‘Born in America, in Europe bred, in Africa travell’d and in Asia wed’: Elihu Yale, material culture, and actor networks from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first*

Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf

Journal of Global History, 2016, vol. 11, issue 3, 320-343

Abstract: Objects can serve as non-living actors in a Latourian actor network which spans not only geography but time. Over this spatial–temporal network, what I call ‘object-actors’ acquire meanings that motivate living actors to use these objects as connecting points between past and present. Object-actors form networks in original exchanges between individuals and institutions, connect the past and present, and generate new and shifting meanings in this global–temporal network. Object-actors work and generate meaning in four dimensions – distance, location, relation, and time. Globally, object-actors can accrue conflicting meanings bound by locality. This article uses the collections of Elihu Yale as a case study in how object-actors constitute an important aspect of networks, and how those networks are not bound to the original transactions between historical parties or to their original geographies.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jglhis:v:11:y:2016:i:03:p:320-343_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Global History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().