The Comfort of Things
Aug. 6th, 2008 10:15 amIn addition to The Antique Gift Shop, yesterday's Amazon haul contained Terry Jones' (yes, that Terry Jones) Who Murdered Chaucer? and Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things. I read a couple of chapters of Jones' book in the bath, and it's using the conceit that Chaucer, who fades out of history with no word on his actual death, might have been murdered to look at the social life and politics that made up 14th century England. Fascinating so far.
But I've gotten much farther in The Comfort of Things, because I picked it up to read a bit right before bed and couldn't put the damn thing down until I was halfway through. It's a layperson's version of an ethnography of material culture. In other words, an examination of stuff and our relation to stuff and how we define who we are by stuff.*
I first heard about this book on a podcast I listened to a while back - while I was cleaning out my old apartment, actually - and the author was being interviewed about the work he and his students had done. Miller is a professor of anthropology at University College London, and this book is one of the results of a large ethnography focusing on one random street in London. (There's an appendix with the study protocols etc. if you're interested.) They interviewed about a hundred households about their lives and their selves and their stuff, to work out what role stuff has in our lives.
There's a sort of mythology about that people who focus on material objects tend to be poorer in relationships (if I'm expressing that clearly), but that turns out to be wrong.** What's important is not the amount of stuff you have, but how it's used to define yourself and mark your relationships. The objects we surround ourselves with become signifiers of personal history and connections with others.***
The book isn't a formal ethnography, but instead a collection of thirty character sketches, each delving into a single person or family and examining who they are and how they define themselves through the stuff they do and don't have. The two extremes occur at the beginning of the book with George, a man who owns almost nothing and who's led a strikingly emotionally impoverished life with few connections and almost no self-volition or self-responsibility, and the Clarkes, a couple who lord it benevolently over their extended family of relatives, friends, and astonished ethnographers in a house cluttered with Christmas ornaments, family photos, and huge amounts of other meaningful stuff.
So far, halfway through, it's been a fascinating peek into the lives of others. And I could see where writers, especially, who are interested in character and defining character through objects and relationships to objects would find this useful.
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* And pets. They use a broad definition of "stuff."
** They didn't meet any pathological hoarders, I believe, who are admittedly at one far end of the bell curve.
*** Which is probably why those "Clean up! Declutter! Get rid of everything!" shows sometimes annoy the hell out of me - like when you see someone with a huge collection of dolls and they make her pick five to keep, but she's crying over having to do that. LET HER HAVE A COLLECTION. This is when you dedicate a storage area to the collection items and talk to her about rotating out the ones on display every few weeks or so.
But I've gotten much farther in The Comfort of Things, because I picked it up to read a bit right before bed and couldn't put the damn thing down until I was halfway through. It's a layperson's version of an ethnography of material culture. In other words, an examination of stuff and our relation to stuff and how we define who we are by stuff.*
I first heard about this book on a podcast I listened to a while back - while I was cleaning out my old apartment, actually - and the author was being interviewed about the work he and his students had done. Miller is a professor of anthropology at University College London, and this book is one of the results of a large ethnography focusing on one random street in London. (There's an appendix with the study protocols etc. if you're interested.) They interviewed about a hundred households about their lives and their selves and their stuff, to work out what role stuff has in our lives.
There's a sort of mythology about that people who focus on material objects tend to be poorer in relationships (if I'm expressing that clearly), but that turns out to be wrong.** What's important is not the amount of stuff you have, but how it's used to define yourself and mark your relationships. The objects we surround ourselves with become signifiers of personal history and connections with others.***
The book isn't a formal ethnography, but instead a collection of thirty character sketches, each delving into a single person or family and examining who they are and how they define themselves through the stuff they do and don't have. The two extremes occur at the beginning of the book with George, a man who owns almost nothing and who's led a strikingly emotionally impoverished life with few connections and almost no self-volition or self-responsibility, and the Clarkes, a couple who lord it benevolently over their extended family of relatives, friends, and astonished ethnographers in a house cluttered with Christmas ornaments, family photos, and huge amounts of other meaningful stuff.
So far, halfway through, it's been a fascinating peek into the lives of others. And I could see where writers, especially, who are interested in character and defining character through objects and relationships to objects would find this useful.
---
* And pets. They use a broad definition of "stuff."
** They didn't meet any pathological hoarders, I believe, who are admittedly at one far end of the bell curve.
*** Which is probably why those "Clean up! Declutter! Get rid of everything!" shows sometimes annoy the hell out of me - like when you see someone with a huge collection of dolls and they make her pick five to keep, but she's crying over having to do that. LET HER HAVE A COLLECTION. This is when you dedicate a storage area to the collection items and talk to her about rotating out the ones on display every few weeks or so.