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2 The Mirror of the Material

Things, Objects and What We See in Them

Janet Hoskins

‘We cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a
material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived
before us. This world confronts us as material culture and continues to evolve
through us.’
Daniel Miller, Materiality (2005: 8).

Human sociality is formed within a complex field that includes both human
and nonhuman entities. The many scholars today who debate the issue of how,
why and whether we should extend the idea of sociality beyond the human do
so at the intersection of studies of material culture and studies of ‘human
culture’ (which is how anthropologists have conventionally defined them-
selves). On the one hand, perspectivism has argued that many peoples include
animals within their own social relations, and actor network theory includes
the agency of objects within the framework of theories of social causation. The
nonhuman entities that we engage with include things (concrete materials),
objects (materials which have already been fashioned by human intention into
something else) and invisible and intangible entities, which we may choose to
describe as spirits, gods or ghosts. Many of the objects that we choose to
engage with reflect back to us aspects of our own agency, and so they are in
some sense ‘mirrors’. Actual mirrors have also, of course, long been important
as tools for introspection, self-evaluation and self-transformation, and they
have often been used in ritual contexts to suggest invisible presences, new
perspectives and an unseen dimension.
I start with the mirror as a prototype for many other forms of technology, the
ancestor, if I might put it that way, of all more advanced forms of producing
flat images. By looking carefully at mirrors, in both everyday contexts and
more specialized ritual ones, we can move from there to some thoughts about
the newer electronic gadgets we can now play with. Both the oldest form of
reflective surfaces and the newer digital mirrors we manipulate share certain
characteristics that may shed light on the different uses we make of objects and
things/materials.

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42 Hoskins

Technology is the process that moves us from things or materials to objects.

By looking at some of the apparently most simple ritual objects – mirrors,
chairs and paper dolls – used in special ritual ways, we can also come to
consider arguments about some of the most technologically complex – mobile
phones and the Internet. As a researcher interested in religion and the ways in
which people reach for the transcendent, I am concerned with the things they
use to do so, and how these things both enable and constrain the ways we can
communicate with each other and with an imagined invisible audience that
may include entities other than human ones. My examples suggest that the
individualization of technology has both enabled and reproduced a newly
individualized form of spirituality, with important implications for both reli-
gion and modernity.
The ways in which human sociality has engaged with things and objects
have been the subject of lively debate within the field of material culture
studies. Daniel Miller’s (2005a) view of materiality and objects has recently
been challenged by Tim Ingold’s (2010) very interesting new focus on things
and materials. These two scholars have debated whether the proper object of
study is objects or even ‘stuff’, as people such as Miller have argued, or more
properly a study of materials themselves, as flows and always changing
substances, ‘things that bleed into other things’ in an ‘environment without
objects’, as Ingold has provocatively proposed. Miller argues that we should
fix our gaze on objects and study how they become entangled in social
relations, whereas Ingold calls for looking beyond the newly created objects
to the things they are made of.
My own earlier work has come out of a study of objects, persons and
exchange, which has played with ideas of agency and impact but has largely
remained within the confines of Miller’s notion of a ‘material mirror’, in which
we can read our own experiences through our interactions with objects. My
book Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives
(1998) – used both the word ‘objects’ and the word ‘things’ in the title. I would
seem to be prime case of someone who did not pay any attention to that
distinction, at least not back in 1998. But I have become intrigued by this
dispute between two original, creative thinkers in the field of material culture
studies. I want to explore not only the biographical dimensions of objects, their
ties to particular lives, but also how our biographies can be enhanced by
technology, how we can construct a public image and share it across space
and time, and so realize new goals. I argue that technologies – both old and
new – have to be studied as cultural genres, as tools used in particular cultural
contexts and re-made within those contexts to serve particular ends. Ingold
(2010) argues that we need to ‘bring things back to life’ by assigning primacy
to forces and materials. For him, things are not reducible to objects. They are
generated within processes of life, so a focus on life processes requires us to
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attend to flows of materials. Since these flows are creative, creative practice
unfolds along a meshwork of interwoven lines. I agree with much of this, and
find his phenomenological perspective a fresh and useful one, but it seems to
me that we can focus too heavily on the liveliness of things, and therefore fail
to see that it is living persons who provide the life that is infused into materials
and turns them from things into objects.
My argument begins with some concrete objects – the mirrors, chairs and
paper dolls used in the Vietnamese spirit possession religion of Đao Mẫu (‘the
Way of the Mother Goddesses’). After situating them in the ritual _ context,
I consider how their use reflects certain ideas of the agency of both spirits and
objects. These theories are re-assessed using the perspectives of Ingold and
Miller, and these heritage-oriented objects are then compared to the more
individualizing electronic technologies of the iPod and the iPhone. Finally,
I suggest how notions of both things and objects are tied to an idea of agency
hidden within the material form.
Originating from a long tradition of trance dances performed for the ‘four
palace’ pantheon of the imperial family, the name Đao Mẫu first appeared in
the work of the eminent Vietnamese folklore scholar _Ngô Đức Thinh (2006),
and has been adopted by a number of more recent ethnographic studies _ (End-
res 2011; Fjelstad and Nguyen 2006; 2011; Norton 2008; Phuong 2009). Đao
Mẫu ceremonies begin by invoking the three great Mother Goddesses: the _
Mother of the heavens, in red; the Mother of the Earth, in gold; and the Mother
of the waters, in white. None of these goddesses actually ‘comes down to
work’. The spirit medium simply sways under the red veil, feeling their
powerful presence but not daring to speak or act as such a high-ranking
divinity. The spirits who ‘come down to work’ are members of an imperial
family, and they descend in rank order: first the members of the imperial Trần
dynasty, then other mandarins and generals, then the ladies of the court,
followed by princes, princesses from various ethnic groups and finally mis-
chievous children. These spirits come from Vietnamese history and commem-
orate the heroic resistance against the Chinese empire, alliances forged with
highland tribes, and the connections between courtly life and village healers.
Today, these rituals are performed both in the historic temples scattered
across the countryside of Vietnam and the modern cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh City, as well as in diasporic communities in San Jose and Orange
County, California (Hoskins 2013; 2014a; 2014b; 2015). The invisible con-
nections between the homeland and the hostland are given a material presence
in such objects as the mirrors, chairs and paper dolls used in these ceremonies.
They operate in material and immaterial worlds, as objects (in Gell’s sense,
where they can have agency) and as things (as defined by Ingold). By looking
at their various uses, we can try to understand how things are made by people,
and how things in turn also help to make people what they are.
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The Mirror as a Bridge between the Material and the Immaterial

