E61: The Social Domain of Stuff

Most of us all have stuff. We may have some of our parents' stuff, and we may have some of our kids' stuff even though long after they've left home if they aren't still hanging around in the basement with their stuff. And we're cleaning and dusting around our partner's stuff. And some of this stuff is precious to us as it's attached to powerful memories. And some of it is just stuff.

If someone calls someone a pack rat, even if it's said affectionately, it isn't always a great name. It means that you've accumulated a lot of stuff, some of it, most of it's small and inconsequential. In nature, the pack rat is better called the wood rat. It's an amazing creature that fills their home space with lots of little things, leftover food shells and bits of fiber, clothing if they could find it, and shiny things that they really can't use. But they prefer shiny things. And if they have something in their little paws and they come upon something shiny, they will pick up the shiny thing and take it home to their middens. A midden is a place where they store and throw stuff. In the Southwest, in the desert Southwest, you can find middens where the same family of wood rats have lived and stored stuff for thousands of years. And we've found prehistoric corn cobs and arrowheads in pack rat middens in places where I hike.

Now, as humans, we're like pack rats. And we sort of like shiny stuff too, at least I do, as judged by my jewelry drawer. It's not just a jewelry box, but a whole drawer. So do all humans save stuff? Have we always done so?

Dr. Jones: With us in the virtual Scope studio is our favorite anthropologist, Professor Polly Wiessner. Dr. Wiessner is a cultural anthropologist. And she's done archaeology as well. And welcome to the "7 Domains." Polly, welcome.

Dr. Wiessner: Thank you, Kirtly.

Dr. Jones: I remember, you know, watching videos, and humans seemed to start out as wanderers and didn't leave much evidence of stuff behind except their bones and the bones of what they ate. What stuff did we keep when we were wanderers?

Dr. Wiessner: Okay. Well, it's not absolutely correct to say we were wanderers.

Dr. Jones: Oh, okay.

Dr. Wiessner: We were mobile groups who moved within territories. Because you were hunting and gathering resources, so you had to map your camps onto where the resources were in order to eat, which meant, of course, as you say, we had to move around all the time, but often within a restricted area. And they left behind more things than you mentioned. They left behind, we find in archaeology, evidence of hunting and gathering equipment. We have food processing tools. And a big amount of stuff are ornaments and jewelry. It seems that all cultures have body ornaments. These are light to carry. They're easy to move around with.

And then you had some ritual items. You have what everybody's heard about, the Venus figurines. Then you have some evidence of clothing because we find awls, needles, and threads. And for instance, in one Aurignacian archaeological site in Russia, they found a man buried with a shirt and trousers covered with beads.

So there was probably more stuff than we think.

Dr. Jones: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Wiessner: I went once on a Danish archaeological underwater excavation, and the site was from 6,000 years ago. And you could even find the lines that were on the fish hooks.

Dr. Jones: Wow. Wow.

Dr. Wiessner: But the overall principle is as long as people were mobile to map onto the resources, to go to where the resources were, they did not accumulate. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins said, "Wealth is a burden when you have to carry it on your back."

Dr. Jones: Right, right.

Dr. Wiessner: Of course, it's absolutely true. So people value stuff, first of all, for the work effort put into making it. They value stuff for the utility, of course, in getting your food and living and protecting yourself from the heat or cold. But in all traditional societies, it's also valued for the social value. Most stuff is received via gifting. So in these gifts, the economic and the social are entwined. When you get a gift, it has economic value, but it also represents a relationship. So it has emotional value. And I looked at 1,400 items from the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen and where they got them. Sixty-seven percent of their stuff was received as gifts. And so the gifts affirms a social tie, but the item also has utility.

Dr. Jones: Well, I would say, as I look around at my stuff, that an inordinate amount of my stuff came from China via Amazon, and it had no social or emotional or gifting. I've got to change this practice. I want more presents, and I want to give more presents and order less stuff. You know?

Dr. Wiessner: Yeah. But when people get money and some economic security, they tend to cut their social ties and get a lot of stuff to make themselves comfortable.

Dr. Jones: Well, I think about cultures where they don't have to move around much because the sea is so rich and they can grow things right in their backyard and that would include the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and maybe the people in New Guinea. They can make a little village and they can keep stuff there or artwork. Don't they make these amazing pole artworks? And so they keep their artwork around.

Dr. Wiessner: They do for ritual. But that's a very interesting point. In no traditional society, where I have worked, do people in any way decorate houses with artwork or have, you know, decorative items on tables. Nothing like that. And when we come in and buy these things to take home and put on our walls, people just think we're a little bit loony.

Dr. Jones: So they decorate their outdoor space . . .

Dr. Wiessner: No, they don't decorate space at all.

Dr. Jones: . . . or they don't decorate space at all?

Dr. Wiessner: They don't decorate space at all. But ritual space, yes.

Dr. Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, there are cultures that have a ritual of giving stuff away, getting back to the how you maintain social ties. And I think about the Alaska and Northwest Native people and what they call the potlatch, which is celebrating some big event or maybe a death, but you get stuff so that you can give it away because that's how you get status is the bigger giveaways.

Dr. Wiessner: Yeah. In the potlatch, there are some theories that this was you would go to war with stuff. So chiefs would try to give away more stuff than the next chief, and then he was challenged. So there was fighting with property, which is interesting.

