Genealogies of asymmetry: Why things were forgotten

Bjørnar Olsen (University of Tromsø)

The study of things has long fallen victim to an intellectual tradition that has devaluated and stigmatised the material. Despite the renewed interest in material culture witnessed in a number of disciplines, its materiality and ‘thinglyness’ continues to be sacrificed in favour of the readerly veil of humanly embodied meanings that envelopes it. Trying to explain the oblivion of the thingly, the author traces an effective history of asymmetry and suspicion toward things in Western thinking.

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