Copyright © Daniel Miller, 2010
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First published in 2010 by Polity Press
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I have always felt that a subject called Social Anthropology could manage to be a hell of a lot more social than is commonly the case. As a result, I changed my way of working many years ago. Increasingly I carry out almost all my research in collaboration. This means that, although this book is largely about my research, it presents results and ideas that have, in most cases, been developed only through my engagement with others. It is impossible, for example, to consider my discussion of the sari in chapter 1 without this being also credited simultaneously to Mukulika Banerjee, or that of the Jamaican mobile phone without this being equally seen as the work of Heather Horst. Other research collaborators have included Zuzana Búriková for the work on au pairs, Alison Clarke for the work on shopping, Mirca Madianou for the work on long-distance relationships, Lucy Norris for the work on clothing and waste, Fiona Parrott for the work on loss, Don Slater for the work on the Internet in Trinidad, and Sophie Woodward for the work on denim.
One of the other delights of my work has been the collaboration with students and especially with PhD students. This creates a vicarious pride which is not entirely dissimilar from that of parents and children. As in the latter case, it is often the younger party that shows much more maturity than the older. Many years ago I established something we call a dinner/drinking group, which meets monthly to drink, discuss pre-circulated papers by the students and then eat (and occasionally party). Sometimes in each other’s homes, sometimes in my office, sometimes in restaurants.
Thanks to this format, friendships have often been formed, and also collaborative publications. The publications in turn reflect the cross-influence between what often started as quite different projects. This has made it easier to produce edited collections with relative coherence compared to most such volumes. So I owe a considerable amount to past and present PhD students: Ivana Bajic, Ira Berdichevsky, Julie Botticello, Achsah Carrier, Pat Clark, Alison Clarke, Magda Craciun, Dimitrios Dalakaglou, Inge Daniels, Adam Drazin, Justin Finden-Crofts, Pauline Garvey, Cleo Gougoulis, Martha Guarneros, Anat Hecht, Heather Horst, Gabrielle Hosein, Neil Jarman, Mark Johnson, Emma Lindblad, Tom McDonald, Desmond Mallikarachichi, Simone Mangal, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux, Marjorie Murray, Razvan Nicolescu, Kaori O’Connor, Bodil Olesen (honorary), Panarai Ostapirat, Andrea Pellegram, Anna Pertiera, Elia Petridou, Sigrid Rausing, Tom Rogers, Ed Ross, Florian Schlichting, Miran Shin, Andrew Skuse, Jo Tacchi, Chang-Kwo Tan, Sophie Woodward. In addition, over the years there have been constant visitors, students who came for just a few months, who joined this group, and then left again; I simply cannot mention all these and I hope they will forgive me. Others who have commented on this manuscript include Eleana Yalouri and Karen Ida Dannesboe as well as anonymous reviewers.
I also owe a considerable debt to my colleagues over the years in material culture studies at University College London. That is, Barbara Bender, Victor Buchli, Paolo Favero, John Gledhill, Suzanne Küchler, Chris Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Chris Tilley and Graeme Ware. I have only ever worked at UCL and never once been tempted by any other potential job. There are also many colleagues around the world who have encouraged and inspired me from time to time, and helped especially when I was first developing these ideas, for example, Rob Foster, Nicky Gregson, Caroline Humphrey, Webb Keane, Marilyn Strathern, Nicholas Thomas and Rick Wilk. As well as others, sadly deceased, such as Judy Attfield, Alfie Gell and Marianne Gullestad.
On a more personal note, of particular importance has been the friendship and advice over the years of Mukulika Banerjee, Kathryn Earle and Stephen Frosh. Nothing I do has ever been possible without the support of Rickie, Rachel and David and I would like to thank Rickie, in particular, for her assistance in editing the text. Finally I am indebted to a vast number of people who have granted me such generous help during fieldwork in a dozen different countries over many many years. I can’t name them but it is their ideas and actions that inform this book.
Prologue: My Life as an Extremist
Don’t, just don’t, ask for or expect a clear definition of ‘stuff’. Sure, there are academic traditions that believe knowledge is best conveyed through such clear definitions. This is perhaps essential in the natural sciences. But personally I have always had a horror of what I think of as pedantic semantics. To try and determine the exact criteria by which some things would be excluded from stuff as perhaps less tangible, or too transient, would be a hopeless exercise. Does an email or a fashion count as stuff, a kiss or a leaf or polystyrene packing? This is a book about the variety of things that we might term stuff, but nowhere in this volume will you find any attempt at a definition of that term. Rather it is intended to introduce my own perspective on the study of material culture, a set of studies that are principally concerned with stuff. Material culture is no better defined than stuff is. In practice these studies have promiscuously picked up on interesting topics and perspectives that more self-absorbed, well-defined sub-disciplines felt were outside of their brief. Material culture thrives as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline: inclusive, embracing, original, sometimes quirky researches and observations.
