Daniel, perhaps we could begin with some background about you. Tell us about your interests, your career, and what really excites you about anthropology today?

I am a specialist in Material Culture based at the Department of Anthropology at University College London. I was originally trained in Archaeology. As it happens, both myself and Michael Herzfeld another of the series editors were originally taught by David Clarke at Cambridge. Although today we both work in Anthropology. My first work was an ethnographic study of pottery in India. I then became interested in material culture more generally and the neglected area of the commodity and consumption. My work since then has ranged from three books on Trinidad (modernity, capitalism and the internet) to three books on Shopping. Currently I am working on my twentieth book along with Mukulika Banerjee which represents my first return to India since my PhD and is a study of the Sari. I feel material culture studies has made huge strides ? from being looked down upon as a backwards looking part of the discipline, to today, when I think we are often regarded as the vanguard. Hopefully we are also part of a general movement in anthropology towards a genuine comparative and global perspective ? so that my students work equally well in London and Norway as they do in Afghanistan and Taiwan.

You are an editor of a relatively new series of books published by Berg, Materializing Culture, along with Michael Herzfeld and Paul Gilroy. Could you briefly describe how the series came about? Is there a philosophy behind the series? Or what sets the monographs in your series apart from some of the stuff being produced by the bigger publishers?

I had previously been editing a series at Routledge, but publishing my own books with Berg, and I found the atmosphere and the respect for authors at Berg refreshing. It also seemed that through their work in anthropology, but also areas such as dress and fashion, memory and landscape, there was the possibility of developing a strong agenda for material culture studies on an inter-disciplinary level. With Michael Herzfeld, a leading anthropologist in the US, and Paul Gilroy, one of the foremost writers in cultural studies and a powerful exponent of a critical historical approach, we hoped to build a series that was devoted to high and traditional standards of scholarship but which would also tackle new topics and with a critical edge. We felt that some publishers and series were starting to get a reputation for work that looked like it was just there to make up a CV, rather than sustained scholarly studies, but also that scholarship needn?t be seen as conservative. It was often the current developments that were least subject to sustained study, and this suited our sense that material culture could be at the vanguard not only of anthropology, but also of archaeology, cultural studies, design, geography and sociology.

Tell us about some of the recent books in the Materializing Culture series? Which are you most excited about?

While I think there have been a whole series of important works such as Judy Attfield's textbook on material culture and design called Wild Things, and much as I would like to plug my own edited collection Car Cultures, just to be fair to all let me simply pick the last three books from the series.

	The most recent book is by Elaine Lally, At Home with Computers, which illustrates what I have just been saying about innovative new topics. It documents a sustained piece of research on what exactly people do with computers in the home, but it is also manages thereby to think theoretically about important areas such as property ? not as a legal concept but as how people in a family understand their rights and obligations with respect to things like a hard disc. It shows how material culture mediates in the working of the internal life of households.
	The book before that is Sharon Macdonald's Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. To the best of my knowledge this is the first full ethnographic study of the construction of an exhibition seen from the point of view of both its creators and the visitors. There are so many glib statements about museum displays and their effects, what we really needed was this kind of scholarly and encompassing treatment, so that I see this as an instant classic.
	The book before that was a study by Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey called Death, Memory and Material Culture. This is a beautifully written and crafted book, a real joy to read. It also shows how one can work with ethnographic and historical materials and create a seamless story out of them, based on the importance of materiality to the way we think about the dead, and the more general role of objects in memory. I think this book shows why I feel the series has if anything gone way beyond my original hopes and expectations.

What is in the pipeline for Materializing Culture?

The next three possible books are to my mind equally exciting.

Second Hand Cultures is a study by two leading geographers, Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, of a whole series of markets for second hand goods ranging from charity shops to car boot sales. What I particularly like is that they have paid as much attention to the buyers as the sellers, and they are not afraid to theorise across the various case studies to make it a general text for anyone interested in the significance of this neglected area.

Susanne Küchler's work on Malanggan is another book that one can be sure will be taken as a classic, because her articles on this subject must be some of the most cited and influential works in anthropology. This is a study of the wooden memorials from New Ireland that have become some of the most common objects in ethnographic museums around the world. It moves forward our understanding of the relationship between memory and materiality by showing how people deal with death through the controlled reception of the decay of objects rather than merely the often unexpected death of an individual.

We have also just received a proposal for what looks like a brilliant study of the way the ancient Egyptians understood the nature of materiality itself by a leading archaeologist. Its one of those cases where I feel an archaeologist is doing exactly what anthropologists should have done but haven?t, which is to appreciate the need for a larger ethnography of what a particular society means by and experiences as materiality itself.

Do you accept unsolicited manuscripts for the series? If so, what should a prospective author do or who should they contact?

We don't look at unsolicited manuscripts, but of course we do welcome proposals. What we are looking for are books which utilise material culture but also that balance a high level of traditional scholarship from any discipline, with an innovative and significant contribution to theory. Any proposals should go direct to Berg.

Contact:
Kathryn Earle
Editorial & Managing Director
Berg Publishers
150 Cowley Rd
Oxford OX4 1JJ
Tel: 44 (0)1865-245104
Fax: 44 (0)1865-791165
email: kearle@berg1.demon.co.uk
web: http://www.bergpublishers.com

Last but not least ... What have you read recently (from the wider world of books, anthropology or not, fiction or non-fiction) that really grabbed your attention?

Well my favourite out of this summer's holiday fiction was Linda Grant's book Still Here. From non-fiction I think Courtesans and Fishcakes by James Davidson has been the best read from the last two years, and is a highly enjoyable must for anyone interested in consumption.

For more books in the Materializing Culture series, go to http://www.oxbowbooks.com/results.cfm?SE=Materializing%20Culture

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