Learning from Fakes: A Relational Approach

Abstract

This chapter provides a framework for studying non-human imposters, the fake things and objects we read about in newspapers and sometimes encounter in everyday life. The approach treats fakes as a recognisable class of objects, namely objects that resemble the real thing but aren’t it. What, in this capacity, these objects do and effect is at the heart of the analysis. Following fakes on their adventures, we learn how it matters that things are what they claim to be, and how deception and its interception are distributed across socio-material alliances that are subject to change. Newspaper stories and other accounts about fakes that are abundant in our societies thus become an ever-renewing resource for explicating social relations of ordering and valuing.