only just beginning at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
The task of trying to understand how we relate to the material world was
left mainly to anthropologists and archaeologists, who took some time to
appreciate that this relationship is a genuinely reciprocating one. Human
societies make things; but the built environment and artefacts also shape
human societies.
Miller’s research is primarily concerned with social relations and it is
easiest to start with this aspect of our associations with the material. His
simple-sounding statement:‘objects make subjects much more than the
other way round’paraphrases the ways in which anthropologists are
trying to express how the material world, modified by human interven-
tions over millennia, informs relationships as well as providing the
canvas on which we create life stories. Miller was able to compare how
his subjects talked about their relationships with others and how objects
and interiors narrated a kind of parallel version of these interpersonal
relationships. He concluded that, notwithstanding the strong tendency to
criticize‘materialism’and‘materialistic’tendencies of contemporary
culture (a tendency that reaches back to the anti-materialistic values of
Cynic philosophers, and of Mysians and Getae in our story),^35 the
material objects that we choose to deploy in our homes and the material
presentation that we create through our own persons reflect individual
narratives that tell others who we want to be. In contemporary societies,
these material configurations are not totally idiosyncratic choices; nor
are they collective decisions, but something in between the idiosyncratic
and the collective. We might say that they are customized choices—
individual selections from within the broad pool of objects and styles,
and shaped by a combination of social background, education, and
personal experience.^36
Thefieldwork conducted by Daniel Miller and his researchers is the
kind offine-grained investigation that tries to understand choices at the
level of the individual in society. In most historical situations, we do not
have this option. There is an obvious practical dilemma in trying to make
mute objects speak. Present experience and a wide range of historical
texts show that the choices individuals make are constrained—by their
experiences of everyday life; by their social position; by the context they
(^35) Str. 7.3.3 (the ascetic practices of the Mysians, called‘pious men’, who resemble those
calledKtistaiamong the Thracians) citing Poseidonios; Baladié 1989, 188–9; cf. 193 ad 7.3.9
(C302–303); cf. also below on Lysimachos’capture by Dromichaites.
(^36) e.g. Salganik and Watts 2009 provide experimental evidence, based on the responses
of 2,930 participants in a web-based survey of reactions to new songs by emerging bands,
which evidently confirm an earlier experiment by both authors.
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