Stuffocation: Living More with Less - Softcover

Wallman, James

 
9780241257357: Stuffocation: Living More with Less
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0241257352 ISBN 13: 9780241257357
Verlag: Penguin Life, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

We're all stuffocated. We have more stuff than we could ever need - but it's bad for the planet and it's making us stressed. It might even be killing us.

In this groundbreaking book, trend forecaster James Wallman finds that a rising number of people are turning away from all-you-can-get consumption, from the exec who's sold almost everything he owns, to the well-off family who moved to a remote mountain cabin.

In Stuffocation, Wallman's solution is to focus less on possessions and more on experiences. It is a manifesto for a vital change in how you live - and it's the one book you won't be able to live without.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Wallman is a journalist, trend forecaster, speaker, and author. He has written for GQ, the New York Times, the FT, and advised clients such as Absolut, BMW and Nike. James wrote the futurology column in T3 magazine and was editor of The Future Laboratory's forecasting publication. He currently lives in London with his wife and children.

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1

The Anthropologist and the Clutter Crisis

Sometime in the summer of 2000, there was a knock on the door of Jeanne Arnold’s office. It was most likely one of her doctoral candidates or grad students, come to ask her about methodology or whether an inference they were making about some evidence they had brought back from a dig sounded reasonable. In those days, Arnold’s salt-­and-­pepper hair was swept up and back in a bouffant style that ended somewhere around her shoulders. The glasses she wore had oversized, 1980s-­style metal frames. She looked up from her research, and smiled when she saw Elinor Ochs, one of her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Got a minute, Jeanne?” Ochs asked—­when what she really meant was, “Have you got ten years?”

Ochs was putting together a bid for a project, she explained. Would Arnold be interested in working with her on it? She was gathering a team to document life in the twenty-­first century. They would use the same methods as anthropologists studying tribes in Africa, or archaeologists analyzing a dead civilization’s remains, like Inca ruins in South America—­except they would be doing the work right there in Los Angeles, with case studies who were very much still alive. The study would be the first of its kind. Well, there had been one or two studies a bit like it before, like one in New York that looked at the art people bought. But there had never been a study as ambitious as this. Instead of trying to understand people through one aspect of their lives, the plan was to record as much of their lives as possible, to create the definitive record of how people were living in the early part of the twenty-­first century. The project, Ochs said, could really use a material culture expert like Jeanne. Arnold was not sure though. It sounded exciting, like it might be groundbreaking, but this wasn’t really her field.

Arnold’s specialty was the past, not the present. That had been her passion ever since she had gotten the bug as a little girl. Back then, she had spent her long summer holidays in the woods by her home near the Great Lakes, digging up crinoids and leaf fossils and arrowheads. “They were only little,” Arnold recalls. “Nothing a real paleontologist or archaeologist would be interested in.”

They were a start though. And as Arnold grew, so did her interest in the ancient past, especially archaeology, and its sister discipline, anthropology. She studied them at summer camp, at the local university, and then at the University of California. That is where, in 1980, she stumbled across her life’s work—­a native tribe called the Chumash and their old home on Santa Cruz, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

When Arnold talks about the Chumash sites now, you can almost see her arriving on Santa Cruz those thirty-odd years ago. She would have just stepped off the navy supply boat. It was the only way to reach the island back then. It went once a week. The wind would have been blowing her brown hair around as she walked up the green hill to the site. There, she would have walked around wearing dark sunglasses, reading the landscape the way only an archaeologist could. Where you or I would have only seen dips in the ground, she saw the footprints of real people, and hints of where the Chumash had sited their pole and thatched huts. If you or I had ferreted around in the ground, we might have found some old fish bones. “A Chumash toss zone,” Arnold would say. “They weren’t bothered about mess. After they’d eaten, they just threw them on the ground.” If we had kept looking we might have found, even up here, far from the sea, shell remains and the beginnings of beads. That is when Arnold would have asked us to stop. Those remains were for the professionals. With those, and many more like them, she could understand how the Chumash lived, what mattered to them, and how their society was structured.

After more than a decade of gathering and analyzing Chumash artifacts, Arnold realized she was not only excavating a site, she was building a case. Until the late twentieth century, the conventional wisdom had been that complex societies, in which there is an established hierarchy of a ruling elite and bureaucrats, had only emerged from agricultural communities—­like Egypt under the pharaohs, for instance. But as the years went by and the evidence stacked up, Arnold became convinced that the Chumash—­who hunted, gathered, and fished, but did not farm—­had also lived in a complex society called a chiefdom. “That meant,” Arnold will tell you now, “that a society didn’t have to be agricultural for complex systems to emerge.” In other words, as Arnold’s work helped prove, the conventional wisdom was wrong, and it had to be replaced with a new theory that reflected the new evidence. “There are a few grumpy old men out there who still say they’re not persuaded,” Arnold admits. “But they’re slowly disappearing.”

Arnold was the sort of person who was not afraid of confronting the conventional wisdom when it no longer accurately reflected the evidence. No wonder Ochs wanted someone like her on the team.

After a few days, Arnold said she was in. Then she and the rest of Ochs’s team at the Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF)—­anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, photographers, and psychologists—­worked out a methodology, and got approval and the funds they needed. In 2000, the team set to work, and soon found themselves in the middle of a clutter crisis of epidemic proportions.

The Middle-­Class Clutter Crisis

With funding and methodology established, the CELF team began the next task: finding some families who were willing to open their lives to scientific inquiry—­average, middle-­class ones who were typical of households everywhere, and thirty-­two of them. Once they had found them, explained what the commitment would mean to their lives, and what it would mean for social scientists who wanted to understand life at the turn of the twenty-­first century, they began. They noted the makeup of their households, the size of their homes, what jobs they did. Each family had at least one child aged between seven and twelve. Their homes ranged from 980 to 3,000 square feet. The professions of the parents included teachers and lawyers, dentists and businesspeople, an airline pilot and a firefighter.

Ochs’s team drew up plans of their homes. They photographed them—­their bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms, playrooms, second bathrooms, garages, gardens. They came early. They stayed late. They asked questions. They stayed silent. But they never stopped taking notes—­of where their case studies went, what they did, when they ate, what they ate. They were like flies on the wall or spy drones in the air, always there. They were the ultimate voyeurs, granted special permission to access all areas of their case studies’ homes. And even when the scientists were not there, they found another way in. They gave the families video cameras to record their own home video diaries.

Sometimes it got to be too much—­for the scientists at least. Once, when one family was having a heated argument, the researcher who was following them around could not cope and had to go outside. But rather than stop recording what was happening, he carried on watching through the window of the family’s bungalow. When the people inside—­still arguing—­moved to another room, he moved too. He stepped round the house and stood outside that...

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Verlag
Penguin Life
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0241257352
ISBN 13 
9780241257357
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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