A mirror – a very hard, shiny material object, sharp enough to cut your fingers
if shattered – is also probably the first object purposely made for image
capture, its surface made smooth and shiny so that it could reflect as well as
clear still water does, and yet be more portable and convenient. The use of
mirrors allowed images to be distorted and manipulated in significant ways,
and is well known to us as a tool of deception, as in the ‘smoke and mirrors’
effects that a magician conjures up to mislead his audience and fool them into
paying attention to the things he wants them to notice, as opposed to those
things he wants to sneak past them unnoticed. It could be argued that mirrors
create the first virtual reality – a reality flattened into two dimensions but
changeable, shifting with the quality of the light and reflecting back something
which resembles the real but is not itself real.
In the detached garage behind a suburban house in Orange County, California,
groups of Vietnamese gather on weekends to ‘serve the spirits’ of their imperial
heritage. Kneeling in front of a mirror, a spirit medium watches her face transform
into that of a fierce warrior, a coquettish dancer or a spoiled prince addicted to
opium. Once she knows which spirit has descended upon her, she signals with a
hand gesture to her attendants, dresses in the appropriate costume, and rises to
feel her body shaking and her hands and arms moving in unfamiliar ways.
Raising a sword or a lance, twirling scarves to choke her neck or entice a lover,
she watches her hands and feet trace the characteristic gestures of a figure from
Vietnamese history and legend. Over two to four hours, she will incarnate two
dozen spirits, offer gifts and blessings to her audience and dance with both dignity
and abandon. The last spirit is always that of the baby prince, prone to tantrums
and pratfalls, who impishly bows at the end of the ceremony as she collapses,
both exhausted and energized, onto mats spread in front of the elaborate altar.
Why is a mirror a required object on all altars to ‘the mother goddesses’?
Mirrors appear on virtually all Vietnamese altars dedicated to a mother god-
dess, and may take the place of photographs of ancestors, tablets with Chinese
characters or statues in certain cases. The significance of the mirror in a
particular ritual context is related to wider questions of how rituals may serve
to alter notions of identity, to imbue particular persons with a sense of
connectedness to ancestral predecessors and to reinforce ethnic identity in
the context of displacement, marginalization and exile. What is really reflected
in the mirror: the person making an offering or ‘serving’ the spirit, the invisible
essence of the goddess herself, the process of transformation?
The mirrors I saw used in the garage temples of Orange County were quite
ordinary mirrors, often bought at Wal-Mart or Target, with no special
distinguishing characteristics. It was their placement on a small table in front
of the altar that made them special. The same logic applies to the most sacred
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chair – a chair draped in red velvet which sat on the left side of the altar (to
the right as one looked at the altar) and was reserved for the most famous of
Vietnam’s military heroes, Tran Hung Dao, who defeated the Mongol
invaders and drove them out of his country in the twelfth century (Phuong
2009). This was also a very ordinary chair, but it was ritually set aside, so it
was very important that no one else could sit in it. I spent hours crouching
next to that chair, holding a video camera and making great efforts not to
touch it inadvertently or collapse into it as I made my digital recordings. The
value of the chair and the respect I showed for this great hero were indexed
by my not using the chair in the usual way and remembering the spirit person
for whom it was reserved.
The principle we see here is that it is not the object that is exceptional; it is
the way in which people treat the object and objectify its importance in relation
to a ritual frame. Without the altar behind it, the mirror is of no consequence.
Without the fact that this chair has been reserved for a great hero, it has no
distinguishing characteristics.
Each is a sort of screen onto which human intentionality is projected, in front
of an audience, and the participants in the ritual are spectators to this projection.

