Lynn M. Meskell
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2002-2003
Material Biographies:
Object Worlds from Ancient Egypt and Beyond
A sculptor
in New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) barters for a block of wood, takes
it home, and begins to craft a shape. From the rough wood emerges
the form of a figure; from the figure, a statue resembling a deity.
At some point in this process, the statue is animated by the actual
spirit of the deity depicted, it is bartered again, and the new owner
begins to worship and petition the deity. Lynn Meskell is investigating
how "things" in ancient Egypt such as statues, votives,
memorials, and images drawn on potsherds transcended the category
of object and were treated as if they had spiritual agency. Her new
book, "Material Biographies: Object Worlds from Ancient Egypt
and Beyond," explores how the material world was experienced
by the Egyptians, and particularly how the material became personified,
moving from thing to being.
"How are things not objects?" Meskell
asks. "They're objects when you make them, and are not necessarily
embued with the divine when you craft it, but all of the sudden through
a series of ritual practices, it is not a representation of the god,
it is the god. I'm interested in that shifting terrain, the moments
of processing and transforming that turn objects into subjects."
Meskell contends that Cartesian dualistic
models such as mind:body, and reason:emotion are inadequate to describe
the "multiplicity encompassed by the whole" perspective
of the New Kingdom Egyptians. "I argue that we have to re-think
our taxonomies for antiquity since things, persons, deities, and spirits
were permeable classifications that could have temporally specific
meanings and existences," Meskell says.
Her book is an interdisciplinary work that
draws from a varied scholarship on materiality including Marx, Hegel,
Mauss, and Baudrillard. Each chapter will sketch sets of things that
transcend the category of object, such as the "false doors"
in homes that provided "a portal between the world of the living
and the dead," and statues that were bathed, fed, and worshipped
as deities. Finally, Meskell applies her analysis to contemporary
relationships to Egypt's past, noting the modern fetishization of
Egyptian culture. "Why do we find Egyptian things so seductive,"
she asks, "and why is their particular aesthetic seemingly timeless?"
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Associate Professor, Department
of Anthropology, Columbia University
