Intended as a sequel to Miller’s previous edited collection concerned with the ethnography of material culture more generally (Material Cultures, University of Chicago Press, 1998), Home Possessions focuses more narrowly on the material culture of the home. Taking readers behind closed doors in London, Norway, Montreal, Romania, Taiwan, and Japan, the contributors’ fine-grained observations of the interactions between individuals and their homes cast a revealing light onto processes of both individual and sociocultural significance. Moving away from the structural and symbolic analyses of the home of the 1960s and 1970s as well as from more recent depictions of the home as a mere expression of its occupants’ values, each essay reveals the home to be a dynamic processual space in which materials and individuals transform each other--sometimes with contradictory results.

The volume is divided somewhat capriciously into three parts, with the major themes of each part recurring throughout the collection. Following Miller’s helpful introduction, the first section, “Mobile Homes,” explores people’s use of homes to create and express identity, reconfigure their relationships, and negotiate life changes. Alison Clarke argues persuasively in her comparative study of middle-class homeowners and state-housing residents in London for a view of the home as an “other” that solidifies and transmits a social view of oneself. Both Pauline Garvey in her essay on furniture reordering in Norway and Jean-Sebastien Marcoux in his examination of residential moves in Montreal demonstrate that it is not the possession of goods so much as their participation in their owners’ ongoing processes of self-definition that creates their emotional resonance. The lack of equivalence between home and material structure is portrayed beautifully by Elia Petridou’s essay on Greek students in London, for whom food serves not only as an evocation of home but also as a model for differences between Greek and British social relationships.

The second section of the book, “Estate Agency,” is organized around the idea that although the material culture of the home at times serves as a means of agency for its inhabitants, that same materiality can form and constrain the possibilities for individual action. Miller’s charmingly written essay spins off from the mythic theme of the haunted house to an analysis of “lesser hauntings” in which the author struggles to come to terms with his own home’s agency and temporality while he simultaneously develops a “larger cosmology of authenticity, truth, negotiation, and identity” with consequences for larger political and moral domains (p. 112). Hecht’s account of the sentimental collections of an elderly Scottish woman living in London demonstrates the interconnections between personal history and a collective sense of the past.

In the final part of the collection, “Building Relationships,” the authors show that the relationship between homes and individuals is rarely free of contradiction. Chang-Kwo Tan’s analysis of marriage and home building among both the traditional and Protestant Christian Paiwan of Taiwan details the fascinating oscillation of identity associated with different “original houses.” Adam Drazin’s essay explores the polysemic significance of wood for urban Romanians amid the broader context of state socialism and its aftermath, and Inge Maria Daniels’s look at “untidy” Japanese houses that defy samurai-inspired standards of domestic order succeeds in placing consumption practices within a wider framework of Japanese modernity and global capitalism.

Despite the overall strength of the collection, readers will find some points with which to argue. First, in the first section of the book there is a curious absence of references to Veblen, despite the relevance of his concept of emulation in the sense of trying to live up to an ideal (as opposed to his related but distinct notion of emulation as striving to outdo one’s peers). The first section of the book would also have benefited from sustained engagement with the larger sociocultural context that makes the role of material culture in individuals’ lives more intelligible. Garvey, for example, argues that moving furniture around the house is emotionally cathartic but doesn’t address the question of why this should be so in contemporary Norway or in the West more generally. A related example is Clarke, Garvey, and Marcoux’s invocation of novelty and change as a vehicle for the expression of agency without attending to the general point that in the contemporary West the obsession with newness signifies the normative dominance of capitalist culture. Third, Miller’s essay on homes as possessors of agency assumes that constraints imposed by materiality have agency, a provocative claim that requires more elaboration given the common identification of agency with purposive action and hence the inapplicability of the term to inanimate objects. Fourth, the book would have been even stronger had it included more studies from non-Western locations.

Despite these quibbles, the book is a significant resource for both researchers and students of material culture as well as an enjoyable read for the voyeuristically inclined. All of the essays are written in a clear and accessible style, making the volume an excellent choice for undergraduate teaching. Having worked on architecture and home decoration in the Arab Middle East, I found that some of the authors’ insights rang true with my own field experiences, whereas others sparked provocative comparative questions. All of the contributors are Miller’s own Ph.D. students, and the success of the book is a testimony both to Miller’s capacity as a facilitator of others’ work as well as to the vibrancy of his students’ research.