6/11/2023 0 Comments Roman provincial coinage![]() ![]() One of my main references, therefore, is the 1964 catalogue, Coins from Karanis. The coins I have been working with for the past month come from the site of Karanis in the Fayum oasis of Egypt. (I will be adding them all to the blog’s Resources pages as well.) But rather than throwing a plethora of links and a long bibliography at you all at once, I prefer to do this piecemeal. (Although those are certainly in the works as well!)Īs I get to know the collection, I would like to share with you some of the numismatic and historical stools - modern and old fashioned - that I find most useful. These first months are merely for me to get a general overview of the collection by browsing through it before diving deeply into specialized projects. I am not systematically cataloguing or studying the coins in depth, yet. This multiplicity of lifetimes stuck a chord with me, so I decided to pluralize the name.Īs I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been working slowly through the numismatic collection at the Kelsey. However, my colleague highlighted the fact that museum objects, coins in this instance, have had many lives: first as currency for economic transactions, then as archaeological objects excavated and catalogued, and now as accessioned museum objects waiting to be studied in relation to other objects. I said that I planned to call it “The Social Life of Coins,” in a direct reference to Appadurai’s book. A view of the Huron River from Ann Arbor’s Arboretum.Ī few weeks ago, I was walking through the Arboretum here in Ann Arbor with a colleague and mentioned that I was going to start a coin blog. As an economic historian, I was deeply influenced by the idea that objects have agency and live lives. The essays compiled in this volume essentially nuance how people assign value to commodities and how, in turn, commodities give value to human relationships. This argument, which is elaborated in the text of this essay, justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives. Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly. Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged. I cannot adequately summarize the book here, but Appadurai is very clear on his intent from the beginning (p. This book was assigned to me in classes as an anthropology major when I was an undergraduate, as well as in graduate school, and it deeply influenced the way I, and many others, have thought about the study of objects and societies. ![]() The title is an homage to Arjun Appadurai’s seminal book, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, which is a compilation of essays by anthropologists who explore through different historical and cultural instances the politics of assigned value via the study of objects themselves. Today I would like to share with everyone, in case it is not already evident, the inspiration behind the name of the blog. ![]()
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