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  • Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter *
  • Regina Lee Blaszczyk (bio)
Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Edited by Daniel Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi+243; illustrations, notes/references, bibliography, index. $45.

A prolific ethnographer, Daniel Miller has expanded his impressive oeuvre with another edited collection on the contemporary material world. Since the mid-1980s, this young anthropologist (b. 1954) at University College London has written, coauthored, edited, and cocompiled eleven volumes, focusing first on archeology and later on consumer society in Great Britain and its former colonies. For those who teach material culture, Miller’s dense Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), which draws on thinkers from Karl Marx to Pierre Bourdieu to formulate a general theory of consumption, is a syllabus staple for advanced graduate students ready, willing, and able to confront abstraction—with a leftist twist. Influenced by the flourishing discipline of British cultural studies, Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter moves beyond arguments about base and superstructure, hegemony and counterhegemony, to offer a more politically balanced interpretation of consumer society that focuses on the agency of people using the goods.

In a useful introduction, Miller situates this volume within the context of a new breed of scholarship, that is, second-generation work in anthropological material-culture studies. During the 1970s and 1980s, stage-one pioneers Mary Douglas, Brian Isherwood, Arjun Appadurai, Ian Hodder, and Christopher Tilley grasped at straws as they tried to gain recognition in an academic discipline that scoffed at artifacts and conflated discussions of materiality with object fetishism. Standing on high theoretical ground, these scholars ultimately convinced fellow anthropologists that “things matter,” paving the way for a generation of empirical research on consumption. Miller’s Material Cultures, along with his Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and Shopping, Place and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), exemplify this cutting-edge approach. Importantly, Material Cultures shows how consumers prioritize the multiple “object worlds” (p. 6) encountered in daily life and argues that certain goods and ensembles—radios and gardens in the private sphere, calypso music and parade banners in the public domain—matter more than others to identity construction.

A series of ethnographies, Material Cultures considers how consumers in England, France, Trinidad, Estonia, and the Philippines interact with specific material worlds as they define themselves as individuals and groups. Ten essays by Miller and his doctoral students focus on three spheres: domestic, public, and global. The most successful contributions move beyond the reportage that can mar ethnography and the convoluted language of structuralism and poststructuralism, onetime mainstays of anthropology. [End Page 874] Implicitly, all give credence to Georg Simmel’s early-twentieth-century thesis that human values are foremost embodied in cultural forms, including the material world. In an exemplary essay on the private realm, Jo Tacchi shows how consumers in Bristol, England, used one commonplace technology, the radio, to create soundscapes that added aural “texture” (p. 27) to their homes, either blocking out unbearable loneliness or creating a space to escape bothersome, noisy families. Consistently, Tacchi’s subjects valued the mood created by radio sound, rather than the appliance or the programming content. Zooming in on the “material culture” created by radio users, Tacchi’s work challenges curators who value objects for their physical qualities and literary theorists who stress the primacy of the text. Similarly, in the book’s global section, Miller’s essay takes on academic proponents of cultural hegemony by debunking the myth of Coca-Cola as a symbol of American imperialism and global homogenization. In Trinidad, Miller found thirsty islanders buying red-colored colas or “red sweet drinks” (p. 178) to identify with their East Indian heritage and “black sweet drinks” (p. 180) such as Coke to define themselves as moderns participating in a world economy. Whether writing about secondhand furnishings, office paper, soap powder, or clothing, the essayists in Material Cultures show how the meaning of objects depends on users’ local needs and circumstances. In their able hands, the inadequacy of the singular term “material culture” is exposed. “Material cultures” more accurately describes the many aural, physical, and visual experiences that consumers build around particular objects and artifact groups.

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