Stuff

Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the
study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the
study of material things. This book shows why it is time to
acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn
from focusing our attention on stuff.

The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality
as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required
to understand the way we are created by material as well as social
relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home
possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues
of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the
implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to
poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define
what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with
death.

Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean,
India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto
for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the
objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and
personal life.

Auteur
Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London and one of the leading anthropologists in the world today. His particular interest is in the study of material culture.

Résumé
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death.

Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.

Contenu

Acknowledgements vi

Prologue: My Life as an Extremist 1

1 Why Clothing is not Superficial 12

2 Theories of Things 42

3 Houses: Accommodating Theory 79

4 Media: Immaterial Culture and Applied Anthropology 110

5 Matter of Life and Death 135

Notes 157

Index 165