A text, material, or concept of scholarly investigation; commonly, “object of study.” (Also, often, a “medium-sized dry good.”) Objects predicate methods and range widely within humanistic inquiry, from forms of concrete evidence (e.g., written documents, material artifacts) to conceptual structures (e.g., traditions of thought, systems of belief), to phenomenal agents (e.g., social forces, cultural patterns), and so on (see METHOD). Where humanistic research engages a human population, the object toggles across the subject/object divide. Likewise, by a metonymic operation, a scholar’s object of study may refer to that subject which identifies his/her entire discipline or field. Where “subject” designates a given topic or theme under discussion, it represents an object of local attention. Virtually inexhaustible and rhetorically slippery, objects also resist conclusive classification by discipline, as well as stable identification according to precedent, genre, or type. Objects migrate between disciplines as a function of interdisciplinary study or institutional change, and often simply occupy wider disciplinary space (see INTERDISCIPLINARITY). It is possible that an identifiable drift in the direction of the interdisciplinary study of “objects” (in the “medium-sized dry good” sense) indexes a general pandering to the commodity fetishisms of a dominant consumer culture—aided, perhaps, by broadly reduced patience with the specific eye-and mind-labor of reading a TEXT.