31 Nikolai Grube material turn also enables us to examine surviving material traces and remnants of colonial rule and oppression, such as monuments, buildings or economic structures. In dependency research, the study of objects also allows for a deeper analysis of the material foundations and resources that enabled and sustained colonialism and asymmetrical dependency. This includes the study of raw materials, production methods and trade networks that enabled the colonial powers to expand their economic and political dominance. This approach is also useful in helping us to analyze the dependencies between exploiters and the dependent by shedding light on the role played by material resources and technologies in creating and maintaining these relationships. Crucially for the study of dependencies, this development has relativized the traditional scholarly focus on written culture, because the majority of those who lived in extreme dependency did not leave rial artefacts in different fields of knowledge production and social practice. Its perspective focuses on the role of objects, resources and other material elements in shaping societies, cultures and historical processes. For scholars studying colonialism and dependency, the material turn opens up new ways of understanding the complex dynamics and structures of these historical phenomena. Traditional methods of researching dependencies often prioritized the role of ideas, ideologies and power relations, thereby primarily emphasizing their normative perspective. But this often neglected the material dimensions that are closely linked to colonial processes. The material turn foregrounds the material aspects of slavery, extreme dependencies and colonialism. This involves analyzing objects such as traded goods, technologies, architectures (fig. 1) and landscapes that played a central role in colonial exchange and in strong dependencies. The Historians, social scientists and anthropologists have approached the ubiquitous phenomenon of extreme dependency in human societies primarily by analyzing texts and images. As a result, those scholars have concentrated on information and accounts about dependent people and the circumstances of their lives. Our approach in this book is very different. Instead of concentrating on texts, we focus on objects and artefacts – on the material world. It is our aim to explore the material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies and to establish the range of information they contain as an equivalent source on asymmetrical dependencies alongside the written word. Our approach to the study of dependency draws on the so-called ‘material turn’ in cultural studies, and on recent debates on environmental and biohistory formulated by authors such as Arjun Appadurai, Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour.1 The material turn is a theoretical perspective that looks at the implications of materiality and mate-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1