Miller, Daniel (ed). Home Possessions.

Miller, Daniel (ed). Home Possessions. Material Culture behind Closed Doors. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001.  

An attempt to overcome what Miller calls structuralist theory of material culture embodied for him in Bourdieu’s writing. Suggests to move “deeper,” into a micro-ethnological analysis of material culture. This allows him to argue a structuralist argument is in many cases simplistic. While there’s a widely shared assumption that people take care of their house in order to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, actually “the home itself carried the burden of the discrepancies between its actual state at a given time and a wide range of aspirational ‘ideal homes’ that are generated out of much wider ideals that a household might have for itself.” (7) This ethnographic study of detailed strategies of home improvement lets home ‘speak’ for itself. Theories of home improvement from a simple perspective that the home “expresses” identities, relations, etc., are, thus, interpreted by Miller (quite correctly) as simplistic. He moves further on to argue that it’s more productive to regard the house as a dynamic process rather than a static backdrop,” that is, “the actual movement of people, the tension between the change in the home itself and the movement of the material culture.” (8)

So, against the grain of commonplace assumption in which the home is regarded as an expressive genre, Miller moves to examine the home as possessing  agency of its own. His own contribution looks at how these ideas become identify in stories of haunted houses. “Although we may seek to overthrow these, more often we develop a kind of negotiated compromise between that which is expressed by the house and that which we seek to express through the medium of the house.” (11)

Miller then moves to examine the relationship between the home and reproduction of social relations. He emphasizes the important of materiality of the home and material culture inside of it. Basically, the idea is that rather than being simply a form for embodying social relations, the home is “both a reflection of and a medium for the construction” of different social relations (in that case, of marriage) (13).

Alison J. Clarke in “The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration” considers “’home’ as a process, as opposed to an act of individual expressivity, in which past and future trajectories (inseparable from external abstractions such as ‘class’) are negotiated through fantasy and action, projection and interiorization.” (25) Examines the role of “ideal homes” in home improvements: “’ideal homes’ are not just escapist fantasy spaces conjured up to deal with the limitations of the materiality of ‘real’ homes, but rather are used as measures or as proactive forces that intermittently meld with or mock the reality of lived experience.” (27) How existing things acquire their own agency and are able to shutter or at least modify dreams. In the end, “the ideal home, as used to influence the construction of the actual home becomes an internalized vision of what othe people might think of one Far from being a site of crude emulation, the house itself actually becomes the ‘others’. The house objectifies the vision the occupants have of themselves in the eyes of others and as such it becomes an entity and process to live up, give time to, show off to.” (42)

Daniel Miller in his “Possessions” starts with addressing English ghost stories as a myth, in Levi-Stross’s sense, which objectifies social contradictions, only in this cast the social contradiction is not between people and people, but between people and things, as “the ghost may be said to be a partial anthropomorphism of the longer history of the house and of housing relative to its present inhabitants.” (109) He then explores how the house in which he lives haunts him, for “the house intimidates me [as] it represents precisely an aesthetic ability that I might aspire to but cannot achieve...” (110), while on the other hand the renovations that the previous owner had made are totally dissatisfactory to Miller’s taste, yet he doesn’t have time/finances to remake them. Miller then explores different ways in which people establish one’s relationship to the temporality of things, including of those that are much older than people are and can hope to be. His conclusion is that while people tend to use their homes “as a means of agency and the expression of social relations, my concern is to remind ourselves of the other side to this coin that quite often we are not the agents that create the material environment that becomes the medium of representation.” (112)