today, museums, especially ones that house ethnographic collections, operate simultaneously as apparatuses of public instruction and as locations for mediating the relations between conflicting knowledges and publics. Bennett explores his contention through an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2015/2016. Aptly named Encounters, the exhibition included Australian Indigenous items that the British Museum had collected during the colonial period. Re-positioned in Canberra, Australia, the exhibition was the result of consultation with members of the Indigenous communities from whom the things had originally been taken. Developed in consultation with Indigenous communities, the exhibition sought to restore the objects to their true “thingness” via the testimony of members of the areas – the Countries – to which they were temporarily reconnected.

Mary Roberts’ provocation for an ‘epistolary interior’ queries the aesthetics of habitation within a globally expansive history of art. Locating Polish artist Stanisław Chlebowski and his work between Kraków, Istanbul and Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, Roberts suggests the epistolary interior as offering possibilities of other imaginations of competing cultural politics. Such interiors operate at the axis of museums and museological practices and ‘suitcase aesthetics’ that underline the precarious predicaments of migrants and exiles (Cherry, 2017). Moving between registers of stability that museums afford and the operational logics of precarity that underline the migratory condition, Roberts opens Chlebowski’s letters to scholarly scrutiny to generate mobile histories of the forces of global cultural capital and aesthetics.   

Locating mobilities within historical circuits of British colonial capital and contemporary commerce in India, Malini Sur subjects the social properties of jute sacks to historical and ethnographic enquiry. Reading a jute sack in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, along with anthropological fieldwork with jute recyclers in Calcutta, she gathers connections between museum objects and the ubiquities of ordinary things. She argues that the history of jute as the Empire’s container continues to shape the logistics of the urban condition by gathering caste and kin in new circuits of profits and extractions. Moving between form and formlessness, jute sacks secure goods; jute’s porosity that allows matter to breathe and its durability as an urban fabric sustains its demand as a thriving recycling material. Following the lives of jute traders, recyclers and workers who stitch and repair frayed sacks, Sur reckons with jute’s entangled histories of mobility; including an Australian past where grains travelled on the hard labours of jute “bag-sewers” and “lumpers” (Radcliffe 2014). Even as jute’s global reputation as an eco-friendly substance animates the future, its enduring qualities that live alongside its propensity to disintegrate generates the very conditions for its repair. The relations that jute sacks continue to produce are a reminder of the coarse hands that sewed the Empire’s containers, as well as the ones that continue to gather disparate fibres, folding them into relationships of mobility.  

George Jose’s exploration of Kappiri tharas – the alters of Black Slave God – suggests that the long history of the Indian Ocean slave trade that resulted in the forced movement of people from Mozambique and Abyssinia to Gujarat, Goa, and Kochi, is a spectral, if commonplace, presence in the bylanes of the old city. In Kochi these alters that are built into public walls gather worshippers. Such forms of worship attest to interconnected religious histories and the diverse ways in which societies move and think about mobility – or do not move – to produce new social and cultural practices that shape public spaces. Taking the humble candle-lit roadside sites of worship in Kochi as new social and cultural practices that shape public spaces, Jose recognizes the potential of ordinary worship to address gaps in the historian’s archive, and the multiple registers that continue to be relived and enacted beyond the making of Portuguese, Dutch and the British colonialism. Worship in the absence of a deity informs the structure and dynamics of historically mobile societies in ways that counter narrate the materiality of national histories.

A model boat, the Tran Van Hoang, offers a point of departure for the contribution by Kylie Message. Despite the Tran Van Hoang’s current immobility in a museum case, it has a rich history of being moved between people, cultures, countries, and transported across institutional and economic boundaries. Although we do not ultimately know why it was made – as a child’s toy, as a trinket to be bartered in the refugee camp, or for some other reason – we can see that the meaning of the model boat has continuously adapted to reflect – and sometimes resist – structural and political conditions. In re-tracing some of the boat’s previous border-crossing movements, Message unpacks what it means for one portable object to represent a generation of refugees – in this case the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees known as “boat people”, who fled the country after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Message’s essay also represents some of the difficulties researchers face in conducting material culture research, particularly where meaning feels always just “out of reach”. There is a physicality to this essay which reflects the production of the boat and its history of being exchanged between many sets of hands. Message’s attempt to ‘repeople’ the boats is, of course, an invocation for political structures to recognise re-humanise government approaches to asylum seeking. This essay argues a point that is shared by all contributors to this volume, which is that no single object can contain the complexity of what happened in the past and that every object is a part of a bigger story of human networks, creativity and frailties. A study of a small transferrable and constantly circulating object like a model boat can give one way of understanding the human relationships that at the heart of all processes of meaning making.

