ABSTRACT

It can be argued that British campaign medals of the First World War represent one of the clearest examples of what the anthropologist Michael Thompson (1979) has called ‘rubbish theory’. This states that an everyday, commonplace item may well acquire cultural status via the rarity accorded to it by the passage of time. Thompson distinguished between three categories of objects: transients, rubbish and durables, and argues that some transients pass through the status of rubbish before becoming durables.