But where I work in Enga, it's fairly you start off as equals, and then there's no inherited leadership and you strive to do well economically and make a name for themselves. And that's where they have these massive pig exchange where hundreds of pigs and other items are given out. And the very rich people, the big leaders have nothing in their house because everything is given out. You get status by giving away, not by accumulating, which is very interesting. But when you need something, everybody you've given to comes and helps you.

Dr. Jones: Oh, right, right. Oh, that's good. And well, you've traveled all over the world to contemporary planetary cultures. Are there any cultures that don't accumulate? It seems like as Americans, we have a lot of stuff and people with smaller houses may be in Europe. But I've been in some European apartments and they have a lot of stuff in them. They have a lot of stuff. Even some of the Japanese homes had a lot of stuff in them.

Dr. Wiessner: I think as soon as you get securely a permanent home to hide your stuff from everyone else, then you begin to get accumulation. And I think some people like sparsely decorated houses, but I think most people accumulate a lot of stuff. But you wonder, you know, why do we get so much stuff? So much of our stuff is sold later in garage sales, right, or stuff in the garage. And my feeling is that a lot of this compulsive shopping has to do with the fact that in our evolution, the social and the economic were entwined. And so when you got something, it came with love or feeling or social relationship. And I think sometimes now we just go out, we're a bit bored, we buy stuff, we bring it back. We show our friends what we got. They say, "Oh, nice," and everything. But as soon as that's over, it often goes into the garage. And I think that we're seeking something that is not attached to stuff anymore, which is the social tie.

Dr. Jones: Right, we are. Or there might be an evolutionary bump in dopamine from getting stuff because for the millions of years where just a little bit of stuff meant that we could build our social ties and that made a little dopamine stuff in our brain. That could be that buying things, because we know that people who are compulsive shoppers get a little bump in that feel-good hormone when they do that click, and maybe even when they undo the box, but it quickly goes away because it doesn't really give them the social connection that maybe we evolved to have.

Dr. Wiessner: That's right. They show it to people. So maybe for some days they show the neighbors what they got. But, you know, then it doesn't come with any social tie, and so then maybe they go out and try again.

Dr. Jones: Well, I'm really looking forward to not a garage sale, but a garage giveaway. I want to take half the stuff that I own and put it in my garage and on my driveway and just say, "Come and get it," and just see what people pick up and do they want the story around that thing, because I like to go to people's homes and have them tell me the stories of their stuff. I mean, if they've got a piece of artwork or something on a table, I like to hear, you know, "Where did that come from? What's the story around that?" because it helps me work on my relationship, which is usually a loving and a giving one with people I know. And I want to enforce that by interest in them and in their stuff. But people usually have a great story and I love stories.

Dr. Wiessner: Stuff from the mall doesn't have a story.

Dr. Jones: No, it doesn't have a story.

Dr. Wiessner: It doesn't have a story. No.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. I just went and clicked on Amazon because I really wanted that pillow, but now I don't really want that pillow anymore.

Dr. Wiessner: No. Exactly.

Dr. Jones: Well, okay. Well, I have a few things that are very special to me and I didn't buy any of them on Amazon except some books, but because of the memories are attached. And one is my father's very large roll-top desk. And it's over 140 years old because he inherited it from a great-aunt who had it from someone else. And in fact, it's a great place to store stuff because it has all kinds of little cubbies and drawers and more cubbies. And I have a painting and a large sculpture and my family ring and bracelet. So they go where I go. And if I have to move, there's very little I'm taking with me. I'm going to have that garage driveway giveaway and just see who I meet and see who asks about what they choose. But I have a few things that are actually mentioned in my will, and these things are important to me because of the memories. So is there some kind of stuff that you have that's special to you, Polly?

Dr. Wiessner: Oh, yes, I have plenty of stuff. First of all, I have the ashes of my parents. And my parents wanted that. And they said whenever there's an event or party, they wanted their ashes moved into the room. So I do that. So they could be there.

Dr. Jones: Are they in your will? Who's going to get your parents' ashes?

Dr. Wiessner: Well, you know, that's a question. Maybe I'll ask that they'd be buried with me. And I'm going to have my cockatoo's ashes buried with me. Then I have gifts from fieldwork with the Bushmen and New Guinea, things that people have given me. And these are really I couldn't give away. They're so cherished. But it's interesting. People in other cultures don't feel that way. They're very happy to give away stuff. And in doing thousands of items with the Bushmen, I didn't find anything that was kept for sentimental value, which is really interesting.

Dr. Jones: Huh.

Dr. Wiessner: Yeah.

Dr. Jones: Well, gosh, I think we keep stuff for a number of reasons. I mean, we keep stuff to keep us warm or to act as tools. And for those of us who like to cook, there's stuff that we need to slice things or dice things. I just saw a great slicer dicer that was on sale at Amazon. I thought, "Oh, I need that." And I thought, "I don't need that. I have a knife." Anyway. But the most human connection to the stuff is what I love best, it's the stuff that has memories.

Dr. Wiessner: Exactly.

Dr. Jones: And Polly, I want to thank you for joining us. And next time we visit, I'll be asking you more about your stuff. So thanks for listening, everyone. And take a look at your stuff. And see you soon.