The Comfort of Things

by Daniel Miller

What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends. If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It’s not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn’t dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn’t any of these things, then what is it? This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Sociology, Material Culture, Psychology, Unfinished, Design

300 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2008

About the author

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 37 books including Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.

Reviews

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite a fascinating read but not for the reasons I assumed it would be.

This study is less a look at the "comfort of things", but more a study in humans in-situ within their own home. The "things" aspect is a loose term applied to the real anthropological test subjects of "Stuart Street" (a pseudonym for a real street somewhere in London).

There are all manner of folks observed; married, single, divorced, widowed, gay, straight, rich, poor, calm, highly strung, philosophical, stressed, depressed, happy go lucky, the whole gamut of human experience.

Some stories were amusing, others heartbreaking, some depressing, some uplifting, all were informative about people and their lives. Some people were more attached to items in their abodes than others, although the objects in reality were just a jumping off point for people to talk about themselves and their experience.

What did perturb me slightly (hence the reduction of stars) was at the end of the book, Miller admits that everyone's names were pseudonyms and everyone's professions had been changed to something of equal likeliness? Why? I see the need for changing the street name and individual's names for confidentiality reasons, but changing their professions renders the stories of their experience less genuine, and therefore I start to question the integrity of everything put before me. This really rankled me for some reason and marred my reading experience.

A 3 star read and an interesting anthropological/sociological study but not one I'd particularly return to.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book confirms something that you already know really, there are as many "worlds" as there are people. Each chapter is a self contained portrait of another world. The interesting thing is that all these worlds are lined up side by side in a couple of streets. The most interesting thing is that when you compare and contrast you discover how different two worlds that may appear to be the same from a geographical perspective are so different when you discover the individual experience of life.

[Ellen Evers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tries to be scientific on one hand and entertaining at the other, fails at both.

[˗ˏˋ ada ´ˎ˗ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Sterne !! 💋
Leider mangelte es dem Buch an wissenschaftlichen und analytischen Mitteln. Selbstverständlich wurden die Leben der 15 Menschen detailliert dargestellt, gerade anhand ihrer Verbindung zu den Gegenständen, oder besser gesagt, wie ihr Verhalten und Motiv zum Objekt im Ganzen steht, doch waren dies mehr Erzählungen statt Beweise, welche die These Millers stärkten. Das ganze Werk wäre ausdrucksvoller gewesen, wenn er all die 100 Haushalte, die er besucht hat, zusammengefasst, die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede hergeleitet und ein anschließendes Resultat mit einer logischen Beantwortung seiner Kernfrage hätte. So war es nur ein befriedigendes Buch mit interessanten Lebensgeschichten, an denen man sich ärgern, belustigen oder mitfühlen kann.

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not visual or funny enough to be entertaining, not enough analysis to be insightful.

On a high-level note, I found it to be kind of weirdly judgmental and opinionated about individuals' lives - maybe its just the writing style, one that tries to seem somber and casually profound by making pithy statements off-the-cuff, but many instances just come off as really judgmental without much analysis. Also maybe because I don't have much contextual knowledge of life in the UK.

The book is structured into 30 chapters, each of which is a vignette of a different resident living along a street in the UK. I didn't really like this style: I felt the 30 characters needed a lot more introduction and description to make them distinguishable and actually engaging. For example, the chapters didn't provide rich, visual descriptions of the people, space, and objects, just kind of flat glossings and mostly a lot of nouns (where they were from, which objects they had, who was important in their life), which I found kind of odd. And with 30 of these profiles, it becomes hard to switch and immerse into each character's story. With that challenge, the chapters soon became repetitive to me. After the first 10 or so I didn't want to read more. Finally, the author chose to write each vignette in the structure of a character's "story", which bothered me a lot because it really felt like there was a contrived "story line" in most of the chapters. Mostly from the way the author tried to draw out some sort of theme from some sort of collection of things the resident had, how the transitions between paragraphs / sections were written, and especially how the conclusions were written: the conclusion in most chapters felt quite superficial; felt artificially constructed just for the sake of having a conclusion to so that the "story" could be nicely rounded off, as stories go.

In general, I'm really curious why this work was written this way. Yes, there is something to study about the mundane and the ordinary, but one wonders if it would have been better if it either had more analysis, or was more engaging. I think this study falls flat in that it doesn't try to provide much analysis, shying away from an academic style that usually makes people feel like they've learned something, yet also isn't engaging to be just interesting to read as descriptions on its own (plus, it has more opinions to be simply descriptions).