Chairs, Thrones and Palanquins

In August 2011, I travelled with seventy other pilgrims by boat to the largest
spirit possession festival in central Vietnam, held on the Perfume River near
the ancient imperial capital of Hue. The boat that we were on, second in a
procession of more than ninety boats, carried the throne of the Mother Goddess
from a usually closed temple in Hue across the river to visit first the Thien Mu
pagoda, the most famous icon of Vietnamese Buddhism, and then the Hon
Chen Temple of the Bowl. At each place, anchors were cast and offerings were
made, snails and eels were released back into the river to get merit, and spirit
possession ceremonies were held all night long on the boats. On the final day,
the throne was carried in a palanquin to Hai Cat village, where it was received
with a splendid ceremony and then allowed to begin the journey home.
No one was ever tempted to sit on this throne, although it was orna-
mented, draped with flowers, had incense burned in front of it, and was
sometimes addressed in song or prayer. It was elaborately carved and painted
in the imperial colours of red and gold. Much grander than the simple
wooden chair behind a suburban home in Orange County, it was neverthe-
less also simply a vehicle for the god to become manifest. George Herbert
Mead said that it is the unrealized future of ordinary things that gives them a
purpose: ‘The chair is what it is in terms of its invitation to sit down’ (Mead
1934: 279, cited in Keane 2005). The throne of the god does not, however,
extend the same invitation.
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At a particular moment, Tran Hung Dao was said to really sit in the
California backyard of this particular temple, and at another moment the
Mother Goddess was said to travel on her throne along the Perfume River, as
thousands of spectators thronged around her, on boats and along the river-
side, singing her praises and dancing with her in their bodies (Phuong 2009).
The throne carved for the goddess helps to produce her influence and to make
it visible. The regatta of almost a hundred boats culminating a three-day
ritual with the presentation of the goddess to her ‘home village’ in Hai Cat
mimes the ceremonies of imperial power and harnesses their power to
contemporary ends.
The gods were able to materialize because the chair served as a platform.
The spirit mediums themselves were able to see the transformation in their own
faces and bodies by looking into the mirror. These two objects became
‘platforms for the spirits’ and enabled the materialization of spiritual entities.
The revival of the popular cult of the Mother Goddess also marked an
important stage in the liberalization of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The association of temples in central Vietnam that established this ritual in
the 1970s was reviving an imperial tradition in the context of civil war, as a
way to invest local struggles with a wider spiritual basis. For more than twenty
years, the goddess was not allowed to leave her dusty perch at the highest level
of a large temple boarded up and turned into a warehouse of discarded ritual
paraphernalia. In 1990, after the beginning of the Reformation period but
before Vietnam had fully ‘opened its doors’ to the rest of the world and the
market economy, a few older men and women had been allowed to come to
present gifts to the goddess on a modest scale. In 1998, permission was
received to start up the procession along the Perfume River, and by 2008 it
had grown to a huge, biannual festival with public dancing, spirit possession
and more than 5,000 participants.
The ‘return of the goddess of Hon Chen’ was part of a wider revival of
popular religion across Vietnam (Phuong 2006; 2009; Taylor 2007; Salemink
2015). It was encouraged more enthusiastically in northern Vietnam, where
authorities were reasonably certain that most participants had been ‘loyal’ to
the Hanoi government. They were more circumspect concerning the revival of
popular religious ceremonies in areas like Hue, which had been part of the
Saigon-based Republic of South Vietnam, and thus potentially allied with
‘reactionary forces’ and ‘dangerous superstitions’.
These objects – both the statues and the throne – were kept out of sight and
out of circulation for two decades because they were seen as powerful. Their
release and their participation in a public parade revealed the potency believed
to have been stored up during that period, which could now be extended to the
community of worshippers who crowded to see her at the festival and honour
her with their performances.
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Spirit mediums describe their own bodies as ‘seats for the spirits and the
heroes’ (ghế thần, ghế thánh) using a more sedate metaphor than the Vodou
idea of mediums as the ‘horse’ ridden during possession (Fjelstad and Nguyen
2011). But it links the idea of the spirit assuming a particular posture in the
world to the sense of the disciple kneeling to receive it.

