The Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Menzel and Charles C. Mann was a staple in every classroom library I assembled over the years. It’s one of those rare books that carves deep grooves in your brain that never fade. The authors sent 16 photographers to 30 different nations to live with statistically “average” families for a week. At the end of the visit, the photographers composed a family portrait in front of their dwelling, surrounded by all the family’s possessions.
I’ve given away so many copies over the years that I no longer own one, so I can’t check back on the text, about which I have no recollection. But no matter; the photos themselves are a wordless and enduring course in both sociology and anthropology, as well as an opportunity to reflect on one’s own relationship to possessions and the way they define us. What we see runs the predictable gamut from the dizzying clutter of items on a suburban American lawn to the meager set of belongings that were a third world trademark – some sleeping mats or carpets, pillows, cooking pots, a few plates, bowls and eating utensils.
Many years ago, our Pakistani writer friend Bapsi Sidwa invited us to Lahore to see how she lived when she wasn’t in residence in Houston. Her prosperous family also had a second home in the foothills of the Himalayas in what had been a British hill station. One day we joined Bapsi for a visit to a local family, part of a hardy community of natives who had adapted to living on the steep terrain, buried under several feet of snow a good part of the year. Their dwelling was cave-like, carved into the mountainside. Just as in the Material World photos, their dark firelit home contained just what was needed for eating, sleeping and staying warm, except for a pedal-powered sewing machine, used for making wedding and ceremonial garments for the community. I doubt that they felt they were lacking anything and wouldn’t until or if they came into wider contact with other ways of living where they might feel what anthropologists call “relative deprivation,” a perceived gap between what they had in contrast to others.
At the end of our first six months of marriage, we loaded our car for the cross-country trip back from San Francisco to Boston where I would complete my Ph.D. program. We had bought a roof rack for our little Chevrolet Corvair which enabled us to fit everything we owned into the back seat and the roof – mainly our clothing and kitchenware. We must have shipped what was then our small library and we had no furniture to speak of, since our compact apartment was furnished, including the Murphy bed that folded neatly into the wall every morning.
We were happy in our lives then, as we are now, but I’m looking around as I write at our incredible mountain of possessions and wonder at how and why they came to be in the intervening 63 years. How had our definition of what we needed changed so drastically over the years? Surrounded by the allure of goods that our Himalayan family was oblivious to and earning enough money to make some of those goods affordable conspired to seduce us into participating in the surrounding culture of consumption, even though we consider ourselves not very materialistic people.
One more small vignette. When Adina and Elana were still very young (Elana wasn’t even crawling yet), we left our New Hampshire home for a month-long camping trip through Canada – Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and home via Maine. In addition to the required baby gear, we had bought a tent big enough to accommodate all of us, a cookstove, a lantern and a box of some basic foodstuffs. True, we weren’t equipped to entertain guests or to watch The Olympics, but when we returned home and were once again surrounded by all our possessions, only a shadow of what we now own, our reaction was “Why do we need all this stuff? Grapefruit knives? Soap dishes? We just lived happily without them for a whole month.” Although we returned to our normal routines quickly, that question has never really left us, magnified somehow by the fact that we’re soon going to be faced with decisions about unburdening ourselves of much of it.
What I haven’t addressed so far is the fact that, in addition to our physical possessions, we have lived lives of paper – manuscripts, correspondence, course syllabi, reprints of articles. How to deal with these demons of print is at the heart of the decluttering process that I’ll try to address after a week off for the Passover holiday.
PS. Charles C. Mann, the co-author of The Material World, has also written two other books that have stayed with me. 1491 is a portrait of what the Americas were like before the arrival of Columbus and all the western influence that followed. The sequel, 1493, addresses the enormous changes that came in Columbus’s wake. Both books make for fascinating reading.
