Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter by Daniel MillerReview by: Mike CrangArea, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 93-94Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003960 .

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Book reviews 93

113). There is a strongly 'integrationalist' conception of culture at work mirroring the emphasis on the city as an inclusive device. We are told that the development of a city project 'impregnates civic culture' among inhabitants through a kind of internal city-promotion campaign (121 ). Is this 'city project' and supporting 'civic identity' a contested synthesis of the identities and goals of disparate and not always compatible associational and organizational inter ests? Or is it a more singular vision, welded together by political actors in the course of orchestrating project legiti macy? We are left uncertain as to whether 'the main objective of urban policy today is to create a city' (121), a self-governing and identity-generating social system, or

whether 'the main goal of urban policy today is creating a sense of city' (1 72, emphasis added). Despite its fashionably 'renaissance' feel, civic culture here would seem to present all the same issues of ideology and contestation that national culture presented to scholars in the pre-globalized age.

The difficulties in generating urban projects specific enough to drive policy-making are acknowledged: the incorporation of more and more groups in developing strategic plans tend to produce consensus urban 'visions' such as that of the Strategic Plan for Rio De Janeiro, which 'has the objective of making Rio a metropolis with increas ing quality of life, socially integrated, friendly and with a confirmed vocation for culture and joyful living' (106). In the blur of associations, partnerships, links and forums that,

we are told, are to substitute for tired old party-democracy, there is not much sense of the sorts of conflicts that

would surely animate competing civic visions and cultures advocating more specific development and social policy proposals. We learn that political parties are in crisis (1 10), but we are told very little about them. As some proposals would undermine the relationship between electoral time tables and policy (115), and involve the development of new city-parties (188), it is unfortunate that little attention has been paid to the literature on party organization and transformation. Urban politics texts are often distressingly vague about such matters, but a book arguing for such sweeping changes cannot afford to be.

In a way, the book offers a practical response to Castells' old question about whether the city is a meaningful object of knowledge and policy. 'Urban' areas are not, but we can

create 'cities' that would be (2). I was not convinced that the emphasis on civic patriotism, city-networks, and so on did not rest on a rather rosy (and demilitarized) ideal-type of early modern city-states. In the authors' vision,

(t)he global and the local complement each other, jointly

creating social and economic synergy, as they did back at the

beginnings of the world economy in the fourteenth to the

sixteenth centuries, a time when the city states became centres

for innovation and commerce on a world-wide scale. (3)

Otherwise, the historical perspective is rather limited, as where a caption describes 'Lima's transformation since its entry into the global economy, 1990-1995' (32). Much of this book relies on an exaggeratedly modern use of old

language to respond to an equally exaggerated sense of crisis and necessity. It would have been more useful, convincing and exciting to have tempered some of the vision with which the book abounds with a more palpable analysis of contemporary city politics.

Murray Low University of Reading

Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter edited by Daniel Miller London: UCL Press, 1998, xi+243 pp, ?40.00 hardback, ?13.95 paperback ISBN 1 85728 685 5 hardback, ISBN 1 85728 686 3 paperback

'It's material culture, Jim, but not as we knew it'. This collection has a feel of the scandalous and taboo breaking about it. OK, I confess this was not my immediate reaction.

My immediate reaction was that I was missing the joke or only hearing half the conversation. Not that this detracted from the merits of various papers in the collection, of which

more later, but I felt somewhat dislocated. I would like to claim that a sudden flash of inspiration told me why, but as a rather more plodding soul, it took a friend to explain it to me. This book treads on anthropological toes: it takes one of the most respectable forms of anthropology and pro ceeds to do some things differently. The subtitle of 'why some things matter' then begins to make sense. The grand, if a little fusty, sense of material culture inherited from

Kroeber and Kluckholm provides a foil for this enterprising volume. Quite clearly this book follows this tradition in insisting that material things are important. The scandal is the sort of things it chooses: modern commodities that translate, shift and alter meanings in fragmentary and plural cultures are not something expected as material culture.

When one publisher mentioned this sort of 'material culture' to an eminent anthropologist, there was a discern ible pause before they replied, 'that is not material culture, that is market research'. For a geography audience, such a context may seem remote, but this collection is part of an argument beyond the papers inside. Coming from outside that particular debate, it seems perhaps less controversial in some ways and more interesting in others. The basis for this book, it appears, is work by postgraduates with Miller in University College London from the early to mid-nineties. From the evidence of this collection, it must have been a fascinating graduate school. But the coherence of the book for a geographical audience may be less apparent than otherwise, and may eventually mean the point of the volume is less clear.

