Memory and materiality: The becoming of biographic objects after war and forced displacement

TL;DR

This paper explores how personal objects become meaningful during and after war, showing how they shape and are shaped by people's life stories.

Contribution

It introduces a new perspective on biographic objects as co-creators of identity in socio-historic contexts.

Findings

Biographic objects emerge through their role in social action across life events.

Objects gain significance not just by surviving, but by enabling agency in specific historical moments.

Examples like wartime letters show how objects intertwine with personal and collective memory.

Abstract

The social life of things, in the aftermath of war and forced displacement, is associated with change in significance and value. Against a background of massive destruction and dispossession, object survival is exceptional. However, not every object that survives gains value equally. Private possessions that survive might not be attended to or be discarded. This complicates a straightforward coupling of person and surviving object. In this paper, the becoming of biographic objects is addressed. My interview partners fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children. The objects they presented in biographic interviews have accompanied them throughout their lives. Rather than being mere prompts to tell life stories, these biographic objects, I suggest with Barad’s study, emerged in tandem with the biographic subject. By example of a wartime letter and a childhood object, I demonstrate how these things become biographic objects as they afford social action at various points in people's lives. My main argument is that things come to be biographic objects because they afford agency in specific socio-historic constellations.