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.

Acknowledgements vi

Prologue: My Life as an Extremist 1

1 Why Clothing is not Superficial 12

2 Theories of Things 42

3 Houses: Accommodating Theory 79

4 Media: Immaterial Culture and Applied Anthropology 110

5 Matter of Life and Death 135

Notes 157

Index 165