322 Introduction What do people do with objects? And what do objects do to people? This chapter explores the dialectic between processes of objectification (how things become objects) and subjectifica- tion (how people become subjects) by rethinking typical assumptions about the passivity of the former and the agency of the latter. The chapter is divided into four parts, slowly building an argument about the weaker and stronger versions of the interrelation between objects and subjects.The first section explores both classic and recent approaches to how objects are imbued with special significance, as well as contemporary scholarship on attachment and affordances. Then we explore what objects allow us to do, the kinds of subjects they encourage us to be, and the kinds of activities they block or enable. Do they collaborate? Are they unruly or docile? The chapter concludes by offering some reflections about what this means for the study of meaning- making in particular and of culture at large. Meaning in objects A central line of inquiry within cultural sociology has been to analyze the long-term purchase of particular objects by establishing a one-to-one set equivalence between objects, individu- als, and/or collectives, in which objects mean only one thing and there is a taken-for-granted link between meaning and emotion. One tradition, for instance, emphasizes the role of cultural structures, focusing on the collective effervescence produced by rituals that aim to produce fusion and catharsis between the object qua totem and the collective. This tradition can be traced back to Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965) and has been continued and refined by subsequent scholars. Victor Turner (1967), for example, theorized concepts like social drama and “breach,” in which change is an odd occurrence and continuity is achieved through rituals that restore the previous order. Mary Douglas (1966) looked at the role of objects in establishing binary boundaries, especially the assignation of “dirt” to those objects that do not fit neatly into the prevailing social order. Randall Collins’s (2004) “interaction ritual chain” theory points to the highly contextualized ways in which an object becomes emotionally resonant with a collective. The work of Jeffrey 34 The cultural life of objects Claudio E. Benzecry and Fernando Domínguez Rubio 15031-2152d-1pass-r02.indd 322 8/27/2018 7:36:31 AM