Paper Dolls and Statues: Icons of Invisible Presences

The statues and the painted palanquin throne are old objects whose power was
first rejected and then re-deployed when they were brought out for a great
processional ceremony. At smaller ceremonies dedicated to the same spirits,
the altar is often crowded with the bright reds, yellows, greens and glittery
golds of paper votive dolls specially made to ‘serve as the spirits’, taking the
place of their human devotees. These paper dolls represent the foot soldiers,
ladies in waiting, horses, elephants, boats and chariots of the gods which are
arrayed in front of the audience, blessed with incense smoke and a dedication
to the appropriate spirit, and then taken to the back to be incinerated.
The paper doll or manikin is colourful, perishable and doomed to be
destroyed so that its image can celebrate the form of the longer-lasting statue
or religious icon. It is deserving of our interest not because it will endure, but
precisely because it is very carefully made to be burned up. At the proper
moment, after it has been consecrated to the gods, it will vanish quickly in a
puff of smoke, since that act of destruction is also in its way a ritual act of
creation and communication.
The material is often described as that which endures, the artefact which is
found thousands of years after it was used, the remnant of a vanished past. But
many material objects are valued for their ephemeral, perishable nature, and
none perhaps more than the paper votive goods designed as offerings to the
gods, carefully and beautifully prepare to be submitted to the flames, primed
for sacrificial destruction even as they are beautifully arranged on the altar.
The crucial relationship here is established between the fleeting and the
enduring: The face of the god is a fleeting reflection in the mirror. It will not
endure, but the person who has embodied that god has changed as a result of
glancing at her body and recognizing the face of the god on top of it. The
visual act of seeing the self as another has become an experience of the
materialization of the god.
The chair used only once a year for the great hero to sit serves a similar
purpose, as do the dozens of paper dolls arranged around the altar to serve this
hero, the horses to ride in his Calvary, the soldiers and elephants that accom-
pany him, the ladies in waiting who cluster around the queen. In Miller’s
terms, these ephemeral objects might still offer ‘the comfort of things’ to spirits
in the invisible world, since they stand for gifts but are not exchangeable out of
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the ritual economy of ceremony. They are a kind of Vietnamese ‘women’s

wealth’ (to use a term developed in the Trobriands in Weiner 1992) which
circulates in a restricted sphere, and they are predominantly (although not
exclusively) brought to ceremonies sponsored by women and in which women
are the vast majority of participants.
From Ingold’s perspective, the very short lives of the paper dolls make them
hardly noticeable in the broader scheme of environmental time, except perhaps
as colourful litter clogging the sides of the Perfume River, or smoke that
pollutes the air for a few moments behind the temple. But his call for us to
consider how things flow into each other, and how their materials affect their
use, is still helpful.

