Through the keyhole
William Leith
SNOOP: WHAT YOUR STUFF SAYS ABOUT YOU by Sam Gosling Profile, £15, pp. 260, ISBN 9781846680182 ✆ £12.00 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 THE COMFORT OF THiNGS by Daniel Miller Polity, £20, pp. 302, ISBN 9780745644042 ✆ £16.00 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less, that if you look at people’s stuff in the right way, you can find out what makes them tick. Miller, on the other hand, is more tentative. He doesn’t want to generalise. But then, the people he studies seem much weirder than the people Gosling studies. Or maybe Miller is weirder than Gosling. As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.
Both Gosling and Miller know that the relationship between people and their stuff is a complex one. You can’t walk into somebody’s house and see a tennis racquet and know for sure that the person in question plays tennis. They might just want to give the impression they play tennis, in an effort to fool people. Or someone might have left a tennis racquet at their house. As Gosling points out, if you jump to conclusions, you might easily jump to the wrong ones. A bible in somebody’s office might be a sign of a religious person. On the other hand, some companies give a bible to every employee.
So jumping to conclusions is wrong, right? Not necessarily. Gosling once devised an experiment about jumping to conclusions. Malcolm Gladwell described it in his book Blink, which is the best book ever written on jumping to conclusions. In the experiment, Gosling asked people to answer certain questions about their friends. Then he asked some strangers to snoop around the bedrooms of the same people. The results were fascinating. If you’re somebody’s friend, you will have a pretty accurate idea of how extrovert they are, and also how agreeable they are. That sounds fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?
What’s less straightforward is the fact that, when it comes to certain other characteristics, the bedroom snoopers come out better than the friends. When it comes to judging how conscientious somebody is, or how emotionally stable, or how open they are to new experiences, it’s better to snoop around someone’s bedroom for half an hour than to befriend them for years. A friend of mine, for instance, once told me that, during a certain period, he’d been having a nervous breakdown, but he’d decided not to tell anybody. And nobody knew. But I bet if he’d let people look around his bedroom they’d have known.
Sometimes, then, you can have a lot of information about a particular person but a poor idea of what they’re like, and sometimes a little bit is all you need. As Gladwell pointed out, it can be better to know less about somebody, because some information can be misleading. Knowing that somebody is a sportsman, for instance, might make you less able to interpret the books on their shelf. So snooping on people is difficult – but, as Gosling says, that’s why it’s so interesting: ‘Snooping is so fascinating because the relationship between clues and personality is imperfect.’ Here’s the problem. You can sometimes look at somebody’s bedroom or office and instantly get a whiff of what they’re really like, just as you can walk past somebody in the street and think: ‘that person is a criminal’ — and you might well be right. But can you know why you know? Can you under stand the process scientifically? What I wanted from Gosling’s book was a series of concrete answers. The thing is that these answers don’t yet exist. This area of anthropology, as Gosling says, is still young. When we ‘form an impression’, what is actually happening is ‘a set of complex mental processes that have only recently been systematically investigated’.
Still, he makes some interesting points. If you want to snoop on somebody, look in the bedroom or the office, because these are sites of ‘repeated behaviours’. And don’t be fooled by a tidied room, which is quite different from a tidy room. Look for things that the person wants to display to others, and then check them against things that are privately displayed. And if you have a chance, dismantle the person’s car and look at their brake cables — anxious people are constantly touching the brake. But perhaps the best thing Gosling comes up with is his analysis of people’s record collections.
Here, he has discovered something concrete. An experiment suggests that, if you listen to religious music, stereotypes about you are fairly likely to be correct. Atheists and liberals, in other words, don’t listen to religious music very much. A similar thing is true, to a lesser extent, of people who listen to country music and classical music. They are, more or less, the people you would imagine the listeners of these kinds of music to be. But stereotypes of those who listen to pop, rap or soul music are much less likely to be correct. I look forward to more of this from Gosling as his subject area develops.
Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things does not contain experiments as such — he just visits people, all inhabitants of a small area in South London, and writes his impressions. So what we have are 30 portraits of people, many of whom seem strange and sad. Miller goes to visit an old man with virtually no possessions, and is moved hugely by the emptiness of his life. He spends time with a happy couple, whose life is full of stuff, and the stuff — Christmas decorations, a stamp collection, vintage cars — suggests to Miller a full and happy life. ‘Usually,’ he says, ‘the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people.’ The main impression I got from Miller’s book was that, even though his subjects come from a very small area, they are vastly different. The more closely you scrutinise a person and their possessions, the weirder and more different from each other they begin to seem. Here is a former mercenary poring over pictures of reality TV contestants, hoping for ‘a flash of c**t’; here is a man who lives with a dog, and whose house becomes more ‘doggified’ the closer to the ground you get. Here, also, is a young woman whose main relationship seems to be the one she has with her tattoos, and a middle-aged woman who took up wrestling and owns 32 handbags.
Anthropology, it strikes me, must be a very difficult science when the anthropologist is studying people whose possessions are not actual necessities; this is all quite different from studying the significance of harpoons and hand-axes. And what kind of people are anthropologists, anyway? Gosling tells us that he’s an extrovert with an obsessively well-stocked fridge. Miller tells us he cried when he left the house of the sad old man. Gosling thinks snooping is fun. Miller says, ‘There is no escaping the horror and tragedy in the interior of people’s lives’. What do we learn from reading these books? As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.
William Leith’s latest book, Bits of Me Are Falling Apart, is published by Bloomsbury next month at £10.99.
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