[Kim Symes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ethnography of a London street. It is not typical of the genre, for two reasons. Firstly, it is not possible to describe the culture of the community (as an ethnography typically tries to do) because there is no single culture, and indeed there is no community. Most of the participants in this study did not know each other at all. So instead, the book describes each household separately in thirty individual portraits, revealing thirty very different micro-cultures. Secondly, the style is rather different to any other ethnography I have read. Miller deliberately avoids academic language and academic theory. He rarely mentions any other scholarly work, and does not include a list of references for the simple reason that he hasn't used any.
What I most liked about the book was that it appealed to my nosiness. It was a chance to go 'through the keyhole' into thirty different people's homes on an ordinary London street, and to find out, via the medium of material possessions, what the people who lived there were like. We discover a wide variety of wealth, luck, value systems, styles, and beliefs between these households.
During fieldwork, Miller and his student actually interviewed the residents of a hundred homes, so the thirty that have made it into The Comfort of Things are a selection - selected perhaps because of their variety?
The style of writing (and thinking) is subjective and speculative. Miller interviews the participants about the things they keep in their house, and about the significance of those things. He adds a considerable amount of speculation regarding the meaning and importance of each householder's possessions.
He concludes that objects become important when they signify something about a relationship - to the past, to a person, to a way of life. My own conclusion was that in the absence of a coherent culture, or even society, many people actively search for, and invent their own. Either that, or they cling on to the vestiges of a culture they remember from the previous generation.
Overall, quite an interesting read, but as happens so often these days when I read social science, I'm left wondering whether I've really learned anything new - are we any further forward in understanding the human condition by the end of the book?

[Danny Cardoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read this book, I couldn't help but think, "This is a terrible ethnography." After taking a step back from the book, and after realizing Miller's intention was not to write a formal (academic) ethnography, I liked the book a lot more. Miller has a lot of interesting ideas. However, I feel that he could have gone much deeper into the anthropological analysis of his main idea by substantiating his work with other theories, or coining his own theories. As "The Comfort of Things" stands, it seems to be based more in the psychology of things, not so much the anthropology of things.

But then again, what do I know? In any case, I would recommend reading this book.

[Susan Mazur Stommen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few ethnographies I wish I had written - and the only one to ever make me cry.

[Cecilia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Red this book for a college exam.
It was ok, not was I expected but ok.

[Melissainau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is magnificent. I read it for research resons, but I would gladly have read it for fun. Beautiful depictions of people and their relationship with the things that share their home.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting reflections on people's deep relationships to material things

[margy moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

I really learnt a lot about myself today, why I do certain thing and why I collect things..... Thank you

[æsj · Rating 5 out of 5]

wunderschöne menschliche beobachtungen

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

p.145
In a previous publication -- 'How Infants Grow Mothers in North London' -- I wrote about the way academics have focused on how the infant develops a gradual sense of itself as an independent being through a series of stages of separation from the mother [e.g. Melanie Klein]. But it seemed to me that three beings were born simultaneously: the infant but also the parents, and in particular the mother. The mother, at first was entirely bonded to the infant, and saw the infant, in effect, as her re-birth in a much purer, more natural state. It was as though she had a second chance -- to live her life again, through the infant, but this time to avoid being sullied by the world, as had inevitably occurred in her own life. I saw this projection of a perfect version of oneself in the pure infant as a form of narcissism. Over time, however, the mother had to learn that the infant was not a pure extension of herself, that she, too, was a separate being and had to pass through various stages of separation in order to let go of this more narcissistic aspect of parenting... While psychoanalysts write about a series of stages it is thought infants go through, in many respects it us us, the parents, who are experiencing them. It is the parents who have to grow up gradually and leave behind an initial image of pure idealized good and bad projected onto their infant, leading eventually to a maturity that accepts the inevitable contradictions embodied in their own children.
p.152
Material things are often like that. They have a certain humility... They don't theorize themselves or abstract themselves... Normally they just serve, in their relatively humble way, as forms through which relationships are expressed and developed; the simple technology through which -- with some play, some passion, some muddling through -- we come to accept and occasionally celebrate our various relationships.
p.217
James is charming, in the deepest sense of that word--where to charm is to induce, magically, a more benign view of the world. You are simply delighted to be in his company, because there is an aura of interest, concern, dignity and politeness that acts to make the room warm and welcoming. He is solicitous, and puts you at ease, but there is nothing remotely obsequious, because ames has about him something of the contradiction conjured up by the image of a dignified puppy: a potential exuberance of giving and wanting affection, but held in check, so as to include and not overwhelm those more reticent in these matters than himself.
p.279
My own convoluted means of legitimating the strange mix of discipline and hedonism, egotism and empathy that is my life is rather different than his, but I have no problem at all in recognizing their common nature and contradictions.
p.282-3
In the social science founded by figures such as Durkheim, it is humanity which created religion and cosmology. It is not the Gods who demand that we undertake rituals; we create these Gods in order to justify the rituals which give us the fundamental bonds and obligations that allow us to live together as social beings and to legitimate the orders and laws by which we live in society.
...Durkheim himself was concerned that, if modern life was lived under the conditions posed by Nietzsche's death of God, then people needed to keep faith with some alternative transcendent object -- ideally, society itself. Otherwise, as is implied by his study of suicide, there was a danger that life itself would seem, and indeed become, pointless.

(Note: He goes on to argue that modernism may have loosened the bonds of individuals to society, and that individuals actually place highest value on their relationships with others. And that his investigation of peoples' relationships to their material objects illuminates their relationships to others.)

