Books
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
Through the keyhole
Sam GoslingbyProfile, 260pp, £15,
William Leith reviews two new books on anthropology
The main impression I got from Miller’s book was that, even though his subjects come from a very small area, they are vastly different. The more closely you scrutinise a person and their possessions, the weirder and more different from each other they begin to seem. Here is a former mercenary poring over pictures of reality TV contestants, hoping for ‘a flash of c**t’; here is a man who lives with a dog, and whose house becomes more ‘doggified’ the closer to the ground you get. Here, also, is a young woman whose main relationship seems to be the one she has with her tattoos, and a middle-aged woman who took up wrestling and owns 32 handbags.
Anthropology, it strikes me, must be a very difficult science when the anthropologist is studying people whose possessions are not actual necessities; this is all quite different from studying the significance of harpoons and hand-axes. And what kind of people are anthropologists, anyway? Gosling tells us that he’s an extrovert with an obsessively well-stocked fridge. Miller tells us he cried when he left the house of the sad old man. Gosling thinks snooping is fun. Miller says, ‘There is no escaping the horror and tragedy in the interior of people’s lives’. What do we learn from reading these books? As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.
William Leith’s latest book, Bits of Me Are Falling Apart, is published by Bloomsbury next month at £10.99.
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