Things versus Objects: Some More General Comparisons

The contrast that Ingold has proposed between things and objects raises a
number of questions about our relationship to material culture. Does Miller
propose a softer, friendlier more comforting materialism (of the object com-
panions we have as clothing, housing or Facebook ‘friends’), while Ingold
moves us to confront a hard materialism which is, however, more porous and
fluid in certain ways than the things which have been ‘objectified’ by human
agency? The ‘things of nature’ that Ingold speaks of are perceived as part of
time scales other than the human one – they belong to geological time, to ‘the
stone age’ and to a temporality that extends well beyond the human life span.
In their exchanges in the journal Archeological dialogues (2007), Ingold
asked his readers to start by selecting and contemplating a stone, dipped in
water and slowly drying on the desk. Miller countered by saying that today it
might be more appropriate to contemplate a cell phone. I remember that when
I was reading their articles, I was in my office and rather far from any
accessible stones, so I in fact used my iPhone and pretended it was a stone
for the exercise. I realized that it would not be a wise idea to dip it in water –
even if this was what Ingold recommended in order to experience the changes
in the materials visible – but by this very gesture I verified Miller’s proposition
that most of us, myself included, are living in the ‘plastic age’ much more than
the ‘stone age’.
Alfred Gell asserts that anthropology is distinctive among the social
sciences in its concentration on biographical time – the understanding that
is reached by human subjectivity and specifically within a single lifetime
(although karmic religions like Buddhism and Hinduism may extend their
views of spiritual evolution over several lifetimes) (Gell 1998). I also prefer
to study objects that can be perceived as part of human biographies, rather
than the larger temporalities into which all things may eventually flow,
dissolve and be transformed.
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Objects, in Miller’s scheme, have been ‘objectified’ by human action, in a

form of self-alienation through products and possessions. This process can
serve to invest them with a sort of agency, through the ‘technology of
enchantment’ which surrounds their creation and helps them to have an
impact. Ingold seems to prefer to talk about the ‘things of nature’ rather than
the ‘objects of culture’. I think that the metaphorical or rhetorical use of the
idea of biography, whether it is applied to objects, ideas or landscapes, implies
the notion of a birth and death, which is at odds with the endless transform-
ations of materials in Ingold’s scheme. Objects, I would argue, are poignant
because they are also ephemeral: They have a life span, sometimes briefer than
that of their human owners and sometimes many centuries longer. But any
thing that can be described as having a biography must have the fundamental
characteristic of coming into being at a certain point of time and eventually
coming to an end of that time.
Each of the objects I have examined – the mirror, the chair and the paper
dolls – is an object used to represent an absence: the mirror reflects an image
which is not present inside the object but outside it, the empty chair makes
visible an absent deity, and the paper dolls are the empty, perishable forms of
spirits who will not ‘materialize’ until they are consumed by flames and arrive
in the afterworld. So these objects exist as indexes of other presences, tran-
scendent presences which are evoked through material objects but exist in
another realm, which we may choose to call the virtual realm of image capture
or the religious realm of spiritual entities.
In the theological models of the Vietnamese religions that I study, these
objects do indeed demonstrate the invisible hand of God, or at least several
goddesses, in the world. But I have always chosen to engage with this idea
with a certain sympathetic scepticism. Believers in all the traditions I have
studied have assured me that I must have unconsciously experienced a ‘calling
from the divine’ in order to chose this research focus, and I have had, sadly, to
confirm to them that I remain deaf to that calling.
In seeing mirrors, chairs and paper dolls as reflective and suggestive
vehicles for ideas of spirit agency and ways for human to interact with these
spirits, we do not, it seems to me, need to embrace the transcendental our-
selves. We need only to accept the idea that the material mirror is focused on
another reality, which we do not need to confirm as real or false. What is
significant is that these spirit entities are real forces within the subjective
experience of believers, and we need to respect the different ways in which
borders are drawn in their conceptions of the material and immaterial.
The ‘metaphysical dimension’ is perceived by those who use objects in
religious rituals, but it need not be a dimension of our own analysis. Miller’s
idea that we come to understand other people by studying what they do with
objects makes sense to me. But the fascination with the everyday should also
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be extended to events whose participants see them as extraordinary, and to

perceptions of alterity that allow objects to focus our attention on what is
unseen, as the tangible vehicles of divine powers, the props which produce a
sensory intensity of experience.

