The Story of a Thing: A Frame-Analytic Perspective on a Biographical Approach to Materiality

Abstract

The article focuses on the integration of a frame-analytic approach into the research field of the biography of material objects, whose main representatives were originally situated in classical anthropology and archaeology. The main aim of the article is the introduction of a sociological perspective to the study of the history of things. To achieve this goal, frame analysis is used as a tool of conceptual translation, based on a synthesis of key assumptions of existing approaches. The article is divided into two parts. The primary part undertakes a review of existing biographical concepts in disciplines related to sociology. Among their shortcomings is the anthropomorphizing of the biography of an object, which leads to linearity and the desire to establish the beginning and end of its ‘life'. We argue that a thing can have ‘a number of different simultaneous lives' without specific dates. In addition, in the presented approaches, exchange appears to be the primary means of endowing an object with meaning, although it is not the only possible way. In contrast, we highlight the concept of ‘itineraries of an object' as a preferable alternative. The first part of the work also formulates the epistemic horizon of a frame-analytical biography of the material. The unit of analyzing the history of a thing - its biographical event - is the transformation of the frame of the social situation given by the object under study. In the second part of the paper, the conceptual points are illustrated by the ‘life' stories of several telephone booths: their transposition into a city Wi-Fi hotspot, their reframing into a work office, and their transposition into a complex facility at a scientific conference. It is argued that frame theory has a conceptual apparatus relevant for explaining changes in biography, which considers the relationality of meaning-making, the qualities of a thing per se, and the dispersed (as opposed to linear) nature of these changes.