The tenacity of enchanted things

Three new scholarly works reconsider the power of things to assemble humans and nonhumans into enduring social orders. Robert Alun Jones's The Secret of the Totem explores how a single intellectual problem-why certain peoples venerated plant and animal totems-became such an urgent question for James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. Bill Brown's Things and Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel's Making Things Public both map out their own "thing theories," an endeavor that echoes past efforts to understand the totem, commodity, and gift. Together, the three volumes offer a rich set of case studies and provocative new questions concerning how the material world ought be engaged as part of any serious social analysis.