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E-book
Author Chin, Elizabeth, 1963- author.

Title My life with things : the consumer diaries / Elizabeth Chin
Published Durham : Duke University Press, 2016
©2016

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 239 pages)
Contents Introduction -- The entries -- My life with things -- Learn to love stuff -- Banky -- A digression on the topic of the transitional object -- Cebebrate -- My purple shoes -- Newspapers -- Rose nails -- The window shade -- Napkins -- My white man's tooth -- Should i be straighter -- Cyberfucked -- Knobs -- Glasses -- Curing rug lust -- Window shopping online -- Catalogs -- Other people's labor -- Making roots/making routes -- My closet(s) -- Joining the MRE -- Fun shopping -- Preschool birthday parties -- Xena warrior consumer princess -- I love your nail polish -- Little benches -- The kiss -- Are there malls in Haiti? -- Baby number two turned me into economic man -- Pictures of the rice grain -- Panting in ikea -- Capitalism makes me sick -- My grandmother?s rings -- Anorectic energy -- Mi-mi?s piano -- Dream-filled prescription -- The turquoise arrowhead -- Turning the tables -- Minnie Mouse earring holder -- Make yourself a beloved person -- Writing as practice and process -- This never happened
Summary "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 meaning: 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."--Amazon
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-234) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Chin, Elizabeth, 1963- -- Diaries
SUBJECT Chin, Elizabeth, 1963- fast
Subject Consumers -- Diaries
Anthropologists -- Diaries
Ethnology -- Authorship
Consumption (Economics)
Consumer behavior.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Social Scientists & Psychologists.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture.
Anthropologists
Consumer behavior
Consumers
Consumption (Economics)
Ethnology -- Authorship
Anthropologin
Verbraucherin
Verbraucherverhalten
Sachkultur
Kulturanthropologie
Genre/Form diaries.
autobiographies (literary works)
Autobiographies
Diaries
Diaries.
Autobiographies.
Journaux intimes.
Autobiographies.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780822374268
0822374269