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Disciplinary Dilemmas in the Study of Persons and Things

Over the past twenty years or so, the interest in studying the nature, circulation, and consumption of things has been growing steadily. As the mobility of things is approaching global boundlessness, and as recent scientific breakthroughs are promoting various new reifications and commodifications of human biology, the problem of understanding things and their relation to persons is becoming even more pressing. To the extent that researchers have responded to these developments, they have neglected the conditions of production that are central to the Marxist analysis of society and have focused instead on what happens to things after they leave their production sites. While Marxists themselves have critiqued this interest in "the power of things to shape human subjectivities and social life'' as an uncritical preoccupation with the epiphenomenal world of commodities, there are no signs that this interest will abate. To the contrary, as a brief list of publications shows, the concern with material objects is broadening, now cutting across fields such as anthropology, literary studies, the history of science, cultural studies, and gender studies. The two volumes under review here—especially the book edited by John Brewer and Susan Staves, part of an impressive threevolume series on culture and consumption in the seventeenth and eigh-