Material culture starts, after all, with mere happenstance: the history of the established academic disciplines. Some of these seem obvious; we have language and so we have linguistics. Others on reflection seem a trifle bizarre. The study of rocks is allocated to geography, and then somehow the study of traffic gets mixed into the pot. Yet no one thought to have an academic discipline whose specific area of study would be artefacts, the object world created by humanity. It could so easily have been otherwise. Consider the degree to which established academic disciplines, from archaeology to architecture, from sociology to design, require theories and perspectives on this material world. If material culture had existed for a century of established study in thousands of colleges, it would have been as taken for granted as linguistics is today. But this didn’t happen and it is not the purpose of this book to create a discipline where there wasn’t one. Instead it seeks to welcome this aberration; to embrace the openness and collegiality of not having to be overly disciplined. Stuff as a term serves just fine. Not establishing a discipline doesn’t mean that a study of stuff lacks substance or consequence. Material culture studies are becoming recognized as a vital contribution to half a dozen established disciplines, from archaeology to design. We provide many theories, and analytical approaches, for example, in discussing the specific nature and consequences of materiality. Several of these are discussed in the course of this book.
This volume is not a textbook, nor a systematic review of the range of studies of material culture. Most of that work is barely mentioned here. It is instead, together with a future companion volume, intended as a retrospective examination of my own previous research. When I was first approached by a publisher to consider creating an edited collection based on my previously published work, I was ambivalent. I had always felt that, in some respects, such collections are lacking something. In general, an edited collection requires very little effort, partly because one is not required to re-think earlier material in the light of later work, while as soon as a book appears in press I tend to see only its deficiencies. Fortunately such introspections are limited by the fact that I write mainly as an anthropologist. This means that most of my writing is about something far more interesting than myself or my ideas – it is an account of other peoples, their practices and cosmologies and ideas. As accounts of others they hopefully have just as much to teach now as when I first wrote them, which helps give me confidence in the value of a return to these works. But I still preferred not to create a book of edited papers, but to wait until I could partially rewrite this past corpus. By reconsidering each publication in the light of others I could draw attention to some larger themes that connect them, and longer trajectories that they developed over time. With twenty-six previous volumes this task seemed better divided into two main themes.
Other grounds for this rewriting of earlier work emerge in retrospect. Academia, as the anthropologist Bourdieu points out, in its structure of employment, creates an incentive for each generation to attempt the overthrow of its predecessors, demonstrating the intellectual agility of the young by repudiating established arguments. As a student in Cambridge, in a highly competitive environment, this desire to demonstrate cleverness, as opposed to understanding, was paramount. Amongst my first works, a jointly edited collection called Ideology, Power and Prehistory1 was a critique of Foucault. There was a need to demonstrate that I was comfortable with the work of figures such as Derrida and Lacan and clever enough to appropriate the opaque and often recondite terms and ideas that impressed, partly through obfuscating phraseology. I gained a great deal from that lively competition and ambition. But it has also taken me a considerable time to overcome the more negative aspects of that legacy: to appreciate that a discipline such as anthropology, devoted to the comprehension and welfare of people in society, was ultimately served much better by understanding than by cleverness, which merely betrayed the need to express the stories and suffering of others. The intention was that this book would attempt to retain some of these insights from earlier work, but to release them from the encrusting jargon in which they were first written and instead to try and convey them as clearly as possible. Another problem with an edited collection is its selectivity. By contrast, a re-composed retrospective examination allows one in hindsight to consider the corpus of work more holistically. So this volume seeks both to juxtapose and to relate theories of stuff, applied anthropology, ethnographic reportage and the analysis of particular genres of clothing, home and the media. Ultimately there are a good many reasons why you should give a stuff about stuff, and this book attempts to bring them together.
