Materiality and Meaning at an Annual Harvest Gathering

Abstract

Every autumn, people from diverse walks of life gather for a four-day Harvest Gathering at the home of a Native American flute-maker and musician who is widely recognized as a tradition-bearer. Gathered from the wide social and cultural networks in which he travels, participants come together to share their diverse traditions and cultural perspectives while striving to construct mutual orientation through a variety of social and ceremonial activities. Many participants are strangers to each other and others do not share English as a primary language. While language certainly plays a role in their efforts to create common ground, most of the work is done in the realm of the non-verbal - the exchange of objects, sharing the day-to-day chores, dance, music, ritual forms and bodily sensations, silence and engagement of the physical landscape which is, in turn, a discourse materialized and infused with particular constellations of social and cosmologic values. In this paper, I consider the processes of material semiosis with which participants anchor themselves to the Gathering and to each other. I combine concepts of topology from Actor Network Theory with spatial indexicality from the anthropology of communication in order to analyze the processes by which participants create an indexically-anchored topology for mutual points of reference through exchanges of a multitude of circulating objects, cultural practices, and narratives from the distant times and places of their homes.