Social Life of Things

The Social Life of Things

The Nature of Things – the secret life of Inanimate Objects by Lyall Watson

Social Notions

When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a child, playing in the lot behind his home in Temuco, he discovered a hole in a fence board:

“I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared – a tiny hand of a boy about my age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvellous white toy sheep. The sheep's wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep. I never saw either the hand of the boy again. And I have never seen a ship like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now... whenever I pass a toyshop, I look furtively into the window. It's no use. They don't make sheep like that anymore.”

Such things are super-notions, objects given value which is independent of their substance or appeal. Value by association. Very often they are gifts. And a real gift, almost by definition, cannot be static. Historically it is something that was intended to be shared, to lead a life of its own. Gifts, to be true to their nature, must move.

Some forms of property stand still, they resist momentum, like houses which exercise extraordinary control over the destiny of certain families. True gifts are not like that, they are not supposed to be kept, but to be given away again as soon as possible. Everywhere that gift rituals exist, those involved recognize that the first movement of a new thing is relatively weak. It is with the movement through the first recipient to a second and a third that an object begins to acquire real potency. Gifts are social things, they need to go out a lot, and those that are prevented from doing so seem to lose a good part of their national identity.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski recalled a visit to Edinburgh Castle where he was shown the Scottish crown jewels, and told how they had been taken away on several occasions by English kings and queens, and how pleased the nation was to have them back now, safe under lock and key, where no one could touch them again. Malinowski was appalled and could not help thinking “how ugly, useless, ungainly, even tawdry they were”, in comparison to a collection of “thin red strings, and big white, worn-out objects, clumsy to sight and greasy to touch” he had seen not long before on islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Malinowski spent the years of the First World War working among the Massim people who live in a spray of islands scattered across the Coral and Solomon Seas. They share a language and most of a common Melanesian culture, but are untied principally by an astonishingly ceremonial exchange of gifts known as the kula. The complex ritual – no one ever things of it in terms of trade – revolves around two main categories of gift. One is known as bagi and consists of small broken pieces of bright red shell taken from Chama imbricata, a frilly rock clam sometimes known as a “jewel box”. These are drilled and strung together into distinctive necklaces on cords of natural fibre decorated with smaller red shell beads. The other gift is called mwali and is a pair of armbands made from giant leopard cone shells, Conus leopards, by breaking off the blunt caps and narrow bases and polishing the central cylinders into shiny white bands like large napkin rings.

Candles are the most common offerings in churches, temples and shrines, where their immolation seems to be understood ad a form of sacrifice. Photo by Elena.