[Erin Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long time ago, I returned to Australia from a study trip to Chile where I had spent three months travelling around with nothing but my backpack. Upon returning home, I was shocked to realise how much stuff I owned, and how little I missed it during the entire time that I was away. It wasn’t that I was horrified that it must mean that I am a materialistic, superficial person. Rather, my possessions now appeared alien to me, as though they belonged to another person entirely. I began a long process of getting rid of things, only holding onto that which was useful, meaningful, or both.

I don’t think I ever really understood what I was doing, or why I was doing it, until a decade later when I read The Comfort of Things. Daniel Miller paints thirty startling portraits of households in a single London street, demonstrating how important our material things are to our social lives. These accounts demonstrate beyond question that it is simply not true that our relationships with material possessions are superficial. Instead, ”possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people.” (p1) In other words, our possessions enhance our relationships with other people.

- See more at: http://popanth.com/review/the-comfort...

[Christl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Etwas langweiliger als ich erwartet habe. Deshalb 3 Sterne. Interviews mit - zufällig ausgewählten - Bewohnern in einer Londoner Straße. Es geht um das Verhältnis von Menschen zu den Dingen, die sie besitzen oder nicht besitzen wollen. Und ob bzw. wie sich in der Beziehung von Menschen zu Dingen ihr Verhältnis zu Menschen widerspiegelt. Fotos, Geschenke, geerbte Möbel, Bücher, Kram...
Interessant. Mich irritiert in letzter Zeit der Minimalismus. Alles wegwerfen. Obwohl ich eher eine "Wegwerferin" bin, hänge ich auch an bestimmten Dingen. Und kann sie unglaublich schwer entsorgen, z.B. Geschenke und Bücher.
Ich denke noch mal ein bisschen anders nach... über meine Wohnung und meine Dinge. Vielleicht doch 4 Sterne?

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of anthropological accounts of residents of 1 London street and their connection to things.

'Things' are not limited to items or belongings but also memories, relationships and places. A real hotchpotch of interesting tales and diverse lives, which presumably on the surface appear fairly normal.

Daniel Miller has a non-judgemental and largely non-academic tone which makes the book easy to read and almost like a chocolate box of nosiness (after all who doesn't like reading about other people's lives).

An ideal book to dip in and out of, for short bursts of insight and pleasure.

[Jenne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, this wasn't quite what I expected, I guess. I think I thought it would be more obviously anthropological, with more distance between the writer and subjects...but still I enjoyed it for what it was.
Clearly in the course of the study he became very close to the people he was studying, and I got the sense that he really felt love for them and admired them even though some of them were very strange people and others were very dull.
It reminds me a little of how my job is, getting a glimpse into the ordinary and extraordinary details of people's lives.

[Claudia]

The most absorbing and sensitively written sociology/anthropology book I've ever read. Miller explores human attachments to objects in a series of thirty vignettes of people living on one London street. Some are funny, some are shocking, some are desperately sad, and some make you want to find the person in question and shake them by the hand. But this isn't just a study couched in accessible text: the humanity with which this book has been written makes Miller's findings that much more profound.

[Robert Landwirth · Rating 4 out of 5]

2 Anthropologists visit the habitants of a street in London. They ask the people about their relation to the most important things they own. The book contains 30 portaits (15 in the german version), and they show some insight and draw some interesting conclusions. They closing essay which should be a quick bout of interpretation falls a bit short, but I guess it will be evened out in the coming book which treats the topic more academically.

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Miller and his PhD student, Fiona, spent a year getting to know the residents of Stuart street in London through their possessions. His thesis is that people who have meaningful relationships with thing have meaningful relationships with people. The portraits of the people read like short stories.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like peering through someone's front window, only it lets you inside the house as well. Miller writes in an accessible way, and you can feel his kindness even as he forms anthropological theories whilst writing. If nothing else, this book reminds you that behind similar exteriors, every single home is different, made up of different materials and stories.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

My daughter read this for a college anthropology class. The author makes the argument that material objects people keep in their houses have meaning and purpose. I haven't read the Joy of Tidying Up, but this might be a good companion read. All of the people interviewed for the book live on the same street in London.

[SonicRim]

A look into the lives of 30 housholds on a London street. Covers the semiotics of material culture. Revealing "the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful."

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has an interesting premise and I enjoyed it quite a lot at the start, but I thought it dragged on for too long. He'd made his point about the importance of objects to people's lives halfway through, and the analysis of additional people didn't seem to add much.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book that takes a portrait look at 30 families in a concentrated area within London, and explores each of their lives through the things they own and have on display. Miller's writing is charming and flows and this was just a lovely book.

[Sumeyye Pa · Rating 4 out of 5]

a really nice book. I must admit I was very touched by the very first chapter and cried! It is contemplation embodied in the form of a book on the relation of human to their possessions (not necessarily material).

[Elizabeth K.]

reviewed in ALDaily

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another master writer of portraits/case studies

[Alice Le gall · Rating 4 out of 5]

A "warm" introduction to the anthropology of material culture, through a series of intimate portraits.