From the iPod to the iGod: Individualizing Technologies

In David Harvey’s (1990) terms, if Fordist modernity was associated with
economies of scale and the mass reproduction of many versions of the same
object, in flexible postmodernity we have economies of scope, and computer
programs can produce individually designed objects with idiosyncratic char-
acteristics. Mechanization no longer requires uniformity. It can be re-calibrated
to produce heterogeneity. The types of God produced for the masses with
shared dogmas and rituals are being replaced by individualized styles of belief,
personalized cults that are as individually distinctive as the playlists we put
together on our iPods.
Several articles in the New York Times have focused on the passionate
attachment that people today supposedly have to technology. Jonathan Fran-
zen wrote a paen to his new Blackberry titled ‘Technology provides an
Alternative to Love’ (May 29, 2011), in which he pointed out that ‘the
extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling
them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers
iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people
a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand ges-
tures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working
perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic’. He describes how technology has
become extremely skilled at creating products that correspond to the fantasy
ideal of an erotic relationship, in which ‘the beloved object asks for nothing
and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t
throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is
consigned to a drawer’. In more general terms, technology’s ultimate goal of
technology is to replace a natural world indifferent to our wishes – ‘a world of
hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a
world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the
self’. The 2013 released Spike Jonze-film ‘Her’, about a man who falls in love
with a computer operating system, seems to present the near-future realization
of this potential.
Franzen considers the idea of collecting ‘friends’ on Facebook and ‘liking’
statements or photographs by clicking a computer mouse and sending a
message over the Internet. He suggests that this cheapens real feelings, and
‘that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and
that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn’.
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His discussion ends with the idea of the object as mirror: ‘Since our
technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have
contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s
all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To
friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of
flattering mirrors’.
While I understand his argument, I do not see any reason to join the many
writers who claim that by using technological devices we are necessarily
losing touch with our own feelings. Few people confuse the kinds of ‘friends’
one has on Facebook with important, long-term relationships, but Facebook
does make it easier to stay in touch with people who were once very important
to us but now live far away. I tend to agree with Miller, who has done an
ethnographic study of social networking in Trinidad and concluded that ‘the
single most important attribute of Facebook is not what is new about it, but the
degree to which it seems to help us to return to the kind of involvement in
social networks that we believe we have lost’ (Miller 2011: 217).
In a similar vein, Martin Lindstrom argued that ‘You Love your iPhone.
Literally’ (September 30, 2011) by citing research that toddlers handed Black-
berries immediately started swiping their fingers across the screens as if they
were iPhones (this seems a new way of promoting iPhones over Blackberries),
and that the sound of a ringing and vibrating iPhone activated audio and visual
cortices of the brains of sixteen subjects in the insular cortex associated with
love and compassion. From this evidence he argued that people have come to
embrace a new technology ‘that does everything but kiss us on the mouth’, and
‘the iPhone has become a best friend, partner, lifeline, companion and, yes,
even a Valentine. The man or woman we love most may be seated across from
us in a romantic Paris bistro, but his or her 8GB, 16GB or 32GB rival lies in
wait inside our pockets and purses.’
This presents an amusing portrait of the rivalry between man and machine,
but of course if there is no human being at least potentially interrupting that
romantic dinner with a call, the simple sound of the iPhone will not have the
same impact. This is why most of us would never give our cell phone numbers
to charities, philanthropic organizations or the various causes that we may
support but do not wish to be communicating with during a romantic dinner.
Marshall Sahlins argued some time ago that cultural innovations are always
‘indigenized’: People tend to use new commodities not so much to become
‘more like us’ (with ‘us’ meaning Euro-American industrial society), but to
become ‘more like themselves’ (Sahlins 2005). So DVDs of spirit possession
ceremonies are now sold widely in Vietnamese markets to promote the careers
of particularly entrepreneurial spirit mediums, and the scholars who support
the revitalization of Đao Mẫu have mounted an impressive website to make
this argument to a wider_ audience.
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52 Hoskins

