Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 1 CHAPTER 1 THINKING THROUGH THINGS

What would an artefact-oriented anthropology look like if it were not about material culture? And could such a project develop, not as a new sub-genre within the discipline, but as a means of reconfiguring anthropology’s analytic methods more generally? These are questions that preoccupy contributors to this volume, all of whom share common concerns about the place of objects and materiality in their analytical strategies. Living in places where powder is power, where costumes allow access to other planes of existence, and where legal documents may not primarily concern reason or argument, ethnographers are obliged to question the assumptions underpinning their own surprise at such things. Rather than dismiss informants’ accounts as imaginative ‘interpretations ’ – elaborate metaphorical accounts of a ‘reality ’ that is already given – anthropologists might instead seize on these engagements as opportunities from which novel theoretical understandings can emerge. The goal of this volume is to gather a range of approaches that show how such moments of ethnographic ‘revelation ’ – in which unanticipated, previously inconceivable things become apparent – may be taken seriously in anthropologica