Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. vi)
• Prologue: My Life as an Extremist (p. 1)
• 1 Why Clothing is not Superficial (p. 12)
• 2 Theories of Things (p. 42)
• 3 Houses: Accommodating Theory (p. 79)
• 4 Media: Immaterial Culture and Applied Anthropology (p. 110)
• 5 Matter of Life and Death (p. 135)
• Notes (p. 157)
• Index (p. 165)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Social anthropologist Miller (Univ. College London; series editor, Journal of Material Culture) has overseen, undertaken, or collaborated on a significant number of ethnographic studies on the Caribbean, India, London, and beyond. While this first of a proposed two-volume study builds on the author's insights from his work with and reading of ethnographic studies, it rises above in-depth study of a particular setting to the level of manifesto concerning the relationships among earthly materials and people. Miller's "intention is to replace a theory of stuff as representation with stuff as one part of a process of objectification, or self-alienation," giving "theoretical shape to the idea that objects make us, as part of the very same process by which we make them." According to Miller, "[u]ltimately there is no separation of subjects and objects.... Instead ... we can call this a dialectical theory of material culture." The author exemplifies his exploration through discussions of particular forms of clothing, housing, the Internet and cell phones, and life-stage shifts in relationships with the inanimate. Some readers will share insights from Miller's "celebration" of his special vision of material culture. To assess the whole argument, others may await the forthcoming second volume, Consumed by Doubt, which "will be directed to the negative implications of stuff." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. L. Cooper emeritus, DePauw University