Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Mark Graham
One of the striking things about many writings on gifts is their relative neglect of the gifts themselves. Very often it is the social, economic, cultural and moral dimensions of gifts that receive attention rather than their material character as things (when they are things). Taking its cues from queer studies, the anthropology of material culture and the more than human turn in the social sciences and humanities the paper explores the consequences of taking the materiality of gifts seriously for how we understand them. What happens if we see gifts as queer things that challenge our categories, ignore our intentions and take part in gift-giving on their own terms rather than simply as things that are given by humans to humans?
Mark Graham is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. His publications include Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory (Routledge, 2014) and Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State (Routledge 2018). He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Ethnos. His research interests traverse the fields of gender and sexuality, refugee studies, material culture and consumption, and organizational studies. He is currently working on two books. One on sustainable urban development and planning in Sweden based on fieldwork in Stockholm. The other on the materialisation of sexuality from a more-than-human perspective based on long-term fieldwork in Sydney, Australia.