Miles Pattenden’s essay extends the focus on governmentality and institutions by considering what it means for an institution to be mobile. Taking the Roman Catholic Church as his object of study, Pattenden observes that no administrative organization has invested more resources in projecting itself as immobile than the Rome Catholic Church. Like the model boat Message addresses, the Catholic Church is, argues Pattenden, constantly in dialogue with the context in which it finds itself. Unlike the model boats which are obviously unpeopled, the Catholic Church is a different case because this continual process of negotiation and redefinition occurs via interpersonal relationships between its members and ‘the outside world’. In exploring the Church’s universe of propaganda and the circulation of people, goods, ideas and information that flows from and around these narratives, Pattenden adroitly reveals the hidden mobilities that inevitably lie within such a large and composite body, especially one that has been influential in processes of globalization.

While Pattenden engages critically with the representation of the Catholic Church from the ‘inside out’, Jakob Parby flips the narrative to look anew the ephemeral ‘observer figure’ of the flaneur. Of course, as Parby notes, this outsider status is paradoxical because the individual flaneur’s ability to move through the city un-observed, incongruous, and as a part of the scenery reflects his own privilege. But Parby’s contribution to this well-tread ground is altogether new. In recalling the soundscape of 19^th century European cities, Parby introduces a different figure, that of the aural flaneur. Through the urban flaneur, Parby re-traces the experience of diverse communities living in Copenhagen in the latter part of the 19^th century. The movement of this person allows us to interface with the material and acoustic cultures of the period. Parby makes a point that is critical for all contributions in the volume: while we may today engage with objects or equivalent as singular or discrete, this is usually a form of decontextualization that risks losing the impact generated by the accumulation of materials and sounds that can be both as confusing to our senses as it is exhilarating.

Grant explores the slippery registers of maps; showing how maps as fundamentally abstract objects are used to mark geographical locations with precision. She casts close attention on Giovanni Battista Cingolani della Pergola’s Topografia dell’Agro Romano (Topography of Rome’s Agricultural Land), first printed in 1692. Analyzing it through the lens of power and control, she challenges common assumptions about rural pre-industrial landscapes. As a departure from thinking of lands surrounding Rome as idyllic or inherently fertile, Grant invites a serious reconsideration of social life through the mobility of itinerant workers compelled to work in these malarial swamps, and the journeys of hurried tourists who desired to reach favorable destinations. Grant’s re-reading of these maps’ contrast with the visual representations of the early modern period of the Roman Campagna, when artists like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain who reproduced images of contented workers tending to fertile lands.

Writing about another rural landscape in the riverine regions of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Evelyn Lambeth revisits the heroism associated with the stump-jump-plough in 1870s Australia. A period that saw widescale transformations in land and rail networks, this special tool ploughed land dry environments to grow wheat. Experimental wheat farming transformed the landscape of Wagga and in the process pushed Wiradjuri men camped on stations into towns, fringe camps and missions. Lambeth argues that while agrarian advances implied freedom for some, for the First Nations it meant lost wages and poverty, a legacy that expands into the present. She recontextualizes this object of progress and an icon of national pride into a force of violence. Lambeth challenges the taken-for-granted interdependence of wheat and humans as an axis on which racial demarcations and technological progress continue to reinforce an evolutionary past.

In the final instance, this collection of essays approaches mobilities and its antithesis, immobilities, broadly, including socio-politically, physically, psychologically, as local and global phenomena, in different cultures and different historical periods. It engages with mobilities/immobilities as forms of intellectual, often interdisciplinary, exchanges that influence or act itself as a form of public culture and contemporary politics. We look in particular at the potential that boundary-crossing forms of critical thinking have on our experience of public culture, and our ability to articulate what mobility means to different people.

References

Cherry, D (2017) Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s. Art History, 40, (4): 785-807.

De Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by S. Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Radcliffe, John. “Transporting the Crop,” Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia Incorporated (2014).

Kylie Message is director of the Humanities Research Centre at ANU and a research fellow of the National Museum of Australia. A professor of public humanities, she is an advisory board member of the International Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and a former director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Researchers and Centres. Her sole-authored books include Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street (2019), The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge (2018), Museums and Racism (2018), Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest (2014), New Museums and the Making of Culture (2006).

‍

Malini Sur is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Western Sydney University and the President of the Australian Anthropological Society (2023). Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President’s Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, Bernard S. Cohen Prize (honourable mention) and Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022).