13 May

Anthropologists have been studying how humans use objects. Take a soccer ball as an example. Without the ball the players would just stand around on a field chatting, but with the ball suddenly there’s a hugely complex set of ongoing relationships between them. The ball helps to shape that activity, it isn’t passive. You could try to say the players add all the complexity to the game, and the ball is just a tool, but the properties of the ball have a huge role in shaping the game, using a rugby ball or medicine ball would create a totally different game. Some anthropologists now call objects quasi-objects, used by quasi-subjects. By which they mean the objects and subjects shape each other, continuously. It’s not a coincidence that most of what we call human culture - language and knowledge - emerged at exactly the same time as we started using objects.