The essays commissioned for this book demonstrate the range of the work now being undertaken in the study of material culture by scholars in many different disciplines. This study can be approached from the various angles of consumption and commodity; social and political symbolism; personal experience; the museum as professional intstitution; as text in its semiotic relationship to linguistics; as narrative and as constructions of the self and the other. The foreword suggests that whichever approach is adopted, objects remain in our alter egos, embedded in a closed system of reference in which the things that touch us most nearly - objects, food, body/sex are used to describe each other and in doing so create both collective cultural, collective and individual identities.