Stuff

Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike thestudy of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to thestudy of material things. This book shows why it is time toacknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learnfrom focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficialityas applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are requiredto understand the way we are created by material as well as socialrelations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our homepossessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issuesof materiality in relation to the media, as well as theimplications of such an approach in relation, for example, topoverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to definewhat it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope withdeath. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean,India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifestofor the study of material culture and a new way of looking at theobjects that surround us and make up so much of our social andpersonal life.