ABSTRACT
This book is an account of the time I spent between 2009 and 2011 carrying out ethnographic research about a specific material - fur - in a specific city - Kraków. I had wanted to learn about everyday' experiences, of kinship and relatedness and was struck by how material culture and kinship seemed to co-produce each other. Temporality is central to both kinship and material culture and, in what follows, local understandings of fur are frequently constructed in relation to familial and national histories. Fur, as a type of clothing, sticks in people's minds because it is unusually expensive and because of its animal origins. However, it also figures in people's attempts to make sense of how politics and society work both now and in the past because, despite its categorical strangeness, it is mundane: a mainstay of the street, the shop, the cafe, the church, the home.
