My Life with Things

Elizabeth Chin is Professor of Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design and the author of Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.

"Chin composes a sprawling paean to the joy of stuff and the impossibility of our ever eschewing it. In My Life With Things, she is winningly alert to the ambivalence around our acts of consumption, both the awful guilt and the immeasurable pleasure nonetheless."  - Shahidha Bari (Times Higher Education) "My Life with Things is a refreshing and honest book, which gives a rich insight into the experience of engaging with auto-ethnography. It should certainly appeal to the more adventurous, less conventional academic from across the social sciences and not just anthropology, the author’s home discipline.... At the end of the day, researchers interested in anthropology, auto-ethnography and/or consumption looking for an insider account complete with warts and all, should find this an invaluable companion." - Christina Goulding (Consumption Markets & Culture) "With herself as both subject and object of study, Chin . . . weaves a highly personal, idiosyncratic, and explanatory narrative. Ever the provocateur, she brings her own consumer diaries over the span of several years into conversation with the likes of Karl Marx, not only at a theoretical level but also as biographical touchstones. The narratives, structured around the themes of inheritance, survival, and love, detail the author’s close relationship with the everyday items that surround her. The results can be exhilarating, giving readers self-reflexive pause on the consumptive world and how they got there." - C. R. Yano (Choice) "My Life with Things is a strange yet fascinating look at our cultural preoccupation with owning and communing with physical objects. Chin uses her anthropological background to present an autoethnography, combining research, theory, and personal writing to criticize (and commiserate with) our love of objects."- Jess Kibler (Bitch) "Elizabeth Chin’s My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries, is a fantastic book. I can’t imagine anyone reading it and not wanting to become an anthropologist. It is also one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time, with actual laugh-out-loud moments." - Ben Highmore (New Formations) "Part academic study and part personal essay, My Life with Things offers both casual and scholarly readers an entryway into conversation about the place of material possessions in our lives.... [A] nuanced reflection on both the fact that we are inescapably tied to our possessions and the ways they connect us to our loved ones and neighbors around the world." - Lee Hull Moses (Christian Century) “My Life with Things is thought-provoking in the best sense of the term. It poses new questions, approaches old ones in fresh ways, and tugs at the complex heart of people’s relationship to the things they have and the things they want.” - Carrie M. Lane (American Ethnologist) "In the end this book, as Chin tells us, is a focus on moments, rife with the complexities and contradictions of everyday life. Just as in other life moments and journeys, it is full of fodder for contemplation and discussion as well as catalysts for new perspectives. I can imagine it as a resource for teachers as well as students, and I envision many imaginative and lively discussions based on objects described in this book as well as the particular objects animating others’ lives and relationships." - Patricia L. Sunderland (Journal of Anthropological Research)

• Acknowledgments  vii1. Introduction  32. The Entries  37My Life with Things  37Learn to Love Stuff  38Banky  40A Digression on the Topic of the Transitional Object  42Cebebrate!  56My Purple Shoes  58Newspapers  61Rose Nails  63The Window Shade  67Napkins  69My White Man's Tooth  72Should I Be Straighter  76Cyberfucked  79Knobs  80Glasses  82Curing Rug Lust  85Window Shopping Online  89Catalogs  92Other People's Labor  95Making Roots/Making Routes  98My Closet(s)  101Joining the MRE  108Fun Shopping  114Preschool Birthday Parties  114Xena Warrior Consumer Princess  118I Love Your Nail Polish  120Little Benches  123The Kiss  126Are There Malls in Haiti?  127Baby Number Two Turned Me into Economic Man  129Pictures of the Rice Grain  132Panting in Ikea  136Capitalism Makes Me Sick  139My Grandmother's Rings  147Anorectic Energy  157Mi-Mi's Piano  162Dream-Filled Prescriptions  169The Turquoise Arrowhead  170Turning The Tables  173Minnie Mouse Earring Holder  176Make Yourself a Beloved Person  1813. Writing as Practice and Process  1874. This Never Happened  203Notes  221Bibliography  227Index  235