Kopytoff object biography

Penn Students Explore the Museum Collection. View PDF. When the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials CAAM offered its first classes in September , the Teaching Specialists had a simple but potentially overwhelming task: to teach undergraduate students about research using the collections at the Penn Museum. We had a single freshman seminar planned, a course called Food and Fire: Archaeology in the Laboratory.

On the first day of class, laboratories were still waiting for furnishings and door hardware. Each student has had the chance to do original research on a Museum object or collection, with the help of eight CAAM Teach-ing Specialists.

Social life of objects

Students in Food and Fire take several different journeys. First, they travel in time from the remote past of human tool use to the present, making their own stone blades and using them to cut meat off animal bones. Second, they become familiar with handling Museum objects and using tools and instruments in the laboratory, working with the Teaching Specialists to understand key analytical techniques.

Finally, they practice recording images, descriptions, and quantitative data, and communicating that data to Museum audiences using images and words. Student research is organized using an object biography , a phrase coined over 30 years ago by Penn Museum Africa Curator Igor Kopytoff. For Kopytoff and the many mate-rial culture specialists who have utilized this concept, the biography of a material object is the comprehensive story of the object, encompassing who made it, used it, gave it away, and changed it in an accumulating set of meanings and stories.

The social life of things pdf

Students first become experts in using these records and then go deeper, studying raw materials used to make the objects, traces of manufacture, signs of wear and damage, and changes that have taken place since the object came to the Museum. They become knowledgeable about the archaeologists, collectors, and scholars whose work built the Museum, going as far as examining archival photographs of 19th-century drawing rooms to pick out objects later donated to the Museum.

To understand the use-lives of objects, they make and use similar objects from the same materials and then map traces of wear under a microscope. Students choose the objects from a curator-approved list and follow personal interests and responses as they work through the steps of the assignment.