For all these reasons, I approached Polity Press with the idea of doing something rather different from a conventional edited volume: to write two new books that summarized and reviewed my own work in a clearer, less pretentious style that could examine my academic trajectory as a whole. This first volume speaks to around a dozen books and over a hundred papers about material culture. All this research was undertaken under the auspices of, and using the methodologies of, the discipline of anthropology. It is therefore a complement to other material culture work orientated more to disciplines such as design or philosophy.2 It is also very much beholden to the specific context of the department of Anthropology at University College London, from where all this research was conducted. My own research has occupied a specific niche within an ecological diversity of ideas that colonize other feeding grounds for material culture, grazed by my colleagues in the department. These include the anthropology of art, museum studies and culture heritage management, visual anthropology, and the anthropology of landscape and architecture. Our collectivity is represented in the Journal of Material Culture which we edit, and many other publications. I also run a blog at www.materialworldblog.com with colleagues at UCL and other universities. While this volume represents almost entirely my own work, rather than that of the larger group, I am happy to acknowledge the extent to which my research has constantly been informed by my colleagues. It is even more influenced by over forty PhD students, some of whose work is discussed here.
This book is intended as an interim report rather than a signing off. I have recently started several new projects on topics ranging from global denim to the use of media by migrants for the conduct of long-distance relationships. Hopefully consolidation can create a higher academic platform for the launch of future work. But the foundation is constructed from the building blocks of material culture itself. The central argument of this book is a paradox: that the best way to understand, convey and appreciate our humanity is through attention to our fundamental materiality. It might seem that this would only be true of our particular present – a consequence of the sheer scale of contemporary consumption and its implications for environmental and other ethical debates. I do not believe this to be the case. I will argue that non-industrial societies are just as much material cultures as we are. This volume treats consumer and non-consumer societies equally and in juxtaposition. A consideration of the specific issues of consumer society will be the subject of a second retrospective volume entitled Consumed by Doubt. If discussion of issues of political economy, indeed politics more generally, including a concern for the consequences of materialism for the future of the environment, are largely missing from this volume, it is because they are the subject of this second complementary work. Before that more political debate, however, I feel we need to consider the more foundational issues: the consequences of our materiality and of material culture for a more profound understanding of what we ourselves are.
The leitmotif of this book is a challenge to our common-sense opposition between the person and the thing, the animate and inanimate, the subject and the object. Certainly this is being achieved in some measure these days through science. New forms of biomedicine constantly challenge the way we think about such matters as the body and perception. Anthropologists including Donna Harraway, Emily Martin, Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour have considered these consequences of science, especially biomedical discoveries, as well as the languages and images we use to convey them. Here, by contrast, I am concerned with developments in social science, rather than natural science; with anthropology’s qualitative encounter with the diversity of peoples, and the increasing diversity of things.
Stuff is ubiquitous, and problematic. But whatever our environmental fears or concerns over materialism, we will not be helped by either a theory of stuff, or an attitude to stuff, that simply tries to oppose ourselves to it; as though the more we think of things as alien, the more we keep ourselves sacrosanct and pure. The idea that stuff somehow drains away our humanity, as we dissolve into a sticky mess of plastic and other commodities, is really an attempt to retain a rather simplistic and false view of pure and prior unsullied humanity. There are good uses of anthropology and also terrible uses of anthropology. One of the latter is a primitivism which assumes that because tribal people didn’t have much stuff they were necessarily less materialistic. On the contrary, some of the most sophisticated relationships to things may be found amongst peoples such as Australian Aboriginals or North West Coast American Indians, whose material possessions may seem paltry, compared to modern Londoners’.
Furthermore, not having things is no evidence that you don’t want them. An Amazonian Indian may be much more desirous of possessions than we are, but simply unable to obtain them. The anthropologist Stephen Hughes-Jones, who spent many years in Amazonian research, was shocked by the avaricious desire to obtain goods that he encountered amongst people who up to then had almost no possessions.3 It may not be what pop groups want us to believe of the peoples of Amazonia, but personally I turn to pop groups for music rather than for anthropology. Anyway, why should we deprive Amazonian Indians of the delights of pop music? This model of the noble, unmaterialistic savage is entirely unhelpful. All it achieves is an assumption of lost purity. It makes us feel alienated and polluted simply for being who we are. Instead, this book tries to face up to stuff: to acknowledge it, respect it and expose ourselves to our own materiality rather than to deny it. My starting point is that we too are stuff, and our use and identification with material culture provides a capacity for enhancing, just as much as for submerging, our humanity. My hope and intention is that this book will demonstrate how and why a more profound appreciation of things will lead to a more profound appreciation of persons.
