Brain-Stone
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE | ANGOLA
It is a windy November morning when I pick up a stone on the Skeleton Coast, in Angola’s Namibe desert. I do so in that timeless moment between two waves; in what feels like a liminal eternity, neither the past nor the future, not even the present—but something else. The stone is neither cold nor warm, and it rapidly shakes off any trace of the Atlantic Ocean as clouds hang like a grey veil along the discernable horizon.
Observing the stone at close range, its form alters, its materiality differs. “We can reach for the stars, but cannot touch them,” Tim Ingold (2007:3) writes in a meditation over our physical and mental relation with the material world. Bringing things to life, he adds, “is a matter not of adding to them a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist” (ibid., 12).
I have stumbled upon this very piece of rock (or didit stumble upon me?) in the oldest desert region of the planet (Ward et al. 1983:175), but have I also captured a piece of geological history, embedded in its shape and form; a forgotten and merely archeologically deciphered time when this region—southern Angola and northern Namibia—embodied the bottom of a vast ocean (van Zinderen Bakker 1975:68–70). The lines engraved on the stone resemble blood vessels and its peculiar form reminds me of a brain. In that moment, I turn the stone into an object in accordance with what Jane Bennett (2010:10–11) refers to as “thing–power.” Bennett reminds us that we, humans, not differ from other sources of materials in the universe, let alone on this planet, as we are all the products of “the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons” (ibid., 11).
Up until the moment I picked up the brain-stone, it lived its own life, in its own hemisphere, “lively and self-organizing,” consisting of its own “small agency” (ibid., 95). “Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other,” concludes Bennett (ibid., 31).
The very second that I picked up the brain-stone, I scrapped its timeless bonds with its own positionality, place, and relations to its surroundings, its own world. Its dance in the surf, in ebb and flow, under the Namibe desert’s starlit nights, perhaps drying in the sand under scorching sun when the full Moon turns the passage between the sand dunes and the Atlantic Ocean into a passable beach path. Whatever meaning, purpose, or joy this very object may have experienced in its own place and time—its life—is now lost, and replaced by something else; chosen, dictated, and formed by me. By, as put by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007:4), attending to “’things’ as they emerge in diverse ethnographic settings,” I not only set out to expand and challenge my perceived, Westernized, and ethnocentric view on the “living” and the “dead.” I also explore personally unchartered waters, what Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (ibid., 6) describes to be “a quiet revolution” within ethnographical fieldwork, “from epistemological angst to the ontological turn.”
“If we are all living in the same world,” concludes Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (ibid., 9, italics in original), “one best described and apprehended by science—then the task left to socialscientists is to elucidate the various systemic formulations of knowledge (epistemologies) that offer different accounts of that oneworld.”
For a discipline, such as anthropology, says Daniel Miller (2005:2), focusing on “what it is to be human,” it is essential to acknowledge “that the definition of humanity has often become almost synonymous with the position taken on the question of materiality.” That is, at least in my case with the brain-stone, to question why and what underlying structures that is driving me to remove it from its natural habitat and install it as a stranger in a foreign land. According to Karl Marx (1976:7), my action is nothing but an example of capitalistic greed, a trained way of framing my surroundings in terms of useful and non-useful commodities. The commodity, as explained by Marx (ibid.), “is first an external object, a thing which satisfies through its qualities human needs of one kind or another.”
My blatant objectification (Miller 2005:7) of the brain-stone becomes clear upon realizing that I find myself attached to it primarily due to its given stories, visions, and geographical and geological background (a mapped life-worldconducted and constructed by me) (see also Wagner 1983:239–246). I have thus turned the brain-stone from a natural subjectinto a cultural object, in tandem with Bruno Latour’s (1991:10–12) theory of purification. By injecting a new set of identity and purpose to the stone as I put it in my pocket—turning its whole world pitch black in industrial-produced cotton pants after eons of existence in the Namibe desert—I also transform “it” (them)into something organic (us), which is no longer a dirty “Other,” no longer “out of place” (Douglas 1984:41).
