ABSTRACT
In his book The Comfort of Things the cultural anthropologist Daniel Miller presents thirty portraits of individuals and their relationship to things that they possess (and that, as he will suggest, possess them). He writes:
There is an overall logic to the pattern of these relationships to both persons and things, for which I use the term “aesthetic.” By choosing this term I don’t mean anything technical or artistic, and certainly nothing pretentious. It simply helps convey something of the overall desire for harmony, order, and balance that may be discerned in certain cases-and also dissonance, contradiction, and irony in others.
