Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.

A synonym of “stealing,” swiping is a vernacular term in the comics industry and fandom used to identify and designate redrawn or traced copies of particular images and panels. As such, swiping constitutes a surprising mode of graphic transmission that implicates the gathering of particular images and their hand-drawn reproductions. The chapter recovers a history of the practice at the hand of a few smaller cases that highlight the variability of swiping as an appreciation and evaluation of copying, only to move to the central case study focusing on Charles Burns’s appropriations of “old” comics panels, mostly from pre-Code romance and horror comic books to Tintin. It is interested not only in how Burns redraws comic book images but also in how he constructs and publicly shares archives of reusable images that are constantly redistributed in his work, especially in his small-press publications. The chapter argues that Burns’s citational tactics function less as postmodern rewriting than as an adaptation of swiping practices from comic book culture, a transmission of a way of redrawing images.