Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter Material Cultures Why Some Things Matter

Material cultures Consumption and space Series editors Peter Jackson, University of Sheffield Michelle Lowe, University of Southampton Frank Mort, University of Portsmouth Adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective and combining contemporary and historical analysis, Consumption and space aims to develop a dialogue between cultural studies and human geography, opening up areas for serious intellectual debate. Published Sean Nixon Hard looks: masculinities, spectatorship and contemporary consumption Daniel Miller (editor) Material cultures: why some things matter Material cultures Why some things matter Edited by Daniel Miller University College London © Daniel Miller and contributors, 1998 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 1998 by UCL Press UCL Press Limited Taylor & Francis Group 1 Gunpowder Square London EC4A 3DE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available ISBNs: 1-85728-685-5 HB 1-85728-686-3 PB ISBN 0-203-03314-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18558-7 (Glassbook Format) To the memory of Beatrice Hart Contents Acknowledgements ix Notes on contributors xi Part I Introduction 1 Why some things matter 3 Daniel Miller Part II The domestic sphere 2 Radio texture: between self and others 25 Jo Tacchi 3 From woollen carpet to grass carpet: bridging house and garden in an English suburb 47 Sophie Chevalier 4 Window shopping at home: classifieds, catalogues and new consumer skills 73 Alison J. Clarke Part III The public sphere 5 The message in paper 103 Andrea Pellegram vii CONTENTS 6 Material of culture, fabric of identity 121 Neil Jarman 7 Calypso’s consequences 147 Justin Finden-Crofts Part IV The global sphere (or the World Wide West) 8 Coca-Cola: a black sweet drink from Trinidad 169 Daniel Miller 9 Signs of the new nation: gift exchange, consumption and aid on a former collective farm in north-west Estonia 189 Sigrid Rausing 10 At home and abroad: inalienable wealth, personal consumption and the formulations of femininity in the southern Philippines 215 Mark Johnson Index 239 viii Acknowledgements The introduction makes note of the fact that all the contributors worked together for several years as a team in order to produce this volume. But it does not acknowledge the social context through which this was done. Indeed the most important acknowledgement in this case should perhaps go to the role of alcohol, without which it is doubtful that this volume would have been produced, or at least with the degree of enthusiasm and excitement that I hope comes through in the various chapters. As you might guess, such an acknowledgement begs a story. The story begins in January 1992. All the contributors to this volume except Sophie Chevalier were registered as students in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, working for their PhDs under my supervision. Since many of them had families and found it difficult to come in for most of the more regular departmental functions, we decided to initiate a monthly evening meeting at which one of us would present a pre-circulated chapter that would be discussed by the others. The first evening set up a routine that has since remained unaltered. We would meet at around 5.00pm at a pub near the department. Here we would sit and drink, gossip and talk about things and persons in a manner that shall certainly not be repeated in print. At some time around 7.05pm (when I tend to get restless since my mental “clock” is telling me I am missing The Archers – a radio soap opera) we would move on to a nearby Italian restaurant that had the advantages of being relatively inexpensive, self-service and having large tables with, on a weekday, relatively few people. At this point beer could give way to wine and gossip to discussion of the chapter in question. By this point also, enough alcohol had usually been consumed that the comments that paper-givers received were often of a fairly robust and uninhibited kind, so that we all bear the scars of our particular encounters with the group. This was the public sphere within which the various ideas and papers rewritten as chapters of this book were created. Sophie Chevalier is the exception here, in that she came as a post-doctoral student after studying with Martine Segalen in Paris. Although based at Cambridge, she became a regular attender at these evenings for a period of two years and contributed papers to the group along with the others. The drinking group has also included visitors who have ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS come for a year from abroad, Denmark and Israel in the past, Estonia currently. On these grounds acknowledgement must be given to all those who were either participants for at least a year or who are current members of this group but not included in this volume. These are Pauline Garvey, Anat Hecht, Denise Homme, Esther Juhatz, Anu Kannike, Gertrude Ollgaard, Andrew Skuse and Karen Smith. Although I am formally the editor of the collection it is the case that virtually everything has been read by everybody at some stage or other, and to that extent this is the product of a collective rather than any individual. The book is dedicated to another member of the group – Bea Hart, who brought to us the same enthusiasm that was evident in all that she was involved with. Sadly Bea died while this book was in preparation and the dedication reflects our collective sense of loss. x Notes on contributors Sophie Chevalier is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Besançon. Recent publications include Transmettre son mobilier? Le cas contraste de la France et d’Angleterre, in Ethnologie Française. Alison J. Clarke is Senior Lecturer in the History of Design, University of Brighton. She is presently completing a volume of Tupperware and post war consumption for Smithsonian Press. Recent publications include Tupperware: suburbia, sociality and mass consumption, in Visions of Suburbia ed. R. Silverstone (London: Routledge). Justin Finden-Crofts is completing a PhD thesis on the consumption of calypso at the Department of Anthropology, UCL. Neil Jarman is a research officer at the University of Ulster (Coleraine). Recent publications include Parade and protest (with D. Bryan, University of Ulster) and Parading culture (Oxford: Berg). Mark Johnson is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull. He has written several articles on transgendering and consumption in the Philippines, and Beauty and power: transgendering and cultural transformation in the southern Philippines (Oxford: Berg). Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. Recent publications include Capitalism: an ethnographic approach (Oxford: Berg), Acknowledging consumption (London: Routledge) and Worlds apart (London: Routledge). Andrea Pellegram is a Planning Manager for a UK statutory authority. Sigrid Rausing is completing a PhD on current transformations in Estonian identity at the Department of Anthropology, UCL. Jo Tacchi is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol, studying teenage pregnancy, and completing a thesis on the consumption of radio sound at the Department of Anthropology, UCL. xi PART I Introduction CHAPTER 1 Why some things matter Daniel Miller The title of this chapter is intended to be taken quite precisely. It is as different from the question “Why things matter”, as it is from the question “Why some things are important”. It is these differences that represent the original contribution of this volume. The question “Why things matter” would have led to the general study of materiality and the foundation of material culture studies in the insistence upon the continued importance of material forms. This was in effect the battle fought against mainstream social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s and the insistence that taxonomies of material forms were often of significance precisely because being disregarded as trivial, they were often a key unchallenged mechanism for social reproduction and ideological dominance. The development of material culture studies may then be seen as a two-stage process. The first phase came in the insistence that things matter and that to focus upon material worlds does not fetishize them since they are not some separate superstructure to social worlds. The key theories of material culture developed in the 1980s demonstrated that social worlds were as much constituted by materiality as the other way around (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987). This gave rise to a variety of approaches to the issue of materiality varying from material culture as analogous with text (e.g. Tilley 1990, 1991) to applications of social psychological models (Dittmar 1992). This book represents a second stage in the development of material culture studies inasmuch as the point that things matter can now be argued to have been made. This volume, by contrast, concentrates on something different and equally important. The volume demonstrates what is to be gained by focusing upon the diversity of material worlds which becomes each other’s contexts rather than reducing them either to models of the social world or to specific subdisciplinary concerns such as the study of textiles or architecture. It will be argued, by example, throughout this volume that studies of material culture may often provide insights into cultural processes that a more literal “anthropology” has tended to neglect. A volume called Material cultures is obviously situated within what may be easily recognized as a general renaissance in the topic of material culture studies.

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