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Friday 5 December 2008

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Through the keyhole

William Leith reviews two new books on anthropology

Still, he makes some interesting points. If you want to snoop on somebody, look in the bedroom or the office, because these are sites of ‘repeated behaviours’. And don’t be fooled by a tidied room, which is quite different from a tidy room. Look for things that the person wants to display to others, and then check them against things that are privately displayed. And if you have a chance, dismantle the person’s car and look at their brake cables — anxious people are constantly touching the brake. But perhaps the best thing Gosling comes up with is his analysis of people’s record collections.

Here, he has discovered something concrete. An experiment suggests that, if you listen to religious music, stereotypes about you are fairly likely to be correct. Atheists and liberals, in other words, don’t listen to religious music very much. A similar thing is true, to a lesser extent, of people who listen to country music and classical music. They are, more or less, the people you would imagine the listeners of these kinds of music to be. But stereotypes of those who listen to pop, rap or soul music are much less likely to be correct. I look forward to more of this from Gosling as his subject area develops.

Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things does not contain experiments as such — he just visits people, all inhabitants of a small area in South London, and writes his impressions. So what we have are 30 portraits of people, many of whom seem strange and sad. Miller goes to visit an old man with virtually no possessions, and is moved hugely by the emptiness of his life. He spends time with a happy couple, whose life is full of stuff, and the stuff — Christmas decorations, a stamp collection, vintage cars — suggests to Miller a full and happy life. ‘Usually,’ he says, ‘the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people.’

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