Materiality, Gifts, Histories, and Collections: Reflections on Entangled Objects

For Stephen Hugh-Jones and Caroline Humphrey This commentary revisits the author’s Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (1991). The book argued that classic types of exchange such as “the gift” were, in the forms in which they had long been observed and theorized by anthropologists, importantly influenced by colonial histories. This essay highlights the importance of sheer materiality, that is, greater attention to the physical constitution of artifacts, but in particular advocates greater engagement with Indigenous theorization of transactions, values, and the spiritual identities of things.