For some time now I have had the ambition to become an extremist, something I consider to be a noble ambition, at least for an anthropologist. In fact being an extremist more or less sums up what I mean by being an anthropologist. While I am generally rather unsympathetic to disciplinary labels and work in collaboration with wonderful researchers from many other disciplines, I am committed to what I see as this extremist quality in anthropology. But, at this point, I suppose I had better explain why I would consider extremism, in this particular context, to be such a noble pursuit. I would think that one of the less controversial characterizations one could make about the modern world is that it shows an ever increasing tendency to greater particularity and simultaneously to greater universality. On the one hand there is a proliferation of diversity in occupations, in commodities, in experiences and in relationships. A Londoner might work in corporate PR or waste incineration, play with a Nintendo Wii or beach volleyball, and love karaoke or tequila. At the same time we devise institutions based on implied universals, such as children’s rights, web technology, neo-liberalism, or a curriculum for chemistry, that have the ambition of reaching all the peoples of the world. At one end of the spectrum we become ever more particular as individuals in our work, tastes, practices and interests. At the other end we have recourse to ever more universal aspirations, some of which we subscribe to, but most of which do not depend on our active identification. Most, such as human rights or medical services, grow more in the form of institutions that strive for universality in practice. Of course, these two processes are connected. Institutions are more universal the more they encompass an increasing particularity.
This simultaneous growth in particularity and universality is one way of defining the modern world. It was central to that philosophical tradition which is usually called dialectics and is most closely associated with the work of Hegel, a philosophical foundation I will refer to several times in this volume, since it is the one which underpins much of my own work. How should academics respond to this condition? I find that, in general, most disciplines respond by searching out some kind of middle ground. Any social science or natural science of the person, such as psychology, that proceeds through hypothesis testing will tend to focus upon some small element of predictability. It will propose a theory or analysis that can be tested against a relatively limited and often controlled observation. In applying for a research grant most academics will present an argument based on a quite immediate relationship between a particular behaviour and a specific generalization or cause. Is class or ethnicity better correlated to educational performance in the UK? How do older people in Chicago respond when you look them in the eye directly or look at them indirectly? Do Serbians more often consider that they are infected with a cold when the weather is cold?
The anthropology I am committed to eschews such hypothesis testing. My problem in seeking research grants is that invariably my only real hypothesis is that I really have very little idea of what I am actually going to find when I go out to conduct fieldwork. This hypothesis has always proved correct. In going to live within another community I assume that the most important findings are going to be about things one didn’t even suspect existed before going to live there. If you didn’t know they existed, how could you have hypothesized about them? In my experience an inconsistent, opportunistic research student tends to be far more original and productive than consistent research students, who achieve merely what they set out to do.
I don’t then follow this search for the middle ground of academic research – the testing ground. This is because I see the primary purpose of anthropology as fulfilling an ideal I derive originally from Hegel. The central problem confronted by the modern world is that universalism and particularity can so easily lose touch with each other. Finance, theory or aspirations to be good can all take on a universalistic abstract form. But these then fall out of synch with the actual diversity, complexity and contradictions of business, analysis and the ethics of the everyday. So the purpose of anthropology is to bring these two back into conversation with and acknowledgement of each other. After all, there is probably no discipline as committed to particularism as anthropology. A principle of its work is relativism. We conduct fieldwork by spending a year participating in the lives of members of an Apostolic church in Zimbabwe, rice farmers of North West Thailand, separated Filipino families, or aspiring pop bands in Manchester. We are not supposed to claim authority to write about these communities until we have thoroughly immersed ourselves in the everyday life of these very specific groups. Our methodology, known as ethnography, typically consists of living with families for a year or more, speaking their language and participating in mundane activities such as cooking and cleaning.
This is a world apart from those who are satisfied with questionnaires and focus groups and seek to conduct experiments. Anthropologists can become so extreme that all generalization seems suspect. Yes, this Balinese family used a word we might translate as love, but the people in the next valley use it slightly differently, as do women as against men, or younger as against older women. Indeed on reflection they seem to be using it a bit differently this year from last year. So how could we ever say what that word love means to a people we drastically overgeneralize every time we use the term Balinese? Such extreme relativism seems doomed to extreme parochialism, a common affliction amongst anthropologists.
Yet, at the very same time, anthropology is a discipline dedicated to universals, and will continually throw up ideas such as Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, the principle of the gift, anthropological versions of Marxism or psychoanalysis, relationships as negotiated experience, the consequences of our materiality. Our theories seem to transcend all such particularities. Culture itself is viewed as binary, or founded in exchange or in kinship, or opposed to nature. We attempt to write a book about stuff. Some of our generalizations are so vast they are scary. The advantage of this simultaneous commitment to the extremes of particularity and of generality is that anthropology can make its major contribution to the understanding of humanity through constantly re-connecting these two without losing a commitment to both extremes. In that sense this discipline that many people regard as looking backwards to prior manifestations of humanity is actually uniquely geared to the central dilemmas of modern life.
