The Inbetweenness of Things Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'human' and 'non-human', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. However, these categories are based on false essentializations and overlook the indeterminacy that often animates social and material worlds.

The Inbetweenness of Things rejects Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects according to bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues for the normalization of a paradigm in which objects are not 'one thing or another' but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, the book is conceived as an exhibition – a cabinet of curiosities – in which anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and museologists debate a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, they explore how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody such mediation in their form. Featuring an impressive range of international contributors, each essay grounds explorations in cutting-edge material culture theory in concrete case studies.

An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

1. Introduction: The Inbetweenness of Things Paul Basu, University College London, UK
Part I: Museums as Sites of Inbetweenness
2. Suspense in the Cabinet: The Inbetweenness of the Vitrine and the Case of the Penacho Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Independent Artist/Curator, UK
3. Displaced Things: Liminality and Burmese Court Artefacts in Oxford, London and Yangon Sandra H. Dudley, University of Leicester, UK
4. Object and Spirit Agency: The G'psgolox Poles as Mediators In and Between Colonised and Coloniser Cultures Stacey Jessiman de Nanteuil, Stanford University, USA
Part II: Masquerades and Mediation
5. At the Centre of Everything? A Nigerian Mask and Its Histories John Picton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
6. Things Fall Apart: Masked Spirits in a Museum Pamela McClusky, Seattle Art Museum, USA
Part III: Syncretism, Intercession and Iconoclash
7. Desire and Imitation in Asmat Sculpture Nick Stanley, British Museum, UK
8. Animating Relationships: Inca Conopa as Social Objects Bill Sillar, University College London, UK
9. Visual Diplomacy: Art Circulation and Iconoclashes in the Kingdom of Bamum Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada
Part IV: Hybridity in Form and Function
10. Mediating Between Mayas and the Art Market: The Traditional yet Contemporary Carved Gourd Vessel Mary Katherine Scott, University of Wyoming, USA
11. Creative Transculturation: Queen Victoria's Samoan Bonnet Catherine Cummings, University of Exeter, USA
12. Woven and Carved: The Indigenization of the Teacup in Colonial Canada Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, Simon Fraser University, Canada and Lisa Truong, Carleton University, Canada
Part V: Between Image, Text and Object
13. 'Curious Statues so Cunningly Contrived': Plato's Silenus, Inwardness and Inbetweenness Lucy Razzal, University of Cambridge, UK
14, Coinage Between Cultures: Mediating Power in Roman Macedonia Clare Rowan, University of Warwick, UK
Part VI: The Materiality of Mediation
15. Glass as 'Demediative Inbetweenness' Taisuke Edamura, University of Essex, UK

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