Narrative bodies. Mapping Predynastic Egyptian anthropomorphic figurines and the performance of identity from antiquity to present day.

Abstract

Predynastic Egyptian anthropomorphic figurines construct and populate an imaginary past landscape within museum displays. Scarcity, paired with the social, cultural and political climate of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influenced the collectors' market, with a large number of context-orphaned figurines entering public and private collections. Anxiety regarding authenticity has resulted in the exclusion of context orphans from many figurine studies. However, the academic reluctance does not match the continued museum display of these objects. Situated within these complexities, this thesis has undertaken to locate and expand ways of approaching object narratives that might displace the dominance of the discourse around authenticity and return agency and mobility to the human-object. This study has collated a comprehensive catalogue of 274 figurines from 12 museums, detailing all of the figurines each collecting organisation has associated with Egypt's Predynastic. Recognising collecting and display as an additional context places human-objects within new assemblages. The figurines have been presented as composites of the elements which constitute their construction, features, attitude, ornamentation and materials. By taking a rhizomatic approach, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's metaphor, the visualisations and analyses have enabled each figurine to function as a story fragment positioned outside, and sometimes in disruption of, traditional narrative storytelling. In addition to broad organisational data, three case studies have mapped the dynamic social lives and relationships of human-shaped objects. They have been conceptualised as hybrids of their iconic and symbolic elements, incorporating the flora, fauna and aspects of the landscape. In this thesis, they are theorised to embody their production, processes, decoration, ornamentation, and materials. These human-objects articulate dialogic relationships that the past has with the present. Informed by social and archaeological theory, discussions on these relationships generate a critical framework for thinking about the ways aspects of identity have been produced, received, and reiterated. Contributions of this exposition include the positioning of the performativity of human-objects in the re/iterative processes of the production of identity in antiquity, specifically within the context of a generative dialogue with modernity. Further, the data and story fragments have contributed to an analysis of the re/construction a Predynastic landscape, in which figurines with and without archaeological context play an active role in the production and communication of a visual vocabulary of the past.

Date of Award	14 Jun 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Stuart Campbell (Supervisor) & Melanie Giles (Supervisor)