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.
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The Entries
- My Life with Things
- Learn to Love Stuff
- Banky
- A Digression on the Topic of the Transitional Object
- Cebebrate!
- My Purple Shoes
- Newspapers
- Rose Nails
- The Window Shade
- Napkins
- My White Man’s Tooth
- Should I Be Straighter
- Cyberfucked
- Knobs
- Glasses
- Curing Rug Lust
- Window Shopping Online
- Catalogs
- Other People’s Labor
- Making Roots/Making Routes
- My Closet(s)
- Joining the MRE
- Fun Shopping
- Preschool Birthday Parties
- Xena Warrior Consumer Princess
- I Love Your Nail Polish
- Little Benches
- The Kiss
- Are There Malls in Haiti?
- Baby Number Two Turned Me into Economic Man
- Pictures of the Rice Grain
- Panting in Ikea
- Capitalism Makes Me Sick
- My Grandmother’s Rings
- Anorectic Energy
- Mi-Mi’s Piano
- Dream-Filled Prescription
- The Turquoise Arrowhead
- Turning the Tables
- Minnie Mouse Earring Holder
- Make Yourself a Beloved Person
- 3. Writing as Practice and Process
- 4. This Never Happened
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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