Materiality on the Move. Agency, Meanings, and Circulation of Objects in the Americas

Abstract

The essays hosted in this dossier engage with the state of the art in their respective fields of interest, implementing a methodological exercise and promoting a historiographic and conceptual reflection regarding the processes of cultural definition of objectuality and its relationship with subjectivity in the creation of sociocultural meanings. This involves a dialectical analysis between subject and object (subjectivized objects and subjectivities that manifest through objects) from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It explores how past materialities integrate into modernity, how and why human groups creatively appropriate objects from social contexts foreign to them or from cultural universes obscured by time, sometimes radically altering their functional aspects, and how these processes of interaction and (re)appropriation should be understood.