It should not be surprising to us that people value communication as an end

in itself that they can possess or feel deprived of (Miller 2010: 132). Feeling
connected to others through a mobile phone is desirable, and for reasons that
anthropologists have studied for years. An expansion of our own space-time
boundaries is appealing, since culture exists in our capacity to reach out
towards more distant horizons and more complex outcomes of life. ‘The
Internet is best seen not as a technology but as a platform which enables
people to create technologies, and these in turn are designed for particular
functions. So what people weave from the fibres of the Internet are the traps
they use to catch particular kinds of passing surfers. They require a design that
draws interest, attention and appreciation and thereby seduces its particular
victims’ (Miller 2010: 113).
Each time I have taught Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories
of People’s Lives, I ask my students what objects are entangled with their own
biographies. While for many years, I heard about backpacks and clothing, in
the last five years my students have almost unanimously chosen instead to say
that their biographies were inscribed onto electronic devices, and in particular
the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad, all of them Apple devices which allow
individuals to create their own individualized archive of music, photographs,
messages, and even films and videos. Creating this archive, putting together a
play list and assembling a photo album was, they argued, an act of self creation
and self construction which resembled the narratives attached to objects for my
Indonesian villagers. It demanded a series of decisions about what to include
or exclude, a sense of what image one wanted to project to others and even to
oneself, and it gave each person an easily searchable ‘life’, neatly organized
into categories of contacts, media, artists, albums and enabled by a series of
applications that would emphasize certain aspects of their biographies and
eclipse others.
My students are obviously already deeply immersed in a heterogeneous form
of sociality which involves both objects and humans. For them, the wider and
more transcendent realm in which this sociality was displayed on Facebook was
a way of locating themselves in a conceptual geography, in some of the same
ways as was the selection of spirits who came to possess Đao Mẫu followers.
_
The selfie photograph – a self-portrait that becomes a permanent ‘mirror
image’ – is circulated in cyberspace to document each new trip or outing. It
is the self-image objectified and circulated to assert a transcendent identity.

Things, Objects and Agency

The English word ‘object’, it should be noted, can be both a noun and a verb.
As a noun, it designates the recipient of an action undertaken by someone else;
it absorbs the agency of the actor. As a verb, however, it designates the
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The Mirror of the Material 53

resistance to that action: it is something which objects to that which has

happened to it. To object is to disrupt the flow of discourse, to propose another
opinion, to refuse to accept what has been done. In English, the shift is marked
by stress: if I stress the first syllable, I am speaking about objects as passive
recipients, whereas if I stress the second syllable, I am talking about resistance.
So paradoxically this one little word combines both the yin and the yang,
the response and the action that provoked it. And this, I argue, can provide a
clue to the value of the term ‘object’ for the terminology used in material
culture studies, since the term is itself a mirror: it is both the thing that we try to
create by imbuing it with our own agency, our intentions, and it is also that
which is reflected back to us, unfamiliar, inverted, a response to our own
appearance which is distorted because it has been processed by the alien
surface of an image-capture device.
I have been looking in mirrors for years, and so I have a gut sense that my
mirror image (which is always inverted) is the ‘real me’, while the various
photographs of my own face that I have seen somehow fail to capture the
person that I really am. I think that all of us are to some extent like Narcissus,
in that we have fallen for a reflection rather than the ‘real thing’, which we
cannot access through direct sensory experience. We need technology to tell us
what we look like, and that technology will always be imperfect in some way.
The object of our affections may in fact object to this attachment. Objects
become meaningful to us as vehicles of our own emotions, our aspirations, our
biographical investments. We may object to their being appropriated for other
reasons, detached from what we want them to be, but our ability to construct
ourselves anew without the ability to edit our lives and looks that technology
offers is limited. The literary memoir is an effort to do this with the technology
of the book. The Facebook page is its contemporary successor on the Internet.
The Facebook page presents a rather flattering visual autobiography, its photo-
graphs selected to present a carefully crafted image of the self. It is often filled
with ‘selfies’, self-portraits that are, in effect, ‘frozen mirrors’ of our faces in
particular locations and at particular times, allowing us to craft and create the
personal memories in our online archives of the self.
Material culture studies has expended a lot of research on arguing that we
construct ourselves through objects, through our most treasured possessions,
but also everyday clothing, furniture, entertainment choices and eating options.
Each object that we use both absorbs the impact of the choices that we make
and pushes back, in a certain sense, because the object is not identical to the
self but detachable from it.