Abstract
We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography. There is a preconception of things being relatively stable, fixed and inert entities. In this paper, I suggest exploring the ordinary life of things, accounting for the interweaving of the human life with nonhuman materials. The mutual becomings of various entities, both humans and nonhumans, create assemblages that emerge from the interaction between their parts. Assembling things works to conceptualize how mutual entanglements create new possible worldings among a contemporary indigenous group in low land Latin-America. Ethnographically I trace the production process of hammocks and other types of items among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, and how it entangles different ‘others’ like traders, tourists, missionaries and anthropologists and how these encounters affect the process of assembling things. Assembling things draws attention to how heterogenic component parts construe temporary but stable configurations that partake in people's worldmaking efforts. I use ethnography from the Warao and how their crafts, especially hammocks, become differently as they entangle various assemblages. I investigate three fields of assemblages in order to discern how the human/nonhuman entanglements unfold, namely household, market and museum.
Highlights
We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography
In the Anthropocene, understood as a time where humans impact the geology of the earth, we divide the world into raw materials exploited through human ingenuity while subsequently undermining alternative political indigenous understandings and worldmaking efforts (De La Cadena, 2010; Lagrou, 2018)
In The Social Life of Things (1986), which contains contributions like ‘The cultural biography of things’ (1986), Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff suggest that things themselves have social lives or biographies
Summary
We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography. As I was working my way through Warao material culture, investigating things like canoe carpentry, house building, basketry and hammock weaving, I became aware of the imbrication of things in wider networks of relations. Tourists and missionaries certainly are ‘others’ effecting change in Warao aesthetics, and assembling entities like chemical colours, palms, fibres, knives, machetes, traders or missionaries in their hammockmaking practices becomes part of Warao wordings.
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