What is this object?  We often limit ourselves to the material — Yes, it’s a headrest. It is made of carved wood and split bamboo stalks. It was was created near the Sepik River in Papa New Guinea, etc. However, concrete materiality is but a facet of what comprises this headrest. Objects are shaped and defined by their experiences — they adopt new meaning with every new use. Significance and definition shifts from owner to owner and location to location — this headrest, now on display in Nashville, Tennessee, is not the same object that was created as a functional item in Papua New Guinea. 
Arjuk Appadurai, in his essay "The Social Life of Things," concludes that, concerning objects, “meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance.” Your personal experience with this headrest is another chapter in its story, an addendum to its social life and influence.