Milk Matters: Material and Semiotic Approaches to the Value of Milk

• In Event: Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - II

Abstract

Material traces in the skeletons of long-dead sheep from sites in the ancient South Caucasus suggest that milk was produced year-round in the mid-2nd millennium BC – a novel development that would have required considerable effort on the part of both herds and herders. In the absence of overt semiotic traces or some sort of ‘Rosetta stone’ of semiotic ideology, various theoretical approaches to the value of material practices and objects are used to jump the gap between materiality and meaning. These scripts either entirely ignore the actual materiality of the objects analyzed or they assume a transhistorical materiality that evacuates much of both the material and historical specificity. I propose that if we take seriously the idea that there is a necessary (but not necessarily deterministic) relationship between object and sign, between material and value, it becomes possible to understand practices from the deeper past – both their material and semiotic coordinates – in a context where information on the arrangement of the material world and the operating ontologies and/or semiotic ideologies is scarce. Drawing on my own research, I explore how the value of milk in the South Caucasus in the 2nd millennium BC was produced, semiotically and materially, through the relationships between sheep, herders, the landscape, and the material substance of milk itself. Attempting to ‘resurrect’ semiotics from the material contributes to the question of how to understand the connection between materiality and meaning more broadly.

Author

• Hannah Chazin, Columbia University