Full Description
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.
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
