{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":162,"pdf_page":161,"physical_index":161,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4d8c0a664e527eaa512072329562002af3ba4e111f64cbeb2a8762689779bd83"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"The implication, as argued in our manifesto paper, is an evident need to acknowledge and account for denim jeans more in the tradition of a philosophy of practice than merely just as an item of apparel. There are many key philosophical issues raised, but for the purposes of a specific focus upon rhythms and routines of consumption the strongest conclusion from this discussion is the direct relationship between buying time, on the one hand, and then the establishment of an extreme polarity between personalization and impersonalization, on the other. If the key to distressing is the way it simulates the long-term personalization of jeans, as a means to negate the impersonality represented by denim’s global ubiquity and homogenization, how is it that this can be achieved through a commercial, industrial and thoroughly anonymous process as represented by industrial distressing and with respect to the most anonymous and homogenizing garment we possess? Denim jeans possess an apparently oxymoronic quality linking the extremely personal and the extremely impersonal. When buying time, which of these are we buying into?\n\nBuying the Patina of the Past\n\nAt this point I want to take this paradox back into the frame of anthropological reasoning by examining it in more general and comparative terms, starting with an entirely different social and cultural context and then exploring an opposition within a UK setting. The first case is drawn from a paper called ‘Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia’, by Caroline Humphrey (2002). This starts with one of the fundamental contradictions of materiality itself (Miller 2005), where objects are used to express the desire to transcend the material, here within a Buddhist context. When a person amongst the Buryat peoples whom Humphrey studied is close to death, certain treasured objects are taken away from them, to help them separate from desire and enter more smoothly into this other state. This is even more important after they have died since there is a category of material culture called refuge objects that the dead soul still desires and wishes to return to. An astrologer identifies these and they are either destroyed, given away or buried with the corpse. So one category of objects is considered too personal, too intimate for them to be inherited or even to survive.\n\n162\n\nDaniel Miller","previous_page":161,"next_page":163}