Daniel Miller's Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter

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In the introduction to Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, Daniel Miller describes the book as part of the second stage of the development of material culture studies. The first stage was the recognition by writers such as Appadurai and Bourdieu as well as Miller that material culture is important and worthy of study. The second stage is the argument made in this book: that it is crucial to focus on "the diversity of material worlds" without reducing these material worlds to symbols for "real" social processes nor cloistering them in sub-studies of like objects. That things matter has already been ascertained; this books intends to investigate "why some things matter" more than others and in particular contexts.

Miller claims a focus on objects themselves that does not however "fetishize" :What we may regard as unique to our approach is that we remain focused upon the object that is being investigated but within a tradition that prevents any simple fetishization of material form. Indeed we feel that it is precisely those studies that quickly move the focus from object to society in their fear of fetishism and their apparent embarrassment at being, as it were, caught gazing at mere objects, that retain the negative consequences of the term ‘fetishism.’ It is for them that Coke is merely a material symbol, banners stand in a simple moment of representation or radio becomes mere text to be analyzed. In such analysis the myriad diversity of artefacts can easily become reduced to generic forms such as ‘text’, ‘art’, or ‘semiotic.’ In such approaches it is not only the objects that remain fetishized but also, as Latour (1993) has argued with respect to the fetishism within debates about science, it is the idea of ‘society’ as ...

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...usic is a good example. Besides the aural experience of listening to music, there is the physical experience of the bass vibrating your body; that feeling is directly related to the nature of the medium by which you are listening. The stereo with four foot speakers or the kitchen radio are things that matter too. CDs come into one’s possession bearing, besides music, artistic cover art, printed lyrics, and the thanks to families and deities by the musicians involved. Things are polyvalent, and things are made up of other things and attached in literal and figurative ways to still other things. And I think it is worth gazing a bit more intently at those objects and all their physical, sensual attributes. That fear of objects does not seem to be entirely gone; there is still a tendency to switch rapidly to the social and symbolic valences of those sensual experiences.

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