Journal of Material Culture

The presentation of an aesthetic identity involves the accomplishment of a coherent, plausible narrative which links one’s choices to desired characteristics of the self. As symbolic evidence of a person’s taste, material culture is a vital component of a successful narrative. Via case studies of pivotal household objects, this paper uses face-to-face interview data as a way of investigating processes of aesthetic choice. Household objects are interpreted as material elements imbricated in the presentation of a socially plausible and internally consistent aesthetic self. Narrative analysis, and the concept of the epiphany-object, are proposed as useful ways of accounting for tastes in domestic material culture. Methodological questions of truth-telling and authenticity in the face-to-face context are considered, and the sociological problem of taste is scrutinized in light of ideas about social accountability and textual identity.

Studies of collective or corporate burial in the British Neolithic have focused largely on ancestors, clans and lineages, or the production of a microcosm of reality. Social relations are often described as egalitarian, or egalitarianism is taken to be the ideological impetus for corporate burial, belying inequalities in life. Studies of individual burial focus more on concepts of individual power, autonomous agency, status and possession. In this contribution acts of depositing Neolithic bones are interpreted as citations of social relations. The possibilities for studying Neolithic social relations between different aspects of life (human, animal, object, place) are explored using theories developed to understand how persons - and their worlds - are produced through activity. Such activities are considered as struggles with different kinds of ideological regulatory fictions about personal identity and social relations. The study starts with a consideration of ethnographic approaches to personhood, reviews recent work on British Neolithic mortuary practices, and concludes with a case study from the Isle of Man.

In post-Independence India, new colonies of garden suburbs served an educated citizenry to integrate science and nature into their daily life. However, one such colony of bungalows (kothi) and gardens, begun in Jaipur in the 1950s, after two generations of incremental construction, has become in the 1990s similar to an old city ward with towering courtyard houses (haveli) abutting the property lines. This longitudinal study compares the middle class occupants’ initial aspirations with real outcomes as documented in the materiality of built form. The biography of these buildings reflects not only a quest for a life style of class, but the adapting of site and building to make secure one’s livelihood and heritage for one’s descendants, and to manage relations with one’s neighbors. The built environment is not simply an outcome of regulation, design, and willful intent. The levels of agency and the variety of actors are multiple and complex, demanding an analysis of social interaction and an assessment of aggregate outcomes.

This article presents a case study about the way women make decisions about colour and dress prior to, and after a visit to an image consultancy, Color Me Beautiful. It specifically asks to what extent women feel they have benefited from such a consultation in relation to the fashion system and the experience of consumption.

The article is divided into two sections. The first section argues that the interviewees, prior to the consultation, had adopted a narrow and restricted mode of decision-making in relation to colour and clothes due to a variety of social and personal reasons. The second section explores the processes by which the majority of interviewees began to gain confidence and a renewed interest in selecting clothes after a colour consultation. Such a technology of the self enabled the respondents to question and ‘play’ with the fashion system, in such a way that they had not felt able to do before. In particular, the mechanisms of expertise and of meaning were central to this process of change.

This paper addresses the relationship between mobility, ageing and death in an urban housing market from a material culture perspective. It examines a divestment ritual performed by elderly people in Montreal (Canada) on the occasion of a move from a home on their own to a care environment. This move which is often a move into a smaller place and a smaller set of things is also accompanied by the compulsion for the people to divest themselves of some of their belongings, a process that is called ‘casser maison’, literally ‘breaking the house’. This ethnographic paper reveals that ‘casser maison’ is not only a matter of getting separated from some, if not most, of one’s possessions, however. It is also a matter of placing those possessions among the kin or other potential recipients. In this respect, ‘casser maison’ pertains to a ritualized form of construction of the self through the emptying of the place. It proceeds from the wish to ancestralize oneself; the capacity to place one’s possessions is taken to guarantee the survival of the subject and of his or her memory. As such, this paper demonstrates that, through the use of personal belongings, the divestment of the self becomes a form of investment.

In this article, the author reviews three recent books that have been published on material culture in France. The main orientations of these books have to be understood by reference to French traditional anthropology and the interest in technology and traditional know how as well as to the analysis of Gift. They also illustrate new orientations such as the interest in the analysis of innovation process. The author finally compares the French context of material culture studies to the English context, explaining that the first one has traditionally focused on the study of production and circulation rather than consumption, even though French intellectuals such as Bourdieu and Baudrillard might be seen as having laid down the basis for material culture studies on consumption.