Biography of things

This paper discusses the issue of a biography of a coffin from the perspective of biographical events common to many modern artefacts from the Polish territory. The aim was to identify past and present functions by determining the life cycle of a coffin: from its manufacturing (determination of its manufacturer and recipient; manufacturing techniques; the shape; the size; ornamentation) through ‘participation’ in a funeral ceremony, including transportation of the dead to the church, viewing, inhumation, the period of ‘concealment’, to its revival (e.g. as a museum exhibit). It was determined that at each stage of its ‘life’, the coffin served informative and protective purposes. Additionally, at the stage of its revival, it serves an important verification and identification function from the perspective of researchers in the field. Moreover, preservation of individual burials in coffins and crypts promotes sacral tourism; coffins in the church space have enormous exhibition potential that can be used to build a national and local community.

Keywords: coffins, biography of things, modern era

This paper discusses the concept of difficult/dark heritage from a theoretical perspective known as the biography of things. First, I analyse Polish archaeological research on difficult/dark heritage. Second, I describe in greater detail the biography of things as a tool for studying relationships between people, things and places. The last part of the paper is a case study presenting the biographies of three objects found in the grounds of a prisoner-of-war camp in Czersk. I aim to prove the following theses: 1) archaeologies of the recent past cannot be understood simply as the archaeology of martyrdom; 2) material culture from the recent past allows us to create different kinds of narratives connected with dark heritage.

Keywords: difficult heritage, biography of things, archaeologies of the recent past, material culture, martyrology

Artykuł analizuje reakcje zagraniczne (głównie pochodzące z rosyjskich ośrodków „białej emigracji”) na plan zburzenia, a następnie na przebieg rozbiórki cerkwi katedralnej Aleksandra Newskiego na placu Saskim w Warszawie (1920-1926). W przeciwieństwie do polskich komentarzy, w których burzenie pokazywano jako działania dokonywane w przestrzeni symbolicznej (jako gesty ikonoklastyczne, wymierzone w niematerialny symbol niewoli i ucisku), w głosach rosyjskich (a także w reakcjach angielskich i francuskich) dominowało ujęcie antropomorfizujące niszczony obiekt: burzenie okazywało się tutaj dręczeniem i zadawaniem ran; dramat obiektu skłaniał do porównań z męką Chrystusa na Golgocie.Tomasik explores international reactions – mostly those in centres of Russian white émigrés – to the demolition of the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw’s Saxon Square (1920-1926). Polish commentators tended to portray the demolition as an activity in the symbolic order (an iconoclastic g...

This piece is a reflection on my encounter with an abandoned printer and the theoretical sentiments evoked by this seemingly unremarkable encounter. Based on a photograph I took, I try to grasp the ephemerality of this encounter by exploring the printer’s possible past and futures and its agency through notions of materiality and Kopytoff’s “biography of things”.
During this journey the printer takes me on, I talk about the brokenness of the world that is unraveled in a close look at this picture; I talk about agency that is perhaps particularly stubborn in the case of a printer; and I talk about affectivities and entanglements that emerge between shifting materialities.
In opening up this perspective, I wish to articulate an agency that is not only mine, that is more than mine, and to bring theoretical insights into the real world of sometimes quite ordinary things that are left to face their own destiny.

With "life history of things" approach, developed by archeologists and anthropologists, as museolo-gists and heritologists we can identify meaning transformations of the same thing, from its creating till today. This "biography" approach suggests thing's unforeseeable semantic potential. So, museum object is not just evidence of certain past, but it potentially testifies about all its pasts, i.e. realities. This premise is recognized as a starting point for insight and analysis of different memory cultures and its transformations through the thing's "life", and for developing a fusion between heritage theory and museology, memory culture and biographical approach to things. We can identify presences and absences in collective memory and its ever changing interrelation, organized or spontaneous, with personal memory and memory of other groups, like family. Thus, (former) museum object is potential testimony of its museum sojourn, professional, social and political contexts of acquisition, interpretation, presentation and, at last, putting away in boxes, or of its shifting to another institution. These premises are examined on example of entirety of former museum objects from, now closed, Museum of Illegal Partisan Printing Offices in Belgrade, Serbia Keywords: life history of things, biography of things, mus-eology theory, post-socialism, transition