Münster Working Paper Series in Social and Cultural Anthropology

Artifacts and their functions all have temporal dimensions. Therefore, a central concern of artifact research should be to explore the structure and scope of these temporal dimensions by considering historically and regionally specific instances of artifacts. In this article, we outline a research agenda that allows scholars to treat the temporal dimensions of artifacts in a systematic way while paying attention to empirical variations in the forms, functions, materiality, and nature of artifacts. At the heart of this transdisciplinary endeavor is an effort to bring into conversation systematic and empirical perspectives on the temporality of artifacts. Our argument evolves in three steps. First, we take stock of existing approaches to the temporal aspects of artifacts, such as artifact classification based on temporal markers, object biographies, praxeological studies, actor-network theory, and philosophical theories of artifacts. Second, we propose a working definition of "artifact". In a third step, we relate artifact theory to time theory in a theoretically rigorous way, and introduce a distinction between three different meanings of the notion of transtemporality. We also propose the concept of artifact assemblage to take into account that artifacts never occur in isolation, but always in arrangements and ensembles that exhibit various superimposed temporalities. We conclude our exposition by outlining the trajectories for a systematic investigation of the temporal dimensions of artifacts and artifact assemblages, an investigation that places time as a central dimension of artifacts on the research agenda.