Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter PDF
Preview Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter
Material cultures http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield 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
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