Bruno Latour (1993:37) reflects over the trees, stones, and minerals that are made into wood and energy, or turned into weapons, tools, or the basis of entire currencies. “The depth of our ignorance about techniques is unfathomable,” Latour (ibid.) adds, and to which I agree completely. What are the natural resources that we conquer and turn into industrial objects, claim to be spiritual tokens, or place as decorative ornaments in our homes other than “merely evidence of a Gestell” (ibid.). So-called non-human actors, Latour (ibid., 64) concludes, “deserve to be housed in our intellectual culture as full-fledged social actors” since they not merely mediate our actions, but also because “they are us.” A conclusion worth keeping close at heart in times when humans ask Artificial Intelligence chat bots for assistance in all aspects of human existence (Carlbring et al. 2023).
Pressed against in my bleak-colored skin and embedded in my rational Westernized mind, the brain-stone has been cleaned and accepted into another world, a treasure that I will show to visitors in my home, explaining its origin, thus constructing it as an extended treasure of my own body, as a kind of currency(McDougall 2021:32–33). Wherever the brain-stone ends up in my home, it has been provided with a hau (based on my own ethnocentric invention of its life-world), and functions as an extension of my own self and travel memory from southern Angola (Miller 2005:7–9). Durable valuables, writes McDougall (2021:33), stretch “beyond the limited spatial and temporal scope of a single human life.” Or, as concluded by Ingold (2007:15), the stone’s “involvement in its total surroundings” has placed it as a living history in a new environment.
In the end, what am I talking about? What is this about, really? A stone from a desert in my hand. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998:92) sums up the whole experience rather well, by questioning our human ability to “explain” objects’ representations, definitions, and interior life-worlds. Knowledge or representation, he wonders, “is it possible to know it?” Or am I—when I observe the brain-stone lying on the wooden-table in my apartment situated on a hill in southern Stockholm, far away from the Namibe desert, its sand dunes and ocean swells—merely reflecting myself in a mirror?
Thus, extending my own presence and beingness into another commodity, confiscating its own history, purpose, and dreams, only to claim them as my own property.
References
Bennett, Jane. 2010, Vital Matter. A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Henare, A., Holbraad, H. & Wastell, S. 2007. “Introduction”. In: Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds.) Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Oxon: Routledge.
Ingold, T., 2007. “Materials against materiality”. Archaeological Dialogues(Vol.14, No.1, pp.1–16).
Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno., 1993. “On technical mediation: philosophy, sociology, genealogy”. CommonKnowledge(No.2, pp.29-64).
McDougall, Debra. 2021. “Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age.” In: Decay (ed. G. Hage). Durham: Duke University Press. (pp 28–36).
Miller, Daniel, 2005. “Materiality: an introduction.” In: Miller, Daniel (ed.) Materiality. Durham & London: Duke University Press (pp.1–50).
Marx, Karl. 1976 (1867). Capital. London: New Park Publications.
Carlbring, Per, et al. 2023. “A new era in Internet interventions: The advent of Chat-GPT and AI-assisted therapist guidance.” Internet Interventions(Vol.32, April 2023, 100621, the article was accessed online on 12 November, 2025).
Douglas, Mary. 1984. Purity and Danger. London & New York: Routledge.
Ward, J.D., et al. 1983. “On the Antiquity of the Namib.” South African Journal of Science(Vol.79, May 1983, pp.175–183).
van Zinderen Bakker, E.M. 1975. “The Origin and Palaeoenvironment of the Namib Desert Biome.” Journal of Biogeography (Vol.2, No.2, June 1975, pp.65–73).
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute(Vol.4, No.3, September 1998, pp.469–488).
Wagner, Helmut, R. 1983. “Toward an Anthropology of the Life World: Alfred Schutz's Quest for the Ontological Justification of the Phenomenological Undertaking.” Human Studies (Vol.6, pp.239–246).
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HEM/HOME/CASA
