Just Finished Reading: Stuff by Daniel Miller (FP: 2010)

Stuff is all around us – from the clothes we wear, to the houses we live in and the cars we drive to work. Our stuff isn’t just a part of our lives, a part we have in no small part created ourselves, but is, in a very real sense, part of us. Take away a human beings stuff and what do you have – apart from a very unhappy human being? Something, the author contends and I’m inclined to agree with, that is less than human. Not only would a human being, naked and alone, have a rather short lifespan out in the wild s/he would be human in name only. Ever since the first human (or more likely pre-human ancestor) picked up the first rock or shaped the first crude tool we have become something other and something different from our more natural contemporaries. We have become wedded to the things we make, the things we use and the things we hold dear that help to define us.

Stuff is about our relationships with those things that we often take completely for granted and, unless focused on, have virtually vanished from sight. They have become ubiquitous, faded into the background, hardly given a second conscious thought. Studying these things with the mind of an anthropologist (as the author is) throws up some interesting questions and some non-obvious answers. Why do poor Caribbean women spend so much of their small income on clothes and why do they own so many shoes? How exactly do you wear a Sari and why is wearing it well so difficult (I learnt so much about something I’d barely given a moment to think about here!), Why is it so difficult for Western women to decide what to wear in the morning and how is it possible to have a wardrobe full of clothes and yet have nothing to wear (one of the great mysteries of the Universe to most men). Why are houses designed the way they are? Are they simply ‘machines for living’ and if so why are they so different across time and across cultures? What do interior furnishings say about the culture using them? How do the interiors of houses translate to the interiors of private cars? Does the type of housing simply reflect the politics of the age and the power relationships between classes? Why do some working class families modify their state-owned properties while others don’t? Do power relations between genders in a household have an effect on their interior design? Why are some houses thought to be haunted and why to people periodically rearrange the furniture? Can mobile phones help to alleviate poverty or will people use them in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways? How are websites designed to trap surfers into staying longer than they had planned to? Can you find God online? Are anonymous game character Avatars as liberating as they appear to be? Can you really have a relationship via mobile phone? Is it a pointless battle to deny boy children toy guns? Can you truly stop children eating chocolate? Why is Barbie still popular in a post-Feminist world? How do you deal with people’s stuff after they die? What do you keep, what do you throw away and what do you give away to others? Can you really keep someone’s life essence in a shoebox?

An often bizarre, sometimes profound, occasionally difficult but generally rewarding read. I’ve dipped my toes into Anthropology a few times and have always found it interesting – after all the subject matter is people who I find endlessly fascinating anyway. In another time and another place I could have so been an Anthropologist - maybe I am already. I’m always trying to figure out exactly why people do (or don’t do) what they’re doing. Definitely a recommended read for anyone interested in our relationship to the stuff many of us hold dear.