070309 PS BA-Proseminar - The history of things: An introduction (2022S)

History has been mostly written with humans, their choices and their institutions at the center of its focus. This course asks the students to make things the protagonist of the historical narrative.
Based on the work of archeologists such Ian Hodder and sociologists such as Arjun Appadurai, this course provides students with the tools to analyze relationships between human and things and also between things and other things. It also aims at making students familiar with things as a peculiar source next to traditional written sources.
It is divided into two parts: an introduction conducted by the course convener that will present the major concepts of the course with a few example, and a second part when the students themselves will select objects and present about their history. The presentations will be the starting point for the pro-seminar work that will be ended in at the end of the course.
The introduction will discuss:
1. The importance of a history of things;
2. The historiography on the biography of objects;
3. Different possibilities to define things: as prime objects, copies, diagrams, etc;
4. Relationships between humans and things and between things and things, with a particular attention dedicated to the concept of operational chain as a major model for conceptualizing the relationships of things with other things;
5. How things have acquired new functions when travelling from one society to the other;
6. The notion of entanglement and the broad systematic networks formed by things and people.
7. How the history of things can be useful in economic history.
8. Things as a source for culture.