Disruption, Continuity, and the Social Lives of Things: Navajo Folk Art and/as Performance

Contemporary Navajo artworks bind together communicative competence, history, and affect within the commodity situation. Exploring the dynamic character of the object and its social trajectories, the author demonstrates how Navajo art objects are not static entities, but invested and infused with infinite performative powers. The object “speaks”; it animates relations of exchange even as it is, itself, animated.