{"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":163,"pdf_page":162,"physical_index":162,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4180c8f78a105fb165603d70ec08bb56f58f882820646fcf3769cabe3ad9dbea"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"At the same time Buryat people in general show a preference for things that have been worn as against new things. They like this patina of care to be attached to objects, but it should be a generic collective sense of the humanized object, not the hyper-personalization of these refuge objects. Humphrey suggests that these are more nuanced ideas of possible relationships between property and the person than those given by the legal bases of property in our society, or the extremes of Weiner’s (1992) inalienable objects as things that can never be given away. The Buryat assume that merely looking after or caring for an object attaches a person to it and helps provide a transformational quality that allows it to grow, on analogy with caring after livestock. Overall Humphrey argues that when it comes to considering the dead, the Buryat aim for a balance between the degree of personalization and impersonalization that accrues from the temporality of association between a person and a thing. So it is not just in relation to ourselves and blue denim jeans that cultural normativity establishes through material culture a parameter based on the distinction between the personal and the impersonal quality of used objects, and within this polarity creates a point of preference. Rather it may be that this striving for balance and commensurability between these possibilities in the signification of material culture is rather common, though it will manifest itself quite differently in different social and cultural contexts.\n\nFor example, a paper by Gregson et al. (2000) provides an analogous instance closer to home. They examine the work of people in charity shops selling retro clothing: for example, dresses from the 1920s and 1930s. Their paper observes how the workers in these shops clean these clothes of evident stains. People will buy such clothes unwashed, but what they don’t want to see are specific stains. In other words, just as amongst the Buryat, we want to wear something that has been given authenticity by its association with another person’s life, but a generic other person, not someone as specific as represented by a particular stain.\n\nMy second comparative study comes from a strangely antagonistic dualism within our own attitudes to consumption. This dualism struck me as particularly acute when watching Signs of the Times – a television series about home decoration made by a documentary film maker trained in anthropology. One programme focused upon two groups of people, those who largely decorated their homes with reproduction furniture and those who prefer antiques. Needless to say each of these groups utterly despised the other.\n\nThe people who brought reproduction furniture saw this as a commitment to the high quality and style of the past. But they also tended to feel disgusted by the idea of having to sleep in a bed that someone else actually may have lived in, or, still worse, died in. They would see actual antiques as worn, possibly diseased, and in general rather revolting. As far as they are concerned their devotion to reproduction furniture grants them all the advantages of the past without any of these disadvantages. By contrast, those who buy actual antiques look quite disdainfully at people who buy reproduction, almost as though it was some version of stupidity, certainly vulgarity. They see these people as being in some sense fooled by fakes, and at least vicariously associating themselves with the inauthentic that cannot match the truth of an antique.\n\nBuying Time\n\n163","previous_page":162,"next_page":164}