| Summary: | Every person’s life can be approached from various angles. Biographies are thus never complete narratives that tell entirely of a person’s life—all the events occurred, all the relations entered, all the emotions sensed, or all the opinions uttered—but are very fragmentary and selective, always incomplete and partial. Biography, as an analytical concept, has found its way into the academic discourse of various disciplines and it has as well entered the scope of archaeology and material culture studies. There it has become accustomed to deal with material biographies or the biographies of objects in terms of their processual career, i.e. the journey of things through their lifetime, from creation to desolation and often back to a new life through research and conservation. Such material biographies, that often draw upon Kopytoff’s notion of the Cultural Biography of Things, tend to focus on the multiple meanings of things and their temporality, their standing and esteem and how all this may change through time. Hence, these studies have preferred to discuss things in terms of their meaning, or how we can approach the essence of human thought and actions through the analyses of the everchanging meaning of things. The preference given to mind over matter has led to a call for a less anthropocentric view on the bonds between humans and things arguing that the relations are of an equal standing where both humans and things make a contribution to the emergence of societies, events, actions and persons alike. This dissertation aims at locating biography within such a network of humans and things. In it I argue for a biography in terms of a re-membering of biographical presences which are the surviving residues of the past assemblages that built the persona. The persona is thus a multi-temporal being whose composite elements are not only human including cognition, consciousness, self-awareness, intuition and intention, but also material, as all aspects of the persona, not only its individual body, but also its actions, ...
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