Most commonly, good anthropological work reveals the particular as a manifestation of the universal. So there is regional neo-liberalism. Coca-Cola is everywhere, but means slightly different things in each locality. The gift is based on an obligation to return the gift but this works differently within the Chinese Guanxi system than with the Maori Hau. My colleague Mukulika Banerjee is an expert on democracy. She has researched why people bother to vote in an Indian village. But this in turn means understanding how these villages respond to the universal pretensions of democracy as an ideal. Democracy as a practice and as a consequence varies from place to place, and yet cannot be understood without also acknowledging its authority as a global aspiration or global conceit. Perhaps there is no capitalism, only capitalisms. So the reason I desire to be an extremist is that this represents a commitment to keep in touch simultaneously with the extremes of universalism and particularism in modern life.
Why does this matter so much? It is because one of the major dangers that besets the world today lies in the increasing dissociation of the two extremes. The universals fly apart from the particular. Economists, psychologists and human rights lawyers come up with more and more general models that claim to represent humanity and assume increasing authority to be imposed upon humanity as a whole. All economies are increasingly expected to seek to accord with ever more abstract, often mathematical models that generate new financial instruments. All children are supposed now to have the same basic human rights. But these universals become detached from the very specifics of our humanity and cultural differences that remain meaningful. London may be gloriously cosmopolitan, but the devout Sikh remains very distinct from the retro-Goth living next door. So I subscribe to a discipline that is prepared to dedicate a year in order to know what it means to live as a devout Sikh, but equally what it means to live as a retro-Goth in London; to simultaneously consider the implications of neo-liberalism and universal human rights. But then there is always a third stage to this dialectic without which our task remains incomplete. This is to ask what the consequences of neo-liberalism are to the retro-Goth and the challenge a devout Sikh might represent to assumptions about universal human rights. Only at that point have we achieved the goal of being anthropologists.
Once upon a time anthropologists were associated only with the study of less developed or small-scale societies. I hope those days are gone forever. All people today are equal in their right to the burden of being studied by some or other anthropologist. My definition of the anthropologist is someone who seeks to demonstrate the consequences of the universal for the particular and of the particular for the universal by equal devotion to the empathetic understanding and encompassment of both. This is why I believe my extremism to be a noble cause. But it follows from this same premise that I have, within this universalistic ambition, my own particularism. My particular particularism is the field of material culture – the study of stuff.
This book charts a path towards material culture studies through several chapters, each of which takes responsibility for providing a different perspective upon this endeavour. The first chapter on clothing is a demolition of the most common academic and popular view of stuff – the idea that objects signify or represent us and that they are principally signs or symbols that stand for persons. Instead, I argue that in many respects stuff actually creates us in the first place. More specifically, I demonstrate why clothing is not superficial. The second chapter presents theories of material culture. Starting with a theory of objects per se, it moves steadily upwards to the more rarefied theory of objectification and thence to a plane of transcendence where we gain a perspective from which we can no longer distinguish subjects from objects. It then examines the consequences of our various beliefs about the properties of materiality itself. The third chapter takes these neat and clean abstract theories and drags them back down to the messy world of application in its consideration of our relationship with our homes and houses. It literally domesticates such theories through examining the process of ‘accommodating’, and reveals how such theories, when applied to specifics, have to incorporate wider factors such as the impact of governments, the history of styles, international migration, and the power and agency that lies in the houses themselves.
The fourth chapter examines the ambiguous materiality of media and communication. Stuff is not necessarily a thing we can hold or touch. This chapter also takes responsibility for issues not previously addressed, but which emerge in applied anthropology. What can and should we do with the knowledge and understanding gained by material culture studies, when it comes to the welfare of populations? How can we hope to improve their conditions and respect their aspirations while considering the negative impact of their desires? Finally, in the fifth chapter, we consider stuff as the matter of life and death; that which brings us into the world and that which helps us part from the world. In this final chapter I take what was introduced theoretically as the way objects construct subjects, and show how this is true for the everyday understanding of what it means to be human.
Notes
1 All references are to my own work, unless another author is specified. In this case, D. Miller and C. Tilley (eds), Ideology, Power and Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
2 For example, Judy Attfield’s Wild Things (Oxford: Berg, 1992) is a textbook on material culture written from the perspective of design studies.
3 S. Hugh-Jones, ‘Yesterday’s Luxuries, Tomorrow’s Necessities: Business and Barter in Northwest Amazonia’, in C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds), Barter, Exchange and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42–74.