Objects on the Loose: Ethnographic Encounters with Unruly Artefacts A Foreword

The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do with things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors and commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic and disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical writings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and his collaborators in the Social Life of Things. Our interests have less to do with formulating critiques or theory-driven responses to this seminal work than with setting out to explore possibilities for ethnographic expansions, revisions, and variations on its themes, and for linking the 'social life of things' to questions of modernity, nationalism, and transnational cultural projects and dilemmas.