My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries

by Elizabeth Chin

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Anthropology, Economics, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2016

Reviews

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for class, very interesting, now overthinking my consumer habits and relationship with stuff

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare auto-ethnographic account of an anthropologist's shopping and consumer angst. Part of the writing culture trajectory in the field. A confessional account of the contradictions of a researcher studying material culture and the angst of being richer than her informants. (Sometimes whiny Americans can be too grating!)

The best thing here is that she puts forward one great takeaway: that we socialize our children to become voracious consumers! It sets off debate if you read this in a book club. A good talk about child-rearing practices and whether we really substitute human bond with things i.e. teddy bear!

Another great take-away is for Marx followers who wonder - who and what was this guy behind the book capital and advocating for a communist utopia? This book gives a simplified and introductory summary of marx's concept of the fetish (e.g. African religious roots that point to an ethnocentric bias) alongside his family life conditions (struggling and insecure middle class) and his financial indebtedness to Engels. Really fascinating!

A good easy read.

[Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

“My life with things” is the best kind of introspection – the one that sees extraordinary in mundane and significant in transient. Chin's writing is also slightly humorous, a quality that is so rare in academic-y essays.

[Cathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

What on earth did I just read?
I enjoyed many of the "field notes" diary entries, especially the one about Banky. The rest of the book is just confusing, overly scholarly, and downright rambling. The author herself mentioned that at times she considered writing a fictional work and stray from the academic portion of the book. Judging by the last section of the book (where she inserts herself plus was able to use all the field notes that did not make it into the book, ::rolls eyes emoji::) it is a good thing she did not do that. What a chore this was to get through. I never thought I would find a book that talks about Karl Marx's home life (mildly interesting), along with jokes about sitting on a toilet. I also hope to never hear the term "dead pawn" again.

[Kaity · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like 2.5 stars- but I wasn’t impressed, nor did I fully understand what the author was trying to do. To call her personal essays “field notes” as a part of an autoethnobiography felt inauthentic and pompous, especially because they seemed to lack concrete observation. It’s okay to share personal experiences, but no need to pretend they are legitimate anthropological resources. Also, her inclusion of passages relating to Karl Marx lacked reason and clarity. Just kind of a confused book all around. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[Tammy V · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic

I was looking for something more accessible. This seems to be written for academia, and while I found it interesting I did not have the will to do the work to get through it. I made it about 25% through before it had to go back to the library

[Brodie · Rating 5 out of 5]

took me a while to get into it and I didn't love it quite as much as having and being had by eula biss but I really enjoyed this book! and as usual I loved the notes on how it was written, and it's going in my mental collection of "books that make me want to be an ethnographer". excellent stuff

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can't put out the capitalism from inside the well-furnished house.
But we also need somewhere to live.

[AM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to describe - both forthcoming and frank in infuriating ways (privileged academic turns the lens on herself) and in tremendously useful ways. Did not feel necessarily cohesive nor complete.

[brooke echternacht · Rating 4 out of 5]

sociology reading - really interesting analysis of our things! loved the connection to theory. as someone who gave frivolous spending up for Lent, this book hit hard.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese]

Biss says she got most of her analysis of Marx from here.

[FluffyNyctea]

Interesting, but nah

[Allison Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was weird for me. Parts of it I haaaaated and parts of it I loved. I generally like to read a book at least once a year that makes me inspect and mull over what it means to be human and how I live.

The intro almost totally turned me off. Overly…scholarly? I just found it a little off putting. Next it went into journal entries that were just little stand alone stories about “stuff” more than data collection but a really humanized way we interact with things and the values we carry. This part of the book was endearing.

Then it went into a fictional story about a hoarder and then another scholarly blib. The book was like a sandwich made with stale, crunchy ass bread but with a bomb middle.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of scholarly books these days, and I will say that this one is slightly less scholarly and more accessible than many books we publish (note, I work for the publisher). For the most part I enjoyed Chin's writing; her diary entries about consumer culture and "stuff" gave me a lot to think about. But there were times when things she wrote about made me uncomfortable and I wondered what contribution they were making to her argument. The interspersing of information and stories about Marx throughout the main text worked, I thought, but I did not really get the final speculative chapter.

[Pris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of timely reading while I've been clicking on these online ads like crazy. A book of autoethnography with a refreshing voice. The academic voice is neither denunciatory nor too jargon-y; it's honest and blends the academic register with the personal. I finally understand what 'commodity fetishism' is about!