Stuff

The cultural consideration of the material world increasingly involves not only recognition of material things in their diversity, many different things, but also ideas and concepts which frame the material world as a whole through particular paradigms. Stuff provides us with one of these sweeping paradigmatic interpretations of material culture, both a popular discourse and a set of academic frameworks. Stuff is about proliferating consumer goods, about domesticity, about the substances things are made from, about the overwhelming artificiality and human-made quality of the material world, and about sustainability. When using the term stuff, we are talking about those moments when the material world is important for its quantity, not only its qualities, and when we perceive the normative state of the material world as artifactual, and human-made rather than normatively natural