AHA Session 192
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Rendezvous Trianon (New York Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, University of Texas at Austin
Session Abstract
Sugar, cotton, wine, bananas, rubber, silver, and other commodities have been protagonists in recent (and not so recent) histories of capitalism, globalization, and colonialism and imperialism. Historians and anthropologists have examined the chains from production to consumption, the role of intermediaries, the wants, needs, and tastes of consumers, and the sometimes unexpected geographical connections that commodities have forged. Goods and commodities have been a key lens to understand imperial projects and the unequal articulation of places in the Global South to the world-economy. But what happens when we shift the lens to objects that never ended up becoming global commodities like sugar or silver? Or objects that we know much less about? Do we gain new insights into global histories of imperialism by focusing on objects that never were the most important export of a given economy? This panel focuses on such other objects. It examines the power of books, paper, textiles, pearls, timber, and mundane goods to consider the roles they played in colonial and postcolonial politics and economics in the global south. The presentations grapple with how these goods were envisioned and promoted as resources, currencies, weapons, and metaphors with multiple and often competing meanings, but endless possibilities.
By centering material culture, and the ways in which objects are produced, moved, and used, this panel explores the relations between knowledge production, technology, and power in the Global South. Purposely broad in its geographical scope and temporal frame, the panel tries to bring together the stories of objects in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean Worlds. With presentations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and covering themes as Indigenous textiles and their commensurability in precious metals in the sixteenth-century Andes; the colonial tensions, environmental interactions, and religious symbolism of pearls in early California; the circulation of teak timber and teak-built ships in the Indian Ocean; and the promotion and circulation of Spanish books as a weapon of reconquest in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, the panel addresses key conceptual and methodological questions. It tries to suggest ways to differentiate between objects and commodities, and to propose different approaches to materiality and material analysis. It also stresses the connections between material culture and political power, and the central role that objects have had in processes of imperial expansion, and colonial and postcolonial forms of domination.
