MATERIAL PROTESTS

Abstract

This article traces and exposes the material dimension of contemporary protests. In this piece, we consider protest as a particular type of human communication that gains intelligibility in specific social situations that are embodied in objects. This has led us to (re)think (about) the dialogue which exists between anthropology and communication in light of the role of material culture. We read and review these experiences from epistemological and theoretical frameworks of protest studies in Argentina and reconstruct social situations arising from our joint work developed at the research group Cosas Cotidianas (CoCo), which we co-coordinate, dedicated to analysing, from an ethnographic perspective, how objects ‘participate’ in social life. Our paper is structured into 3 parts. Firstly, an analysis of anthropology and communication is undertaken followed by protest(s) as social situations and finally, understanding protest through objects. We present how pots (in Spanish cacerolas) in Latin America, umbrellas in Hong Kong and waistcoats in Paris (France) appear as objects of protest in countries of the global south and north. The ‘cultural biography of things’ is proposed as a conceptual framework for our analysis