How Close Are Things To Us? On the Relation Between the Incidental and the Valuable

Abstract

Je mehr man außer sich ist, desto besser beschaut man das ObjektKant ([1772] 1923, 664) As pointed out in the introduction, incidentalness is a challenge for the study of culture. This applies not only to anthropological and archaeological approaches, but to any discipline that produces descriptions of cultures. As I will explain in more detail, in the framework of more detailed empirical studies dealing with things, the challenge is not only one of ‘method’, but also in terms of ‘research artefacts’, such as the tendency to overestimate meaning. Basically, this is about the question of how cultures should be described and what role everyday things play in cultural change. In this comment, I shall develop the hypothesis that the place of the individual in a society and in his or her material environment as part of everyday culture is adequately described only when incidentalness has a prominent role. Furthermore, I argue that incidentalness is a condition that is unstable, if not transient and ephemeral in terms of temporality. Innovation and cultural change are often related to this specific form of instability in time. Things are eclipsed from incidentalness and, at a certain historical moment, may become central vehicles of meaning in a society, or vice versa: things are shifted to the status of casualness, and the collective awareness shifts to other fields.