Anchoring Objects: Material culture and the dynamics of innovation in the ancient world
- Date
- Thursday 4 June 2026 - Saturday 6 June 2026
- Address
- Several locations, please see the pdf
For new ideas, objects and practices to be adopted, relevant social groups must somehow be able to effectively integrate and accommodate them in their conceptual categories, values and beliefs. This happens if they manage to connect what is perceived as new to what they consider familiar, known or already accepted in the ‘common ground’: a process or activity called anchoring. Thus, new objects (that is: newly invented, adapted or imported) are among the things that may need anchoring. However, objects can also (and simultaneously) represent existing conceptual categories, values or beliefs and thus play a role in the anchoring process themselves, as anchors for the new. This is not just a passive role: objects can be (perceived as) active, anchoring agents that somehow mediate between the familiar and the new. The role(s) played by objects (things) in relation to anchoring remains underexplored. Is there a (special) role for objects in dealing with ‘the new’, for instance in relation to the anchoring which is done by and through people or ideas? And if so, what is it?
This meeting brings together literary scholars and historians with material culture specialists to explore these questions. The workshop takes its inspiration from ideas of ‘situated cognition’ and the material turn, in different guises (thing studies, New Materialism, vibrant matter, Actor-Network-Theory, flat ontology, etc.).
One aim of the workshop is particular: to analyze specific case-studies of human-thing entanglement and investigate how they relate to issues of anchoring.
A second aim is more general, although inevitably case-studies may come to the fore here as well: to investigate questions of the impact of things on people on a more general level and ask how objects are entangled with the coming-into-being of people and culture (without prejudging causality). In other words: how the history of the ancient world evolves through and with changes in the relationship between objects and people. Often these concern a more subconscious human–thing entanglement and may therefore tend to go unnoticed in ancient texts. But not if you read these while conscious of recent development in cognition studies and / or through the lens of New Materialism, as exciting recent studies illustrate.
In our meeting we hope to make progress on these two questions based on a variety of case studies: how objects and anchoring are related in specific historical encounters and situations, and how, being anchored or as anchoring devices, (repertoires of) objects were able to shape innovation and change in the ancient world.
Programme
For a detailed programme, please check out the pdf.
Registration
Free registration required by 28th May, please email your name and affiliation to: l.w.kruijer@arch.leidenuniv.nl.