The structure, dividing papers by scale into those dealing with global issues, the public arena and the domestic sphere, is a useful and robust device, even if the middle section seems to be rather unstable. The first section on domestic spaces has papers by Tacchi on radio, Chevalier on domestic building form and Clarke on shopping by

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94 Book reviews

catalogue and classified adverts. Tacchi's chapter on the immaterial, yet space-filling, qualities of radio, on its uses and socialities in mediating, and indeed mixing, private and public realms, is a nice piece, raising issues of differential use and the particular qualities of the radio form, too often missed in geographical analyses of media. Clarke's work on the different reasons for using catalogues and classified adverts provides another well-founded study of the sort of knowledges and competences required in shopping. Some of it was indeed strikingly resonant with this reader. Chevalier's comparison of French relationships with kitchens and English attitudes to gardens is more problem atic. I was not entirely convinced by the evidence from

what seemed a rather pre-selective reading of media, coupled with field material that illustrated interesting ways of shaping domestic space but hardly bore the weight of the thesis. The final section of the book, on global connec tions, offers three fascinating papers: Miller on cola in

Trinidad, Rausing on Western goods in Estonia and Johnson on consumption and identity in the Philippines. Miller's elegant and powerful account of cola in Trinidad has appeared in other books, but it remains an important critique of how Coke gets used rather too glibly as both symbol of and evidence for a homogenizing Westerniz ation of cultures through commodities. For anyone who thinks geographies of consumption means saying that

Coke sells America as a myth and ideal, it should be salutary reading. Rausing provides further evidence of the ambivalence of Western commodities by exploring the dynamics of the adoption, refusal and misconnections provided through goods supplied by charitable aid schemes run from Sweden to 'help' post-Soviet Estonia. Likewise, Johnson's discussion of the Philippines focuses on how material goods are used and valued in different circumstances-working to unpack the traditional versus modern distinction-but this is perhaps a little too ambitious, trying to integrate the effect of international migration and religious and taste dynamics within the Philippines. The middle section of the book works least well: Pellegram focus on office paperwork, Jarman on Orange Order banners and Fiden-Croft on Trinidadian Calypso. The last, most straightforwardly, deals with the public sphere, looking at how music is taken up by and takes up political issues, though the sophisticated analysis of the music is not really matched in the analysis of the political sphere. The attention to the specific form, though, is welcome and thoroughly worked. Jarman's analysis of

Orange Order banners left almost the opposite taste, that the politics had rather been lost in attention to material artefact. It offers a detailed account of the banners' evolu tion and design, but, curiously for work associated with consumption studies, it seemed to shy away from their use. Finally, Pellegram's study of office work seems less clearly associated with the public sphere-apart from being a government office, which adds little specifically to the account. I liked the idea of taking seriously the paper in

paperwork, reminding me of the Latourian adage always to

follow the object. But I was left thinking that the piece could have been strengthened by an explicit engagement with that actor-network literature and its study of centres of calculation and inscription devices.

To a geographical audience, then, the book probably does not really function as a coherent collection, but I have no hesitation in recommending it as a useful set of papers.

Many chapters are fascinating in their own rights, and as a collection of consumption studies pieces, they are well worth the price. I have no doubt they will interest staff and students working in that area.

Mike Crang University of Durham

Regional Development Agencies in Europe edited by Henrik Halkier, Mike Danson and Charlotte Damborg London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998, 373 pp, ?25.00 paperback ISBN 1 85302 602 6

This volume, based on Regional Studies Association conference papers, is one of a series aimed at promoting the concept of and debate into regional development. The editors, concerned to apply some discipline to the study of regional development agencies (RDAs)-a concept that has proved notoriously difficult to pin down-start by outlining a model of RDAs against which to measure the practice in a number of case-study European countries. Their model development body is: semi-autonomous of sponsoring political bodies; supports mainly indigenous firms by means of 'soft' policy instruments (eg advice and training); and acts via a broad range of policy instruments,

which the RDA 'integrates'. They do not define what they mean by region, which gives the case-study chapter authors plenty of spatial scope, and their specification of develop ment and agency is sufficiently broad to cover most even tualities.

The case-study chapters approach their task in a variety of ways: some stick grimly to the task of testing particular agencies, or sets of agencies, against the model; some provide historical accounts of how RDAs developed into their present form; some attempt an evaluation of RDA effectiveness without much reference to the model; and some adopt a mixture of these approaches. It is customary for reviewers to lament the lack of editorial discipline in cases like this, but I have to admit to welcoming the contributing authors' waywardness. The chapters that do not stick to the brief are, by and large, the most interesting ones. This is not to decry the editors' attempts at order, but the parameters set seem to be too prosaic. It is also a tall

order both to provide enough political and institutional contextual material to explain, say, to non-Hungarians, where their RDAs sit in the wider scheme of things, and to describe and analyse an empirical agency classification process within a short chapter. The intention was clearly to

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