Šiuolaikinė tarpdalykinė daikto teorija ir jos taikymas analizuojant lietuvių etninę tapatybę literatūriniuose tekstuose

Abstract

Object theory, also known as thing theory, appeared in the past three decades through inter-disciplinary conferences and publications and have since attracted the attention of specialists in a wide variety of studies, from art history, filosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This article first briefly surveys some major publications and ideas in object theory, providing a cultural analysis of one object’s life history as an example. Its main concern is its application to ethnic identity issues in two novels by second or third-generation Lithuanian North Americans, Jo Dereske and Irene Guilford. The notion that objects are not really passive in their relations with human beings, that they can be called actors in their own right, with their own life histories and their own effects on the people who come in contact with them was discussed from a number of academic points of view in an American conference in the early 1980s which resulted in a major collection of essays The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). Its introductory essay in particular by Arjun Appadurai aroused widespread interest, leading thirteen years later to a followup conference in Amsterdam and, in 2005, another important collection, Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisted). More recently the collection of articles edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, The Object Reader (2009) also stimulates researchers in many disciplines to explore this theory. To illustrate how a real-life object can have a life history and impact on human concepts of identity, the history of small ceramic jug, taken by the mother of the author of this article from Kaunas through war-torn Germany and refugee camps eventually to Canada is analysed. This object became a concrete example of Lithuania for two generations of Lithuanian-Canadians. [...]