The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity
Maia Kotrosits
Abstract
The Lives of Objects is a psychoanalytic theory-inflected intervention into the materialist and new materialist turns in the study of the ancient and contemporary worlds. Considering physical objects in tandem with psychic ones, and tracing the felt subtexts of material things, it substantially reorients readers to the literature of the ancient Mediterranean, concentrating on Jewish and Christian literature within it. This literature provides condensed illustrations of the way people across time and geography grapple with the politics and materiality of life and death. This book also offers a ... More
The Lives of Objects is a psychoanalytic theory-inflected intervention into the materialist and new materialist turns in the study of the ancient and contemporary worlds. Considering physical objects in tandem with psychic ones, and tracing the felt subtexts of material things, it substantially reorients readers to the literature of the ancient Mediterranean, concentrating on Jewish and Christian literature within it. This literature provides condensed illustrations of the way people across time and geography grapple with the politics and materiality of life and death. This book also offers a number of theoretical propositions issuing from the non-obvious histories of obvious physical artifacts, asking (in the vein of gender and critical race theories) what and who matters, what counts as a life, and what counts as real in the making of history. Finally, it performs a sustained reflection on the stakes and implications of disciplinary mechanisms and the fantasy lives they engender, from ancient imaginations about Roman law and justice to contemporary devotions to particular academic fields and their privileged objects of study.
Keywords:
early Christianity,
ancient Judaism,
Roman empire,
diaspora,
material culture,
new materialism,
psychoanalysis,
ancient religion,
martyrdom,
late antiquity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226707440 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2021 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226707617.001.0001 |
