Unconventional and provocative, My Life with Things is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items-kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano-and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.
Elizabeth Chin is Professor of Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design and the author of Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction 3 2. The Entries 37 My Life with Things 37 Learn to Love Stuff 38 Banky 40 A Digression on the Topic of the Transitional Object 42 Cebebrate! 56 My Purple Shoes 58 Newspapers 61 Rose Nails 63 The Window Shade 67 Napkins 69 My White Man's Tooth 72 Should I Be Straighter 76 Cyberfucked 79 Knobs 80 Glasses 82 Curing Rug Lust 85 Window Shopping Online 89 Catalogs 92 Other People's Labor 95 Making Roots/Making Routes 98 My Closet(s) 101 Joining the MRE 108 Fun Shopping 114 Preschool Birthday Parties 114 Xena Warrior Consumer Princess 118 I Love Your Nail Polish 120 Little Benches 123 The Kiss 126 Are There Malls in Haiti? 127 Baby Number Two Turned Me into Economic Man 129 Pictures of the Rice Grain 132 Panting in Ikea 136 Capitalism Makes Me Sick 139 My Grandmother's Rings 147 Anorectic Energy 157 Mi-Mi's Piano 162 Dream-Filled Prescriptions 169 The Turquoise Arrowhead 170 Turning The Tables 173 Minnie Mouse Earring Holder 176 Make Yourself a Beloved Person 181 3. Writing as Practice and Process 187 4. This Never Happened 203 Notes 221 Bibliography 227 Index 235
"In this highly anticipated volume Elizabeth Chin provides what is sure to be a classic text in consumption studies: a breakthrough auto-ethnography that exposes this mundane space as the highly affective, contradictory, and political space that it is. Smart, beautifully written and honest, My Life With Things is a singular achievement and an unprecedented work that will forever trouble how we think about consumption and the very craft of contemporary ethnography."
Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure on and off the Ice - Erica Rand
"In My Life With Things Elizabeth Chin offers a smart and fascinating look at the historical, political, personal, and material specificity of people's relationship to commodities. Chin's use of short essays, autoethnography, colloquial language, and often poetic prose make for an elegant, original, insightful, and accessible book."
